Promoting Your Site: Alternatives to Paid Advertising

[Review Part 1: What are the Benefits and Disadvantages of Paid Ads?]

What if you can't economically buy the advertising keywords you need, don't want to manage an ad campaign, or just don't like the idea of a short-term solution?

You do not need paid ads from Google, Yahoo, or anyone else for your business to prosper online. Ads are just one tool in the big toolbox of marketing solutions.

If we become an affiliate for your products, or advise you on how to jump start your web marketing, a number of alternatives come to mind. Here are some of our favorites:

Open Customer Communication with Your Mailing List. We've seen substantial online businesses built almost entirely with email. Which should serve as a reminder to always collect your visitor's contact information, including their email address. Use an autoresponder to give them something of high perceived value in return . . . a guide, a white paper, a software download, a complementary office visit, etc. Then follow up with regular mailings. Joint venture mailings (using someone else's complementary list) can be very successful as well. Sophisticated visitors might opt for an news feed from your blog instead of email, but this technology has not been widely adopted. Email is "warmer" and more powerful medium. [Automatic mailers like Get Response and Aweber are essential email campaign tools]
Build Search Engine-Friendly Pages. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques should be built-in to every site and blog, but most sites are poorly optimized. They are not structured to be as accessible or focused as they must be to get the best positioning in the search engine results . . . resulting in a substantial loss of traffic and business.

It's rare to find in-house people qualified to do this work. Your outside web "designer" might be able to do it, but most won't have the marketing background or knowledge of up-to-date methodologies to pull it off. To complicate matters, there is a multitude of sham operators that promise optimization but deliver little of real value. Some will get you into trouble with their unscrupulous techniques.

The people who really do know what they are talking about are a select group of professional Search Engine Marketing consultants, and also full-time Internet Marketers who make their living promoting affiliate programs or selling their own products. These two groups are in the trenches every day and use methods that are YEARS ahead of the typical small business.

Common organic SEO techniques include content-rich pages, keyword-optimized pages, syndication, inbound link, and social media strategies. The point is to end up with focused, relevant pages that are of real value to visitors and favorably placed by search engines as well.
Start a Blog. What do Robert Lutz (vice chairman of General Motors), Jonathan Schwartz (president of Sun Microsystems), Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com founder and billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks), and Steve Jobs (chairman of Apple Computer) have in common? These busy executives all find time to write a business blog. Why would they bother? Because blogs (weblogs) are one of the best ways to communicate with a constituency, and as a bonus, they are a near-perfect vehicle to create high-ranking content pages. A bit of advice here: if you're a professional or expert of any kind, write article-length posts for your blog; use them to show your expertise.
Offer an Online Tool. This is a bit of a long-shot, but if you have something novel tool to offer, for example, a cool way to share pictures (Flickr), or video (YouTube), or music (MySpace), or something less sexy, but still useful, like Tiny URL, which turns long, nasty Web addresses into short ones, you could have a winner. Tiny URL has 50,000 inbound links and millions of visitors per month! What tool does your industry need?
Leverage Your Sales with an Affiliate Program. No one really wants to play the search engine game. At the end of the day, the idea is to do business, not cater to search engines. And that's where affiliate programs shine. Affiliates are a great source of inbound links and a direct business channel.

If you have a big affiliate base, they may send you enough business and inbound links that you don't even need to concern yourself with other promotion methods. Some "super-affiliates" are as knowledgeable as professional search engine consultants. You get the benefit of their experience without paying the up-front fee. Turn your customers into affiliates—make it obvious you have an affiliate program and embed it into all your downloadable products.
Offline Ads & Postal Mailings. Radio, television, magazines, newspapers, and postcards. While far from free, these are good alternatives to online ads, often reaching an entirely different audience. Postcards are cheap and effective. As with national magazines, they reach far and wide. For smaller businesses, radio, television, and newspapers are typically local or regional media buys. In all cases, make a big deal out of your web and autoresponder addresses, so customers can take the next step in the sales process.
Start a Link Campaign. Inbound links are both search engine catalysts and direct traffic channels. With enough inbound links or name recognition, you may not need to even concern yourself with search engine rankings. There are many approaches to building links: Create valuable content. Get listed in relevant directories. Submit content to the big social media sites. Send out press releases.
Spread the Word Through Syndication. This simply means making your content (usually articles, but often other media) available to other sites . . . and embedding links back to your own site in that content. Very effective. It will build your readership, reputation, and inbound link count all at once. To do this right, don't syndicate the same text content that's already on your site. One spin on this is to post your audio and video to the big media sites. We know of one alternative medicine physician whose You Tube videos have been watched over 1.5 million times over the last 18 months! That's an incredible amount of free publicity.

The ideas on this page are general tactics. Contact us to find out more about a custom strategy designed specifically for your business.