I have used adwords for a while now, particularly for one of my websites that needed to advertise to local people in the area. I had a look at using adwords to advertise my ability to design websites. This is when I hit a problem….

The Cost Per Click of adverts on the first page is as follows:

“website design” costs £15 per click
“web site design” costs £10 per click
“web site designers” costs £10 per click
“web site developers” cost £11 per click

Now to me, that is a A LOT of money. Out of the total clicks you get in say, one day, how many people are actually going to want you to design their website?

This is what set me about looking for alternative ways to advertise my abilities and so I decided to start my blog.

I had read a lot about blogs and how they can attract attention to your work. As long as I kept my blog on topic, Google would be happy and my rankings and backlinks would gradually increase.

But what other ways are there to advertise? Here’s a few that I think are worth it…

• Forums
  I am not sure how many of you will agree with me on this one, but if you use a forum on a regular basis, why not put a link to your portfolio in your signature? You are getting free backlinks from what is hopefully a respectable forum.
  Even if you don’t use a forum on a regular basis, there is no harm in starting.
• Blog Posting
  Make some friends. Get posting on other peoples blogs. If the posts are not spam and are relevant to the topic, the author will like it. Try not to just post “Thanks, great post”. Engage the author, ask them a question, show that you are actually interested. Who knows, if you do this enough, they might become a friend and link to your site (hopefully where you choose the anchor text!).
• Directory Submission
  An easy way to get your link over the Internet is directory submission. Most of these free directories are around page rank 3 – 4 and although they are not going to bring you massive amounts of traffic, they WILL help!
• Post good – relevant articles – OFTEN!
  Make sure you update your content. Get a blog – post on it daily. It only takes half an hour, do it before you get into your work of after your evening meal. If you do this, you will get good SERPS by Google and the search engine will begin to like you! After you’ve written the article, submit it to these:

  - Digg
  - Stumbleupon
  - Delicious
  - Propeller
  - Twitter (Get tweeting it!)
  - Linkedin
  - Google Bookmarks
  - Reddit
  - Dzone
  I have had quite a lot of traffic come from these sites and it is really worth taking 10 minutes and submitting to them.

Now I know most of these techniques are just SEO techniques but they are a must for advertising any website.

If you do want to pay, however, there are a number of other websites out there:

http://www.buysellads.com
http://www.botw.org
Yahoo Directories
http://www.v7n.com/forums (A lot of people will sell links here)

There are just a few websites that you can pay (sometimes a lot)  and get your advert displayed.

Thanks for reading,

Jack

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