How to get free traffic to my online shop of souvenirs and gifts without spam?
Seven is a magic number. Why? Because there are seven simple strategies every small business can employ to jump on the social marketing bandwagon. The best part: most require only a moderate investment of time and/or money.
1.Start Blogging – Blogging is old news to many. Not quite the distant past, but still not the future…sort of a Web 1.5. Is blogging what’s ‘hot’ at the moment? Well, no. It certainly doesn’t compare with chasing a link from the front page of Digg. But blogging is alive and well! It continues to be a great way to get interactively connected with your customers. ‘Dialoguing’ is the reason social marketing exists. How much time you invest in your blog is up to you, but you’ll get out what you put in. You don’t have to drive yourself crazy putting in daily entries, but you should establish a regular schedule for your blog updates. Otherwise, when people check your blog they’ll see the same-old/same-old so often that they’ll stop visiting your site…which is the whole reason you started the blog! So don’t shoot yourself in the foot by creating a blog that’s a visitor-repellent rather than a visitor-magnet.
Blogging is not a monologue. Your blog is not the electronic equivalent of Hamlet’s soliloquy. Just the opposite! Blogging is about creating conversations and joining others in progress. Take time to read what others in your industry are saying. Get in on the discussion (and get your name out there) by posting your comments on other blogs. It’s free, and again, the amount of time you invest can bring some very big returns. The beauty of blog posts is that you’ll almost always be encouraged to supply your name and URL when leaving a comment. This is a great way to build visibility and create a springboard to catapult traffic from other blogs to yours.
2. Take and Share Digital Photos – Flickr can be a tremendous marketing tool thanks to its incredibly active photo groups. The time and cost investment are minimal, and you can use Flickr to reach thousands of highly targeted prospects with compelling images of your product.
3. Be The Answer Man (or Woman) at Yahoo Answers – There’s one thing you have to offer that no one else does – your expertise. If you’re a service-based business, your knowledge is your #1 marketing tool. Yahoo Answers is a great place for you to hammer away at prospects. Imagine being the go-to person that people seek out. That’s who you’ll be at Yahoo Answers.
There’s no better way to share your expertise and make an instant and direct connection with potential customers. I know dozens of marketing pros like me who spent as little as an hour or two each week answering SEO and promotion-oriented questions there. They tell me that they’ve been able to track big results from even that small investment of time.
4. Get Into the Movie Business – Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but moving pictures are worth their weight in solid gold marketing. Fortunately, good video cameras are cheap these days, and a short video needs little editing/production work in today’s “everyone’s a filmmaker” environment. And if you’ve got the creative “chops” to add some sizzle to a video, go for it! Be the next Scorsese, if you can. Fortunately, the software you need to add special effects won’t break the bank. The most “viral” videos are usually spontaneous and unproduced…merely “captured” by a videographer. For marketing purposes, however, a produced video is the way to go… and a how-to video featuring your product is a good choice. If the look or location of your business is a selling point, “tour” videos –of a workplace, a restaurant, the homes you sell, the real estate you landscape, etc. – are your best bet.
Marketing videos are finding a home on local search portals like CitySearch. The find-it-in-your-town site announced that local video ads will be added to its listings. YellowPages.com is also exploring the idea of video opportunities.
Upload your videos to a unique page on your own website or add them to your blog page. But don’t stop there! YouTube is the most obvious ─ and the most active ─ sharing destination. And there are so many others. Just nose around the web and you’ll find ‘em.
5. Don’t Wait To Visit StumbleUpon.com – There are many so-called ‘discovery’ type sites in social marketing. The best-known are Digg, Reddit, and Netscape, but they’re also a bit complicated. StumbleUpon requires the lowest time investment. The site’s functionality makes it much quicker and easier to join groups related to your industry and add friends from those groups.
Once you’ve joined and created your lists, you can start to upload “sticky” (appealing to visitors) content and before you know it, other users will “stumble upon” what you’ve added. That’s when the “magic begins”. When visitors give your pages good feedback, your content is shown to even more users.
You can’t sell your product or service on StumbleUpon. The benefit it offers is increa
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Put Your Spare Domain Names To Work For You Using Affiliate Programs.
Every website owner/operator is familiar with affiliate programs, we all belong to one or more, or have at one time, and display banners and buttons on our websites offering anything from a credit card to viagra, Which is completely fine for attracting perspective buyers to products that your affiliate sponsors offer. There’s no crime in earning a little revenue to support your website and your hard work designing, developing and supporting it.
But if you’re like me at all, you have a few domain names sitting around doing nothing too. It occurred to me that having the domain names listed for sale has generated little or no revenue, but every year I renew them because I think that they are good domain names and have marketing potential if put into the right hands.
So I decided to do a little research and find out what affiliate programs were out there that offered more than buttons and banners, and I found that there are a number of affiliate companies that offer RSS feeds and Data Feeds and even some offer complete “Turn-key” websites already built for you, download an asp or php version of the Turn-Key site to put on your own server and you’re good to go. Point your domain name to it, and you’re offering a service or product that people have a use for, just go about your normal marketing practices for the site(s).
So I looked at what domain names I owned and wasn’t using, thought about what types of affiliate programs they would lend themselves to, which in my case was easy, and I did some research. I had 3 domain names reserved and no websites for them, http://SongOasis.com, http://Gear-Junkie.net and http://ArtistMatch.com. They were at one time active websites but hadn’t been in service for quite some time, so considering they were domains pertaining mostly to music or media, I started my search there. I discovered that there were more than a few music based affiliate programs available which required an investment in time doing a little digging through.
I narrowed my search to those affiliate programs offering “Data Feeds”. These are feeds that come in the form of XML or RSS feeds, as well as Text or CSV files that the affiliate would make available to you to download and use how you see fit, with some restrictions of course. Researching those affiliate programs I found that these feeds would provide all of the information, or at least much of it to the same extent as the affiliate website themselves. Which to me meant that I could build a dynamic website offering some great things in a way the I controlled without having to maintain an inventory or process payments or handle returns and deal with any billing issues should they arrise.
So… I decided for my http://Gear-Junkie.net domain to go with musical instrument sales through http://Zzounds.com, and offer over 4000 musical instruments online. Being a musician myself, this sounded appealing to me. For http://SongOasis.com I went with a great program from Rhapsody which offers real time feeds in xml format so my site is updated everyday with the latest artist and music releases everyday with no additional work on my part after building the site. And Finally for http://ArtistMatch.com I went with an affiliate program by http://CDUniverse.com. This program provided Data Feeds for over 40,000 items where you can shop online for music CDs, movies and games.
I’ve also cross referenced each of the sites with my own banners promoting the other sites from within my sites so that visibility to all of the affiliate programs is blended throughout the 3 websites which is helpful in generating sales if not traffic. So if you are sitting on a few domain names and would like to put them to work for you, try researching some of the affiliate programs out there that offer these type of data feeds and see if you can use them to your advantage as well.
Thanks for reading, and happy (and hopefully profitable) coding.
Benjamin Cortese
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/put-your-spare-domain-names-to-work-for-you-using-affiliate-programs-90136.html
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Why Brick and Mortar Companies Should Use Information Products for International Development
Any business can use the internet for international sales and lead generation.
And yet brick and mortar companies often do not take the time to study how they can create their own international business from their physical office.
Here is a basic outline of how information products are used to generate sales on the internet.
The Internet is an information source. It has been widely commented on that people do not want to pay for information any more. To cite one source: Seth Godin writes about this phenomenon in his books and blogs.
How many people have a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home, and how many use the internet for information research?
For many people today, the initial reflex to find information is to go online. This holds true for people in many, many countries. Since you can get all the information you need for free on the Internet. Why pay for it?
Here are the two main categories of information available on the internet:
- General online content – also providing excellent organic SEO value for the publisher
- Information products, given away for free, as an incentive to subscribe to something, or for sale online.
General online content can be put online in websites, social media directories, blogs, forums, information directories and other sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion or Wikipedia.
Information products come in various formats:
- EBooks,
- Teleseminars,
- Video training in online format or on DVD
- E-Courses delivered automatically by email in text, audio or video formats,
- Membership sites in various formats
- Subscription based online training
Infopreneurs use these information products to create product funnels with products at varying price points. From the initial free incentives through low priced front end products and on to packages sold at thousands of dollars.
Infopreneurs use information products as a stand alone business. There are several online business models that create an automatic stream of income once in place.
Other offline businesses typically use front end information products online to either
- Create an online lead generation tool for their offline business
- Create a new stand alone business model
These information products have been sold on the internet for a while now. And there are a few changes in the information product business.
- There is a decrease in the price of eBooks buyers are willing to pay for.
- Infopreneurs are using low priced incentives to get people to sign up on forced continuity membership programs.
The changes in online business may make offline businesses wonder whether there is any point for them to get into online information products.
But these changes do not affect the fundamental business opportunities for international development through information products.
Don’t forget the first point made above.
People all over the world expect free information on the web. And when they need information they look for it on the web.
People will spend money to implement this knowledge, learn skills, get ideas, and for quick solutions on how to use this information.
In international business development information products are:
- An effective tool for international market research – creating authority, online visibility, inciting feedback – when used with the right online channel, and with the right content.
- An international lead generation tool – in an integrated marketing strategy, and with the right content.
This is the reason why brick and mortar businesses interested in international development need to implement an online content and information product creation plan.
You can run your own international market research right in your current office location. An online information strategy gives you:
- Flexibility on how you run your own international market development.
- Control over risks in traditional international business development
- Control over the pace at which you want to expand
- An international lead generation tool which you can tweak real time, at no cost.
Brick and mortar businesses need to look at how they create their online presence. Providing content in the right format and within the right strategy gets you more international clients.
Are you committed to speeding up your international sales cycles?
Learn how to combine cross-cultural marketing tools and international sales strategies for faster sales.
Join us on the International Sales Road Map
Would you like to develop your international business?
Are you a beginner at international sales and marketing?
Read the Beginners Guide Discover Your International Business
Cindy King
http://www.articlesbase.com/international-business-articles/why-brick-and-mortar-companies-should-use-information-products-for-international-development-718803.html
