Get Prime Rib Leads On A Hot Dog Budget

Online marketing is an art and a science. It is imperative that you, as a marketer, understand both components. To err on either side will cost you hundreds and thousands of dollars before you can click through to your on-line banking account!

Knowing this, there are several things that a marketer can do to create an advertising campaign that will drive targeted, inexpensive traffic to your goods and services. The first thing to realize is that online marketing is a numbers game. Accept it. It is a natural force of the Internet. Your job is to plan, track results, tweak, track results again and so on until you have found an acceptable spot to put your campaign on autopilot.

The art of Internet marketing is to creatively find ways to generate as many targeted leads as possible. This requires creative copy, creative avenues of distribution of your information and creative ways to stretch your advertising budget and time.

The purpose of this article is to give you a couple of proven ways to do all of these things and increase your odds of success in your online marketing campaign. Let me start with a caution about some things that do not work and/or are an inefficient use of your time and money. Some examples are free classified ads, creating an expensive website and simply parking it on the web, buying cheap leads of prospects that don't have any want or desire for YOUR goods and mass distribution software. There are many more, but the general point is that you can spend a lot of time and money generating traffic that isn't looking for what you have.

The fist way to create FREE leads that can be extremely targeted is through article submissions. The only thing this costs you is your time, and with a little practice you can become quite efficient. Articles can expose you to thousands of potential readers who are interested in your targeted topic of discussion. Once someone has taken time to read your article, they are now a much more qualified lead. Here are the major components of successful article submission:

1. Create a unique and interesting headline. You have a few seconds, at most, to catch someone's attention about what you have to say. Your title should receive the majority of your focus and creative juices.

2. Provide valuable content. It doesn't have to be rocket science, but it should be content with a new twist, personal application, step-by-step instructions, etc.

3. Write as an expert. Whether you think so or not, you are an expert in many areas whether it is through unique knowledge, study or personal experience.

4. Create keyword rich content. The most inexpensive traffic available is called "organic" traffic. Organic traffic is unpaid search listings that Search Engines provide as a result of its "crawling" registered web sites. These crawling programs (crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or "robots". Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the Search Engine database where it goes to find pertinent information for the various searches. As a general rule, your keyword should be used up to, but no more than 3% of the total word count in your article.

5. Do not use marketing type verbiage. Your article is NOT a sales letter. Prospective leads are looking for information. They do not want to be "tricked" into a sales pitch. You must have the reader's desire for valuable applicable knowledge as your top priority.

6. Keep the length of your article to about 300-1000 words. Write in short manageable paragraphs that are easy to read.

7. Only submit your article to sites with an Alexa rating of 50,000 or more. Anything less does not generate enough traffic exposure. You can find the Alexa ranking of any site by visiting www.alexa.com.

8. Give readers a way to contact you: direct them to your website, email address and/or telephone number. Here are some good places to submit your articles. Most all of them are free. Submit to several of them at a time to increase your exposure: www.goarticles.com, www.freesticky.com, www.ezinearticles.com, www.isnare.com, www.articlecity.com, www.submitcontent.com, www.articlesbase.com, www.articledashboard.com, www.articlemarketer.com.

Another free and very time efficient way to generate targeted traffic is through press releases. Press releases are a great way to expose you to massive amounts of free advertising. Typically, press releases are issued to announce things like a new product, new breakthrough, record sales, release of new information. Your press release should not read like an advertisement. What you do want to do is solve a problem, be controversial or position yourself as having something unique and different.

Again, the headline needs to catchy. There are editors out there looking for information that is valuable to their readers. You won't even get the chance to convince publishers that your information is valuable if the title doesn't lure them to read further. Always write in third person when crafting a press release, and keep the length to no more than a page.

If you are in network marketing, you should look into the advertising policies of your company carefully. They will most likely have restrictions about using the company name, specific names of products and contact with media.

You can still craft a compelling press release without violating any of those restrictions. For instance, you may have a network marketing business in the wellness industry. Instead of writing about XYZ Company's new product called XXXX, you might write about the new studies that have been done on its main active ingredient. Or, you might write about a breakthrough treatment for whatever condition XXXX treats. You can then have any interested reader contact you for more information. The results of this type of advertising are very targeted informed leads that cost you the price of a fax at most.

A few places where you can submit free press releases on the web are: www.prweb.com, www.free-press-release.com, www.i-newswire.com and www.prleap.com.

The name of the game in online marketing is get the most targeted leads for the least amount of time and money. Articles and press releases are the two best ways that I have seen to accomplish this task when you are in the beginning stages of learning the ropes of internet marketing.