If you’re looking to market your business online, you might want to reconsider spending thousands of dollars on a pricey marketing campaign. For a fraction of the cost, you could set up a blog to spread the word about your services. Setting up your own blog on the web is about as easy as making an account on eBay. But like with an eBay account, you won’t get anything out of your blog if it just sits there.
If you want to properly utilize a blog to market yourself, your business, or a certain product, you have to do what everyone else in the marketing business does to achieve success, in or out of the web: work for it. Despite the legions of bloggers praising the ease of blogging as a marketing tool, the truth is that you’ll have to commit yourself daily to your blog if you want to see any substantial results. First things first—you need to set up your blog. Do so by choosing a clean, professional (and free) blogging platform like those offered by WordPress or Blogger.
So what’s next?

Start cranking out market-worthy content

Let’s assume that you’ve chosen to start this blog on the basis that you’re marketing your professional services consulting small businesses. You have a local office and you’re looking to the web to massively expand your reach in the field. In this case, the best way to start your blog is to write regularly occurring posts offering free and substantive tips for small businesses looking for management advice. Make your posts pithy and informative—remember you’re looking to lure readers (and customers) browsing for services similar to yours. The last thing you want to do is bore them with writing too much content.
Aim for content that engages the reader so they can relate to your message quickly. Informative anecdotes or problem/solution posts about the industry are good examples of blog posts that hook readers. Consider the problem/solution post: imagine a minor management issue for a small business—like a dispute between employees—and then offer a short, effective solution that would disarm the situation. This way a reader would glimpse your services in action, and may then be more inclined to contact you about in-depth consulting for their company.

Do everything to expand your readership

In order to further expose your services on the web, take advantage of social media networks that could spread your name related business and professional circles. Set up accounts on services like LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter as mobile web marketing tools to reach out to potential customers. Though social media services differ in their interface, they all serve the same function of uniting likeminded web users. Your task as a blogger is to use your social media account to search out viable customers and business contacts that can help spread awareness about your services.

When you make an account, be sure to add detailed information about the nature of your services, your professional experience and your education background. And most important of all, post your blog url! Once you’re set up with your account, take some time to familiarize yourself with the format of the social media network’s interface. Bear in mind that you’ll search out users on each service by using their comprehensive search features. You simply type in the topic of your choosing or the name of a prominent person in the industry, and you’ll be presented with a host of users who reference or discuss them in detail. Sift through the search results and follow the users who you think could help you the most.

You can also raise awareness for yourself and your blog by offering to guest post on blogs that talk about similar issues. As a guest poster, you may write about topics on other blogs to showcase your knowledge or industry savvy, putting your spin on a particular subject. Most blogs will tell you up front whether or not they accept guest posts in their “About” or “Contact” section. As compensation for your guest post, ask the blog’s webmaster to include a byline about your services and your blog so interested readers can follow your work in the future. It’s an easy chance at huge exposure to a new audience, so don’t pass it up!

Patience is a virtue, even in blogging

Nothing that’s free is easy. While blogging may exist in the fast-paced and constantly variable realm of the web, don’t expect your blog to become a success overnight. In the same vein, don’t expect your blog to acquire a handful of readers even in a month’s time. The cultivation of a popular and reliable blog takes time, patience, and persistant hard work from the blogger, no matter what your subject may be. You have to be determined that your initially low (or nonexistent) readership will grow as you continue to write and network your blog. If you’re willing to stick out months of blog posts with 0 comments while maintaining a steady stream of high-quality content, you might just make it in the blogosphere. All it takes is to have one or two readers refer another reader to your blog, who refers another reader, and so on. A blog’s an investment just like any other business venture; with time, it has the potential to yield great returns.

By-line: Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

Even if you’ve seen your share of hideous holiday sweaters and extra-thick wool socks from your family, there’s no need to bury your face in your hands. One man’s trash is certain to be another man’s red, green, and itchy-all-over treasure, so gather up all of those clothing items that you don’t want, and head to an online auction site like Ebay to find some eager collectors who will pay top price for your merchandise.

You can also make money online with a quick clear out of all of the exercise equipment that you’ll never use. If you have a fixer upper of a bike or workout equipment in great condition, the first few months of the year will be the perfect time to fetch a good price for them online. Many people are trying hard to stick to their New Year’s resolutions, and your equipment can help them realise their goals whilst padding your bank account at the same time.

If you’re serious about your home’s decor, you could even try selling your Christmas decorations. We all know that garden Santas and twinkly lights need a good home, so don’t throw yours out. Instead, give them a new life with a different family. The period after the holidays is when Christmas decor enthusiasts (you know, the ones who go all out) shop for discount deals for next year’s celebrations. If you tap into this market online, you could make a pretty penny from those decorations that you won’t use again.

Next, move on to your entertainment collection. If your family is stuck in the 90s and still purchasing CDs to give as gifts, you can both enjoy the music (assuming that it is a cool band or singer and not ‘Sounds of the Sea, Vol. IX’) and make money off of their technological impediment at the same time. In the age of digital music, we’re sure that you have a completely digital music library where you store all of your tunes. You can do the same for any digital-worthy music that you received during Christmas, and then make quick cash by selling the CDs. What’s even better is that your discs will be in new condition, so may be able to get more money from them.

When it comes to movies, you can do the same thing. Ripping DVDs is fast, easy and totally legal nowadays. You can begin your own digital movie library and sell DVDs online in the same way. And whilst you’re in the selling spirit, now is a good time to clear out your entertainment system and get rid of any CDs or DVDs that you’ll never watch again. And don’t forget those workout videos!

Whilst your music and movies can be sold in the same way that you plan to get rid of your other unwanted items, there is actually a more intuitive and lucrative way to sell them that doesn’t require web auctioneering or costly shipping. Online services like musicMagpie will take your CDs or DVDs by the tens and give you cash. This particular service also organises a courier pickup or free postage so that sending your stuff costs no money and very little time. MusicMagpie is available in both the UK and Germany, so you can sell even if you’re overseas.

The end of the holiday season marks the beginning of a very important time for you–a time to make money online. As you enter the new year, go forth and sell!

When you are marketing a blog online there is very little choice but to consider guest posting. It is a great way to get potential visitors to your site as well as getting a link on a high page rank site that you would normally have to pay for. But sometimes you can have difficulty finding great sites to post on. Maybe you can’t get on a high page rank site or you can’t find the right blog for the article you want to write. This article is going to show you the best way to go about searching for your perfect match.

If You Can Go For The Biggest Blog You Can Find

Without doubt the best coverage you will be able to get will come from the biggest blogs in your niche. They will have the highest amount of traffic which will help you by sending you traffic for a few days. The main benefit that I like from high page rank blogs is the strong backlink that you get. It is great for your Google search engine rankings and it will last as long as the website with the post on stays on the internet so the more guest posts you write the better your search engine rankings will be. Also if you find a blog that will let you use your own anchor text then you can focus your SEO efforts as well.

One of the problems with writing for the top blogs in your niche is that you will need to write a really high quality article. I had had a lot of posts that I thought were good rejected by the top blogs in my niche because they have a high standard. What I’ve found now that does work is that you should add some kind of catch to your article that people can relate to. For example in this guest post I wrote for problogger.net I wanted to write about stopping procrastination and getting on with blogging hard but how I increased the quality of the article was writing in from the perspective of a drug addict who was ‘addicted to checking traffic stats’. This added a new dimension to the article and made it about more than the topic.

Writing Articles For Smaller Blogs With Potential

Like it or not getting a blog off the ground is a lot of work and most new blog owners would be really pleased if they were to receive a few guest post submissions to help them with their work load. This I think makes it easier for you to get your post up on their blog. The trick here though is to choose a blog that has a lot of potential to grow in future, this way you could get all the benefits of a high pagerank blog in a few months time with the ease of getting a post on a lower pagerank blog.

Choose A Blog With The Best Readership For Yours

When you are choosing your guest post partner blog you have to think about whom is reading it. You can do this in a few ways but by far the easiest is to simply read a sample of their articles and see what kind of content they have. If it is similar to the content on your blog but with a slightly different twist on things then you have found yourself a winner. This way you can be as sure as possible to get extra readers to your site and that when they come to your site that they are likely to read on through several of your articles.

Is there anything else that is important about finding a site to guest post on? Please tell us in the comments section.

If we want to take a strategic approach to using Facebook as a marketing tool, we should get back to basics. Facebook was built by university students for university students. If we do not take a platform for what it is, we are not approaching our task with due diligence. Facebook was not built for online marketing and it was not meant to be a world changing social media marketing platform.

Facebook marketing seems like it is getting very complicated, especially the more we talk and strategise how we can use it. The online marketing world is abuzz with the recent changes of Facebook, and those implications for brands and business. It is interesting that some young people can understand these changes instantly, while marketing professionals go to elaborate lengths to explain how to integrate and use these new profile changes. Should they be the ones we are consulting for SEO (search engine optimisation) and social content organisation? Can younger people really do that, and what is it that gives them the ability? In this article, we take a look at young people in general, and how Facebook changes and Facebook being built by young people, influencing the way it operates. When we simplify it, it is not difficult to understand, and we can use Facebook as a marketing tool despite all the challenges.

• Built by Young People. Facebook was built by a university student, for university students. Mark Zuckerburg was excited because he had 20,000 people (university students) interested and joining his webpage and simplistic website design. He did not create Facebook to influence the world. He did not create Facebook to invent social media marketing. He is still young, and it is only in the last year Facebook has started to heavily spend funds on lobbying professionals in Washington. Last year they had two people working for them, and this year they have 12. It is interesting to note Facebook has constantly hired and continues to try and hire very high profile people. Facebook is getting older, but the foundation of all that it is built on, is still the mentality of a university student. To ignore that would be neglecting due-diligence.

• Being a User is Essential. Facebook was not built to make money. It was not built as a tool of marketing. It is impossible to expect Facebook to develop their site around the business of brands doing business and marketing to Facebook users. Facebook is all about users and creating a reason for them to keep using Facebook. If they changed that, they would be selling out on what they are. We cannot expect them to do that. The reason why Facebook has grown the way it has, is because it is user focused. Being user focused is therefore an essential of being involved.

• Is it Marketing or Attention? The question is very simple, and the correct answer is very simple. Think about getting attention when you use Facebook for your marketing purposes. You need to be in the cool crowd, and you need to say cool things. Nike can be cool by saying, “don’t do it”, for example. As soon as you are marketing, you are not making any sense on Facebook to anyone. In summary, Facebook is not a marketing tool.

• Understanding the Rhetoric. Internet advertising professionals and online marketers alike, continue to try and describe and define the necessities of getting our message across through Facebook with complicated terminology and lengthy explanations. Facebook makes changes that make sense to young people, and they are not offended. They are also not bothered by notions of privacy. When was the last time you read or watched a younger member of society making a noise about such issues? They understand the information they put online. In most cases, it is not an issue for them. They do not have an income, career, family and others to be concerned about when it comes to the information they disseminate.

Online marketing for business is a very serious issue. This article is raising a range of issues that most of us are not dealing with. At the same time, why should we expect social media and true social networking sites, from the heart of social media, to be based on those adult and business values? Instead of trying to convert Facebook into a tool of business marketing, why don’t we just work with what it is?

I wouldn’t usually bring up online poker on this site because a lot of people don’t generally consider it a logical and stable way to make money. And in most cases they would be right. The house always wins in the end. But I am writing this post because I won over £2000 on a poker match last week and I was already in profit before that for my poker exploits and I think that I have found a way to play that minimizes the amount of risk. There is definitely still risk involved and you will loose money at some point or another but I am doing well using it.

Use The Mathematics

One thing that you need to consider heavily in poker is the odds of your chance of winning. Now I know a lot of players do this by the ‘feeling’ that they get on whether the player is bluffing or not. You must keep a clear mind and consider the likely hood that they have a better hand than you logically. Maintain discipline at all times throughout your play. If you are sure that you have a better hand than them before you see any cards then try and get them to go all in. For example if you have any of the top five hands AA, KK, QQ, JJ, AK then your aim should be to get them in for as many chips as possible because you can be almost sure that no one has a hand that is as good as yours at that particular moment in time.

If you have a hand like 2 pair or top pair and there is no flush or straight possibilities on the board then you should bet because you can be reasonably sure that you have the best hand oddswise.

The Key To My Style Of Play

The main strategy that runs through my style of play is caution. Only play when you have the best of the cards. If you try and bluff your way out by betting all the way up then you are likely to loose all of your money. Most of the times you’ll find out if they have a good hand or not with a smaller bet. Then you get the opportunity to fold if you find out they have good cards.

This isn’t a strategy as such it is simply a frame of mind that you should get in before you play. Try and release yourself from all the emotions of playing poker. The ups an downs and the highs and lows. Try and filter all of that out and treat it like a machine. You are able to calculate the odds that you have got the best hand to a certain degree so try and use that advantage as much as possible. Don’t feel any shame at folding when you think they could have a better hand than you and don’t be worried to raise if you are sure you have the better hand than them. But try and withdraw emotion from your decision and consider the numbers.

If you can manage to do this then you should have a statisitically better chance of winning. However please only consider it as something fun to do and not a proffessional occupation to ‘invest’ your money into.

We’ve written on this blog before about the credit card tips and tricks that can help individuals make the most of their everyday spending.
But while credit cards rewards are a great small-effort method of making a bit of extra cash, they’ll always pale in comparison with the returns a determined money-maker can get from a successful blog or small business idea.

That’s why we thought you’d be interested to see providers starting to produce products that can combine the two: credit card rewards that can be ploughed back into a business idea and, used right, generate even more revenue.

Who’s doing it?

American Express have been at the forefront of this idea.
In the US, AmEx credit card holders collecting Memberhip Rewards can turn those points into free Facebook advertising.
According to Regus, 41% of UK businesses now use social networking sites to win new customers so this is likely to appeal to more than a few.

American Express has a long-standing relationship with Facebook in the place of both companies’ births.

Every year the credit card provider runs a competition to find five companies in dire need of a social media facelift and gives them some much needed help, as well as $20,000 to grow their businesses even further.

As paying by smartphone becomes a reality the implications of such rewards for small businesses could be even greater than credits to use for advertising spend.

Imagine a payments system tied to, say, Facebook that meant that not only did a customer buy from you they ‘liked’ you on the site and instantly got your business seen by a subset of people likely to also enjoy your product.

The idea is already a reality for China’s Facebook equivalent RenRen which has a social-media link-up with China Merchants Bank.
But in the UK that’s a bit of a flight of fancy; let’s get back to what’s actually available at the moment.

Google aren’t far behind in the race to reward with social media spend.
A beta version of Google’s Ad Words Business Credit Card was released in the US earlier this year and, since it’s Google, the model is widely predicted to go global after that.

Unlike AmEx, though, the card is designed to be used exclusively for buying up Google ad space and the only reward, as such, is a very low interest rate.

The idea is that small to medium-sized businesses usually need targeted advertising at one point in the year: if you’re a BBQ company you need to spend through the summer; fancy-dress shops need to concentrate their efforts on Halloween.

For Google, which generates 96% of its revenue from adwords, the incentive is clear – get people spending more and more exclusively – but businesses aren’t getting a bad deal either.
All in all, the trend for combining credit card rewards with social media spend is well and truly entrenched.

Look out for its entrance to the UK market soon, it’s an opportunity to make those credit card rewards even more rewarding.
This is a guest post from consumer site Choose. The site helps users to compare credit cards, particularly 0% purchase credit cards.

Small business owners are more than likely aware that optimizing Twitter to their best ability is an extremely lucrative way to lure-in potential customers and eventually make some serious cash. While target audiences are limited by account followers, meaning only those who “follow” you can see your promotional tweets, if a new program launched last week expands to smaller businesses, you may just be able to reach thousands of potential customers regardless of the number of followers you have.

We’re talking about the social networking site’s new Promoted Tweet Program. Under the program, businesses are given the opportunity to pay for “advertised tweets.” These tweets are then automatically displayed on a consumer’s timeline, regardless if the consumer follows that particular company or brand on Twitter. Of course the promoted tweets won’t be random—the idea is to display promoted tweets to consumers that are in need of a particular service or product (i.e. it has to be relevant to the consumer). For example, if a consumer is tweeting about wanting to check out a new movie, a tweet for AMC movie theaters may just appear at the top of his or her timeline. The paid tweets will only appear once and will clearly be marked as “promoted tweets” so that there is no confusion, much like Google’s promotional links that appear at the top of each search results page. The only downside is that consumers have the ability to dismiss some promoted tweets from particular companies, thus eliminating a company from reaching their stream (which means a potential customer lost) but it’s still a great way to reach an unthinkable amount of buyers.

Currently the program is only open to Twitter’s business partners, major companies, and non-profits such as HP, Yahoo, Disney, and Pepsi just to name a few. But depending on how well these paid tweets are received may just determine whether Twitter decides to expand the program to smaller organizations and brands. It seems likely if the program is successful. After all, this isn’t the first time Twitter has made an expansion of the program. Initially the program was launched in April—an experimental “non-traditional advertising” period where the social network used Starbucks and a few other companies to test the waters. In July Twitter finally decided to roll out the program. However at this time promotional tweets could only be viewed if an account followed a particular company. Now of course everything is fair game. And since Twitter is currently rebooting its monetization efforts, the company will most likely branch out even further in the coming years.

But if you haven’t seen any promoted tweets yet your account isn’t broken. Twitter says that it is starting the program very slowly—in fact only a single digit percentage of Twitter users will begin to see promoted tweets in their timelines in the next few months. But soon enough Twitter will roll out the program full force.

Meanwhile, it’s important that you continue using strong marketing techniques to reach the target audience that you desire and make money—don’t doubt the power of the hash tag, look up potential customers using strong keywords in the search bar, and tweet at times where your followers are more likely to see your activity, such as near lunch time or early in the morning.

Author Bio: Stella Walker is a freelance writer of free credit score where she writes about topics including credit, debt, investment, bankruptcy.

The concept of adding value to things has been around for a very long time now in traditional business and it is basically perfecting the art of being a good middle man. At the core of good scaleable businesses there is always profit being made on every run of the chain from raw materials to wholesale through to retail.

Lessons To Learn

Some of you who follow my blog on a regular basis might have read the article I wrote a couple of months ago about selling on ebay and how its much harder than it sounds to make a profit. Well I still stand by that but I definitely learnt something from that process that has given me a better idea of what to do. Last time I bought some X-mini speakers from a wholesaler and decided to sell them on at retail price. Because I was the guy at the end of a long chain and I didn’t add any value to it I got a very low profit margin on the goods and so I realised that what I needed to do was buy some component parts and add value to them.

Ideas For Inspiration

To give you a few examples of the ideas that I’ve had I saw some nice looking things when I was searching online for my garden and one thing in particular caught my attention, these Sun Jar Lamps. If you take a look at the link then you will see that all they are made out of is an led light, a small solar panel and a frosty jar. All of these things if you bought them in bulk would be cheap and you would be able to add value to these individual products and make something that people would pay quite a bit of money for.

Money Coming Out Of Your Green Thumb

I’ve been having a think over the past few days and I have come to the conclusion that one of the the best things to add value to is food. If you are a farmer you are basically getting the food you grow for free after the initial start up costs. Crops make their own seeds and animals have babies. Of course its a lot more complicated than that and there are over heads and running costs but basically the product they are producing is as cheap as chips.

Then you have a think about all of the products you look at in the supermarket and see how producers have added value to them by simply putting them together or cooking them and canning them for you. This is why so many farm shops have been sprouting up over the past couple of years, the farmers have started to realise that they are right at the bottom of a long chain but if they cut out all of those middle men their profits could be much greater.

You can do the same thing! If you have space in the garden and a willingness to put in a bit of graft to develop your green thumb then you can grow your own vegetables, add value to them by baking them or making soups for example and then taking them to your local farmers market.

There are a few boundries that you have to overcome like getting the stall, equipment and a food hygiene certificate as well as having an inspection to make sure that your food is local. I can promise you that the profit margins are large and its a business that you can set up for less than £500.

If you want to find out more about applying to farmers markets and selling your own produce then then take a look at this article but I really just told you about this avenue to give you inspiration to come up with your own ideas to add value to things that you can control and sell them in the best places

If you’ve got any ideas about what sort of things you could add value to then we would love to hear about them. Please tell us about them in the comments section or tell ask your friends on facebook.

It’s not easy to run a blog or site and keep people interested, especially when there’s so many people that are active in the field. More blogs are started everyday and it’s become even easier to start one with hosting and Cloud Computing services. Without the proper tools and content, you run the risk of blending into the background and seeing lackluster online traffic.

Many bloggers make a living, or at least a portion of their income, from blog advertising. Depending on what kind of site you run and advertising plan you have, you need to keep your traffic high in order to make any money from all the time you’ve already put into it. If you’re seeing lagging figures, here’s the kinds of posts that will boost your numbers and get you paid:

The “How-To” Post

The Internet is the place that people go now to get information on pretty much everything. People love these kinds of posts, and they are among the most popular types of articles that you find on the Internet. “How-To” posts pretty much tell the reader the process and implementation of how to get something done. This can apply to anything from saving money to looking for insurance quotes. This is one kind of post that you may have used in the past but you might want to dust off and start using again. You can make them as informative or general as you want, but the more specific the content is, the better your numbers will be.

Budgeting Posts

The majority of people right now are having a hard time getting by with the economy being so difficult. Different posts on budgeting approaches are a very effective content measure to get people interested. There’s a million different bloggers posting articles about how to cut back on spending so if you use this method, you’ll want to be as specific as possible. Give readers options and resources that they can seek out. Vary up the topics and talk about saving with coupons, budget apps, personal fiance, and the like. Even if you’re blog isn’t finance related, you can relate the topic to most any niche blog as long as it’s done in the right way.

Topical Posts

Keeping things relevant and up-to-date is a must-have approach in the online world. Information and daily news has an increasingly shorter shelf-life and something that happened just a day or two ago won’t get the attention you might think. Keeping up with recent tech, news, and general information is a great way to show that you’re an active blogger that is relevant and a good resource. Some bloggers will only update weekly, but if you’re blogging more about current and daily events, you’re going to see results. Take some of these tips to heart when you’re trying to come up with ways to get your traffic results higher. The more people you have coming to your site and interacting with links and content, the more money you’re going to make. It stands to reason that if you’re wanting to make some money from your blog, you have to do everything you can to improve you online visibility.

As any freelancer or intern will tell you, doing the work is the easy bit; it’s getting paid that’s tricky.

Being able to take debit and credit card payments has long been a good route for turning a money-making idea into a reality that actually allows you to rake money in but, in the past, it’s been a tricky route open only to ‘established’ businesses.

Now, however, technology is emerging which allows even individuals to take credit card payments with a minimum of effort and fuss. Here are three ways to start getting the money you make quickly and with more convenience for your customer.

1. Boku

Boku is a clever way to turn your customers’ phone credit into money in your account.

Your customers hand over their mobile number rather than a credit card and reply to a text message to confirm the purchase rather than entering a PIN number.

The amount is then just debited from their phone bill.

2. iZettle

Square has captured hearts and minds in the mobile payments business over in the US and iZettle is set to do the same thing in Europe.

They don’t really use chip and pin over in America so iZettle is necessarily a little bigger than Square’s tiny whites square but the principle is the same; your phone becomes a chip and pin machine and you can take payments quickly and without fuss.

Pricing seems to be the same as Square too – 2.75% of the transaction plus some pennies.

iZettle launched in Sweden in June and is set to take over Europe within the year.

3. Adelante

Adelante allows you to take credit card payments using just a smartphone and their software.

On the plus side, it’s a reputable business used by many plumbers and taxi drivers and other people with businesses that need to take credit card payments. On the minus side, it’s more business focused and less focused on individuals.

You have to apply to the company direct for pricing, for example.

This is a guest post from Choose, a UK consumer site that covers personal finance including full reviews of deals like Tesco Clubcard and tools to compare specific deals such as cash back credit cards