I have just had to take over a week off work as I have been ill and had to stay in bed. For the first time in a long time, I did not open emails, do any Social Media or respond to anything in the ‘Virtual World’.
Did my businesses come to a grinding halt, or did they carry on working as smoothly as clockwork while I took time out to self-care and heal myself?
They did the latter.
This was not a stroke of luck or chance. This was because I have built my business models on businesses that are all internet based and automated. I have put in place systems and procedures that ensure that they work 24/7 and 365 days a year.
One of my businesses offers business coaching. This is a good business model. However, to coach businesses can be extremely time consuming and even if you are fortunate enough to have high level coaching clients, there is only one of you. This means that you are selling your time for money.
Had I only had this business model, it would have meant that last week, I would have had to cancel everything. I would have had no income and would have had to reschedule all of my appointments, meaning that the coming weeks, I would have been playing ‘catch up’.
Does this sound familiar to you?
My new businesses are both internet based, so accessible anywhere from the world at any time of day or night. I set up two of them during the Coronavirus pandemic. There could not have been a better time, as the majority of people were confined to their homes and the internet was the only way of communicating with the outside world.
If you are trading time for money and have no back up plan in place, maybe you need to look at what you are currently doing and think of ways that you can implement to ensure that you are not left vulnerable and without any income.
If I can be of any help, please email me at ali@alimcoaching.com or call me on +44 7968 134048.
Are you able to promote your website for free? Is that even possible?
Yes, it is. Your business website can gain huge traffic in no time thanks to free website promotion.
How do you go about promoting your website for free?
The following is a list of steps that you can take to get more traffic to your website:
1. Enlist your website on Internet Directories
Look for the best Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic. Start with this step and the rest of the steps will follow on from here.
Before you try to list your website, make sure that it is looking professional and business-like for a higher chance to get accepted in your directory of choice.
2. Know your forums.
One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you will attract instant visitors from the forums.
3. Write a press release.
Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site. This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime. Type a brief paragraph or two and email it to your friends, colleagues, internet E-magazines, newspapers and other media and you will find that the traffic to your website will increase dramatically.
4. Be friendly online.
Free website promotion means you need to be friendly to other people who are on the web. You wouldn’t be rude to people that you meet in real life, so why would you treat people on the internet any differently? If you build up a list of colleagues and friends online, ask them to like your posts and share them. Work on establishing links with other business owners and building up relationships with them.
5. Write an article.
There are lots of places that you can submit articles without it costing you any money. Use Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook and other online Social Media platforms to post your articles on. If for example, your website is about your travel agency. Write an article about the perks of traveling or the hottest travel spots in the world. In the concluding paragraph, make sure that you put a link to your website. This article works as an advertorial and doubles as free website promotion.
6. Let the whole world know about your site.
What is free website promotion without the word of mouth? Make sure that you have conversations with people, rather than just spamming them with your sales pitches. Once you have built trust, insert your website, its URL and features in daily conversations and let the good news spread from one person to another.
7. Make a banner ad.
Make a banner ad for your site and ask another webmaster to do the same for his site. Then swap, so that you both have links to each other’s sites on your websites.
Two Basic Parts of a Low-Cost Web Site Promotion
Anybody could own a web site. Anybody could up sell their products and services to their target audience. Anyone could try to promote their website with a low-cost budget. But there are not many web sites that have a truly successful web site with traffic all day. What these individuals or companies lack is the most essential factor of success – a low-cost web site promotion that really works.
If you have been trying to promote your own web site and you have received traffic consistently, congratulations. But for those people who need assistance, who do not have the patience to promote their own product and services, and who lacks the knowledge to properly advertise themselves, here are some guidelines to help you achieve success with a low-cost web site promotion.
SEO
Search Engine Submission and Ranking are the two basic parts to a low-cost web site promotion. Both of the parts have the same effect on the marketing of the website – for your products and services presented in your website to catch people’s attention.
The first inexpensive method of website promotion is search engine submission. This first part is the act of filling in information and submitting your website to search engines. There are two types of Search engine submission – manual and automatic. For a low cost and effective web site promotion, automatic submission is ideal because after filling up the information, a software program would forward this information to other search engines.
The second money-saving web site promotion is ranking. This refers to the numerical position in which your web site appears on a search engine, based upon the web site’s criteria. Some search engines rank the order in which your search results appear primarily by how many other websites link to each page. The leading web sites on this order would eventually fulfil a low- cost web site promotion.
Other types of inexpensive web site promotion you could use to boost up traffic to your web site are Google Ads, banner advertising, classified ads, text links and section sponsorship. Banner advertisements pop up above and below web pages, and sometimes in another window. Text links and section sponsorship may cost more, but these methods help in promoting to your specified target audience. If you have the budget to do this type of advertising, it is worth experimenting and seeing what results you get.
Website v Traffic
Having a website and getting traffic to your website are two totally different things. If you are losing sales because no one can find your website, then it may well be worth trying out some of the methods mentioned above or employing someone who has the necessary skills and experience.
The internet is open for business 24/7 and is global, so investing a small amount of money in some of these strategies could greatly increase your customers, clients, and revenue.
Take a moment to think about how you would really answer this question. If given enough thought just about any business owner who utilizes the Internet for any purpose will likely find that whether or not they intentionally organized an Internet Marketing campaign, they may already be marketing their products and services on the Internet. This article will examine some subtle ways business owners may already be marketing their business on the Internet.
Do you have a website for your business? If you answered yes to this question then you are already marketing your products or services online just by virtue of the fact that you have a website online. Having a live website means there is the potential for curious Internet users to access your website. You may not be actively promoting your website but you may still find that your website generates interest in your products despite the lack of promotional endeavours; this is a form of passive marketing.
Do you participate in Social Media posts and include a link to your website in your signature? Again business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their website online. Savvy business owners realize the importance of participation in industry related groups or posts to create an interest in their products and services, establish themselves as knowledgeable about the industry and offer a link to their own website even if it is in the signature line of their posts. However, even business owners who do not realize this may already be inadvertently enjoying the benefits of Internet Marketing which result from Social Media participation just by doing something they enjoy and may be doing as a form of leisure activity.
Keywords and Optimization
Do you include keywords which are relevant to your business in the content of your website? Business owners who answer yes to this question are also already marketing on the Internet by optimizing their website for these keywords. These search engine optimization (SEO) affects the websites whether or not they were even aware of the concept of keyword density and how it can help to SEO a website. Business owners will likely use certain words often depending on the type of products and services they offer just because it is natural and logical to do so. This tendency, however, can result in search engines boosting your website rankings for these particular keywords. The concept of SEO is much more involved and complex than simply using keywords frequently but business owners can gain some benefit just by naturally applying relevant keywords to their website.
Customer Feedback
Do you solicit feedback from your customers online? This is yet another example of how business owners may be accidentally marketing their business on the Internet. Most business owners realize the importance of soliciting feedback from customers for business purposes and business owners who offer products online might solicit feedback in the form of online surveys. Although the business owners may be doing this simply for a business purpose the fact that it is done online makes it fall into the category of Internet marketing.
We have already discussed several ways in which business owners may already be marketing online but what about business owners who want to have an increased online presence? Business owners who may already be marketing online accidentally may wish to launch a full scale Internet marketing campaign. The best way to do this is to hire a consultant with experience in Internet marketing to assist you in creating a campaign which is effective for your target audience.
Hiring an Expert
If you are considering jumping into the world of Internet Marketing but do not have experience in this type of marketing, it is definitely worthwhile to consider hiring a consultant to assist you in your advertising endeavour. This is important because they can do a great deal to assist you in ensuring that the marketing effort is a success. You may pay more for their services than you would to handle the Internet Marketing on your own but the results you gain from the effort will likely be significantly higher. Hiring a consultant to assist you in your Internet Marketing campaign is even a worthwhile endeavour if you have some experience in Internet Marketing but are competing in a competitive niche and need some additional assistance to help you rise above the competition.
Choosing the Right Consultant
The key to hiring a consultant to assist in an Internet Marketing campaign is to hire the right consultant. You will find there are many different options available to you as Internet Marketing has become a huge industry. However, not all consultants are created equal. You may find that some consultants can create significantly better results than other consultants. There are, however, a few characteristics to look for when seeking a qualified consultant in the Internet Marketing industry. Surprisingly cost is not one of the most important considerations. Experience and past performance are much more important. You can compare costs among consultants who are similarly qualified but using cost as a primary source of evaluation is not recommended.
Choose Someone Who Has Experience
Experience is very important when it comes to selecting a consultant to assist you in an Internet Marketing campaign. Experience is critical because consultants who have a great deal of experience also have a great deal of understanding of which techniques work best and which techniques are not as effective. This can save you a great deal of time and money as there will likely not be as much experimentation necessary as there would be with a less experienced consultant. More experienced consultants will also likely be better skilled at dealing with clients and will likely answer your questions more quickly and keep you better informed about the progress of your Internet marketing campaign. All of this is important because you will likely be very interested in receiving progress reports and staying up to date on everything that is going on with your Internet Marketing campaign.
Ask For Recommendations
Seeking out a consultant in the Internet Marketing industry with an excellent past record of performance is also very important. This is so important because consultants who have had a great deal of success in the past will likely have a great deal of success while assisting you as well. Past performance is considered to be one of the best indications of future performance. This does not mean that new consultants are necessarily going to perform poorly but there is some risk involved in selecting a consultant who does not have a great deal of experience or who has not performed well in the past. You can feel much more confident putting your Internet Marketing campaign in the hands of a consultant who typically generates the type of results you are looking for in your own Internet Marketing campaign.
Value for Money
Once you have evaluated consultants on the basis of experience and past performance, it is time to start considering price. Considering price early in the process of seeking a consultant may cause you to be influenced by price over performance. Some consultants may be incredibly affordable but if they are not capable of producing the desired results, it may end up being a complete waste of money. However, once you have narrowed your list of potential consultants down to a few qualified candidates, it is definitely time to start comparing prices. Once you are confident each of the candidates on your list is well qualified, choosing the least expensive candidate is not always the best investment of your money. However it is important to note all of the fees involved to ensure you are making an accurate cost comparison.
If you need some help with your business Internet Marketing, please feel free to email me on ali@alimcoaching.com and we can have an informal chat about how I can help you to turn your expensive hobby into a thriving business.
Internet marketing for beginners is somewhat of an oxymoron. This is because while in theory the concepts behind Internet Marketing might be quite simple; executing effective strategies can be extremely difficult. With this in mind, this article will attempt to explain the concept of Internet Marketing for beginners and will outline some basic strategies which can help a business owner to launch his own Internet Marketing campaign. We will cover concepts such as creating a website, placing sending out e-newsletters, orchestrating an email marketing campaign and optimizing your website for search engines.
Where Do I Start?
One of the most basic steps for starting an Internet marketing campaign is to create a website. If you don’t have a website or have a poorly designed website you should consider creating or re-designing a website to adequately market your products. If you do not have experience in web design, there are a number of software packages which make it simple for those with no design experience to create a functional website. However, sometimes this can be a false economy. Hiring a web designer is worthwhile because he or she can work to create a website which is attractive, functional and suitable to your products and offerings. He or she can also help you include more advanced features on your website, such as connecting it to your autoresponder, setting up payment options, automating tasks, SEO and ensuring that you have the correct Meta tags and keywords.
Learning about Internet Marketing
Internet marketing is not overly complicated but it is also not a process in which anyone can excel without making attempts to learn more about the subject. Business owners who do not know a great deal about Internet marketing, but who wish to implement Internet Marketing into their overall marketing strategy should carefully study the basic principles of Internet Marketing before launching their online marketing campaign. Fortunately for these business owners there are a variety of options for learning about Internet marketing. These options may include online research, reading published books and studying successful Internet marketing campaigns.
E-newsletters
Sending out e-newsletters can also be a part of an effective Internet Marketing strategy. E-newsletters are essentially emails which may contain a variety of information including informative articles, special offers, product updates, relevant advertising or any other information which is deemed worthwhile for the recipients of the e-newsletter. The importance of these newsletters is that they can be used as marketing tools which are not viewed by the recipients as an advertisement. One way to do this is to incorporate links or other soft sale approaches into the copy of the e-newsletters. However, care should be taken to keep these references minimal so the e-newsletter is not viewed as spam.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing campaigns can be another successful aspect of an Internet marketing campaign. Email marketing essentially involves sending out emails to a group of individuals who may be interested in your products and services. Care should be taken in sending out these emails to avoid sending emails which are unsolicited and will be viewed as spam. The correct way to do this is to only send out the emails to users who have opted in to your email mailing list. Another way to do this is to provide value in the emails as opposed to just including advertisements. This can be done by offering relevant advice in your emails and other useful information which may be of interest to the recipients of the email.
Optimizing Your Website
Optimizing your website for search engines is a critical aspect of an Internet Marketing campaign. Search engines rank websites according to quality and relevance for particular search terms. Many Internet users appreciate the effort by search engines and use these search engines to find the best websites on a particular subject. This means the Internet users are likely to only visit websites which rank well with search engines. Therefore if your website is not high ranking, you are not likely to generate a great deal of traffic from Internet users. Top ranking websites are likely to obtain the most traffic from search engines and all websites falling on the first page of the search engine results will always get more traffic to their website.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of any Internet marketing campaign. SEO is so important because it dictates the ranking of your website on popular search engines. Internet users value these results and are not likely to seek out websites which do not rank well with search engines. Conversely, high ranking websites can enjoy a great deal of increased website traffic as a result of these rankings.
Do Your Research
Researching Internet marketing online is one method which can be used for learning more about this topic. This type of research can be very informative and can provide the business owner with a great deal of advice and other information. However, it can also provide the business owner with a great deal of misinformation. When researching any subject online it is very important to note that not all of the information available online is accurate. This may be due to a variety of factors including content which is written by those who do not have a great deal of knowledge about the subject matter as well as content which was written years ago and is outdated. This can be frustrating but fortunately business owners can still learn from the Internet. This just means they should be more cautious about accepting information as being accurate and may wish to verify the information they obtain before implementing an Internet marketing strategy.
Published Books on Internet Marketing
Published books are another valuable resource for learning more about Internet marketing. There are a variety of books available which focus on this subject and provide a wealth of useful information. When selecting a book for use as research material it is important to seek out a book which received independent reviews which were positive. It is also important to seek out books which were published recently. This is important because the Internet marketing industry is evolving continuously and a book that was published only a few years ago may be outdated and may lack information on some of the new developments in the industry. The appeal of using published books to learn about Internet Marketing is you can keep the books on hand for easy reference when you launch your Internet Marketing campaign.
Study Successful Internet Marketing Campaigns
Finally business owners can learn a great deal about Internet marketing simply by studying successful Internet Marketing campaigns. If your business offers products and services in a particular niche consider entering relevant terms in popular search engines and studying the websites of some of the highest ranking businesses. This can provide you with a great deal of insight into what these business owners are doing which may be contributing to their success.
Examining everything from their website design to their search engine optimization strategies and even the content on their website can help you to determine why they are more successful than you. You should also consider how they are marketing their website which may include banner ads, affiliate marketing programs or other types of advertising. Armed with this information you can take the opportunity to implement changes to your own website and marketing strategy which may help you to gain a greater degree of success. Care should be taken to not copy anything directly from your competitors but to rather try to emulate their degree of success in your own way.
Market Research
Conducting market research can do a great deal to help you determine whether or not you should invest in an Internet Marketing campaign for your business. This step is very important because it will give you a good indication of whether or not you should even begin marketing your business on the Internet. Hiring a person or company who specialize in market research is recommended because they can conduct this research quickly and efficiently and will likely gain a great deal of valuable information as a result of their research efforts. If they determine your business can benefit from an Internet Marketing campaign, it is time to start thinking about how you want to advertise your business online.
Internet Marketing Success
The potential for success with an Internet Marketing campaign is virtually limitless. The success you enjoy is only limited by your ability to promote your products and services and execute effective marketing strategies. Some of the marketing strategies you may wish to employ may include optimizing your website for relevant search terms, placing links to your website judiciously on the Internet, writing and publishing e-newsletters and blogs and utilizing affiliates to promote your website.
Hire a Professional
Seeking the help of professionals can be an extremely worthwhile investment. If you are not well versed in the industry of Internet Marketing, hiring a firm with a great deal of expertise in this industry can be very helpful. They can assist you by consulting with you to determine which marketing strategies will be most effective, designing advertisements for your campaign, helping you to orchestrate your Internet Marketing campaign and evaluating the results of marketing efforts to determine which strategies are working and which are not. If you increase your customer base, sales and profits, any money that you have invested will be money well spent.
Branding, as a whole, is essential for any serious business because a company’s brand is what distinguishes it from its competitors. In today’s internet global age, it is necessary for most businesses to have an online presence to stay competitive. An effective internet branding strategy, just like its offline counterpart, helps bring awareness to your unique business offering and drives customer demand.
While Internet branding offers huge opportunities for business, in order for it to be effective one needs to attract and engage its customers. This isn’t easy on the internet. Branding is not as easy as putting up a website and adding your company logo and slogan. Your internet branding strategy should make your online brand noticeable and apparent.
Why Should You Worry About Branding Your Business?
Branding utilizes hi-tech tools to create an online presence for your business. Graphics and animation, a compelling web copy and overall website design that reflect your company are some of the important elements that will bring your online brand alive. An attractive website that helps customers easily and quickly find the information they need is the key to getting customer interaction and eventually, business. Your branding plan should include good design elements and ease of use to create an effective overall impression.
What Will Make Your Company Stand Out From the Crowd?
A strong online image will make the difference between a customer who buys from you online or switches to your competitors. Remember, that online customers can just leave your site and go to your competitors at the click of a mouse. A lot depends on the impression they get from your site. Branding seeks to convey an immediate unique message about your business to your target clients.
Basically you may know what your vision and offer are, but do your potential customers understand and will you immediately be able to capture their attention before they click away and go to your competitors.
As you can see, there are many requirements for a successful branding strategy. Hiring a branding specialist might be helpful to give you focus on your efforts in creating an online presence that will become a valuable asset to your business and make you stand out from the crowd.
Are you constantly feeling anxious and frustrated that you are not receiving all the internet traffic you would like to get to your web site?
Are you tormented from information overload listening to all the latest free website traffic tactics and not being able to understand any of it?
Are you dejected by people trying day and night who are harassing you to max out your credit card and get loans for Google clicks, and in the process losing your credit score?
Are you stupefied by the way your website just completely dropped out of the Google search results?
Or are you just too broke that all you have to rely on is getting some free website traffic tactics?
Well the good news is that you can employ website traffic tactics without spending any money whatsoever. However, knowing what to do and how to do it is crucial.
Here are some ways to get traffic to your website without spending any money on advertising or marketing:
1. Link it
Of all the effective website traffic tactics that can get you best results, linking to and from other websites is the one of the most widely-used method. Just make sure that the Internet business you are exchanging links with is relatively if not utterly related to your own business. And of course, don’t overkill by linking to too many websites as this might ban you from search engines.
2. Utilise Your Meta Tags
Another way of to acquire your desired traffic for your website is through having your Meta tags contain usually used keywords that target your business. Meta tags help search engines in describing your web page. If you’re quite adept with the HTML aspect of your web pages, manipulating your meta tags would be easy.
3. Keyword-rich And Sensible Content
Writing or acquiring articles that provide solid information regarding your business is one of the best ways of increasing traffic to your website. Making use of free keyword suggestion tools such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Overture, Wordstream, or Wordtracker will help you on which keyword or phrases to work on to better lead more traffic to your website. Making these write-ups very readable and genuinely informative will help you to gain trust and repeat visitors who will subsequently become repeat customers or clients.
Submitting these articles to various article directory listings will provide more visibility for your business as long as you keep your resource box intact to create for yourself numerous back links.
These methods, if employed properly, will not only make your web site popular but will make you achieve your most desirable result – higher conversion rate, therefore more customers or clients.
More leads, more customers, more sales, more revenue!
How can Branding help you to sell your products or offers?
When you think of the Coca Cola brand, what comes to mind? Does an image of a red can with words Coca Cola written in white display in your mind’s eye, or perhaps a coke bottle? Of course it does. Possibly a huge proportion of the globe know what the Coca Cola image and brand are.
Other incredibly famous Brands are companies like Apple, Nike, Microsoft, Disney, McDonalds to name just a few. The instant that you see their logo you know exactly who they are and what they do.
Following their example, we must pick our niche on the internet and brand our company name accordingly. Having a Brand that is easily identifiable and which tells your potential customers of clients what you do without them having to read a lot of text or to contact your company is essential if you want to succeed.
Here are the things that you will need:
1) A website that belongs to you.
2) Auto Responder and Opt In box. Your visitors will most likely not make a purchase on the 1st attempt and when they leave your site, you will not see them again. So do capture your visitors details with an auto responder opt in box and follow up with a series of emails. Follow up emails reinforces your brand name in the mind of your readers. Respectful persistence wins sales.
3) Photograph & Signature. Scan a groomed, smiling photo of yourself and your penned signature. This adds that personal touch to let your audience know you are a real person.
4) Audio. Do you have a nice speaking voice? If so, combine this with your photograph and signature to humanize your website and establish rapport with your audience.
5) Blog. A blog can be an add-on to your main website or be used as a free alternative to a website, at least until you are generating profits. You can combine every aspect of name branding mentioned in the above points into your free blog. Update your blog at regular consistent intervals with content specific to your vision. Refrain from writing about off topic content so as to keep your message and theme consistent. One way to keep your readers posted about your content is to use RSS feeds.
6) A Domain name. You can register a domain name and forward it to point at your Blog. Use the domain masking feature that allows your website to have a professional look.
7) A logo that represents your colours and theme and that people will instantly know what you do.
8) A clear image that are your colours and theme that you carry on to every Social Media account that you have.
Be specific on what your offer is and how you are trying to portray yourself as a company to fulfil the needs of your potential customers and clients.
Perhaps you have followed the trend in business to create an internet web site for your business that can be used to supplement your marketing efforts. If so, you have joined the momentum of the majority of businesses nowadays to create a corresponding “place” in cyberspace that can be used to reach customers online. The need for such an internet presence is entirely market driven and now more than any time, this is the place where you should have a presence and been seen.
Internet sales have soared during the last 6 months of the Coronavirus Pandemic outbreak, particularly in certain market segments and more and more, the first place people go to in order to learn about your business is the internet. If they find a well-designed web site that is full of features, that works fast and draws them in, that can be a tremendous tool for promoting your business. It doesn’t have to necessarily be an online business to have an internet presence, but it is the most cost effective and successful way of marketing any business.
When you set up a marketing tool outside of cyberspace, the first concern is how will that new marketing effort get noticed. So we would traditionally have been drawn to places where there is already an active traffic of people who would qualify as our customers. That may mean putting up a billboard where it will be seen by people going to work. That target audience may be the best population to respond to your message. Or if your business appeals to youth, advertising on MTV or on popular radio stations is a natural place to put your marketing money because the traffic is already there. However, these methods are extremely expensive and nowadays when a large proportion of the population is either working from home or on the internet, it is really touch and go as to whether you will ever capture their attention and interest.
We have to approach the internet differently. Yes, the traffic is already there but we have to enter the world of cyberspace marketing with a different kind of strategy so we can reach the customers who are traveling certain “internet roads” and make sure those roads lead to our web site.
There is a whole industry that has sprung up around the need for knowledgeable internet marketing gurus. It’s a good idea to use their talents to make sure the search engines put your web site in front of the right kind of client or customer. These talented internet geeks can put your business web site into the flow of web surfers so you get your share of that traffic.
That said, you don’t have to wait for the internet marketing experts to make your web site more successful. If the business has made the effort to put that web site up, you want to see it start to pay off right away. That is why you should consider some creative ways to drive people to your web site from your traditional markets thus educating your current customers, clients and partners about the site.
Ways to do that include:-
Promote the web site at every opportunity that you have. Have some business cards printed with your website details on including your email address and contact telephone number. Make sure that you give them out to anyone that you meet who may be a potential customer. Some creative signage such as flyers or brochures at your relevant retail locations can create some momentum and interest in customers to visit your exciting new web site.
Put the link on all correspondence. If you have flyers, a magazine or other current means of communications, your URL should always be listed there, as well as your email address and contact telephone number. Add your URL to your email signature and on business cards and all other forms of communication so your community of clients, customers and partners get used to associating that web site with you as much as they do your business name.
Create excitement. It is easy to operate a discount code or special offer from your website and Social Media as well as your business site that drives people to the web site for discounts or special offers. That kind of momentum can create huge surges of traffic through your web site with the corresponding surge of sales and leads.
The modern customer or client is used to seeing the promotion of a web site included with other forms of promotion and advertising. You are not “assaulting” your customer base with this information. If anything, when your audience sees that the business has burst into the cyberspace world in a big way, they will be thrilled and as likely to respond with, “It’s about time.”. A lot of people will now do their shopping or purchasing when they are at home or in the evening either on their computer or on their phone.
You know how much you depend on the internet to keep you informed about areas of interest and about businesses you like to patronize. So you can see that not only putting up a good web site but letting people know that it is there and that there are big things there for them to enjoy is doing them a favour as much as it is creating new marketing opportunities for your business.
If you would like any help or assistance with any of the above, please email me on ali@alimcoaching.com and let me help you.
Who doesn’t want inexpensive internet marketing tools?
In this day and age when advertising your business online is the way to go, it’s a must that you avail of internet marketing tools at the lowest cost possible. How do you know what you need and how to get hold of them? How can you make the most out of these low cost internet marketing tools?
These low cost internet marketing tools aim to better your website and promote them to massive audiences regardless of their location and business niche.
Here are some tools to help you market your business:
1. Software
There is software specializing in internet marketing. These programs are affordable internet marketing tools. They attract traffic, communicate your site to anyone online, harness and trim down your keywords, track your site visitors and create links to other sites. Of course, the phrase “low cost” emphasizes that you should not spend a large amount of money on them. Watch out for internet marketing tools that promise the earth, but actually do not deliver and just take a large chunk of your marketing.
2. Website packages
There are many low cost internet marketing tools and companies that do the following: hosting and designing your site, getting your domain, offering technical help, configuring and upload your files, and doing your Google keywords or AdWords campaign to attract traffic. These are available in website packages that you can sign up to anytime. Choose a package that caters to your site’s needs and to your budget.
3. Mailing lists
When you visit the ‘inbox’ folder of your emails, you read nothing but website promotions. That’s email marketing. It boosts your business like no other method. Be very aware of the rules about spamming. Ensure that your subscribers have opted in to your emails and are therefore on the “safe lists” that make your mails spam-free. You can also buy mailing lists from the internet or work with JV (Joint Venture) partners.
4. Data Submitters
This is a money-saving internet marketing tool that works like magic. Have a data submitter of your own and amass tremendously huge hits.
5. E-books
Integrate a free E-book in your site for people to download once they have subscribed to your emailing list. If you give away free information and value, you keep people’s interest and attention and hopefully they will keep visiting your site in the future. That’s one very affordable internet marketing tool for you.
6. SEO tools
Internet marketing is not complete without the standard SEO tools. Search engines remain as the major powerhouse in marketing so never leave this part out. Generate traffic through this effective low cost internet marketing tool. If you are not sure how to do this yourself, there are plenty of companies who specialize in doing this and often for a small amount of money.
However, if you are going to outsource your SEO, before you sign up to a company, study the package deals; analyse the contents and benefits before deciding who you will go with.
I hope that these hints and tips have given you some value, if you would like any help with any of the above, please email me on ali@alimcoaching.com.
To promote your new business and to let people know that it exists, you can utilise a lot of various Internet marketing methods. You don’t have to spend millions of pounds just to get some decent exposure for your company. There are ways to make your business be seen and felt without spending a lot of money on advertising.
Make use of your online power – through Internet marketing. Here are simple methods that you may employ to boost the visibility of your business without spending more than what you can afford. However, these techniques need patience and some footwork to produce satisfying results.
Firstly, you need a website before you can make use of these low cost Internet marketing strategies. So create one or hire a web developer. It will display your products and services. This will be used in employing the following Internet marketing techniques.
1. Affiliate Marketing
This is the process of recruiting a network of smaller websites known as affiliates to drive targeted traffic to a website. Ad copy and links will be provided by the advertisers. You will have to pay a certain percentage of the sales profit to your affiliates.
2. Links
One of your goals should be to attain a good ranking with search engines. One way to do it is through link building. This could be done through trading links to other businesses that are related with yours.
3. Newsletters
Sending out newsletters to your subscribers (those who signed up for your newsletters) will help greatly in establishing a good working relationship with your customers or prospective customers. It has to be short, sweet, consistent and written for a general audience. You also need to do this on a regular basis, whether once a week or once a fortnight.
4. E-mail Marketing
As one of the best cost-effective Internet marketing tools, it stays as a very important method of keeping your customers aware of your products and services. Just make sure to avoid spamming or you will have to close down you business due to complaints. Ensure that you have an opt-in form on the front page of your website giving you permission to email your subscribers.
5. Articles
If you put quality content in the form of articles in your website along with your products and services, search engines will have to index your website. Getting you website indexed by popular search engines means more traffic for you.
6. Forums
Expand your Internet network is through joining forums that mainly discusses stuff regarding or related to your products and services. Actively posting responses or answers and asking relevant information will build your reputation as that forum’s member and boost your company’s visibility through your signature files. These signature files are those that go with your every post. Links to your website could be included in this signature and your email address.
