The World Business

Archive for the ‘Advertising and Marketing’ Category

by David Batchelor

The suggestions i am dealing with in the following paragraphs, are on online marketing for online businesses. They should make the strategies of internet based promotion more accessible to people.

The understanding of how the internet is used to promote things is crucial. As this makes it clear, that this technique of promotion is geographically not limited. Articles appear online as soon as they get submitted. For this reason article marketing is not vulnerable to time related barriers. Barriers like these, were the biggest hindrance of traditional advertising methods such as the newspaper.

Articles containing backlinks, is a famous concept of advertising. They get submitted to various article publishing websites. These articles are a useful read for the visitors, therefore they will follow up the posted backlink.

Similar to the method described before, is blog commenting. Just as articles do, comments that are posted by advertisers on well read blogs contain backlinks. The reader again, will want to know what the backlink is about. Obviously the comment has to be made on a themed blog relevant to the advert.

Posting banners is nowadays the most common way of promotion, even though it is not free. Websites are paid to post banners of advertising companies’. This method is not effective if the banner is published on a less visited site.

Advertising on the web raised some serious problems. Certain companies use the internet to make profit by betraying peoples’ trust. These groups try to sell fake products online.

This method of online marketing is founded on the idea that the seller can promote scam products as the buyer will not be able to track him after he has purchased the product.

Further concern of internet marketing is the issue of privacy. Companies that are specialized in advertising, see the visitor numbers of the websites they work for. This not only informs them, how many people have visited that site but it also tells them when the people visited it and where they are from. This makes some individuals feel suspicious about internet marketing.

Companies, that operate within a small community might want to chose more traditional ways of promotion such as newspapers. Local people are probably aware of that company and of the newspaper. Therefore their trust is easily won.

These suggestions on online marketing for online businesses are here to further peoples’ knowledge about the basic ideas of online advertising. For those who want to know more about this useful topic, the article presented here is just a brief introduction.

Do you really want to know how to promote home based business network marketing opportunities on the Internet? Distributors from all over the world are coming online and finding out that you can actually recruit people into your organization without having to go to hotel meetings and do things like that. Am I against hotel meetings? No, they are a staple in network marketing and they do provide great energy but as using them for many years they never seem to work for me. I was always left wondering why no one joined me when I attended the meetings.

Do you want to know the reason why nobody joined me? The reason why no one decided to join was simple. I was attacking the wrong target market. In all businesses you have to have a certain and specific target that you want to sell to. The same goes for network marketing. What you should be doing is going out there on the Internet and start finding people who are interested in the concept of network marketing. That’s the big secret.

Why do you want to do this? The reason why you want to do this is simple and is because they are most likely going to join you because they understand what network marketing is already and also there is a great chance that they will be great producers in your organization.

Stop trying to convince other people that you have the best product or service and that your compensation plan is number one in the industry. Instead focus on others who are already interested in the area and know exactly what to do. By doing this personally I have been able to bring many people into my business that are highly qualified and that already know what network marketing is and what needs to be done. This is a simple yet powerful strategy that I suggest you begin to use whenever you decide to get involved in this industry.

One of the most difficult aspects of operating a small business is attempting to decrease your customer acquisition costs to improve profits and in many cases high acquisition costs are what prevent the business from being profitable at all. Most small businesses do not keep track of acquisition statistics so they are unsure of how much it costs for them to acquire each new customer. Without knowing this statistic, it is impossible to truly measure the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing.

One of the ways to help reduce acquisition costs is to use free advertising resources to increase your customer base. With these resources the primary cost is time, which for advertising is a relatively low price. Here are a few resources that small businesses should be taking advantage of to grow their customer base as it will definitely give you a competitive edge over your competition:

Craigslist – Craigslist.com is an online classified website that is free to post listings. Craigslists is one of the top 10 visited websites in the United States and can drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your business. Craigslist has a services section where local businesses can list the products and services that they offer for potential customers. Craigslist is organized by local geographies, therefore you have the potential to drive very local customers to your business. Total time to post an ad on Craigslist is probably about five minutes and will be less once you get the hang of it.

Google Base – Google Base is a free online classified that benefits from the large amounts of traffic generated by Google.com. A simple listing on Google Base can help to drive traffic to your website and although Google claims that it does not make a difference, it is a good bet that the more activity you have on the web properties, the better you will rank in their primary search engine.

Press Releases – The days of needing to be a professional writer to submit a press release are long gone. Now anyone that has knowledge of a product or service should submit press releases to media outlets and can be done easily with free resources. A couple of the sites that I recommend are prleap.com and prfree.com, but there are many others. These services submit your articles to the Associated Press which in many cases will be a distribution of 40,000 subscribers. If only a fraction of the subscribers pick up your article, you benefit. It first establishes you as an authority on the subject matter, but it also generates links back to your website which will increase your search engine rankings. The benefits of these free services can be massive in reducing your customer acquisition costs.

Merchant Circle – Merchantcircle.com is an online business directory that is focused on offering small business websites to promote their business. The main benefit of their service in my opinion is that their pages rank highly in the search engines, therefore, increase the ranking of your website in your local geographic ares. To set up you page only takes about ten minutes.

These are just a few examples of free resources that your business should be using. Think out of the box and do a little research to find out other free resources that will benefit your business. With only one new customer, this form of advertising pays for itself.

January 28, 2009 — Tips for getting your permission-based marketing emails into the inbox and the actual design of the email are closely linked. Here you will find useful information on getting into the inbox, email design tips, and the nexus between the two.

If you are just getting back into email marketing after a break, are new to it, or are sending to an old list, make sure to ramp up your sending. This does not take long. If you have a large list, do not send to your whole list all at once but ramp up incrementally to maximize email marketing deliverability.

It is very important to keep a clean list. Too many hard bounces (email addresses that do not exist any more) can hurt your reputation with the ISPs. Pay close attention to keeping a clean list and purge as many bad addresses off the list as you can before you even send through a new Email Service Provider (ESP). You want to get off on the right foot with good delivery.

Keep in mind that the worst thing you can do to build your email list is to harvest emails off of Web sites, as this a flagrant violation of the CAN-SPAM act.

In addition, do not buy a list from some guy on the Internet who promises you the subscribers have all opted-in. They may have opted-in to hear from someone, but not from you. For you, they are likely to hit the spam complaint button along with the many others to whom this guy has sold the list. Sending to this sort of list will hurt your ability to reach your best customers or prospects.

No matter which ESP you choose, they will assign you an IP address – either shared or private. This IP address, not your email address, is the “Caller ID” of every email that goes out, whether a personal message or email marketing. Make sure you setup a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record that matches the IP your ESP assigned you with the sending domain (yourcompany.com). If you do this, you will be in the elite of email marketers who are following this optimal practice and will have an advantage. If you need help, ask your ESP. If you are a techie or know one, setting up an SPF record in your Domain Name Service (DNS) records does not take long. With many ESPs, you can determine the IP (shared or private) by looking in the settings of the account; with some ESPs you may have to ask them what IP address your emails are coming from.

Here are some additional tips on getting your emails through the spam filters.

Email Marketing Design: The Coin of The Realm

Good email design is not only more appealing to recipients and better for click throughs, but it also makes the spam filters look more kindly on your emails. This matters greatly when it comes to reaching the inbox, but do not forget that people like well designed emails better than something that is hard on the eyes. Your success with achieving your email marketing goals — including click-through-rates (CTR) and conversions — will be greatly enhanced by aesthetically pleasing email design.

One of the top guidelines for email marketing design is not to send out an email that is too heavy graphics or, much worse, one giant graphic. The guiding principle is 60 percent text, 40 percent graphic. Many email recipients view emails in a preview pane, so the top left corner is an ideal location for brand placement and a good enticing lead. Also, keep in mind that many email clients have graphics turned off by default so you have to entice people to click the button that turns graphics back on. The best way to do that is to leverage strong content, a well-designed email, and a good balance between text and graphics. It is always a very bad idea to send out an email that is one large graphic because not only will it lessen the chances that people will read it, but also because spam filters hate one large graphic emails.

It is crucial to remember to include ALT text for any images you include in your emails. The reason is that anything you are trying to communicate through images will be lost until many users turn on the graphics, which usually can be accomplished with a quick click. Entice them with descriptive ALT text that describes the graphic. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then give your recipients a reason to view those images.

Tables are back – which may seem counterintuitive to those of you who have been involved in a Web design project. Tables are an important element of email marketing design.  You can use CSS but it must be inline CSS if you want it to work. Consider tables in your email design and play close attention to using table attributes.

Be aware of the inherent limitations of email programs as compared to Web browsers. Consider that the optimal email width is recommended at 600 pixels wide to accommodate for various browsers and mobile devices. Try to hit this range to avoid wide and unwieldy emails that few will want to read through. You probably want to avoid very long emails as well.

Again, keep in mind that while Web browsers are developed to handle javascript, flash, etc., many emails programs simply cannot handle the fancy stuff.

In addition, make sure to have a link in your email that enables your recipients to view the email as a Web page. Most ESPs provide a very easy way to accomplish this task. Some people will just prefer to view your email as a Web page.

If you combine good design for email with an awareness of both the spam filters and an aesthetically pleasing email for your audience, then you have a recipe for success. Email marketing can be hard work but when done well it yields the highest ROI of any other marketing tactic, which, according to the Direct Marketing Association is nearly $57 for every dollar invested.