As we all know, traffic is king in the internet marketing world. No traffic to your site equals no money for you, since there is no one visiting your site. There are various ways that you can use to get traffic to your website, but many webmasters are looking for free traffic. Is it even possible? Don’t you need to spend money in order to make money? Well, thanks to the power of the internet, it is possible to get free exposure for your site and thus draw visitors to it.

Yahoo Answers is a very good way to bring people to your website. For those of you who don’t know, Yahoo Answers is a place where people ask questions about various topics and others give them answers. The good thing about this platform is that you can insert a link to your site in your answer. Also, the site gets a lot of traffic from all around the world. What makes it a great marketing tool is that anyone can see the questions and answers, not only the person who asked the question.

But in order to stay out of trouble and get the maximum benefit from Yahoo Answers, you need to conduct your marketing activities properly. Remember, this is a place where users seek information. They don’t come to Yahoo Answers in order to be bombarded with commercial advertisements. After all, if someone wanted that, all they have to do is to open up their “Junk Mail” folder in their email account, there’s plenty of ads there all right.

When you answer a question, be sure to state some useful information and not just say “Here go to this website NOW!!! (your link)”. For example, if someone asks whether online surveys are legit or a scam you would say something like “While there are a few scam sites out there, most online survey sites are legit and pay you either in cash or by giving you stuff like gift card, I found a list of legit survey sites that are free to join here: (your link)”. It is better for you to build a landing page, rather than insert affiliate links. This will seem a lot less suspicious to Yahoo.

To stay below the radar, vary your answers, don’t simply copy and paste the same answer to everyone, even if the question is the same. Give answers in different topics as well, without inserting any links. Even if the site you are promoting is related to online surveys, for example, answer some questions about other things such as dogs or computers or whatever else you may know about as well. This will make it look like you are a legitimate contributor, rather than someone who is just answering questions related to their niche to get clicks to their own site. You should give more answers without your link than those with it.

The traffic that you will receive may start slowly, but if you keep at it you will soon get enough visitors to make some decent commissions or sales each month.

Social Media is quickly becoming THE way to promote online business and websites. There are three main reasons for this, which are: the high amounts of back links, the increased attention to the website, and the increased amount of traffic sent to the website. Social media is a cheap, and generally free way for businesses and websites to gain free exposure resulting in the three things just stated.
Social media is built around interactions and conversations. So, in order for it to work for people wanting to advertise, they need to modify their techniques into a more personal, and conversational tone. This can allow businesses to create a face, and not hide behind corporate shields, resulting in more end-user trust, as well as an easy to obtain email marketing list.

Preparation is key for virtually anything, and is key when you are entering the social media market for the first time as an advertiser. First off, you need to know your audience. Hopefully, your audience, or at least part of it, is young, because mainly, the youth are the ones using social media, although the middle-aged and older sectors appear to be growing in numbers among the various websites out there. As a business, you should already have identified the demographics of your target audience, and with that, you already have your groundwork. The next step would be to analyze your competition, find out what they are doing and if it works, and if it does work, figure out why and how you can do that too.

After that, you should make sure you have employee guidelines. This might not be a big deal to small sites, but for large businesses with tons of employees, it’s important that they know what they can and cannot do in the social media realm when representing the business. That being said, it might be helpful to only have one or two people working on your social media sites and blogs, so everything is run smoothly. It is important for those people to update them frequently and monitor the conversations. They must also keep everything relevant to today’s society, and of course, interesting.

In closing, social media is meant to be fun, so keep it that way. Don’t bore people with plain old advertising. Make it new. Make it exciting. Make it cutting edge. If you do that, people will be interested in you and what you have to offer, whatever it might be.