Free Give-Aways - Your best Promotion tactic

The normal method of promoting a website involves generating new content or spending advertising money.  Both aim to generate visibility in the search engines.

But the most important element in determining natural ranking positions is the quality and relevance of incoming links.  Ideally your site should be of such interest that others in your field, customers, competitors, consultants or just those with a general interest, want to link to you to show features they do not have themselves.

So, if you can create a tool good enough to become an industry standard, don' t restrict it your own customers, give it to relevant forums, even give it to your competitors, in return for a simple link acknowledging your authorship.  At one stroke you enhance your own reputation for expertise and the search engines will recognise this in improved rankings.  The cost to you is in the time and effort to produce such a winning idea and should save a small fortune in standard promotional costs.

Of course coming up with such an idea is not easy.  And getting it to the point of general acceptance will certainly require time and effort.  Often, however, the real block is the immediate reaction of keeping the best hidden on your own site instead of deliberately giving it away.

So spend this month thinking of how you might help your competitors - just ensure you gain even more than they do.  In present conditions free offers are likely to be particularly welcome.

Talk to you next month,

Stephen Orr