Promoting Your Service-Oriented Website on a Tight Budget

You've finally created the website you always wanted for your service-oriented business, but you've allotted too small an amount in your budget towards marketing to make it effective. While a web marketing consultant is helpful, you can take matters into your own hands. You just need a little direction.

The first and most obvious marketing strategy is by using search engines and directories. To bring targeted traffic to your site, submit your website to the major search engines and directories so potential customers can find it. Google is one option, but don't leave out other popular engines like AltaVista. For these sites, try optimizing your web pages for the search engines' indexes; optimizing basically means keywords into your text that customers might search for with a search engine.

Unfortunately, while many search engines are free, there's no guarantee your page will rank high enough to ever reach the first three pages of a search engine (the average number of pages a customer will browse through before moving on.) Being a service-oriented company, you have more to worry about because the chances are good someone out there has been offering the same service for years, and has a budget that allows them to be placed high on the search engine sites. The only way to guarantee good placement for your chosen keywords is to pay for it. Pay For Performance search engines let you bid for placement of your chosen keywords. Kanoodle and GoTo are the two most popular sites, but others also exist. Research to see which option is best for you.

Alongside search engines are directories. Directories such as Yahoo are run by people, not computers, and value the quality of information on your website, not just the keywords within the content. As long as you place information others find useful on your site, directory editors will be interested in it.

These days you have to pay for entry in most well-known directories, but the added traffic to your site is usually worth the price. Yahoo charges a one-time fee, but this does not guarantee acceptance of your site into their database; it only gives you the opportunity to have your site reviewed by the editors. Other popular directories are NBCi and LookSmart.

Another option available to service-oriented websites is advertising in an e-zine. Are e-zine ads always an effective form of advertising? Of course not. But when you put it up against other, more expensive options of online marketing, coupled with an already-tight budget to begin with, it may be a temporary solution. Yahoo Groups and Ezine-Universe.com are popular directories of e-zines. You may also want to check out the "Directory of E-zines", which lists a variety of e-zine publishers for your perusal.

Another choice aside from advertising in an e-zine is to publish one of your own. Offering a free e-zine for customers who give you their email address is a great way for a small business to build a customer base and establish you as an expert in your field. There's generally no cost involved with maintaining an e-zine, but you'll need to invest the time and effort it takes to create content that your customers will find useful. Keep that in mind when figuring out how much time you can afford to write the e-zine.

For a large mailing list, you may want to invest in a list manager or similar type of software. There are also companies like mail-list.com that allow you to put a small list online for an annual fee of around $100. When writing articles for your e-zine, add a few lines at the end that describe you (and your site) and provide a link to it. This way you can display your knowledge while having a built-in site promotion.

The last low-budget option is to write and send out a press release if you feel you have something that's newsworthy. The publicity can't be beat, and the only thing you'll really be spending is your time. You'll need to seek out a free press release distribution service (PR Web is one example), or you can spend a little extra money and have a paid distribution service send your press release to several thousand journalists. Either way, you need to make sure the information really is newsworthy, or you'll end up with a group of disgruntled people who could have been your future clients.