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HOW TO EVALUATE ONLINE BUSINESS TOOLS FOR MARKETERS

There are myriads of online tools out there for marketers, but that doesn't mean that they are all worth using. In order to figure out what tools would be the best to include in a short report, it's important to understand what kinds of tools marketers want, what features work best online and why, how expensive a tool is, and how well it works to accomplish a marketing goal. Going by these conditions, we've included some online marketing tools that we think every online marketer to should include in their toolbox, and we've offered you an evaluation of that tool to convince you to add it. But, first let's discuss the criteria more indepth, to give you an idea of what we think makes a useful and worthwhile marketing tool.

WHAT KIND OF TOOLS INTERNET MARKETERS WANT

If you are an Internet marketer, you know that what you are looking for is something to reduce your workload to help you create the following to your website and Internet offerings:

• Traffic The number one thing any Internet marketer wants to achieve online is a good traffic count. Without traffic, there are no customers. Without customers, there are no sales. So, traffic has to be generated and any tool that helps a marketer automate that process is helpful. However, some go way beyond the “helpful” criteria to be actually POWERFUL traffic drivers. Those are the ones that you want to make sure to include in your tool kit. Some of these help you target demographics like a laser, others just get distributed in a fashion that drives traffic back to your site, regardless of demographic.

• Income Another thing that marketers want are tools that help them generate income, manage income streams, or reduce expenses. Along with these tools are things that can produce products online that can be sold, shopping cart tools, and any other sort of revenue specific tool.

• Contact Management So, you have the traffic and you got some sources of income out, but you don't know who is visiting your site? That's because you need tools that help you harvest contacts and then market them via email or subscription campaigns. This is the mouth of your sales funnel and without these tools, you can end up doing a lot of marketing and never getting off the starting block to sales.

• Promotion Tools that promote an Internet marketers business are essential to good online marketing. The Internet may be filled with millions of people, but that doesn't mean your online exposure is sufficient to get the word out. Using tools that help you boost your exposure is one way that you can start creating an online image and brand yourself or your business.

Sound good? Obviously, even limiting the toolbox to these criteria there are still plenty of other tools out there that can be fun to use and/or stimulate interest in your business. But, we'll also offer you some locations to check out tools being developed as they come off the assembly line, for those that want to move even further in adopting technologies for their websites.

WHAT FEATURES WORK BEST ONLINE

Since tools will be either online services or scripts, the best tools have the following features:

• Easy To Use No one wants to spend a ton of time trying to get the tool to work.

• Solves A Customer's Problem Any tool that gives better customer service, or provides a value-added feature to your customers is valuable to your business model.

• Consistent Performance Adopting a tool that works great one time and bombs another is a sure way to lose customers. Stick with established tools that have the bugs worked out of them already.

• Simple Registration A good online tool will either have a very curt registration opt-in, like an email, or none at all, if it's free.

• Manages Multiple Users Efficiently The idea is to attract tons of traffic, convert it to contacts, and start

marketing it. If your tool does this, but performance drops off or you cannot keep up with multiple users efficiently, as an online marketer you might as well not use it.

• Great Customer Support Sometimes technical glitches can happen, even with the best of tools. You want to have a phone number, and AIM contact, or an email you can go to and send in a help support ticket to get your problems resolved.

• Creates Excitement/Interest A tool that creates buzz, excitement, fun and gets your users to participate in your website or offering is a great way to get noticed.

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THE GOLD STANDARD: PAY PER CLICK

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has been the standard bearer in online advertising models. It all started with the Google search engine that began using keywords that people searched in their engine to determine where to place ads through a content-generated ad placement system. By combining the power of the Google search engine and tracking keywords, advertisers could set up ad campaigns based on very highly targeted niche topics. This insured that when an ad showed up on a site, it was relevant to the audience, who would be more inclined to click on the ad since it would interest that demographic.

ADSENSE VS. ADWORDS

In Google's program, there are two programs that a person can sign up with to use pay-per-click advertising: AdSense and AdWords. AdSense is the program that publishers of pay-per-click advertising use to generate income by adding Google ads to their online content. AdWords is the program where online merchants can create pay-per-click campaigns using keywords so that publishers can expose them to their markets.

There are ways to make money with either of these models, whether as a publisher or as a merchant. Pay-per-click marketing isn't just limited to people who publish pay-per-click links and get paid per every click generated. There is far more to making money with pay-per-click marketing than that. However, the most popular and well-known way to make money with pay-per-click advertising is as a publisher, for several reasons.

PPC PUBLISHERS

The main reason that people like to implement PPC publishing as a strategy to make money online is because it costs them nothing, except time, to do. If you have a large enough audience or know how to attract traffic to links, you can make a good amount of money by simply posting links that other people will click on, and thus, create income for you. It does take some understanding of keywords, and we will go over that a little later on. Suffice it to say, for now, if you want to start using PPC marketing in your lineup of potential money makers, then PPC is the easiest way to go. Ads are generated automatically on your sites based on the content that you post. You don't have to know much programming, other than cutting and pasting code into Web pages. You don't have to shell out any money to get involved, and entry into the Google AdWords program is very easy.

MAKING MONEY WITH PPC AS A MERCHANT

There are ways to use PPC marketing in your online advertising to create powerful campaigns that attract an army of affiliate partners to do your promotion for you. You will have to pay for the privilege, but it can be a great way to generate almost instant exposure. PPC campaigns in Google start with an AdWords account. From there, you can choose keywords that are good traffic draws or can create your own based on what you think will bring in traffic to your site. You will be responsible for paying your publishers per every click they generate that brings someone back to your site.

THE COSTS OF PPCMARKETING

Unlike PPC publishing, PPC advertising campaigns cost money. You will have to pay whatever you've set as cost-per-click on your campaign, whether it's only $0.01 or more. If you set too high an amount and many publishers market your campaign, you can end up paying a lot of money for your clicks. On the other hand, if you set it too low, no one is going to be interested in targeting your keywords, and you'll end uur p with few of your ads appearing anywhere. Pick something that will bring value to the publisher, but will also keep you within your budget.

You can set a daily and a monthly budget so that once you've reached your limit, the ads are no longer served up, and thus, you’ll stay within ybudget. Some people start at $400 per month for an advertising campaign, others go higher like $800 per month. Obviously, the more money you have to spend upfront, the more you will gain traffic and exposure to your sites.

WHAT'S THE REWARD?

For business people, the reward of using PPC marketing with Google AdWords is that you will hopefully get many more new customers. You will be able to advertise more of your affiliate links, and your content may end up placing higher on their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). If you do get top placing in the Google search engine for a keyword phrase that is highly searched, you will end up driving massive amounts of traffic to your site. You should be ready for that possibility by having email capture pages and offers ready to entice your visitors to sign up to your email list.

Once they are on your email list, you will be able to market to them much more effectively. Getting that email address is the start of your sales funnel and is highly important to generate future sales.

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WHY PAGE RANK MATTERS

If you are reading this, you have a website or would like to have one. You may be an Internet marketer or you may be someone that is just getting his/her offline business online. Your goal is to get customers.

To get customers, or visitors, to your website (which is called traffic), you need to let the world know that your website is there and that anyone can stop by and see what you have to offer. The problem is, the World Wide Web is huge, and in fact, there are millions of websites up. How will people find you?

INTRODUCE THE SEARCHENGINES

Search engines are not something that you should be afraid of. In fact, they are one of the best tools that you have available to you online. Search engines that are most readily known include Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. AOL is another large one, but it is powered by Google. Another popular choice moving up in the ranks is Ask.com (former AskJeeves) In any of these options, one thing is common.

Search engines hold the power of your website's success in their hands. Without them, your website will struggle simply because people will not know it is there. The good news is that you can alert the search engine spiders (as they are often called) that you are there and that you want their attention. In fact, more website owners than ever are taking search engine ranking in their own hands.

So, what is search engine ranking? That is the answer to the initial question about why page rank matters. Let's explain. Search engines have to determine which websites are important. To do this, they have to browse through the millions of other websites and organize them. They do this in a process we will cover in just a minute.

What is important to know is that after organizing these websites, the search engines can then respond to the requests submitted by their users. You have used them in the past, most likely, so you fully understand the importance of giving the user the most accurate results possible. If you want a stove, you want a stove, not a lawnmower, for example.

To do this, search engines use the words that people type into search engines to help them. If you were looking for a stove, “stove” is the word you would type into the search engine. Search engines call these search terms “keywords.” Keywords are their method for ranking websites too.

When a person types one of these keywords into the search box, the search engines go into action to find websites that are relevant to the user, based on these terms. What you end up getting after that is called a search engine ranking page, or an organized list of links pointing to various websites. Your location on these pages matters.

So, why does all of this really matter to you, the simple website owner who just wants people to find you online? In short, the answer is that if you cannot place well in these pages, people cannot find you online.

70 PERCENT

Did you know that these search engine pages have both paid for and natural (or sometimes called organic) search results? At the top of this page, you will notice a number of companies, sometimes listed in a box or a colored section. The links at the top are paid for by companies who want to be positioned at the top of the results page.

See, these companies know that being on that first page is quite important. If you are not there, chances are good that people will not find you since most people only view the initial page, rather than moving on to others. Being at the top is critical, so they often pay a premium price to have their ads listed there.

But, the key that you should know is that 70 percent of website users who search for something will forgo these paid-for ads and click on those website links that are listed just below, in the naturally ranked pages. They are often a better choice and they are more specific. If your website is listed in this region, you are likely to get many more visitors to your website.

Therefore, if you want to get as many visitors as possible to your website, you need to work to have your website listed in the first positions that are naturally in the search engine results page. Anything else may not give you the location and the traffic you could potentially get.

The question has changed now. Now that you know the importance of being positioned at this point, it is critical to know how to get there. The good news is that there are a number of ways that you can successfully pull this off. In fact, you should have a plan that includes a number of methods.

Before getting into that, let's explain a bit more about how search engines work so you can tailor your methods appropriately.

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INTRODUCTION

No matter what type of internet business you have, you need to be promoting it at all times. If you don’t make the effort to tell the right people about it (i.e. those people who are going to be interested in buying whatever it is you have to sell) then your business is not going to be seeing the number of sales it could be seeing.

And in the worst case scenario, you might lose your business altogether.

The problem is that marketing is expensive. Every advert costs money, and you could easily spend at least several hundred dollars on an advertising campaign if you aren’t too careful.

Or then again, perhaps not.

You see, despite what other people might say you don’t HAVE to spend a fortune on your marketing efforts. In fact, if your budget is tiny or you are just starting out, you don’t have to spend a single cent if you don’t want to.

It’s true – sometimes the best things in life really are free. And marketing your business online can be one of them. So let’s find out how it’s done, shall we?
WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO REACH?

Before you start marketing your internet businesses in the ways we are going to discuss, you need to think about who your audience is. There are lots of ways to market your business for free, but depending on your audience you may not need to use all of them.

For example, if you have a product that is aimed at retired people, the chances are you won’t find too many of them on social networking sites. Always know exactly who you are trying to reach from the outset; that way you won’t waste any time using methods that aren’t going to give you a good enough return.

In other words, a small amount of time spent figuring out who you are looking for and where you are likely to find them will pay huge dividends later on. So with that said, let’s move on to the next step you need to think about.

PUTTING A PLAN TOGETHER

When an internet marketer is investing money in a marketing campaign, they tend to put a lot of effort into it. After all, they want to be sure they are going to see a good return on their investment.

But when it comes to marketing a business online for free, some people just don’t put enough effort into it. It’s understandable – after all, you aren’t putting any cash on the line so it doesn’t really matter if you do something and it doesn’t work. It also doesn’t matter if you forget to do something or you skip a stage when you are too busy with other things.

But you need to think differently. You need to take the same professional approach to a free marketing campaign as you would if it was going to cost you $10,000. Not only will you learn a lot by doing this, but your business will thank you for it too.

So start having a think about what you are aiming to achieve with your free marketing efforts. Start thinking about how you could develop your business in this way. And as you read through the rest of this report, you will soon find yourself starting to come up with fresh ideas and plans that could make you a decent amount of money in the weeks and months to come.

USING SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES

It’s not supposed to be done, and if you read the conditions of using most of these sites you will see that they frown on the idea of businesses using them for their own ends.

But they are free (for the most part, at least, and certainly for our purposes) and they are easily able to accommodate people who have an interest in a specific subject and want to share that with like minded people.

So for example, you might have a website that regularly sells USB gadgets. And of course you would be fascinated by all the different USB gadgets that are on the market, wouldn’t you? So why not share your thoughts and knowledge with all the other people out there who like the same thing and have a growing selection of them themselves?

You will be able to have a link to your website on most social networking sites – in fact they usually have a specific place where they ask you to type in the URL if you have one! That’s fine by them – but what they don’t like is blatant advertising.

But you aren’t going to do that. All you are going to do is share your fascinations and interests with people. They will naturally follow you onto your website anyway, so you won’t even need to try and sell to them.