Getting Free Advertising
As I have stated before FREE is wonderful way to get customers but not a reliable one and if your really going to attempt to make money online you need to commit to your business a budget to promoting your online store. That being said there is tons of free traffic out there and the real question is can you do anything with it. In today’s search engine market content is king good quality content is what both the search robots and the consumers are looking for. This needs to be said early and many times. NEVER TRY TO TRICK A ROBOT. As you go out and wonder around looking for others to confirm or deny what I tell you. Listen to this. There will always be ways of tricking machines they are big dumb and only can do math. Its not hard to predict what they are up to if you know what to look for. But there are 100,000's of websites that couldn't get a single hit anymore because they used a Doorway page scam generating 1000's of keyword rich doorway pages or trade a link farms to increase link popularity. Frankly it doesn't increase your income to increase your traffic unless your a search engine. So don't risk being blacklisted there is no appeals process. Your site gets blacklisted you may as well buy a new domain name and start all over.
Setting up a good free campaign so that you can have 300-1000 people a day come to your site without spending money is not hard but there are rules. Follow them. Also ignore the "other" experts their advice is general and they may as well be reading Tarot Cards. Not to be ignored mind you but understand that your in a different situation than anyone else selling online. There are only 23,000 licensed dealers this year. Less than 1400 online gun stores. There are 400,000 online hosting companies. So when they tell you to avoid popular keywords, don't, there just isn't that much competition out there yet. Age has its privileges with the internet the older your domain name the higher your search rank. That again is why it’s so important not to take chances with being blacklisted.
Now submitting your site to search engines and directories is the obvious way to get free traffic, but I will warn you there are no shortcuts to this. YOU HAVE TO DO IT BY HAND. If you absolutely need to automate it. My recommendation is Selfpromotion.com you need to own your own domain name. You need an email address from that domain name. If you don't have these three things STOP. Contact us and get a $70 per year hosting package. Search engines are no longer looking for anyone and everyone they are being picky and these three things are mandatory if you’re going to see results. Besides BillyBob@MSN.com is not professional or reliable. Also a new twist recently is major Search engines have started trashing any submissions done at night(screams home business) For this reason we recommend you spend your lunch hour every day submitting to a few search engines each day. You can streamline this process by using RoboForm.
So now that you dumped the Aol, msn, and yahoo email accounts so that the searches don't dump you. Your ready to move on. Did I tell you there is a lot of groundwork?
Its the new trend to put 75 Top 100 lists on a website 7-8 banner exchanges. This is not a good idea we played with it and frankly our stats went down not up because the page took so long to load. So while we got more Clicks we got fewer page views, which is a good indicator that folks are looking around with ease. Some have told me they do for the Links back to them. Again to be frank it doesn't work that way with anyone's but our own top 100. Hover over a link on a top 100 site. If you don't see the URL your going to in the lower left status bar of your browser its not a link to you its an internal link to a robot. With a RE-Direct. Robots hate re-directs. We custom built our Top 100 to have REAL links to your site so that you can benefit from our High Frequency Google Crawls.
Remember from the previous article you don't want a heavy load on your first page. You can have 1 or 2 top 100's but don't use anybody that has a FREE one. Or if their graphic goes down a lot dump them. Bad links that have to draw content from other servers can add 10-15 secs to your page load time. Costing you money. 1 banner exchange is a good and of course we recommend ours it has a 2:1 exchange ratio but there are really some other good ones out there. Just remember these are not Sources of traffic they are gravy traffic. You get traffic from them only when you have enough traffic to earn high ranks or lots of credits. We can't use them because we have such a high traffic load we overload their servers and wind up with 100,000's of unused credits. I just get pissed off anyways when they accuse me of cheating because no other gun site has those high numbers. The fact is you lay down good ground work your site will grow every month all on its own. It just takes effort. This is my full time job so I have lots of effort to give toward promotion.
Pop-ups/popunders This is a hot button with a lot of people but here is the honest truth about pop-unders. They work. That is why there are so many of them. Pop-ups are annoying because they distract you from what you were doing. Pop-unders(Good-ones) don't interfere and are just there when they close their other window. A popup window is only annoying if its something your not interested in. That is why targeting is so important with this type of free advertising. The number one source is ExitExchange.com(click here to see them) a few years back we talked them into creating a category specifically for us. Hobbies/Firearms. The big benefit to this is at the very least its another page view and when your seeking better search ranks more page views equals Higher Alexa Ratings which means even more traffic. I tell you where we use to put the code. On the last step of our online checkout. You will be amazed at how many fill a cart then quit. Its a good way to get a crack at someone else. But while your starting out don't be afraid of them. Keep in mind you can put ANY page you want in there so don't just put your home page in there. Stick a Slick Gun or a some other hot item on its own page. Make it a light(fast loading) and direct to the point page. What did I put in mine. A picture of detailed Colt and a add yourself to our mailing list link. We averaged 75 sign ups a day from that popup window on someone else’s site. Remember its HOW you use the tools that makes the difference. A small popup asking to join a mailing list for Guns when a guy is on a gun site is rarely annoying.
Author: GunMuse Date: Wednesday Sep 22 2004 20:21:47 pm
