42 ways to promote your business online

In this post, I will share all of you about 42 ways to promote your business online. This post includes 3 parts:

+ Part I: Top free traffic sources
+ Part II: Top paid traffic sources
+ Top 3: Another traffic sources

Part I: Top free traffic sources:

1. SEO

SEO is the best source about promoting methods online but it needs more time so that I will focus on other methods below:

2. Optimize Old Content

Because you are tracking your keyword rankings (you are, right? If you’re not, use SEMrush), you can find the keywords that you rank near the bottom of the first page and go add useful content to those pages to help them rank better. Google also prefers updated and new content over old stale content.

3. Create YouTube Video Tutorials 

Did you know that YouTube ranks 2nd in the world? YouTube is a great resource for driving free organic traffic to your website.

I have developed 3 YouTube channels for 3 niches: job search, fitness, dating and YouTube brings 35k visitors / month to the 3 above sites.

4. Create content for Slideshare

Slideshare is its own content social network. By creating content for Slideshare specifically and promoting it, you can also land on the popular content sections of their homepage which drive great traffic. Make sure you link back to your site from Slideshare too.

I created three slideshare.net accounts for 3 niches: job search, dating, fitness. Then I uploaded 312 rich documents on slideshare.net. The total traffic I got are 45k visitors per month.

5. Blogspot.com

Blogspot.com is the largest free blog service in the world. Along with wordpress.com, tumblr.com ...

Blogspot.com of the best free traffic generator and backlinks for your website. In addition, Blogspot.com has many great features that other blogging platforms do not have such as: enable code insertion into templates, enable redirect blogs on your domain (included free hosting).

I started using Blogspot.com from 2010, I now have 182 Blogs with an average blog visitors of 1000-15,000 visitors per month. The total number of visitors to all my blogs is 850,000+ visitors. These free blogs have generated free traffic to my 3 niches of 31k visitors per month.

6. Create Pinterest boards

Pinterest is a super strong domain and your Pinterest boards can rank very well. Do your typical keyword research for your website, then take some of those keywords and target them on Pinterest. A pro tip is to use your other online resources (website, Instagram, etc) to get them indexed faster and ranking better.

I have created 3 boards for my 3 niches. In the last 4 years I have uploaded 512 rich images on Pinterest. Total traffic from Pinterest 32k visitors / month

7. Guest post on similar sites

Similar to acquiring new users, guest posting on similar sites that likely have your audience and have read your site is a great way to remind them about your site/product as well. I started performing guest posts from 2015 with a total of 174 articles. The traffic I got are 11k visitors/month. Although traffic is not much, but I still evaluate this as a source of high traffic and quality backlinks for your website.

8. Answer Questions on Quora

Quora is a great medium for driving traffic to your site. Answer questions on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content on your site or blog. However, don't use this platform to spam. Ensure that your answers are detailed and that you know what you're talking about

I started answering on Quora since 2014, initially I mainly inserted links, then my account was locked. I began to study the famous Quora accounts and I realized they gave very so good answers. I re- registered Quora account, currently I have 346 answers on Quora. The amount of traffic pushed to my website is 12k visitors/month. What I'm most surprised at is that I currently have followers 46k followers on Quora.

9. Linkedin

LinkedIn has become much more than a means of finding another job. The world’s largest professional social network is now a valuable publishing platform in its own 16 right, which means you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to your website, as well as increase your profile within your industry especially if you have a moderate to large following.

I created a Linkedin account from 2013, so far I have created 122 articles, my Linkedin account has 75k + followers. An article on Linkedin will have links: linkedin.com/pulse/article- url. The traffic I got from Linkedin are 18k visitors/month

10. Post Useful Content On Reddit

Another great way to drive traffic to your site is to use Reddit. Reddit is a wildly- popular platform where you can share useful information and engage in conversations with millions of people from across the planet. The domain is extremely popular, making any link from the site extremely useful for boosting your visibility across the web.

I have posted more than 400 free materials on Reddit for my 3 niches and currently I got 26k visitors/month.

Part II: Paid traffic source:

Social advertising

Social advertising on Facebook, Twitter, and other networkds is still relatively cheap today as compared to Adwords. Many of them also allow you to segment down by demographics or target by keywords so that you hit your ideal audience.

PPC

PPC is usually best used for conversion-oriented keywords, which is great because it gets you a new audience that is also ready to convert.

Utilize Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site or your blog, and to promote any offers, but it also means that you need a list to market to. Create a lead magnet and build a sales funnel immediately if you haven't already done so, in order to build up a list that you can eventually market (not spam) any of your offers to.

Run YouTube Ads

Can’t create videos, but there are videos on YouTube that your target audience watches? You can run YouTube videos.

Purchase Ads Through Facebook

Want access to the global populous? Clearly, you can advertise on a platform like Facebook. As long as your offer is enticing enough, and you can convert that traffic into sales with a great sales page or free offer, then you can scale this marketing initiative out infinitely to drive nearly unlimited sales.

Advertise On Instagram

Instagram now has a clear revenue strategy, and that includes placing ads on the social network. This is a terrific way to reach people in your area and offers you a highly-targeted approach to reach potential customers to buy your products and services.

Part III: Another traffic sources:

Interview Industry Influencers

Remember the importance of content marketing I mentioned earlier? Well, interviewing an industry influencer is a prime example of how to create epic content.

Interviews work because they are win-win situations. The interviewee gets more exposure, while the interviewer gets their hands on some hot content for their publication, which in this case, is your blog.

Make the most of the interview by asking relevant questions surrounding not only their lives and careers, but also the industry as a whole. This will ensure that fans of the influencer get a taste of their personality, while others will value their expert advice.

Publish a Press Release

Lots of new online stores push out press releases in order to attract media attention, but fail.

It goes without saying that to get ignored by every single news outlet when distributing a new press release is demoralizing and often a huge waste of resources.

The secret to getting noticed is simple. Don’t publish a lousy press release!!!

First of all, make sure your news actually is news worthy. Don’t expect a massive response unless you’re giving the public something seriously interesting to read about. Also, a press release should be presented in a way that is concise and professional, without being too monotonous.

Start An Affiliate Program

If you’re struggling to make sales and you don’t have the cash to hire sales or marketing help, consider adding an affiliate program to your store. You can get other people to promote your product for a commission. You’ll only have to pay them if they make a sale.

Affiliate programs typically work by creating a custom URL for each person promoting your products. They can share this link on social media, in a blog post reviewing your product, or even in a YouTube video where they’re showing it off. Through the custom links, you’ll be able to track who is driving sales for you so you can compensate them.

Instagram

Instagram has over 400 million active users and its visual focus is perfect for promoting products. Half of those users are on Instagram every day. Any brand would do well to share their products on this network.

There are several ways to use Instagram to promote your store. You can share captivating images of your products, share a stop motion video of one of your products in action, run a contest, or reach out to influential

Run a Contest

Contests are an easy and affordable way to get your brand in front of a lot of people. By giving away your product, you can make sure your contest gets in front of the right kind of people: potential customers.

However, many contests fail. There are a few key mistakes to avoid when running a contest to promote your business. Make sure the platform, the timing, the messaging, and the steps people have to take to enter your contest are well thought out.

Create free Online Courses

The great thing about the Internet is that you can publish any type of content you want. By creating longer form content like courses that are targeted around both user needs and specific keyword phrases (don’t forget keyword research!), you can drive more traffic to your site and convert them into email addresses that you can then take down your funnel.
Plus, online course websites exist in plenty so you can put them on places like Lynda.com to further your reach.

Launch Infographics

If you have a designer in your company or can find one online, create useful graphics that tell a story and help people see your content in a new way. Do outreach for links, promote on Pinterest, etc.

Give Podcast Interviews

Podcasting is HUGE these days, and one of the best ways to grow a podcast audience is to invite influential people onto your podcast. Think about it like audio version guest posts. So, get one or two podcasts under your belt (or launch your own) then start targeting podcast producers to get onto their shows.

Promote pins on Pinterest

In this day and age, it’s not just enough to create content and expect it to rank and drive traffic. Rankings are influenced by engagement stronger than ever before, so use some budget to promote pins on Pinterest to your target audience.

Partnerships

Especially in B2B spaces, partnerships can be gold for customer acquisition. Build out referral programs with complementary companies to yours and try to funnel some of their traffic back to your site, either through website mentions or even their email marketing.

Link acquisition

This feels like an old school tactic, but it’s still true that the more links you have to your site, the better your site will rank. So acquire links to your site from content, from relevant resource pages on other sites, and from outreach that you do.

Promote content via Outbrain/Taboola

Content promotion is so cheap these days that you’d be silly not to do it. I know people with content sites making literally thousands of dollars a day all from promoted content.

Create satellite websites

If your main website is around one niche yet you operate in many niches, you can build out websites specifically targeted at those other niches and use them to funnel traffic to your other sites. You need to disclose that you own those other sites, but this is a great way to spread the organic reach.

Speed up your website

A fast site not only converts better, but on a big site you will also get more organic traffic because the search engines are able to crawl your site faster and find more content. Start with switching hosts then optimizing your code, all while making sure you are using aggressive caching and a content delivery network (CDN).

Target the longtail of keywords for SEO

If you don’t have a very strong website, you can target longer tail keywords (<50 searches a month) which are often much easier to rank for. From this you can start building up a base of content that you can then use to earn links and propel rankings for more competitive terms.

Run competitions/giveaways

One of the best ways to build an email list and therefore a new audience is through giving away high value items and incentivizing your entrants to share as well in order to get more entries. I use the Kingsumo Giveaways plugin for this.

Run webinars

Webinars can drive a new audience for you when you invite guests, or do advertising, that have an audience that they will promote your webinar to. Try to bring on guests who already have a large audience.

Sponsor Meetups

Meetup.com is one of the most popular websites online for organizing groups of people to get together. Many of them accept sponsors, who do things like give free meeting space or pay the bar tab. This can be a great way to get your company or product in front of your ideal target audience.

Do retargeting advertising

If you’re not doing retargeting and you operate a business online, you are literally leaving money on the table. With all the different display networks available, not to mention Facebook, you can easily target people who have come to your site but not purchased to come back and finish their conversion.

Advertise on similar sites

Once again using SimilarWeb or SEMrush, find the sites similar to yours who are not competitors and see if you can advertise there. Now their audience is yours.

Let users subscribe to content

Some CMSs, like WordPress, will let people subscribe to replies to their comments that they leave on your content. You can also use a myriad of tools (like SumoMe) to capture email addresses to which you can send content when it publishes.

Post On Medium.com

Medium is one of my go-to platforms for marketing my content and provides another authority-site domain that gives you the versatility of link-dropping the way that you normally would through any blog post on a CMS like WordPress. Leverage Medium to create intuitive content marketing posts that also link back to your primary posts on your site or blog.

Create Free Webinars

Free webinars offer a great platform for driving traffic to your website.  You can automate your sales presentation with webinar platforms like Demio, GoToWebinar and others that exist out there. Use the time to deliver value while also directing viewers to your site and its content along with any offers.

Use Outbrain or Taboola To Promote Your Content

Sites like Outbrain and Taboola are great for promoting your website or blog as long as you have some sales funnel setup and an ability to track those individuals who arrive from these platforms. These sites will promote your content across thousands of other similar websites across the internet for a fee. However, be sure to do your due diligence and test things out before diving in headfirst.

Get Listed

Another way to increase traffic to your website is to get listed in online directories and review sites. For most of these sites, your profile will have a link to your website, so actively updating these listings and getting positive reviews is likely to result in more website traffic.

Use Landing Pages

Create landing pages specific to your offers, such as for redeeming discount codes, downloading a free guide, or starting a free trial. Landing pages are another source of traffic to your website. Plus, they contain the details users need in order to move forward and convert.