10 Fantastic Free Ways To Get Customers to Your Website

Here are ten ways you can get new customers to your website, using the free resources available on the Internet. There are many free Internet sites where you can get in touch with potential customers, if you reach out to them. You’ll be surprised how effective they are. Yes, they’re free. You don’t need big bucks to see big results. 

1. Use Free Social Media to Get Customers

• Use the online social media sites to introduce yourself, your business and your products. Over time you will build brand awareness among people there. Set up your MySpace page, your Twitter account, your LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster and Hi5 profiles, and link each of them to your website. Facebook offers business pages, too.
• Post pictures of your products at Flickr.com and Photobucket.com, together with your profile, description and a link to the website. When you choose your screen name for these online accounts, you might want to use the domain name of your business site, like JoesHVACDotCom.
• A number of online bookmarking sites offer you an online community of people, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Ask, Google Bookmarks, Reddit, Blogmarks, Simpy, Delicious, Kaboodle, Blinklist, Live, Slashdot, Magnolia, Spurl, Technorati, myAol, Yahoo Bookmarks, Furl or Newsvine. When you post an article of interest to customers on your website, bookmark the article at some of these sites.

2. Try Free Guerilla Techniques to Get Customers

Explore guerrilla marketing techniques that require only time, energy and imagination. Choose a new promotion, and spread the word about it on your social media sites. Depending on your business, you can offer online seminars, free samples, free consultations, and product video demonstrations. Perhaps it makes sense to give away a free toolbar, screensaver, game or utility, all of which can be branded for your business. Many websites get new customers when they give away free coupons. You can promote the coupons on Twitter and on other social media. Give your customers more service than they expect. If your employees have idle time, offer the customer free product assembly. Use your website to introduce yourself to the customers and share your product expertise with them. 

3. Visit Online Groups to Get Customers

Visit the online groups for more free opportunities to introduce yourself. See if Google Groups or Yahoo Groups has a topic that fits your area of interest. Group members will appreciate your help and advice. Build your reputation as an expert in the field, and group members will turn to you when they are ready to buy. Also, participate in related online forums where your expertise will be useful to customers. 

4. Write Online Articles to Market Yourself

• Write an article about your field of expertise. It could be a helpful "how-to" article about using your product, or an explanation of the benefits of your product. Then submit your article tor one of the many online sites, like ezine.com, that accept free articles. You’ll automatically get a link back to your business website along with free publicity.
• Write a press release and post it online. The topic could be your website expansion, your new product line, a new employee, or a charitable project. Include links to your online website and submit it to the free press release sites online. Check out sites like 24-7PressRelease.com, PRLog.org and 1888PressRelease.com. Email your press release to your local newspapers, too.
• Find your business niche on Wikipedia, WikiTravel, and other wiki sites, and become a contributor. You might be able to link to your business site as a reference. It's one more way to keep your name in front of the online public.

5. Optimize Your WebSite to Get Customers

Use the help of search engines to get more customers to your website. Make your website friendly for search engines. The technique is called search engine optimization. Just by changing the title of your page, its description, or your introductory remarks, you can double the traffic to your site. The traffic sent by search engines is called organic traffic, and it’s free. More traffic gets more new customers to your website. 

6. Take Advantage of Free Business Listings

• Use the Google Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Google Maps for local information, they'll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. It's easy, it’s free, and you don't need a website of your own.
• Proofread your business listing in yellowpages.com.
• Check the local online telephone listing for your business, and correct it if necessary.
• Make sure your Yahoo city listing is up to date.
• Submit your website to The Open Directory Project, dmoz.org. This directory is maintained by humans, and getting in is difficult, but the search engines rank your site higher if dmoz lists it.

7. Use Free Online Blogging to Get Customers to Your Website

• Locate Internet blogs that cover topics related to your business. Leave comments on the blogs, and use your business domain name as your screen name; for example, AngiesCookiesDotCom. Your blog comments provide an additional link to your website. You can pick up free traffic from these links, too.
• Read more blogs. Set up your feed reader with the names of good blogs. A feed reader saves time by letting you skim the headlines of new articles. Whenever you have a spare moment, read something in your field. New ideas are always hatching online.
• If you enjoy writing, set up a blog for yourself. It can be a part of your business website, a page where you write informally about related activities and allow your personality to shine. A business blog is a great tool to build traffic and get customers to your website.

8. Use Free Internet Tools to Get Customers to Your Website

• Set up and verify a Webmaster Central Account at Google.
• Submit a product to Google Base. Google Base lets you submit pictures and describe your items with detailed information called attributes, which will help customers find your content more easily. You don’t even need a website to take advantage of Google Base.
• Install Google Analytics on your site, if you don't already have it. Google Analytics is helpful and free. You’ll learn more about customer behavior when they get to your website.
• Set up a CrazyEgg heat mapping test for your most important pages, to analyze what part of the page a customer looks at and clicks on. The results will help you rearrange items on your pages to maximize visibility.
• Show your customers how to find your physical store by adding a link to Google Maps on your website.
• Set up a MyBlogLog account for your blog or your website. When you put the MyBlogLog widget on your website, your customers can see avatars (small photos) of each other. The use of avatars helps build a sense of community among your customers. There are many such widgets available free online.

9. Create a Video to Get Customers

Convert a slideshow of your products into a video and upload it to Youtube or MetaCafe. Be sure to optimize your title and descriptions to get the most traffic from search engines. Set up your own channel on Youtube. With YouTube hosting your video and supplying the bandwidth, embed the video into your website. The link from YouTube will get more customers to your website. 

10. Try Pay Per Click Advertising to Get Customers to Your Website

No, Pay Per Click advertising is not free, but it can be very inexpensive. Signup is free. When people search for the products you sell, your PPC business ad will appear on the search engine report. With PPC, you only pay when a customer clicks on your ad and comes to your website. Each customer who comes to your website costs you only a few pennies. You can set your advertising budget as low as $1 per day, and turn your ad campaign off and on whenever you wish. You can easily track your Pay Per Click customers to see if PPC brings you more sales. The largest PPC advertising networks are those with the most popular search engines: Microsoft Ad Center, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google Adwords. 

I hope life brings you much success.
I wish you a very happy day. 

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3 Ways to Brainstorm a Useful How-to Video

There are lots of reasons to add how-to videos to your content marketing strategy:

• Make it easier for your customer to understand your product or niche
• Create another asset to get ranked and draw people in
• Drive video viewers into your conversion funnel
• Give your brand fans another reason to share on social media channels.

Yes, there are many solid reasons to create how-to videos and none to neglect it…

The huge demand makes a how-to video the perfect way to promote your product or site.

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How-To Videos: Inspiration

Youtube Suggest is the greatest help when it comes to brainstorming a video topic that is likely to resonate with the audience.

There are lots of ways to expand your suggest query too:

This is where SEOchat Google Suggest tool will of be great help:

There’s also a neat FireFox addon that enables Youtube suggest within your FireFox search box (that lets you brainstorm on the fly).

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Youtube Search Operators

Don’t forget that Youtube is run by Google – which also means you can do magic by just getting creative with search functionality.

Try advanced and boolean operators:

• Exact match “how to …” (turns particularly useful when you try sorting results by anything other than relevancy. For example, if you sort your search by ratings, the results might be rather unrelated to your initial search unless you force the exact match);
• Wildcard “how to * …” (In combination with exact match, this operator helps you broaden the proximity and let the search engine insert any words in place for it. It may trigger quite unexpected results, help you to brainstorm and even change the initial focus of your research);
• Exclude any word “how to … -word” (especially useful if some irrelevant word dominates search results);
• Force any word in the video title “how to … intitle:word” (which again turns quite handy when you sort search results not by relevancy)

Note: now that you can play with search results to yield various related search results, pay close attention to video titles and notice which words are used next to your keyword: this is a great way to brainstorm an awesome video concept.

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How-To Video Sharing Networks

Do you need more ideas to create a related how-to video? Here are some video network focusing on exactly that:

	Expert videos	User-submitted videos	Best feature
HowCast	Yes	Yes	Active community, high rankings, powerful Youtube channel (for expert videos only but adds to branding)
Menkey See	Yes (experts have to adhere to thestandards.	No (but videos can be added after you contact them)	Only features professional how-to videos
Wonder Howto	No	Yes	High moderating standards, advanced search functionality
eHow	No	Yes	High Google rankings, powerful Youtube channel
VideoJug	Yes	Yes	Active community; powerful Youtube channel
SuTree	No	Yes	For content owners (auto-index your videos):the site can automatically index videos using your RSS feed.

Happy brainstorming!

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3 Improved Ways to Reach the Modern Target Audience

In one of my previous marketing class, I had to draft up an individual profile that would be representative of a certain brand's target audience. I had to include the age-range of this consumer, where he lives, what he likes to do, what his profession is, and include a picture of what this consumer would look like.

This detailed description can provide your inbound marketing team with a clear vision of its target customers. In the practice of traditional marketing, this target audience was commonly reached by deciding what TV shows they watched to determine where to place TV advertisement, figuring out what kind of music they listened to determine which radio stations to focus radio commercials, and knowing what they enjoyed reading so print ads were published in the right newspapers or magazines. 

But haven’t you heard? These techniques are outbound, ineffective, and immeasurable! People are recording their favorite TV shows and fast-forwarding through commercials, jamming to their favorite music on ad-free iPods, and reading content online. It’s crazy town—but as a marketer, you have to be a part of it.

So let’s take a look at these 3 distinct differences between how marketers used to reach their target audiences, and how they must reach them today.

1. Find Them Online

Then: Conventional efforts to reach your audience included knowing where these consumers resided so that you could reach them geographically. That way, you knew if you should be paying for a suburban newspaper ad or an urban newspaper ad. 

Now: Marketers must find where these people are online. Perhaps your audience flocks more toFacebook than Twitter, or maybe they are more concentrated in an industry-specific social network. As a marketer, the time and effort you spend on these networks should reflect that. Be present and participate where your audience is participating. Use analytics to guide you: take advantage of Facebook Insights, use Twitter analytics like Bit.ly, and implement other tracking tools to monitor traffic and leads from these sites to determine what is effective and how you should be allocating your time.

2. Be Part of the Conversation

Then: When you talk about customer service before the internet and social media, people would wait in long lines, sit on the phone for hours, or fill out complaint forms. You would then give them a muddled response or sometimes just blow them off because hey, it’s only one person, right?

Now: Wrong. Anything negative about your company is now easily transmittable through Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social networks. Businesses must not only monitor their brand and be prepared to respond at any moment to these complaints and clear the virtual air, but also be engaging with prospects and customers online in general. Join groups and discussions on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other online sites where people are discussing a topic relating to your product or service. Use Google Alerts and social media monitoring software to monitor conversations about your brand. Participating in these dialogues by sharing your opinion and providing answers to questions will show your audience that you care.

3. Change the Way You Communicate

Then: The marketing world used to solely be a one-way communication-based industry. As a campaign was executed, some PR or media relations specialist would take the story your brand described and pitch it to traditional media outlets in your target market. The hope would be that it would get picked up and covered in the media so your target audience could see what you were all about. What people thought, or how many people even the read story, was left to circulation numbers—which isn’t the best method of measuring your reach. Let's face it: not everyone who purchased that magazine or watched that broadcast necessarily paid attention to that particular story.

Now: Communication is now two-way and asymmetrical. Brands are engaging with prospects and customers through social media and telling their stories through business blogging. Getting media attention is still important, though many articles and broadcasts are now posted online. This allows marketers to clearly analyze and better understand what their audience's reactions are with online marketing analytics that report on comments, traffic, inbound links, leads, etc.

Use Google's Keyword Tool (or if you’re a HubSpot customer, our Keyword Grader tool) to conduct keyword research and unveil what your target audience is searching for in relation to your product or service. Then, talk about it. Create blog posts that contain content your target audience wants, and don’t feel the need to limit it to just text. If your audience hates to read but sits on YouTube all day, then you should have a series of videos for them to watch that answers their questions and keeps them engaged. If your audience has an even shorter attention span, perhaps a quick infographic or cartoon that catches their eye is what you should be producing.

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Get Free Targeted Traffic To Your Site

I mentioned in my last post that my traffic is all organic, and highly targeted... and that my traffic continues to climb at a steady rate.

If you missed that post see 2012 Advertising Rates which shares my 2011 traffic stats.

Would you like to get that same kind of free targeted traffic to your site?

I'm sure you would! So follow along - I'm going to outline exactly what I do, what Idon't do, and how you can duplicate my results for yourself. 

If you looked at my stats, then you can tell my site obviously wasn't affected by theGoogle Panda update. Click that link and read that article (again, if you already have) as it gives you a basic blueprint for post-panda site success.

How To Achieve Massive Traffic Growth

First, let's talk about what I didn't do last year to get well over half a million unique visitors (666,014) to this blog alone - not including any of my other properties.

I did not do any major article marketing, outsourcing or link building.

I also did zero PPC campaigns or paid advertising.

Those are all good marketing strategies to consider, especially when your site or blog is newer and you're just starting out. I'm simply pointing out that I did not actively engage in any of those things during 2011 myself...

How I DID Get So Much FREE Targeted Traffic

It's important to note that as of March 2012, I have been blogging for 6 full years on this domain. Prior to that it was on blogger, so I've been blogging consistently for almost 8 years now.

This affects traffic in two ways: 1) the search engines consider you an authority on your topic and/or your domain gets well established in the major search engines, and 2) you build up a readership, a mailing list and a loyal following over time.

Success is not going to happen overnight, no matter what those big red headlines promised you. Be ready to invest in your online business long-term.

Here are the specific things I did to increase my traffic dramatically:

• Blog Consistently
• Proper Web Page Optimization for every page/post
• Some Guest Blogging - when I had time 
• Creating Solid Content That Gets Shared
• Engaging With My Readers
• Active on Social Media Channels
• Add Social Media Share Buttons so readers can share content

Is It Really That Simple? Yes.

I know you probably expected a detailed blueprint giving you a million things to add to your task list. It's really not that complicated. The key to getting free targeted traffic to your site is really as simple as this:

Write great content. Address your market's needs & wants (via keywords & responses). ENGAGE with them. Make it easy for your readers to share your content (for you!). And be consistent until your readership is solid and your site/blog is well established in the search engines.

That pretty much sums it up...

These are the same marketing strategies I am using on my two newer blogs (my video blog and my low carb blog) to get free targeted traffic, including the strategies I listed earlier that I didn't actively do for ClickNewz last year.

I hope that proves inspiring and helpful. 

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What is an Effective Internet Marketing Strategy?

If you’re still struggling to finally reach your financial independence & make a nice living from your home, then listen... The only reason why you’re failing is because you don’t have a good website marketing strategy.

If you ask any successful offline world entrepreneur how it’s possible to build a great business without a proper strategy, he’ll start laughing. But many internet marketing experts are trying to make money without even realizing what on earth they’re doing online…

If you believe that you can jump in, create a website, submit it to a few directories or blogs, sit down, relax & watch those thousands of dollars (that you’ve seen in many marketers’ checks) to come, then you need to stop right there. It ain’t gonna happen. You need to think: who you are and where do you want to be in the future. Whether offline or online, there are only two things that matter: “Buying” and “Selling”. Basically, to simplify, it all comes down to this:

• Who is your customer?
  What is he or she specifically looking for? You must know their problems or desires. You must be in their shoes and find out what is that would make them feel better (an offer).
  
• What is your offer?
  Why should they buy from you? How come you’re better than the rest? Why should they trust you? Are you offering your own or someone else’s product? How will you create an irresistible offer so they beg you to sell it to them?

Think about it… There are millions of people buying online every single day. If they’re not buying from you then whose fault is that - theirs or yours?

Before you even start creating internet marketing strategy for your website(s), you need to do a research. That’s where it all begins actually. Just like in any business, you have to understand where you are and what can you do.

#1 Phase - Online Research

In this phase, you must research your market. Who are your main competitors? What are they doing online? PPC, SEO, press releases, develop their own products, do affiliate marketing or Adsense? What are their weaknesses? Do they offer a guarantee? Is their product really good? Do they build links constantly or not?

Who is your favourite customer? Where do they hangout: MySpace or YouTube? Are they freebie seekers or desperate buyers? What forces them to buy one or another product? Read reviews, forums, testimonials to find out as much as you can about your target market.

#2 Phase – Data Analysis

If you’ve performed a thorough online market research, it’s time to systematize the data you have. Write down what are the main strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Maybe you have more time than your competitors? Or maybe you know some targeted traffic source that others don’t. How might this affect your business?

Which are the places your target market usually visits? What are their main concerns? Maybe they’re not satisfied with the products in the market. Can offer something better, maybe in a form of a bonus? After that, you come to the next step, which is developing your internet marketing strategy.

#3 Phase – Strategy Development

When you already know your target market and your competitors, you are able to start creating your internet marketing strategy (or strategies). Just sit down and think about: who you are and what you can offer to the target market.

It involves a little bit of planning. What marketing methods you’ll use and which ones you can afford? PPC, SEO, email, blogging, podcasting, video blogging, webinars, viral traffic generation, link building, banner exchange or others…? You must prioritize your web marketing tactics. Find out what’s going to bring you positive ROI in the shortest time possible.

Do you have enough time to perform search engine optimization? If so, then sit and do everything you can, day in day out, to rank at the top in search engines. Don’t have time? Then buy PPC traffic and start testing your landing pages effectively. Or buy resell rights to products and sell them on ClickBank with the help of JV partners.

Don’t have time AND money? Then you better get one or another, otherwise you’re dead.

Seriously, you must find ways to get time or money. You need to think about how you can exploit other people’s time and money to build your own web business. That’s what rich people do and that’s what you must do if you want to survive in this competitive world.

#4 Phase – Monitoring Performance

When you have an internet marketing plan, you can start implementing it right away. The last step is to start monitoring your internet marketing campaigns. Which keywords people typed into search engines to find your site? Which keywords brought you the most money in PPC marketing? Are you satisfied with your SEO rankings or not? Do majority of your visitors leave your site without even spending 30 seconds? And so on…

Only with the help of close monitoring you can discover what works and what doesn’t. Testing landing pages, testing Adwords ads against each other (A/B split testing) can show you some amazing results. And remember – you never know for sure until you TEST it!

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