In all of the web building and online business forums I visit I see the same basic question get asked a lot, “what’s the best way to spend X dollars promoting my site?”
The problem is that X always represents a number far below what needs to be spent for any kind of real success from a paid marketing campaign.
However, there is a great solution for someone in this shoe-string budget position: the $0.99 Cheeseburger at McDonald’s!
And yes, you can get traffic and SERPs (search engine rankings) increases with that–though fries will cost extra.
Here’s the situation, you need to gain SERPs and traffic to your web site, but you don’t have the money to spend on a full blown marketing campaign. It seems like you’re in a corner with your back to the wall, and caught in the classic catch 22, “you need traffic to earn money, but you need money to build traffic”.
There are very effective, ethical and free ways to build your SERPs and traffic without spending a dime!
Here are my personal favorites (in no particular order) for you:
1 : Article Marketing – This is the writing of informative articles (not keyword stuffed article spam!) that support the topic(s) of your web page(s). Target your keyword phrases with these, without sacrificing on article quality, and remember to include a “call to action” link in the author’s resource/bio box at the end.
2 : Social Bookmarking – Don’t SPAM! Yes, I’m expanding the meaning of spam to include posting poor quality articles and pages to Digg, StumbleUpon and other similar sites. If you haven’t published something worthy of reader’s time, don’t submit it! That’ll come back to bite you in the ass over the long term. However, if you publish something of quality and value, definitely share it across your social circles. That is why they exist after all.
3 : Forums and Blogs – Visiting forums and blogs related to your site’s topic is smart because it allows you to stay on top of what people are discussing about that particular topic, but also because most forums and blogs want your participation. Include a signature link in your forum posts, and your site URL in blog comments. Even if they use the “nofollow” tags, if you post topical and sincere thoughts you’ll get human traffic from those links.
4 : Build your own Topical Network – I know someone who is in a heavily saturated industry but wanted to get to the top of the SERPs for 2 dozen keyword phrases. His solution was to build an independent mini-site (using free hosting services) for each of those phrases, publish quality content to each mini-site, link all of those mini-sites to his main company web site pages that were targeting the same keywords and then use article marketing to promote each of the mini-sites. It was a lot of work, but in less than 2 months he was on the first page of Google for almost every one of his keyword phrases with either one of his mini-sites or his main site.
Now, some might argue that it’s shady practice to build multiple sites like this rather than a single site, but if each of the mini-sites contain good content that is of value to searchers who find them I think this is a completely ethical way of expanding market reach online.
In my mind the question is simply “are the mini-sites being used to trick unsuspecting searchers to traffic your page, or are they being used in an effort to connect searchers with the actual information they’re seeking?”
If you’re working to facilitate connections that otherwise might not be made because of industry saturation and/or elusive search engine love for your main site, then there’s nothing unethical at all in it.
Okay, there you go. Four very free and ethical ways to increase your SERPs and traffic. Now, take your $1 and go get that Cheeseburger at McDonald’s!
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