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.

When you create a membership site, you need to promote it in order to get people to subscribe to it and thus make some money from it. We have already seen how using internet marketing forums could get you the members that you need to your site. But what about using your existing members to promote the site for you? This is indeed quite possible.

If you run a quality site that is very helpful and informational, many people will tell their friends about it and encourage them to join if they want to learn a few things about online marketing. Indeed, word of mouth marketing can be quite a powerful tool. But if you want to be even more successful with it, then you will need to give incentives to your members so that they recruit others to join. This can be done by various means such as:

• Giving a discount to the member being referred. If someone has been referred by an existing member of the site, they would get a discount on their first month’s membership.
• Creating a contest. By doing so, you can offer a prize to the top 3 people who refer others to your site. This will encourage members to get their friends to sign up for it.
• Giving a special bonus once someone has referred a certain amount of people to the site. This could be a product that you own, or maybe a one on one coaching session with you.

By doing these things, you will encourage members of your site to refer others to your site in greater number than what you would have ever though possible before. But if you want members to tell others about your site, there are also a few other things you need to remember:

• Run a good quality site. This means having useful and informative content on it. It also means that your site must be easy to navigate and function well. Nobody will like a membership site that goes down every few minutes and will definitely not want to recommend this kind of website to their friends.
• Update your site on a regular basis. This doesn’t mean that you will need to add new content every single day, however you should give your members the impression that your site is updated regularly. If members see that your site looks “dead” with no new information added to it in quite a while, then they are less likely to stay members and even less likely to encourage others to join.

Remember, that one of the best advertising tools would be word of mouth referrals. This works well in almost any business and it will definitely work well if you run a membership site. All that you need to do is to give your members the necessary incentives to promote your website to others and chances are, they will actually go ahead and do it.

Starting a social media page is a great advertising method and has numerous advantages over other types of web marketing methods. But in order to make the most out of it, you need to take certain actions that will increase both your visibility and popularity on social networks. Sure, there have been some pages that were receiving virtually no traffic and then went viral when a user stumbled on them and shared it with his friends. However the odds of your page going from zero views to millions of them without action on your part are roughly one in a million. Here are some ways to promote your social media page:

Have a link or button on your main website.

If you have a quality business that brings in recurring customers, having a link to your social media page on your main site is a great idea. This will let your customers see your page and add it to their profile (i.e. “liking” your page on Facebook or “following” you on twitter.) In turn, this can generate an increased amount of traffic to your social media page as their friends see you and decide to check it out. They may also add you to their profile for THEIR friends to see and so on. Companies, big or small, are including a social media button or link on their site in increasing numbers. What are YOU waiting for? It only takes less than a minute to paste in a snippet of code.

Hold attractive promotions on your social media page.

This could be in the form of a discount, a free trial, a 2 for 1 special, etc. The possibilities are quite endless. If you own a brick and mortar retail business, such as a clothing store, you could also include a printable coupon for some merchandise. Many big name stores have started this practice, so why shouldn’t you? The amount of profit that you will make from increased sales due to a higher number of people finding out about your social media page will quickly surpass the small loss that you will take as a result of offering discounts.

Include it in your email newsletter.

If you have a mailing list and send out email communications to your users, you could include something about the launch of your social media page in your newsletter. Then, in subsequent newsletters, just include a small footer saying something like “Join ABC Inc. on Facebook!” or “Follow us on Twitter!” You might think that your users will be reluctant to use your social media page because they’re already receiving an email newsletter from you to keep themselves updated. This may be true for a few users. A good strategy to use then is to follow point number 2: offer them a unique promotion for joining you on a social network.

When your trying to get backlinks for your website there are a number of ways you can do this which are:

1) Write articles and submit them to article websites

2) Build a blog on your website and write very useful articles and submit these to social network sites like twitter, digg, facebook, delicious

3) Submit your website to classified advert websites like craigslist, gumtree,hotfrog and loads of others

4) Write comments on blogs with a link back to your site on a blog that is in a similar niche to your website

5) Join forums that is in a niche similar to your website and write a number of posts with your anchor text keyword link in your signature

6) Answers questions in yahoo answers with a link back to your website

7) Write a squidoo lens, hubpage and wiki page linking back to your website

8.) Create a facebook group and get all your friends to join and ask them to ask all their friends to join.

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To run a succesful internet business you need to work hard. By working hard i mean keeping your website upto date with correct information and content. Making sure your website is user friendly with easy navigation

The key to driving users to your website is making sure you work on your SEO (Search engine optimisation).

Your website needs to be unique and different from anyone else and offer decent products or a service which they will want to come back again and tell their friends.

Having a blog attached to your website is a good way to keep your high rankings on google, as google likes websites that are updated daily with relevant content that matches the website