Top 5 Web Promotion Strategies Under $200

Let's say you have a great concept for a web site but you don't know where to start. You start checking into web hosting and pay their fee. Great, now you have the ability to get online but you have nothing drafted yet. You need a site developed with the content you specify and some additional functionality which requires some expertise. So you hire a few IT moonlighters and voila! A few weeks (or months) later and your site gets published. You are on the web, ready to do business.

Then you start to realize that was the easy part. We are not all sales and marketing experts but the web mandates some marketing savvy if you ever hope to get anyone to even see, let alone purchase, your products or services. If you are a true newbie, you really can't go at it alone. You need two things - you need to know that you need help, you need to find the right help.

And since your meager budget to start with has already been depleted, you might like to know about some great deals. There are many companies offering similar services to the list below but I think you will find these competitive prices very attractive.

Here is a list of the top five promotion strategies found on the internet today which can expose your blog, web site, product, service, or ideas to literally millions of people in a short period of time...

Search Engine & Web Directories Submission Service

Exactseek

For only $36, they will expose your site to hundreds of search engines and web directories for an entire year. They have over 150 million searches per month in their network. Apart from the low fee, the next best feature about their services is there are no PPC charges! You don't even have to bid for your keywords. A great service and the deal is hard to beat.

The only other service provider that comes close and may even be equal or better is EntireWeb.

EntireWeb - Search Engine Submission Service

For only $36, they will expose your site to hundreds of search engines for an entire year. The nice part about EntireWeb is they not only list your site within 48 hours of submission, but also they re-index your site every 48 hours for the entire year. Plus they offer extensive crawling information and a free XML search results feed.

You will find it tought to beat either of these offers for their offerings. You must be in the search engines and the sooner the better. Make sure you have a good META tag in your site's description. Make sure to have accurate, selective, a few META tag keywords chosen. Don't think that having more keywords will make your site any more attractive to a search engine. It will be just the opposite affect so choose wisely. I suggest 15-20 keywords.

If you have frequent and fresh content, you don't want to overlook pagerank with Google. This is a measure of your link popularity, how many sites are linked to you. This is a valuable component for search engine optimization. You need that credibility and you need the exposure. There are a number of companies that can do this for you but here is one that is affordable and builds up your link popularity with both social bookmarking site and link directories...

SocialMarking 2.0

For only $75, they will manually register your site to 100 social bookmarking sites and 1,000 link directories. If you ever tried to register for either a social bookmark or link directory, you will appreciate this service a great deal. If you have never done this task, suffice to say you are saving yourself days if not weeks of time and effort. For me, realizing that it was going to take more than a few hours, I would rather pony up the fee that spend my time doing that much manual entry. Their staff does all the manual entry for you. You are guaranteed permanent one-way links and the sites are all search engine friendly. They claim that once indexed (which happens within 1-2 days), Google indexes and updates very fast.

All their links and directories are constantly reviewed and verified. They support many titles and descriptions and even provide a complete submission report. Again, it would be tough to beat that price for the value.

Direct Traffic

Part of your marketing plan should include sending direct traffic to your site. It doesn't have to be the lion's share of the budget. In fact, it should probably be less than 25% of your budget. You have to gauge which is more effective. You need to do some math and calculate how much money exposes you to how large of a market, and is it the right market, a targeted market, or not. One place to start is with wholesale traffic.

Wholesale direct traffic

For not more than $50, you can drive 1,000,000 visitors to your site within 60 days. That's a fantastic deal! If you have any questions, they will get back to you within 24 hours. Some traffic providers don't even reply to their emails. These guys have Adserver generated traffic with traffic pacakges from 15,000 to 1,000,000 visitors. They have multiple traffic sources which route all traffic to one url per campaign. They don't use anything illegal like spam or bulk emailing techniques either. All campaigns launch within 24 hours and the traffic keeps coming for 20-60 days depending on how much traffic you order.

eZine Readers Read and Respond

For only $40, you can advertise to over 1,000,000 ezine subscribers who read their email every day and support one another. This is a 100% opt-in group of ezine readers so there is no spamming involved. It's essentially a safelist. Plus they have an eZine Promotion Resource Center and many bonuses included with your fee. That is a great way to have a large group of people find out more about your site.

The last method is only too obvious - free advertising venues. Specifically, you want to get your site into online classifieds with very high traffic. The best one is Craigslist. You can visit www.craigslist.com and create an account (for free), post anything you want (for free), and have your ad exposed for 14 days. They get millions of hits per month. Google Pagerank (PR) of 8 which is very high because they are hugely popular.

Need Professional Help?

Get Me On Media

This is a professional Google Adwords management service which falls outside of the scope of the Top 5 affordable services listed above, however, their services are affordable if you want to break into Pay-Per-Click advertising eventually. PPC advertising is not the cheapest advertising, but it does drive the most relevant visitors assuming you have picked good keywords. This service provider figures out all those details for you. They create custom business-specific ads written by Adwords experts. They create custom keyword lists which are optimized for your entire ad campaign. They provide you a dedicated account manager. For $5, you can give them a test drive for 14 days. After the trial, it costs $60 per month for their services. After that cost, you only need to determine your Adwords budget. The minimum is $30 per month ($1 a day). They guarantee you will be listed within 48 hours. If you can figure out Adwords on your own, you will save $60/month but then you have to know what you are doing or you will waste alot of money.

One last strategy that is "off the radar" for this article but is definitely worth mentioning is the use of doorway pages.

For only $50, you can buy a product like Doorway Page Wizard (www.doorway-wizard.com) which does all the tedious work for you. Basically, the concept is to create web pages with content that is related and relevant to your site which the search engines can index readily. This makes it easier for people to find your web site when they do a search. Without the use of Google Adwords, by using doorway pages, you can increase the chances of people finding your site from the "organic" search. That is the normal free search results that Google sends you after a search. The very top and right are the sponsored ads.

After spending many hours searching and comparing different products and services, I hope you find these suggestions useful and affordable. Once you have some successful campaigns running and some revenue comes in, you can increase or diversity as necessary.

Ahmadinejad’s Opponents Hate Ahmadinejad

Landslide rigged election. Probably big payoffs. Lies. Deceit. Lunacy.

Opponents can only "snub the election ceremony" because no one in the country has the freedom to speak openly without reprisal, of course.

Two hours ago, Ahmadinejad got sworn in.

Another headline says "Mixed signals sent out because of a single kiss between men of power". In other words, it seems clear someone is buying the presidency of a country. A country still heavily in the process of making nuclear bom...er, power. Oh, sure, it might look like dissension in the ranks but make no mistake this is clearly working in kahootz. I wish I could be surprised.

US Marshals Seize Sanitizer For Bacteria Problems??

Don't U.S. Marshals have ANYTHING better to do in A) fighting crime or B) maintaining law and order in the context of their law enforcement role than to confiscate of all things skin sanitizers due to disease-causing microorganisms? This is where my tax dollars are spent?

Read the article

I know. I know. It was a corporation. Still, this is ridiculous.

If they are spending their time doing this type of work, then we should see many more U.S. Marshals at the local dive restaurants. Why stop there? The food industry is simply not big enough. Go after Panama Jack and Coppertone. Who knows what lurks in those lotions. It cannot be a good thing to wipe chemicals all over your body. You would think people have enough common sense to not wipe chemicals on their bodies over open sores, cuts or wounds. At least sanitizers are intended to kill bacteria (note the irony here) while sun tanning products are designed to absorb into your skin and bake it. Like smearing vegetable oil over that Thanksgiving turkey to make the skin crispy.

Come on, guys. Stop playing it safe. Sounds like marshals are getting kind of soft.

I want to see news headlines that read more like, "U.S. Marshals Capture Last U.S. Mafia Boss", or, "U.S. Marshals Executed Mexican Drug Lord" or at the very least -- "U.S. Marshals Are No Longer Concerned With Sanitizers".

What? It's Been A Whole Year?

Yes, it's been quite a hiatus but Jake is back (for all the probably 12 people who might read my blog). Thanks for stopping by. I resurrected the old blog and dug around for my backups and lo and behold I found the XML to restore it so voila!

It must have something to do with Summer because around May-July of last year I had the same level of boredom and thought why not start a blog to opinionate about current events, culture, news or pretty much whatever people like Lindsey Lohan and Courtney Love do. Well, actually I don't pick on them. But I should.

Thought I might share a picture of my dog since I don't have a commentary as of yet. Cute, eh?

I have never known a dog that doesn't turn their head when you talk to them.

Will The Real Betty Crocker Please Come Forward

What a transformation process this woman has been through! I applaud the makers of timeless favorites like Hamburger Helper, Hershey Original Supreme Fudge brownies and Supermoist cakes for re-creating this fictitious woman over the past few decades into more and more of an American icon.

In 1996, she really had quite a makeover. The fine print says she would be a "multiracial, multiethnic composite of 75 women 18 years and older" hence the final version on the end. Talk about being P.C. They really covered their bases on that one. How could anyone feel excluded? Although, the last time I went shopping, I only recall seeing the little red spoon at the top of the box. What happened to Betty? Did they ditch Betty or did she retire? Replaced by a spoon. And you thought getting a gold watch after 20 years of corporate schmoozing was bad.

Here's something different -- how about a delicious recipe. If you make this with the ingredients given -- no substitutions allowed -- you will be the hit of the neighborhood...

Breaded Italian Pork Medallions & Asparagus

First you need to buy one of these three flavored Hormel Pork Tenderloins...

Honey Mustard

Lemon Garlic

Teriyaki Tenderloin

1. Beat three eggs in a bowl.
2. Fill another bowl with...
1. Italian Bread Crumbs
2. 2-3 cups of Mozzarella shredded cheese
3. Mix them together
   
3. Cut 1/4" slices of the entire tenderloin.
4. Heat a non-stick skillet to medium heat.
5. Pour in just enough Extra Virgin Olive oil to cover the bottom of the skillet.
6. Drown a slice of pork in the eggs.
7. Roll the slice in the bread crumbs and shredded cheese.
   
8. Lay the slice in the skillet.
   
9. At that thickness, you only need to cook about 6-8 minutes per side depending on what you consider "medium" heat.
10. Once golden brown and crisp, remove from heat. Let it rest 2 minutes.
11. While the skillet it still hot and the meat is resting, toss 2 cans of asparagus into the skillet and let them sear in the oils for about 3-4 minutes.
12. Need a good wine too...
1. Mondavi's Cabernet Savignon is excellent.
2. Dry white wine might even be better but a favorite name escapes me at the moment.
   

Would You Go To Prison Over A Lawn Mower?

There are many things in life that can make us mad.

We get cut off in traffic while hustling down to the office and get pulled over by Officer Franks who still has Vietnam flashbacks.

We get screwed while Christmas shopping and find the last popular toy for our children at the nearest Toys 'R' Us which is 132 miles away -- only to have someone in the store hock it from our shopping cart while we weren't guarding it. If you haven't checked out, I guess they can't call that "stealing", technically speaking. But it's damn rude!

We get mad just waiting in line to checkout of the grocery store while Mrs. Neihaus, our friendly neighbor from down the street, counts out pennies one by one and hands the cashier a stack of coupons to barcode swipe, as Jimmy yanks on our shirt to remind us we are late for dropping him off at soccer practice, as dinner is probably overcooking in the oven right now because the teenager back at the "fort" forgot to take the casserole out and instead is talking with hunky boy Jason from last year's AP Biology, and where the hell is my debit card...

Nevertheless, we try to manage our frustrations because we simply have to cope with these functional necessities of life. Some people are more patient than others.

And some people had enough. Like Keith here pictured above. Those sheriff's office photographers ought to do family portraits, don't you think? People like Keith had enough.

How angry would you have to be at your lawn mower for not starting to pull out a short-barreled shotgun and shoot it?

I know what you are thinking. He's a red-neck, right? Well, that's not fair because Keith is from Wisconsin and most of those guys are hunters so that's probably the 12-gauge he uses to go duck hunting. I thought a bit about Keith's anger dilemma and what went awry for him...

First, you need to own a house and have some grass to relate to this man's frustration. Better yet, have a sloping yard with divets and different inclines and use a non-self propelled mower. Mow at least once a week for about 25-30 years with the same Lawn Boy.

Second, you need to have a fifth of rum. Let's face it...it's the weekend, you're tired, cranky, and perhaps the last thing you want to do is yard work.

Third, you need a mower with the ol' rip cord crank start. If you pull those rip cords hard enough, you can pull them right out of the case. Sure, the engine might roll over a few times, but if it's not starting, maybe check your sparkplug, your gas level, the oil level. If not that, your carburetor is probably had it.

I'm picturing this 56-year-old in a dirty white t-shirt, ripped jeans, and obviously a pretty small yard inside the city limits. He's pulled the cord a few times, took a swig of Jose Cuervo, started swearing at his vintage lawn mower and said "F*** this s***", opened the gun safe, and took the mower out of his misery.

Not worth an $11,000 fine and over 6 years in prison, if convicted.

Update: Cell Phone Usage Linked To Cancer

I found this article online this morning about Link Between Cell Phones and Cancer and after I had just made a posting about the topic just a few weeks ago, which is weird. Although, to be fair, I was speculating that cell phone usage may cause "brain damage" which was a bit more at the extreme.

At any rate, this is definitely a concerning health issue considering the number of cell phone users nationwide is about 250,000,000 and worldwide is well into the billions.