Starting an online business has become an increasingly popular trend among a wide demographic since it provides the opportunity to own a business without costly overhead expenses. However, to ensure your online business is successful, you must promote and market it.

Ezines and Newsletters – Communicate with your customers regularly by providing an e-newsletter which details the latest news surrounding your business. This can include anything from new products to publicity your business has received. Entice customers to sign up by offering an incentive, like a discount on their next purchase or a small gift.

Press Releases – In conjunction with an e-newsletter, write a monthly press release which is submitted to online PR sites and local media. Make sure your news is newsworthy and of value to your audience and market.

Network Online – Join and participate in online forums, communities, and discussion boards relevant to your product or services. To properly utilize these forums, don’t blatantly market your site get involved in the discussion and introduce yourself. Doing so will enable you to position yourself as an expert in your field, thus garnering new customers and driving traffic to your site.

Foreign Customers – If your site is global or you service international customers, accept online payments in local currencies to increase sales.

Complementary Items – Expand your offering by adding complementary products or services in order to upsell your customers. For example, if you sell clothing, add accessories; if you’re an artist, sell frames.

Contests and Give Aways – A great and relatively inexpensive way to market your online business is to offer a contest or give away. This will generate publicity and traffic for your site and get people interested, especially if the item (or service) you’re giving away is a hot commodity.

Email Signature – Add an email signature, including your website and contact info and even easier way to get the word out about your website to all those you email.

Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. It has gained extensive notability and popularity worldwide. It is often described as the “SMS of Internet”.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Twitter extremely valuable to any e-commerce site.

Simplicity has played an important role in Twitter’s success. People are eager to connect with other people and Twitter makes that simple.

Most people shop online for convenience rather than customer service. And while inroads have been made into providing better customer service online, the personal aspect is often still missing. It’s the ability to have conversations with customers that makes Twitter extremely valuable to any e-commerce site.

One of the best things about twitter is that it gives you a readymade platform, in which the online business can directly communicate with its customers; listen to their feedback & demands. Brick-and-mortar retailers have the benefit of physical presence of their customers when they are making purchases. But, e-commerce merchants may be unaware of customer problems or questions unless they are contacted directly or worse, if the customer publishes a complaint online. With Twitter, an e-commerce business can monitor what people are saying about its brand and products and respond with assistance.

Twitter also gives the online business to create & build upon their brand perception. Internet shopping is usually impersonal. Ecommerce sites often try to connect with customers via blogs or comments, but Twitter makes it much easier to have direct conversations with customers and also show a bit of personality.

It’s okay to use Twitter to provide useful information to your customers as long as you are clear about your intentions and can do a bit of listening as well. Sometimes customers just want to know when you have a sale. In fact, Dell was so successful in using Twitter to alert followers about sale items that it has now set up a separate Dell Outlet Twitter account that offers discounts exclusively to followers on Twitter.

The best way to get started on Twitter is to learn as much about it as possible. Sign up for an account, listen to what people are saying and find interesting people and companies to follow.

Once you’ve decided to use Twitter to promote your online business and website design , it’s important to fill out your company profile and upload an image that your customers will recognize. Make sure to identify the people within your company who will be monitoring and using the account, and the more people tweeting the better. Unless you already have a very reputable and popular brand, your company will probably need to use your Twitter account for a while before people will want to follow it. Encourage your customers to follow you on Twitter by adding a link to your website, your emails, business cards and any other place with company contact information.

There are some tools to make Twitter easier to use. For example, Twitter offers widgets on its settings page which you can use to put your Twitter updates right on your website. You can automatically send updates to twitter by using twitter-feed to import items from any RSS feeds you have, a good way to let customers know about updates from your blog or featured items on your site. Monitor what people are saying about your company and products by using tools like Twitter’s search or Tweet Scan. You might also try applications such as Tweet Deck, twhirl, or Twitterific to post updates and have conversations on Twitter.

Most of the people who are interested in starting their own business and opt for online business, do not know where to start. There are many questions related to the starting point in online business. Such questions would be:
-Where do I start looking for an online business idea?
-Where do I start learning about marketing online business?
-Where do I start looking for online advertising media?
Then most people will go for the search engines and start typing in what they are looking for, hoping that they will find something that will suit them. There is nothing wrong with this methodology. The problem here is that in most cases people do not really know what they are looking for.
In this article we will try to give recommendations and guidelines on the things that a person should be looking for when searching for the online business opportunity he/she would be most relaxed with.
In a previous article titled “Choosing An Online Business Is A Tricky Business” we categorized the different types of online businesses a person could be involved in. We will not repeat them but our advice is to begin with one particular type and then move to the other types when the person feels relaxed with the idea on online marketing.
If a person is totally new to the idea of online business he/she should start with an affiliate program. An affiliate program is one that allows you to sell other people’s products and services in return for a commission. Yet a person should not be involved in just any affiliate program. There are special requirements that a person should be looking for in an affiliate program if he/she is still new to the idea of online marketing.
We will look list and explain each one of these suggested requirements:
1-Design and setup your own website: There are a lot of affiliate programs out there that give you an assigned web page that you can promote. Although it is a very good feature that saves you the hassle of building your own web pages, yet it is limited in the ways you will be able to market it as most online marketing media do not accept affiliate pages. Therefore, you will need an affiliate program that incorporates setting up and designing your own website; in addition to advising you on the hosting service provider you should get. “Your own website” means that you should own the domain name. I have written a complete article about the benefits of owning a website with comparative analysis with the option of not having your own website.
2- Provide a systematic training: Most affiliate programs provide you with what they call marketing tools. But if someone is new to the internet and to online marketing, then there is no way that he/she would be able to use those tools effectively. Therefore, the affiliate program that you should be looking for is one that has a systematic and detailed training that can take you by the hand to show you how to promote your business.
3-Systematic and not individualistic support: Most affiliate programs depend on the sponsor support for their team. This system is very weak. This means if the sponsor is away, ill, vacationing or for any reason cannot and would not answer the support questions, the sponsored team is lost and cannot proceed with their business. The affiliate program that you should be looking for must have the following support levels:
a.Sponsor Support
b.High traffic and high quality forum especially dedicated for the particular affiliate program you are thinking of promoting.
c.Help Desk
With this system a person might not even need a sponsor support.
I have heard many recommend having a mentor that will be able to teach all the ins and outs of online marketing. I completely agree with them, but would not include it in the above criteria. The above criteria are recommended so that a person can examine any affiliate program against. Thus, they will facilitate for anyone the decision making process for choosing an affiliate program to work with. Therefore, a mentor is not a must have in affiliate program for the newbie. Still, I would highly recommend searching for and getting a mentor, as a mentor can act in many dimensions especially on the motivational and technical aspects.