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5 Essential Tools You Need for Marketing on the Internet

These five indispensable tools will help you to compile, respond to, maintain, track and otherwise gain control of your marketing efforts online. All of them are even available for free or at a very minimal cost. While you might be able to function for an initial period without some of these, ultimately you’ll need them all if you’re going to grow an online business. The “fabulous five” essential online tools include:

1. An E-mail account

The first essential tool is an e-mail account capable of handling large quantities of mail, large attachments and file sizes. Most free e-mail accounts aren’t really suitable and many sites and group lists don’t accept them. Google has by-invitation-only e-mail accounts that house a stunning two gigabytes of storage. (gmail.google.com/) Hotmail now offers 250 megabytes of free e-mail storage which in itself isn’t too shabby either. There are so many others that just typing in “free e-mail” into a search engine will yield scores of sites including those from Netscape, Yahoo, Hotmail, Google, and Lycos among others.

2. An auto-responder

Initially, you also may be able to self-respond to the incoming messages to your e-mail account, but eventually, if your marketing campaign is working, you won’t be able to manage all your inquiry traffic without assistance. That’s where the auto-responder will come in handy. It will acknowledge incoming mails as they arrive with your pre-determined message, saving you, your business and your sanity. There are numerous good ones available at no cost online. Here are some for starters:

http://www.freeautobot.com/ allows to follow-up on e-mails. The program is free with no ads

Another free auto-responder is downloadable at: http://www.macurious.com/free/

A tutorial on auto-responders and auto-reply e-mail services as well as free software downloads is provided at: http://www.creatingonline.com/site_promotion/auto_responders.htm

A free autobot is available at: http://www.talewins.com/FREEbot.htm

http://www.webmasterfree.com/software/E-MailTools/E-mailNotification/free_auto_responder.html is yet another good free auto-responder downloadable from the web.

3. A List server

Another essential tool for managing your soon-to-come throngs of incoming inquiries, requests and orders is your list server. As you build your opt - in e-mail list of contacts you’ll need a way of sending messages to all of them at once. Announcements, promotions and special notices along with your normal touch-base e-mails will need to be sent out in a reliable manner. Maintaining customer contact is a marketing essential. Without some form of contact management database, you’ll be swimming “upstream against the flow” in the management of your past, present and potential clients. It’s all too easy to be overwhelmed. Later you may opt to install a contact management database like ACT! or Goldmine, but while you’re growing your online network a list server will do nicely. Have a look at these:

An overview of the principal list servers and their features as well as providing the download access pages for them is at:
http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/10825_1355051_1

http://www.lsoft.com/download/default.asp?item=overview

http://www.lyris.com/products/listmanager/

http://server.com/communityapps/maillistapp/ allows users to create their own internet newsletters in plain text or HTML, create mailing lists, RSS syndication feeds and is *free* to use.

4. A PDF compiler

If your products and services include distribution of e-booklets, e-reports, e-books or other online info-products, you’ll need to put many of them into pdf format. This format helps protect your documents from copying and other pilferage and is an accepted industry standard for online document and e-book distribution. Free pdf compiler software, with tutorials, is available online at these sites:

http://www.ebooks-made-easy.com/ebooksoftware.htm

http://www.virtual-ebooks.com/compilers.htm

http://www.hsinlin.com/software/pdf.html

5. A website

Although it’s quite possible to market services and products online without the associated costs, programming and hassles of a website, ultimately it is an essential tool that is highly effective in showcasing your wares, whatever they may be. Aspects of getting and maintaining a website are too numerous to be addressed here. Information on free website hosting, templates and site management is only a few mouse clicks away. Free website hit counters, website templates and even no-cost hosting services for a website are at: http://members.freewebs.com/.

Here are more for comparison:

Free web hits counter
http://www.statcounter.com/free_hit_counter.html

Free web hits counter http://freelogs.com/

Free website templates http://freesitetemplates.com/

Free website templates http://www.freewebtemplates.com/

Free web site hosting and utilities are available from: http://www.bravenet.com/

Using these tools for building, maintaining, marketing and promoting online commerce at any level will be indispensable in marketing your products and services on the internet. This short list is certainly not to be considered all-inclusive. Whether you opt for these or other free or paid versions, you can use these five essential tools to boost your online presence and build your customer base. Hey, shouldn’t you be getting busy?

Larry M. Lynch is a writer and photographer specializing in business, travel, food and education-related writing in South America. His work has appeared in Transitions Abroad, South American Explorer, Escape From America, Mexico News and Brazil magazines in print and online. As an expert author he can ghost-write original articles for your articles marketing campaign and content for your website, newsletter, blog or e-zine. His fees are $98 for 10 articles or $24 for 2 articles of 500 to 800 words each. Please e-mail him now with details of the website, newsletter or blog you’d like promoted and how many articles or content insertions you’d like at: pentagon_elsb@hotmail.com

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What is a Niche Market

First of all, we should understand what is a niche market.
It is a group of people with common interest, a group who has
the same hobbies, or the same social background, ethnicity.
They will have the same desires and need.
Each niche need informations and solution to their problems, and
it is an extremely targeted market.

Your role of Internet marketer start here.
How? You will give them what they want. Not something you are
trying to sell to that niche by a forcing or a massive attack,
but something they have to buy. Something you discovered that is
vital for that niche.

For example, you can’ t come with the latest karate gi (kimono
for the non martial artists), and present that gi with a massive
advertising campain to a football team? You will spend tons of
money, and you won’ t make any sale.

But if you understand the needs of that niche, what they are
passionate about, what they are dreaming of… Now you will come
with products they simply can’ t live without. That’ s powerful,
you will have literally nothing to do to sell. Just present them
the products, and that’ it they come like the mouse follow that

peace of cheese, they rush from everywhreto buy from you, they
are complaining because your product is not available in their
country, they advertise your products to their nichemates; the
effect is viral.

It leads to residual income, because these people will buy from
you other and other, they have no choice, no alternative, they
can’ t miss that.
Now I hope you understand why you have to target a specific
niche with the specific product, the big deal.

So let’ s resume:
Find a niche market, it’ s easy on the web, you have all the
tools that you need for free or small fee.
Find out what they want.
Present them a product that satisfies their needs
Come to them with convenience: come with something they are
searching for days or months, or they already found it, but you
come with a new one, more sophisticated, who fit exactly their
needs, the answer to their questions, take a old product who
worked in the past in that niche and make a survey to find what
you will add to this product or remove from it which will make
the difference.

Or you can come with a very new concept that they maybe was not
aware of.
Think about the cellular phone, people din’ t know 10 years ago
that it will be crucial to have a cellular phone. Who can leave
without a cellular phone today?
Do your homework now, and find what people want.

Copyright 2006
Franck Silvestre.
I hope to meet you in our Powerful Internet Marketing Training FREE classes for beginner and advanced marketers.
Niche Market Mastery

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Search Engine Position Report

Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally.

Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.

This means you must come up with a strategy create a search engine position report to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.

Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two,
the monitoring and protecting stage.

In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions that you will see in your search engine postion report. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.

Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes - many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking - your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis.

Devise a search engine position report to chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.

Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.

You must also deal with your competition - a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings.

Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.

Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.

This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present!

People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html for a current list of website favorites.

Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations - this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things. It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders - those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your
website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely.

Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your website come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.

Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.

Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.

Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions using your search engine position report from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture - your long-term marketing campaign.

Christian Whiting is the publisher of Internet Profits. Dedicated to bringing you the best tips, tools, and resources to help you make more money with your online business. http://internetprofits.bushido.net

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