Having a web site means being able to utilize the many free web site marketing resources available, to promote your business.

One of the best ways to get free web site marketing is to get your web sites link, with title and description, placed on other websites. For them to do this, there needs to be a reason. This usually means enhancing the other web site in some way beneficial to them. The trick to free web site marketing is to give them a good reason to list your site.

A successful website marketing strategy uses many different resources to increase awareness of your site, to give it access to different sorts of markets/visitors.

Marketing your web site to different types of visitors and target markets, will increase your web site traffic. The more traffic, the more money you can make. Selling is a numbers game after all.

How do we get this targeted traffic for free?

Search Engines
Getting listed in a search engine for a keyword that people type into a search engine to find what they are looking for. This listing is free. Search Engine Optimization is a set of strategies to get highly placed in the results of a search, ideally on the first page, for free.

Incoming Links
A link to your website ie an incoming link, should be placed on as many other websites as possible. Reaching a wide range of target audiences can be accomplished by having the links placed for a wide variety of different reasons. For example, someone may be looking for a health newsletter. The logical place for them to find one would be at a site that lists newsletters or ezines by category. If your health ezine is listed there, they can click on the link to get to your site. If it isnt, they will find someone elses ezine instead.

Incoming links is also the way to externally optimize your web site for the search engines. So the one strategy works for both, increasing both non-search engine traffic, and increasing traffic due to a higher placement in the search engines.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Is where your ad is placed on different websites, and on search engines as Sponsored Links. You only pay when someone clicks on your link. This does cost money, however you have a lot of control over the amount. And if what you are spending is less than the profit you are making, then you are essentially getting this for free.

It is worthwhile to go through this, as you will get traffic from a carefully thought out and researched campaign. You can then work out and track your conversion rate.

A good marketing campaign should consist of a mix of all 3 of the above, plus utilize traditional offline marketing, for maximum exposure.