Once you have developed your product or service, your next step must be to get quality traffic to your online business to start making money online. Promoting an online business can take some effort to get where you want it to reach.

There are many ways to advertise your online services, Free as well as Paid.

SEO Techniques. Optimizing your online services for high rankings in search engines, especially Google, gets you free targeted traffic. You need to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and make on site and off site SEO changes to your website. More details about On Page SEO to come.

Paid Advertising. If you plan to go for paid advertising, there are many pay per click programs that you can start with. Google Adwords is one such service. Check out for Google Adwords Coupon Codes. Google is currently promoting their Pay Per Click Program and send qualified people Free $50 or $100 Adwords Credits.

Free Advertising. Free Advertising is something where you do not have to pay for any programs. You opt to make effort and keep patient for the time it takes your website to reach higher rankings or start a good fan following.

I will talk about three major free advertising methods that have worked for me.

1. Posting on related niche forums.

Find and join the Internet Marketing Forums if you are into make money online niche. Similarly, if you are in weight loss for women niche, find and join weight loss for women forums. Make sure not to start dropping your links the first or second day you become a member. Internet Forum etiquette calls for hanging out at the forum for some time, reading and learning from the posts in the past and answer relevant questions. Make a good fan following and reputation. Once you become a good contributor, refer to your sites so that users can take advantage of your advice.

2. Yahoo Answers.

Believe it or not, Yahoo Answers gets me targeted traffic. I make sure not to post my links everywhere, to every question. I answer questions where I think I can genuinely help other members of that community. Trick is not to drop your link to irrelevant or unrelated questions. Many people complain that either they get banned or do not get any traffic. The truth is, people who are really looking for a solution to their problem are your target audience. If you paste your weight loss link to the question where someone is asking where they should spend their summers, please do not think they are interested in visiting your website.

3. Writing articles.

Another effective way of free advertising is writing articles about your niche and submit to free article directories like EzineArticles, ArticlesBase and GoArticles. If you write your own articles or pay an article writer to write your articles for you, you get enough exposure  in exchange for the reprint use of your article. The resource boxes at the bottom of the article pages does it for you.

There are many other ways to promote your website free of cost, like social bookmarking and blog commenting. But the above three ways have been more effective for me so far. That doesn’t mean I do not do social bookmarking and blog commenting. In fact, blog commenting is how I meet other like minded bloggers

How do you promote your online services? Please share!

• First off, think about what kind of website you want to design. Do you want it to be service oriented, informational or blogging style? When you have that figured out, you will feel much more focused at the whole conept of website designing.
• Next step is to start building your website. This process has been made very convenient by automated web designing tools available online. Just google search for, say, “Free Website Designer”. You will get results with free tools to start building your website. Some of the top results include tools like Freewebs. Weebly and Angelfire. You can check out more search results as per your requirements. Some may require basic knowledge of HTML, some may not. HTML is the basic building block of any website.
• Go through the tool that you chose. Set up the formats, themes and appropriate colors.
• Once your website is setup with basic configuration, you are ready to add your contents.
• For the contents portion, you can write your own original and unique articles. Duplicate contents are easily identifiable. Remember, you want to make your own unique identity, with your unique style. Let people recognize you by your writing and expressing style.
• You can also add photos from stock photography sites like photrade. You can buy the royalty free photos from similar websites, and sometimes you can also buy the licenses to own the copyrights of these photos.
• Make sure to setup or check the comments section on your website. I would recommend that you set up the comments so that your visitors do not have to be logged in, to post the comments. When you become an authority in your niche, you can always change the settings. Also moderate the comments to approve them before they start appearing on your website.
• Once your website is up and running, keep adding fresh and unique contents. Outdated contents do not leave a very good impression on your visitors. Update your “About Author” page every now and then.
• Keep optimizing it for search engines. In the long term, that’s going to help you become visible in the world wide web. You can check the pagerank, backlinks and link popularity by using different free SEO tools available online.

In the end, unique, original content and search engine optimization is all that matters.  Your website should have valid contents. You can have your website reviewed from fellow bloggers, and have them check the color, theme and overall layout. Ask them how appealing is it to the viewers and will it convince the visitors to come back for more?

Many believe that Google utilized this sandbox effect to cut down on rampant spamming, to discourage spam websites. Most of these websites were eventually banned, but still they somehow managed to create new websites and rank high for some particular keywords for couple of weeks. Sandbox Effect helps getting rod of the spam websites, while the ones that continue to improve and make regular changes to the contents, start appearing in the search engine rankings at some point.

You can check if your site is in the Google sandbox or indexed already by using this position finder tool.

If you do become victim of this practice, do not wait and watch. Take action. Here are some tips you can try to improve your chances to remove your site from the sandbox effect:

• Avoid deep linking your posts in your web page. Limit them to at the most 3rd level linking. Chances are crawlers stop searching at this level and your posts won’t get indexed.
• Revise your meta tags, title, loading time and overall web page optimization. Make sure to put content=”index,follow” or content=”noindex,nofollow” in the web page headers indicating to the crawlers which pages should be shouldn’t be indexed.
• Check your robots.txt file to verify that you have not blocked any bots or crawlers.
• Add your site url to Google so that it can begin the re-indexing process.
• Check other websites in the same niche as yours to see what additions and changes they are making to look fresh and attracting visitors.
• Analyze your website to check for the keywords that you would like your site to rank well in Google. Do not do keyword stuffing though.
• Remove duplicate or invalid pages from your website that are still in Google’s index.
• Keep doing on and off page optimization.

Remember, sandbox effect does not have to be painful.  You can well utilize this time to improve and establish your website. And if done correctly, your site will be re-indexed in the search engine again.

Technorati Tags – google sandbox effect index reindex rankings search engine

Domain – First off, you need a very good domain name. If you have a niche in mind, you should name your domain accordingly. It is recommended that domain name is relevant to your website niche. This helps in indexing your site faster in google. You can register your domain using any of these services – yahoo, godaddy, register.com etc.

Webhost – Like a house serves a person, a webhost serves the domain. Webhost hosts your site on their server. You can have shared ot dedicated hosting. If you are just starting out, go with shared hosting. It is not as expensive as dedicated hosting, and most of the maintenance of the servers is automatically done for you. Once you start getting good amount of traffic, you can try dedicated hosting. You can try some of the recommended hosting services like hostgator, bluehost, lunarpages etc.

Design and Development – Designer or developer is the one who programs your website, who makes it functional. You can do it, or have some professional do it for you.  Keep in mind that you want your visitors to keep coming back to your website so the design should be extremely appealing, and website should load fast.