Start a group on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the top social network for professionals, so what better place to start a group centered on your website’s niche? By connecting with various professionals, you can promote your product and learn from other professionals in the same market at the same time.
Create or get involved in a Google Group centered on your niche. Google is the largest marketing entity around, and you can take advantage of the wealth of knowledge of Google professionals by creating a Google group or by getting involved in an existing group.
Create an affiliate program. This can be a great way to gain exposure for your small business. Your affiliates will do all the marketing work for you, and for every new customer they sign up, you will pay them a small percentage. This allows you to create a larger customer base while concentrating on running the business, instead of spending all of your time marketing and trying to gain new customers.
Create a text ad and have it placed on thousands of websites for free. By using Adsvert, you get to create a fully-targeted text ad and have it placed on multiple websites where it can be viewed thousands of times per day. This kind of exposure can get your business going quickly and efficiently, and can help create a customer base that will return for repeat business.
Directory submission for greater exposure. Backlinks are one of the highest attributes that can determine a site’s search results ranking. Need fast backlinks? You can spend a little time manually submitting your site to a minimum of 100 web directories and just like that — you have 100 backlinks to your site! If you don’t want to spend the time submitting the sites, hire someone from Craigslist to submit the sites for you.
Create an eBook or informative document. Face it — people like FREE. So what better way to get them to read about your company than to offer them something free? Create an eBook, white paper or other informative document and offer it free on your website. The catch? Have them sign up for your mailing list or give more information such as name, email, etc. in order to receive the free document.
Reach out to bloggers. Do you have a new product or service you want to promote? Offer it free to bloggers who will create a positive review of your product or service and post it on their blog for all their viewers to read. This will help you gain a larger customer base, and you will gain blogging contacts for future marketing and promotional use.
Run contests on your company site. People like fun, and people like free. Run contests on your site with free products, services, coupons or discounts as the prizes. This will create a fun, competitive atmosphere that promotes your products and services at the same time.
Write guest posts for blogs. Search for blogs that are related to your market, and if they offer guest posts, create an informational article about your product or service and have them post it. You can join Blogger Linkup to find blogs in your market that offer guest posts. This can be outsourced if you don’t have the time or skill to create the content yourself.
Blog comments. This is one area that can be extremely efficient if done correctly or extremely negative if done incorrectly. Search out high-traffic blogs, and comment on posts. Be sure to include a link back to your site. Just be careful that your post does not appear spammy, or too commercial in content. Your comment should be directly related to the blog post and should be informational, not just an advertisement for your product.
Create free business cards. There are a variety of services that offer free business cards, such as Freepdfcards and VistaPrint. Hand them out, leave them on counters of other businesses, post them on bulletin boards, include them in mailings, etc. This is another job that can be outsourced if you don’t have time to do the work.
Offer free eBook on Craigslist. Craigslist is a popular site that attracts a wide variety of individuals and businesses on a daily basis. Create an eBook or other document and offer it for free on Craigslist. Remember to set up a form to have users add their name and email (or sign up for a mailing list) before they can download the document.
Create your own company newspaper. Does it sound like a lot of work? It’s not as bad as you may think if you use an automated service such as li. This service uses tweets from you, your company Twitter account and other users that you choose to add to the paper. Tweets are chosen by the service and added to the paper to create an official newspaper for your company.
Write guest articles for ezines. You can search through lists of ezines at Ezine-Dir to find ezines that are related to your market. Find the ezines that accept guest articles and write one. Be sure to add a little marketing content about your business (not too much, don’t want to be flagged for spam) to gain exposure. If you don’t believe you are a good enough writer, this can be outsourced to a talented writer or blogger.
Create an eBook and sell it on eBay. EBay is the largest auction site in the world, and is the perfect place to gain exposure for your business. By creating an eBook and selling it on eBay, you could potentially gain a much larger customer base. Just make sure the eBook you create (or have someone create for you) is interesting and engaging, something people will want to pay money for. And put a call to action somewhere in the eBook that will persuade readers to visit your company website.
Analyze and schedule tweets. You can create tweets and post them on Twitter at random times hoping that users are online, or you can analyze your Twitter followers to find out the times that the majority of them are online, and schedule tweets to be posted at these specific times. You can use an app such as Buffer or HootSuite to analyze your followers and schedule your tweets.
Exchange backlinks for a review or testimonial of another company’s product or service. You can gain backlinks by offering to write a positive review or testimonial about a product or service that you have used. In exchange, the company will place a link to your site on their company website, and you will gain a valuable backlink to help with your website’s search results ranking.
SEO Optimization. Your company website should be optimized for specific keywords so that when internet users type in this particular keyword, they will find your company website on the first page of the search results ranking. A company blog consisting of optimized articles can be a big help, and each page of your website should be optimized to gain positioning in the search engine results. If you need help optimizing your content, you can hire a professional or use a plugin such as Scribe SEO.
Create and submit a video. An excellent source of exposure is video exposure. Sites like YouTube have helped companies make money while gaining exposure at the same time. You can also create self-help or how-to videos and submit them to various sites such as Good Tutorials. These videos can be informational and instructional, but should also contain a call to action to get viewers to visit your site.
Press releases. One of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to get instant exposure is to create and submit a press release. A press release can promote a new product or service, or any news-worthy content about your company. It should create a link to your website, but precautions must be taken to ensure that your content and links do not appear spammy. If so, the press release site will reject the press release. You can submit press releases at sites such as Free-Press-Release.
Create an eBook and list it in directories. There are specific directories (such as Free-eBooks) that help promote eBooks and gain exposure for authors. This is the perfect location to list an eBook with marketing material and information about your small business.
Produce an informational video. Why tell people about your company when you can show them? Video has become extremely popular in recent years, and video-sharing sites have seen huge surges in popularity. Create an informational video — it can be about your company, a product or service, or simply general information — and post the video on as many video-sharing sites as possible in order to gain maximum exposure. There are many video-sharing sites, such as YouTube and TubeMogul.
Bundle your product or service with another popular item or service. A simple way to gain exposure is to find another company with a related product or service, and see if they will include your item or service as a free bonus to customers that buy the other company’s product. This is an excellent method to obtain exposure and gain customers in your market.
Start a campaign and make it go viral. Use the power of social media to your advantage by creating a viral campaign across multiple social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Give away a copy of your eBook for free to users that tweet about it on Twitter, “like” or share it on Facebook and other social networks. This will get a surge of posts and likes and will gain exposure for your product and/or company. An excellent tool to help create your viral campaign is CloudFlood.
Use trackback links when commenting on industry-related blogs. This helps in two ways. First, it creates a link to your site on other related sites which helps for SEO rankings. Second, it spreads the word about your product or service across multiple blogs and websites, and helps your company gain much-needed exposure.
Create a customized 404 that redirects website visitors back your home page. You can also customize an error page to offer visitors other products, additional information about the company, or other persuasive content. But you never want to leave your visitors stuck at a roadblock. This can result in visitors abandoning your site and choosing one without errors and roadblocks.
Use Ning to help you set up a separate social network. Ning offers many useful features such as:
Social media integration with major social networks
Community features such as forums, chat, customizable profiles and more.
Publishing tools complete with SEO optimization
Mobile device optimization
Custom design and URL
Privacy and administrative controls
Create an eBook and share it through document-sharing services like Scribd. Need help marketing your content? Scribd already has a huge userbase of visitors that are there for one purpose — to read content. If you publish your eBook on their site, the potential for large exposure gain increases exponentially.
Use Buddy Press to help you create an integrated social network for your blog. Ever thought how cool it would be if your blog was one big social network? Using Buddy Press, it can be. Buddy Press integrates with WordPress to help you create a social network completely contained within your WordPress blog.
Create your own learning course and upload it to Learnable. You can create tutorials and post them for others to read. Be sure to optimize the tutorial (not too much, don’t make it spammy) for your company, product or service. This will help you gain exposure for your business while helping others.
Produce an informative signature for use in all correspondence. Use a signature optimized toward a specific product, service, or just your company in general. Then use this signature in emails, on forums, on social networks, chatrooms, bios and more.
Create a free offer of your product or service and place it on another user’s “Thank You” page. This will help you gain valuable exposure to other users’ customers without spamming up their website or blog. Make sure it’s a short, optimized comment, and leave it on a user’s “Thank You” page.
Create a “How-To” Powerpoint presentation and post it on SlideShare. Slideshare already has a large userbase of visitors that are there for one purpose — to check out informative presentations. So help them out by creating your own presentation, optimizing it for your product, service or company, and post it for more exposure.
Use Micro Poll to implement fun polls on your website. Everyone loves polls, so make them interesting, yet also optimize them a bit to inform visitors about other useful products or services that they might be interested in.
Attempt to get your website featured by submitting it to Cool Site Of The Day. This can help you gain additional exposure to a site that already has a huge userbase of visitors that could potentially become your customers after seeing your site promoted.
Create a lens on Squidoo. This allows your business to create pages that offer information, photos and more, while still promoting your company. As always, don’t over-optimize the pages to the point where they become spammy.
Use quiz software such as Question Writer to create engaging quizzes for your website and blog visitors. People love quizzes, and this is a great way to connect with them and provide them with information about the company.
Use social media to create stories through Storify. You can tell any kind of story you want, and have it published to thousands of users. Be sure to optimize the story if possible, Storify can help you create viral stories, and that kind of exposure cannot be overlooked.
Implement a top bar to your company website. Complement it with handy links that provide access for visitors to subscribe to your blog, sign up for your newsletter, enter information for a free item, service or discount, etc. You can use a free optimization tool such as Hello Bar to achieve this.
Join internet forums and create posts, as well as reply to other user’s posts. Include a link to your website in your forum signature, and it will be displayed every time you create a post or reply. Be sure to post in forums that are in your industry/niche or your posts may be deleted as spam. Also check the forum rules to ensure that links in signatures are allowed.
Use a service such as Ideascale to provide your customers and clients a platform enabling them to interact, share and vote. Here’s how it works:
Users submit feedback and ideas.
Other users vote on the feedback/ideas.
The best ideas will get the most votes.
This can help you obtain feedback about ideas before you ever spend the time and money to implement them.
Use Hubpages to create a “hub” of targeted content. This allows you to create posts on a specific topic and post them for thousands of other HubPages users to view. Create pages based on a topic related to your products or services and you will find it much easier to optimize.
Use LinkedIn Answers to answer questions. LinkedIn provides you with an audience of professionals, so it’s much easier to directly target types of users. Many of these users ask questions on LinkedIn Answers, and this opens an opportunity for you to post an answer that is optimized for your company, product or service.
Join a banner exchange program to gain valuable exposure on other websites. Exchanging banners provides you with backlinks on other users’ pages, sites and blogs.
Create articles and have them submitted to offline trade magazines. Most of the tips we have given you so far have been directed towards online marketing. But offline marketing still has a high amount of value. Offline trade magazines are your best bet to get solid marketing articles accepted and published to a wide audience of readers.
Answer select questions from users at Yahoo Answers. Yahoo has millions of users in its userbase, so do not pass up the opportunity to gain exposure from such a large audience. Not only that, but Yahoo Answers are often ranked at the top of search results if they are related. This provides you with an opportunity to answer questions and optimize the answer slightly toward your company, product or service. Just be careful not to overdo it, Yahoo is tough on spam.
Create a press release and send it to professional journalists and editors. You can visit the Gebbie Press website to obtain a free list of contacts. We already covered online press releases above, this will give you the opportunity to score free press offline as well. Just remember — journalists receive many press releases every day. Make yours stand out while keeping it short and to the point, and do NOT make it sound spammy or all future press releases you send to that journalist will most likely be tossed straight into the trash.
Use survey software such as Survey Monkey to create surveys for your site. This will help you gain valuable insight on what your customers and visitors think about specific products, services or parts of your site.
Create a podcast and broadcast it across popular podcast sites such as Podcast Alley. A podcast is a great way to reach out to a large listening audience. Don’t have the voice for it? Hire an amateur voice talent to speak for you.
Join a blogging community such as Triberr so that your blog posts will get shared to a larger audience. Bloggers love to reblog (just check out Tumblr) and you can give them the perfect opportunity to reblog your posts by posting them on sites such as Tumblr and Triberr.