Marketing Your Business: Our Top Eight Tips

How to market your business? It needs your continual effort. You need keep learning and practicing to find out where your real customers are and how to target them effectively. How in other words, how can let other people find your business? It should be a long term plan and investment. You should consider it as your job, your business. You need take care of it. If you respect your business and work on it with your effort, you will be rewarded eventually.

So where to begin? Here are some tried and true tips that will help you market your website with confidence. You can begin marketing your website when:

- Your website content is complete. This includes your website text, products you want to sell, the correct title, descriptions, and hidden keywords.

- You are ready for your first customer. You need test it by yourself before send your website to public. Make sure all links are working, the order form is ready. Testing everything you can think of. - You have a clear knowledge of the product(s) or service(s) you want to sell online. You need understand your product very well. Please remember: content is the King. When most people think about marketing, they think of advertising.

Don't fall into that trap. Marketing also encompasses your design, your page copy. According to MediaMetrix, 75% of all repeat visitors come back to a site due to the site's content. It is vital that the content be good, compelling, new, and free. Offer some valuable freebies so your visitor will come back to visit your site.

Tip 1. Prepare to Collect Email Put an form on your website to let visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. You can initially offer them a free ebook or a valuable report. Then you follow up with them using the auto response system. You can start to sending out your own newsletter weekly or bi-weekly to your opt-in prospects. They have option to remove themselves from your list if they are not interested in it. Even you do not have a website, you can still collect opt-in people's email address by advertising your eZine with your auto response email address.

Tip 2. Use Pay-Per-Click Services Set up an account with a pay-per-click (PPC) service, such as Overture. Pay-per-click means you pay for every visitor that comes to your site through the service provider. You post an advertising on the sites. If visitor clicks your advertising, you will be charged. At very beginning, it is recommended that starting from small, like pay $0.05 or $0.10 per click. You need time to test which key word is better and which advertising works out. The Overture network includes big names like Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Lyocs, HotBot, Netscape, Dogpile, Metacrawler, and Go.com.

Tip 3. Submit Your Site to Your Search Engines Once your website is ready, submit your site to major search engines. Please make sure not to submit your site too often to those big search engine companies. They will ban your site out if you submit the site frequently. They will eventually include your site in their index. For small search engines, you can use some automatic software or service to submit your sites since there are thousands there.

Tip 4. Create Your Signature File A signature file is a short message that goes out at the bottom of each message. It contains your name, your contact, like your email address, your website if you have one. Then add a brief description for the product you want to promote. You can create a signature file at the end of your email. You can create a signature template file in the "mail preference" area, or some other area depending on what kind of email service you have. Make sure to keep it down to 4-5 lines with 65 characters wide. Save it to your local hard disk. You may use this short signature file for your future articles' resource box.

Tip 5. Submit Articles to eZines

Starting to write articles, then submit it to eZines. You can reach thousands of peoples with your products and service for FREE.

How it works? If you are familiar with some area, like gardening, cooking, or how to use a specific software? just think of any topic people may have interest in, then write it. Make sure there is some good value in it so people will like to read it through. Once you finish it, just go ahead to contact some eZine editors with a short cover letter. Tell them you have an article which is valuable to their eZine readers and wish to post it.

At the end of each eZine, there is a resource box. You can put your signature file you create or some other kind of contact information. People will know you from there or may contact you if they are interested in your topic and want to learn from you more.

Tip 6. Increase Your Link Popularity Link popularity, or the number of quality websites that provide a link to your website, is a vital part of your online marketing campaign. If you have a business, check some website which offers the products which will benefit to your customers. Like if you own a website builder, you are looking for the business who can provide the graphics, free business cards, etc.. Once you find a site with good content, then you contact the website owner. Tell him you want to swap the links. It will take some time and effort to do, but the reward will be big.

Quality link popularity can not only get you listed in the major search engines without you ever having submitted your website, but it will help your website move up in the search engine result rankings as well. Tip 7. Start Your Own Newsletters If you want to build relationship with your client, or really want to make money online, a good newsletter will help you. You can send out your newsletter weekly, bi-weekly. Do not send out once a month since the time span is too long, people may forget you.

Writing a newsletter may be hard at the beginning. But once you start, you will realize you can do it, and do it successfully. Of course, you need learn a lot of materials, and write the valuable information to your people. Gradually you will build up the good relationship with you. Down the road, they will join into your business.

Tip 8. Build a Daily Marketing Routine Market your website daily, even if it's just for 15 minutes. Get into a daily routine--even if it is only for 15 minutes. Doing so will increase your traffic, your customer loyalty, your sales, and your profits. It will pay big dividends months or years from now. Daily promotion activities include:

- Email. Responding to customer's e-mail in a timely manner. If this is overlooked, you could lose hard-won customers. Many Internet businesses have earned and kept business based on their ability to respond quickly to customer email. Customers appreciate a timely response.

- Update Your Site. Keeping your site fresh with new content is vital, even if you are selling product. By expanding your content you are not only giving new content for your customers to read, but you are also expanding the number of pages listed in the search engines, which will increase your chances of appearing in the top of the search results. Search engine likes fresh contents. - Link Popularity. By contacting sites on a daily basis, your link popularity will increase, and if you do it right, your Link Reputation will increase as well.

- Write Articles. Writing an articles or prepare a newsletter. Contact eZine editors for submission. Keep learning new information and marketing strategies, apply the latest technology into the marketing campaign.

If you apply the above 8 methods, you will gradually build up customer base. In the long term, you will have a successful business.

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Julia Tang publishes "Smart Online Business Tips", a fresh
and informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people
like you. To find out the best online business opportunities,
to discover hundreds more proven and practical internet
marketing secrets, plus FREE internet marketing products
worth over $200, visit: http://www.best-internet-businesses.com
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You may use this article in your ezine or on your site as long as the article and resource box remain unchanged

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