Writing for your business is unavoidable. Unless you have a staff to do it for you, you'll have to answer customer email, and write sales letters, as well as promotional materials.
If you sell affiliate programs, you can avoid a lot of the customer service tasks involved, but in order to be successful with affiliate programs, you need to differentiate yourself from the other affiliates in a program. This means writing articles, product reviews, press releases, and other forms of communication that provide value to your potential customers.
There are ways to market though, and they're all free, that can cut the amount of writing that you do, build your credibility, help you find ideas for products, and help your potential customers find what they're looking for.
Below are four:
1. Networking
Networking is a way to connect with business associates, and sometimes, your potential customers. This is normally done through sites that allow you to do searches for those you want to meet.
Normally networking sites allow you to exchange messages, blog, exchange messages on forums or groups, and start conversations with others who are interested in your area of expertise.
This is the easiest way for you to find joint venture partners that can help you sell your products and services.
Examples of networks are:
http://www.myspace.com
http://www.ecademy.com
http://www.ryze.com
2. Forums
Forums are very similar to network sites. However, unlike networking sites, where you're looking for business partners, or to sell business to business, with forums, you're looking directly for your market. You can find out what others are shopping for by reading about what they're actually talking about.
Studying the forums is what finally made me decide to create a blog on how to market on the internet for free. I kept seeing the same question over and over: "I've just built a website, but I don't have any money. How do I market it?"
Forums will allow you to answer the questions of others and build your credibility in your aread of expertise. You can also find product ideas from what others are discussing.
To promote yourself, you can answer questions. If you're passionate about your topic, and you consider yourself an expert, you should be able to easily answer questions. Give the potential customer enough information to be helpful, but give him/her a reason to visit your site.
If you don't know what to say, ask questions. This will allow you to build links and learn your area of expertise better. It will also help you build relationships.
To find forums on your topic, do a search in a search engine and combine your topic with the word forums.
3. Free Classifieds
Although classified advertising isn't as popular as it used to be, and most don't use these sites, classified advertising can still be effective.
What you want to look for in free classified advertising are sites that rank high and get a lot of traffic.
Sites like Yahoo, MSN, and Google have groups where you can exchange messages and promote your products and services.
Unlike a lot of free classified ad sites, the messages on these groups do get read.
If you want to easily learn how to write good classifieds, study the small ads in magazines and newspapers. The ads you see repeated are making money. If they weren't, the ad writer wouldn't continue to run the same ads over and over.
4. Search Engine Optimization
If you market online, search engine optimization is a task you can't afford to ignore. It's amazing the number of sites on the internet that aren't even in the search engines.
You'll have a tough time being found online if you don't optimize and then submit your site.
The easiest way to do this is to get a tool that will tell you how to optimize your site. Software like Web CEO, http://www.webceo.com, will help take you through the process of optimizing your site by helping you find keywords, as well as analyze your site to tell you how you can improve your search engine optimization to raise your rankings.
With search engine optimization, you optimize each page for a specific set of keywords. What's important here is to know what keywords you want to be found for, who your competition is, as well as how much competition you have. Optimize your site and then make sure that you submit it to the search engines.
Although you may not like to write, and most people don't, you can cut your writing tasks down by choosing marketing methods that don't require you to do a lot of writing. Write in a conversational tone and help your site visitors and potential customers find the solutions to their problems. This will increase your sales and website conversions.
