The main point of gaining online publicity is to drive traffic to your business website and the best way to do this is to develop your persona online. There are a couple of different ways to go about this.

First, you need to decide whether you are going to be yourself or your business online. For example, when you leave a comment on a blog, will you use your name or your business nickname? There are advantages to each. People tend to respect a real person a bit more, but at the same time, if you have more than one interest or business, you might want to use nicknames to distinguish the different areas.

Once you`ve chosen the name you plan to use, start building a rep online. This could include any number of the following methods:

• Blog commenting
• Social media networking
• Review sites
• Set up Squidoo, Flickr, YouTube accounts
• Start a blog of your own
• Get a page on Facebook
• Start Twittering

All of these will help build your reputation online and as you gain popularity, you will be able to start talking your business up to online friends. Of course, some well-written press releases can`t hurt, either!

On November 13, I`ll be a guest on BlogTalkRadio with Chris McElroy and it would be wonderful if my readers could join us. I`ll be discussing online publicity and how to make it work for you.

The topic of the show is “How to Stand Out From the Online Crowd: Identifying and Unleashing Your Unique Selling Proposition” and I`ll be covering the following points in the hour long show:

• How to get more targeted website visitors
• Choosing better keywords
• Increasing conversion rates
• How to beat out the competition

The show starts at 2 pm and you can check it out at the BlogTalk website. I`m looking forward to having the opportunity to appear on the show and hope some of you can listen in.

Whether you have a business website or not, there are some big advantages to online publicity. You can reach far more people online for a small amount of money than you can using printed materials offline. This helps a lot when you are still growing your business.

There are plenty of ways to get free publicity online, here are just a few of the ways:

• Blogging
• Contests
• Article marketing
• Giveaways
• Email marketing
• RSS advertising

And, if you are willing to put some money into it, you can expand your online publicity options:

• Virtual tradeshows
• Blog advertising
• Banner ads
• Widgets
• Mobile ads
• Sponsorship
• Pay Per Click

Any way you look at it, online publicity is a good thing. People are online a lot more these days and it`s often the first place they turn when doing research on a product or service. You want to be there and easy to find.

There are a lot of advantages to having an online business presence, even if it is just one webpage describing what you do. Offline businesses are rapidly discovering that it pays to get involved in online publicity, as it can really boost sales.

For the offline diehards who think that the internet is highly overrated and unnecessary, it`s important to remember that most of your clients, possibly all of them, turn to the internet when they are looking for products and services. Even if they plan to buy locally at a store, they will still research quality, brand and prices online first. It`s the way we work these days.

Online publicity has many aspects and you can choose the ones that fit your business best, from setting up a webpage or blog to online advertising and giveaways. There`s something for everyone and it all tends to be effective for driving traffic to your offline website.

Don`t leave online publicity and advertising out of your promotion budget. It`s definitely worth doing.

Whether you are using your real name or your business name as your brand, it pays to get it out there. You`ve got a lot of different options when it comes to promoting your name, so let`s take a look at a few.

• Guest blog. Doing a post in exchange for a link on another blog related to your topic is an excellent way to get some exposure, particularly if the other blog is well-known.

• Article marketing. Sites like EzineArticles allow you to share your articles with the world and still get credit for it with a resource box where you add your bio.

• Multiple websites. You can set up small webpages for assorted aspects of your business, or even use sites like Squidoo or Hubpages to help build backlinks and a reputation.

• Make online friends. Whether you leave comments on people`s blogs, meet them through forums or chat rooms, you`ll find that networking can be a very good way to get your name known.

Online publicity takes work, but it`s definitely worth investing some time into. Imagine someone types your name into Google . . . what are they going to end up with? Are you in the majority of the first page results, or is there something else there instead?

Blame it on Google. They went Chrome.

Yes, Google is introducing its own browser, but that’s not the subject of this blog post. Instead, I’d like to discuss how they are marketing it - through an online comic book. How innovative!

Yes, this is a great concept and it’s the kind of online marketing that companies need to be thinking about doing these days. It’s creative, it’s informative, it creates a buzz. My guess is that Google’s online comic book marketing their new browser, aptly titled “Chrome”, will get a lot of inbound links. Not just because it’s Google, but because it’s good marketing. The comic book is well laid out, well thought out, provides lots of useful information, and breaks down technical jargon into everyday language. If your company isn’t doing this kind of marketing online then you need to study Google’s playbook.

One often overlooked tool in the Internet marketer’s arsenal is the press release. With a press release you can increase your website’s SEO benefits and drive traffic to your website. But in order to work well, the press release has to be written well and it has to be about an event that is relevant and deserves promotion.

Newspaper editors typically reject press releases that are nothing more than advertising sheets in disguise. Your closeout sale isn’t newsworthy. The carnival in your front parking lot is.

When judging whether an event is newsworthy or not, try to look for the community angle. If it benefits others even if you get nothing in the end then it may very well be newsworthy. In that case, it deserves a press release.

For instance, let’s say you are a local doctor who has decided to provide free check ups to all children ages 10-12 on Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to noon. Well, that’s pretty newsworthy because you could have 100 children in that age range show up for a free check up and there is no guarantee that you’ll get new business out of the deal. A press release could work for you.

You can submit a press release to your local newspaper, but you can also submit it online. When you do submit a press release online, you have the potential to build a lot of links to your website and increase your traffic substantially. The more news agencies that pick up your press release, the more likely you are to get those benefits.

When you write your press release, don’t focus it on the benefits to you. Focus it on the newsworthy benefits to the community. That’s the best way to ensure you get your press release printed.

If you are thinking about doing online marketing for your business (and you should) then you should consider that Internet market is different from traditional marketing in a number of ways. While there are similarities - you will of course require some of the same specialty skills - the differences are rather striking. One major difference with online marketing is the rate at which changes in the marketplace or the playing field can affect your business. One recent example illustrates perfectly what I mean.

Yesterday morning at 2:22 a.m., SEOmoz posted a blog post about how Google won’t index websites whose URLs end with .0. Later that morning, Small Business Mavericks followed up with a post about it as well. By 9:40 a.m., just barely more than one hour after SBMs post, Matt Cutts had posted on his blog that Google’s policy had changed to allow .0 file name extensions and URLs that end with .0. It happened that fast.

In the world of online marketing, things can change at the drop of a hat and because communication is instant, a company like Google can make a policy change and communicate that change worldwide within a short period of time. That kind of change has the ability to influence how every business online markets itself and if a change is sweeping enough it will bend the rules of online marketing just enough that those who know about the change before everyone else will have a distinct advantage over all of their competitors. That’s how alert and responsive you have to be to compete online.

When it comes to online marketing, you need to stay on top of the latest information by the minute or consult with a marketing company who does.

I understand your small business dilemma. You only have so much budget for marketing each month. You can’t spend it all online.

That’s true. And I wouldn’t suggest that most small businesses with a local presence spend their entire advertising budget online, but you should be spending some of it online. The question is, How much?

First, let’s discuss how much you should allocate to marketing in general. You should earmark 15%-20% of your revenue each month to marketing. In other words, if your company brought in $10,000 last month then allocate somewhere around $1,500-$2,000 next month to your marketing or advertising initiatives - online and off line.

That’s just a figure. Spend more or less depending on your individual circumstances. Do you have a lot of overhead? You might have to spend less. Is most of your profit free and clear? Spend a little more. But how much should you spend online?

If you are new to online marketing then you’ll have to do some testing. Don’t just jump in and start spending money wildly. Take some time to understand the principles before you get too deep into it. But you should be doing some online marketing. I would recommend that you start with 10% of your total marketing budget to online marketing and test a few things to see what works best for you. Then you can slowly increase your online marketing budget to 50% of your total marketing budget, cutting out those off line marketing efforts that aren’t working as well as they used to.

If your total marketing budget is $2,000 per month then start with $200 per month as an online budget. Let’s say you decide to build a website and SEO it for best performance in the search engines. After that you’ll need to do some other things to market your business. Examine your options and see which online marketing methods might suit your business goals and needs. As your online presence grows, you can increase your budget and cut off the off line marketing measures that are making you less in terms of ROI. Do this until you reach 50% of your total marketing budget being spent on your online marketing. Keep only those offline marketing efforts that are making you money and cut the rest.

Online marketing is getting better and better every day. From time to time, I like to find and highlight tools for small business owners that can help them in their marketing efforts. Today, I’ve got a great tool for business owners that want to improve their online marketing. This tool is a great tool to help you do better competitive research and help you find your niche.

The tool I want to introduce you to is Myriad Search. This is what we call a meta search engine. A meta search engine takes information from more than one source. Other popular meta search engines include Dogpile and AOL Search.

The best way to use this tool is to type in a search term that you want your website to rank for. By doing that, you’ll find out which websites already rank in each of the top four search engines for that key search term. A ranking algorithm creates an authority ranking for each of those sites and by using this tool you can see what the competitive landscape is for the key search terms that you want to capture. I don’t know of any other tool that does this.

I recommend setting it so that you can see the top 50 sites at each search engine. You can also filter out duplicates if you need to because some of the search engines will include the same website more than once for a single search term. Google already has a filter that eliminates websites from being ranked more than once for the same search term. Ask.com, however, does not.

After looking to who is ranked at which search engines for you key terms and seeing who has authority in your niche, send the file to CSV so you can manipulate it and use it more easily. Then visit each of these websites, the ones that are most likely to be your major competitors, and see what they are doing that you can be doing. Include Myriad Search into your online competitive analysis and your online marketing will improve.