The following is a guest post is from one of my favorite online marketers, Jessica Swanson of Shoestring Marketing. I’m sure you will find this article extremely informative and filled with great advice.

There are several steps that you must take to effectively market your business. If your ultimate goal is to be a master marketer and catapult your business to the top, then you must understand, memorize and implement every single one of these important marketing secrets.

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As promised, here is Part 2 of the list of free tools to help with your marketing efforts. In case you missed Part 1 of this list, you can see it here: Free Tools That Make Marketing Tasks Easier – Part 1

1. eBay Pulse
Wouldn’t it be great to know what people are searching for and more importantly, what they are actually buying? With eBay pulse, you can have that information at your fingertips. This is a very powerful tool and it’s something I recommend that every marketer use when doing market research. When you first go to eBay pulse, you’ll see a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay.
Click here for eBay Pulse
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The following post was written by one of my favorite marketers, Jessica Swanson – “The Shoestring Marketer”. This article covers a topic that is near and dear to me: building relationships. I found this article both informative and useful and I’m certain you will also. So, lets get right to it.

A radical change has occurred in the world of marketing. Just five short years ago, most companies utilized only traditional forms of advertising including: TV ads, radio ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads, etc.

As a result, most marketing consisted of advertising that interrupted whatever the consumer was doing. TV commercials are a perfect example of this advertising concept. As you watch your favorite Thursday night program, suddenly a commercial breaks onto the scene and interrupts you. Thus, the term “interruption marketing” was born!
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Today, I’d like to introduce you to our guest author, Harris Fellman. Harris recently launched CoupDeTwitter – a course on how to properly get started with twitter, get lots of followers, and turn those followers into cash.

He is by no means a Social Media Purist, but still he teaches what he considers the “right way” to interact on Twitter & other Social Media platforms (hint: it ain’t by spamming people with your offers). Harris has a number of years of success in the internet marketing realm and I feel very honored to have him as a guest author today.

With that … here’s Harris’ blog post entitled “How to Take Over Twitter”:
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To be successful as an affiliate marketer, you need to know how to drive targeted traffic to your web site. Even though you may have all the necessary tools such as a great looking and unique web site and the proper mindset, without quality traffic, you’ll find it extremely difficult to make any money. It would be a shame to see all your hard work go down the drain because people aren’t coming to your web site.

It can be a very difficult task trying to drive targeted traffic to your site especially in today’s highly competitive marketplace. With the rapid growth of affiliate marketing that is taking place, the competition has become fierce. With all the new web sites out there, how are you going to make your site stand out from the crowd? If you are really determined to make money in this business and have the patience to stick with it, here are some suggestions to help drive targeted traffic to your site:
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The following is a guest post by one of my favorite online marketers, Jessica Swanson of Shoestring Marketing.

Twitter is one of my all-time favorite places to market my business, Shoestring Marketing.

In addition, I encourage every small business owner to jump head-first into Twitter in order to develop strong business relationships and find new customers and clients.

However, one complaint that I often hear from my own clients is that Twitter is intimidating, confusing and even a waste of valuable time. I want to put these complaints to rest once and for all.

I have compiled 7 Golden Twitter Rules that, if you follow, will catapult your business to the top of your industry in no time at all!
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Normally, I don’t get excited about this type of opportunity but this one really got my attention.

I just became a shareholder in me2everyone and I never had to pay a single penny for the shares! It can only be described as the gold-rush for 2009. This company is going to be huge and shares will soar in value over the coming months! You can register for free and it never has to cost you a single penny!

me2everyone is going to be a cool new virtual world where you can meet friends, chat, shop, play, watch videos, create an art gallery, open a virtual newspaper, play the free inworld lottery and make money from your own online store! You and everyone you know make the decisions, shape the world, create real incomes and share in the profits. It’s a new place where you meet new people or invite your friends. Learn new skills or expand your business. Find the love of your life or help the planet.

Membership is free and every member automatically becomes a shareholder in me2everyone Limited. Personally I have 250 shares in the venture and I am going to increase my shares very soon. This is an excellent chance for all of us to make some real progress in 2009 and beyond! Please do not miss it.

If you are looking for something really good in 2009: something that changes your view on the world, then you really have to spend just one minute and look at this website.
Click here to visit me2everyone

PS: The team is getting ready to launch version 1.5 of the website – but there’s still a chance to get involved and benefit from the pre-launch offers. With zero cost to join, a committment to translate the website into 38 languages, from a debt-free company; this is something that you really have to take a serious look at.

Everybody’s been talking about Twitter. You can’t get through a newscast these days without someone mentioning Twitter or Tweets. Barack Obama tweets. But what exactly is this new social marketing tool, and how can you use it to grow your business?

Twitter is like a blog on a microscopic scale; instead of writing whole posts and your mailing list being notified when a new post goes up, a tweet (what a Twitter post is called) can only be a maximum of 140 characters, and the people who are following you get your whole tweet at once, instead of having to go to your website.

Twitter has now become huge. Companies like Apple, Intel, H&R Block and Zappos are all on Twitter. As mentioned above, so is the new President of the United States.

So how do you leverage this phenomenon? You need to get up and running on Twitter, asap. And you need to build your list of followers. While that may sound like something out of a bad science fiction movie, its actually just building a list of people that want to receive your tweets, much like you built your mailing list for your blog.
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