A lot of people have the idea that online advertising is expensive.  This can be true, but I’ve recently been looking for inexpensive ways to promote your site that are different than the standard “yellow pages” or “direct mail” that so many small businesses seem to be fixated on.  Here are 3 ideas that I’ve come up with so far: stumble-upon-ad

1.  Advertising on StumbleUpon

I explained what StumbleUpon is in a previous post.  Their toolbar suggests websites that they think the user would be interested in, which is based on their previous browsing history. 

With StumbleUpon advertising, they let you submit your site so that users can see it when they “Stumble” and give it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’.  You can target the users by their age and location to make sure that you are only advertising to individuals in your immediate area.  This is good for industries like real estate or insurance where they would only have an interest in reaching individuals within a certain geographic proximity.

With your account, you are able to log in and see what types of ratings the users have given your site.  You pay as little as $0.05 per visit, so essentially for $5-$10 you can have 100 visitors view and rate your website.  This is a great form of advertising because it will only work if you have interesting content on your website.  It keeps business owners realizing that if they are going to have success online, they need to have something unique to offer.

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2.  Advertising on BrownBook

BrownBook is an online directory like InsiderPages or Yelp.  They allow users to go on and rate local businesses.  The great thing about BrownBook is that it is free to submit a business listing, and for $10/year you can get priority placement in all the listings, a detailed marketing message, and instant alerts when your listing is reviewed by anyone else.  I have yet to find any other websites that can offer that for as little as $10/year.

I know some people will wonder, well, how much is a listing on BrownBook going to do for me – I’ve never even heard of them!  The answer is simple.  BrownBook has a great standing with the search engines, mainly with Google.  Every listing I have ever submitted to them shows up on the first page of Google under the business keywords/categories that I put on the listing.  If your name is Bob Thorton Real Estate in Orange, CA, your Brownbook listing will be very likely to show up when someone “Google’s” your business name, or does a search on Google for  ”real estate in Orange, CA”.  Obviously you have to make sure you tag and enter your business information correctly for this to happen.

 

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3.  Advertising with Press Releases

A lot of people are aware that there are tons of “free press release distribution” websites out there.  However, sometimes it will be more beneficial to go with a company that will distribute your article to sources that people actually visit on a day-to-day basis.

Marketwire is a press release distribution company that will send your press release to every major news source (on and offline) for $140 and up.  On their site, they show you all the different sources that they distribute to, and you pay based on whether you want to do a national campaign, regional, state-wide, or just your metro area.  To distribute a 400-word press release in New York City, it costs $140.  If you’re doing a national distribution, it’s going to be closer to $600. 

The great thing is that they are able to tell you when a source has published your article so that you can track your efforts.  You do this by logging into your account online.  They will also distribute your release to online sources to help better your SEO campaign by inserting keywords into the article.