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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Private Label Rights (PLR) products are products that you can use for a variety of projects, including rewriting it, putting your name on it, or sending it to your newsletter readers for free.

All PLR products have different rules about what you can use them for, but in reality your options are pretty limitless.

Podcasting
As a podcaster, one of the hardest things about it is the research on the topic and finding information on your subject and getting it together so you can easily access it for your recording session.

PLR products can be used for great podcasts. You can simply read the article from the PLR pack and use it as your free audio content. It will save you a ton of time when it comes to researching your subject. It is a lot less work to record off a PLR article then improvise your responses and tidbits of information in between the PLR content. It can produce a really unique podcast with some great information.

Make it into an eBook
Taking PLR content and repackaging it into a eBook could be a great idea. If you take the 10 articles for example from a pack of articles you bought, you could easily create a PLR product yourself, or an eBook to sell to your readers, etc. Each article could be a chapter of your eBook or whatever you want. You can be as creative as you want with this. It is such a great idea to get a cheap and very easy eBook created, as most PLR is less than $15, you can do the rest of the work and have an eBook in no time. Adding more information, some photographs, and some nice graphics can really make the eBook an enticing offering for sale or giveaway.

Make sure you read the terms of the PLR before you do this however. Many packages have the same restrictions on them, for example most you can not sell master resale rights (as in, the other people can do whatever they want with them), and others do allow all access.

Have fun when you buy PLR content, try to do some creative things with it and create a unique product from everyone else. Do not buy PLR just to buy PLR though, as it tends to accumulate on your desktop and never get used. If you are going to buy it, plan on using it right away.

Photo Credit: nDevilTV