Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.

Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.

This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.

To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines.

Do Your SEO

Who else in the world doesn’t know about Google? Nobody except people who are still living inside caves, right?

As you might have known, Google currently owns the largest user base when it comes to web searches. This popular search engine is used by millions of people who are looking for something in the massive Web – people looking for information, entertainment, products, services, and so on. Oops, did I mention “products and services”? I guess I did.

Taking a serious analogy on that, it means that there are millions of potential customers you can have for your business. The problem is – how to catch them – since they browse through millions of websites which could be other businesses searching for their respective customers too. Meaning to say, you are not alone wanting these people – you have rivals like the typical business situation in the real world.

Now to arm yourself, you have to optimize your website to become friendly with search engines. This is first and most necessary business promotion activity you have to do before engaging on other methods.

Here’s what you need to do: try validating your each of your web pages to the following W3C validation services to know if your HTML markups and CSS adhere with the standards: the W3C Markup Validation Service and the W3C CSS Validation Service. If you find irregularities during validation, fix them if you can (else you can contact me for assistance). By doing such, you are making your site friendly to web crawlers and search engine spiders that contribute to your search engine ranking.

If your online business runs a blog that uses WordPress platform, make sure you read my previous post on how to optimize them.

I want to emphasize few things on what you must do for search engine optimization (SEO) since this topic is very broad and if we talk wholly, we would be making a whole separate SEO blog. You have to do some additional researches and make sure to do the following things to your website:

• Make sure you properly setup your meta description and keyword tags in each of your web pages.
• Name your web pages and image files properly and make them readable to human beings as they do to search engines. Make sure they present relevant keywords related to your site. Use hyphen as separator of more-than-two worded files.
• Put relevant ALT descriptions to all your images.
• Never use flash as a web page. Flash is known to be SEO suicide.
• Make sure your web page file size does not exceed 100 KB (images inclusive).
• In your contents, work on mentioning more the keywords related to your online business. However, do not overpopulate them with similar keywords.

In the next business promotion sequel, we will talk about how to generate press release buzzes and where to buzz them to make your business controversial and popular.

Prospective customers always prefer good deals. Good deal in a sense of affordable and justifiable prices tagged on quality economic outputs, along with wholesome help and continuous support. These are basic grounds toward consumer satisfaction.

Business individuals and companies basically must employ customer-centric mindsets to win customers from their broad marketing audience and sustain the hearts of their existing customers. They must understand that people as customers, always demand the following things:

• Quality Product Offers – People are predisposed to spend more for a quality item or service than cheap, imitation, low-quality product. Small players in business (spinoff/startup companies) usually exaggerate the quality of their goods and services in their marketing to match their big, well-financed competitors in pulling customers. Though they may not able to rival their huge competitors in some areas where financing is prime ingredient, with efficient marketing campaign, they may still produce irresistible product offers that could draw customers. To become customer-centric, big players must be able to lower the prices of their commodities without sacrificing profitability. Small competitors, on the other hand, must continuously strive towards offering better product quality. Value-added services, overselling prevention, and support improvement can also make significant contribution.
• Justifiable Prices – Higher quality means higher price, but too lofty prices especially when above the price of substitutes are not very attractive to customers. A customer-centric online business would see to it that their prices do not only match the quality of their products, but the competitiveness in their respective markets as well. It is good to note that each cost billed to the customers, though it could yield additional revenue to the business, is never good to them unless they need so badly to avail a certain service or product.
• Timely and Responsive Support – When comments, suggestions and issues are received, it should be given attention right away regardless of priority. A customer-centric business attitude assumes that customers are not too patient when it comes to problems and they should be addressed regardless of size. If the solutions are not immediately available, a prompt response to their written correspondence (email, trouble ticket or chat) must be done explaining clearly the estimated time of arrival (ETA) of solutions. While that is an excuse, it lets customers feel that their issues are acted upon, extending their patience, and giving additional time margin for the support staff to find permanent solutions.
• Performance Consistency – Some online businesses tend to overlook the importance of long-term customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer must be consistently treated well in the long run. Consistency earns trust and trust establishes long-term business relationship which is good.

The more you abide to customers’ demands in a business, the greater the chance for them to close deals and convert your marketing efforts. Customers are always right and with that, they have to be in the center of your online business.

Paid review programs usually require a certain reputation, PageRank (PR) level of a blog and number of existing blog posts, before an applicant is accepted to the program. Rumors about Google penalizing blog sites who participate in paid reviews, which in their view is a way of building links “artificially”, also discourages new bloggers to get involved to the said program. However, doing paid reviews still and yet the biggest income source of popular bloggers like John Chow.

One of successful bloggers’ qualities is that they are very good at identifying trustworthy affiliate programs. They can easily detect which one’s reliable and a real money maker, and which one isn’t. Knowing such is important especially because everyone on the blogosphere wants to succeed. Unfortunately, it is certain that there are really chances where hard work doesn’t pay off, efforts backfire, and time is wasted. These can be minimized by following the guidelines successful bloggers follow in determining good and reliable affiliate programs.

The merchant should be legitimate and contactable.

If you feel that a certain merchant, the one who offers affiliate program, seems obscure and ambiguous, you should prevent from doing business with them. There have been many bloggers and affiliate marketers who became victims of fraud in the world of online marketing. Determine your merchant’s reputation by reading reviews, testimonials, and the success stories of their existing members. Also, ensure that they provide contact information and that they eager to listen to their affiliates’ inquiries and problems.

Commissions are substantial.

The commission of the products you want to promote must be substantial in itself. This is to ensure that the products are worth advertising for. If you are selling $3 item, then you must make a lot of sales to earn satisfactory revenue. It can be as difficult when you are trying to promote a high-ticket item – 20% to 40% commissions are already acceptable. If your blog is new, you may not worry about commissions being substantial or not.

There is a demand for the product.

How willing are you to market a product if nobody even wants to buy it? Well, that is indeed a question. There must be a sensible demand for the merchant’s products towards online consumer market. If you already have a blog site, your sponsored ads must match to your site’s theme or topic. Doing such will help you build credibility to your suggestions and product recommendations. Doing a keyword such on Google or Overture.com will help you determine a product’s online market demand.

Commissions are traceable in real-time.

If your friend purchases a certain product by clicking the affiliate button on your blog, the commissions earned should immediately reflect to the affiliate tracking software. Merchants running vague tracking software are a minus to the reliability of their affiliate program.

Promote relevant products.

If you are building a niche blog, it’s pointless if you join affiliate programs that aim to sell products irrelevant to your website’s topics (unless you can personally vouch that there is a high interest of the merchant’s products). However, I still highly suggest that you only promote appropriate products as this may translate to better conversion rates.

The Web’s most popular e-commerce and money transfer business, PayPal, just expanded their services to the Philippines and Indonesia. October 5 last year, PayPal rolled a mass mail announcing to their members residing in such countries about their initial withdrawal and receiving features. They announced that fund transfers are now available using debit or credit cards.

Though it was good news, and some Internet savvy people were jumping, it was still infant and very limited. This is true because the number of credit card and debit card holders in the area is smaller compared to the number of people who actually have bank accounts. Nevertheless, PayPal did a good introduction – much better than nothing.

Today, January 29, I got a copy of PayPal’s mass mail again saying that they have finally launched the much-awaited local bank withdrawal. I was very happy reading such news and I was imagining just how many IT people are jumping to the roof upon reading PayPal’s mail.

It is good to take note that eBay Inc., the company that owns PayPal business, might have launched the feature in order to support their campaigns of the localized versions of eBay.com website in the region. Either way, it’s still good news!

PayPal just unlocked millions of merchants and customers from the two nations to the online business world. Their expanded services enable more Filipinos and Indonesians to buy and sell products online, and to send and receive money through the Web. The lack of online money transfer agents in the previous years had always been the hindrance of the people from the said countries in participating money transactions on the Internet. This scenario is about to change though.

So, if you’re a Filipino or Indonesian who’ve been dreaming of using PayPal in participating Web transactions, now is the time to wake up, join our big brothers, and rock!

Sign-up for PayPal Now.