Marketing is an absolute necessity for any business that is going to succeed. The problem is that you aren’t opening up your mind and thinking about where your customers are. Just because you own a website and do business online, doesn’t mean that your customers have to live 1000 miles away from you.

Face to Face Networking

Where are local business people in your area spending their time? This is a question you must ask yourself. Networking with other business owners can not only bring you new business, but help them to give you theirs! Develop relationships with other people that own businesses and you’ll literally be amazed with the results you find.

You can network with these business people at your local Chamber of Commerce. Becoming a member of the Chamber is normally inexpensive and provides you with a way to meet reputable people that work in your area. These people already have some success, or they would not be there. Learn from them and teach them and you will both gain from your relationship. This develops a desire for them to help you. Now, watch as the referrals start rolling in.

Organize gatherings through Meetup. There are tons of like minded people in your area that have no idea you have the same interest with them. Meetup is a site that is dedicated to bringing you and them together. Being the originator of a group gives you instant expert recognition from other members. Create a simple flyer for your meetings and post them at local grocery stores to get new members and grow your group.

Seminars are a great place to meet people with common interests and are the premier place to build business relationships. Be yourself and you’ll develop a following in no time. When attending a seminar, don’t be a wallflower. Stand up and make yourself stand out. There are experts in attendance at any seminar. Reach out to them and offer to help them. Build a friendship and you’ll be amazed with the results. I put on seminars twice per year.

Flyers & Business Cards

Your business card shows your professionalism and gives future clients a way of getting in touch with you for any need you may be able to fill for them. Always keep a stack of a dozen business cards in your pocket, as you never know when a networking opportunity will arise.

Format your card with your picture to guarantee that you are remembered. Also, remember that there are 2 sides to every card. Put a form on the back to allow them to put where they met you and when they want to contact you.

Flyers done on simple colored paper can direct attention to your website. Every grocery store has a bulletin board that people post products for sale and services they offer to. Post one for your business! People do honestly read those flyers. Use flyers with tearaway phone numbers so someone that is interested in what you do can simply pull it off and call at their convenience.

The next step is to include business cards, flyers, & coupons with any correspondence you have with a customer. You can also add special items:

Branded Pens – Magnetic Business Cards – Key Chains – T-Shirts with your logo

Don’t forget the power of a coupon – it gives customers a reason to come back!

The Simple Things

Don’t forget the simple things! At the end of your message on your answering machine, mention your business and thank your prospect for calling. Tell them directly to leave a message. It is very common to see magnetic signs on the sides of cars. You can get them very cheap on Ebay.

Open up your mind and think of ways you can interact with local customers. If you do it right, you will have more sales.

Referrals

Word of mouth is the single best form of advertising. A good testimonial makes people feel comfortable with you and are makes them more likely to pull out their credit card. Specifically ask your customers to refer their friends to you if they need any service or product you offer. If you can, offer them a special discount or small affiliate payment if they refer someone to your site. This gives them motivation to tell their friends and family about how wonderful you are! The best part is that they don’t even have to hide an affiliate link – family doesn’t care!

The best way to obtain referrals is to make it easy for your customers to get them for you. Utilize tools like Viral Friend Generator to allow your visitors to refer their friends. Provide affiliate programs as a way for them to get paid for sending people to you.

Auctions are great for selling your products, but you can generate traffic from them as well. Here are some tips for redirecting customers to your website from auctions:

• Include business cards, flyers, and promotional items with any package you send to a customer that tells them about your website.
• EBay gives you an “about me” page that you are allowed to include links on. Be sure to talk about your website and direct customers there for more products or special deals.
• EBay is not the only auction site. There are literally tons of others. Check the resource section for more auction sites you can use to generate traffic. Some of them even allow you to post links to your sites in your listings!
• Your User ID should be your website without the .com on the end. Mention that you have a website in all of your listings and the smarter people that find you will go look at your website.

Ebay’s fees are insane, but they do still have a great deal of traffic that I’m sure you’d be happy to redirect to your website. Here is a list of alternative auctions and some tips for each one.

http://www.bidville.com – Low fees, a lot of customers and traffic. Definitely worth your time

http://www.mightybids.com – Up and coming auction website http://www.ebid.net – Serves the entire world with a lot of traffic. You cannot sell EBooks at this site.

http://auction.overstock.com – Total garbage – don’t bother http://www.ecrater.com – You can literally sell anything here and it’s free! Listings are plain with zero html changes allowed. http://www.blujay.com – Same as above, but allows html code. http://www.onlineauction.com – $8.00 per month for unlimited listings and sales. This site allows you to post a link to your website in every listing.

Ebay Success

Ebay has gone through major changes over the last few years. They have added some very cool tools to allow you to promote your products to their audience.

Ebay blogs give you the power to interact with your audience and update them on your new products and services. Be sure to treat this like a regular blog and use the blogging domination system. Hint: You can link to wherever you want from your Ebay blog!

Reviews and guides are extremely powerful, too. Guides are the key to showing your expertise to your potential customers. By putting up a solid guide, you can get tons of targeted visitors to your listings or store. Ebay Wiki is another great place to build a presence. Be aware that any member can edit what you post, so make sure that the information you add or create is very solid.

Once you get someone to your listing, the key is to sell them! Use simple sales copy that shows the benefits of your products. Features are important, but simply list them and focus on what your customer needs to see and hear to buy.

Copy successful listings by looking at how they structured their offer. No matter what your product is, if you can find someone that already sold something similar, there is a reason that it sold. If they did something obviously wrong, fix it to get better results than them!

Secret Tips: Visit www.auctiva.com to enhance any Ebay auction listing for free!

The coolest thing I’ve seen on Ebay was where a seller had an expensive product and they posted details for a teleseminar in the listing. They don’t have to pay Ebay’s fees and get new customers.

Purchase a domain name that is similar to your store. Forward the domain to your auction website. This will make advertising easier, as people have no problem visiting websites with real domain names.

I recommend incorporating Podcasts into your social marketing campaign. Podcasts are an MP3 file of you talking about anything you can imagine. Once again, these should be informative, entertaining, and valuable. You must then take these podcasts and submit them to Podcast directories. People will load them onto their MP3 players and listen to them at their leisure. I recommend incorporating podcasts and youtube videos into your blogs to generate more interaction from your visitors.

The competition right now for podcasts is so low that it is literally a wide open playing field in nearly any niche. Here is how many results come up for affiliate marketing (most are one person!):

Audacity is great free audio mixing software

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

You need the lame plug-in for MP3s – http://lame.jthz.com/

Formatting your Podcast is simple with the software above, but you need to make sure it compares to your competition. Find a Podcast from a name you recognize in your industry. Listen to it! Do your best to mirror the level of professionalism found in the Podcast. You can get inexpensive intro audio samples here:

http://www.audiobag.com

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is just like adding a website to your favorites folder. The difference is that you are posting them to the web where anyone can find them. These websites have risen in popularity very quickly and are the secret to ranking well in the major search engines. Follow these rules and you’ll get tons of traffic quickly:

1. For every link of yours that you post, post a link of value that doesn’t belong to you.

2. Bookmark every single website and page you own including your profiles on every networking website, different blog posts, press releases, articles and every other piece of internet real estate you have.

3. Use proper tags to identify your site to others. Try to keep it under 30 tags and double check to see if they want tags separated by spaces or commas. If they want terms separated by spaces, join words with a dash or hyphen (-), pluses (+) and underscores (_).

4. Contact friends and family to request that they bookmark your websites. This will get you extra traffic, as the more bookmarks there are of your site, the more exposure you get.

I strongly recommend bookmarking your sites to as many different services as possible. You will want to do a ton of research on these sites to see what is resonating with your audience.

The main problem with this is that many people are gaming these sites. To see who is a spammer, look for sites with no true reason to be bookmarked. If there is nothing special or attractive about the site, ignore it. Odds are pretty high that it was just someone gaming the system.

Here are some tools that make social bookmarking a breeze:

Onlywire – www.onlywire.com – Submits to 15 Social Bookmarking services at once.

The Socializer – http://ekstreme.com/socializer – Submits to over 50 different Social Bookmarking websites and saves your sites information.

The methods I’m mentioning here drive the highest quality traffic. Some cost money, some don’t. The bottom line is that you should simply use them!

Safe Shopping Network

The internet is full of websites that sell different products. It’s a simple fact that people still don’t trust websites. The Safe Shopping Network tests your website and lists how safe it is for people. They run a directory of sites that someone can use to find products at a website rated based on its level of safety. This website gives you a seal to post on your website that will help people trust your site and spend their money with you. I recommend contacting them first to have them run their testing to ensure you get the highest possible rating before signing up.

They have 2 different cost set ups. The first is to pay for a category listing with unlimited clicks. You can do a single category for around $300 or unlimited categories for $900. The better answer is their PPC program. There is a minimum deposit of $329, but there is a 100% price match. This way you aren’t risking anything. You pay for results.

Niche Websites

Every single type of business online has a hub that they need to be a part of. Most of them have many. These are the best possible sources for targeted traffic. If you sell music, wouldn’t MTV direct customers to you? If you sell diapers, wouldn’t Parents.com be a good place to advertise?

This is a simple piece of advice – Find These Websites and Advertise There!

For the perfect example of this, check out Self Growth. This is the one I found for my first company online.

Expired and Mistyped Domains

Thousands of Domain Names expire every day. The dotcom boom of the nineties resulted in people buying hundreds of domain names for their niche. Now, it’s 2006 and many of those domain names are unused.

What does this mean for you?

You can find a diamond in the rough by doing the proper research on expiring domain names. The key here is to find domains in your niche that have a lot of backlinks. This guarantees a lot of traffic from people finding the links to this domain. You purchase the domain and redirect it to your website. You now have a source of traffic that will continue as long as you own it! I recommend Bizmint if you truly want to take advantage of expired domain name traffic. It not only tells you which domain names are expired, but tells you of ones that are expiring soon, too!

Can you imagine how much traffic you’d get if you owned Gooogle.com? Think of domains that are simple mistyped versions of the most popular websites you visit. Register them and redirect them to one of your sites. Make them targeted!

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is one of the best traffic generation strategies available online today. It’s actually quite simple. You go to the Answers website and find questions that are in your niche. You provide a valid answer and post a link to your website in the “resource” area under your answer. This directs a ton of traffic as Yahoo is pushing its Answers section quite hard and its Answers section is showing up in Yahoo and Google results quite often.

Post your URL everywhere!

Have you ever seen the crazy cars that companies like Red Bull have their employees drive around town? This can be very powerful if done right. I’m not talking about some bumper sticker or window sticker. I’m talking about making your car stand out!

Link to A Site!

By linking to a popular site in your niche, smart people that are looking to replicate what they have done will be looking for who links to them. They will find your site! This is especially useful for blogs.

Get Interviewed!

Getting interviewed by an expert can give you a huge swarm of traffic. This does not only apply to podcasts or blogs. This is great if you can be interviewed on the radio! A good press release can get this done for you. Doing interviews of other experts can easily do the same thing.

Public Domain Content

Every day there are thousands of different properties that have their copyright expire. You can now take that content and claim it as yours. This includes books, audio, and video content. Put it out as a free product, but include links to your websites. This works best with targeted content!

Don’t think outside the box, break it!

What do you think would happen if somebody came to your website and it was upside down? What if it flashed between 5 different languages. Do you think that might make an impact?

To have something like this work, you have to have a method that your visitors can use to turn your website back into what it is supposed to be, but this can generate insane buzz around you and your products.

Testing and Tracking

Your logs can be accessed through your control panel of your hosting plan. By seeing what is bringing traffic to your site, you can improve your results by focusing on improving the rankings of specific terms. If you find some strange site is bringing you traffic, see if you can add more content to that site!

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. Every blogging software comes with an RSS feed. This RSS feed allows people that like your blog to be automatically updated every time you post to your blog. Adding your RSS feed to RSS directories is a necessity for any feed you own.

There is a simple plug in for the Firefox web browser that you can use to submit your RSS feeds to over 100 directories for free:

Download Firefox at: www.getfirefox.com

Get the plug in here: www.submitemnow.com

You simply add in the information necessary to sign up for the 100 + different websites and a description for your feed.

You need to create an RSS feed for any of your main websites.

Syndicate your articles for your customers and host it on your website. Create a feed for new products. You can literally put anything in a feed that you update often.

You can create an RSS Feed at this site:

http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/makerss.pl

Your RSS feed includes a title, description, and link for every item. Be sure to use attention getting titles to generate actual traffic from your RSS feed. Use important keywords in titles for SEO purposes.

Secret Tip: RSS feeds come with all types of blogs and websites you’ll be using to generate traffic. Here are sites that give you RSS feeds to submit:

• Every Social Bookmarking Service
• Myspace
• Blogger
• Squidoo