My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘online advertising’

If you are in a sales position where you are soliciting a product or service, there is some advice that might be helpful when speaking to other businesses. There are times during a year that are good times and other times that might not be so good. As I always state in any advice I give, every market is different, so this is more of a generalized theory than anything else.

Rather than get wordy and lengthy in my explanation and reasoning, I’ll give best and worst times:

Best Times for B2B selling:

* The months of January and February. (First of year numbers start over)

* Between the dates of the 10th through 25th of any month except December. (Meat of month less bills)

* Between the 5th and 20th of December. (moves up a bit due to holidays)

* The last week in December. (Some companies like to dump excess funds to escape taxes)

* First of January, April, July & October (Typically first of each quarter for quarterly companies)

Worst Times for B2B selling:

* Any holiday period. (companies may be closed)

* The week leading up to the tax deadlines. (business owners stressed and sometimes facing big bills)

* The last week in December. (This is either hit or miss. While it can be the best, it can also be the worst)

* The end of March, June, September & December. (End of quarter for quarterly companies)

* Weekends. (This one is obvious, but Saturday and Sunday are probably the worst)

Again, these are generalized timeframes for business to business selling. If it’s business to customer, it’s a completely different ballgame because weekends are great for customers, along with holidays. You should always try to sell 365 days a year in some fashion, but put more emphasis towards the prime, or best selling times.

Imagine surfing through the Internet, looking for information, or maybe just sauntering along, clicking upon whatever comes your way, not really paying attention to the content, when your eye is caught by a link to a site that claims to have content that really appeals to you at that very moment. You hopefully click upon the link, curious about what awaits you when suddenly you’re hit with one, two, three, four, five pop-up ads and they keep jumping up and hitting you from every corner of the screen. How many times have one of us been attacked by pop-up ads that don’t interest us? How many times have the efforts of the advertisers to sell their products ended up in completely ruining the happy and receptive state of mind the user in a stampede of information, hitting too soon, too suddenly and too forcefully for the user to have any favorable impression of the product.

In fact, in many cases it is observed that the content of the pop-up ads isn’t even the issue at hand. Pop-up ads by their very nature are irritating and annoying to most users of the Internet. People are not happy at being interrupted while they surf or hunt around for information. However, many site owners and web masters feel compelled to include pop-up ads in their advertising mix in order to generate revenue for slow moving sites.

According to a study conducted by the Bunnyfoot University, “The Efficacy of Pop-ups and the Resulting Effect on Brands” Internet users feel harangues and harassed by pop-up ads. The study revealed that pop-up ads precipitated dislike and annoyance with the pop-up ads and for this reason, with the web site and the site owner as well. Most users do not even wait to see the entire ad; they do not even wait till the entire ad is loaded or till the company or brand logo is displayed. More than half the pop-up ads displayed to the sample group were ignored. There were negative comments about the adverts because the users felt that the ads insulted their intelligence by assuming that they could not locate a certain item on their own. Annoyance at the appearance of the adverts also reflected that the users found them to be irrelevant and obstructive to the content of the site. These viewpoints are the opinions of the sample group selected by Bunnyfoot University to conduct their research however, considering the responses garnered from a multitude of Internet users, these opinions are shared by many users of the Internet who want to be able to view content-rich sites without being disturbed by pop-up ads.

The reasons given by the web masters for using pop-up ads is that they are not quite as repulsive and disagreeable to their users as they are portrayed. Another reason many web masters are not willing to dismiss pop-up ads is because they offer the example of Web giants like Yahoo! and Google Inc. who also offer their users pop-up ads. The site owners cite this precedent as justification for using pop-up ads on their sites. Pop-up ads are a good way to earn revenue on sites that offer quality content. The web site owners believe that they are justified in their bid to earn revenue since most of the information featured on the Internet is free for the user, and most users do not want to pay for the information offered by the content-rich sites. The site owners contest that if the users are allowed to view the content on their sites for free, the least they can do is tolerate a couple a pop-up ads that after all, help to pay for the site’ running. Even though most site owners feels justified in displaying pop-up ads on their sites, many other webmasters are resorting to pop-under ads that do not obstruct the user but wait till the user is finished with viewing the information on site. Pop-under ads are not so zealously opposed, they are far more likely to be tolerated and viewed with patience by the user, which is why increasingly more and more web masters are opting for pop-under ads to fund their sites.

There are ways to increase your profits by using pop-ups as a website tool. More than likely, you have heard of pop-ups, but there is new software on the market that will amaze you. It has never been as easy to use pop-ups to market your website as it is today. You might be glad that you took a few free minutes to learn about pop-up marketing.

The new pop-up marketing software is not just your standard pop-up anymore. Today, you can market in a much less intrusive and irritating way to your customers. The prevalence of pop-up blockers in web browsers is huge and very affective. In the older days, it was a necessary tool because computers would literally freeze up because of p pop-up. Your job as a marketer is to draw in customers and keep them. However, you do not want to drive traffic away by having huge amounts of pop-up that take over their screen. When using the software, you will need to decide which type of pop-ups you want to use. Be sure to check out several of them before making a decision.

Pressure Pop-up – These types of pop-up have a countdown button that appears after your customer is on the web site for a while. The great thing about these is that they are set to give your customer time to look over the site, and will leave the screen once the count down runs out. You can put anything on your pop-up to entice customers to buy.

Instant Opt &ndash In Pop-up – A new software feature of pop-ups is opting in by clicking either yes or no. Using this feature is good for capturing potential customer’s email address. All business depend on lists to make future contacts about products, discount and special offers or drawings &ndash and not just the typical tasks of order taking and receipts.

Conditional Timed Pop-ups – Timing is everything in business. With this feature, you can decide when you want a pop-up to appear. A pop-up that appears too early may not give your customer time to thoroughly taken in the site, or a pop-up appearing when they were about to order without a discount will damage your profits a lot.

Changing Pop-ups – If you want to keep your customers from being bored every time they come to your site &ndash then use different pop-ups. The new type of software for pop-ups allows you to stage different pop-ups to appear with new information. It can be offering them a new product, information, or even close outs on certain products. You can make it to fit your customer’s needs and that spells more profit for you.

Generalized Pop-ups &ndash This software configures pop-ups to look exactly the way you want, and timed the way you see fit.

There are numerous places online where you can order the new pop-up software. Many times, you can order them with different features separately, like the changing pop-up software. In the end, it will cost more though so you might want to consider buying a package deal with the other software included. As you can see, there are great benefits with the new pop-up software. In addition, most of the software has other features that you will like. They are fully integrated with to work with other types of web design software. You don not have to be a computer scientist to run them either. Most of it is WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get type programming.

Other features are just as valuable with the new software of pop-ups. You can edit to your hearts content any aspect of your pop-ups. If you want the color or shape to be unique, you can change it. You can change the wording to suit any style of customer you have too. In most programs, you do not have to dispose of any past work that you have created. There are numerous save features for wording and designs. This alone saves you lots of time for the other important business aspects that you have to do. And that is the part that is important &ndash getting down to business on the Internet.

Eliminating the uncertainty in advertising…

For many people, advertising online is a quagmire of uncertainty and complexity. Rarely is there a way of tracking how effective, if at all, your ads are and if those ads are even reaching the right people. The result of these failed advertising campaigns often causes businesses to stagnate and debts to incur. The fact is there are some people who just do not know how to advertise their online business effectively.

Advertising effectively and properly online is an important aspect of keeping your internet business making money and attracting repeat customers. There are tons upon tons of ads out there, so being smart about how you advertise and where you do it is very important.

There are many websites and tools out there to aid in your advertising campaign. Crocads.com is a top rated site with the goal of helping your business attract more customers. Crocads.com is a component site with owners experienced in marketing and advertising. They know what it takes to get your name out there and are dedicated to helping you and your business.

Unlike other similar sites, Crocads.com offers many benefits and opportunities to advertise websites and businesses. By becoming a member with Crocads.com, you will receive different benefits according to the level of membership you choose. Overall, Crocads.com allows you to advertise to a targeted audience that will be interested in your site and product, making it more likely that they will purchase from you or use your services. This takes out a large amount of uncertainty that results in using other methods of advertising. In fact, this feature can be seen on Crocads.com site. Called the Wombat Search, anyone is able to search through countless advertising by keywords or categories. Along with offering Recommended Advertising and Recommended Sites anyone can clearly see how dedicated Crocads.com is to promoting others businesses.

A membership allows further access to benefits. There are four levels of membership starting at a free member and ending with lifetime membership. The names of these memberships display the fun and whimsical attitude of Crocads.com.

The Croc Hunter membership is the free membership and offers limited abilities and benefits. Croc Hunter level is most often used by those wanting to test the waters of Crocads.com and quickly realizes that the site offers among the best advertising campaigns on the web.

Apprentice Croc Wrestler is for those wanting to use Crocads.com on a monthly basis. With more features than the Croc Hunter level, as an Apprentice, there are still many features that are unavailable at this stage. One of the most valuable of these features is being advertised on Crocads.com itself.

Expert Croc Wrestlers experience more benefits and features than the previous two and is one of the most cost effective ways of advertising through Crocads.com. Compared to the sign up cost and the cost of maintaining advertising for a year, Expert Croc Wrestlers know what it takes to be cost effective.

The last membership level is the Champion Croc Wrestlers and these members are truly champions. They understand how important it is to advertise using Crocads.com and see the most benefits of the site’s methods and resources.

Advertising does not have to be difficult or confusing. In fact, with the aid of Crocads.com, advertising can be fun, easy, and enjoyable, not to mention affordable. Or to put it another way, Crocads.com is a beaut!

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More and more online businesses and internet marketers are recognizing the tremendous benefits and responsiveness that multimedia generates when used as an advertising medium and marketing strategy.

For those that utilize multimedia effectively, significant increases in buy rates, conversion rates and subscription rates have been experienced and all within a very short period of time. However, many believe that just adding any old media content, such as video and audio onto their website will generate significant increases in visitor responsiveness regardless of content presentation, quality, and other attributes that contribute to a positive experience for the website visitor. Just so that we are clear, this assertion is very wrong and can have potentially negative consequences from a marketing and/or advertising standpoint.

My philosophy is quite simple. Using multimedia to advertise your product or service needs to follow the same basic rules and principles as would apply to any other strategy or medium that can be used to convert prospects into subscribers and buyers. Yes, multimedia does improve conversion rates but it has to be done right and convey professionalism. This is absolutely essential.

When it comes to video and audio content online, what’s often been the case is that those who have tried to add this type of media content to their websites have unfortunately had disastrous results. For example, with video content, many have added videos to their webpages that are of extremely poor quality, small and ugly. The overall experience for the viewer – Poor. One of the biggest problems has been the fact that the videos load very slowly. Visitors are turned off completely by the fact that they have to wait for minutes, even longer sometimes in order for the video or audio file to start playing. This, unfortunately, is a result of these webmasters using cookie-cutter solutions to add video or audio content to their site without really knowing the implications and limitations. As I said, with multimedia…either do it right or don’t do it at all. For those who do their research and take a little time to produce video and audio content that is of good quality, the results have been tremendous.

Bottom Line: If you want to capture the attention of your visitors,you need to use top notch technology to bring your message to that person and provides the viewer with a positive experience.

If you do plan on adding video and audio content to your website, here are a few simple guidelines to follow when determining what the best multimedia solution is for you:

1. Cost Effective: You need a solution that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and leaves you with great video and/or audio content on your website but flat broke.

2. Fast loading Media Content (Video/Audio) that can play almost immediately. Website visitors are fickle and inpatient so its not wise to keep them waiting when trying to view your video advertisement or listen to your audio message.

3. Superior Website Integration: Video and Audio Content that can appear to be seamlessly Integrated into your websites and emails. Viewers don’t have to view video and audio ads with media player’s that annoyingly pop-up on top of their internet browsers and distract them from the rest of your website.

4. Superior Customization: Video and Audio Advertisements that can be customized for your websites and emails based on your specific requirements.

5. The ability to handle a large volume of simultaneous visitors.

6. Large-Scale Playability: Viewing/Listening DOES NOT require the download of additional plug-ins. Don’t make your visitors have to download any special software to view or listen to the video and audio content on your website.

7. The media content needs to be of reasonably good quality and resolution. Don’t worry, you don’t need Lord of the Rings quality to provide your website visitors with a positive experience. They won’t expect perfect quality but you need to make sure that the content is of good quality.

Of course, we can get into specific details about each one of these things but we won’t get into that in this article. These are just high-level, general guidelines that you can follow when shopping around for a good multimedia solution for your business.

Multimedia does have impressive results from a marketing perspective. That’s why the big companies and brand names are utilizing multimedia content to sell their products and services. However, not everyone has the exact same budget and requirements and if you are looking for a multimedia solution you need to spend some time shopping around to find a solution that offers the best bang for the buck.

All web sites are different. MTTs unique software is modified on the fly to suit each web sites products and services to guarantee that thousands of sales are generated. A huge surge of ready to buy targeted search engine traffic is Guaranteed.

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Your web site will be deluged by ultra-targeted ready to buy search engine traffic. You site will jump to the top of all the best search engines’ results for the keywords and content the software will feed them including Google. You will sell more and earn far greater profits but only pay service fees subject to the MTT income and performance guarantee ONLY when they generate you $100,000.

If you do not earn $100,000 net profit within 4 months, MTT will give you the remainder of their service for FREE- no charges plus you get to keep what you earn. You can set up as many of your web sites or affiliate programs as you want. This is true Set-It-And-Forget-It technology. Join our FREE affiliate program and try the service before the introductory offer expires.

See You At The Top!

C L Eldridge

The internet is a place where people often throw darts into the darkness hoping that someday, somehow they’ll hit a bulls eye. Most people nurture a mistaken notion that huge amount of traffic can eventuate good business without paying any attention to what sort of people are coming to the website. This is the worst sort of Internet Marketing.

No matter how revolutionary your product or service is, unless it is backed by a well-thought-out Internet Marketing strategy, it is as good as being non-existent. You have got to be as sure as any of the conventional brick and mortar businesses.

Breaking the great wall of non-presence is the biggest challenge one faces while trying to set up an online business. When you set up your online shop, you don’t know them and they don’t know you. You need to make your presence felt; you need to set up an identity for yourself that tells your visitors that you are not an unemployed weirdo trying to dupe visitors from your dark and unheated basement. Your website should seem to represent a genuine business that can really deliver. How can you do that?

HAVE A WELL-MADE WEBSITE

A good website is quintessential to your online presence. It is your online office; people come there and draw an impression. Even the first glance can make or break a great business transaction. Your website should be neat and clean. It should be accessible to people of all abilities and it should have a well-structured navigation system. There should be no broken links and all the essential pages should be there.

CONTENT IS, OF COURSE, KING

If having a decent website is important, then so is having the right kind of content on your pages. As mentioned above, your website represents you amidst the din of the World Wide Web. Since you are not there to directly talk to your visitors, your website accomplishes that task. Make your content — whether graphic or textual — as convincing as you can. Utmost care should be given to the language and the tone to make sure your visitors get all the right information they need to take their visit to the next level.

KEEP PERSISTENT CONTACT

Establishing an identity takes time, and this is not just unique to the internet. Companies invest millions of dollars on establishing their brands. On the Internet, you need to establish your identity, you need your name to sound familiar, and you need to be there almost all the time. You should be accessible to your present and future customers and clients; you should always be in a constant conversation. A good way to carry out a regular conversation is publishing a regular newsletter (ezine) or blog where you post regular updates about your business.

Finally, although there are numerous “killer” methods being sold as the ubiquitous reports that claim to make you millions, there is no substitute for a thing called good old hard work. As in any form of business, hard work is need to build trust, to initiate a two-way communication, to render a countenance to your online presence your customers can relate to, and to deliver goods and services that set you on a path of long-term profitability.

Without a doubt, if you asked me, Shane if there was only 1 marketing strategy that you could use on the Internet, what would it be? Without hesitation I would say joint Ventures. Joint Ventures are easily the most lucrative Marketing Strategy ever invented and if you learn to do it right, will likely be the ONLY marketing strategy you will ever need to use.

A Good Internet Joint Venture is your shortcut to success. It can send you more qualified internet traffic rushing to your site in the shortest amount of time than anything I’ve ever seen! And it can mean bringing your product to market without spending one single penny of your own money!

In it’s simplest form, Joint Ventures have to do with 2 businesses (or more) joining forces to leverage off of each others success, assets and/or expertise. There are hundreds of different variations but let me just give you one simple example:

One variation of a simple type of joint venture partnership used most frequently would be where one business provides a product for sale, the sales message and the product delivery while the other business provides the recommendation for that product to their own list of subscribers/prospects and receiving a commission based on the sales generated through that recommendation.

The benefits are great. You can build your subscriber list, leverage off of your partners infrastructure like using their existing servers, software etc where you don’t have to pay a dime. If you pick the right JV partner, you can acquire instant credibility and reputation with their customers and lists. Credibility sells. Let me give you an example, if you created a book on “how to acquire real estate”, you could certainly make MANY more sales if you JV’d with Donald Trump and put his name on the book as the co-author, building your reputation and increasing your credibility at the same time. Are you starting to see the incredible power of this strategy?

Now I know that some people may think that Joint Ventures are difficult to do,but if they are telling you this, then I wouldn’t take anything they tell you at face value because they’re either lying to you or don’t understand it themselves.

Let me show you how easy it is. Here’s typically what I do when rolling out a new product. In this example, let’s pretend that I just completed a new ebook on Penny Stock Trading and have setup a web site with an affiliate program. I would go to google, do a search on keywords like “penny stock”, “penny stock trading”, “stock market strategies” etc..you get the picture. The top sites on the first page are typically your target partners because since they appear on the first page you can bet they have lots of business, traffic, subscribers and customers. I would visit each site to make sure that they are right for my product and then I would first send them a very brief email asking them if they would be interested in marketing my product in exchange for a high commission as an incentive.

Typically in this email you should briefly introduce yourself and your product. Describe your product and the benefits it would offer to their Newsletter subscribers, customers and/or web site visitors. Ask them politely if they wouldn’t mind responding to you asap and provide your contact information if they are interested in marketing your product. Also very important, you need to give them access to this product FOR FREE!..so that they can review the product and feel comfortable about endorsing it. These site owners have spent years building their business, lists and cultivating their lists to be very responsive. Any endorsement they do to their huge lists could mean thousands of dollars in your pocket for very little effort.

then, go thru the same process for all the other appropriate sites under that keyword and send JV proposal letters over and over again. Then repeat that process for other relevant keywords until you’re finished.

Understandably, this can be a very time consuming task which is why I developed a piece of software that will automate this whole process for me at .jvmining.com. I can now get all of this done in a matter of minutes!

Remember if just a few of these super affiliates decides to market your product you’re golden. Once they contact you all you need to do is setup their affiliate account and commission. This will ensure that their commission will be calculated properly when they endorse your product to their list. If you send these offers to just 10 sites per day, Within a week you’ll be on your way to making thousands of dollars per month, all for 5 hours worth of work and at NO COST to you. Isn’t that easy?

That’s all there is to it.

The following are 10 simple yet very powerful ways to increase your sales significantly:

1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with the customer. You could follow-up with a “thank you” email and include an advertisement for other products you sell. You could follow-up with them regularly. The goal is to begin building a relationship with your customers so you need to keep in constant contact with them.

2. You could upsell to your customers. When they’re at your order page, tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale. They could just add it to their original order.

3. Tell your customers if they refer four customers to your web site, they will receive a full rebate of their purchase price. This will turn one sale into three sales.

4. When you sell a product, give your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product. This will multiply the sale you just made.

5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. You could include an ad on or with the product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product.

6. You could cross promote your product with other businesses’ products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you.

7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include a coupon for other related products you sell in the package. This will attract them to buy more products from you.

8. Send your customers a catalog of add-on products for the original product they purchased. This could be upgrades, special services, attachments, etc. If they enjoy your product they will buy the extra add-ons.

9. Sell gift certificates for your products. You’ll make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate, when the recipient cashes it in. They could also buy other items from your web site.

10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ad printed on them. It could be bumper stickers, ball caps, t-shirts etc. This will allow other people to see your ad and order.

There you go. The great thing about these powerful strategies is that you can implement them immediately. As I said, they are easy to start using but the outcome could be a substantial increase in your conversion and/or buy rate which is the ultimate goal. It is extremely important to make your customer and/or prospect feel special and to provide them with additional value-added items that will keep them coming back.