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Even if you know how important it is to market your business on the internet, you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend each month, and you may not be an expert on Search Engine Optimization or Keyword Advertising (yet).

This article is about using consistent, free (or cheap) marketing strategies that you can start using today to make a difference in your business.

The Goal of marketing your business on the internet is to get consistent traffic to your site from your target market.

The three key words to remember about internet marketing are Consistent, Targeted, and Smart.

Consistent marketing practices will help you build a trusted presence on the web, and catch people who visit the same sites regularly. New people are always suspect, and you may not start to get results until you’ve been around long enough for people to trust you.

A Targeted strategy will focus on the type of person who is most likely to be interested in your product or service. If your ideal customer is a truck driver between 40 and 50 years old, you should not be marketing to young single moms on Myspace.

Smart marketing means using the tools the big kids use. Find out what successful marketers are doing to get such high traffic and do what they do. My mentor Walter Hailey always told me that “It’s easier to copy genius than to create mediocrity.”

It will take time to create the kind of web presence that will generate consistent traffic (and revenue) for your business, but as long as your effort is targeted, consistent, and smart, you will attract quality customers without spending thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours of your time.

Let’s get down to specifics – what can I start doing in my business tomorrow that will put me on the path to generating more traffic for my site and putting more money in my pocket?

I will assume that you already have a website for your business, and a professional email address with a unique url (not generic like yourname@gmail. com or business@yahoo. com). If you don’t have one yet, you can get one free from Google. Your next step is getting your business name, image, and content onto the web where your target market will find it and become a customer/client.

There are three main categories of marketing strategies to investigate as you are creating a marketing plan: Networking, Blogging/Article Writing, and Advertising.

1. Social or Business Networking.
Become a part of a networking community where you can build your own profile or web page and interact with others in the community. There are a ton of networking sites on the internet, some of which are mostly for socializing about niche topics, others are more focused on doing business. Choose 3-5 networks to join, and make sure all of them are connected to each other, and back to your website.

Here are a few to get you started: Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, Direct Matches, Shmoozii, Biznik

2. Blogging and Article Writing.
They go together like peanuts and raisins. Every article you write for the blog should also be published on the web to as many article directories as possible, with your link included in the resource box. The more places your link appears on the web, the better. Update the blog frequently, put an RSS feed on your website and social networking profiles, and tell your friends about it. Search engines love fresh, new content that matches keywords, so including keywords in the blog content can help searchers find you.

For the beginner blogger, Google’s Blogspot is a good way to get started. Wordpress, Squarespace, Typepad, and Thoughts.com all have great templates and can be set up in a day.

As for Article Directories, you can submit by hand, but I wouldn’t recommend it. People getting real results with article writing have an automated service that submits articles to hundreds of directories automatically. I have found two: SubmitYOURArticle (web-based) and Article Submitter Platinum (Software). They are not free, but they are worth it if you choose article writing as one of your marketing strategies.

3. Advertising using Adwords, keywords, pay-per-click, or traffic exchanges.
A much less personal approach, advertising can give you access to a huge number of people for a relatively small cost – and most sites have free trials or sign-up bonuses that can help you create an ad that works before you start paying for it. Use the same keywords that are on your website and blog in your advertisements, and search engines will like you even more.

My short list of Advertising sites would include: Adland Pro, Bananapile, ReaLook, Spiderjump, and HitsFrenzy. Also look at Clickable – a service that can manage advertising campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others simultaneously.

Using a few of the services from all three of the above categories in tandem will create a tight web to capture your customers and send them to your site. As long as you update Consistently, Target your campaigns accurately, and be Smart about where you spend your money and time, you can see results in a little as a few weeks and secure your long-term success.

Best of luck with your research, stick with it, and remember that even in the tedious moments, owning your own business is so much better than going to work at 9am in a job that doesn’t fulfill you.

Do Good and Be Well.

Colin Turner has been an entrepreneur since the age of 17, and is a regular blogger and writer about home based businesses. He has become a mentor and trusted source for information on Internet Marketing for Home Businesses. http://www.marketingsystemforsuccess.com

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Marketing your Business on the Internet – The Basics

I’ve seen some crummy sites. What about you? How could they make any money? A poorly done website ruins credibility and runs visitors away before your site has had a good chance to present your offer.

Having spent 35 years in retail furniture we learned that if you want to sell top end furniture fast enough to make money each month there are several things retail store managers have to do to make it in today’s world.

First – The store has to be clean. The floor, the walls, the actual furniture itself, and, the bathroom! That’s where our comparison falls apart as there is no bathroom in a website.

Second - The store has to “make sense”. The arrangement of the inventory, the signage, the bedspreads on the beds, and the logic of store branding logos, posters, and policy signs has to look professional as well. The overall look has to be clean and “feel right”.

Third - What about colors! The ladies in this business know things about color and what goes with what than most men would never know.

In furniture stores the colors need to be those that are popular in furniture today, not last year. I wonder how that applies to websites?

Fourth - The salespeople have to speak clearly and without obvious defects in their speech habits. It’s the same with websites. In retail stores the salespeople need to be clean and spiffy and give their full attention to the customer in order not to appear disinterested.

You can see where this would apply in websites to pictures of people, like in testimonials, and scrupulous attention to detail and spelling.

Spelling! There’s a biggie. It deserves a section of it’s own. It is said that a potential customer’s enthusiasm will notch down a bit for every misspelling and grammatical error. It pays to proofread!

Experts suggest that you should have another person do your proofreading for you, since you are not as likely to catch all of your own mistakes.

Fifth - The sales area has to be kept neat and businesslike, but not barren and empty. Like the rest of the place, it has to be neat and clean. It should be easy to purchase!

Sixth - One last thing, in our stores we always strove to have the best music possible playing in the background and it had to sound good everywhere in the store. We had it at a level high enough to be heard well but not so high that it made it difficult to converse.

In the website world that might compare to having clean, easy to understand audio and video. Hmm…is there a place for appropriate background “score”?

Your business website should come across to your visitors as a professional site with which to do business. It should be welcoming and help them around in order to make the sale as easy as possible.

Your website says a lot about your business, so you need to make certain it is saying positive things.

If you want to make sure your website isn’t falling short on the details of general houskeeping, find a few sites that are trying to do something similar to what you are attempting, and use them for comparison sake. That’s a good place to start.

And my favorite! Keep it simple. My sales pages start at the top and go to the bottom. How are you going to lose your vistor with that?

Keep it simple, kill off the clutter, make it easy to read, and don’t allow spelling and grammar errors. Your customers will like that and be more inclined to buy.

Oh, one last thing. Ask for the sale. Don’t waffle here, be strong. You know what you want them to do, and, if your copy is any good, it contains many benefits for your visitor. Customers want those benefits (like more sales, higher conversion rates, and fewer returns) and they are willing to pay to get them.

Be very direct, but smooth. Say to the customer… “Click this button and when you get to Paypal check that the quantity is correct and that the price is right. If it is, continue with your purchase and start profiting from an improved website right away!

Thank you for your business!

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Riley West has trained retail management for 30 years. Starting in 2006 Riley began studying Internet Marketing methods and Web Page Design. Go to his popular blog today and you’ll receive a FREE MONEY MAKING PDF, A NEW, FREE EBOOK, and a good READ too! Go to :=> http://www.makinganinternetmarketer.com

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Six No-To-Low Cost Profit Tactics For Your Website

The sheer number of e-commerce websites that exist today is enough to overwhelm any consumer and make the Internet marketing challenge for business owners seem insurmountable. Bob Regnarus, also known as “The Leads King,” has made a successful business out of helping business owners drive more traffic to their websites and inspire visitors to buy once they get there.

Bob was selected to offer his web marketing expertise in “Start Your Own Information Marketing Business,” a new book from the Information Marketing Association. This new book is an essential how-to guide for anyone interested in starting an information marketing business, and features insight from 12 of the biggest names in the industry.  In it, Bob shares his secrets for maximizing online sales through search engine optimization and more.

Here is the Leads King’s 3 Basic Phases to Getting More Website Traffic and Sales Now

1. Understand What You Really Need from Your Website

Determining what your website can and cannot do is the first phase.  Setting the right expectations for a site can help businesses invest their time and effort into marketing to target customers.   The point is to avoid wasting time on people who will never become customers.

Remember your website should be a lead generation tool. So, you want to focus on targeted leads that are a perfect match for the products and services you provide. Make sure you build an opt-in option on your website’s landing page.  This is where you make an offer in order to collect contact information from visitors.  You might offer free, valuable information such as access to a newsletter or a complimentary lesson or session.  This is important to your strategy for making building your list and starting a customer relationship that leads to more sales.

2. Build an Attractive Site With Your Objective in Mind

The second phase of a web traffic campaign is to build or alter a website so it fits the new strategy for generating sales leads and attracting target customers.  An attractive website is easy to understand, and is interesting and engaging.  It does not mean you should spend money on expensive graphic design or Flash animation – in fact Bob strongly advises you not to waste your money on elements that will not directly help you increase your website sales conversions. Instead, focus on communicating to visitors what your business offers and why they should be interested.

3. Drive Additional Traffic Through Advertising, SEO and Promotion

The third phase of the campaign is to make it easy for potential customers to find your website through search-engine optimization (SEO), article marketing, pay-per-click advertising and other advanced promotional tools.

Investing in online advertising is crucial to promoting your website, but there are also many low-cost strategies.  Effective SEO tactics include creating external links, regular website updates and keyword saturation.  Other little known channels for driving website traffic include promoting sites through blogs, articles and press releases.   According to Bob you don’t have to be a technological wizard or a marketing genius to improve your search engine ranking and generate traffic to your website.

Follow Bob’s step-by-step directions and you will get more website traffic and sales. To learn more about SEO opportunities and discover how to create effective advertising campaigns with search engines look for more advice from Bob in Start Your Own Information Marketing Business. This information marketing how-to guide is available in bookstores now.

About the Author:

Robert Skrob, President of the Information Marketing Association teaches new entrepreneurs and small business owners how to build 6 and 7 figure income information marketing businesses simply by modeling top experts like Bob Regnarus. Now you can get his FREE Video revealing how 5 info-marketers easily created and marketed fast-selling products & how you can too. Get free access now at http://www.infomarketingstartup.com

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How to Get More Website Traffic & Convert Visitors into Buyers in Just 3 Steps

The Truth About Generating Online Website Traffic

It is easy to build a website these days, with many of the free blogger networks offering everything from ready-made templates to HTML tutorials. It is that easy, but generating traffic to your website, well that’s another matter. With almost anyone propping up a website or two, getting the right amount of attention will take some effort on your part. It is, in a way, similar to a bookshop seeking customers. With many new ‘bestsellers’ vying for shelf-space, the only way these books get picked up is as a result of ‘getting the word out’. That phrase is the key to generating a healthy dose of internet traffic to your website. The major handicap that most internet marketers face is a lack of internet traffic, mainly because they failed to get the word out.

So let’s say that you have managed to get the website up and running, now the only thing left for you to do is to go on a marketing binge. Getting visitors to your website is the objective, that’s a given. So with that in mind, there are a few things that you can do to ensure that you achieve your objective.

You can start by incorporating a feed on your website, try ‘feedburner’ ( a google tool that allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers), as that seems to be the popular choice and it is free to use – which is an additional incentive. The point is that any time you add fresh content to your site, it gets converted into a ‘feed’, making it possible for many feed subscribers to access it immediately. The whole idea behind the ‘feeds’ is that it makes content available to multiple internet users and provides content in real time, allowing you to garner some valuable traffic in the process. Now feeds are just a small step in the right direction. You will need to make sure that your site url is posted to the various search engines out there thereby increasing your site’s reach.

But the above method is utilized by nearly every webmaster and may not get you the huge increase in traffic that you are looking for. So here are a few additional strategies.

You can visit other websites; provide comments to blogs resulting in valuable one way links. You can utilize some of the paid traffic sites to increase your traffic. Though webmasters do use the paid traffic option as a marketing tool, it works only if the traffic provided is real and not one delivered by ‘web robots’ (used for web-spidering at a much higher speed than humanly possible). It’s essential that you check out the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page of the ‘paid traffic’ site to see if the site in question provides this source of traffic. If they do not, then you can be sure that the traffic delivered by such sites is not that beneficial.

Article marketing, now that’s a method that works seamlessly. The traffic generated by way of posting articles to some of the major article directories is so effective that webmasters have started using it for affiliate marketing, another cool way to make money as long as you are able to generate the traffic. But here is the catch, you need to be able to write well, for it is only a good article that will generate traffic. In addition to the directories, you can try your hand with some of the classified sites such as google and ebay OR utilize the benefits of google ad sense.

There is no doubt that marketing online will take a little effort on your part and it will be sometime before you can see some meaningful results. However at the end of the day, having worked through some of the approaches listed above, you should be able to generate a healthy dose of internet traffic to your site.

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Garry Macdonald & Kieran Smyth provide marketing success systems to help you significantly boost your business profits. Want to learn more about how to develop amazing marketing strategies? Claim Garry & Kieran’s popular Free Marketing Magic Report identifying marketing strategies you can implement immediately guaranteed to explode your sales, available at: =>

http://www.professionalsinmarketing.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Generating Online Website Traffic