|
|
| Internet Marketing Information |
|
|
|
|
3 Highly Effective Strategies To Power Up Your Business in 2005
Whatever your business resolutions may be for this year, you need to take action. Each day that passes by is lost profits if you don't do anything to improve your business. Everyone wants to have more and more success but if you just stay there and dream about being more successful, you will never reach your goals. As a matter of fact, it's imperative that you work on a well-constructed business plan to ensure that you meet your objectives. By using a road map for your future promotions, you will be more focused and motivated. Just remember, doing a little every day can lead to a huge accomplishment in the future. You should always try to improve your business wherever you can and make more profits because there are so many different profitable marketing techniques that you can use to boost your business. With that said, let's see some of these lucrative promotion strategies that will skyrocket your sales and profits. (1) Pay Per Click(PPC) Search Engines Pay Per Click search engines are among one of the quickest ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. You just bid on keywords related to your site and you can get a top listing along with the organic search engine listings. Bidding and keyword research are critical to the success of your campaigns. If you bid high for high competition keywords, you can be sure to get a good placement in the PPC. An example with Google Adwords, positions 2-4 are usually very good. Of course, position 1 is the best but you will be paying the highest bid and your budget can be drained quite fast. If you bid for low competion keywords, you can pay for as low as 5 cents and expect a top listing because there won't be many ads competing for these keywords. Hence, if you can get lots of these low competition keywords which bring you highly targeted clicks, that will be a very profitable campaign. Then you just need to ensure that you either get these visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or buy whatever product or service you might be offering. The most difficult parts are to get the right keywords and sufficient amount of clicks to prevent your keywords from being slowed or disabled. When this happen, your ad will disappear. The best status for your keyword should always be "normal", hence it will be shown at full delivery. To solve this issue, your ad must be eye catching, it can arouse curiosity, it can state a benefit in the description, it can include a call to action and it helps if the ad itself contains the keyword you're targeting. It takes a few minutes to set up an account with AdWords at http://adwords.google.com To search for potential related keywords for your website, you can make use of Overture search tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ or Google AdWords Keyword Tool at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordSandbox Some changes at AdWords, if you are promoting affiliate products, you no longer need to identify yourself as an affiliate and include the abbreviation for affiliate ie "aff" in your ad description. In addition, if there are several ads promoting the same product by using the same keyword, only one ad will be displayed now. Hence there won't be duplicate ads. A higher rank for your ad will be determined based on its maximum cost-per-click(CPC) and clickthrough rate(CTR) just like before. To solve this issue, you can promote that same product on your own website instead of linking directly to the merchant's site. To know how much advertisers are paying for keywords, check out Overture bid tool at http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/ This can give you an idea for the competitivity of the keywords. Advertising on Overture is more costly and depending on your industry, usually you will reach over 80% of active Internet users than on AdWords because your site will also appear on Overture's network of sites like MSN, Yahoo, Altavista, Infospace and CNN amongst others as sponsored sites. To sign up for an account at Overture, go to this url http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/choose.jhtml (2) Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Getting free traffic from the search engines is one of the most powerful marketing tactics because not only are you not paying a dime but the traffic just like PPC is extremely targeted. People coming to your site after making a search on the search engines is one of the best methods to deliver good results. Getting your site noticed and ranked high in the search engines takes time and work but the long lasting traffic is well worth the effort. To optimize your site, consider putting your targeted keywords in your title, description, include some keywords in your content, and most importantly, get quality relevant links to your site. While you will be waiting for your rankings to appear on the search engines, an advice is to drive traffic via the PPC in the meantime. (3) Affiliate Program An affiliate program is a type of joint venture and is a highly effective technique to generate new streams of traffic and skyrocket your sales. And best of all, it's FREE advertising and minimal effort on your part in contrast to ppc and seo where you have to work for your rankings or pay for every click. On the contrary, you can capitalize on other webmasters' existing websites which are already getting traffic and if you have a product or service, it does not cost you anything to contact these business owners and offer them to join your affiliate program to promote your product in return for a commission. Persuading them and finally recruiting them is the hardest part of your job and you have to make sure that your joint venture proposal is convincing and interesting. Furthermore, you can also profit from other marketers opt in email lists and you can get a flood of new customers very quickly. Promoting your business constantly and regularly is the key to long term growths. Take action today and start to work on your online business goals by implementing the strategies mentioned above. Every day and month which goes by is only lost time which could have been used to market your business slowly but surely. This article can be freely published on a website as long as it's not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below. Jean Lam is the editor of Web Biz Secrets Newsletter. Subscribe today for powerful marketing tips and receive his new PDF eBook "3 SureFire Ways To Start An Internet Business And Strategies To Promote It" Visit his Internet Marketing Resource website.
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Learning More About Your Customers to Achieve Maximum Online Profits! Knowing about the people who buy your products or use your services on the internet is extremely important. If you know what your customers like, dislike, want and think, then you know exactly how to update your site and adapt it. Nothing pleases a visitor more than a site that fulfils everything that they desire. Pleased visitors lead to buyers. Not only will this boost your profits but it will also lead to satisfied customers who will leave your site and tell others. This will boost your web traffic. The 13 Hidden Treasures of Internet Marketing Most people get into internet marketing because it looks like a good way to make money from home. These people usually don't realize that initial sales are only a small piece of the pie. Don't be like them and miss out on all the hidden treasures! What is Guerrilla Marketing? The history of these battles is the history of guerrilla warfare. What Businesses are Succeeding on the Net? The most basic question any Internet business owner will have to answer at one point or another?"what should I sell?". Guru... Schmooru... So What! The Internet Gurus Unmasked The word "guru", in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is defined as: How to Turn Freebies in to Sales You can increase sales and profits by offering freebies to people who buy your main product or service. They increase the over all value of your main offer and in return people feel they're getting more for less. How To Profit From HOT Niche Markets - Every Time! Do you want to learn two proven niche marketing business models that are virtually guaranteed to succeed - in all niches? So do hundreds of my clients. They ask me every day. Beg me to share them. Demand that I reveal them. Internet Marketing: 10 Motivational Insiders Tricks To Attract Thousands Of Visitors If you have a website but not attracting many visitors, it may be because you've not known the insiders secrets that I have. 10 Viral Internet Marketing Strategies That Produce A Massive Surge of Web Site Traffic and Sales 1. Start a newsletter that people can subscribe to, and use an autoresponder service like GetResponse (www.getresponse.com) or Aweber (www.aweber.com) to capture and store your subscribers' contact information. To Survey Or Not To Survey I have learned over the years that when it comes to online marketing as I know it, it's not about what I want in my business. It's really about what people who visit my website want. For awhile I didn't understand that philosophy. How do I find out what people want? Its All About The Leads: Publishing to Capture Profits All online businesses are nothing more than lead capturing machines. They capture traffic from search engines and links from other sources and turn that traffic into leads which turn into sales of products and services being sold on their sites. 7 Tricks for More Holiday Web Sales "Black Friday" has just passed, marking the traditional start of the holiday shopping season. Web sales are already at a record high this year and the fourth quarter of 2004 is projected to bring in $22 billion in online sales alone ? a whole third of the sales for the entire year. (Source: eMarketer.com) Selling to Sellers - Utterly Stupid Idea or Not Quite? The list of promotional tools and resources available to online marketer today is very impressing, and new ones appear almost every day, each fancier and more sophisticated than ever. Almost all of them however are touched (some will even say "cursed") by a sort of the original sin. After all, after SPAM became criminal offence and as the result direct email marketing became all-but-impossible, the only people who see your offer are those who are also trying to sell something. Every thinking person involved in the Internet marketing must have noticed this disturbing fact. Most marketers evidently try to forget, after having classified it as some modern version of the ancient Achilles and the Hare paradox - intellectually sound perhaps, but not really applying to the real world. Other escape into "niche" markets where you sell to "normal people" i.e. not-marketers. Which of course is a perfectly valid and often profitable option. But is it really THE ONLY rational solution? Is it really not possible to sell to other marketers and be successful in that? In my opinion this "selling to sellers" is not at all as absurd as many people believe. It's simply different. And I often wonder why so little has been told about this difference by the experts. Because to me it seems to be the most important aspect of your marketing, the most important initial decision: "Will I be trying to sell things to people at large? Or perhaps will I concentrate on selling tools, resources and information to marketers?". And even the obviously important question of tangible vs. intangible merchandises doesn't seem to me more crucial. There are two main branches of Internet marketing. They are, as I will soon try to prove, very different but none of them is "absurd", "stupid", or by definition unprofitable. Of course, there are many more branches. Whether you're selling tangible or intangible goods is perhaps equally important. I don't know. In any case it's much more obvious and widely understood. (That's probably because selling of tangible goods is as old as the humanity itself, and in it the tested methods of the post-order selling still basically rule, though of course adapted to the virtual reality.) Let's now give those two categories some short, simple names for the use of this text. How about "X marketers" (from eXternal) and "N marketers" (from iNternal)? The X marketers will be those selling to the "world at large", and N marketers will be those selling to fellow marketers. Now, an explanation is needed. When you start your marketing career you don't usually "decide" whether you want to be X or N marketer. It's mostly determined by the promotional tools you have access to at the beginning. If you start without any investments, or only with little ones, you will be using opt-in lists, traffic exchanges, FFA pages and similar resources. Then, by their very nature you start promoting to people who see those ads, and who are those people? Of course they are other marketers using the same tools! You have become an N marketer without even giving this issue much thought. (It can be noted that you are an N marketer trying to sell to other N marketers. Selling to X marketers seems a much more difficult matter, for they don't use the same promotional tools, or at least not in the same extent. You will need to be somewhat of a Guru to start selling to those people! No doubt there's lots of common between those two branches. After all "the money is in the list", and the really big profits come from back-selling to people who have already bought from you, are satisfied, trust you and therefore are willing to buy from you more. This part of your business will be fairly similar, no matter if you send to marketers or non-marketers. There are also important differences of course. If it wasn't so our distinction would have little meaning and so the this article would have no meaning. But those differences are very visible. let's start with the language itself. If you are an N marketer and are successful, have a list of many thousands happy clients and so on -- then you will be soon called a "Guru". If, on the other hand, you're enormously successful in selling let's say 2' x 3' stainless-steel widgets (or ebooks on painless, well-fed & lazy slimming for that matter), which of course means that you are an X marketer, then, even if you have thousands of faithful clients with deep pockets, instinctively reaching for their credit Platinum cards whenever they hear your name... Well, you will of course be admired and envied, not to mention rich, but you won't be called a Guru! You might be called something like "a Great Salesman", which is not too bad of course, but it's not the same,is it? Another difference is that in N marketing you don't usually speak much about "niches". Selling memberships in credit based opt-in lists from some external point of view can be seen as much "niche marketing" as selling, let's say... polishing-wax for pet anacondas. Not true? But I personally have never heard this term used in this context. The most important differences are however in how X's and N's find their clients in the first place. Or sometimes how they let themselves to be found by them. This is not just a play with words, as search engines do exactly that -- they let people find your offer, don't they? There are of course many different types of search engines and similar systems ("normal" search engines, Pay Per Click search engines, directories etc.) but from the viewpoint of the potential client they basically do the same thing. And for the X type marketer they are nowadays one of the very few available means of promotion. Of course it's in large part because they are very powerful tools, providing you with highly targeted hits. If you're able to get high position on those search engines that really matter (and don't get bankrupt on the way, as they tend to be costly) you're almost there. Add some off-line promotion and you're on your way to become The Great Salesman. (Of course all other aspects of your business also must be done right.) If however you have decided that selling to sellers doesn't sound so absurd or pointless as it is often presented, then your options are much more numerous. Which is a good thing of course, though your competition also has the same options, so it's not an unmixed blessing. You must show your offer to marketers, so you need to show it where marketers are looking for offers. Why should they be looking? There are two main reasons. The first reason is that they simply are forced to look at your offers. How? Why? By whom? It's simply that many, if not most, of the methods of online promotion available today base on the principle reciprocality. Which in this context means: "I will take a look at yours if you agree to take a look at mine". Yes, of course, you don't always have to actually look at those offers. Often you can pay the service to show your offers to others and ignore theirs. Still, the people who will see your offer will be those who want to show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devoted to hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something rather than SEE somebody else's offer.) Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketer trying to sell to sellers (N marketer in our terminology) have any advantages over the one trying to sell to non-marketers (X marketer)? My answers would be: YES and YES. Why? There are a few reasons. Some of them pretty trivial though not without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offers from online businesses. Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buying things online. Two sorts of needs in fact. Firstly, the same needs that everybody else has. Secondly, specific needs related to Internet marketing. By being rather more exposed to Internet ads and offers than an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy more things online. But the other type of needs is far more important here. Now for the second type of needs. Marketer will need marketing tools, resources, information... These things change and develop in an enormous pace. This is of course a truism but it's absolutely true. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or information on Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will not plunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it is exactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should be less receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probably much more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends on those tools, information and opportunities. It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, but it must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online and there's no reason to believe that this situation ever radically changes. So it's not only information on new available services and opportunities that is sought after, and therefore sellable. In order to be successful in this sort of business, where there's so much available information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fully trusted, one needs to find their own way. Way of doing business online. Human life being as short as it is, with most often very limited finances (or you wouldn't spend your time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven't found the right method and attained real success in online business will need a "recipe", or, perhaps better, a successful person to help them -- a teacher, or even perhaps what the Americans call "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents to pay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary and very risky thing to do.) If you already are successful, then being the N marketer you have serious advantages. One of them, perhaps the most important, is that you only deal with one (big, that's true) issue: online marketing. As X marketer you would need to handle both marketing itself and the market niche you're in. This fact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketer you're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. What I mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course is Internet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, you will be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen as a crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you are in any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will be much harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested business methods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's the best marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate many new players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicing N marketing. One special advantage that N marketing has is something that I personally call "self-propelling money machines". So far they are not very numerous, at least those that work smoothly and bring tons of money without constant need for adjustments and pushing. But there are some, pretty successful. And their will be more. What are those self-propelling money machines? They are smart combination of promotional resources with selling. One could say that they are resources that sell themselves, automatically. The simpler form cosists of just two main parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something that can be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that was CommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook by Stephanie L. Woolford, a very successful online marketer. (This ebook can be for example found on http://ebiz-guru.com.) Here one can three conceptual modules: the Lead Generating Module, the Selling Module, and an ebook (that can be either free or paid) that ignites the whole process. I'm not sure I managed to describe the idea clearly enough, but it can be understood when seen in action. Ebooks are supposed to be the almost-perfect business and in near future they may really become that. If we assume that this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishing a competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have much greater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previous paragraph included. Which seems to be another advantage of N marketing. So after all Selling to Sellers may not be so stupid idea, wouldn't you agree? Free Demographics or Updated Data? During your search, you may encounter free demographic data. If data is data, then free is better, right? Not necessarily! Census data and commercial data do vary, at times so significantly that you may come to the wrong conclusion by using the latter. Let's take a look at each so that you can make the best decision when purchasing data or reports. Is The Internet the Ideal Marketing Medium? The internet has grown explosively in the ten or so years that it has been in widespread use,and internet marketing has grown along with it. Many factors contribute to making the internet the ideal business medium. Why Do Market Gurus Exploit This? Regardless of what you're trying to sell, you can't sell it without your prospective buyers. And selling through mail successfully depends mostly on how you talk to your prospective buyers. Knowing the psychology of your prospect is a very good advantage to cash in. This is an important guide line to apply when writing sales letters that generate very huge revenue. Hocus Pocus? Its Just Focus! How many times have you wondered what magic formula the top Net earners were using? Sex and the Gods of Internet Marketing Whenever I mention my occupation to a non-wired person, it seems to generate the same response: This Here Web Aint Big Enough For Both Of Us! Can You Corner Web Market Share With Negative Action If you're a fan of Western movies I'm sure you've heard most of the title line before; just replace "Web" with "town." That line of dialog is offered right before the two cowboys go outside and have a deadly gun duel. Wind blown tumbleweeds and shades of the OK Corral as a backdrop! Build Your Marketing Muscle During a saxophone lesson the other day I realized how much regular practice can help a part time internet marketer. My teacher taught me a long time ago to just play for 15 minutes a day to progress. I was shocked when I first started doing it, but it works. And it works fast.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2005 |