OmarBarraza.com
 
You're going to find that one large prize works best most of the time. This is particularly true when you're asking your audience for something non-trivial, such as completing a survey or providing their contact information. This might be expected when you consider that more people are motivated to gamble by a chance to win one huge jackpot than doing a bit better than break even.
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You should expect to find that business-to-business (B2B) marketing primarily involves communicating how you're going to save money or make money for potential customers. A key reason for this is that many businesses require a   group decision before making significant changes or purchases.

While it's easy to cast doubt over a potential qualitative improvement, it's challenging to argue effectively against something that quantitatively reduces costs or increases revenue. In other words, everyone stands ready to shout "I told you this waste of money wouldn't work," but no one wants to admit "It's my fault were spending too much or not  selling enough."

Once you can describe how you can help prospects save money or make money, the next step is determining how to best communicate this opportunity to the individuals that will most benefit.
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You're going to find that companies are interested in ideas that will directly save them money first, followed by ideas that might make them money. This means you need to think about strategy and find an answer to the question "Why would [specific company name] be interested in buying my idea?" If you're wondering why, the reason is simple. Saving money is lower risk.

For example, an idea designed to make a company money by selling more products will require marketing, selling, and other expenses before it has a chance of success. An idea that could save money won't cost them anything if it works since the savings will recover its costs. In a worst case scenario, the idea won't cost much if it doesn't work well since it probably will never be implemented.

So ask yourself, will your idea save the company money? If not, can the idea be transformed so that it will? It would be ideal if you can get to yes on these questions.
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It's my opinion that niches are created rather than found.

If you agree, then the process of making a niche can be simple. Start by identifying a group of people that share several similar interests, then exclude interests (and the people with those interests) until you've excluded 99 percent of the people. One in a hundred is a strong niche and the interest they share is special enough to build a community and rare enough to hold the community together.
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Take a look at Posterous.com before you do anything more. Posteroues is so easy to use that you can focus on your writing rather than blog management. You send an email to create your blog and send emails to add posts. You can 'upgrade' to a more powerful (read complicated) blogging alternative later, if needed. 
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Strategy is the reason for what follows. In other words, it answers the 'why' question. Plans, tactics, and other items are tools that help deal with the how, when, where, etc.
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One of the ways you could choose to make money while helping others is to share potential solutions to their problems at no cost and offer to help them apply the solutions for a fee. I think this is beneficial for everyone involved since some people will not be able or willing to try the solution you have suggested on their own. 

For example, you could teach entrepreneurs how to accept credit cards without expensive upfront fees or terminal devices and then offer to set things up for them if they are too busy to do this for themselves.
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Writing a news release to match the preferred media outlets gets the story picked up more often and results in longer stories. Perhaps this happens because it saves time by delivering a first draft for their use. Convenience is valuable to busy writers. So, if you want to get picked up in newspapers you might find yourself writing traditional releases in the Associate Press (AP) style, and reserve the use of a narrative style for releases focused on blogs.
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The most common mistake I see people make as they plan, start, and grow their Internet marketing businesses is to focus more on the marketing than the business. That is, they invest all of their energies following someone's "system" before determining if their business is viable (or that the system works for anyone other than the provider).

Also, no matter what type of business you have, you will need to ensure that your costs to acquire and support a customer are significantly less than the expenses.

Suppose you need to reach out to 1,000 strangers (aka prospects) in order for 10 to become acquaintances (aka opportunities) and one to become a friend (aka buyer). Then suppose selling one of your items (product or service) provides a gross profit (selling price minus item cost) of $100 total. This means you will need to spend 10 cents or less to reach each stranger just to appear to break even. In reality, you'll loose money on every sale because of other business expenses in this example.

You need to get your business formula (model) figured out before you begin to pour money into your marketing to ensure your business can succeed.
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This is absolutely possible. Consider www.Weebly.com for a retail website. 

It's fairly simple and essentially free to create a website with an online gallery, blog, store, and more. A few of the options do cost a little money, but all the options combined cost less than $100 per year. Just as importantly, the folks at Weebly can do the work of creating your website for about $500 if you decide you want some help.
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