David Ogden asked:


Today many small businesses are marketing themselves on the Internet. As a matter of fact many small businesses today are actually Internet businesses themselves. Here are 3 affordable small business marketing strategies and you can use to get the word out about your business.

1. The first thing we want to talk about is utilizing a pay per click advertising campaign. Google Adwords and Yahoo Marketing are the two most well known companies that offer pay per click advertising campaigns.

These are great because you control how much money you want to bid on a targeted keywords, and you also control how much money you want to spend every month. You know that the traffic that you are getting to your website is targeted because people are searching for specific keywords or keyword phrases.

What makes this affordable for many small businesses is you only get billed when somebody actually clicks on your ad. This makes it very easy for you to determine if this form of our marketing is the effective for you or not.

2. Blogging is another affordable small business marketing strategy that you must be using. As a matter of fact, you can blog and get the word out about your business and your only investment will be in the time it takes to write the blog articles.

The key point to making blogging work is to social bookmark your post to the proper social directories. The other thing is to write your blog articles to target specific keyword phrases that relate to the theme of your small business.

This may take a little while to get the hang of, but it is really quite simple to do. You must be consistent in how you blog and how often you blog as well.

3. A third small business marketing strategy that has proven to be very effective is ezine advertising. The reason this is so good is because there are many email newsletters today that have been around for several years and have very loyal readers.

This gives you an opportunity to get the word out about your small business to people that actually will read either your classified ad, your solo ad, or an article that you run that is picked up by the ezine publisher.

This is three affordable small business marketing strategies that you should be implementing to promote your business on the Internet today. You may not know how to do any of them right now, but you can quickly learn the ins and outs to make these strategies affective for your small business.

Cynthia Minnaar asked:


To prepare to pull in more sales from your website it is a sensible internet marketing idea to have a stat counter on your website or use Google Analytics so that you can see, inter alia, exactly where your traffic is coming from, the keywords being used, the entry and exit points from your site, the number of pages they visit and how long a visitor stays on your online home business website.

These statistics will help you fine tune your website to encourage visitors to stay longer and explore your website and to either make a purchase or sign-up for your newsletter or affiliate program and ultimately pull in more sales from your website.

The bounce rate referred to in Google Analytics means that visitors go no further than the page they entered your site on. If your bounce rate is high it could mean that you are targeting the wrong keywords and they are arriving at a site that they have no interest in.

Perhaps the colour is off putting or there is nothing to grab there attention in the top fold of your website that is visible in their browser when your site opens. Is your site easy to navigate? Can they get back to the home page once they click on a link to another page of your site? Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and take a tour of your own website to find out! These are all areas you could look at and make gradual adjustments to entice the visitor to explore your website.

You could change the position of the products or opportunities that you are offering. It is amazing what can happen when you change two links around or move a banner to another position on your website.

Be sure to have a call to action on your website and make it highly visible so that it attracts the people’s attention and makes them click.

An internet marketing idea that a lot of people do not like but have been proven to work is the use of pop up windows or slide in advertisements on your web site. They grab your visitor’s attention because they jump right out at them.

Be sure to keep track of and analyze all your promotional efforts. Concentrate on the ones that work and drop the ones that don’t work. Don’t waste your valuable time.

You know what it takes to get traffic to your website so you need to get the most from each one of your visitors. You could add a message board or chat room to your web site. If people enjoy it, they will revisit your web site to participate regularly. Ask them to subscribe to your ezine, bookmark your site or complete a survey and remember to always offer them something free in return.

Keep yourself up-to-date with the latest internet business marketing ideas by buying internet business books, ebooks, private site memberships and joining appropriate forums. The internet and technology moves at such a rapid pace that you need to keep studying, learning and applying all the new website promotional ideas you can.

If you find a banner is not performing well on your website change it to a text link. Try a different colour text to draw attention to a specific area on your site or add some tiny graphics to break up the text and attract attention.

Visitors are looking for information so be sure your website offers unique, interesting and informative content for them to read. Keep the sentences and paragraphs short and to the point, try using lists, short tips and short articles as many people have little time and just skim over text but at the same time hope to find really useful information.

You can trade content with other ezine publishers or web sites. This is also a powerful and effective way to place your links on other targeted web sites.

Nothing is static on the internet and that includes your website. Be continually on the lookout for internet business marketing ideas to pull in more sales. Tweak and change things on your website to adjust to the expectations of your visitors and this will generate online income for you.