Tools and Programs to Help Your Online Business

Let me preface by saying that these posts are more suited to less experienced marketers. There are numerous people in this business who know a lot more than I do, that will find this information a bit elementary.

Here is a little bit of history to set the stage for introducing the topic of this blog.  I started out during the early days of online marketing selling custom golf clubs through a Yahoo store.  It was a new concept then and worked very well for my product, which was also fairly unique at the time.  There were probably only a half dozen professional golf clubmakers selling products online then and most of the highly marketed brands did not offer any kind of customization online in those days. Within a year or so about 75% of my business was online.   So my business (and traffic) did quite well with relatively little marketing.  The small amount of  advertising I did was very inexpensive compared to today.  As more people began to get involved in internet marketing, particularly the big golf companies, it became more difficult and more expensive to find new customers. Pretty soon I was relying mostly on repeat customers and referrals.  The golf club business was something I did in addition to a “real” job and when I retired from my real job I also closed my golf shop, primarily due to the higher costs of marketing, lower profit margins, increased competition and the overall decline in business. So with that history…

I have spent the last several years transitioning into the affiliate marketing field. My shop is my den and my computer.  I kept my domain names and changed the websites to affilliate links, with some news and information.  I also  moved into different niches other than just golf.  Now I am always in transition!  I learn something new almost every day and I am continually making improvements based on what I learn, new tools, and new concepts.  Now I am attempting to move this particular website into more of a blog format and less of a static page full of banners and affiliate links.  Hopefully I will share some information, tools or products that will help you in your particular online endeavor.

Websites and blogs are used for many different purposes and if they are used to build a business or promote sales there are a couple of constant factors involved in their effectiveness.  One is traffic and the other is a targeted audience.  Something that I learned early on is that once you have exposed your product or niche to a market for a period of time, or you are promoting the same product as other people, then you need new traffic.  So depending on the product and the audience, different tools or methods may be more effective.  For example, if you are using a traffic exchange I buy into the theory that generally you should use a capture page and build your list so that you can market your product at more opportune time.  Having said that, if you have a specific product that may be new, and of interest, to that particular traffic exchange audience, then a splash page would certainly be appropriate.  To promote your full sales pages, email marketing to safelists and autoresponder campaigns to your lists are likely going to be more effective.  I read some posts a couple of years ago on the Trafficera blog that didn’t make as much sense to me then as they do now. I dug them out of the blog archive at this link.  Regarding targeted traffic, it seems like the best way to get it is to have your site positioned well on search engines.  That involves understanding search engine optimization techniques or being able to spend the money to have someone do it for you.  By incorporating some of the things that I have learned, my golf tee time  reservation sites now rank on the first page of Google when someone searches for “discount golf teetimes”.  (shwarp.com ; last-minute-teetimes.com).

There are a lot of opinions about different methods, tools and products for internet marketing.  There are also many people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, but please don’t be offended by my suggestions or recommendations.  I am only sharing things that have worked for me.  Even affiliate products that I promote are things that I use or subscribe to, and businesses that I purchase from.  So much for the first post on this new format for Newtraffic4u.com.

Next…Traffic Exchanges