Online marketing

If you are interested in starting an online business and have no idea how, why not enroll in an online marketing course? There are lots of educational opportunities out there that cater to this specific aspect of E-commerce, and believe it or not, most of them are free over the Internet.

The reason why some people fail in business is the lack of proper marketing for their products and services. This is especially true for online stores where the strength of your web presence will make or break your business. Failure of a business due to low sales is usually a sign of poor marketing strategy.

Why is enrolling in an online marketing course good for you? For one, if you have a business, you need to advertise it. But as every store owner knows, advertising takes up a large part of a store’s operational cost. This is due to the fact that more often than not, you have to let someone do the actual advertising for your store. You have to hire graphic artists to do your ads and other promotional materials. For small businesses this can really hurt profits as most of your income has to go to advertising fees. A primer on marketing your products could actually help you do these things yourself, essentially teaching you how to “sell” your business. You could reduce and even possibly eliminate the payment for advertising if you learn how to do this yourself, thus earning more profits.

Another advantage is that you don’t actually have to go to school since the course materials are available over the Internet. You can learn marketing from the comfort of your own home. This is practically very advantageous since you can study while having the freedom to do other things, like running an online business. For a virtual store owner, this is a win-win scenario.

By: Juan Manuel Mejorada

As I mentioned in the last entry, I’ve been speaking with people who are making $5000 – $10,000 or more a month online, and I’m beginning to see some common factors.

You have to understand how difficult it is to get people to talk to you about their successes. They remind me of the inventors I’ve spoken to about financing their products — they are deathly afraid that someone will steal their ideas, not realizing that their talent is part of the success of that idea. Sometimes it took several emails, an IM and a lot of promises, but I got people to talk.

One of the factors that struck me very early is the fact that most of the successful people I spoke with use some form of viral marketing in their advertising and marketing plan.

Viral Marketing is a marketing strategy that encourages other people to spread your marketing message, which grows your exposure exponentially. Link exchanges are a good example of viral marketing, because people take the link to your site and put it on theirs. When people link to their sites, they see yours. Then they may take your link and add it to their site. Just for fun I ran the SEOElite backlink checker on a successful web entrepreneur’s site. There were 1498 different sites that had his URL in them. Not bad. Affiiate programs are also viral in nature.

The guru of viral marketing has to be Dr. Ralph Wilson. You should definitely visit his WilsonWeb site. There are many terrific articles there.

These are Dr. Wilson’s six elements of a viral marketing strategy:

1. Give away products or services

2. Provide for effortless transfer to others

3. Scale easily from small to very large

4. Exploit common motivations and behaviors

5. Utilize existing communication networks

6. Leverage the resources of others

Viral Marketing seems to be an integral part of making a lot of money online. It could be as simple as trading a small banner or button for a directory listing (Income: $8000 a month), or offering webmasters a cut of your earnings to get them to your website to view your content and then buy (Income: $4000 a month). In fact, doesn’t that second business model describe Chitika, the ill-fated PPC network?

Multiple tier affiliate programs, where you get a cut of the income from people you get to sign up, are other examples of viral marketing.

You don’t have to do anything quite as dramatic, but I think it would be a smart idea to come up with some viral marketing elements for your own web site. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Write articles and get them posted on free article sites. Make the content compelling and the title provocative and interesting. Make sure at least one link appears in the article.

2. Install a ‘email this page to a friend’ script or plugin. There are plenty of them out there on the Internet.

3. Come up with a free product, utility or service that will promote your business, and encourage people to distribute it. Even if you have to pay for one to be made, it will be worth it.

4. Write for free on a well-known site in your area of expertise, especially one with a newsletter or free article distribution. This is a terrific way to perpetuate your site virally.

5. Put together an affiliate program that gets your banner on websites. If you have a unique utility, service or information source, you can get webmasters to put up a small box, banner or chicklet that has a link to your site.

Viral marketing can make you rich…I’ve seen the examples. The reason is simple…you are giving people something for free that they perceive as valuable, and they are telling other people how smart they are for getting something for free. In order to tell other people they have to mention you. It’s brilliant.

6. Share and Enjoy: You can place some simple icons on your pages or in your posts, and allow users to bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites where other readers can share and discover the content.

By: Matt DeAngelis

Alright first off. Let me explain. I am no guru. I am just a 19 year old kid who makes about $5,000 a month. I achieved this with help from various professionals. Let me explain my 5 “magic steps” to become an online marketing expert!

Step #1 for becoming an online marketing expert:

What I did was I started to research niches, by burning interest. That is what you have to do as well. I found my main interest being “internet marketing”. My feelings for the subject are way beyond anything I can describe. I could literally do this for a lifetime and not get a single cent for it. That is how much I loved the topic. I want you to find the “topic of your desires”. A topic you could work with and receive $0 for the rest of your life. When you got that… move on to step #2.

Step #2 to marketing expertise:

Find the BEST product! Now it is time to start getting specific. Earlier you chose a pretty general topic. The real secrets to an online marketing expert is that they teach “ONE THING”. Or rather one specific topic within a large market. There are sub-topics such as affiliate marketing, product creation, SEO, branding and copywriting etc.. These are all subcategories of “internet marketing”. Find 3-5 products that are hot for your topic.

Step #3:

For step three there are a few ways to go about it. You can start researching keywords and try to find “buyer type keywords” for your niche or you can get hosting for your website. There are various ways to get hosting for your website. An online marketing expert almost always has paid hosting! Don’t be fooled with cheap or free hosting! We are expecting huge amounts of traffic here.

Step#4:

Now, since you will want to keep all of your customers you will have to “collect them”. The best way to collect people that are interested in what you have to sell/teach is by getting an autoresponder. I personally use Aweber. If you want to use something else that is fine too. Be sure to do get an autoresponder. I can’t stress this enough. You will get e-mails from people asking you huge amounts of questions and you can build a solid relationship with them!

Step#5:

Creating a website! This can be done in over 2,000 ways or more. Now something I have found that you should be thinking of is that the more flashy and catchy with more distractions the less you sell. Get a simple website and make sure you have good content and a pre-sell for your product. If you have created your own product then a sales letter and an orderbutton is what you want!

By: Christopher M Stigson