Marketing An Online Business
6 Ways To Get Customers!

Techniques for marketing an online business include article marketing, pay-per-click, newsletters, affiliate marketing, videos, and viral marketing. Promote your online business with these techniques and see your customer base grow.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is a popular way to get traffic to your website. As an article marketer, you would write short informational articles about your expertise.

Then you publish your articles in article directories such as EzineArticles.com or Directory of Ezines. (new window)

These articles are then re-published in ezines/newsletters and on other websites. If you include a link to your website in the resource box at the bottom of your article, you will get a back link.

As you probably already know, you need many back links to boost your website in the search engines. Article marketing is a great way to do that.

Your articles need to be of the highest quality possible in order for reputable website and ezine owners to be willing to publish your articles. Remember your articles reflect on you.

A typical article should be 400 to 700 words in length. Don't publish the article you give to article directories on your own website. The reason is it will be classified as duplicate content by the search engines. You want your own website to be unique in every way.

I would write a unique article to both EzineArticles.com and Directory of Ezines.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising is the quickest and probably the most expensive way to get traffic to your website. Pay-per-click advertising requires you to set up an account with pay-per-click search engines, such as, Google AdWords, Yahoo search marketing, or 7Search.

You would then fund your account, depositing what you are planning on spending for advertising. Next submit your ads for approval. Once your ads are approved, you can start bidding on keywords.

Don't over bid on keywords. You need to know where your break even point is. You don't want to get into the situation where you lose money on every sale. Bidding too high can have this effect.

It is critical to have a landing page that converts well in order for your pay-per-click advertising campaign to work. Spending hundreds to thousands of dollars to have traffic come to your website and not make a sale is poor business.

Marketing an online business with pay-per-click advertising can work well, but you do need to be careful. Placing the highest bid on popular keywords will bring you lots of traffic. It will also drain your account quickly. Be careful.

Newsletters

Marketing an online business with newsletters is another excellent way to promote your online business. A bi-weekly or monthly newsletter that contains excellent and timely information keeps you in the minds of your customers or website visitors.

Your newsletter builds trust between you and your visitors. When the time is right to buy your product or service, you have first chance of closing a sale.

I believe your newsletter should be of the highest quality in content. Again, your newsletter reflects upon you and your business. If your newsletter lacks substance, it gives your online business a poor image.

Don't email a newsletter daily. I guarantee that it will not be read often. I have many emails from websites that after awhile I begin to ignore. Emailing a newsletter weekly is a bit much, in my opinion. Daily is out of the question. I just don't have the time to keep up with that volume. If you mail too often, your message will be lost.

Affiliate Marketing

Marketing an online business with your own affiliate marketing program is another excellent way to promote your business. Let's say you write an ebook about your niche. "How to do" books are often popular.

When you sell your ebook through affiliates, you are also creating backlinks to your website. You know how valuable that is! This drives more traffic to your website through the marketing efforts of others.

Rosalind Gardner, author of The Super Affiliate Handbook writes on how she earns over $436,797 in one year selling other people's stuff. While her book is from the view of an affiliate marketer, I feel you can learn some tips that would help you in developing your own affiliate program.

ClickBank.com offers a great way for you to sell your ebook. They will manage your own affiliate program for you. They collect the money and mail the commission checks to your affiliates.

If you sell physical products consider Commission Junction (cj.com) as your program administrator.

Videos

Marketing an online business with videos posted on your website is an increasingly popular technique. No doubt you have heard about YouTube. Many businesses now post their own videos on YouTube, as well as on their own website.

It is a great way to get your message delivered. Many people prefer to view a video over reading a long web page. If you use classes to educate your customers, consider videotaping a class. Break your video up into ten minute segments and post the video on YouTube.

Videos are a great way to demonstrate your products and sell your services. The professionalism of your video will have an effect on your customers. So be professional.

Viral Marketing

Marketing an online business with viral marketing is an excellent way to get your message to spread across the globe. The classic example of effective viral marketing was HotMail.com.

HotMail, as you may well know, created a free email service. They added a simple message at the bottom of everybody's email that said something like get your free email at hotmail.com.

When people sent normal emails to their friends and family using the HotMail service, HotMail's message was spread with every email. As more and more people joined HotMail to use their service, HotMail's subscriber list grew in exponential proportions.

That is the perfect example of what viral marketing is. You want your message, whether it is a free ebook, video, or whatever, to spread by people sharing your message with their family, friends, and business associates.

When you do it successfully, your traffic to your website will skyrocket.

Marketing an online business using these methods will help your online business grow.

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