Internet Marketing For Free

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If you’re full time in your business, it’s easy to spend time marketing your business and you can apply a lot of different marketing techniques to your business. If you’re only part time, or you’re pressed for time, it’s a good idea to start with one marketing technique and test and test it first.

The most important thing I want to emphasize about marketing your business online is that’s it’s more important to be consistent. You also want to test and track whatever you can and eliminate any marketing that isn’t working. Don’t waste your time on internet marketing techniques that don’t work for you, or aren’t getting you the results you want, or worse, anything you won’t do.

My recommendation is that you choose one internet marketing technique, try it out for a month, and see what type of results you get. If you own your own website, then a search engine optimization strategy should be your first step. You don’t have to do anything complicated; just work on optimizing your site, which is easy to do. Web CEO can help you do that. You can also build backlinks by posting to directories (Directory Submitter can help you with this one)

Other techniques you can try are:

1. Article Writing

2. Press Release Distribution

3. Free Classifieds

4. Pay Per Click

5. Joint Ventures

6. Affiliate Program

7. Linking

8. Blog Comments

9. Forum Marketing

10. Ezine Ads

In fact, there are at least 101 internet marketing techniques you can try. Richard Quek, in his book, Exposed: “101 Proven Strategies to Get More Visitors to Your Website in One Day Than Most Websites Get in a Year!” shows that there are at least 101 different techniques, and this doesn’t even take into account blogging.

The first step in creating your marketing campaign is to decide which marketing strategy you will use. Ask yourself what you will stick with. What marketing technique do you feel the most comfortable doing? Since free classifieds are a fairly easy and effective way to get started, especially if you are new to internet marketing, we’ll start with this.

The tips I’m about to give you are tips you can apply to classified writing, but you can also use them to write articles, press releases and other types of sales materials. Although I don’t think you necessarily have to write for the search engines, a little SEO doesn’t hurt, and it can actually help you rank your promotional materials higher in the search engines.

1. Start with your headline. This is how you will get your marketing materials read. Regardless of what it is.

To find good headlines, you need to go to sites for the type of headlines you want to write: classified ad directories, article directories, press release directories.

I use:

 US Free Ads

Ezine Articles

PRWeb

How you craft a headline for an ad will be slightly different from how you create your headline for your article or press release. An article or press release is more like news, where the ad is meant to get the person to click, sign up for your list, or whatever action it is you want your visitors to take. The goal is to get the attention of your readers to get them to read your main piece.

Once you choose the site or sites you want to use to do your headline research, then carefully study the headlines. Copy any that you find useful. Your headline is what you use to get others to read your sales materials. Spend the most time here to get the best results.

You might also want to write several different versions of your headline and test them. If you’re not ready to write your own headlines, and you’re marketing an affiliate program, get ads from the program, rewrite the headlines and use those. You don’t want to use the exact same affiliate materials because they’ve been used already. What you do want to do is change them enough so they are still effective, and they’re fresh.

2. Don’t try to sell in your ad. You want to get the click, and you want to get the person to go to your website or the merchant’s website. The easiest way to do this is to offer something like a report, free piece of software, or something no one else is offering. You want the person to get it from you.

With ads, it’s easy to test. All you have to do is use a unique link. You can get free ad trackers. Just do a search in the search engine for free ad trackers.

One thing I do before I submit anything is to create my sales materials in a text document. I use Notetab Lite, which is free, and I save all of my articles, ads, and other stuff into text files. That way I can quickly copy and paste my ads, articles, press releases, etc. into the appropriate forms. When I organize these text documents, I put everything in the order in which I will paste them. This makes it a whole lot easier.

A faster way to do this is to use Roboform. (This is a free download so you can try it out without having to register for anything.) If you want to learn how to use Roboform in your marketing, and really speed things up, you can download Roboform Magic (This also includes the software download).

Personally, my favorite ad posting software is Cyberfetch, and it offers a lot of free classified ad sites you can post on, and it’s automated. You can try it out for free to see how you like it.

If you decide to use blog comments, forum posting, or any type of marketing like this, there’s really no way to automate these types of posts. Blog blasters, forum blasters, or any type of software like this will only get you banned. I get these types of comments on my blog sometimes, and I mark it as spam so these people can’t post again.

There are several utilities here you can use to help you keep track of both blog comments, as well as forum posting.

Comment Sniper - This software will help you keep track of high traffic blogs so you can be the first to comment. Then everyone has to at least scroll past your comments to post their own. This allows you to get your comments seen and can be used to get others to visit your site.

Comment Kahuna - Helps you find blogs on your topic.

Forum Software - This free tool will help you track at least 15 different forums so you know when they’re updated. Also includes an ebook on forums you can post on.

You can do a search on the internet for free software to help you in your marketing campaigns. Just make sure that the software you download is freeware or open source. This is software you can use to for free.

Now, to get started, decide what internet marketing technique you want to try. Search for sales materials you can study to create your own. Write your own sales materials and then start posting. Test your results.

A Note About Testing: To find out if your campaign is effective, you need to take the number sales and divide it by the number of clicks.

For example, if you receive 10 sales, and you got 1,000 clicks, then your conversion is 1 percent. This may not seem like a lot, but it’s a good conversion rate. You can work on improving it, or you can consider that this is an effective campaign.

If you are using pay per click, or some type of paid advertising, subtract your costs from your sales. If it’s negative, you either want to rewrite the campaign and make it effective, or abandon it and create a new one.

Now that you have an idea of how to start your marketing campaign, write down how you plan to market, find sites to market on, and write your sales materials. We’ll explore some of these techniques in depth next week.

Two resources that might help you:

Free Ad Report - This is the best resource for those who are new to internet marketing. Bob the Teacher shows you some really good ways to market your business online for free using free classifieds and traffic exchanges.

Writing Cash - For those who are interested in using pay per click to sell Clickbank products, and you can use this program to help you sell any kind of products, Eric has created a really nice tutorial to teach you how to make money using pay per click and Clickbank.

Both of these programs require you sign up, but it’s free.