5 ‘No-Cost’ Ways to Promote Your Website

Wait. I Meant 5 No-Cost Ways to Promote Your Website and Why They’ll End Up Costing You.

Who says promoting your website has to cost a fortune? Well, you make the call.

While there are plenty of paid techniques out there, you might be surprised to learn that there are free promotional methods, as well. Keep reading to learn the top 5 no-cost ways to promote your website.

Google My Business – Truly Free

For local visibility, the first thing you’ll want to do is create a listing under Google My Business. Formerly known as Google Places, this free-to-use service is designed to enhance the visibility for small businesses. Assuming you are a small business owner, create a listing here to gain additional exposure in Google’s search results. The Google Local Pack (5-7 local business listing block) found in search results still captures a good bit of real estate. You can even include your website’s URL in the listing, driving free traffic (and hopefully sales) to your site.

Press Releases

FREE:

I know what you’re probably thinking: how am I supposed to make a press release without a newsworthy story? Even if you don’t have any “news” to reveal, chances are there’s something about your website that you can craft into a press release. Whether it’s the announcement of a new website redesign or the addition of new products, craft a current event-style article and submit it to free press release websites.

Here is a list of our top picks for free press release distribution with PRLog and i-Newswire beign two of my personal favorites.

WHY YOU’LL END UP PAYING:

Like many people, I am attracted to free service offerings; that being said free typically doesn’t get you much. To get the quality formatting, distribution and reach most of us are looking for you’ll need to step it up to a paid press release distribution program; which is why all of the ‘FREE’ PR sites listed above also offer paid programs.

You’ll see some of those same sites listed below in our list of top paid press release distribution sites:

Blog Commenting

FREE:

It may not hold the same SEO value as it once did, but blog commenting is still a tried and true method for promoting a website. It involves commenting on relevant blogs while leaving your site’s URL in the appropriate field. The key thing to remember is that you want to leave meaningful and constructive blog comments, not some generic comment like “thanks for the post.”

WHY YOU’LL END UP PAYING:

Blog commenting can be an affective way to begin building a reputation and gain some notice by authority leaders in your industry. However, this is a very tedious and time consuming tactic that yields little payoff in the way of driving traffic that will convert into a lead or sale on your site which is why most people abandon it for something more enticing like search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization

FREE:

Search Engine Optimization alone can yield tons of highly targeted traffic when done correctly. By optimizing your website for higher search rankings, you’ll reap the benefits of additional free traffic.

But wait… You’ll need to keep in mind that there’s no guarantee for success with SEO.

WHY YOU’LL END UP PAYING:

Some webmasters invest countless hours and resources into optimizing their sites, only to discover little-to-no gains in their search rankings. Thus begins the search for an seo company. During your research into seo online you’ll find many strategies that tend to lead off-site such as; link building, content marketing, blog posting, etc.

You will undoubtedly get overwhelmed with uncertainty about how to proceed or if it’s even worth it, but hey somebody’s winning at seo, right?

So what should you expect to pay to win at it too?

According to industry leading sources such as SearchEngineWatch and Entrepreneur, you should expect to see ranges as shown below.

Monthly retainer: $750-5,000 per month. Within this range, the amount that a client pays depends on the size of their business and the extent of services provided by the agency. On the lower end of this spectrum are small SEO agencies that offer a limited range of services. On the upper range are businesses with greater needs working with full-service SEO agencies. Most businesses pay between $2,500 and $5,000 for a monthly retainer.

Social Media

FREE:

We can’t talk about no-cost ways to promote a website without mentioning social media. Facebook alone receives more than 1.3 billion monthly users, and that’s just one network! Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and even Pinterest are all excellent networks on which to promote your website. After creating profiles and pages here, begin posting a combination of both engaging content and promotional content.

WHY YOU’LL END UP PAYING:

“The average organic reach for posts from Facebook pages in March was 2.6 percent of a brand’s audience. … This percentage dropped to 2.3 percent for pages with more than 1 million likes.” (Source: Localytics, reported by 1to1Media)

Everything free online that is good moves to a paid model. Other social networks are showing signs of decreased reach as well, albeit less rapidly than Facebook. There are two widely cited reasons for it:

1) Social media sites want to encourage businesses to pay them money for the value they now get for free.

2) As more people and businesses post to social media more often, everyone gets less attention, so supply and demand push reach down and rates go up.

In Summary, free is good and it’s not wrong to pursue building your web traffic through free service offerings, but the reality is that building a quality site with lots of traffic is hard and it is going to cost you time and money.