Most business owners hate the entire marketing process. I find marketing to be an energizing exercise to showcase my creativity, however, and enjoy it -- when I do it. However, I fall into the same trap as millions of other small business owners -- Im so busy with clients (my profit-generating days) that I often push aside my marketing (my business development days).
So, to aid me in my marketing efforts, I try and get the most bang for the buck out of what I actually end up doing -- and try to do that with a minimal amount of effort. These are 10 tools that I use in my marketing efforts that help me turbocharge my marketing:
1. Assessment Generator: Like to create an interactive survey or assessment that will help your visitor learn something about his/her life or business With Assessment Generator, you can create online assessments that you can post to your website to increase your traffic and attract more clients. http://www.profcs.com/app/aftrack.aspafid=256129&u=www.assessmentgenerator.com
2. AudioAcrobat: AudioAcrobat makes audio streaming fast and simple, whether you want to add an audio greeting or audio testimonials to your website or send out an audio postcard or record a teleclass. http://dgunter.audioacrobat.com/
3. Ezine Director: Ezine Director is a great service for creating, mailing and reporting back on the success of your newsletter. I love to be able to see how many readers opened my newsletter, who opened the newsletter, and what links they clicked on from the newsletters. EzineDirector offers the service free of charge if you send out less than 249 emails per month. http://www.ezinedirector.comaffiliate_id=250924
4. FreeAudioConferencing.com: Ever need to meet with colleagues, associates or even family members at a distance but dont want to do it face-to-face A teleconference bridge line can bring up to 100 people together at one place over a teleconference phone line. You can also conduct classes and training this way. And best of all, its free! www.freeaudioconferencing.com
5. Google News Alerts - Need a quick way to find out whos talking about you online Want to know on what sites your content might end up Need to discover what your competitors are up to Google Alerts let you type in an unlimited number of search terms, like your name, your company name, your industry, the name of your competitors, etc. Google will then deliver an email alert for any mention of your search term online. This is a wonderful way to track your own PR as well as industry trends. http://www.google.com/alerts
6. Kickstart Cart: Kickstart Cart is easy to use and setup, and offers the ability to create affiliate programs, follow up with prospective and current customers with autoresponders, create coupons for limited-time offers, as well as enable buyers to immediately download electronic purchases (ebooks, audio files). There is a free 30-day trial, but dont sign up until you have the time to test drive it--30 days goes by fast! http://www.kickstartcart.com/app/pr=31&id=59401
7. Press Release Distribution Services: A well-written press release about a new development in your company can earn you great amounts of free publicity, at little or no cost! I use the services that distribute the releases at no cost, and several of them offer a low-cost upgrade ($10-$30) to expand the reach of your release. To see the listing of the free services that I use, visit http://www.onlinebizcoachingcompany.com/resources.htm
8. Submit Your Article: If youve ever tried to manually submit your articles to article directories, youll find it to be a time-consuming task. SubmitYourArticle.com automates this process by allowing you to submit up to four articles each month and then distributes the articles to hundreds of web sites, article directories and ezine publishers. Ive just started using this service, and Im already seeing results! http://www.submityourarticle.com
9. SalesLetter Generator: Need to create a quick one page website for a special program or product youre offering I often need to do this, but need a bit of help in writing the content. Salesletter Generator asks you a series of questions about what youre offering, and when youve answered the questions, generates a one page sales letter in HTML that you can post immediately! It saves me lots of time and energy--much easier than trying to determine how to write this on my own! http://www.ebookgenerator.com/cmd.phpClk=1227194
10. Typepad: Ive tried out several blogging software services, and Typepad is the one that I found to be both simple to use and powerful. You can set up as many blogs as you desire with a Pro account, and you can customize your blog in an infinite number of ways. You can also password-protect your blog and use it as a client-only portal to share info and files with your client base. http://www.typepad.com
Marketing can be a chore, or it can be a creative process that ignites your business. See how these tools can help you turbocharge your marketing plan!
Copyright 2005 Donna Gunter
Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed professionals make more profit in less time online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE ebook, TurboCharge Your Productivity: 50 + Tools To Help You Automate Your Business and Make More Profit in Less Time Online!, visit her site at .
There are many ways to get free web site traffic to your website or business promotion. One of the best ways is the use of free traffic exchanges. These exchanges allow you to submit your website into the rotation with hundreds, or thousands of other websites for the membership of that particular traffic exchange. Some traffic exchanges are better than others, so you need to make sure the ones you choose, are best for you and your business.
Needless to say, you want to pick a free traffic exchange that has lots of members so theres much more exposure to your websites, sales pages or affiliate programs. You also want to make sure the audience would be more likely to purchase your product or service youre trying to sell. For example, if youre selling antique dolls and the free traffic exchange youre joining is made up of 95% webmaster business opportunities, then your chances of selling something are slim to none. You need to know your market.
A free traffic exchange offers webmasters the ability to promote their websites or affiliate marketing campaigns for free, or at very low cost. The idea is to surf around other members websites, and for each viewing, you get so many of your own URLs and banners added into the rotation for other members to view. There are hundreds, if not thousands of free traffic exchanges online today. The trick is to find the ones that work best for you. Not all free traffic exchanges are created equal and the most active ones are not necessarily the best ones for your needs.
Free traffic exchanges are a great marketing tool for a variety of reasons. The most obvious reason is that you get lots of people looking, and hopefully clicking on your website or promotional pages. But there are hidden benefits to free traffic exchanges you may not have even considered.
Some free traffic exchanges may convert sales like crazy for one person, and be a complete waste of time for another. If everyone were promoting the same website or affiliate program is the same traffic exchange for example, then chances are you would not make many sales. Even if you were promoting the #1 thing on the internet, if everyone promoted the same program, your chances are much lower that someone will purchase through your website or link to make you any money. Also, when people see the same ad over and over again, they get desensitized to it. Dont fall into this trap. Its one thing to try and sell a very popular product/service/ebook etc, but its another thing when a million other people are trying to do it too. Competition is a good thing, because it validates your market, but too much competition is tough and its time to move on to something else. We all know clicking on ads in a free traffic exchange can be very boring, monotonous and can take a lot of time. Thats why you need to make the best of your opportunity or you will just be wasting a lot of your time and effort on something that just isnt working. If you have your own niche website, then you already differentiated yourself from the pack. If you are an affiliate marketer, then you need to find products/services that everyone else isnt promoting, especially within that particular traffic exchange.
One way to use free traffic exchanges to your advantage is to join a few at first, and see if your sales pick up. If your sales arent doing well, then test out a few more. When you do find a few traffic exchanges that appear to be generating sales for you, then narrow those down until you find the one, or two that are working. Now concentrate your efforts on those because theyre the ones you want. At least for now. Things may change, so keep an eye on your campaigns and if sales seem to be falling off, then it might be time to change your offer or find another traffic exchange that could pick your profits up again. As I mentioned, your individual promotion is everything. If youre trying to promote something everyone else is, I dont care what traffic exchange service youre using, your sales conversions are going to be very low, or nothing at all. You cannot always blame the exchange. Sometimes you have to look at yourself and think if youre doing all you can to make sales.
If youre going to be using multiple free traffic exchanges, and I recommend that you do, your first priority should be to pick up a multi-tab web browser. Many of these browsers are free and run on PCs and MACs. The tabs feature allows you to have one web browser open with multiple tabs each going to a separate website. You could easily put 5 or 6 of your free exchange sites in these tabs, and earn credits for all of them at the same time. So instead of surfing for 1/2 an hour or an hour earning 200 hits for one exchange, you could earn 200 hits for 5 exchanges in the same amount of time. This is a huge time saver and multiplies your earned hits by 5X or 6X.
Getting free traffic to your website can be a lot of work. If you dont have the money to spend on full blown PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns like Google AdWords, free traffic exchanges are a great way to get the traffic you need to get visitors to your site and close the sale.
Copyright 2005 East Tech LLC
Andrew Daigle is owner and creator of many websites including a Free Traffic Exchange at , DXInOne Free E-Currency Exchange Training Site , Free Google AdWords Training at