Saturday, November 24, 2012

Exploring New Ways to Market an Online Business


You can read blog post after blog post filled with suggestions for promoting your website online, most of which contain the same information. Some tactics have stopped working, post Google Penguin. The best tactics aren't always common or obvious, and it may take a little creativity to come up with them.

You can't rely on your site being so great that the traffic will just come on its own and SEO is only just a part of the traffic generating process. There are things you can do without any technical knowledge:

E-Commerce

Let's face it. Some niches are downright boring. There isn't much of anything original you can say about furniture and you'll find yourself hard-pressed to encourage natural links to product pages.

So, how do you get creative with a boring niche? Ask yourself what is interesting about your niche. When it comes to furniture, people like to look at the photos, if nothing else. People like to share photos. What can you do with photos? You can run contests based around photos people take - link bait. (There are plenty of contest and sweepstakes websites where you can list your contest). You can find sponsors for your contests who promote the contest on their website, fan page or even offline in print. You can post photos on your Facebook fan page or Pinterest. You can have numerous photos of the same product turned into video and then submit that video to YouTube and other video channels.

Cross-Promotions

One thing that social networks are great for is discovering other pages/websites in related niches to run cross-promotions with. You can promote one another's fan pages, coupons, sales, etc. You can mention each other's website in a monthly newsletter and both sites gain new site visitors.

Guest's Content

You can find a guest blogger to write something for your website (he/she will be very likely to share his/her content on your site).

Guests need not be limited to the written word. I've found people in my industry who are happen to conduct live streamed video demonstrations in return for the opportunity to promote their products. This makes for exciting content worthy of a press release.

And, of course, as you may have suspected, I'm coming back to the most important point that you will have drilled in to your head everyone online now: make your content count. If you have writer's block, find writers in your industry, interview people in your industry and publish it, review products and/or services in your industry. Doing the same things your competitor does keeps you in a perpetual race. Creativity can set you apart and you'll be known for how you are different.




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