Let's say for example you want to open up a record shop. You sell second hand cds, cassettes and vinyl. Of course you can open this up locally but the likely hood is that your customer base will be limited. However why should you limit this to people that actually visit your store when you can expand this to sell to anyone in the world.

There are plenty of websites online that let you list your stock so that they deal with that side of things for you. However how do you go about letting people know you exist? Well this is where internet marketing is for you. There are 100s of very simple ways that you can go about letting people who about your products.

Firstly you need to register a domain. These are simple to do and if you can then a.com works best. Once you have done this and set it up you ready to get started.
Some simple methods for online marketing are:

Blog Writing

Why not set up a blog somewhere and post on it your "find of the day" or something else exciting that you have added to your stock list. Put this URL in your signature of every email you send out and people will check it out. Once they have done this and they subscribe they will always know your exciting additions. This could become viral and you will get more hits and promotion to your site from this blog.

Social Networking

Most people online have either a Facebook page or a twitter page, sometimes people have both. You should have both for your business. For a start they are ways of your existing customers keeping in touch and they are a way for you to build up a massive contact list that you can message at the touch of a button. A Facebook fan page can usually be set up in a few minutes and if you invite all your friends from your personal page and encourage them to invite their friends this can really help.

Search Engines

Getting hits from places like Google is hard and competition is fierce. However one way of helping with this is to get backlinks. Backlinks are where another relevant site has placed a link from there site to yours. You can help this along by:

- Writing articles on your topic and placing them on article directories with a link back to your site.
- Getting a press release written and submitted to press release websites
- Making things such as Squidoo Lenses and Hub Pages which make great back links.

Don't worry if you are unsure how to go about these there is lots of help online or you can hire someone to do the above for usually a few dollars.

This is all to do with the SEO (search engine optimization) of your website which affects how popular you are in the search engines. A big part of this with Google especially is the back links. We all know that the higher you are on the search pages the more likely it is that people will click on your link and buy your product.

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