Free Website Leads For Your New Complementary Therapy Venture, Year After Year

If you're in need of free ways to generate customers for your new complementary therapy business, particularly if it has an online shopping cart, the best way is Article Marketing because it's free and the traffic keeps coming, over and over again, from each piece of work. So if you are looking for product launch ideas read on.

Article Marketing isn't a fast way to get started online, but it's a low-cost, no risk strategy anyone can adopt. First let's compare it with some different ways to get Internet visitors. Let's take the example of promoting a new shopping cart.

The usual way of bringing prospects to your new site, taught by some on-line marketing training, is to get in touch with other website owners requesting a link exchange. This can be successful, but it's a slow process and you need to take care who you target. For example, if I sell dog collars by post I may be happy to do a link exchange with someone who runs dog training classes, but not someone else selling dog collars.

Another method is answering questions on forums in your market-place, with your URL in your signature. Also effective, but time-consuming.

In theory a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign is quick to set up and you could see leads the same day. In practice unless you're experienced at these campaigns, you can spend ages testing for the best settings and exhaust your budget without making a single sale. I did! And being of a suspicious nature , I often wondered how many clicks were by my competitors, to waste my cash!

Additional online launch ideas include FFA (Free For All) sites and traffic exchanges where you view other people's sites, in return for them viewing yours. This strikes me as a waste of time. I am trying to sell, not buy, so why sit bored, clicking on other people's websites so that they can sit bored clicking on my site? They probably never even look at my advert. With tabbed browsers the temptation is just to open the next tab to click on the advert, never reading the adverts.

These methods are time-consuming and ineffective for a serious product launch.

Offline promotional methods include networking to exchange cards at business clubs. Time-consuming, expensive and again in general, others are attending to sell, not to buy.

In contrast, article marketing targets people who have shown that they are interested in the topic your website targets. Choose the correct keywords and visitors will be actively intending to buy, not sell.

The idea of article marketing is that you publish an article and submit it, with your website URL, to article directories from which publishers can take articles for newsletters etc so long as they include your website details with your article. Then as interested parties read your article, they can click onto your website.

The article you have produced in an hour or so stays (theoretically) online forever and you have the potential to receive focused traffic from it in perpetuity.

For example, I submitted an article in October 2005 and 4 years later it is still generating traffic, with no extra work, and had received 28,897 lifetime views, with 5,961 clicks through to my website. How much would that have cost by PPC? Another advantage is that the best article directories send you a report showing the keywords from which your article is being found.

In my opinion article marketing has so many advantages over alternative methods that I cannot imagine why it would not be one of your marketing strategies.

Much of my success with article marketing was learned through trial and error. With a little free, or low cost, training I would have realized the potential much earlier.

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