Previously, we’ve seen some good habits that you can establish to start off the year well with your online marketing efforts. Here are some more tips that will help you make the most of your online marketing activities, no matter what line of business you’re operating in.

• Understand Your Audience and Target It Correctly

There are still many businesses which aren’t targeting their audience right when it comes to promoting their products and services online. While advertising on a “general” site can sometimes be profitable, most businesses will get better results with advertising that is targeted towards customers which are more likely to buy their products. If you use search based advertising, then you’re already doing this if you’re targeting the right keywords, meaning keywords which people are likely to search for when they’re interested in buying something that your business sells.

But if you use on-site advertising, such as by buying text ads, pay per click ads, video or banner ads on various websites, then you will need to be more careful as to whether you’re really displaying your ad to the right audience, meaning people who will visit your website because they’re likely to buy your products, as opposed to being simply curious. Many advertising networks now let you choose the sites on which your ads will be displayed. You can also target your advertising to specific geographic areas, such as cities and states, plus also select demographics such as age, gender, income level, etc. By thinking about who your buyers are and targeting the segment of the population that they represent, your ad campaigns will be a lot more likely to be successful.

• Track Your Results on a Consistent Basis

One important advantage that using online marketing brings you is that you can track your results and see how you’re doing, often in real time. However, there are still too many online marketers that aren’t taking full advantage of these tracking capabilities. There are free tools and scripts which you can install on your web server that will tell you exactly where the clicks to your website are coming from, how long a visitor has stayed on your website, which pages they have visited, etc. Since they’re available to you for free, you should definitely take advantage of them.

Many advertising networks also provide you with detailed information about how your ads are doing, such as which ads and keywords get the most clicks, etc. Use these metrics to determine which of your ad groups and advertising methods are performing at their best, so that you can focus on using these, and get rid of or make changes to ads or marketing methods that are simply causing you to waste time or money. Keep tracking how your ads are doing each day and at the end of the month, compare the statistics to see how each ad group has done. This will give you a much clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t work too well for you.

We’ve previously seen some of the changes that could happen in the world of online marketing in the year 2012. While it’s good to know about what will be new in online marketing, it’s even better to know how you can apply this in a more practical context, as in your own online marketing efforts. If you want to establish some better online marketing habits for this year, there are certain things that you should do. Of course, not all of these tips will apply to you as some might be specific to local businesses, e-commerce websites or affiliate websites. What you should do is to think about what will make sense in your own situation and how you can integrate it within your business. Of course, you should also develop your own methods, strategies and ideas if you’ve resolved to have better success with internet marketing during 2012.

• 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.

You’ve probably heard about how effective it can be to build a blog to help you with your online marketing efforts. It is true that if you have a website, adding a blog can be very useful, as it will deliver interesting content that will be both useful for your readers and also will be well loved by search engines like Google. This will help you rank higher for your targeted keywords and ultimately lead to more money for you in the end. Building a blog is straightforward enough, but there are some things you would need to be aware of first. You will see some of the things you can do to make your blog a more effective tool.

Choosing a Good Blog Hosting Provider

If you already have a website, then your web host will probably allow you to add another website either on its own domain, or as part of a subdomain of your existing one. If you don’t then you should sign up for a basic shared hosting account to begin. Avoid using the free services like Blogger, as they’re not really a good choice if you want to make money from your blog. A paid hosting account gives you more flexibility and reliability over the content of your blog.

Figure out How You Will Make Your Blog Profitable

If you already have a website where you’re selling your own products, one of the ways to make your blog some money for you would be to link to the relevant pages of your main website from articles posted within your blog.

But there are also other ways that you can monetize a blog even if you’re not selling anything directly online. For example, you can include affiliate links to products that you provide information on in your blog, or that are related to its content. So if your blog deals with mobile phones, you can include mobile related affiliate offers on your blog. It is also possible to add some pay per click ads from a service such as Adwords or Bidvertiser, where you will get paid for every click that someone makes on one of the ads served on your blog.

Decide What Kind of Content You Will Have On Your Blog

Of course, you need to decide on a niche for your blog. But also, you will need to determine what you will be talking about more specifically in that niche on your blog. Your blog could, for example deal with new happenings in your niche/industry. Or you could provide product reviews of products that you sell on your own site or are an affiliate of. And then there is the possibility of putting up informational and educational content that’s related to your main niche. Of course, you can also combine all of these possibilities in your blog, but it is a good idea to know what kind of posts you will be making once the blog is up.

One complaint that many online marketers have is that they don’t have the time to do all the things that they would want to in a day. We all know that being an internet marketer is sometimes not easy. Certain tasks, such as creating landing pages, writing articles, creating graphics and logos, etc. could be quite time consuming. However, there are ways around this which would allow you to save a lot of time and focus on your marketing efforts, rather than to get bogged down in the technicalities of doing the job.

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.

Using article marketing is a good way to drive some traffic to your sites, as it works in two different ways. First, you can receive traffic from people who are viewing your article and then decide to click through to continue on to your site. You also have some SEO benefits from it, as every time you include a link to your site, it counts as a one way backlink which can be very useful in boosting your search engine ranking. But are there some things you should do to increase the efficiency of your article marketing efforts? Definitely. Here are some of them:

• 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.

A recent survey taken in the United States by a technology consulting firm gives some very interesting figures about the use of internet marketing among small business owners. Based on the results, the majority (close to 80%) of small business owners had a website for their business. Of those that didn’t the majority were planning to create one in the coming year. This result is really not something that is surprising. It has been said time and time again that creating a website is beneficial for any business owner, even those that run a very small local enterprise. It makes them easier to find by their prospective clients, many of who exclusively use the internet in order to locate a business that they want to use.

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.

Of course, having your members do your promotion for you is a very good strategy when you run a membership site, due to the fact that it is free and would actually not require any marketing efforts on your part. All you would need to do is to create a decent membership site and give your members a few incentives to promote it for you. But there are a few more free methods for promoting your membership site. Let us examine them here:

• 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.

When it comes to creating their own products, you can see a lot of online entrepreneurs creating an ebook or a more complete course that comes with videos and several bonuses. Of course, these are all good ideas and can be very profitable. The issue, however, is that if you use this business model, you would only make one sale from each customer and will have no residual income from them. Sure, you can get them on your mailing list and try to sell them some of your other products or promote a new product that you have created to them, but this will require additional marketing efforts on your part. Creating a membership site will eliminate these issues. There are several advantages that creating a membership site has:

• Recurring income

Instead of just making a sale once, you will be able to get a monthly fee from your buyers. As long as you update your site on a regular basis and thus provide them with interesting and new content every month, they will stay. In fact, some of them could stay for many years as long as they find your site to be useful for them. This is much better than simply making a “one off” sale.

• Better perceived value from your buyers

Many people have seen a lot of ebooks, especially in the internet marketing niche. Plenty of them have bought these ebooks before and have been disappointed with their content. However, there are a lot of buyers out there who see membership sites as more valuable and useful to them than just a course or a guide. This is because the sites often have a collection of tools, several sections of learning material, a discussion forum, etc.

• Increased marketing and money making opportunities

With a membership site, as opposed to a stand alone product, you have more opportunities to sell to people, especially once they become members. Sure, having a mailing list can be very good and can make you successful. But the issue here is that plenty of ebook buyers are already on the mailing list of every guru (real or wannabe) in town. They get so many of these emails each day that they might read one or two and ignore the rest. But if they become a member, they will pay a lot more attention to what you have to say.

So if you are promoting another product, whether it is an affiliate offer or one that you created, they are a lot more likely to take interest in it. Also, if your methods involve the use of services, like web hosting or online phone services, you can become an affiliate of these and include your affiliate link in the relevant section of your membership site content. This gives you an even greater opportunity to make some money from your buyers.

Of course, setting up and managing a membership site will require a bit more work than just selling an ebook. But it is not impossible to do and remember that in terms of profits, it can be a very beneficial activity for you.

Craigslist is a popular and free online classified ads site. While it certainly isn’t as popular as say Google or Facebook, it is still one of the most popular sites on the internet, with millions of users from all around the world visiting it. This has given online marketers a lot of ideas on how to monetize all of this traffic. Unfortunately, Craigslist is not what it used to be when it comes to internet marketing and you have black hat marketers to thank for that. What some people did went far beyond just spamming CPA offers to downright lying to people such as promising them jobs or mortgages if they complete a CPA offer for a credit report or a biz opp. As a response to that, Craigslist has upped its security mechanism and has even posted warning in many of its sections that specifically mention affiliate marketing.

But this doesn’t mean that is is completely useless to online entrepreneurs. There are a few ways to use it for your online marketing efforts. Here are some of them:

• Promoting your e-commerce site

If you have a website that sells merchandise, then you can still use Craigslist to promote it. For example, if you sell clothes or electronics in your online shop, then you can post an ad in the proper section of Craigslist and get some traffic to it that way. Make sure to post in the right section, or your ad will be flagged down rather quickly. Also, don’t post the same ad in different cities at the same time. While there is nothing wrong with a global e-commerce site posting ads in multiple cities, remember that Craigslist is not mainly aimed at internet marketers, but rather for small, local businesses to post ads in the city where they operate.

• Providing services

If you offer some services that can be done over the internet, then you can use Craigslist to get some business too. For example, if you create websites for businesses and individuals, then you can put an ad in the right section to promote that. There are plenty of services that you can do over the internet and have your clients pay your by Paypal or another payment system. Some examples include: translation, writing, graphic design, flier/advertising design, promotional video creations and a whole lot more. If you want to appear more professional and therefore more trustworthy when providing these services, you can always create a simple “business” style website that gives details of what you do and your prices, as well as get a toll free phone number to get your clients to reach you. You can get one for a few dollars a month and then forward it to your cell phone, or just leave it to always go to voicemail. Here’s a tip to get more sales: put a special discount or coupon code in your ad and tell readers to mention it when they order.

In the past, we have talked about what a great tool social media can make when you are trying to promote your business online. But in order to get good results from your campaigns, you will need to do things the right way, rather than simply plunging into the social media world unprepared.

We have already made a comparison between paid and free social media marketing. While there are some differences between both types of advertising, the following tips will be valid for both paid and free advertising on different kinds of social networks. Here are some things to keep under consideration:

• Will you do things yourself, or hire outside help?

Social media marketing is not complicated. However, just like any type of online project, it will require that you spend some time on it and acquire the necessary knowledge to do things right. You may want to spend about half an hour to an hour a day checking up on your campaigns and updating your pages. If you can’t do this, you may want to hire some outside help, either from a dedicated online marketing firm, or from a freelancer that is knowledgeable on social media marketing for small businesses.

• Which networks will you use?

There are plenty of social networking sites out there. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are some of the most popular ones, but there are also some small and emerging networks that are used by many people. Some of these smaller networks could be quite popular with people residing in a certain region. What you need to do is to figure out who your targeted audience is, and what networks they frequent. You will then be able to focus your marketing efforts on the social media sites which are most popular with your target audience.

• How will you keep your audience interested?

Remember that social networking sites are places where new content is posted all the time, ever single second of every day. While users come to these sites to learn things and inform themselves about what their friends and local businesses are doing, remember that these sites are not an encyclopedia or business directory. As such, you need to keep your content fresh and interesting for your readers. This can be achieved in various ways. For example, if you run an auto customization business, you may want to put up pictures of work that you have recently done on customers cars. You can also put up info on upcoming promotions or events related to your business. While you don’t have to update your page every single day of the week, you will still need to put up updates on a regular basis.

By keeping these tips in mind, you will be able to draw a much bigger benefit from your presence on social media sites. It is always good to have a strategy in mind, but you might need to make some changes to it if you realize it is not giving you the desired effect, or if you want to try using a new social networking site that has just become popular.

Now that you know how to find a virtual staff, it is time to go forward and to actually set up your business in an efficient way to take full advantage of the opportunities that having a staff to help you will provide.

There are basically two things that they can be helpful for. Either by helping you with your own internet marketing efforts or by providing services to other internet marketers.

Let’s say that you are an affiliate marketer that is pushing Clickbank ebooks. You can use your staff to do certain things, such as writing articles that you will submit to article directories, building landing pages for you, building backlinks, etc.

You can also provide services to other internet marketers and business owners as well. This can be done by simply applying the “Buy low – sell high” concept that nearly any business in the world uses. Now say you own a landscaping company. You would charge the client a certain rate for landscaping services, which would factor in the cost of materials, operations and wages for your employees. You would then picket the difference as your profit.

The same thing can be applied online as well, and doing so actually is more advantageous in many aspects than running a “traditional” business for many reasons. First of all, you won’t have much overhead, as you don’t need a physical office from where to run your business. You can run everything from home… or anyplace that has a computer and internet access, for that matter. It’s that simple.

All you have to do is to find clients that will pay you for your services. This can be done by putting up a thread on internet marketing forums or on classified ads sites that will attract customers who will pay for your services. You will then outsource the work to your virtual staff and pay them a lower price than what the client is paying you and thus pocket the profit.

Say, for example, that a client is paying you $6 to write a 400 word article to promote their website. You would then pay $3 to the outsourcer and then pocket the profit. While this may seem like just a few dollars a profit, if you get larger products and many new clients you can make a lot of money by outsourcing services to your staff members.

One of the best things that you can do with this method is to basically do a combination of both providing services for others and using your virtual staff for your own marketing efforts. That way, you have two streams of income at any time.

Now, how do you make sure that all your operations will run smoothly and that the staff that you hire will be the very best? Join in tomorrow for more information about how to ensure that your staff members will be capable of doing the job and how to avoid common scams.



If you are doing search engine optimization or search engine marketing, it is possible that you have seen some advice pertaining to long tail keywords. It is quite possible that you may have asked yourself: what exactly is a long tail keyword? And what benefit does it bring to my site exactly?

To give you a quick answer, long tail keywords are those which have more than 2 words in the main keyword phrase. What makes them so powerful is that these keywords are often what people search for when they are ready to purchase a certain product or service online. By making your site rank high for these keywords, you increase the chance that a buyer will see your site and therefore make a purchase from you.

Targeting long tail keywords during your online marketing efforts has a lot of advantages. Here are some of them:

These keywords convert better than general ones

Traffic that comes from long tail keywords is more likely to convert than traffic which comes from general ones. This is a known fact throughout the internet marketing industry. The reason behind this is because these keywords are a lot more targeted and specific than general ones. People who are searching for more detailed keywords such as “buy iphone” or “iphone discount” or “used iphone New York” are more likely to buy a product rather than someone who is just seeking for “iphone”.

You can put in your product name in them

Basically, people who are looking for a specific product online can be in two categories. They either have already made a decision to buy a certain product or they are seriously considering to buy it but they are seeking more information about it. In both cases, what you need to do is to target the necessary keywords and have a landing page that will be able to convince visitors that your product is exactly what they have been looking for.

Don’t require as much efforts to rank higher

In the internet marketing world there is plenty of competition. Unless you have a product or service that is extremely unique with no competition (highly unlikely… chances are somebody will copy you sooner or later) or is in a very obscure and specific niche, you will see others online promoting the same product or service that you are.

If you are in the dog training niche, you will see, for example that keywords such as “dog training” or “dogs” are already dominated by your competitors. The problem is that many of these competitors are large businesses which have a large budget and staff that is making sure that they stay on top of search engine results. Therefore, going against them is not the best idea. However, if you target a more specific, long tail keyword, such as “make your dog stop barking”, you will find that there are far fewer pages with that keyword phrase. This means that you will not have to do as much SEO work if you want to rank high for it.

If you are using article marketing in order to increase the popularity of your business online, chances are you will need to write a decent amount of articles on a regular basis. While some people don’t have any problem with article writing and actually enjoy it, others seem to have trouble creating enough unique content to get their marketing efforts rolling. Is it possible to write articles faster? Here are some tips:

Get rid of distractions.

A lot of people aren’t able to write articles fast enough simply because they are so easily distracted and not focusing on the task at hand. Turn off the television. Close your email. Close your IM clients. Close any website that is not needed. Doing so will allow you to better focus on what you are doing and complete the required work a lot faster.

Organize everything beforehand.

Taking advantage of the power of article marketing is a great thing. But you need to be very organized in order to have the maximum success. All aspects of your campaign should be carefully planned beforehand. And this means before you sit down and starting writing articles.

Here is what you should do:

Think of what you will be writing about. Will the articles be more of a product review? Or will they instead be general information articles that will give information on the niche of the product you are promoting?

Do the necessary research. If you are already quite familiar with the topic, then you may not really need to do this and can write a great article off the top of your head. That’s great, but what if you are promoting a product on a niche you are not that familiar with? For example, if you are an affiliate for an “alternative energy” Clickbank book and don’t really know much about that. You will need to do some research to get ideas for your content.

Here are some sources of information for you to use:

The product’s website / sales page. You will get insights as to what it does, how it works and how it can help people solve a problem that they have. On some Clickbank products, you will also find a few articles written about the niche in the “affiliates” section of the website (usually a small link at the bottom). Use these to get some inspiration.

Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. A great resource for information on various topics. For example, if you are writing a review of a certain cell phone model, you can find information about it’s technical specifications, features, the countries where it is sold, etc.

Article directories – Go Articles, Ezinearticles, etc. Here you will find some articles already written by others on your niche. What are they saying? A great source of info.

Google – I hope you already know what this is. Simply type some keywords related to your product or niche to find content that is related to it which you can use in your article.

Whether you’re involved in email marketing or social media marketing, it can be extremely tempting to buy more friends or subscribers. Resist that temptation. A lot of companies offer thousands of subscribers, or friends for one “low low price”, but the ACTUAL price of those new subscribers and friends is much higher than you want to pay.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you have no way of knowing how those subscribers or friends were obtained. In the case of email addresses, the addresses could have been obtained either illegally, or at the very least, fraudulently. If that’s the case, well, we don’t need to explain to you why you don’t want any parts of that.

Social media friends could also have been obtained through nefarious means. If someone is offering you a lot of friends for a low price, it’s possible that all of these friends are either fake accounts, or accounts that have been hacked, and used as part of this deal. Again, if that’s the case, you don’t want any parts of it.

Let’s assume for a minute that all of the subscribers and friends you buy were obtained legally. If that’s the case, then you have no way of knowing how many of those email addresses, or social media accounts are still active. People abandon both every day, and there’s nothing stopping these companies from selling you inactive users.

Let’s assume that all the accounts were legally obtained, and that they’re all active. There’s still no way to know that all of the new subscribers or friends you’re buying will be interested in your products or services. You might very well be buying subscribers and friends that are just going to mark you as spam, and ignore you.

If enough people flag you as spam, then you’ll have a hard time getting your emails to make it to anyone’s inbox, and your social media accounts could get closed. In short, the price of those cheap friends and subscribers could be an extreme slow down in your online marketing efforts. In the long run, it’s just not worth it.