The best ways to market your business offline
It may seem easy to remember to promote your business online. After all, you're probably online a good portion of the day already, and it's practically second nature to do things online, that promote your business. However, small business owners who are savvy in the Web world tend to forget is that there was a whole world of business happening, before the Internet, ever made its way through the office doors. Although online promotion is important for your business, it's crucial to remember to go back to your basics, and do offline promoting as well locally, nationwide, and worldwide depending on whom you are marketing to. Here are some of the best ways to market your business offline-
Writing successful PPC ad copy
Building a successful pay-per-click campaign takes a lot of time and management from you. In order to develop a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you need to have the right ad copy. Your ad copy is used to generate an interest from your customers and to get them to focus on purchasing your products or services. Your ad copy will play a big role in helping your customers to click on the pay-per-click ad so you can actually have a successful campaign.
Why online marketing continues to be profitable
Finding a way to market to your customers can be tough if you don't know who you are marketing to. Some companies don't spend enough time focusing on their market research efforts in order to truly understand their customers. You can gather this information online and you can successfully market to your customers online. In the past few years online marketing efforts are more than tripling and about 1.1 trillion online advertising promotions are used each quarter. Web marketing revenue rakes in over $24 billion a year, which goes to show that if you don't have an online presence, you could be missing out.
Easy ways to use social media marketing
Social media is all the rage right now and it seems like just about every business is using social media to gather market research information and to market their products to their customers. Social media is free to use, which makes it extremely attractive to many businesses that have smaller budgets and are unable to spend large amounts of money on their marketing efforts.
Getting higher rankings
When planning the marketing strategies for a website, one of the most important focuses should be rankings. In other words, how can you get higher rankings? The following are a few of the best tips for improving your rankings, and optimizing your website:
Blog SEO tips
Optimizing your blog for search engines can be tricky, but lucky for those of you looking to use a blog for marketing, search engines love blogs. Of course, if you use your blog incorrectly, you won't get as much of the search engine love. Here are a few tips for blog seo:
Bing local for SEO
While search engine optimization is internet wide, it is important to hit your local listings first, and expand from there. If you have a business that is locally based, not run just off the internet, getting on those local listings is key to your marketing strategy.
Registering with net directories
The internet has opened the door to many new marketing avenues for businesses. And many of the marketing options available for businesses online are free. One way for a business owner to market their business online is by registering with net directories. This article discusses registering with net directories.
What are some examples of net, or online, directories?
Cyberspace marketing
Many small businesses have found the benefits of cyberspace when it comes to marketing their products and services. With Internet sales at an all-time high, you can maximize your profits and your presence by turning to the web to help promote your small business.
There are many benefits of cyberspace marketing, including:
Continue reading "Cyberspace marketing"Using podcasting as a marketing tactic
Podcasting reaches potential customers easier than emails because there is no junk filter set on a podcast. A podcast is a form of advertisement, similar to what you might hear on the radio. By having an audio file that can be downloaded onto a computer, cell phone, MP3 player, or other devices that can play audio files people are able to play the ads in the background while they continue with what they were doing. Think about how popular radio advertising is, many people listen to the radio as they are driving, cleaning house, etc. The radio unlike television allows them to multitask so they feel like they have gotten stuff accomplished; podcasting is similar to radio advertising.
Using teleseminars to boost online traffic
Small business owners have been using teleseminars to boost their online traffic. The best part about teleseminars is that they are free! You can even create them right from the comfort of your home. Teleseminars will cause people to come to your web site for additional information and to purchase certain products.
Most people use web sites like YouTube.com to promote their videos to a mass audience. Using a video-hosting web site is a great way to get your name out there, especially if you are trying to build your company's reputation.
Search engine optimization tips for your website.
Getting the most hits to your website can be done by optimizing your search engine. By ranking and placement advice, information, hints, tips, and clues. Thus creating better keyword placement.
You might wonder how your new website could even come from no where, and become the top result from a search.
There really is not any real Search Engine Optimization secret. Mainly ranking and placement techniques used in order to out do the other guy. Your goal is to obtain a high ranking for desired search keywords.
Frankly it is not nearly enough to just add Meta tags, and do a search engine submission of your site to millions of search engine indexes and directories. Obtaining significant web visitor counts will help obtain the optimized amount of hits on your website. Be sure to build an illustrious content rich site. Finally, make sure you have proper submission of your web site to the search engine or directory.
Using your website for marketing
Websites are a crucial tool that companies can use to successfully market their products and/or services. Many people go to a company's website before they even contact you or purchase anything.Here are few guidelines to using your website for marketing:
- Get a unique domain name. It's best to include your business name. Or you could get creative and come up with a domain name that captures what your business is all about. Whatever you choose, be sure to keep it short. This will make it easy to remember. You can find many domain registering sites all over the Internet (these can be found through a simple Google search). Having a memorable and recognizable domain name will help people find your site.Once you have your domain name registered and your website established, advertise it.Be sure that your website's address is printed on your business cards, letterheads, any pamphlets, signs, everything. The key is to get that website out to the public.
Using a blog to market your product
The modern blog is at something that has caught on like wildfire rather recently on the Internet. In just a few years, the number of blogs numbers in the tens of millions and continues to grow at an astonishing rate. As a result, it only makes sense that your company should join in on this phenomenon and be using a blog to market your product.
A blog (the word is shortened version of "web log") is a little different from a regular website. One difference is that they are simple to set up (there are pre-made templates on a variety of sits), free, and easy to update. The term "web log" perfectly describes what a blog's purpose is - it's basically an online journal where you keep track of whatever you want, day by day.Just log into your blog, say what you want, click post, and you're done. No wonder people are making, reading, and using blogs more often than ever.
Continue reading "Using a blog to market your product"Paying for hits on your website, pros and cons
There is no argument against the fact that using the internet to your advantage when marketing is a good idea.There are many different ways that people use the internet to promote their product and sometimes outside companies with more technological experience are called in to help.Such is the case with SEO or Search Engine Optimization.SEO entails hiring a professional firm to help you to become more accessible to your online customers or people of interest.
There are millions and millions of websites on the internet.It is not hard to imagine how your specific site might get lost in the crowd.What a SEO does is give you the advantage of being a top hit in a search engine.Giving yourself this advantage is huge, traffic to your site definitely increases when more people know that your business exists because of the search engine tag.SEO services may also include hits to websites where your contact information is listed in the form of an advertisement, making the reach of your influence go even farther.
Continue reading "Paying for hits on your website, pros and cons"How SEO is key to marketing
It is hard to own any business now without at least some knowledge of the internet.And for some businesses, having a presence on the internet is vital to their overall success rate and customer acquisition and retention.Websites are the business wave of the future that you need to be working on establishing now.It is not enough to simply have a website anymore, you must drive potential customers to that website in order to maintain a sales advantage.SEO is a key factor in that marketing goal of attracting possible buyers.SEO or Search Engine Optimization is, in short, a process used to improve the traffic to a website by using search engines and links from different pages.
Creating a full proof marketing campaign
Coming up with ideas to market is easy, but actually making a marketing campaign is a little tricky. There are several different approaches to a marketing campaign. Will this be a targeted campaign? Will this be a viral campaign, e-mail campaign, direct mail campaign, or SEO campaign? Obviously you have quite a lot of options to choose from. Let's take a look at some guidelines for creating a full proof marketing campaign.
Decide how you want to market
If you are an internet junkie, you probably know all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategies. Chances are your listed on Google, AOL, yahoo and msn already. If not, this is definitely something you need to look into. The internet is the biggest tool marketers have. Pay-per click marketing campaigns are quite popular. Starting up a pay-per click campaign does require a lot of time and effort. In order to be successful with internet marketing, you must have three tools; text, link, and popularity.
Tips for effective online marketing
Are you interested in marketing online?Online marketing is a completely different world of marketing from other marketing approaches.With online marketing, also called internet marketing, you will be reaching all different kinds of global audiences, and the possibilities for reaching different kinds of groups are endless!Here are a couple of tips so that you will be effective in your online marketing:
1) Have a well-designed website:If you are going to market your company and products on your website, you need to make sure that it is well designed.In being well designed, the website page and links not only need to look sharp, but everything needs to be accessible and easy to find.People will often pull up a poorly designed website and immediately leave it in search for one that it better designed and more inviting!Don't shut out your potential customers just because of a poor design!There are design firms which specialize in website design, or you can get a free-lance designer to work for you.If your funds are tight, you can even hire a college graphic design student to work for you- college design students are usually very qualified to design websites, but they cannot charge as much because they do not have a degree.
Continue reading "Tips for effective online marketing"Placement of online advertisements
Is placement of online advertisements very important? Statistics have shown that consistent placement of online advertisements with either a company's logo or business name lead more people to recall the information that they had seen and about 30% of these people went and visit the websites later on. Statistics have also shown that if targeted to the right audience the percentage rate went up. The placement of online advertisements is everything.
You can also do your own placement of online advertisements. Whether placing your online advertisement on a banner or just on the internet somewhere, you need to make sure you are on a website that will be targeting the right people. This is critical to the success of your online advertisement. For example if you are trying to market crafts you are not going to want to put your banner on a sports page or a link to a sports page. This would not be a good placement of your online advertisements. But on the other hand if you are selling big screen televisions and happened to be having a sale the weekend before the super bowl, you would want your online advertisements to be placed on the sports channel.
Continue reading "Placement of online advertisements"5 tips to increase conversion on your website
Your conversion rate is a measure of the number of potential customers that go on to buy your product or service from your website.In other words, it is defined as the number of visitors that turn into customers of your products or services. Although many websites concentrate on increasing the number of visitors they have, what you need to be concerned with is actually retaining new clients.
Improving a website's conversion rate can be relatively simple. Here are five techniques for doing just that:
Continue reading "5 tips to increase conversion on your website"Where to submit online videos to get more website traffic
Once you have created your online video, you now need to submit it to the web to get the video to drive traffic to your website.A few years ago, this may have been a fairly daunting task.However, there are many sites that will support your video for free today.It is important to get your video to as many of these sites as possible.
You will want to make your video entertaining enough that others will want to host the video on their website.One of the best methods to get your video to the maximum amount of people is by using viral marketing.People like the video enough that they send it to their friends and family who forward it to their friends.You get many of these items forwarded to you.Think of the potential marketing power if you could have your video forwarded to everybody the same way.
Online video's power in selling product online
As the web continues to gain popularity in the world so does online videos.With this growing popularity and technological advances also makes it possible for more people and businesses to use online videos.Hence, the power of selling products and services with the use of online videos is exploding today and will only continue to grow.
Online video is also more powerful than its competitors in selling the product.This is because potential customers get more information from a video than they do other forms of advertisement.For example, if you are walking through a store, are you more likely to watch a video advertisement in the television section than you are to read an entire poster size advertisement?
Keys to design online videos to sell your products online
Before you begin production for your online videos to sell your products you need to understand the keys to online video design.Billboards and television advertisements may seem similar to internet advertising, but the big difference is that online video can be interactive.Hence, you must make the video have some kind of input from the viewer.You will remember things much better if you interact instead of just look at an advertisement.
Online videos have several different methods that can be used for interaction.First, you can leave some information out give the website address for where the information can be found.However, you must be careful as to what information is left out.You don't want to leave out key information, but you want to leave out the information that will draw the interest of the viewer enough that they will immediately look up the information to see what it is.For instance, if you were Ford you could ask a survey question like what car would you like to see made next.The viewer would have to go to Ford's website to take the survey and see leading answers.
5 keys to successful business online videos
Business videos are becoming more mainstream as a tool for marketing and teaching online.However, not all business videos are created equal.Because creation of a good quality video can be expensive, you want to make sure that you create the best video that will accomplish your goals.This article will outline the five keys to successful business online videos.
1.Determine the purpose of your video
You must have a single idea that you are trying to convey in your marketing video.Too often we try to pack all of the information into a video and the person watching the video gets confused with too much information.Define the exact purpose for the video and state that up front in the video.
Search engine optimization tips for your website.
Getting the most hits to your website can be done by optimizing your search engine. By ranking and placement advice, information, hints, tips, and clues. Thus creating better keyword placement.
You might wonder how your new website could even come from no where, and become the top result from a search.
There really is not any real Search Engine Optimization secret. Mainly ranking and placement techniques used in order to out do the other guy. Your goal is to obtain a high ranking for desired search keywords.
Continue reading "Search engine optimization tips for your website."Email marketing tools to build your business.
Use the power of email marketing tools to build your business. Many successful companies use email marketing as a tool to increase sales and profits. Whether you are just getting started using the Internet or you are an old pro, you know the value of email marketing tools.
The main thing is to consider how you want your next customer to visualize your business. Using a private and personable email name may not be the perception you want for your company. Using a professional business email is more appropriate, and will generate more customers.You can use your email marketing tools to build your business. Perception is everything.
Continue reading "Email marketing tools to build your business."RSS: What it is and how to use it.
RSS means "Really Simple Syndication". It is a means of gathering information on the web and having it brought to you rather than you having to go to it. It is a program that does so through two steps, which we will go over soon. It is an amazing resource for large business and broadcasting companies who need information on a daily bases but who otherwise would have to do a lot of research to gather the information themselves.
RSS was originally designed by Netscape to gather headlines to portals to stream through news quickly. Netscape however did not stick to developing portals and RSS technology has now been picked up by three separate companies, Userland, RSS-DEV, and Working Group. Which technology is currently best on the market? That depends on you and your needs.
Online metrics - which ones are the most important to watch:
Companies using online metrics are going to choose the company that can give them the fastest reports, real time data, and are the most user friendly.
Metrics related to the business world is the process of tracking your sales, where they are coming from, and which sources are the most valuable. In the world of online business many people are paying vast amounts of money for advertising, marketing, and web trafficking, but paying little to no attention to tracking where the sales are coming from or which advertisements are bringing the most traffic to their business. In the world of online business there are many things that can be measured, most important, is to start measuring; but you also need to know what is and is not important to measure or you will be wasting your time and money.
Continue reading "Online metrics - which ones are the most important to watch:"What are 5 keys to improve website usability?
A usable website is a two way relationship between you and your customer: your website must have enough information to keep youhappy, and must be one where the customer can easily understand what they are looking at and find what they want quickly. Are you receiving a heavy flow of traffic to your website, but finding that traffic is exciting rather quickly? If so than your relationship probably needs a little work (and unfortunately a dozen roses and a box of chocolates probably won't do the trick). Following are five ways to improve your business, customer, website relationship.
Step 1: Use simple language. Whether you are informational or product based - don't talk above anyone (except maybe those young ones who aren't reading yet). Use common and daily words and phrases that everyone can understand. Do you have a health or other product that requires the use of some "big:" words? Then use those words, but explain them in simpler terms afterward so that you don't ward off potential customers because they can't understand what you're talking about.Remembering to use simple language is much like learning to communicate in any relationship, to really have success you have to focus on the other person.
Continue reading "What are 5 keys to improve website usability?"Pay Per Click Advertising Can Be Very Risky Business
Click fraud is an unfortunate byproduct of the pay per click advertising business.Many people with an online business spend large amounts of money on pay per click advertising only to discover that many of the people clicking on their ads weren't really interested in their products or services.
Bogus "visitors" to a pay per click ad represent click fraud. This is a serious scam that threatens the viability of the pay per click advertising business which has become enormously profitable for all of the major search engine operators, namely Google, Yahoo/Overture, and MSN.
Click fraud has different forms, but the end result is generally the same.Advertisers are billed for fruitless traffic generated by someone who repeatedly clicks on an advertiser's ad without any intention of ever buying anything.
The search engine advertising market is currently about $3.8 billion per year and estimates vary widely on how much click fraud is actually going on.Clearly, the search engine operators would like to downplay the extent of this problem.Some industry experts claim that a little click fraud exists but that it is overblown by advertiser paranoia, while others estimate that ten to twenty percent of all clicks are false (made by someone with no legitimate interest in the ad itself).
Virtually everyone involved with pay per click advertising sees click fraud and knows it's there, but no one is quite sure what to do about it.
Continue reading "Pay Per Click Advertising Can Be Very Risky Business"Learn how to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Online Marketing Campaigns. . . in a free PDF download
Do you know that according to WebSideStory, an analytics firm, in 2003 medium to large Web sites got an average of 13.6% of traffic from search engines? Do you realize the power in that one simple statement?
Search engine marketers trying to get new business from medium to large Web sites can ask for log files from potential clients. They can then determine the percentage of traffic from search engines for those potential clients. They can compare it to the average, and use that number to prove the need for their services as well as the importance of search engine marketing.
The same principle applies to SEOs trying to prove to the marketing or management departments that search engine marketing needs to be taken seriously.
Measuring the percentage of traffic from search engines over time is one way to measure the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign. But hang on, because we're going to explain a few other definable elements that you may have previously thought of as un-measurable.
What other elements can be truly and effectively measured?
Continue reading "Learn how to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Online Marketing Campaigns. . . in a free PDF download"Top Ten Reasons to Market Your Business Online
If you are like me, and love your business, you certainly want to grow it to be as successful as possible. Whatever product or service you offer, wouldn't you be willing to nurture it through the number one way to market--the Internet? Especially if you realized all the benefits?
You want to market Online because…
1. It's highly profitable.
You can quadruple your profits in just four months using e-commerce. Your Internet marketing coach, brand new to the net three years ago, built her sales from $75 to $3000 plus in eight months.
2. It's a guarantee that you will be well known as the expert in your field.
Getting targeted traffic to your site through submitting articles to top Web sites can connect your name and URL with over 900 Web sites in less than a year. And it's all free publicity for you and your business.
3. It's less trouble.
You don't have to be a polished presenter to market your product effectively online. While speaking to groups in person does give you instant credibility, it takes a great deal of preparation time for your talk, your materials, and your wardrobe.
At your computer nobody cares if you're in your jeans and tee shirt. You don't have to run to the copy shop or printers. Your talk translates easily into a short article. It's far easier to write a how-to article that you can edit several times at your leisure, and send it immediately to over 400,000 opt-in ezines in many categories on the Web by just clicking a button.
Continue reading "Top Ten Reasons to Market Your Business Online"10 Easy Ways to Skyrocket Your Online Sales
Apply these marketing strategies to skyrocket your online sales.
1. Keep search engines in mind when designing your site. Include keywords and META tags in your web pages to improve your ranking with search engines.
2. Design your web site based on your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Why should prospects buy from you instead of your competition? What sets you apart? What makes your products and services unique, better, and more desirable? Do you provide hard-to-find expertise, the best customer service, lowest prices, highest quality, fastest service, or strongest guarantee? Back up your claims with testimonials, statistics, results of studies, and other data. Stand out from your competition. Offer more. Make your offers unique. Be original.
3. Put the benefits of your site and your USP right on top of your home page. Many web visitors never scroll down past the first screen of information. Give your potential buyers the information they need as quickly as possible.
4. Include an opt-in form to collect your visitors' email addresses. An opt-in form captures the email addresses of interested prospects and gives you permission to email them. Getting your visitors' e-mail addresses and building opt-in email lists is essential to staying in touch with your prospects and turning visitors into buyers. Offer something valuable to get your potential buyers' email addresses such as a newsletter, free report, consultation, discount, or special offer.
Continue reading "10 Easy Ways to Skyrocket Your Online Sales"How To Use Banner Ads Effectively
It's no big secret that banner ads have become less effective than text links over the years. This phenomenon is called "banner blindness". Banners were so ubiquitous in the early years of the Internet that users simply began to ignore them.
So what did many advertisers do to combat banner blindness? They made their banners harder to ignore by causing them to flash, rotate, jump around, and all sorts of other annoying tricks.
This of course led most users to like banners even less!
Does this mean that banner ads are useless? No, not at all!
There are several things that you can do to make your banner campaigns more effective. First of all, ensure that each of your banners is pleasant to look at and blends in well with the web page it's displayed on. Match up the design and color scheme with those of the site.
This means you'll need to create a customized banner for each and every site you advertise on, but the results will most definitely make the extra effort and expense well worth it!
Continue reading "How To Use Banner Ads Effectively"Effective Ezine Advertising Part 2
Continuing on from last week's article, today I will discuss writing and tracking ads. Effective ezine advertising can provide your business with a substantial boost!
* Writing the Ads
Once you make the decision and choose an ezine or two to advertise in, you must write an effective ad. If your ad does not get a response, it is not always the ezine's fault. It could be in your ad copy. The main points to remember when writing an ad are:
1. Keep it brief.
2. Grab their attention in the headline.
3. Emphasize the benefits to the purchaser.
Example:
Headline: Do you want to lose weight?
Better Headline: Lose 3 Pounds a Week!
When you simply ask if they want to lose weight, the benefit is not clearly defined. But when you say lose 3 pounds a week, that is quite clear and more apt to grab the reader's attention.
Continue reading "Effective Ezine Advertising Part 2"Google Wants You
I am about to show you how thousands of webmasters are quietly pocketing thousands of dollars every month for doing nothing.
Well, almost nothing.
Here's the scoop:
Google started a pay-per-click program called "AdWords" some time ago. You have likely seen some Adwords ads at the right hand side of Google searches or on many websites (like a few pages on mine.)
While those ads generate solid revenue for Google, they also generate revenue for the websites which show them to their visitors.
The program for webmasters is called "Google AdSense."
Continue reading "Google Wants You"Google AdSense Adds New Enhancements for Users
If you have a website and don't mind displaying ads that relate to your website's content, you can earn a decent income with Google AdSense. Every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your site, you make money. It's not a bad gig for doing absolutely nothing.
Here are the new enhancements Google has added to the AdSense program:
1) Channels: It used to be hard to tell which ad layouts and webpages were performing the best. Google added what they call "channels" to make it easy to track which ads on which pages of your site are receiving the most clicks. To start using channels, you'll need to set them up from within your Google control panel and then paste the code on your webpages. You can set up to 20 channels and deactivate them at will. You can also assign channels to multiple domains if you run ads on them, in order to track performance of each. If you like to test and track, you'll love using channels.
Continue reading "Google AdSense Adds New Enhancements for Users"How To Promote Your Business - A 10 step guide for beginners
Often times when people start an internet business they don't have a clue how to go about their marketing campaign. They end up posting ads aimlessly to places that do nothing but send them spam and waste time and money. Then, after a couple weeks without results, they give up. It almost happened to me and I know it happens to others everyday. So, in order to help the newbies, I decided to give a quick overview of some of the widely used techniques for marketing your business. When used correctly these marketing techniques will dramatically increase traffic and sales without emptying your bank account.
Here they are, in no particular order:
1) PPC's (Pay Per Click) - These are a very widely used method of getting traffic to your website. Pretty much everyone uses PPC's at one time or another. The concept is really simple... you bid a certain amount on keywords related to your product or service. Then when someone searches for those keywords they find your ad (assuming you bid high enough). Finally, they click on your ad and you pay the amount you bid. This is great because you only pay for traffic that actually goes to your site and all the traffic is targeted.
When is an Ad NOT an Ad?
One marketing technique used by advertisers old and new is to conceal sales pages as something else.
The Infomercial, for example, extends the TV Advertisment into something that prentends to be an informative program.
Likewise, newspaper and magazine advertisments often mimic the style of news reports or editorials.
In Internet Marketing we can also make use of this technique, in a number of ways.
Continue reading "When is an Ad NOT an Ad?"Google AdWords and AdSense - A Dynamic Small Business Marketing Duo
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last year or so, you probably know that Google has become the king of the search engine hill. There are many reasons for this but number one in my opinion is that above all else they put value on content. Today I want to introduce you to two very powerful small business advertising options created by Google.
These two ingenious programs have all but revolutionized the way advertising is done on the web. Warning: If you are thinking..."web advertising isn't for me, I just need a few more clients around the block"...you better read this or be prepared to have your competitors eat your lunch.
Continue reading "Google AdWords and AdSense - A Dynamic Small Business Marketing Duo"