Once you are done promoting your web store socially, by letting others know about it, then there are some other methods that you can employ to promote your site to a wider audience, outside of your direct social circles both online and offline. Here are some common tactics used by small businesses everywhere that you can take advantage of:

• Offline promotion

While the results may not be as direct and measurable as online marketing, offline promotion still works and is done by many small businesses, even if they primarily operate online and do not have a physical retail location at all. Here are some methods:

Passing out fliers and business cards

Here, you can print out some fliers, or simply some business cards and pass them out to people on the street. Of course, you can also pay someone else to do this for you.

Advertising in print media

While there are many newspapers that are having problems maintaining a readership, they are still surviving, which means people are still reading them. But one way to be more successful with print media ads would be to advertise in the right type of publication. It is possible to advertise in a “general” newspaper, but it would be better to do so in a more “targeted” publication, even though circulation may be smaller, the readers will have a higher chance of getting an interest in your website.

So if you are selling urban and trendy clothing, you may want to advertise in a local magazine that deals with hip hop music. Or if you are selling computers and electronics, then advertising in a publication about technology would be an excellent choice. The advantage of using print media today, is that many free magazines and papers have both a print and online version. Therefore, your ad will be available both online and offline as well.

• Online Promotion

Here, you have a few other methods to choose from, but remember to focus on local customers first.

Online classified ads sites

These are probably the best choice for a start up web store. You can post a free ad on a number of online classified ads sites such as Craisglist, Gumtree, Kijiji, US Free Ads, etc. In many cases the ad is free, but you can pay for a small upgrade to get your ad featured on top of the list, or to have a border around it to bring attention to it.

Pay Per Click Ads and Media Buying

You can use pay per click ads or buy banner ad space on websites that have visitors from your local area. You can also advertise on search engines such as Google and the Facebook pay per click platform. A quick tip: take advantage of the free ad credits that many web hosts offer when you sign up. Most give you a $100 or so Google Ads voucher, as well as a $50 Facebook ads coupon. These can also be bought on many webmaster forums like Digital Point for around $5 to $10.

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.

Search engines such as Google sometimes change their algorithms which are used to determine the ranking of each web page in search results. Sometimes, these changes are very minor and go largely unnoticed. Sometimes, they create waves in the entire online marketing and webmaster world. Many are now asking themselves this: how can I keep up with all these changes that search engines make? The answers are actually quite simple. There are a few things that you need to be doing which will increase the chances that your website will not be affected in any major way by any changes that the search engines make to their algorithms. Here are some of these tried and true methods:

• Avoid Black Hat SEO If You Want Long Term Results

Well, the goal of this article is not a debate on ethics or whether using black hat SEO tactics is “evil” or not. Let’s simply stick to looking at the facts: if you want long term results, then black hat SEO methods are not your friend. Basically, black hat SEO involves finding loopholes and ways to game the system so that a website rises in rankings rapidly. This might be something desirable if you are launching a temporary website that will only be making you money for a few weeks and you don’t care about what happens after. But if you want to build a long term online business, then these tactics are to be avoided, since you will get slapped down by search engines eventually.

• Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

Both search engines and human visitors love a site that is well structured and has an easy navigation. Therefore, create simple menus that will lead your visitors to different areas of your website that they would want to see. Also, it is a good idea to create a site map and include a small link to it at the bottom. True, most visitors will not use it. In fact, it has been almost 10 years since I last looked at a site map when I was visiting a website. However, most experts on SEO would agree that including one would increase the chances on getting a good ranking with search engines. There are many software programs as well as scripts available which can create one automatically for you. Since it takes very little effort on your part, this is not a step that you should neglect if you care about your website‘s position in search engines.

These are some of the two basic ways that you can employ to keep your website ranking high in search engines, or to help it move up in rankings if that is your goal. Their advantages is that they will work, no matter what changes search engines bring to their website ranking and scoring algorithms. Tomorrow, we will explore some additional ways that webmasters can employ to control their websites search engine ranking, consisting of both on page and off page factors which have been tried and tested ever since search engines came into existence.

If you need to write several articles, then chances are you may sometimes find this online marketing task to be long, tedious and perhaps boring. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are certain things that you can do to make your article writing more efficient and less time consuming. Here are some tips for article writing:

Plan your writing first

If you are going to write several articles, then it is better for you to plan the entire task ahead of time. So, for example if you need to create 5 articles, then think of the titles and topics of these 5 articles before you start writing them. You don’t have to figure out everything that you are going to say in the article at this point, however it does help for you to get a general idea of the topic and main points.

Set aside some time for research

Some times, you can write an article, or several articles, solely off the top of your head without needing to do any research at all. This is usually the case if you are writing about a topic that you are already very familiar with. However, in some other cases you will need to do some research first.

Start doing that research before you begin writing the articles. After you have the main topic of the article, it will then be time for you to begin gathering all the information that you need to write it. Look for other articles and websites on the topic. Gather the facts, figures etc. that you need. If you are reviewing a product that you have used than take a look at the product and see what you would want to mention about it. By doing your research in advance, you will be able to make your article writing a lot more efficient and less time consuming.

Write without stopping

I find that writing an article usually goes a lot better if you simply write whatever comes to mind first and then make adjustments or corrections later on if they become necessary to do. Think of it: if you stop for 5 minutes after writing each sentence to ask yourself whether what you have written is good and to think of what you will say next, you will end up spending hours on an article that could have been finished in less than 20 minutes.

The great thing about writing on a computer as opposed to a typewriter or with pen and paper is that you can make as many corrections to your text as you want. You can add things, delete things and move entire paragraphs of text around as necessary. Therefore, save the corrections for the end, where you will proof read your article and think about whether there is something that you could have done better.

Previously, we’ve seen some of the issues regarding making money online with MLM offers. But what if you’ve decided that you would like to make some money with them? Here are a few tips that will help you profit from this kind of business opportunity.

• Don’t stay stuck on only one opportunity

If you take a look at some of the leaders in the MLM business opportunity world, you will see that they participate in various different money making opportunities. The reasons are simple: if one opportunity dries up, there are others that can be scaled up to make more money. Therefore, don’t get attached to only one program and treat MLM opportunities for what they really are: a vehicle for you to make some money.

• Choose business opportunities with good products

The product is an important part of any business opportunity. There are certain things that you need to ask yourself about it: is it something that is really useful? Is it priced in a way that will enable you to make a decent profit from selling the product instead of constantly hounding others to become distributors? It is something that will last for at least a few years, or just a fad that will be over in a couple of months?

• Go with MLM opportunities that do not focus exclusively on promoting to friends and family

While some people may be able to pull this off with success, promoting to friends and family is not the best way to go. Sure, a few may sign up, but if you limit yourself to just people you know, then you have a limited pool of prospects, who are actually low quality prospects to begin with (they probably aren’t interested in a business). A good business opportunity to take part in is one that will provide you with some tools and training on generating leads and prospects by advertising online.

• Join an opportunity early

This gives you a good advantage over those who come later on. There will be less marketing material online about the business that you are in, meaning that you will be dealing with a lot less competition when you start out. Essentially, this will make acquiring leads and prospects, as well as clients who are interested in the products, much easier than an opportunity where there are already hundreds of thousands of distributors competing for the same resources.

• Learn independently

While many MLM businesses give you some training materials on how to make your business grow, there is plenty of third part material available online for free that will teach you how to do that as well. You may even discover some things that you didn’t know and that wasn’t covered in the training materials of your business opportunity. Therefore, if you want to succeed, you need to be able to find information independently and use that information to build and grow your business as needed. Spending a few hours a week on research and learning can definitely go a long way.

One of the ways to earn money by using CPA networks is by using a content locker, also called a gateway on your website. This is something that can be used with incentive offers to increase conversions. Now what exactly does a gateway do? The principle is very simple. When a user gets to your page, a content gateway will pop up, asking them to complete a CPA offer before they get access to the content presented. These offers are usually short email submits or mobile offers that pay around $1 to $2 a lead.

Is this better than simply having CPA text ads or banners on your site? Well, the answer is usually yes. Many people are used to seeing ad banners, especially the cheesy “Shoot X to get an iPhone” type of ads and will usually ignore them. However, with a content gateway, they will actually have to complete one offer before they get access to the content that they want. Sure, some of them will simply walk away and go to another website. However, some of the visitors will complete the offer, especially if they are really looking forward to seeing the content that is presented on your website.

Many of you may be thinking: sounds great! How do I set this up on my site? There are essentially two ways to do this: either you can sign up for a CPA network such as CPA Lead or Adscend Media, that offers CPA content locking gateways, or use a third party script with incentive offers from another network. Of course, the first would be much easier, as the script has already been designed by the CPA network and all you would need to do is to insert some pre formatted code on your website. If you do use a third party script with another network, make sure that you only do so with incentive offers. Also, discuss with your affiliate manager first to see if you are allowed to do so, to make sure that there are no restrictions on this type of marketing with the network that you are using.

One question that remains is: should you use this on your site at all? The answer here will vary. If you have a completely new website that you’ve just started sending traffic to, then this might be a good idea. However, on the other hand if you have an established site with plenty of regular visitors, you may want to think twice before using a content locker on it. This is because if you are already making a good amount of revenue from these visitors from “regular” CPA offers or pay per click ads, you might risk losing some of your regular traffic if these visitors don’t really like the idea of filling out a CPA offer to get to your content. But there is always a compromise, for example you can set up a “premium” section of your website that requires filling out a CPA offer to access. Or you could display the gateway only to random users, or after they have visited a certain amount of pages on your website.

In the online world, there are plenty of business opportunities that you can take advantage of. But is the one you are looking at legitimate? Here is part 2 of some of the things you should be looking at.

Watch out for hidden costs and other tricks

Many business opportunity sites try to entice you to join a program without fully telling you how much it will cost you up front. The most common tactics are:

The free (or very low cost) trial. Here you are told that you can get your very own money making website, training, or tools for nothing or just a tiny cost. The problem is that once the trial period, which can vary between a few days and a few weeks, runs out you will be dinged a hefty monthly fee unless you cancel. Many people have reported that they were still charged even though they had called to cancel and needed to call the company several times to get these charges reversed.

Hidden fees to join that are not disclosed up front. Some business opportunity sites tell you that all you need to get information and join is to pay a relatively small amount of around $50. The problem is, once you pay that fee, you quickly realize that in order to truly take part in the opportunity and earn money, you would need to make additional investments which would often run up into several hundred or even thousands of dollars.

Incessant pressure to “upgrade”. You may be allowed to join a site for free or at a very low cost. But then, as soon as you sign up, you will be incessantly pressured to take the “premium/platinum/gold/big boss/etc.” package. They will tell you that by upgrading your membership, you will get even more opportunities to make money that you wouldn’t have with the free option. This is a widely used marketing tactic called an “upsell” in which you are baited with a free offer and then constantly pressured to upgrade/

Ask yourself, do you really NEED to join this site?

Many business opportunity sites promise you things such as: free hosting, free website templates and building software, access to “exclusive” information such as lists of wholesalers and “top secret” money making training courses. Are these really worth the $99.95 a month that you are being charged? While, I admit, it may be convenient to have all these tools in one place, anyone with a bit of time and resourcefulness (things that you will need anyways to succeed in ANY business) can put together their own toolkit.

Think about it: a webhosting account with unlimited websites costs less than $10 a month. Free web design software and website templates are available to be downloaded all over the web. Very often, the “secret” money making techniques are the same ones that you will find in online business forums for free and the “exclusive wholesaler lists” are little more than links to well known sites such as AliBaba or iOffer.

No matter how good your sales page is or how much excellent content you write people will not buy a product through you if it is not worth their time. Follow the below tips to learn how to choose products that will not only convert sales, but will make you proud to be an affiliate.

What would you buy?
The easiest way to choose affiliate products or judge whether or not a product is worth while is to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and decide whether or not you would want to buy the product in question. This can be challenging if you are not interested in your niche, but that is why so many people online suggest only choosing niches you are interested in. Ask yourself these questions when looking at affiliate products. Does it look like it can solve the problem? Products are created to solve problems, so if a product does not look like it could fulfill this calling, it is worthless. Is it priced competitively? This one is pretty obvious, without some phenomenal marketing most people will not purchase a product for $50 when they can get the same thing somewhere else for $5. Will it get returned? Even though you do not have to deal with customer complaints and returns as an affiliate, you commission is taken when a customer returns a product. If you are only promoting fishy products, be prepared to see a lot of returns.

What can you sell?
Selling is approximately 500% easier if you know what you are talking about (this goes back to the whole “knowing your niche” idea). It is imperative to affiliate a product that you either know about or can pay other people to know about for you (outsource the writing). If you do not know anything about medical supplies but are looking to affiliate every product in an In-Home medical supply store, you are in for some hard work and most likely a lot of disappointment.

Who does it appeal to?
Analyzing your customer demographics is important, if you are selling to 16 year old boys you probably will not make many sales, they do not have any money and their parents are probably getting tired of buying stuff for them. Cute 5 year old girls on the other hand can be an excellent market, even though they do not have any money themselves, their parents do and every parent wants more than anything else in the world to give their 5 year old daughter whatever they want.

In conclusion, when choosing an product to sell do not choose the first product that pops up in your niche or has the highest grav, sit down and ask each of these questions about your product and think hard about the answers, this short exercise will greatly benefit your affiliate sales.

In the online marketing world, you’ve probably seen the name Clickbank mentioned quite a few times. In fact it has been the topic of many informational products and many of the “proofs of earnings” that you see posted online by successful marketers are screen shots of their Clickbank accounts. Obviously, since that network is so popular, it must have something good to offer to marketers and allow people to earn significant amounts of money.

Clickbank is basically an online marketplace for digital products. Affiliates make money from it by promoting products created by others through various means. Most of the products sold are informational products, such as guides on how to make money online, how to train your dog, how to lose weight, etc. Practically all the products being sold on Clickbank have one thing in common: they fill a need that people have, which is to find answers to their questions.

So how do you make money from it? Getting started is quite easy. You just sign up. Unlike certain other affiliate networks, everyone is approved and there is no need to speak to an affiliate manager before you are let in.

You will then need to select the product that you want to promote. As you can see, there are thousands of different products to choose from. When looking at a product in the list, you will see something called “gravity.” This is a number that is calculated by Clickbank and designed to reflect the overall popularity of a certain product, taking into account the number of sales and how recently they happened. A higher gravity means that a product is very popular, but it also indicates that you will face a lot of competition when promoting it. An ideal choice would be to select a product which has a gravity that is around 100. You will get a product that is getting many sales, but doesn’t have as many people promoting it as the top ones are.

Knowing how much competition you have will be important. No matter how good or popular the product that you are promoting is, the more affiliates you have that are pushing it, the more difficult it will be for you to make a profit, as they will be plenty of ads online for basically the same offer.

Another thing to look for when selecting a product to promote is the resources that the creators have given to the affiliates who will promote their creation. Simply go to their sales page and look at the bottom for a link called “affiliates.” In many cases, you will find various tools to help you out such as keyword lists, articles about the product, pre-made banners, various landing page templates, etc. All of these can save you a lot of work when you get started in your campaign to market their product.

In the online world, there are a lot of different ways to earn some cash. So if you are seeking to start an online business, you will find that there are many opportunities which await you. And since you are effectively your own boss, your earning potential is actually unlimited. So whether you are trying to build a six figure income or just get a few dollars a day in revenue, there will always be something to do on the internet.

Providing services

We had previously talked about using affiliate offers and CPA programs to earn some cash online. Of course, these are fine ways to earn money, but they do come at a certain disadvantage. It is mostly the delay before you get paid. Many affiliate programs pay on a NET 30 basis, meaning that you get paid 30 days after the end of the month. But there is something that you can do in addition to, or instead of using affiliate or CPA programs. You can provide your services to those who do.

To put it simply, those who sell or promote products online need to spend a lot of time and resources on their marketing work. This includes setting up web pages, putting up advertisements, writing content, designing good templates and graphics for their site, etc. Those who are making the big bucks out there seldom do all of this work by themselves: they hire external consultants to do it for them. This is where you could come in.

There are many examples of services that you could provide to those who are either selling their own products or running affiliate offers, for example:

• Reselling web hosting services
• Building backlinks
• Designing web pages
• Writing sales copies
• Posting ads on classifieds ads sites or business directories
• Driving traffic to websites through various means
• Doing SEO work to improve someone’s web site rankings
• Creating advertising campaigns on social media
• Creating, editing and uploading promotional videos
• Etc

These are just some of the examples of what you can do for other marketers. Now how much will you earn? This will largely depend on what you are doing, and how skilled you are at it. So this is where you will put your online skills to the task. For example, if you are good with Photoshop, you could go into creating web page graphics. If you are skilled at creating videos and animations, someone could use you to create a promotional video for their product.

There are many places where you can find work, but the best place to go to would be an internet marketing forum, like the Warrior Forum or Digital Point. There you will find a section where members can offers to buy or sell various types of services. As your reputation increases, you will soon start getting a lot more customers as well.

Your squeeze page (or opt in page) is your way of introducing your visitors to your email list, and as such, it needs to have a few specific elements in place in order to convince them to sign up. People get a lot of email each day, and convincing them to sign up for another mailing list isn’t always easy, but if you have all the right elements in place, you’ll get as many new subscribers as you can.

Headline

Right at the top of the page, you should have an attractive headline. Your headline should be brief – one sentence is enough. It should also be catchy. For example, instead of something like “These five training modules will help you learn the PHP programming language” you might want to use something like “Learn PHP in just FIVE steps”. That way, the viewer will get excited about your list, and they’ll be more inclined to sign up.

Bullet Points

Instead of forcing your readers to wade through paragraphs upon paragraphs of text to find out why they should care about your list, give them the major highlights of your product in a bulleted list. That way they can get a clear picture of what you’re offering right away. To be clear, include the paragraphs that describe things in more detail, just do so after the bulleted list.

Opt In Box

You should have an opt in box for your list right at the top of the page. You don’t want to make your readers scroll down the page if they know they’re interested in signing up. The further down the page you put the opt in box, the less likely your readers are to sign up for your list. Keep that in mind as you lay out your squeeze page.

Putting these elements in place on your opt in page will help you get more subscribers to your list. Email marketing is getting more and more challenging, but by setting up a strong squeeze page, you can still use it effectively. Remember, include a strong headline, a bulleted list of benefits to the customer, and put your opt in box near the top of the page. Doing those things will help you to be successful with email marketing.

There’s no question about it, email marketing is extremely challenging. A lot of emails wind up in spam folders without ever getting looked at, which means that all the work that went into that email was for nothing. If you want the time you spend creating your emails to count, you have to take a few steps to ensure that your emails will get read, rather than deleted, or flagged as spam.

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that you’re never going to get everyone to read your emails and respond to them by buying your products and visiting your site. Almost everyone gets a lot of newsletters, and other promotional emails in their inbox every day, and they’re just not going to read every one. You can increase the chances that yours will get read by working to build a relationship with your subscribers.

In order to build a relationship with your subscribers, you have to give them some really strong reasons to keep opening your emails. For starters, be sure to do more than just send advertisements to them. Send out emails with interesting information about your niche. Link to any news that might be of interest to your subscribers, and maybe even give them your take on it. Do everything you can to both inform, and entertain your readers instead of just advertising to them. If they see that you’re sending out great information, they’ll be more likely to keep reading your emails as they show in their inboxes.

It’s also a good idea to engage your subscribers in a conversation. For example, you could include a poll in one email, and the results of that poll in the next email. That way, you can get some useful user feedback, and engage the reader. When you ask your subscribers questions, and include them in what’s going on with your company and your products, you create a feeling of inclusion in the reader. If they feel like a part of your company, and they feel like they’re engaged by your emails, they will be more inclined to keep reading your emails.

It can be tough to keep your emails from getting lost in the sea of messages in your subscribers’ inboxes, but if you work to inform and engage your subscribers, you’ll find that they pay attention to your emails.

Using a forum to market and monetize your website is a great idea. There are two different ways you can do this, one is by marketing on other people’s forums, and the second is to create your own forum.

Forums are a great way to market to a very specific area. Sure, you sometimes see a forum that is about general topics, but mostly the topics discussed are very narrow minded (in a good way). For example, there are massive forums on cycling, soccer, social networking, making money online, or knitting.

There is really no limit of what a forum can be about, if there are passionate and interested people about a subject, they will most likely find their way to a forum to discuss the topics.

Using Other People’s Forums
The easiest and cheapest way to market your website via forums is to use someone else’s already established forum. This way, the cost of entry is much lower, in both monetary and time terms. All you need to do is register on the forum, read the rules, put your website in your signature with a catchy phrase that will entice people to click on it, then start posting on the forum. It is important to engage in conversation, rather than spamming the established members already (they will not take kindly to that). Engaging and holding an intelligent conversation is essential here, because this is the first time your potential visitors will ever see what you have to say. Make sure you add value to the forum and post several times a day or week in order to maximize your results.

Creating Your Own Forums
Another way you can use forums is to create your own forum to allow your followers to engage with you and one another. This will help create a sense of community around your site, especially if you are already getting comments. The problem with this method is that you need to have viewers already to leverage them into becoming forum members. This is usually one of the later aspects of a website to come along, simply for that reason. But once you do have established readers, it could be a great way to promote your topics, engage in conversation, and even get new ideas for content and products.

Facebook and Twitter have become a part of the lives of a great number of people, so it only makes sense to try and use those services to get your message out to your target audience. So all you have to do is sign up for them, and put up a few links to your website, and the traffic will just pour in, right? Wrong. There are a lot of things to consider before diving into marketing your site through socian networking services.

The most important thing to remember whether you’re thinking about a Facebook or Twitter account is that there has to be an actual human being running the account. There is plenty of software out there that will post updates about your website to either service automatically, but that software should be used alongside a person making regular updates, not instead of a person making regular updates. Just remember, the key word in social networking is “social”. People use Facebook and Twitter to connect with other people, and giving them that connection is a big part of using social networks effectively as marketing tools.

When using Twitter, make sure you take the time to talk to your followers. If someone @ replies you, be sure to answer their question or address their statement. Same thing goes for direct messages. If you have a healthy number of real tweets crafted by a real human being, your followers are way more likely to click on links to your site when you tweet them.

Facebook works a little differently. When you’re setting up a Facebook page, you should take a minute, and think of something elated to your niche, and create a page about that rather than about your specific website. For example, if you have a website that sells luggage, start a Facebook page about travel. Once the page has a good number of fans, start throwing in some links to deals on your site in between posts about travel. That way you’re certain to reach your target audience in a meaningful way.

If you’re careful to give your social marketing campaign a friendly, human feel rather than just letting software post updates to Twitter and Facebook for you, you will drive more traffic to your links, and get more attention from your target audience. With no sign up fees or other costs involved, Facebook and Twitter can be affordable, and powerful marketing tools if used correctly.