How To Have Fun Marketing Your Site – For FREE

How to have fun marketing your site – for FREE

Creating an online business does not need to be like another boring job that I have worked in the past. This can be a fun and exciting time!

As we continue our discussion of stating our online business, once I have built my new site in WordPress, how do I let the world know how to find it? This will be the topic of today’s discussion.

I will cover where to market your new site, how to promote it, and the different types of marketing you can do. Then I will show you where you can learn to set up your own online business in an awesome and helpful community. Yes, the same one I use.

What To Do First

The first thing your want to do is to continue to add content to your site. This can be done by writing articles and product reviews. By doing this, your visitors will gain value from your site and will come back to read future articles, purchase products that you recommend, or sign up to your email list.

As we discussed in the last article, How to write content for a website, the importance of providing your readers’ information that they find value in. They came to your site for a reason. Whether for information or a recommendation on a product, your want to provide them with that. If they found what they came for, they will be back. I bookmark sites all the time that have provided me value.

Search Engines can be my Friends

As I built my site, I started getting emails from Google “congratulation your page has been indexed”. I had no idea what that meant, but it was exciting. I found out that this means that my page was noticed by Google and it now can be found by searching for keywords. (more on keywords in a future article)

Now my page or article I wrote maybe only be listed on page 5 of the searches, it’s a good start. As I continue to build out my site with more content and I attract more visitors, my ranking will go up and eventually end up on page one for a specific keyword.

Two main types of marketing

In previous articles, we have discussed that the two types of ways to market or advertise your site are free and paid methods. Let’s look at each one of these:

1. Free – this can be using your new friends, the search engines. Once an article is indexed, that is free advertising. As it climbs in the ranking, it will be noticed by more people and they will click it to come to your site. This can lead to sales as long as they find what they came for.
2. Paid per click (PPC) – this is paid advertising. You can pay to have ads place with Google, Yahoo, Bing, or others. You set up your ad campaign in something like Ads.Google.com and set your budget of how much your want to spend. Google will place your ads and when someone clicks on the ad, they are taken to where your direct them. You can send them to your site or off to purchase a product that you are promoting.

Let’s focus on the free marketing methods for now. This way you can continue to build your site and get free traffic. For me this is the better way to go unless all I want to do is promote high-ticket items, then I could just do PPC and not build a site. But I am having fun doing this and will continue this way.

How to Market my site for FREE

As I am adding content to my site, one of the best free ways to bring visitors is through social media. I could post a description of my article or what product I reviewed along with a link to that specific article. When someone is interested, they click on it and read your article.

Have you ever been to a chat group like Yahoo Groups or any other type of interest group? These can be a great source to market your site, just be careful not to spam or you will be kicked out! When you join a group, add to the discussion, then your can always mention “by the way, I wrote an article about that” and include your link. Don’t just go in there and start spamming!

Do you have friends that have their own sites? What about being a guest blogger or author? Never hurts to have a new twist put on something that adds to your site. This is something that I plan on doing in the future. I can write something for another site, then they will write something for mine. As long as the topic fits your site’s main theme, why not?

Using Social Media

Social media is a great free way to market my site. There are so many outlets that I can use, but I will only discuss some of them here:

• Facebook – this is one of the best social media platforms in my opinion with over 2 Billion accounts. I can add my website to my profile, create a page, write posts about my articles, or if I want, run paid ads. Facebook is a great tool to use, for both personal and your new online business.
• YouTube – How many times have you gone to YouTube to watch a product review or learn how to do something? Tens of thousands of people every day use YouTube. Why not review products and direct them back to your site or post your affiliate link so that they can purchase the product? You can also add your Videos to your product review on your site!
• Twitter – I can blast out a tweet to approximately 175 million! A tweet currently only contains 140 characters, so choose your words carefully. Hashtags (#) are a great way to target your tweets.
• Pinterest – it’s like send sending free postcards to over 200 million accounts. This is where your creativity can really shine. How graphics and texts are used to create a reader’s interest is important. I need to catch their interest in 2 seconds for them to read my card. Just like the mail, I receive at home, if it looks like an ad, I may not even open it.
• Google+ – here is another way I can showcase my site’s content for free. I create a card and post it on my account which will link back to my site.
• Instagram – has approximately 1 Billion accounts! In some ways, Instagram is less cluttered than Facebook and easier to use. The demographics can be a lot different since Instagram’s average user’s age is less than Facebook’s. To some, Instagram is considered to be the younger generation’s Facebook.

There are many other Social Media outlets that you can use to market your business, but these are the main ones that I use. I am always willing to listen to new ideas and your can let me know which ones have worked best for you by commenting below.

Final Thoughts

We have covered a lot here about marketing your new site. The most important goal of a new site is to build valuable content for its readers. As content is created, I can market my individual articles and reviews, which will bring visitors to my site.

If your notice, when I gave a brief description of the social media outlets that I discussed, many of them mention having links back to your site? The reason for this is that Google or the outlets do not like it when your link directly to product sites. They may consider this spam and will delete your post. Yes, some of my posts were deleted, that’s how I know.

Using your site as a home-base is the way to go. By bringing visitors to your site, will help improve its rankings with Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This will lead to more visitors to purchase products, comment on your articles, and sign up to your email list.

To learn more about how to market your site, click here to read my review on Wealthy Affiliate. This is where I started and continue to learn.

Please leave a comment below, I like to hear if you found value in this article and why or why not.

Thank you for reading and have fun marketing your site.