Before you can make a single dollar with your online business you need to find ways to get potential customers to see the products or services you offer. The basic principles of online marketing are the same that any business marketing plan would follow, but the actual steps you take in marketing your online business can look very different. To help you get started on a marketing plan we are going to look at two effective and free marketing methods. These methods are search engine optimization and article syndication.

Search engine optimization is the process of tweaking your website so that the major search engines have no questions concerning your website’s topic. This means that when someone is looking for what you offer they find you at the top of listings on Google or Yahoo. While traffic referrals from search engines are free it takes time and effort to work your way to the top of the rankings.

There are two primary factors that influence search engine rankings. The first is called “on page” search engine optimization (SEO) and the second is “off page” seo. On page refers to the content of your website. The words you use, the words you highlight and the words you use in links from page to page all play a factor in notifying search engines what your website is about.

Off page SEO refers to incoming links from other websites. These links act as ‘votes’ for your website and help the search engines know what your website is about. Naturally, the more ‘votes’ you have the better your ranking potential. There are many different ways you can work to manually build ‘votes’ for your website. One of the most effective ways is to visit popular forums and blogs that are related to your business and post comments or messages. The key to having success with these methods is to post interesting and relevant comments and contribute to the community. Over time this will allow you to build up a long list of links and it might even bring you immediate targeted traffic.

Another method that can help diversify your web marketing plan is article syndication. This is the process of writing helpful and unique articles that relate to the topic of your business and then submitting them to sources with the hope they get republished with a link to your website. This is a very time consuming task, but it can lead to very good targeted and residual traffic.

The key to successful article syndication is in building long term relationships with publishers. To begin these relationships you must contact related blogs or eZines and ask to be a guest blogger. You can also post your article to websites that publishers frequent to find quality content (like eZine articles). If you notice your article has been published, follow up with the publisher and offer them exclusive content on a regular basis. This method might require writing a few long, informative articles each week. Following this plan over time will not only provide you with diversified, residual and targeted traffic – but it will also help you enjoy better ranking in search engines.

As you can see, building an internet business can be hard work. It takes time, patience and dedication to succeed.

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Today I’d like to share with you a great way to make money as an affiliate marketer. If you have ever visited a product review site, then you know that these sites are created to help consumers make informed decisions about purchasing products online.

They’re also used to make money for affiliate marketers who want to promote other peoples products to generate income from commission sales. So if you create a review site the correct way, you can benefit in two ways, one you’ll have a site that genuinely helps people, and two a site that will help make you money.

When writing product reviews, be sure to compare all benefits and features of each product you are reviewing, making sure to compare them fairly and objectively. Remember, your job is to help the consumer make a decision to buy, and not try to force a sale.

Do a suitable amount of research in order to collect as much information about your affiliate products as possible. Strive to present this information as clear, concise and complete as you can. This will go a long way in writing a convincing review that will avoid being hyped and boring. You want your reader to have enough information to buy from you and not go off looking for a better informed web site.

This doesn’t mean that you need to sell products from your review web page. Your job is to present products in a non-biased way that will educate the future buyer as to which is the best product to buy and why.

You should try and give visitors 2-3 solid options to choose from. Of course you’re going to want these options to be your affiliate products. This way, even if the person on your site decides to buy an option other than the one you recommend, you may still make a sale. Even though you may have recommended something different, visitors may spot something else that caught their eye about a different product.

You can write product reviews for both downloadable and physical products. Physical products may be easier to make money on because more people search for them than information products. The only problem with physical products is that the commissions are generally smaller.

A great way to get started is to determine what products are popular, and then find related keywords that have high search volume and low competition in Google. You can use Google’s free keyword tool to locate these keywords at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Then include your main keywords in the review. You can also put your keyword in the domain name to increase your chances for higher search engine page ranking.

Reviewing popular products on Amazon.com and creating a review web site around them is another place to find hot products. If you prefer reviewing information products that have higher commission rates, you can go to Clickbank.com to check out their top selling products.

Either product type you choose to promote you’ll have a better chance to make money as an affiliate marketer using review web sites.

Click Here for help with Affiliate Marketing.

Some take a long time. Some are instant. Some are free. Some take a lot of time.

However, one of the best things you can do for your business to generate traffic is to start a blog.

A blog is a great way to get traffic because you can use a variety of different methods to promote it.

You can use SEO for each blog post that will help you build traffic over time.

If you’re using something like wordpress for your blog, you’ll be able to use a variety of search engine plug-ins that will help you with doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

This takes a lot of the technicality out of getting good rankings for your websites.

Another great thing about a blog is that you can focus solely on creating great content without having to worry about getting top search engine rankings.

If you create useful content, people will start linking to your blog.

You’ll start receiving visitors from another trusted website.

When people link to your blog it’s like they’re giving you a vote of confidence.

They’re telling their readers that you have a good website that will provide them with awesome content.

Automatically you already have trust in their eyes. Whereas getting traffic from a search engine you’ll have to build the trust.

Blogs are interactive so people love them.

You’ll be able to read some of the comments on your blog and be able to respond accordingly which is another great way to build trust.

One of the other positives about blogs is a thing called a “RSS Feed” (Real Simple Syndication).

This will make it so your content can get syndicated by other websites and this is why it’s important that you have interesting headlines for your readers.

The feed will pick up the headlines and the person will decide to read depending on how interested they are in what you’re offering.

So if you’re looking at starting a blog, you can now see the benefits of doing so.

You’ll get traffic. You’ll build trust. You’ll build relationships.

In the end you will generate a lot more traffic to your business web site.

Another great blogging resource is Click Here!

1. An analysis of the services or products which the web site will offer should be made. This includes describing those services or products involved, figuring out unique selling propositions and what the benefits to the customers will be. A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) should also be made at this point.

This will form a strong understanding of what the entire site will be about and how it can be promoted.

2. Analyze the market to see what the competitors are doing, what the current market is like and if there are any opportunities in the future and how to capitalize on them.

3. Try and adopt different personas so that you can understand how customers will perceive the site and business. Try to create four or five different demographic profiles and see how each would benefit from using your web site. Doing this enhances your ability to sell to your customers as well as trying to provide a good user experience for them so they will come back. It also will hone your Internet Marketing skills.

4. Now we start getting into internet marketing itself. Keyword research is the next stage, and your campaign should focus on initially trying to get twenty or so good keywords down. The primary keyword phrase should be focused on the home page of the site itself, while the rest will make up keywords for site content and other marketing strategies. The ideal is to find keywords with high use, but with minimal competition from other sites.

5. Next, focus on what marketing strategies to use and how to implement them. The keywords found can form the basis of paid promotions like PPC (Pay Per Click), or organic listings via SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or use of social media (like Facebook and Twitter). The keyword phrases found can also form the back bone to other off-page marketing in the form of article writing and submissions designed to attract traffic and back linking.

Create a blog where you can give tips and solutions to problems, while at the same time promoting the service or product specified on your business web site.

6. Other marketing methods to bring targeted traffic to your site include newsletters, email marketing, affiliate marketing, video marketing, forum replies (leaving back links in signatures), and listing the business on Google Places, Yahoo and Bing equivalents.

7. Of course, there are traditional means of promoting your site and business via business cards, letter heads, local sponsorships, newspaper advertising and so on.

Internet marketing is a huge industry and it is very easy to make a full time job out of marketing just one web site, given the amount of work involved. There is no one set formula to follow, every site and every business will have its own personal marketing plan applied to it, but the overall key is consistency and measurement to ensure things are always happening and always being recorded.

Hiring people through forums has the added benefit of being a place where you can look around to see a person’s reputation before you hire them. You can search the forum for their name to see if anything negative has been said about them, and to see if any positive remarks have been made.

You can also make a post on a forum and ask for recommendations. You can post something like, “I’m looking for a good graphics designer who works quickly and charges a fair price. Who do you recommend?” You’ll probably get a number of recommendations, as well as a few private messages from freelancers who want to work for you.

Elance is a very popular freelance website. You can look through a number of different freelancers‘ portfolios, and you can also see their feedback. People with high feedback and very few negatives are less likely to do a bad job than others might be.

You can also post a bid request and have freelancers bid for your job. You can get a variety of prices and freelancers to choose from, but don’t automatically choose the lowest price. Lower priced freelancers are sometimes cheap because they’re less experienced.

That’s not always the case, though! Sometimes they’re cheap because they’re new to the site and they need to build a reputation. Rent-a-coder is another popular freelancing site. They’re popular for being a place to find programmers, but they don’t only have programmers available.

You can also find writers and graphics designers there, and sometimes people who will do things like site submissions and other administrative tasks. Perhaps the best way to find a good freelancer is to ask for referrals from friends and acquaintances you’ve met while networking.

If you’re really worried about the financial part of outsourcing, you could go through a site like Escrow.com. They let you make a deposit for the job, and they tell the freelancer that you’ve paid. Then the freelancer can being work, knowing the money has already been funded.

Once you’re happy with the work, you can tell Escrow.com and they’ll release the funds to the freelancer.

By using one of the more reputable outsourcing companies and checking references and feedback, you stand the best chance at finding a good freelancer that works at a reasonable price and will do a great job.

Watch for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts in the New Year!

To your online success,

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A list in Internet marketing terms is a database of your prospects and their contact information. If you have a product or promote products and I sign up for your list knowing that you might promote to me, then I’m a prospect that you can now market to repeatedly, with my permission, until I unsubscribe.

So why is building a list so important? Let’s say you start off as an affiliate marketer. You find a niche to promote to and you start working what you’ve learned into some traffic for your affiliate links.

Over a period of 30 days, imagine that you funnel 5,000 prospects from the Internet who are interested in your niche straight through your affiliate link to the product owner’s site.

To continue our example, let’s say that some of them even buy the product you are promoting. If you’ve made a 50% commission with a 2% conversion rate, for example, that means 2 out of every 100 people you sent bought the product, and your share was $26.00 (as an example). That would mean you earned a cool $2,600 this month – good for you!

But you’re leaving money on the table. Those 100 people who bought from your 5,000 clicks? They’re now on the product owner’s list, not yours. So what he’s going to do is send them more offers over the coming weeks.

After all, they are proven buyers. Over the next 30 days, those buyers fork over some more money for products that complement the original one they bought. That money goes to the product owner, not you – because you passed on building a list the first time around.

A better way to build an Internet marketing business is to start with a list from day one. Before you let a single person slip through your link without capturing their name and email address, have your system set up to build a list.

You can have unlimited lists for different niches using a simple tool, called an autoresponder. Every day you can log in and see how many people have signed up, and you can create automated messages that get sent out to help convert your list into more sales.

Why should the product owner get to cash in on that person again and again when you’re the one who brought him the customer in the first place? Stake your claim to each prospect and leverage your relationship with him or her for future sales and commissions.

Watch for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

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First, consider utilizing a local marketing or PR firm in your area. Many of them are run by skilled single agents – and although good ones don’t come cheap, their services may not be as out of reach (or non-cost-effective) as you might think.

A local marketing consultant has his or her hands in many different networks. They know plenty of resources and probably have some creative ideas about where to promote you, often at low or no cost to you.

A basic rule of business is to expend your energy where your money-making skills lie. So you can be focusing on those areas, leaving your marketing or PR consultant free to do what they do best… promote you and drive people to your sites.

You also may be shocked to hear that you should consider advertising on local television stations. That may be because we’ve all been conditioned to believe that TV advertising is something only the Big Leagues can afford – and, in general, that’s certainly true.

But did you know that advertising with your local TV station can be surprisingly affordable? As well as building your visibility as a “celebrity” – and even in just your own home town, you’d be surprised how inexpensive it can actually be.

There’s another big advantage to local television. Local newspaper editors may be much more inclined to print your press releases if they know you’re also appearing on TV in your area.

Now this may not sound as exciting as your own local TV ad, or as easy as simply hiring a marketing consultant or local PR firm, but offering a workshop to your Community College is a long term status and traffic-building strategy every online business person should consider.

It can be quite easy to draw up a solid proposal, find out who to contact and make your pitch. Once you’re done, the audio and video recordings make a great new product for you to sell, and the transcripts can be chopped up into articles, free reports, and more.

Teaching provides another great opportunity to increase website traffic by sending out press releases – both to offline sources like local newspapers and trade magazines, and to online paid and free PR services.

The more offline promotions you do, and the more enthusiasm you put into them, the more you’ll notice benefits returning to you… So stay positive, stay proactive, make the most of every online and offline opportunity – and watch your credibility and business reputation grow.

Watch for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,

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What should you split test? You should split test because tiny changes can generate huge results. That’s why almost everything should be tested, whenever possible. You should test at least two versions of your headline all times, at least two different price points, and at least two different calls to action.

You might also test multiple versions of your sales copy, different graphics on your sales page, and even different product names. Great marketers always tweak their pages for the best possible conversions.

Very few people achieve maximum conversion rates for the first version of their sales letter. And many marketers underestimate how minor changes can have a huge impact on your conversions. A 1% change in conversion may not sound significant, but it’s not so small if you think of it in terms of dollars instead of percentages.

If you have a 1% conversion rate and you make a total if $3,000 from 10,000 visitors, that seems pretty good. But what if you doubled your conversion rate to 2%? Then you would have made $6,000 off of the same 10,000 visitors. An increase from $3,000 to $6,000 is a pretty big improvement for a tiny bit of work.

Some people do their split testing manually. In this case, you simply have at least two different versions of your sales letter, and you send the same amount of traffic to each version.

Ideally, the traffic will come from the same source, because different sources of traffic can have wildly different conversion rates. For example, traffic from Google AdWords might perform better or worse than traffic from an alternate pay-per-click or advertising source.

After driving enough traffic to be able to see a difference, look at your conversion rate for the two versions to decide which one performed better. It’s vitally important to send a decent amount of traffic to each version before deciding which version is the true winner or you could make the wrong choice from inadequate data.

One hundred hits will probably not be enough to provide statistically valid data. You should probably send at least 1,000 hits to each version before you make your decision. However, the cost that may be involved is often a reason why marketers resist split testing their sales letters.

It can be costly to drive traffic during the testing phase. If you send 1,000 hits to each version at a cost of $0.50 per click, that is $500 per version, for a total of $1,000. That might seem like a lot, but keep in mind that you should make some money off of the testing exercise if either of your sales pages is any good.

Even a 0.5% increase could mean an additional $1,500 in your pocket in the earlier example, so it really pays to test. Remember to track very carefully. Be sure to use an analytics program like Google Analytics, or one of the many other programs available.

This way you can track where your traffic is coming from, where it goes, and how well it performs on your site. Google Analytics is free, and it can help you track a lot of very important information, so you can test conversions more easily than ever before, without spending any money on tracking software.

Some split testing tools do all of this work for you, automatically rotating your files and tracking the conversions for you. You simply log in, tweak something new, and sit back to see how much better (or worse) it affects sales.

Watch for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!