Resource of Marketing & Advertising

1. E-mail courses are generally quick and easy to create. Contents for your e-mail courses are everywhere old articles, interviews, information from doing research. You only need to know how to organize them and make the content easy to understand and follow.

2. You can append your sales letters at the end of your e-mail courses. People who take your e-mail courses can learn something valuable from you first, and when they’re done, they will be more receptive to your follow-up letters.

3. E-mail courses can help you attract visitors to your Web site. You can’t put everything in an e-mail course so you can actually place links within your e-mail course messages. These links can point to more information found on your site. You can promote your Web site’s URL in each message.

4. E-mail courses can help you gain more subscribers for your e-zine. Make people aware that subscribers of your e-zine are always the ones to get first dibs on your e-mail courses.

5. You can run your e-mail courses hands-free. You just need to create and arrange your e-mail messages in the order you want them to be delivered to your participants, then put them in a sequential autoresponder. Your e-mail courses then become your 24/7 promoter!

6. E-mail courses can help you get leads and you can promote your products or services to these people. And by making your e-mail courses 100% opt-in, the risk of being accused of sending unsolicited e-mails is significantly reduced.

7. People won’t ever need to download any special software before they can take your e-mail courses. All they need is an e-mail address. They can read your e-mail course lessons straight from their e-mail clients (Eudora, Pegasus, Outlook Express) or on the Web (Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail or any Web-based e-mail).

8. You can tailor your e-mail courses to promote specific products or services you are selling on your Web site. If your e-mail course consists of 10 lessons delivered in 10 e-mail messages, then people who take your e-mail course are exposed to your product or service 10 consecutive times. This definitely increases your chances of getting your product or service bought.

It’s no secret that Search Engine marketing can drive significant amounts of very qualified traffic to a web site as 85% of Internet users utilize search engines to find/research for goods and services. The problem for many companies is the difficulty they face sifting through conflicting information and hyperbole! Here is my top five list of myths that need to be run to ground.

Search engine ranking leads are not as good as those which originate from other forms of traditional marketing this is absolute hogwash, the truth is many agencies don’t have a clue about s/e ranking, so they push their clients to ignore this form of advertising. They simply don’t want to recommend anything they don’t understand and/or utilize an interactive marketing vehicle that requires a blend of very specialized technology and processes.

We’ve in fact found just the opposite when we’ve analyzed s/e traffic versus other types of leads for our clients; i.e. search engine traffic can be much better, as it is comprised of individuals who are actively seeking info, not just people whose curiosity has been piqued by an eye-catching publication ad or press release. And, when we’ve analyzed the data by tracking leads via a landing page we’ve discovered that CPL (cost per lead) numbers can be much lower for s/e ranking than other more traditional marketing methods.

Big Picture Myth Two – Effective s/e marketing can be done in house – this is rarely the case, the sheer complexity and online competition (digital warfare!) for rankings makes this extremely difficult for most companies. Based upon our analysis over 73% of corporate accounts don’t understand the basic fundamentals; i.e. how to properly use keywords, meta tags and titles and worse, don’t submit their web sites to top tier Directories (Yahoo, LookSmart, OPD) and the hundreds of second tier directories.

Most companies delegate the s/e submissions to the webmaster or web site development staff and they just don’t have the time to understand the daunting complexities required to generate page 1-3 rankings or to stay abreast of the shifting submissions and ranking criteria standards, as modified monthly by top tier search engines. And, in many companies the s/e ranking is added to the over worked webmaster’s tasks purely as an afterthought – as opposed to being addressed formally by the marketing department, with dedicated personnel and a budget.

Big Picture Myth Three – off the shelf software that submits a site to thousands of web sites and presents snazzy reports can do it all. This is so inaccurate and nothing can be further from the truth – it takes a tremendous amount of labor and time to identify keyword sets (not just words), optimize the content for these keywords, submit the pages while obeying the rules of the road and then continually analyzing rankings and tweaking to maintain and drive rankings (web site visibility).

Software can certainly help to automate some facets of the process and be used for back end analysis – but you can’t expect any application to make the job easy, there is too much inherent complexity in the processes. And, competition for keyword sets is fierce as there are an estimated 5-10M registered domains (the numbers vary widely) with 60K new domains being registered every day.

Big Picture Myths Four and Five, Any page listing will help to drive traffic to a web site this is another misconception. If you are aren’t achieving page 1-3 rankings then your wasting a great deal of time and resources – most people never drill down below these pages. Another common mistake is trying to achieve s/e rankings for a specific URL or product if people know the name of a company or product they will find your web site easily, it’s a waste of resources to optimize for these specialized terms in 80% of most cases.

Instant Messaging is rapidly becoming accepted in the business community as a viable communications tool and process it’s faster than e-mail, free on the client side, even a novice user can easily grasp the interface in just a few minutes and it enables remote workers and business partners to “talk” and share files and information effortlessly using the in-place infrastructure of the internet. Its mushrooming in popularity too according to IDC, corporate and general business users will jump from 5.5M in 2001 to close to 200M by 2004.

What are some of the pitfalls and concerns you need to have when assessing and integrating Instant Messaging (”IM” another biz acronym) with your business processes? Be aware you are sending clear text messages over the public Internet so all IM technology is inherently insecure. Privacy issues can also be raised - these messages are typically archived via the IM servers of the company whose services you are using and can be made public at a later date. Anyone with a network scanner may have access to and be reading your messages and if your are downloading files, you need to ensure your anti-virus software is setup to scan these files when you open them. Read More »

White space in newsletters is like pausing in conversation. Take a breath now and then to avoid overwhelming the reader.

It’s tempting to pack a business e-newsletter tight with content. After all, goes the rationale, the piece appears more substantial, more authoritative.

However, in the audio book, “Sound Advice on Publishing E-Newsletters,” author Michael Katz says that laying out text in big, chunky paragraphs creates an obstacle to effective communications.

Katz relates a recent experience with newsletters written by a professional services company. “What they had in place was actually pretty good – professional design, good content – and yet something was wrong.” The newsletters were difficult to read because the great content was too dense.

Katz sites three important reasons for inserting frequent paragraph breaks to increase white space.

First, it’s hard to read on screen. “By breaking up newsletter paragraphs into little pieces, you make it easier for your readers to get through the material.

Second, people like to skim. “Studies of online habits,” says Katz, “show that people jump around. Shorter paragraphs help readers pick out things of interest to them.”

Third, white space makes the text feel more conversational. “Think about the way dialogue in a book is laid out on a printed page. Lots of short, one or two sentence paragraphs. When your e-newsletter writing uses this same approach, it has a much more personal rhythm to it.”

“Pull Marketing” has always been, and will continue to be the most effective internet marketing strategy at your disposal. Allow me to explain. Most marketing efforts can be placed into one of three categories:

1. “Push Marketing” or advertising basically screams at the viewer. “Hey Look at ME, Buy My Stuff NOW!” Because we are exposed to this type of marketing thousands of times a day, we’ve learned to tune it out, hate it and even protest against it. Look at SPAM for instance. People even get arrested for using email to “Push” their offers in front of us!

With Push Marketing we have no choice in the matter. We get a sales pitch whether we want it or not. And who doesn’t want a choice in what they see, read or hear? Read More »

Speak to almost any self employed professional and most of them will say that they love their job but don’t care much for selling their services. Here’s some advice to help all those reluctant professionals who need to sell to clients.

We have identified 9 basic selling skills that will help you to sell your product or service. Ensure that you and your sales team master these skills and you will be successful at selling.

Research shows that fear of selling is one of the greatest barriers to business success and, often, professionals are the worst of all. But whether you are an accountant, advertising excec or business coach you still have to sell to keep the business coming in.

We have found a few ideas that will help you to become successful at selling yourself. The main idea is to know your product, know your client and be prepared and professional. The following tips will greatly enhance your ability to sell. Read More »

Wondering to know the most effective marketing solution for your business? While the television ads and printed posters can easily to be ignored by those people, it is now the time for you considering mobile marketing then. Imagine what people will do once they receive text message on their mobile phone? Yes, they will read it and at that point you have successfully to spend your money to the right thing.

CellitMarketing.com is the site where you can get the Cellit Mobile Marketing assistance, the expert mobile marketing provider, which allows you to send your discount offers or special menu promotional messages to thousands of people in simple way. Here you are allowed to specify your market range, such as the gender, age, location, interest, and many more. This will increase your chance to get potential customers through it and obviously saving your money for unnecessary cost as you have narrowed recipients into the potential market range.

For your best consideration, be sure you checked the number of clients been using their service and there you will see that Cellit has successfully to gain trust from many companies in around the country as well as the international companies for their marketing campaign. One thing for sure is that almost everyone now has mobile phone in their pocket, which it means that it should be much easier for you to get the direct marketing campaign through their mobile lines than other ignorable platform. And there Cellit is there to accommodate you with the this mobile marketing system.

The application is quite simple though that you will be given the Short code for the access to their service and there you can publish your advertisement at any way you like it. Thanks to Cellit and its incredible mobile marketing system as now business owners can simply to figure out new effective marketing solution and to spend their money wiser than before.

One of the greatest challenges to effectively marketing a business is determining which marketing method is best suited for your business.

Most people look at what their competitors are doing to market their businesses and then simply imitate that, whether good or bad.

The best marketing strategy does not involve selecting only one or two marketing approaches that we see others using.

The best marketing approach resembles an octopus.

An octopus is very effective at catching food with eight limbs. If the octopus loses one limb it may momentarily lose some of its strength and agility, but it adapts and continues on as an effective hunter and predator.

It’s the same with marketing your business. The more marketing approaches you use simultaneously the more successful you can become and the easier it is to continue growing your company.

You will continue to thrive despite the challenges that your competitors may face. No setback in any one marketing approach will ever devastate you or pose major problems.

Despite the many options available most companies use no more than two or three marketing methods at best to grow their company.

Few realize that there are over 100 methods for bringing in new business, for increasing web traffic, for selling more to existing clients, and for increasing repeat sales that their competitors are not using.

They basically imitate worms in their marketing attempts. A worm’s approach to life is singular. It does not use multiple limbs because it has none. Its existence is slow and labor-intensive. Very unlike an octopus.

The great thing about this is that most competitors are making this same mistake. They may be too busy, too shorthanded, or too myopic to do much more than hand out boxes of business cards and sit around talking ‘fish stories’ of the one that got away.

That is a marketing approach to avoid.

Don’t just settle for an ad in the yellow pages, your local newspaper, or on the radio.

Use as many marketing methods as make sense for your industry, your market, and your company. Then you will become a marketing octopus while your competitors remain marketing worms.

1. Pick 4 or more articles you’ve written that have a common theme and put them in an autoresponder series. Announce it on your site as an e-mail course on the go.

2. If you have a page for related links, create a related links file and put it on autoresponder. This can be a one-page e-mail containing 15-50 links that are of interest to your visitors. Put your own promotional texts or blurbs at the top, middle and bottom of the e-mail.

3. Create a fun or trivia quiz, put it up on your site and put the answers in an autoresponder that your visitors can request. This way, you’ll know the people who took your quiz.

4. Write reviews of books, music, e-books, sites, software or anything you can think of and put each review (or related reviews) in an autoresponder. If what you are reviewing have affiliate programs, use your affiliate links in the autoresponder.

5. Run a contest on your site or e-zine, then have your visitors or subscribers send their responses to your autoresponder. This way, you won’t have to worry about manually sending them a confirmation receipt.

6. Create a frequently updated autoresponder and let your visitors and/or subscribers know about it. You can put in weekly tips or links to useful resources in the autoresponder and a reminder to the people who request it that you update it every week or on a regular basis (e.g. tell them to request for the same autoresponder again a week from now). You can use this method instead of using autoresponders with limited follow up messages.

7. If you’ve written 20 or more articles and you have them on separate autoresponder accounts, create a master list for your articles. In this master list, list the titles of your articles, their autoresponder addresses and their short descriptions. You can then just promote this master list.

8. Put excerpts or free chapters of your e-book, book or paid e-mail courses in an autoresponder series, then include your follow up sales letters at the end.

9. If you’re selling your own products, put your testimonials on autoresponder, along with the description of your products, an excerpt or a free chapter. This will increase your credibility.

10. Keep track of people who download your free e-book, e-report, or free software by putting their download links in an autoresponder. When you promote your free product, you can just promote the autoresponder address.

11. Put links to your hidden pages on autoresponder. A hidden page could be the affiliate page where you have all the graphics, text links, promotional articles that interested affiliates can use. Let people know they can have free access to your affiliate page by requesting the autoresponder. This way, you can have a list of people who are interested in becoming your affiliates.

A new client recently emailed us a brief here at Mano Design. It was very brief brief indeed. All it said was, “Can you write me some copy for a postcard?” Resisting the urge to write, “Dear Customers. Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. Love, The Client,” we asked him for a more detailed brief and explained why it was necessary.

Why Write a Brief?

Even with something as simple as a small piece of copy, a proper brief will save you time and money.

The agency will also have a better chance of getting the work right first time, so you get the quality of work you expect. Plus, it gives you something to measure the agency’s work against; i.e. how well they responded to and met the brief.

What is a Brief?

A brief (sometimes called a ‘creative brief) tells the agency what objective you are seeking to achieve. It answers the ‘where are we now’ and ‘where do we want to get to’ questions.

Ideally, the brief should be a written one. It focuses attention and provides the foundation for your marketing campaign. The brief should be agreed by both you and the agency before work begins and it can to some extent form a sort of contract. Read More »