Inexpensive Ways to Market Your Business

If your advertising budget is thin, there are still some basic and effective ways to raise awareness that you have a website. They will work on their own, quietly, as you go about the day-to-day business of running your company.

If your advertising budget is thin, there are still some basic and effective ways to raise awareness that you have a website. They will work on their own, quietly, as you go about the day-to-day business of running your company.

Coordinate the launch of your website with some internal housekeeping. Update your letterhead and all your business cards to include your website address. Interestingly, many companies forget to do this, or forget to add the address to their telephone book listing, their current advertising, or their reader boards in front of the building. Yet doing so adds nothing to the cost of advertising; at some point you would have had to renew your stock of letterhead anyway.

Submit your site's address to every major search engine: Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. This is free and takes advantage of the most commonly used method of generating site traffic. You may need to hunt around in the fine print of each site until you find a link that says "Submit your site" or something similar, and do read their guidelines before submitting. You don't want your site refused for violating their terms and conditions.

Update your site regularly. A static site sinks quickly in search engine rankings. Fresh content attracts the search engine robots to come investigate the changes, which re-indexes your site on a regular basis. Also, new material or a fresh look encourages visitors to keep coming back to your page to see what's new, what specials you may be running, or for general information about your company's activities.

Websites need care and attention just like your company itself does, but that doesn't mean you have to spend a fortune to get the word out.