Why you need advertising

If you want to make
money online you have to do a lot of effective marketing. You may
not need a better product or a lower price than your competition in
order to make more money than they do. If you want to, you can make
a heap of money selling mediocre products, as long as you promote them
effectively. Of course, you wouldn’t do that; I just make the
point that marketing is really all that matters.

You need to be spending at least 90% or more of your time on promotion
to have any realistic hope of having a profitable online business. Don’t
spend too much time in building a pretty web site, as that in itself
doesn't help grow your business as much as advertising and marketing.

You need to decide if you are going to get some free advertising, or
pay for it. The quickest and most effective advertising is that which
you pay for; it takes a lot of free advertising to get any real results,
while an ad in Adwords will get you instant traffic.

Free advertising means using strategies like article marketing, which
can be very effective, but it will cost you a lot of time in writing
the articles. This is why the big players always outsource everything
– it frees up their time to do more marketing.

You need to focus on getting the best advertising you can for the least
possible cost.

If you could spend $500 a day on advertising in order to make $1,500
a day in profits without spending long hours doing it, why not just
do that? This is how Adwords arbitrage works. You can bid on Adwords
ads for as little as 25 cents, so that even if your campaign bombs you
won’t have lost too much. For that price you won’t get enough
traffic to make you rich, but if you have a saleable product it can
bring in some steady cash. Just make sure of course that your income
from sales always exceeds your Adwords cost.

Email Marketing

This is where you offer something that’s both free and attractive
at your site, and if your visitors want to claim their freebie, they
have to enter their name and email address on an opt-in form. They then
get a series of pre-scheduled and pre-written email messages. These
messages should offer valuable help and information about the subject
they were looking for when they originally got to your site.

A series of well-written emails will establish relationships with your
customers, and provides a valuable way of keeping your visitors long
after their first visit to your site. The best part is that once the
initial setup work is done, everything is completely automated and personalized
through your auto-responder.

Now that you have an opt-in email list you can send out newsletters
filled with even more helpful and current information and should also
include more freebies to insure they will be read. Naturally, links
to your site and your current offers will be prominently displayed.
In most cases you won’t even have to write the newsletter –
you just use someone else’s, as long as you leave their name and
site link intact.

Until your own opt-in email list is up and running, you can always
consider newsletter network advertising. This means that you pay email
newsletter management sites to run your ads across their network of
newsletters.

Email marketing can be immensely profitable, and it’s usually
the major income source of the big players. Just be careful that you

don’t try and sell something in every email, as this is a big
turn off. Use holidays to send an email wishing them a happy whatever,
together with a message that you hope they are doing well, and offering
to help them if they are not. People get bombarded with emails, and
yours needs to be one of the few ones that actually get read every time.

It’s important to get a good balance between your chatty emails
and your selling ones.

So, create a niche site, set up your autoresponder sequence, promote
it then move on to your next project.