Your site is ready for promotion, but your wallet is not? No problem, here’s a surefire way to get things off the ground with no budget at all. Then once the sales are rolling in you can start to fund higher end advertising solutions.

Meta information will be your friend. Metadata is like a fingerprint of your site. This is the underlying information search engines feed from to build a profile of your website. They combine the content of your site with your site’s metadata to determine what your site is about. (more…)

Ever wonder how some businesses become successful through online marketing? You don’t have to be a web guru or marketing genius to successfully market your business online, however you do need a lot of patience and a great marketing plan.

There are several ways you can effectively market your company online, using message boards/forums, pay per click advertising programs, link exchanges, social media sites, blogs, video sharing sites and search engine optimization (SEO). As a rule of the thumb, it is recommended you apply one or more of these methods in order to increase your chances of success.

Online Forums(free)

Online message boards otherwise known as “online forums” are a community of internet users who discuss common interests and activities with each other. Some online forums allow each user to have a unique image, text, or other graphics that is always tagged to each of their posts, these are referred to as signatures. If someone clicks on your signature link they will be redirected to your website or online store. The more you post, the more exposure you get.

Pay Per Click Advertising (paid)

Another option for marketing your online business is using pay per click advertising programs such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. A clear benefit to these programs is that you pay only when someone clicks on your link, just as the name “pay per click” suggests. I would not recommend this method if you are just starting out. If you have a limited budget and have no clue what you are doing, you may want to save this type of marketing for later. PPC can get very expensive very quickly. (more…)

The internet is considered to be a place of instant gratification where people try to have the fastest connection, instant downloads, and where people reputedly make a pile of money without even trying. However, the reality of the internet is that while many things can be done quickly, having a successful business isn’t one of them. One of the keys to having success is having the patience to do all of the little, detail oriented things that must be done in order to get the maximum visibility and thus get the traffic you need.

Blog Writing and Pinging

Blog writing and pinging your blogs are two things that individually don’t take too long, but it’s something that has to be done. Writing a blog is a very common practice for business owners, but it has to be done with care in order to be picked up by the search engines. You not only have to write the blog, but you also have to optimize it for search engines (many blog sites have a form to fill out that does this for you), do the keywords, do any backlinks to things like affiliates or your own sites, and when the blog is all done and published, you then have to ping it. Pinging is a generally free service online; when you ping your blog, you notify blog directories and services that you’ve posted something new. This directs search engines to you in hours instead of days, so it’s definitely worth doing. (more…)