There is no better way to take your business to the next level than starting your own affiliate program. It’s a no brainer really. Many business owners do not want to give up any part of their revenue, which is why they may be hesitant about running their own affiliate programs. It could also take a lot of work if you have lots of affiliates. But why would one want to avoid recruiting affiliates when they can sell products without any real effort on the merchant’s side. You are only going to have a certain number of hours each day, so it does make sense to outsource your promotional efforts by relying on affiliate marketers. The risk is not that high either.

Large businesses prefer working with networks such as LinkShare or CJ. But those networks can be a bit expensive to deal with for small businesses. Thankfully, there are software solutions that one can use to start an affiliate program and control how things are run. Here are 4 affiliate software solutions to get you started:

iDevAffiliate: used by many top independent sites on the Internet. It makes it so easy to host an affiliate program and gives merchants options. It can be integrated with other software solutions as well.

Post Affiliate Pro: a nice alternative to iDevAffiliate. It is designed to handle small or large affiliate programs. Your affiliates can start their campaigns, take advantage of your banners, or create their own links. The report options are pretty nice too. Continue reading 4 Ways To Start An Affiliate Program for Your Business

The iPhone platform is one exciting journey to be a part of. Apple may be a controlling company, and you may not agree with the company’s policies. But it’s not tough to admit that the company has a gem of a phone on its hands. Add iPad to the mix, and you’ve got millions of people who use Apple products on an everyday basis to get things done. That’s why building an iPhone app for your business makes sense. You never know how many of your prospects use an iPhone to get things done, so it never hurts to give your prospects the tools they need to stay in touch with your business.

Developing an iPhone app is not too easy if you do not know any programming. But you don’t need to know programming to get your business app on iPhone. All you need is a partner to help you with the technical side of things. Thanks to these 5 iPhone app builders, you won’t have to worry about the technical side of things:

BlogApper: a very easy to use and quick way to get your app submitted and displayed on iTunes. If you own a business blog and want to give people an easy way to stay in touch, BlogApper is quite a useful service.

MyAppBuilder: a handy service for anyone who is interested in target the iPhone community. Whether you own a blog that you want to bring on iPhone or start selling your products on the platform, MyAppBuilder enables you to get a fast start for as low as $29 a month.

uBuildApp: uBuildApp is another easy to use iPhone application development service that makes it easy to bring your ideas to life. It costs as little as $99 to get your app live. Continue reading 5 Ways To Build an iPhone App for Your Business

Blog directories can be a good source of traffic for your personal or business blog. You do need to have decent content on your blog to keep people coming back for more. But you can’t just sit on your content and hope for others to make it to your blog. You’ve got to promote your blog. One of the best ways to do that is by making sure that your blog makes it to Alltop. Alltop is the brainchild of Guy Kawasaki, top entrepreneur and venture capitalist. You can think of it as the yellow pages of websites and topics on the Web. But here is the catch. Only quality sites make it to AllTop. So when you log on to the site, you know you are not going to get a bunch of splogs.

Adding your website to Alltop will not allow you to gain more credibility with your readers, it can help bring more people to your website as well. As AllTop grows, your traffic grows as well. So everybody wins. Before submitting your website to Alltop, you want to make sure you have a decent, professional looking website with a decent amount of good posts on it. So if you have just started your blog, you want to take the time to develop 10 or 20 high quality posts before going after top blog directories such as Alltop. Once there, you are ready to submit your blog to Alltop:

Continue reading How To Add Your Blog To Alltop

Writing a book is not everyone’s cup of tea. Not everyone can come up with killer content for a book. But if you can, you are in the driver seat to bring a lot of publicity to your online business. A while ago, many didn’t even want to touch this topic as publishing and promoting a book was difficult or next to impossible for everyday business individual. With the emergence of devices such as Kindle and platforms such as Kindle Publishing, you can publish your book or blog and publish it on Amazon fast. So if you can write, you are going to have the opportunity to get your work noticed as well.

There are two ways you can go about publishing your work on Amazon. You can use Amazon’s Digital Text Platform to bring your work to Amazon. Even if you don’t have a book, you can use Kindle platform for blogs to get your work published.

Continue reading How To Get Publicity with Amazon Publishing

Article marketing is one of the oldest ways of driving traffic to a website. It’s in fact one of those few methods that works all the time as long as you know what you are doing. In reality, you are not going to get a huge boost of traffic from a single article. But if you keep at it and produce high quality, exciting articles on a consistent basis, there is no reason you can’t build a decent following online. Of course, when you write a decent article, you want to make sure you get as many eyeballs on it as you can. One way to do that is by taking advantage of premium article distribution services. These services let you submit your articles to top directories without having to create an account with each site. That not only saves you time but lets you get more out of your articles as well.

If you are planning to go beyond E-zineArticles and get more out of your existing articles, the following article distribution services are worth a try:

My Article Network: is a hybrid article/blog system that can get you lots of back-links and traffic from the blog network that is My Article Network. Your articles are put on highly ranked websites in your niche, and you not only get relevant back-links, but a whole lot of targeted traffic. It gives you much more flexibility as far as your links and content are concerned in comparison to other article distribution services.

Isnare.com:  a top article promotion service for small businesses that lets you get more exposure for your articles and increase traffic to your website in the process. Isnare is an article directory and an article submission service. You can submit your articles to up to 40,000 sites by using Isnare’s premium service. Continue reading 3 Premium Article Distribution Services for Businesses

Whether you are a small business owner hoping to go online or just starting your online business, you are going to need a website to succeed. Hosting a website is not too expensive these days, but having a website designed from ground up can be. That’s why smart small business owners rely on open source solutions such as Wordpress to go live with their websites without breaking the bank. Premium Wordpress themes make it easy to give a website a whole new look and feel without spending too much money. And if you need your site to look unique, you can always hire a designer to change things around. That won’t cost you as much as hiring someone to design a site from scratch.

If you are planning to launch multiple websites and need professional quality themes to give your sites the better chance to succeed, here are 5 Wordpress theme membership clubs you should look at:

Templatic: a very powerful membership theme club for Wordpress that gives you access to various professional looking themes to take your e-commerce business online or start your business blog.

WooThemes: WooThemes is one of the top premium theme clubs for Wordpress. New themes come out on a regular basis, and the cost is not that high. Best of all, you get all you need to change these themes around to make them fit your needs. Continue reading 5 Best WP Premium Theme Clubs for Startups

Whether you are a blogger, a small business owner, or work for a start-up with a handful of products, you always want to give your visitors and customers a way to communicate with you and each other and share information. Forums have long been used by companies for support purposes. It’s so easy to address the concerns of your customers by putting up a forum and responding to their questions on a consistent basis. Best of all, there are plenty of open source forum software solutions that you can use to save money and get yourself a head start in the process.

If you are looking for a forum software that lets you start your own business forum and save time in the process, here are 4 forum scripts you should take a look at:

PHPBB: a free software solution that gives you the chance to build a killer forum without spending too much money. You can always enhance the functionality of this script and even get help.

vBulletin: one of the best forum software solutions on the market. It’s not a cheap solution and is designed for those who have a commercial forum in mind. Many top forums on the Internet are taking advantage of vBulletin as it’s secure and easily customizable. Continue reading 4 Forum Software To Start Your Own Board

In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook Ads is quickly becoming one of the best ways to promote your online business to a targeted set of Facebook users and get more exposure for your brand and your business. Facebook Ads has been around for a while but has recently gotten an upgrade to make it easier for business owners to create and manage their online campaigns. Facebook is the hottest social networking site around. Facebook Ads may not be Google Adwords yet, but it does give you yet another avenue to promote your business online and reach a more savvy set of prospects.

Facebook Ads provides you with a plenty of ways to better target your audience and get more exposure in front of the right audience. With that in mind, here are XXX ways to use Facebook Ads to drive targeted traffic to your website:

1. Destination URL: make sure you have proper tracking in place to see who’s coming to your website from where. Also, provide your targeted audience with an optimized landing page just for them. That should help improve your conversion rate as well.

2. Title: make sure your title is clear and magnetic enough to make people want to click on your ad. You can be a bit creative here but Facebook does have a set of strict rules, so you don’t want to get yourself banned here. To stay on the safe side, you can always talk about the value you provide in your title.

3. Body Text and Image: your body text needs to be compliant with Facebook policies. At the same time, make sure you convey what value you can provide to your visitors. An image can help you get more clicks and will set you apart from amateurs on Facebook. Continue reading 10 Ways To Promote Your Business with Facebook Ads

Driving traffic to your online venture should be one of your top priorities. Your goal should be to get your conversion rates as high as feasible to make a profit with your business, but a conversion rate of 100% does not lead to a profitable business. In fact, any number like that probably means that you are not doing a good job driving enough traffic to your website. You can always try SEO and pay per click marketing to increase traffic to your business and generate leads, but what a lot of entrepreneurs are not paying attention to is the power of Facebook Ads. It’s true that being involved in Facebook and having your own fan page up and running can generate leads for you. But in order to really make it on Facebook, you’ve got to take a more aggressive approach. Facebook Ads is a very exciting ad system that lets you target Facebook users by their birthday, how they are interacting with your pages, their age, and even their marital status. These are all invaluable information that can help you reach a more targeted set of prospects.

There are many Facebook ad strategies that you can use to make money online, but you don’t have to be a genius to get started pushing your brand on Facebook. You do need to create a page for your business before getting started. A lot of entrepreneurs that are using Facebook only drive traffic to their own websites. But you should compare your conversions rates from your fan pages and your home page to find out which one is more suitable for Facebook traffic. Once you have done that, you are ready to take advantage of Facebook’s Ad system:

What I like about Facebook Ads is the fact that is very simple to use. So you don’t have to be genius to get started with it. You do want to take time to read the guidelines to find out what you can and can’t do on Facebook. The people behind this system are very strict, and they won’t hesitate to remove your ads if you are not compliant with their policies. You also want to test image ads versus text-only ads to figure out which works the best for your situation. Continue reading Drive Traffic To Your Website with Facebook Ads

As someone who has been involved in the online marketing business for years, I hear from people who have started their iPhone development business from time to time and try to help them out get more traffic and sales. Developing a killer iPhone application may sound difficult, but promoting it could be even more troublesome for iPhone developers. A lot of these folks are not online marketing experts, so they find it difficult to figure out where to spend their effort on. After all, you only have 24 hours a day and limited resources when you start your venture, so you want to make sure you get the most out of each and every minute everyday. But there are a certain things every application developer can do to promote their apps more effectively and get free leads.

Online marketing may look complicated on the surface, but there are a lot of tactics that everyone can adopt to generate leads. Sure, there are more complicated strategies that are better left to professionals but creating a Twitter account, a YouTube video, or a Facebook fan page is not that difficult to do. If you are an application developer, here are 10 tactics you should adopt to push your app and generate more sales:

• Video Review: creating a video review for your app can help others find out whether your app is worth trying. It’s easy to tell people what your app is capable of. But it’d be all more effective if you show people what your app can do in a video. You can even give applications away in return for video reviews. You should at least try to create a YouTube account and post a couple of videos from your app to show what your app can do. There are many other video sites that you can be on, so make sure you take advantage of what’s out there.
• Lite Version: one of the best ways to show people what your app can do is by giving others the opportunity to test your app for themselves. That’s why it’s a great strategy to create a lite version of your app and give it away for free and encourage your lite users to make the move and buy the premium version.
• Facebook Fan Page: one of the best ways to get connected with your fans and build a real community around your application. Don’t forget to register a catchy name for your Facebook page when it’s eligible.
• Twitter: if you have an iPhone application that you are selling online, and you are not on Twitter, you are missing the boat. Twitter is a great community to find people who are interested in all kinds of products. Use Twitter search or these twitter tools to figure out who may be looking for your app.
• FriendFeed: may not be as popular as Facebook and Twitter nowadays, but it certainly has a lot of potential and a bright future. You should take time to sign up for an account, connect with folks, join rooms, and be involved.
• Ning: Ning is a cool web service that lets you create your own social community. If you have a niche app, why not create a social community around your niche and push your app that way. Ning doesn’t cost any money (unless you go with premium features) so it’s worth a try.
• LinkedIn: now this is a bit more tricky to pull off, but you can always try to reach out to folks in your niche or industry on LinkedIn and either push your app or ask them to spread the word around. You do want look useful on LinkedIn. So don’t hesitate to post polls, ask questions, answer questions, and work on your profile.
• Giveaways: once you have your social media accounts ready, you should try to make things interesting by giving away copies of your app to your followers and Facebook friends. Freebies are a great way to go viral, and people who win these competitions can help you spread the word around and gain more leads.
• Bloggers: reaching out to top bloggers is an amazing way to drive lots of traffic to your app and make a killing on iTunes. If you happen to get featured on Engadget or any other top blog, you are going to get more traffic that you can handle. Don’t be afraid to reach top bloggers and ask for their reviews.
• Press Releases: press releases can drive you lots of traffic if you play your cards right. Ask any search engine optimization professional, and he/she will tell you how important press releases are to their overall strategy in optimizing a site for search engines. Just choose keywords that can help you make sales and include them in your press release. It’s easier said than done, but there are plenty of sites that can show you how to go about writing a killer press release.

There you have it. You don’t have to be a genius to pull the above tactics off. These tactics, if implemented correctly, can get you a lot of traffic and sales. The first days of any venture can be difficult but once you tough them out and gain momentum, who knows where your business can take you.