Marketing is one of the single most important things you need today if you want to stay in business and succeed online.  But there is one small problem - you may need a lot of money to make it work.  And if you are  just getting started, you may not have the money for marketing budget.

In this article I will show how you can run a full-scale marketing campaign with very little cost up front.  Here we’ve put together a list of ways you can utilize online marketing resources, often for free.  Yep, FREE!

First you have to make sure that  you are listed on Online Review Sites  - this is very important. You need this not only to get more traffic to your site and to get more product sales , but for ensuring that you have good online reputation.  Below you will find the most influential review-sites for this.

Blogging:  Guest posting  -  you may want to find some other websites and blogs within your niche industry to create what they call a Guest post. Just try to make comments on this blogs and after that you may leave URL of your site in the appropriate field. You must use your real Business Name and not keyword - rich anchor text.

Install a free social sharing plugin on your blog (Share Buttons as an example) - it will make it easy for blog readers to share posts such increasing your traffic and audience.

Hold free webinars on your site:  If you’ve researched this prospect before but decided it would be too expensive, consider some of these alternatives.  WordPress has a webinar plugin called WebinarIgnition you will be charged  $97 one time and you will get unlimited webinars and unlimited attendees for life. 

Join Forums and Answer Questions:  There are multiple forums these days out there and for there are forums  just about anything.  Take the time to make meaningful contributions to conversions and provide real value and give assistance to those posting the questions.  This will get the attention of other readers and make them more inclined find out more about you.  

Personally I like Quora - on Quora real people are looking to find real answers to their problem questions. You may search Quora for relevant questions, next  simply answer intelligently.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out):  Sign up and get free PR by responding to relevant media queries.  This will turn into free mentions and links in publications like Huffington Post, Forbes more.

eBooks: You can become an author and publish your ebook now.  Whether it’s about business or, choosing the best wine, you can create an eBook simply and for free. Just input your content into chapters using MS Word.  Add some images and links, edit and review and do a spell check.  Then you may save it as a PDF file and you already got an eBook! Post your ebook on your blog or website and offer the book in exchange for a person’ s e-mail address to grow your List.

There are so many options out there that you can implement. Do not worry - you may look at this list and just narrow it down to couple of options you are excited  about now.  Once you have got them under your belt, move on to a few more.

As a special treat for you, also read Forbes article about 33 great marketing tools for professionals.

Ready…Set…Go!!!

Virtual assistants usually are home - based and well-skilled professionals which offer businesses and entrepreneurs support remotely,  instead of within the traditional offices.  In this case the communication usually is done via  e- mail and phone  or even face-to-face  services - remember the Skype?  This alleviates the need to provide additional work space at your office or other business location.

When you choose to hire a virtual assistant the first thing need to determine - is whether you want them to be an employee or just a self-employed contractor for you.  There are pros and cons with each arrangement.

When you hire an employee, even a remote one, you will need to provide any benefits  your other employees receive, based on employee  status, ie: Full -time, Part -time  or hourly, as well as add them to  the regular-payroll.  One Real-estate Agent from California area reported he has a full-time person who's only job entails maintaining all Social Media postings for active accounts.

If you choose to work with independent contractors or a freelancer you will have none of those  responsibilities, but  you will have little iv any control over the hours they work or and you will be not able to demand from them when they should be available for you.

To be designated as an independent contractor, an individual must be free to determine how the work will be done to completion, free from the client/company’s control.  The contractor should be in 100 % responsibility for the Final-product only as far as  the terms of their contract requires this.

A few  years ago  the University of  Florida even created The First  Bachelor  and  Masters Degree  program  to provide accredited  education in Social Media Marketing and  other schools also followed after  that.

Just as the internet provides the opportunity for  the concept of a Virtual Assistant  to work, it also provides locations as well as some platforms to easily  find and hire, and pay to your Virtual Assistant.  Here is a short list of web-sites which provide Freelancers and Online Businesses a way to find each other:

• 24/7 Virtual Assistant
• Assistant Match
• eaHelp
• Fancy Hands
• Freelancer
• FlexJobs
• People Per Hour
• Red Butler
• Time Etc.
• Me
• Upwork
• Virtual Assistant USA
• Virtual Staff Finder
• Worldwide 101
• Ziptask
• Zirtual

Hiring a Virtual assistant will help you to keep more energy and time on your hands, so you can focus on the other aspects of your business.

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Or to put it more simply, marketing funnel is about capturing a lead and taking people to the point of a sale where a sales funnel captures and then leads people through the sales process via a series of pitches, etc.

In businesses where the marketing and sales departments/people are separate roles from one another, the two different concepts are implemented separately with Marketing Funnels working to create interest at the top and acquire clients at the bottom, these acquisitions becoming the top of the Sales Funnel.

In smaller businesses, this distinction may become a little muddled as employees may need to wear multiple hats, but for the sake of this article, we’ll go with the simplest viewpoint.

Your marketing is responsible for compelling an individual to become a potential client by creating awareness. It will typically focus on a broad area through a variety of methods, with the idea of attracting as much interest as possible.  These days this of commonly done via social media, paid advertising, blog posts, and PR.  Thanks to the internet, the possibilities are almost endless when looking for a target audience.

This initial scouting is the TOP of the marketing funnel.  The goal of these endeavors is to provide enough information to interest the general masses in taking action and becoming potential clients.

The final goal is to end up getting the potential client to provide contact information and hopefully specific product interest.  This can be accomplished in a number of ways including a free eBook download, providing a contact form with the promise of more info, calling a toll-free number, or any other process you can collect their details.  This result makes up the BOTTOM of the marketing funnel.

By acquiring this info from a potential client, you will then be able to move them into the procedures outlined on the sales side and bring them to the TOP of the Sales Funnel.

Different businesses will show a variety of ways that this transition from Marketing to Sales may happen, but the overall desired result will be the same, gaining a loyal and long term client that will refer others to a business’s products and services.

So essentially, sales have the power to change condition through the skills of the sales team. A sales funnel dictates the actual steps used to lead your customer towards the final goal, the actual purchase or use of services that you are offering.

Marketing, however, generally does not possess this same power. It needs to work with conditions as they come.  The use of a marketing funnel is to create some anticipation about what is being offered or sold.

Both Marketing Funnels and Sales Funnels can become very complex systems with numerous sub-steps within each primary step, depending on who your client is compared to what you are offering.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access

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