Any online shop needs promotion to start making revenue. This is obvious and doesn't require any additional arguments. If you don't have visitors, you have no one to purchase something from you. Visitors are crucial for your online shop business. Targeted visitors are ultimate.
As Internet now gives lots of opportunities to drive targeted traffic to your site, you only need enough money and adequate planning on how to spend it. PPC systems, direct mailing, banner ads campaigns, search engine optimization and more - all these are the sources of the visitors you need. But all of them need you to pay. That is why any online shop owner who is a freshener and doesn't have a huge budget to spend on paid promotion opportunities at the end comes up with one simple question: "Are there any ways of promoting online shops for free?"
Yes. There are.
All of them, though, will require you to spend some amount of time which is pretty logical – if you don't have money to pay for others' time and service, you should contribute your own working hours. Here are some tips.
Try and find websites that operate in the niche relative to the products you offer. For instance, if you sell soil fertilizers, any farmers community will do. Their visitors are your 100% target audience so why not try and bait this very audience? Of course, you should offer the site owner something in return. There is no money, huh? Then offer the site owner some commission from each sale generated by his website. If you are generous enough and the whole deal makes some sense for the site owner, he will likely accept your offer. It is very important to stick to one of the most powerful marketing rules these days - to make lots of money, allow others make it. You give the site owner a chance to convert his traffic to some incentives from your sales, and you get the sales you need.
There also special online services that don't ask anything in return for promoting your products. These are the Product Search Engines (PSE). Regrettably, not all of them are so generous to include information about your products for free. For example, Yahoo! Shopping and Bizrate.com need you to purchase some PPC advertising to make your goods available for submission into their index. But we don't have any advertising budget, remember? That is why we'll drive our attention to
http://Froogle.com and
http://WillyFogg.com. Froogle is a nice free Product Search Engine from Google, but it requires the information about your products to be converted into a specially formatted feed. This may end up with some problems for the inexperienced users not familiar to programming. WillyFogg.com is also free, but it has a great advantage - you don't need any special feed for your products to be listed in this PSE. Submitting your shop URL is enough for the goods to be indexed and added to WillyFogg.com database in a few days. A fully-functional multilanguage support makes this Product Search Engine the number one opportunity for those who want to promote their online shops for free.
Online shops free promotion is definitely a reality. You only need to give some effort and utilize all the possibilities the Internet eagerly gives you.
