Advice Welcome: Internet Marketing

[LDW]

Hello Everyone,

Having recently become self employed I earn a comfortable living working as a sales agent. However, what brings me to this site is that I have also developed a website which has recently gone live, but I am limited financially on the amount of marketing I can afford. I would therefore, welcome any cost effective marketing tips.

I feel that advertising on the internet, google etc will not be effective until I have increased the number of members on the site itself, and therefore feel that partnerships, may be a way forward?

I would love to know what has worked and not worked for others. Please view my site to see what you think. I will gladly review others sites and give honest feedback in return.

Kind regards,

Liza


[Edited: No direct URLs please]

[FDG]

Hi Liza

I have been marketing for 7 years now and know what you mean. I have worked with small and large companies and they all starve for the same thing...getting noticed!

Your interest in Web marketing is a good step, but it doesnt have to cost thousands$$$, just need to get done what you need..

is your site currently optimized for search engines? or your content? do you have people linking to you? do you have info people want to read? Does your site look professional?

these are some of the things needed... contact me if you need more help.

[vesperinc]

Liza,

I agree. The best way to get noticed without investing in Pay Per Click (PPC) ads is search engine optimization. You will definitely want to include your key words in your website content, title tags and metatags. Also be cognizant of the way you're labeling your files and URLs.

I have been working on my site for about 7 months. I think we are getting there, but we're still not listed with the search engines. It can take between 6 to 12 months.

Wendy

[LisaSp]

Liza,

I tried article marketing and it really worked when it came to traffic and dominating the search engines.

I wanted a domain name but someone else had it. So I started writing and distributing short but informative articles to a targeted group of e-mail newsletter publishers. Some of them published my articles online and my Web site shot to the top of the search engines.

Now when anyone searches for my name online my Web site is the first one that comes up. I may not own the domain name that I want, but I do own the search engine results, which actually helped my sales a lot.

I wrote an ebook about it. You can find it on my Web site if you click on my profile. Another person who has a very comprehensive, but expensive, solution is Jason Potash. His product is called Article Announcer. Just put .com behind that name and you should find his product.

[BENJAMIN]

You could use email promotions as well.
If you have a list of customer or subscriber e-mail addresses, then you're ready to get started.

People who've visited your site and signed up for your newsletter are far more likely to buy from you than someone who's never heard of your site before. It's essential that you stay in touch with these people!

Encourage visitors to frequently return to your site by e-mailing them attractive promotional offers, such as e-coupons or discounts on new products you're offering, notification of a sale or a contest you're running, or even free services or products you've decided to give away to a limited number of people.

You can manage your mailing list and automate your e-mail promotions using existing software programs.

[Maximus]

Dear fellow business owner,
I would love to give you some free advice. After briefly looking over your request I do not have a solid idea of what your online business does. I know that you are a salesperson and have decided to start an online business, that is it. No one in there right mind would give you advertising advice based on this alone. Marketing is a complex and delicate tool to be utilized only with all of the facts. Please post a detailed description of the online business and its mission. Only then can any sound advice be given.

[UsefulBloke]

Hi Liza,
This biggest problems I found with the "trading" websites I've been involved with has been converting traffic into revenue and having a coherent set of methods for doing so. It's good to be found, but what do you do with them after that?
You're getting lots of good advice here and you can use all of it to help build an effective marketing structure for your site.
What I'd say to you is, there's no one thing you can do to improve the traffic, value and revenue on your site, it needs to be a mixture of methods. Just what those methods are depends on two factors: the time you have available and the budget you have available (if one of those is small it tends to mean the other needs to be bigger).
Implementation and follow through is what's really important (in other words, it ain't what you do it's the way that you do it).

TTFN

Al

[faeriebell]

There are some cheap online sources for marketing and advertising, but you will not get any quality traffic from them.

Stick with the reputable ones and choose keywords that are niched and you won't have to pay much for (Google's minimum is 1 cent now.)

Go with Adbrite, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing (formally Oveture) They have low minimums and are the most effective online advertising methods.

PM me if you have any questions.

[googoos0ng]

Do you invest into newsletter and web marketing? I bought this online software www.getresponse.it at a very low budget and I use it to send to customers newsletter with news and updates. There are already some preloaded templates that might help you a lot on building your newsletter and, moreover, the use of preloaded templates would help you a lot on giving a more professional look to your marketing. Getresponse offers you also some more interesting tools and oportunities to you webmarketing, give it a look

[smartmom]

Today people seem to be using ebooks more and more to get people to become members of their sites. I tried it and it works. You could give away a 10 or 20 page ebook on the subject of your expertise. There are a few things that you can give-away but make sure that they know that they will only receive the electronic book if they become a member of your site. Then visit one of the freebie sites and share your free give-away with them. You may only want to give away so many free books, its all up to you!!