It doesn’t matter how large or small your business is, we all need to advertise.

Joe blogs down the road with his burger shack will advertise his business all the way up to the big boys such as McDonald’s, (boo hiss).   

My point is if you have a business and you want to succeed you need to advertise, there are plenty of ways to do this to accommodate every one’s budget no matter how large or small, paid ways or even free.

Most offline businesses will advertise in the yellow pages, usually for a onetime fee, however more and more businesses are turning to the Internet to advertise their products and services.

There are many ways you can advertise online from (PPC) pay per click advertising, which involves a monthly budget and ongoing costs, to free advertising in classified sites and directories.

Personally I’m on a small budget like most people who first start out on the Internet; I would like discuss further more ways of free advertising or practically free advertising.

Free advertising will include methods such as submitting articles to article directories, most of them are free such as this free article directory. You sign up and then write and submit an article, the article will include a backlink or two to your own site.  

This will in turn create search engine awareness of your site, meaning search engines will come and visit your site and index your pages, also if you submit to popular article directories and the get featured you will get people reading your article and coming directly from the article to your site.

Another good way is buy submitting your site to online directories, again these can be free directories or paid directories, generally you will submit your site to the most appropriate category, for example this site would be submitted to the SEO section of a directory or a blog section.

Normally free directories have very low page rank, which will means two things, first you won’t get much link juice from them and secondly the probably don’t have much traffic so you won’t get many visitors coming from their directory, but hey at the end of the day its free traffic.

If you have a small budget for directories then submitting to a strong PR business directory is a must, not only will you get link juice from them but actual traffic as well, Try and find anything over PR4 and it would be worth paying to submit to. 

Think smart, if it’s a onetime fee, affordable, and will bring in traffic that will make you $$ then it has to be a wise investing.

Well i wrote in my last post a couple of days ago about the different types of backlinks and how they will benefit you, but now here comes a few words of warning that may get you in to trouble with the big G (Google) in particular.

There is a lot of discussion about if backlinks can harm your site, i am of the belief that building backlinks too quickly can adversely affect your site, it may be something small where as the extra backlinks you are getting are just not counted or if you are going all out buying high PR backlinks or building 1,000 of backlinks using black hat method you could get your site penalised quite hard.

What could the result be? any number of things could happen to your site if you get links that are unnatural, Googles way of thinking is that a link should be natural and if you have good content on your site people will link to it naturally. therefore people going out buying paid links and using co-op programs may be in for a shock.

You could end up loosing all your sites PR (page rank), you may loose your search rankings and worst of all you may get you entire site black listed.

Think I’m joking? take a look at Googles link schemes page, and think twice before buying your next link.

Just remember good SERP’s take time, things will happen naturally and you cant cheat the big G.

1. A standard backlink using your url. Example http://www.bettermychange.org

And

2. An anchor text backlink. Example Search Engine Blog

The second is a much better way to improve your SERP’s (Search engine results pages) as the site that is linking back to you is telling search engines what type of site it is, it need to be written in html code and looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.bettermychance.org”>Search Engine Blog</a>

Its not always easy to get sites to link to you using anchor text, but a good place to start experimenting is forums that allows footer links, such as Digital Point. There we go, that was another backlink using anchor text. cool huh!

Google considers a backlink as a vote for your site, so the more backlinks or votes you get to your site the more popular your site will become.

The above is a very basic description, you may also want to read, Types of backlinks and Too many backlinks.

When you write a new blog post and publish it, wordpress automatically pings http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
thus notifying it of a new blog post. If you update your ping list to include the following services. more sites and people will be aware of your new blog post and now you potentially have a better chance of getting more people to visit your blog

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

To update the list go to your wordpress admin section and then go to options / writing
you will see update services at the bottom of the page, copy and paste the above list there.

There are several websites that specialise in automatic link exchange programs, the one i am going to discuss is called receive links.

The reason i prefer this one to other similar sites is because the links are permanent, link placement frequency is better and the paid upgrades are cheaper.

So how does the program work?

You have to go and sign up for a free receive links account, then add your site to your new account, then all you need to do is download 3 files that need to be added to your site and then add a piece of code to your sites footer or other similar file that is used sitewide. You can specify how many links you want to display up to a maximum of 5

You will then be given “points” based on a number of factors, PageRank, Number of pages cached by search engines, points are built up over time so don’t expect to see huge amounts of points straight away, but they do build up quickly.

Once you have your points you can then start to advertise your site/sites. you dont have to advertise the site you are placing ads on, so you can have one site for showing ads and another one or more than one site for promotion.

There are also other features like sending points to other accounts, so webmaster with large sites can rent points to other receive links users and make some $$

Once set up it runs on autopilot, just add new ad’s when needed and new site when you need more points.