Your online business, Part 6

You did it: you picked, chose, waded through a lot of hype and verbiage. You analyzed, ran a whois, did your homework, asked questions. You then made a decision and “found” that business just for you or the affiliate program you believe in. Phew. All done. So, now what?

Start by making a plan, a daily or weekly agenda and then stick to it. While you may not have a lot of inventory overhead, stock to deal with, employees to pay and etc, you KNOW YOU MUST PROMOTE! In fact, that will be your single most costly item in terms of both time and money. Even if you find tons of free resources, you STILL MUST SPEND DEDICATED TIME using those tools and resources to bring in visitors to your website. Any site which tells you otherwise IS LYING TO YOU. Period.

As discussed earlier, any enterprise depends on some kind of marketing, promoting or advertising to bring in business: this includes WORD OF MOUTH. That, is marketing as well. On line, you have many different resources to choose from and a well balanced marketing campaign includes a little bit of everything! So, you will want to do some email marketing, ffa posts, run your sites on traffic exchanges, find some good adboards and etc.

And, while you will find good free resources, you will also want to purchase resources as well. These are some of the more “traditional” tools you will want to have in your marketing arsenal:

1. Safelist “Submitter”. You want a good, commercial type submitter that offers lots of features including: auto join, auto validate BOTH contact and list addresses, auto submit ads, banners and mailbox cleaners.
http://xtreamsubmitter.safelisthosting.us/is a good example of a email center that features all the above and many other “value added” resources. One of the major considerations of belonging to a submitter is that you need two “pop3” mailboxes. Your typical web based mailbox like yahoo, msn, aol, and gmail will not work for submitters.

2. Adblasters. These typically blast to lists and members and do not require email “validations.” http://2xoptin.com/blastomatic/cgi-bin/main.cgi?Xtreamnet is an excellent adblasting tool that is highly affordable.

3. FFA Submitter. There are many good ones out on the net. These are basically huge “classified” boards which people post their ads and sites on for free. I am especially partial to Massive FFA Submitter which is included in your http://xtreamsubmit.msnethosting.com/ membership. Another good board is found here: http://www.easyblaster.com/links_inc.php?ref=74

4. Daily leads from Pro FFA boards. These are the emails of people who posted their sites and ads on FFA boards. These are both good FFA sites:
http://xtreamffa.msnethosting.com/ and Massive FFA.

5. Safe lists. If you belong to a submitter, you will belong to hundreds of these. But if you are not ready for that kind of financial commitment or are still testing the waters, here are several good ones which are free to join:

http://www.xtream.safelist2go.us/list.php
http://www.listbank.net/sl/Paid2Read_Safelist/
http://xtreamsurf.safelist-nation.com/

6. SafeAdLists. Unlike “traditional” safelists, you do not need the big pop3 mailboxes. SAL sites house the ads on the site itself, meaning you log onto the site to view and then post your ads.
http://www.impressions-hosting.com/Xtream/admin/login.php

7. Ad boards like Search Estate. http://www.searchestate.com/uws/mn1233805.htm These are free, give you a website in which to promote all your affiliate sites, and also “billboards” that appear on the search engine page.

8. Traffic Exchanges. These are sites where you “exchange” ads. You post your site and receive credits to run them by viewing other member sites. These are very effective resources to get your sites actually “seen” by people. http://www.xtreamsurf.com

9. Blogs. Short for (we)Blog, these are basically magazines or journals in which members post “articles” concerning what ever is the specialty of that particular Blog. These are great mediums for finding information and resources. http://xtreamsurf.blogspot.com/ , http://xtreamnet.blogspot.com/

- Cherie Halliday
http://xtreamsubmitter.safelisthosting.us/