101 Free Offers and Coupons to Advertise Your New Site

Here are 101 Web sites that offer budget-conscious business owners the tools they need to publicize their company without going broke.

http://www.insidecrm.com/features/marketing-startup-budget-051208/

100 Best Marketing Tips

I was looking at a blog called Small Business Trends and they offered a downloadable PDF document made up of the 100 best marketing tips that readers sent in. She said we could share, so here you go: Download your copy of 100 Best Kept Marketing Secrets here.

Do You Make This Marketing Mistake?

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For the past several days I’ve been sharing articles that I’ve found online while trying to learn more about marketing, websites and ecommerce. This one made me look at my online store and ask myself how I can market my products in a new way.

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review, the authors remind us what a normal person wants when they buy something. And no, it is NOT the thing they buy. Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt, they write, used to tell his students,"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" (Harvard Business Review, 12.05)

Think about your product. Are you selling its features, benefits, ingredients, or scientific validity? Or are you offering what someone might do or make happen with it? Like the drill - it's used to make a hole where there was none before. So when talking about your products, especially when you're talking to women, tell first how you used the products - what they did for you. Tell YOUR story (AKA Your First Date Script). Women (a big fat 80% majority of network marketers) always want to know FIRST how others are using the products you are offering - what they DO with it. Not what's in it. That's a big difference between how women and men buy. (Marketing to Women, Barletta).

So, what if you start with YOUR story? My company's introducing a product for women who... (...who want to get X done, like I did). Then you tell how YOU use the product and how it helped you do X. How it gave you the "quarter-inch hole" you wanted (AKA Your First Date Script). You end it by asking for someone like you - someone who wants to get the thing done that YOU got done.

Professor Levitt had the insight: Consumers, us, want to get things done. We all buy stuff (and hire people) to get those things done, including buying it just to be able to show it or talk about it with others. So, what 'got done' for you, by using your product? Next ask yourself: might there be others out there who'd like to know about a product that did that for you? And if the answer is yes, that is your market. Isn't it?

About the author: Kim Klaver is Harvard & Stanford educated. Her 20 years experience in network marketing have resulted in a popular blog, http://KimKlaverBlogs.com a podcast http://YourGreatThing.com and a giant resource site, http://BananaMarketing.com

Taking Charge of Your Marketing

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Kim T. Gordon, the marketing coach at Entrepreneur.com has an enlightening article about the need to market all the time and how to come up with a plan. You may read her article here

Six Marketing Tactics Worth Paying For

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Mary Crane over at Forbes.com has a good article for online entrepreneurs called Six Marketing Tactics Worth Paying For.

As much as we like the free marketing, sometimes it pays to pay!

Read her article here: Forbes

Branding your business

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I read a great article on line tonight: Little known ways to brand on the cheap: 99 tips for poor web startups.

Here are just two of the tips I plan to research further –

22. Social Bookmarking–where to start? Start by building a profile and keeping it active at all the top bookmarking sites. A few sites we recommend are: Del.icio.us, Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. Each has a different audience, so some of your content will do better at some sites over others. Because of their differences, it is important to be an active member of all the sites and submit your content at all of them.

26. E-profiles: manage your reputation. If a potential customer types in your name into a search engine, what sort of results will they see in the top 10? It’s key for you to secure the top 10 results in Google, Yahoo and MSN for searches relating directly and indirectly (if possible) to your brand. You need to be the one defining what people see when they search for you, not your competition. Start by building e-profiles on authority domains such as MySpace, Squidoo, AboutUs, WordPress, Blogger/ Blogspot, MSN Spaces, TypePad, Newsvine, LinkedIn, Rollyo, Wikipedia, etc. Don’t let someone else define who you are.

Read the entire article here