award winning web design & development

1. Electronic Catalog Marketing

Create a catalog of products or services in e-book or auto responder form. Give the catalog away for free to your web site visitors. Ask other web sites, that aren’t in direct competition with your business, if they would like to add their products or services to the catalog. If they do, just ask that in return they either link to your web site, run your promotional ad in their e-zine or place your banner ad on their web site for a set period of time. You could ask them to also give away the free catalog because you would already have your ad(s) in the catalog. Since you created and compiled the catalog place your ad or sponsor ad at the top or title page of the catalog. This technique will quickly multiply your advertising.

2. Donate Your Publishing

Donate to libraries. There are thousands of school, college and local libraries all over the United States and world. Millions of people visit libraries everyday. Why not donate your e-mail newsletter to them. You can find a huge list of libraries on online yellow page web sites. Contact the library by mail, phone or e-mail. Tell them you would like to donate a free subscription of your e-mail newsletter. If they accept find out if they want it sent by mail in print form or by e-mail so they can print out the newsletter. You could also donate your books, audio tapes, video’s, booklets, etc. If you have an e-book you could put it on disk or CD-ROM and donate it. Just have your business ad included in the material you donate.

3. Online Community Marketing

Create a popular online discussion board. Reward people points for every message posted on your discussion board. Let’s say you reward each person 25 points for each posting. You could give them a free product or service for 500 points which would add up to 20 postings on your board from that one person. Just keep track of points for each person that posts on your message board. This could also work for e-mail discussion lists. Just post your promotional ad at the top of your discussion board page. Everyone that visits your discussion board will see your ad.

1. Give Incentives
Give people an incentive to subscribe to your e-zine. Offer them a freebie if they subscribe. It could be a free e-book, free report, free advertising, etc. Make sure the freebie will attract your target audience.

2. Joint Venture
Joint venture with a similar e-zine. Combine your subscriber bases together and publish one e-zine. Edit and publish each issue together. You both will be promoting the e-zine which means more subscribers. 
      
3. Allow Archiving
Allow your subscribers to archive back issues of your e-zine on their web site. They may need content for their web site. If people visit their web site and like your e-zine, they will subscribe.

4. Form An E-zine Ring
Form an e-zine ring. Team up with 4 to 10 similar e-zines. All the publishers would agree to list each others e-zine name and subscribing information in every issue. You could call this section “Other Free E-zines You Might Enjoy” 
      
5. Ask Subscribers
Ask subscribers to forward your e-zine to close friends, family, or associates. If they enjoy your e-zine, they will subscribe. It’s almost like your subscribers are endorsing your e-zine.

Networking is when two or more different businesses stay in contact on a regular basis to build and improve each others business. There are many ways to network your business online. Participate in online business related discussion boards , e-mail discussion groups, newsgroups and chat rooms. You can communicate with other business people via e-mail, video conferencing and by using instant messaging programs. Join online business associations and clubs. 

You’ll gain many benefits from networking online. You’ll learn business information that you didn’t  know before. You can get advice on how to solve a current business problem. It can lead to new business projects. Negotiate joint ventures and cross promotion deals. Learn important skills that you didn’t have before. Get constructive criticism that can improve your business. Brainstorm with others to come up with new business and marketing ideas.        

Before you go out and communicate with other business professionals there are a few things you should know ahead of time. Know what kind of business information you are seeking. Figure out which professionals could give you this information. Know what questions you want to ask them.

It seems as if everyone is talking about online auctions. And why not. There are thousands of online auctions on the internet with more popping up everyday. People love them because they can usually find great bargains. Businesses are
now also seeing the benefits of online auctions. Below are five ways your business can benefit from online auctions.

1. Get Rid Of Excess Inventory: You could sell your excess or discontinued products at an online auction. Your unsold inventory is doing you no good sitting around, collecting dust. It’s an effective way to make extra income and it won’t be a total loss for your business. You could even get lucky and make a profit depending on how much people will bid for your excess inventory.

2. Test Pricing For New Products: An easy way to test new product prices is to see what people will bid for them at an online auction. First, sell your product at three different online auctions. Next, calculate the average selling bid from all three auctions and that will be your selling price for your new product.

3. Sell Your Products: You can get your product in front of a large audience by selling it at an online auction. Some of the bigger auction sites draw over millions of hits a year. The key to being successful is to sell your product at multiple online auctions at the same time. Let’s say you sold one product a day from just one auction site. If you sell your product at one
hundred online auction sites that would be one hundred sales a day!

4. Start Your Own Online Auction: Drive traffic to your web site by starting your own online auction. People will visit your web site to find bargains and to sell their own products. You will get plenty of repeat visitors from people rebidding on products and adding new products to sell. You could also charge other businesses to advertise on your web site.

5. Lower Your Business Costs: You can find lower prices on business supplies and equipment at online auctions. I’m not saying all the time, but before you go pay retail for a new printer try bidding on one first. A company may be selling them at a lower price at an online auction because they have excess inventory.