5 Popular Ways To Market Your Services Online Part 1

There are many ways to promote your products, services or even websites and blogs online. How you choose what to do is going must be based on what you want to accomplish, how much time and money you have. 

If you have a lot of money coming in, you will be able to do some things to speed up the process and get traffic to your website. 

 If you don't have money, then you must have time. I will be touching the most common and well known ways to market online. 

First I will give you a list and overview so you get a feel for each avenue and then I will go into more details with the ones that you will find the most success with. 

Not all of them are worth pursuing for instance Banner Advertising I won't really get into just because it will bring you poor results compared to other things you could be doing.

1. e-Zines and Newsletters

 
You can start your own or advertise in others. This is not limited to online e-Zines. Not at all. 

There is no reason you can't advertise off-line in magazines related to your product and many more that offer your targeted audiences and often large distributions where you can reach markets that you can't even find online. But there are also online e-Zines.  

You can hunt these down and purchase space. You could also create your own e-Zine and list it in e-Zine directories.

 You can promote it using a number of different methods. You could also create partnerships and joint ventures with other people that might have e-Zines or newsletters and help each other promote to each other's lists. e-Zines (Newsletters, Reports) are very popular and a very useful tool to promote your products and services. 

If you decide to market using your own e-Zine you are actually getting into something called e-mail  marketing...  your goal will be to build what's called an opt-in list. 

It's simply a list of subscribers who have given you permission to send them stuff.  Permission based e-mail is a very powerful way to grow a business.  

 
2. E-mail Marketing

 
If anyone tells you e-mail marketing is dead or on it's way out, don't listen to them.  They don't know what they are talking about.  

Many warn that other technology will take e-mails place like RSS (Read more about RSS here). 

I just don't see it happening. There are a lot of fads that will come and go.  You'll see this the more time you spend online. 

But there are some time tested things that have worked for a long time and are so effective and still works that they will be very difficult to replace. E-mail marketing is big business and there are companies with giant lists who won't let it go.

 
What e-mail marketing can do for you is protect you from the ever changing online environment.
Many of the ways people rely on for traffic like search engines are difficult to predict.
You could be getting a lot of traffic and one day it disappears.

 
Building a high quality targeted list is an excellent way to build a long term relationship with your customers and get repeat buyers of your products and services. You can also buy lists, but I would be very careful doing this... 

 There are a lot of bad lists on the net:  old, out of date lists, ones that claim to be opt-in and aren't.  You want to be careful you’re not spamming. 

Generally speaking if someone is promising a lot of traffic to your site by sending out millions of e-mails and it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

 
There are a number of ways to build lists...  the best approach is just to build it into everything you do.  Try and capture as many visitors as possible by giving them a reason to sign up. 

Providing a simple sign-up box on a webpage like the one at the bottom of this page can be very effective. Many marketers will even go as far as designing what they call a "Name Squeeze" page...  it's a landing page (web page) designed solely for the purpose of capturing an e-mail.

It will give you little information, but will give you a reason to enter in your name and e-mail address...  maybe to get a free report or to enter the site for more information. 

No matter how you approach it, it is my feeling that building e-mail lists is a very powerful and almost essential marketing approach that will secure your business for the long term.
 
3. Banner Advertising

Banner advertising to me is not worthless....  Unless it's free to do. It’s become a little unproductive.  Most people ignore banners while surfing… it’s become part of the background.

Text links are on average more productive than banner... it is more subtle and leads to targeted information about what you are reading.

 
In the beginning years of the internet they were more effective because they weren't as common as they are today...  now they are everywhere and many surfers have become so used to them they literally don't even pay attention. 

They can work to a degree, but like I said above, it's hard to pay for a banner service and make out. They tend to be a little un-targeted as well. 

If you do have banners, you want to make sure the pages they are being shown on are as close to the same theme as what you are selling.
 
4. Search Engines
 
Do website and blog submissions and pinging when you update. If you want traffic from search engines, you need to be indexed in their results pages, Do that with the great tools Listed Here.

 Many companies online will try and convince you to get listed in a Search Engine's results pages that you have to submit your website to them.  This is wrong. 

The best way to get crawled by search engines is to submit to directories, get involved with link exchanges, or just getting natural links by providing good content that gives people a reason to link to you. 
 
I'm going to tell you a very powerful secret right now...  well maybe it's not a secret, but it WILL get you indexed faster than if you would submit. Submit your website to a directory that gets crawled regularly. Popular directories get spidered (crawled) by search engines daily...

A search engines Spider Bot (simply a small program the goes to your website and brings information back to the search engine) will follow every link out on page. So if your link is there, it will follow it and the search engine will spider your site!  

It's that simple. You have to be careful with a lot of this submit services as well because you will tend to get a lot of spam afterward. They are also submitting you to thousands of search engines in reality.  You will not get any traffic from 99.99% of these. 

The main search engines you should be worried about are Google, Yahoo, MSN (Bing) and few others, but those are your top 3. That's where you will get 97.99% of your traffic.
 
5. Submit Your Website to Directories
So  if you didn't know this, I just saved you some money! And seriously using this method can often get you spidered within 24 hours. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Make sure your site is optimized for search engines. It is the most cost effective form of traffic. 

It costs you nothing but the time involved. I won't go into details here about search engine optimization. If you are interested I wrote an article about Search Engine Optimization basics Find it here: SEO Basics
  

Have a wonderful day and Enjoy. Read Part 2 Here