If you sell a product or a service, there’s no cheaper or easier way to market yourself than venturing online. It doesn’t matter if you sell exclusively online or from a retail location, Internet marketing offers the best way to reach the largest number of potential customers.

This isn’t discounting the more traditional marketing methods. Press releases and direct mail marketing can still be successful, especially for offline businesses, but they’ll take more time and money.

Internet marketing can be as simple and inexpensive as you want it to be. It’s true that some larger companies pour millions into online marketing. However, a small business owner can start on a smaller scale and move on to more sophisticated marketing techniques as sales progress.

Many traditional advertising methods don’t offer inexpensive, beginner options. Newspaper advertising, direct mail, and television advertising can sometimes require hefty, up-front payments with no success guarantee.

As an online marketer, you can shift your marketing dollars, and time, to those methods which give you the best return on your investment.

Find out how here:

Your goal may be to display a simple Website that introduces your company and products or services. Or you might be thinking about developing a fully functional ecommerce site. Either way, there are plenty of design options to meet your desires and needs.

How you design your Website depends in large part on how you want others to view your business. A Website should reflect your personality and products while displaying confidence and trust to visitors.

Whether you want visitors to signup for your email newsletter or buy something, your site will only be effective if it moves visitors to perform the action you intend. This is done through a combination of design and copywriting.

Below are 4 tips that will help you design a Website that meets your goals.

Simple is better 

With all the design technology and styles available, keeping to a simple design methodology is always the most effective. Simple designs are best, not only because you might be just starting out but because most Web users dislike “busy” Websites.

Start with your directory structure. How many pages do you want initially? Organize pages so users don’t have to “dig” into your site to find what they want. Your initial directory structure will lay the foundation for future page growth. One simple way to organize your structure is by file type. Images should have their own directory as should html and other file types.

CLICK HERE to check out the other three tips:

Is it a Radio Show?

The word “Podcast” is derived from iPOD and broadCAST and is an audio broadcast very similar to what you would find on a talk radio station that has been converted to an audio file that you can playback in a digital music player (iPOD) or a computer.

The “pod” in podcast was coined from “iPod,” the predominant portable, digital music player, although there are many “MP3 Players” out on the market which work very much the same. Although podcasts are mostly verbal they may contain music as well.

Using the RSS 2.0 syndication format, (Really Simple Syndication allows content from one site to be republished (syndicated) by another.) podcasts are made available to subscribers who might be looking for that information and they can then download that broadcast onto their player of choice.

Podcasting began to catch hold to the masses in late 2004. The ability to distribute audio and video files easily has been around since before the dawn of the Internet. Podcasting is different from other digital audio and video delivery in the use of syndication feeds. This allows podcasts to be automatically downloaded to a user’s media playback device if they become a “subscriber”…just as you could subscribe to a newsletter or news post.

GO HERE to discover a GREAT EXAMPLE of a FREE podcasting service YOU could use and that several of my colleagues have been very successful with!

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Debbie Ducic of GutZy Women offers this video as an example of what is possible with new video hardware and software that make video creation fun and easy. In her article GutZy Women FLIP over EASY Video !,  Debbie explains  her successful experience with using video in her marketing mix and gives a few options for creating it. Read more about video here:

Video, Video, Video…it’s all the rage on the Internet and I must admit, I’m SOLD on the benefits of including it in just about anyone’s online marketing mix! When I first got all excited about video on the Internet, we were continously warned about the limitations on the number of peope that could actually view them in a decent way. Boy, has that changed dramatically in just a few short years!

The appearance of You Tube and other free video hosting sites plus the spread of high speed internet connections has opened up an incredibly affordable and effective opportunity to get your message and your unique persona out into the world in a form of communication that is very easy for others to absorb.

 As much as we all hate to admit it, we like watching more than reading…especially our younger generation!

I learned that lesson big time from the young whipper snappers I spent time with at the Next Internet Millionaire competition. They were shooting videos constantly… in very creative ways. They were having so much fun doing it…brainstorming ideas, joking, coming up with story boards or interviewing each other, sharing software knowledge and tips and tricks that I was sorry I didn’t bring my own digital video camera…I don’t like missing out on the fun like that.

But since then, looking back on how video was the medium by which I was chosen to participate in such a unique, historical event, and how creating different styles of video for GutZy Women since then, has exponentially increased our exposure (ie: visitors) out in virtual land and brought in a more international mix of visitors, I can’t speak highly enough about what video has done for my business and can do for YOURS as well!

“How can I get Started with Video in my Marketing Mix?”

I hired Dream Teller Video, a woman owned professional team, to film the GutZy Women Grand Opening, the pre-grand opening interviews and many of the “article” follow-ups that now appear on our sites, which are high  quality, professional and have worked GREAT for us. We  have also played with NEW, less expensive, but often time- consuming  ways to produce videos ourselves and they both valuable in attracting different types of audiences.

Other GutZy Women have  just FLIPPED over video!

We at GutZy Women have discovered an almost PERFECT NEW ALTERNATIVE to creating interesting and fun videos that are SO EASY and fast to make, it’s almost ridiculous! It’s called the Flip… and we’ve FLIPPED over it!

Watch for the next couple videos we created with the Flip template software while skiing in Vail and Breckenridge and find out how EASY and fast they were to make with the templates provided free with the Flip Camera. I’d LOVE your feedback one way or the other.

The next question might be…”What exactly do I do with my videos once I have them?”

Oh, we have LOTS of ideas! Join our FREE Beta Membership at http://www.gutzywomen.com to find them or follow the posts coming up soon at on http://www.debbieducic.com