Best Bans Templates

Now you have your store up and running and (hopefully) fully SEO optimised (more about that in another post!) it’s time to publicise. What are the best ways to ensure your store is seen by the most people? There are lots of tips in the BANS forum so I’ll try to round up some of the better ones and point you to places to find more information.

1) USFreeads

Many people are having good success with using USfreeads.

If you take the Gold option and pay the $10 fee, you can then upgrade to the premium for about $6 a month which is a big discount. A big advantage of using USFreeads is that your ads will be indexed by Google and can rank highly. Use your keywords in your ad title and also sprinkled through your ad for maximum SEO. I haven’t found a UK equivalent yet. Does anyone know one?

2) Make a Blog

Google (and other search engines) love blogs. New content will be spidered quickly and a blog will definitely help your SEO. There are 2 options here both with their own advantages.

a) make a blog in a folder off your main site. The advantage here is that Google will see the blog and the store as one site so any PR from one will reflect on the other. The disadvantage is that for a new store/blog combination it will take some time to achieve a decent PR. If you have many stores the time needed to keep up that many blogs is probably not feasible.

b) make a free blog using one of the free locations listed at this forum post.

I set up a blog and posted 3 articles at blogger.com in minutes. You can see it at Lawns & Gardens. Blogger is owned by Google and there are many debates on the net about whether blogs hosted on Blogger have unfair advantage for Google search engine rankings. I have no idea whether this is true but just in case I set up my free blog there!

The advantages here are that it’s very easy to set up a blog, you can make articles with embedded links to deep pages in your store and gain SEO advantage. Make sure you also include relevant links to other sites. There is an excellent thread at BANS forum about this. Once you have a blog set up you can use the numerous ways to publicise it (too many for here - that’s for another post!)

3) Using Free Directories

It’s a bit of a pain listing your stores in directories but it will go a long way to helping your SEO and publicising your site. A good list of free directories is available at Best Catalog.

4) Hub Pages and Squidoo lenses

I haven’t used Sqidoo myself although I’ve heard good recommendations for it. I have used Hub Pages and am having good success with attracting visitors to my stores. Hubs are very easy to set up and you can make as many as you like. You can embed links to your store, affiliate links etc, add images as static images or as a slideshow. A good way to publicise your atores, although a little time consuming. I also find that a get good traffic initially but it drops off after a while so you need to be adding new hubs regularly.

5) Bookmark Your Store

Bookmarking your store with as many social bookmarking sites as possible. Not only will this bring your store to the attenti0n of people searching the bookmarks but will add valuable backlinks to your store. Bookmarks on High PR ranking bookmarking sites like del.icio.us will often show up high in search engine rankings.One way to easily add your store to multiple social bookmarking sites is to use a service like OnlyWire.

You will need to register with all the bookmarking sites that OnlyWire posts too, which is going to take a while, but once done, add the OnlyWire bookmarklet to your toolbar and with one click you can add your store pages to up to 23 social bookmarking sites. That’s 23 backlinks to your store from one click!

I’m sure there are lots more ways to publicise your BANS store. If you have a favorite that I missed please share it with us