Thursday, July 3, 2008

How To Market? Internet Marketing Is the Key

By Billy Anderson III

So you've finally taken the plunge and started your own business. Congratulations. Now, where do you go from here?

In the past there were a number of fashionable advertising methods. If you just loved making hundreds of phone calls and receiving hundreds of rejections maybe you would have tried cold calling. Or, if you liked sores on your feet, maybe you would have tried selling door to door to get that great feeling of rejection. If you liked the idea of borrowing a lot of money you could hire a Madison Avenue advertising expert to put together a really expensive advertising campaign for you.

Fortunately, you no longer have to do any of this. With the evolution of the internet economies of scale have been created with respect to advertising costs that help the little guy compete with the corporate giants. With internet advertising not only do you make sales faster and therefore make money faster but you can cut your marketing expenses tremendously.

An essential component of your own business is putting up your own website, which is nowhere near as expensive as it used to be. If cost is a concern, there are a lot of businesses available today which have their own website and would love for you to join them. Caveat: Even if you join a business with a website, you want to be able to control your own customer lists so create either your own website or your own lead capture page which links to the site.

Much to the chagrin of old school advertising executives the internet offers an almost limitless list of advertising methods from which to choose and we will discuss several in this article. If you are trying to save money you are in luck because a lot of these methods are free. Banner ads is one example. I would prefer writing and posting free ads which are not banner ads. In my experience people usually pay more attention to the smaller ads as they appear more credible. There are sites available online which allow you to post either an unlimited number of free ads or many for free. Then there are some which charge a nominal fee.

One ideal way to incease the number of visitors who click on your site is to either give away something for free or give away something valuable for a nominal charge. Writing free e-newsletters will bring more people in for you but you might not like the idea of having to write regularly. How about an e-book? It can be short and informative and you can either give it for free or for a small charge. Of course, you will want to include a link to your lead capture page in the newsletter or e-book.

How can you guarantee to increase your profits in the start-up phase of your business as well as when your business has matured? You can try affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing involves signing up as an affiliate on other people's sites. An affiliate is one who agrees to offer or recommend someone else's product or service to their own website visitors and/or customers in order to generate referral commission income. This can be done to even out cash flow when your business is young and to add to the bottom line even after your own business is a roaring success.

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