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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Facebook Acquires Video Advertising Start-Up LiveRail

They Know What Users Want, Now To Sell It To Them

Facebook has acquired LiveRail, a start-up which develops ways for companies to focus video ads on their sites more directly to consumers. As the largest platform for the publishing of video adverts across a variety of sites, delivering over seven billion targeted video ads every month, the purchase of LiveRail marks a definitive move on Facebook’s part to further monetise the growing capacity of mobile devices in particular to integrate video into users’ News Feeds.

Source: mashable.com

The social networking site first trialled auto-playing ads at the end of 2013, and auto-playing videos were introduced into all users’ News Feeds in March of this year. This acquisition demonstrates Facebook’s commitment to this movement, and can be seen as a challenge to the growing threat of Twitter and that company’s long-term integration of corporately sponsored Tweets into users’ feeds. It also shows the impact which mobile browsing has had on the company’s business model; Snapchat’s recent introduction of sponsored Snaps suggests that Facebook is not alone in seeing video advertising as a significant aspect of the future of monetised mobile social media.

LiveRail’s reported purchase price of up to £291 million reinforces Facebook’s perceived commitment to targeted advertising as a large part of the company’s revenue stream. Targeted is the key word here; while the traditional models of advertising have prized volume above all else, LiveRail’s expertise in tailoring adverts to specific demographics and even to individual users is another indicator of the paradigm shift which mass engagement with social media has brought about.

Just as Tumblr have been careful not to disrupt or alienate existing users as they introduce advertising to their site by attempting to ensure that people only see ads which are of genuine interest, so too do Facebook hope to create an environment in which suggested content is almost indistinguishable from user-selected content.

Currently Facebook tracks the browsing history of users even outside of Facebook – a person searching for flights to Venice, for example, may then see ads on their Feed for hotels and restaurants in Venice. This extensive data mining, combined with the technology for tailored ads which LiveRail will bring, should attract advertisers who may previously have been concerned that their products were too specific to be worth dropping into the maelstrom of Facebook’s 1.11 billion monthly users.

Source: sify.com

This is not only a move to ensure direct profits. Next week Facebook will release its quarterly earnings, and with their share price still not as robust as some may have hoped by this stage their purchase of LiveRail could be seen as a move to reassure investors that the company is still focused on growing a more diverse array of revenue streams. Alongside their introduction of promoted posts earlier this year and their trialling of a ‘Buy’ button on businesses’ pages from last week, this latest move should suggest to shareholders that the company is at least open to experimenting with methods of monetising which consist of more than simply a string of ads down the right side of the page which are ignored more often than not.

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Where do I start? Choosing your niche

Where do I start??

You have decided to start your own online business!!!

What do I sell? what market is good? where do I start??

Well, first you do need to decide what area of the market you want to get into....

First of all, think of all the things that you are passionate about.

For example, if you are passionate about Golf - that is where you should start.
I use this example because of how popular that niche is.
You could start by giving tips on improving your swing, or how to drive the ball further etc.

If your passion lies in a less well known niche, then you need to find if the market is there for you....

If there is a magazine available about your passion, then there is a good chance that it is popular (just think of the cost to produce a magazine .....)

If you do not have a passion for anything in particular, then think of something you would like to learn about - 

The most important thing with internet marketing is to enjoy what you are doing, otherwise you have no real motivation and you will drift away and just eventually stop because you get bored.

If you are still not sure of what niche to choose, then click on the link at the bottom of this post and you can see two free videos from British internet marketer Sarah Staar on choosing a profitable niche.

Click Here For Free Videos