ABOUT | FORUMS |LINKS |RESOURCES ONLINE MARKETING Online Marketing is basically where you take an existing idea (usually your existing business) and attempt to expand your client base by establishing an online presence. Sme ways to do this are: -ESTABLISH A WEBSITE OF YOUR OWN This will involve creating your own website which obviously requires you to either have knowledge of how to create a website or the money to pay someone else to do it for you, or using a free site like Myspace or Facebook or Ebay to create one for free. If you decide to create your own page from scratch I would recommend GoDaddy they are VERY affordable and simple to use, and their servers never seem to go down. There are other good ones out there, but this is a good starting point. I would whole heartedly suggest you do fork out for at least some hosting and a domain name, as it does look more professional and how many people would really buy something from free site like myspace or facebook that anyone could build? Having said all that, those social networking sites can be an invaluable addition to your sites publicity! SIGN UP WITH AN AFFILIATE MARKETING SITE Sign up with an affiliate marketing site such as the ones listed below. They will market your product for you and they only get paid on results gained! You will be able to taylor the outcomes desired to suit your needs. Sign up for one here: -ADVERTISE ON OTHER SITES: This is obviously simpler than creating your own website, but will cost you money. the most popular wasy to do this are to advertise on a well known site in your feild, the webmaster will usually be able to give you a price for their advertising services, or to advertise in the paid listings on Google and Yahoo. I would say the best option is to find a business related to yours and pay them for advertising as they would usually be cheaper, as yahoo and Google advertising will cost at least 10 cents per click through they send to your site where as a a niche site will be cheaper or maybe just glad to have anyone advertising on their site. SUBMIT YOUR WEBSITE To SEARCH ENGINES Much of my traffic to websites comes from search engine traffic. As mentioned above you can undertake paid advertising campaigns, or get your site listed for free. The free option is good, but of course not as good as if you paid for the better listings and rankings. Both Google and Yahoo both have web crawlers that actively search out for sites to add to their search engines. Two ways to get listed are to link your site from someone else's site who is already listed in search engines, the more you do this the higher you are likely to climb up the results rankings, and secondly if you don't appear on these sites submit them yourself. SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO YAHOO SUMBIT YOUR SITE TO MSN Google and Yahoo control much of the search engine traffic between them. Your priority here to get listed with them. It will take serveral weeks (maybe more) for anything you submit for free to appear, and then its anyones guess as to where in the results you will appear. The exact methods of the search engines ranking algorithms are kept a closely guarded secret, but what can help boost your listing up the results chart is the relevance of your site to the search term, and the amount of links that other sites linked from the search engines have to your site, your "META TAGS" and just the amount of relevant text contained in your site. While this is not an exact science, the more bases you cover the higher up the rankings you can climb. If you are taking your site really seriously and have a few dollars to spend this online manual can help you out: TRADING LINKS Find websites in a similar niche to your own and contact them regarding link exchanges. After doing some more research on how google prioritise their search rankings, they've pretty much addmitted that a lot of it has to do with how many "quality" sites you are linked back from. Also you may get some substantial traffic from the sites them selves. TOP LISTS / TRAFFIC EXCHANGERS These are programs that can be hosted on your server or other server which can automate the process of the link exchanges and even rank the links you have to your sites in priority of the traffic they are sending back to your site. There are many ways to do this , try googling Banner Exchanges, Top Lists as well as Traffic Exchanges on which there is a good recommendation below. EBAY STORES: Ebay is another invaluable resource to anyone hoping to market their product online. Ebay offer unparralled publicity for your listing and their online shopping cart setup where you can electronically bill people for your goods and services over the internet through Paypal account. NOTE: paypal is now regarded as the most secure way to shop online! Check this out if you've ever wanted to start your own ebay store: I would recommend the potential online business person take up all these options, though obviously building your own site can be time consuming and costly the other options are FREE to start up and only cost you your time. TRAFFIC EXCHANGES Most of these I have found quite frankly are useless, some operate on an autosurf policy and these are a waste of time and even if you do get the hits they aren't interested in your site. My advice, stay away from these. One site I've found that does seem to work to some degree is LINK REFERRAL. I am going to try out a few of these again soon and will report my findings here. ONLINE SURVEYS ONLINE MARKETING AFFILIATE MARKETING RESELLING HOME BUSINESS GOOGLE Adsense etc.... ONLINE TRADING FREE-SITES