Let’s talk about Anne Frank, one of the most celebrated women in history. Her life was brought to open not because of the time she was in—Anne was a victim in the Holocaust—but because of a gift given to her on her thirteenth birthday: a journal.

Such is the power of writing, and such is the effectiveness of a diary. However, since we already have technology that we can take advantage of, we have something very special and even more powerful. We have a blog.

Blogs today are no longer used by those who want to talk about the food they ate at lunch, newborn babies, plans for tomorrow, gossips, and celebrities. They are also being utilized by business owners who want to connect to their customers.

Any Comments?

The comment section of the blog is perhaps abused, with plenty of links from suspicious websites. However, it should not be turned off because it’s a highly efficient tool in communicating with your customers. It’s how they get to air their voice, and it’s how you can let them know that you’re real and that you are someone who listens to them. If you’re receiving questions or even hints of doubts, you can use Comments as your way of making them feel assured.

It’s in the Words

Of course, you can never underestimate the effectiveness of blog posts. Let’s take the story of Green Cine. It’s just a small DVD rental company, but it’s earning huge profits every month because of its blog, which is generating thousands of hits every month. All they have to do is to write about the various film festivals all over the world and other entertainment-related news.

The good thing about blogging is that you don’t need to sound like an intellectual or a genius. In fact, it’s a death knell, simply because readers don’t want to spend a lot of time understanding what you’re trying to say. Blogging permits you to be informal yet conversational, as if you’re just talking to a friend.

Introduce the Guest Blogger

Here’s another way on how you can interact with your customers: invite them to write an entry for your blog. They can develop testimonials for you, which are actually more effective than press releases or sales letters. They may also create news that are related to your business—anything that will keep the interest of your readers high. Besides, having a guest blogger means that you don’t have to generate stories on your own. You already have great partners with you.

A start-up company can surely rely on blogs as one of their most efficient marketing tools. They are for free, and yet, they are loaded with plenty of features that will help you create a very unique blog site. They are also very easy to maintain. To make the readers come back, all you need to do is to come up with interesting stories. Blogs are also favorites of search engines, which means ,they can improve your search engine ranking. Most of all, they provide you an avenue where you can talk and mingle with your customers.

Got Myspace? Indeed, who would have ever thought that a website that aims to connect people will be such a hit, with millions of members from all over the world? What’s more, this is not the only one—there are plenty of them. In fact, Facebook is coming in close to Myspace in terms of market share.

Business wise, though, this only means one thing: you have a huge potential market in social networking websites. Making your marketing ploys a lot easier is the fact that there are several built-in applications that you can use to promote your products and services. To give you an idea, read below:

1. You have the blog. Admit it, people will always be hungry of information, whether it is about the weather, social issues, your business, or even about the life that you live. Your entries can be read by your friends, and if it is good, they can even be passed on from one person to another. Simply put, a blog can offer you a very effective free publicity.

2. You can set up groups. Would you like to have a very good idea about the size of your target market? Try to set up an online group right at your chosen social networking website. In here, only those who have interest in what you are offering would definitely like to join. You cannot really expect many, but you know that they will be ones that are the easiest to convince. You can update them about your business, share more information, or invite them to your mailing list, which then allows you to promote your products through their e-mail.

3. You can build up your authoritative character. Why are there some ridiculous products that still get sold every day? Well, it only proves that in business, it is not really what you have per se but how you are able to present them to your market. There are a number of social networking websites that have message boards that you can participate in. If you can just check on them, there could be some questions that you are relevant to your chosen niche. You can share your knowledge and expertise to others, thereby increasing your reputation as an authority in your own field. When there is trust, there is no way that you will not be able to persuade them to accept your business and make it part of their lives.

4. They are free. When you’re in e-business, social networking websites give you an opportunity to save yourself hundreds of dollars in advertising costs and yet be able to reach out as many people as possible. Most of these social networking websites, if not all of them, are completely free. All you need to do is to sign up.

5. You can choose your friends. If you’re using social networking sites to gain contacts, you might as well choose your friends. Fortunately, you can narrow them down by using the Advanced Search option. You can identify the profiles of your potential market.

In a report published by USA Today, there are almost 100% of Internet users who are utilizing search engines such as Google to look for a product or even buy one. That means that the market is definitely huge, and if you know how to play your cards right, you can actually have a good share in the market pie. Yet where are you in the Internet?

It’s not uncommon of online businesses to be lost among the millions of indexed pages, hardly ever appearing in search results. However, you know that these are the ones that don’t succeed and will eventually fold up. If you don’t want to be placed in such a situation later on, you may want to implement one of the most effective online marketing strategies: search engine optimization (SEO).

How SEO Can Help You
SEO is simply tweaking the pages of your website to make them appear friendlier to Google. For example, this mega search engine highly favors websites that are relevant to the key phrases commonly searched by Internet users. Thus, to obtain such favor, an SEO specialist will add meta tags that will include these keywords. He/she may also link your website to other related ones to further establish your relevancy and even your authority on the niche that you’ve chosen. Technically, SEO can help you rank better because of the inbound links that you’re going to get.

What Should You Do Then?
Improving your ranking in Google can be accomplished in two ways: paid and non-paid. Non-paid strategies include link development, content writing, off-page optimization, directory and article directory submission, as well as press release submission. They are considered non-paid, since they are completely free of charge.

They are also more preferred by Google for one good reason: if your website is not good enough, then nobody else would accept or even link to it.  Moreover, the effects of these strategies are more long-term.
The only downside is that it will take months before you can actually see the results. Free submission to directories, for instance, will take 1 to even 6 months before your website can get approved. You may then need to pair your non-paid strategies with paid ones. It may cost you some, but definitely not a lot, and results are guaranteed to be really fast, as short as 24 hours.

Should You Do This Alone?
There’s no question about it, SEO can be handled by just one person—but can you? There are a lot of factors that would probably make you think twice. First, you have to take into consideration the fact that SEO is ever-changing, and keeping tabs on the new methodologies can sometimes be too exhausting. You can also have other responsibilities to take care of, more importantly, how you can better your products so they are worthy of your customer’s trust. 

You may want then to work with an SEO company who can be your best partner in making sure that you can obtain a very good placement in Google.

Have you heard of bailouts and suspended presidential campaigns? Blame it on the economy. With the kind of crisis the entire country—or even the whole world, for that matter—is facing right now, not a lot of business owners would consider hiring more people into their wing. After all, that is almost equivalent to flushing out hundreds of dollars from the profits every month. However, if you’re marketing in the World Wide Web, you are going to lose more when you don’t get a dedicated and professional website designer.

If you haven’t got the whole point yet as to why you need to get a professional website design service, hear out the many benefits you can reap out of it:

1. You can have your own time back. A website appears to be too simple, but if you’re going to be the one to make and maintain it, it can actually eat up all of your precious time. Keep in mind that you still need to research, develop content outline, build or modify the design, and enhance its overall look. Giving the job to professional website designers therefore will allow you to make the most out of whatever time you have. You can focus on more important business matters, such as your offline and online marketing strategies, as well as business plans and expansions. You can even find time to attend your daughter’s recital or your son’s football game.

2. You are actually spending less. Yes, you can save hundreds of dollars just by working with website designers. For one, you don’t need to purchase new equipment or software, as most website designers already have their own. What’s more, you only get to pay for the working hours or for the project completed—no more spending money over idle or nonproductive hours of your staff. Simply put, you’re getting your money’s worth.

3. They can update and maintain the website for you. The World Wide Web is a dog-eat-dog world. If you don’t show anything new to your visitors, they would never think twice of moving on to your competitor’s website. A lot of web design companies right now don’t only create but they also update your website, making sure that you can always offer something interesting to your visitors. Some of them even have their own copy writers, who can provide your target market a lot of relevant information about your products or services.

4. Website designers understand the relationship between function and form. Here’s a typical mistake: just because the website looks cool with all its Flash animation, it’s already an effective one. On the other hand, not all websites that are filled with useful information are excellent either. It’s important that your website maintains a good balance between aesthetics and function, the animation, photos, and other multimedia files enhancing the message of your content. Who else can do that? Website designers fully understand this principle.

With hiring a professional website design service, you’re not wasting anything. In fact, you’re investing in something that will help you sustain your business even in the midst of an economic problem.

However if you save hundreds of website links, it can be difficult to remember where a specific website link might be hiding. Enter delicious.com.

Delicious.com is a social bookmarking website. Saving your links in Delicious allows you to create categories and tags for easy retrieval later.

The best feature of Delicious is the ability to share your bookmark selections with others. And of course you can review bookmarks from other users. This social networking feature is great because you can find links to websites that are highly rated by the Delicious network.

I have used a website service called Digg.com for over a year now. Digg is an aggregate service for blogs and other RSS enabled websites. Users of Digg send links of articles that they think are interesting.

If that were the end of the story, Digg wouldn’t provide any value. But once someone posts a link to an interesting article, other users vote and comment on the selected article. If users like the article they will cast a positive vote called a Digg. If users don’t like the article then they cast a Bury vote or they don’t vote on it at all.

The amazing thing is if an article becomes popular with positive votes, the original website will be flooded with thousands of visitors in a very short period of time. Maybe your next blog article could become popular via a Digg submission.

Many companies are hard at work on Social Networking applications for networking and sharing with friends. All of the popular applications can be used on any computer with Internet connection. However an amazing transition is taking place.

Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg are building apps for mobile devices such as cell phones. Or in my case, the iPod touch. The Internet along with SMS just got a whole lot more interesting.

To the uninitiated, social networking is changing the landscape of the Internet. Social networking is a place where people develop networks of friends and associates. Websites that use social networking allow you to connect with people of similar interests or hobbies. Popular websites such as Facebook and MySpace let you create profiles where you can post photos and information about yourself such as location, interests, etc. And other users can link to you and share information.

Think of social networking websites as highways connecting people of similar interests. The users of these websites generate content by communicating with each other. And networks are formed quickly by users linking together. There many different types (from aggregate to bookmarking) of social networking websites.

As of 2007, Google has been the dominant search engine throughout the world. If you are looking to expand your business online it would be wise to invest in professional SEO services that take advantage of Google and other search engines.

It comes down to extensive research about your target markets, budgeting, hard-work and determination. Learn all you can about different types of tools you can use in e-commerce to boost sales and traffic to your web page. Be open-minded about change. And most importantly of all, realize that search engines will optimize based on the quality of your website and content. Do your research. Familiarize yourself with the industry-specific terms that will increase your overall knowledge of the Search Engine Optimization process.

Some terms that will be useful in your endeavor to build your business are:

• SEO Management
• Linking Building Strategies
• SEO Audit
• PPC Management
• Website and Landing Page Design
• Optimization of Content

This is a competitive field. You have to use every available resource possible to last in the world of internet marketing. Find your market niche and then maximize your business with Search Engine Optimization. You’ve worked hard to get your website up and running. The traffic is starting to come in and you want to get maximum saturation of your target market. So what do you do? You manage your SEO carefully and perform periodic statistical analysis to see if you are consistently increasing the amount of traffic to your website and successfully converting that traffic into paying customers.