1. Get started for free. Yes, it is true that you can start blogging for no cost at all. WordPress and Blogger are just two of the more popular blogging platforms that you can use for free. This is a great way to start learning what blogging is all about. You can select various themes, customize it, and add plug-ins to give your blog added functionality. These are all things you should eventually know how to do. But…

2. Free is an option, but not the best option. You shouldn’t stick with the free option forever, especially if you are going to use you blog to make money. The problem with the no cost option is that you will be hosting your blog on their server. And that means they can close down your blog at any time for any reason. If you follow the rules, they probably won’t, but you should be aware that it can and does happen. You can take your chances if you will just be sharing your blog with family and friends, but it is essential to get your own domain name and hosting if you plan on using it for business purposes.

3. Choosing a topic is important. This bit of blogging advice is the most important for money-making sites. You need to take time researching a topic and finding out about your target audience. Keyword research is the bare minimum you need to do. But the more time you invest up front, the more your potential return will be. Consider every aspect of your blog and how your visitors are likely to respond. This step will be much easier if you are building a personal blog as you can write about almost anything; your thoughts, experiences, rants and raves are all fair game.

4. Post frequently. It’s a safe assumption that you want to start a blog so other people will read it. And if people don’t see new content when they check in, they will eventually stop coming back. Posting once every day or two should keep things fresh enough for most of your visitors. If you post less often than once a week, then you will have a very hard time getting people interested in coming back. So, the best blogging advice for this tip is to post as often as you can, but to not wait too long between posts.

When people are looking for products or services to avail they usually go for ones that they are familiar with or have long used. This way they can be sure that they are getting the most of their money. So for a business owner like you who is just starting up in the business industry, it is important to make a good first impression. Sure, you can do this by offering discounts and other special offers. You can even put a large banner in front of your store announcing your special opening sale. But when are not able to offer the right image you may as well consider hiding in your den and reflect on what you need to improve in your marketing strategy.

But then again you may be doing the right strategy and using the right advertising trick. But have you looked at your logo? Thats exactly what Im thinking. You could have overlooked the most important part of your product your logo design. Logos often tantamount to a companys image, hence, whether it is hip, chic, interesting or boring it is essential to create a logo that gives the right impact to the customers. It doesnt really matter if you, your friends or employees like or does not like the logo. What is important is the impression that it gives to your customers.

A good logo must represent the business image appealingly and effectively. It must likewise be practical and functional as complicated logos often leave customers confused and wondering what is actually being sold or presented. Keep in mind that less is always more. Hence, a simple logo design will most likely seal the deal and help you grab more customers. Certainly a colorful and over-designed logo will catch more attention but no company achieves success based solely on their logo. So a simple flexible logo is more likely to entice prospects to actually buy your products and avail of your services.

A combination of art, science and psychology often creates a good logo. A designer should know this, so if you do not know how to design your logo you can ask their help. Remember that a poor logo can ruin your image but a good one can instantly create name recognition and can boost company sales and services.

If your website is only a way to show vacation pictures to friends and family than getting a lot of traffic won’t be a concern of yours, but for everyone else this is a crucial issue. It can be the difference between success and failure.

This type of marketing revolves around the concept of doing anything possible so that the website ranks high in all the search engines: Bing, Yahoo and Google. When someone does a search using a certain word or phrase the search engine will bring up a list of returns. These returns are referred to as Search Engine Results Page, or SERPS, for short.

The higher on the list your site is ranked, the more free traffic you will get. People will usually click on the first 5 or so listings on the first page of results. When they do they will be taken to that website. If that is your website you have a lot of traffic coming to your site for free.

Another benefit is that you know that the visitors to your website are very targeted, they are interested in your product or service or they wouldn’t have done a search using that term.

To decide which of the billions of websites for a certain search term rate the highest, the search engines utilize a sophisticated algorithm to help it determine which sites are the most relevant to the search term. So if your site is about golf balls, the sites that are the most relevant to that term will be rated the highest and receive that coveted first page listing.

There are various tactics that a webmaster can use to ensure that the search engines recognize their website as being very relevant to certain search terms. So, to use the above example, if you are selling golf balls you would optimize your site for the term golf balls (along with other terms related to golf balls).

This may all sound complicated, and it can be, but some simple tweaks to your webpage might be all it takes. To a large degree how much time and effort you will have to put in will be in relation to how competitive your niche is.

No one really knows what the algorithms look for, it is a closely guarded secret, and they are changed and perfected all the time. For this reason, you should either incorporate some simple techniques or enlist the aid of a professional to follow all the changes and optimize your site as soon as possible after the criteria has been changed.

Search engine placement marketing is one of the best ways to ensure that your site gets a steady stream of highly qualified visitors.

There are a lot of different social networking sites around the internet that you can use to market your business and the more of them that you join and use the more potential customers you can connect with.

Let’s take a look at some of the Social Networking websites that are very effective at driving targeted traffic to your own business website.

1. Facebook – Facebook would have to be the most popular social network site on the internet and has millions of members from all over the world. With Facebook you can request people to be your friend and so you can search for people that are interested in the niche of your business and send them a friend request.

You can also set up group pages with Facebook so you can set up a group for your business and your friends and other members can join your group.

The most effective way to market your business is to get to know your potential customers on a personal basis before promoting any offers to them. So you will want to connect with them on a social level as well as a business level.

2. Twitter – Twitter is a website where you can ‘follow’ people. You can follow friends, family and people that you share similar interests with. To use Twitter for your business you will want to follow people that have interests in the niche of your business. When you follow people there is a good chance they will follow you too.

Whenever you make an update on Twitter, the people that are following you will see your update. If used correctly Twitter can be a very powerful marketing tool for your business.

3. Squidoo – Squidoo is another popular social networking site where you create ‘lenses’ where you can write and share information on any topic you choose. Squidoo lenses tend to rank very well in the search engines so if you create a lens for your business it can rank highly resulting in a lot of targeted traffic coming through to your own website.

You can even promote products as an affiliate using Squidoo although you don’t want to abuse the system and be too salesy. As long as your lenses are subtle and offer good quality content then Squidoo can be a very effective tool to market products as an affiliate.

4. Hubpages – Hubpages is a social networking site that is very similar to Squidoo but instead of creating a ‘lens’ you create a ‘hub’. You can share lots of information on your interests or your business as long as you offer good quality content. Hubpages is a very effective method for building backlinks to your own website and driving targeted traffic to your site.

5. Tumblr – Tumblr is another site where you create a type of blog that you can post content to on a regular basis and share your information with the other members of the Tumblr community. With your Tumblr blog you can add video and audio and you can also chat with other members. You can also follow other members and if you are active within the community you will soon have other members following you. The more members you have that follow you then the bigger customer base you are building.

Which social networking sites should you use?

The sites above are just some of the social networking sites available that you can use to promote your business. There are other sites such as YouTube, Stumbleupon and more. It is sometimes a matter of personal choice as to which one you use so why not try them and see what works for you. The more social networking sites that you are a member of the more customers you can connect with.

What we’re probably forgetting is that up to 80 percent of our sales growth can and should come from PAST customers. People who have bought from you before are pre-sold on you, your products, and services. It often just takes a simple reminder to get them

to buy again and again.

A while back I was talking to a group of realtors. When I asked how many followed up with old customers, only a couple of hands went up. Even though most customers will sell their home and buy another within just a few years, hardly any of the realtors

were considering how MUCH that repeat business could increase their sales.

I don’t mean to single out realtors. Just about ALL of us could increase our business simply by getting in touch with our past customers.

I’ve found the most effective way to say, “I’m here and can help you,” is to send a genuine paper greeting card by regular mail. It’s FAR more effective than sending an email, mailing a sales letter, or even placing a phone call.

Paper greeting cards say “I appreciate you.” Everyone loves them! Send cards to past customers to let them know you miss them, send them to employees for a job well done, send cards to prospects on birthdays. These are just a few tried and true ideas, and I’m sure you can think of many more.

Now I’ll admit choosing, buying, and mailing a greeting card can take a lot of time and a fair amount of expense (figure $3 for the card, $4 for the gas to get to and from the store, and even more for postage).

The time and trouble involved is one reason why greeting cards are so effective. First of all, the recipient doesn’t receive many cards, and secondly, they intuitively know just how much trouble you went to.

But let me share a little secret with you. There are new systems now that let you log onto a web site, choose your card, affix your digitized signature, then the service regular mails your card for you. The cost for the entire package can be as little as $1 per card, and it only takes a few seconds to do.

Can’t remember important dates? These same services will let you enter all your dates for months, then send your cards out automatically.

If you’ve got lots of relatives to keep up with, your customers would appreciate this special gesture, or you know your employees would be motivated by a nice pat on the back — then sending paper greeting cards is a communication tool you shouldn’t be without.

These further serve the cause of generating several useful contacts. There are a lot of like minded people you can find online and these forums help on to garner networking prospects like never before. Thus the forums are extremely useful social mediums too.

One thing that you should definitely avoid while making use of the forums is to push your product indiscriminately and too frequently to ruin your professional image and lose all trust of fellow users.

There is only one way of garnering the trust of the forum members and holding on to it and this can only be done by offering information or services which are genuinely useful to fellow users along with a proper promotion through signature tags, valuable posts etc. There might also be the case when the forum would itself allow for promotion for example many forums have marketplaces where you can actually sell your products and services.

A significant part all online marketers efforts should be framed on forum marketing. This can prove to be another very useful equipment to create a brand of one’s own. To create a professional brand on a forum is the most efficient kind of promotion. Trust does not come as something easily buyable.

But none of that holds a candle to what is most assuredly the core of any new business: you can’t succeed until you master prospecting and selling!

“But I’m really good at what I do. Won’t word just get out and people will find me and want to buy?” you say.

Don’t bet on it. We live in a busy, crowded world where thousands of businesses are shouting their marketing messages. If you don’t get in there and promote — and promote WELL — your customer base will resemble a trickle more than an avalanche.

Here are several proven methods for finding lots of new prospects and turning them into customers. Then I’ll show you an exceptionally EASY way to do all this on a shoestring.

1) Get a web site, get it listed on search engines, and let your site grab prospects 24/7. By now you’ve surely seen scads of small businesses doing this. For those who do it right, the Net can pull in lots of new customers with very little effort. But remember, it’s not as easy as some make it look. Your site has to be good, your copy has to be right, and you must be visible in search engines to make the magic happen.

2) Sell over the telephone. I love email, and face-to-face meetings will always have their place, but good ol’ telephone conversations are a top-notch selling strategy. Prospects feel like they’ve made a personal connection with you when you give them information over the phone.

3) Finally, method number 3 is the one to use if you don’t want to or don’t know how to build your own professional web site, or can’t bear the idea of talking to hundreds of strangers on the phone.

Frankly, this 3rd method has become the only method I truly recommend to small businesses and individuals: OUTSOURCING. These days, you can OUTSOURCE all your online promotion and selling to companies that specialize in doing the work for you.

In the past, that would have meant spending tens of thousands per month to hire an outside selling team. Today, with online and telephone automation reaching new heights, you can have all the advertising, phone calls, and closing done for you by the pros for about what it costs to get a decent home office computer set-up.

Don’t hesitate, do it! Getting a really good marketing, prospecting, and selling machine working for you is essential to your success!