A new year has arrived and now would be the time to review how you do your online marketing and maybe make some changes for the coming year. It’s important to know that online marketing is an industry where change happens often. This is exactly the reason why online entrepreneurs need to adapt to the changing climate and review their strategies. Many are wondering about how the landscape of online marketing is going to change during this year. It should be known that changes aren’t usually drastic and take a few months to take effect. Here are some things that can be expected to happen during the year:

• Some E-Commerce Sites will Change their Business Models

2011 saw the rise of daily deal websites such as Groupon. There have also been many other sites that followed the same business model, some were targeted towards specific geographic areas, while others were centered around a specific line of product or services. The issue with these sites is that many merchants didn’t get the results that they wanted from them. Instead of getting customers that would be loyal and be willing to spend more at their business, they ended up with many freebie and discount seekers, which simply meant a net loss for them. As such, starting a daily deal website in 2012 is not really a good idea.

For those interested in promoting savings and deals, a return to more “classic” methods is expected to happen. Websites that would offer both printable and online coupons are expected to get more popularity. Also, websites which offer merchandise by a subscription model, such as book clubs and other sellers of items that consumers buy regularly are expected to grow, due to the fact that they can be quite profitable for the owners and also mean good savings for their subscribers.

• Social Media Marketing Will Rise Up and New Methods Will Become Popular

It probably won’t surprise anyone involved in the online marketing and advertising industries that social media marketing will get a lot of attention in 2012. New advertisers are expected to appear on social networking websites, including smaller businesses. Many small business owners, which are looking for targeted advertising options are going to consider advertising on social networking sites such as Facebook in order to get the customers that they need to keep their business running successfully. Another thing that attracts small businesses is that social media advertising can be less expensive than paid search advertising while remaining just as profitable if done correctly.

Social networking sites are considering new ad placement strategies, such as including ads in the middle of users news feeds. Also, advertising inside social media apps, such as games, dating plugins and other applications is expected to get some more attention from those who use social media to advertise. With all of this considered, if you don’t currently run social media ads, now would be a nice time to start doing so.

Putting ads on a website is definitely the best way to monetize it. Ads on websites can bring webmasters money through various business models, such as cost per click, cost per impression, selling an ad space for a fixed amount for a period of time, or running affiliate offers that pay a commission to the webmaster whenever a sale is made by the action of a website visitor that clicks a link on the publishing site.

Website ads can come in many formats. One of the most popular one is text ads, which are commonly associated with the Google AdSense service. These text ads neatly appear in a box on the site. One of their primary advantage is that they’re not obtrusive and don’t interfere with site navigation. However, there are many new types of ads that have become more popular recently.

One prime example are flash based ads, which pop out of their assigned space on the website to momentarily cover a portion of the site in order to catch the user’s attention. These ads sometimes also play sounds. While they are an effective method of advertising since they are an “in your face” kind of ad, there are many site visitors that don’t like them and consider them to be annoying. For this reason, webmasters should limit the use of such ads to only a few pages on their site. Another issue with these ads is that they take some time to load, which means that they could disrupt site navigation for a visitor that has a slow connection. Also, use of flash ads increases the chance of crashing the users browser, especially if they have many other tabs opened at the same time and are using a computer that isn’t that powerful.

Video ads that start playing automatically are also another kind of on site advertising that has gotten more popular recently. Generally, video ads bring more revenue to the webmaster, as their advertisers are willing to pay more for a view or click than with a simple banner or text ads. However, the use of video ads should also be limited for similar reasons. One of the first annoyances about them cited by web users is that they play audio without any interaction from the user. They also put more strain on the users browser, thus making the page “heavier” to load. Some advertisers have taken this into consideration and only show an introduction frame or loop for the video ad in the beginning, and will play the full video when the visitor mouses over the ad to see more.

As a webmaster, you must remember that besides making money from your website, your goal should also to provide your users with useful and entertaining content. Sites that are supported by ads which are very profitable get many of their profits from returning visitors. As such, you should ensure that your users always have a good experience when visiting your website, so covering half your page with ads is not really a good way to go.

If you want to make a full time income online, there are plenty of business models to select from. Of course, it is possible to earn some decent money by providing services to others, such as doing web design, writing articles, sales copies, etc. However, there are some things that you can do to make a full time income without spending all day actually doing the services.

What you can do is to outsource the actual service creation to other workers that you can find on classified ads sites, freelancing sites as well as forums. If your business gets really big, you always have the option of actually getting a physical office and hiring a full time staff.

Here are two business types that you can start:

• Web Design Agency

A lot of small and local businesses right now are getting online and would like to have a website. The thing is, very few business owners have the skills to create a good looking website and many of them do not want to spend the time it takes to learn how to put one together. This is where you come in.

All you need to do is to put together a team of a few freelancers that specialize in web design. It is always good to have people with diverse skills on board, such as one who specializes in blogs, while another one that does flash websites, etc. Basically, you would get clients to pay you for a website. Let’s say you charge $100 per site and pay the freelancer $60 for their work. You would then pocket the difference.

• Digital Marketing Agency

Plenty of business owners are also realizing the potential that the internet has when it comes to attracting new customers. This is where you will be helping them. You can offer a complete marketing package to small businesses, which would include optimizing their website for SEO, building backlinks, creating articles and uploading them to directories, creating and managing social media pages, putting up ads and listings in business directories and classified ads sites, managing their ad campaigns on PPC and media buying platforms, etc. This can be a very profitable business model, as there are plenty of local businesses that would like to advertise online, but don’t really know how to.

Getting Clients

Remember that most of your clients aren’t really up to date on the whole internet marketing scene, so advertising on IM forums is not really the best idea. It would be better to advertise in local classified ads sites, business directories, as well as in local businesses. Doing direct mail campaigns as well as calling up local businesses can sometimes yield quite good results, although these methods of advertising are a bit more expensive and time consuming for you. However if you do great work at competitive rates, you are likely to succeed in building a full time income.

Anyone that is putting up a website needs to have quality web hosting for it. The type of web hosting that you would select would vary depending on your needs and objectives online. However, if you want to start an e-commerce site that would be the main source of income for your business, or if you are an internet marketer, you need hosting that is of the highest quality. Here are some types of web hosting that are better avoided:

• Free web hosting

There are hundreds of free web hosting services. There are also various types of business models in the free hosting industry. Some put up text ads on your site. Others put in banners or popup ads. Some do not put ads on your site at all. While certain people think that free hosting with no ads may be sufficient for a serious business, this is quite a mistake to make. Free web hosts often are not as reliable as some of the better (and not free) web hosting companies out there. Just read some of the comments on message board. You will find plenty of complaints of people’s accounts getting deleted for nebulous reasons, slow or unreliable servers, etc. Some of these hosts will also pressure you to buy their “premium” hosting if you find their free option to be not suitable for you. It is just not worth the trouble, as by saving $10 a month, you might be losing thousands in sales if your site goes down.

• Very cheap hosts

These hosting companies are small web hosts that charge maybe $1 or $2 a month for hosting. This may seem all good, except that they often suffer from the same problems than free web hosts: lack of reliability. Many of these small, “bargain basement” hosts often oversell, which means that they overload their servers in an effort to make money. This can cause downtime and your site to load very slowly, especially at periods of peak traffic. Their support could also be severely lacking, and often consists of just one or two people who answer emails or occasionally appear on the live chat on their website.

• Local hosting companies

Let’s clarify one thing: not all smaller, local web hosting firms are bad. In fact, some of them may have world class data centers and provide top notch service to their webmasters. The issue here is that many of these hosting companies have not established their reputation yet in the industry and as such you may have a hard time finding independent reviews of them. Furthermore, a lot of smaller local hosting firms have smaller budgets. Thus they may not be able to afford to have the latest hardware and the fastest connections to the internet. They may also not have the staff necessary to offer you around the clock tech support, which is a necessity if you are running an e-commerce site.

Now that we have seen what media buying consists of and the various business models available when it comes to paying for your ads, it is time to take a look at two things that are just as important: what type of ads you can run and also where you can place your ads.

There are various types of ads to choose from:

Text Ads – These are similar to the sponsored ads that you would find on Google search results, except that they are served on various websites rather than on search engine results. Depending on the network, you will have a certain amount of characters that you can use for your title and for the body of the ad. Remember, you want people who are interested in what you have to offer to click on your ad, but also to avoid those who are merely curious or looking for freebies. This is especially important if you are paying on a CPC model, as you don’t want to waste your advertising budget on non productive visitors to your site. As such, your ad should inform the viewer of what you have to offer as well as be cleverly worded and attractive.

Banner/Graphic Ads – These are another popular type of ad in the media buying industry. You basically create a graphic ad, which can have various shapes and sizes. Some are the classic horizontal banner, while others are more in a vertical “skyscraper” format. There are also banner ads available in a smaller, usually square format. When you create a banner, you want to do the same thing than with a text ad: captivate the viewer’s attention, but still give them enough information to decide whether your business offers them something they need. Banner ads are basically an animated GIF file, which can easily be created with a graphics program. Or you can also pay a freelancer $5 – $10 to create a banner ad for you.

Popup/Popunder Ads – These types of ads are still being offered, although they have lost most of their efficiency, due to the fact that browsers now have integrated popup blockers and if an ad does get past those, most people simply get annoyed and close it. As such, it is not recommended that you use them if you are promoting a local business, as they are more suited for affiliate offers.

Video Ads – This is a relatively new type of ad, but is growing in popularity. It is basically a mini commercial, like one that you would see on TV. The video is played either before the user watches another video on a video sharing site, or plays automatically when the page serving the ads is loaded. You will, however, need to create a video ad by yourself and have it approved by the ad network. Since this is a new type of ad, their success rate has not yet been fully tested, so unless you have a significant budget to devote to your media buying, it is best that you try the other ad types first.

Tomorrow, we will see where you can put your ads and how to optimize them in order to take maximum advantage form media buying.

When it comes to online advertising options for a local business, there are plenty of choices that are open to you. Some of these options are completely free, while others will require you to spend some money and thus create an advertising budget. But one of the advantages of online advertising is that it is not as expensive as other methods, such as television or radio ads. It is also possible to very specifically target the audience that you want to reach, so that only people who have a high chance of being interested in your products end up seeing your ads.

One of these options is media buying. Now, many of you who are not familiar with online marketing terms may wonder what media buying consists of. Basically, it means that you will be buying advertising space on another website and paying for these ads according to different business models. Here are the ones that are the most commonly used in the media buying industry:

Fixed fee – You pay a certain fee to have your ad displayed in a permanent position on a certain website. This fee could be for a day, a week, two weeks, a month or even longer. Usually with this option, your ad is not rotated, meaning that it stays in one spot on the website for the entire time that you have paid for it. The costs will vary depending on the ad location as well as the traffic that the site receives. As such, the price for a daily ad on a site with a moderate amount of traffic could be as little as $4, while one on a site receiving tens of thousands of daily visitors (such as a popular news site in your city), a daily ad could cost you $1000 or even more.

CPM (or cost per views) – Here, you will pay a certain amount for every thousand visitors that view your ad. Every view is counted, so you will pay the same amount whether a visitor clicks your ad to go to your site or not. Once again, the amount you pay will vary on the popularity of your site, as well as the location of the site where your ad is put in. Ads which are displayed in prominent parts of the site tend to cost more.

CPC (or Cost Per Click) – This is similar to pay per click (or PPC) ads that you see on Google sponsored results. You will pay an amount for each person that clicks on your ad and is thus redirected to your site. Costs will vary depending on the site where you are advertising. They can be as low as $0.01/click up to $1.00 or more for each click you receive.

Tomorrow, we will explore more details about online media buying, such as which websites you can advertise on and the types of ads that you can create for your business.

If you’ve ever sold an ebook, or other digital product, you know that maximizing your profits can be a tricky task. If you take the time to take a look at your products and figure out how they can work better for you, you can increase your revenue significantly.

If you have one digital product, you might be able to convert it into another format to generate more profits. Let’s say you have an ebook that’s getting some sales. Have you considered taking your content, and making an audio, or video product out of it? A video that helps to illustrate the points you make in your ebook could be a great addition to your product catalog. As for an audio product, an audio version of your ebook would do well. Many people enjoy listening to audio books at the gym, in the car, or even when they’re just out for a walk. By converting your existing product into other formats, you can sell it to a wide variety of customers. In fact, you may even wind up selling it to the same customer multiple times.

If your product is a multi-step instructional guide of any sort, you may want to consider breaking it down into weekly lessons, and switching business models. By starting a membership site, you can generate more revenue over time. Let’s say you are currently selling an ebook for $30 a piece. If you convert that ebook into a six month online course, and charge $10 a month, you can double your profits. The downside here is that you run the risk of having a customer unsubscribe before the course is over. This method isn’t going to work for every product, but if you have a good step by step guide, you might just be able to make a membership site work.

Whether you’re running a membership site, or selling digital products, you can always up your sales by offering bonuses to your customers. If your customers are getting something for free when they purchase your product or sign up for your membership site, you will generate more sales. People love free stuff, and by offering them a bonus item, you’re increasing the overall appeal of your product.

Digital products can be highly profitable if you play your cards right. Sell your content in multiple formats, and consider a membership site, either in place of, or alongside your existing products. Throw in a few bonus items, and you’ll see a significant boost in sales in no time.