Comment marketing: using forums and blog comments to help spread the word about your brand or business; moderating the comments on your own blogs or social profiles to add value to your brand and/or curate fan input into data.

Yes, the comments people leave on your blog can give your brand an extra amount of exposure. The way you answer your friend’s questions or comments on Facebook can help build your expertise and create an important interaction between you and your followers. How you use the comments they leave can help build your business: are they offering suggestions on what they would like to learn from you? Are they addressing their concerns about what’s working and not working in their business? These tidbits can be used to ‘curate’ their concerns into new products. Often, your friends and fans are telling you in a roundabout way what new information they’ll be seeking in the future.

Even the replies you leave on Yahoo! answers and forums can build your expert status and help drive traffic to your website. Do businesses know how important this is to their marketing and overall exposure on the web? Probably not. That’s why this is an opportunity for you to create a solution for their problems. These ideas in ‘comment marketing’ can help you create a niche career for yourself and have something unique to present to businesses that otherwise have no idea.

Comment marketing is easy and the concepts are simple to implement if you have the right training. Working from home in an Internet marketing career has never been this easy to obtain until now.

One of the main factors that many marketers find they have trouble with is time management: how can one do all of the things that are required for a busy online business? With so many new marketing tools coming out on a daily basis, how can one keep up with the tasks?

As time goes on and your business grows, you’ll find that you need help. That help can be as simple as a part time virtual assistant, all the way to a full time employee. After years of marketing online and trying out what works and what doesn’t, we have found some great places to find decent help for your business, even if you don’t want to pay big money for it.

High School Students:  No matter what age you are, most high school students are on top of the hottest and cutting edge services and software that could help your business. Videos, social networking and blogging are the heart of what high school kids do everyday, they’re just not aware that there are ways to make money doing it. Instead of trying to learn everything yourself, high school kids can help you out, sometimes for very little money. They’ll often help you out for a couple bucks an hour or a pizza, and you can learn the shortcuts to the latest techniques. Find high school students at computer clubs or even friends of your neighbor’s kids.

Interns: if you take your business and marketing seriously, you could have an intern work for you. In most states, a sole entrepreneur can have an intern (check with your state laws).  This gives a young person, or even someone who desires to change careers, the chance to learn a new skill. For a couple hours a week of work, you can teach them the effective marketing techniques you have learned in this school.

Outsourcing:  there are plenty of outsourcing firms that can help you with your daily tasks, usually very cheaply. Do your research and make sure you review the outsourcing company before spending any money. Since they are mainly overseas, they will vary greatly in the quality of the work they do. Make sure you see some of their other work they’ve done and whether they have a good command of the language and good writing skills (usually their biggest weaknesses). The pluses are that they are great at social networking skills and graphics, and that you can get some outsourcing help for as low as $5.00 an hour.

Virtual Assistants: These are professional people that cost more to hire, but are usually well-versed in marketing and good at what they do. The best part is that you can hire them for as little work as you need done to as much as you need. They are as reliable as a real employee without the expense of hiring one: benefits, office space, computers, etc. Most virtual assistants will cost you about the same as an experienced employee per hour: $12 – 20 an hour range depending on their level of service, but you can hire them for only a few hours a month, usually on a retainer, because they often work for a firm with multiple customers.

Craigslist:  a great free way to find an employee when your business grows to that level. Either part time or full time, even temporary or by the project, you can use Craigslist.org to find just the right help that you need without the expense of a job placement firm. Write a free classified ad to attract whatever level of help you need. Craigslist is one of the most highly visited websites on the Internet, attracting millions of job seekers.

Elance.com:  a giant resource of professional people looking for work virtually. You can hire by the project and look over the qualifications of your assistant that are listed on their profile. You put out a bid for the work you need done, and the thousands of members of elance will browse the listings and accept the bid if they choose to do so. There are various levels of experience and rates on elance because it includes workers from the U.S and overseas.

Telephone and Text

There are two types of marketing that involve the recipient’s telephone.

1. Is voice broadcasting and the other

2. is text messaging.

For voice broadcasting you can use a service called http://www.automaticresponse.com

Be careful not to use this too often because it can get some complaints that it is too intrusive. Overall though, it can be very effective and people can opt out of the broadcasts easily. You also want to consider only using this service on a customer list of yours, so the people you are broadcasting to already have somewhat of a relationship with you.

There are two major ways you can use this.

A. You can record a message that is broadcast to all the phone numbers on your distribution list and

B. You can advertise a phone number to call for recorded information.

It’s simply amazing what these systems will do.

They have a wonderful video and features list for

A. at http://www.automaticresponse.com/v2/content/services/broadcast.aspx and

B. http://www.automaticresponse.com/v2/content/services/marketingline.aspx

Text Messaging

One thing is for sure. People look at their text messages and they normally do it within minutes of receiving them and mostly immediately when they receive it. They might wait a week or more to check their email, they may never check it or they may check it sometime whenever they feel like it, but not text. They check it NOW.

On one hand this is an EXTREMELY powerful form of marketing but on the other hand it still can be considered intrusive so you have to be careful how you handle it. The first thing is you don’t want to be buying lists of phone numbers and spamming text messages to them. That’s a great way to ruin your reputation.

The best way to do this is to give your customers or prospects a big enticement to allow you to text them, such as giving away give discounts on many of your products and services once a week. You should tell people signing up exactly how many texts they can expect. Some text messaging services require that you do this and you must guarantee that’s all the messages you will send.

You can send as many as you want as long as the receiver has agreed to it. Since text broadcasting is not free at the present time, you should be judicial in how many text messages you send and make sure you are getting a return on your investment.

Plus, for most professional people too many promotional texts would get aggravating. You can actually sell text messages. You could sell your daily inspiration message or your daily weight watching reminder or whatever short message you have.

Here’s some tips on text message marketing:

• Add a text message field to your ezine sign up form

• Add text message subscribe instructions to your printed material.

• Send a broadcast to your email subscribers encouraging them to sign up.

• Give instructions to sign up for your messages on all your social networks, websites and blogs.

• Don’t text too often

• Make sure you don’t text anywhere near sleeping hours (this may be difficult if you do business worldwide)

• Limit your messages to about 150 characters.

Adwords Express is an easier version of Google’s Adwords. It’s designed for local businesses to easily set up ads for their brick and mortar store. It’s specifically made for local businesses looking for local customers. Adwords express gives business owners the benefits of a targeted online ad campaign without spending a lot of time to manage it.

How it works:

When people search your area for the products or services you provide (“flowers in Dallas”, or if they’re already in Dallas, just “flowers”) an ad for your business will appear above or beside their search results. Your business will also be marked with a distinctive blue pin on Google Maps, helping it stand out to potential customers.

The blue pin indicates a paid ad created by adwords express. The blue pin is only available for businesses that have paid for the listing. The orange pin indicates businesses that are listed with Google Places but have not paid for a listing. The lettered order of businesses is determined from organic search results. The orange dots indicate businesses that are listed with Google Places but are not ranked high enough with organic results to get a lettered pin.

There’s a growing need for experts in paid Internet advertising. How about you?

Signing Up

The first thing to do is to sign up for all the affiliate programs you like. Signing up for an affiliate program is usually easy. The affiliate program you sign up for will email you your user ID and Password and give you instructions on how to use their program. They will also issue you their affiliate links. Some will put in your specific ID into the link and some will show you where your ID number goes.

It is imperative that you get the link thing correct so you can get your commissions. Also, don’t think you can lump tons of affiliate links all together and make lots of money. The most successful affiliates promote only one product at a time and they endorse the product too. This means they say something nice about the product and they build interest in the product by showing the potential buyer the need for having the product or service.

If you can’t find a link to join the affiliate program, it doesn’t mean they don’t have one. Some companies don’t really want everyone signing up for their program. A large percentage of the people that sign up never even put their links up. Companies just don’t want to mess with these people that don’t know what they are doing, so they’ll make their program “by request only.” If you find a company you really like, email them to see if they have an affiliate program.

In your ebook, this means that your recommendations should be worked into the text of the book in a natural way. Yes, you can have lots of affiliate links in a book, but just don’t make a big list of them.

Putting the Links in the Book:

There are two ways to put affiliate links in your book.

1. Simply put the entire link in the Word document before you convert it to Adobe PDF or

2. Make a separate page in your website for each affiliate product like

http://www.greatinternetmarketing.com/rudl.htm

On this page you will say more about the affiliate product and, if you wish, you can put the long affiliate link under a “click here” for more info button that would take the visitor to the affiliate site.

Method 2 is more work, but actually better because if you find a better affiliate, you can switch the links on your site easier than redoing the links in your book. Diligently put affiliate links in your ebooks and watch your overall profits soar.

Learn to make more money with your home-based business.

I can’t tell you how convenient it is to work with a company that is not only in the office but most of my work is on a computer.  I am a mother of 3 children in which I home school too.  Your probably thinking I am crazy to work a full-time job and home school my 3 children.  Well, lucky for me just like everything else in this world my children do most of their work on a computer.  Technology has changed this world we live in today even from what we were used to 5 years ago.

I am able to keep all of my files on a password protected flash drive which I back up daily and I can use in any computer.  Internet Marketing Training Center also uses programs and software that all employees can log into at any computer in any part of the world.  So I am able to access all of my work from my flash drive and log into our different data bases.  When my children are sick, a day I need to stay home with them, or I have appointments to go to for the day that doesn’t stop me from getting my work done.

My point to all of this is that having an online business in our world today is considered to be “Normal”  If you do not have a website and profiting from it then you need to have the proper training to have a successful website and more.  That will give you the convenience to work from anywhere and take care of your personal needs as well. 

Another point is that you may be working for a company that does not have a website or they do but it’s not that great.  With receiving the proper training you could make yourself more valuable to the company.  You could quit and start your own.  There are tons of possibilities you would have from the training that IMTCVA.ORG provides.

Get started today so that you can have more time for your family and work from anywhere in the World… Including on a beach in Bahamas;)  If you have a device to get online then you can work from where ever you choose.