Online marketing can be a daunting task, especially if you’re on a tight budget. Fortunately there are a few ways you can drive traffic to your website without having to spend any money.

Never underestimate the power of word of mouth. The first thing you should do once your website is completed, and ready to be shared with the world is tell your friends and family about it. Be sure they’re clear on what niche your site serves, and let them know that you’d love it if they recommended it to anyone they knew who might enjoy it. Depending on your niche, and the size of your circle of friends, this can actually bring in more traffic than you might expect.

Using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to promote your site is very similar in nature to the word of mouth marketing mentioned above. The first goal of your Twitter or Facebook account should be to make friends. Once you’ve got that down, it’s time to start showing those friends your site, and encouraging your new internet friends to pass that site along. Keep in mind the part about making friends. If you just fire your link off to random strangers seconds after sending them a friend request, you won’t get very far. Take the time to send messages, and reply to theirs. It really doesn’t take as much effort as it sounds like it does, and the benefits are worth the investment of time.

Social bookmarking sites are another great way to spread your link around. Start an account on a social bookmarking site, and fill it with sites you like. Include plenty of things from your niche, but don’t be afraid to include other things too. Over time, throw in links to your own site, and as your account gains attention, so to will your website. Take some time, and send friend requests to people with similar interests, and you’ll be on your way to more traffic.

All of the above mentioned ways to build traffic are completely free, but they all require an investment of time, but it’s worth the effort. That investment of time will yield quality visitors to your site that are interested in your niche. These methods are highly effective at reaching your target audience, and at the end of the day, that’s what really matters.

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.

Times are tough, and everyone is looking for ways to bring in a little extra money. It’s tough to figure out which methods work, and which don’t, but we’re here to help you sort it all out.

Contrary to popular belief, you can actually make some money doing online surveys and responding to email promotion offers, just not a lot of it. Small tasks like this bring in small amounts of money, but if you’re just looking to spend a little bit of time every day working towards making some extra spending money, surveys are a great way to go about it. We highly recommend treating small tasks as something of a holiday fund. If you do a lot of surveys throughout the year, and put the money they bring in aside, you might find you have a nice chunk of spending money for your next vacation.

There are a lot of opportunities for an aspiring writer to make some money online. Many sites will provide writing jobs if you can show some proficiency as a wordsmith. You’ll usually have to submit a resume, or a writing sample, so be prepared to show some credentials. Once you’re in with one of these sites, they’ll provide gigs on a regular basis. The pay isn’t always tip top, but if you can turnaround the work quickly, it will definitely be worth your time.

Signing up for Amazon and Ebay affiliate programs can also bring in a nice chunk of change. You’ll need a little bit of web design skill for this one, but the investment in time is worth the yield. Set up a site with good information about a wide variety of products, and place Ebay and Amazon ads for those products on the site. For each person that buys the product, you’ll get a small percentage of the sale. This also works through a twitter account, just be careful not to come across as being spammy.

Setting up a full fledged affiliate site takes a lot more time and research than the above-mentioned Amazon and Ebay method, but the yield is worth the work. By doing some research on what companies have high paying affiliate programs, and what questions people have about their products, you can create a highly effective site that markets products to the people that are looking for them.

Some advertisers offer Pay Per Click programs, where (as the name implies) you get paid each time someone clicks on one of your ads. The pay out is usually small, and advertisers often have very specific terms and conditions dictating how you can use their ads. If you have a high traffic website in place already, PPC ads can put a little extra cash in your pocket, just make sure you’re following the rules.

There are other ways to make money online, these are just some of the more popular ones. Before diving into any of the above mentioned methods, or something we didn’t cover, be sure to do some research. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If you do your homework, and work diligently, you’ll find yourself with a full fledged second income in no time.

Facebook can be a great platform to market your business or products on if you do it right. The biggest thing to remember is that Facebook is a social network where two way engagement is important. People who spam Facebook with links, and information that looks like spam are going to be classified as such and potentially ignored or even shut down by Facebook.

The problem with Facebook is that you need to have a very engaged audience in order to be profitable through the social media part of it. That is what we are going to talk about today – the social aspect of Facebook, not the advertising platform.

On Facebook you have two real ways of marketing for free to individuals. The most prominent now is through Facebook Pages as they are called. The other is through Facebook Events.

Facebook Pages are the best way to promote and connect with your readers or fans online, except through mailing lists. Facebook pages are a great way to promote your content because you can easily share links to your website, interact with fans and hold contests and more.

It is important to remember that your Facebook page is only a compliment to your site, not your only site. Due to the interaction levels being so high, it can be easy to use Facebook Pages as your only source of interaction and content creation. Spread the love around to other social networks such as Twitter and see your brand grow even more so.

The best way I have found to get my Facebook page numbers up (right now it is around 1,400 for a pretty small community’s website) is to hold a “fan drive.” A fan drive is simply a plea to get people to “like” your pages in order to achieve a goal. My goal was 1,000 fans in one month and I would donate $150 to the local Hospice. Within two weeks my page had over 1,100 fans and I was writing a check.

Those 1,000 fans are worth so much more than $150, and the cost was well worth it.

Depending on your situation, there are other ways to get people to join if you are not working on such a local level. For example, giving away an iPod or something to a random fan is a great way to get people to join, even small things like books and gift cards are a huge motivator.

Be creative when using Facebook to market your product or page, but remember, don’t be a spammer or you will lose fans a lot faster than you gained them.

Site flipping is quickly becoming a viable way to make money online for people interested in creating websites.

It used to be that you would create website properties, manage them and nurture them into something that is a long term business idea. That still exists, but a new way of doing it has come about, it is called site flipping.
Site flipping is much like house flipping if you are familiar to that. You can start a new website, build some traffic, backlinks, and profit from it, then sell it on the marketplace.

So how do you go about doing that? The first thing you need to do is find a popular niche that you enjoy writing about. I say this because if you hate the niche you are working on, you are never going to make any money from it. A lot of people can write about random niches and be just fine, but for me, writing has to be about something I enjoy or else I will burn out really easily. So the first thing is to pick a niche, after that, you must find keywords relevant to that niche that you can be the most competitive in, then write great content around those keywords.

After you get your content going and your niche picked out, it is a good idea to get a great domain name. Having a great domain name will be a very attractive part of your offer, especially if it is zeroed in on your niche of choice.

When your site is up and running successfully, the real work begins. I recommend writing at least one great post per day of original content. You can intermix PLR (private label rights) articles as well, but having some great unique content is very important.

Promotion is definitely one of the most important areas as well. Starting to build quality back links on other websites, through blog commenting, forums postings, social media such as twitter, Facebook, and Delicious, are all very important to the success of the blog.

Once you start getting some good traffic and start making some profit from your affiliate offers or Adsense, it is time to start gearing up to sell your site. Make sure you use a reputable site, such as Flippa.com and Escrow or Paypal to ensure safe payment and transaction. There is no real timeline on how long you should hold a domain or property, but depending on the revenue and growth it could be 3 weeks or 3 years.

Good luck!

Some of you may of noticed Googles new results page and have you wondered how this might affect your websites search engine results position ?

Google has for the last year have been slowly changing the way their search works, for example the search results are more tailored to the individual using the computer.  The new design is very similar to bing and yahoo.  But Google still dominate the search engine niche with last month being one of their best months in terms of users using Google compared to other search engines.

The new SERPs may make SEO webmasters a little worried as to how users will now start to use the new tools that Google provides users and how results will be displayed.  I can say that my traffic stats to my website haven’t changed much since the new Google changes have been introduced but my enquiries and sales have dropped a little which makes me think if this is a result of the recent Google changes, but i doubt very much as my bounce rate is still the same so im just guessing its a seasonal issue.

The options in the left panel of the new look Google pull from “everything” – classic Google results (universal, organic, paid, etc.), blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google’s real-time search.

You will also notice that at the end of the search results page it will show live results from Twitter and match any keywords from a live feed directly from Twitter.  Google is moving more towards giving you live results as its constantly improving the way it gives the end user results.

I recently ran an experiment using Twitter as a way to get traffic from using the live twitter service on Google by using a plugin on my wordpress blog that updated my twitter account every 15 mins with new articles and this brought in alot of traffic as Google was picking up my keywords in my tweets and giving them tops spot on the results of Google helping direct organic traffic straight to my blog.  The only drawback on this was the plugin i was using crashed my server as it was using alot of bandwidth as it was an autoblog adding 7 new articles every minute, so you can image what this did to my server.  However at the time i was getting around 500 clicks, many from very competitive keywords on Google via the Twitter live feed.

Google and Bing (Microsoft) have signed a deal with Twitter which will allow tweets to be made available via search results.  This means that users searching online will get access to live results instantly via Tweets on Google and Bing.

Twitter has created a new type of online search in that in gives users real time information from users tweeting their information to their followers.  These tweets will now be available to Google and Bing which will make the online search experience more realtime in the information that is presented to the user.

Microsoft has announced that a potential deal will soon be struck with Facebook in that user status updates will be made availabe to Bings search results.

Google’s Marissa Mayer said: “Our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world.”

 ”In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged – real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.”

Internet experts are predicting that with this new invention of real-time search this will be the next big money maker for webmasters, allowing companies the opportunity to advertise alongside the popular information in real time.

Microsoft’s Bing service has already setup a Twitter search page specifically to search for Tweets and Google will soon launch a Twitter search service within the next few months.

Social networks are now becoming a vital method to drive traffic to your websites as Twitter in particular is used as a search tool by some users to look for information.

If you have a website that needs more traffic then you should take advantage of the free media that is out there.  One way to get more traffic is to

1) Setup a wordpress blog and link this to your website. 

2) Sign up to Twitter and create an account.

3) Follow as many people as you can that are related to your niche, just run a search for your main keywords

4) Download the wordpress twitter plugin and upload it and active it on your blog.  Fill in your twitter details and set it up so everytime you create a new post, it automatically submits a link on your twitter account

5) Setup a facebook account and become friends with as many people as you can related to your niche.

6) Install the Twitter facebook application and link in your twitter account to your facebook account.  Everytime you create a new tweet via your blog, twitter will also update your facebook status with a link to your article automatically.  So you will get traffic from both Twitter and Facebook automatically when you create new posts in your blog.

To get more followers on Twitter CLICK HERE

To make money from Twitter CLICK HERE