A consumer survey reports that 56% of people said that they plan to start their shopping using the internet, and more than 60% said that they plan to start their Christmas shopping before the end of October!

So you need to be getting your business ready now for the Christmas season if you haven’t already done so, you don’t want to miss out on those sales.

If you have a website that you can edit easily yourself, you can make these changes immediately, and start your Christmas marketing campaign quickly. Then, if you have a mailing list, as soon as your site is ‘set up’ for the festive season you need to use your list to let your customers know.

Keeping in touch with your customers is the key to increasing your sales and this is, of course, especially true in the holiday season.
 
When so many smaller retailers are competing for consumer attention you need to reach out to your customers before somebody else beats you to it.

Many of your competitors are already sending their Christmas marketing emails out as you read this. As more than 60% of shoppers are buying early this year, you need to capture their attention by sending your marketing message out before the holiday rush starts.

Why not include an incentive? A special offer is always a good marketing tool, you could offer free postage, or buy 3 get one free, or send them a coupon code for your shopping cart that will give them a discount of some kind.

Did you know that more than 79% of consumers say that free postage is an important factor in deciding where to buy?

If you offer a discount or special offer, make it time sensitive, that is give the recipient a set time in which to use it. The fact is that if people do not respond soon after receiving your offer, then they probably won’t respond at all, so give them a good reason to buy now by limiting the time in which the discount or special offers is available.

If you are looking for new customers this Christmas why not invest in a short Google Adword campaign specifically targeted for the season, its only a couple of months away and it could prove to be one of your best investments.

And finally, why don’t you send a Christmas greetings email to your clients, thank them for their business and let your customers know that they are important to you.

So don’t let the grass grow under your feet, set up your site now ready for the Christmas shopping season, and reach out to your customers before someone else does!

An Affiliate is an individual who markets other people’s products on the internet for a commission on the individual sale. Thousands of people do this because they can start making money almost immediately without the expense and time needed to produce a product themselves. Having a website is not necessary and there is no interaction with your potential customers beyond getting them to the sales page.

Getting involved in affiliate marketing is a great opportunity to make a lot of money on the Internet, but one should not go into it blindly. As an affiliate you must invest some time in research, this is absolutely necessary. Know what products you want to promote, how much you will make on each sale and the return rate of the product. If possible it’s a good idea to buy or request a sample so you know the product inside and out.

As a first time affiliate it’s a good idea to start with reasonably priced products making at least 50% commission. The most critical part of affiliate marketing is of course marketing. The issue of traffic is one of the most central and fundamental issues in making any money online. You can separate your marketing campaign into two distinct groups, paid and non-paid. Free marketing can be quite effective if you know how it’s done. Here is a list of the most popular methods for getting traffic for free.

Article marketing ? A great way to increase your ranking with search engines and direct targeted traffic to your sites. You should write about what you know. If you do not have more information on your topic than does the average reader you should probably choose another topic. Write your article in a conversational tone so that it’s easy to read. Don’t make your article too long, remember it’s an article your writing not a book. A length of 450-750 words should be ideal. Your article should be informative and about your website topic. If its just useless information your readers will expect the same from your website.

Blogging ? Writing a blog is also a good way to drive traffic to your site and increase your search engine rankings. Blogs were originally used as online diaries but have recently taken on a business dimension. Your blog should be focused on your particular niche. You should have several blogs with different providers and include your links in your blogs and profile. This is a good technique for increasing traffic and search engine rankings.

Forums ? Participating in forum discussions is another great way to meet people and get your URL out there on every post you make. You should join forums related to the niche you are targeting or the product you are selling. When you sign up for a forum you have the option of adding a signature. This signature will show up at the bottom of every post you make in the forum and should be used to promote your website links and products. Whenever you make posts you will then be creating links back to your site, while attracting the attention of the forum readers.

Social Bookmarking ? This is a valuable and reliable way to get traffic and backlinks to your site. There are many social bookmarking sites such as Furl and del.icio.us. These sites allow you to share your bookmarks along with a description with the public hence the term social bookmarking. The main purpose is to put your links in front of people who would hopefully also bookmark your site giving you more backlinks.

Facebook ? Facebook is one of the largest online communities with over 100 million members. It is a great place for networking with other people who hold the same interests and marketing. Another great benefit of Facebook is that it has dozens of different forums and groups related to specific niches. Be sparing with your use of music bites, videos and other media clips, you should create an attractive profile that is easy to load. Forget the animation and other bells and whistles, make it easy to navigate your profile and organize your information logically. You should also use a recent photo as you are now.

The ‘Marketing Strategy’ is the way we have come up with for achieving our marketing goals and it should include two mandatory elements:

– Which target consumers whom we can reach, hold a viable potential to buy whatever we intend to sell?

– What is the offer (the entire marketing mix) we will be presenting to these consumers in order to appeal to them and thus realize the said potential, given their alternatives?

You must not think of these as two separate questions but rather as two parts of the same idea. Let me clarify. What are “target consumers with a potential to buy”? These are consumers (a sizeable enough group with buying power) likely to desire what you are offering. Why would they want it? That is the potential that you are supposed to identify. There may be several reasons. For example, maybe they are not consumers of your kind of product yet, however, they might be if something happens, or if they are exposed to a certain message. It could be that they have special needs or preferences, which up until today were not catered to by any of your competitors’ offers (and don’t forget that psychological, social, aesthetic needs are real needs). Maybe they are bored with what they routinely buy. When you identify such a situation, you know that the potential is there.

Identifying potential is only the initial stage of your mission, of course. Your strategy would also have to include something that you are going to offer these consumers that might improve their situation in a certain way, solve a problem, give them more than what they already get for the same price, or open new opportunities for them. In short, something that will motivate them to buy from you and thus materialize the potential.

The ‘Marketing Scenario’ is a synopsis of the logic of your marketing strategy. In the same breath, it also enables you to make sure that that logic really works. The ‘Marketing Scenario’ translates the ‘Marketing Strategy’ to simple everyday language. How will it happen in reality? How will the materialization of marketing goals occur? I don’t know whether or not you have already sunk in this fact, but marketing goals are achieved through customer acts. So, let’s assume that we install a webcam with enhanced psychological insight capabilities inside the market and that it captures the materialization of our marketing plan, one purchase after another.

What is the ‘Marketing Scenario’?

The ‘Marketing Scenario’ is an amazingly simple tool to use: Only four questions. Are you jotting this down?

1. Who are the people who we believe have the potential of buying what we intend to sell? Yes, these are the same people we so often refer to as the ‘Target Consumers’. First, we must define our targets. What do these people have in common that makes them probable prospects (in the sense that they are likely to be particularly interested in our offer)? We could use demographic, socioeconomic, psychographic, as well as lifestyle descriptions. Note that at times, we target not a specific group but a wide almost indefinable group of people in a specific mood, a specific situation, or a specific need or state. Make room for another possibility. You can target not a defined group of consumers but rather a state of need/desire or a consumption context shared by many diverse consumers at one time or another.

2. What precisely should they be doing (that they are not doing already and will probably not do if we will not intervene), that would direct them to eventually choose our brand specifically? It is, by the way, the first and only objective of branding. What do they have to do so that your marketing plan will materialize (even before the actual purchase)? Do they have to go somewhere? To call? To agree to meet your salesperson? To stop and pick out your product from the shelf? Which activity, which does not occur today, would lead them in the correct path on the way to buying?

3. What is the sound reason that should motivate them to change their behavioral inertia? How will they benefit from that change? Why would you, in their place, buy what you are offering? You can think of it as your differentiating factor (what makes you differentially better?), or as your competitive advantage (what makes you comparatively better?), according to your preference. What could make their situation better compared to their current standing and to the other options available to them in the market?

4. How exactly will they extract the benefit (that which answers question 3) according to your marketing plan? That is not a repeat question. Notice that the third question dealt with the ‘why’ of the target consumer’s planned motivation, and now, we are trying to understand the ‘how’ of your marketing plan. How are you planning to provide the benefit defined in the answer to question 3? If, for instance, you said before that you are making something more accessible, easy or comfortable for them, now explain how it will become more accessible, easy or comfortable, due to you product.

Let us look at an example: The introduction of Palm Pilot to the market. O.K.? Just the main points:

1. “Residents” of the business community, gadgets fans, who manage a dynamic, constantly changing schedule, and have not yet embraced the electronic organizers, or were disappointed by them because of their being laborious to update and generally unreliable.

2. … will step into the nearest office equipment store and ask about the Palm Pilot.

3. … because at last there is an organizer which is not only sophisticated, small and wonderfully shaped, but is also easily kept up to date and  preserves the stored data when damaged or when upgrading to a new model

4. … because the Palm Pilot can ‘converse’ with the PC, making the updating process a simple task to perform, as well as enabling creation of backups which could be easily transferred on to the next generations of organizers.

That is what the ‘Marketing Scenario’ is all about. All you have to do is answer the questions. Be precise. Be thorough. Be honest. Do it in writing. Even if you’re absolutely sure that the answers are positively clear to you and there’s nothing to be gained. Only when your ‘Marketing Scenario’ is totally translated to a written text, should you go on and proceed with the brand development process. Otherwise, you will get trapped along the way, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

There are a number of questionable traffic generation methods you should avoid if possible. While they may work some time if you get extremely lucky, 99.99% of the time, they will produce no results at all.

The two most common questionable traffic generation methods people fail with are buying “targeted traffic” and using classified ads.

Let’s start with targeted traffic campaigns. For marketing reasons, the people who sell these traffic campaigns call it “targeted traffic,” when, in reality, it is the absolute lowest, scummiest form of traffic. This traffic is usually generated through spam, untargeted pop-ups, and domain squatting. The entire business is a racquet – and they’re delivering all of their angry customers directly to your site.

Not only is this simply not going to generate revenue, but it also has the potential to get you reported to your host, as many of these visitors wont be happy that they ended up at your site.

Avoid these bogus traffic generation campaigns at all costs. Almost all people waste money on them sooner or later. Don’t be one of the herd; avoid the mistake.

Using classified advertisements is usually disasterous, too. To begin with, most people simply cannot create a classified ad that will generate traffic even if it does receive hundreds of views. But what makes classified ads worse is that they’re tiny boxes on a page of scores of advertisements.

The chances of someone actually finding your ad in a classified section are pretty slim, even with a high circulation paper.

Things are even worse at online classified sites. Many of these sites exist only to host classifed ads to generate revenue. In reality, people are only going there to post ads – not to look at them.

So avoid these two types of advertising. They’re a waste of your time; and you’ll only be disappointed and short on cash after you’re done experimenting.

Rather than giving you a single way to drive traffic to your websites, I’m going to give you a rundown of several of the easiest and most important tips for generating traffic – and allow you to try them all out yourself to determine what will work best with your given setup.

Traffic Generation Tip #1: Pick The Low Hanging Fruit Using SEO

Building natural search engine traffic for “low hanging fruit” is akin to building an asset. You are simply creating pages that have little competition, which upon being indexed, will immediately take the first, second, or third slot for their given keyword.

Traffic Generation Tip #2: Use Viral Promotion

At least once every two months, creating some type of viral product to generate more traffic for your site. This can be a piece of software, a PDF, an audio recording, a video, or an ebook. Whatever you select, make sure you make people want to distribute it for free – and make sure it has built in ways to bring people back to your site.

Traffic Generation Tip #3: Consider Legitimate Link Exchanges

Link exchanges only work if you do them with sites that get a lot of traffic and have high PR – and if you exchange them in places where people might actually click. Keep in mind that the traffic leaving your site probably would have left, anyway, but the traffic you gained wouldn’t have arrived any other way.

Traffic Generation Tip #4: Use Joint Ventures and Affiliate Programs

A joint venture partner or super affiliate can generate a veritable avalanche of traffic faster than any pay per click campaign, natural search engine traffic, or link exchange. So spend the time to find the right partners at the right times – and engage them personally.

Traffic Generation Tip #5: Always Recycle Traffic

Recycling traffic ensures that your traffic increases each month, even if  your natural search traffic remains the same – or even decreases slightly. Find ways to recycle your traffic into regular visitors and you will increase your revenue each month.

And there you have it: five simple tips you can use to generate traffic to your site without too much additional work.

Why give mini e-books away for free when you could sell them and make money? Many marketers might say there is no reason to give them away for free. In fact, giving them away for free might devalue them, leading people to overlook them, rather than spending the time to download them.

In stark contrast to this opinion is that of Jimmy D. Brown, who has made a career of doing precisely that. Why give mini e-books away for free? Because Brown and other marketers have repeatedly demonstrated that doing exactly that will yield higher sales and higher exposure than any other method you could possibly use, but in the long run.

Rather than gaining small profits for the short run, you can gain thousands of potential future customers, which answers the question of “why give mini e-books away for free?”

With that being said, it is important to qualify this statement with some “must dos.” While giving away mini e-books for free can create massive viral traffic, it has to be done properly.

The most important part of these free give aways is to find partners who will help you distribute the e-book. The best place to look is actually on your own mailing list – people you already have a personal relationship with. Give your subscribers a really strong incentive to distribute the report (i.e. Allow them to rebrand it or to earn a commission on referrals).

The next “must do” involves implanting some sort of successful lead-capturing method into the mini e-book. For instance, you could place links throughout the mini e-book that refer people back to your opt-in page, where they can become a subscriber. Again, if your goal is long term profit, rather than short term, gaining a subscriber is always better than gaining a potential, one-shot customer.

For more information about giving away free E-Books to make sales. Visit this link: http://www.ezcashformula.com

The Internet has made this world an open enterprise. It has become important for companies to further expand their market and their consumer targets. Engaging in Internet Marketing maybe a risk for some people who wish to be involved with this type of business.

Ensure that most of  your target consumers will surely acquire your product. Consider the best products which will definitely capture their interests and needs. This means that you need to identify specifically who these people are, their location and financial level in the society. Have a marketing knowledge and skill to achieve your goal in the field of Internet marketing.

At the present, you can use a variety of Internet Marketing Solutions that are being offered by companies which can be your tool for support to your consumers. This solution maybe email marketing, search engine optimization or creating web pages or sites. Since you need to maximize your return profit, you need to choose Internet Marketing Solutions that will help you achieve this. These marketing techniques will not cost much since they are very self-explanatory, thus, learned easily.

Email marketing is a common Internet marketing Solution.  This is a cost effective way of communicating and interacting to your consumers, driving them to visit your website and check out your products. It may be in a way of marketing articles, leading them to forums or newsletters. A newsletter has an advantage of expanding your consumers as more and more sign up on it until you can have a bulk list of emails.

Another great Internet marketing solution is through websites. This is a good promotion strategy to employ since you can display all the necessary information for your target consumers. The website should capture their interest and be complete since every transaction, from inquiry to payments may take place. All correspondence that will be done online must be well-facilitated by the features of your website.

Another Internet marketing solution is search engine optimization. This is a type of service for your website that you can make use of in order to raise the number of visitors to your site. Once a consumer uses a search engine, your website will rank high in the list of searches which in return will increase your site’s traffic.

Considering these Internet Marketing Solution, there are different companies offering software products containing one or all of these solutions. It would be a great opportunity to try one of these which will match your financial capability and expected return profit.

If you’ve spent any time at all reading Internet marketing or Internet-based business forums, you’ve heard time and time again how traffic can impact your website profits.

But can it really increase your profits? As I mentioned previously, it CAN, but in order to do so, it has to be targeted. For this reason, you should avoid any traffic-generation scheme that looks too good to be true.

So how can traffic impact your website profits? Let’s count the different ways:

1. It can explode your sales. Let’s say you regularly have 20 unique visitors daily and most of them are untargeted. You might be able to go weeks without a single sale. Now, let’s consider a situation in which you setup a joint venture and your partner sends a mailing to his or her list that generates 15,000 targeted visits over night. You could go from making less than one sale per day to over 1000 sales in a single night.

2. Traffic can impact your website profits by helping you build your list at warp speed, too. Again, consider how long it would take to build lists with the two models described above.

3. Last, traffic can absolutely expose your personal (or your brand) popularity. This can have an exponentially powerful effect on each of your successive product releases.

How else can traffic impact your website profits? If you have no traffic, you will also have no profits. It’s simple.

If your site receives little to no traffic, you will have fewer chances to gain opt-ins in sales over any given period of time.

Moral of the story: traffic is important. Targeted traffic is even more important. If you don’t have both coming to your website in a fairly constant stream, your website is in the process of slowly dying, not growing.

E-commerce is such a massive industry these days, and so many different opportunities exist for the online business, that sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. What I mean is that it can be difficult for someone new to this world of virtual businesses to determine what works and what doesn’t. There is so much reading and research that goes into the development of a sound online business strategy that some people may give up before they get going. But there is one way to make money with your online business that doesn’t take much thought to see why it works. It’s the affiliate program, and I’m going to tell you why it is such a great idea.

This part is for the online merchant selling products or services. Whether you’ve been in business online for awhile, or if you’re just getting started, you will need to generate traffic for your site to build sales. Affiliate programs group together literally thousands of merchants and non-merchants alike, all looking for the same thing: traffic. The way it works for you as the merchant is this: you join an affiliate program, others join and advertise your site in some way on their site. You get highly-interested leads from them, and you pay them for it. The great thing about the programs is that they are pay-for-performance. You don’t pay unless a lead or a sale is generated from that affiliate. Remember that the non-merchant wants to make as many referrals as possible, so they will literally be working for both their, and your, benefit.

For the non-merchant business there are distinct advantages to joining an affiliate. First, you will be providing your visitors with links to the merchant, so you make money by getting more people to come to your site, and then getting them to go to the merchant. You get paid for the number of leads or sales generated by your efforts. Another thing to remember is that you have the opportunity to increase this traffic by getting others to advertise your site. True, you will have to pay for the leads generated, but the benefits of that added traffic to your site far outweigh the costs.

As a final note to all online businesses, affiliate programs are relatively easy and cheap to manage. They are in the business of generating business for all of their clients. Therefore, it is usually far less costly, and much less work for you to join an affiliate program than it would be for you to try to manage your own list of affiliates. And with the massive number of members these affiliate programs have, you are in a position to tap a far wider range of the market than you could hope for if you do the whole thing on your own.

When it comes to marketing your products, you’re going to need an effective strategy to advertise what you have for sale. Joining an affiliate program is definitely one of the best ways to accomplish this. However, you may already be in business and, for one reason or another, you’ve decided that you would rather do the affiliating on your own. Or, if you’re just getting started, you may have the independent spirit that tells you to do it for yourself or not to do it at all. In either case, you can start your own affiliate program to market your products on the internet. Let’s look at how it can be done.

The first thing you will need to do is decide what websites out there will offer the type of traffic that would want to buy what you’re selling. If your in business selling power tools, you wouldn’t want to contact a website that discusses pets. This just wouldn’t be a good choice as an affiliate marketer. You would be far better off choosing websites whose subject matter is comparable to your merchandise. A website discussing mechanics, or construction, would be a far better lead for you to follow. It’s all about matching like for like and creating a list of potential affiliate marketers.

Once you have your list, you will need to develop a solid sales letter to send the webmaster of each site. When you do this, be sure to include all of the selling points for your proposal, and information on what commission you are offering for sales generated by them. Proofread the letter carefully, as this is your one chance for a good impression. Send the letters out.

Once you’ve signed on some affiliate marketers, you’ll need affiliate software to keep track of the sales generated, and how much commission you need to pay. Then you will be responsible for cutting the commission checks and sending them out. An alternative to managing all of this yourself is to enlist the services of a third-party affiliate tracker. This company will manage the tracking of sales and the distribution of commissions for you. Either option will work.

No matter which way you choose, running your own affiliate marketing operation to sell your products will give you the control over where and how the advertisements are placed, and over who will be directing traffic to your site. Be aware, though, that this is more work than having an affiliate program run it for you. But if you know what you want, this is how it’s done.