How to advertise free online

Any activity that you do online to generate sales or create brand awareness becomes a part of online advertising. To a pair of untrained eyes, it might look madness, but let me tell you that there is a pattern to it, and this article will introduce you to that.

After reading the following paragraphs, you will come to know about different types of online advertising tool, and when to use which and why.

An online directory is similar to a business directory, but it consists of URLs of various web sites, which is neatly organized in various categories and subcategories. Online directory is also known as link directory, as it consist of website links, and also may be because it sends out links to the websites listed in the directory.

Online directories predate search engines, and directory-based search engine was the service that people used in good old days to search for the website they needed before algorithm-based search engines came along. In its initial days, Yahoo was nothing but a web directory that indexed different websites. Most of the online directories are free.

Types of online directories

* Website directory
* Article Directory
* RSS feed directory
* Blog directory

There are other types of online directories as well, like, affiliate program directories, forum directories, pod cast directories.

Submitting links of your websites to various relevant directories is one of the major search engine optimization activities that you can do for your site. Directory submission gives your website backlinks, which may or may not translate into traffic. The house is divided on this issue.

The working of classified advertisement sites is similar to the newspaper classified advertisement in basic usefulness. But online classified sites have more usefulness as an advertisement medium then the newspaper classified advertisement can ever have. Unlike print classified, the ads placed in online classified is not charged on the basis of per line, as there is no space constraint. Online classified has many benefits, which I have listed below.
Benefit of classified advertisement sites

* It is highly searchable
* The space is not limited, therefore, the ads can be low
* Can easily be searched
* Can be tightly focused on one geographical location or it can address anyone or everyone on the internet.
* Can be updated at will. You can update it once a day, twice a day or even hourly.

This is a great medium to advertise vacancy, find vendors, and even customers. And you should even not be surprised if you find some companies pulling traffic to their websites through online classified sites. Craigslist, Kijiji and Gumtree are major international players in this category.

Auction sites like eBay can be a good source to sell you product, and it can also be a good source to make people aware of the offerings you have. People purchasing on the auction sites leave a goldmine of information behind when they shop. Even window shopping done by online shoppers on these sites gives away lots of valuable information for the marketers to use to further refine their offerings. You can also use sites like eBay to see what kinds of product people are purchasing. You can even start a whole new business based on the information you gathered from here.

What differentiate our web from the web of 1st generation netizens? Well for one thing, they did not have Facebook. The web of the first generation was nothing but mere reflection of the other media we knew at the time. The internet was nothing but a tumefied version of mass media. No dialogue was possible there. Companies used it to deliver message from the ivory tower with a hope to find hypnotized audience listening to them. And what happened? It tumbled. No one heard.

We understood the nature of the Internet more than big, bulky corporate. It was our understanding of the media that made the web 1.0 obsolete, giving birth to collaborative Internet, web 2.0, and thus came a wave of MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, and yes, Facebook. Now two-way communication is possible. And as a marketer, we should appreciate the fact that consumers can talk to us and among themselves using this platform. This is not necessary a thing to be alarmed of as reported by the doomsayers. It could be a good thing.

Think like this: if you succeeded in creating just one excited consumer, you can get the entire tribe. This is as easy as this, but at the same time, if you end up rubbing one consumer the wrong way, you are doomed.

Blogging is one thing that has changed the nature of the Internet. It has democratized the knowledge, and made every user a content producer. Blogging has done one more thing that has changed the way a brand interacts with its users. It has given users an opportunity to talk back to the brand they cared about or have grudge with using the comment box. And for a brand blogging provided an opportunity to strike conversation with its users.

Now marketer can talk directly to the end users, as no intermediaries (ad agencies, media channels) were necessary. This has revolutionized the brand and consumer relationship. You too can use it to start focused conversation. Start a blog, invite your consumers and then speak, and you will see what a goldmine blogging is.

We always knew silence is golden, but we never practiced it; instead, what we did was put every dollar to buy a big loudspeaker (read advertisement spots on TV, radio, or print) and turned its volume to the fullest, so that we can make ourselves heard. And thus we created noise that no one could hear, and even if someone happened to hear the noise, he would ignore it.

This is how traditional marketing worked, which has been rendered obsolete by micro blogging sites like twitter, plurk, identi.ca, etc. Now you do not have unlimited space to say your things. Twitter has seized your loudspeaker, and instead, has given you 140 characters to communicate your marketing message. How you use it will define how successful you will become. Micro-blogging can be a good tool to keep people apprise of updates related to your brand.

In good old days, we used to bookmark pages on our computer and then came digg, reditt, del.icio.uc, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking websites, which changed the way we saved bookmarks. Not only that, the nature of bookmarking also changed. Now the bookmark has become a vote that visitors cast after going through the bookmarked page. They can either vote you up, or bury you down depending upon what they think about your website.

Social bookmarking tools can be of great importance to marketer. You can use it to create buzz about your offering. These tools play a major role in pulling people to a website. A story or page submitted to a social bookmarking site induces trial of your website.

When you write an article for an article directory with an objective to get traffic and backlink to your website, it is called article marketing. There are many article directories that accept non-duplicate quality articles that they publish in their directories.

What do you get in return?

To compensate for the time you invest in writing an article, these directories offer you 2-3 backlinks which you can either insert in your author box or in the body of the article.

Benefits of article marketing

Article published in the article directory offers two-fold benefit

1. It sends traffic directly from the directory where it was published.
2. Some publishers pick the article from the directory, and publish it on their websites, which gives you more traffic and backlinks.

A press release is an integral part of any PR (Public Relation) activity. The traditional role of the press release has been to inform media and public about the newsworthy event in your company, which worked to form public perception about the company.

Press release is still plays this role, but the internet has added a new dimension to it. Now, ia press release is not used merely to inform people, but like article marketing activities, it is used to get links back to your website. There are many free as well as paid online newswire that publishes press releases.

Every newswire has different guidelines related to link inclusion, but including 2-3 links goes well with every newswire. If used judiciously, a good press release has a high chance of getting picked by online news services operating in your niche. These online news websites give you high-quality backlinks and highly targeted visitors.

An online forum is a platform where people help each other by sharing their knowledge. A forum induces a topical discussion on the given topic. The discussion is not only helpful in terms of the knowledge you gain by being part of it, but these discussions also provide fertile ground to pull visitors to your website by showing your expertise in your niche.

The more you participate in a forum, the more backlinks and traffic you get because every forum gives you an opportunity to construct a signature line that can include 2 to 3 anchor-text-enabled links to your website.

The quality of traffic that you get from a forum is quite high, because people who visit forum are those who are actively seeking solution for the problem that you have. And they click link in your signature line only because the quality of your answer has convinced them that you are an expert in the field.

These online tools are very potent in helping you get quality backlinks and targeted traffic to your website. These tools can also be used to build community around your brand. Depending upon which tool you use, you can use online advertising tools to listen, talk and engage your target audience.