How to Promote Your Website for FREE

Archive for the ‘Simple Marketing’ Category

A Facebook fan page is a great way to stay in touch with your blog followers or clients.  It’s another way were you can really keep your website in front of people.  You have to remember you are competing with over 50 million websites and people have so many things going on that unless you keep up your “appearances” you could be quickly forgotten.

So here is a step by step of how to make a Facebook fan page and how to get people to join it.

Go to www.facebook.com If you are logged in log out.  On the homepage you’ll see under the sign up area Create a Page do NOT fill in the sign up area just click the create a page.

Once you click Create a Page you’ll be prompted to answer several questions and give the page a name.   If you are already a Facebook user at the end you will choose the option I already have an account and log in.   You will then be taken to your new fan page.  Be sure to click that button at the top of the page that says Become a Fan.

Now let’s fancy up your page a bit.

Add a picture by mousing over the picture area and clicking the pencil.

Add a short description of your website or blog, in the box provided below the picture area, remember to include your URL and don’t forget the http:// so that it will automatically be made into a clickable link for anyone visiting the page.

At this time you might want to complete filling out some information on your info page.  Do this by clicking on the info tab at the top of the wall.

It’s time to start to invite people to your new space!  Under the main picture for your fan page it will say suggest to friends.  Click that to begin to invite your friends.

Easy enough!

Posting to your fan page

You’ll want to post updates on your fan page as to what your business and/or blog is doing.  This will be seen by all of your fans on their home page wall.

Posting links is important too.  This will remind them not just about your fan page, it will remind them of your site. Posting links here will also help the search engines find your website.

Finally you’ll need to get people outside of your circle of Facebook friends.  Add a Facebook banner on your blog or website and link it to your new fan page.

*A question I’ve received in the past is how do I find my fan page?

Good question because after you close out it would seem it would be lost.  You can either bookmark your fan page or go to your main profile page go to the info tab and scroll all the way to the bottom where it shows your fan pages.

I hoped this helped you.  For some this is easy stuff and for others not so much so if you have questions leave a comment and I will try to answer asap.

So you have a brand new site, now what? Well you need people to be able to see it.  I’ve found a simple way to jump start traffic to your website when you need to market your site for free because you have more time than money.

First and most importantly you need to keep your expectations real! It’s not like The Field of Dreams where if you just build it they will come. It takes time for people and for the search engines to find your new website and index it.

The easiest way I’ve found to get traffic coming to your site is to use places like http://www.linkreferral.com Some people will tell you that places where you have to visit other sites to get them to visit yours is a waste of time. I tend to disagree with this. I’ve used Link Referral for several years for many different sites.

To me the point of Link Referral is not just to exchange traffic, it can be a way to network online. I use it to build blog roll and link exchanges. While you visit blogs there it’s a perfect time to leave a comment with the link to your site. Remember that the sites you are visiting have people behind them that are working hard to get their site noticed too. With this there can be a collective effort to in establishing new websites. One can even target who you’d like to see on Link Referral as they have different categories so it’s easy to locate those that might be interested in a link exchange. I’ve also found customers there as well for one of my e store sites.

There is a recreation benefit there as well. I’ve had fun seeing some websites I might not have ever run across.

If you have a blog depending on what it is about keep an eye on the latest news and use those headlines as keywords.

This works because search engines especially Google indexs blogs very quickly.

Let’s say you have a lifestyle blog and you see a great piece on the news about a new diet.  Writing a blog post with the name of the new diet in the post title and the body of the post with some of the key words will help you get indexed on the seach engine and while I can’t guarantee visitors to your blog I do know first hand that this works as I’ve been experimenting with it for several weeks and had an increase in the traffic to my site.

To know for sure it is working, you’ll need to check your stats.  If you don’t currently track you stats you can get a free account at statcounter.com it’s simple to use and gives you great information about where your visitors are coming from and what keywords they are using to find your blog.