Are there any more online marketing tips that you should be applying to your business in 2012? Here is a final list of good pieces of advice that you can use to increase the results that you will be getting from your online marketing campaigns. As always, remember that these are just general tips and you can think up of your own online marketing strategies that will help you gain more from your online efforts.

• Take Advantage of Different Advertising Opportunities

One thing that you should do at the start of this year is to review the online advertising and marketing methods that you’re using and see if they’re bringing you the success that you wanted. While it’s always a good thing to keep doing what works well, there might be some additional online marketing opportunities that you might want to explore to see if they would fit in well with the type of business that you’re running, as well as your budget and online objectives. For example, you could use social media marketing, video marketing, classified ads sites, media buying, etc. Do some research on the different advertising methods and how they work.

• Create Both Short and Long Term Objectives

It’s important to have goals, but the term of these goals should also be considered. Make some goals for what you hope to do and accomplish now, within the current month. Then make some goals for the rest of the year. How would you want your business to grow? What other opportunities would you want to explore during the year? These are all good examples of what you could include in your long term online marketing plans.

• Don’t Forget to Protect Your Data and Have Backup Plans

Nothing can ruin a business like data loss. While this isn’t a marketing strategy per se, it’s more of a business survival tip and is included here because many small business owners and independent online marketers don’t really do. Remember to make backups of both your local files on your PC, as well as of your business website. Viruses, hacking and equipment failures could have a disastrous effect on any business. Having recent and up to date backups can help minimize the damage and get you back up on your feet faster than ever. Having backup plans doesn’t simply involve protecting data, however. It also means knowing what to do when something unexpected happens. For example, one advertising network that you’re dealing with could go out of business. Or an affiliate network that you’ve been running offers for could go bankrupt and leave its affiliates holding the bag. Have some backup partners and marketing options that you could fall back on if something goes wrong with what you’re currently doing. Being prepared for the unexpected is a very good strategy, whether it’s for online business or any other line of commerce that you may be operating in.

It’s not a big secret that when you’re building a website, if you want to get it to rank well in search engines, then some SEO work is in order. This makes plenty of webmasters do their research on various websites, blogs, forums, etc. dedicated to the topic of search engine optimization. Getting information on the topic is of course the way to go and just like with anything, knowledge is power. So the more you know, the more you will actually be able to apply in a practical context on your website. But when you research information, it’s very important that the SEO tips that you read are actually good information and not some of the myths and misconceptions that keep re appearing on many sites. These actually cause webmasters to make mistakes when it comes to SEO and often make them waste time focusing on things that aren’t important.

The issue of wasting time is definitely one to consider for any webmaster. If you’re working on your site, or on your websites by yourself, then in many cases you only have a few hours a day to make things happen. You definitely don’t want to spend that time doing things that won’t matter and won’t help you achieve your goals as far as search engine rankings will go. Instead, you could be focusing on improving the content of your website or actually using SEO techniques that will work.

There’s also one big problem when it comes to bad SEO advice. If you apply the wrong SEO techniques to your website, this could end up actually hurting your chances of gaining a good position in search engine results rather than helping you. Now if you’re just making this mistake on one of your mini sites and you have 50 more of them, it may not be such a big deal, as you can start all over again. But if this is your main business website we’re talking about, then this would be even more problematic.

So the question is, how do you avoid making mistakes in SEO? The first thing would be to look for quality information. This can come from well reputed sources, such as websites and blogs of SEO experts. If you take advice from a forum or any other website where user generated content is posted, then first evaluate what’s being said and whether other members agree with it or not.

Avoid Black Hat SEO techniques. These are methods that take advantage of loopholes in search engines systems and are mainly designed with the hope of rapidly getting a website to go up on a search engine, even though it wouldn’t normally “deserve” to get to that position. Using such methods will rapidly get your website penalized as search engines catch on to them and close the loopholes that were used. If you want to build a good reputation online for your site, you should seek out techniques that allow legitimate and long term growth, not tricks to try to get ahead too quickly.

Previously, we have seen some good approaches to promoting your new web store. As an online entrepreneur, your next question would probably be: how do I make this all happen? Well, the concept of local promotion is not that difficult at all. It all starts with you, the owner. You would first promote to your friends and other people you know closely, then the promotion would spread to their friends, and then finally you would promote to the public in your area. After this, you can start promoting regionally, nationally and then globally.

• Leveraging the Power of Social Media

If you are like billions of people around the world, then you probably have an account on Facebook and maybe one on Twitter. Here, you would start by creating a social media page on Facebook and Twitter for your website. You would then contact your friends by posting your business Facebook page on their wall. It is also possible to create a graphic ad featuring your website, upload it to your personal account and then tag your friends in the photo. Some of your friends may Like your page, or even make a purchase on your site if they need something that you are selling. Since your post will be on their wall, it is possible that their friends will see it and Like it too. The goal here is to create a viral effect that will spread to people.

• Don’t Forget “Personal” Marketing

Even though we live in a world where many of our communications take place online and ads are often seen as impersonal and targeting a wide audience, you can also market your website to people that you know and that you think may benefit from your products. It would be a good idea to print out some business cards with your website and info about your business. These can be ordered cheaply online, or you can just print them yourself with business card paper that you can find for $1 at the Discount Dollar store and a cheap ink jet printer. Pass these around to your friends and people that you know. If you know of someone that would especially benefit from the products that you are selling, then promote your site to them in priority. For example, if you sell smart phones online and you have a friend who just accidentally dropped their iPhone in the toilet, then now would be a good time to market your products to them. If you maintain the stock yourself as opposed to drop shipping, you could just give them the item in person for a cash sale, saving them time on shipping the item and also saving you on shipping costs as well as on payment processor fees.

But running an e-commerce site isn’t like running some sleazy MLM program, is it? So you don’t have to promote only to the people you directly know. There are also some great local marketing methods that you can employ as well, which we will see tomorrow.

If you are going to design your online shop website, or any other kind of business website yourself, then there are a few important tips that you need to keep in mind. These will help you give your users a better browsing experience when they look at your site and it will also be helpful for SEO in certain cases.

• Use the right color scheme

There is a variety of backgrounds and templates that you can use for your website. Some are simple solid colors, while others feature intricate and creative design elements. The most important thing here is that the text of your website is clearly visible to your users. So if your website background is black, then you will need to make your text a bright color, such as white or gold, to stand out.

• Avoid using pre-fabricated templates

There are hundreds of free website templates that you can find online and use for your website. This is great, however you should know that if you were able to download that template for free and use it on your site, then so did hundreds of others webmasters on the internet. Therefore, there will probably be many sites that look just like yours. Don’t be afraid to modify the design to make it look more unique. You can easily do this with a graphics manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP. This would allow you to customize things like backgrounds, headers, buttons, etc. You can also pay for a custom template to be designed for you, however this can cost between $25 and $1000 depending on what you want done and how complex it is.

• Check to make sure your site works with all browsers

Test out your website in all browser, like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome to make sure that it works well and all elements appear correctly. This will provide a better user experience for your visitors. Also, it is a good idea to create a mobile version of your site as well. Since there is an increasing amount of visitors that use smart phones like the iPhone or Android phones to shop online, this can be very useful. There are many free tools and tutorials that are available online to webmasters which would allow you to accomplish this.

• Test all elements of your site before deploying it

This is an important part. Once you are done designing your website, make sure that everything works well and is bug free. Check to make sure that all your links work, for example. There are automated tools that can let you easily do that and can save you a lot of problems, as it often happens that a typo could make a link not working or an image not displaying correctly. Also, check your payment gateway to be sure that it sends your customers to the checkout page correctly and that the prices, minus any discount offers or promotions, are reflected in the right way on your site. Many payment gateways have a “Sandbox” mode for testing purposes.

When it comes to getting visitors to your business website, there are plenty of ways to do it. Some of these methods are free, while some others require an investment to be made in terms of advertising budget. But what if you don’t have that much money to get started? Is it still possible to get free visitors to your website? The answer would be yes. Here are some of the ways that you can employ.

• Get Listed in Google Places

Time and time again, online marketing experts will recommend that anyone who has a website for their business gets a free listing in Google Places. Why? A few simple reasons: its free and can help you get visitors, both to your website and to your actual business. All you need to do would be to list your business and it would appear in a few days.

• Put your website on your receipts, bags, printed materials, etc.

Some of your existing and potential clients may not even know that you have a website. By putting it out in front of them, you are increasing the chance that they will see it and go visit it. This also has the effect of increasing customer loyalty. A customer who visits your website will be more likely to buy from you again in the future, as it serves as a reminder that your business exists.

• Use social networking

Facebook is the second most popular website in the world, right after Google. So if you don’t have a Facebook page, then you are leaving traffic on the table. Simply create a Facebook page for your business, filled with information about your latest offerings, and prominently include links to the relevant portions of your website. Create special, Facebook only discounts and promotions to boost its efficiency.

Twitter is also a popular social networking service. It works a bit differently from Facebook: you send out short messages to your followers, called Tweets. These Tweets can include a link to the relevant part of your site, such as the page for a new product, or to a promotion that you are having for the season.

• Have your website on your business sign, your vehicles, etc.

This can serve as a very effective way of getting free traffic. For example, if your business is closed and someone passes by who might be interested in what you have to offer, they could remember your website and then check it out later. Keep in mind that very few people will actually note down your website URL, but will rather remember it from memory. Therefore, it needs to be something that is memorable and something that would not be confused with one of your competitors websites. Remember, you can have multiple domain names pointing to your main website, so if you think your main domain would be too hard to remember, consider getting an alternate one. This definitely has the potential of getting a few extra visitors to your site when you need them.

Previously, we have seen some of the technical aspects of building a website for your small business, namely planning the site building and determining whether you will want to use a Content Management System (CMS) to operate your website. While these are all important considerations, once you get them squared away, it is now time to move ahead and start building your site. Here are the main elements that you would be including in your site:

• Product information

Obviously, you will want people to know more about your company’s products and services. After all, this is why they came to your website in the first place, no? Add some details about your products, pricing, etc.

• Relevant details about your industry/niche

Here, you will be giving your site visitors some information that is not directly related to promoting your products. Like what, for example? Let’s say that you sell laptop parts. You could include some tutorials about how to take apart various models of laptops, how to remove the screen, replace the keyboard, etc. Basically, things that are relevant to what you are selling, without promoting your products too much. You can also include multimedia content here, such as videos as well.

• Background information about your business

This section will simply contain some basic information about your business, such as the types of products that you sell, the amount of time that you have been in business for, who the company leaders are, etc. This will help the visitor find out more about you and will give them the reassurance that they are dealing with a legitimate company.

• Contact information and ways to get in touch with you

Your contact information, such as your phone number and address, should be featured prominently on your site, as well as in the header and footer of every one of your pages. After all, you want your visitors to contact you, right? Don’t make them dig through 10 pages before they are able to find your phone number. You can also include a contact form that will allow a visitor to send you a request for information or an inquiry, and then you can respond to them via e-mail or by phone. Including live chat support on your site is also a great idea, if you will be able to have someone on staff ready to provide support by live chat to your visitors, at least during regular business hours.

• Links to your social media pages

Social media is an excellent business tool, and this has been stated numerous times by industry experts. Because of this, it will always be a wise idea to include links to your Facebook and Twitter pages. Also, on your content posts and product, include a “Like” button for Facebook, which wil let the user share that page with their friends. If your business has a YouTube channel, just link to it from your website. This will allow them to quickly check out all of your videos that you have uploaded to YouTube.

Now that you have seen more information about building a static HTML website, what about using a Content Management System, such as Joomla, WordPress, or Drupal? This is something that many small business website owners are now preferring to do, even though it may seem a bit more difficult to accomplish at the beginning. However, using a CMS has many more advantages as opposed to disadvantages as you will see presented here.

Advantages

• Ease of updating your website. If you plan to update your website on a regular basis, such as adding or removing products, adding new content, adding and removing seasonal promotions and special offers, etc. than a content management system will make this a whole lot easier for you. All you would need to do would be to log into your back end, make the necessary changes and it’s done. No need to use an HTML editor software, or re-upload files constantly to your web host.
• No coding or web design knowledge required. Here, you will not need to have any web design knowledge, or know how to use HTML. All you would do is install the CMS, then install the necessary themes or templates that will be the backbone of your site.
• Good for e-commerce. When you are planning to run an e-commerce website, using a CMS is mandatory if you are serious about it. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all have e-commerce themes, both free and paid, that you can use to manage your website with ease. You can perform operations such as adding products, setting up different prices, coupons, promotions, integrating with different payment processors and gateways, etc. There are also dedicated e-commerce CMS available out there, such as Magento and OS Commerce.

Disadvantages

• A bit of a learning curve. For those who are used to working with simple HTML pages, using a CMS for the first time may seem like it has a learning curve associated with it. You will need to figure out which theme is best for your website, then install it and figure out how to use it to make the necessary changes and customizations. However, there are plenty of free tutorials, resources and help files available online for all themes and content management systems. Therefore, even though you may need to spend a few hours learning how to figure it out, in the end it will all be very easy for you.

As we can see here, using a CMS for your business website is definitely a good choice. No matter what kind of website you want to run, there will always be themes and templates available for you. Also, your site management will be streamlined significantly, as you can simply update your website with a few clicks of the mouse, rather than having to fire up Dreamweaver, make changes to your site, save the new file, then upload it to your webhost and replace the old one. Therefore, there is less work involved when using a CMS.

Previously, we have seen that there are certain things that you need to decide when you are building a website for your business. One of the things would have been selecting a system to manage the content of your site. Of course, the goal of any business website would be to share information with your visitors about what your business has to offer and make them want to buy your products. But you should also have a good back end system that will enable you to easily manage your website, plus add or remove information to it as necessary. Your main options are either: simply put up a static website, or use a content management system, or CMS. Both options have their pluses and minuses, as such, it would only be logical for us to explore them in the context of building a website for your small business.

Using a Static Website

This is by far the simplest way to put up a site. You create the pages, either from scratch, or by using a template or web builder and then you upload them to your web host. Then, you are done. Let’s examine some of the advantages and disadvantages of this option:

Advantages

• Ease of use. You will simply have to create the web pages and upload them onto your server. There are no new systems that you would need to learn how to use, etc. This makes creating a static website quite easy and an attractive option for beginner webmasters.
• Availability of many templates and tools. There are plenty of free and paid website templates and web building tools that you can use to create your site. Many of these are quite straightforward to use as well.
• Highly customizable. You can add any type of content that you want on your site, usually with a WYSIWYG web editor, without worrying about compatibility issues too much.

Drawbacks

• Hard to add or remove information. If you have a static website, adding or removing information, especially if you need to do so on a regular basis, will be quite difficult. You will need to open up the page in an HTML editor, make the changes and then re-upload the page to your web host. While this is certainly achievable, it is not too convenient.
• Limited e-commerce features. If you plan on selling things on your website directly, then managing an e-commerce site that is simply composed of static HTML pages is quite hard. You will have no back end system, so you will have to rely on your payment processor’s system to manage sales, get reports, etc. Also, adding and removing products, adding new promotions, etc. is going to be quite difficult due to the point above; you will need to manually edit and re-upload the page every time.

Conclusion

Using static HTML pages for your business website may be an acceptable option, if you own a business where your offerings do not change very frequently and if you are not selling anything directly on your website.

If you are going to be building a website for your small business, then there are certain things that you definitely need to know. The purpose of a business website is to help people who are interested in your business find out more about it and then contact you to purchase a product or service if you have something that interests them. To create your business website, you have a few choices. Either you can build the site yourself, or hire a web developer to do it for you. Many small business owners will prefer to create a website by themselves, primarily due to the availability of good tools that allow a website to be built without coding, and also due to the fact that professional web developers and designers might sometimes charge more than what some people would want to pay.

When you build your site, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind. Here is some information on the whole web building process that will be useful to anyone that is creating a website for their business.

• First, Make a Plan

Before you begin building anything, it is important that you plan the overall look and feel of your website, as well as determine the kind of content that you will be placing on it. Also, you will need to determine what your website will do for your business. Will it be just a website that will present information about your business and encourage your site visitors to contact you, or will it be something a bit more advanced. If you are selling products, you could, for example, build an e-commerce site that would let people buy your stuff online, without needing to call you to place an order or to visit your location. If you offer services, then you can include an ordering system on your website as well. Planning your site is the first step in putting all the pieces together. Of course, you will be able to make changes as you go along, as well as after when your site has been put up.

• Determine What Platform Your Site Will be Based On

A “platform” in web building usually refers to a content management system that will power your site and allow you to make easy changes to it. Of course, you do not have to use one if you don’t want to. If you want to build the simplest kind of website possible, then you can simply create a static HTML website that will need to be updated manually.

But to make things easier, there are several systems that you can use. Some are general, such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, which work well with any kind of website, due to the thousands of free themes, plugins and additions to these systems that can be used. If you are going to run an e-commerce website, then there are special e-commerce platforms like Zen Cart, Magento and OS Commerce that you can use to base your site on instead. It is a good idea to learn more about these systems and what they can do for you.

Yesterday, we saw that there are certain ways that a local business can employ to attract local traffic that will be useful to them. One of these ways is by doing SEO on your site. Now SEO may seem like it is something complicated, but in reality it is not. There are some very simple things that you can do to make your website look more attractive to search engines and thus rise through the rankings faster than you would have ever thought possible. Also, if you need to do some SEO on your site and don’t want to do all of the work yourself, then there are service providers which can do some of the SEO work for you cheaply.

When we talk about SEO, there are a few things that you need to consider if you want to do proper SEO for your small business website. There are two categories of factors which will affect your position in search engines. One is on site factors and the other one is off site factors.

On Site Factors

How your site will do in terms of SEO will depend on how your overall site is designed and the content on it. If you run a local small business, it is better to focus on targeting keywords that have your main product or service name, in addition to the name of the city that you service. That way, you will have less competition that you need to beat to get to the top of search engine results. This is especially true if you are in a relatively small city, then you might only have 2 or 3 competitors. Also, remember to add content to your website regularly. You may want to add a few articles related to your niche that are optimized to your main keyword and the name of your city too.

Off Site Factors

The main off site factor is the amount of backlinks that your site has. Backlinks are the amount of links coming from other websites and that point towards your site. However, quantity is not the main focus here. Quality is more important. The backlinks need to come from reputed sites which have some kind of relation to your niche.

Learning SEO

There are plenty of detailed, yet easy to understand guides on SEO available online. You can find these simply by doing a Google search. Or, you can look through internet marketing forums to find some useful guides, as well as additional advice on SEO techniques that you may want to use.

Outsourcing SEO Work

Doing SEO for your site will involve doing things such as writing articles, building backlinks and submitting your site to business directories. While these could easily be done by yourself, the main drawback is that they take time to do. If you want to outsource these relatively cheaply, then check out some internet marketing forums, as these have a section where people can buy and sell various kinds of services. You can also look at a site such as Fiverr, where you can outsource many tasks for just $5 each.

An ebook is a great way for you to market your business, website, or blog to fellow enthusiasts who read your blog. If you have a carpet cleaning business, write an ebook on the 10 things carpet cleaners can clean that you can’t. If you have a technology blog, write a howto book on whatever subject you write about. If you have a computer repair shop, write an ebook on installing a hard drive.

When you start your first website or blog, one of the last things on your mind is to write a ebook. But it can be a truly remarkable marketing tool and money maker as well.

There are two types of ebooks, ebooks that cost money, and ebooks used for marketing, please note how I didn’t say they were “free,” more on that in a minute.

When you sell an ebook to your readers and viewers of your website, you are marketing to them because you want to make an immediate profit from the sale of the book. This is a great way to bring in some cash to pay off some expenses, upgrade your hosting, or to put a little cash in your pocket.

Another popular thing to do is to create a “report” rather than an ebook, this is something that you use to lure people into your products and other ventures. When I say lure, I don’t mean it as a bad thing. When you give them something free, you need to get something in return. Whether that is a click to another one of your websites, or a new sign up onto your newsletter, you need to profit from them in some way.

A great way to do this is to have a free giveaway to market a bigger product. So if you have an ebook on how to repair home theaters and you have every known brand and every possible problem in the book, why not create a mini version with only a bit of general information and then up sell from the free version to the paid, more in-depth version of the ebook.

Marketing your first ebook can be very challenging and difficult. But once you get that first one out of the way and written, the only thing to do is to market the heck out of it. Blast it everywhere you can think of, post it on your Facebook, Twitter, message boards, forums, newsletter, and anywhere else you can, and if you do it write, it will be a profitable and great learning experience.

Image Credit: Designing Ebook Covers

Website for sale

Having an electronics business is a great business. Many searches a day are looking for electronic items whether they be ipods, gadgets, tvs, computers, games consoles, etc which is why having an electronics affiliate website linked into Amazon can be a very profitable income if you can market the site correclty and drive traffic to the site. We currently have a number of websites for sale that are linked in with many different affiliate merchants that can make you nice income from the daily searches a day that are put on the major search engines