How to promote your business online for free

Promoting your business online can seem very complicated in today's internet age. A few years ago people were still pondering whether they should even have a website, well it's now pretty obvious that it is essential.

There are a lot of different ways to promote your business. Some are free, some are not and some are very very expensive.

We're going to talk about the free ones today. Here is a quick overview.

-BizSheet.com of course is one of these free tools.
It is designed to promote your existing website or to provide you with a one page website for you company that is easily found in Google by your customers. Go here to promote your business for free

-Social Media! Yes, it's the buzz term of the decade. It too is complicated, but most of what you need to know is contained on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. It's all about staking out your territory. You don't need to be tweeting every five minutes - but you do need to be tweeting. You can tweet new business partners, new products, solicit potential customers for thoughts, or any number of things. Be careful to not be too self promotional, it's a community after all, and if all you're doing is trying to sell, your followers will turn their backs on you.

Here's what I would recommend as an approach for free business promotion in social media.

Twitter - Plan to promote your business on twitter twice a day in a 140 characters or less. Here at Bizsheet we often use Twitter to welcome new business' aboard or re-tweet business stories from the news. If you schedule 5 minutes in the morning and 5 in the afternoon, it is really cost effective (as in free business promotion). www.twitter.com

Facebook - Create a business page on Facebook to promote your business for free. There are a few approaches, here is one from mashable.com http://mashable.com/2010/02/22/build-facebook-landing-page/ But what you are really looking for is the 'like button' on your website. Here it is the code http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like Don't be afraid, the like button is your friend - it is one line of code, just make sure you are logged in when you get the code. I am embarrassed to say that when I was writing this I realized that I had neglected on putting it on my own site. For shame. It is so easy to do I did it as I wrote. There it is just to your right. See it?

YouTube The power of YouTube as a free business promotion tool should not be under estimated. We at BizSheet have used it to show users how to ad their business to the BizSheet directory. The real power though are the links back to your site from YouTube and the internal marketing power of related videos on YouTube. You get plugged into a website instantly with millions of existing users. www.YouTube.com

Yahoo Though normally $299US to submit to their directory, you can submit here for free (be prepared to wait up to 2 months for inclusion)

DMOZ Ah, old faithful. The open directory project has been around for many years. Their directory feeds many of the older but still popular(among some) search engines. It also has a direct influence on your Google page rank. http://www.dmoz.org - go there and surf until you find an appropriate spot for your site and then click 'Suggest URL' and don't be spammy with your text. You may have to go deep, I had to go 5 levels until I found a good fit for BizSheet (Home> Computers> Internet> Web Design and Development> Promotion> Directories )