Think of your small business as if it were a local celebrity. The business has a place in the community, most people are aware of its presence and its activities and there is a certain image and reputation this business must uphold for the people of that community to continue to support that business. Public Relations (PR) is just as important to a small business as it is to a celebrity. How wonderful then, that the return on PR investments is among the best in the marketing business.

Many Kinds of Marketing

When owning or running a small business, there are many forms of marketing available. There is direct mail marketing, e-mail marketing, advertising campaigns; however, often times the least considered option is a simple Public Relations (PR) campaign. PR is too often considered a minor expense with little to no return on investment (ROI). This could not be farther from the truth.

When it comes time to decide how to reinvest in your business, consider PR first. Based on recent studies, it has been shown to be the most effective form of marketing per dollar spent. It is also among some of the least expensive marketing you can conduct, courtesy of many of today’s modern technologies. How then, as a small business, with limited resources, can a full-scale PR campaign be conducted? It’s easier than you might think.

PR On The Cheap

Advertising and marketing does not come cheap. Be it direct mail marketing, TV advertisements, even the hiring of a consultant; every expense related to marketing can be a crippling expenditure for a small business. PR, however, can be a welcome relief to many small businesses when the ROI is quite high and the cost to conduct a PR campaign can cost very little, or even just the cost of an Internet connection.

With the advent of seemingly ubiquitous Internet connectivity, a small business can literally always be connected to its community and its customers. Taking advantage of this is quite easy and can be done with any Smartphone or computer with an Internet connection. Creating a Facebook profile for a business is a fast, cheap and easy way to start to give your business an online image.

Be specific when describing your business on your Facebook page and be sure to include any links to the business’s website. With Facebook, you can also link together your profile with your business’s Twitter page. Twitter will allow you to constantly stay in contact with your customer and community base with short updates about sales, promotions, all the while conveying a tone that defines the kind of store you are. On the business website, consider a Blog where the business can comment on industry-related issues, news and even showcase sales there as well.

All of these tools – Facebook, Twitter, Blogs/Websites can be created for free or for very little investment, all the while not requiring additional workforce or consultancy be hired to complete. As far as Public Relations go, these are among the most effective ways of communicating with the public as many already use these tools on a daily basis.

In the end, PR is a perfect marketing solution for small business. It has a high return, is fast to complete and is very cheap. Small businesses are a part of the community and must present an image accordingly. Consider how wonderful it would be if a local business offered a promotion over its Twitter page based on the current score of a local high school football game. The possibilities are endless.

This article was written by William from Home Loan Finder. Visit the Home Loan Finder website for a range of articles to help you find the right home loan for your needs.

The following is a guest post by Carol Abedania. If you would like to write for this blog, please check out the guidelines here.

Online marketing is a good avenue for small businesses to do promotion.  It allows you to set aside a budget-friendly amount of money yet offers many options for you to market your products and services. By investing enough time and effort to make effective online marketing strategies, you’ll see how useful the internet is for your small business.

As a small business, creating your own TV or radio ad and using super-enlarged billboards on public places may not be realistic since these tend to be expensive. However, you can still reach a wider audience through the internet. This is the reason why online marketing is used by many businesses today. Online marketing can be done several ways. Here are tips on how you can do online promotions:

Smart Tips for Small Business Online Promotion

1. Optimize Your Site

An optimized page can rank well on search engines. To gain traffic and be found on search engines’ first pages for related search queries can require much optimization strategizing. One of the basic ways to optimize a site is by doing on-page optimization. Your pages’ link structures, keyword use, titles and content are important elements for on-page optimization. Study the basics about these SEO strategies and apply them to your entire site, and eventually you can go take on more sophisticated strategies like link building and site usability. This may all seem complicated at first, but even taking small steps in this direction could help a long way!

2. Use Social Media

One good thing about social media is that is it a very interactive medium where you can instantly reach and communicate with your target market. Many businesses use social media for promotion. It can keep your customers updated on any latest news from you. Customer engaging techniques like contests, product giveaways, and other promos can be done through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and other community sites. Promotion for your website to gain traffic can also be done using social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg and Mixx. Also, you can use social media to brand your business and increase the strength of its identity. There are also other available social media sites like YouTube where your video creation and promotion can possibly go viral.

3. Content Marketing

Content is king. Engaging content is the key to increase traffic to your website and gain more potential customers. Internet users today tend to look for sites that are useful and will give them the information they need. The quality of the information you produce can encourage visitors to stay longer in your site, trust your brand and recommend it to other people. An optimized page will be useless if people who visit them find the content unhelpful. It can even cause bounce rates to your site, or worse, give you a bad reputation. To make quality and appealing content, you need to inspire and make them want your product. The power of words is a strong marketing weapon that can influence a customer to move and make transactions.

4. Create Your Own Blog

Creating blogs can give you a lot of benefits. Aside from getting links from other people’s mentions of your posts and promoting your business website in general, it is also a medium for direct communication with your market. Blogs can be an avenue for you to brand your business, get connections, and participate in a community where you can gain more customers. By creating useful content, you can build a credible brand with authority. Using blogs also offers you the chance of building reputation through participating actively in the blogosphere, having product reviews and interacting in blogger community forums.

5. Mail Updates and Newsletters

Mailing lists are important so new blog posts and other updates from your website can be sent to your audience right away via email. There are many forms of mailing lists you can use for promotion and updates. For blogs, there are email subscriptions complementary to their usual RSS feeds where readers can also subscribe for post updates. Company websites typically use mailing lists to update their audiences about their latest promos. To convince them to participate, you can use audience-engaging techniques where your customers can be given exclusive benefits, giveaways and freebies like your branded calendars, postcards, or business cards. These are products that your subscribers can use frequently so they are often reminded about your brand at the same time.

Although the work might be very tedious, it’s all worth the time once you see the results of your efforts on marketing your product and business using the web. Internet marketing is important to communicate and deliver value to your customers while also finding ways on how your business can achieve your marketing goals though customer interaction. These strategies can be a good foundation and an important investment for your business promotions online.

About the Author:

Carol Abedania is currently an online content marketing specialist working at UPrinting.com. She writes about marketing tips, printing and design ideas, and other business topics related to online and offline promotion. Her interests include photography, advertising and design.

There are numerous websites and blogs related to working from home. This blog is just one out of the thousands, so the fact that you’re reading this really means a lot to me. You could just as easily stumble on one of the other work from home blogs instead.

Would that really be a bad thing, though?

I mean, every blog is different and provides their own unique perspective, so reading more than one blog is by no means a bad thing. In fact, I encourage it!

Yes, I recommend reading other work from home blogs as well. It will help you to get a more rounded perspective and overall picture on working from home.

With that said, I want to point you to a resource that showcases other blogs in this industry.

MastersDegree.com recently posted their Top 25 Work From Home Blogs picks, and I’m honored to say this blog is among them.

Also making the list are some other blogs I follow, including the SmartPassiveIncome blog by Pat Flynn, making the top of the list, which is well deserved in my opinion.

Somehow my blog managed to come in at number three on the list. Not sure if that’s deserved, but I’ll take it.

I encourage you all to go check out the post and read some of the other work from home blogs that are out there. You can learn a lot of awesome tips and advice from other experts in the industry. And I, by no means, consider myself an expert. Just throwing that out there.

I want to thank Amanda from MastersDegree for making me aware of this post and showcasing my blog. I appreciate it!

See you all soon.

Going off from what I talked about in a previous post, writing guest blog posts can in many ways be more effective in building traffic and gaining readership, sales, etc than paying for reviews or buying advertising slots or links on blogs.

Not only can this free method of advertising be more effective, but it also brings with it many more benefits.

The fact that you don’t have to pay anything to get exposure on a high authority blog, or any blog of your choice, is the most obvious. There are two other main benefits, and they are:

Being seen as an expert in your field – The fact that your post is being published on a high authority blog speaks volumes for your credibility, whether you’re actually credible or not. Common sense says that you are if you managed to get this far, and the readers of the blog are automatically going to trust you just as much as they trust the blog owner. Well, maybe not quite as much, but if the blogger is endorsing you, and they are since they’re publishing you’re article, then that’s going to build trust between you and the readers.

This holds a lot more weight to the blog readers because you’re providing valid and relevant information that they can relate to and use, rather than just paying the blogger to write a review about you. The readers are going to respond much better to a guest post because the blogger isn’t obligated to post your article at all. If they’re being paid to write a review, then they have to talk about you.

Automatic trust among readers – I touched briefly on this in the first point, but I feel I need to elaborate on this further. Don’t underestimate the power of trust. Trust is critical to your online success, no matter what your business.

No matter what activities you’re involved in with your business, you want to make sure that what you do and say is creating and building trust with others. It could be the slightest, littlest thing, but believe me, one miniscule little thing can completely ruin any trust you had. You want to do whatever you can to build and keep the trust you have.

The first thing to do to create trust is build relationships, and keeping in line with the topic of guest blog posts, the blogger has already done the hard part in building a relationship with his/her readers. As a guest author, you get to reap the rewards.

That’s not to say that you can slack off and write a mediocre article. For one, it won’t get published. Second, the readers will take notice and decide they have better things to do than check out another wannabe blogger. A lot of care and time needs to be taken when writing your guest post.

Here are some tips to help you write killer guest blog posts…

This should really be part of your overall marketing strategy for many different reasons, but knowing what to do, and what not to do, can really go a long way. Read each and every post I link to and learn them well. Save them, favorite them, bookmark them… whatever you do… so when you’re ready to do a guest post, you’ll start off on the right foot.

Instead of making this into a VERY long and drawn-out post, I thought I’d keep it somewhat short and give out some link love to other bloggers who have already taken the time to share their guest blogging tips. I call this the “Holy Grail” of guest blogging tips… tips from the A-List bloggers themselves.

The first set of tips comes from none other than “ProBlogger” Darren Rowse. Darren writes about How to be a Good Guest Blogger. Be sure to check out his full Guest Blogging Series at the end of his post for even more great killer content. Also check out his How to Guest Post to Promote Your Blog article.

Our second round of tips comes from Copyblogger, which just happens to be a guest post by Jordan Cooper. Neat how that works, huh? Jordan’s article is 10 Proven Steps to Snag a Guest Post on an A-List Blog. If nothing else, read it for the humor and sarcasm Jordan incorporates into the post… if you like that sort of thing. I think you know which way I lean.

The third set of tips comes from Chris Garrett about How To Guest Blog Without Disaster. Chris provides some great advice for bloggers who are ready to tackle the challenge guest posting.

As mentioned earlier, check out every single one of these articles. The content is beyond excellent.

Another reason I decided to go this route is because I’ll soon be venturing into this area as well, and linking out to articles I find helpful makes it easier for me to find for future reference. That’s my own personal blogging tip… did you get it?

Know of any other bloggers who’ve shared guest blgging tips that you’ve found helpful that I didn’t link to? Share them below to make my “Holy Grail” list even bigger!

What other benefits are there from guest posting on other blogs? Share your thoughts and personal experiences below…

A problem that many new bloggers and website owners face is building up traffic and readership right from the start. So, what can one do to get traffic and gain readers early on? The simple answer is that there are numerous ways to drive traffic to a new site or blog, and there are many things you can and should be doing to gain exposure.

I’ve been talking lately about writing reviews to earn affiliate commissions or directly getting paid to write reviews. But, what if you simply reverse the idea and now think of yourself as the advertiser paying a blogger to write a review about your website, blog, etc?

You’re basically paying a blogger to write a review about your site. There are a lot of people that pay for reviews, whether it is for a new product, service, or a new website or blog to get exposure.

Is this method of advertising ideal? Is it worth spending that kind of money ($500 is a lot)?

Here are what some other bloggers have to say about paying for reviews:

Jason Pereira at TUK states that “You Are a Moron if You Pay for Reviews.”

Fabien at Small Fish Big Money reports that “Paid reviews are good for exposure and publicity…nothing more, I repeat, nothing more.” Check out Fabien’s Shocking Revelations post to read more.

Disadvantages of Paying for Review Posts

The most obvious disadvantage is actually forking over all of your hard-earned money for a review.  The amount differs depending on the blogger you plan to have write the review. For high authority blogs, you can expect to pay $300 and up, or if you want a review on John Chow’s website, you’ll have to hand out a whopping $500. For small to medium sized blogs, $50 is around normal.

The other disadvantage as pointed out by Fabien is that the amount of exposure is actually very dismal. Not only that, any exposure you do get will be gone within 24 to 48 hours. Buzz only lasts as long as the subject is still being talked about. Since the review is a one-time thing, as soon as the review is written and published, any buzz created will be gone soon after it’s read.

All in all, I think if done right (promoting the review yourself and building buzz about your new site/blog), and you choose the right blog, this can be beneficial to gain traffic and readers right from the start. You’ll have to weigh the pros and cons and see if the money you’re about to spend will justify the amount of exposure you think you’ll get.

Something else to consider is that there are sites out there that will review your site, blog, etc. for free. Anthony Dinh of Diaries Of A Blogger asked the question, “Why Pay for Reviews When You Can Get Them FREE? In his post he shares a list of sites that will write reviews about your blog for free.

I urge you to check it out these other blog posts before you pay for reviews. A better method, in my opinion, and something Jason touched on, was writing guest blog posts. I’ll talk about guest blog posting in an upcoming post and explain how you can get much better exposure than paying for reviews, all for free.

What do you think about paid reviews? Is it worth spending the money? Leave your comments below and let’s discuss it.

Every blog owner dreams of having thousands of readers. In fact, I’m one of them. As of right now I only have 27 subscribers to my RSS Feed. I would love to get that number up. But regardless, that tells me I have 27 people who are interested in my blog and what I have to say. Ignoring them would be a disservice to not only them but also myself.

I’ve ran across some popular blogs that have literally 1,000′s of readers. These types of blogs receive many comments to their posts, and some are specific questions regarding what the posts were about.

What I’ve noticed is that some of these blog owners are completely ignoring the readers by not answering the readers’ questions and responding to the comments. For the life of me I can’t understand why.

In my case, I blog because I want to help people and provide valuable information. If someone has a question, I would be doing a disservice by not acknowledging the reader and answering the question. It just wouldn’t make sense.

But this is what I’m seeing on other blogs. If these blog owners truly want to help people, then why are they completely ignoring their readers?

It’s one thing to have great content that brings in readers and lots of comments, but if you’re not paying attention to your readers then what’s the point? Your readers could just go elsewhere to find the information they’re looking for.

I’m saying this from experience. It takes a lot of guts to post a comment on a respected blog for the first time. If I’m going to take the time to comment and make it meaningful, the least the blog owner can do is acknowledge me.

I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels this way. Personally, I’ll probably leave the blog never to return.

I would much rather keep my blog readers coming back time and time again. And, I want my readers to feel comfortable and feel free to comment. If they have a question, I’m going to answer it. I won’t leave them hanging.

So if you’re reading this and have a habit of ignoring your blog readers, just remember, you could lose them and potentially lose some money in the long-run.

If you’re a reader of this blog and have yet to comment, now’s the time. I want to hear your thoughts on the issue.

Oh, and THANKS for being a valued reader of this blog! I truly appreciate it!

Following up with my previous post on finding freelance work from home, I wanted to share about another freelance opportunity. Freelance writing opportunities are in high demand. If you’re a writer, or aspiring writer, then this post is for you. Heck, even if you’re not that great at writing but are knowledgeable in a certain area or niche, then pay close attention.

There are numerous amounts of people that constantly require article writers on a wide variety of subjects. Just go to my previous post, linked above, and sign up with those sites as a service provider. You’ll be able to see firsthand at how many writing jobs are available.

Other freelance writing opportunities, and one that is very similar to the above, is blog writing. The same principal applies, but this time you’re writing an article or blog post for the owner of a blog. There are millions of blogs ran by webmasters, and many webmasters don’t have the time to keep up with their blogs.

The fact is that it’s hard keeping up with a blog, and I should know. . It takes time to research a topic and then write about it. It’s very time consuming to keep a blog updated on a consistent basis. And as we all know, Google loves new, fresh content that’s added regularly to sites. This is where you, a freelance blog writer, can help.

Many blog owners would like to keep their blog up to date and provide valuable content to their readers. The problem is that many just don’t have the time due to other interests or obligations. Many blog owners would be willing to hire a blog writer to post content on their blog.

It will take a little effort and time on your part, but if you run across a quality blog that doesn’t get updated very often, or seems to have been neglected, you could simply contact the owner and offer your writing services to them. Many will be so happy that you contacted them that they’ll jump on the idea.

The price you get paid per post for blog writing will vary and has many factors. Some factors include the niche, length of the posts and your writing experience. With a little effort there’s no reason why you can’t find a blog writing job.

So there you have it… two examples of freelance writing opportunities that are available to you. I’m sure with some creativity and strong will, you’ll be able to find other avenues as well.

A week ago I posted about the new Contextual Link Partnership WordPress Plugin and how it allows you to earn free and unlimited one way backlinks to your blog.

Since the plugin was new and I just installed it on my blog, I didn’t have any results to share with you. Of course my hopes were high as this looked like the ideal setup in getting relevant backlinks.

Well, I just received an email from the owners yesterday that pretty much fortifies what I’ve already been saying about this plugin. So far they are seeing tremendous growth in the network and have started distributing backlinks.

I still have high hopes and look forward to the potential that this neat little plugin will have for my blogs, including this one.

If you would like to learn more and read up on what’s been going on just head here: http://www.contextualpartnership.com/news/over-54000-places-for-your-links/.

I would recommend grabbing this plugin and utilizing it on your blogs. You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. And don’t worry, I’m not getting paid or anything to promote it. I just see a lot of value in this and hope all of you will too.

Here’s a really cool plugin for all of you WordPress users out there. If the idea of building relevant and natural backlinks to your blog appeals to you, which it should, then this plugin is for you. It’s called the Contextual Partnership Plugin.

The basic gist behind the plugin is that you do nothing different from just blogging as you always do. For each post you have, past and present, you can build backlinks with your chosen keywords on other relevant blogs in the network.

Notice I said network. This means that there is a network of bloggers who all have this plugin. As the network grows, there will be more and more blogs available to earn backlinks from. So, this is important as you need to spread the word to everyone you know about this plugin and have them install it on their blogs.

There’s an approval process before your blog will be available in the network. It took my blog about an hour to get approved, so you shouldn’t have any trouble either. You can install this on as many blogs as you own, which I would recommend.

The only guidelines is that you have at least five posts, have contact information readily available, and provide value in your posts.

I just installed this yesterday, and it could take a few weeks before I start seeing backlinks. I’ll keep you updated on the results.

This is one very easy and automated way of building more links to your blog. Another free method that is similar to this is the Free Taffic System. I’ve been using the Free Traffic System for quite some time now and have seen excellent results. With both of these at my disposal, I’ll be able to work less to build high quality, one way backlinks.

I recommend you take a look at the Free Traffic System and also download this free plugin so that you can start to experience the same awesome results I’m getting.

The PIPS Power Group (PPG), a group of mentors established to help Plug-In Profit Site members excel with their home business, is holding their 2nd annual summer marketing contest.

For whatever reason, I didn’t participate in last year’s contest. This year, however, I decided it would be a good idea for me to participate as it can only help my work from home business. Getting motivated and staying focused on daily tasks can be hard, so this contest is a way to keep me on track with what I need to do.

I just wanted to share with you all what requirements were included with this contest, so you can get somewhat of an idea of what it takes to market your online business and that it takes a daily and consistent effort on your part.

Here’s what we are required to do each day:

• Post at least once to our blog
• Post at least 4 comments on other blogs
• Post at least 4 forum posts, on 4 different forums
• Make at least one post in the PPG forum
• Write at least 2 articles per week

After that, we have to post our daily activity of what we did, including posting the links to all the posts we made in forums and blogs, a link to our blog post, etc.

Now before the marketing contest began, we posted how many inbound links we had to our site as well current Alexa ranking. The winner of the contest is the one who has the biggest positive difference of those numbers and what those numbers are at the end of the contest.

The PPG marketing contest runs for 6 weeks, and this is day 2 of the contest. So far I’ve been able to manage to meet the requirements for yesterday, and I’m on a good track to meet them for today.

Doing these tasks everyday will make a positive impact on my business. Looking at this, this should give YOU a good idea of what is needed to take your online business to the next level.

If you’re struggling with your business or just want to take it to that next step, but feel like you just keep hitting roadblock after roadblock, I highly recommend checking out the PIPS Power Group and see what they can do for you.