You probably already use the Online World for many things.
Whether you use it for entertainment, research, sending E-mail
to friends and family, or just discussing numerous subject
topics with others.
Of all the things you can do online, there is one that you
should definitely know how to do. MARKET A BUSINESS ONLINE!
That's right, with the power of the Online World to reach
millions of people, Online Marketing is definitely an awesome
tool that no business should be without. The simple fact that advertising is practically FREE. The ability to get the results of thousands of dollars in free publicity is practically unheard of in business today. Only recently have more and more people figured out how to utilize the ever exploding Online World to market their business efforts.
Think about it, there is probably no business in existence that
could not benefit from free publicity! And the fact that
properly utilizing free advertising raises net profits to
unbelievable levels! Using any or all of the major online
services, or the INTERNET, can help you market your business
efforts.
Let's start with plain-old advertising. On America Online, for
example, they will let you place classified advertisements for
FREE! They have a variety of classifications to choose from. By
placing these small free ads you can generate some very quality
leads that can turn into sales. Or if you are a really good
marketer you could sell something straight from your free ad.
Wouldn't that be something, using the actual free ad to do all
of the selling.
The other services offer free advertising from time to time.
When they do charge for classified ads it is usually very
inexpensive, and still a great deal considering how many people
those ads can reach. When you place any advertisements you
should always "code" your ads. This means put something in each
individual ad that will tell you, if you get any business from
it, which ad it came from. This way, you will probably find
that some sections are better producers than others, and you
will want to concentrate on these sections and not the ones that
weren't making any money.
To code an ad you could make them request a certain "report" for
more information. You should give each report a different code
for each ad. Such as: "ask for report #1tv" , this way you
would know that this request came from the ad on television,
for sale category, and so forth. If they send you an order
straight from the ad, make them give you an order #, which would
be different for each ad. THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE WHO
ARE ADVERTISING ONLINE ARE NOT USING THESE AD CODES!!!
THIS IS A MAJOR MARKETING MISTAKE!!!
By not tracking exactly which ads are making money, they are
wasting their time by continually placing ads in "loser"
categories. The actual code can be anything you want to assign
to it. ALWAYS keep track of every ad you place. Make a note of
what it said, where and when it was placed. You will be
pleasantly surprised when you analyze your "ad data" and see
some positive trends developing. Just repeat these trends and
it will help you to make more money!
How would you like to find a name list of several hundred (or
even thousand) people who might be interested in the particular
product or service you are selling based on their jobs or
interests? Wouldn't that be great!? Well, you can! And the
Online Services supply this service as a part of your regular
membership.
This little unknown tool is called the "Member Directory!" You
can do searches in the directory for other users with certain
characteristics. For example, if you were selling fishing
equipment, you could do a search by "fishing." All of the people
that were registered in the directory and had listed fishing as
one of their hobbies would show up on that search list. You
could now send each one of those people an e-mail message
telling them about your product or service, it's just like using
a mailing list, but you have no postage! (*Make sure you check
with your Online service to see if they allow unsolicited
E-mail.)
You can also get the names of several prospects by doing some
"browsing" in the different topic forums. Using the earlier
example of looking for people who fish, you could look under
sports until you found a discussion on fishing. You could then
take note of the users' names that were participating in the
discussions. You could do the same thing on the INTERNET with
one of the many newsgroup topics that they have.
The bottom line is that you "test" and record the results of
your Online Marketing efforts. Then just repeat the steps that
are making you money and expand on them to reach more people.
Doing simple research on the Internet. The Internet has several
mailing lists that are dedicated to marketing on the Internet.
You will also find hundreds of articles on the World Wide Web.
By searching one of the WWW search engines like Webcrawler you
can find all the information you can read. Use search strings
such as: "online marketing", "internet advertising", "selling
online", and so on.
You can also find many books on the subject at your local
bookstore or being advertised online.
