Affordable internet marketing is a mouth-watering prospect. Boy, do we have a lot of options if we want to throw cash around! If we’re not prudent we can dissipate a small fortune searching for that one nugget that will propel us to victory. But put your credit card away for the moment.
The phrase ‘affordable internet marketing’ is not an invite to a free lunch. Web success will always necessitate an investment from you, whether it be funds, time, patience, persistence, or the disconcerting possibility of living on the edge of your comfort zone - a big hurdle for many folks. But if you want to limit your cash investment to building a basic web site and buying an autoresponder account (both are non-negotiable), then Web 2.0 marketing presents a very affordable alternative to paid advertising.
Let’s for the sake of simplicity assume you have a ‘squeeze page’ set up where you have a solid headline, a sub-headline, 3 or 5 bullets (odd numbers work better - 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 offering, and presenting a ‘submit’ button that feeds 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 penny and will - over time - bring targeted traffic:
Create a Squidoo lens. Go to Squidoo.com and create a site ( or ‘lens’) about your chosen area. Settle 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 chosen a less competitive keyword phrase, which targets buyers of your product or service, rather than a generic phrase with massive search volume.
Then go to Hubpages and create a ‘hub’ along the same lines. Don’t copy the Squidoo content - it’s better to target another good ‘buyers’ keyword phrase and optimize around that instead. In your lens and your hub, make certain your links to your website in the "resource" box contain your keyword in the link text.
Also, place a tracking code on the end of your destination link so you can see in your autoresponder list where each visitor came from. Do this for all your Web 2.0 marketing, and any other type 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 whistlestop 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 system. If your web host has the Fantastico function, this is a breeze. If it doesn’t, I’d either move to a hosting provider that does, like GoDaddy or Hostgator. Alternatively get 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 effort. It’s not rocket science. 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 hardware store?
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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