Any small business company should have a marketing strategy.  On the same lines, any small business should have a webpage.  A webpage is a great way to generate public interest in your business as well as receive customers that are not within your local area. Without an effective marketing strategy, consumers will buy products, which means no revenue will be generated for your business.  Creating a website marketing strategy is just as important as marketing for your brick and mortar business.  Many companies pump in thousands of dollars in sleek and well designed websites to only figure out that no one is visiting their site. Besides being a huge waste of money, it’s also very discouraging when your hundred thousand dollar website is being outranked and out visited a website created by a teenager for sixteen dollars.  There are many ways to advertise and market a website and business owners can even perform their own free website marketing strategy.  Here are a few tips to when braining storming ideas on how to market your website. 

Article marketing is a great way to describe a product or company as well as generate back links to your site.  Article directories are websites where users can write about various topics that they are interested in or are relevant to their website.  Many people visit these directories to search for information and generally, these articles show up in the Google listings.  Another good reason to use article directories to market your website is because you can spread the word about your site without having to pay anything.  Many article directories allow you to add a few links to your webpage.  Think of it this way, the more web pages that are available to the public, and the more chances that consumers will go to your site.  A few websites where you can write free articles to promote your website are Ezine, GoArticles and Article Dashboard. 

Besides article directories, using micro blog sites such as HubPages is a great way to add to your website marketing strategy.  Hubpages are similar to article directories except that instead of just an article, you will be able to create a small website that will spread the word about your product and company.  However, too much self promotion is not advocated and your micro blog will also have to provide educational material. 

Besides marketing your website with article directories and microblogs, you can also use Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.  Building relationships with people online will ensure that you drive traffic to your website as well as develop your brand image amongst the more web savvy users.  Twitter has many likeminded individuals and you can “follow” people that are within your same industry.  The more people that know about your website, the more chances that people will spread about your site. Youtube is a great way to visual show a product and company and is basically “free advertising”.  Millions upon millions of viewers log onto Youtube everyday and if your video is popular, you will be able to market your product towards millions of viewers per day, for free!  Paying advertisers would kill to have some of the free views that some viral videos have. 

Lastly, attempting to rank your website on the first page of a popular search engine such as Google is a great marketing strategy.  Besides having free search traffic, or organic traffic, ranking your website on the first page of a search engine will give you a great return on investment.  Once you have marketed your website effectively, you won’t have to pay advertisers in order to receive traffic to your website (unless you want to). 

Ways to rank your website well in a popular search engine is by performing search engine optimization tactics.  The great benefit of learning search engine optimization is that it’s free to learn and your knowledge well allow you to create other websites and further promote your company.  These are just a few ways that you can add to your very own website marketing strategy.