If you can't optimize your site, or can't wait for the delay it can take with a search engine, you can always purchase placement. This is usually a good, quick way to get traffic, although it can be expensive. Therefore good customer research can help you lower your costs, by targeting primarily those in the buying stages, thereby improving your conversion ratio. But this research is often hard to find, especially online.

There are also directory submissions you can do. You can still pay to be included in the Yahoo! directory, or there are free directories, such as the Open Directory Project (also known as DMOZ) which you can submit to.

These 3 (search engines, paid listings and directories) are where most people consider when deciding on an online marketing campaign. But there are other options out there.

Shopping feeds are becoming more popular these days as well. In case you didn't already know, shopping sites like Google's Froogle accept product feeds to display, for free, on their shopping site. By creating a Froogle feed (for example) not only can you submit what products you want your potential customer to see, but you can also control the description they see. If you don''t submit this feed, you are subject to whatever the crawler pulls back as "relevant."

If you have product to sell, but don't (or can't) invest in your own website, sites such as Ebay allow you to setup a storefront and use their services to sell your product. Even if you do have a website, an Ebay storefront can supplement your online sales.

If you have the budget, you can buy a link on the homepage of a major portal like MSN. While this may be an effective traffic generator, you may find that you don't receive the volume of qualified leads you'd like.

Other feeds which can be used to promote your site and/or products include RSS and XML feeds. While traditionally used to promote new content and news items, RSS is flexible enough to allow for product promotion as well. In fact, XML support is more widely accepted across the web. More developers are finding new ways to use XML to help them achieve their online marketing goals.

Press releases are another great way to expose your site to millions of users. There are free services which allow you to submit press releases which get picked up by other popular news services such as Google news and Yahoo! news. While you may not necessarily be able to promote existing products, you can inform users of new products or services which your company offers via these news releases.

Also exploding in popularity this year are blogs. Blogs (also known as web logs) are generally personal web pages. That is, they are places were the average user can go and post their own thoughts and comments. While blogs may have initially been designed to allow just this, more and more companies are finding a use for blogs. Not only can you use blogs to keep your site content fresh and up to date, but by having a blog, you become part of the blogging community. Since most blogs have feeds built into them, your feed can be instantly replicated on tens of thousands of other sites.

That about covers the majority of the current ways to promote online. Tomorrow, we will look at what one could get into with new and emerging technologies.


Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Enquiro.com

Copyright 2004 - Searchengineposition Inc.

Related link:

Online Opportunities Part 2