Guest Post by William Eve

Whether you’re a professional business coach or a life insurance agent or a remote travel agent, chances are, you have a website and would like to be directing new customers to this site. After all, with millions of new webpages coming online every day, it can be a challenge to make yours stand out from the rest. And staying in business can be difficult if you are not constantly scouting for new customers. The cheapest and most effective way to find new potential buyers is on the internet, of course. But what ways have been proven to work in driving quality traffic to websites of small business owners?

The following seven ideas will give you a general scope of what’s working today, as well as offer some tips for those looking to delve deeper into these fields of marketing and advertising.

Social Media Marketing

One of the most popular mechanisms of the new millennium for driving traffic to your site organically would be social media marketing. This includes: Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Google+ and more. This is word of mouth marketing, and with a good enough product or service, this can be the best marketing technique you’ll ever use. They key to success here is to build up a loyal fan base, which will like your business page on Facebook and retweet your Twitter messages regarding the latest news or deals for your company. To build your list, you ought to have strong incentives for people to follow you, such as periodic deals offered only to those on your list or fans of your business’s page. Social media marketing is dependent upon people taking what you offer them and sharing it with some friends, who will share it with some of their friends?and the chain continues with minimal effort on your part.

For example, if you work in life insurance sales, you may want to offer them valuable advice through a Facebook page for no cost to them. Or if you sell scarves, you could offer a free or discounted scarf for the first ten who retweet your Twitter messages. The possibilities are limitless when it comes to social media marketing.

Free Newsletters

Free newsletters are excellent ways of staying in touch with your customer base while providing them with something immensely valuable (and at no cost) in return for the permission to occasionally pitch things you’re selling to them. Many business owners opt for monthly newsletters via email, because this is cheap, efficient, and you have a good idea of how many people are interested in your business venture. You can include informative articles, humorous pieces, stories, and even small adverts within these priceless digital packages.

Free eBook

If constantly developing and formatting a new newsletter every month seems a bit daunting, then why not invest the time and effort (or money, if hiring a ghost writer) and create an ebook to give away to new customers that sign up for email updates? If it is full of useful information that people are simply dying to get their hands on, then this can be an excellent way to build your base without much extra effort after the initial creation process. Almost every industry could offer ebooks to its customers: insurance sites can offer basic guides to life insurance, horse-related businesses can offer equine health care manuals, clothing manufacturers can offer store comparisons, etc. If it is something customers would like to read, then ebooks are the way to go.

Contests

This has been growing in popularity over the years. Many businesses offer contests with big incentives for just minimal participation (usually just having customers sign up with their email addresses in order to enter). The investment in the grand prize- be it a private session with you if you have a service-based business or a gadget such as an iPod touch- will more than pay for itself with the audience you’ll garner as a result of hosting the contest. It works even better when you have multiple prizes or regular contests to keep people interested, rather than removing their email from your databases immediately upon completion of the contest.

Affiliate Marketing

If you sell informational products, then affiliate marketing is an absolute must. This allows people to make reasonable commissions off of the sale of your product, and while this may initially seem like it’s eating into your profit margins, it’s actually much better than you’d think. After all, you are essentially removing a chunk of the profits and drastically cutting your paid marketing efforts at the same time. Giving other people incentive to go out and actively market your products for you is one of the best marketing tools available today.

Article-Based Marketing

Search engine optimisation has become quite advanced over the past several years, and many people are still using this keyword based marketing tool to their advantage. The idea behind this is writing articles with specific keywords in them in order to make more search engines drive web surfers to your website. Terms such as “Australia holidays” or “life insurance comparison” or “investing in China” are some such examples of keywords that people type into a search engine, and sites with more of these keywords come up first. SEO-embedded articles have the best chance of organically driving more traffic to your site, making this a must for any business owner with their own website.

Blog

Last but not least, is the blog. Most companies have blogs, but very few use them effectively. A business that makes the best use of their company blog will be adding SEO keywords in each post, offering regular updates (3-6 posts per week), and offering relevant information that is not to sales-y. People like to stay in touch with companies they regularly or are considering buying from and blogging- even if they’re just 300 word posts- is the best way to simply stay in touch and keep people informed about the business.

So, when it comes to attracting new customers to your online business, the seven ways listed above are the most popular for a reason: they work. And, when you manage to execute these marketing concepts effectively, you’ll be far ahead of the competition and cementing your business as a formidable opponent in the online marketplace.

This article was written by William Eve from Life Insurance Finder. Visit Life Insurance Finder to compare life insurance quotes.