You Can Do Business Online 201

By Scarlet Paolicchi
Posted Thursday, July 1, 2004

If you read my 101 course, you now have a website and you have begun basic promotion. It is time to increase the traffic flow! Now is the time to increase links to your site. This serves you two purposes. Number one is the obvious, the more links, the more ways for people to find your site. Number two, the more links, the higher your search engine rankings! The first step is to take a trip to a search engine and type in words related to your site. This will bring up a whole list of sites that you can potentially get your link on. Now it is time for some work. You need to visit each site one by one and determine if it is appropriate for a link to your site. Do they have a list of website links or resources already? Would they benefit from your link? Some sites will list your link for free. Others will require link swaps, which are valuable as long as the subject matter is related. In other words, will your customers find these links useful? If you have a health product site and you link a fitness site, both of you will benefit from each others customers. So find the sites and then email them your proposal for a listing or link swap. Remember to make it appealing to them.
Next, it is time for advertising you site. There is one free advertising option that produces good results. You can write articles for ezine publication. Yes, you can write articles which relate to your website. The people that read these articles will have more trust in you and want to check out your website. This is how it works, there are thousands of ezines published and often the publishers accept article submissions. You don?t typically get paid for your article but they do include a ?resource box? with information about you and a link to your site. So everyone wins! Your first step is to write a brief article for publication. Make sure you edit it. You can submit your article in several ways. Number one, you can submit it to article directories which you can find on a search engine. Publishers often get articles from these directories. Examples of these are netterweb.com, articlecity.com, goarticles.com, and zinos. Number two, you can submit directly to ezine publishers. To do this, you should use a search engine to locate ezine directories. These directories list the publications by topic and give you contact information. This option is obviously more time consuming but it can also help you to develop a network in your field. Examples of such directories include, ezinelocator.com, ezinesearch.com, and jogena.com. The third option is to pay money to have an article blaster do it for you. You can also find these through a search engine.
Paid advertising presents tons of options. One of the most cost effective is to advertise your site through ezines. Not only is it relatively cheap, it works really well. Remember that ezines have a loyal customer base and are targeted to specific interests. The readers want information on the topic they subscribed to. For instance if you are selling an ebook on the best diet ever, chances are health ezine subscribers are interested. You can use the same directories that you submitted articles to and have them run your ads. You can also check out ezineauction.com to bid on advertisements but they have a limited ezine base. There are typically several options available for ezine advertising including classified, sponsor, and solo. I recommend solo for most impact, that?s why it is the most expensive though. Sponsor also works quite well if you have a short catchy advertisement.
Great, now you are making a name for yourself and your website online, but you can still do more! Look for ?You Can Do Business Online 301? to really build your customer base and increase your sales.

About the Author
Scarlet Paolicchi has her own online business for natural health care products at (www.youngliving.com/scarlet) so please visit to receive a FREE health newsletter or for details on business opportunities.