There are a massive number ways that you can promote yourself online. As a small business you probably have a limited budget so the trick is to make the most of the free and cheap resources that you have. The main way to do this is to take advantage of social networking. Make a fan page for your site or product and invite all your friends, ask them to invite all their friends and you can already how the fan page can grow to epic proportions. Other places are websites such as twitter and blogspot which can grow viral very quickly.

Depending on what you are selling you can list yourself on free directory websites. You should be able to find some one that does that for you in bulk rather than you needing to do them all individually. You will have to pay for this service but you didn’t usually have to pay massive amounts for that service.

You could also look into options such as distribution press releases and articles to relevant websites and directories. These help in that people can stumble across them and click the link to the site. However, search engines also like it when you have relevant websites linking to you, so this will help you get ranked higher on search engines such as Google. Most of these are free to submit too and even just doing a few a days can make a difference to your promotional campaign.

Of course another option is to find related websites and ask them to swap links. It isn’t wise to find websites that are exact the same as you but related ones are fine and you could both benefit from the extra targeted traffic.

What you need is a decent website that attracts people’s attention and gets hits from the right types of people. Of course to do this you need to advertise your website in the right places. The places that you choose to promote yourself will of course vary depending on what it is you are selling and who you are targeting. For example if you have a local driving school business then it is well worth investing in advertising space in local newspapers and magazines. Your audience is well targeted and you will be in a great position to convert those hits to sales.

If however you are starting a massive mail order company that advertising is going to be on a much grander scale. It is worth looking at the search engine optimization of your site to ensure that you are getting as much traffic from search engines as possible. You will probably also want to consider submitting things like press releases and articles to directories and news sites to grab both the attention of the people reading the sites the search engines that you need to rank you so highly.

Creating backlinks from web 2.0 sources such as Hubpages and Squidoo Lenses can also help in your mission of getting ranked higher in the search engines. This in turn will get you more targeted traffic and that way you can turn more of those hits into sales.

1. Start blogging for your business – you can have a third party hosted blog up and running in 10 minutes. Write quality contents that your customers would like to read. A regularly updated blog can drive not only traffic to your main web site, but can also help your website’s search engine ranking. If you are serious about blogging you should host it on your server and use an unique domain for it.
2. Offer free articles to other websites – most people know that search engines ‘love’ quality unique contents. Contact other website owners and tell them they can post your articles on their websites as long as they provide a link back to your website.
3. Email signature – by having a small call-to-action message in your email’s signature can greatly increase the chance of being found by potential customers.
4. Give away a free e-product – e-books or reports are great for getting the words around on the Internet. You need to make sure the information is top notch quality – something that people would normally have to pay for. Never be afraid to give away a lot for free!
5. Social networking sites – these are web sites where your customers ‘hang out’ and spend time on. If you try to advertise or sell your service or product.
6. Templates and themes – if you are a website designer you can do this yourself, otherwise you can simply hire someone to design the templates or themes for you. Make sure to put a link at the bottom of all the themes.
7. Use videos – videos are getting more and more popular on the net now. There are many ways of using videos to promote your website. One good example would be to make a video to show people how to do a particular task. So if you sell fishing rods, then you would make a video on how to choose a fishing rod, what should people look out for when buying a fishing rod and which one is good for beginners etc.

If you take the time to implement and study these seven methods, you will see the traffic of your website shoot up within weeks.

Become the Expert In Your Niche
Writing and submitting articles that are related to your business, product or service can be a wonderful way to build credibility, increase your search engine rankings, and be seen as an expert in your field.

Writing quality articles is all about using keywords that are related to your product or service. The SEO tools and robots pick up your keywords, which in turn, increases your search engine rankings.

Getting Started In Article Writing
So, how do you write a good quality article? First, think about your keywords that you want to use. For example, if your product is selling environmentally friendly garbage bags, you could use keywords like ‘garbage bags’, ‘environmentally friendly.’ How about ‘earth-friendly’,’ green’ or ‘waste.’ Write your article around these keywords. Perhaps you could provide tips on how to cut down on waste, or tips on how to make sure that the bag is really environmentally-friendly. Use your imagination, and let the words flow.

Once you have written your article, you need to submit it to various article submission services. A Google or Yahoo! search will bring up dozens of sites for you to submit to. Most of them are free and easy to use. You will need to create an account before you start submitting your articles.

If you really aren’t much of a writer, there are several writing services that will write for you, using the keywords that you provide. They usually write in batches of 10 and most are reasonably priced. Do your research and find someone who you feel will do the best job for you.

You can also submit your articles to ezines or online newsletters. These are publications that publish content online and email to their distribution lists. Most ezine publishers love receiving new content and articles. Look for ezines that relate to your product or service. Using the sample above of environmentally friendly garbage bags, you would look for ezines that are ‘green’ related. A simple search should yield you dozens of results.

Don’t forget to include your resource box at the bottom of your articles. This will include your name, email, website and business name. When someone reads your article and wants more information, or wants to order your product, they just click on your link and visit your website.

When you regularly submit fresh articles and content to various sites and ezines, more and more people start visiting your site, and your traffic numbers will rise steadily month by month. In a relatively short period of time, you will see your rankings and your product orders increase, as well as your profits.

Most people who are new to article marketing will face many problems because they don’t understand the right ways of structuring and placing articles in article directories, therefore the results they get would be limited.

Not all article directories are the same; some have good traffic for all subjects while others only have traffic to a few very specific topics, and some doesn’t have any traffic at all. So if you submit your articles to one of the bad article directories, Google will assume your website link is part of the “bad neighbourhoods”.

Understanding the differences among article directories is the key to success. You will find so many so-called “article blasting” services that will spam article directories with poorly written contents, which are often filled with spelling and grammar errors. These type of articles will seriously affect the quality of the directory, and this can happen very quickly because many people are using these “blasting” services. If these sites do not pay attention to the bad contents they will develop a bad reputation, which means the search engines will ignore them.

So what’s the ideal way to get around this issue?
The short answer is to do it by manually. You can use a professional article marketing company or you can simply do it yourself. By submitting articles manually to hand-picked directories you will get the best search engine ranking results. Remember that success is all about quality and not quantity. After all, why would you want your articles on hundreds of article directories that are banned by Google?

When you submit the articles manually you won’t have to worry about getting negative effects in the search engines, instead you’ll get the quality one way links that would give you the value you need. Good quality article directories are normally visited by both humans and search engine bots on a regular basis. Finding them isn’t difficult; a good starting point would be Google.

Once you have collected a list of article directories, you need to visit each one and look at the submitted articles. The next thing you want to check is Pagerank. An easy way to do this is that if you are using Firefox you can install a plugin called SearchStatus. With this simple plugin you can instantly see the Pagerank number at the bottom of the browser when you visit any sites. Avoid submitting articles to Pagerank 0 directories because that’s the indication of banned sites. One last thing you want to check is the Alexa rank. This number tells you how much traffic a site receives. It isn’t 100% accurate, but it can be used as a guideline. If you have installed the SearchStatus plugin you should be able to see this next to the Pagerank – the blue bar. Move the mouse pointer over this blue and a fairly long number will pop up. A good article directory should have the Alexa rank below 1,000,000.

After finding the good article directories, you can then import them into an article submission software like this one here.

Choosing a good website design company is something that should be taken seriously. There are so many web design companies that offer similar services. Finding the right one can be a real challenge; but when you are able to do so, you will see the benefits of their web design service.

Here are some tips on how to find a good web design company:

Identify Your Needs
Before you set your eyes on finding the right company to do your website design, you have to identify the needs and requirements of your business. You must be clear on what role your website will play in enhancing your online presence as well as contributing to the growth of your business.

These are some of the questions that many web design companies would ask you:

• How do you plan to use your website?
• Who is the target audience of your website?
• What is your budgetary allocation for the website?

Your website will depend on your expectations as well as the information that you want your website to contain. It will help to determine these things in advance to make it easy for you and your web designer to conceptualise and implement a good design for your website.

Gather a List of Web Design Companies
When you have already identified your needs as well as how your website will cater to the requirements of your business, you can start creating your list of your potential web design companies. You can do this at the comforts of your own home just by going online and patiently search from the internet.

You may also want to ask for referrals from family or friends, or if you come across a website that catches your attention, you may inquire or search the web design company that have created that website.

Choose the Best Company
You can now narrow down the list of your potential web design companies based on the following criteria:

1. How they meet the four Cs – Capability, Credibility, Consistency, and Cost.
2. Have a look at their website portfolio and see if their style is suitable for your business.
3. Length of experience in the web design industry.
4. Turn-around time.
5. How they respond to their customer needs and queries.

Evaluate Their Proposal
A good website design company will send you a proposal for evaluation. To be able to get the best deal, compare the proposals you have received with the following considerations:

1. Over-all soundness and feasibility of the proposal.
2. Strength and limitation.
3. Package including value-added features.

When you have done the above, you will be able to pick the best from your list. If there are still gray areas or some questions in mind about their service, then by all means phone them up and clear all your queries about their website design service.

One of the many benefits is that people will talk about your service or product both online and offline. Thus, will attract “natural” links from forums, reviewers’ blog, news sites…etc Websites that rank high in the search engines are usually those who are providing high quality services or products and are focused on acquiring satisfied and engaged customers. There are many factors that can attract people to buy products or services you are offering. According to some researches made by the Gallup Organization in Nebraska; the most important element that make customers come back to a fast food shop is “the people”. People is one of the most important element in any businesses. The other important thing is having a user friendly website, this is like putting most of your products in the lower shelves so that most people can reach.

There are a number of ways to improve the usability of your website, for example, if you are selling electronic gadgets through your eCommerce store, you can make description of your products as detail as possible, include a photo for every product and make sure the shopping cart is as simple as possible.

Videos are getting more and more popular so if there’s enough requests for the same information, you could put up a series of training videos to show people how to do the most asked things. Also, you could put up videos that others have created, which are beneficial to your customers. The objective of this strategy is to provide your visitors with enough information that are related to your products or services so that they can make the right decision quickly. The additional information will also give the visitors more confident to do business with you.

The more you focus on the customer service. the better your business will be, and the better your website will rank in the search engines.

If you do run out of ideas you could always review other people’s products or services that are related to your market. Only review those that you like and would use yourself. After you have done a few reviews you can send the Youtube video links to the original owners and they like what you done they will ask you to review their next product, and this time, most of them would offer you a free “copy” of their product or some payment. Before you accept their offers, try to find out if they have a strong customers list or a popular website/blog. If so, ask them if they would promote your product or service on their website or to their list.

So now you have your first video on Youtube, but how do you get people to view it? The best way to go about doing that is by commenting and rating. You need to find related videos that are popular and leave comments on them. Try to make your comments relate to the video content, and avoid short comments like “nice video”, “thanks alot”, “cool stuff”…etc You can also comment on other people’s comment if you have nothing interesting to say. When you comment on someone’s video, other people will click on your username to see who you are. When they are on your profile’s page they will see that you have uploaded similar videos. Keep on doing this and you have more and more subscribers.

To make Youtube work for your business you have to use all available options, and commenting is the next best thing you can do after uploading your videos. The next thing is rating, to do that you need to view a video. Once it’s over you can rate it by clicking on the yellow stars.

Both commenting and rating are great way to get your username out there, especially with commenting because human beings enjoy chatting, therefore if your comments are interesting people will want to start a conversation with you sub-consciously, so they reply to your comments. Another good thing about commenting is that your comments will be there permanently.

1. Update your website often. If you have nothing new to add, try to improve the copy. This will let the search engines know that your website is still “active”.
2. Start blogging for your business. Write something that could be useful to your customers.
3. Join some affiliate networks, add their products to your website. Make sure they are not in direct competition with you.
4. Invite people to opt-in for your newsletter or free gift.
5. Join social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, stumbleupon and wiki, then add the icons to the bottom the homepage.
6. Add a bookmark link to your website so people can easily save it to their favorites.
7. Make sure your branding, colours and navigation are consistent on every page. It should be clear that which page the user is on.
8. Create a policy page if you don’t have one yet. Let your customers know the principle and philosophy of your business, so that they will feel more comfortable in dealing with you.
9. Make sure each page has a unique page title and description. Doing so will give you not only the search engine benefits, but also the benefits for humans.
10. Create a user friendly 404 error page. By default, if somebody goes to a page that has been moved or doesn’t exists, he/she will be shown a page with the message “404 Error – page not found”. To make this page more user friendly you can create your own error message with a link that takes the user to the homepage.

The concept of this may sound simple, however, to get the maximum benefits from it you’ll need to have some good ads to grab people’s attention. It is more difficult to get people to click on your ads when they searching for your competitor’s name products or services. So do prepare to see the click through rate to be lower compared to the generic keywords, but you will also see the cost of per click is 5-10 times lower. And this is why you need to test the ads. If the results are worst than your generic keywords then try to write a different ad. If you have some good copywriting skills you will able to see more benefit from this concept. I won’t be getting into copywriting right now but if you want to learn more about it I would highly recommend Joe Vitale’s Hypnotic Writing book.

Another way to “steal” your competitors’ traffic is to buy misspelled domain names and redirect them to your website. So if someone accidently typed in “your misspelled domain” instead of your competitor’s domain, he/she will be redirected to your website. Ideally you want to buy names that have the same extension (.com .net .org .co.uk) as your competitors’ website. Even if you only get 1000 visitors in a year from that domain I’m sure you will get at least 1 customer out of that, and how much did it cost you to acquire that customer?