So you have a website up and running. But you wont be selling anything if the crowds dont come. How do you get the crowds to come by your website without paid advertising?

Try running a contest!

Besides helping you promote your business, running a contest enables you to collect details about your prospects! After all, those who participate in the contest must somehow be interested in your prizes, right?

To increase sales, instead of displaying banners or ads on your website, write a review. On your main page, display a short intriguing paragraph with a link to your full review. For example, this is the text that was displayed on the main page of one of my websites, which was a lead in to the main review of "Make Your Site Sell."

Make Your Site Sell

By Ken Evoy, MD

While banners have lost the appeal of many marketers on the web, they are still an effective means of pulling in traffic. The key is to have a visually appealing banner with an enticing offer. Heres what you need to do:

Before you start, decide exactly what you want your banner to do. Decide the action you want your prospect to take. Keep this in mind at all times when youre designing the banner!
Who are you making this banner for? Stay focused on your target market
Generate curiosity, Create excitement, Make it urgent!
Write about BENEFITS

What is the worth of a steady stream of free search engine traffic to you? If you are an internet marketer, search engine traffic is pure gold! Why is this so?

Consider this:

When a person searches for the item or information that you are offering on your website using a search engine, that person is someone who is interested in whatever you are offering. He is a quality targeted prospect! Mutiply this scenario by hundred of times, and you have a horde of targeted prospects looking up your product or message on your website.

Anyone who is any sort of internet business knows that profits are the most important thing to attain. The key to gaining more profits is through website promotion. With the right website promotion, you can be sure to gain mass profits that you would not have had without it. If you are interested in learning how to gain more profits this way, please read on for some tips.

One way of promoting your website and product can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this "free" method can boost your sites and sales, doubling and even tripling your income.

Articles. One of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does this work?

Write articles relating to your website and submit them to "free content" submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.

Your website's vital statistics do not have to remain a mystery to you if you install a good web page counter or Internet tracking system. While web page counters offer on-page display showing you the approximate number of visitors to your page, more advanced Internet tracking systems provide detailed website traffic statistics online as well as off-line. Which counter or tracking system is the best? It all depends on your needs. Below you will find a description of the different types of counters and trackers that are currently available.

Vertical linking; will it help my rankings? Is it important? Does it matter? These questions are often asked of site owners in regards to increasing their rankings in the search engine listings. Id like to shed some light on this subject and answer these questions.

Search engines place major importance on vertical linking when establishing a sites search engine positioning. You see, these links are often seen as positive votes for the site being linked to. This tells the search engines that your site is important and authoritative.

Writing articles has become a premier way to increase targeted web site traffic. In fact, if you are not writing articles you are missing out on one of the best ways to increase targeted web site traffic for your online business.

Article marketing has a country cousin that is not talked about as much, but is beginning to gain some respect. It is very similar to writing and submitting articles as a tool to generating targeted traffic.

Who is this country cousin?

When many people begin marketing on the internet, they are unaware of all the possible ways of getting their website recognized. While many of the suggestions below may seem apparent after a little thought, many who are new to internet marketing tend to think primarily in terms of getting high rankings in search engines and overlook the possibilities of working offline to get people to their online site.

However, the internet is a huge sea, and it might be easier to begin creating your internet empire by becoming a fairly good-sized fish in your small, local pond first.