Read ‘Where Do I Start With My Online Business? Part 1’, if you haven’t done so already and then meet up back here.
Hopefully you’ve had some time to think about what steps you need to take to begin to move your online business forward. I will suggest some first steps and I highly recommend that you go through them one by one and start implementing them to your site. I will begin with general recommendations. I will get into more details about each one in future posts. There are endless ways to begin getting the word out about your site that I can’t cover them all in one post. However, building your business is like building a home, brick by brick.
- Submit your website/blog to the major directories.
Here are the links:
http://www.google.com/addurl/ Free Service
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit Free Service
http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx Free Service
http://www.dmoz.org/ Free Service; a bit difficult to get listed but well worth the effort
Best of the Web! This site charges a fee but it has been around for a while and offers very good page rank
For blogs you can also submit it to blog and feed directories. Click below for a list:
- Write at least 5 killer articles and begin submitting them to article directories such as http://ezinearticles.com and http://www.goarticles.com/ . There are plenty more of them as well. Just do a search on ‘article directories’. Make sure you abide by the Terms and Conditions of the directory. For example, some directories will only allow you to add site links or affiliate links in the bio section of the article. Other directories are a little more flexible. The point is to write a great article and include a link back to your site for people to find you.
- Begin visiting forums in your niche and start connecting with others. For example, if your niche is selling pet collars, you can do a search on ‘pet forums’ (btw, I just did a search and there are PLENTY of forums to choose from). Pick a few and started browsing and answer some posts. Some of these forums actually allow you to submit your site links. PLEASE adhere to the forum’s policies…DON’T SPAM. Participate with the intention of truly contributing to the forum and helping others out.
- Research what your competitors are doing. I will get into this topic in more detail later on. In the meantime, here’s a tip. Sign up with Google Alerts. It provides alerts with results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups. Enter the url of the site you want to get information on. Choose type ‘comprehensive’, how often you want the reports emailed to you and how many results. Don’t forget to also include your own site and your name. It’s also great for keywords. For example, if you sell pet collars and one of your keywords is ‘dog collars’, then enter this keyword in Google alerts and have fun seeing what comes up.
Now get to work! Proceed to Where Do I Start With My Business? Part 3