Promote Your Website By Giving Away Free Content
It is a known fact that customers in the real world just love getting something for free. The same goes in the virtual world. If you are a website owner or webmaster, give your visitors something that is totally free and you can bet that they will appreciate your gesture.
What is the most valuable thing that you can give to your visitors for free? The question may sound hard but the answer is quite very simple - INFORMATION! In the history of mankind, our era has been called "the information age", precisely because information has become central to our daily lives. So when you give your customers information, you are, in effect, giving them something that is truly valuable in this day and age.
What would be the best format for the information that you will be giving away for free? Readers just love to get information in the form of articles. Ever wonder why mankind has produced millions if not billions of newspaper and magazine articles? It's because people love to read articles. When there is a demand, someone will supply. Conversely, if millions or billions of articles have been supplied, then there must be a huge demand for articles.
Write many articles so you can give your visitors a big chunk of information on a particular topic. Give permission to your visitors to reprint the article on the condition that your article remains unchanged including all the links pointing to pages on your website. If your article is informative enough, a visitor may reprint it on his own website. That will give you a free, one-way, inbound link to your website. Note that you gave away your article free, and in exchange you've gotten a free link back to your website. Isn't that free promotion?
Believe it or not, you can go further in promoting your website via articles. Submit your article to article submission sites and if your article is accepted you've got another set of eyeballs coming your way. Send your article to mailing lists and you get another wave of visitors. If readers to the mailing lists and article submission sites love your free information, they'll forward it to their friends, and guess what? - you've got viral marketing, that's what!
Nah, it can't be that simple. What's the catch? The catch is that your information must indeed be valuable and not some piece of fluff that readers will treat as trash. If you give away nothing but fluff and you'll get the expected response that all kinds of trash deserve -- disgust. On the other hand, if you give away truly valuable information, then your visitors will respond with delight and you're on your way to successfully promoting your website.
So there you have it. Giving away free, informative, and helpful content in the form of articles is a great way to promote your website!
