Added August 18, 2011 by 372 Comments

If you like what you see, spread the word!

WebMaxed is also a small business. We're bootstrapping to bring you essential internet marketing news, tips, and trends. Thanks for your support!

Advertising

Alternatives to Pay-Per-Click Advertising for Small Businesses

Share
Pay-Per-Click Advertising for Small Businesses

Paid traffic often comes in the form of pay-per-click advertising. Traffic you don’t pay for comes via your website appearing in organic search results, a newsletter, social networking website, or video.

I’ve seen many small businesses build a website and immediately start a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, spending lots of money on trying to get visitors to their website. Pay-per-click advertising isn’t bad if you know how to optimize your campaigns and what to do with the traffic when it comes.

Small Business Tip

Before you spend money on pay-per-click advertising, learn how to get and convert organic visitors into paying customers.

Here’s three easy do-it-yourself marketing strategies to drive free organic traffic to your website without laying out a lot of cash:

Search Engines

When building your website’s pages, be sure to SEO (search engine optimize) every page. Add a meta title, meta description, and meta tags. The content on your page should reflect the meta info, and vise versa. Using a free CMS (content management system) such as WordPress and a SEO plugin like All-in-One SEO Pack allows you to simply login to your CMS and add SEO to your pages.

Social Media

Add links to your website on your social networking profiles. Spend some time each week updating your social networking profiles with useful information. To most effectively gain the attention of your audience, your goal should be to consistently provide tidbits of helpful info that will show you’re an expert in your industry.

Video

Because it’s cheap to produce and cheap to broadcast, video is fast becoming an amazing tool for small businesses. With an inexpensive video camera, you can make a short video relevant to your business and put it on YouTube. Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google, and that YouTube videos also appear in Google search results? Making short videos and optimizing your YouTube page for search engines can drive a steady flow of traffic to your website and add tremendous credibility to your business.

The tools you need to perform SEO on your website are free and available to anyone, and you can buy an HD video camera for under $200. Generating traffic to your website using these tools will have lasting effects on your business.

Whether you’re in the process of building a website, or you have a website and want to start bringing traffic to it, keep these points in mind so you can quickly gain visitors without a huge monetary investment.

Have you used pay-per-click advertising and DIY marketing? What option was more effective for your business? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Image source: Shutterstock

About Kevin HaynesFollow Kevin on Twitter

Kevin Haynes is the founder of WebMaxed.com. His personal mission is to make internet marketing easy and fun to learn for small business entrepreneurs (trust him, it's possible!). Kevin is a creative entrepreneur who's into meditation, delicious wine and food, traveling, and sweatin' off calories wherever his workout takes him.

Your information is 100% safe! Your email will never be shared; you can unsubscribe anytime.