7 Budget Friendly Internet Marketing Tips

admin    Google Optimization     Budget, Friendly, internet, Marketing, Tips

7 Budget Friendly Internet Marketing Tips

It seems everyone now is watching their money and looking for ways to stretch their marketing dollar. Here are 7 Budget Friendly Internet Marketing Tips. Every tip listed can be implemented for under 0 (for the entire year) plus a little elbow grease! How?s that for stretching your dollars!

1. Get a website- a year or less

If you?ve got one-great-make sure its updated. If you don?t have one you need two things to get one up by the end of day. You need a domain name and then domain hosting. You can do both at GoDaddy.com or HostMonster.com. You can walk away with a basic plan for less than 0 a year. Next, Install WordPress and the Atahualpa* theme (google ?Atahualpa wordpress theme? to find) and build a quick website. Do not get roped into using the website builder software that comes with web hosting. WordPress is FREE and comes a lot of support from others who use it at wordpress.org. Bare minimum your website needs is information on how to contact you (phone/email/physical location), list of your products services. Add some pictures and you?re good to go.

2. Start Blogging-FREE

Why? How? Oh my! Here?s how to make it really simple. Again, you?ll need WordPress and the Atahualpa theme installed at www.yourdomain.com/blog (ask your hosting provider how to do this if you don?t know how). Then 3 times a week- type a brief message/article/how-to tip/customer interview/monthly special as a blog post. You can google things like ?blog post ideas for small businesses? and get a lot of tips on things to blog about.

3. Create a Facebook Page for Your Business-FREE

Get your business a Fan Page set up on Facebook. Go to: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and walk through the step for setting up a Fan Page. After you set up a Fan Page-send an email to all your current clients and customers asking them to join. Whenever you make a blog post-send an update to your fans. Also keep fans updated on specials or discounts that your business might have. Think about offering a ?Facebook Fans Only? special.

4. Create a Facebook Group-FREE

A business Facebook Group will let you communicate and get to know your current customers. A group allows you to privately message members much like someone being on an email list. You can also have discussions in the group about products or services that you offer.

5. Create a Twitter Account-FREE

Local News stations, police departments and local newspaper have started using Twitter to keep followers up-to date. After you set up a Twitter account, invite all your current clients and Facebook Page friends to follow you on Twitter. Then begin watching the conversation. Start by re-tweeting what others have said. That means copying something that some else has said in your tweet update box and putting a ?RT? in front of the message then sending it out to your followers. This allows the message to be seen by others in your group that the original message might not have been seen by. It builds trust and loyalty. People like when you acknowledge what they say or do. Then tweet about things that are going on with other local businesses that are tweeting.

6. Start or continue your email newsletter-0 or less

If you are blogging this can seamlessly be tied together so that every blog you create automatically gets emailed out to your newsletter subscribers. I recommend iContact for this as their service allows for autoresponders, email newsletters, surveys and RSS feeds. If you are blogging 3 times a week-there are 3 emails that go out to your subscribers every week! Plus if they like the article it?ll drive traffic back to your website.

7. Set Up Google Alerts-FREE

Go to alerts.google.com (you need to have a gmail account-create one if you don?t already have) and type in the name of your business in the ?search terms?. Select Type: ?Comprehensive?. Select ?How Often?: As-it-Happens and have it delivered to your gmail address. This service will send you an email anytime your company name is mentioned.

Also set up google alerts for general industry terms or products that are related to your business. This will provide you with ideas for writing blog posts as well as quickly keep you updated on what?s being said about your business and your competition.

There you go! If you?ve already got all these in place-Super Job! Watch out for a future article on ?Advanced Budget Friendly Internet Marketing Tips!?

Related Google Tips Articles

Amazingly Huge Profits on Low Budget With Google Adsense

admin    Google     Adsense, Amazingly, Budget, Google, HUGE, Profits

You would be amazed at the money being made with Google Adsense every day by people like you and me. Google adsense is one of the easiest way I have found to add extra in come to your website or blog.

It hardly takes any computer skill to implement Google Adsense ads into your website or blog. All you have to do is sigh up with Google for the Google Adsense program and get approved, which will take 2-3 days in most cases. Once approved google will automatically make you Adsense code. All you have to do is insert Adsense ad into your website or blog. That’s it.

With that said, now that you have your Google Adsense ads posted to your website you will need to drive traffic to it. For starters, everybody knows that content is king on the internet and search engines love it.

Fill your site with good quality keyword saturated content is the first step in getting you website noticed by Google and other search engines, keep you content up to date, try added new stuff weekly. RSS feeds also work nicely because it automatically ads fresh content to your site with no work on your end. Everybody likes that! I could go on and on about SEO but your web site content is probably the most important thing of all. People searching the web love information.

I would recommend finding out as much as possible about SEO, ranking high in the search engines will be worth the work, times a million.

Placement of your Google adsense ads will also play a huge factor in the amount of clicks you get on you ad sense adds. I have found that a large horizontal banner right under the header works best. You will also wont to customize you ads to go with the theme of your website, so they look a little more like content and less like ads. People will be more apt to click on them the ads that way.

Google does set some limiting on what you can do to the ads. You are going to wont to read terms of use with Google adsense. Reading terms of use is a very important step. You do not wont to get shut down for something you were not aware of.

There is also many other ways to get traffic to your adsense ads, here is a list of a few that have worked the best for me.

1. Submitting articles just like this one to article sites. This is a great way to get your site out there. Just write a good article on any subject that you no a little about. Ad a link to your site at the bottom and that’s it. If people have found what you have written interesting they will in most cases take a look and your site. Best of all it is free advertisement for you. There is also software out there that will automatically submit your articles for you and save you a ton of time.

2. Get your site linked to as many high-ranking sites as possible. This can be down by contacting high-ranking sites with similar content to yours and requesting them to add your link in there site. This will help you get index in search engines faster and increase your page rank. Search engines like a lot of links from other high ranking sites. This makes you look more important to them.

There are hundreds of ways to promote your site. I recommend just sticking to a few simple methods to start with. It is very easy to get over whelmed if you try doing too much.

Improve Your Google Pagerank – SEO Tips and Affordable, Budget Hosting Plans and Services – the Hosting Hole

admin    Google     Affordable, Budget, Google, Hole, Hosting, improve, PageRank, Plans, Services, Tips

If you can improve your Google PageRank then you will have a sure-fire way of improving your listing position. Google states very clearly that their PageRank and your link density is a very important part of how they decide your listing position for any keyword.

There are steps you can take to improve that and use an approximation to the Google PageRank formula to calculate how successful you are being. However, no one really knows what is required to get from one page rank figure to the next. If it takes 10 linking points to get a page rank at all, it will likely take a lot more to get from 1 to 2. It might take hundreds of thousands to get from 5 to 6, but many sites seem to get to page rank 3 and then stop.

Page rank is a measurement of the relative number of links to your webpage and the importance of the sites making these links, compared to the number of links leaving your web page. Page rank is what it says. It is a ranking of your web pages, not your whole website. This is particularly useful since it lists individual pages on your website, not the whole website. Check the current PageRank of your site / URL here.

These links need not be from outside sources, since internal page linking also counts. If one of your pages is linked to your home page, your home page gets a share of that page’s rank. The share decreases for each other page that the page in question is linked to. Each page in your website starts off with a page rank of 1. That then increases or reduces according to your internal linking strategy, and it is possible to design that strategy to provide as much PR as possible to one or more pages in your website.

Once you have optimized your internal links, you should then try to achieve as many links back to your website as possible from other websites. Keep in mind that you should try to get other web pages to link to specific pages on your site, that you have chosen either for their relevance to the keyword in question, or because that is the page that you want to get listed highest in Google.

Also keep in mind that websites with a very good page rank on their home page might be providing you with a link from a page deep in their site that has a very low PR, or even zero. A links page, for example, with only one link to the page but a hundred out will provide with next to no benefit. If the link is reciprocated, you could be giving that website more page rank points than you are getting back.

Another very important note. Make positively sure your hosting provider is consistent and reliable. Nobody exactly know how often Google updates PageRank but records show that PageRank updates 4-5 times a year on average. DO NOT take a chance of your website being down during the PageRank update. You must ensure that you have quality, reliable web hosting from an industry leader. So how do you choose a hosting provider when there are thousands of hosting companies available online? These tips will steer you in the right direction.

We also have a collection of Google Pagerank related articles discussing the basics of PageRank and how to improve PageRank. These articles include:

Unbiased Review of Google PageRank

Google PageRank is one of the very main factors which decide the ranking of Google search results. PageRank is made upon how many votes you have and the importance of those votes.

How to Protect Your Site from A Google PageRank Drop

For the uninitiated, Google ranks all pages on the web with a scale of PR0 to PR10 — higher is better. High PR sites or pages receive most of the traffic for competitive keywords or phrases.

What is PageRank and How Does It Work?

Google was the favorite among search engine. Most of Google’s popularity is credited to its preferred form of search engine optimization, a trademarked program Google dubbed Google PageRank.

10 Ways to Outsmart Google’s PageRank System

A list of 10 things you can do to lessen the impact of a sudden drop of the almighty Google PageRank

Please visit us at: http://www.thehostinghole.com for more information on PageRank, SEO and Web Hosting

Copyright © – 2000-2008; http://www.thehostinghole.com – All rights reserved.

Top 5 Myspace Marketing Tips for Businesses on a Budget

admin    mySpace     Budget, Businesses., Marketing, mySpace, Tips

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand we live in a social networking world.

Businesses of all sizes have quickly caught on to the importance of having a presence at websites like MySpace and Facebook for a number of reasons.  From the sheer volume of traffic these sites attract to the demographic diversity of their users, smart marketing professionals consider social networking a significant part of their branding efforts.

Contrary to popular belief, having a substantial presence at a site like MySpace, for example, doesn’t necessarily require a substantial budget. As a matter of fact, there are a number of easy-to-follow marketing tips businesses can follow to have a commanding MySpace presence, for pennies on the dollar.

1.  Create a MySpace Layout that showcases your business.

A clean and attractive MySpace layout that includes your company name and a description of your products and services is essential in marketing yourself to the MySpace crowd.

When you consider that one of the most popularly searched phrases on the Internet today is “MySpace Layouts”, you’ll understand just how important this tip is.  Aside from the popularity of social networking itself, the second fastest growing trend is customization, or the art of being able to decorate your profile with cool layouts, backgrounds, pictures, graphics and video and music applications that convey your likes and dislikes and, in essence, your overall personality to the friends who visit your page.

It’s no different if you’re a business.  Posting a layout to your MySpace page, one that clearly conveys who you are and what you do, speaks volumes to the people visiting your profile – people who may very well become your customers.

Look online to find websites that offer custom layouts and incorporate your company’s information and graphics into the elements of your layout design, including backgrounds, extended network banners and boxes within the layout such as contact tables.  Whatever you do, keep it simple. Cluttered and confusing layouts lose their branding effectiveness.

2.  Add MySpace friends who fit the demographic profile of your customers.

MySpace has a nifty feature that allows you to browse for friends by age, gender and relationship status.  Use this tool to locate friend prospects that fit the demographic profile of your target customers and reach out to those prospects with friend requests.  When you add friends who you believe will be most interested in learning of and receiving information about your products and services, you increase your chances of gaining new customers through targeted marketing.

Be sure to communicate important company news such as discounts and special deals or the launch of new products and services to your MySpace friends as often as you can, in a reasonable manner.  Keep in mind MySpace has safeguards in place to prevent spamming.

3.  Work your MySpace profile.

Having a MySpace profile that features your business is one thing, “working” that profile so it works for your business is something completely different.

Assign someone within your company to manage your profile on a daily basis.  It’s important that they add friends, post comments, post bulletins, write blog articles and send and receive messages. Don’t assume that by creating a MySpace profile, millions of people will find you.  The art of social networking is just that – networking socially within a site like MySpace by reaching out, making friends and interacting with those friends as often as possible.

Also, aside from foul language or inappropriate content, don’t be afraid to allow people to post public comments about your organization on your MySpace page.  A big draw for social networking is the ability to be real, to speak your mind and say how you feel.  If you allow only positive comments about your business to be posted, you lose credibility.  But if you allow people to speak their minds, you gain credibility while learning a lot about your customers – and your business – in the process.

4.  Let your MySpace friends become your own marketing army.

Certain MySpace customization websites like SpaceGravy.com (http://www.SpaceGravy.com) for example, now offer a service where they will create layouts and other designs, such as backgrounds, extended network banners, contact tables, graphics, glitter graphics and flash widgets, that feature a particular business, product or service (in this case, up-and-coming bands).  These designs, showcased prominently throughout SpaceGravy.com, are available for free download to any MySpace, MyYearBook, Xanga, Friendster or Virb user. 

Not only do participating bands get excellent marketing exposure at SpaceGravy.com, they get excellent marketing exposure from the various social networking users who customize their profiles with the band’s layouts.  Aside from bands, virtually any type of small or large business can take advantage of this service.

Bottom line – by offering free MySpace designs that feature your business, your MySpace friends, and MySpace users in general, become your very own marketing army.

5.  Use MySpace Ads.

MySpace Ads, similar to Google AdSense, allows you to promote your business by targeting your advertising to MySpace users for a fraction of the cost of traditional online advertising.

MySpace Ads is an online advertising program available through MySpace that allows you to create ads featuring your business, target those ads to a specific group of MySpace users you choose based on demographics information, spend only the money you want based on your budget, and then closely monitor the performance of your campaign with detailed reporting provided through your MySpace Ads account.

Depending on the size and specifications, you can use your own ads or use MySpace’s pre-made ad templates and you never pay more than the budget you originally determine at the outset of the campaign, according to the company.

Businesses on a budget should consider MySpace Ads as an affordable online advertising alternative.