• Establish a Plan

This is how you should start, no matter how simple your goals are. There’s no need to buy $1000 software that creates fancy graphs and flowcharts either. A simple plan drawn up with a pen and paper is sufficient. List your goals, as well as the methods that you intend to use in order to achieve them. Also, list some backup options or side goals that you would want to use if your main objectives don’t work out for whatever reason, or have already been achieved and you would like to do something more.

• Keep Track of Changes in the Online World

Anyone that does online marketing, whether as a primary occupation, a side job, a hobby or as an alternate to other means of marketing (print, radio ads, etc) should stay on top of the new things in the online world. This is because you could find some opportunities to take advantage of that you otherwise wouldn’t have even known existed! By reading online marketing related blogs, forums and news sites you can see if there’s something that could be useful for you, such as a new advertising network which has a unique business concept, an up and coming social networking site that is starting to grow, etc.

• Cut Costs Whenever You Can

Now this doesn’t mean that you should go for whatever is cheapest without regard to quality, but there are many ways that you can cut your business expenses online. For example, if you’re using a web host that charges you $25 a month for just 1 website and domain, you could find other hosting companies that can provide you with unlimited website hosting for just $5 a month and still be of high quality. The bottom line is that you need to look at the services that you’re using or are planning to use. Think about whether it would be possible to get the same functionality and quality for a less expensive price. This can be done by contacting your existing partners and providers to negotiate better rates, or comparing other companies online to see if they have something that would be right for your business.

Better Marketing Habits to Establish is a post from: Websites For Sale

Be Social

Social media is a topic that comes numerous times when discussing traffic generation techniques as well as internet marketing in general. This is not without good reason: the majority of people visit social networking sites, so the traffic on these sites is already there. You just need to direct it to your blog. The two best examples in this case would be using Facebook. When you post a new article in your blog, share it on Facebook. Readers will see the title of the post and a summary, where they can click through to your blog to read more if interested. For Twitter, just send out a Tweet about the update and include a link.

Also, don’t forget to include buttons so that users can like and share your posts on their social networking profiles, thus giving you exposure to their friends and followers, generating a potential for more traffic in the process.

Use RSS

RSS feeds are a good way to get people to follow your blog in a way similar to following someone on Twitter or Facebook. When they subscribe to your RSS feeds, people will be able to see in their browser if you’ve made a new blog post. If it’s something that interests them, they will then click through to your blog and read the article you just posted.

Be Patient

Building a steady amount of traffic to a blog is something that takes time and patience. It’s quite unlikely that you will receive thousands of daily visitors after just taking one of the actions presented here. But keep posting good content and keep using the techniques shown here and you will soon start seeing a few visitors on your blog. This can grow in time, you will just need to be patient and continue blogging and actively taking efforts to generate more interest and thus more traffic on the blog you’ve built.

Be Creative

You’re not limited to what was presented here when it comes to getting traffic. Think up of your own strategies to bring in high quality visitors and read up more about things such as social media, SEO and traffic generation to blogs. You may discover some new methods and techniques that you will want to try, which may very well be the solution that you were looking for to finally get the amount of visitors you wanted.

Tips for Promoting Your Blog: Part 2 is a post from: Websites For Sale

Establish Good SEO Practices

If you have a blog, then you’re already at a slight advantage over other sites, since search engines such as Google tend to love blogs. But you would still need to take some actions to give your blog “better SEO”. The first thing would be to think about the inclusion of targeted keywords in your blog posts. Optimize your posts for your targeted keywords by maintaining a density of around 1% to 2%. Try not to over do it, as it would look like you’re just keyword stuffing. Also, don’t force keywords in phrases where they would make no sense. Search engine algorithms have been updated recently to detect such things and you will end up being penalized for having nonsensical phrases in your posts that are obviously designed to boost your rankings rather than give your readers some useful content. There are a few plugins that will help you analyze the SEO qualities of your blog posts, for example SEO Pressor for WordPress. Use them to your advantage.

Link to it From Your Main Site

If you already have some steady traffic flowing to your main website, then including a link to your blog can be a logical thing to do. If you’ve just launched your blog, then including a mid size square button on your site or making an announcement on it can build some interest in your blog rather quickly and bring your some much needed traffic to it. After all, if your site visitors don’t know that your blog exists, they won’t visit it and will just stay on your website.

Announce it in your Email Campaigns or Link to it in your Email Signature

If your blog is new, having an entry about it in one of your email messages that you send to your mailing list is recommended. You already know the importance of linking to your main website in your messages by including a link to it in your signature at the bottom of the email. You can do the same thing with your blog in your subsequent communications to your customers. Of course, if you’ve made a new and interesting blog post, you can also make this the topic of one of your email newsletters. Rather than copying your blog post in your message, link to the relevant post on your blog.

Tips for Promoting Your Blog: Part 1 is a post from: Websites For Sale

The great thing about internet marketing is that there are many tasks which can be outsourced to others for a relatively low amount. You also don’t have to maintain a permanent staff on hand like in many other businesses (unless you actually want to). Most of the tasks related to running an online business can be outsourced to freelancers that you can find in online forums or on freelancing sites such as Fiverr or Odesk. Here are certain things that are easy to outsource:

* Content creation

If you do article marketing, or have a blog that you need updated regularly, you can have this part outsourced to a content writer that can deliver the content that you need based on your specifications.

* Landing page and website design

If you are an affiliate marketer, you probably run a few different campaigns at the same time. It can be quite hard to find time to design all the landing pages for your advertising campaigns. You can outsource this task as well. It is possible to have a freelancer with experience in online marketing and web design create landing pages for your offers based on your specifications, including lead capture boxes or affiliate links, etc.

* Graphic design

If you need graphics, logos, etc. designed, outsourcing the process can be an excellent idea. Sure, there are many programs out there such as Photoshop and GIMP that allow you to create your own graphics for your marketing materials, however learning how to use them to get professional looking results can be quite difficult if you don’t have much experienced and aren’t very skilled in the graphic arts. You can find people who can, for example, design a logo for your site, or edit a picture in Photoshop for just $5 on many freelancing websites.

* General administrative tasks

You can get a “virtual assistant” to help you with many of the aspects of running an online business. This can include things such as responding to customer inquiries, uploading new pages and videos to your web server or to various sharing sites, updating your social media pages with your recent promotions, etc. Having a virtual assistant usually doesn’t cost that much, depending on how many hours of work you would need done by them every week. On various freelancing sites, it is possible to hire someone for less than $10 an hour.

Save Time On Your Online Marketing By Outsourcing is a post from: Websites For Sale

• Use Only Unique Content

In most cases, article directories only accept content that is unique and has never been posted anywhere before. It doesn’t matter if you wrote it, or if it has been posted on a site that you own. Your content needs to be unique. Search engines frown on duplicate content and so do visitors. If someone starts reading the article and notices that they have already seen the exact same information some where else, they will probably just move on to something else and not bother continuing.

• Avoid Making too Many “Salesy” Articles

There are way too many fake “reviews” of online products being posted all over the place and this is something that seems to be especially popular when promoting internet marketing related stuff such as e-books, membership sites and courses. The articles usually go like this: “Product X is a SCAM!! Arrghh!!! Oops… Actually, It’s Not, Buy It!!!!!” See, the thing is these might have been effective 6 years ago or so… but not anymore. The problem is that there are simply too many of them and the reader will automatically see that your “review” is completely bogus and you are just trying to make money by selling your own, or an affiliate product.

Articles that you post should always include useful information about your niche. For example, if you are promoting an “alternative energy” guide, you could post something about the different kinds of ways you can generate alternative energy and their pros and cons. Or, you could go into detail about how a certain method works and then explain why you think that it would be suitable as a solution for someone looking for an alternative energy generator for their home. Believe me, this is much, much more likely to result in someone visiting your site and buying the product you are promoting, as opposed to simply going on and on about how great the ‘ACME Green Energy Super Guide’ is and why everyone on the planet should drop everything that they’re doing and rush to buy it. Keep the sales pitch for your website. If a user has clicked through to it, then it means they are seeking more information about what you just told them in the article and now would be a good time to propose some products to buy.

Some Article Marketing Tips is a post from: Websites For Sale

• Look through dropshipping websites

There are some website out there such as DH Gate, TradeTang and Alibaba that are a real treasure trove for all kinds of merchandise. Anything like clothing, electronics and jewelry can be found there. The good thing about these sites is that they are mostly aimed at business owners who are looking to acquire merchandise rather than at individual consumers. This means that you can easily find dropshippers or buy merchandise in bulk. This is the good thing. But the bad thing about these sites is that they also contain many scammers who will either rip you off and not send anything, or ship something different than what they advertise.

But there are ways to protect yourself from that. Obviously, you can apply what we covered in the previous article which would be to make a test order first to see if they deliver. But you should also check the seller’s feedback on the site. See how long they have been active and how many positive comments they have from others who have done business with them. Also, look to see whether they have a website and phone number. While this is not a guarantee of safety, it does make it more likely that you will be dealing with a legitimate supplier rather than a scammer. If possible pay with PayPal or a credit card and avoid sending money through Western Union or Money Gram, as these services are preferred by scammers due to the fact that the transaction cannot be reversed.

• Look at internet marketing forums

Most “make money online” forums will have a section that is dedicated to eBay selling or dropshipping. Check it out to see what others are saying. You may find the contact information for some good suppliers, complete with comments from forum members who have used them and were happy with their transaction. You might even find some members of the forum who are suppliers for a wide variety of merchandise and who can drop ship to your eBay buyers.

Dealing with someone from a forum can be safer than dealing with a seller on Alibaba, as the supplier will often be well known in the forum and have members who can vouch for him. But this is not a guarantee that everything will go well. Don’t forget to use common sense when you are looking for a dropshipper, no matter where you find him. Always try to check their reputation out before you decide to use them as a supplier for your eBay online business. If you are careful, then you will reduce the chances of getting scammed when doing business with one.

Selling on eBay: Choosing a Good Drop Shipper: Part 2 is a post from: Websites For Sale

While this first statistic was not especially surprising to anyone, what followed next may raise a few eyebrows. Of all business owners that had an online presence, nearly 40% were not entirely satisfied with the results that it was bringing them. Some were not happy with the way their website looked and wanted one that was more professional and more attractive to customers. Some others had a website and were quite happy with the way it looked and worked, but they were not convinced that it was doing them any good, as they did not see their website bringing them the amount of customers that they needed. It has also been said that small business owners (outside of the technology or marketing sectors) did not have much knowledge of how internet marketing worked and only a minority of them (14%) wanted to spend some time studying techniques to make their site better and to figure out how to deploy betting marketing efforts such as SEO and other internet advertising, in order to get more visitors to their website.

Ok, this maybe news and it is always nice to know some stats… but what does this mean to internet marketers? The bottom line is that there is a wide open market of local business owners who would want to use your services. Some of them want better websites. Some want to do some SEO on their site to get a better ranking on search engines. Others would want to use internet advertising in order to bring in more customers but are not sure which kind to use and are hesitant to buy ads on their own.

For those of you who are just learning internet marketing, or who are doing something else (CPA, Clickbank, eBay sales, affiliate stuff, etc.) and don’t get the results you want, this is a great opportunity. What you need to do is simple: learn how to create simple, yet functional websites. Learn how to optimize pages for SEO and build backlinks. Learn about the different kinds of online ads (business directories, classified ads sites, PPC, etc) and how they work. Compile a list of tutorials and learning materials (there are hundreds of videos, articles and blog posts on these topics, all free) and study them for about 2 weeks. Then you can start targeting local business owners and providing them your services as an internet marketer.

Internet Marketing Use In Small Businesses is a post from: Websites For Sale

• Social Media

Again, social media. This is something that is talked about a whole lot in internet marketing circles. Of course, there is one big reason for that: it works. Think of it, if it was ineffective, there wouldn’t be thousands of guides, forum posts, etc. about it. There are two things that you would need to do if you are promoting your site on social networking websites:

• Create a page for it

Facebook lets you create a fan page for a business. You should do so for your membership site. Give a bit of information about it and make a nice looking, but not too pushy, sales page as well. People can also “like” your page. The more people like it, the more popular it becomes.

• Make a post about it

With Facebook, you can post on your wall that you’ve created a new site and invite your Facebook friends to check it out. On Twitter, you can send out a Tweet with the link to your website included in it.

But to make your social media use even more effective, consider creating a promotion for those who access your site through social media. A discount on the membership price works very well, but there are also other things you can do to add value such as adding an additional product, or giving a free personal consultation with you, etc.

• Email marketing

If you already have a mailing list, email marketing could be an excellent way to market your new site. This would work even better if you have released products before that were liked by your subscribers. All you would need to do to make use of email marketing would be to send out an email to your subscribers and let them know about your membership site. If your list is made up of people who have already purchased products from you, then they will be more likely to join your site.

Another way to build a list would be to release a free product and give it to people in exchange for opting in to receive emails for you. That would allow you to build a list of subscribers who are interested in internet marketing course products and might want to join your new membership site. While building a list from zero would take a bit of time, it is nonetheless a very good marketing method and something that you can consider doing alongside other promotion methods such as forum posting or social media promotion.

Promoting Your Membership Site: Social Media and Email Marketing is a post from: Websites For Sale

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.

Let Your Members Promote Your Site for You is a post from: Websites For Sale

• Content management system

Basically, it will be the software that resides on your server and will be powering your entire membership site. This will allow you to add content and manage your site. There are hundreds of different membership site systems out there. Some are commercial, while others are open source systems. The best way to select a good content management system would be to first read some information about this. You can find this in many webmaster and internet marketing forums such as Digital Point and the Warrior Forum.

Basically, some points that you should compare the various systems on are:

• Security – Is this system vulnerable to any kinds of malicious attacks and are there any known security vulnerabilities affecting it?
• Functionality – Does the system give you all the features that you would need to manage your site well. Is it able to be fully integrated with payment systems? This will allow members to be given access right away after they join.
• Flexibility – Are there any limitations on how much content and what kind of content you can add to your site? Is there a maximum number of users you can add?

• A Payment System

This will allow your membership site to take payment from members and can be fully integrated with your content management system in order to activate accounts as well as deactivate those that did not renew their membership.

The payment system that you use will process credit card payments and allow you to receive the proceeds of your membership site subscriptions. The most common payment processing system available right now is of course PayPal. Many membership site owners use it because of its popularity and the fact that it offers many API features that can integrate very well with the majority of content management systems out there. PayPal also supports recurring payments, meaning that your subscribers will not have to pay manually every month. Rather, they will be charged automatically unless they themselves cancel their subscription to your site.

Although PayPal is the most popular system right now, there are other payment processors available too. Some examples are MoneyBookers and Plimus. It is also recommended that you use more than one payment processor, in case someone has problems using one. Creating a business account is free and integrating multiple payment processors is not that difficult, all you would need to do is to add the right code to your membership site. This could also be convenient for users, as for example someone might not have money in their PayPal account but might have some in their MoneyBookers account and would want to use that to join your site rather than paying with a credit card.

Creating Your Membership Site: Some Other Things You Need is a post from: Websites For Sale