So you have read my previous post about making your own site for almost nothing, and now you want to promote it. How do you do it - without a large pile of money?

If you had a lot of funding, you could make a Superbowl commercial like GoDaddy has done and the world would beat a path to your site. If you are reading this, then you probably don’t have any money for that. So let me share a brief bit of strategy for how to promote your site, especially if you are a business operating locally.

Going Local

There are a number of directories online that focus on local listings. There is the familiar Yellow Pages, the similar Super Pages, plus Google Local, Yahoo Local and you can also find some other niche type sites like Yelp and a few hundred more.

Industry Directories

In every industry there are online directories that attempt to catalog the various sites into similar groups. This site would be fit into the Order Fulfillment section or Contract Warehousing. You should look to see what business directories are appropriate for your business. There are also the big directories like Business.com, Yahoo Directory, the DMOZ and Best of the Web. You will have to decide for yourself if the pay versions of these are worth it for you.

Your Printed Material

Don’t forget to put the web address of your new site on all of your business cards, invoices, follow up letters - in short every piece of paper that you send to a customer. Put it in the ads you run - print, radio or TV.

So that is a start, and I will try to post more later on some other simple and ethical techniques. Like all the subjects related to website building and promotion, if you don’t wish to do it we would be happy to do it for you for a small fee. I would estimate that it should not take more than 8 hours to get your site listed in the major local directories and a dozen smaller industry directories.