marketing your online business on a budget

How to market your online business on a budget

Do you have a great online business but few customers,and a very limited budget to work with?

Just uploading your site onto the internet is not enough, even submitting to the main search engines and directories takes time. Often it may take months for a website to get listed.

You don't have to spend a fortune on marketing your site, the best methods are often very inexpensive or free.

1) Pay Per click search engines

Pay per click search engines work by bidding for keywords. This is an immediate way to get your site listed.
They work by bidding for specific targetted keywords related to your site.

You pay only for hits to your site and bidding can start as low as $0.1 depending on the popularity of the keyword.

Only bid for words that are specific to your site. For example if you sell blue widgets then "widgets" is to vague. "blue widgets" will get visitors who specifically want to buy blue widgets!!

"Widgets would probably be more expensive as it has a more general audience but "Blue widgets" is more targeted to a particular audience and would most probably be cheaper.

http://www.overture.com Overture can get you listed on the majority of the leading UK search engines and portals, including; AOL UK, Ask Jeeves, Freeserve, Lycos, MSN UK, Tiscali and many more. You set up an account with them and deposit an initial £60

http://www.go-click.com You can create an account from $10 and they have a minimum bid of $0.1

2) Submit ezine articles

Submitting ezine articles is free and often one of the best ways of getting visitors to your site.

Write an article about a subject that relates to your site giving useful information, but don't use it as an advert for your site or it probably won't be accepted.

You can however advertise your website in a resource box at the end of your article.

Articles should be of a 65 character line length. textpad enables you to word wrap your document. For a free trial download go to http://www.textpad.com/download/index.html

Submit your articles with online article directories at
http://www.ezine-writer.com/article-lists.html
http://www.ezinewriter.com/top10.html
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.webmasterslibrary.com
http://www.marcommwise.com
http://www.mailbiz.com
http://www.UltimateProfits.com
http://www.vectorcentral.com
http://www.freezineweb.com
http://www.smarteremarketing.com

Make sure that your article is in keeping with the directory before submitting it. Some directories are specialised in their subject matter.

If your articles are of value with good content they will soon be circulated amongst many other websites providing you with links back to your site. Search engines love sites with lots of links so it will increase your website's popularity.

In time you will find that traffic to your site has dramatically increased. This will be targetted traffic from visitors having read your articles.

Success doesn't happen overnight and takes hard work and perseverance but if you write a couple of articles a week you will soon find an increase in visitors to your site.

3) Write your own ezine

Start your own ezine and publish it regularly. This is a good way of informing your visitors of any news and updates on your website. Have an opt in form on in a prominate place on your site so that people can subscribe to it.

The ezine should also have an unsubscribe option as well. Any visitors who do unsubscribe should be deleted from your database immediately.

EzineAnnouncer includes over 900 resources of places to promote and advertise your ezine and articles for free! This is a must have for anyone serious about promotion!

An autoresponder is a vital tool for keeping track of your subscribers and enabling you to send out personalised emails containing your ezine, free e-courses, or any message you may want your subscribers to receive.

Get Response is a remote autoresponder service. Price starts from $12.12 or under £7 a month.
http://getresponse.com

mailmerge is a list builder that you download to your hard drive. There is no monthly fee as you pay a one off purchase price.
http://www.coloradosoft.com/worldmrg/index.htm

A pop under box may help to get more subscribers, but make sure that you use a script that only triggers the box once during a visit to your site. Nothing is more annoying than returning to the home page only to be continually bothered by a pop under box with each click.

With this script you can control the frequency of the popunder, so it either pop unders every time the page is loaded, or only once per browser session
http://wsabstract.com/script/script2/popunder.shtml

If you need articles to put in your ezine there are many sites that have databases of free articles that you can use. Try
http://www.freezineweb.com and
http://www.ezinearticles.com

Submit your ezines to the following ezine directories
http://www.bestezines.com
http://www.ezinesearch.com/search-it/ezine
http://www.ezine-universe.com
http://www.escribe.com
http://www.e-zinez.com

For more info on ezines and newsletters the ezine university is free and has lots of valuable tips, courses and advice.

4) Offline methods of getting traffic to your site

These are just some of the methods that you can use to get traffic to your site.
There are also many offline ways as well including just talking to people you meet!!

You could design and print out some flyers to advertise your business and place them in cafe's, libraries, supermarket customer advertising boards, and even place some on car windscreens in car parks that you are passing through. I have often gone back to my car after a shopping trip and found a flyer on my car advertising a business or local event!!

Design and print out business cards. You can get some nice quality paper for printing these out on to make them look professional. Hand these to everyone you meet and leave one with a bill whenever you eat in a restaurant. Use different colour paper as well to add interest.

How about designing a car sticker and place it on the rear windscreen of your car.

Placing an ad in your local paper is a good idea and reasonably inexpensive.

Always make sure that you carry some cards and flyers whenever you leave the house you never know when an opportunity will occur!!

Kathy has her own mlm online business which you can visit at
http://www.healthandbeautytowealth.co.uk
She has written several other articles on online marketing which you can find at http://www.healthandbeautytowealth.co.uk/articles/articles.html

Contact Kathy on 020 88046181 mobile:07958 259 757
E-mail:bizopp@healthandbeautytowealth.co.uk

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