Internet Marketing for Your Small Business

There are several ways you can promote your website online. Often the best way is to use a combination of strategies to bring you targeted traffic to website so that you can make sales.

The big online marketing promotion strategies that I\’m going to cover in this article include pay per click, search engine optimization, and article marketing.

For almost instant results you can use Pay Per Click Advertising, you’ll be able to immediately see results and assess your success. Whilst Pay Per Click gives you the quickest bang for your dollar, it does mean putting your money on the line. and programs like Google Adwords let you pay at the end of the month, if your campaign isn’t profitable you’ll end up with a debt.

To market your business online with Pay Per Click Advertising you start by writing short ads of about 90-125 characters. The ads you write will show up on the right hand side of the search results in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. In addition your ads can show up on the pages of related websites if you choose to activate that option.

The position of your ad will depend on a combination of the amount you are willing to pay for each visitor and the percentage of people who see your ad and are willing to click through. Therefore, writing a good ad for low competition keywords is the way you make money with pay per click.

It is possible to get a listing on the first page of the search engines for free but it will take some effort. You can’t just build a website anymore you need to work on the stature of your site to make the search engines want to list it.

You need to take a number of actions both with the pages of your site and other sites around the internet in order for the search engine spiders to be able to find your site and index it.

Firstly your site should be ‘friendly’ for the search engines which means having the right coding in your html and relevant contextually driven content. It is also a great idea to update your site often with more content which will add pages to your site and improve your ranking in the search engines.

Once your onsite factors have been taken care of you need to start building links to your website. You can do this by submitting ads to online classifieds, commenting on blogs and submitting your site to online directories. A fantastic way to build links is by submitting articles with links back to your site to online articles directories.

Article directories have two valuable purposes for online marketing promotion. One is to build links which increases the chance that your own site will be indexed in the search engines.

There is another very valuable benefit of submitting your articles to article directories. Established article directories have high page rank and this can be passed onto the articles that you submit to them. The article you’ve submitted could show up in the search results when someone searches on your topic even though you site might not. Then as that person reads your article and finds the content valuable they can click through to your website by clicking on the links in the resource box. The better articles directories are EzineArticles, GoArticles and Ideamakers.

As well as article directories you can use websites like Squidoo. With Squidoo, which is free, you can create a lens using short articles which direct people back to your website. You can also add features like polls and YouTube videos to make your visitor’s experience unique.

There are many great ways to get traffic to your website. Article Marketing, Pay Per Click advertising are 3 of the most effective. Combining all 3 strategies will give you the best results.