Inexpensive ways to market your website

[hanslynch]

I had seen a thread like this on anotherwebsite and i thought it would an interesting discussion here.

I thought that many of us could benefit from this discussion.

Here goes. I market mostly through SEO. I do it myself and while it has taken a while to move up I am on the first page of SERPS for some competitive key phrases. SEO, if you do it yourself is the ultimate in sweat equity, adds a lot of value at little cost.

I am not selling services as an SEO expert. This is for discussion purposes only.

[hanslynch]

I tried PPC early on in my websties life and while it generated a lot of traffic, the return on investment was not where it needed to be. One of these days I will go back to it again.

I think one of the things that worries me is click fraud or folks forming clubs and click on each others advertising links.

[MilosPetPaintings]

I have been doing SEO myself for a few months now, do you have any tips on how to improve my rating? Do you use a software program? I think that this could be a useful discussion, so I hope more people participate.
I also used PPC and had the exact same fears about possible scams, but because my keywords are very targeted, it actually worked out all right. THanks for starting this thread.

[skittledoo]

I have absolutely no idea how to even begin to build a website let alone try and market it. I want to start a website about Bamm that logs all his training sessions and things I'm learning as I work towards my dog trainer certification. I just have no idea where to start.

I'll pay attention to this thread though... might learn something

[nuvetmarie]

I run a doggie hotel and I love my vistaprint web hosting. It cost about 20.00per month for the 5 pages. I am not a computer person and I was able to do it all myself...
Easy templetes to complete... I called one time for some help. They answered my question right away and looked at my web site with me... at the same time.

My tags ( names and words I put into my pages) give me GREAT top or near top hits...

Anyway, Just wanted you to know about them. I have been buying business cards from them for years. They started selling web sites about 8 months ago. Before that I had Yahoo and I hated it. ( too hard for me)

I am marie of the Doggie Chalet

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Any questions, Just ask

[RodneyB]

I have absolutely no idea how to even begin to build a website let alone try and market it. I want to start a website about Bamm that logs all his training sessions and things I'm learning as I work towards my dog trainer certification. I just have no idea where to start.

I'll pay attention to this thread though... might learn something

skittledoo, what you want to do lends itself perfectly to starting a blog. The even better news is you don't have to know anything but how to type to start one. I would recommend you go to https://www.blogger.com/start and open up an account with them. You could also open one at http://wordpress.com/ but if you ever want to start monetizing your site blogger is better.

Either site is pretty self explanatory in how to set up and maintain your blog.

[hanslynch]

I would recommend blogger as well. What you want to do will fit into a blog very nicely. Blogger is sper easy to use and to set up. You should be up and running on it in less than an hour.

[hanslynch]

There are a few things that you can do to improve your SEO results or ranking on the SERPs.

The best thing to do is to build links into your site with the keywords that you have selected and put into your title tags. They should match exactly including if they are capalized or not. To do this you can either blog, build a squidoo lens or hub pages.

The next thing you can do is make your site larger with the pages linking back to your homepage. Add useful content that your visitors would like. I use articles and videos (that I pull of of youtube).

Take a look at your keywords and see if yo are going after key pharses that are too challening. If so nest your keywords in less competitive keywords. For example you want dog collars but your site just does not have enough umph use the keyword nylon dog collar. That way for at least your title page you get credit for nylong dog collar and dog collar. Build links slowly for both terms and you will get there.

[Sch3Dana]

I work on a small business site for my family business. After we went through and optimized for the search engines, our page rankings went way up on terms really relevant to our products and industry. Our competitors are paying dollars per click on terms that we have first page rankings on for free! As hanslynch says, it does take time and some effort.

The biggest things in my experience are title tags and h1 tags. Meaning, the text that looks like the main title of the page should be inside an "h1 tag" and your page needs a "title", which is not an element that is visible on the page. It's amazing how many people's pages are missing titles, which is one of the main ways that the search engines decide what the page is about. If you don't know how to edit these things, do a little digging in your website creation tool. Most software has options for this stuff, but people don't realize they should be looking for it. If you are not sure what the difference is, you can give them identical text. FYI, the title is normally the link text that you see in the google search results pages, so a well written title can really drive more people into your site.

One other thing everyone should know about is google analytics. This is a super cool FREE tool for your site that will give you tons of information about who is coming to your site, from where, and what they are doing while they are there. It is way better than the analytics that normally are provided by your web host and if you are running a google adwords campaign, they sync together really nicely.

[hanslynch]

I use GA as well and it meets my needs. I have priced out other analytic services and the best ones start at about 800 dollars a month.

I eventually want to use them when my business can support a cost like that. Apparently it gives you evn more precise data. We shall see. For now GA is what I am using.

[hanslynch]

I alos have an affiliate program that is starting to generate some traffic. My affiliate manager has been recruiting like crazy we just need to turn those affiliates into producing affiliates.

We just recently signed with the Pepperjam Network and we have been working through Share a Sale for a while. Pepper Jam has a pretty cool users interface.

[chanda]

seo industry now is really booming... there are a lot of people who are getting interested in seo....

guys what are your seo practices? care to share some...

[hanslynch]

Go Slow to Go Fast - Buidling links slowly over time without any sudden spikes is a good rule

Paid Links - Stay away from paid links, especially sites that advertise that they have links for sale

Going for less popular keywords - I have been working at going for less popular keyword that are more specific to a product. My conversion rates for those keywords are fantastic.

Article writing - I have been writing and submitting articles. My traffic has gone up as a result.

[Doggoneit]

Writing articles for what/who/where? :confused::rofl1:

[hanslynch]

There are all sorts of articles directories that you can submit articles to. Ezine Articles is a good one to start out with.

All the best,

Hans

[Suzzie]

SEO, while important, is not the be-all end-all of getting your website noticed, particularly as we enter into web 3.0. Times, they are a changin'! In addition to SEO, you have to worry about keyword density (too high or too low), your domain name, keyword quality (it doesn't help to be unique if no one searches for it), etc.

Google in particular is interested in link popularity - which means how many good, quality websites are linking to *yours*. There are about a billion websites that tell you their thoughts and ideas on getting visitors to your website. A large percentage of it is speculation, because it's not like Google is going to release its algorithm for us to decipher.

[garett]

I've had a lot of success using Sitebuildit.

People are put off by the price of it, but the results are real. I'm extremely happy with them as hosts, and the fact that I've been able to build websites with no training in HTML, SEO or anything is great.

The community of webmasters is superb, and all the tools (and training) you could ever need are included.

For someone that is serious about starting a website from scratch with little to no experience, it is amazing. For someone that already is proficient in website design, it is still worth it because of all the SEO principles you learn going through the process.

Just my two cents. I love sitebuildit.


I have also found that submitting articles to places like Goarticles and Ezinearticles have generated a little traffic. What is most important are the backlinks they can generate for your site.

Feel free to message me if you want to learn more about how I got started with sitebuildit.

I am not trying to sell anybody anything. I just wanted to contribute to the thread and share my thoughts on the subject.

[hanslynch]

Suzzie,

I am not sure I fully understand what you are saying. You say that SEO is not the end all be all but then all of things that you are list are components of SEO, both on page and off page optimization.

I am not trying to argue with you, I am just trying to better understand your point.

[hanslynch]

What is wrong with Site Build It's price? From the website it appears that it is 299 a year, right?

Is it ecommerce ready or do you have to add a bunch of modules for that capability?

If so does it readily accept different types of credit cards?

[garett]

It is not "e-commerce" ready.

The concept behind is that you first write a full site with your knowledge of a subject, and only when you have a fair amount of daily traffic do you try to monetize.

I am not so sure that it is the easiest solution for hard goods sellers. I was first drawn to the unlimited bandwidth.

You would have to get your own merchant account / credit card processor. I was thinking of at some point adding an amazon web store (The $35.00 a month professional looking ones).

In my personal opinion sitebuildit is more about building quality traffic. There are people that make their living sell hard goods from their sitebuildit site, but not before they went through all the motions.

For your purposes, I think building a sitebuildit site about a dog related subject that you are passionate about, then linking to your pre-existing sales website would be the best way to go.

I'm on track to receive 10,000 unique hits this month on my pet care portal website, and it is only like 5 months old. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the traffic to monetize after adsense, but becoming affiliated with a retailer, or setting up my own shop is an option.

It is a lot of work, but sitebuildit and its tools really can help people drive traffic.

[aivzdog]

I use wordpress for all of my blogs.

[doglover83]

SEO is easy to learn but takes a lot of time and effort. But I think that's the best way to market your site. ;)

[hanslynch]

10,000 visitors and the site is only 5 months old. That is great, you must be working hard on it.

As far as monetizing you have the option to sign up for affiliate programs and the like. That seems to be a good start to monetizing a site.

Best of luck with the site build it and your websites.