3 Highly Effective Strategies To Power Up Your Business in 2005
 by: Jean Lam

Whatever your business resolutions may be for this year, you need to take action. Each day that passes by is lost profits if you don't do anything to improve your business. Everyone wants to have more and more success but if you just stay there and dream about being more successful, you will never reach your goals.

As a matter of fact, it's imperative that you work on a well-constructed business plan to ensure that you meet your objectives. By using a road map for your future promotions, you will be more focused and motivated. Just remember, doing a little every day can lead to a huge accomplishment in the future.

You should always try to improve your business wherever you can and make more profits because there are so many different profitable marketing techniques that you can use to boost your business.

With that said, let's see some of these lucrative promotion strategies that will skyrocket your sales and profits.

(1) Pay Per Click(PPC) Search Engines

Pay Per Click search engines are among one of the quickest ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. You just bid on keywords related to your site and you can get a top listing along with the organic search engine listings.

Bidding and keyword research are critical to the success of your campaigns. If you bid high for high competition keywords, you can be sure to get a good placement in the PPC. An example with Google Adwords, positions 2-4 are usually very good. Of course, position 1 is the best but you will be paying the highest bid and your budget can be drained quite fast.

If you bid for low competion keywords, you can pay for as low as 5 cents and expect a top listing because there won't be many ads competing for these keywords. Hence, if you can get lots of these low competition keywords which bring you highly targeted clicks, that will be a very profitable campaign.

Then you just need to ensure that you either get these visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or buy whatever product or service you might be offering.

The most difficult parts are to get the right keywords and sufficient amount of clicks to prevent your keywords from being slowed or disabled. When this happen, your ad will disappear. The best status for your keyword should always be "normal", hence it will be shown at full delivery. To solve this issue, your ad must be eye catching, it can arouse curiosity, it can state a benefit in the description, it can include a call to action and it helps if the ad itself contains the keyword you're targeting.

It takes a few minutes to set up an account with AdWords at http://adwords.google.com

To search for potential related keywords for your website, you can make use of Overture search tool at
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

or Google AdWords Keyword Tool at
http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox

Some changes at AdWords, if you are promoting affiliate products, you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate and include the abbreviation for affiliate ie "aff" in your ad description.

In addition, if there are several ads promoting the same product by using the same keyword, only one ad will be displayed now. Hence there won't be duplicate ads. A higher rank for your ad will be determined based on its maximum cost-per-click(CPC) and clickthrough rate(CTR) just like before.

To solve this issue, you can promote that same product on your own website instead of linking directly to the merchant's site.

To know how much advertisers are paying for keywords, check out Overture bid tool at

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/

This can give you an idea for the competitivity of the keywords.

Advertising on Overture is more costly and depending on your industry, usually you will reach over 80% of active Internet users than on AdWords because your site will also appear on Overture's network of sites like MSN, Yahoo, Altavista, Infospace and CNN amongst others as sponsored sites.

To sign up for an account at Overture, go to this url
http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/choose.jhtml

(2) Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Getting free traffic from the search engines is one of the most powerful marketing tactics because not only are you not paying a dime but the traffic just like PPC is extremely targeted. People coming to your site after making a search on the search engines is one of the best methods to deliver good results.

Getting your site noticed and ranked high in the search engines takes time and work but the long lasting traffic is well worth the effort.

To optimize your site, consider putting your targeted keywords in your title, description, include some keywords in your content, and most importantly, get quality relevant links to your site.

While you will be waiting for your rankings to appear on the search engines, an advice is to drive traffic via the PPC in the meantime.

(3) Affiliate Program

An affiliate program is a type of joint venture and is a highly effective technique to generate new streams of traffic and skyrocket your sales.

And best of all, it's FREE advertising and minimal effort on your part in contrast to ppc and seo where you have to work for your rankings or pay for every click.

On the contrary, you can capitalize on other webmasters' existing websites which are already getting traffic and if you have a product or service, it does not cost you anything to contact these business owners and offer them to join your affiliate program to promote your product in return for a commission. Persuading them and finally recruiting them is the hardest part of your job and you have to make sure that your joint venture proposal is convincing and interesting.

Furthermore, you can also profit from other marketers opt in email lists and you can get a flood of new customers very quickly.

Promoting your business constantly and regularly is the key to long term growths. Take action today and start to work on your online business goals by implementing the strategies mentioned above. Every day and month which goes by is only lost time which could have been used to market your business slowly but surely.

About The Author

Jean Lam is the author of the highly acclaimed eBook "Top Search Engine Ranking Secrets in Google Revealed", a concise, step-by-step guide to high search engine ranking for the beginner to intermediate level webmaster - available now at http://www.top-ranking-strategies.com