If you hate cold calling, you are not alone. Many business owners hate cold calling, but since for many business owners this is the only technique to drum up new business, business owners just keep using it.

Not anymore! Using online marketing to get clients is one of the best ways to stop using cold calling. Online marketing is all about bring your potential customers, who are already looking for what you have to offer, to your web site. Since you are starting out with online marketing, here is a three step plan to help you get started:

1. Define your target market. Before you start marketing, you need to know who you are marketing to – who your perfect customers are.

2. Create/revise your web site to make it an effective sales tool. Your customers can’t talk to you when they are surfing the web, so the only thing that can convince them to buy from you is your web site.

It is extremely important to make your web site communicate the benefits of hiring you to your potential customers.

3. Use online marketing techniques to drive your target market to your web site. Now that you know who your target market is, and have an effective web site that communicates the benefits of hiring you to your target market, you need to bring your target market in.

Use search engine optimization, newsletter publishing, article marketing and other online marketing techniques to drive your target customers to your web site.

Here is the FREE Tutorial on marketing your business: How To Market Your Coaching Business – it discusses exactly how to use online marketing techniques to stop cold calling and get clients online.

There are lots of things you can do to promote your podcast online, but the first thing you need to do, just like you’d do with any product is to make it crystal clear who you’d like to find your podcast. Who is the target market for your podcast?

Once you know who you’d like to attract, start working on using online marketing techniques to bring them in. Write articles that are of interest to your target market, and publish them in popular article directories. Doing this will expose you to a whole new segment of your target market, that would not know about you otherwise. I get weekly inquiries and countless newsletter subscribers due to my article marketing efforts. The key to article marketing is to write useful articles AND submit them as much as you can.

Also, use articles on your own web site, optimize them for search engines and make sure that you use the keywords that your potential listeners would use to drive traffic to your web site.

Do the same thing with your blog – write keyword-rich blog posts to drive more targeted traffic to your blog.

Put events together with other business owners with the same target market, so that you can get exposed to each other’s lists.

The key to using these techniques is that they are not a one-time shot. In order to get actual results from marketing your business, you should apply the techniques on a regular basis – submit 10 articles a month, continuously use SEO and put together events, etc.

Here are three steps for you to start thinking about your online marketing plan:

Your online marketing strategy should start with clearly defining your target market. If you don’t know who needs to be coming to your web site, you will not be able to bring them to your web site.

Next, you should create an infrastructure to keep in touch with your potential customers/web site visitors. Not everyone is going to buy from you on their first visit. How will you keep in touch with them and educate them about your business long after they have left the web site?

Next you should look into where your target market is online and how you want to reach it. There are many online marketing techniques – search engine optimization, article marketing, pay per click, blogging, etc. You will need to look into them, decide which techniques would be best for bringing customers to your web site, and start using them.

Biana Babinsky

P.S. Need help with your online marketing plan? Join MarketingSalad.com, the online business coaching community for business owners

Many service professionals submit bids on project in order to gain work. The business that receives bids compares the bids received, and picks the one that would be the most appropriate. So how do you make sure that your bid is the one accepted?

If you have to submit a bid, I recommend finding out as much about the project as possible first. This includes information about the company, their budget, their requirements, etc.

However, since you run a service business, I recommend to create a long term marketing plan that will eliminate the need to submit bids in the future. I haven’t submitted a bid in many years – my clients find me by finding my web site online, through networking and recommendations by my past clients. Here is what I recommend you do:

– Create a system to increase your circle of influence. People buy from people they know and like, so get to know more people. You can do that by networking both online and offline.

– Create a strong Internet presence – get your web site up and running, optimize it for search engines, etc. Many people search for products and services that they need to buy online. When you have a web site up, they can come to your web site, learn about you and your products and services and find out how you can help them.

Use online marketing techniques such as article marketing, search engine optimization, newsletter publishing and others to build up targeted traffic to your web site.

– Market your business on a regular basis. Marketing is not a one-time event, it is a continuous process. By marketing on a regular basis, you will educate more people about your business, and you will be able to gain more clients.

Learn how to promote your service business online, step-by-step, in my Complete Step by Step Online Marketing Course.

Biana Babinsky

There are many ways to find your target market:

– Online networking is a great way to get in touch with your target market. You are already networking on Ryze, so explore other online networking venues. Yahoo groups, LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy and others are great places to reach out to your target market.

– Publishing articles and submitting them to online directories is another great way to reach your target market. When you write articles that are of interest to your target market, your target market reads them and visits your web site. I have gotten many newsletter subscribers and web site visitors through my articles.

– Search engine optimization is fabulous for this. Over 70% of online users are using search engines to locate the products and services that they need. This means that your customers are searching for your products and services every single day. You need to find the keywords that your target market uses, and make sure that your web site can be found in search engines using these keywords.

– Business blogging can be used to show your expertise, attract your target market to your blog and get more search engine traffic.

The FREE Tutorial, How To Market Your Coaching Business discusses different online marketing methods to reach your coaching target market online.

However, it is not enough to get your target market to come to your coaching web site – you want to keep in touch with them and market to them in the future. For this purpose I recommend having a newsletter on your web site, that your target market can subscribe to.

There are two ways to increase your product sales:

1. Get more of your existing web site visitors to buy.

2. Drive more targeted web site visitors to your web site.

I would recommend doing both. Let’s see how:

1. There are many things you can do to increase sales to existing web site visitors:

– Make it easy for your web site visitors to find products they need. You can do that by having a professional and user-friendly web site.

– Make a compelling case for buying your products. Once your web site visitors find the products they need, you need to convince them that they have to buy your products. You do that by writing compelling web copy and sales letters.

– Make the checkout process easy. Even if a buyer thinks that she needs your products, she will leave your web site if the checkout process confuses her. Make the process as easy as possible.

2. Here is how you can drive more targeted web site visitors to your web site:

– By publishing your newsletter on a regular basis, and using it to drive your readers to your products pages. A newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with potential customers and increase your product sales.

– By doing search engine optimization and making sure that your products can be found in search engines. I have traced many of my own products sales to people finding them in search engines and buying them – this is a very powerful way to get new customers.

– By doing article marketing. Another one of my favorite marketing techniques. Many of my articles have been re-printed on various blogs and web sites, which increased my name recognition and sent many web site visitors to my web site.

I also recommend business blogging, holding free teleseminars and events and online networking to get more web site visitors.

The FREE Tutorial, How To Market Your Coaching Business discusses, step-by-step, how to use different online marketing methods to market your coaching business and sell more of your products online.

I am sure you know how to use search engines to find the things you are looking for. You go to your favorite search engine, type what you are looking for, and search for it.

But how do coaches use search engine to make money online? They do that by making sure that their web site shows up on relevant searches. When people are searching for their products and services, their web site shows up in the search, and they earn money by being able to sell their products and services.

You can make your web site appear on relevant searches by using a process called search engine optimization, or SEO. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Meta-information includes certain HTML tags (title, heading, emphasized text, keyword and description meta-tags), as well as the internal (links between pages on the same site) and external (links between pages on different sites) link structure of a web site.

To learn more about SEO, use the FREE Search Engine Optimization For Coaches Tutorial

Many coaches are looking for a source of customers that they can tap into every week, month or year. They are very surprised to learn that this source is search engines.

Search engines are the number one resource for consumers to research and buy products or services online. In fact, marketing studies have shown that over 70% of web surfers use search engines to locate online merchants. The ramification of this statistic is simple: if you want to reach the members of your target market you need to make sure that your business web site ranks well in popular search engines.

Search engines are the source of online customers. Every day millions of people use them to locate products and services they want to buy; if they find your web site, they will go to your web site and buy from you.

So how can you use this source of customers to direct the customers to YOU? You can get traffic from search engines by performing search engine optimization (SEO) for your web site. SEO is a crucial online marketing technique. It helps you to get your web site to appear in search engine result pages for keywords that that are relevant to your business. For example, if you are a business coach, and someone is searching for
“business coach”, it would be great for your business if your web site appears in the first 10 results.

Learn all about applying search engine optimization to your web site in the FREE SEO Tutorial. In this free tutorial, you can discover, how to get more web site traffic to your coaching web site using search engines.

Click Here For FREE SEO For Coaches Tutorial

There are no guarantees in online marketing, but by investing.time into your online marketing strategy, you can start getting more traffic to your web site. Here are a few things I recommend doing:

– Search engine optimization. Create effective content for your web site and make sure that your content includes keywords that people use to search for your products/services. Once you find keywords that you can use, weave them into the tags as well as web site text.

– Article marketing. Write articles on the subject of your expertise and submit them to article directories. Don’t forget to create an effective Resource Box for every article, and include a reason for the article reader to click on the link to your web site.

Article marketing helps to introduce your expertise to people who would have never known about you otherwise, and it helps you gain more links (and more traffic) to
your web site.

– Business blogging is another great way to bring in web site traffic. Start a blog and make sure you update it on a regular basis. Make sure you list your blog in Blog Directories, Technorati, etc, so that potential customers can find your blog, subscribe to it and read it on a regular basis.

There are dozens of articles on search engine optimization, article marketing, blogging and more, they should help you learn more about getting web site traffic.

And for step-by-step instructions on getting more web site traffic and promoting your coaching business online, use the FREE Tutorial, How To Market Your Coaching Business.

Hi, everyone

Yesterday we had many people on the Make Money With Information Products call. I got a few e-mails from people telling me that the lines were full, and they could not get in.

You can get the teleseminar’s audio recording at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/info/ Here are just some things I shared on this call:
– How to find ideas for most profitable products

– How to make more money with your products

– Online marketing techniques to use to bring more buyers to your web site

– How to leverage your products to create a products empire

Grab the recording at https://www.avocadoconsulting.com/info/