Free Index
If you’ve been taking advice and heeding to the other marketing tips we’ve told you about so far, you’ll know about the importance of creating online profiles for your business- but if you’ve just joined us- welcome! Come on in and sit down.
Free Index is another networking/free advertising site which allows you to construct a profile for your company and showcase your work. It’s very simple to sign up and as the name on the tin suggests, free of charge. A great point about Free Index is that it is ridiculously easy to use, which you will experience for yourself once you’ve signed up, and unlike other sites which insist you write some clever copy to go into your profile, the system at Free Index does this for you. This is a brilliant feature if you’re not the world’s most confident writer or are on a shoestring budget and can’t afford to employ someone to complete it all for you, as it is literally a case of filling in the blanks, so to speak.
Easy to use
You can go back and edit them later if you require something more personal, but bear in mind that all profiles are inspected by a real human being before being published on Free Index for the world to see, and they advise you not to cut and paste large sections of text from your original business website. Human inspection, takes around five days, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t see your profile appear on someone else’s computer within
hours.
If you’re quite seasoned to our 101 Marketing Tips, you may find the form system on this frustrating as you will be used to completing your own company profiles on websites but don’t let that put you off. That system is in place to make the site fair to everybody and protect us all from spammers, frauds and the like, and although the forms are mostly completed for you, your Free Index profile still provides and additional platform for your company to promote itself for no extra charge which is excellent from an optimization point of view.
Simply register your email address and begin filling in the online forms. You will need an image for your profile, so if you’ve resized your logo previously for other sites, best use that. There’s surprisingly quite a lot of features on free Index compared to other free business sites, and one of these that we here at Vizcom like a lot is the Photobook, which allows you to upload up to twenty images to showcase your work. This works wonderfully for us as we also specialize in graphic design as well as website construction and SEO, so we’ve uploaded examples of our previous graphic design projects.
Other features on your profile include the ability to display your website address, opening hours, accepted methods of payment, contact details, location (via a Google Map) and it’s relation to public transport and nearby hotels, opening hours, the trade organizations you are part of and details of the services and products that your business provides.
As with all online profile forms, fill in as much information as you possibly can- a full profile is a busy profile, and will get you more interest and credibility if it shows that you have taken the time to complete it all, as opposed to doing the bare minimum and relying on that to generate your site fresh traffic and potential custom.
Free Index also allows customers to rate your business with a standard five star system, like YouTube, which is very useful for providing credibility as most people rely on recommendations before they take the plunge and approach a company for business.
hours.
If you’re quite seasoned to our 101 Marketing Tips, you may find the form system on this frustrating as you will be used to completing your own company profiles on websites but don’t let that put you off. That system is in place to make the site fair to everybody and protect us all from spammers, frauds and the like, and although the forms are mostly completed for you, your Free Index profile still provides and additional platform for your company to promote itself for no extra charge which is excellent from an optimization point of view.
Simply register your email address and begin filling in the online forms. You will need an image for your profile, so if you’ve resized your logo previously for other sites, best use that. There’s surprisingly quite a lot of features on free Index compared to other free business sites, and one of these that we here at Vizcom like a lot is the Photobook, which allows you to upload up to twenty images to showcase your work. This works wonderfully for us as we also specialize in graphic design as well as website construction and SEO, so we’ve uploaded examples of our previous graphic design projects.
Other features on your profile include the ability to display your website address, opening hours, accepted methods of payment, contact details, location (via a Google Map) and it’s relation to public transport and nearby hotels, opening hours, the trade organizations you are part of and details of the services and products that your business provides.
As with all online profile forms, fill in as much information as you possibly can- a full profile is a busy profile, and will get you more interest and credibility if it shows that you have taken the time to complete it all, as opposed to doing the bare minimum and relying on that to generate your site fresh traffic and potential custom.
Free Index also allows customers to rate your business with a standard five star system, like YouTube, which is very useful for providing credibility as most people rely on recommendations before they take the plunge and approach a company for business.
Have a look at the forums
Finally, the jewel in the crown of Free Index is their forums. Once you’ve built your profile, you’ll find the forums listed under ‘Business Community’ on the tabs at the top of the page. Here you can join in with the very active forum made up of other business owners like yourself and a number of experts in various fields. They can provide help and support on a wide range of topics including legal rights, business scams, marketing ideas and ways to improve your Free Index profile. They’re a friendly bunch in there and the advice is priceless, especially as it’s free from individuals who know what they’re talking about.
Once you’ve become accustomed to Free Index, have a look around to see if you can find any of your existing customers or suppliers, and if you can, be sure to leave them with some nice feedback to encourage them to return the favour on your profile. Also, if you recommend another business to Free Index, the site will provide you with a Super Highlighted Listing which is highlighted and contains no third party advertisements. This is a useful feature as the website also has the option to search for groups of businesses by location, such as town or city only, so if you’re the only highlighted listing in a search of ten similar business, it puts you in good stead to get the most fresh traffic to your profile, and your company website too.
Although your completed company profile does not need as much time spent on updating it as much as other free sites, you do still need to check that all of your details remain relevant, and the forums are an interesting place to talk about how your business is doing. As always, taking part in forums helps build up your credibility as an expert in your industry and keeps your business at the forefront of users’ minds.
Once you’ve become accustomed to Free Index, have a look around to see if you can find any of your existing customers or suppliers, and if you can, be sure to leave them with some nice feedback to encourage them to return the favour on your profile. Also, if you recommend another business to Free Index, the site will provide you with a Super Highlighted Listing which is highlighted and contains no third party advertisements. This is a useful feature as the website also has the option to search for groups of businesses by location, such as town or city only, so if you’re the only highlighted listing in a search of ten similar business, it puts you in good stead to get the most fresh traffic to your profile, and your company website too.
Although your completed company profile does not need as much time spent on updating it as much as other free sites, you do still need to check that all of your details remain relevant, and the forums are an interesting place to talk about how your business is doing. As always, taking part in forums helps build up your credibility as an expert in your industry and keeps your business at the forefront of users’ minds.