Promoting your small online business is a challenging mission, particularly if you do not have any ideas about the best methods to use. Amidst the so called “new” marketing techniques that currently swamp the Internet, you will sometimes find yourself confused in trying to decipher which processes work most effectively and which will just waste your valuable time and effort. To be successful with your business promotion online, you need to utilize the most effective marketing tools as much as possible to attract visitors. More importantly, you should concentrate your efforts in mastering the most suitable techniques for your company.

Here are three of the most effective small business marketing strategies that can be implemented by almost any small business.

1. Email List building – This method is one of the marketing strategies that must be implemented in every small business promotion campaign. Many online marketers do not understand the importance of building a quality targeted email list, or the best way to achieve it. You must gain your prospects’ trust and capture their contact information in order to build a list. Through this list, you can advertise your site or product to your prospects and later on turn them into paying customers. According to many of the famous online Gurus and Blogs that I have studied, research shows that people will keep ignoring your advert until they have seen it at least seven times.

2. Article marketing – This technique is also essential in online marketing, not only because it is free but because it is very effective too. Online users very often search for information from article directory sites because unlike a book or magazine they do not have to pay for the information. Be sure to write good quality articles and people will keep coming to your site for reference.

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After losing a 5,000 member list because I was trying to save some
money and used a cheap service, I switched to Aweber. Aweber is one
of the most reliable services for email deliverable and list building. They
have affordable plans and your most precious asset is safe with Aweber!
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3. Forums – If you want to get the attention of search engines, you must join forums related to your business and participate in them. You have to make sure you always leave a link to your website in your signature, and search engines will very often index your site through forum discussions, sometimes in only a few hours if the forum is a popular one. This will give you more website traffic and higher search engine placement.

John Osgood writes about and teaches small business owners how to market their companies and products online for a zero to small cost. John maintains the strict policy of building a relationship and not “HAMMERING” his subscribers with constant email offers!

His 5-day e-course for Small Business owners who want to build a huge email list can be downloaded here: Head over to http://www.smallbusinesslistbuilding.com to get your FREE copy now!

There also many other resources for the Small Business owner including Podcasts and a blog which you can check out by going to: http://www.smallbusinesslistbuilding.com/blog

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When it comes to building a profitable online business you actually have many inexpensive, yet effective, methods available to you.  One of the best methods to use is  email promotion internet marketing. Using an opt-in email list to build trust and rapport with your website visitors can pay you dividends for years to come. Building a list is one of the first bits of information you’ll learn about when building a business online!

Building an opt-in email list is simply a way to get your visitors to grant you permission to send them emails thus eliminating the danger of being accused of spamming. When a visitor gets to your website they will have the chance to sign up, or opt in, to your email list.  In order to encourage them to sign up you can offer them useful  information that will provide them with a lot of value.

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After losing a 5,000 member list because I was trying to save some
money and used a cheap service, I switched to Aweber. Aweber is one
of the most reliable services for email deliverable and list building. They
have affordable plans and your most precious asset is safe with Aweber!
================================================

For example, lets say your website is on bird watching, if you want to get your visitors to sign up to your email list you could offer them an ebook on the basics of birdwatching.  It doesn’t have to be something expensive to have a high perceived value.  However, the more valuable the free gift, the better your chances of someone signing up to your list and staying on the list!

The reason building an email list is so important to your long term internet marketing success is because it can be very difficult to build long lasting relationships online.  The internet offers amazing opportunities but it can also be tough to set yourself apart from all the other internet marketers.  By building a list you can communicate with, and provide helpful information to, the people  on your list for as long as you want.

Keep in mind, email promotion internet marketing applies to the typical internet marketer AND to anyone doing offline marketing or local marketing. Revealing the secrets of email marketing to you local businesses can offer huge rewards. And for those local businesses who discover email promotion will find that they are now in a better position to capitalize on their existing customer base!

In order for this technique to be effective there are a few things you have to keep in mind:

1. Do not make all of your  emails one sales pitch after another, if you do your subscribers will opt out of your list and you will lose that potential customer forever.  Instead offer them useful information in every email and either send out one sales pitch for every 5 or so informational emails, or you can add a P.S. at the end of your email message suggesting a product or service that can help them accomplish some goal.

2.  When offering them an ebook or a newsletter as encouragement to sign up to your list,  make sure that it is something that has a lot of truly beneficial information in it.  People are overwhelmed with free offers these days and more often than not the free things really don’t offer that much value. This is a great way to set yourself apart from the others, if you offer some unique and valuable information for free instead of the same old recycled junk that everyone else gives away, you will show your visitors that they can trust you which will make them much more likely to buy from you in the future.

Email promotion internet marketing is the only real way to establish a long term relationship with your website visitors.  It’s much easier for you to make another sale to an existing customer than it is to constantly find new customers to sell to, use email to leverage all of your website visitors. Remember to treat your email promotion list as you would like to be treated……no one likes one promotion after another, it’s no different than getting a mailbox filled with junk mail!

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Cruising some IM forums again, this dude had the following question:

Is There A Wordpress Plugin That………
Posts to the majority of the social network sites out there?

I have ones that do a few like 5-10 (Twitter, FB, tumblr, etc.)

I’m looking for one that can post to 150-200 at once.

Since I use Auto Social Poster I thought I would fill him in on some of the features of ASP.

Auto Social Poster is what you’re looking for. I purchased several years ago. It’s expensive, but it does the job.

Updates are usually at least 1 per month….sometimes weekly.

The number of social sites it will auto post to range from 20 to 30, it varies due to the constant changing of the social sites to get rid of programs like ASP

The coolest feature is the process by which you send the autoposts. First you enter your username and password for the available social sites….let’s say there are 25. Next, you can tell the program to post to all the sites with each blog post…..which will get you banned from some of them…..or you can tell the program to post to a minimal number of sites. I usually pick between 3 and 5.

Not every post to the social sites will work….as I said, the social sites constantly change their programs to prohibit autoposting…..ASP does a good job with continual upgrades.

Another cool feature is that you can set up multiple accounts to each social site. If Mix is your favorite site, you can create 5 or 10 Mix accounts and add them to ASP and ASP will randomly choose between your Mix accounts.

One very nice feature is that you can download your social sites accounts that are set up in ASP to a text file and use it for your other websites that you have the Auto Social Poster plugin installed.

Every time I use ASP with a new blog, the site is indexed within hours. Great tool, one of the best kept secrets of successful online marketers.

Sorry….but I have a killer migraine and afraid I’m not making too much sense   If you have any questions, maybe I can answer….send me a PM.

If you want to purchase….I even have an affiliate link

Good luck!

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In today’s world it is easy to underestimate the importance of internet marketing. Advertising and communications are everywhere, and people can forget how delicate a process marketing can be. To get the full benefit of internet marketing, you need to make sure that you understand how to use it in the right ways.

Do Your Research

Researching your internet marketing strategy cannot be stressed enough. You need to know what it is and how you can use it to your advantage. Most importantly, you need to know how your competitors are using it to their advantage. Only then will you be able to grasp the importance of internet marketing and be able to use it to its fullest extent.

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You’ll find some of the best places to learn about internet marketing are on the internet marketing forums. There are many around, the warriorforum.com is a good place to start Earn1KaDay is a paid forum, you have to pay a small monthly fee but the teaching is excellent and on point, plus you’ll find many members anxious and able to answer your questions….the atmosphere is friendly and conducive to learning. You can grab a free book about internet marketing that might help you make some decisions…Start by learning how to make just 5 Bucks A Day! ….its FREE
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There are many places where you can learn about internet marketing, such as the Earn1KaDay Group. Lots of books are released on the subject every year and there are even periodicals devoted to it. Finally, you can look around online for information as long as you are careful about the websites you get your information from. Grab a free book….. exposes the strategies for making an income online!

Doing it Right

By investing time in research, you can learn various very effective ways of implementing marketing strategies online. Some people really don’t think there is a right or wrong way to market online, but this simply isn’t true. There are the basics, such as having good grammar and a captivating ad campaign, but it goes beyond that.

One thing you need to think about is that you can’t just stick the online equivalent of a brochure up and think that is marketing. Maybe that is part of it, but it isn’t going to cut it overall. The importance of internet marketing lies in the ability to really communicate with your potential customers in ways that cannot be done with off-line advertising.

You need to know what internet marketing is capable of before you get too far into it. Only then will you be able to do it right and get the very best results possible.

Continue to Grow Your Marketing

As with other types of advertising, you need to constantly shift and change your online marketing. People easily become bored with seeing the same campaign over and over. They get inured to certain things over time. So you need to be ready to change up your marketing.

This is another aspect of the importance of internet marketing that many people overlook. Just like your business, if your marketing doesn’t change and keep up with the times, it will fail. To keep this from happening, keep your eye on popular shifts in advertising and communicating. Also make sure that you watch your client feedback carefully when you make changes in your marketing. If you don’t you could miss crucial fluctuations in your sales or visitors.

By understanding the importance of internet marketing, you will put yourself in a better position for success. Read up on internet marketing and the trends that it goes though so you can anticipate changes. Also make sure you are using the internet to its fullest advantage. By doing this, you will make it more likely that your business will end up on top.

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I was given a copy of Wp Zon Builder to review and found myself being very impressed by this wordpress plugin. Thought I would post a copy of my review of Wp Zon Builder…..you can get a copy at WpZonBuilder.

IMHO, if you want to autoblog or autopost using Amazon products, WPZonBuilder will easily do it, suitable for newbie and advanced autobogger alike!

If you want to autoblog or autopost with Amazon products AND have the ability to create a unique store with unique templates with many customizing options….then grab a copy WPZonBuilder.

Follow me as I ramble on in an effort to describe my experience with this wordpress plugin.

We live in exciting times.

Creating an autoblog or autoposting site once was a task that wasn’t for the weak in heart……today there are many solutions. With each new solution comes a new twist, feature and possibilities.

We benefit by the abundance of autoblogging plugins and scripts by the fact that only the best and the best supported plugins will survive. I mention all this because, Louis, the creator of WPZonBuilder has gone out of his way to create a unique wordpress plugin for anyone wanting to get into autoblogging Amazon products. The best part is his attitude and desire the make this the best possible plugin, truly looking for suggestions to make it better and always looking to help the user that’s lost! Kudos for having that type of mindset.

I was lucky enough to get one of the review copies and agreed to share some of my thoughts here:

Installation couldn’t have been simpler. Standard wordpress plugin simplicity, I prefer to upload via ftp and activate in the plugins directory.

Adding Amazon id’s and affiliate code was a simple matter.

Next I’m ready to start creating blog posts and I do this by starting to add products to the queue. First I need to pick a keyword or keyword phrase.

I plugged in my keyword phrase (chicago bear jersey) and pulled up over 1000 results. Next you have the ability to check out each product and decide whether you want to add to the queue. As you can guess, clicking on 1000 links got old real quick….I decided to quit at 300 or so, well I got to about 280 or so and my browser froze up….now, it was my fault I had about 90 tabs open ….but I had spent around 45 minutes picking my products an now they were lost. I was pissed, it was late so I went to bed.

Next morning I thought I’d give it a go again and start over, so far I wasn’t too impressed…..much to my surprise, all my items were still in the queue!!!! So….what I thought was a pain in the butt way of picking products actually wasn’t so bad The more I think about it, this option of selecting products will really help you drill down and keep relevant products on your pages….very nice feature.

I understand the next version will have the ability to add all in one click…which I also would like since it would be a quick and dirty way to create a huge site if so desired and bypass clicking individual products to “add to queue”

Posting Schedule

Posting schedule is always important with any autoposter and this plugin has a unique way method of scheduling posts:

1. A simple option to dump all the posts now with the date of your choice.

2. A randomizing feature. Will allow you to take all your posts and drip them in randomly over a period of time. At the same time, you can take the group of posts and back date a percentage and schedule the rest of the posts. For instance. I had 300 posts, and choose the “Random Dates” feature, setting it to “-2 months” and “June 30, 2010″ …… that’s 300 posts over a 6 month period….so WPZon took about 1/3 of the posts and back dated them (random dates) and they were posted …..the other posts were randomly dated and scheduled over the next 4 months and it looks like they will post anywhere from 1 to 3 per day…..pretty cool feature !

I can stick all the posts in an existing “category” or WPZon will create a category or categories based on the keywords in the title. I need to experiment a little with this feature, but it has some interesting potential.

General Settings

This tab allows you to configure the way your posts will look. There are key features that will allow you to develop your own templates which can help to eliminate footprints. Don’t get scared if you’re a newbie because you can basically go with the default settings and you’ll have a great looking site. However, for the more advanced users you have everything you need to customize your own templates.

I’ll go over some of these settings….although it might confuse you, trust me, if you’ve been doing this a while, the settings are very intuitive.

First you choose a Template….you can use the default or a customized template.

Next you can determine the number of characters in the “Post Excerpt”. Louis if you read this, it would be awesome to be able to define the number of characters as a range….for instance 150-300…..anyway, as it is you simply plug in a number.

Link Text…..this is the typical “Read More” link text you usually see at the end of a post. You have full control over how you want the link text linked to the permalink of your product.

Where to Show Excerpts….tell the plugin where you want the “Excerpts to appear” such as the:

• homepage
• front page
• search results
• and so on…..

Product Descriptions:

This is pretty cool…you can tell the pluin to use the Amazone Editorial Review for the product description…(if available) talk about getting rid of footprints

Of course you can add customer reviews as post comments and you can limit the reviews to any number….you decide how many to include with each post.

Again….this is an awesome feature. You can determine the the order of the reviews by quite a few factors such as:

• overall rating (highest first)
• number of helpful votes
• submission date
• and more…….

You can “tag the products” with the original Amazon Tags or auto create tags from the post title.

Many more options under the “General Tab” all to help track, control and configure your new site….and one heck of a thorough way to create a unique site….definitely takes care of footprints.

Language Settings

Amazon has special wording when products aren’t available, price isn’t available, no list price, lowest price not available. Well…..change the standard phrasing and include your own. For instance:

Amazon —-> Lowest Price Is Not Available
You——–> Price is Ridiculous…Too Low to Display!

Just another way to get rid of foot prints and in this case, a way to encourage or create the desire for your visitor to click on a link.

Integration Settings

For me, this offers some of the most powerful methods of creating unique text or content for each post. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’ve got a couple of very unique ways to use this feature and can’t wait to give it a whirl.

Imagine your standard post.

Now imagine your stardard post with a snippet of text above the post. Or maybe an ebay auction above the post!

Add to the above with the ability to add image, content, snippet or auction to the bottom of the post.

In short, this feature allows you to use shortcodes to add content to the top and/or bottom of each post. If you use this feature, there simply isn’t anyone who is going to have a post similar to yours….so whether you believe in the duplicate content penalty or not…..You won’t have ANY duplicate content on your blog!

Imagine if you could rotate a snippet of text above each post that was relevant to the post. Write 3 sentences, use a spinner and spin a couple of hundred unique versions of the text and rotate them as intro’s. Or how about an rss feed, or image…if you use your imagination on this one, the world is your oyster

Click Reporting

This is a nice feature but I honestly haven’t had time to check it out. 24 hours after I put up my project I had 5 or 6 pages of click tracking info all from the same IP. I’m sure that many people didn’t click on the links so I’m assuming it was spiders or maybe an automatic click when the post was loaded. This feature would be nice if there was a date, info on the click…was it IE, FF or search engine. Otherwise it may not be very useful to you….interesting, yes,….useful, I doubt it.

Documentation

There’s a nice page of documentation to whet your appetite, however, I really think that in order to take advantage of the full power of this plugin it would be a big advantage to have a more detailed documentation. Perhaps a set of video screen capture videos along with a pdf explaining more thoroughly how to take advantage of all the advanced features.

For instance this is what you get for the explanation of Template Tags:

A little help by the author would be appreciated!

Final Thoughts

This plugin offers something for just about everybody. If you are a complete noob but you know how to set up a wordpress site and you know what a plugin is….and you’ve heard that autoposting or autoblogging is the newest craze….well, you can get started using all the basic settings of WPZonBuilder. You’ll have your first posts up within 30 minutes if not sooner.

To you guys who know your way around a blog, plugins and some coding….WPZonBuilder is an Autobloggers dream if you want to autopost Amazon products. At first glance it might seem like another wprobot or similar plugin….but, it’s much more. The more I study and use the plugin, the deeper you fall into the plugin’s magic. Duplicate content and footprints are some of our biggest concerns if you’re building autoblogs. I honestly think you have more options to create content unlike anything else on the internet with this baby….and I’ve used quite a few of them. I would say all, but it seems like every day a new autoposting plugin enters the scene. With that said, I really feel confident that Louis has the personality and ability to make this one of the top autoposters on the market…..can’t wait to see what he comes up with in the coming weeks and months!

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Most businesses have jumped on the train of internet marketing as they have discovered the value of cheap, targeted advertising compared to more traditional mediums. Not only that, but it offers many companies a much wider customer base than they could previously access.

Just think about it, as little as a decade ago if you wanted to sell something in another city or country you would have to open a point of sale locally, which was certainly not cheap. Most businesses couldn’t dream of expanding abroad due to costs, however the internet opened the doors to small businesses as well, allowing them to compete with the big fish.

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However, web wide advertising is not always suited to every type of business, especially some types of offline service providers. For example, a restaurant will never be able to service more than the local area and therefore it doesn’t make sense for its website to target the whole web. This is where local internet marketing comes in.

In this case, the SEO plan is designed to target only people interested in the local area. This can be done with the use of geographically targeted keywords, maps and many more.

The advantage of focusing on local internet marketing is that costs are usually much lower than if you were to target the general public. For example, “French restaurant Houston” will not cost as much per click as “French restaurant” and will only target people interested in a French restaurant which is in Houston. On the other hand, a search for “French restaurant” will bring up a very long list of French restaurants all over the world.

Local internet marketing is an excellent option for offline, small businesses that provide local services and their type of business does not allow them to expand globally. Plumbing, landscaping and even cleaning services are all such businesses. On the other hand, web development companies or ebook publishers do not have the same limitations and in their case they should focus on global internet marketing.

Offline Marketing Guide For Selling Online Services To Offline Businesses
A PLR product from the Rhodes Brothers

One extremely useful way to take advantage of local internet marketing is with maps. The large search engines offer a map service where companies can register their offline address. This has multiple advantages but the main one is that it establishes credibility because people can see the physical location of your business. This also has a positive impact on the ranking of your website but, unfortunately, it is a technique that is often overlooked.

Local internet marketing is an excellent way to reach extremely targeted customers for a much lower cost than if you were to market to the entire world wide web. However, you need to do a little more investigation regarding which keywords your PPC campaign should target and maybe even get some professional internet marketing consulting to show you how you can design and track your campaigns.

The beauty of internet marketing is that you can see virtually in real time how effective your campaigns are and tweak them accordingly. However, you do need some professional advice until you learn the ropes and can handle it yourself.

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