Marketing your online business, website, or blog doesn’t have to be a nonstop financial nightmare, nor a burden to market and promote even of you are on a super tight budget, so long as you are willing to put in some work on a regular basis.

Dispelling the myths

You don’t have to have a large marketing and promotion budget to be successful with your online business, and you don’t have to spend every waking hour performing marketing and promotion activities. The keys to successful marketing is based on diligence and some hard work to establish your online businesses initial presence on the Internet, followed by a promotional and marketing schedule of tasks to increase and maintain your presence. Once your marketing task schedule is underway you will see the results in increased traffic, higher rankings and the most important result of all, sales!

Stay away from those marketing tools, programs, and software that promise overnight success and wealth, almost all of them are worthless, and will deprive you of money you could have used for more legitimate uses in your marketing efforts. There isn’t any one piece of software, or any marketing gimmick that will replace hard work and hands on effort. There are some useful tools that can help you reduce you work load or automate certain aspects of your over all marketing and promotion plan, but 99.9% of those offers you will get in your email or read about at marketing and promotion sites are worthless!

The most successful websites, blogs, and online businesses on the Internet today have a few things in common.

• They have well researched keywords, titles, and descriptions.
• Each page is named using a top keyword or phrase.
• Their site is filled with high quality relevant content with links to other useful resources.
• Each of these sites are marketed and promoted using an editorial calendar to ensure regular posting of fresh content.
• There is a marketing plan in place that include regular promotional tasks.

Laying your marketing foundation

Whether you are starting a new online business, or intent to revamp the promotion of an existing online business or site the same principles will apply, and will only be successful if you continue them with your editorial or marketing schedule. If you do not have the skills to undertake editing pages or writing content then it will be a good idea to either hire a local SEO/Marketing consultant or look for a freelance writer, or SEO tech online. There are many reputable sites such as rentacode.com that offer outsourcing services that are inexpensive, secure and cost effective. Once you have your sites foundation in place, then you can focus on publishing content and other marketing tasks. It may be a good idea to purchase a moderate quantity of 100% original unique articles that will serve as your primary base for publishing new content. You can always use a few filler articles in between 1 or 2 of these purchased articles to keep a regular flow of fresh relevant content on your site.

The first things you need to do are ensure that your website or blog is using the right meta data: page titles, keywords and phrases, and descriptions. I won’t bore with a long boring monolog on the importance of quality meta data, but your first priority is making sure you have the right titles, keywords, phrases, and descriptions, for all of your pages. This will guarantee your marketing campaign is forged upon a solid foundation.

With your Meta data sorted out, the next concern is the content on your pages. If you are using a static page website, then you will want to make sure you have a few well optimized gateway or landing pages that have keyword dense relevant content. Gateway pages are focused around 2 or 3 top keywords that are designed to gain prominent ranking on the major search engines. As visitors go to these pages they will be offered your business product or service with links to your home page and other relevant content via links with keyword anchor text.

Blog sites are already build around the gateway or landing page premise, and are crawled and indexed as single pages within your blog site. To leverage the maximum ranking potential you should use keyword rich titles for each blog post, and write each new post with keyword infused relevant content. As a rule of thumb do not mention or use the same keyword more than 5 or 6 times within a 400 word article to avoid what is known as keyword spamming. Use alternate or variations of your keywords in your articles.

Each new blog post or article should include keyword tags at the end of the article. There are a few good plugins for WordPress and other blogs that will automatically add in the most relevant tags at the end of your new post, but you should always add the most popular keywords in manually as well.

Using an editorial calendar

An editorial calendar is powerful tool that regulates your publishing dates with the topics for each new post. Your calendar will serve 2 purposes, the first is a time line for each published article, and the second is the topic or topics that will be covered. if your blog or website is new or has little content, then you should use an accelerated calendar that would include 4 to 5 new published articles per week for say 30 days. this will give your site 120 new article in 30 days if you publish 4 new article each week. Once you have completed your first 30 days of publishing, then you can relax your editorial calendar to 2 to 3 per week,  this will give you enough free time to work on other promotional tasks.

You can use a computer based calendar such as "to do" lists in outlook express, or Outlooks calendar, Thunderbird, and most every other email client, or you can download a free calendar, from download.com or other shareware/freeware sites. Other option would be Google Docs. Google Docs is 100% free and will let you share your marketing tasks, and editorial calendar to your employees, co-workers, or anyone you wish to have access.

To keep your publication dates on time and running smooth, add lists of proposed topics for each publication date, and to maximize the quality of your articles create a list of the most popular topics for your marketing niche, and add under each topic some titles that would be catchy and make use of your keywords. You can use a project manager to create lists of proposed articles with notes and rough drafts of content. Google Docs and OpenOffice can help you compile and manage this information, as well as the "to do" options in Outlook, Outlook express, and many other email clients.

Automating important marketing tasks

There are many tools and resources you can use to automate some important tasks in your regular marketing efforts, such as using Feedburner to build an xml based feed for syndication of your blog or website. There are also some very powerful tools that you can also use in conjunction with Feedburner, such as auto-posting updates to Twitter, subscription management of your RSS feeds, and html tools to further promote your blog site.

There are auto-ping tools and plugins for WordPress and other blogs that will send a ping notification to Google, ASK.com, Yahoo, other blog and search directories with each new post or article that is published. This will make submitting and crawling of your sites pages run automatically, although it is still a good idea to do a manual site submission every 30 days to Google, and the other top search engines.

Maximizing exposure with Social Networking

There are hundreds of social sites and tools you can take advantage of to extend and maximize your blogs visibility and exposure, such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and many many others. There are also many plugins for WordPress and other blogs to post updates directly with each new article published. As your articles are seen by other users at these social sites you will see increased traffic and new followers. If you do not have accounts with any social networking sites, now would be the perfect time to create some.

Build your sites reputation

Getting your new pages indexed on Google and the other major search engines will help build reputation and authority for your site, but you can not rely on that alone. A great way to build authority, reputation and back links is to find blogs that are related or relevant to your blog or online business niche, and post useful comments on articles published on their site. As you continue to contribute to these related sites you will get others who are following those sites to visit your site to see what you have to offer. Always be a contributor on these sites, not a spammer!

Follow your marketing task schedule

As you get comfortable with your new marketing schedule, make sure you are consistent, as you start to build traffic, your visitors will quickly get bored if you are not publishing new useful content for them, and they will simply move on to other sites. what works best is a balance of publishing articles, with the other tasks in your promotional schedule. Stick to both your editorial and marketing schedule, you can easily burn your self out by doing too much too soon, and the end result will be that after you burn out nothing will get done! Remember easy does it. and the best way to ensure that is by staying on course with your schedule and publishing calendar.

As you will soon see, with a little hard work and sticking to your promotional plan you will have built a truly profitable online business, and with continued effort you will reap the benefits of your hard work!