How to Promote your Automotive Website Free
by WILLIAM CRITTENDEN
The point of starting many websites is to make money. If the website owner had money, they wouldn't need to start a website to make it, right? So why would a startup website have a big marketing budget?
There are a few free ways to advertise a website. One involves getting as many links back to your site as possible to enhance your Google PageRank. Another involves getting links back to your site where people will see them and click on them. Yet another is to actually reach out to consumers and tell them about your site.
For automotive websites, the challenge is even more steep. It's just about impossible to get a higher ranking for your page than the manufacturer's own pages or Wikipedia's. Except for a few very obscure topics, such as old out-of-production cars by manufacturers that are no longer in business, not the biggest moneymakers if you're trying to sell parts or products for the cars, working for PageRank is out.
So that leaves putting links in front of consumers and telling them about your site.
It takes a lot of work, and a bit of time, but one effective marketing method I've found is web forums. Find a friendly car forum that allows you to link back to your site and fire away. Don't spam the forum with blatant advertisements, but instead make meaningful, useful posts and just put a link back to your site in the signature. That not only gets links in front of consumers, but meaningful and helpful posts will increase your reputation on the site and make users more likely to check out your own site.
One such friendly and open car forum can be found at CarsAndRacingStuff.com. The recently reopened forum allows linking to external sites from signatures and also just began a new marketing promotion where the Top 5 posters get links to their site on the front page of the Forum. You don't even need an automotive website to promote yourself there, just about any site can be linked to from a signature provided the posts remain on topic.
