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!