Google Adwords is an incredibly powerful marketing tool with an instant global reach that can take your business from nowhere to an overnight success. Why wouldn’t a new marketer take advantage of such a powerful tool? I can answer that question with another question. Why wouldn’t you let someone with a new driver’s license behind the wheel of a race car? Because, unless they are extremely lucky, they are going to crash and burn. Google Adwords is the Formula One of online marketing and it is not for beginners.

As advertising goes, the reasons to avoid Google Adwords early on in your education is overwhelming.

1. First, it can be very expensive and most new marketers will exhaust their ad budget before they can successfully bring in revenue. This is mainly because Google Adwords can be deceptively difficult to master. The basic formula is to identify keywords, write an ad that uses the keywords and have a landing page that completely delivers on what your ad promises.
2. Next, Google rewards advertisers who solve the problem their searchers are trying to solve. If you fail to do this you can expect high cost per click and low traffic.
3. Further, Google purposefully keeps the exact formula for success under wraps. If you are not getting the results you are seeking, the support you receive from Google will be general at best. Expect Google to suggest “improve your landing page” or “tips for writing ads.” On top of that, Google periodically change their rules requiring you to change your campaign or face the prospect of high cost per click or low traffic.
4. Finally, the instant global reach of your Google Adwords campaign is accompanied by global competition with a wide variety of skill levels and budgets.

Keep your chin up though. There are many options that exist for the new marketer.

Initially most new marketers have more time than money and that can be a good thing (more on that later). There are many low-tech approaches that have worked for decades and still do. These alternatives allow you to learn how to market affordably which will allow for some trial and error without spending your whole ad budget.

Using some of the methods below will allow you to use several forms of marketing which is a more balanced and stable long-term approach. Here is the big bonus: your competitors are still online spending themselves out of business with Adwords!

Here are just a few options when thinking about an offline marketing campaign. They may not be sexy, but they are time-tested, and still very effective marketing tools.

1. Newspaper Advertising – requires only a computer and 800 number. Information about newspapers from around the country is easily researched online and ads can cost as little as $10 per week.
2. Flyers – this is a big one for those who have time but little money. Getting flyers or business cards made is cheap and easy using a site like vistaprint.com. Spend a couple of hours a day papering parking lots. The key with this plan is to put out a lot of flyers (hundreds daily).
3. Bandit Signs – Simple three line signs that reside at intersections and other high traffic areas which direct prospects to an 800 number with a message. Signs cost between $2-$5 dollars each and work wherever your prospects pass by or congregate.
4. Warm market – You have an immediate advantage approaching people you know because a level of trust exists between you. Many marketers can get off to a quick start by starting here.
5. Article campaigns – this is absolutely free to do. Establish yourself online as a respected and knowledgeable marketer in your niche. You may still be learning the ropes about marketing but you definitely know more than most people about your business.
6. Blogging – Similar to article marketing in that you share information about your area of expertise. Once people see you as a helpful resource they will begin to seek you out. The key here is to provide new content on a consistent basis. You can start today with a free site from WordPress or Blogger

If you have the budget, make Google Adwords a part of your overall marketing plan AFTER you have established other forms of marketing. Whenever you are new at something you need to be allowed to make mistakes, learn from them and apply what you have learned in the future. Hard won knowledge is the best way to learn. By starting with basic (and still viable) forms of advertising you can develop into a well-rounded, knowledgeable and, ultimately, more successful marketer in the long term, which is everyone’s goal.

Learn More About Google Adwords…

One of the most frustrating aspects to business is when you have all the marketing tools your business needs, perhaps even some your business does not need and yet you still see no results. You may even be spending time and effort marketing your business and yet conversion ratios and traffic remain constant or even drop. The reasons why marketing plans fail are numerous however; one of the primary reasons is that it was not the right marketing plan.

Every business is different and that includes businesses that sell the same products and services. Every business has something that is unique, the group of people they are targeting, the area they are working in, the options they have available to them. These different aspects mean that the same marketing plan is not going to work on every business.

When a marketing plan fails, it is important to find out exactly why it failed first. The reason or reasons are is essential. It may be that there is only one aspect of a marketing plan that failed, it may be multiple items or it may be the entire plan.

Research

Research is an essential aspect of marketing and inadequate research is one of the biggest pitfalls that can affect a marketing plan. Research provides a wealth of information that is vital to the success of a marketing plan. Generally, research is done on the target market. If a target market is not known, research is done to determine what market is going to be the most likely to benefit from the product or service provided by your business.

This is the group of individuals you will want to target and in some areas there may be multiple groups. While it may be possible to market to all these groups it is, in most situations better to market to a single group or groups which contain a large percentage of similar traits. This makes it easier to consolidate a marketing plan as well as eliminates a significant amount of research, time and effort.

The second aspect which needs to be researched for a marketing plan to be successful and is also one of the reasons why marketing fails to produce appropriate results involves research competition. Researching competition is not just about researching the prices of a competitor. It includes noting things such as lay out, finding out what marketing techniques the competitor is using and how often these tools are used for example.

Many business owners and beginning internet marketers fail to note anything more than price and perhaps general layout. As a result, they are missing vital information that can save time, money and effort when it comes to setting up their own marketing plans. It is also important to keep in mind that you want your business to be unique from your competition.

Get a good idea of the types of deals, offers, discounts and promotions that your competition uses and offer something different to help your business stand out. Many people simply do what their competition does. In doing so, they often lower their marketability and their marketing plan can ultimately fail in this area.

Marketing Tools

Having enough research to create your marketing plan is only the first step in solving the problems that often cause marketing plans to fail. The next step is to take the time to pick out the right tools. Having the right tools for the job is essential to ensuring you get the most out of your marketing strategies.

Marketing tools have diversified over the years. Tools are not limited strictly to email and promotional options. Video, social networking, SMS texting, in addition to email and promotional marketing tools are also available. The increase in available options means that there is a greater spectrum to work with. It also means that picking the right tools is more important than ever.

Pick tools that are going to be easy for you to use, require minimal maintenance but provide you with maximum potential results. This will help to prevent your marketing plan from joining the ranks of those that have failed. Knowing the right tools to use can often be a trial and error process. The important thing is to avoid one of the reasons why marketing plans fail. In this case the reason involves putting too much into a single marketing tool.

Action, Action, Action

One of the biggest reasons why marketing plans end up failing is the lack of action. Marketing is an active part of your business, it is not a set and forget aspect of you business. In order to ensure that a marketing plan succeeds you must be actively engaged in working that plan. This means that email marketing messages should be updated and redesigned regularly.

SMS messages should be rewritten after very send. These messages should be short, contain only the minimum necessary information. It is important to remember that SMS marketing is relatively new and involves sending messages to mobile devices that often indicate repeat messages.

Videos should be produced, edited and updated to as high a level as possible. Computers and technology can turn just about any computer into a production studio with the right software. Keep videos interesting, engaging and relevant. The videos should be related to the company, the products or the services offered.

It is important to set up a marketing schedule and find out how much time, generally through trial and error that you need each day, week or month to handle all your marketing tasks and keep everything up to date.

The reasons why a marketing plan might fail are numerous. Some of these reasons include, failing to do the proper research into the market, the competition as well as the tools available. Other reasons can be failing to have enough tools, having too many tools or not using the tools you have effectively. Taking the time to make sure that you have the information you need as well as putting in the effort to ensure your success can go a long way to eliminating these reasons.

Next, Discover here how to outsmart your competitor, ethically dominate the search engines,and legally siphon off tons of cash in hand buyers from your website!

You might think that writing 100 articles in a year is a Herculean feat that only the most advanced or professional writer can accomplish, but the truth is that even a beginner can reach this goal with a little bit of planning and consistency.

What’s the benefit of having a ‘100 articles’ goal?

When you’re doing article marketing, a pivotal factor of your success will be how consistently you submit articles. Many amateurs decide to try article marketing and then give up prematurely when they don’t see immediate results.

What a shame! Article marketing is one of the most effective, reliable, and user friendly website marketing tools, but you need to submit articles consistently over an extended span of time in order to reap the benefits.

Even when you know you should be submitting articles every month, it can be a challenge to stay focused and write articles on a regular basis.

This is where the ‘100 articles’ goal comes in–focusing on that long term goal and coming up with a plan on how to reach it is like building consistency into your marketing plan. Instead of thinking of each article as a one-off, you start to see each article you submit as contributing to a larger goal.

Why should you aim to accomplish this goal in a year?

The goal is not just to submit 100 articles–the goal is to do it in about a year’s time. There are SEO benefits for trickling out your article submissions consistently over an extended span of time. This allows you to build links in a more organic way, which is attractive to search engines.

So, a year’s time is a good time frame. Space your articles submissions out evenly over that time. Submit just 8 articles a month, and you will reach your goal with ease.

Strategies For Submitting 100 Articles In A Year:

Just 8 articles a month will let you accomplish this goal in a little over a year. That’s just 2 articles a week.

• Write one article 2 days a week. Create regular ‘writing days’ where you have a block of time set aside for writing.
• Or schedule, one or more extended writing sessions where you produce multiple articles at one sitting.
• Or you can stockpile articles: Write 5 articles a week for 5 weeks. That will produce enough articles to last you about 3 months and will allow you to take a break from writing for a couple months (while still providing you with articles to submit during that time). Then do it all over again.

Need Writing Ideas?

Easy enough to decide to write 2 articles a week–the hard part is coming up with ideas of what to write about. Here are some suggestions to keep your creative juices flowing:

1. Use a free article writing template that gives you a basic structure for crafting an article on your topic. I’ve created some of my own, and I use them all the time.
2. Adapt content from your blog to create articles.
3. Remember to write for newbies and more advanced readers–you can cover the same topic in two different articles geared towards groups with different knowledge levels.
4. Use customer frequently asked questions as the basis for an article.
5. Use a keyword suggestion tool such as WordTracker to see what keywords your target readers are typing into search engines. Then write articles to satisfy those searches.

Your Assignment:

1. Commit to writing 100 articles in about a year’s time.
2. Develop a plan to reach your goals using one of the strategies I’ve outlined here or customize your own plan.

Imagine how you’ll feel at the end of a year when you know you’ve stuck to your goal and made a huge and lasting impact on your website’s health. Consistency is the key–it is not hard. It just takes writing a steady amount of articles every month. You can do this!

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that asks you a basic question, “What are you doing?” It allows anyone with an account to write up to 140 characters in a text field as a means to update, comment, promote or communicate to others who are “following” you. When people follow you, they see what you’ve recently contributed when they login. They see your “tweets”, which are the messages you leave.

And of course you can follow others who tweet about the things that interest you. As an Internet marketer you may want to follow other Internet marketers, for example.

Like anything, and this is especially true of working with social media, the more you give, the more you get. In other words, the more often you tweet the more activity you’ll generate. Some suggest that you tweet a few times a day, every day. Not every tweet needs to be profound. But they should all be useful.

It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services or affiliate links. Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only once in a while should you try to use Twitter to promote something. Otherwise you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.

Imagine if you had a large number of people following your tweets? Some people have tens of thousands following them. If you had something to promote and you had a large following, you could quickly and efficiently alert a lot of people of your promotion. It acts sort of like an opt-in mass emailing blast to your house email list, but it’s a heck of a lot easier and faster. This is the power of Twitter.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Twitter is that it can seem overwhelming at times. The sheer information on Twitter, the ‘how-to’s’, tutorials and all the other ubiquitous advice on how to use and take advantage of it can seem hard to understand and implement. So here’s an easy-to-understand list of the top ten ways in which you can use Twitter to market yourself, your business and your website.

The Top 10 Ways To Use Twitter for Marketing:

1. Use it to promote new pieces of content you or your company create to drive traffic to your site. From online articles to blog posts or from videos to webinars, each time you add something to the Web that is of value, tweet about it and include a link. (Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short.)
2. Use it for learning new marketing ideas, strategies and techniques. If you follow the right people, and you have to be picky about who you follow, you’ll get pointed to a good amount of useful tutorials, videos, e-zines and other things that teach you about marketing.
3. Use it to get new customers. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in your product or service. There are many ingenious ways to search for people on Twitter. For example, if you sell red widgets you could go to http://search.twitter.com and find people who have tweeted specifically looking for red widgets. To do this, type the following into the search box: red widgets?
   1. You’ll notice a lot of the results will be of others selling red widgets. These ones will all obviously have links in them to direct people to the site they’re selling red widgets on. To weed these people/tweets out, use the negative sign like this: -http red widgets?
   2. Since every link has ‘http’ in it, using the negative sign in front of it will cause your search results to not include any tweets with links in them.
4. Use it to build your email list. Use Twitter’s search to find people who may be interested in the monthly newsletter you send out to your opt-in house email list. Invite these people to join.
5. Utilize Twitter plugins or add-ons such as TweetMyBlog or The Twitter Updater, which both automatically make tweets of every new blog post you publish. Also check out TwitThis. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the Web page and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their followers on Twitter. Finally, look at TweetLater, a service that allows you to write lots of tweets at once and then schedule them to go out over time.
6. Use it to build buzz about an upcoming product or website launch.
7. Use it to better brand yourself or your business. Remember, when someone wants to learn more about you or your company, they are increasingly using sites like Twitter for research. You could easily use Twitter to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
8. Use it to update followers on breaking news regarding your company. If your company is mentioned in a new article, tweet about it and include a link to the article. Or if you’re at a conference or trade show, you could tweet what you’re doing and invite people to visit you in person.
9. Use it for business networking, master-mind groups (see Napoleon Hill), and getting yourself seen by high-profile people in your industry.
10. Use it as an instant messaging system to keep your and your team on the same page during projects. This is especially useful for those who work with teams spread out in different cities or countries.

You should note that this top 10 list is not in order of importance or in any particular order. I suggest that you give Twitter a try if you haven’t already. See if you can apply a few of these techniques and tactics to help you take advantage of Twitter as a marketing tool.

And one more important thing to remember is that there is no silver bullet in marketing. You should always be trying and implementing numerous tactics when marketing your business. Don’t only rely on Twitter or any other one thing. Instead, use Twitter (or any other Web 2.0 site) as simply one more tool in your entire social media and marketing toolbox.