A Guide to Free Marketing Online

One of the most overlooked and far too underused way to get free marketing online is through social networking sites. Some businesses haven't yet realized the untapped potential available to promote a business through sites such as Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, Hub Pages and more.

Not only is this type of marketing without cost, but also its effectiveness in reaching target audiences is immeasurable. Since we are a visual society, sites like YouTube have become an Internet business' silent partner in promotion. You can make a video, upload it and tell the world you're here.

There are free marketing opportunities in online forums. How do you know which online forums to join? Look for ones related to your business niche. Not only will you find networking opportunities, but you'll be able to let others in the forum know about your business by talking it up as well as having what's called a signature link below your name when you post or respond to posts. For the best results in a forum, make sure you post on a regular basis. You can quickly get a reputation as an expert, which in turn drives traffic to your site.

Using Yahoo Answers is another way of using social networking for free marketing. There are millions of questions asked and answered on Yahoo Answers and it ranks right up there next to Wikipedia in popularity.

Google Knol is another way to have free marketing for your site, especially since Google ranks it high in their search engine. One thing you do need to be aware of with Google Knol is that if you want your Knol to rank high, your content must be accurate and tightly written.

No matter how you look at social networking sites, putting them to work on your marketing team makes good sense.

Deciding to take advantage of free marketing ways to promote your business is smart. But in order to get the most out of free marketing, you can't just write anything and stick it up on a content site and expect great results.

For example, your article should not have large blocks of unbroken paragraphs. When readers see this, they tend to skim or worse, move on to an article written in a style that's easier to read. Don't talk in a language your audience can't understand. Just because you know the correct terminology doesn't mean your audience does. Write in a personable, easy to understand format. No one wants to read an article written like a legal brief.

Make your content matter. Don't take a thousand words to say something that can be said in five hundred words. Get to the point. Draw attention to article by the use of bullets. Break sentences up into varying lengths. Don't use an article template. Be original. You don't want your articles to sound exactly like thousands of others already on content sites.

There is another free marketing method that many companies fail to take advantage of and that's the use of press releases. Press releases are a great way to promote your business free of charge, but you want to be careful that you don't write the press release like an ad.

You can find many sample press releases free online but just in case it's not covered in the samples you find, there are some important things to include in the press release. In the header, make sure you say why what your company offers or the service it provides is helpful to the target audience. Also, be sure to put three number symbols at the bottom of the page when you're finished writing your press release to show editors that it's the end.

Finally, another free marketing method you can take part in is what's known as a joint venture ad swap (JV for short) A JV is where you partner up with a marketer that has a large mailing list. He runs ads for you and you the same for him.