Where to start for a newbie?

Pens, fridge magnets, car signs, all do work, and are worth it!

I have received a few customers from just my pens alone! All I have is my company name, and a website on the pen.

A family member recently bought a coffee at starbucks in another city, and the cashier gave her MY PEN! How it got there, I have no idea.

Pens travel from person to person (people tend to "steal" them), and people always LOVE free pens!

Don't just focus on online advertising. Focus offline too!!!

Cheers!!!

Hi Gina,
Yes, it can be confusing! Generally, when writing articles the goal is to provide information that a reader will find useful. . . the more informative the article, the better. To give you an example of how writing such an article can promote your website, consider an article directory site like http://EzineArticles.com. When you post an article to this site, there is a "Resource Box" into which you can enter a link to your website and your promotional blurb. When someone reads your article, they see your link and may click on it. That is how you get website traffic. The EzineArticles.com site has a lot of tutorials and editorial guidelines to help you get started. Registration is free. Hope this is helpful.

onestopshop,
Writing articles is a way to advertise free. You can use any of the free online article directories, but the best one is Ezine Articles. If you google EA you can check out a few articles and see if it's something that would interest you. Also called bum marketing.
Sonni

I am such a newbie, I don't even know where to start. I've joined blog sites, ezine sites, made web sites...and I'm still trying to figure out how they all relate to each other. My mind is spinning. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Rvmama: I am such a newbie, I don't even know where to start. I've joined blog sites, ezine sites, made web sites...and I'm still trying to figure out how they all relate to each other. My mind is spinning. Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Hi Rvmama,

Welcome to the forum. I find your post a bit confusing, but I'd like to help you if I can. If you have done all the things you list, but don't have any understanding of how they relate or why you did them, you really need to stop.

It's not just your mind that is spinning. You are spinning your wheels and wasting your energies, too.

You don't necessarily have to understand every single thing you do (I certainly don't), but you should understand the basics and know why you are doing what you are doing and what you are aiming to accomplish. Obviously I mean more than the standard 'make money' response.

We all started somewhere, so it's natural to feel confused and overwhelmed, but you want to have a goal to reach and easy to follow instructions and steps that will guide you in the right direction.

Here's one pointer to start with. Don't say in your signature link 'see how I make $300 a day' unless you really are doing that. It doesn't give you any credibility, which is important online. It's okay to have a signature link, but keep it honest. You'll get much farther that way.

Secondly, try to decide what direction you want to go in and then stick with it. For me, I started out like you trying to do a whole bunch of different things that I read about and didn't have a clue what I was doing, why I was doing it, or if it was going to get me anywhere. Just for the record, it didn't!

After a couple of months of spent energies, I ran across some free materials (in my sig.) that helped me get an understanding of the direction I wanted to go in. I decided I wanted to build a niche topic website and make money through affiliate marketing.

Having settled that in my mind, I went with what I now consider to be the best program on the net for accomplishing that, SBI. I didn't know if they'd live up to their claims at the time I joined, but after a bit of research I decided to give it a fair try. Whew! I'm glad I did.

I tuned out everything else that was pulling at my attention and just focused on following their instructions and building my chocolate site. I learned to understand the what, when, why, and how of all those things that plagued me early on.

I'm no expert yet, but I've come a long way and continue to grow and learn as I build my online business. It's so refreshing.

So, stop, take a few deep breaths and consider what it is you want to accomplish and then find out how to do that one thing. If it's building a niche website, I'm happy to help answer your questions.

If it's blogging, or article marketing, or something else, find someone in the forum who is doing that successfully and ask them how they learned. Most of the folks here are really friendly and happy to help.

Wishing you long term success.

Blessings,
Angie

happywife!

Thank you so much for the quick response. I will take your advice and 1) correct my signature and
2) concentrate on areas I am familiar with and hopefully, it will start to make sense! Thanks again!

You don't necessarily have to stick with something you are familiar with, but tackle one thing at a time and get an understanding of it.

Ask questions as you need to.

Blessings,
Angie

Great advice, madnawat and others. Besides all these technical things, a passion and persistence are the keys to success.

don't forget and add RSS subscription to your blogs!

does RSS directories submission works anyone try that?

That's a new one for me. I have no understanding what RSS is or how to use them. Advice?

Anyone needing marketing tips and so on may want to try http://becanada.com
They give you plenty of marketing tips, where to post ads, and all kinds of material FREE. Just so no one gets the wrong idea, I'm not an affiliate or anything like that. I use a lot of there stuff to do my marketing with and have great results.

Rvmama:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication), for a marketers intents and purposes, is a way to build your website traffic and regular visitors virally (one person gets your newest blog post, after subscribing to your RSS feed, and recommends it to another person and so on) and keeps people coming back to your page. Repeat visitors is what is going to make your site a huge success.

If your blog host doesn't already offer visitors a feed for your site, you can add this yourself. There are several popular RSS and Atom feed generator sites, but the most relied upon is Feedburner.com.

Let me know if you need help getting your feed onto your site. You can even create multiple feeds for different sections of your site or have one for each regular feature you write.

You should submit your feeds to Google and other search engines, just as you would submit your sites pages.

Sasha

sashawk:

thanks for the fast response. It's yet another thing I must learn! It's going to take me a lot longer then I thought to get this up and rolling, but I'm not giving up. Thanks again.

HI Rvmama,

Here is a link to two articles I found for you.
In no way am I affiliated, just trying to help.
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175271


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

I hope it is okay for me to post for educational purpose..
VBctoria

No problem. Let me know if you have any more temporary road blocks.
"Mile-by-mile it's hard but inch-by-inch anything's a sinch."

Sasha

Well said madnawat
Those are most excellent ways to promote a site.

And might I suggest for the nitty-gritty money-makers is to create your own Lead Capture Page w/ built-in Auto-responders.

Your 3 Main Focuses should be to:
1. Build A List
2. Build A Relationship With People On That List
3. Market To The List

And Keep Things Simple!

Good Luck,
Dario M.

I am having the same issue

It seems that many newbies start out on a really tight budget and are told to post free classifieds. That's okay advice but because these sites are free they are inundated with ads and people get discouraged because of the lack of results. I definitely agree that forums are a great way to get your website seen.
Also, niche marketing is great. What are your interests? You can use a software like stealthfriendbomber to do a lot of friend requests on sites like myspace and invite people with similar interests to your channel. Also, if you can, personalize your site. I teach my team to put their own audio and videos on their site. Generic sites that the company gives you just seem to get lost in the masses. Look at leaders in your industry and see what they have done to brand themselves and make their websites stand out. Mimic success.

lots of great advice... thanks for all those who have contributed. I'm new to the whole internet marketing arena and this has helped alot

Website promotion is a time consuming task unless you have the means to outsource Quality Information.
Social bookmarking will allow the search engines to quickly pick up your new website.
A few articles with the top two article directories initially...then change the title each time and submit to the rest .
Forums specific to the theme of you website are excellent a providing you quality backlinks that google bots love...and by placing your details in the signature file ,other members often find what they may consider hidden Gems.
All of the above take time and persistence ,but they do work and results will come...Good Luck