My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘articles’

When it comes to article marketing, we’re all searching for that perfect headline. It has to be something catchy. You want it to be unique. You want it to leave people wanting to read your article. After all, what good does your article do if people don’t pass it on with that almighty link attached at the bottom?

I’m constantly trying to come up with new and exciting takes on my areas of expertise, as well as, new headlines to get my articles passed along. I’m always observing. I watch the headlines on the news, in the paper, and on the homepages of MSN and Yahoo. Then, I examine the ones that really catch my interest.

Personally, I also feel the need to watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and such informative programs as “Best Week Ever” on VH1. I watch these solely for creative business ideas, really!

Well, maybe not solely for business! I have to admit I do have a bit of pop culture addiction. But, in my defense, you can learn a lot from pop culture.

Enter…”Snakes on a Plane.”

Have you ever heard something that draws you in more? It’s absolutely brilliant. They’ve done next to no marketing for this film. All we really have is “Snakes on a Plane” and Sam Jackson. Yet, here we have this huge cult hit even before it’s been released. Seriously, if you haven’t heard of this movie, trust me, you will soon!

I first saw a brief bit about this movie on “Best Week Ever” a few weeks ago, and now, it’s everywhere I turn on the internet.

So, what does this really have anything to do with article marketing or am I simply trying to get something with “Snakes on a Plane” attached to my links? Simply, the answer is both!

You have to realize that finding pop culture analogies to business principles you write about can boost your links enormously! People want to re-print and link to stories that catch their attention because those are the same stories that will get more traffic to their sites in return.

Now, I’m not advocating writing articles that have absolutely no content value or that are not helpful in some way to readers. Again, trust me, I run an article directory, and I can’t tell you how sick of the same keyword-saturated articles on acne, affiliate programs and whatever other keywords or money-making schemes are hot today.

The key is that you’ve got to actually take the time to find the analogies. Find how you can relate TomKat’s baby to your site…well, maybe that’s not an easy example, but you get my drift! You can churn out articles by the hundred that will get published across the net, but you won’t get the respect of the article directories, the higher page-ranked sites and most importantly potential clients/link-clickers if you aren’t putting out quality material.

Whether it’s “Snakes on a Plane” or TomKitten, whatever you want to use, be creative and take the time to write quality articles. In the long run, if you have to choose between having 1,000 blah articles out there with your name and links attached or 100 awesome, catchy articles out there that people are passing on and referring to others, you’ll want to have the 100 best on the net.

So, here’s your assignment, turn off CNN for a moment and put away your Wall Street Journal. You might just find that a few moments of Comedy Central or People magazine might be increasing your bottom line! If you still don’t believe me, look what you’ve spent the last few moments doing. You’ve just read this entire article. Thanks “Snakes on a Plane!”

Promoting your internet business can be done in hundreds of ways, some of which are more effective, some less so. Others can be total flops. But what matters at the end of the day is simply this: RESULTS…RESULTS…RESULTS. All your efforts should be geared to this one goal alone: Results that put money in your wallet.

So what really works?

1. People just cannot resist…FREE! Yes, FREE!

Imagine: You are out shopping for perfume. You pass the cheese counter. A gorgeous lady offers sample tastings of smelly, bluey Gorgonzola. You hate cheese, it gives you eczema. But you take some all the same &ndash maybe not to eat, but take it anyway as it is free. Lesson: People just love… FREE! If it is free, people will take it. Send out free newsletters; offer a free trial period/services/information. Tease your potential customers, for example, with FREE PC reports or PC scans. After running these free services, alert the customer of problems (potential and existing) on their credit record or PC. Then show them what it is, or repair the problem for a fee. This can be an effective way to get information to your potential customers, create sales or to generate traffic to your site.

2. Turn KNOWLEDGE into traffic to your site.

You will probably be an expert on your product/ business. Leverage this expertise by writing articles and publishing them in an ezine or an article information site. The most effective way is to give away your articles for &ndash FREE! In return, ask the publisher for authorization to include a byline. A byline is a very short summary of the author, his credentials and website. Your byline is a way to claim a ‘visible’ place, a niche on the world wide web for you/your business. With time, readers will come to regard you as an expert in your area of specialization. The logical progress and outcome will be trust in your site as a source of credible information.

3. Click-Click-Click to riches

Some search engines allow the purchase of website rankings.This is an excellent, inexpensive and effective online marketing technique. With Pay-Per-Click programs, you choose keywords that are relevant to your site, and determine yourself the bid prices for each keyword/s. When surfers enter these words, your site will appear with other sites bidding the same words. Higher price bid words rank the site higher in the list. You are only billed for that click if the surfer chooses to view your site. Many Pay-Per-Click programs offer other benefits such as updated lists of commonly used keywords.

4. In the Real World, we live…OffLine

You business may be online, but…remember that in the real world, everything else is offline. Utilise the myriad media advertising available: Newspapers, magazines, the radio, the television. Send out press releases to distribute your information to thousands of people across the country you live in.

5. Net-keting

We are not islands unto ourselves. Many online entrepreneurs share similar marketing ideas as you. Networking with these people via link-exchanges and customer referrals could bring exponential growth to your online business. However, caution must be exercised in the choice of a networking partner: everything that you recommend is a reflection of yourself/your business, hence you owe it to yourself to do due diligence and ascertain that your networking partner is reputable.

Your web site is just like your business, in fact it is an extension of your business in some cases and it IS your business in others. Your advertising campaign must address each of these methods to the best and fullest extent possible given your advertising budget.

Let’s take a look at how you can use these different advertising methods to your best advantage:

Using Articles to market your web site

Short articles are a great way to generate traffic to your website. Articles can be used to keep the material fresh on the site so that your customers keep coming back, they can also be used to ‘advertise’ your site on web sites owned by others. Placing your article on article submission sites allows others to download it and use your article in their newsletters and on their web sites. Of course there are links in the article that point to your site for more information or other reviews etc. These links are great as they help increase your standings in the search engines.

The articles can be about any topic and you will find there are hundreds of article submission sites available to place your articles on. Most are free as they need fresh information so that their customers keep coming back as well. Iwantabusiness.biz is a new article submission site that I have started to give you an idea of what one is like. Feel free to post your articles on this site if they pertain to small business or home based businesses.

Using Affiliates to market your web site

Affiliate programs can add thousands of independent sales people to help market your products and services.

Over the years I have been involved with many businesses, and one of the things I remember from my Amway days was that as an individual, I could only do so much. I have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year in which I can work. I will hit a maximum point of sales that I can handle by myself. After that I’m done. The only way to do more is to automate and have others duplicate what I do. The same is true on the web. We need to automate and duplicate what we do so we can have others expand our sales for us. The first part of this equation is duplication. We can have others follow what we do and sell our products and services for us and pay them a portion of the profits. This is different than having employees. Employees have no requirement to sell. They are overhead that must be paid regardless of sales. That is NOT what you want for a new business. Keep your hard earned cash for other things. What we need is someone that is willing to do the work for part of the profits. This is where affiliate programs come in to our formula for success. Affiliates are basically a partnership between web sites to advertise and promote products, services, or information for a share of the profits. When someone they refer to you buys, you pay them a percentage of the sales. Result? More traffic, more sales and less time required by you to find the customers as someone else does it for you.

What else can a good affiliate program do for you?

• How about driving more traffic to your site!

• Build brand awareness as more people visit your site from the hundreds or thousands of affiliates that are advertising for you.

• Obtaining qualified leads that you can follow-up on to increase or up sell to.

• Increasing the links to your site which will increase the ranking of your site on the search engines resulting in more traffic and more sales.

There are all kinds of affiliate programs. Some programs charge to be a member and some do not. Some are web based and some are software programs that you load on your computer to set up and track the sales and affiliate yourself. Which one you use is up to you. Here are a few that I have found.

Affiliate Net – This is one of the more affordable server side affiliate programs. With this software there are no monthly fees only a one time software charge. At the time of this writing this package sold from $49.95 to $99.95. Referral Software – This package is also server side although more expensive, it has many more features and is worth while to consider if you are serious about earning a lot of money with your Internet business. At the time of this writing this package sold for $299.00.

Click Bank – This is a web based affiliate program. By signing up on their web site you have access to over 100,000 affiliates. There are monthly and set up fees.

clixGalore Affiliate Networks – This is a web based affiliate program. There are monthly and set up fees.

I highly recommend affiliate programs. For the reasons listed above. Remember they will help drive traffic to your site, which means more sales and you can use the affiliate programs to offer others services and make the commission once you are done with the client. This could be a good business all by its self.

Using Auctions to market your web site

Ok, you have a product or service you want to sell; you need to let people know about that product or service and you don’t have much money to spend. Imagine a place that gets over 3 million customers that are ready, able, willing and looking to buy everyday. It is a Super Mall!

Ask any business person what they would pay to be in a mall that got 3 million visitors a day. You can see the dollar signs light up in their eyes… both in terms of cost and sales potential. Remember my goal from earlier in the course when we talked about business planning? I need to have 4200 visitors a month come to my web site in order to sell 420 copies according to my business plan. Well E-Bay gets 3 million visitors a day! Do you think that might be a place that I would want to advertise my books or my web site? You bet! In fact I have sold quite a few of my other books on E-Bay as well as bottles, baseball cards, clothing, computers, software, training, video and much more. So can you.

Let’s take my Weekend Chef’s guides and see how I can sell them on E-Bay, Yahoo Auctions, or MSN Auctions. First I need an account. This is simple, but does vary based on who you are signing up with. Follow the instructions (at the end of this page is an excellent course on how to really make money on auctions, but this will get you started). Once you have an account, we now need to place something for sale. Think of the auction site as your web site As such we need to create a web page that offers you product/service for sale. I use a software package call Auction Wizard 2000. They have an excellent program that allows you to try it for 60 days before you have to register. It is so easy to use as well. Using Auction Wizard, I can create an auction page and automatically post it and repost as needed to any of the supported auctions. No special knowledge of html is required. Simple fill in the blanks and add any pictures or graphics and I’m done. It also will track the sales, send emails to successful bidders, track inventory and so much more. If you are thinking of doing auctions, this is one piece of software to take a hard look at.

Back to selling my guides and building my business. Within the auction listing, I can place a link to my site, offer a free download of some chapters of the book, of course, I will need your email before you can download. Remember, I need to keep you coming back. Be careful here, E-Bay does not like you selling outside of their auction so make sure the visitor is not allowed to buy from your site at that link. Well, now we have given something away for free (a chapter of the book), we have the visitors email address, and we hopefully will get a bid on the product/service. If not, we have the email to follow up. What has it cost us? Each item up for auction on E-Bay cost …. are you ready for this 30 cents to list it plus a small percentage of the selling cost. If I list my Weekend Chef’s Guide to Sushi on E-Bay with a starting price of say $1 it will cost me a total of about 30 cents for the week. 30 cents to reach millions of potential customers a day. If I sell the book, I will have recovered my 30 cents and started building my customer email list as well.

Now I could write a whole web site on using auctions, but this page is just how to use auctions to market your business. You can sell items and make a profit or you can just list items and build a customer database to market to later. Either way Auctions make a great way to market your business.

I have on my website a couple more tips on using auctions as well at rd-webhosting.com or visit my eBay store for other eBooks that are available from time to time.

Using Auto responders to market your web site

Depending on the products, services or information you are selling auto responders may be able to automate a good portion of your web site business. An auto responder is a piece of software that checks email for certain words or phrases and responds according to your wishes. For example, you may have received a newsletter by sending an email to me with Subscribe as the subject. My auto responder sees that email come in and has a set of actions defined that when the subject has subscribe in it that it will email back to you our newsletter. Another thing that the auto responders can do is following up with your customers at predetermined times with a predetermined letter. This is good for driving traffic to your site after they have visited and left their email address such as to subscribe to a newsletter or download a free chapter of an e-book or other information you have made available. For my training business I send up to 4 different emails to each person that request my guide to increase their income. Each email introduces them to other benefits and services that are available. Some of the emails will offer a discount or free training class as an incentive to sign up for a class. All of it done without me having to get involved.

Auto responders can be installed on your computer or used via the Internet. Some are free and others you have to pay either by the email address or based on the number of responses you want to program it to respond to. Here are some links to auto responders on the web as well as a software package with a trial version you can use yourself.

Promasoft: This is the one we use with our servers. I highly recommend. They have a trial version that is a full version. It places a header in the outgoing email, so you will want to register once you have it up and running. I think it is a great program.

GetResponse: This is also a great program, although, this one is a subscription service. It can be a less expensive way to try out an auto responder. They do offer a free account as well.

This is part one of a multi-part series of Marketing you web site. In the next section we will cover marketing you web site using banner ads and classified ads .

Selling an item or service through the internet can be a grueling task, without question. And most internet marketing techniques either don’t work, or have been overused. Marketing through self-promotion is a new, innovative way to sell your products, while at the same time advertising your skills. Providing your customers with information about yourself and your background can put them at ease with their impending purchase, and assure them that you care about their best interest. This fresh internet marketing technique may just be one of the best sources currently available.

One way to utilize internet marketing through promoting yourself, is to regularly participate in online communities. These can involve discussion groups, chat rooms, or message boards. Any forum where you can interact with the public is a great form of internet marketing. As you regularly visit these online areas, you will get acquainted with your peers, as they familiarize themselves with you and your business.

Another great internet marketing technique is composing informational articles on subjects that you are interested or skilled in. The end of the article should include a byline, and short bio about you. Adding your web site address is also a helpful marketing tool. Submit the articles to numerous e-zines and article directories for even more internet marketing power.

Have you ever wanted to be a teacher or professor? Why not teach an online class devoted to your area of expertise? Chat room classes have become a favorite on the web, and now an outstanding marketing source. A chat room can easily be installed on your web site. Before each class begins, be sure to tell your students about your education, background, and business. This method of internet marketing is exceptional, because it allows for continuous interaction and a commitment to learn more about the subject at hand. The more that you promote and market yourself, the more others will want to know about your business and goals!

Did you know that there is a way that you can actually create content that will help generate plenty of relevant and valuable one way links pointed at your site? In the same way that articles can be written with the objective of getting as many readers as possible to click through the links in the resource box at the bottom of an article, you can also specifically write content with links in mind.

The accumulation of links has been made a lot easier by the rise of blogs in recent times which tends to make linking and creation of links very easy.

How Useful Is Your Article To Other Sites?

When one is looking for links, the focus changes from your prospective clients out there to fellow bloggers in more or less the same line of business. This means that you have to be familiar with blogs that are closely related to the topic or subject area of your own blog.

What kind of content would they be interested in referring their visitors to at the moment? These are the sort questions you will need to ask yourself and answer accurately before you can even begin working on a strategy to get related high-traffic sites to link to your content.

Select A Hot Topical Issue

Yet another direction to take is to select hot topical issues to write about. Especially where it is directly related to or deeply affecting the industry or topic you usually cover.

Actually the idea here is that the more passionate people are about the issue, the better.

Then you have to be careful to write about it in a different and refreshing way. If for example you can look at the whole raging debate in new light, the better. Whatever you do, just remember that you cannot afford to bore you potential audience. This brings us to the next point.

Controversy Sells, Controversy Will Get You Links

For centuries offline newspapers have known this great secret to high sales. Controversy never fails to sell newspapers. In the same way that it sells really big on the newsstands, controversy can also get you plenty of links. There are numerous examples on the net to prove this. For instance controversial pictures have had the effect of getting thousands of links pointing at them literally overnight.

Admittedly, getting a controversial photo to post at your site or a controversial topic to write about is far from being an easy task. However the huge advantage you will have from this day on is that you will know exactly what you are looking for and therefore it will be a lot easier to find it when you always keep in mind what you are looking for. Whatever you are doing, which ever site you are visiting always keep the thought at the back of your mind that you are looking for something controversial to help you win links. If you do this for any length of time, then chances are pretty high that sooner or later you will get an idea.

Get Into The Conversation

It is really all about creativity and the powerful ideas that you can generate with the sole objective of coming up with the sort of content that can help you accumulate many precious links to your site within a relatively short period of time.

However your idea creation needs to be controlled so that you concentrate on your particular niche and other closely related niches that compliment yours. To be able to so this successfully, you will need to get into the conversation going on in your niche. At any given time they will be a certain discussion through comments left in blogs and discussion groups about some issue related to the industry in general. By monitoring the comments on the major blogs and also discussion groups and forums, you will be able to even participate in this conversation. This is important since it will give you the added confidence of writing your content.

Participating in these conversations also plays another very important role. And that is, it will enable you to test your ideas before you turn them into content.

Conclusion

When you create content with links in mind, it dramatically increases your chances of accumulating them. More so when you use the tips supplied in this article.

Content is still the King of the Internet. Most people go online looking for information about their favorite topics, or about whatever is on their mind at the moment. Frequent Internet users seem to have an insatiable appetite for information on various fields.

So, if you want to drive targeted traffic and pre-qualified potential buyers to your website, you really must publish useable information online in the form of quick-to-read but interesting keyword rich articles.

Here are four reasons why you must do that.

Reason #1 – Get Premium Exposure for Your Website

It’s much easier to achieve high search engine ranking for article pages than for your homepage or salespages. Search engines are crazy for fresh content on practically every topic under the sun.

So, write your articles surrounding less competitive keywords (research those at Nichebot.com) or edit those keywords into already existing articles of your own. You will have a much better chance of getting your article indexed by major search engines.

Just be sure to place a link to your main website in the article by-line or resource box.

Reason #2 – Get Automatic Back Links from Authority Sites

Each time your article and site link are republished online, it provides a back link to your website. Back links are regarded by search engines as a sort of recommendation for your website. If your site has a number of quality back links, it can quickly improve the search engine ranking.

Submit your articles to online article directories. In most cases it’s free. Many directory sites are regarded by major search engines as authority sites, and are spidered frequently for new content. This means the website link you include in your article will also be indexed from the site where it is found.

Offer your articles for reprint as well. When other website owners republish them on their own sites, it will develop even more back links for your website.

Reason #3 – Improve Your Conversion Rate

By conversion rate, we mean the percentage of website visitors that convert to paying customers and sales.

You can boost your credibility and convert more website visitors into a paying customers by providing them with interesting and informative topic articles, and then introducing them to related products you have for sale.

On the other hand, simply displaying products on your website, with no related information or content, will likely result in a low conversion rate. It’s important that you use articles to first prove your credibility and your knowledge in your field.

Reason #4 – Your Cost is Practically Zero

All you need is your thoughts and your computer. If you can write a letter to a friend that explains the details of some topic, then you can write topical articles to publish on your own site and submit to other sites.

However, if you don’t like to write, or simply believe that you can’t, you can still have original keyword rich articles written for you.

An original 400 word niche article on a topic of your choice might cost you $5 to $7 at JustArticles.com – but the potential value is enormous in terms of bringing targeted visitors and buyers to your website.

With numerous ways to advertise your home-based business and web site, it can be hard to choose which internet marketing methods to utilize. While some of these marketing tools are favored more than others, a few have been deemed as the most effective. Using these internet marketing options cannot only bring visitors to your site and promote the business name, they can also assist you in the plight to accomplish your goals.

Search engines are one of the best internet marketing methods. A few of the larger search engines will allow a web site to buy their ranking for a specified price. This is considered an excellent internet marketing technique because of its low cost and effectiveness. Pay-per-click (PPC)programs are also praised in the internet marketing community. In these programs, the website is only charged for individuals who visit the page. The pay-per-click program also utilizes the use of keywords, which greatly influences the success of internet marketing. Many pay-per-click programs offer site owners a list of frequently entered keywords, a huge benefit for the internet marketer.

Most business owners will start an enterprise that they interested in or are knowledgeable about. This knowledge and eagerness to learn about the product can be an effective source of internet marketing. Many business owners are now using their education and proficiency to write informational articles to submit to e-zines and article directories. Most owners will write the articles free of charge in exchange for a byline and credentials to be published under their work. This is currently one of the best free forms of internet marketing available.

There are thousands of other marketers that are going through the same experience that you are. Networking can be a great way to compare similar internet marketing ideas, while also exchanging web site links and business information. When choosing networking partners for your internet marketing campaign, be sure that the individuals are a respected and honored member of the business community. To be successful in internet marketing, you must be friendly and inviting, while also staying aware of your business associates.

The importance of articles in the success of today’s internet based companies is immeasurable. They are the life blood of product promotion and drive traffic to commercial web sites. Articles are key elements in making web sites produce profits. And business owners must include them in their marketing campaigns in order to create credibility for themselves and their product or service.

Submitting articles for publication creates links to your web site resulting in higher ranking on the search engine result pages. The higher a site ranks the bigger slice of the traffic flow pie they receive. With increase traffic to your web site comes more profit and potential for producing other income streams as well.

It is not enough to just stuff your site with articles; there are other elements to be considered as well. You need these additional elements to obtain the maximum benefit articles can provide. A well written article will peak the interest of site visitors and keep them coming back for more. These added elements can also prompt visitors to recommend your site to others.

Here are four tips to help you spice up your articles to produce more traffic that will result in increased attention to your site.

1. Keywords and Keyword Phrases.

An article must be centered on keywords and keyword phrases. Visitors to your site are looking for something specific. Their at your site because they may have been sent there via a search engine as a result of typing in a keyword or phrase they were looking for (e.g. Toyota Camry, Tax Lawyer etc).

You need content on your web site that has the keywords that are related to what visitor’s are searching for. For example, if you maintain an auto parts site, you must have the auto parts listed in your article. Look for tools on the internet that can help you determine what keywords and keyword phrases are mostly sought after. You can use these tools to determine what keywords to use and write about.

2. Keyword Density

You must use the keywords and keyword phrases you choose throughout your web site content. Keyword density is important for search engines to “feel” their way to your site. Web site content should have at least ten to fifteen percent keyword density for search engines to rank them high in their results.

Keyword density is the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in an article. The number varies depending on the number of words used in an article. An effective article must have a keyword density that is not too high or too low. With a very high density, the essence of the article is lost and may turn off a reader as well as search engines. It comes off as overeager, and a low number may be ignored by the search engines.

3. Good Article Content

Like what is stated above, you cannot just riddle an article with keywords. They must also be regarded as good reading material. Articles must be able to entertain people as well as provide good information and help for their needs. Articles should be written well with correct spelling and good grammar. If you want people to trust you, make sure your writing is well thought out.

People respond well to figures, facts and statistics. Try to get great information and as many facts as you can. A good and well written article will boost your reputation as an expert in your chosen field or topic. As more people believe in you. They will be able to trust you and your products.

4. Linking Articles

Here’s another important thing to remember. If you are going to submit articles to e-zines and/or contribute your articles to newsletters and other sites, DON’T ever forget to include a link to your site. A little resource box with a brief description about you and your site should always be placed right after the articles you submit. If people like your articles, they will most likely click on the link directing them to your site.

I have been in internet marketing for over ten years and have seen marketing techniques come and go. Some are still around and some are new and innovative. Below you will find what I believe to be the best and most effective online marketing techniques.

Article Marketing – Article marketing was and is one of the most powerful online marketing methods available. Not only does it do wonders for you and your business, it is free as well!

Article marketing consists of writing helpful, informative, easy to understand articles that actually help your readers, not try to sell them something. Then you submit them to article banks, directories and ezine publishers. When your article runs in a popular ezine, it can do great things for your business. Writing articles is not as hard as you might think so give it a try. You will be delightfully surprised at how much it can affect your business.

Remember:

Don’t worry about fancy words. People are looking for help, not big words.

Advertise in your resource box, not your article.

Provide real, helpful info and resources, hot hype!

Write from the heart! Let your personality shine through in your articles.

Blogging – Blogging is a newer form of online marketing that just started becoming popular in the late 90′s. Blog is short for weblog and means an online publication in the form of a log or journal. Blogs can increase your customer base, your traffic and your search engine ranking, thus increasing your sales.

Blogging can be done for free through such sites as:

blogger.com

wordpress.com

and livejournal.com

Be sure and update your blog regularly; everyday would be best as people like fresh content, ideas and information.

Ezine Publishing – Ezine publishing has been around much longer than blogging and is far more effective, in my opinion. Your ezine needs to contain helpful resources and information, not just sales pitches. Develop a relationship with your readers. Let them know they can trust you and rely on you when they need your help.

Things to remember when putting together your ezine:

Keep it clean and easy to read.

Limit your advertising and be selective.

Always provide quality content and information.

Add your personality so your readers can get to know you.

Always provide contact info and be accessible.

Be consistent; send your ezine regularly as scheduled.

Be sure and proofread before sending it out.

Online Networking – Online networking, as with offline networking, is very important to your business. This is when you connect with as many people as possible to learn more and share more about your business. Many leads can come from networking. There are several ways to do this online.

Email Discussion Groups: Go to yahoogroups.com and search for appropriate groups.

Message Boards: Be sure and follow the rules for posting and offer your help as much as possible.

Social Sites: Such as MySpace.com, Ryze, Merchant Circle, etc. These can be great ways to make more contacts and get leads.

Joint Ventures – This is when you enter into an agreement with another online marketer that will benefit both sides.

Examples of joint ventures:

Ezine Ad Swaps

eBook Ad Swaps

Subscription Page Ad Swaps

Affiliate Programs

Exchange Advertising for % of Sales

and the list goes on and on. Be creative and come up with new ways you and your associates can help each other.

Podcasting – Podcasting is using digital media files which are distributed all over the internet via syndication feeds. Podcasting is still a fairly new way of online marketing and has great potential. Podcasting can be powerful because it uses voice not written words to get the message across. Offer your articles, do voice interviews, offer a chapter in your ebook via podcast, etc. Again, use your imagination to create new ways to spread the word about your business.

Ezine Advertising – Advertising your business, product, service, etc. in quality ezines can be well worth the money spent. There are a few things you can to to help you choose which ezines to advertise in.

Do a search to find ezines that cater to your target market. For example: if you are advertising kids’ books, you don’t want to advertise in an ezine about cars.

Once you find several targeted ezines, subscribe to them so you can look them over and see if the publisher is reliable in sending them out. You can also look over the other ads and make sure the publisher is selective in their advertising. You can possibly learn what the other readers think of the ezine as well.

Try contacting the publisher to see if they respond to your email. Ask about testimonials from other advertisers. Find out how many ads they run per issue and what the costs are.

You could also ask the publisher to do an ad swap to get an idea of what the response is like. Be selective in your choices and always code your ads so you know which ezines actually deliver.

I hope this article has given you some insight as to how to market your home/online business. I use several of these methods (and should be using the rest) and know from experience that they work!

The possibilities with the internet are endless and we need to keep up with new and innovative ways of marketing ourselves and our business. And we need to keep using tried and true methods as well.

Article marketing is a fairly new, very effective internet marketing tool that allows you to promote yourself, your product, website or service. But, this seemingly simply marketing technique can have explosive results!

As a business owner or marketer, you simply write articles about your product, service or website. In other words, you write about what you know. Once you’ve written your article(s), you start to submit those articles to directories and sites that accept them. From that point, your articles will be spreading across the internet like wildfire…wildfire with your name, site’s name and usually a link to your site included! You see, whenever you submit an article, you include an “author resource box” that includes any information about yourself, your experience, your business and your site’s URL. Anytime that article is published, including on the directory sites, your information must appear along with it!

As a webmaster or publisher, you know that one of the keys to keep your site popular with search engines and to keep your visitors coming back is to have fresh, new, relevant content. Article directories can be the answer to your prayers! You simply search the articles or browse the site and you will find as many articles as you could want to add to your site or publication. All articles submitted to these directories are free to re-print as long as they are reprinted exactly as presented and include the author’s information. There can be site-specific conditions on the reprinting (so be sure to check the terms of each site), but for the most part just stick to the article as presented with all author info included and you’ll be safe!

Some people can get put off by the idea of actually writing something for publication. It can send them back into freshman English class-like anxiety attacks. But, don’t worry most people that use article marketing aren’t Pulitzer Prize worthy writers! In my experience, the best articles and the ones that are picked up and spread the most are the ones that are written in a very reader-friendly manner. Yes, grammar and spelling are important, but what’s most important is that your information is easily accessible and helpful or interesting to potential readers.

If you simply don’t have time or really dislike writing, you can always hire a copywriter or ghost writer to do the work for you. Just make sure that the terms are very clear from the beginning as to whose name will appear on the article, the links to be included, the keywords you’d like the articles to focus on, etc.

If you’re looking for a new marketing strategy, and you don’t have a huge budget…write a few articles! Get your name out there and start getting recognized as the expert that you are. And best of all get mass distribution of the all-mighty links to your website.