Cross promotions are not a new idea. They have been used by businesses for a very long time. For example, a real-estate company may promote a certain lawyer to close a sale, as the lawyer will promote that agency in his firm. The system is somewhat similar to the primitive barter system, where people traded items rather than using money. How can anything primitive fit into the online world of Internet marketing? Very easily. Cross promotions are, simply stated, a trade of advertising space. Instead of paying for advertising space on a site, you would place their ad on your page and yours on theirs. There are many ways to use cross promotions in your internet business that can be an effective and cost efficient way to advertise.

One way is to use link exchanges. This is very effective when doing cross promotions with a company that is similar to yours, however you should be sure and never link to a page that is in direct competition with yours. One of the best things about link exchanges is that some search engines are factoring in hits from the sites that are linked to your page to when determining the ranking. Therefore linking to a more popular site, can not only increase your advertising, and traffic, but also increase your search engine ranking.

When customers or potential customers subscribe to your ezine you can use this as an opportunity to use cross promotions. On the same page that the customer subscribes to your ezine, make available the opportunity to subscribe to another company’s ezine. You can even exchange ad space in ezines, and provide recommendations for those whom you cross promote with. You might even want to exchange column space in one another’s ezines.

Writing free articles that inform customers or potential customers with information that is useful and accurate can create a reputation for you and your business. Soon readers will come to know you as an expert on the subject. In these articles the author uses a byline to help promote his site. Bylines can be a way to use cross promotions as well. You can use part of the space in your byline to recommend another’s product.

If you have been considering writing an ebook, a joint venture could mean increased profits for you and the person you are partnering with. Cross promotions through ebooks are an excellent way to allow for a wider topic and to promote both your business and your partner’s business. The ebook should contain information that will benefit both businesses and still be helpful to the reader. A good example of using cross promotions through an ebook is to a site selling used video games partnering with a site selling gaming devices. These are two subjects that would interest the same reader and most likely lead the reader to both sites.

You should keep in mind that the recommendations that you make are a direct reflection of you, so choose your cross promotional businesses carefully. Also keep in mind that it would be nice as a shopper to be able to link from one site to another as a way to “shop around.” Since this is usually not beneficial to you, never link or recommend a site that is in direct competition with you. Instead, recommend those who are similar, such as health and life insurance.

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I understand the frustration webmasters go through trying to get that next link, but it’s actually pretty easy to get the ball rolling.

Many enquire, beg and cheat to gain some kind of incredible link advantage, when the stress and effort isn’t necessary. My methods and knowledge of ‘where’ to do this isn’t science or secrets, it’s simply knowing where the cheapest and best targeted places to advertise are.

Make sure the links are 100% targeted - most important,as you don’t want your visitors seeking out untargeted goods or services. They won’t return if you mess them about.

Let’s imagine Site A sells carpet cleaner. You now need buyers that want carpet cleaning stuff, so the obvious sites for advertising on will be Janitorial or have a strong cleaning theme to them.

All good links aren’t free. Yes, I know people chase freebies, but it’s so much work and hassle that a few paid links can work wonders in the long term, it’s well worth actually ‘paying’ (yes it’s a filthy word) to get going.

So basically you want a cheap paid service that submits you to all the major search engines (about 300 should be fine). Next choose Mirago as it’s a good link and costs only £14 + VAT for 12 months. You also want to go with Microsoft Small Business Directory at £20 or abouts for 1 year. JoeAnt at $40, Gimpsey is free. Next, seek out any decent b2b and niche directories and buy a link in every one (ensure the directory is established though, and has been on the web for at least 12 months). Okay - that’ll get you off to a flying start, and once you finish submitting, you should have about 100 quality links. Quality speaks volumes on the web and is what you should be going after.

Next buy a sposored ad with Yahoo for £25 a month, and create an Adwords campaign for a few pound a month. These are cheap methods that house links on quality sites. Remember the reasons for the links - you are doing this so each link gets picked up - these cheap methods won’t deliver billions of visitors to websites - you ARE NOT doing this for that reason. The aim is for spidering and link swap power over time.

The Golden rule is to save you many hours of negative and naff link swapping - and by buying cheap links, it works a treat. These links will get picked up by webmasters, content seekers, businesses and the not so good websites - but you need to remember that for every one of your links that is placed, another 50 sites will link to you, which I believe is called ‘link surge’. As you surf you’ll find useful sites - so make a note on paper, and not bookmarks as they can be accidently deleted - and keep all this info in a A4 lever arch file (you’ll need this later). Next get those hard backed directories, and start extracting email addresses, save them to disk and file for later use. Send out a nice email letter asking for a link, and keep going down the list until you finish. At the end, you should have quite a few targeted links, which will also get picked up.

Note: under no circumstances should you send 10 million follow up emails to each website. All this will do is wind up the site owners or get you banned by your ISP, and if that happens you won’t be able to turn those link swaps into clients as they’ll be watching you for the emails. Never Spam anybody - be nice!

Invent a free service and offer that as part of a link swap - I’ve done this many times and it works well. In fact 9 times out of 10 it will work. After about 3 months hard work, you’ll start to see good results in Google.

Buy large adverts in Major search engines twice per year and get a Yellow Pages enhanced listing too. When buying ads, it’s cheaper to get the Paid For Inclusion options and it prevents click fraud - let em click away…….

Avoid the following when advertising:

Forums

Blogs

Bad neighbourhoods

Link exchanges

—– believe me these really eat into your time, and will only produce minimal results, as will contributing for forums. You want to take fast action and get the best results, and that involves paying cold hard cash. Sorry, but there aren’t any secrets I’m afraid. Free is mostly crap - money talks and bull walks!

Buy links, buy cheap and buy often……… I got well over 43′000 backlinks in Google doing the above, and I only spent £200!

www.eventdomain.co.uk

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