My Buy Essay

Archive for December, 2007

Haven’t you heard that word of mouth marketing methods work? In fact, according to

research, well over 75% of the most effective methods of marketers actually use word

of mouth marketing, which, for the purposes of this article I shall refer to as WOM.

So, you want to start a WOM campaign. The first thing you need to do is to have a

goal for your WOM campaign. I can immediately think of a few reasons why you might

want to do this:

#1 – Generate leads. This is probably easy to do if you have a few bonus products in

hand. Giving free things away to people definitely will encourage them to think of a

few people whom you can can refer to you for the same thing.

All you need to do is get an autoresponder message set up so that they can forward

you the email addresses of the people they’d like you to contact.

#2 – Generate affiliates. Okay, this one is a little easier, but you will have to

educate the affiliates you build. WOM for affiliate marketing is great because now

you have an army of people who are incentivized to market on your behalf.

#3 – Convert into sales. For this to happen, you definitely need to create a lot of

testimonials in order to create the buzz. This approach will then get other people

talking about the quality and the level of "must-haveness" of the product

you are promoting.

#4 – Build credibility. This approach will help solidify your brand in the long run,

so you will most likely have to have points of proof that people will talk about and

associate with you. This article, for instance is a way to generate credibility

because you are reading it in the first place!

#5 – Retain current subscribers. Few people would have heard of this, but sometimes,

your current list of subscribers need perks to keep them ‘alive’ and warm. Send them

freebies or get a campaign going to increase the buzz amongst them. I have monthly

events where different people actually get together and meet each other and chat so

that they know who’s who instead of a nickname in a forum. This keeps people from

opting out of your mailing list!

#6 – Warm up for a product launch. When you want to do a product launch, you will

want to ensure that people are ready for you. How can you do this? Well, all it

takes is to create more buzz. Warming people on a list also takes time, but the

sequence in which you do it is important. With this goal in mind, you can already

think of some ways to get your list of people excited, talking to each other and

involving themselves in a discussion.

Once your goal is clear enough for you, it will be far easier to keep track of your

results. After all, without a clear direction, you won’t know how far you need to

go, or what you are aiming for in the first place.

I’ve created an initial list of Word of Mouth Marketing Methods that you can find on

my internet marketing blog. So far, it lists 20, but I’ll be working to enhance it

to around 101 or beyond. The marketing methods themselves are not as important as

the way in which you use them.

To find out more about word of mouth marketing methods, just go to

internetmarketingsingapore.com/blog/category/word-of-mouth/

I read a quote once:

“It’s not a tragedy not to achieve a goal it’s a tragedy not to have that goal to achieve!”

How many people wonder through life, without any aim or purpose, just passing the days? How many people with the best of intentions set a goal and go about trying to achieve it, and just because of an “issue”, they give up on the goal, then they fall into the aimless category?

How many people are just plain stubborn &ndash like time &ndash just go on and on to achieve their goal but don’t because they didn’t realise all that was hindering their success was a minor issue that could have been resolved if help had been sought!

To succeed in anything you need to have the right mindset, planning and action are simply not enough. You need a positive attitude, accept that you will make mistakes, accept that it wont happen by tomorrow and most importantly be willing to listen and learn (ask for help &ndash don’t be afraid).

Whatever your goals are, at some point along the way it will involve money &ndash whether your goal is to be the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or simply to help the helpless you still need money (via profit or donation). I’ve come across a straightforward and simple method of helping to achieve that goal, they are profiting from Internet Marketing. How many people use the internet now? It’s not small is it? &ndash Lets face its only going to grow with increasing use in emerging markets like China and India (I was in India last year there is hardly any internet use &ndash I felt lost without my buddy “the internet”!

These days, companies are looking for better methods they can relay their messages to potential consumers &ndash so as to reduce advertising costs and increase customer acquisition (and later retention).

There are 3 ways that messages can be relayed at minimal or no cost.

1. Face to Face Direct Marketing &ndash visiting potential customers at their place of residence (check local law to see if this allowed where you reside)

2. Internet Marketing &ndash having even a basic website that has some traffic coming to it &ndash is better than having no website &ndash there is more chance of attracting/retaining customers.

3. Word of Mouth/Email &ndash Have you ever told someone about a product or service that you’ve had a good experience with? Whether you do it by telling someone or emailing them, it’s a recommendation from a positive experience.

As advertising budgets decrease and competition increase the use of the above methods of marketing are simply put “the way forward”.

What about me? There are many ways for you to market online, you can market other peoples products (be an affiliate). You could even create your own product or service (maybe you already have one). The first thing to have a basic website; best of all &ndash you don’t need to hire anyone – these techniques can be learnt for little or no cost.

I came across a course that taught me to build my own website &ndash in under a week I learnt what I thought would take at least a year at college. There are various things on this course that interested me; I’m not going to get into the exact content &ndash the BEST thing for me was that everything was SHOWN to me &ndash step by step. I’m sure you’ll agree &ndash that’s the best way for people to learn something new.

If you want to open more doors in terms of potential income and satisfaction then Internet Marketing might just be your ticket!

Kaval Patel

These secrets can be learnt by you at

.internetmarketingsecrets4u.com/.

Viral Marketing also known as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company.

Companies ride on the idea that if people like a good movie, funny story etc, they will pass it on to their friends and family. The company brands their logo or a product description to go with that particular media. Result? The company gets free advertising that keeps growing without them having to do anything else. .

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pass on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

The main advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of public awareness about your site and your company. You can generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives like prizes and discounts, you can reach out to a great number of people and get them to pass your advertisement along at a very low cost to you.

For instance If you write an ebook allow people to place an advertisement in your free ebook if, in exchange, they give away the ebook to their web visitors or e-zine subscribers.

Give permission for people to give away your free product

Just include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site.

Hold a contest on your web site. You could place the other web

site’s ads on the contest page in exchange for them promoting the

contest.

There are many ways to reap the benefits of Viral Marketing . Take advantage of them.

Building customer interest and excitement is the first step to successfully marketing many products. Autoresponders play a vital role in building this interest and excitement. For instance, if you were developing an ebook, you may want to start telling your website visitors and opt-in subscribers about it. Start building interest; tell them what this product will do for them, and how soon it will be available.

Do more than build interest by telling them about it. Use an autoresponder to let them preview your product! Even though you will be selling the product, you can allow your potential customers to preview the information. Have you ever seen previews for movies that will be playing intheaters soon? It is the same concept.

Load one chapter of the ebook into an autoresponder, and put a form on your website where your visitors can enter their name and email address to receive the preview chapter free of charge. This gets their name on your list of potential customer. Each week, send a reminder email, letting them know how close the release date is, and what they can expect from your product &ndash keep building interest and excitement.

Finally, a couple of days before you are ready to launch your product offer those that received the preview the option to buy a pre-release copy. You canopt to offer a discounted price, or leave the price as it will be on launch day &ndash the choice is yours.

Take a look at the list of people who signed up to receive the preview. How many of them are still ‘subscribed’ to that list? They’ve had the option to stop receiving notices about your product, but they chose to keep receiving the information you were sending. These are highly targeted prospects for our product. They have already shown you that they have an interest in your product, and a large number of those people are simply waiting on the autoresponder broadcast message that will let them know that it is time to pick up their copy of your product!

Isn’t automation a wonderful thing? Using an autoresponder, you are able to see how much of a market there is for your product, and build a great deal of interest in it before it is ever released. This isthe key to making sales on launch day. Use autoresponders to build the interest. Get your prospects excited about what is about to come &ndash andon launch day, give them what they are waiting for andwatch the sales pour in!

Giving items away for free is a great way to increase traffic everybody likes freebie. If you give something different away each week, you are sure to have a steady stream of repeat traffic. When you have freebies or giveaways on your site, your pages can also be listed and linked from the many sites on the Internet that list places where where people can receive free stuff.

To find these listings of free stuff, simply go to search engine and do a search on “Free Stuff Index” or “Free Stuff Links”. You will be amazed at how many people are giving things away online.

You don’t have to give something away to everyone. You could simply have a drawing everyweek. You could then ask entrants if they would like to notify them of the winner, which again gives you permission to email them.

If you want to bring only people from your target market to your site then don’t give away mainstream things like screen savers, shareware games, utilities, and so on. Try to give away something that only people interested in your industry would want. If you don’t care what traffic comes your way, and any traffic is good traffic, then give away useful things that everybody needs. Try to have your logo and URL displayed on the item. If your freebie is something that has your URL on it and is something that is generally kept around a computer, it’ll remind and encourage people to visit your site.

The best implementation of giving away freebies is by having a “Tell a friend about this” button near the freebie so site visitors can quickly and easily tell their friends. It’s the ideal viral marketing opportunities.

The best thing about Niche Browser (despite it’s being free) is that it provides such a rich array of features for you to use in your online marketing research.

Anybody that is starting out or continuing to build their home business will benefit from owning and using Niche Browser. One disadvantage you will find about Niche Browser, however, is that there are so many features that it can be a bit overwhelming.

That is why I am writing this article. I want to help you get started using and mastering Niche Browser in order to take advantage of all the great resources that it provides for you. So let’s take a tour of the overall interface.

Niche Browser can be divided into three basic elements:

1. Browser Window

2. Search Tools Side Panel

3. URL Toolbar

1) Browser Window

The Browser Window is quite simple to understand: It is an instance of Microsoft Internet Explorer. If you right-click a blank area of the window, you will see the familiar context menu, in which you will find, for example, the “View Source” item which will allow you to view the html code for the current page.

Just above the Browser Window, you will see the browser toolbar. On the left are the familiar back, forward, stop, and refresh buttons. The right side has the go, history, favorites, add to favorites, and print the current page buttons. In the center is the URL address bar. To the left of the address bar is a special button that opens the browser in a separate window on your desktop.

Just above the URL address bar, you will notice a small button. This is the URL Address Lock, or Pin URL button. It enables you to browser other websites while keeping the current URL from changing. This is especially handy when you want to use the URL tools toolbar which I will explain a little bit later.

Also, to the left, just above the “Back” button, there is the Expand Browser Window button. This allows you to enlarge the browser viewing area.

2) Search Tools Side Panel

The Search Tools Side Panel provides special features for each Search Tool that you select. The content and functionality of each Side Panel will change depending on the requirements of the associated Search Tool you happen to be using at the time.

In order to understand the side panels, you have to first understand how to activate a search tool. The search tools are listed as subsets of the Search Categories. The Search Categories are the first row of buttons that you see just under the “Related Searches” tool bar. We will be discussing these later on as well.

So, for each item you select in the Search Categories row, you will see a different set of buttons appear in the row below it which provides the Search Tools for that category.

The simplest way to begin exploring the side panel is to look at three different versions of Google search tools: Google Basic search, also known as the Generalized Keyword Search, Google Suggest search, and Google Advanced search. You’ll notice that the contents of the side panel are different for each.

3) URL Toolbar

The Toolbars of the Niche Browser Interface provide a wide variety of features that will assist you in your niche marketing research. When you use the URL Toolbar, be sure to enable the URL Address Lock, or Pin URL button. This will allow you to select each of the tools without having to restore the Site Address each time.

The URL Tool Bar provides the following resources:

a) Alexa Ranking

b) Related Sites

c) Indexed Pages

d) URL Trends

e) Text Analyzer

f) Site Images

g) Site Audio

h) Site Video

i) Site PDF’s

j) Site Flash Movies

k) Wayback Machine

l) Inbound Links

m) Whois Information

n) URL Slide Show

o) Site Search

As you can see, there is an incredible amount of information you can gather about any particular site using Niche Browser’s URL Tool Bar.

a) Alexa Ranking

For those of you who are not familiar with Alex Ranking, you will be amazed at all the information it can provide you about your competition’s website.

Let me give a brief overview. To start with, Alexa only ranks pages for sites that contain the Alexa Toolbar, so this is not a complete sampling of all sites on the Web. However, if your site of interest is listed, you will find it useful.

The first piece of data is the ranking. This tells you how popular the site is compared to all other sites being ranked by Alexa. The next notable feature is the Explore This Site categories. These are, Overview, Traffic Details, Related Links, and Inbound Links, or Sites Linking In.

In the Overview Section, you will find the following:

- People who visit this page also visit…

- Site Stats

Traffic Rank

Speed

Other sites that link to this site

Online Since

Look for similar sites by category

d) URL Trends

URL Trends provides a great deal of information in one location. It will provide the following information about a website’s pages:

Current Rankings

Google Page Rank

Alexa Rank

Incoming Google Links

Incoming Yahoo Links

Incoming MSN Links

Incoming Alexa Links

Overall Incoming Links

Outgoing Links

Page Information

Page Title

Description

Online Since

DMOZ Listed

Archive.org Listed (Wayback machine)

UrlTrends Cache

m) Whois Information

If you ever need to find out about a website domain, this is the place to do it. Using the Whois information tool, you can find out when a site was first registered, when the domain name will expire, what type of server it is running on, whom to contact for information, whether the site has been blacklisted, and related site domains that may be available for sale or at auction.

o) Site Search

If you come across a website in which you would like to search but they don’t provide a search box on the site, you can use this tool that Niche Browser provides. Just navigate to the page, enter the text you want to search, and press the search button.

The tools and features in Niche Browser are seemingly endless, and the value to you certainly is. So be sure and download it now if you haven’t already. In other articles, I will be discussing some of the tools in more details, so be sure and watch for those as well.

A company, no matter how big or small, will not be complete without an official web site. Millions of people all over the world visit the world wide web everyday, and what better way is there to promote your business?

However, if nobody visits your web site, it will not serve its purpose – which is to inform people about your company.

On the other hand, if there are a lot of visitors on your web site but nobody is enticed to buy your products or take advantage of the services that your company offers, then the web site will still be useless.

The key ingredient to a successful web site is getting leads. The purpose of leads is to guide the customers and prospective clients to your web site.

Here are some tips on how you can get successful leads to your web site:

1. Review the design and content of your web site. Once people are led to your place on the Internet, then the next thing that you need to do is keep them there.

- Make sure that the site tells people about the products and services that your company offers.

- The web site itself should be user-friendly. A visitor will be annoyed and will browse away from your company’s web site if it has a lot of useless information and the links are not organized.

- More importantly, the web site should be visually pleasing and have eye-catching graphics, helpful articles and easy-to-follow links.

2. Conduct a study of your target market. Learn about their age and social group and location. If your customer base is mostly teens, check out their online forums to find out about their likes and dislikes, and their opinions.

If most of your prospective customers are regulars of this kind of web sites, you may actually join their online forums and give out your opinions but do not directly advertise.

What you can do instead is give your e-mail address and other contact information while posting on such forums.

You can also contact the creators of the web site for the online forums and ask them about your advertising options.

3. Build a mailing list to make your advertising campaign more effective.

You may employ paid and unpaid methods when building your list.

With the unpaid method, you are making an effort to convince people to give out their e-mail address.

Here, you would have a solid mailing list to make up your customer base because when people volunteer information, it only means that they are interested with your company.

On the other hand, there is a “paid” method of building your mailing list. With this, you actually shell out advertising money for your products to be promoted on popular web sites.

There are also “partner” web sites that would let you advertise for free, in return for a service or product that your company may provide. This is how affiliations are built towards a mutual, beneficial gain.

You may also convince your current customers to refer your company and web site to their friends and relatives to increase your mailing list.

Freebies, discounts, and coupons may be given out to customers who can give you a friend’s e-mail address.

This should be an additional incentive, aside from the free mailings that they will receive from your company.

Follow these steps and you will be able to promote your business, find local and national customers and help your company grow through targeted advertising online.

With more than 77% of all American adults now online, and more than 175 million Americans using the Internet regularly, the argument that a website is an essential business tool is resolved before the debate begins. If your company isn’t taking steps and making a continuing effort to maximize its website it is leaving customers and revenue behind (for competitors to pick up).

Some of the hesitancy in developing and maintaining a good website is derived from misunderstandings of what it takes to make a website productive. This article shares 8 things you can do with relative ease to enable your website to deliver better results. They are:

1. Make Sure Your Website is User Friendly

Whether in an offline or online environment, your target market can’t be expected to buy your product if you do not make it easy to find and purchase. Your website can enhance the ease with which information and specs about your products/services can be found, thereby making the decision to buy them easier. Your website needs to (a) open quickly, (b) be easy to navigate and find information, and (c) provide a painless checkout process. If you can meet these three criteria, visitors will enjoy being on your site, and your sales through the site will increase.

2. Give in to Speed

According to some sources, you have about 30 seconds to convince a visitor to your website to stay there and look for what they came to purchase. If your website takes these same 30 seconds to upload, or you have a 30 second flash that is well prepared but devoid of any message (loved by the graphic design folks and marketing people for its creativity and hated by visitors because it takes time and says nothing), then you will lose visitors even before you have a chance to present your benefits and offer. The key to speed is a well designed site hosted on servers that deliver high speed.

3. Know Who Your Site is Targeting

The better you understand your target market the better your website will perform. Keeping in mind that the website is a marketing tool, and that knowing your market is a fundamental of good marketing, it makes sense that your website should be developed with your market in mind. You need to understand how you market behaves not only in terms of buying habits and spending patterns, but also, in the case of effective web development, online. The online behavior of your market will help you construct the site to meet their expectations, needs and preferences. In most cases the market will demand (a) that your site be updates and provide the latest relevant information, (b) that the site enable their inquiries through the latest online technologies, and (c) that the website be convenient to navigate.

4. Know Your Goals

Just as with offline business, “getting more sales” is not a useful goal in that it is vague, overly apparent, and devoid of any market based elements. You need to approach your website with goals and objectives in mind, not only so that the site can be constructed consistent with them, but also so that the maintenance of the site can be executed to support them. For example, the goals of your website could be “present products in an attractive manner that allows prospective buyers to visual their use and benefits”. Another legitimate objective could be “to present information on products and the company so as to educate consumers and broaden our customer base”. In both instances, the goals are clearly defined, and the websites constructed around them will be designed in architecture and appearance to maximize the success of the stated objectives.

5. Develop a Smart Web Architecture

When it comes to the architecture of your website – where the information is placed and the paths visitors take to get to it – the most critical tool you can deploy is common sense. Most people will look for information in the place where it is most logical for it to be. If you get creative, or want to make a point with your navigation (or the names you give to the information links you have) you will find that most people will leave your site rather than try to unravel the brilliance you are showing through your very clever structure. In other words, people are on your site to get to something, the easier you make it for them to get there, the better your website is. Period.

6. Operate According to a Plan

Like any marketing tool, your website needs to be tied into your overall marketing strategy and needs to be reflective of your company, its products, and the message and image it seeks to communicate to the market. Your website needs to have a plan of operation that detail, through a process and in accordance with steps, timelines, and accountability elements, the milestones for measuring performance and success. The plan needs to include (a) processes and timetables for updates and announcements, (b) your web marketing campaign, and (c) how your site will compete against similar sites.

7. Market Your Website

Like every other aspect of your business, if you do not market what you are doing nobody will know about it or why what you are selling is something they should buy. There are many ways to market a website and, as with Tudog’s approach to traditional marketing, we recommend a basket of tactics. These include (a) organic embedding of metatags and other keywords into the content of your website so as to secure a higher natural listing on the search engines, (b) the purchase of select keywords to ensure high search results when these words are punched in, (c) affiliate sites and appearances on other sites, and (d) targeted web ads. These marketing tactics will assist you in driving traffic to your site, as well as serve to raise general awareness for your company.

8. Monitor Your Activities

The Internet offers excellent opportunities to monitor and analyze your activities so that you can be certain that what you are doing is not only working, but maximizing your potential. The web can help you determine how many people are coming to your site, where they are going inside the site, where they came from into your site, and whether or not they made a purchase. You can use this information to determine the efficacy of your navigation, architecture, content, graphics, message and marketing.

Your website, like all other aspects of your marketing, is a window into your company and a reflection of not only how much respect you have in what you do, but also how much respect and commitment you have toward your customers. A professional website demonstrates a professional attitude. Anything less is…well, less.

Content is still the King of the Internet. Most people go online looking for information about their favorite topics, or about whatever is on their mind at the moment. Frequent Internet users seem to have an insatiable appetite for information on various fields.

So, if you want to drive targeted traffic and pre-qualified potential buyers to your website, you really must publish useable information online in the form of quick-to-read but interesting keyword rich articles.

Here are four reasons why you must do that.

Reason #1 – Get Premium Exposure for Your Website

It’s much easier to achieve high search engine ranking for article pages than for your homepage or salespages. Search engines are crazy for fresh content on practically every topic under the sun.

So, write your articles surrounding less competitive keywords (research those at Nichebot.com) or edit those keywords into already existing articles of your own. You will have a much better chance of getting your article indexed by major search engines.

Just be sure to place a link to your main website in the article by-line or resource box.

Reason #2 – Get Automatic Back Links from Authority Sites

Each time your article and site link are republished online, it provides a back link to your website. Back links are regarded by search engines as a sort of recommendation for your website. If your site has a number of quality back links, it can quickly improve the search engine ranking.

Submit your articles to online article directories. In most cases it’s free. Many directory sites are regarded by major search engines as authority sites, and are spidered frequently for new content. This means the website link you include in your article will also be indexed from the site where it is found.

Offer your articles for reprint as well. When other website owners republish them on their own sites, it will develop even more back links for your website.

Reason #3 – Improve Your Conversion Rate

By conversion rate, we mean the percentage of website visitors that convert to paying customers and sales.

You can boost your credibility and convert more website visitors into a paying customers by providing them with interesting and informative topic articles, and then introducing them to related products you have for sale.

On the other hand, simply displaying products on your website, with no related information or content, will likely result in a low conversion rate. It’s important that you use articles to first prove your credibility and your knowledge in your field.

Reason #4 – Your Cost is Practically Zero

All you need is your thoughts and your computer. If you can write a letter to a friend that explains the details of some topic, then you can write topical articles to publish on your own site and submit to other sites.

However, if you don’t like to write, or simply believe that you can’t, you can still have original keyword rich articles written for you.

An original 400 word niche article on a topic of your choice might cost you $5 to $7 at JustArticles.com – but the potential value is enormous in terms of bringing targeted visitors and buyers to your website.

There is no question that the key to running a successful business is to generate a steady traffic flow. There are a number of ways you can increase your traffic flow, but submitting to directories can be extremely successful. Whether it is submitting articles to article directories or submitting your site to web site directories, you will begin to get thousands of visitors by doing so.

When you submit to directories, you are receiving free advertising. All over the internet you will see advertisements and promotions trying to get you to pay for advertising. But in reality, submitting to directories can be equally successful when it comes to increasing your traffic flow.

There are thousands of people that search article directories and web site directories for ideas and opinions. Whether the web surfers are looking for ideas for their own site or just quality content, you will have your content and site viewed thousands of times. And by placing a link to your site with the submission, people will have easy access to be redirected to your site.

Submitting articles to article directories can do much more than provide a link for people to click on. When you submit articles, you are also delivering quality content to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. There is so much duplicate content on the internet that readers are salivating for fresh content. If you can produce fresh and enticing content, people will jump to your site to see what else you have to offer.

Another way you can get thousands of visitors to your site by submitting to directories is through page rank. By targeting specific keywords on your web site, you can climb higher on the search engines. The better your site flows and casually spreads your keywords throughout, the higher your page rank will be.

Search engines reward quality sites with a higher page rank. Typically you will find the higher page rank sites toward the top of the search engines. And according to the golden triangle rule, internet surfers tend to focus on the top four or five searches on the search engines. Therefore, try to spread keywords throughout your site without making it too obvious and you will begin to climb up the search engines.

A business is nothing without traffic. You could have the best web site in the world, but if nobody knows it exists, it is nothing. That is why it is essential that you take the time to submit your articles and web site to thousands of article directories and web site directories. The more directories you submit to, the better chance you have of people seeing your site. From there, you will notice a steady increase in the amount of traffic you receive.

Always look for directories with either high page rank, or a good predicted page rank. Normally new directories make good ground fast in traffic, page rank and serp. This is good for your site and surely worth submitting to, because they are either cheap or free.

What are you waiting for then, GET SUBMITTING!!!!!