Marketing Online Secrets

Marketing Online Secret: 5 Ways to Save a Huge Chunk of Money on your Online Start-up

If you are nearly dead-broke, you will love the tips here to save you money on your new start-up. Don’t spend a dime before you have read this post!

1) Domain
To get started, you’ll need to register for a domain name. You can get domain names from godaddy.com at $6.95 or you can get it cheaper. The good news is Yahoo is now having a promotion - domain name at only $1.99! Grab one before the offer expires.
Register your domain at Yahoo! Only $1.99/1st yr.

2) Free website hosting
Hosting of domains typically cost at least $40 to $100 a year. Two ways you can save on that:
Use a free blog such as wordpress or blogger.
If you only need a simple web-site, go for free hosting at freewebs.com. You url will appear as www.freewebs.com/yourname. But not to worry, you can easily forward your registered domain name to point to your freewebs account. The only catch is that they’ll put up an ad-banner on your web-page and that’s about it. If you can live with that, that’s one great way to save on web-hosting!

3) Payment facilities
If you are selling stuff, you will need to have some payment facilities to bill your customers. Shopping carts typically cost a few hundred dollars. To save on that, register for a clickbank account which accepts credit cards. Account activation costs only $49.95 and you pay them a small commission when somebody buys. The other advantage of using clickbank is that they have an affiliate program. Hence, what you get is an army of sales force to promote your products as an affiliate by offering them a cut of your profit. If you don’t need the affiliate part, then go for Paypal, which provides free registration.

4) Use free auto responder
To get customers to ‘opt-in’ to your mailing list, you’ll need an auto responder. For a start, I recommend www.freeautobot.com for its ad-free and absolutely FOC auto responder. Pay for a more sophisticated system when your web-site has grown and you have a larger mailing list.

5) Free traffic
You can pay for traffic or you can get them free by doing some work. Once your website is up, submit it to all the major search engines (Yahoo, Google, MSN, Lycos, etc). Learn about meta tags descriptions and keywords and make sure that your website has included these.
Get others to link to your websites. For a start, you can offer a one-for-one link exchange with other webmasters. It helps to improve your search rankings!
Oh, and do you know that you can monitor your traffic for free? A great tool that I personally recommend is statcounter.com. It generates free traffic analysis reports on all your webpages.

Do you find the tips above useful? Give me your comments!

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