Archive | December, 2022

It’s an exciting adventure that you’re about to begin by being self-employed. It’s time to let everyone know about your soon-to-be successful company by promoting your home business.

While hiring a marketing or public relations firm is an easy option, since you are just starting out, it may be a tool you cannot yet afford. If this is the case, it is up to you to develop different media means to promoting your home business.

The most obvious is starting a Web site. There are many freelances out there who would gladly do this for you for a fee, but this is not really necessary if you have basic computer skills. Several sites are dedicated to instructing you on a step-by-step procedure on how to create a Web site for promoting your home business. Many provide usage for a price, but there are some out there in which you can use for no cost at all. This would be a practical option. A free site might not offer all the flourishes of a paid-for one, but as your first priority would be simply promoting your home business, other features, graphics and designs can be added once the money starts rolling in and you have extra cash to spend on creating a stand out site.

What a wonderful invention it is, this thing we call the Internet!

If you would just take your time to know your way around, you could discover a lot of premium products and services being offered for free. What’s best is that there is a seemingly endless number of these wonderful finds, what with the Internet being a vast network of constantly evolving ideas and all!

Among these magnificent benefits is the chance to be able to promote your business, any business, online, free of charge! It doesn’t matter if your enterprise is a purely online or offline venture, the World Wide Web is home to a great number of marketing opportunities that you could avail of, with no damage to your business’ budget whatsoever.

Advertising can be a big problem otherwise. A lot of companies reserve a big chunk of their budgets to cover marketing expenditures. Sometimes, these gambles pay off, but there are occasions when they fail miserably, putting to waste some good money that could have been used in other areas of development for the business involved.

But with the many channels available online, marketing has become a less risky course of action. There so many avenues available online where you could advertise your business for free and attain more exposure for your products or services. Here are some of them.

1. You could advertise through your own website. Ordinarily, you should pay a nominal fee for web hosting and your domain name. A paid web hosting service is more reliable. Your own domain name would impress upon your visitors an immediate sense of professionalism. But if you don’t want to spend for them, there are a lot of free web space providers on the Internet!

2. You could advertise through other people’s websites. And you could do this in a lot of ways too! You could create a banner that would summarize your business’ offers and have it displayed on existing pages. Or if you have your won website for your business, you could use the said banner to link to your pages, or you could even settle for simple links. Additionally, you could have other webmasters rave about your venture and they could talk about it in their own websites.

3. You could create your own affiliate program. By giving commissions as incentive, you could invite a lot of Internet users to become your affiliates. Each affiliate would work to help you make a sale. It’s like having a battalion of sales representatives that you’d only have to pay if they manage to refer a willing customer!

4. You could try viral marketing. Viral marketing is the online equivalent of word o mouth advertising. By giving away something for free, for as long as that something has a link or a simple reference to your business, you’re encouraging the recipient to spread the word about your business to the people he knows. This would result in the exponential expansion of your business message like wildfire.

5. You could advertise in online communities. Forums and mailing lists are popular venues that could likewise convey your business message. Membership to these groups is usually free. Additionally, you could also create your own mailing list and start capturing leads for future sales by doing some helpful follow-ups.

The Internet is a great place for promoting your business. There are five million people online at any given time and the world is, quite literally, your market. It would be best for your business to capitalize on this wonderful opportunity and expand your audience a thousand fold bigger!

And you wouldn’t even have to spend a penny while you’re at it.

We tend to make living a successful life more complicated than it needs to be. It’s human nature to want to overcomplicate even the simplest concepts, because we can’t seem to get how something could be that simple. We often maintain this ideal to stop ourselves from being successful. Sure, life is difficult and it can be hard, but that’s how it was designed to be. Achieving success isn’t as difficult as you might think, just use these 3 principles.

#1 Begin with what you can control.
If you are like most people, you spend too much time worrying about things that are outside of your control. These things cause you stress because you spend your day focusing on how terrible your situation is rather than how you can change your situation.
For example, you can’t control that you didn’t exercise in the past. There is no value in wasting energy focusing on the past. Instead, learn from your mistakes and make changes.

What you can control is how you react when those curveballs are thrown at you. Your mind is your most powerful tool. There is no quick fix. You need to be willing to do the time. Build upon a strong mental foundation and shape your world.

#2 Intentionally develop a process to build momentum.
Your developed mind is a tool to use to be proactive in attaining your goals. You can use it to develop a process to build momentum to reach your goals. Momentum can be tough to build, but there are countless rewards. The concept is easy, but the execution can be difficult. You will build confidence in yourself once you develop a process that works for you. This process will work no matter what goal you are trying to achieve.
You build momentum by making you feel like you are a winner who can accomplish anything you set your mind to. Failure is not an option.

#3 View the world using a value-based model.
Strolling through life aimlessly is what will cause you to become lost. You can increase how effective you are by using a set of values to guide you. Everything you do should be guided by this value-based model. You don’t want to get left behind because you were mediocre. You always want to give your most based on your value model.
Implement these 3 fundamental principles into your life and begin to enjoy the benefits and the success.

How do you look at life? Do you find yourself complaining about every little thing? Do you have a long list that goes on and on and on…. Job stress, friend problems, family that’s done, you wrong, the weather… and on it goes. What you may not realize is that if you wake up in the morning and you find something to complain about that’s pretty much how your day is going to go. You may have already heard of the ‘law of attraction,’ which simply says that what you focus on and where you put your energy is what you are going to get. In other words, you create your reality.

What would happen if instead of waking up complaining, you opened your eyes and gave thanks for your life. Just that little shift in your attitude from complaining to gratitude can make you more aware of the pleasures in your life and all the blessings that surround you. Gratitude will put your day to day experiences into perspective. When you view the good and the bad, you will be able to move past the constant complaining. Let’s look at 4 ways to do that.
#1 Start Your own Gratitude Journal
You should set aside a few minutes at the end of your day to write down 3 or 4 things you are grateful for. It can be as simple as you woke up this morning or as complex as something that happened during the day. Writing down what you are grateful for can help you realize how blessed you are.

#2 Take Time to Stop and Smell the Roses
Start to handle your day differently than you have been. Take a minute to stop and smell the roses. In other words, stop rushing through your day. Stop yourself before you become overwhelmed and the negative feelings start to take hold. Stop, breathe, look around, find something beautiful to absorb. Nature is always great but if you are nowhere near nature, perhaps there’s a child, a piece of art, etc. that catches your attention. Focus on it and breathe.

#3 Turn a Negative Into a Positive
This can feel difficult. However, if you can achieve it you will benefit greatly. Before you allow yourself to get upset, stop yourself, and think it through with a positive attitude. You might have to meditate on it, you might have to get yourself into a calm state before you address the situation – whatever it takes. Take a minute to look for the good in the situation.

#4 Make a Compliment
Share kindness with those around you. Say something nice to a stranger or a friend. Spread the love and lift up another human being. You will make their day and yours too.

4 ways to create an attitude of gratitude. It’s really not that hard!

When you decide to have an opt-in list, it is not just a matter of sending your subscribers your promotional newsletters or catalogs. There are many things to consider in avoiding many complications. While there are so many ways you can make people subscribe to your list, there are also some things you must do to avoid subscribers from wanting to get off from your list.

Aside from that, you also want to avoid any problems with the law and your internet service provider or ISP. There are now many laws and rules that are applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted mails. With the popularity of the electronic mail as a medium for marketing because of the low cost, many company’s have seized the opportunity and have flooded many people’s e-mail accounts with promotional mail.

But, with an opt-in list, you avoid this annoyance because people subscribe to the list; they want to receive the newsletters and promotional materials. They have consented to being on the list by subscribing themselves, just don’t forget to put an unsubscribe feature everytime in your opt-in list so that you avoid any confusion. There may be times when an email account was provided when the real owner didn’t want to subscribe.

It is essential that you keep your list clean and manageable. Arrange it by using the many tools and technologies available for your opt-in list. Do not worry; your investment in this marketing strategy is well worth it with all the coverage you will get which will likely be converted into sales then to profit.

Keep yourself and your business out of trouble and potential run-ins with the law and the internet service providers. Keep your operation legit and clean. Your reputation as a legitimate businessman and a legitimate site depends on your being a straight and true marketing strategist. As a tip, here are three things to avoid when emailing your list.

1) Take notice of your unsuccessful sends. These are the e-mails that bounce. Bounced emails, also known as undeliverable messages, are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully received by the intended recipient.

There are bounces that happen or occur because the server was busy at that time but can still be delivered in another time. There are also bounces because the inbox of the recipient is full at that time. There are those bounce messages that are simply undeliverable ever. The reason for this is that it may be an invalid email address, a misspelled email address, or an email address that was abandoned and erased already.

Manage your list by putting markings on those that bounce. Erase an email account from your list so that you have an accurate statistics and records as to how many are actually receiving your mail. You may also want to check the spellings of your email addresses in your list. One common mistake is when an N instead of an M is placed in the .com area.

2) Always provide an unsubscribe feature in your site and an unsubscribe link in your mails. When someone in your list files a request to be unsubscribed, always take that request seriously. If you don’t take them off your list and keep sending them your e-mails, you are now sending them spam mail.

When you are reported as a spammer, you and your business can get into a lot of trouble. You can be reported to the authorities and maybe blacklisted by many internet service providers. You will lose a lot of subscribers this way and many more in potential subscribers.

3) Do not provide pornographic or shocking and disturbing content in your newsletters. It is hard to decipher the age of the recipient and many complaints may stem from these. Controversial issues also are to be avoided to not be branded by your subscribers. Stick to the nature of your site and 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. This can even be tough for those who are quite experienced in the world of Internet marketing. 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 banner ads, sending out e-newsletters, orchestrating an email marketing campaign and optimizing your website for search engines.

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, hiring a web designer is worthwhile because he can work to create a website which is attractive, functional and suitable to your products and series. He can also help you include more advanced features on your website.

Banner ads are another popular option for advertising your business on the Internet. Banner ads are advertisements which typically appear along the top of a website, but it may also include smaller ads in other locations. Banner ads typically include graphics and text which entice Internet users to click on the advertisement. Once a user clicks on the ad, they are directed to your website. This type of advertising can be very effective when care is taken to place the advertisements on high traffic websites which attract an audience who may have an interest in your products.

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, useful quizzes, 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 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. One way to do this is to only send out the emails to users who have requested inclusion on an 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.

Finally, 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 who use search engines to find relevant websites. 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 likely enjoy some degree of success in improving their traffic.

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be considered a critical element of any Internet marketing strategy. This is important because there is so much which can be gained from SEO in terms of Internet marketing and advertising. Failure to optimize your website for search engines can result in a considerable loss in terms of free advertising which is essentially gained from ranking well with search engines. This article will provide insight into what SEO is and will explain why Internet marketing requires at least some degree of SEO.

SEO optimization is a strategy in which a website is designed to obtain favorable search engine rankings from popular search engines. This may be achieved in a variety of different ways and optimal SEO strategies combine a variety of different strategies to complete one well-orchestrated SEO campaign. There are several elements to consider when attempting to optimize your website for search engines. This may include keyword density, prominence, META tags, titles and inbound links. Keyword density is one of the most common SEO strategies and essentially involves using relevant keywords often in the content of a website to demonstrate the relevance of these keywords to the website. This is important because search engines are likely to reward websites with optimal keyword densities with favorable search engine rankings in an effort to provide Internet users with the most relevant websites for particular search terms.

The prominence of keywords should also be considered. This includes how close the keywords are placed to the beginning of the website. The common mistake with this strategy is to believe the first opportunity to incorporate keywords is in the first line of visible text on the webpage. This is not true because search engines crawl the code of a website as opposed to the visible content on the website. This means there are multiple opportunities to incorporate relevant keywords long before the actual visible content on the website. This might include the code for the title as well as the META tags. Business owners who realize the potential for incorporating keyword into the code gain an advantage over competitors who only incorporate keywords into the content on their website.

Another area of concern which is very important for those who are interested in SEO is inbound links. Inbound links are essentially links which reside on other websites and direct traffic to your website. These links are considered important because many search engines place a value on inbound links because they are essentially an example of one website recommending another website. However, when obtaining inbound links, it is important to do so from other websites which rank well with search engines because many search engines consider the rank of the original website when determining the value of the inbound link.

Now that we have briefly explained some of the main concept of SEO, we will illustrate why it is important to optimize your website in the first place. SEO is so important because most Internet users highly value the results of search engines and are likely to only visit to ranking websites when they search for a particular keyword. Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant content first and are therefore not likely to visit websites which do not fall on the first or second page of search results. This means websites which rank well essentially are receiving a great deal of free advertising from search engines that place their website in a key position. Website owners who do not invest time into optimizing their websites miss out on a great deal of potential web traffic.

If you are currently marketing your business online and have not put a great deal of thought into the content on your website, you may be making an incredibly costly mistake. The content on your website is invaluable for a number of reasons. First of all, it gives visitors to your website their first impression of your business and the products and services you offer. Additionally, well written content can be instrumental in selling your products and services to your potential customers. Finally, the content on your website can influence the size of the target audience you are able to reach by helping to improve your search engine rankings. With your content capable of doing so much, it is clear you should be hiring a professional content writer to assist you writing the copy for your website. This article will delve deeper into the importance of providing accurate, concise, and informative content on your website when you are marketing online.

One of the most basic reasons why the quality of the content on your website is so important is because visitors to your website will likely form their initial opinions of your website based on the content on your website. If the copy is poorly written, does not hold the visitor’s attention and does not promote your products and services well visitors are likely to exit your website without making a purchase. Conversely, if the copy on your website is well written, engages the reader and promotes the products and services you offer the visitor is more likely to investigate the website further to learn more about the products and services and may make a purchase. The content of your website will be one of the aspects of the website which is first noticed by visitors, so it is important for this content to be well written.

Well written sales copy can also be very persuasive and may compel visitors to the website to purchase the products or services offered on the website. This is important especially if the main purpose of the website is to sell the products or services. The sales copy should accurately describe the products or services offered, stress the importance of these products and services and compel the visitor to make a purchase. All of this should be done without appearing to be blatantly advertising the products and services. Writing this type of copy can be quite complicated and typically requires hiring a sales copywriter who is experienced and skilled at writing this type of informative and persuasive content. Sales copy written by an amateur or an inexperienced writer will not likely be as effective as copy written by a professional with a great deal of experience in Internet marketing.

Finally the content on your website is very important because it can greatly influence your search engine rankings. This is critical because high search engine rankings help your business to reach a considerably larger audience. Internet users are typically looking for information quickly and want immediate results to their inquiries. Search engines understand this profile and write complicated algorithms which help them to supply the most relevant websites when a user searches for a particular word or phrase. This is important to business owners because Internet users realize the value of search engines and are likely to only visit websites which rank well in the search engines. This includes websites which rank on the first page or two of search results. Your business might sell football jerseys and you may have a well-designed website, a superior inventory and excellent prices but if your website does not rank well in search engines you are missing out on a great deal of free advertising. If your website lands on the third page or lower most visitors who search for relevant terms will not likely visit your website because they will have found what they were looking for on earlier pages. This is where the content on your website becomes important. Websites containing content which has been optimized for keywords will likely rank well with search engines. Hiring a writer skilled in writing optimized content can help to improve your search engine rankings so you can reach more potential customers.

Autoresponders are one of the most important marketing tools that you can have if you are doing business online. In fact, the only thing more important that the autoresponder is your opt-in list!

But all autoresponders start out without a list – the list doesn’t exist until your autoresponder mailing list starts filling up with names and email addresses!

The easiest and fastest way to build up an email list is to give things away for free. Some marketers will tell you that this is a waste of time – and if you already have a list of one hundred thousand people that you can market to, then it probably is.

But for those who do not already have a list, this is the way that it gets built! You simply pay for advertisement to promote your freebie.

Don’t think of this as lost money, think of it as an investment in future earnings.

Give away an ezine, free reports, free eBooks, free access to private websites, or anything else that you can think of. The object is to get people to sign up to receive that freebie, and to agree to receive email from you in the future! It is a win-win situation for everyone, but you get more than anyone else in the deal. The person gets a freebie. You get their name and email address, and permission to email them in the future.

But if you do it right, you get even more than that. The freebie that you give away should also be used to promote your products or services. Even if it just has affiliate links for products or services that are related to the topic of the freebie, it is a way to generate extra revenue. Then, when you send email in the future, you can again promote your products or services. Just be sure to include valuable information in the email as well, or you will have people dropping off of your autoresponder mailing list like flies!

Using every opportunity that is presented to you in the world of Internet Marketing is vital to your success. You have the opportunity to earn money in the freebie that you create, you have the opportunity to earn money when you send the ‘thank you’ email after a person has requested your freebie, and you have the opportunity to earn money every time an autoresponder message is sent out to that list in the future! Don’t waste those opportunities and put it all in automatic mode with the use of an autoresponder.

You may all know about these methods in some way but let’s take a look at the 3 most reliable and efficient ways to boost traffic to your website in good time.

Being a web developer, I know how to build an attractive and functional website that is worth more than the price charged to the customer. If in my head it wasn’t adding value, I wouldn’t bother trying to sell it. I soon realized that building the website was only half of the challenge for my customers, and gaining traffic was the next. The three main ways that we’ll talk about are paying for traffic, sending an email to your mailing list (that itself takes time to build) and lastly to joint venture with another website owner. This means they send you traffic, and you split profits with them 50:50. You can use software to track the number of hits produced from their mailouts.

1. By buying traffic, you can target the people already looking for your product. The biggest player here is Google. I’m sure you know them well  For those new to this industry, whenever you run a google search, the listings that show up on the right-hand side can be bought by anyone. You pay 5 cents and upwards for each click. You can have traffic showing up to your website 5 minutes after setting up a Google AdWords account. Other search engines also offer this ‘pay-per-click’ (PPC) service.

The next step after paying for traffic is to monitor results. You can track the number of hits from various sources to focus on those that are producing sales. Let’s say you had 4 different advertising sources producing a total in sales of $200 and you spent a total of $80. That’s a profit margin of 250%. If you were able to see that the $20 you spent with PPC advertiser A produced 0 dollars in sales and the same for advertiser B. Advertiser C brought in $20 in sales, but advertiser D brought in a whopping $180 in sales. That’s 900% profit and you could then focus your advertising dollars on that source to maximize profit. Every type of advertising must have a tracking system with strong accuracy.

2. Emailing a list is the next method that becomes your greatest asset with time. There are no overheads, and you can create a huge rush of sales every time you send an email. In a previous article I mentioned that a signup should be between 10 and 33%. That is the percentage of visitors you can expect to sign up to a mailing list. By having autoresponders, you can attract these visitors back to your website again. There’s a good chance they’ll buy the second time around. If they leave, you can send them another email to ask them to return and make them keep returning until they eventually buy.

Knowing how often to send emails to your list is also important. The key here is to add value and send regular free content. In between asking them to buy something, send something free that is of value. Generally, once a month is an appropriate time period between emails, or more often depending on your market. Some people send emails three times a day and it works for them but here’s what works for my mentor so that’s the best of my knowledge.

3. Joint Venture.

The strategy is simple, other websites send out emails and place strategic links on their website to attract visitors to your website. You only pay them for the sales produced from any clicks. Generally, 50% of the profits is the best since it’s an equal share.

The key here is to make it as easy as possible for you JV partner. Create emails for them, banner ads and any other promotional material that will help them.

JV deals allow you to create a lot of traffic to your site in a short period of time and for you to build your mailing lists very quickly. You can receive JV support from all of the established companies in the field you wish to enter if you approach them correctly.