Paid Advertisements or Free Promotion? On the web, you can pay for advertisements on other websites that address your target audience.  If you want to explore paid advertisements make sure you have a way to evaluate if you’re getting good return for your investment. Before you pay, think of this, do you buy a magazine to read the ads or to read the articles? 

Leverage Your Expertise for Free Exposure:  One of the great advantages of being an author is that you’re an expert. If you do your research wisely, you may be able to provide articles and content for other websites, instead of paying for advertising space.

Whether you write non-fiction or fiction, poetry, children’s, or memoir, you are an expert about the subjects you cover. You carry the prestige of an author.  Leverage your expertise to provide value to other websites.  Write articles, blog comments, reviews for other books, syndicated columns, or whatever you can think of.  

Online Article Banks: Entire websites exist to collect articles and make them available for reprinting on other websites.  Here’s an example. http://www.my-articles.com/   You can search “Article Directory” for more places to submit articles.  Once an article is posted, anyone on the web can use your article, including your brief bio and link back to your website. 

Along with Article Banks, if you’re going to write articles and offer content, you’ll want to directly contact websites that match your target audience.  Either way, if you have articles accepted and distributed on the web, you stand to generate traffic in two ways.  First, readers who find the articles can easily click to view your website.  Second, search engines raise the ranking of your website based on how many other websites have links back to your website. 

Every time you get an article posted or a link added from another website back to you,  you’ve increased your footprint on the World Wide Web.  Over time, with some effort and some luck, you’ll build a growing volume of traffic to your website.