Monday, February 16, 2009

The Top 3 Ways to Get Free Advertising on the Internet

By Alex Wu

Company budgets are tightening world wide to compensate for the economic crisis that has spread across the globe.Give your employer a reason to keep you by finding free advertising space online.Maintaining a free advertising campaign online takes planning, patience and networking skills.Here are the top three ways to get quality free advertising space on the Internet.

Press and related media coverage are hands down the best method for free advertising.Whether you meant to be in the news or you are manufacturing the news of your company or product, you need to learn how to take advantage of the media.One of the best ways to get your news message or press bite out there is to put it in the form of a press release.

There are a lot of free press release sites where you can submit your press release and have it read by editors who watch the rss feeds of the press release sites for new content.Writing press releases creates an angle for journalists tocreate a story about your product or company.Compile a list of free press release sites and methodically submit the release to each site.

When you write your press release make sure to give it a newsworthy edge.If there is a story there or an editorial angle already in place it is more likely to get picked up by writers.To follow the success of the free press created by your press releases monitor the online coverage of your company and product.To do that you will need to use something similar to Google Alerts and Google Analytics.Google Alerts will send you a message each time your keywords, or company name and product, are mentioned in online articles and blogs.Google Analytics will allow you to see who is coming to your website and how they are being referred.

This brings us to the second best way to get free advertising online.Find the online communities that represent your industry and get friendly.Find the top blogs and community websites and pitch your press release and stories to their content editors.

Consciously build your relationships with website managers and content editors.Keep in touch with monthly phone calls to touch base on the possibility of receiving free advertising coverage.By building business relationships with multiple editors you increase your chances of receiving free coverage exponentially.

The third best way to receive free advertising is to spearhead a giveaway or contest in collaboration with another company, service provider or non profit organization.Make sure that through negotiations both parties benefit from the endeavor.You will want to receive the emails of participants for future marketing.Also ask about placing an advertisement on their website that links through to your website and promotes the contest.

Follow through on the new client leads you will get from the contest.Send out creative emails with promotions to your potential customers.If you can win over customers in the process you will gain valuable word of mouth advertising.One of the most powerful methods of free advertising is through word of mouth.Capitalize on that by making sure your customers have a good experience. - 15246

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