Let's take a look at what you've learned so far: search engine strategies, building links, and promoting your website through traditional media and emails. While search engines, emails and linking strategies are usually free, traditional media needs a special budget. If you have a good budget for website promotion, here are some online strategies you might want to consider:
5. Online Paid Advertising Strategies
If you want your online business to bring you rapid results, you need to employ paid advertising strategies.
The most popular paid advertising solution is PPC - pay per click. You can buy PPC advertising from Yahoo or Google. Your ads will appear in the sponsored results. The position of the ad within the sponsored results depends on how much you pay for a particular keyword phrase in comparison to other companies. This is a tricky investment though: you should first learn how to use PPC, unless you want to pay more than this advertising solution is really worth. You could also use CPM (cost per thousand views)
Buy text ads: some companies offer you the possibility of buying advertising space in their newsletters. The best approach is text links. Choose companies that you know having a large target audience. Check your web stats to see how much traffic and real revenue this paid advertising strategy brings. You could also purchase banner ads, but, statistics show, they don't work as well as they once did.
Build up an affiliate program. This is known as PPA - pay per action. That's how you build a network of resellers who will get a percentage of your wins by promoting your products. What you need to do is: determine how much you are willing to pay in commissions and how you are going to manage the program. If you are online business savvy you may know how to set up the technical details. If not, choose a company.
Froogle your products - this is free. There are two reasons to froogle: clients all over the world can find your products and the product page could rank higher in Google.
List your products on Auction Sites: eBay, Amazon, Yahoo! Shopping etc.
6. Other Website Promotion Strategies
To achieve success with your website you need to use all possible (ethical) means.
Here are a few "supplementary" strategies:
Bookmarks. When visitors bookmark your website, they actually vote for its quality. They will also have your website in their favorites list, so you can be sure they will come back for more. Google also likes social bookmarking. So, don't be shy: ask your visitors to bookmark your website.
When you post comments in forums (not just any forums, but serious discussion forums, eventually related to your industry), blogs and other discussion groups (see Google Groups), don't forget to provide a link to your website in your signature.
Sweepstakes are great: people love to win. So why not organize sweepstakes every so often to stimulate your visitors? Offer prizes that will encourage people to become your clients.
All these tools will certainly boost your website's popularity. As you see, success doesn't come over night: you need to build it up through continuous effort, hard work and the correct financial approach.
