Entries Tagged 'Marketing' ↓
February 16th, 2008 — Marketing
What masters of profit have perfectly mastered is to leverage outer resources. In the world of one-man-business it is especially nice to rush into the store full of free candies when you personally cannot afford to buy more than one of them. How? First, by discovering what type of candies you want, second, what kind of stores they can be found at and, last, where these stores are. Here is the partial list of ·candy stores· that I·m sure you can easily benefit from.
Auction/eBay Marketplace
Well-known store or marketplace full of buyers and sellers. You task comes down to either promoting and auctioning your stuff directly or locating ideal power-sellers for arranging lucrative deals as their back-end sales. Either way you benefit from the developed market and exposure of targeted bidders or established customer databases and reputation of power-sellers.
Big vendors and power-sellers have established auction businesses with thousands if not tens of thousands auctions closed with the respective list of subscribers, customers and repeat customers. Ask them to promote your product/service on the back-end as valuable complementary addition to the products they sell or up-sell your solutions through their web-pages or other means.
Offer free copies of your products to reassure vendors in its benefits as well as prepare information necessary for vendor to promote your solution to minimize their efforts and maximize their returns.
eBay of course is not the only auction in town, so you can successfully experiment with this strategy in other places online.
Indexes, Directories & Catalogues
Any accessible professionally organized list of websites, products, ezines, affiliate programs etc. is a valuable resource for respective visitors or buyers. It is clear that submitting your listing there allows you to attract extra market exposure for the item or resource you·ve listed. Depending on the type of catalogue or index you may want to make your listing to be like an ad more or less. Your end-target in most cases is to make people click the link and take your desired action, so approach your submissions as such.
The tastier you listing and its position are and the higher rank of the index, directory or catalogue is, the more exposure and benefit you gain. Want directions? Check out the DMOZ and Google directories. They will swamp you with dozens of relevant niche directories and valuable resources.
This is efficient marketing since, in most of cases, you submit your listing once and benefit ·forever·.
Joint Promotions
Joint promotions help you tap into the other people·s market and goodwill, monetizing their credibility and years of business development. You can participate in either tete-a-tete JV deals or partnerships with multiple parties.
In some cases the combined benefits from multipart promotions are higher than derived from a single affiliate, but it may vary from deal to deal. As you know, there are several ·super-guys·, who can open such a huge customer market to your solution during exclusive tete-a-tete JV deal that no other joint efforts of 5, 10 or even 30 webmasters have chances to compete with.
Your task is all about finding leaders of your niche market and arranging such joint promo deals with them. It many cases, but not necessary, you can locate B2B directories, what means memberships of niche businesses, so you can close deals almost in volumes, without organizing one-on-one JVs over and over again.
Membership sites, associations
We started to look into benefits of membership-based sites, where you can get instant access to systematized list of members or address to them via mass email. Not only does it help you save massive amounts of time, but also money that you otherwise would have had to spend for ads or other means to reach this market.
Here you gain almost similar exposure to showcase your products and services as with the help of super affiliates, close JV deals with respective site owners, promote your relevant publications or offer other type of useful material depending on the aim of the particular membership site. The same goes to Internet associations, where you can find your customers or potential partners in one place. In any case your task is to introduce your business to the members, gaining extra exposure and profits if term ·extra· can be relative to the profits.
You can easily find all types of membership websites depending on your target market by means of Search Engines. It may be useful tip for you: don·t to try to find membership sites first, but search for niche-targeted informational portals, so that you can find there the whole lists of such niche membership resources.
Publicity
Publicity is a great way of covering large customer market for relatively small input. Unlike advertising, publicity exposure is free, long-lasting and catchy.
Publications entice readers of different media to explore your business in more detail.
Often, one free-submitted tasty-written press release can do for you much more than ten super-expensive magazines ads. Publications and press releases will be seen by thousands of publishers, editors and targeted Internet readers what means gold alone. If it is going to be further re-published and announced or you happen to be interviewed by interested media your solutions will surely get thousands of dollars in free publicity. Such action bringing in long-term benefits is the smart marketing indeed. Use it to make more sales.
There is a simple logic line · if you experience shortage of time and money, you need results and you need them fast. You can be sure such ·stores· are almost the perfect places of fast profits you can ever find. Why spend months of SEO, waiting in vain the day when your traffic finally starts buying, when you can access established online ·stores· full of ready-to-buy customers or ready-to-do-business marketers.
Direct your marketing efforts towards attracting massive exposure to your solutions via these ·stores· like all the major players do (if you were smart enough to notice this) and stop wasting your time reading hundreds of all these ·I-want-to-help-you-email-sales-pitches· you get daily. Spend your time on real results and information that show you how to get these results, rather than on reading email solo ads and buying never-to-be-used products.
Pavel Lenshin is an Internet entrepreneur, web-developer and marketer. Learn how you can maximize your online profits and get a free access to special profit opportunities and thousands of dollars of ebooks, reports, software, email courses, audio interviews, exclusive programs, resources and enjoy advanced Internet services. Register now free at http://anesbo.com
February 16th, 2008 — Marketing
The ease with which electronic magazine can be started reminds me joining affiliate programs. This is usually the second step newcomers undertake after realizing absolute vainness of numerous affiliate program promotions.It became so popular, especially, on the Internet “money-making” market that it is very hard to find entrepreneur without one. Indeed, what you need is a notepad, a way to transmit it to subscribers via free to join ezine announcement services or free to setup mailing list script (majority of hosting accounts have them installed or you may install it yourself with a click of a mouse) and, the last thing, the ability to type and the knowledge of “copy&paste” operation. You are set.
Fortunately, Internet is full of free reprint publications that allow you, if desire, to create 15-page newsletter in a matter of 30 min or an hour. The most of this time will go for reading articles to publish and writing short “editorial”.
This easy to implement and powerful method was widely used 5-7 years ago. The publisher quickly gained the “expert” status, attracted advertisers, promoted offers and earned, earned and earned. Such ezine system worked like clock-work. The competition was weak, people just login on the net in desire to discover some new opportunities and gladly “bought”, “participated” and “joined”.
At present there are thousands of publishers who publish their newsletter to tens of thousands other publishers. Is there a way out? Of course. There is always a way out. Some joke, with its own share of truth, states that: “The way out of any trouble is usually located where the entrance is”.
To stand above your competition you need to differ in the best way. Help comes from the golden rule of innovation that proves itself here as well. Requirements became tougher for quality, practical, value-added newsletters filled with personality. This task can easily be achieved when you combine innovation plus knowledge.
The last trend I observe going in the direction of professional, yet simple, one to three pages newsletter that brings practical and original tips with a simple HTML layout.
Professional is not just a meaningless adjective, but essence of newsletter that stresses the importance of expert knowledge of the person who writes materials to it. You or your columnist should be a true expert in the sphere s/he represents.
Second conclusion is that knowledge cannot be “copied”, original content is the vital feature of powerful electronic newsletter nowadays. For this very criteria (original content or not) I can project the level of expertise, establishment and, eventually, the income publisher has, because, in most cases, successful Internet entrepreneurs publish original and unique newsletters only.
Another way to be on top of the market is based on revealing unexplored market niche with big potential and low competition. The benefits of such approach are obvious, but still underestimated by many publishers, who keep on struggling bravely for their share of the “internet marketing” pie, without paying any attention to their natural abilities, hobbies and knowledge background that is neither connected to economics in general nor to management, marketing or e-commerce in particular.
As for the format of ezine distribution, HTML and PDF are to kill text newsletters due to unmatched potential and unbeatable advantages, except for size. While size of the issue may play important role now, I predict a major shift in the nearest future as it cannot compete with interactivity (sometimes in real-time) and reading pleasure that HTML and PDF newsletters can bring. This process reminds development of web-sites that was used to represent simple “notepad” text in the origin of the Internet and after a short period, evolved into design-rich interactive media, the same way text newsletters will go down in history very soon.
First steps are being made in this direction forming new powerful media sector that possesses much more strengths rather than weaknesses. Let us make this incipient trend work for our good.
Pavel Lenshin is an Internet entrepreneur, web-developer and marketer. Learn how you can maximize your online profits and get a free access to special profit opportunities and thousands of dollars of ebooks, reports, software, email courses, audio interviews, exclusive programs, resources and enjoy advanced Internet services. Register now free at http://anesbo.com
February 16th, 2008 — Marketing
Imagine a bookshop selling dental instruments or law agency offering tourist trips instead of legal services. It may be fun to imagine and seems unreal. What is the reason to take a name of an absolutely unrelated field of activity if you get nothing, but customer confuse?On the other hand, for some strange reason the example above “wrapped” into advertising “paper” perceived as a normal and rational way of marketing practice. We get numerous totally unrelated to our scope of activity advertisements through ezine or magazines we are subscribed to. SPAM is, by the way, another example of selling dental instruments in a bookshop.
There is standard ratio adopted in the online business community as a tool for quality evaluation of customer response, it is called “conversion ratio”. It describes what percentage of web-site’s visitors commit the needed action whether it is a sale, subscription, signup for an affiliate program or other.
Tracking this ratio can be a valuable asset in estimating marketing activity, promotional measures, development of product etc. All these factors influence this ratio as well and may easily “say” what is good for customer and what is bad. Every business online strives to achieve higher “conversion rate” for one simple reason - that would mean increase in sales, subscriptions, affiliate signups or other.
One of the easiest and usually fallacious way of raising your business “conversion rate” is narrowing your marketing focus or selecting more targeted niche-market inside the one you are working at. This way doesn’t demand spending money or time for inventing more powerful marketing schemes or improving your product. Instead, direct your marketing campaign to more targeted and more interested in your offer groups of people. The fact about their higher interest in your offer will by itself increase response rate at your site without any additional measures.
It is so easy to sell a glass of cold water to strangers in desert rather than to people at North Pole.
Second stage of your customer-targeting attitude may lie in creation of more addressed promotional materials. Materials that are capable to “speak” with your potential customer as closest friends, who know all the fears and hopes your customer feels. This way your visitor, listener or reader will feel more involved, interested and more likely to “follow your way”.
Your targeted customer market may be further diversified by age, interests or financial capacity, so you can prepare even more targeted materials addressed to this particular group of people for the short time of your direct advertisement campaign.
In order to prepare such addressed marketing campaign you need to evaluate fears and hopes together with what your potential customers already know, what they are looking for and what they expect from the product you are offering.
As a result of such research you should have more targeted sales/promotion materials and niche-oriented sales copies. It may even be a good move to create several versions of sales copy for different groups of people, changing them depending on what niche you are currently advertising in.
Pavel Lenshin is an Internet entrepreneur, web-developer and marketer. Learn how you can maximize your online profits and get a free access to special profit opportunities and thousands of dollars of ebooks, reports, software, email courses, audio interviews, exclusive programs, resources and enjoy advanced Internet services. Register now free at http://anesbo.com
