by Gene Patterson

Created on: September 24, 2010

Free!  It is one of the greatest words in the English language.  If you are looking for potential tips to promote your website, there is no better word to hear than free.  To keep this level of happiness going the follow is a list of great tips for promoting you website for free.

♦  Forums

Commenting on forums can certainly gain you exposure.  Being seen as an authority on your topic and then leaving links in your “footer” will drive many people to come to your site to find out everything that you know.

♦  Blog comments

Blog commenting does two things.  1) It works for SEO purposes to help drive traffic  2) It provides a direct link to your site from another.  The comments must be decent to resonate with people and make them want t follow the link out.  If you leave a lot of quality comments it will raise your exposure, as sure as the sun rises in the east.

♦  Article marketing

Article marketing is in many ways the content gold standard.  You make a quality short article.  Leave links to you site within it (or within the resource box).  If the article is on a quality site, like ezinearticles.com it should have decent potential to rank on the search engines and drive traffic to your site for a long time.

♦  Social Networking

Twitter, Facebook and the myriad others that are popping up like flies are some of the best ways to advertise these days.  If you have 10,000 followers on twitter that is an instant 10,000 people that you can share your message with.  There has likely never been a way to spread the message on a website in quite so speedy of a fashion.

♦  Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking can be the 800 pound gorilla of free promotion.  You create valid links to your sites remotely.  Those links have the potential to be shared again and again.  It doesn’t happen that often.  But when a social bookmark goes viral your can drive tens of thousands of visitors to your site in a day.

♦  Banner swap

Many have the firm belief that banners really do not attract much attention.  People learn to look past them.  But it is a form of promotion and every little bit can help.

♦  Directories

There are many sites online that allow you to submit your sites to their directories.  They do not want to have EVERY site, so the first step is to make your site a quality site.  Once you do that directories are a great option

♦  Create a Blog

Creating your own blog is cheap and free.  You can make one using a “Blogger Blog” or a “Wordpress” Blog.  Both of these options are hosted 100% free.  If you want to make a really professional blog, you will want to buy your own domain and hosting.  But if you just want a way for some extra backlinks and promotion a free blog should easily do the trick.

♦  Ping

Pinging doesn’t really get you a lot of traffic directly.  But when you put up new material it can help to get the material indexed a lot faster.  A ping takes little time and it though the “promotional” aspects are dubious, they are there.

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