Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
ways and places you can advertise
November 2nd, 2007 | 
Author: - yellow page ads
- local newspaper advertisement
- message forums for your target market
- real estate welcome packs for new offices
- word of mouth
- yellow pages and other phone book listings
- craigslist.com
- networking and activity in discussion groups
- create a signature on forums and for your email
- business card and brochure handouts
- flyers in your town if looking for local clients
Posted in 
marketing using MySpace
For many households, the term “MySpace” is used on a daily basis. The website has definitely become a pop culture phenomenon. If
you do a Google search on the term, over 120 million results are displayed. It seems that almost everyone has a MySpace page –
from your local high school quarterback to the people running for President of the United States.
In basic terms, MySpace is a social networking site. Once users register for a free account, they are given a MySpace page where
they can post personal information and customize. They can upload photographs and are also given access to a blog. Users have
the option of joining MySpace Groups, and they can also connect with other MySpace users and become “friends.” MySpace has a
unique messaging system that allows users to send mail back and forth, and MySpace friends are allowed to post comments on each
other’s pages.
If you simply look at the fact that you are able to network with other people that may share your interests, MySpace sounds like a
good marketing tool. However, there is a debate over whether MySpace is actually a smart marketing move or not.
MySpace has definitely received its fair share of bad press. There have been countless reports of how some evil-minded people use
these types of social networking sites to abuse others, usually teens and preteens.
It is a well known fact that many MySpace users are high school and college students. Therefore, some people feel that it is a
waste of time to market on MySpace, as many users may not be in their target market. Other people may feel that using MySpace as
a marketing tool might make them look unprofessional or immature.
MySpace isn’t just for teenagers. The site offers entertainment for adults as well. For instance, the site has a search function
where people can find old classmates and plan high school reunions and so forth.
Depending on the type of products you offer, you may receive a lot of traffic from having a MySpace page. MySpace’s search
function allows you to search for people by age and gender. You can do a search on the age and gender of your target market and
see what comes up.
You can also try searching for your competition. If they have a MySpace page, take a look at their friends’ list. If they have a
lot of “MySpace Friends”, then it might be worth your time to create your own page.
If you decide to create a page, you may also want to add a link to your MySpace page on your website and blog in order for your
regular visitors to become your “MySpace friend”. As a MySpace user, you will be able to send messages, also known as bulletins,
to your entire friends list. This is a great way to let people know about any upcoming specials or sales that you will be having,
as well as updates to your website.
Your business plan and marketing
A business plan serves as the guidebook to your business. Your business plan should communicate what your business is, how you plan on growing it, and what steps you are going to take to achieve your success.
Your business plan also has a huge effect on your marketing efforts. Your business plan can help you decide what type of marketing will add value to your business and which types of marketing will simply be time wasters.
By writing out your business ideas and goals, you can determine your target market. Your target market is the group of people that you want to promote your products or services to. Determining your target market is the first step in planning your marketing efforts.
Having a business plan, and knowing who your target market is, will lead you to create your marketing plan. A marketing plan is similar to a business plan in the sense that it acts as a guide and helps you stay focused.
A marketing plan is a written plan of action that communicates how you are going to market your business. There are many ways to market your business, such as flyers, paid ads (newspapers, magazines, online), business cards, speaking in front of groups, becoming a guest on a radio show or television program, pay per click campaigns, direct mail, and more.
Your business and marketing plans serve as tools in deciding which marketing ideas will work best with your business and your particular brand. It can be easy to try too many different marketing approaches. Whenever you feel confused about your marketing efforts, take some time to re-read your business plan. This can help you decide if the new marketing idea will actually reach your target market and if it is worth trying.
Developing relationships with other business owners that offer complementary products is a great way to market your business. When you know which direction you plan to grow your business, you can start scouting out possible future business partners.
For instance, if you have created your own line of organizational handbags and would like to start offering diaper bags, you can start researching the top baby focused websites and see if they would be interested in helping you promote your diaper bags.
Your marketing plan should also include information on how you plan on keeping your customers after the initial purchase. Some ideas include customer-only sales, back end sales opportunities, customer-only freebies, etc.
Know your audience
Understanding the type of people who visit your site is a very important task because you can use that information to enhance your site to suit them. As a result, you will gain more loyal returning visitors that come back again and again for more.
What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.
Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this way, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.
When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they old or young people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.
Try to sprinkle colloquial language in your sites sparingly where you see fit and you will create a sense that your audience is on common ground with you. This in turn builds a trusting relationship between you and your audience, which will come in useful should you want to market a product to your audience.
Start off search engine friendly
There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.
Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Stop using wrong HTML tags like to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load. It also provides you with a way to edit and change the look of your site by just editing one little line of code in your files instead of having to edit every single page.
Keep Them Coming Back
A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:
Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.
Start a blog
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.
Carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.
Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.
Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!
[tags]marketing, website traffic, website visitors, blog traffic[/tags]
Top 5 Ways To Generate Low Cost Website Traffic
Exchange Links
A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.
Traffic Exchange
This will only get you traffic, it won’t be very targeted. But, it does get your page in front of people rather quickly and it of course creates impressions if you’re looking for that. Not a very effective method in the long term though. Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site.
Write and Submit Articles
This is quickly becoming the most popular and effective way to generate traffic. Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.
Make a Newsletter
As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.
Join Online Communities and Forums
This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site. Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.
[tags]build traffic, low cost traffic, free traffic, article marketing, marketing[/tags]
Gathering email addresses the right way!
The first thing you want to be sure you don’t do is get over-zealous. The one thing you need to avoid at all costs is spamming. Spamming is still used widely, but with the government establishing more restrictions and fines you don’t want this to be a problem for you. The professional image of your site will also suffer if you send mail blatantly.
Spamming requires a database that contains a huge list of e-mail addresses set up so that the message can be delivered with one click. The problem with it (aside from the governmental restrictions and associated fines) is that it irritates the recipients and kills the validity of your campaign, which in turn kills the factors that would motivate someone to refer your site.
You need to personalize by creating your website with personal appeal. You must see to it that your website makes your customers feel safe, secure and cared for. E-mail is important, because it is going to be one of the most affordable ways to keep in touch with your customers.
The proper way to handle email permission is to first let your customer know that you will not transmit their e-mail addresses to third party companies. The next thing to do is to attach the need for their e-mail addresses to benefits they can receive.
Coupons or discounts that are only available to members who receive e-mail notifications. With each e-mail you send the viral marketing effect takes place. A newsletter, a submission or request form of any kind. Give away free reports or ebooks in exchange for information …. be creative!
[tags]email marketing, email addresses, gathering emails, no spam, spam[/tags]
Why does viral work?
It might sound like a gross icky flu or cold, but it’s a method of getting your name and product in front of people and saying hey look at me. Why does it work? How does it work? What does a virus have to do with marketing?
Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands and then to millions.
From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. Remember the K.I.S.S. standard….Keep it Simple Stupid. My favorite saying when it comes to work! The shorter and easier to remember is always better than long and complicated. Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. The desire to be cool and greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages.
People are social by nature, both online and offline. Social scientists tell us that the average person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. On the internet people socialize, favorite websites, send and collect emails, keep contacts lists, and so forth. All of these activities develop relationships online. A lot of times we don’t even think about them, but they are there. Look in your contacts, how many email addresses do you have saved? How many websites do you have bookmarked?
Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion. If you can design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, you have a winner.
[tags]affiliate marketing, viral marketing, marketing[/tags]
Forums and Viral Marketing
Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion’s primary sales market. For example, someone involved with a health related product, many types of forums could apply….everything from holistic medicine to stay-at-home moms.
Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this.
Choose forums that allow sig tags. If it’s possible read the rules before joining and pay attention to them. Your time is important, too. It is better to find out that a forum doesn’t allow posts with sig tags before you go to the time and trouble of joining.
Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This all but a universal rule and only displays the marketers lack of experience if he does so. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors….at worst, it is grounds for being banned.
[tags]forum marketing, networking, forums, signatures[/tags]
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