How Marketing B2B Can Boost Your Home Business

How Marketing  B2B Can Boost Your Home Business

When you think of marketing your business, you may tend to think of marketing to individual consumers.  However, there is a lot to be said for marketing to other businesses.  A business can provide you with a steady flow of work and repeat sales, and you can also use marketing b2b (business to business marketing) as a way to generate new business leads.

Marketing  b2b simply means marketing your product or services to other businesses.  While some companies focus their entire marketing efforts into this category, the vast majority of businesses spend their time marketing to consumers.

An example…

When you take the time to market to other businesses, you are opening up a whole new client base for yourself.  For instance, if you are an event planner, you could market to an individual consumer and plan children’s birthday parties, family reunions, baby showers, and even weddings.

Marketing b2b benefits…

You could also market yourself to businesses and plan luncheons, product launch receptions, holiday parties, and other business functions.  This can offer you a much busier schedule than you would have had, if you were only marketing to consumers.  Plus, businesses may be willing to pay more for your services, thus allowing you to charge a higher rate.

Business to business marketing allows for a whole new way to network your business. Individual consumers are usually more than willing to refer you to anyone who specifically asks about the type of services you offer.

Another business owner, however, understands the importance of word of mouth advertising and may be more apt to bring your name up in conversation, rather than waiting to be asked about who planned their last event.

Continuing with the example of the event planner, other businesses would be attending many of the events you would be planning.  They, too, are in need of the services you provide and could see first hand the quality of the work you perform.  This alone, would be an excellent way to network with potential clients.

Business to business marketing can also add to your credibility. When you have worked with well-known businesses, this adds clout to your resume.  An individual consumer would be very impressed to see that you planned a luncheon for the town’s largest car dealership.  The simple fact that businesses also hire you could impress an individual consumer so much, that they would be willing to pay you a higher fee.

To generate the most “buzz” about your business, you will want to market your business in many different ways.  B2B marketing is another way to achieve your goal of creating buzz.

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4 Easy Steps to Creating Your Own Profitable Mailing List

4 Easy Steps to Creating Your Own Profitable Mailing List

Do you find yourself wondering how you can possibly create your own mailing list that will actually be profitable?  You may even be even be envying some online marketers who have huge lists and seem to be raking in all the cash.

I once thought you had to actually build a huge list to make any profit at all, but after building my first small list of subscribers, I soon discovered that you don’t have to wait until you have thousands on your list to start earning income.

You may be wondering, “Do I really need a mailing list?”

Offering your own newsletter or some type of free membership at your site will give you the opportunity to collect leads by placing a form on your site for interested visitors to insert their names and email addresses.

Let’s face it, you rarely get the sale the first time a visitor comes to your site.

How can you improve your chances of getting that visitor back to your site or getting them more interested in your product or service?

The answer is simply by offering them a reason to allow you to contact them in the future through email.

Here’s four easy steps to start creating your own profitable mailing list…

1.  Determine Who Your Target Market is Going to Be

The biggest mistake is not knowing “who” you’re targeting for your marketing campaign. Building a list of thousands of subscribers who are interested in baby items when you want to sell products for the elderly certainly isn’t going to produce much profit at all.

You’ll have quite the opposite affect when building a small, well-targeted list of interested subscribers who specifically have a need for elderly products. Once you’ve determine exactly who your target market will be, you will find that your mailing list indeed is becoming profitable long before your reach your first thousand subscribers.

2.  Create the Best Possible Content

This step is pure common sense, but many internet marketers become quite money hungry and soon forget that their site visitors and subscribers are seeking quality information.

Entice your visitors with great tips and articles that will actually help them. It’s not too hard to convince your site visitors to subscribe to your newsletter once they’ve had a taste of the quality information you’ve provided on your blog or website.

Once they subscribe, don’t jeopardize your trust by sending them tons of promotional emails. Keep promotion to a minimum and always make sure you’ve kept your word. If you’ve promised to only email a specific amount of times per month then stick to your word.

3.  Give Away a FREE Report and Over Deliver

As you probably know giving something free is the most common way to build your list. But, you can make even happier subscribers by over delivering. Tack on an extra bonus or an unexpected surprise or discount. Step your foot in the door by making a first good impression.

As an added tip, your free report should certainly entice the interest of your target market. Don’t offer a free report on losing weight if you’re targeting wahms who want to make money online.

4.  Generate Some Targeted Traffic

Now this step often stumps many newbie marketers. They build their sites and set up everything and wait for the results.  Soon, they discover there are no results because there are no visitors.

Truthfully, it’s not that complicated. To make profit one MUST have traffic. Your goal will be to gain exposure that will bring “targeted” traffic to your site. As a start, join groups or forums that are interested in your niche and get involved in their communities. Don’t bombard them with ads, but rather, be genuine and helpful.

There are numerous ways to market online with a very low budget. I suggested low budget because starting out you usually have limited funds. If this is your case, start off learning some basic internet marketing tactics. You’ll find article marketing, forum marketing, social network marketing, directory submissions and many other free advertising solutions available online.

Use this content on your blog or newsletter by including my bio below:

Rhonda White helps Work at Home Moms Learn to Market their Home Business.
Grab your FREE issue of “Mom’s Internet Marketing Advisor” at  MommyRevenue.com

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Additional Recommended Resource:

How would you like to grow your opt-in lists by the thousands every month – and get to a point where you couldn’t stop the new subscribers from coming in even if you wanted to! Click Here to Find Out How

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10 Ideas for Marketing Promotional Items

10 Ideas for Marketing Promotional Items

Promotional products are everyday products that you have personalized with your business name, logo, slogan, website address, or some other personalized greeting. You may even have some promotional items lying around your house from other businesses, such as coffee mugs, calendars, magnets, pens, and key chains.

Using promotional products in your marketing methods is a very smart move. People love to receive free items and will generally hold onto your item for a long time. Every time they see your item, they are getting a reminder about your business.

The following are some of  the best places for marketing promotional items, and the reason behind it…

* Your website: To generate some buzz, opt to hold a monthly giveaway on your website for one of your promotional products. To be effective, think about your target market and what they may like. If you have a website with information on cooking, you can give away an apron, a measuring cup, or a recipe holder.

* Other people’s websites: In addition to holding a monthly giveaway on your own site, find other non-competing websites and offer one of your products as a giveaway for their site. To be effective, the site should have a similar target market. It doesn’t make much sense to contact a bass fishing website and offer them an apron as a giveaway.

* Upgrade orders: Use promotional items to entice your customers to upgrade their orders. Going back to the cooking website example, you could offer a free apron to anyone who purchases two recipe ebooks. Send the ebooks as digital delivery, and simply send the apron through snail mail.

* Best customer: Another twist on this idea is to surprise your best customers with the promotional item. Go back through your records from the past year and send anyone who spent over $100 a little gift. This will show your appreciation and your customer will be so flattered they will continue to buy from you again and again.

* Best affiliate: If you have an affiliate program, sending your top affiliates a promotional item as a “thank you” is a great gesture. Your affiliates will be touched, and will work even harder to promote your products and services.

* Non-competing businesses: Non competing businesses can be a great source of referrals and word of mouth advertising. A non-competing business is a business with a similar target market as you have, but is one that doesn’t sell the same products as you do. For example, a virtual assistant and a graphic designer are non-competing businesses, as are hair stylists and make-up artists.

* Trade shows: Keep an eye out for any trade shows that may be coming to your local area. For example, a graphic designer or web designer may want to attend a computer show. You don’t have to rent a table; simply get a batch of personalized pens and hand them out instead of your business card when you meet a new person.

* Local businesses: Another idea is to make a list of local businesses you would like to work with and hand deliver them a promotional item, along with your resume, cover letter, and prospectus.

* Local media: Don’t be afraid to send some promotional items to your local media, such as your local radio and television stations. Go the extra mile and add some cookies or donuts. They may say an on-air thank you, and you will get some local exposure.

* Vacation spots: If you are heading out of town, grab some promotional materials and leave them in your hotel room, rest areas, and any other place you can think of. When you return home, you may have requests from every town you visited.

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20 Ideas for Budget Marketing

20 Ideas for Budget Marketing

Here are 20 ideas for marketing on a budget.  These ideas won’t cost you much, but will definitely yield some positive results if you stick with it.  Test and see which ones bring your the best results.

1.  Starting Your Own Blog

Blogs can give you instant credibility and allow readers to get a lot of information about your product or opportunity by reading your blog posts. The more popular and established your blog gets, the better. You can start with a free blog hosted by Wordpress and Blogger, but you will have much more control if you host your own blog on your own domain name.  Personally, I suggest using Wordpress software provided by most hosting companies.

TIP: You can get FREE Blog Installation Here

2.  Commenting on Blogs

Take time to comment on blogs related to your own niche to draw relevant traffic to your own site.  Check out these two directories: dofollowdirectory.com and dofollowblogs.com for some blogs that can help you create some quality backlinks to your site.

3.  Becoming a Guest Blogger

Blogging on another blog related to your niche can draw in more targeted traffic to your site.  Look for opportunities within your own social networks.  You can even offer to do an exchange with another blogger by allowing them to be a guest on your blog.

Tip: Blog Energizer is a great source for finding opportunities to become a guest blogger.

4.  Sharing Your Articles and Content

You can allow your visitors to use some of your blog posts for free content if they provide a link back to your blog.

Tip: You can get free backlinks to your site by submitting your articles (with your own links) to blog owners who are seeking free content. Click here to sign up for Free Traffic System.

5. Participating in Valuable Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are not as popular as they used to be but can still be worth your time if you find some quality websites which would be willing to exchange a link with you.

Tip: My best tip here is not to give your traffic away on your homepage.  Create a “resource page” or “partner page” to add your exchanged links.

6.  Marketing with Articles

Does article marketing really work? Well you’re reading this one aren’t you. Free online article directories allow you to post your articles easily and this type of marketing makes you an instant expert. You can write your own articles like many do or buy some private label rights articles.

Tip: Here’s 50 Article Submission Sites to get you started! (pdf)

7.  Marketing with Videos
Video marketing is one of the most popular ways to market online and for good reason, it’s extremely effective. There are countless free video uploading sites online.   The most popular is Youtube but there are numerous others that are definitely worth your time and energy.

Tip: Read one of MommyRevenue’s latest blog post on “How to Create Viral Videos on YouTube”

8. Participating in Forums Related to Your Niche

Want to talk to other people who are interested in making money from home? If so forum marketing is for you. Along with talking to potential prospects, you can also get a wealth of information and learn from other successful online marketers. The best part of forum marketing is it’s free and there are a ton of them out there so you won’t be limited.

Tip: The best tip I can suggest here is to choose forums related to your niche and be sure to utilize your signature profile to add your link if allowed. Don’t just post ads.  Get involved and be helpful. Here’s a free directory of forums to help you find forums in your own niche

9. Tweeting on Twitter

Twitter allows you to keep up with your fans and followers by posting different status updates whenever you want and once again it’s free!  I just recently joined Twitter myself and have found it a great marketing tool…and as a bonus it’s super fun once you get started!  In fact, it can become quite addictive.

Tip: Grab your free report from MommyRevenue, “Truth About Twitter Traffic” (pdf)

10. Taking Advantage of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows you to “bookmark” your favorite pages for others to see and take notice. By bookmarking your websites, articles, blog, videos and more you’ll get a lot more attention for your business and can get indexed in search engines much faster.

Tip: Here’s a list of the 20 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites

11. Taking Advantage of Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular websites online so it only makes sense this could be a useful tool for marketing on budget. There are many groups on Facebook devoted to making money online.  Join some and start chatting!

12. Taking Advantage of Myspace

Home based business owners have another marketing opportunity at Myspace, the highly-trafficked social network.

13. Creating Free Web Pages at Squidoo & Hubpages

By creating squidoo lenses or hubpages you can instantly get the word out about your website to these thriving communities and the rest of the web. Want to make the most of your Squidoo lens? Choose some keywords based on small niches as possible and it will get you noticed more and indexed in Google faster!  For instance, if you sell makeup, create some lenses on specific items.  Perhaps create one on helpful tips for applying eyeshadow, etc.

Tip: Use this method to gain some backlinks to your site, but don’t depend on Squidoo and Hubpages alone for marketing.  It’s wise to have your own main website to market your products and services.  Click here to start your first Squidoo Lens!

14. Answering Questions at Yahoo Answers

You can’t abuse it, but Yahoo answers can be a great place to find people who are frustrated with their job and ready to start working from home. There is a limit to how many times you can post per day and if you come off as a spammer you’ll get blocked but when used in moderation it’s awesome!

15. Submitting your Site to Directories

This is really worth your time! It will help you increase the pagerank of your site and allow you to have permanent backlinks to your site. There are many directories that allow free submission. Check out Directory Critic to start submitting to directories yourself.

Tip: If you hate the tedious task of filling in submission forms, use the service that I’ve used many times at Directory Maximizer, which will allow you to submit your website to numerous directories at very little cost.

16.  Building Your Own List (Email Marketing)

Most knowledgeable marketers realize that you may not get the sale right away. This is why list building can be very important.

You can offer your visitors a free report, ebook or a free discount code on available products if they sign up for your email list. Email your list once a week or at least once a month with some valuable tips and helpful information and they will become your loyal fans. You will then be able to sell future products to your list as long as you treat them with respect. In other words, don’t bombard them with sales pitches all the time. People very rarely tolerate this and consider it spam!

A free useful tool to start building your list is Feedblitz.com. You can also include your rss feed from your blog which will send automatic news updates from your blog to your subscribers.

Tip: Right now Rapid Response Bot is offering a discount on their upgraded version, but you can scroll down to the bottom and sign up for a FREE Account to manage your first 500 subscribers!  *Autoresponders make it easy to deliver your download links or ecourse automatically to your subscribers.

17.   Starting Your Own Affiliate Program.

An affiliate program is simply a method of sharing the revenue with your affiliates.  You give them a commission for sales from visitors that they send your way. With this setup, you don’t have to pay for incoming traffic.

Sharing commission is a wise option because it’s like having your own marketing team.  Paydotcom.com allows you to sell your first product free and you can easily set up your first affiliate program.  There are also some great software programs out there that will allow you to set up an affiliate program on your own domain name.

Tip: The best tip I have here is that you need to learn a little bit about affiliate marketing and offer your affiliates some training via articles or a report.   You also need to provide them with some marketing graphics and articles.  *SimpleAffiliateTraining has done the work in helping to train your affiliates if you want to take a peek.

18.  Upselling on your Thank You Pages and your 404 Pages

Don’t waste any space or opportunities.  Take advantage of every page on your site!

Tip: Sign up for this free Bonus and Upsell Management System at My Bonus Products.

19.  Utilizing Viral Marketing Tactics

Giving away free stuff is a great way to get people talking about your site.  I suggest you don’t go overboard with this.  Use a “good balance” of giving away some freebies to build interest.

Some freebie possibilities are:

Ebooks, Ecourses, Videos, Templates, Graphics, Software, Reports, Teleseminars, Web Conferences, Blog Giveaways for one of your products or services, etc.

Tip: Use this resource to give away useful software that has your own links to your site to build your list and bring in extra traffic. IMBuzzSoftware.

20.  Using Free Ad Sites to Gain Leads
Craigslist and Backpage are two popular ones.  You have to post in the right areas otherwise your ads will get deleted especially on Craigslist. That means posting in the small business section and not under “jobs”.

Free classified sites can help you get word out about your business, but don’t expect immediate sales from these ads. Instead, try offering some free information such as a free report to gather some leads.

Tip: The best tip I can offer you here is not to waste a lot of extra time on free ads.  There are much better methods to gain more traffic to your site.  Click Here to Get a Free Basic Listing at Mommy Revenue Classifieds.

To summarize my blog post here, I want to add that budget marketing is very worthwhile.  Just because it’s free or low cost doesn’t mean that it can’t produce great results.  This list is by no means the only marketing methods worth considering.  Please share below any marketing tips that you have utilized and reaped some worthwhile benefits.

Use this content on your blog or newsletter by including my bio info below:

Rhonda White helps Work at Home Moms Learn to Market their Home Business.
Grab your FREE issue of “Mom’s Internet Marketing Advisor” at  MommyRevenue.com

Twittering to Increase Your Internet Marketing Business

Twittering to Increase Your Internet Marketing Business

One of the newest and best free ways to market your IM business is by using a social networking site called Twitter.  Don’t overlook the value of this simple concept.  Twittering away is addictive and it can help you increase your business awareness online.

Twitter allows people to create a page for themselves and interact with other people by choosing to follow updates from other users. Twitter is basically a medium for people to connect with other people. You, as an Internet Marketer, can easily use Twitter to increase your Internet Marketing business.

It’s very easy to sign-up for Twitter. All you have to do is go to Twitter.com and follow the instructions. It will literally only take you a couple minutes to sign-up. Then, once you’re signed up you can begin twittering short messages of what you’re working on and what you plan to do next.

Twitter allows you to create a short profile about yourself and upload a picture. The site basically involves you typing what you are doing in a little box at the top of the page. Anyone who is following you will then see what you have typed. You can type in anything, including subtle marketing messages that will help to advertise your business and your products.

As with most social networking sites, SPAM is not allowed, so don’t even try it. Also, any blatant attempt to advertise will not go over well. If you want to keep followers then you will want to write quality posts and you’ll also want to be very slick with advertising.

How do you get people who will follow you? Unfortunately, you can’t make anyone follow you. However, you can follow others and then more often than not those that you follow will begin to follow you.

A great site to use to find people on Twitter is Twellow.com. Twellow will allow you to use keywords to find people on Twitter. So, you can search for keywords that are related to your business and then follow people who are connected to that keyword. Then, once you get a few people that you are following, you can look at
the people they are following and the people who are following them. Then you can choose to follow these people as well.

You should definitely use Twitter to increase your Internet Marketing business. It is free to use and it can be very effective. Just make sure you don’t use Twitter to SPAM your followers and also make sure you are very subtle with how you market your business and your products. If you use Twitter correctly then you will certainly reap the financial rewards.

For a free copy of “The Twitter Report” as well as some Twitter videos, check out:  Twitterhints.com