Internet Marketing: Promoting Your Local Business

Now more then ever profitable opportunities exist to promote your local business on the Internet. Through search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, email marketing and local listings, you can connect with a willing audience. Your customers are turning to the Internet to find local products and services. If your competitors have an online presence and you don't, guess who gets to take home the prize

Even if you do not have a web site you can still promote your local business online. For example, you can list you business and contact information with the local search engines of Yahoo and Google. For more detail go to:www.tube-pros-espects.com. It takes an hour at the most to get a free listing on the two most popular search engines. Your listing will include an interactive map that can direct customer’s right to your front door.

And don't overlook regional and industry specific directories. Many accept free listings, or charge a nominal fee. Once again, for most a web site is not a prerequisite.

If you do have a web site, than you need to promote your local business through Pay Per Click on both Google and Yahoo. With Pay Per Advertising you bid on keyword terms that your potential customers would use in a search. For more help visit to: www.internet-marketing-online-goldmine.com .An example is "Tacoma Wedding Photographer." The cost per click depends on how competitive the term is. You only pay if a prospect clicks on your text ad and goes to your site. This is referred to as performance advertising, where you only pay if the ad performs.

The appeal of PPC is you can get it going within an hour. You set the budget, you determine what keywords are relevant, and you determine your price per click. You can also turn it on or off in an instance. The general consensus is that PPC generates a higher return on your investment over traditional offline advertising.

For those that like a challenge there is search engine optimization. SEO is the ability to optimize your web site for high search ranking. If you can optimize your site properly, you can benefit from an endless stream of free, targeted search engine traffic. It takes time and effort, but the results can take your business to a whole new level.

Another tremendous marketing tool is email. For virtually nothing you can communicate with both prospects and your existing customers. Email is an excellent method to convert prospects to customers. It can also significantly increase the lifetime value of your existing customers by simply alerting them to upcoming sales and promotions.

Knowing the power of email communication, I find it hard to believe how few use it to promote their local business. Now listen up, start collecting your customer's email addresses today. I can guarantee they will respond favorably to joining your list. We all like to be informed on bargains and special offers.

The future of your local business will depend on the Internet. It is estimated 25% of searches online are local in nature. The Internet is the perfect resource for finding local products and services, which is why your customers are searching online. Now is the time to get your business positioned to reap the rewards?

By Rajoo

Know About Internet Marketing Advertising?

Given my present understanding of my ubiquitous lack of understanding of the world in general, I ca not help but smile just a bit when I think about my beliefs when I was around 15 years old. I was in 10th grade at the time and good god did I ever have it all figured out. On a pretty consistent basis I would use words like “ignorance, short sighted and unaware” when talking to my mother; and I guess probably most other people that had the misfortune of chatting with me.

As you can probably guess, it turned out that I really didn t know everything. Well, here I am a full grown adult and, fortunately, I am much, much wiser; I currently know that I don t know anything. And, if I ever start to forget that, I am thankfully reminded on a consistent basis how little I really know.

This just happened about 10 minutes ago, in fact. I thought that I had the internet marketing and advertising thing pegged. I was thinking about all those annoying pop ups and all the other advertising that frustrates me , on the up side this irritating new field of advertising has given rise to an unprecedented number of new jobs, for the people that are able to create all the software that shields the rest of us from the internet advertising. So, anyways I had my mind made up that people could be divided up into two camps—the good and the bad. To know more about it logon to but, much like the Haitian Revolution, things have much more complexity than just black and white.

Let’s get back to the topic at hand. I sort of saw the internet marketers as a group that found their financial success wherever it happened to be and without consideration as to what was necessary in order to achieve it. Don t get me wrong, I don t think they are killing puppies or anything.

But, I do think that there is a certain pride that can come from contributing something positive to the greater community and those that choose to directly and consciously work in means that are in direct conflict with that are not on the good side.logon to. But, I just was informed about a little thing that is throwing a wrench in my good vs. evil dissection of the world. It is the business that does networking for the internet advertisers and marketers. Now, it seems like the companies that are behind all the banner ads and the like are on the short end of the stick from these internet advertisers for the internet advertisers, the victim of uncouth internet practices.

This changes everything for me. I am not simply talking about internet advertising, but the multi-layered complexities that are a spider web of friends and foes and who is crossing who and back stabbing who, while helping who else. Hmm, I have a lot to think about, but for sure I understand that I definitely don t know anything.

By Bimla

Profit From Creating Free Reports

Have you ever downloaded a free report from a website you’ve visited?

If you’ve surfed the internet for any length of time, you would have already found hundreds, if not thousands, of sites offering free reports on almost every subject imaginable.

Why would anyone spend so much time and effort writing and creating enough information to fill a report only to give it away? Surely, it would be logical to sell the report and earn some income from all that effort instead of just allowing anyone to access it.

Of course, there is a brilliant kind of logic behind the popularity of website owners giving away free reports.

Let’s look at some great reasons to create a free report for your visitors to download.

- Free Traffic

By offering a free report for visitors to download, you can seriously increase the amount of traffic to your site.

Of course, there will always be some people who are only interested in the freebie, but there will be a percentage of people who will become curious enough to stay and scour the rest of your site.

- Reputation

Creating a reputation as an expert within your own niche topic is becoming difficult.

Internet users are bombarded with thousands of false gurus and bogus offers that it’s harder to find quality information from someone you can trust.

By offering a free download, you can begin to build a relationship of trust between you and your readers. This step can go a long way toward building a credible reputation with future customers.

- List Building

If you’re going to offer a free download, you could display the download link proudly right there on the front page of your site for all to see. Thousands of people will download it and leave your site in search of something else.

In order to keep in touch with those people consider advertising your report prominently on the home page, but don’t allow people to download it directly. Instead, ask visitors to join your private mailing list.

By harvesting the email addresses of each person who downloads your report, you now have a way to market directly to future customers. These customers already know and trust you and they know your information so you will be increasing the chances of them buying your next report from you.

- Free Advertising

Offering a free report to your visitors is the obvious focus for most webmasters. Why not approach other website owners and offer them the chance to give away your report to their visitors as well?

By having your report available on several different websites, you reach a much wider audience and you’re benefiting from the marketing efforts of other webmasters.

- Word of Mouth

People always talk about things they like to other people. Word of mouth between friends and acquaintances can form a great marketing tool when used correctly.

If your free report has given visitors information they didn’t expect or that they really enjoyed, then they’ll be tempted to forward it over to friends to view as well.

Every time a person sends your report on to someone else, they’re introducing you as the expert to that next person. Once again, you’re increasing your traffic and you’re building your reputation – but this time someone else has done it for you.

- Free Profits

At this point, most people begin wondering if they can fill their free report with paid ads or affiliate links.

People download free ebooks and reports all the time and they already know there’s going to be a certain amount of advertising included in the material.

In order to retain their trust and increase your chances of getting a sale from your readers, be absolutely certain you’re offering content inside your report that has real value. If you
do this part first, then your readers won’t mind being directed to an ad or an affiliate link.

Just be sure the products you’re advertising are related to your report’s topic!

Hopefully, you understand a little more behind the marketing benefits of creating a free report to offer visitors to your website.

If you’d like to learn more about creating your own free report, visit: http://success-methods.com/jackpot/index.htm today and get a free e-course that will show you step-by-step exactly how to create your own free reports for profit today.

By Billy Mitchell

Role of Intelligent Marketers in Internet Marketing

If you do then my guess is that you probably market to one main niche. Whether you sell your own products, work as an affiliate or run a marketing newsletter, I would be willing to bet that the main target area for your online activities is the make money online niche or helping others to earn a living online.

The "make money online" is a great niche to work in and can yield fantastic results, enabling you to make enough money to eventually ditch your 9-5 and go it alone, working from your own home and to hours that suit you.

There is one main problem though and that is the fact that pretty much every other online marketer is working in this niche as well, and with so many marketers targeting the same group of people online to it is becoming increasingly hard for the smaller, lesser known names to get their products and services seen amongst sea of other offers from competing marketers.

The make money online niche is very very overcrowded.

Let me ask you a quick question.

What does an intelligent online marketer do to increase the chance of getting seen by crowds of information hungry customers?

Have a think about that for a second....

Well, they could:

* look for more places to post links back to their website.

* set up PPC ads and pay a lot of money to attract customers.

* approach the more respected and well known marketers to ask if they could help promote your products (let me tell you, they get hundreds of these requests a month).

* Create more and more minisites, blogs and articles in an effort to drive traffic.

They could do all this and much more in an effort to make decent money, But there is one main problem with this approach.

It involves a hell of a lot of work, time and money to put in place.

But you shouldn't let this spoil your dreams of making it online as there is a much simpler way to get your offering seen by crowds of hungry customers.

You should......... Target Less Crowded Niches!

There are many many niches that can be just as profitable and are not marketed to as aggressively as the make money online niche.

For example fishing, weddings, health and beauty, home improvement. The list goes on and on.

Of course there are also many sub-niches or "micro-niches" that can be explored as well.

For example in the fishing niche you could take a look at bass fishing, fishing lures, fly fishing, fishing bait, etc, etc

In the wedding niche, you could consider these micro-niches - wedding flowers, honeymoons, wedding dresses, wedding speeches, cheap weddings, wedding favors, etc, etc.

Of course once you have found a niche that you want to market to, you need to consider how to monetize it.

Creating a product or content yourself that is of suitably high quality to make you money involves a lot of research and development time (anything from a few weeks to many months).

If you are selling a product as opposed to making money through advertising such as Adsense then you will also need to write salescopy, create graphics (ebook covers, webpage graphics), create a salespage, download page and more.

All of this time and work before you have even made a dime.

You could outsource this task, but will end up paying anything upwards of a few hundred dollars just for one single product.

There is another much cheaper and easier option available to you that will allow you to get your product live and earning money a lot quicker.

By using ready made products that come with private label rights you will be able to get you’re offering up and running within hours instead of weeks, enabling you to get a much faster return on your initial investment.

By Chaman Dhiman

Role of Time Management in Internet Marketing

"Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money but you cannot get more time.".
Earning an income on the internet is a process that in broad terms involves three stages:

1. Getting your product (acquisition)

2. Developing your product presentation

3. Promoting the product

In this article, "product" means any tangible product, digital products (ebooks and software) and services such as membership sites, web design and development, hosting, "print on demand" for ebooks, fulfillment for orders and so on.

By necessity you will spend time in each of these stages. Each stage will involve a learning phase and an action phase. It's important to identify clearly what stage of development you are currently working on and to focus on completing that stage.
1. Getting your product (acquisition).

Choose between your own product and an affiliate product.

Key Point: Once you have your product you can stop spending time looking at other product possibilities for the time being.
2. Developing your product presentation.

Once you have chosen your product you will need to develop a presentation.

This will include your website primarily and can also include autoresponder sequences and a newsletter.

3. Promoting the product.

"We have to become better at promoting what we do than doing what we do."

This is where it is also important to be clear about what stage you are in. Remember, time is limited, so if you have already chosen your product and developed your presentation it is not productive to keep looking for products or spending a great deal of time "tweaking" your presentation.Time can always be spent tweaking sales copy, images, layout, web presentation, upgrading or trying new software, investigating new product opportunities (before the current one is complete), improving design skills, keeping up with the changing web "standards"... The list can seem endless.Key Point: Time is better spent developing a clear promotional strategy and putting it into action. For more details visit to Only when you are seeing results from your promotional activities should you consider altering your presentation (such as modifying headlines and sales copy) to assess how that affects conversion of prospects to customers.

Here are a few tips to keep you on track:

1. Name your project

You may name your project as a final name of the product or you may just give it a code name that means something to you.

2. Understand what part of the three step process you are in: Acquisition, presentation or promotion.

Here is a simple question to ask yourself to check if you are on track with your time budget, "What is this activity designed to do?" or perhaps, "What is the outcome of this activity?"

This will help you to identify if you are spending time in the wrong area at the wrong time.

3. Set up check lists to make sure everything is covered. Focus on completion.

4. Promotion: Clearly define your action steps.

5. Track the results or your promotional campaign in terms of traffic, click through rates, subscribers and purchasers. Include costs of conducting your campaign and compare that to your sales to determine your return on investment. For details visit to It is only by tracking the results of the promotion that you will know how to effectively change the presentation for further testing.A spreadsheet is an invaluable tool as a template for specifying your promotional campaign and also for tracking results, costs and return on investment. Adding in columns for each day of the week allows you to allocate your time so that all your promotions are covered in a time effective manner. This becomes your business gauge by which you assess the effectiveness of your promotional campaign.

By Chaman Dhiman

Starting a Internet Business Step by Step Instructions

The main means to earn money on the internet is by selling something. You can either sell your own product if you have one, or someone else's product for a commission.

Chances are, that if you are in the beginning stages of starting a internet business, you most likely do not have a product of your own. So what we are going to do, is show you how to sell other peoples products.

For starters you are going to need a product to sell. To do this you can open a free account with Click Bank. There you will find thousands of products to market. I would recommend that you read their getting started section to acquaint yourself with how the system works.

Then the next step is to open an account with Google Adwords. You will need to have a credit card to create your account. Without Adwords you will not be able to get anywhere so the minimal setup costs are well worth it. You will need this account to advertise the products your are selling as well as Keyword Research.

When your Adwords account is set up. Do a bit of reading to get the feel of how the system works. But here are the basics. The Adwords system is keyword driver. You bid for the keywords you want to use for your ad. In other words. Let say someone does a search for widgets. If you have placed your ad and used widgets as one of your keywords. The chances are pretty good that you ad will be seen. However the popularity of the keyword will determine the bid amount to get the ad on page one of Google.

Now for the product. Go to the market place in Click Bank and have a look at the various categories available. You can choose any product but what is important is the commissions offered and the conversion rates. Select 5 to 10 products with good conversion rates and that pay a commission of at least $20.00. For a lesser commission, it may just not be worth the effort, unless there is a very high conversion rate.

Once this is done, you need to do some research to find out if the product may be profitable. To do this you will use the Google Adwords keyword Tool. Enter the exact title of the chosen product and do a keyword search for all the keywords related to you product.

Go through all the related keywords. What you are looking for are keywords that have more then a 1000 searches per month. And that do not have too much competition. Bare in mind that the higher the competition, the higher the minimum bid needs to be to get you ad on page one of Google. The estimated required bid will give you an idea if the keyword is usable or not.

As an example, let's say someone wants to find out how to prune roses. To do this they would enter the keyword "how to prune roses." Now if this is the keyword phrase you are using for your product. The chances are very good that they will click on your ad to find out more. Now let's say that from 100 clicks you make one sale. This would mean that on a minimum bid of .10c, you would make 100% profit on just one sale. More then one sale would be clear profit.

You may think at this point that this will not make much money. But think about it. 20 to 30 products marketed in the same way, each with a profit of $200.00 plus per month. Not bad for starters.

Enough said. From the keyword list as explained above. You need to find 5 or 6 keywords that describe the product you are selling. Ad these to your keyword list. Remember. The title of the product is the main keyword. You also do not need 1000's of keywords. A select few with low minimum bids will fit the bill perfectly.

Now for the ad. If "How to knit Gloves" for example is the product, then that would be my title. Simple. For the body of the ad, have a look at the competition ads for your keyword. Use the top ones and change them slightly so that your ad is the same but slightly different.

Job done. Run the ad. A word of warning though. In the world of Google Adwords. If you do not carefully monitor your expenses against profits. It could become a very expensive exercise. What you also need to know is which of your keywords are making you money and which are not. If this is done properly. Then starting a internet business could be a very pleasant experience.

By Cecil Heim.

The Future of Stock Photography is on the Internet

When my brother John started his photography business about 35 years ago...there was no such thing as an answering machine! Nor did individuals have fax machines...He remembers being very excited about getting a fax machine...because now an Art Director could send him a layout without using a bike messenger or Fed Ex!. Now, here he is shooting without film, digitally enhancing his images on a computer and delivering them via the internet.

For twenty years he shot assignments. A huge part of the business was marketing him self to ad agencies and design firms. Thanks in large part to his foray into digital manipulation of his images; he was very successful at his marketing. He was selling stock photos through "Tony Stone", later to become Getty Images, and through "The Stock Market" along with my line of greeting cards being sold through Portal Publications. He was shooting assignments, but he was very picky and only took assignments that really interested him.

If you were an advertising agency you went to Tony Stone, The Stock Market, or a tiny handful of stock photography houses. There was no internet and thus no way for small businesses to easily purchase stock photos for their advertising needs.

After the dot com bubble burst he found him self without assignments for a couple of months...but it didn't matter because he was making plenty of money with stock photography. One gig ended and another took over. Of course, today that industry is in turmoil...first royalty-free stock photos impacted the business...and now micro-stock. I even see pay per click ads that cost the advertiser money...advertising free stock photos! I guess he doesn't have much to worry about that now because the prices can't go any lower than that free!

I remember when it took a week and buckets of money to get a good print from a photo lab! Now, if I want to print a funny animal picture I just hit command-p on my keyboard and get almost free prints that are of far better quality than anything I used to get from the lab! I can make fine art prints that are even more archival than what the labs could offer right in my own office...and these prints are in my hands in just a matter of minutes.

A few years ago my brother bought a house...a beautiful house on a hillside overlooking a valley. He was surrounded by horses, deer, wild turkeys, and even bobcats and coyotes! He planned living in that house till the end of his days. A close friend cautioned him though, that he should not count on living there forever. "One day you will sell that house" he said. My brother laughed. As I write this He is planning on selling the house in the spring.

John's greeting card business was growing like crazy. Each quarter his royalty checks were getting larger and larger. People loved the cards...the company was thriving and he was their number one greeting card artist. Still, a business consultant friend of his suggested that he create a worst-case scenario plan for his business just in case something went wrong. John found it difficult to do because he could not possibly see any worst case scenarios on the horizon. Eventually he forgot about the backup plan for his stock photo business.

Fast forward five years...the greeting card company no longer exists. It was purchased by a venture capital firm that made some bad decisions and the business for all practical purposes died. He is now with a different greeting card company and they are slowly rebuilding the business. One thing is different this time...he no longer assumes that the greeting card business will be around forever.

Two new 35mm digital cameras have just been announced...one by Nikon and one by Canon, that both shoot, in addition to extremely high quality digital stills, HDTV motion. Videos are becoming increasing popular...as evidenced by Youtube and other internet sites for sharing video clips. There is an emerging market for stock video clips.

The stock photography business is changing rapidly. More and more small business's are turning to the internet and purchasing their stock photos online and even getting free stock photos! Digital cameras are not only prolific, but producing better images and in some cases they produce images of higher quality than you could shoot with a film camera.

I believe the future of stock photography is online. Photographers need to adapt to changing times and learn to market their work on the internet.

Who was it who said the only constant is change? That is so true...but he does have a method for coping with all this change. His secret is a good attitude and continuously reminding him self of the need to stay open and flexible.

By William Lund