Category: Online Biz Tips

Online marketing presents you with an opportunity to get more bang for your buck compared to traditional marketing. This is particularly true for word of mouth marketing.

Word of Mouth Marketing on The Web

Word of mouth marketing refers to a type of marketing that promotes something by enticing independent parties to promote the service, idea or product to friends.

The idea is to create a buzz for the subject matter. In creating the buzz, the goal is to create enough word of mouth momentum to get the idea to spread quickly. People are the sole conduit for the momentum.

If you get it right, an entire product can become an established success with little or no paid marketing.

A classic example of word of mouth marketing, often called viral, is the situation involving Red Bull. Red Bull is an energy drink. When it was first introduced in Europe, rumors spread that the drink was an aphrodisiac. Nobody knows who started the rumors, but Red Bull became very popular. It then evolved into a mixer for alcoholic drinks in nightclubs and the rest is history. It is a hugely popular product and much of the popularity arose through this word of mouth process.

Word of mouth marketing online works in much the same way. The primary difference is it tends to happen much quicker than in the real word. The Internet is full of forums where like minded people congregate. A new, cool product, idea or service can blow up a site over night. If you don’t believe me, consider the wild success of the My Space platform, Napster, EBay and so on.

Most of these sites grew into behemoths because of word of mouth endorsements, not paid advertising.

Obviously, this type of marketing can lead to tremendous riches. Unfortunately, it isn’t particularly easy to accomplish. Everyone is trying to do it, so you really need to be pushing something unique.

If you can come up with something, it is time to hit forums and other sites to create a buzz.

A traditional way to pursue viral marketing online is to offer a free e-book. The book will detail your thoughts on some subject matter, such as marketing.

One makes the book available for downloading and also allows people to send it to others. If you are offering something of quality, the book should spread quickly to thousands and thousands of people.

The ultimate goal is to promote it over and over until hundreds of thousands of people have read it. At that point, you write another e-book which you sell for $3 to $7.

If people liked the first book, they will buy the second.

If 100,000 read the first one and only 10 percent buy the second, you will have 10,000 sales.

This strategy has been pursued over and over by many authors.

The word of mouth approach is definitely a hit and miss strategy. The large online communities make it a viable strategy, but there are a lot of people trying to do it.

If you fail 50 times, but succeed once, life will be very good.

How you would like to meet and communicate with other Internet users, especially ones that share the same views and beliefs as you do? When it comes to easily finding and communicating online with other Internet users, social networking sites are, perhaps, the best way to go.

If you are interested in joining a social networking website, the first thing that you will need to do is find a network to join. You can easily find a number of networks by performing a standard Internet search. For the best search results, you may want to search with the words social networking or social networking websites. In your search, it is likely that that you come up with a fairly large number of different networking sites. Popular sites that may be included in your search results may include, but will not be limited to, MySpace, Orkut, Yahoo! 360, FriendFinder, FriendWise, Facebook, and Classmates.

Once you have made the decision to join a particular social networking website, whether or not it is one of the ones mentioned above, you will need to need to register with the site. Even free networking communities require that you go through the registration process. Once you are registered, you should be able to start communicating with other community members. Before you start communicating, you may need to develop your online profile or profile page, depending on the networking site in question. Although it may seem easy enough to create a profile, there are many Internet users who are unsure exactly what they should and should not include.

Perhaps, one of the most important things to include in your online website is your picture. While a personal picture is optional, it is ideal. Many Internet users enjoy taking to someone that they can see in their minds, without a picture this is difficult. If you are looking to use social networking websites just to meet new friends you may not necessarily need to post a private picture, but you may need to if you are looking to find love online. When it comes to Internet dating, many individuals will not even view an online profile if a picture is not included.

In addition to your photograph, you may want to include your name. Now, when it comes to your name, you need to be cautious. You are advised against giving your full name, especially if your profile or profile page contains a personal photograph of you. In addition to your name, you may want to put down your location. As with your name it is important to display caution. Your picture, your address, and your full name can be dangerous, especially if it falls into the wrong hands. As much as you would like to fill your social networking profiles with personal information, you are advised to think about your safety before anything else.

You may also want to include information on yourself. This information may include your hobbies, issues that are important to do, your likes, and your dislikes. With many social networking websites, including MySpace, you will find that there are preset profile fields for this information. In addition to preset questions or categories on your likes and dislikes, you may also find additional information, including fun questionnaires. Many social networking websites will ask that you describe your favorite color, your goals in life, your most embarrassing moment, and so on. As with your other personal information, it is important to stay as vague and possible and not use any full names, especially real ones.

By keeping the above mentioned points in mind, you should not only be able to create an online social networking profile that is filled with valuable information, but you can do so while staying safe at the same time. Your safety on the Internet is in your hands, that is why it is important to think about safety, as well as Internet popularity.

Whether you love it or hate it, marketing and sales are critical to the life blood of any business. You can make it more fun, if you take the approach that you want to seriously flirt with a growing list of prospects.

Marketing attraction. It sounds like flirting doesn’t it? And in a way, that’s exactly right.

You do want to flirt with your prospects, to allow them to get to know, like, and trust you. Since it takes upwards of 7 touches to make a sale today, you need to attract them to your product, service, or program in many different ways.

One critical element you must have in your basket of attraction tools today is a fully developed web presence.

People are most likely to google for you or your service or the benefit/solution they seek first. They are less likely to open the telephone book and flip through the yellow pages. The future of your marketing reach is the internet.

Even with the internet, you need an arsenal of marketing strategies to reach your prospects and attract them to your product and services. You can’t flirt with them, if they can’t find you.

Here are a few ideas which you can do quickly and on a budget. They are culled from the likes of Mitch Meyerson, Jay Conrad Levinson, Seth Godin, and Bea Fields.

On your website:

* Build a powerful direct response entity

* Make sure your headlines are engaging with a problem/solution approach

* Direct their eyes to the one thing you want them to do

On your email signature:

* Include your business contact information, of course

* Promote one thing – a new product, service, newsletter, article, free conference call.

This is your best and first opportunity to ask everyone to engage with you and your company

Develop relationships for referral business – complementary services serving the same market niche and get listed on their websites

Include client testimonials – use them in all your printed and online collateral materials.

The hottest new thing is audio and video testimonials you put up on your site.

Use audio and video conferencing from your PC for sales, presentations, meetings. They work effectively for a prospects, clients and vendors. It’s no longer novel. It’s cost effective, timely, direct, and can be very interactive.

Write articles and press releases about everything you do and get them published in print but more importantly across the web.

Yes, all of these are ideas you can do yourself, burning the midnight oil.

But what’s even better, is that these tools and systems can be delegated and automated – one more way for you to generate more profit in less time.

Here is a helpful exercise on how to research and prepare promotional marketing materials to bring the right people to your business. When I do this exercise with my marketing students, we always have a lively conversation that not only sparks solutions but also leaves participants feeling enthused, inspired, even excited about showing up in the marketplace.

The themes we explore and the fun we have doing this exercise are so central to an authentic approach to small business marketing that I have decided to highlight them in this article.

First, let us stipulate that somewhere in the world there are prospective clients or customers who will fit you and your work “just right.”

(If this does not feel true for you yet, then you have work to do. Perhaps you need training, practice, or mentoring before you can attract “just right” customers. Or perhaps, like I did with my art business, you are trying to make an avocation into a vocation. For now, let us assume that you are in the right business with the right skills.)

Second, let us assume that “just right” clients are those who get great value from working with you just the way you are. These are clients who share enough of your standards and values that it is easy to develop mutual respect, appreciation, and benefit. With these two assumptions in mind, here are some unconventional yet highly productive questions to help focus the image, tone, and message that will attract clients who fit “just right.” Answer them quickly to tap into your creative subconscious. There will be plenty of time later for thinking about the answers and deciding when and how to use them in sharing your gifts with the world.

1. If your work were a color, what color would it be?

2. What shape would it be?

3. How big would it be?

4. What texture would it have?

5. If you pressed it with your finger, what would happen?

6. If your work were a popular song, what song would it be?

7. Who would be singing?

8. How loud?

9. If your work were an historic personage, who would it be?

10. If your work were going to a party, what would it wear?

11. If your work had a typical mood, what would it be?

12. If your work were a plant, what kind of plant would it be?

13. In what environment would it thrive?

14. If your work were an animal, would it be domestic or wild? How big?

15. If your work were a meal, what kind of meal would it be? (Fast food? Haute cuisine? Mac and cheese?)

What is the point of questions like these? Simply this: Answering them can reveal aspects of your personality that inform and augment the work you do. By surfacing these unique associations, you will be unearthing imagery and attitudes you can use to set the tone for your marketing so that it is easy for your “just right” clients to differentiate you from other people doing similar work.

Try this exercise – it could be the start of something beautiful.

Creating (or buying) high quality content for your site is without a doubt one of the most important activities you can do. Content truly is king. You want to consistently add good content to your site. This is what will attract people to your site, and more importantly bring them back. Most people won’t buy something until their 3rd time on a website. You want to give them as much of a reason to comeback as possible, and nothing does that better than good quality content.

Content will also catch the eye of Google. If you are creating a new blog post in WordPress every time you add content, that is a separate page that can be indexed in Google. The more pages you have in Google, the more chance people have to find you AND the more powerful your site is to Google itself (better Google rankings).

Fresh content is another big favorite of Google. A site with fresh content will out rank one with stale content all things considered.

Great content is also a traffic driver. You can try all of the traffic techniques you want but NOTHING will top your content going viral. If your content is good enough, people will share it. Social media makes sharing things so easy now, that nothing can compare with the traffic driving power of “word-of-mouth”.

If you want to build backlinks, drive traffic, increase your Google rank and create repeat web visitors – then you need to create good content on a consistent basis.

What is money? A child might say that it’s something rich people have and poor people don’t. An engineer might go into a detailed and lengthy explanation, but we all know that money is what really “makes the world go around.”

In the business world, money is the definition of success or failure. That’s why it’s vitally important that every entrepreneur has a good understanding of money – even if their business is still struggling to get off the ground.

Have you ever noticed that people who have a lot of money are magnets for more money? I’ve listened to the gripes and accusations of onlookers who accuse them of being born with a silver spoon in their mouth among other things, but it’s more than that. The secret is that they UNDERSTAND money.

Financially successful people can spot opportunities to create more money in a heartbeat. They understand the money system and how it works. They know the magic of creating money. They have experience under their belt.

Understanding money is a key ingredient to becoming someone who has money, and fortunately it’s getting easier instead of harder to do just that. Think about it. A checking and savings account used to be the only options within realistic reach of the “average Joe”. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that there’s an amazing menu of options available at any bank or savings and loan company you walk into.

What does that mean? It’s time to get busy and become students of money. If we’re going to have a lot of it, we need to understand how to invest and manage it. I can already hear it… So what if you don’t have much to manage and invest at the moment! Prepare for the future

Here are 3 easy steps to get started…

1. Think like a millionaire

I know that’s tough to do, when you’re struggling just to pay for your overhead, but attitude is half of the battle. If you think like successful business owner, you’ll soon find out that money really is attracted to the “rich.”

2. Become Financially Literate

There are a million-and-one self help books on the market for people looking for information on money investments. Learn from the best. Find a few reputable authors and read, read, read. Subscribe to money magazines and “The Wall Street Journal.” Read what the rich read.

3. Make Informed Decisions

Once you know the ins and outs of the money world and have studied the successes and failures of others, it’s time to put your knowledge to work. When the opportunity knocks, you’ll be ready to open the door and greet it with a confident smile.

Your new knowledge and attitude will make you a marketer to be reckoned with. No more slouching around and pointing fingers at the rich marketer down the block. You’ll be one of them. You’ll have the tools to use every opportunity to create more success.

Customers love to help themselves. They can get what they want when they want them not when someone else is ready to serve them. This is where e-business can really make a difference, by extending your existing customer service systems over the Web. Web-based or online service allows your customers to find out what they need at the touch of a button, anytime of the day or night. Whether its actual transactions or account details, they will appreciate a better level of service, making it easier for them to do business with you. All within a secure web environment.

But as a customer you are probably wondering why it is better to opt for online printing than the traditional printing service. Well for one, online printing service allows you to produce and order documents with just a few clicks of the mouse. The web-based printing company will receive your order, print them and ship them right at the comfort of your home. The efficiency, convenience and ease that are offered by online printing can present a lot of benefits to you. When you are looking for the lowest price for your print job, all you have to do is do some comparison shopping until you see the lowest bid. You need not write bid letters to find the vendor that best cater to your printing needs.

Say for example you have a poster that needs to be printed as soon as possible and in huge quantity. After surfing through the net you find this site that offered you an incredibly low price. Great! Not only will you save money but you will also be able to track the progress of your print job without the hassle of missing phone calls from the sales person. And you also have the advantage of having several choices in layout, ink, paper and typefaces when you are having trouble with your design.

But as they say there are always two sides in a coin, if there is a yin there’s always a yang. So even if online printing has its benefits, of course it has its downsides. First off, going online for your printing needs necessitates you to do it ahead if time. If you need your poster printed by next month you have to start that online search as early as today. Remember that delivery and printing may take a few days so do it ahead of time. Additionally, there is lack of personal interaction with the vendor and lack of control over the job when you go for online printing. The Internet is your only way to track the progress of your print job. So you need to have lots and lots of faith to your printer. When you are able to trust your printer, you will have less worry of not getting your print job the way you want them to be.

Nevertheless, modern technology has brought a lot of options when it comes to print jobs. Online printing has offered customers and printers alike a brand new way of doing business. That is why; sometimes the best service is no service.

1. Listen to (and write down!) the questions your clients ask. They’re clues to the problems you can help them solve. They’re also topics for your next article, talk and e-newsletter. Don’t invent this stuff – just listen!

2. Plan and write out your next sales conversation. Got a meeting next week with a hot prospect? Write down the words you will use to find out who the decision makers are, what the budget is, the scope of their problem, and how you’ll ask them to take next steps. If you have no idea how to do this, send me an email and I’ll help you think through it.

3. Read a marketing article. Most non-marketers don’t go out of their way to read about marketing. A painless way to stay motivated, though, is to read one new article every week. Start here: YOUR BLOG HERE 🙂

4. Pay attention to the marketing messages all around you. See if you can pick out the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) and call-to-action (what they want you to do). Practice thinking like a marketer.

5. If you manage others who perform your client work, visit a client with your employee to show interest. This keeps you fresh and demonstrates your commitment to the client. It also shows the client that there’s more to your organization than their sole point of contact.

6. Give a copy of this article to your staff and ask them to come to the next staff meeting prepared to talk about the ideas that this generates. Ask people to commit to one new task. Have them give a progress report at the next meeting. Rinse, repeat.

7. Draft a 3 or 4-question survey to do short, conversational telephone interviews with your target audience to find out what they struggle with…what’s on their wish list…what they want from you.

Do NOT ask them if they want to buy anything from you. This is a relationship-building task, NOT a sales call. That comes much later. Ask others you work with to pick two clients or prospects and call them. Compare notes and discuss your findings.

8. Think of small solutions that you can offer to important problems. Or small solutions to little problems. The key is to think small. It’s less intimidating for your customer to “sample” you and makes it easy for them to take a first step.

9. Practice saying your Positioning Statement out loud. To the mirror. In the car. In the elevator. If you don’t know what your Positioning Statement is, that’s a problem. Email me and I’ll give you a hand.

10. Visualize doing any one of these things successfully. Really – it’s what professional athletes, speakers, performers, and successful people do all the time. Visualize it, and it will be so.

The next time a scientist tells me they can’t market, I’ll know better. These ideas clearly prove that theory wrong!

1. Lack of Focus – It is important to focus on one niche, website or method at a time. You don’t want to multitask between 500 things. You will never learn what works and what doesn’t unless you focus on one thing and give it a fair chance. The added focus will ensure you see results as quickly as possible.

2. Buying Every Product – I spent a lot of money on money making systems, turnkey solutions, push button cash generating reports etc… To be perfectly frank, I got ripped off a couple times. Not only that, I lost my focus because I had bought reports on 20 different ways to make money. There is nothing wrong with buy these reports, but you don’t have to buy everyone you see.

3. Not Following Through – If you buy some sort of product – then make use of it. Don’t just file it away. Buying a product is useless unless you USE it. This is exactly why I wasted so much time and money. I would buy a product or system and then never follow through on it. I wouldn’t get results right away so I would give up. I did this over and over again with no results. If you don’t follow through on your campaigns you will not make money.

4. Underestimating Sales Copy – This came up on 4 out of 7 marketers lists. It is something I wouldn’t have thought of — but it instantly hit home. Never underestimate the power of sales copy. It is definitely worth learning. My major issue was never believing those long sales pages would ever work on anyone – since they have NEVER worked on me. I assumed people were like me – but I was wrong. Luckily I learned my lesson early. If you are thinking of investing money into your online marketing – consider a high quality Sales Copy course. Even a basic understanding will dramatically increase your results.

5. Lack of Confidence – The above 4 points came from other marketers, but this last one came to me. You need to be confident when you are working online. You will hear people in the outside world doubt you, and people on the online world can be downright brutal. Don’t listen to them. If you are intelligent, willing to learn and hard working you can and WILL success making money online. Don’t let anyone talk down to you. If you fail, pick yourself up and keep trying. There is money to be mad, and you can earn it. Don’t believe otherwise.

Learning from your own mistakes is a quick way to learn. Even faster than that though, is learning from our mistakes. That takes out the time you waste making mistakes in the first place 🙂

Video: Brad explains what document sharing is and how you can use it to get traffic to your website.