Free Website, Printing and Graphic Design Tips

Blogging, submitting articles to directories, creating a company page on Facebook and posting on Twitter are today’s top free marketing strategies. Publicize your business and increase your search engine rankings by taking advantage of these marketing venues.

The article directory of choice for me is http://ezinearticles.com/. I write up a 250 to 500 word article related to my business and of interest to my potential clients and then I submit it  to them. Registration is free and the process is very simple. Write about something of interest to your potential clients and be sure to include keywords (words and phrases potential clients will use to search for your products or services) in your article! Submitting an article including keywords in its content will make the article more like to be found via internet searches.

Create your Facebook and Twitter accounts  now! Registration is free for both these services and Facebook offers you the opportunity to create a company page. These are social network sites with huge audiences. Register for twitter at: http://twitter.com/ and to get a FaceBook company page visit: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. Before you create your facebook company page locate images of your company logo, samples of your work or products, etc. to upload during the page creation process. It’s very user friendly and goes quickly. Use these social networks to advertise your business through images, links to your website, and daily posts. The result can be more traffic to your site, more sales and consequently, increased search engine standings for your company website.

Blogging can increase exposure to your website, search engine ranking and sales. As you may have noticed, I like http://wordpress.org/. By the way, The New York Times, Yahoo and CNN use the service as well. It’s Free. It’s easy. It’s what you need to do. Blogging is simple, and doesn’t take a great deal of time.  You can post entries in your blog according to your schedule. Daily, once a week, even twice a month would be fine. Be sure to include a link to your website in your blog posts and add your blog link to your website.

Keep your website visitors coming back. A “sticky” site gives its visitors reasons to return to the site and since the number of visitors a site gets has a large impact on its ranking…you want as many visits as you can get! With that in mind, take a look at Freesticky.com. This is a site where you can get lots of free content to help make your website “sticky”. You’ll find items like horoscopes, games, software, educational material, maps, tools and tips. Just follow their simple directions and you’ll be making your site even more appealing to your visitors.

I received an email today from Microsoft Office Live Small Business Advisor. Since I’m always searching for new ways to promote my business, I took the bait and checked out their claim:
“Microsoft Office Live Small Business now includes new easy-to-use tools to help you do business on the Web. And now’s the perfect time to explore them all, because you can get started for free—no strings attached. Sign up now.”
If you have an msn, hotmail or windows live email you can sign in with those credentials and I did. This looks like a good resource for small businesses who aren’t ready or able to pay for professional web design services. You can set up a website for free. You can set up advertising promotions including a pay per click beta deal, that sounds good, and email newsletter campaigns. Some of the services are free and some come at a cost but overall it looks like a good place to start getting your company name out there. 
Setting up your own website is free. You can get a domain name, and use a “powerful site designer” and templates to get the job done. They even include a section with tips on how to create an effective site. I’d suggest you take the time to give it the once over and no, I’m not on their payroll.
http://www.officelive.com/