Now the email is just an example the same thing could be done via phone calls, SMS text message or filling in a form. Either way you need to make it as simple and hassle free as possible for your customers to ask you for more information.

If you aren’t already doing this on your website you will soon see that it is vital that you implement this to your website.

By having this easy way for customers to contact you, you are collecting contact details of the people who came to your website but didn’t buy or call. If you have captured their contact details you can then build relationship with them and send them special offers.

They may not be interested in purchasing something right now but that doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future. Maybe they are too busy now or too distracted by something else to make a purchase. If you email them once a month with either a special offer or information that are useful to them, and sooner or later they will be interested in what you have to offer. Of course there will be ones who may never buy from you, but that’s ok because they are not your target customers and you probably want to remove them from your list after a while.

The important thing to note here is that if only 30% of your website visitors want more details and give you their contact details, just think how many extra leads you could be generating by implementing this simple yet powerful idea.

You can just add a capture form on your existing company website, however, the most effective way is to have an unique website (different domain name) that focus on just capturing leads. This type of website should be no more than one page and contain only the essential elements on it.

1. Start blogging for your business – you can have a third party hosted blog up and running in 10 minutes. Write quality contents that your customers would like to read. A regularly updated blog can drive not only traffic to your main web site, but can also help your website’s search engine ranking. If you are serious about blogging you should host it on your server and use an unique domain for it.
2. Offer free articles to other websites – most people know that search engines ‘love’ quality unique contents. Contact other website owners and tell them they can post your articles on their websites as long as they provide a link back to your website.
3. Email signature – by having a small call-to-action message in your email’s signature can greatly increase the chance of being found by potential customers.
4. Give away a free e-product – e-books or reports are great for getting the words around on the Internet. You need to make sure the information is top notch quality – something that people would normally have to pay for. Never be afraid to give away a lot for free!
5. Social networking sites – these are web sites where your customers ‘hang out’ and spend time on. If you try to advertise or sell your service or product.
6. Templates and themes – if you are a website designer you can do this yourself, otherwise you can simply hire someone to design the templates or themes for you. Make sure to put a link at the bottom of all the themes.
7. Use videos – videos are getting more and more popular on the net now. There are many ways of using videos to promote your website. One good example would be to make a video to show people how to do a particular task. So if you sell fishing rods, then you would make a video on how to choose a fishing rod, what should people look out for when buying a fishing rod and which one is good for beginners etc.

If you take the time to implement and study these seven methods, you will see the traffic of your website shoot up within weeks.

From the traditional media, most people are now aware that the digital media is steadily gaining momentum. If before pen pal letters seem to be the only way to create friends from a distance, you can now instantly connect with friends and even gain new ones through online messengers such as MSN and Yahoo. Little girls used to write their day-to-day experience in their diary. But now, thanks to technology, they can easily ‘blog’ about their experiences.

Statistics show that there are approximately 1.4 billion of Internet users worldwide. And every year, it is always increasing, with increasing hours of Internet consumption in a week. This goes to show that majority of the people nowadays are online.

The major implication of this phenomenon is on maximising the potential of the Internet as a business tool. And the great thing about it is that you, as an business owner, do not have to settle for the same old advertising tactics. After all, promoting your business online does not necessarily mean blasting advertisements out to the World.

One of the best things about promoting your business online is that you can use different strategies that will suit your needs. And the good news? You do not have to spend more or at least the same amount as traditional mediums. With the Internet, you can easily promote your business at a fraction of the cost, and the results are more instant and easy to track.

Social media is one of those tools that provide consumers a new way to manage information. Through social media, technology has allowed entrepreneurs and marketing people to provide consumers a voice.

Online communities have a closely connected group of users who can help promote branding and improve a consumer’s impression or awareness about a product. By utilising these social networks through an array of content targeting strategies or tools, businesses can significantly obtain a lot of interest and awareness.

The social media can also trigger word of mouth marketing. With consumer generated contents, people can tell the others whether they consider a certain product good or bad. And as they encourage everyone to participate, the potential of increasing brand awareness is definitely on its maximum.

If you want to start promoting your business through social media, you can start with blogging, forums, and social networking sites. Experts say that blogs became the platform for consumers to stop cursing whatever they see on TV. Through blogs, they can write about what they think about the product. At an entrepreneur’s point of view, blogs can also be a place where they can leverage other people by sharing their expertise on a certain matter. For example, if your brand has something to do with air-conditioning and you want to promote your product using blogs, you can write something about choosing the best type of air-conditioning system. When people regard you as somebody who knows the product very well, they will most likely trust you and buy your product.

Forums, on the other hand, can be a great place to manage your time while talking about topics related to your product or business. It’s also a good place to find out what your customers are looking for and their experiences with your product or service.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can also help you promote your business. Surveys show that nearly 80% of users would rather add the “brands” as their friend than letting companies advertise these to them.

The bottom line is that promoting your business through social media can significantly help you leverage sales by allowing your consumers to get more close to your business. Bridging the gap between consumers and the brands will create major impacts in your business. And the only way to do this is to let consumers be in control.

So how can you ensure that your brand message is Web 2.0? Start with a simple site which is free from contaminated messages, use a pull factor such as information, games or unique content to entice your consumer and finally interact with the consumer. If a consumer has connected with you then the power of word of mouth marketing fuelled by online communities, is unstoppable. But beware, a bad brand message can destroy your brand because in this Web 2.0 world information spreads like wild fire.

However, the future of online communication is far from set in stone the next level of web communication Web 3.0 is already in its infant stages. Web 3.0 is the thinking internet, an internet which is ‘intelligent.’ Web 3.0 will see applications tailored around the user and search engines which know what you are searching for before you even decide. The brand message will be conveyed to the perfect targets; communications will be pre-meditated and customised to your every whim. This utopia vision is far from the reality of a small business, but the growth of brand messages cannot continue exponentially they will eventually embody a perfected form of intelligent targeting in Web 3.0.

As technology evolves, the capacity to extend your brand message to those who want to listen is growing. Web 2.0 will ignite a conversation and a two way chat. Web 3.0 will build a society where the subject of your email message is assimilated into a targeted mainframe of information. If you are writing about music then you will be exposed to new music discounts. If you are writing about travel then the travelling agents will be shouting out at you with content. Brand messages combined with internet intelligence will increase exposure but will also ensure precision through targeted marketing.

Does all this sound beyond your brand message? Would you prefer to retreat into good old fashioned knocking on doors and a nice simple web interface? To be fair we cannot underestimate the value of real time communication and face to face relationships, however, this will only take you so far within your circle of contacts. The ‘world wide web’ does what it says on the tin. It exposes your brand message to the world.

If you do run out of ideas you could always review other people’s products or services that are related to your market. Only review those that you like and would use yourself. After you have done a few reviews you can send the Youtube video links to the original owners and they like what you done they will ask you to review their next product, and this time, most of them would offer you a free “copy” of their product or some payment. Before you accept their offers, try to find out if they have a strong customers list or a popular website/blog. If so, ask them if they would promote your product or service on their website or to their list.

So now you have your first video on Youtube, but how do you get people to view it? The best way to go about doing that is by commenting and rating. You need to find related videos that are popular and leave comments on them. Try to make your comments relate to the video content, and avoid short comments like “nice video”, “thanks alot”, “cool stuff”…etc You can also comment on other people’s comment if you have nothing interesting to say. When you comment on someone’s video, other people will click on your username to see who you are. When they are on your profile’s page they will see that you have uploaded similar videos. Keep on doing this and you have more and more subscribers.

To make Youtube work for your business you have to use all available options, and commenting is the next best thing you can do after uploading your videos. The next thing is rating, to do that you need to view a video. Once it’s over you can rate it by clicking on the yellow stars.

Both commenting and rating are great way to get your username out there, especially with commenting because human beings enjoy chatting, therefore if your comments are interesting people will want to start a conversation with you sub-consciously, so they reply to your comments. Another good thing about commenting is that your comments will be there permanently.

Now that’s all the benefits, what about the cons? Don’t worry the benefits are more attractive than the cons, but it’s important for you to know the cons upfront so that you’re more prepared to tackle them when they appear.

One of challenges of start a newsletter campaign is getting the contents. Creating your contents can be difficult if you don’t have a strong interest in writing and not so good at coming out with ideas. One way to tackle this problem is to create the contents in advance. So you choose a day and compile a month’s worth of articles. This usually helps because you will be focusing on just one thing and make sure you pick a day that you feel like writing.

If you don’t have the time for that or you just can’t write, then you can try to outsource the task to someone else. It will cost you for the service but the articles will be credited to you when you publish them, then hopefully the time you saved is worth more than the cost of the articles, in most cases it is.

There’s a free option of getting the contents if you don’t want to spend any money. Go to article directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Use the articles you find there, provided that you include the original author’s info below the article. Do email the authors prior using their articles in your newsletter.

Overall I think newsletter marketing is definitely something that worth considering for your business. It’s a way to keep build a good relationship with your existing customers and also a way to attract opportunities like joint venture partners.

1. Pay Per Click (Google Adword)
   This is by far the best way to get highly targeted traffic. You get instant traffic to your website at the cost of only 0.10 per click, and you can always track those clicks in Google Analytics. When you first start the pay-per-click method you should set the daily budget to a small number. Once you’ve found a few profitable keywords and ads, you drop the ones that aren’t profitable and then you increase the daily budget.
2. Article Marketing
   You write some “how to” type of articles that may interest your customers and submit them to article directories like ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com. Alternatively you could use Article Submitter to simplify the process. Be sure to include your website link in the about section. Don’t try to sell ANYTHING in the articles.
3. Forum MarketingFind forums which your customers would go, and join the community. The easiest way to find these forums is to type in “fishing + forums” in Google if your business is related to fishing, if not, just change the first word. Look at the number of posts on the forum, if it looks fairly busy and related then register. Post valuable information often, let them know that you’re the expert in your field. Again, don’t try to “hard sell” your products or services, it just doesn’t work. All you need to do is put a link in your signature and let that do the work for you.
4. Sponsored Blog Reviews
   You can find blogs that are related to your industry in websites like BlogCatalog or Technorati. Visit each blog to check the quality of their content, the relevance and traffic. Go to Alexa.com to get the blogs’ traffic details. The ranking system is reversed, which means low the number the better. Try to look for blogs that are below 500,000 (that’s around 100 visitors per day). Once you’ve got a list of blogs that you like, you can write to the owner and ask for a sponsored review of your products or services.
5. “Steal” Other People’s Customers
   This method can be used both online and offline, it’s very powerful and cost effetive if done properly. You need to find businesses are related to yours but not the same. They’re not your competitors, but their customers can be your customers too because your products or services can benefit them as well as the other business. For example, if you sell fishing rods and baits you may want to approach companies that sell fish tanks, fishing clothes, fishing books…etc and then ask them to promote your website once in their next monthly newsletter, if they don’t send out newsletters then just ask them to send out an email to their customer list. And in return you will promote their website in your newsletter for a whole year (or whatever you think is good). Now if they have a good customers list you should get many sales, as well as subscribers (you should have a opt-in box before you start this)!

So how do you get an opt-in box onto your website? This is actually easier than you may think, all you need is some basic Internet and computer knowledge, you certainly don’t need to know anything web programming language. There’re online list building management services like Aweber, which does 95% of the work for you. The cost is very reasonable, its user friendly interface allows you setup multiple campaigns, manage the list, setup auto responder, customise your email template, track clicks and many more. I highly recommend you to customise your email template and opt-in box to match the look and feel of your website.

Do experiment with different ways of getting people to opt in. One of the most popular opt-in offers is giving away free eBooks or reports. This method works better on some industries than the others. If your target audiences are not so computer savvy he/she might never heard of the term eBook, if that’s the case you have two options: 1. Name it something else. 2. Try a different offer. Test, test and test again, the key is to let the results to show you what works and what doesn’t.