Building a business online can be a rough task. With so many business “experts” pulling you in a hundred directions with their advice, it’s nice to come back to “core” concepts and refocus your online marketing efforts.

I’m going to share with you the 5 fundamental thoughts I have when it comes to building business online. This is not hype or pie in the sky, but rather a clear mindset for planning your business marketing strategy, especially when it comes to the marketing online.

Build Your Email Marketing List

The more emails you have on your list the more profit potential you have in your business. This is a huge void for most small businesses. If you don’t have a tool in place to manage your list, get one ASAP. Make sure your site has a form to get new subscribers.

Automate Your Marketing Processes Online

You can use great tools like this business marketing automation tool, or even have your own custom application built. Processes include, client account setup, account management, subscription management, email marketing, customer incentives, affiliate management, credit/points management, shopping cart, online payments, recurring payments, etc… the list of processed that can be automated online is just ridiculous, I’ll leave it there for the sake of brevity.

Leverage Social Media & Web 2.0

You can use videos, audios, pdfs, social groups and profiles, contests, giveaways or even a referral process with rewards. Social Media and Web 2.0 are not synonymous with Social Networking Sites, but rather embody the concept of virtual, word of mouth marketing. This is one of the most powerful, yet least understood marketing strategies of them all! No one is going to have all of the answers, be very WARY of those claiming to have the “final answer”, as it were.

Think subscriptions

Subscriptions, and more specifically, automated subscriptions is the best move a business can make. If you only sell products in your business, you may have internal sources for recurring revenue. Just spend some time thinking about what is valuable to your clients and how to turn that into a monthly subscription.

Selling a product one off is great and all, but it’s much nicer to have the base of passive residual income flowing! Not only will you profit more, but if your exit strategy is to sell your business, then you’ll want some residual income flowing, to demand top dollar!

Get in the news

I sometimes feel sorry for retail establishments that have no news about, but most of the time it gets me excited! Why? Because I know I can help them generate returns with a well executed press distribution strategy. Anyone can submit a press release, but not everyone has the reporters calling them!

And of course, the most fruitful of all strategies…

Use Common Sense

I knew you’d get a kick out of that one.. what I mean by that is, know what you’re getting into and plan ahead so you can have a well rounded marketing strategy that encompasses these 5 core concepts.

If you are looking for some expert video training for getting your business online, take a look at Maverick Money Maker Series – I know you’ll be impressed!

Since Twitter API hit the scene, there’s been a huge influx of new Twitter tools on what seems like a daily basis!

It can be confusing at times, not knowing which tool to use and, more importantly, how to use it. I’ve tested nearly 50 Twitter tools that have had at least decent reviews, but I want to share the top 3.

First and most impressive, in my humble opinion, is HootSuite:
http://hootsuite.com/

For Twitter tools, this one is a stand up tool – it allows you to manage and distribute tweets across multiple twitter accounts. That’s just for starters – it also has a built in URL shortening service ow.ly (cute name too). Last but certainly not least, you can setup your tweets for timed distribution.

Since having niche twitter accounts is a great strategy for making money on twitter, you can really leverage this tool, together with the two below, to grow your online business or rise awareness for your cause fast!

Next, is Twollow:
http://twollow.com/

Twollow is a neat app, as it allows you to save hundreds of hours of searching for people tweeting about the things that interest you most. You can set the process up for each of your twitter accounts and assign niche phrases for the service to automatically follow. The more phrases, the better you results will be.

When it comes to following people, you want to spend your time communication with a list of followers that care about your content and with whom you can engage in conversation with. It may take you a week or so to find out just how powerful this tool is – but you can also take the shortcut can check your phrases against the twitter search (search.twitter.com) to see how many and what kind of results are coming up.

Lastly, we’ll look at TwitterFeed.
http://twitterfeed.com/

While at times this thing can be annoying, due to high frequency – you can setup twitter feed to post once an hour, or even better, 4 times a day (every 6 hours). This allows you to have relevant and valuable content flowing through your twitter accounts. Just like HootSuite, you can manage all of your twitter account under one Open ID login, which is very cool!

Imagine, having 10 twitter accounts for differing niches and keeping relevant content flowing through each of them, daily.. this tool is more for the twitter fanatic and it truly takes some common sense, otherwise you can fall into that spammer category real fast.

Five words of caution: Low Frequency, Nice Feed Content.

There are a ton more tools, as I mentioned I tested nearly 50 of them this past year. These are the cream of the crop to me. There are some honorable mentions though, and in no particular order, they are:

TweetLater – Great service for sending automated and timed direct messages and managing follower karma. http://tweetlater.com

TwitterCounter – A useful tool for doing some research into your new followers, competition and sharing your twitter profile on other websites with it’s embedded tools. http://twittercounter.com

Twellow – A twitter yellow page directory that allows you to seek out and follow people – it also has a great expanded profile feature when you confirm your twitter profile listing. http://twellow.com

I hope you got some value from these 6 tools and my brief review of them. I encourage you to test out new and emerging twitter tools as well, and post a comment with anything spectacular you find!

Copied with permission from: Joshua Jones