7 Free Ways to Promote and Advertise Your Business

Guest article by Adam Woods

There are many ways in which to get your business found on the internet for free, it is a combination of all the aspects outlined in this article and persistence in doing the work regularly. If you want quick exposure and are willing to pay through the nose for it then just go and open a pay per click account. If you want to drive endless quality traffic to your website for free then read on. When implementing these tactics the search engines will also be more likely to pick up on the website you are promoting and will list it in the organic search engines which have statistics for sending more traffic with a higher conversion rate than pay per click. The seven points I am going to cover today are

1.) Writing articles.
2.) Writing press releases.
3.) Blogging.
4.) Forum signatures.
5.) Podcasts.
6.) Making and publishing video.
7.) Viral marketing.

Submitting articles in ezines is one of the best ways to promote your new online business or any new offerings. But in order to be successful your articles must be informative and should not be promoting the business at the consumers face. There is nothing worse than searching for some important information on the net and stumbling on someone trying to push their business down your throat. You must present yourself as a knowledgeable person offering help rather than a mere salesman. But you can promote your business through the article signature. For example if I am writing an article on how stay at home parents could earn extra money from the internet then I can put a hyperlink at the end of my article that says something like ” Click here to see how I make money as a stay at home mother”. Some ezine sites have their own coding system for incorporating such signatures and so they may differ from site to site. So if your website has more information on the subject that you have written about in your article, then it is beneficial to put a direct link to your website or you else may link to your blog that has more information on the same and then you can link to your website from the blog without any issues. You have the choice to be a free member with most ezine article sites or otherwise you can subscribe. A monthly subscription will ensure that your articles get published at a faster rate but if you are writing

Writing press releases is a more direct way of advertising your online business. It is possible to keep people up to date with recent events in your business such as developments in products or changes made to your website or you can use press releases in the same way as you use articles to give away valuable content to your readers on related topics to your business. Pressexposure.com, is one of the best press release sites and is fairly relaxed in the rules of self promotion, it only takes a day or two to get your work reviewed and published.

Blogging is another great way to promote your site, your business and yourself. If you can make a blog with interesting and informative content then people will subscribe to it and follow your work regularly. A blog can also earn you money. The more popular it becomes, the more visitors you will get and you can allow others to advertise on that blog thus which creates a nice bonus income and of course opens a gateway to your main website. You can also publish good video content in your blog. It is really easy to publish a video from youtube on your blog. Just copy the embedding code from there and paste it on your blogs HTML code. It doesnt even have to be your own work. You can embed any video with an embedding code but make sure it is relevant to your content.

Forum signatures is a way of creating a link to your website and as described in point 1. With ezine articles it is a way of disguising your domain so as not to be obviously promoting yourself. It is best to enter a forum with the view as not to promote yourself but to brand yourself as a servant to other people in the forum. This can be done by viewing peoples help requests and finding the answers to their questions and posting them in the forum with your signature. There are literally hundreds of forums out there just be careful to read the rules before you make a post because if you write to much self promotional material you will have your account closed very quickly and sometimes without warning. The more traffic there is in a forum the better don’t be afraid to join as many as possible and make use of a good hour a day reading through and replying to posts and making fresh posts that are of interest. You will soon see that people will take note of what you have to say and be interested in finding out more about what you do.

Creating a promotional video for publishing over the internet is not as geeky as you may think. In fact with software like windows movie maker, that comes pre-installed with any PC with windows operating systems, the process is really simple. I have already written an article on making videos with windows movie maker. Video publishing is easy nowadays as by using sites like trafficgeyser.com and tubemogul.com you can publish them in multiple sites at one go. They also cover Podcast publications of the same content which is discussed in the point 6 of this article.

Viral marketing is my favorite of the lot and Im going to give you a golden nugget of information here. If you have a look at the videos in YouTube or any such site, you would also notice the number of views counter and the date it was posted. You would also notice that funny contents are among the most viewed ones there. For instance there was a well known video called Charlie bit me a few years ago about two baby brothers biting each other on the finger which was really funny and had over 62 million views in a very short span. Now imagine you have such a video with your URL mentioned at the bottom as a subtitle. How many of those 62 million viewers might type and open your website? Even if we consider 1% strike rate, you still have 620,000 potential customers. People also embed such videos into their blogs or forward them with mails or face book and other social networking sites. This is the origin of the nomenclature viral. It spreads like viruses! The generated traffic might be untargeted but still you get high amount of publicity and once you go viral then you can potentially gain lots from it. The easiest way to find content for viral marketing is to simply record a highly viewed program from the television. I have had great results from programs like Britain’s Got Talent and X Factor. Do you remember Paul Potts? When he sang for the first time, the video had over 10 million views in a week on YouTube and it now has over 40 million. Just imagine the potential!

All these tactics are ongoing exercises and should be executed on a regular basis in order to see results. Make it a weekly task to do one of each, each week and you will soon start to see results.

About the Author:

In A cut-throat online world of marketing you need certain tools to make your business a successful one. Adam Woods has learned from some of the very best marketers on the internet today and is rapidly creating a name for himself and his business. Let Adam show you the path he took to a better life and financial freedom.

A Step-By-Step Guide To Niche Marketing

Guest article by David Lim

A niche market can be defined as a market within a larger market segment whose needs can be very targeted. Typically, a niche market is too small for the big players to be interested in so the competition will be manageable for the new players. Niche marketing is simply marketing that is targeted at a niche market.

There are many ways you can go about running a niche marketing campaign. But online, where the target is usually keywords with low competition in the search engines, you would probably take the following steps:

* Identify keywords that has the most potential in terms of either Adsense revenue or product sales or both.

* Build a website to target those keywords.

* Use on-page SEO techniques to optimize the website for the targeted keywords.

* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.

* Keep building inbound links until your website ranks at the position you want in Google for your targeted keywords.

I have outlined the basic steps above but you will probably have to mix and match as necessary. Niche marketing is definitely not an exact science and you have to adjust accordingly.

Expected Cost

In my opinion, you must pay for your domain name and web hosting. They will cost you less than $11 per month. The advantages of paying for those far weighs the small cost incurred.

You might also want to consider some other services which can enhance your productivity and, in the longer term, give you a better return on the time and effort that you invested:

* Paid writers for your articles, websites and blogs. You can look for them at job sites like eLance.

* Services that automate the submission of your articles to article directories, blogs and websites.

* Exchanging links with other webmasters can become a breeze if you subscribe to services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchange. Some of the paid services comes with scripts that you install on your website so that the whole link exchange process is quite automated.

Recommended Skills

A relatively good command of English would definitely be recommended, especially if you intend to write the content and articles yourself. You don’t have to be a writer, but you must at least be able to write grammatically correct sentences and be disciplined enough to spell check your work.

You will need to tinker with name servers and web hosting accounts to get your website or blog up and running. Some changes in the web templates supplied might also be needed, or you might even want to design your own. Instructions will be provided or can be googled, but you do have to be computer literate enough to understand and carry them out.

I have broken down niche marketing into a series of simple steps. But those steps cannot be looked at in isolation. You must look at those steps as part of a business, a niche marketing business. As a niche marketer, you are the boss of your niche marketing business. And the decisions that you make for your business must be made not as the niche marketer but as the boss of the niche marketing business.

About the Author:

While ideas are easy to come by, those that are easy and really work are not. David Lim runs a site about easy money-making ideas that are practical, quite easy to implement and works well given a little time and effort.

Home Based Residual Income

Guest article by Joe Cotroneo

The concept of owning and running a business from home is to be able to earn enough money to afford the desired lifestyle of your dreams. To achieve this many people work extremely hard at becoming a success, and quite often put in lots more hours working for themselves from home, than they would when employed by someone else. The main factor that people seem to overlook is that they could do to be earning a residual income from home.

Residual income from home is money that you are making on a consistent basis with little to no work. You build your business, and you acquire customers and clients. What you sell them is a product or service that they will need to buy again and again. If you can set this process up to be automated it cuts your work down even more. By selling something that is disposable, which means they will have to buy it over you are creating a residual income from home.

There are a number of different existing programs which can be selected, or even bought, in order to give support in the building of your residual income from home. One example of this is Prepaid Legal, which is a subscription service, whereby there are newsletters and member sites available to you that you can keep upon paying your monthly subscription. Consequently, when the initial site is created, the buyer will pay a monthly fee in order to keep the service. This is one way in which you can receive a residual income.

Independent sales can also be used as a way to build residual income from home. Melalucea and MonAvie are two types of companies that you become an independent distributor for and in order for you customers to make purchases they sign up and become members in order to buy the products. The membership usually includes an autoship, which means that regardless of whether the customer has an order that month or not they are sent what they selected to have in their autoship and they are billed for it. The autoship helps to ensure that you have residual income each month.

Affiliate programs can also help you build a residual income from home. Affiliate programs are programs where you are selling products through referrals for different companies. You aren’t necessarily selling anything; you are referring people to the company to make a purchase, sign up for membership and so on.

Whether building residual income from home is easy or not really depends more on you then it does the product you are working with. Building a residual income from home requires time, work and effort on a consistent basis. Remember that nothing happens overnight, you need to be diligent and persistent. If you can do that you can build a nice residual income from home and live the life you have dreamed of.

About the Author:

Before you buy anything online, make sure you check out Joe Cotroneo’s website about residual income.