Advertising and Marketing

“The trick to developing a product that is guaranteed to sell like crazy is to offer a solution to a problem. If you can save people time, money, or hassle, they’ll be willing to pay for your solution!” – Corey Rudl

If someone offered to help you make a million dollars, why would you say, “no?” This very thing goes on all the time to thousands of people all over the world. You may have never imagined you could make a six-seven figure income, yet it’s happening all the time on the internet. This is the result of internet marketing. It is a viable business and has made many millionaires. Even 19-year-old billionaires!

On the internet, millions upon millions of transactions take place every day, every hour, every minute and every second. This was not possible fifteen to twenty years ago. Now, with access to the internet, you have the capability of reaching many thousands of potential customers at the touch of a button. And – you are only limited by your imagination.

Internet marketing sounds easy to do, yet most businesses that currently use the internet to market their business lose money. When marketing your business online, there are three important steps that will make you feel confident. They include:

1. Targeting your audience.
2. Automating your business, and
3. Testing and adjusting your offer.

Your target audience depends upon the type of service or product you are offering. A little homework is required here. If you wish to sell hair and beauty products, you wouldn’t send your announcements to farmers. Find out where your customers are by searching the web. Track what they are interested in when they visit other websites. Find out by asking. Do market surveys. Send out questionnaires. Query friends, acquaintances, neighbors and find out what interests them.

You can easily find out what your customers want by testing your products and services. Then if it doesn’t sell, you can make adjustments before spending lots of money on a product or service that the market won’t support. Testing new products, ideas, or your advertising message on a small target audience first, saves you time, effort, and money. Doing a small test, first, also allows you time to make adjustments to your website or your advertisement to meet the needs of your customer.

Automate your online business so that your valuable time and attention is directed to creating more products or services. There are now hundreds of web sources that offer business automation services. They can send out your advertisements, business cards, flyers, press releases, and post cards to thousands of potential buyers at a time. They can notify your customers when their order is ready to ship. They can do your bookkeeping and track of your customer’s order.

Internet marketing can be as easy as you make it, and it can be fun. Thinking up products and services that meet the needs of customers and getting them to the customer in a manner that is convenient and appropriate is rewarding in itself. And when your product or service is something you love creating, and when it helps others save time, money, feel and look good, this is a great benefit.

Three other benefits of selling your product or service online are:

1. You have access to a global market at the touch of a finger.
2. Your investment of time is small.
3. You can start an online business with little cost.

Compared to the cost of offline marketing – newspaper, radio, and TV ads, and the cost of postage with direct mailing, you can set up a website at a low cost and start offering your product or service and even see the results in a matter of days. With internet marketing you can test your ads, sales offers, website design, and notify thousands of potential customers – and sometimes receive an order within hours – and almost at no cost.

The internet allows you to reach a global market and the cost is much less than using the traditional methods. You can quickly change your marketing plan and send out your marketing message multiple times. Whereas, with the old way of selecting the media and waiting for your ad to be scheduled, printed, and then distributed, the comparison in cost and in time is monumental.

For internet marketing to work for you, you must set your business to run on automatic so you can put your attention on developing more products and better services. You must target your advertising message, consistently get it out to as many potential buyers as possible, and be ready to test, test, and test again to make certain your offer is what your customers wish to buy. These key secrets are a small part of what makes for a successful online business. It’s up to you to find your passion, your faith, and your will to increase your sales, and – to give back.

Gerri D Smith publishes an inspirational newsletter for women business owners and individuals eager to improve, and willing to learn more. And it’s Free! Well-written articles, business offers, and more for your business and personal image improvement. Go to: http://www.distinctivebusinesswomen.com

Finding the right SEO tools and resources can be challenging – but we’re here to make it a little easier on you. SEO forums and newsgroups can be very confusing to a person with no SEO experience. These forums and newsgroups are just so heavily populated that they can intimidate many new users.

The first rule regarding these situations is to just slowly try to integrate yourself into the community. Follow these rules closely and concisely so that you do not offend anybody:

1. Do not spam the forum with your problems. If you have a few things that you would like to discuss you will probably get help, but do not try to hog all of the assistance for yourself. For one thing, most of your questions have already been answered, believe it or not. There is generally a “search” option. Always use this before posting your problem.

2. Do not “Flame.” Flaming is a term used among forum dwellers to describe the behavior of “yelling” at people via the forum. This is generally associated with cursing, constant argument, typing in all caps to try to convey anger, and dismissing other people’s posts in an undignified fashion. There are other problems that are included in flaming, but I have given you the jist of it.

3. Never take a post off topic. If there is something that you would like to discuss that was inspired by a post on another topic, post a new topic in the appropriate board and explain where the topic was conceived. You may still want to reply to the post just to let people know that the topic has been created so that somebody else doesn’t take it off topic.

4. Do not “bump” your thread (or post). Bumping a post is when you reply to your own post in hopes of getting a response sooner. The only time that this is acceptable is if your thread has laid dormant for about a week. Bumped threads are very annoying to most forum users. Bumping posts on a regular basis will probably lead to a lack of interest in your posts and will probably contribute to a lack of support in your ventures.

6. Be friendly. There is no reason that you can’t be completely polite when posting on a forum. You will get very good response if you are simply polite in your post. Politeness in the world of forums includes making sure that you have communicated your problem carefully so that people attempting to help you can understand and provide answers to the best of their abilities.

7. Join in on the community favorites. Many forums now include “games” which are occasionally pretty fun. They are pretty much just there for if you are bored and waiting for a response to your other posts, but they are enjoyable if you keep up with them as many forum dwellers are quite articulate and witty.

Here’s a list of resources that you can use when you need help but you don’t want to pay for it.

Finding Groups.

Google makes discussion groups easy to find with their ‘Google Groups’ tool (groups.google.com). Go there and type in ’seo’ to see what’s on offer. Two popular groups are alt.internet.search-engines and alt.www.webmaster. If you don’t like Google’s groups, try Yahoo’s instead (groups.yahoo.com). Either of these sources will provide you with a pretty substantial list. Remember, regular search engine listings seem to apply here so generally you will see the best results towards the top of the listing.

dmoz.org is a good place to start: from their home page, you can browse down to any subject you want, and you should find at least one mailing list, discussion forum or message board in the listing.

There are several forums out there on the web that focus on SEO, and you can learn a lot from all of them, even if some of the discussions are over your head at first. Even ordinary searchers can learn a lot from following these discussions, as they tell you a lot about how search engines work.

Here are some useful forums: WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, ThreadWatch, Best Practices Search Engine Forums, cre8asite forums and the High Rankings Forum. Check them out.

About The Author:

Lawrence Andrews is an ePublisher, software developer, consultant, and author of numerous books. Visit his Private Label Content and Software site at http://www.lmamedia.com for more information about
SEO and PRL.

You may use this article freely on your website as long as this resource box is included, a link point back to my site, and this article remains unchanged! Copyright 2005 Lawrence Andrews

Internet users know that the online world is growing and expanding on a daily basis. Many entrepreneurs are using their web sites to make money. Online business is thriving, Internet buying and selling is more popular than ever, and everyone is cashing in. But to make money from your web site, and make your Internet dreams a success, you must have customers.

Sounds simple enough, right? As easy as it sounds, there’s more to it than that. The Internet is a thriving, fast-paced, high-tech world where everything has to be bigger and better than what came before. Thousands upon thousands of web sites are out there, many of them probably very much like yours. How do you make your web site stand out above the competition? How do you make sure that customers come to your site first, buy from you?

Search engines. Everyone who has used the Internet has used a search engine at one time or another. The process is quite simple and usually quick. You know you’re looking for heated socks. So, you go to the search engine of your choice and type in “heated socks.” Voila! Web sites that sell heated socks.

So, what do you do? You click on the very first web site that’s on the list that the search engine returns. That’s what everyone does! The web sites that appear on page thirteen of the listing aren’t going to get any visitors. Obviously, you want your site to appear right up there near the top of the list.

And that’s where search engine optimization comes in. Search engines look, primarily at one thing: keywords. Choosing good keywords for your site is incredibly important, because keywords are what your potential visitors are going to use to find you. First, you have to decide what keywords you’re going to display on your site, what keywords you think visitors will use to find your site.

What sort of site is it? Are you running funny a site with lots of political jokes? You’ll want keywords like “politics” “Washington, D.C.” “Funny” “humor,” etc. Choosing good keywords is very important. You want simple, straightforward keywords. Some words are very commonly misspelled – include the common misspellings if your keywords are easy to misspell. Simplify your keywords as much as possible, include as many as you can, and you’ve taken your first steps to search engine optimization.

But, even that isn’t enough. Knowing that your keywords are “computers, Internet, and mouse pads” is great, but you still need to do more. Those keywords, all the keywords that you want connected to your site, have to appear on the site. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Well, it is pretty simple, but you have to know what search engines are looking for. Search engines are very, very smart, and look for very specific things.

Your keywords must appear within content on the site. You can’t just repeat the same keywords over and over “computers, Internet, mouse pads. Computers, the Internet, mousepads.” Search engines will discount your site, because they’ll know what you’re trying to do, and you won’t get a high listing. To get a high listing, you have to have lots of content. Here’s the secret: it doesn’t have to be great content. As a matter of fact, most Internet users don’t read the text of web site that carefully in the first place. Just have lots of contents on the site, with your specific keywords repeated 4-6 times on the page, and you’ll have optimized your keywords.

Search engine optimization isn’t hard, as long as you know how search engines work. By using good keywords, you can get the most out of your site and out of search engines.

Charles Preston is the president of Click Response. Click Response offers small businesses a search engine optimization service that guarantees 1st page ranking at an affordable price.