Launching a product to a new market – you need to know where that market is, and why they want your product. Only then can you effectively market to them.

Benefits of Market Research

For current business owners you can increase your communication with customers – The public can see you are taking an active part in finding out their needs and wants. Show them you are aiming to fulfill these needs and wants. They are more likely to remember you in future and buy from you again.

Both new businesses and established businesses can identify opportunities – By speaking with the public in regards to their wants and needs, you will find other areas that you had not thought of, that you could fulfill.

Minimize risk - By researching before you start your business, you can see if your product/service will sell. If it is obvious from the research that no one would buy your product/service, then you can change direction before you start, and thus save yourself a lot of time and money.

Measure your progress – By conducting Market Research at the start of your business, and then following this up again at a later point, you will be able to see from the responses how successful you are, and if you could afford to branch out into new areas.

Getting Started
Before starting Market Research, it is important to understand what you want out of this research. Do you want to know if your product will sell? Do you want to see how many other products are out there? Do you want to know if people are planning to continue buying this product/service, or if the market is moving in a new direction? There is nothing more annoying for potential customers to be harassed by people with no real reason in mind.
People are generally happy to help others. If you explain that you are trying to find out how people would react to a new product on the market, or simply if they would like it, most people would be more than happy to give you their opinion.

How to do it?
There are many different ways to conduct Market Research. If you are running an online business naturally you would use online resources. One of the best ways of doing market research is to create a survey and have people fill it in for you. A popular online survey website is Survey Monkey. You can create a free survey, and then forward the URL to people, which will take them to the website to allow them to participate in the survey.

There are many arguments as to whether you should request people to fill in the survey, or request people to fill in the survey and offer a free gift. You can offer a free e-book, article or product in order to entice people to fill in the survey. It depends on your personal preference (obviously if you do not offer a free incentive the numbers may not be as great completing the survey, but then the persons completing the survey may be more ‘real’)

Promote your Research
When you have a survey, you can get your family and friends to fill this in, but you can also promote the survey on social media websites. Promote this on Facebook, Twitter, and various other social media websites. This will give you a wide range of opinions from a wide range of people – ideal for Market Research. You could also used paid campaigns such as google Adwords.

Analyze, Analyze, Analyze!
Once you have the information, it is essential that you do something with it. Firstly sort the information into categories. The easiest way is to do this is in a spreadsheet. You can filter people by demographic, or by the responses people gave you. Create a graph of the results. It is an easy way to see the density of the answers.
Finally, use this information to adjust your product/service, rethink the product/service all together, or charge ahead with promotion.

Market Research is essential for every business. Always take the opportunity to ask your customers opinions and use the feedback to your best advantage.

Getting Started
When you have a product or service that you are marketing online, one of the best ways to do this is through email.
Email marketing involves creating and sending emails to opt-in subscribers (a person who has given permission to receive emails from you). These subscribers become your online database.

Success in Five Steps –

1.Build your list. The best way to do this is to have a sign up function available in your blog, or your website where you are promoting your product. If people like your blog/website, they will sign up for more information.
2.Provide an incentive to sign up. Offer a free trial of your product/service, a free newsletter, or a free gift. Your subscribers need a reason to give you their details.
3.Start sending out your emails to your database on a regular basis. Send a variety of emails, and do not send a sell in every email. Research has shown that the best days to initially send emails are days 0, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 then every two weeks following. During your two week cycle send on a Tue or Thursday, and the best times are normally between 10am and 2pm.
4.Make sure you have an opt-out option. You want to make sure that if people choose not to get emails from you anymore, they can have them stopped. You can achieve this via an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
5.Never spam! Spamming is when you are sending emails that someone has not signed up to receive.

Following these simple steps will enable you to create your own online database.

Database Security
When compiling a database, it is crucial that you are careful about how you utilize your subscribers details. You must ensure that you have up-to-date security software to ensure that you do not allow access to unauthorized people to your database.

Make Internet Marketing easy! Market your product via email and get the results you want.

One of the most exciting things for an Internet Marketer is Domain Name Shopping. The excitement of having a new domain, all to yourself is awesome. But what are the things that you need to consider when choosing a domain name?

Where is the domain to be located?
This means, where is the world are you? This directly related to your domain. If your business is located in Australia, for example, then you would look at getting a .com.au domain. If your business is global, then a .com or .net would be best.

The specific reason for this is that Google looks at searches and domains globally and locally for relevancy. If you have a .com website such as www.makeup.com, and a competitor has the website www.makeup.com.au (and both sites were equal in their SEO efforts), and a searcher in Australia searches for makeup, Google will present the .com.au address as it is related to the location. It is most relevant to the person in Australia.

This means it is very important to consider your business and your location before you buy your domain.

Does .com rule?
When looking at buying a domain name , always try and get the .com (or .com.au) before the .net. This is because .com has been around for longer than .net. People think “.com” more easily than “.net”. If both .com and .net are available, it is worth getting both and redirecting the .net to the .com. But remember in every circumstance, SEO efforts will see the domain ranked best.

Keyword Research
When buying a domain, it’s essential to make sure that the domain is viable. Make sure there is a relevant and popular keyword that is related to your business, in the domain name. The shorter the keyword, the better. Thorough research will pay off with a catchy and memorable domain for your business.

Take the time to peruse and purchase domains – doing your research can mean profitable domain names for you!

Backlinks to your website/blog is essential for good SEO. And as we know – good SEO means a top Google search engine position. So backlinks are important – but how do you get backlinks?

Backlinking is basically placing your URL on a site so that people can click through on this link and be taken to your website.

So where can you put your link? Backlinking isn’t like graffiti – you can just trawl the net and then place your URL like a tag everywhere. You need to be decisive about where you put your link to ensure optimum success.

There are many ways that you can create backlinks – and we will look at three here:

Forums
Web 2.0 pages
Blogs

Forum
All  you need to do here is find a forum that is relevant to the topic of your website/blog. Join, read through posts and then add comments where appropriate. When you leave a comment, ensure you have set up your signature and that your URL is in your signature. This way, each time you make a post, your URL is posted – thus backlinking to your website/blog!
Ensure that your posts are relevant, helpful and add something to the forum. One word answers and pointless questions will not show you in a good light, and people will not click through on your link.

Web 2.0 pages
These are pages such as Squidoo or Hub pages. These are like a cross between a website and a blog. Search through the Squidoo and Hub page websites for pages that are relevant to you website/blog topic area. Some of the pages may have room for comments. Leave comments as appropriate, and always remember to leave your link!
When making comments, ensure that you are writing something positive. If you write negative comments about someone’s page, they are unlikely to approve your comment and your efforts will be wasted.

Blog
This is similar to Web 2.0 pages – simply search for blogs that are relevant to your website/blog area, read through the posts, and then make comments as appropriate, remembering to add your link. Backlinks done!
As with Web 2.0 pages, make sure that you write appropriate and positive comments. Negative and useless comments will not be approved by the blog writer!

Backlinking is easy if you know how to do it. Make the effort to backlink correctly, and the link will payout well into the future!

For information about affiliate marketing why not check out www.theWebonaire.com/home

In the all the excitement of providing good content, affiliate marketing, social media marketing and traffic generation, sometimes you can forget your SEO focus. Everyone needs a good SEO refresher – and here’s yours!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process designed to have you ranking number 1 in the search engines for a particular keyword. As far as being and Internet Marketer this is one of your key tasks. Not only does this unable you to drive more traffic to your website, it also builds your reputation.

When doing the SEO on your website – you need to ensure that you SEO is consider ‘White Hat’ – and not ‘Black Hat’ SEO.

Fundamental SEO

Ranking number one takes consideration and consistency – in the following areas:

Onpage SEO – This is where you make changes physically to your website and your website code to ensure that your site ranks highly. Changes can be:

• Add your keyword into the title
• Keyword is at the beginning of your meta description
• Bold your keyword in the post/webpage
• Italicize your keyword in the post/webpage
• Underline your keyword in post/webpage
• Link back to the page via the keyword during the post/webpage
• Tag your pictures with your keyword during the post/webpage
• Approx 5 keywords in the tags

Offpage SEO – These are things that are not on your own website that you can work on to ensure your website ranks well. This includes:

• Linking (Relevant external and internal links)
• URL signature
• Forum commenting
• Social media

These are the SEO basics. There are many other ways that you can promote your website to ensure that it is ranking well with the search engines. Staying up to date and on the pulse of current techniques and strategies is essential to ensure your success.

Refresh yourself often on the basics of SEO and ensure you stay at number 1!

Adsense is advertising provided by Google. Basically, Google puts ads on your blog or website. Simple!

What are the specifics of Adsense? When you have a blog or website, you can sign up to Adsense through your gmail account and then register for advertising.
What does this mean? It means that you are allowing Google to place advertising on your website – which you profit from.

Each time someone clicks through on a Google ad appearing on your website/blog, you earn!
So this also leads to the point – traffic generation – it’s very important to have regular and fresh traffic to your website and blog, not only for your great content, but also to click on your links.

The amount that you earn varies. You can earn from 40c per click through to $30 per click. It all depends upon the ads that are appearing on your website.

For ads for fishing tackle boxes or craft supplies you might be earning around the 40c mark. For credit cards and law firms you might be earning $30+.

However, the Adsense ads are targeted by two factors: By the keywords on the page and by site selection.

So if your website or blog is about fishing, Google will not place ads for banks and law firms on you site. And vice-versa. Google controls what ads appear where. And it is a helpful thing too. You need to have subject specific advertising on websites or you will not have people clicking through. The ads will not be of interest to them, and they will therefore not click on them. Even worse, inappropriate ads may turn readers and visitors off as they may see the website as miss-directed.

Adsense is one of the leading ways to create an income from your blog or website. Try out Adsense and find out!

There are many benefits to creating an affiliate income. Firstly, you can make extra money. Secondly, if you are interested and dedicated, you can replace your current income with your affiliate income. This will enable you to work whenever, wherever you want. Thirdly, you can promote products you know, trust and believe in.

Many people start affiliate marketing to earn extra cash. As you start, you create a small amount of money, this gives you a great feeling of success. Affiliate marketers that are consistent and dedicated to the promotion of their products will soon see ever increasing results and income.
Affiliate marketing can be transformed into a home business as it can easily replace your current income. Having a home business is a great way to create the lifestyle that you want. Working from home, when and where you want, and working for yourself.
A great tip when starting out in affiliate marketing is that you should choose products to promote that you know and trust. This will make promotion of the product much easier and enjoyable.

So how do you find affiliate products to promote?

You can find products in affiliate marketplaces, such as Commission Monster, Commission Junction and Clickbank. These providers list many of the major world wide companies and their products.
Another way to find affiliate products is to join affiliate programs such as The Webonaire. These programs provide you with a product, training on how to promote the product and ongoing support to ensure you succeed.

Creating an affiliate income is easy – and there are many options out there for you to get started.
Decide what type of product you would like to promote, and then go for it!

Targeted Tweeting

It’s one thing to write a killer copy – sure to convert millions, however, if you are tweeting this to your followers, and they are not interested in your product/service – the message will fall on deaf ears.
So how do you get targeted followers?
Firstly you need to ensure that you have twitter following links available on your website/blog and every other social media outlet that you have. You need to make yourself available to the customers that have already landed on your page. They may not have purchased from you, however, encouraging them to sign up to your twitter announcements ensures that they will hear of every offer and killer copy that you tweet.
Next, when completing various other traffic generation techniques, such as blog commenting or forum commenting, instead of directing people each time to your website, try directing them to your twitter.
Also, check out your target area on twitter. See who is tweeting about your topic – and follow them. Not every person who is following this person will be targeted, but you will be opening yourself up to a range of people who could benefit from your targeted tweeting.

Convert with your Copy

With 140 characters it can be hard to write a good copy message. Sometimes it’s too short, other times too long – particularly if you are trying to add a link. It goes without saying that any link you add in should be a shortened link through a provider such as bit.ly.
Before writing your message consider the main point of the tweet. Are you informing your list about a new product? A sale? Whatever it is, ensure you use easy to understand words that are related to your message. If you need inspiration, try looking at the copy cuts that some magazines have on the front. These are short character messages that are designed to draw people in and buy the magazine.

Targeted tweeting does take some time to set up – however it is very valuable in the long run. Ensure that your killer copy isn’t wasted.

Video marketing is basically creating a video of yourself, then posting this to your website/blog, and submitting it to the various online video outlets. When submitting the videos, naturally you include all your SEO rules in order for the video to be ranked well.

What do you film yourself doing?
You should make it relevant to your product or service. If you have an online business in wedding dresses, then you should make a video informing people about the different material types used in wedding dresses. This is relevant and useful information for people in your market.
You could also create a video series of tips . For example, you could have a video series about the 10 steps you need to go through to choose the perfect wedding dress. Each tip is useful, and will have people searching and looking out for the next video. Again, each video has appropriate SEO and link backs to ensure that people are directed to your website.

You can also create a video every now and again letting people know about your business and business updates. If there has been a new staff member added, a new product line, the business has had success – anything of this nature will let people see more of your business and create trust for the customer.

You can submit the video to various video outlets such as YouTube, Metacafe, Video Surf, Google Videos, and Tube mogul. You should also ensure that you put the video’s up on your webpage and blog, and push the video through your social media outlets.

Video marketing is the connection tool for 2010. Do the best for your business and jump on board the trend.