Promoting Your Business Online
A traditional or online/home business can be promoted online and there are many different ways to promote your business online. Promotional methods vary from free to expensive, ineffective to highly effective. The major authority on internet marketing is internmet marketing expert and self-made millionaire, Corey Rudl, he owns the Internet Marketing Center. There you can find free tips and articles as well as very valuable resources for your business. If you don't want to waste any time or skip the learning curve, this is the place to go.
Search Engines
One of the most common and effective ways to promote your business is through the search engines. This way you will get targetted traffic to your site. Meta tags help search engines find your site when people search for certain keywords or phrases. Meta tags are codes you put into your webpage wich have your keywords and description. Another thing to consider is using key phrases, "how to start a business", for example. There are other kinds of meta tags though. Whatever method of promotion you use, finding the right audience is important, search engines are one of the best ways to find the right audience. If you submit to search engines for free you'll usually have to wait 4-6 weeks for inclusion (if they include you) . Most of the express service fees I've seen are 200 dollars but AltaVista charges 39 dollars for the 1st URL, their express service also includes things like weekly refresh of your URL. Inktomi charges only 30 dollars to add and re-index your site every 48 hours for a year. Inktomi's listings are also included in some other search engine/directory results, including MSN. Be careful about repeating a keyword too many times, search engines might think you're spamming them.
Different search engines have different rules for submitting your site, that's why marketing experts advise submitting to them individually. Corey Rudl, one of the internet's top marketers, swears by SitePromoter, a software that submits to 150 search engines (and directories) using submission forms prepared individually for each engine/directory. This service at the sitepromoter site costs $575, but Corey Rudl resells it for $96.70 on his site. You also need to maintain your site's ranking because after a while it will start slipping down the ranks. While Corey Rudl doesn't recommend WebPostitionGold for submitting your site to search engines, he does highly recommend WebPositionGold for monitoring and maintaing your spot in the engines and directories, this software costs $149 for the standard edition but you can get a free 30-day trial. SiteBuildIt!, developed by Ken Evoy, does both of these tasks. I just discovered a site that submits to 30 engines as if "by hand" and that analyzes your rank or whether you're listed or not with several engines.
One way to get ranked high in search engines is bidding for keywords in pay per click engines. There is a software for this too, the Keyword Bid Optimizer. Ken Evoy's SiteBuildIt! software helps you a lot with this as well.
Link popularity is also worth consideration. That is, sites that are linked to you. You can improve your link popularity by linking your own websites together. You get much further with, you guessed it, more software, the software I'm talking about is the Internet Success Spider, developed by Neil Shearing, founder of Scam Free Zone. The software tracks down super affiliates and Neil's email formula gets them to sell your products. This will not only increase your sales/commissions but will dramatically improve your search engine ranking. For more detailed information on submitting your site to search engines, visit this site.
E-Mail Marketing
Another effective way of promotion is e-mail marketing. Of course you want to avoid bulk mailing and be careful how you obtain email addresses. If you're not careful you could be reported for spam. You should also use disclaimers, for example, "You are recieving this because.......to be removed....etc". One of the safest and possibly most effective email marketing methods is to have your own mailing list. You can, however, submit ads or articles to ezines, for some places it's free, and for some it's not. Your emails should contain useful, educational, helpful, and/or related-to-your-site information. I've learned that when you submit your article to an ezine, you should leave any affiliate links out of the content, instead provide them in a sig file or seperate resource section. I suggest you read 8 Tips How NOT to Get Your Advertisement Read".
Your Own Affiliate Program
If you have a product or service that you sell on the Internet, you will want to develop and set up an Affiliate Program.
An affiliate Program is the least risky, least expensive way, by far, to acquire new customers and to explode your sales in a short period of time. It sure beats the heck out of paying for advertising up front. Why not pay for advertisers only when a sale is made the ultimate way to advertise. Click here to learn how you can setup an affiliate program for your product or service.
One thing you should remember is to treat your affiliates well, pay 25% or higher commissions. This way people will want to join your affiliate program and stay. Help your affiliates be successful, coach them, give them tools to help them be successful, effective methods of promotion, prewritten ads they can use on their site or put in their ezines.
Most affiliates aren't very successful, however, there is a way to locate super affiliates. Super affiliates will prove quite benefitial to your business. Super affiliates can help you make thousands more in sales. I suggest you get Neil Shearing's Internet Success Spider. This software locates super affiliates. He also has a special email formula that will help you convince these super affiliates to sell your products. This is worth checking out, click here to learn more.
