There are many free promotional opportunities out there that businesses and individuals can use to their benefit. Sometimes these promotional opportunities appear in some unexpected places. Here I will discuss VeryRelated.com, a mind-map tool for finding related key words built by Geoff Peters and Sigal Blay.
When you first come to the site, you can enter a keyword. Pressing the “go” button will bring up related keywords from the database. You can then suggest keywords that are related to your initial search. So for example, if I initially enter “Marcus Emmanuel Barnes” and press “go”, I can then start entering keywords related to “Marcus Emmanuel Barnes” like “www.twobrianed.com“. I do this by entering the term in the textbox under “What is related to [keyword]” and pressing “add”. The VeryRelated algorithm will then determine if the keyword I entered is related to the original keyword. If so, it will add the keyword to the mind-map. By continuing to add keywords related to yourself, your product or service, etc., you can quickly create a mind-map like the following:
The site gives the following description on how to interpret the resulting graph:
The bigger the bubble, the more popular the word. Words are shown closer to the center if they are more highly related to the main word.
Furthermore, the keywords in the graph are clickable — you’ll be forwarded either to another mind-map with the keyword as the root of the graph or to the Google search results page for that keyword. Note that the VeryRelated algorithm bases how related things are by measuring search results. Keywords that are not found when one searches for “Marcus Emmanuel Barnes” wont be added to the mind map.
Do you see the potential here for promotion? When people look for keywords and what’s related to them, it’s possible that your website, product, service, etc., will come up. Let’s just hypothetically say someone was looking me up on VeryRelated.com, but didn’t know that I was co-creator of the YogaNearMe web application for finding nearby yoga studios. After searching, they now see that the site is related to me — they’ve learned something new and I’ve possibly gained an additional site visitor or client. I get this just for using a neat free online tool for finding related keywords.
Do you know of other free interesting unconventional promotional avenues out there?
