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The internet is a fantastic place to promote your skills and accomplishments. You can pay a large sum of money by coming up with banner ad or pay per click plans to “get the word out” or you can go the budget way and market yourself smartly without spending nary a dime. I’ll leave the money plans for another article, instead let’s take a look at smart ways for you to promote you or your product online for little or no money!

Who said you have to have a marketing budget to promote yourself? Well, many companies do, but they are in the business to sell you something [namely, their marketing plan]. If you have the money to spend on marketing then go for it. If not, then you must examine cost effective ways to get your name out there. Here are some of my personal favorites:

Write Articles - Yes, just as I am writing this article in hope that you are reading it, you can do the same and submit your missives to leading article directories. A well written article of medium length [500-750 words] can go a long way in attracting interest by others. If you are new to the game, write the article and give it to a friend for their review and critique. Once you make your changes, find article directories you can join and start submitting. Make sure your resource box - the information at the end of the article - effectively pitches your product or you personally. Enjoy the resultant [and free!] links back to your site. Submit on a regular basis and you will reap the added traffic to your site resulting in more business for you.

Join Forums — I run several message board communities and with my two largest ones — the Corporate Flight Attendant Community and the Aviation Employment Board — I permit members to add a link within their signature to their personal or business website. Many of my threads are indexed by Google and picked up by people all over the world. Thus, the right person at the right time can click on a thread and see valuable links to other sites of interest. Not every forum manager permits this practice, however. I guess I am just a nick guy! [wink]

Post on Craig’s List — Craig Newmark started his “list” more than a decade ago to serve the San Francisco community. Years later his site is still going strong with well over one hundred cities across the globe featured. People from Atlanta to Auckland and from Zurich to Zimbabwe now have access to a site that allows them to pitch their products, display their resumes, or sell their very souls. The site is still free unless you are posting a job opportunity or real estate information under a few, select cities.

Your Website — You do have a website, right? Oddly in this day and age I am meeting people who do not. I hear all kinds of excuses: it is too expensive, too time consuming, too difficult, etc. Heck, if you are going to “play” the internet you must be properly equipped to participate. Quit making excusesfind a way to get online and do it today! At the very least your DSL account probably provides a page or two where you can design your personal page and upload it to the internet. Oh, you are still using dial up? Yikes!

As with any marketing campaign you must stay on top of it at all times. What I mean is this: however you choose to proceed, you must continually monitor and adjust your plan to maximize its effectiveness. No going on auto-pilot here: you must take charge of what you are doing to reap the rewards. If you do, you can gain a lot of exposure - and work - without expending a huge amount of money.

Copyright 2005 — Matthew Keegan is The Article Writer who writes on a variety of topics including: advocacy, automobiles, aviation, business, Christian themes, family, news, product reviews, travel, writing, and more. Samples from his portfolio are available right online.

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There is no internet marketing chore that I enjoy more than doing a regular google search to check the viral effect and progress of my online marketing articles. Within a recent short period I saw the number of websites where my articles are listed grow by a staggering 16,000.

The full implications of this is that without me lifting a finger 16,000 more websites, blogs and their pages, with search engine prominence, now contain my articles. This means that even if just one person in the entire month reads only one of my articles in each of those locations, I will end up with a total of 16,000 unique readers per month. And without any more effort on my part.

But for articles to enjoy this kind of magic they must have 3 key ingredients.

An effective internet marketing article will have a good headline

What causes you to click on a link or ad? What attracts your interest to any content online? It is of course a headline. Writing headlines is an art in itself. Those who are good at it, earn a lot of money. Tabloids like the National Enquirer or The Sun in Britain understand the power of a headline because they’ve sold millions of copies of their publications regularly for many years and it all hinges on how effective the main headline is.

I learnt this lesson well in my offline marketing days when a newsletter I used to publish would sell a few hundred copies on one headline and then sell over 300,000 copies with another headline.

On the net, headlines are even more important and when writing articles you should bear this in mind. Apart from taking care of the keywords (with search engines or google adsense ads in mind), your headline should be so enticing that anybody mildly interested in the subject you are covering will want to read it.

In writing this article, this are the headlines I considered and discarded before I ended up with the headline I used. Study them carefully and learn something about internet marketing headlines.

- 3 things an effective internet marketing article must have
- Why my internet marketing articles posted in only 20 sites suddenly appeared in 16,000 other websites shortly after
- Why my internet marketing articles grew from being in only 20 sites to 16,000 within no time
- 3 things an internet marketing article needs to go crazily viral

I would have chosen this last headline listed here, except that more specific headlines are more believable in a World Wide Web that is choked with hype these days.

An effective internet marketing article must contain useful information or tips

Why would somebody bother to take an article and post it at their website or blog? There is only one reason that would cause them to do this. Your article must contain useful and valuable information. Some internet marketers deliberately hold back vital information and refer others to their websites for it. This is a mistake because the reader will judge you from the information they read in your article. If there is little or no information then the assumption is that your website will not be any different and probably has more of the same.

Remember that online there is always too much to do and too many websites to visit. So for anybody to visit your site, they will need to see some really useful and valuable information.

An effective internet marketing article must be well written

Your internet marketing article must be very well written to be read and posted widely. Remember that people on the net are in a hurry and they have the widest choice mankind has ever had in history. So if they have a problem making head or tail of what you are trying to say in your article, with a simple, impatient click of the mouse, they will move elsewhere.

Online writing should be brief, direct and to the point. It also helps a great deal if the article is broken down the way it has been here, with simple points listed in bold.

With a little effort, most people can write reasonably well. But even if you can’t good online writing services are very affordable. In fact the going rates are so dirt cheap that many offline writers used to earning a minimum of $500 for any piece of writing they do, are bitterly complaining. Luckily their complaints haven’t changed anything.

Check this site for details on an excellent experienced online writer who charges only $9 per article.

http://marketingurhomebiz.blogspot.com/2005/06/9-per-article-experienced-writer.html

Christopher Kyalo has made money online while using articles as his only marketing tool. Visit the following link to find out the most effective site to post your free article to; http://marketingurhomebiz.blogspot.com/2005/06/revealed-most-effective-internet.html. Visit his blog for more valuable free tips; http://big-online-story.blogspot.com

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The internet is a place where people often throw darts into the darkness hoping that someday, somehow they’ll hit a bulls eye. Most people nurture a mistaken notion that huge amount of traffic can eventuate good business without paying any attention to what sort of people are coming to the website. This is the worst sort of Internet Marketing.

No matter how revolutionary your product or service is, unless it is backed by a well-thought-out Internet Marketing strategy, it is as good as being non-existent. You have got to be as sure as any of the conventional brick and mortar businesses.

Breaking the great wall of non-presence is the biggest challenge one faces while trying to set up an online business. When you set up your online shop, you don’t know them and they don’t know you. You need to make your presence felt; you need to set up an identity for yourself that tells your visitors that you are not an unemployed weirdo trying to dupe visitors from your dark and unheated basement. Your website should seem to represent a genuine business that can really deliver. How can you do that?

==> HAVE A WELL-MADE WEBSITE > CONTENT IS, OF COURSE, KING KEEP PERSISTENT CONTACT

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