Chris Rohrer asked:


With any online business today online and offline marketing plays a big key to either your business succeeding and making a lot of money, or failing and you losing a lot of money. However marketing online is not all that easy as some may make it out to be. If you jump into it to fast you can quickly lose a ton of money if you market wrong. So lets take this time to go over the correct ways of how to market and make money online.

First you will want to set up some type of marketing budget that you can follow for the month. When you do this make sure that you do not to set your budget to high, because you are just starting out so you will want to take your time and test things at first. A good marketing budget to set would be a couple hundred dollars. This will allow you to test a number of things like google awords, yahoo, and maybe even a good press release.

This moves us into the next part of how to market and make money online. You must test your ads first. Not every ad you post or submit is going to work. So make sure you test your ad to first see what kind of results you get from it. At the end of your test if you like your results you have gotten then you know this ad will work, and you can then invest more money into it.

The next most important thing to do with any marketing campaign is to track your ads. You could have the best ads in the world running, but if you are not tracking to see which ads are converting into sales you could be wasting a lot of money and not even know it! So make sure that no matter what type of ad you are running that you have a way to track it, and see if it is worth keeping or not.

Finally you will want to stay educated. There are always new ways to market online and offline. So it is very important to read up and educate yourself on these new ways of marketing. You can do this by reading messages boards, or surfing the web for new ways to market. Always remember though. Test every new marketing spot you find before you go and invest a lot of money into it.

temp_168807 asked:

If you own and operate an online business, it would be quite myopic to exclusively focus on online marketing methods to promote your enterprise.  Granted that the World Wide Web is home to some amazing and cost-effective ways that can help spread the word about your business, the World Wide Web remains as just one avenue for you to exploit.  There is a more promising avenue that has been neglected since the advent of the internet.

 

This is the offline market.

 

Below are 5 simple but highly effective offline marketing methods that you can implement for your online business.

 

Distributing items that prominently display your URL.  Coffee mugs, caps, shirts, and even bumper stickers.  Surely, you’ve seen such items that displayed a particular URL, right?  Can you remember how intrigued you were when you encountered them?  Perhaps you may still remember the URL you saw back then?  Such is the power of this method.

 

Distributing media kits for the press people.  Press people are always on the lookout for things to write about.  Make things easy for them by distributing press kits that consist of: an expertly written press release about your company or about an event that affects your company, a profile of your business, a list of prominent clients/customers, a list of awards received, your complete product line, and other similar details.

 

Conducting seminars, symposiums and workshops.  What better way to promote your website – something that is often viewed with the negativity caused by the prevalent anonymity on the internet – than by providing the public with the face of your business: yours.  By making yourself visible and displaying your expertise in events that call for the same, such as seminars, symposiums and workshops related to the field you are concentrating on, you’ll be able to build your name in the industry, and consequently, you will be able to build the brand of your business.

 

Advertise in your dailies and magazines.  Yes, it will cost some money, but advertising on print publications is not as expensive as it may initially seem to most folks.  You don’t need full page ads or double-paged spreads.  You won’t even need a quarter of a page.  You will need an eighth of a page at the most.  Based on experience, the best type of print ad that you can run is a simple display of your website’s URL.  Imagine white font on black background and you’ll see how such an ad will stand out.  Because of the dearth in details, people will be intrigued and they will log online to check out your site to see what it’s about.

 

Sponsor charity events.  Most of these events will prominently display their sponsors’ logos on the advertising materials they will use.  Instead of your business’ logo, ask that your website’s URL be displayed instead.  The exposure your link will receive via this method can potentially be immense.  Imagine a charitable event on a national, if not a global, scale, and you will begin to imagine the sheer potency of this technique in action.