How to Promote Your Internet Business

Now that you have decided to venture into Internet marketing business and have in fact signed up with some affiliate programs and have your own websites up and running, I wish to say “Congratulation!”.

However your job is far from over! You need to promote and advertise your business in order to get people to buy your products or services. How do you go about doing this in the Internet?

The following are some of the routes you would come across in the Internet some of which are very effective while others are a sheer waste of your time:

1) Promotions Which Are Good to Know But Not Recommended

1.1) FFA (Free For All) pages
FFA is an abbreviation typically used when referring to "link farms" where you can get your site listed along with hundreds or thousands of others. It is supposedly designed to "submit your site to thousands of search engines and directories”. Although this sounds like a potentially easy and good source of visitors, you are forewarned that these sites get very little worthwhile traffic and their benefits in terms of link popularity leave a lot to be desired.

They often have no categorization or review although they offer marketers a false gratification because of the “instant submission”.
Generally, you can submit your URL to a FFA page, but it usually only permits 100 or 1000 links on their page at any one time. Your ad remains on the site until these numbers are added which forces your ad out of the list. You therefore have to revisit these sites many times to maximize your exposure.

If you see any ads that go something like this: “Submit your web site to 700,000+ FFA Pages - FREE”, do think twice before jumping into it.
Many search engines now regard FFA as a form of spam.

1.2) Safe Lists
A safe list is a group of people who are willing to receive each other’s promotions or ads via email with the hopes that their own promotion will be viewed by others in the list to generate more business. In other words, safe lists are many Internet marketers who have agreed to receive each others email. Since every single safe list member has to agree to receive your email, it makes these lists “safer” than simply mass-emailing (i.e. spam)

If you sign up to receive the list, you will receive anywhere from fifty to hundreds of messages a day from the list. Like many in the list, you are only interested in promoting you own products and therefore have little motivation to open, let alone read others’ ads. As a result, thousands of messages are sent out daily that would receive little attention.

2) Promotions Which Are Direct and Recommended
This includes Pay Per Click Search Engines, Direct emailing, Banner Ads, Classified Ads, Publishing articles, Ezine Advertising, Solo Ads and Newsletter Publishing.

2.1) Pay Per Click Search Engines (PPCSE)
This is an Internet advertising model used on search engines where you only pay when a visitor actually clicks on an ad to visit the your website. You could bid on keyword phrases relevant to your targeted market. When a visitor types a keyword query matching your keyword list, or views a webpage with relevant content, your ad would be displayed. Such ads are called a sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above the "natural" or organic results on the result or landing page.

2.2) Direct Emailing
This refers to sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing your old customers to buy something immediately or with the purpose of enhancing your relationship with your current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.

We are being bombarded by emails in our inbox every day whether they are from business associates, friends or even spasm mails i.e. the unsolicited emails. One way to make full use of these emails is to respond to them with your own “teaser” emails to tell them something interesting about your Adsense sites. You can do the same thing with your own opt-in list.

2.3) Banner Ads
This form of online advertising is intended to attract traffic to your website by linking it with an image. The advertisement is constructed from an image program or multimedia object using technologies such as Java or Flash, often employing animation or sound to maximize presence. You can use Banner ads to notify potential consumers of your product or service and presenting reasons why they should choose the product or service.
However please take note that many web surfers today regard these advertisements as highly annoying because they distract them from a web page's actual content and therefore very often than not, they would tend to ignore banner ads.

2.4) Classified Ads
These are advertising appearing according to specific categories or classifications and it can be done either online or offline like a newspaper or a magazine.

It is the most popular traditional marketing tools used by small business to reach huge audiences with minimal investment. Very few people know the fact that in the year of 2006, advertisers had spent almost $18 billion in newspaper classified ads! This is more than almost every other category of advertising media.

Classified advertising is not only a valuable marketing tool offline, it is also a powerful way to reach thousands of potential customers and generate incredible profits online. You can check it out at Online Classified Club.

2.5) Publishing Articles
Getting your articles written with killer headlines that will grab the visitors’ attention, and distributing and publishing them on the Internet is one of the very best Internet marketing techniques in existence.

Once you have become an author of an article, you become an instant authority. When visitors locate and read your article they could obtain some useful information from it. They would most probably appreciate you. When appreciation turns into trust, it is very likely that they would click the link in your article resource box to visit your website to get more information.

Submitting your articles and getting them re-published on others' websites and newsletters/ezines is one of the most powerful Internet marketing strategies. Your articles will then start working as a free advertisement for you forever. And you do not have to pay even a dime for such advertising space. You will continue to enjoy free traffic driven to your sites for a long, long time!

2.6) E-zine Advertising
An online magazine that caters to a niche or special interest subject matter is referred to as an ezine. Ezines provide advertisers with highly targeted markets. Ezines are usually narrowed-down to a particular target market. All you need to do is identify ezines that cater to your target market and place ads in those ezines. You should look for ezines with at least 500+ subscribers.

2.7) Solo Ads
A solo ad is a stand alone mailing sent out to the entire ezine subsribers. It is known as “solo” because the ad does not have advertisements from other advertisers.

Hence, unlike safe list advertising discussed above, solo ads in ezines present your stand-alone advertisement to a more responsive audience. Most publishers allow you to have your own subject line i.e. a header, or the "attention grabber" that will entice people to click on the email and read what you have to offer.

2.8) Newsletter Publishing
The main reasons for running a newsletter to your mailing list are to disseminate information to your readers who had visited your site and signed up for the newsletter and to make any announcement regarding your products and any updates done to your site with the hope that some of your readers will return to your site to check out the new stuff mentioned in your newsletter.

3) Promotions That Give Passive Income and Are Highly Recommended
This includes Article marketing, E-books, and link exchanges.

3.1) Article Marketing
This has been discussed above. What needs to be stressed here is the fact that most articles are timeless meaning that the content would still be valid in 3 to 5 years’ time. You need only to perform the work of writing, publishing and distribution one time but the free traffic keeps coming back year after year giving the fruit of passive income.

3.2) Ebook
Similar argument for article marketing also applies to writing and publishing of e-books.

3.3) Link exchanges
Link exchanges are programs in which one website owner offers to link to another site in return for a reciprocal link. You do this for two main reasons, namely, to promote traffic to your website and increase your search engine rankings.

More and more websites owners are actively participating in link exchanges, either individually or through a program, knowing that getting these links would produce lasting traffic as well as improving your ranking in the Search Engines.