Red Penguin Web Solutions

If you are looking for great ways to promote your business on the internet, than look no further than this top 10 list of the best - and often free - web marketing techniques.

1 - Website

Nowadays, you MUST have a website for your business – it is as important (if not more so!) – than your phone number. For your website to be effective in promoting your business on the internet, it must be:

Informative - (about you and your business, as well as about your field, to establish you as an ‘expert’)

Updated – people don’t call businesses with obviously outdated information

Organized – if people can’t easily find what they are looking for, they will click out of your website quickly

Attractive – this is last because it is both secondary & subjective

2 - Domain Name

Choosing a quality domain name will often mean the difference between minor and major traffic for your website. When choosing your primary domain name, it should be:

• .com
• Easy to remember
• Fairly short
• Not include any dashes or dots

Additionally, you should also purchase domain names for any possible misspellings of your domain name, along with your name (if available), and they should all be set to forward to your ‘primary’ domain. For example, we are:

www.RedPenguinWebSolutions.com

www.RedPenguinWeb.com

www.RedPenquinWeb.com

www.RedPenguinWebsites.com

www.RedPenguinWebDesign.com

www.StephanieLarkin.com

3 - Web Visitor Tracking

It would be wonderful if we always knew exactly how our marketing campaigns were going – well, with web tracking, we can! Web tracking – such as Google Analytics (which is FREE!) can show you exactly how many visitors your site had, how long they stayed, what pages they looked at, what keywords and links they followed to arrive at your website, even what size their computer screen is! With information like that, you can tailor your web marketing campaigns to increase your web traffic substantially. Go over to www.google.com/analytics to learn more about this invaluable tool.

4 - Free Directories

There are many places on the internet where you can register your website for FREE, and benefit both from the increased traffic coming from that site, as well as the boost to your own ranking (because the more incoming links you have, the better your rankings in Google). Some places to register your business for free include:

Also, if you go to www.google.com and type “_____ add URL” into the search bar (where ___ represents keywords associated with your business, like dentist, hair salon, restaurant, etc.), you will find more free place to add you site.

5 - Facebook

There are over 160 million users on Facebook, making Facebook an excellent FREE way to promote your business on the internet. Facebook offers both personal profiles and business pages, and both types offer many opportunities for promoting your business. While you won’t want to do heavy-handed marketing on your personal page, you certainly want to ‘friend’ everyone in your circle and be sure to drop in tidbits about your business dealings – you’ll be amazed how many people you know who DON’T know what you do for a living! After creating a personal profile, a business page is a great place to offer promotions, interact with customers, upload pictures, even blog about your business.

6 – Email Marketing

It costs 3 times as much money to acquire a new customer as it does to retain a current customer, but many of us are at fault for practically ignoring our current clientele (unless they go elsewhere, and then it is too late!) Email marketing is a great – and inexpensive – way to keep in touch with your customers and encourage referrals to their friends and families. Email marketing generally has a staggering $57 ROI per $1 spent – it just doesn’t get much better than that in the marketing world!

7 – LinkedIn

What Facebook is to the world at large, LinkedIn is to the business world. Head over to LinkedIn.com to set up your business profile, join various networks, and form relationships with others in complementary fields. LinkedIn users have done everything from forming new partnerships to acquiring venture capital for expansion projects. Also, LinkedIn has excellent search engine rankings, so if a person is looking for you by name, they are more likely to find your LinkedIn profile than almost any other avenue.

8 – Stationery & Signs

There are many, many businesses out there that have well-constructed, informative websites, yet you would never know it from their business cards, advertisements, signs and stationery. Promoting your web address in non-web locations could easily make the difference between a potential customer going to you or to your competitor. For example, if I’m looking through the newspaper at restaurant ads, I will only investigate the ones with a web address, because I would like to see more before making a decision – like menus and photos.

9 – Incoming Links

As I mentioned in #4 with free directories, incoming links to your website are invaluable – both for the direct traffic from the other site, as well as for the increased Google rankings those incoming links will bring you. To find even more places to link to your website, consider going to message boards and blogs pertaining to your area of expertise (by typing in “Dog Training message boards” or “Dog Training Blogs”, for example), answering some questions or making comments, and leaving a link to your website in your response or signature. This would be a valuable thing to do on a regular basis, if possible, to keep those links coming.

10 – Top Search Engine Placements

If you just have to be ranked first on Google, all you need to do is pay for it. Top search engine placements, or pay-per-click, is available to shoot you to the top of the search page for whatever terms you choose, and you can set the amount of money that you are willing to spend daily for your rankings. (Be aware that it is a bidding process, meaning that whoever bids the most amount of money will have the best rankings, and everyone else who is paying for a particular search term will be ranked accordingly). While general search terms such as “Personal Injury Lawyer” may carry exorbitant daily fees, less popular terms (like “New Hyde Park Podiatrist” or in my case “Red Penguin”) can be had for much lower fees. Imagine having your business not only listed on Google, but having it listed first! This can be especially valuable when there are other businesses with your same name or particular services, and you want to be sure that your potential customers find YOU!