There are many ways to promote your business online for free. In part 1 we explored a variety of approaches, and in this article I’m going to introduce several more opportunity building ideas.

Create a blog.
Blogs provide a marvellous platform to connect to your prospects, bring in new prospects from search engines and they can also enable your site to perform better by giving Google new pages to crawl as you make your posts. New blog posts can be added once or twice a week on your selected topics, optimised for the search engines with SEO and published.

Take an online marketing course.
There are many of these available for free. Others can cost not much and will provide you with a clear marketing plan and provide you with instructions on how to professionally promote your business for profitable results.

Create a video for YouTube.
Create a video that provides informative and educational material. Keyword it well and post it up on YouTube. Your video will be found by people looking for videos of that topic and you’ll be able to provide a link to your site. Make sure that you post the link to the video on your social media profiles and in any groups and forums that you are a member of. Don’t spam but tell people what benefit they will deride from watching the video.

Add your website to free directories.
The internet has plenty of free directory style websites. Use Google to run a search on the words ‘list free directories’ to get you started. Use as many as you can to list your site and add a profile. Remember to spell out the benefits of your service or business whenever you can, it’s essential to take all opportunities to promote your business.

Offer yourself as a speaker.
If you have experience at speaking publicly, then offer yourself as a speaker on your area of expertise. Look for opportunities at relevant conferences, industry association meetings and with your local chamber of commerce. You might even want to offer to run a presentation at your local university or business park, this way you can benefit from the credentials that this will afford you regarding the PR around the event.

Create a free product and post it on your site.
You might want to offer a free trial of your service to get some new business. Alternatively, you could write a report or presentation that you know that your customers or prospects would be interested in reading. You’d get web visitors to your site and you could also benefit from the publicity that could be gained from others sharing that you have something free to offer.

Write articles.
Article directory sites such as EzineArticles.com provide a free channel to promote your business. By writing engaging and informative articles you will attract readers, who could then even post your article on their own sites with a link through to your site. Be sure to include keywords to help your article get found on Google in addition to on the directory. Also make the most of the bio box to add a link to your site with a strong call to action.

Hopefully within this article you will have found some useful tips on how you can get your business out there. If you want to know more about how to promote your business, then you know where to find me.