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How to market your phone card website
Once you have signed up for a phone card website how do you get people to start buying phone cards from your website and start making money? Here are a few easy ways to start:
- Word of mouth advertising: This is the cheapest and most effective way. Do you have friends from overseas or know of people that call overseas regularly. If you do tell them about your phone card website and tell them to tell their friends about your website. You will be surprised how effective this simple technique is.
- Social Media: Are you on Facebook or Twitter? Tell all your friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter about your phone card website and tell them how much money they will save on their calls when they buy a phone card from you. On Facebook you can also create a Facebook page for your phone card business by going to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?ref_type=sitefooter Here is an example of someone that has created one for a gift card business http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/giftsms
- Google AdWords: This can be expensive but can be very effective. When you do a search on Google with the word "phone cards" you will see a listings of search results of phone card websites that are available on the internet. Your Google adwords ad will appear on the right of those search results. Please see below:
- Email marketing: Send emails to your friends and family and tell them about your new business. Be sure to ask them to forward your email to their friends and family to spread the news as quickly as possible.
- SMS marketing: Send SMS to all the people that you know and tell them about your business. We have a special deal with www.smspapa.com where you can can login to that website with the same username and password that you selected when you joined our site and you will receive 5 free SMS to test their SMS service. Each SMS you send from www.smspapa.com cost around 6 cents.
- Buy a domain name: when you sign up for a website with us your website address is a sub-domain and not a proper domain. An example of a sub-domain is Joescheap.phonecardsales.com.au. This is because you are sharing the domain name phonecardsales.com.au that we own with us and all our other partners. Sub-domains are harder to remember and people often type the wrong website address and cannot find your site if your use a sub-domain. To overcome this problem we recommend buying a domain name, for example: joescheapphonecardsales.com.au. If you own this domain people can go to your website by typing in www.joescheapphonecardsales.com.au. Apart from the fact that a domain name does not have a "." after joescheap which may be confusing and is shorter, people can also type www. in front of your domain name to get to your site. Most web users are used to typing in www. in front of domain names but if you have a sub-domain and you type www. in front of the subdomain they will not be able to get to your website to buy phone cards from you. There are many places on the internet that sell domain names. Just do a search in Google under "buy domain name" and you find companies that will sell you a domain name. For a .com.au domain name expect to pay around $25 a year to $50 per year. For a .com domain expect to pay from $10 to $30 per year. Shop around to find the best deal. However, we recommend www.godaddy.com for .com domains and www.domaincentral.com.au for .com.au domains. Why? Not because they are the cheapest but simply because we use them and they have been easy to deal with over the years. Try to find a domain name that has the word phone card or calling card in it as search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing will list your site higher in their search results for those keywords when people search with terms containing those words. The higher your website is listed in the search engines the more likely people will click on it to go to your website to buy phone cards from your website. For more information on how to use your own domain name on your website please see our FAQ: Question 8: Can I use my own domain name?
- Do you already have visitors in another website and you want to get visitors from that website to your phone card site? We have created a rate finder widget which you can place on your website which will get people to your phone card site. The rate finder widget looks similar to the one below. When people select which country they want to call to and click search or look for best rates they will be directed to your phone card site. To install the web finder widget on you website simply select how you want the rate finder widget to look like and click on "Give me the code" then copy the code that appears on your website.
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