Internet Marketing for Dummies!

By Keith Bryan
Posted Monday, August 23, 2004

There are many people every day jumping into the online world. With more and more people using the internet the floodgates of internet users are opening wider everyday. But how, as a home business owner, can you expect to compete with the *big dogs*
of the internet and dip your cup into the profits as well?

There are a ton of tips and tricks that people will tell you are the *best* way to advertise your home business... But do them incorrectly or choose the wrong methods and all you’ll really end up doing is increasing your frustration, not your traffic or your sales.

I remember back when I started my first business (not online) it seemed like almost everyday someone was willing to offer me a great deal to advertise my business. Of course with all these different resources out there some of them had to be more effective than others. The only problem was .... HOW Do I Tell Which Ones? I had limited resources and certainly couldn’t afford to give them all a try, unless I just wanted to cross my fingers and hope they worked so I wouldn’t go out of business!

Thankfully, today’s online world provides home business owners with a variety of different marketing techniques, and each can be as profitable as the next. As a business owner you simply have to decide what you are willing to invest in your business, and which will have the best return on your investment

Let’s run through a few of the most popular types.

Paid Banner (CPM + CPC) and Paid Text -

Banner ads you can pay for as CPC(cost per click) or CPM(cost per every thousand times banner is displayed) usually placed in a high traffic area on a site that causes visitors of that site to see it and visit your site.

Paid Text advertising is similar only the ad is in the form of a text link usually off to the sides (or at the top in search engines like Yahoo! And Google) If you are going to use this kind of advertising make sure you pick the sites you place your ads on carefully (popular sites will be expensive but you should get more clicks and smaller sites will be cheaper, but often with little or no results)

E-mail lists –

Programs or services that will get your link out to many different internet users. These can be good if you have a very widely used type of product. The negative to these lists is that with new e-mail features often these types of messages get marked as spam and are disregarded by the intended recipient.

Free Traffic Generators –

Traffic generators like Traffic Swarm can be a great way of just getting people to go to your site. There are some that you can pay for that will guarantee you a certain number of visitors for a set price. Problem is that most of the people that are now visiting your site aren’t really interested in your product or service. You might get one or two sales from extremely impulsive buyers but the rest only visit to earn credits or something of the sort from the home site. If you’re going to rely on this type of advertising make sure your visitor/buyer ratio is already high for your site.

Link Exchange –

This is by far the best way of driving quality traffic to your site... if you do it right! Before you even THINK about trying to exchange links with other sites there’s a few things you should know...

1. Download the Google toolbar – This way you will be able to tell the page rank of any pages you want to exchange links with (higher the PR the higher in the search ranking which means more traffic)

2. Exchange links with only pages of PR 4 or higher. It will help your page more by having a few PR4+ pages linking to you than 10000 pages with no page rank.

3. Build your content FIRST! Don’t expect E-Bay to display your link just because you asked them nicely! Webmasters want to know they are linking to a quality site with a good amount of substance. Focus on building your site before you ask people to link to it.

4. Try to exchange links with other sites that have the same key words as yours. Ie: There’s no reason to exchange links with a flower web site if you sell telephone service

The only thing this type of advertising will cost you is a little effort. The greatest part of it is that the people that visit your site are people that are actually interested in your product or service, not just people stopping by to earn credits... and you don’t pay a cent. There are many books and sites on the web that can give you more details on how to effectively exchange links to your benefit.

Hopefully these tips have helped you narrow down the best type of advertising for your site. The one thing that hasn’t changed in the transition from regular to internet marketing is that you never really know what will work best for you until you try. Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet and see what you like!

GOOD LUCK!

About the Author
Keith Bryan has over 9 years experience in both Internet and other forms of advertising and marketing. For more information, tips, tricks, hot products and articles visit (http://www.WorkatHome-101.net) or e-mail him at keithbryan@cox.net