If you’re a small business owner, chances are you struggle for time to do the marketing you know is essential to your business. You battle administrative duties, and spend the necessary time to perfect your product or service, that pretty soon the marketing necessary to sell your product or service gets pushed to the side.

This is where a web directory can help.

A web directory is a place where consumers go to find specific products and services. They list companies in the customers region, and offer a quick resource for your target market. When your company is listed on a web directory, your product or service comes up in front of the people who are searching for what you provide.

Many firms spend big money and many hours on perfecting their search engine optimization (SEO) so they can have the same effect. But in fact, being on a web directory can also help increase your SEO. By having a link back to your site, you gain recognition online. Backlinks are expensive to purchase and timely to gain. A web directory gives you one quickly and for free, or close to free.

Once your consumers click on the link in the web directory to visit your site and learn more about your offering, you gain traffic. You can be assured that this traffic is qualified traffic as it is coming from people looking for something very specific.

Higher traffic volumes will also help improve your SEO. Search engines look favorably on websites with higher traffic because it means they are actively in business, and there is a strong need. Likewise, it will improve your rating on other rating sites, such as Alexa.

When building your website, keep your message clear and consistent to the same offering your prospects searched for on the web directory. This will help you convert a larger number of visitors into customers. It will also automatically fill your website with the keywords search engines look for when determining how strong of a match your website is to what your customers are searching for. This means, that when your customer searches in a search engine for a product or service, instead of a web directory, your listing will automatically come up higher.

A web directory is a great way to get your product or service placed in front of your customers. A great side effect of this placement is a backlink to your site, increased qualified traffic, and better use of your keywords. All of these benefits will improve your SEO, making your business successful.

Internet marketing is a huge umbrella with lots of smaller categories for you to consider. These categories can fall under email, websites and social media marketing. Social media marketing is the newest form of marketing when it comes to the internet but this relatively new baby is already making waves.

Traditionally, marketing has been less personal and more company centric. If you consider how most companies market, they do so from a company perspective and not really from a customer perspective. Yes, companies focus on getting their products to sell but they do this by showing their customers just the professional, no nonsense side of the company.

This is a necessity in most forms of marketing but not as much when it comes to social media. This is because social media marketing entails thinking of your customers as people and thinking of your company as being on the same level as these different people. Instead of showing yourself as a stuck-up company, you show yourself as a human being – a process which is called “humanizing”.

Since most customers prefer to buy or work with a company that is more personal and more in tune with their needs, companies that use this approach tend to appeal not just to their customers as consumers but also as people. The concept of “humanizing” means you build that personal communication and marketing by being more personal.

Internet business insurance will help protect you from any complications that arise from this type of marketing if you are worried about implications down the line. Ultimately though, a couple of points are clear. Hard-selling is still a tactic that works but it is a tactic that should be used with personalized techniques as well so as to ensure that the view of your customers towards your company is well balanced.

Are you looking for a low-cost way to generate some extra income? In that case, affiliate marketing can offer you a lot of possibilities. To make a long story short, affiliate marketing is about taking someone else’s product and promoting it (either online or offline) in exchange for a commission on every sale you generate. A lot of people think that this is something that started with the Internet but in reality it’s a business practice that has been going on for decades.

The biggest advantage of affiliate marketing is that someone else incurs all the expenses associated with creating the product or service. You are presented with a final product and all you have to do is promote it and get your cut. There is a delay between the sales and when you get paid (to account for returns) but besides that, what happens after the sale is not your responsibility (like customer support).

There certainly is a lot of potential to make money. There are affiliate programs for every product or service you can imagine, and the commissions are often pretty generous. Several bloggers have been able to earn full-time incomes from their sites once they’ve built an audience, thanks to their affiliate sales. It’s the ultimate hands-off business.

But wherever there are pros, there are also cons. Personally, what I dislike the most about affiliate marketing is the lack of control. You don’t control anything. They can decide to cut your commission rate, or to discontinue the product, or to close the affiliate program altogether. Imagine your predicament if this is your only source of income or your main one. That’s why it’s so important to diversify.

Another big issue I have with affiliate marketing is that it’s front-loaded. That means that you, the affiliate marketer, make money on the front end, but you don’t see any of the back-end money (where transactions are always more profitable). So you bring the traffic and make some money, but you leave a lot of money on the table.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think people should do affiliate marketing when they’re just getting started. But this should be just the first step because the real money is made by the people who put together those programs, not by the affiliates. If you want to make money like the big boys, this is where you need to be.

There are a lot of internet business opportunities out there that make it seem like making money using the internet is easy. From automated niche sites to creating huge downlines for some MLM company (read my Market America scam article), it all seems a bit too good to be true. The reality is that if you want to earn a living online with a website, you need to know how to promote your site. It all comes down to getting traffic. It doesn’t matter how good your product is or how pretty your site is. If you don’t have traffic, you don’t make money.

So what are some ways to promote your site? One of the best ways is through proper SEO techniques. What this does is helps your site to rank in search engines and therefore bringing you free, targeted traffic. Another way to drive visitors to your site is to create social properties such as a Facebook fan page or Youtube videos. The purpose of doing this is to hopefully get enough subscribers who will share your site with their friends in order to drive even more traffic to your site. Site promotion will take time and patience and this alone make creating an income online hard.

We all know that in order to have a good website, you’ve got to have a good webhosting service. Webhosting is what makes our site reliable and accessible for our customers and ensures that we don’t have to worry too much about not being available.

If you are unfamiliar with what a webhost does, let’s take a look at this analogy. Imagine your house right now. Your house is built on a street, which has an address in relation to the rest of the world. When you say you live at that street, in that city or town, in that state and that country, it’s pretty clear that there’s only one place your house could be. In web speak, that address is your domain.

Now, just because you have an address it doesn’t mean you have a house. If you want a house, you get a contractor to set it up for you with the rooms that you want. Your hosting provider is the one who provides you with that house, in this case a place to put your stuff.

If you want to be found you would list your address in the phonebook. If you wanted to be found even easier you would put your address in multiple phone books, highlight your name and so on. In the case of the web, that’s the search engine and those steps you are taking are similar to SEO. Social media sites, directories and so on represent your SEO steps (highlighting) and the big phone book, is Google or even Yahoo! These phone books and highlighting techniques mimic the SEO concept pretty well.

According to a Constant Contact review that put it pretty well, “SEO builds on the foundation of a lot of actions, meeting to get you seen and heard online”.

Building a website that sells is not all that different then drafting a direct mail piece that gets a great response or developing and producing and infomercial to sell your new product idea. The goal is often the same, to get the visitor, reader or watcher to do something you want them to do. That could be opt in with their email address, make a phone call for more information or call in and buy.

What tends to happen all too often, at least in the website development world is the website owner and developer forgets about the importance of getting his or her visitors to do what they want and instead ends up creating what they feel is the best bet for their success online. However you can never know for sure what will perform the best until your visitors start coming to the site.

So how can you be sure you create the best site for your visitor and you? Let’s take a look at a few tips.

For these examples let’s assume you’ve created the best wrinkle cream and you’re not building a website to sell it to the world and let them know just how awesome your new product is.

1 – Focus on Benefits Not Features

When you’re creating a website you want the product front and center, but you also want to educate. This is best done these days with video and text. However not a sales letter but rather bullet points that are short and to the point that help people know what your product can do for them.

In our example, women and men would be landing on your webpage because they want to get rid of wrinkles and look younger. So it makes sense then that you would want to focus on the benefits. Forget your amazing formulation of ingredients focus on all the great things the user will experience from fewer wrinkles to no more dark circles under their eyes.

If you tell them contains such and such amazing new ingredient, no one cares because now you are educating them. They want to be sold.

2 – Split Test

Always be testing your website main page. The one where the majority of your visitors land on, always be testing to see what you can do to improve the layout, content and information you present your visitor with. Change the position of graphics, videos, text. Never question statistics as they never lie. If more people buy from a new version of a page you create then the old one, then change the old one for the new one. That’s how you build a better site.

3 – Don’t Get Too Fancy

Try to avoid using flash and other tech stuff on your site. Sure video is great, but you only need a regular HTML site, not some new age fancy ruby on rails creation. This is only going to confuse visitors who may not be web savvy. Also to this point keep in mind who your regular visitor is going to be. If it’s middle aged women then present them with what they will understand, don’t make them jump through hoops to buy.

A lot is going on these past few months after the big G decided to make some pretty serious changes to the way they rank websites. While money still can be made by building small sites that only exist in order to make money, the tendency certainly is to create more bulky sites filled with quality articles and reviews. 

The Internet user is becoming more savvy and are more eager to hit the back button if they don´t see right away what they are looking for. So instead of building thin sites that only promote a handful of products, affiliate marketers are now having to do quite a lot more work in order to create successful sites and earn their income.

While that may sound harsh, in the long run though, it will mean that people will start focusing on quality and build better sites that will be far more google proof, meaning eventually they will make more money.

So how do you go about building these great review sites? First of all, keep in mind the long term, meaning that you might want to spend a bit more money on design and brand your domain and business from the get go. While it was ok to build simple websites to just promote one single product, for instance the Nerf dart tag, and get away with it, it is now advisable to build a much larger website that can compare all the related toys.

That way you are offering a lot more information to your visitors and they are much more likely to stay on your website, browsing through the different categories and finding the information they were after.

If you open up your websites so that they can actually participate and also give their opinions on the different products you review, you will see affiliate sales going up eventually, because people are more likely to trust your opinions, even if that means that they end up buying the Nerf Vortex instead of the dart tag, it means you are still selling.