YesYorkshire

Gumtree Advertising is also a very effective, and cheap way to reach the masses within the UK.

Yes i should have give the keywords "Innovation Vouchers" & "Innovation Vouchers Yorkshire" a quick check before i threw in a "Well Done". But your in here watching my back, so cheers INDIZINE. PLEASE NOTE: If anyone is wanting to target keywords within a certain niche, please use the tools available such as Google Keyword Tool to ensure that the keyword has sufficient searches beforehand, otherwise your efforts are useless.

Well to defend my side i stated above that i use the google keyword tool when using this "keyword domain" method, so i know for certain that any keyword i target has enough searches. It would obviously be daft, choosing a keyword to target that has no searches, this is standard stuff.

Yes its very smart, yet so simple to implement - and cheap for the kind of results you can accumulate. well done.

Well Imob is actual mobile display advertising, not text. Like a pay per click on yer mobile.

If you want to get into advertising on mobile you may get better results using Imob which is the leading iphone advertising network. The iphones have great browsers and can view your free advertising offer on your website. Just a thought. Put an email capture form on the landing page so the surfer can request information on what you have to offer. You can then follow up with your pitch.

maybe in a couple of years i will be ready for your service. hahaha.

Thanks, Warentee run out about two weeks ago, how ironic. Argos here i come. Thanks for the advise Steve.

Thankyou for your input, its much appreciated. I dont want to go on about my new business as it may be seen as off topic within this thread by admins. Thankyou anyway, if you wish to talk about it you can pm me.

Your entitled to your own opinion, just like anyone else.

The batteries have run out on my remote also and underneath the battery cover it explains what you need to do but even when i put new batteries in the remote will not even try to connect to the box. Usually, everytime i press a button on the remote, a red light flashes on the box, but whn i put the new batteries in the light does not flash anymore meaning i cannot complete the required steps to connect the remote. Why do companies this large make things so complicated, when it could be so simple. Batteries run out it dont work and when you put new batteries in it should work...SIMPLES.

Thanks, yes i know adwords is the wrong way to go. I specialize in free or low cost advertising so it makes it easier on my pocket. Looks like we have the same great mind.

I know this maybe not your thing but Kiddie Discos can be very profitable. I know the dj who had one local and after a few months over 100 kids aged 8 to 16 were paying 3 pound each per week. He only provided like chart music, no games, no kareoke, just tunes. Parents encourage their children to do this and children find this exciting and moan at the parents to take them to the disco. Theres not enough for kids to do these days. Just a thought.

No i dont, but as i have just launched Yorkshire Auction, this service would be ideal for me due to the features it offers. For me personally, my personal auction site has its own bulk listing software like the turbo lister provided by ebay. The Select have included with their account a csv file that includes all of their product catalogue which will save me hours of work. All i have to do is upload the csv file into my bulk listing software, edit a few variables and post. This will fill my auction with thousands of products instantly. I suppose it all depends on the individual, its ideal for me and i only plan to make £1 per item profit so as long as the prices are near enough the same as ebay or amazon i wont mind as it will help my site grow.

I have started this thread to enable any online business to share experiences on what you have found to be effective, low cost, online marketing. One of the most important factors of online business success would be the amount of targeted, buying traffic that you can send to your website. Yes there are many other things that decide your success such as web design, customer service ect, but without the traffic, nobody would see the rest of your creation. Post your most effective, low cost. online marketing strategies below. Here is a few to get us started: 1- SEO - This is a low cost way if you know what is involved, if you dont, do some research or use the free optimization tools that are available such as the free webceo. Its much easier to target long tail keywords which is around 4 words long, as theres not much competition for these and would be alot easier to rank on the first page within the search engines. Choose your keywords carefully as all your content and optimization for these keywords will take time and if you choose the wrong keywords you could waste alot of time. Find your keywords using the free keyword tracker to give you an idea of how much traffic these keywords generate. Once again, i would not target the main keywords unless you are well experienced and can build highly relevant backlinks. Make sure you have plenty of content rich pages that are relevant to your keyword choices and make sure the content is extremely informative to the reader. Try to insert your keywords within your title and description on the meta tags as this is the details that the search engines use to display and rank your website. Your website has to be as relevant as possible for your chosen keywords but the best thing for seo would be one way backlinks. If the search engines see links on other websites that are also relevant to your keywords then this will boost your rankings, especially if your website does not link to it. If you link to a website that links back to you, this would be worth less as the search engines would see this as a simple link swap, where as if the site has a link to you and your not linking to them, the search engines see that the website has placed a link on their site due to relevance for further information to the readers. Google loves websites that display relevant content from their other services such as youtube, google maps ect. So if you display relevant videos/maps on your site, this will give the google bot a big hug when it crawls your site and will eventually reward you. There are plenty of low cost ebooks available out there so my advise would be to buy one or two to get the hang of it. Once you know the basics there will be no stopping you and its very exciting to see your website increase through the ranks and to watch your traffic increase as a result of your efforts. 2- Article Marketing - Many individuals see article marketing as a time consuming in effective marketing method. Well i disagree. Article marketing allows you to establish yourself as an expert within your business field. When people search the internet, it is a known fact that people first search for free information and advise. Then if you are lucky enough to connect with this individual, you will make a sale. When writing an article you must think like the reader who has an issue within the subject of your business. You then provide information and advise on how to overcome this issue. I have had a little bit of success and sales through my short effort of article marketing and i will explain below what i achieved. I started off as an affiliate of a website hosting company and made a website that provided advise, tips and tricks that were relevant to website hosting and domain names. I then tried adwords to market the site and soon found out that it would cost between £3 to £5 PER CLICK. I come across article marketing when searching for alternative marketing methods and soon got the idea of what needed to be done. After a few weeks i had wrote around 25 articles with around 450 words in each. I submitted them to ezine articles and got some traffic and made 1 sale which made me $100 in affiliate commissions. Sounds simple right, well it wasnt. Each article had to be Search Engine Optimized for me to get the required results. Just like you would optimize your own website, you have to do the same for your articles to attain the best, long term results. Do your keyword research and try to insert your keywords or varients of your keywords around three times every 100 words. Try and make the article as informative as possible. You must not write your article in a way that advertisers your service as the signature box is for that. Just provide pure information on a certain issue. Within your signature box you can place information about yourself, your website and a link back to your website. Make sure the anchor text on your link shows the keywords that your website in optimized for as the search engines will pick up the link and see that your anchor text keyword is relevant to your domain and to the keywords and content on your own website which will increase your rankings. Try and write your signature in the third person, as if its the actual site that is recommending you and your website as a valuable source for information and products related to the article. 3- Video Marketing - Video's are becoming increasingly popular as google is using them more and more within the search results to provide a more diverse search experience in which you can leverage to your own advantage. Once again you must treat this just as the same as article marketing and seo, in a way that your title and description will determine your videos exposure due to the search engine rankings using its relevance with the searches made online. Your title must include the keyword that you are targeting but you must make the title unique by adding extra wording. Once again make the video as informative as possible and then embed the video within a section on your website. In the description you would first add a link back to your website and underneath you would write a few relevant words that explain whats going on within the video. Do you keyword research to determine the best keywords to target for your video to maximise your efforts. 4- Social Bookmarking - The best thing about social bookmarking is the instant traffic boost that this provides as well as fast search engine rankings if used in the correct way. The best way to use this is with blogs or content rich websites that provide information on a certain subject. There is a free service out there called "Addthis" which is a project that has been developed that allows you to place a small button on your website that gives the chance for either you or your visitors to bookmark your website with over 50 different bookmarking sites. I have found excellent results bookmarking blog posts using digg and yahoo buzz as the search engines can display your bookmark within 10 minutes on the first page of google for certain search terms which is massive, instant results. Once again, treat your bookmark as an seo exercise. Optimize your bookmark for the keywords or phrases that you have researched. You will be suprised with the results after a while. The key is to make around 3 to 4 different bookmarks everyday with fresh content. You will soon see a drammatic increase of targeted traffic to your website. 5- Blogs and Domains - Search engines love blogs that are updated daily with fresh UNIQUE content that is relevant to the domain and meta tags. I will let you in on a little trick of mine. Have ever noticed that when you do a search, usually the top organic search result has the exact keyword as the domain name or at least has the keyword within the domain somewhere. Use the free google keyword tool to find long tail keywords within the subject of your website and see if the .com domain is available to register. Then install a blog on the domain and do your seo for at least four keywords that are relevant to your domain then post daily with informative articles that are relevant to your domain or subject. Within every post use your keyword at least once and link the keyword to your home page. Just like you would use the anchor text within an article signature, you can do this within your posts. Just once per post is enough. Always write two posts, one for your blog and another unique post for ezine articles that links to your blog. Between 250 to 400 words is enough. You can then link back to your main website by placing a banner somewhere within the widget section on the right. Dont link to your blog from your main website as this would be seen as a link exchange. Also use a different hosting account for your blog so the ip of your host is not the same as the one for your main site. This will then create relevany one way links to your main website that will increase your rankings. You can do this for as many long tail keywords as you like. Build up a network of around 10 blogs for each main site and you will soon realise the power. As you may be aware it would be hard work writing 2 posts per day for 10 blogs so you can outsource this from elance or other websites when your network of blogs increase. This is just 5 ways that can help you increase your targeted traffic and in turn help your business succeed. All the above is either free or very low cost so please add your experiences and methods below to help other small businesses increase traffic.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion i suppose. Depending on the individual and the level of experience would determine if a decision is made to build a business plan. If you are new to the certain business sector then you need to know exactly what to do, what you have done, the results and what you can implement to increase existing results. If you have alot of experience within a certain business sector then you may already know in your mind what needs to be done if you have made yourself a success already within it and just wish to expand.

Yes google adwords is an excellent source although someone that maybe new to the service could lose out big time due to not much experience. If your websites seo and relevance is not top quality then your cost per click increases due to quality score. Google adwords can help with your organic search results in the following way: Firstly you would optimize your site for your specific keywords, then you would write an advert for each keyword that has the keyword within the title. Due to the amount websites your advert displays on, the search engines that index the websites that show the adverts will see your advert and realise that your domain is connected and relevant to the keyword within the title of your advert. This gives you a better advantage as search engines will see your domain more relevant and in turn this will increase your organic search results.

I would have thought that your profit margin would depend on which package you would choose. At the moment on the select if you were to go for the £299/y package you would get a free upgrade to the £499 package which is great for beginners who are not fully aware of online marketing as this site offer dedicated marketing managers that will help you establish your presence on the internet. Not only will you have prices with upto 80% off retail, you also get a professional webstore with data feeds, also with a custom logo. Yes, Niche Products are the best to aim for and esources and alibaba would be great for this. PLEASE NOTE: Even though you can find products cheaper on ebay there are still millions of people who refuse to use it due to scams, bad experiences ect. If you are visible in the search engines for specific searches and have a good reputation, people will be willing to pay a few extra pounds for that piece of mind. Also if you hit a local market, many individuals feel alot safer knowing that customer support is close by.

Everyone is different, if you believe it would be beneficial to you then make a personal business plan. I prefer a to-do list so i know what i need to do, what i have done and how i can improve what has already been done.

Now ive got that off my chest i would like to apologize to those who see that quality business cards are important to their business. You see, i have never had much to do with business cards as the advertising i use is all online, seo + many other channels. Yes i do care about my business and its quality, i just dont use business cards. When clients have asked me in the past for this service i would always attain the cards from vistaprint. Obviously i went premium on the cards and 100+ people who recieved the cards from me via vistaprint were more than happy with them. I guess alot of other people can tell the quality. I found them fine but i dont know much about business cards and what else is available. Apologies for my rant......

Business cards mean nothing to me. If business cards did not exist it would not matter to me. I feel sorry for people been so passionate about something of very little importance. Because i prefer the cards offered by vistaprint does this mean i dont care about my business. Come on now. These are business cards.

To be fair, business cards are the last thing on my mind when it comes to advertising a business. Many individuals only buy them as it seems to be the first thing that people think off to generate business. Even though the majority of the cards people buy will never be handed out, people still seem to think that this would be a main priority. Yes you can post them door to door, hand them out in the street, offer them to family and friends but lets face it, business cards are not that important. The only effective way i have found business cards are useful for is if you have had a customer who has used your service and has provided excellent feedback, you can then send him 5 to 10 business cards in the post with a thankyou letter that allows him/her to offer the great service to friends and family. The chances are that because the person recommending this excellent service is handing over the business cards, the quality of the cards would not be important as his/her personal experience with the service would be enough to persuade the potential client to take action. In many cases, the best advertising you can get would be online for free.

In every business that i have run, it has been online as i dont believe in offline business due to too many risks so my plans are in my head, not on paper. I dont think i could get my head around an offline business. Online is way much easier and in most cases you dont even need to deal with customers as other companies do this for you. My business plan is simply, design, implement, monetize, advertise, increase conversion, profit, visit the bank. Im sure it is much more complicated offline.

This is business cards we are talking about people. No need to cry when a business card is a couple of mil thinner. Vistaprint cards are good quality, why do you think these guys are one of the biggest suppliers, because they deliver quality at the best price. If you have to have the best, top quality, high profile, gold plated business cards that your customers will probably sell on ebay then go ahead. Ill settle for vistaprint and spend the rest of my money on more effective advertising.

Although the best links are ones that you dont have to link back to, even if you exchange links it adds to the weight overall in the search engines. Free Text Link Exchanges are a great place to start, the only thing i would recommend is that you dont set any of your accounts to auto approve link exchanges. Only choose the sites that are relevant to your website. The link below will take you to the "text link exchange" search results. http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&source=hp&q=text+link+exchange For a free banner exchange try: http://ukbanners.com