Grass Roots Marketing

Grass roots marketing is the promotion of your Web store using effective, but inexpensive means.

Search for sites that will link to you and vice-versa. There are two methods:

Reciprocal Linking

Placing links to complimentary product sites that agree to link to your site

Banner Exchanges

Swapping banners that advertise your site with the banners of other sites.

E-mail Discussion Groups &Newsgroups

Monitor and participate in discussion groups and newsgroups to get the word out about your company.

Although it is bad form to blatantly advertise with these groups, you may find other e-tailers on the lists that would be interested in forming strategic relationships with you to increase sales for each other.

You can get your Web store some visibility here by creating a good sig file.

A sig-or signature file is a text tag that you place at the bottom of the e-mails that you send out to these groups.

A good sig file can act as a small promotional message at the end of each posting that you do.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is just the time honored advertising by word-of-mouth.

It is the best kind of marketing for the small web business because it's free.

You can encourage this activity by offering a referral program on your site-the person who refers a new person to the site may get something for free, for example.

Free visitor referral/marketing site:

recommend-it.com

Much more information and links on Rich's ATC web site:

http://www.richickman.bizhosting.com/