Affordable internet marketing is a tantalising prospect. Boy, do we have a lot of alternatives if we want to splash money about! If we’re not careful we can fritter away a small fortune searching for that one secret that is going to drive us to riches. But put your wallet away for now.
The phrase ‘affordable internet marketing’ is not an invite to a free lunch. Internet based success will always need an investment from you, whether it be funds, time, patience, persistence, or the disquieting prospect of living on the edge of your comfort zone - a big hurdle for many folks. But if you prefer to limit your money investment to building a basic web site and purchasing an autoresponder account (both are non-negotiable), then Web 2.0 marketing provides a very affordable alternative to paid advertising.
Let’s for the sake of time assume you have a ‘gateway page’ set up where you have a punchy headline, a sub-headline, 3 or 5 bullets (odd numbers work best - go figure!), a free report or mini-series offering genuine value, and a form box asking for first name and e-mail address as ‘payment’ for your free gift, and presenting a ‘submit’ button that plugs subscribers into your autoresponder.
Done all that? Good! “Well what about the "affordable internet marketing", now I just paid for my site and my autoresponder?” Well here are some Web 2.0 marketing options that won’t cost a dime and will - over time - deliver targeted traffic:
Create a Squidoo lens. Go to Squidoo.com and create a site ( or ‘lens’) about your chosen subject matter. Decide on the keyword you’d like to optimize the site around though. Google just adores Squidoo, and if your lens is optimized you have every chance of showing in the free search results on the left (free listings) of the first results page. It helps if you’ve selected a less competitive keyword phrase, which targets buyers of your product or service, rather than a generic term with vast search volume.
Then go to Hubpages and create a ‘hub’ along the same lines. Don’t duplicate the Squidoo piece - it’s better to target another good ‘buyers’ keyword term and optimize around that instead. In your lens and your hub, make certain your links to your website in the "bio" box contain your keyword in the anchor text.
In addition, put a tracking code on the end of your destination url so you can see in your autoresponder list where each subscriber came from. Do this for all your Web 2.0 marketing, and any other kind for that matter. You do this by putting this at the end of the url - mywebsite.com?t=squ or mywebsite.com?t=hub.
You can also use social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gather and LinkedIn to create a profile for yourself, and target community members with the same interests. You don't find more affordable internet marketing than this. Don’t continually spam them with your links though. That’s not what Web 2.0 marketing should be about. Contribute to the community with uplifting, insightful or humourous comments with your link subtley included rather than telegraphed.
We couldn’t complete a lightning tour of affordable internet marketing without looking at social bookmarking and blogging. A blog is the simplest way to create an online presence. Go to Wordpress.org and install it on your computer. If your web host has the Fantastico function, this is a cakewalk. If it doesn’t, I’d either change to a hosting provider that does, like GoDaddy or Hostgator. Alternatively hire a coder from elance.com, rentacoder.com or scriptlance.com to do it for you inexpensively. Choose a coder with some good references though. As for social bookmarking visit Digg.com, Technorati.com, del-icio-us, and Stumbleupon, to start you off with this strategy.
Affordable internet marketing just requires some patient and persistent work. It’s not difficult. It is the business of the 21st century. And if you don’t build an online business, what else are you going to build? A garage?
Author Resource:
A conventional business will cost you a thousand times what an internet business will. Web 2.0 is a goldmine for anyone looking for affordable internet marketing. And if you want a whole bunch of free e-books to help you understand Web 2.0 marketing and other techniques, then go get them now.
Alun Maxwell is an experienced online marketer and infopreneur, regularly hired by top companies to train executives on personal communication styles.
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