With marketing budgets facing significant reductions across the board, each dollar spent needs to do more. This is only possible when you think about your most effective marketing campaigns and scaling those activities to achieve true success. When times are difficult for marketing budgets, improving performance is a must.

Do more with your shrinking marketing budget. This is easily done when you consider the power of viral marketing. The purpose of viral marketing is to leverage others – customers, prospects, friends, and connections to help you sell your products and services. Here are a few other ideas you can use to jump start your marketing.

Leverage all of your assets. As a business, are you leveraging every customer interaction you have? Whether it is on the phone, face-to-face, or over the Internet, how frequently do you use that opportunity to ask about other needs or pain points?

Start a referral campaign. You’d be amazed at how many companies do not have a standard procedure for acquiring referrals. It’s simple to begin a referral campaign. The quickest way is to simply ask your previous customers for the contact information of others who might benefit from your product or service.

The media is the message. Communication takes many forms. When sending bills or putting merchandise in a shopping bag, consider adding a flier or promotional offer that entices buyers to come back or visit you online. The key is to keep the dialogue going and provide customers incentives that keep them coming back.

Keep testing new things. Especially in tough times, it is very important to dedicate a portion of your budget toward trying new marketing methods or ideas. Even if it is just ten percent of your budget, all it takes is one success idea to have a significant impact on your lead flow or revenue.

Improving ROI doesn’t have to be difficult. When considering where your successes were in the past, you can probably recall some simple campaigns that produced the greatest return and cost next to nothing. Consider all the different ways that you can recruit others to help you sell. How can you leverage your existing campaigns to bring in more money with less? The key is to focus on the tried and true, make some minor tweaks, and measure the results. Rinse and repeat.

One final idea to consider. Take a closer look at your website. Can you do more to attract visitors and have them provide some information about themselves? This could be access to a free instructional video or ebook. As the economy worsens, people are looking for more free information and helpful advice. So give it to them. The result will be a trusting relationship. When they have money, they will buy from your versus your competitors.

Sent by: Orville Popcorn Popper. Keywords and key phrases relevant for a certain domain make the fundamentals the pay-per-click advertising model. There is a certain bidding price for every keyword, and this price varies according the level of demand for the specific keyword. From this point of view the margin profit can be higher or lower depending on the rest of the techniques used in association with this approach of pay per click search engine submission. Submission works as a more rapid identification opportunity even if the site would eventually get detected.

Pay per click search engine submission thus implies a variety of processes that include SEO, keyword choice and page ranking. Things are definitely complex given the fact that the electronic market depends on a certain technological level.

The PPC advertising system is one option business owners have to promote a product or service, but it is surely not the only one available. Most experts recommend a careful marketing analysis of the most relevant and suitable options for the support of the promotional campaigns.

Further on, if we consider the progress made by search engines in terms of development, sites no longer require submission.

Ever since 2004, search engines have been developed to the extent of being able to identify new web sites a lot more quickly than ever before. With this new capability, the PPC search engine submission stopped being a necessity and turned into an option to be used at will. However, the examples of former-popular practices that are now redundant can go on. This could very well happen to search engine submission as well, since the efforts to make a site more visible by such means often represents a violation of the service protocol.

The sitemap method that stood at the basis of pay per click search engine submission was somehow invalidated by the introduction of the Google Sitemaps in 2005. The new facility allowed web developers to submit only links instead of sites that enabled search engines to detect the web pages quickly and without the web developer’s interference. Since 2007, XML sitemaps have been massively endorsed by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN being widely applied for web page identification and display on search result pages.

After writing a book about SEO and even publishing my own SEO products and services, I still seem to get the same question over and over again. That question is simply what the secret is to top search engine rankings. Other than applying SEO best practices, there are really only a couple of SEO techniques that stand above all else.

I consider some SEO techniques to be true secrets because they are not generally talked about or shared by others. You might wonder why this is. Simply put, there are a number of reasons why these secrets are not shared and it often has to do with the fear that as more use these secrets the less effective they will be.

Anyone constantly focused on SEO and you are anything like me, you probably want the fastest and quickest way to put your website on top of major search engine rankings. You know the value of having the number one position and want to get there.

As someone making a living online, I can promise you that having the top ranking for competitive keywords is all it is cracked up to be. The difference between a number one ranking and number 4 ranking is the difference between making a living online and making next to nothing.

I’m sure by now you are wondering what some of these secrets are. I am happy to share one at no charge. Keep in mind that not every secret is all that esoteric or unique. It is more common that these secrets are traditional methods applies in a new way. That is how I view SEO related information because its rare that you find something that is all that new or different. More often than not, techniques are simply modified to get a result.

The secret is simple. If you want to achieve number one rankings for any keyword, then you simply need to follow the same strategy being used by the top ranked website for that keyword. Does this technique sound too simple? If you answered yes, then I ask you to ask yourself if you are using it today. This technique may be simple but it is not easy. To be as successful as the number one ranked website you need to discover what he is doing to be ranked number one. Top rankings do not happen by chance.

The best place to start is by analyzing the links into your competitor’s website. These are referred to back links and carry a lot of weight when thinking about SEO. These third party links often contain link text that includes the keywords you want to rank highly for. Contact these websites and attempt to have them link to your website in the same manner.

The key to success is to find all of the sites linking to your competitor and then get links to your website from the exact same sites. The obvious challenge is finding who is linking to your competitor and then getting links to your site from the same web pages. The good news is that there are tools that can help you do this. In fact there are tons of them and some work better than others.

By duplicating this technique, learning which sites are linking into your competitor, you can significantly enhance your website ranking. This can be done for one keyword or many. This takes a good deal of work so begin researching the inbound links to your competitor and start your link building campaign using the sites they use. Your SEO results with improve quickly.

As all website owners know, the more sites linking to yours, the higher your search engine rankings will be. What everyone may not know is that there are many ways to get links.

Here are the top 10.

1. Either submit your site to directories or hire a service to do so (it is quite inexpensive). Concentrate on the directories in your niche and directories with Google PR of 4 and above.

2. Submit to classified ad websites. Many are free.

3. Request link exchanges with other webmasters. This takes persistence, but is worth it if you have a reasonable success rate.

4. Do some podcasting.

5. Make a few simple videos and submit them.

6. Register at social bookmarking and other social sites.

7. Utilize press releases. Several services are available to assist you, some at no cost.

8. Become a blogger. Write at least two articles a month, and link from your blog to your website. This is a “must” activity. If you’re not blogging you’re not trying.

9. Do some article writing, and distribute your articles to article distribution sites. There are lots of services and sotware tools to help automate the process. This is the single fastest single way to obtain lots of links. Can’t write? Do a search for “article writers”.

10. Make appropriate comments on blog sites and forums. Note the word “appropriate”.

Of course, you do not have to engage in all of the activities above. Just pick a few and be persistent; if you do, you will be rewarded.

So let’s take a few minutes to do a quick review of some of the main online marketing strategies that you can use to promote your site. The fact is that you need to be doing multiple things if you’re really going to see some long term success.

A Note About Using Online Marketing Strategies

I don’t want you to get overwhelmed with all there is to do to market your website. You need to test these different strategies and see what works for your business. Test, tweak, find what works, and then optimize what works!

SEO

This is probably the one marketing strategy that everyone wants to learn how to do, and honestly should learn how to do. And for good reason! How could you pass up tons of free traffic if you can get ranked for the right keywords? It can really be a great thing!

You really need to be aware that it takes a lot of time and effort before you’ll see any really good results with SEO. If you stick with it you’ll see results most likely within a few short months.

SMO/SMM

Social media marketing and optimization is one of the newer online marketing strategies, but it can be a great way to get exposure, bring in additional traffic, and links. You can use sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and others to increase your traffic and exposure. They can also really help with SEO.

PPC

A lot of people seem to be afraid of this online marketing strategy because they’re afraid that they’re going to lose money without having any control over it.. The good thing is that these days you pretty much have to set up budgets and protections so that you don’t spend more than you’re comfortable with.

Here are 3 reasons why you should learn how to do PPC: you can do really good testing with PPC; you can target more phrases with PPC than you can with SEO; you can get traffic faster with PPC than you can with SEO;. Learn how to do it, then take use it to your advantage!

JV Partnerships

Here’s an example of a joint venture idea: Let’s say you have a site that sells health products. Well, what if you went and found a popular health newsletter and made them an offer where you would give them a promo code that they can give to their readers. If any of their readers use that code on your site you’ll split the profit with them. This way you both benefit from the agreement!

Email Campaigns

Have a newsletter that you send out every week or two, but make sure that you’re giving out valuable content and not just advertisements. This is a great way to keep in touch with current and potential customers. You’ve all heard by this time I’m sure of the value of building a list.

Shopping Networks

There are a lot of sites out there that shoppers are already using to find good deals. These include Shopzilla.com, Shopping.com, Shop.com, Amazon.com, Google Base, and others. A lot of these sites run a PPC-like program, but some are even free like Google Base. If you have a retail or dropshipping business this is on strategy you should definitely be using.

Final Thoughts on Online Marketing Strategies

So there you have a short list of some of the different things you can do to promote your site out there. This is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of all the things you can do, but this should get you started. Think about your site and model, and think about which of these approaches could work for you. For example, if you have an affiliate site you won’t really be able to use shopping networks the same way a retail site would.

My hope is that after reading this article you understand that there is more to do than just SEO. Use some of these other online marketing strategies. As mentioned before do some testing to see what works for you. Then make the most of it!

Website owners, online marketers, and so-called gurus often disageee about the keys to success in the world of online business. But, there is one universal point of agreement: if you can’t get traffic to your site, your days are numbered. Nothing can compensate for a lack of website traffic.

That is why website owners spend a large percentage of their time, and often lots of money, on online, print, and electronic advertising.

Instead, try the following.

1. Article distribution is my favorite marketing activity because it has paid such great dividends for the websites with which I am associated. At last count, my article writing has netted those sites more than 30,000 links. The process is pretty simple. Just write articles that will be interesting and/or helpful, and use one of the many available software tools to submit them to article distribution sites. Include an author’s box, like the one at the end of this article, with links to your website(s). As Webmasters looking for content find and use your articles on their sites, you will pick up links; often lots of them.

2. Send out emails offering to swap links with other website owners. Target those whose visitors might be interested in your site and those of high quality.

3. One way linking. If your content is good enough or if you have something to offer other webmasters (a widget, an ebook, etc.), try for one way links. The search engines value them far more highly than reciprocal links.

4. If you are not yet blogging, you are missing a great opportunity. The search engines love blogs. A post a week is optimal, but even a post a month can help. Be sure your website links to your blog and your blog links to your website(s).

5. Bloggers, even more than webmasters of “regular” websites, need lots of content. Offer them articles (with author’s boxes containing links to your site , of course). They’ll love you, and you’ll pick up lots of links.

6. One of the least utilized traffic generation tools is the press release. Press releases can be picked up by hundreds of websites, giving you hundreds of (almost) instant links. There are several services which will distribute your website (some at no cost) and at least 3-4 pieces of software you can use to get your releases out.

I realize that not everyone can write. If you are “writing challenged”, don’t despair. You might have to search around awhile, but there are folks who write blog posts and/or articles for less than $10. Press release are generally more, but the cost is not prohibitive. Remember, your potential return for each project can be hundreds of links. And, you know what that means.