Promoting your online business almost always depends on others. You use family and friends to get the ball rolling when you are just starting out. If you have some customers, you count on them to pass the word. Cross promotion helps you do the same thing but with other businesses.

What is cross promotion? In a nutshell, it is working with other businesses both large and small to draw attention to your products. Cross promotion is different from affiliate marketing in that it is an agreement that is mutually beneficial to both people in the same way. With affiliate marketing, the affiliate gets a percentage of the pie based on an agreed upon amount. With cross promotion, both partners are looking to receive the same amount of compensation.

With that said, cross promotions can begin with your business associates within your niche. No doubt, you have found some kindred business souls on niche forums and social networking sites. Niche associations are another great place to find businesses that operate within your chosen business niche.

The key here is to find someone who is not in direct completion which is much like affiliate marketing. They already have their finger on the pulse of the niche so any leads or sales you get through their promotion are targeted. They have shopped with your partner and are also likely to buy from you.

Why Cross Promote?

The easy answer here is that you want to increase your sales. That is the goal of business after all. You would be doing less than your absolute best if you didn’t pull every rabbit out of your magic marketing hat to help your business perform even better.

Another reason is to increase your visibility among your business peers. When you partner with a bigger more well known business, you increase your credibility. After all, those large companies wouldn’t waste their time with someone who couldn’t bring something valuable to the table.

Types of Cross Promotion

So what does cross promotion look like? Well, you can post advertisement links on each other’s sites. This gives customers a chance to check you out. When businesses are compatible this is more likely to be rewarding. For instance, if you sell party supplies, partnering with a party planner makes good business sense.

Write website content and blog for each other. This gives your customers and their customers a chance to see and hear from the person they are talking about. Allow links within the text and a bio with links for your partner so the visitors can click on it for more information.

Cross promotion between similar businesses are both a way to network with new business people and also a way to increase profits for both of you.

’5 Steps To A Successful Niche Blog’.

This FREE report has just been updated so you can now feel free not only to use the 5 steps yourself, but if you wish to please do give the report away from your website or blog or pass it on to your list. Enjoy!

It covers the following areas:

Step 1: Choosing Your Niche

Step 2: Creating Your Blog

Step 3: Adding Valuable Content

Step 4: Driving Traffic

Step 5: Creating An Opt-In List

If you would like a copy please click on the link below:

http://midnight-software-mart.com/5Steps/5StepsBlog.zip

Article or bum marketing can be a powerful force in your online endeavor to make money. If you want to drive a huge amount of traffic to your website, blog or affiliate product, but with very little outlay, then article marketing is the way to go.

This FREE 50 page guide walks you through the process of making these articles highly effective, and you don’t need to be a highly skilled write in order to succeed. The guide includes the following areas:

• Introduction: But I’m Not A Good Writer
• What is Article Marketing?
• Article Marketing: So How Does It Work?
• Why Do People Do Article Marketing?
• Chapter 1: The Top 10 Questions People Have About Article Marketing
• Chapter 2: Your Article Writing ‘Quick Start’ Guide
• Chapter 3: What Should I Write About?
• Chapter 4: What Are The Hot Topics With Your Readers?
• Chapter 5: How To Write Articles To Drive Traffic To A Product Based
• Website
• Chapter 6: How To Craft An Attention-Grabbing Title
• Chapter 7: Creating A Resource Box To Lure Readers Back To Your Website
• Chapter 8: What’s An HTML Resource Box?
• Chapter 9: Maximize The Effectiveness Of Your Articles By Targeting
• Chapter 10: ArticleLeverage™ Makes Keyword Targeting Easy

Download How To Create Highly Effective Articles today and get started with one of the most powerful methods of driving traffic, improving the search ranking of your site and ultimately making sales.

MarketMeTweet.com is a new application that offers a real boost to your online marketing.

Amongst other things here is what it offers:

• Unlimited Accounts

• Brand Management

• Scheduled Tweets

• Twitter Management

• OAuth Secure

• Search Function

I have bought it and it makes handling my Twitter accounts so much easier, plus the brand management allows for a direct link back to my website, for these two things alone it has been a huge boost. Take a tour today and see for yourself.

If you like what you see and want to promote it as an affiliate, you can head over to the affiliate page and sign up for free.

I have mentioned The At Home Couple blog before because not only is it cool but it offers some great tips on building an online income.

At the moment Veronica and Elijah have just started a series of videos called the Passive Income Project and this is definitely one that it is going to be worth following along with. The first video in the series set the scene and outlined some of the key areas that they are going to cover. So far, so good.

The second video PIP Module 1: Finding The Money Niche steps it up a notch and really demonstrates some great tips for finding profictable  niches, researching keywords and finding out which ones receive high search volume and have reasonable competition and then they show how you can set about monetizing these niches.

This is valuable stuff and what’s more it’s free, quality info. Check it out and look out for the follow up videos too. I know I will be. Race you to the domain.

If you want to boost your online income, niche markets are your key to success. Niche markets are sub-categories of broader markets, and can be very profitable. The key to the high profitability of niche markets is their specificity. For example, it’s much easier to find and market to people who are interested in 1964 Ford Mustangs than it is to market to people who are interested in cars in general (or even Mustangs in general). Plus, the people who comprise your potential customers in niche markets are usually quite passionate about their chosen interest, and are ready to buy if you’ve got the right marketing message. So how can you find hot profitable niche markets to boost your online income?

Some people look at the headlines in magazines or best-selling non-fiction books for ideas. However, there is a much better way to find niche markets with the most eager buyers. One is to search on eBay. The front page of eBay will show you the top 10 most frequently searched categories on the site. These are categories in which people are actively looking to buy. You can then find these categories in the categories menu on the left-hand side of the page. Click on the appropriate category link, and it will show you all of the sub-categories associated with it. These are niche markets and if there are buyers on eBay then they are most probably profitable niche markets.

You can see just how many people are selling things in those niches, just by scrolling through all the listings. More importantly, to see how many people are buying and how much money they are willing to pay, scroll through the list of items for sale in that niche and see how many bids there are on the items there. If you find a niche with a lot of bidders, and with less than 1,000 items for sale, you’ve found a profitable niche market but with little competition. This is a niche you should get into and one which with a little research you can start to source products for, and by all means use one of the larger affiliate product providers such as Amazon, eBay, Commission Junction or Linkshare. However, there really are a wide variety of companies out there who have affiliate schemes and thus you should spread your net as wide as possible in order to profit from niche markets.

On Day 1 we looked at the reasons we target keywords at all in our content, Day 2 we looked at what keywords to use for your niche , Day 3 we turned our attention to keyword tools and on this the penultimate day we are going to consider keyword density.

What do you know about keywords? They improve how the search engines perceive your content. But, too many can also get you a bad name. Learn about keyword density and how to mix and match for the perfect combination.

A Keyword Myth

Common sense is not always the best approach especially when thinking about keyword use. Your mind says that if such and such keyword is the one you should be using to attract customers, then it should appear everywhere. So far, you are right.

This next part is where many veer off the track. Putting them everywhere doesn’t necessarily mean stuffing your content like a keyword burrito. At one time, you may have gotten away with that but search engines have evolved much like anything else. They are smart enough to know that a keyword is not going to appear in every third sentence as the normal course. This is keyword stuffing.

Keyword Density

A search engine is a complicated mix of algorithms that the average person won’t ever hope to understand. All we know is that it tells the bots to do their thing and they do it. They search for keywords that are entered into the search box on thousands and thousands of sites, blogs and the lot indexed all over cyberspace.

Keyword density is a measure of how many of those particular words appear within text. For instance, if your article is around 500 words, bots will calculate how many times a certain word appears within that text. Internet gurus used to always say that a safe keyword density was anywhere from 3-10%.

But, search engines have their own ideas about what constitutes the proper density for their rankings. Now, it can be as low as 1-3%. For a 500 word article, that would be 5-15 occurrences for any keyword. Most err on the lower end just to be safe. Besides, in 500 words, encountering the same keyword fifteen times may seem a little banal depending on your subject matter.

Keyword density also takes into account the number of words in your target keyword. Long tail marketing has become popular and can further focus your content and website for a larger, well-defined market.

But keyword density also works for your website in general. Using keywords in picture tags, as anchor text within content and as subheadings as well as headlines will also get you noticed. The content will get people to visit you over and over, but your entire website will be the linchpin that can help you gain and stay on the first page of search results.

On Day 1 we looked at the reasons we target keywords at all in our content, on Day 2 we looked at what keywords to use for your niche and today we turn our attention to keyword tools.

What do you do with that list of keywords after you’ve taken the time to brainstorm? Well, you could potentially be holding on to a gold mine of profitable words. But, you won’t know that unless you analyze their potential with keyword tools.

You don’t have to go out to your nearest computer store and purchase any software. Most of what you need is available on the Internet for free or a small fee. If they offer a free trial, use it. At least you will learn how the process works and if that particular software works for you.

Here are a few software tools for finding appropriate keywords for your website. All of these are free tools but some offer more features for a paid subscription.

Wordtracker (http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com) – There is no way that you could possibly think of all the different combinations of words that are used to find results in your niche. That is where software like Wordtracker comes in handy. Using the list of possible keywords you have compiled, choose a keyword to enter into the program. The software will return all possible combinations (according to your search parameters) and the number of searches for each. You may even notice a few that you haven’t thought of before. You can even compare results by search engine.

Wordstream (http://www.wordstream.com/best-keyword-tool) – If you want to let the software pick the keywords for you, here are a few tools that you can use. Wordstream returns keyword suggestions that work well for content and pay-per-click ads. You can also manage your keywords. You will be able to pick form the best words and phrases for your niche.

Overture (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) – This keyword tool is brought to you by Yahoo. It is now called Yahoo! Search Marketing. Using this search engine, the tool returns results for a variety of keywords and how many searches are done for them. You can choose to keep or discard the ones that have too many search results and opt to exploit the keywords that have not been overdone.

Keyword Discovery (http://keyworddiscovery.com) – This tool will return the best keyword results from one keyword that you enter. It pulls information from over 100 search engines to compile a focused list.

Another great source for not only keywords in profitable areas, but tons of other research as well is Affiliate Niche Packs (http://www.affiliatenichepacks.com).  For those wanting to start affiliate sites without spending tons of time researching keywords, niches, and everything else that goes into setting up a site, these packs will do it for you.

It all starts with keywords. If you pick the right ones, you can definitely find a profitable website. Using these tools can help you narrow your search even further than the list you came up with. Which ones will be winners? You’ll have to test them and see.

So on Day 1 we looked at the reasons we target keywords at all in our content. Today we will turn our attention to the choice of keywords for our niche.

Website content is not just something for visitors to read. It is also a way to attract the “right” visitors in the first place. Using the correct keywords throughout your website will garner high standing with the search gods and get you noticed.

Doing your Homework

You thought that homework stopped when you graduated from school. In the world of business, you never stop learning if you want to go as far as the road will take you. To that end, it is time to do a little homework for your content – keyword research.

Now, you don’t have to be stellar at research in order to get this done and get it done right. Keyword research is finding the words that will rank your content and your website head and shoulders above the rest. Are you ready? Let’s begin.

Conducting Keyword Research

There are a few things that you can do:

1. Create a list of words. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What words would you input to find you? Write down as many as you can. Better yet, record them in an electronic spreadsheet for easier editing later. Choose single words and multiple word phrases.

2. Ask your customers. You already have some customers. Survey them to find out how they found you. If it was through an Internet search ask what words they used. It seems too easy, but most business owners overlook such a resource because they don’t ask the right questions.

3. Use keyword software tools. These tools can be very helpful once you have your list of possible keywords. The software will let you know a variety of things about your keywords and whether they are good enough to reach your target audience.

4. Analyze the data. From your list, whittle down to just the keywords that are likely to get you what you want. Then, rank those keywords in order of best to worst.

5. Try out those keywords. Don’t use all of them at one time, but keep track of which ones you use and for how long. Using website management tools you can find out how much traffic and conversion (how many people used your keyword content as a means to do something – click, sign up, or buy) rates changed.

So, are you ready? You obviously already use content, but maybe it isn’t working well enough. There are always ways to make it better and keywords are one of those ways.

Over the next few days I am going to be taking a look at the why, how and wherewithall of using keywords in content. So first up today we are going to look at why we want to use keywords in our content and what it will bring in terms of traffic.

The Internet is a place where anyone can find information on just about any subject. If you want any one or two of these billions of people to find you there, giving them what they desire is the key. Using keywords in the website content you post is the way to begin.

What are Keywords?

This word has been tossed around a lot on the Web. Keywords are the words that people use to search for information in cyberspace. Now, every word is not a keyword. Some words like “the,” “of,” and others are too common and are usually excluded from search results. Only the main words are used in the search parameters.

Based on those entered words, a series of results are returned for the viewer. Usually the results are in the millions but no one is going to look at all of those entries. So, if you are not featured on the first page, you might as well be entry number 999,999.

Use Your Content

The world is being educated now about bots and spiders. They are icky but they perform a great service for your business website. They crawl your articles, headlines, picture tags and unique pages for the words that searchers enter. If they are found, you get ranked for that word.

Is that all? Of course it’s not. We left out that the number of times the word appears (keyword density) is highly important. The crawly things are looking for how many times that word is mentioned to calculate where you stand compared to other content using the same word.

The hang-up is going to be finding those words. And, for each topic of interest, there are an untold number of words that can be entered alone or in the form of a phrase.

But, what you have to remember is that without the keywords, it will be next to impossible to reach your target market. Some use the “net casting” approach and try to appeal to everyone using generic wording in their articles and advertisements. Not only are you going to get a large amount of uninterested people but you are also going to waste money doing it.

Keywords narrow down the field to only the people who are likely to use your product or service. Just like with ads, you will want to test out these keywords to see the rate of return you get from your efforts. But at least you will start off on the right path.