Link Exchange and Banner Ads

Posted by arlene

After you’ve prepared your Web site for the search engines and carefully registered with them, your thoughts now should turn to promotion. Your first question is probably “How can I make a big impact on the Net—fast?”

Keep in mind that unless you have substantial resources (or happen to be a relative of Bill Gates), promoting your new eBusiness takes a lot of hard work and time to see results. So make the most of your time with these basic grass-roots marketing strategies to launch your eBusiness.

Promotion does not mean advertising. So, before you go out and spend a bundle of money advertising, start your marketing first on a grass-roots level. This gives you a chance to find out what works best for your eBusiness and what doesn’t before you put your limited resources toward a full-fledged marketing plan.

Swapping Links and Banners

After registering your site with the search engines, the first grass-roots marketing initiative should be to search for sites that will link to you and vice versa. Swapping links can come in two ways.

Reciprocal linking

Placing links on your page to complementary product sites that, in turn, place links to your site on their page.

Banner exchanges

Swapping banners that advertise your site with the banners of other sites.

First go to the top search engines that you’ve registered with and—using the keywords and key phrases you’re using for your Web store—search for content and community sites that would match the products or services that you are selling.

For example, your site sells cigars. Another site sells humidors. A relationship made in Web heaven! Look for sites that sell products or services complementary to your own. Then contact them and offer a reciprocal linking arrangement. The same goes for cooking sites. If you sell kitchenware, then contact recipe sites or gourmet cooking communities and ask to exchange links.

Although time consuming, reciprocal linking pays off handsomely in the long run with increasing traffic to your site. The more sites that link to you, the more shoppers you will draw to your site. And even though it can take up to a couple of months to begin getting substantial amounts of reciprocal links from other related sites, this should be one of your top priorities.

Another way to get reciprocal links is to exchange banner ads.

You can either work directly with the sites you contact to exchange one another’s banner ads, or you can join a banner exchange program such as LinkExchange at adnetwork.bcentral.com. LinkExchange will place your banner on more than 400,000 Web sites and rotate its banner on your site for free. LinkExchange administers the program and provides you with reports as to how many times your banner was shown around the network and how many times it was clicked on. Check out bCentral at bcentral.com for other promotion services.

After you have submitted your site to the search engines and started to communicate with other sites to get reciprocal links and/or joined a banner exchange network, you want to focus your time on email discussion lists and newsgroups.

Sow Your Participation and Reap Site Visitors

One of the best ways to get the word out about your company and what it offers is to join in the community gabfest that’s on the Internet. By monitoring and participating in newsgroups and discussion lists, you have the opportunity to respond to potential customers and promote your product or service. And because you will be communicating with others with similar interests, you might find that there are other eTailers on the list or in the newsgroup that you might want to form a strategic relationship with to increase sales for one another.

For example, if you sell camping gear, you might find that an eTailer who sells freeze- dried food is also a participant on your discussion list or in the newsgroup you monitor. You might strike up a relationship where you would promote his product on your camping gear site and he would do the same in turn. You might even decide to work together offering bundled products to each other’s customers—thus both increasing sales. Or perhaps you might sell travel packages and form a relationship with a luggage site.

The possibilities are endless. Participating in the newsgroups and on discussion lists is an easy way to find and form these strategic relationships. Where do you find these lists and newsgroups? Liszt (liszt.com) has a searchable directory of more than 90,000 mailing lists that you can participate in. The List of Lists (catalog . com/vivian / interest -group-search. html) is another site packed with discussion lists to join and TileNet (title.net /lists /) will point you to newsgroups in just about any subject area.

Finally, although you can’t blatantly advertise your Web store on the lists and groups, you can still get your Web store some visibility by creating a good sig file.

A sig file—or a signature file—is a text tag that you can place at the bottom of the emails that you send out. When you participate in an email discussion group or post to a newsgroup, your sig file can be attached to your message. Created properly, a good sig file can attract shoppers to your Web store. In reality a sig file can act as a small promotional message at the end of each and every posting that you do.

The trick, of course, is to create a compelling sig file. Do this by creating a brief 4-5-line statement that describes a specific benefit your product or service provides, why that benefit is important to your target customers, and why they should respond to you now. It’s cheap, fast, and it works.

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