Marketing Archives - Page 9 of 10

Online Business Opportunities – Social Media Marketing And Article Copywriting

Online business opportunities have been made more popular by social media marketing. It all began as a social initiative that has progressed into a viable tool in promoting business companies, products and services. Corporate organizations are gradually moving towards the use of social media and benefitting from its positive effects. As a refresher, social media focuses on more valuable interaction with business associates, prospective clients and existing customers.

Both major and minor players should strive to understand the crucial responsibility of social media in marketing. Indeed, it plays an essential function in marketing which depends on the business and how it best matches the requirements of that venture. It also depends on the effort that an entrepreneur is willing to contribute in the aspect of social media.

Strategies to Consider for Social Media

One of the questions that should be answered is can companies ignore social media marketing strategies as an effective way to advertise their products and services? This cannot be answered right away and it would be advisable to see the results or developments in the coming year.

Networking in business has never been more expedient than it is now, thanks to the concept of social media marketing. As it is aptly described by some experts in search engine optimization, business prospects are just a click away. Social networks continue to attract so many people who can end up in becoming your future contacts.

Article Copywriting as an Online Opportunity

Among the online business opportunities that are currently increasing in terms of demand is online copywriting. It is different from conventional copywriting although the objective of properly-implemented marketing copywriting is to heighten the online presence of business ventures. It aims to foster exposure and trust among the target publics.

In copywriting, these are the factors that should always be considered:

The content must be able to catch the interest of the target audience through the title of the article.
The headline should be motivating and engage the fascination of readers.
The content must be relevant and provide practical information to the readers.
The primary objective of copywriting is to win over readers to become loyal customers and patronize your goods or services.

Keep in mind that it is not the design of the website and advanced technologies that matter but the fact that the web page copy should be persuasive enough. The site must be able to generate substantial traffic for the business to be successful. SEO copywriting can enhance the ranking of websites by putting keywords at the proper places and in the midst of tabs on the web pages. Of course, the web pages must be appropriate and capable of connecting to readers as well as persuading both the readers and search engine spiders.

The first pointer about SEO copywriting is that it concentrates on generating content that is valuable for online users and at the same time to achieve better rankings in search engines. The next suggestion is to avoid cramming the web page with keywords and keyword phrases that do not work. These websites may be blocked because of irrelevant content. The content can be made relevant with the help of search engine optimization.

Marketing Your Trailer Hire Business

Once you have your trailer(s) ready for hire you need to let as many people as possible know. This is the part of the business that is often either overlooked or not pushed enough. No matter whether it is a trailer hire business you are trying to make a go of or something like a restaurant, hotel, shop, or online website store; none of them are going to make any money without customers!

You could have the most wonderful trailer in the country, but unless people know about it and can hire it easily, you are wasting your time. So you need to market your trailer hire business effectively. So starting close to home look at your trailer and see where you can place an advert advertising the fact it is available for hire. Get a weatherproof sign made and mounted on it.

Next, let everyone you know that you now have a trailer for hire. Speak to them, phone them, text them, and email them. Either you or your family go round your village, town or district with fliers in their hands and post them through letter boxes. Arrange for teenagers to do it for you for a small fee. Contact your local newsagent and ask them if their paper boy or girl will deliver the fliers at the same time as the newspapers.

Contact your local newspaper and see if you can arrange for your flier to be inserted in each edition. Leave your fliers where people congregate – taxi offices, takeaway shops and diy shops. Leave your flier or smaller card in every supermarket in your district – remember to call back every 10 days to put up another one.Go to your local libraries and put your advert on their notice board.

In local shops arrange for your advert to be put in their window for a small fee per month. If you have more money to spend on marketing you could arrange with your local taxi firm to have advertising on their taxis. Same goes for local bus companies. Visit your local skip hire business and come to some arrangement to have your business advertise with them. This way anyone hiring a skip may also want a trailer to hire.

Next move to online possibilities. In this country just like America, there are yahoo groups. The two groups you want to post messages (adverts) on are – Freecycle and Cheapcycle. The first, Freecycle has allsorts of household and other items available for people to collect from them, for free. Some of these items are large, too large for loading into a car. These people will be reluctant to pay removal firm fees. They want cheap transportation, as soon as possible. It is the same with Cheapcycle, although these items cost their customers, they still want one off transportation for hire.

Classified ads online such as Loot, Intergiant, FreeUKClassified, Vivastreet, Classifieds, FreeAds, and Onlinexchange are all places you could advertise. There is also a website called Craigslist, which is very widespread in America and has the same rising success over here. However, recently Craigslist has attracted ‘time wasters and others who want to spend their time ‘messing people about’. So by all means visit the website and judge for yourself. If you decide to place an advert. Make sure the person hiring your trailer is ‘bona fide’ (in good faith).

While thinking about online advertising and marketing you might consider having your own website. Your own trailer hire website maybe worthwhile. Setting up a website requires the following- a Domain name, Hosting, a platform such as WordPress (free), a PayPal account and a Google AdSense account. This would be the minimum necessary to have an online business.

Guerilla Marketing Tactics For Small Business – Marketing Ideas That Stick

Guerilla marketing means maximum impact for minimum expense, often on a Do-It-Yourself basis. And while this sort of thing has always been a priority for small business marketing, in today’s tough economy, innovative, low-cost guerrilla marketing strategies have the potential to be more important than ever.

This article focuses on custom stickers-one of the cheapest, most versatile marketing materials in existence, and one often overlooked by traditional marketing campaigns.

Let’s start with the basics:

1) Understand Your Customers

First of all, this may seem like commonsense in any marketing strategy, but commonsense is often not so common. If it were, more small business owners would understand that a simple logo sticker-however great that logo may be-is probably not going to go viral, except among folks who are already ravenously loyal to their cause.

However, a sticker that people actually identify with-because of the humor, the artwork, or some other element-does have the potential to go viral, for one very important reason: it says as much about your customers as it does about your business.

A great example of this is a pizza shop in my area called Bob’s Pizza. Their logo, appropriately enough, is their name, in a curlicue type font next to a drawing of a slice of pizza. The owner of this shop (Bob) could easily have made a custom sticker of this-instead, he chose to do something different.

As the owner of an affordable downtown pizza joint, Bob understands that his target market in this area is composed primarily of families and students. So he not only provides crayons and paper for young artists and late-night doodlers, he posts these masterworks on the walls of his shop. One of these artworks happened to be by a seven-year old boy; it was a happy, blob-like person with a piece of pizza, accompanied by the words, in a childish scrawl, “I like Bob’s Pizza.”

This is the image that Bob chose to turn into an eye-catching, die-cut sticker-an image that seemed to strike a chord with both families and students, who appreciated the style and the humor. I’ve seen this sticker everywhere imaginable. I’ve also noticed a lot of people in Bob’s Pizza.

The moral of the story being: create a sticker that shows you understand your customers, and they will advertise your business far and wide-at virtually no expense to you.

2) Be Useful

Nearly everyone knows the old trick about putting a tip-calculator chart on the back of your business card, to encourage people to keep your cards in their wallets.

Depending on your business, however, there may be a better way to “stick around” in your customers’ lives-and in a way that helps to establish authority in your area of expertise. By printing a custom sticker with useful information related to your business, designed for semi-permanent mounting in important, everyday places, you can keep your name and number in front of your former and potential clients for an almost indefinite period of time.

Fix computers for a living? Design a sticker with quick-reference trouble-shooting for common computer problems, designed for mounting on a computer monitor or laptop. Yoga studio? Create a daily ‘mindfulness meditation’ designed to mount on the dashboard of a car. Heating and cooling business? Print a sticker designed for thermostats, featuring energy-saving tips.

The trick here is to be innovative, useful, and to stick around long enough so that when people need your services, you’ll be the one they call.

3) Be Outrageous

If you truly want to create some buzz in your area, you can put the “gorilla” in guerrilla marketing with some over-the-top, in-your-face marketing-that-does-not-resemble-marketing.

Case in point-a website called SprayGraphic. This online artists’ community wanted to create some buzz in different places across the US. First, they recruited creative artists to feature their graphic design work on their website. Next, they sent out eye-catching posters and custom stickers to these artists, in order to help them promote their work.

The result? Intriguing posters began to appear in coffeeshops and on community boards all over the country, accompanied by their characteristic, funny moustache, nose and eye-glasses logo, explaining who they were, what they did, and why people should join. Then a series of die-cut stickers featuring their logo started showing up everywhere, accompanied by their URL. You can rest assured this simple, affordable guerrilla marketing tactic created a huge amount of traffic for this site, almost overnight.

The trick with using custom stickers this way is not to give too much away-and to use them to create a kind of mystery, which your customers will then be compelled to solve.

5 Ideas to Use Social Media Marketing for Small Business

According to the statistics published by Nielson, a leading company facilitating global view of market trends in specific industries, social networking and blogging are the 4th popular online activity. In fact, the Nielson reports claim that these are better liked than emailing. In the present competitive world, online presence is a must for any business. Social media marketing for small business is a new revolutionary concept that takes advantage of online advertising campaigns to promote a brand name. All you need to succeed in this campaign is the knowledge about the right kind of marketing strategies and tactics.

How to Leverage Social Media Marketing for Small Business Promotion

An entrepreneur can get a large number of visitors by leveraging social media marketing for small business. In order to convert these visitors into sales, you can do the following:

Create videos: People often search YouTube for quick information on products. Create interesting video clips demonstrating your products, their usage and customer testimonials. Post these videos on YouTube with a link to your original website. If people find your videos interesting, they are sure to follow the link. These people might end up getting converted to your customers.

Use Facebook profile: Whenever you launch a new product or undertake a specific business activity, make a relevant wall post on your Facebook profile. For instance, you own a business of energy boost drinks and you have recently launched a new product in the same category for people aged above 50. Catch the attention of your target audience with a crisp wall post, such as, ‘Feel like 30 with our new Re-vital 50+ health drink!’ Do not forget to add your website link for driving interested audience to the product page.

Use Twitter: Tweet links of your product videos, articles, blogs and press releases on Twitter. A large follower base on Twitter is likely to click the links and visit your website. If a customer posts feedback regarding a product, make sure you retweet. This will engage more followers into your business.

Get involved in online discussions: Online forums are a great place to spread your brand name. Get involved in online discussions and tell people about your products. This is also a platform where you can get to hear about your customers’ likings, grievances, appreciations and rejections. Whether positive or negative, you should handle every customer reaction wisely as it may affect the mindset of other people on the forum.

Post search engine optimized content: Driving traffic to your website is all about employing the right keywords. So, never undermine the importance of SEO techniques and employ highly searched keywords. However, never misuse the power of optimization while doing this

New Ideas For Small Business Holiday Marketing

2 seconds after Halloween it seems that all the retail stores put up their Christmas decorations – trying to capture as much of the Holiday market as possible. Typical ways that retail stores use to capitalize on the holidays include extended hours and sales. This is all well and good. Today I want to give you an early present by giving you some novel ways to think about holiday promotions.

Many people are fed up with holiday crowds, which is reflected in the growth of online sales and the decline of some traditional retailer’s sales. There also seems to be a trend towards buying fewer gifts, but those gifts tend to be higher-ticket luxury items.

In the type of marketing we all should be doing ,we start with the customer in mind. What do we know about people this time of year?

– Time is a commodity – there’s too much to do and too little time. – People have more shopping to do than they usually do. – People are under a tremendous amount of stress. – People tend to clean and decorate their houses.

These are just some of the factors affecting people during the holiday season. I’m sure you can think of many more. Take these things into consideration, and take the stance of being a giver.

Here’s an idea I’ve never seen (so I want credit if you use it). If you own a store, offer free gift wrap – nothing new there. While people are getting their gifts wrapped, they get a free chair massage? You could partner up with a local spa, or even a massage school who could also give every customer a promotional coupon. You save your customers time, take away their stress, and create a fusion marketing partnership with the spa.

If you are in a household service business, offer to do additional winterizing services for your customers to save them time. Offer a free holiday housecleaning. If you aren’t in the cleaning business – again team up with a cleaning service.

Give-aways are great. Give away free Christmas trees – depending on where you are you could buy a couple hundred for $10 a piece. The deal could be – spend $100 and take home a free tree. Give away turkeys, or complete turkey dinners – a lot of grocery stores have this promotion.

Everybody gives away calendars, aim for something different but still useful. How about ice-scrapers if you live in the north? Blankets, sweatshirts, caps – are all good promotional items when the weather turns cold.

Holiday cards are great. People enjoy getting them and displaying them. Hardly anybody sends Thanksgiving cards, definitely consider it. In this politically correct age (gasp) you have to be sensitive to people’s religious sensibilities. Send Happy Holidays cards and not Merry Christmas Cards – unless you are absolutely sure your customer celebrates Christmas.

If you have any kind of retail business, think about add-on gifts that might be used as a second gift. A florist might include a free gift-wrapped ornament with a certain level of purchase that can be sent to a different address. Two gifts for the price of one. Buy one get one free offers are great at holiday times.

Use your creativity this holiday season and think about how you can solve your customers’ problems.

Email Marketing For Small Business

Email marketing for small business is seriously by far, the most powerful and least costly method around. It is very easy to build a list of customers and potential customers, particularly from your website.

By building a relationship with your customers, they will get to trust and know you and more likely to buy from you again and again and email is a great way to do it.

At its most basic and at no cost, start with an excel spreadsheet, but I highly recommend you use an email database management system like Aweber. I personally use this in my business and it is very cost effective and relatively easy. It also comes with the ability to send newsletters.

The topic of email marketing, creating lists and communicating with your lists is huge, but here are a few tips to get you started:

Use your list right away

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to focus on building the list and neglecting communicating with the list. Make sure you begin building that relationship with your subscriber right away. Send them a welcome message. Send them value in the form of links, downloads and information. You may want to have an email template that brands your business, but if not, text is OK. In fact, text gets through most spam filters.

Create a communication plan

Make sure you’re communicating with your subscribers on a regular basis. An autoresponder is a wonderful tool because it enables you to create and schedule your messages in advance. You can basically set up all of your email messages on auto pilot – do it once and when someone is added to your list, they all receive the same messages in the same sequence at intervals you set. Aweber also does this.

Each new subscriber can receive the same messages in the same order, regardless of when they signed up. This gives you control over the relationship-building process and it is completely automated. You only need to set it up once. Also remember to offer valuable content, not just promotional messages.

An autoresponder automates the process, including the subscribe and unsubscribe management. You don’t need to hire anyone to manage the task for you. Your time is free to build your business in other ways.

Partner with others to grow your list

Once you have your list building and management process smoothed out, consider partnerships. You can really boost your subscribers by partnering with other relevant business owners. For example, the website owner who markets to pet owners might partner with a website that sells pet toys. They can help market your opt-in list by including a link to your form in their newsletter and vice versa. You can support each other to succeed. I do this successfully on my travel blog.

Your list can mean the difference between thousands of prospects. It really can launch your business. If you don’t have list, start creating a plan to build one. You’ll be glad you did.

Cost-Effective Marketing Strategies of Small Business Marketing Experts

Whether your business is old or new, you marketing should be dynamic and timely. Often times marketing in small business involves sending several outgoing calls and walk-in customer service satisfaction. But are these small business marketing ideas still operational today? Or is Internet marketing becoming the next norm for small or big business.

Adding to the dilemma is that, these days, the business magazines, newspapers, Internet and even your email Inbox are filled with small business marketing ideas from just anybody. Inexperienced businessmen or women can easily feel lost in these barrages of small business marketing views, advices, strategies, etc. So let me give you more centered strategies that harness one effective small business marketing strategy: Internet marketing.

Six Top Ideas for Internet Marketing

1. Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

For a tech-savvy business man or woman, Pay Per Click marketing proves to be a strong business marketing method. But, entrepreneurs using Pay Per Click should know what they’re doing or their cost per conversion could rapidly break unknowingly. The key to a productive Pay Per Click marketing drive is continuous oversight.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Unlike Pay Per Click advertising, Search Engine Optimization pays off slowly but a lasting prospect is feasible. On average, 75% of a business website’s traffic come from organic search engine queries. Remember that search engines wouldn’t mind your advertising budget. What they look into is the SEO strategies you employed on your site What are important are the SEO strategies that you have on your site.

3. Public Relations (PR)

Public relations are perhaps the parent of all small business marketing ideas since advertising campaigns was started. Nailing your offline and your online PR campaign is a very good way to build-up awareness, authority, trust, and loyalty to your business. Online public relation through PR Wire is very cost-effective small business marketing strategy, for example.

4. Twitter and Facebook Places

Adding to the micro blogging and the syndication power of Twitter and Facebook are their new free service to all business marketers: the Twitter and Facebook Places. This application allows you to integrate your Tweets and Facebook updates to display a map where your business is located.

5. Online Business Directories

Today, clients are prepared to junk yellow pages in favor of the more interactive online business directories to find local businesses. If you’re not included on several online business directories, then it means you’re losing on a lot of small business marketing ideas. You’re missing on citation burst that could have tremendous positive impact on search engines.

6. Online Word of Mouth

And the last small business marketing strategy that’s paying huge dividend is online word of mouth. This includes glowing customer reviews on online directories, blogs, and social media sites. Seventy percent of future clients trust online reviews, so it’s time to start looking into ReviewBiz, for example, and start strategizing.

I know that was a lot of online small business marketing ideas to study let alone implement. In fact, imposing and managing all these online marketing ideas can even be time consuming. Don’t worry though because there are solutions you can find on the Internet that should help you implement the marketing strategies above.

In closing, small business marketing ideas such as online directories, etc. are a potent means to reach more local clients. These tried & trusted methods are permanent, and your business will fall if you don’t have these strategies in place.

Legitimate Home Business Marketing – Increase Website Traffic with Forum Marketing

SO, you created your website for whatever purpose, to sell a product or service, to show off your photographic genius… whatever its YOUR pride and joy!! But you have no visitors to see your wonders in design or your legitimate home business opportunities?

The VERY FIRST STEP in driving traffic to your website is through what is commonly referred to as Online Forum Marketing. Online Forums are very interactive web pages that allow you as a registered user to read, interact and participate in discussions about a certain topic of interest. You would do everything you can to participate in as many discussions as you can about your favorite topic, wouldn’t you?

The reason is because with these ‘discussion groups’, you realize that this is your opportunity to learn as much as you can from these people in the shortest amount of time! and more importantly, you can establish your credibility as an authority on your chosen topic!

Forum Etiquette – Every forum has its own set of rules. It is your duty as a member to find out what is acceptable and what is not. This can include how to set up your signature. Do they allow links? If so how many? How long can your signature be? Some forums do not allow you to post links that are of certain type of nature. This can include links to adult sites, gambling sites or even affiliate links. What is the general subject matter of the forum? If using a Homeworker Ideas forum for instance, don’t post things that are off topic unless they have a specific thread for that. There are forums that do not allow discussions of a political nature or discussion of religious topics. Even others discourage talking about specific products and companies.

The bottom line is that each forum is different and if you are to be an outstanding member, you have to play by the rules. If you don’t, you might get slapped and even publicly humiliated. That doesn’t amount to good marketing.

In conclusion, the best way to market yourself in a forum is to not really market yourself at all but rather to be a consistent member that contributes quality and substance to the community. When your motive is to help others, contribute good content and become an integral part of a community, you end up marketing yourself without even trying.

When you start participating in various forums, you will notice the various Signature Boxes on the bottom of the majority of the comments posted by forum members. You will also notice that after you read a member posting that intrigues you, you will find yourself clicking on the link of that particular member’s signature.

Just like that, you just created a click through to that particular member’s website!

When you simply register for your first online forum, the VERY FIRST THING you should do is create your ‘Signature’. As mentioned in the section above, a Signature is basically what is used at the end of email messages to give your recipient that ‘feeling of credibility’ about you. However the SAME THING could be accomplished by adding that signature at the end of EVERY SINGLE ONE of your forum posts.

This is one of MANY times you are going to hear me teach you about the importance of your CREDIBILITY when marketing your product or service online.

Your first major accomplishment as an Internet Marketer is to first ESTABLISH your credibility. As you are well aware, the Internet is enormous – and being able to establish even a small amount of credibility is a major achievement, and COMPLETELY doable! Do everything you can to use Online Forums as your first step in establishing your online credibility! Why not, it’s free! Warning!

Forums are VERY interactive in nature, with back-and-forth replying from just ONE particular post lasting for weeks and months at a time! You should post as frequently as possible: 2-3 times a week in as many as 5 different forums.

Try not to spend a tremendous amount of time on the forums. Just simply log in, locate your prior posts to check out any possible responses, respond if necessary, then go ahead submit your NEW POST, maybe read a few other members’ posts, then LOG OUT!

Forums could be VERY ADDICTIVE if you let them effect you in that way. Millions of other forum members around the world find themselves investing TOO MUCH TIME in forums. So don’t forget the reason why you are a forum member – that is to learn as much as you can, and DRIVE TARGETED TRAFFIC to YOUR WEBSITE! Another reason why you want to be careful in forums is because, depending on the forum, it may be a case of the blind leading the blind. You will notice that the MOST SUCCESSFUL internet marketers may not even exist in the forums anymore because of this.

Just to remind you, When you are just starting your internet marketing career, establishing your positive professional credibility is your first and main concern. Forums are one of the most PERFECT places to accomplish this goal. However, as your credibility starts to rise and you start to brand yourself, you may make the decision whether or not you still want to invest your valuable time in the forums. This is completely up to you and your business.

Your Action Step for driving massive amounts of targeted traffic to your website using Forum Marketing TODAY! Simply sign up and register for as many RELEVANT forums as you can, insert your Signature Box, and publish your first posts! Don’t hesitate to involve yourself with 3-5 separate forums – of course the more the merrier! The first step is to modify your profile to include your Signature Box. When you create your first post, make sure you can ‘preview’ your post to make sure your Signature Box appears. Don’t forget to make sure your website link is WORKING, then post away my friend!

Making Money Online With CPA Affiliate Marketing

It’s a fact. Many thousands of people worldwide are being laid off by their employer owing to today’s global economic crisis. From big car manufacturers to small business, everyone is feeling the pinch. However there is one industry that’s still booming and offers regular people, with no qualification necessary, the chance to make money working from their own house.

Some people, the hard working ones, are earning the same income that they did working the 9-5 work day. These people are leaving their jobs behind in droves and working from the comfort of their own home, on a full time basis.

So what’s this industry called? Can it really be so? The industry is affiliate marketing, and yes, it can really be so.

Affiliate marketing is very simple. It rewards a marketer, commonly known as an affiliate, for promoting various products on the internet. Affiliates are paid a commission by the company whose product they are promoting, every time they refer customers to the company’s website and a sale is made, or a ‘lead’ is generated.

Becoming an affiliate is now one of the most profitable ways to make money on the internet. The sheer scope and amount of products that can be promoted is staggering. Marketing using affiliates is an extremely cost effective way for big and small business alike to expose their products to a massive audience of potential buyers.

The industry has the potential to provide a limitless source of income for affiliates who aggressively promote products and offers of such businesses. Such affiliates have been reaping the rewards of larger profits as the industry grows and becomes ever popular. As an affiliate you can expect to earn from 30% right up to 90% of the price per sale from customers whom you refer. Some programs even offer recurring monthly payouts for their products!

Cost Per Action, or CPA marketing as it’s commonly known, is a marketing system whereby affiliates earn money for simply referring visitors to a web page to fill out a short form or enter their zip code, without the necessity to make a purchase. This is fast becoming the hottest trend in affiliate marketing and sees some affiliates make $1000 plus in a single day. This new way of marketing promises to be exciting and highly profitable for years to come.

As mentioned earlier, there are no specific criteria or qualification for becoming an affiliate. You need to submit your resume. You do need to be committed and put in a good effort, and will at the same time develop skills in internet marketing, research and promoting offers.

The Small Business Success Secret to Marketing With Ease and to Increase Your Sales

So many entrepreneurs struggle to create a successful home-based business – going through times of plenty, and times of drought. Only about 18% of entrepreneurs are extremely successful. Want to know a small business success secret? Successful entrepreneurs make the best use of resources to accomplish more with less effort – they use the principle of leverage.

Small business resources that entrepreneurs can leverage include knowledge, expertise, time, human resources, systems and technology. The result of leverage is a turn-key business that can “run itself”, generate more profits with less stress, and allow for the freedom to enjoy prosperity.

A great way to leverage technology is to automate and simplify your sales and marketing with an online professional shopping cart. This small business success secret allows you to put your small home-based business on autopilot, exposing hidden profit sources. Using an online shopping cart is the fastest and most flexible way to do business online, without expensive and complicated software.

The shopping cart small business success secret will grow your online business by leaps and bounds when you:

o Use custom forms and opt-in boxes to collect names and email addresses of website visitors

o Keep in touch with your customers 24/7

o Maintain accurate contact information of your clients and prospects

o Automate product sales and purchases

o Send personal automatic email responses (auto responders) to inquiries, registrations, purchases, and to follow up with prospects

o Deliver scheduled, informative emails, newsletters and promotional messages to your mailing list

o Set up multiple affiliate programs for others to market your business

o Track the success of your ads and emails

o Test and track your website links

o Use questionnaires to discover customer needs

Statistics show that you need to contact a prospective customer 7-9 times, before they remember your business. Many entrepreneurs stop at only 2-3 follow-ups and are losing 70-80% of their sales! The online shopping cart will help you follow-up easily and effortlessly with autoresponders.

It is easy to believe that doing already contracted work is more important than marketing, but you must have marketing systems in place to generate sales consistently. You want a successful home-based business, not the feast-or-famine roller coaster that many home-based business entrepreneurs experience. Even if you are doing well now, keep looking toward the future and how to further take advantage of this small business success secret.

Several online shopping cart companies offer similar services, but at the very minimum, you want to ensure the program you choose:

o Offers support services

o Offers free tools

o Is easy and accessible

o Is simple to setup, even for a novice

o Offers multiple packages

o Offers a NO RISK trial period

Here’s how to get started with an online shopping cart:

1) Identify your marketing and sales goals.

2) Determine what products and services to sell on the internet.

3) Sign up for an online shopping cart and discover how you can easily use its internet marketing tools to achieve your goals.

4) Get the help of an e-Commerce Virtual Assistant or Shopping Cart Strategist who has the technical cart skills and strategic expertise to effectively market your business online

The online shopping cart technology and its small business resources are essential to any successful home-based business. Implement this small business success secret to develop a consistently thriving business that is easy to manage, achieve your marketing goals with ease and skyrocket your sales.