My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

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.

You can create a win-win proposition in which a buyer wants, and readily requests information from your web site, and happily pays you for it, all electronically, even while you sleep!

The information is digital, usually in the form of an electronic book (eBook). Once purchased, transfer of the information to the customer is digital (via the internet) and immediate. And the transfer of the customer’s money to your bank account is also digital (via Paypal, Clickbank, and others) and immediate. The customer wins because he/she got needed information, immediately. You win because your bank account grew, immediately.

You create the information and then you own it (it’s your asset). Or you can become an affiliate of someone else that owns the information and who has given you permission to promote and sell it. The production cost is mostly related to the amount of time spent at the keyboard creating the original digital product. Unlike hard, physical products like the ones you can hold in your hand (for example, a hard-bound book or a toaster), the cost to reproduce digital information is essentially zero. This is a great advantage in that identical copies of the product can be sold over and over again (your inventory is virtually unlimited) with very little expense in both production and transportation of the information. Even marketing and promotion can be done over the internet, requiring very little continued overhead and expense.

Inexpensive tools are readily available for capturing customer email addresses, creating, packaging and distributing the information product, and collecting the customer’s payment. Or, you can hire out someone else to set it up for you. You decide the information product you wish to sell, you decide the approach to make it a reality, you make the rules. All you have to do is take action. And you can learn from others that have successfully done it. Here is a roadmap to get you started:

1) Decide on a valuable idea that can be represented as information content. Research your idea and see if it is tangible. Use the internet to see what others have done, and to get an idea of market potential. You must have your own UNIQUE Info Product; offer your own flavor of content that the competition does not have (create your own Unique Selling Proposition).

2) Create the information content using a word processor.

3) Convert the content into an eBook (low-cost software tools are available on the internet for doing this conversion).

4) Purchase a website URL domain name from a reputable web hosting service.

5) Create the website content yourself, or contract to have it done.

6) Get setup with a payment processor to accept credit cards and other online payment formats via your website.

7) Get traffic to your site and capture emails of interested parties. Use an “auto responder”.

Stay focused; put passion into your work; take action!

9) As you make money, continually improve and add value to your information product.

This “virtual estate” concept provides a “paradigm shift”, a new perspective, for those smart enough to learn about it and apply it.

Jim McCabe

The Money is in the List?

I am sure that you have heard this before. If you are involved with Internet marketing, you have probably heard it over and over again. But, Is it True?

Absolutely!!

I am involved with affiliate marketing and the great thing is that you do not need a product to begin making money. There are thousands of viable products available that you can make a great income on.

Whatever your interest or your niche is, there are plenty of products waiting for you to make money with. There is also plenty of room for you to create and promote your own product. Provided of course that it is a good one.

As for affiliate programs, they are very simple to get started with. You just need to sign up for their affiliate program, promote it, and watch the money start rolling in (hopefully). This is all great, but then what? Most likely you would find another product and start all over again.

What if, when you find or create this new product, you already have hundreds or thousands of people to instantly tell about it? You can shoot them a quick email and have immediate money in your pocket. Then you can start advertising this product and create even more people for your next great idea. As you can imagine, this process can take on a snowball effect. Before you know it, your primary income will be from your online business. Now you can work from home!

How do you go about starting a list?

One of the best ways is to create a squeeze page. This is a simple one page website that is designed to capture your visitors name and email address. You can do this by offering a free report, a free subscription to your newsletter, or both.

Once you have their information they are added to your auto responder and they are a part or your list. At this time you would redirect them to your affiliate product website or to your own website with a link.

You have now created a potential customer for your current and your future products.

When you start to email them regularly make sure that you are offering them something of value. Some ideas include: useful information, free reports, free software, and creative ideas that you come across.

You can than suggest your product and offer a link to your product or affiliate page. Build up your product with a strong sales message and watch the sales start pouring in.

One piece of advice, do not oversell to your list. This is a very valuable resource and should not be jeopardized.

You need to give good solid information and only promote worthwhile products. Treat your list as a group of friends that you want to help with the information that you are providing. Not as another dollar in your pocket. Just follow the golden rule and treat your list as you would want to be treated and you will be on your way to success.

So you’re interested in getting to the top of Google! If you’re interested in search engine optimization then there’s about a 98% chance that it’s the reason you are reading this article. In SEO you have two choices you can hire a company to handle your search engine optimization, or you can read about a thousand articles like this one and learn how to do it your self in doing this I would also learn a little about html, and find a way to do some sort of keyword analysis because if you can not change your text on your website, and you choose worthless key words then your site will not be associated in the right category therefore you will not make any sales.

If you’re still reading this then you’re looking for the great hidden secret to getting to the top of Google. In order to rank high in Google you have to do two things have a better word score then anyone else for your keywords, and have more links coming to your site from sites with high page ranks. In getting a high word score you need to have some text on your home page and in this text you need to mention your keywords as many times as possible. When you optimize your web site for keywords you are basically getting your site ready for search engine optimization which in all reality is just getting incoming links to your site.

Before you submit your site to the search engines you should have a good amount of keyword rich text, Meta tags (Which are not obsolete by the way), a robots Meta tag, and a Google sitemap. Once you have done all these things you are ready to get some links to your site (this is how you get to the top). When you have incoming links to your site it matters a lot that those sites have high page ranks for example if you have a site with a page rank of 7 linking to you then Google’s algorithm will crawl your site every 24 hours which is very good.

There are some things that could have a negative effect on your ranking with the search engines these things are called black hat SEO tactics. You do not want to do anything to get your site black listed in the search engines. Before Google and all the other search engines changed there algorithms SEO Company’s and webmasters would use some techniques to get to there links to the top like hiding text, hiding links, link malls, and link farms. You should avoid anything that might have a negative effect on your page rank.

There is a lot more to Internet Marketing then just search engine optimization however search engine optimization is where it all starts. Search engine optimization improves the volume and quality of traffic to your web site. Before optimizing your site you should have knowledge of how search algorithms work, and research on what people looking for your site search for to get to it. This is one of the key factors in having a productive website, and achieving a good page rank.

Everyone who uses the web knows that advertising is a huge part of the entire experience. The internet is full of advertising for every possible company and product you can imagine. Although many complain about the forms of advertising, there is not much difference in internet advertising and telemarketing phone calls to your home. The interesting thing is however that web users prefer to be annoyed by internet ads over unexpected phone calls. This acceptance of ads has created a breeding ground for millions of pop-ups and banner ads on the internet. Sites use them individually or together, but some still wonder which is better for increased website traffic. Consumers have offered a response, perhaps not verbally, but with statistics of effectiveness.

Pop-ups are typically seen as annoying advertisements. Those that include blinking lights can even be hazardous to some users with certain medical conditions. They have been considered the most hated form of web advertising available. With pop-ups being so annoying however, consumers may wonder why they are still being used so frequently. The truth is that pop-ups are terribly aggravating, but they are indeed effective overall. For some crazy reason, there are millions of people who actually utilize them when they appear on their screen. This is partially due to many sites using pop-up ads as an excuse and reason for offering free services to site users. They will state that they must use these forms of ads in order to offer the site for free. Users, who don’t want to pay, but still want to use the site, will likely accept the excuse without question.

The trouble with pop-up ads these days are that there are many programs to install on a computer that will not allow pop-ups through. This means that when a pop-up is meant to appear on your screen, your installed “pop-up blocker” program does not allow it to happen and instead blocks the advertisement from reaching you, the user. These programs are very effective most of the time and can cost advertisers a great deal of money if the ad is not reaching the intended target. Advertisers are now coming up with newly programmed pop-ups however that can bypass these “blocker” programs and still deliver the ads to your screen, whether you like it or not.

Banner ads began to appear on websites in response to the annoyance consumers felt from pop-ups. Advertisers thought that if banner ads were not as bothersome, they may offer even better results than the pop-up ads. Sites began sticking banner ads in every free area of their site. Upon doing so, they soon realized that although banner ads are not typically as bothersome as pop-ups, they are also not as effective. Users were less likely to utilize banner ads for their purpose. Many of the banner ads were perhaps not as noticeable as an aggressive pop-up ad right in the user’s line of vision. Some are off to the side of the screen and out of the direct eye contact.

Many users prefer banner ads when asked, because they claim they are easier on the eye and they are often unnoticeable. This may mean more comfortable use for the user, but it means something completely different to the advertiser. An advertiser wants their ad to be noticed, even at the user’s expense. They would rather annoy the user and get the ads noticed than the ads simply sit being unnoticed. In whole, advertisers were not seeing a large turnout with banner ads, and therefore many sites no longer use them for advertising purposes.

The answer to whether or not pop-ups or banner ads are best really lies with who you speak with. Consumers will likely tell you banner ads are much better than troublesome pop-ups. Advertisers however would tell you the exact opposite. They both have a place on the internet and their own group of “fans”. The conclusion is however that unless users completely boycott pop-ups in an extremely dramatic way, they will likely continue to replace banner ads. The power of the choice lies in the hands of the advertisers at this time and until users want to force them to change their ways, the advertisers will continue to support pop-ups over banner ads.

For anyone interested in growing their business or maximizing the return of their marketing spend, online marketing is one of the most effective means of doing so. Online marketing is effective as a part of a well developed marketing plan.

What is Online Marketing?

Online marketing has come to mean many things. You can consider online advertising, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, and even SEO (search engine optimization) as online marketing. It has also changed and evolved over the last decade. With the advent of Google Adsense and other forms of targeted, pay-per-click advertising, online marketing means a whole lot more than 468 X 60 banners.

When thinking about the types of online marketing available today, you really need to think about the objectives of your online marketing spend. Are you looking to sell a product? Drive prospects to your web site or marketing pages? Create awareness for your company? The most important thing to remember is that your online placement, creative, and offer must be consistent across the web and your own website or retail establishment. This creates a seamless buying experience, increasing the odds of a purchase being made once a browser clicks on your online marketing creative.

As mentioned previously, online marketing also includes affiliate marketing &ndash a method of utilizing partner sites to distribute your products or services. One of the best methods of developing an affiliate network is by providing content in addition to an aggressive affiliate commission plan. Other web sites seek out content and useful information. If you can provide meaningful content to partner sites with an opportunity to earn money at the same time, they’re likely to participate in your affiliate program.

It’s important to realize that Search Engine Optimization is also a component of online marketing. Too often, SEO is not considered part of the online marketing mix. However, it is one of the most important aspects of an online marketing campaign. When launching a new product or marketing an existing one, make sure that it’s easy for individuals to find your website and offer page. Browsers who see your online ads may not click right away. Rather, prospective buyers may later be searching for your promotion when a specific need arises. Think about the keywords prospects may use to search for your offer and optimize your pages accordingly. Also, be sure to link to your promotional pages from your web site’s home page to optimize search result rankings.

Why is Online Marketing Important?

Online marketing often provides direct responses and the ability to measure campaign effectiveness. This immediacy helps you to test your offer(s) and creative, as well as measure the overall return on your marketing investment. Having the ability to evaluate effectiveness in real time allows you to reposition your marketing spend or switch out creative to increase results.

With more than 68% of homes having internet access and about two-thirds of them having a high speed connection, the web has become a reality. If you wish to reach the majority of consumers, you need to include online marketing as part of your overall marketing mix. Online marketing also gives you the opportunity to segment your market, providing highly targeted positioning. Unlike traditional advertising, online advertising allows you to select the sites upon which you run your ads. There are also many services which help you deliver ads around appropriate topics or contextual pages.

Best know for contextual and pay-per-click advertising, Google allows you to choose specific keywords around which your ad can be displayed. When individuals search on the keywords you’ve selected, your ads will appear. The power of Google is the affiliate network they’ve created which displays their contextual ads across hundreds of thousands of websites. Despite recent allegations of click fraud, Google still provides one of the most targeted online marketing options. Other services, like Overture, owned by Yahoo! provide similar services that deliver targeted online marketing.

Who Can Benefit?

Anyone who is interested in improving their marketing results should think about the role that online marketing plays in their marketing mix. Because there are so many ways to engage in online marketing including advertising, contextual ads, pay-per-click advertising, affiliate programs and more, the practice is sure to benefit anyone who is seeking a measurable return on investment.

Before beginning any online marketing campaign, you should always determine your budget &ndash how much you’re willing to invest in your marketing efforts. Ask yourself how much you’re willing to spend? What type of conversion will you need to break even? What you anticipate your click to purchase ratio will be? Understanding these fundamental financial metrics is essential to determining how much you’re willing to spend on your online marketing efforts.

How to Begin.

Starting your online marketing campaign can be as simple as bidding on a few keywords or as complex as developing a comprehensive online marketing campaign that consists of multiple buys across a network of websites. As with any new marketing venture, it’s best to start small and work your way up to more intricate marketing campaigns.

My recommendation for beginning your online marketing initiative is to focus on your own site (developing promotional banners, buttons, and content), creating an affiliate program, and pay-per click advertising. The first two methods should cost little or nothing to implement and will propel your campaign forward. Supplemented with pay-per-click advertising, your marketing message is sure to reach your intended audience.

The first two steps to successfully marketing online and through your website have little to do with online marketing itself. However, it’s critical to complete them before your campaigns begin. These two steps are Setting your Website Objective and Defining Your Online Target Market

Setting Your Website Objective:

Whenever a client is looking to drive more traffic to their website or is trying to raise their conversion rates, I always take them back to the beginning and ask them what the objective of their site is. This is always more insightful (and entertaining), when I’m meeting with more than one person from the company.

… “drive more sales”, “get more leads”, “reduce product support demands”, “gain access to new markets”, are a few of the more common responses. We then take a look at their site. It will often focus on who they are, their history, their commitment to customer service; all noble things, and usually all without a strong call to action that matches their now stated objective.

Setting an overall website objective is not easy but the benefits are huge.

Not easy: Real estate on the web is cheap. Add a page, add 100 pages, there is still plenty of room to expand. So it’s easy to quickly develop multiple objectives for your site.

Additionally, many people in the company will have different views on what the site objective should be. Human resources wants the Career section to stand out. Customer Service wants the Support area to be highlighted. Sales, of course, wants to highlight Product or Solution areas, and so on.

If you’re ruling by committee you’ll have a well balanced, but underperforming site. The winning play is to have one objective that rules all others. If that objective is to drive more sales, then the Home page must be geared to that. It will need to highlight and focus on information and calls to action to take web visitors down that path.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you won’t still link to support and careers sections. You just won’t focus on them on your Home and other main section pages.

Get Specific: Now if “Drive more sales.”, is your first-cut objective, you need to get a little deeper, more specific. Will you actually be closing sales over the internet (a la eCommerce), or are you driving the new prospect to call you or email you. What level of knowledge should the prospect have before they contact you. Should they know the part number or should they just know that your company is one they need to call.

Thus, your objective may evolve to “Drive qualified prospects to contact us to get detailed information on which of our products best suits them.”

So what made them a qualified prospect. Were they qualified before they came to your site (maybe they were driven to your site from a trade show), or did they get to you through a search engine and know very little about what you do.

Your objective may ultimately evolve to “Visitors should find the information to qualify themselves as good potential prospects and contact us to get detailed information on which of our products best suits them.”

Huge Benefits: Once you’ve set your objective, everything becomes easier. Writing content (often the biggest challenge a company has), becomes clear. The path with which you lead visitors through your website becomes clear (e.g. entice, inform, qualify, call-to-action). Site architecture and layout become clear.

You now focus your efforts and resources around fulfilling that main objective. The sections that are not directly relevant to your main objective still support that main objective.

Now that you’ve clearly set your website objective, the next step is to know who your target audience is &ndash and it may not be who you think.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Who do you want to visit your site. Are they researchers or decision makers. Are they likely to “convert” on their first visit. Do they know anything about your company already. If yes, how much do they know. Are they internet savvy. Are they over 40 and likely would appreciate larger type. Are they visual. Are they detailed. Are they a “people person” or do they prefer dealing with things or words. Are they likely to be highly educated. Do they like to have lots of options or lots of direction.

All these questions and a lot more need to be asked and answered. Initially, you’ll use this information to help in the design of your overall site. You’ll want the proper balance of image to text. You’ll want to set the text level at the appropriate level of detail. You’ll want to write to their probable education level.

Ultimately, the answers will drive the theme of your site. They’ll drive the type of online advertising you’ll use. They’ll drive the design of advertising landing pages. They’ll drive the keyword phrases you’ll target in search engine optimization. They’ll drive your call-to-action.

Now you’re ready to start your marketing. Knowing what you want to accomplish and to whom you want to accomplish it with, you’ll be able to structure the right ads, emails, keyword phrase targeting, etc. You’ll be able to focus resources on the proper additional web media (e.g. blogs, podcasts, more web pages, Flash demonstrations, etc.).

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this will be the end of the beginning of your online marketing strategy, and you’ll be ready to begin a productive and effective online marketing campaign.

Online marketing more often than not takes a beating in the press. In truth, it is one of the singularly great things about the net if you can get the hang of it.

One Philosophy [Rant] on Online Marketing

If you can figure online marketing out, it gives you the ability to spend your time, not your money, advertising your business. It gives you access to a much broader market than any brick and mortar business. It allows you to kick the crap out of big companies that just throw money at Internet marketing, a tactic often used to crush smaller business in the brick and mortar world.

When you get down to brass knuckles, online marketing not only gives you a level playing field with the big or bigger boys, it gives you an advantage. I like to call this the leverage and arrogance advantage.

Assume you write one piece of great software and try to start a small company in the brick and mortar world. If you are deemed to be a threat by the big software companies, what is going to happen? If you don’t get bought out, they are going to wipe you out. Since you have limited resources and little leverage with retailers, you are screwed, blue and tattooed. Not on the web.

Online marketing is beautiful because it flattens the playing field for all players, big and small. The key is search engine optimization. Regardless of how much money a dominant company in an industry throws at search engine rankings, they will never have an inherent advantage over you. They have no leverage, because there is nobody to buy off. The best they can do is buy advertisements, which fewer people click. If you get the top ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN for your keywords, nobody can knock you off unless they do a better optimization job than you do. In no way, shape or form would this ever be possible in the brick and mortar world unless you have a monstrous amount of cash.

The second reason you should use online marketing is arrogance. Dominant brick and mortar companies use marketing firms to push their brands on television, billboards, magazines and so on. When the companies open a site, they often have the same marketing firms handle their internet efforts as well. Crushing them on search engines is like taking candy from a baby. They just throw money at the problem, a strategy that fails every time on the web.

You, however, are not going to waste money by purchasing banner ads and other junk that will waste your money. Nope, you are going to pursue search engine optimization on your own or through a credible group. While the dominant company is spending $20 a click for their ads, you are going to be laughing your way to the bank as customers pour in from your top rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Does online marketing deserve the criticism it gets? Sometimes it does. Once you figure it out, however, you will never slander it again.

With the exploding numbers of on-line businesses, it is increasingly more difficult, and far more expensive, to market your business effectively on-line. Internet businesses are now turning to the off-line world to advertise. Here is what you can do to market your on-line business, in the off-line world, without going broke.

Off-line marketing consists of print, direct mail and TV/Radio advertising. Although TV and Radio are the most effective means of off-line marketing, they are cost prohibitive for most on-line businesses. So for the purposes of this article, we will concentrate only on Print and Direct Mail.

Print ads include everything from simple black & white flyers, distributed by hand at the mall, to a full-page color ad placed in a magazine. If you are a member of an industry organization, you can advertise in their related industry publications. This is the natural first choice when deciding which magazines or periodicals to advertise in.

When placing print ads, you will need to place the largest ad you can reasonably afford. And you will need to run it consistently over several weeks in order for it to be truly effective. Depending on your type of business, you can place ads in local “Penny Savers” magazines and in local and regional newspapers at fairly reasonable rates.

Additionally, posting or handing out flyers at malls, supermarkets, parking lots, etc. is another surprisingly cost-effective method of offline marketing. For example, if your site targets a certain industry, lets say “Arts & Crafts”, you can hand out flyers at the large retail arts and crafts stores, leaving flyers on customer’s cars in the parking lot.

I think if you operate an Internet home business, unless you have a BIG marketing budget, you should stay away from placing ads in large magazines. Even small industry publications tend to be over-priced, and in order for your ad to be effective, once again, you must be consistent and place ads regularly. Just doing one-shots is really a waste of your money.

Probably the most reasonable and, in my opinion, the most cost-effective means of advertising is Direct Mail Marketing. Direct mail ensures that your message gets directly into the hands of your potential customers. All it takes is a simple post card, with your message, mailed every three months and you’re set.

Now compiling a mailing list to mail to is another story. My suggestion is to join professional organizations in your industry. Almost every industry has some sort of professional organization related to its field.

Most of these organizations publish their own newsletters and magazines and maintain member mailing lists. These lists are usually available in printed format, or online; however, if you want them formatted for a database, you will most likely have to pay a rental or buy fee. If that doesn’t work for you can also purchase mailing lists from independent list brokers.

Once you have your list you simply import it into a database, like Microsoft’s Access, and then you will easily be able to spit out letters and/or labels for your marketing materials and off they go right into the hands of your customers…very effective.

Now the “down side” to direct mail is that it is very labor intensive. Someone has got to lick the stamps, place the mailing labels, sort, print, etc. This is where family comes in handy. Put your kids on the payroll and let the little buggers go to work. If not, there are mailing services available that will handle all of that for you for a fee.

Keep in mind, as with all advertising, statistics show that it generally takes 7-8 times for a customer to be exposed to your message before they decide to take action. So needless to say, be sure your marketing budget allows for a long-term plan that includes multiple exposures.

You will need to stay in your customers face constantly over an extended period of time, no matter what your offline marketing campaign may consist of. And using both the Print Ad and Direct Mail methods is important to your overall marketing success.

“U can do it…just dive into it”

Duh Idiot’s Home Biz Start-Up Guide