FREE Ways To Get Your Business Noticed Online

People aren’t going to come to your site if they don’t know it exists!

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend a fortune on advertising (although this helps!) Below are my top 5 tips to get your site seen for free.

1. Participate in forums. Forums are a great way to make people aware of your business. They give you the opportunity to show your knowledge in a particular field and at the very least, you might make some good business contacts. I get around 10 visits a day from people seeing my posts on one forum and I only post perhaps once a day. ‘That doesn’t sound like a lot of visits to me’ you might think. For a multi-national company, you’d be right; 10 visits a day is insignificant to them, but for a small business like mine and yours, that equates to roughly 300 people a month or 3600 a year, not to be sniffed at.
2. Business Directories. Submitting to online business directories is another good source of free advertising but beware, some free directories are nothing but link farms. Reputable directories do exist such as Free Index and let people find you according to trade/profession and location. For example, Elan Web Design is listed on Free Index and I also have a listing on Which Web Design Company to target a more specific audience. There are lots of directories out there, so get your business listed.
3. Quality Backlinks. Search engines love backlinks! The key word here is ‘quality’. Incoming links to your site need to be relevant to your business to have any effect with the search engines. Try and target businesses in a related field to yours. For example, if your business sells cars, possible ‘quality’ links might come from car accessory shops, mechanics, car valetors, tyre-fitters, any business related to cars. Just ask the website’s owner if they would mind having a link to your site on theirs. They might require a reciprical link in return, which is fine although not as effective. Apart from search engines, customers will find your site more useful if it has relevant information/links to other related businesses.
4. Simple SEO. A longer term solution is to give your site some basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). It does take a while for your SEO efforts to filter through to the search engines but it’s the surest way to get your site placed higher in organic results. For more advice about SEO, see .
5. Article Writing. If you own and run a business, you almost certainly have an area of expertise to write about. Write an article covering the best practices in your trade, hints and tips, your opinions on recent products etc. The trick is not to assume that people already know everything about your profession. Something that you might think is common knowledge might actually be a great piece of advice for somebody else. Once you have written your article, you need to publish it. A great source of sound PR advice is here.

Now that you have people coming to your site, you need to convert them into paying customers. That’s where my next article comes in.

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