My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

How to get started

First off, some points about money. People pay money, a valuable, in exchange for a product or service you provide – another valuable. It’s really barter, with a commodity called money. People buy things which will improve their lives, which gives them some benefit they feel they need. You aren’t really in it for the money, but to provide better service to people so that they can improve their lives. That’s a perfect fit – they want to spend money to improve their lives and you are more than happy to accept money to enable them to do so – with your product and services.

Money is really just an indicator of how much you provide real service to others – and how valuable they think that service is. We’ve gone over how you can increase your income by giving it away, as well.

Now, down to the brass tacks of what to do when and why.

Before we start -

Don’t quit your day job. Rome wasn’t built in a day, God took seven to create this world – so don’t figure you are going to become a millionaire overnight. I’ve heard some talented people got rich in 90 days, but we’ll take the conservative approach here.

Until your Internet activities start bringing income to you, that day job will be providing the seed money for your online business.

Consider all your online activites a second job. This is much better than going to get a second job at some company. Then you are spending 60 hours a week just working for a fixed wage – away from your family and giving a large proportion of it to the government and insurance companies with very little return.

So your online business is your second job. Set it up with a specific workplace and a schedule. Treat it like a business, not a hobby. Show up on time and ready to work – not late and hung over or taking constant breaks for food – or having the TV running so you can “catch the game”. Arrange for your spouse and kids to keep the noise down – or set up your garage so it is comfortable all year round and you can easily work there with no distractions. (Remember, setting this up as an actual business means you can deduct these expenses from your “day job” income tax.)

Work out your finances. See if you can get by on only 80% of what you currently earn in income from your day job. Means you are going to have to set up a budget and find out what you are spending your money on. Or – you could simply have your check deposited directly, 80% going into your checking account and 20% going into your savings account (preferably) or another account.

What you do with that 20% is to set half away for savings – never touch this for anything except, perhaps, a real emergency. The other half (10% of your income after taxes) goes to investment. This is what you are allowed to spend on your online business. But the idea again is that you are investing in your own business – not just blowing it on nice stuff for your home office.

Once you have your home business set up, you are then – an only then – ready to really start in on Internet Marketing, Sales, and Delivery.

These days an internet marketing strategy plays a vital part of small business marketing strategies (or any size business marketing strategies for that matter). Web site marketing is an important part of just about any business, small or large.

You can’t put up a beautiful (or any) web site and hope that people will just arrive. You have to let them know, IN EVERY POSSIBLE WAY, that your web site is there. This HAS to be part of any Internet marketing strategy you develop. This is actually a basic marketing principle. Customers are not going to look for you, you have to look for them.

Promoting your web site on-line and building traffic is the subject of thousands of web sites, e-zines, books, courses and seminars. Using the web to promote your site, however, assumes that your customers are surfers. But there is a large percentage of our population that is not as savvy with the internet as we would like them to be.

So, what about the large percentages of the population who are not? They will only find out about you through traditional marketing and public relations media. This is particularly true if you serve a fairly local market. Fortunately these are the easiest and cheapest prospects for you to reach off-line.

Key Off-Line Internet Marketing Strategies

Here are some of the ways to make your web site known (this list was taken directly from the Traffic Building Volume of Ken Evoy’s brilliant book, Make Your Site Sell! 2002:

• TV, print and other advertising

• Stationary and business cards

• Catalogs, fliers, billboards, blimps, etc.

• Direct mail (prominently on every document)

• Telemarketing (make it part of the script)

• News releases to targeted media.

The main principle, to which you can add all your imagination, is INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY INCLUDES ANY AND ALL MEANS OF GETTING YOUR WEB SITE KNOWN AND VISITED BY TARGETED PROSPECTS.

Unless you have a high budget, the TV, radio, classified ad route is not recommended but if you do run ads, be sure to mention your web site everywhere. Make it part of your Internet Marketing Strategy.

Another guiding principle is that your off-line internet marketing activities should make it easy for your prospect to go straight to your web site. One of the best ways to market your website off-line is direct mail postcards.

If your prospect sees your website on a billboard as she’s driving home, she probably won’t look you up when she gets to the office the next day.

This is not the only medium that has problems like this. Newspapers are bulky, radio has to spell it out and like before most people are driving at the time. On the other hand, if your prospect is sitting at her computer and a post card comes in the mail announcing your web site, she can just turn around and type in your URL and she’s at your web site.

Now if someone is in the office reading a trade journal and comes across an article about you in the magazine, it’s not difficult for him to copy your URL into his browser and pay your site a visit.

I don’t mean to say that those other avenues won’t drive traffic to your site, but it will take numerous impressions and repetition to get them to remember your address.

On the other hand, direct mail postcards are generally received at the home or office where a computer is present, and if received somewhere else they are small enough to keep with you until you can get to a computer. This way, your prospective customer will be able to take the take right over to their desk top computer, type in your address and go right to your site. Brilliant!

I have seen the greatest success in off-line web site promotion with direct mail, and specifically direct mail postcards.

A few weeks ago I was watching my 7 year old Grandson Joel as he was drawing a picture of a strawberry patch.

As he drew, it began to look more and more like a Christmas wreath than a strawberry patch. I told him that it looked pretty good, but suggested to him that “maybe you could put a few strawberries here, and here and here” as I pointed to the big white area in the middle of his drawing.

He looked at me in all seriousness and said…

“Grandpa, it doesn’t matter what YOU think, it’s what the artist thinks!”

It was funny at the time, but I have been thinking about this quite a bit.

You know what? He is right!

There is a great lesson to be learned here. The lesson applies very well to Internet marketing. Actually it applies well to ANY kind of marketing, it doesn’t necessarily have to be on the internet.

We have a tendancy to come up with an idea that we think is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We’re absolutely convinced that everybody will beat a path to our door to buy our product. We spend lots of money to develop a sales campaign, build a website, buy advertising and so on, and spend a lot of time and effort to draw people to our website, get good search engine positioning, and then more often than not we’re disappointed because very few people buy our products.

Could it be that the marketplace doesn’t care about our opinion?

Does that hurt your ego? It shouldn’t. It should open your eyes to this very simple, but wildly profound truth.

IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, IT’S WHAT THE MARKETPLACE THINKS THAT IS IMPORTANT!

Big companies spend millions of dollars on market research, testing and surveys before they ever spend any money in developing a product or marketing a product. Doesn’t it make sense that before we ever spend a dime on any kind of product development, website development or whatever that we should spend some time first to find out what people are buying, when do they buy, and how do they buy?

By doing proper research in advance, you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort, and you’ll be rewarded many times over by successful, money making websites. Finding profitable “niches” is not a difficult process, but it can make all the difference in the world as to whether or not your website will be a huge success or a dismal failure.

As you consider what kind of websites you’ll be building, keep in mind the lesson learned from a 7 year old.

Marketing online has become fiercely competitive. Marketers are attempting to unravel and decipher online marketing to succeed. Some argue that there should not be a distinction between traditional (off-line) marketing and online marketing. Others feel that concepts applied to mail order work well on the web, while still others argue that online marketing is a breed of its own and what works in one arena may not work in another. While some standard practices like “above” the fold, hold true in both print and online copy, it is rare that you see the printed type face on the web the same as in printed advertisements. Regardless there are traditional forms of advertising that are viable and make sense to use on the web but many marketers do not.

These undervalued marketing opportunities are not the end-all be-all but are great supplemental channels, that compliment strong online marketing campaigns.

Buyers Guides

Many print magazines offer free listings in buyers guides. Buyers guides typically have a long shelf life and are viewed as a product resource, meaning it is one of the first places consumers look when wanting to purchase an item. Often magazines will include product reviews or sponsored placement in a buyers guide. Typically the standard listing is free, but optionally vendors can increase their exposure by adding listings in additional categories for a nominal fee. Regardless the free listings are a great value and worth pursuing.

Product Reviews

The impartial overview from a credible source can spark product interest. A third party independent review of your product or service is seen as a vote of confidence. Invite publishers or even bloggers to review your product or service.

When requesting a review, it is proper net etiquette to always provide the reviewer an evaluation product free of charge. After the review, be sure to thank the reviewer and if appropriate, link to the completed review.

Forums/Volunteering in Communities

Offering your time and expertise will establish expertise and knowledge in a specific industry. Participants who participate in forums have a genuine interest and are a great target audience. Posting helpful information rather than blatant product advertisements will enhance an image.

Article Syndication

Writing quality informative and educational articles will also establish expertise. Articles also educate users about related product or service. Generally educated users require less technical help and are an easier sale because they understand how the people or service will help them.

RSS Feeds

Provide content in an RSS feed. While RSS is becoming very popular there are still a number of industries and sectors where very little content is available via RSS feeds. Placing quality content in an RSS feed and being “early to market” will help your company shine.

When small businesses compete with big businesses there are a number of areas in which they can compete effectively. As more businesses turn to the web as an advertising model, it is important that marketers and businesses define themselves by giving themselves every opportunity to be found. Utilizing undervalued marketing opportunities will separate online successes from failures.

Permissions:

Permissions and notification of use not required.

You’ve heard about the Adsense craze and decided that you are going to get your share of Adsense cash cow. You’ve either built a website or purchased one, and now you’re ready to rock! You submit it to every search engine and directory that you can think of, dreaming of thousands of surfers coming in from every engine on the planet. All begging to click your Adsense links and make you rich.

Then you sit back and wait. And wait. And wait some more. Checking your stats daily hoping to see the rush of traffic pouring in. But for some reason it just doesn’t come.

The days of the above business plan working are long over. It might have worked in 1996, but in 2006 you’re going to have to do a lot more to promote your new website. There are still free traffic sources out there, but they want something in return to link to your new site. Content.

This is where article marketing comes in. The concept is simple. You write an article that’s relevant to your sites topic, inserting a link or two within the article or the articles footer, linking back to your website. Then you submit it to article directories. They in turn publish your article, giving you a RELEVANT link back to your site and possibly sending you some of their traffic.

Many of the article directories out there have a lot of good traffic to share. They also can really help your Google Page Rank when it comes time for Google to rank your site. Google wants to see INBOUND links to your site from other sites with similar content. So the links these article directories can give you are crucial to the weight of your website in the long run.

But the article directories are just the first stop for your article. Almost all of the article directories encourage other webmasters to republish your content on their own sites with similar topics. So one article can really turn into literally thousands of inbound links over the months ahead. This snowball effect is exactly what we are looking for with each article we write.

Article marketing is only as powerful as your commitment to it though. To really build your site’s traffic and page rank you are going to need thousands, if not ten’s of thousands of inbound links. One or two articles is not going to do this for you. It’s going to take a daily time commitment on your part. As the owner of two different article directories ( .articles.pn and .articlescience.com/ ) , I can tell you that there are many article marketers out there submitting as many as ten articles a day in an effort to promote their websites. They obviously see the value of article marketing and they don’t intend to do the job halfway.

“But Chuck! I can’t write an article!” I hear this all the time from my customers. Frankly, it’s an easy copout. What you’re really saying to me is that you don’t WANT to write articles. You don’t have to be an ex journalism major to write a short article to promote your website. Heck, you don’t even need to be a high school graduate. All you need to do is to be able to read and write. If you can’t read and write then you probably don’t need to be the owner of a website.

It’s very simple. Sit down and write about the topic of your website. Hopefully when you built or purchased your website you picked a topic that you’re at least interested in. It doesn’t have to be a topic that you’re familiar with, just something that interests you. If you’re website’s topic is something you know nothing about, do some research! Write an article sharing what you learned with other readers. You can start as simply as “I didn’t know this, and you may not either….”

If you’re suffering from severe writer’s block, try using a tape recorder. Dictate things you would like to say about your site or your site’s topic and then transcribe what you recorded later. You can take the recording and edit it in writing and come up with a good article.

The bottom line is this. If you want to promote your new website without spending thousands of dollars, you must integrate article writing into your promotion plan. Without it, your road to success is going to be a lot more bumpy.

Till next time,

Chuck Crawford

.affiliatewebdesign.com

The World Wide Web has captivated my attention ever since I was introduced to it by my mother (another WWW freak!). That was about 10 years ago and ever since that time, my interest about all the different things that can be done through the internet has continued to grow.

For the last couple of years, I have been grappling with the idea of making money online. Although I searched and found a lot of information, but most of it was vague and did not give me any concrete answer to the most important question: what to actually DO to make some money on the internet.

During my quest of getting answers, I came across a very informative video on the internet which gave me a lot of information about internet marketing and gave me some pretty good food for thought. The video talked about “Niche Markets”; what they are and why they are important to any person who would like to make money on the internet by selling a product or service. In fact, the concept of Niche Markets is applicable to any business or service provider, whether they operate on the internet or otherwise.

If you look it up in the dictionary, the word “Niche” means “A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests, abilities, or nature”.

A “Niche Market” is a group of people with a common interest or ability or nature, who would all be interested in a common product or service. The common interest of these people can be any thing ranging from a common hobby, a common problem, a common cultural background, to any common desire they might have. Let me explain this to you with a few examples:

1) A niche market of people who have a hobby of scrapbooking

2) A niche market of people who have common problem of lower backache

3) A niche market of people who are all Hispanics

4) A niche market of people who have a common desire of learning plumbing

People with common interests tend to cluster and you can easily find pockets of such people online; in forums and groups or visiting websites of their interest.

It is best to direct your marketing to select niche audiences for maximum benefit to you and to them. It is always a waste of time, effort and resources to market your product or service to a niche audience which is not interested in what you are selling. For example, if you try to sell scrapbooking materials to a niche audience who wants to learn plumbing, you will not get any customers. Granted that you will find a rare plumber who also likes to maintain his scrapbook, but you will not make a profit! Similarly, marketing a new and effective acne product to a group of people with lower backache will only lead you to lose the money you spent on marketing your innovative acne solution to them.

Niche Marketing is very cost effective and powerful; the world’s most successful businesses use this concept to maximize their profits. Therefore, if you have a certain product or service that you want to sell, concentrate your marketing efforts to the Niche Market that it caters too. Conversely, if you do not have a specific product in mind that you want to sell online, it is advisable that you seek out large Niche Markets and then think about what they would be interested in buying and then provide them with that particular solution/product/service.

I wish you great achievements and prosperity in all your endeavors.

*********************************************************

Every busines sonline or off line needs a promotion. The type of business we wish to reserch is email marketing techniques.

Using newsletters, announcements, promotions, is a good, inexpensive way to reach prospects and customers with your message.

Being totaly honest and keeping our integrity we don

I was looking around at some websites to see what things I liked and disliked about them. There is no doubt that there are things that attract people and there are things that totally turn people off.

I have made a list of 13 tips that can help make your website more successful. Most of them are simple but quite effective at making your site more user friendly.

1. Make your site simple – With all of the bells and whistles available, too many people are trying to see how impressive they can make their websites. They may be attractive but unless your goal is to win a contest for best site, impressing people with glitter will not make sales.

2. Make sure your site loads quickly – You do not have long to grab your customer’s attention. Make sure that you at least get a fair shot at grabbing his attention. If your site takes too long to load, you will lose a lot of potential customers without even giving your site a chance.

3. Don’t have too many items on one page – You do not want to confuse your visitors. You want to make sure that they understand th purpose of your site. Too many items on one page can make this difficult for some. Don’t take the chance. Make all of your pages simple.

4. Make sure every page lings to home page – It is much easier for your visitors to navigate if all of your pages link back to the home page. You will not lose as many potential customers if you make your site easier to navigate.

5. Get your own domain name – Free servers are great for some things but trying to gain credibility in a business is not one of them. It is well worth the price to get your own domain.

6. Make sure your hosting service offers full support – You want your service to have CGI access and offer secure ordering. This is a place that you don’t want to go for cheap. Make sure your service offers the things you need before you choose and save a lot of headaches down the road.

7. Offer as many options for ordering as possible – The more options you provide for ordering, the fewer cutomers you will lose. You should have a secure order form on your site. Offering the options to order by phone, fax and by regular mail can also increase the number who will order.

8. Make sure you accept credit cards – If you don’t accept credit cards, you are making a huge mistake. The biggest percent of your customers will pay this way if the option is available. Don’t take the chance that they will choose another method if credit cards are not a possibility.

9. Offer free information on your site – You will want to offer some type of free material on your site. Free material such as courses are a very good way to build yourself as an expert in the eyes of your visitor. Free ebooks are another good thing to offer. Make sure these freebies are good solid information that can help your visitors.

10. Get your visitor’s email address – You can accompish this in quite a few different ways. Giving away the courses or ebooks is one great way. You can publish a newsletter or ezine that your visitors can sign up for on your site.

11. Make sure to build your site with purpose in mind – If you are trying to sell a product on your site, then sell that product. If you are just trying to get addresses and make the sale later, then make that your purpose when building your site.

12. Encourage feedback – Make your visitor feel like his opinion is important. Offer him the chance to provide you with feedback. Don’t be too proud to make changes if you start hearing some of the same things from your visitors.

13. Remember that you are building this site for your customers – This is not a site to fulfill some fantasy of yours. Remember the purpose of your site. Keep your customers wants and needs in your mind as you design it.

Your website is one of those things that will determine if you are a marketing success. Make sure that you make your website user friendly. Also make sure that you don’t lose sight of the purpose of your site. If your sit e does not come across direct to your visitor, you are going to lose many visitors before you can even make a pitch.

If your website traffic has suddenly come to a stand-still, you may need to give your site a marketing jump start. This is really directed towards Information Marketing (one of the best markets around) but can really be applied to anything. Here are a few ways to get your traffic flowing again.

1.Buy hits for your website.

Pay for targeted hits to your web site. You can do what is called “pay per click” advertising. This is where you pay search engines every tine some one clicks on your link for your web site. A great advantage to this is it almost instantly gets you visitors.

2.You can also send out a promotional email to the opt-in email list you SHOULD be creating by offering free reports or courses to your visitors.

3.Pay your competition a flat fee to email your promotional offer to their lists. This is a great way to build relationships with your competitors.

4.You can do what is referred to as a Joint Venture. This is when you pay someone a commission on sales when they email your promotional offer to their email lists.

5.You can pay for advertising on someone else’s website by paying a flat fee up front to put an ad, banner or link on the site.

6.You can pay for advertising by offering a commission to your competition or anyone on sales when they put your ad, banner or link on their site.

7.You can submit your website to search engines with your keywords and website description.

8.You can submit your link to other websites, and in return, add them to yours.

9.You can write a free report or course to give away to other websites in your market and allow them to put an affiliate link inside (so they have an incentive to give it away), and give that away for free. If its good information, it will spread like a virus. This marketing concept is known as “viral marketing”.

10.If you have good material you can have a nice marketing edge because people will share the website because the enjoyed it. You can also offer affiliate programs so your customers can earn commissions when they refer some one to buy your product .

These should give you some good ideas to get more traffic, and maybe even spark some ideas of your own!

Best wishes,

Maranda Mann

Most business owners fully understand that not advertising is the surest way to kill your business.

However they are also bombarded by so much information and so many choices they quickly lose track of what options are available to them.

There are a number of cheap and easy online advertising options available to you.

1. Ezine Advertising

Ezine advertising is one of the best ways to reach your future customers because it is often inexpensive and flexible as well as offering you the option to match the ezine audience with your product and ad. It also often offers a double benefit–your initial ad plus longevity in the ezine archives.

2. Text Links

This simple tool is often overlooked by many. It is simply one of the least expensive and yet most powerful advertising option available. You can often buy text links for under $10 and the link will not only promote the specific site or page you choose but also connect it with the specific key words that will benefit you the most.

Text links also provide a double bonus. You can attract immediate traffic from the host site as well as achieve better search engine ranking which will further increase traffic.

3. Pay per click advertising

Just like it sounds pay per click advertising is simply paying for specifically targeted traffic. You can monitor and control these advertising programs very closely and tweak your ad copy and the key words that you are sponsoring. This can be a very expensive option but doesn’t have to be if you plan carefully and watch closely.

4. Email marketing

Despite ever-increasing vigilant attempts to stop spam, we all know that email marketing is still alive and well. While it is foolish in the extreme to risk your business, web host, or internet connection, by sending out spam you can still use email marketing as a way to reach out and touch your customers and your future customers.

You just need to make sure that no one receives mail except the people who ask for it. People are still willing to sign up for mailing lists–especially if you have something to offer them in return for sharing their email address. Sponsor a contest; give away an article, ebook, or tutorial; or offer a discount and you will have people sign up willingly.

Then if you don’t abuse the mailing list you will have the opportunity to reach them again and again!

5. Banner Ads

Banner ads have a bad reputation. In part because of the proliferation of banner farms that killed all the banner swap programs (or at least made them completely ineffectual). Also we all have memories of those hideous banners flashing across the top of so many web sites.

Banners have come along way since then and a cleverly designed banner can be a real asset to any advertising campaign. Also don’t forget that you don’t have to use one of those big giant banners that span the width of the screen. You can use smaller simple ads that can fit easily into the sidebar or special box on a web site so they can suit the design and work more effectively.

It is also important that you pay close attention to what sites you will choose for displaying your banner. IE. A site about web development for your web hosting service ad or a site about parenting for your ad promoting your potty training book.

Many text link and pay per click advertising vendors also offer the option of banner ads. Similarly many ezine and newsletter publishers sell space on their sites.

~~ Sell Your Knowledge ~~

These next five advertising methods are all free or relatively inexpensive because you are trading something of value — your knowledge and expertise — in return for advertising.

6. Publish a Newsletter

Creating your own regular newsletter or ezine offers you all the advantages of ezine advertising and email marketing offered above.

7. Publish a Blog and RSS Feed

While publishing a newsletter or ezine isn’t that difficult it is much easier to create a blog and make its content available via RSS feed. This can offer you the benefits of regularly updated material for your web site which will be attractive to visitors and search engines alike. It will also help establish you as an expert in your field.

I personally like using WordPress on your own site but many web hosts now offer blogging services and there are many free blogging sites around where you can create a blog on their site.

8. Write Articles

Take some of the material you have generated for your newsletter and/or blog and share it with others. Make it available in one of the many free content directories available on the web. This not only helps to establish your credibility but the contact info you provide in your resource box (which will run every time someone else publishes your material) will bring in both direct traffic as well as search engine attention.

9. Create an Ebook

Once you have enough material generated from your newsletter and blog then you can package it into a convenient Ebook and give it away. Make sure to collect names and email addresses and offer a coupon or discount to bring people back to your site!

10. Post in Forums

If you have the time you should start your own forum but even if you only have a few minutes a week to spare for this effort then it can be well worth the effort. Don’t offer blatant spam posts but find a forum where you have something to offer. Make sure that you include an appropriate url and description for your forum signature and you will attract the double benefit of traffic and search engine attention!

No successful advertising campaign embraces one single method of advertising and no single method of advertising works for everyone. Advertising cannot be treated as a one-size-fits all proposition. However you know what your business needs and can offer–mix and match methods and make sure to track your results–to optimize your choices.