Content can make or break your online presence. It is quite evident that only having a website would not help in attracting customers. Your site should be Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly. It should get top ranking in noted search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Search engines scan the content of a website and ranks it in the form of Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). If your site gets a good rank, you are bound to get traffic. However, sites don’t get good ranking even after the content has been tweaked for optimization. What’s the issue behind this failure? In short, how does content be responsible for your online presence? Read on to know more.
RSS Feeds
It is quite an in thing to have an RSS feeds on your site to make it content-friendly. In many SEO techniques, the SEO experts use RSS feeds as a part of Content Management System (CMS) to boost fresh content each day.
However, RSS feeds have the option of using content from yet another site. Even blogs, opinions, comments are copied and place in websites as RSS feeds. Although you may feel it is boosting your website ranking, you are not doing anything good. On the contrary, this action is not ethical – known as scraping.
The result can be alarming. Google and other search engines would only blacklist your website and summarily remove it from the SERPs. With no links of your website, your online presence is bound to be a fiasco.
Exclusive Write Ups
Content is the king – this adage has been a well-accepted fact from a long time to come. However, your website should be content-centric with relevant, informative, yet catchy web content, articles, and blogs. Make sure you use the blog section to discuss issues about your business.
Any piece of content that is written in a website needs to be polished and prestigious. The articles should also be subjected to criticisms. You can promote your website by submitting your articles – those that are exclusively for your website – to directories. Your website reference in the articles would promote your online presence.
Content with Difference
There are many directories which offer similar content on a particular topic. It can be clearly seen that the content is written subjectively and does not address a particular website. If you want your website to shine in the online world, ensure that the articles or blogs are especially made to address your online business.
In short, there must be something unique in your articles which clearly show that it is an article based on your website.
Lastly, don’t forget to start today. Write, edit, change, and again write the content. It is through rigorous practice that you can succeed in showing the prowess of your website through content.
The Internet’s full of hyped-up promises of the ‘ultimate’ marketing secret that will singlehandedly skyrocket your business to instant success.
Naturally, this is ALL it is: hype. There’s no single ’secret’ that will magically transform a fledgling business into a powerful money-maker. Instead, every business owner is responsible for testing and refining various techniques until he or she has developed a solid, effective base that produces the desired results.
What works for one business may not work for another! Likewise, another business may have poor results with one method, while others experience great success. Here’s a quick checklist of some of the more popular — and completely free — marketing techniques to help you build your online business (note: this is a 3-part series).
PART 1: FREE ONLINE MARKETING TECHNIQUES
1. Build and use your own opt-in list of targeted and interested prospects. Offer a free newsletter that provides fresh, interesting, and relevant content. You’ll receive feedback from your readers about what’s important to them, and over time they’ll come to know and trust you. Your products, services, and even recommendations will then be taken much more seriously because you’ve developed credibility with your readers.
2. Contribute to newsgroups or discussion boards. Establish yourself as a helpful member of a community. Other members of the community who come to know and respect you will often refer you to others.
3. Niche directories or search engines. Find all the highly-targeted directories and SEs for your market, and then work to get listed. You’ll be surprised at how many niche sites there are! Good places to start
looking are http://yahoo.com/ and http://www.dmoz.com/ .
4. Build your link popularity. For example, you can trade links with other businesses in your market so that you can ’share’ each other’s traffic. Most of the major search engines take link popularity into consideration when ranking your site.
5. Endorsed mailings to other lists. Find the editor of a great newsletter, and offer your product or service to him for free in return for a review or an endorsed ad to his list. Endorsements from the editor can far outperform regular ‘ads’, since they come from someone they know and trust (the editor).
6. Testimonials. It’s fine for you to say that your product or service is wonderful… but there’s far more ‘punch’ when someone else says it! Testimonials show prospects that you have happy customers and helps them to make the decision to buy.
7. Use autoresponders to follow-up with your prospects. It has been proven time and time again that autoresponders can dramatically increase your profits! They’re also great time-savers, saving you from following up with
each prospect manually.
8. Ad swaps. You can get extra exposure for ‘free’ (no out-of-pocket expenses) by swapping ad space with another editor that caters to your audience. Plus it’s a great way to put ‘remnant’ ad space to good use.
9. Join a webring. Link to other sites like yours and build an online ‘community.’
10. Offer coupons or gift certificates to entice visitors to make a purchase now*.
11. Make good use of referral marketing. Ask happy customers to refer prospects to you. Many people are so busy these days that they’re willing to rely on a trusted friend or contact’s advice — it saves them the time necessary to do all the research themselves.
12. Write and distribute articles in your area of expertise. This is a great credibility-builder! People who appreciate what you have to say are much more likely to check out your business. Another ‘bonus’ is that articles are often archived on websites for visitors to refer to time and time again.
13. Become an ‘expert’. If you like to write and have the time to do so, consider partnering with a high-traffic site within your niche market and offer to write a regular column or article. You establish credibility and get exposure; your partner site and their readers get great content.
14. Use a ‘Recommend-It’ or ‘Refer-A-Friend’ script. These scripts let visitors send your URL to friends.
15. Make it easy for others to link to your site. Consider adding a ‘Link to Us’ section where you provide the HTML that visitors can simply cut and paste to their own web pages. Again, this helps to build your link popularity (see point #4).
16. Hold contests. For example, every month you could give away one of your products to a lucky subscriber or customer.
17. Use a signature. Also known as ’sig files’, a signature is a brief blurb about your business along with your URL and/or contact information. Put a signature on every piece of email you send out, as well as on any message board posts (if appropriate).
18. Give away a quality free eBook or report. eBooks and reports can be excellent viral marketing tools. You can even offer them as a ‘premium’ to other businesses within your niche, so that they can give it away to
their own customers or subscribers. This is an effective way to build a network that will willingly promote your business for you! More on promoting free eBooks and how they can help you can be found in the
article, ‘10 Quick Tips on How to Create, Distribute, and Profit from Free eBooks’: http://onlinebusinessbasics.com/articles/ebooktips.html Hopefully this has given you a few helpful ideas on how to market your online business. In the next installment of this series, you’ll read about several marketing techniques that may cost you money, but that can be worth the investment many times over. The final installment is all about marketing your online business in the ‘offline’ world! Stay tuned.
