Online marketing is essential for driving traffic towards your website. Whether you are trying to gain clients, page rank, subscribers, customers, or general traffic - Marketing is an absolute necessity.

You will find that there are many places where you can purchase essential marketing tools, such as email marketing software, back office website consoles and perhaps even forum software. But have you pondered on the notion, that even though it seems like you’re getting a fantastic deal - you might not be.

Let’s take a look at your email marketing; you need a subscription box and a means to issue your important newsletters, email campaigns and/or eCourses. You find a recommended and popular email system and sign up for the low fee of $15 a month for up to 500 emails. This is great - you’re on your way!

Then you need a website where you can add your subscribe box. If your looking to do things right, you would also want several essential features such as a blog, a forum, web apps, and we can’t forget hosting - you’ll also find a great deal for this on the Web, for a minimal fee of just $14 a month. You add your subscribe box and you have your 2 systems up and running.

Of course, you would most likely also want sell your products online, so we toss in a shopping cart too. As this function requires payment gateways, and checkouts, this could be a bit more costly. So you find the best deal you can, at a modest $34 per month for the basic version, and of course when the capacity runs out and your business grows, this could leap up to $99 per month, but we’ll worry about that later, right?

So, now we would like a member’s area. We want to offer excellent customer service, which means keeping our customers details secure and accessible, and as we don’t want the hassle of arranging it through a hosting company, we opt-in for another low cost option - essential SSL, the lowest cost around at $10 per month. Along with our customer service we should have an excellent CRM (customer relationship management) system. So, we throw in another $10 a month.

Such small amounts of money to part with, but essential for your marketing to run effectively. So, let’s see what freebie services we can add on… Analytics, and a Blog in addition to standard email. Let’s take a look and see our result.

* Email marketing $15
* Online business console $14
* eCommerce $34
* Additional extra’s $20
* Total $83 per month minimum…

Then consider, how much is your time worth? How practical is it to manage your online business in 7 different systems?

So, at $83 a month for bare minimum basic fees - and several hours of your time, exactly how cost effective are your marketing tools?

Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an Experienced Executive Virtual Assistant who collaborates with businesses and individuals with the sole aim of accomplishing their professional goals. Want to learn more about these comprehensive online business building success strategies? Join the Campaign for FREE Virtual Assistance right now!

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 2:44 am and is filed under Online Business, Promotion and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.