Is your Business Website lonely?

3 tips to help your small business grow online

Many people launch their online business or online presence for their bricks and mortar small businesses with completely overblown expectations. They've heard the statistics about how many new users come online every day and the millions and millions of web searches that are conducted daily by web surfers. What they don't often realize is that while there are over 1 billion people online, there are also millions and millions of websites vying for their attention. Simply having a website is not enough to generate traffic anymore. You must promote your site as much as possible to encourage people to visit your website. It's similar to throwing a party but forgetting to invite anyone. You can pour the drinks and lay out the nachos, but if nobody knows about the party, you'll have a pretty lonely evening.

To beat the loneliness that some businesses feel online, here are 3 low cost tips to draw some people to your website:

Write about your Topic: What is your website about? What are you selling? Whatever it is, you should be able to come up with a few ideas for articles that will be of interest to your audience and will establish your credibility in the field. By writing short 500-word articles and circulating them on the Internet, you'll pick up some free traffic to your website. You accomplish this by remembering to add a resource box, or a byline at the end of your article. It might read something like "Joe Smith is the owner of www.bestplumbinginventionever.com where he offers his revolutionary new plumbing products for sale". The article in this case probably had something to do with a challenge facing the plumbing profession, hence the readers were mostly plumbers. Joe essentially gets a free advertisement in his byline that is attached to his informative article.

There are a number of great sites online that will post your articles at no charge for others to read. Some of the best include:

www.ideamarketers.com www.clickforcontent.com www.marketing-seek.com

Exchange Links: Links from other websites can be a substantial source of web traffic for your site. Not only will the links generate traffic for you, but inbound links are one of the key factors evaluated by search engines in determining the ranking of your website. The key to linking is to go for quality, not quantity. Most search engines are now evaluating websites based on their relevant inbound links, meaning that a link from a webpage that has nothing to do with your business (i.e. a pool table company that links to your pet nutrition website) won't do you much good. The best approach is to locate related businesses who are not competitors and approach them with an offer to link to their site in exchange for a link from yours. A good example would be a pool table company that links to a website belonging to a website about party games or pub games. The topics are related, but the sites are not likely in competition with one another.

Study your Competitors : Do a quick search on Google (the web's number 1 search engine) for a common search term applicable to your business. For example, a pool table company should search for "pool table sales". Now look at the top 10 results. Your objective is to determine what these companies are doing to be successful in gaining such a high ranking in a Google search. Read their website thoroughly. Are they posting articles on other websites? If so, find out which ones so you can evaluate the possibility of posting your articles there as well. What about inbound links? Who is linking to your competitors? (you can find this out by typing "link:www.yourcompetitorsname.com"). Why are these sites linking to your competition? Can you get a link from these sites as well? By studying the key success factors of high ranking sites in your industry, you'll unlock some great leads for you to investigate in the quest to drive your site up to the top of the search engine ladder.

Through informative article writing, inbound link building, and an analysis of competing websites, you can beat that lonely feeling you get when nobody visits your website. Keep working at raising your online profile and maybe next time you throw a party, the whole neighborhood will show up!

About the author: Will Dylan is the Author of "Small Business Big Marketing" a powerful e-book for small businesses available through his website www.marketingyoursmallbusiness.com . Will also offers article and news release writing services.