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  • How To Work With Offline Companies: Go Local

    If you’re an online company who specializes in consulting, you’d be wise to turn your eye to the thousands of businesses that have no sort of Internet footprint whatsoever. Your business may primarily deal with startups who come to you looking to better their Internet presence, but the fact of the matter is that there are potentially millions of dollars worth of customers who won’t look your way at all. This is not because they’re inherently opposed to the Internet, just that many people are wary of the Internet and don’t know how to approach it at all.

    The people who aren’t on the Internet at all should be a prime concern if you’ve got an online consulting business that deals with helping companies improve their online images. Of course, most of the time you’re used to having clients come to you to request your services, but being proactive on your part can reap great rewards. Not only is this a mostly untapped source of revenue, but also most businesses can benefit from any sort of online presence, even if it’s something as simple as a Twitter account. If you can introduce web-wary clients to these easy to navigate tools, you’ll be able to build a steady business relationship with them and help them take it to the next level when they feel comfortable.

    Of course, the first question to ask is thus: how do you, an online consultant, get in touch with companies who aren’t online at all?

    The simple answer? Go local.

    You likely know of a few hole in the wall spots around town that aren’t likely to have a very strong Internet presence, if they have one at all. Consider actually physically going to these businesses – yes! Get off the Internet for a moment – and see if you can talk with the owners about their online marketing potential. Of course, acting like a door-to-door salesman might not be your style, but consider working through contacts to see if you can speak with the owner on a more “friendly” level, rather than walking straight up and offering your services. Not to say that the blunt approach won’t work sometimes – you might be surprised with how often it will – but being able to work through connections will often make the process easier. And once you have one client under your wing, it’s amazing how fast word will spread.

    The old adage “think globally, act locally” is so true in the case of online consulting companies working with offline customers. You’ll need to think of terms of the Internet – which is a worldwide endeavor – but also bring your local knowledge and connections into play as well. When you combine these two initiatives, you’ll be surprised at how powerful they can be.

  • How to Use Twitter for Your Online Business

    Video: Brad discusses how to effectively use Twitter in your online business.

  • The Offline SEO Approach: Step 3, Engagement

    One of the primary reasons that social media exists in the first place is to engage. Social media gives people a platform to reach out to each other, whether that purpose is fundamentally business or pleasure. People wish to engage with each other constantly, and social media gives people the ability to do so in real time, around the world.

    This is why social media is such a popular way for people to touch base, since it can be done anywhere, at any time. While a physical storefront will have hours of operation, the social networking sites never close.

    Essentially, the final step in the three part process regarding the offline business’ approach to social media should be getting people to engage with you and your business. You want people to subscribe to you Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles in order so you can communicate with them in a regular manner, and keep them interested in your content and wares.

    There are several ways you can use social media to engage your potential customers other than simply leaving messages on a Twitter feed. Many people these days are turning to video blogging, or “videologging,” which is an excellent way to reach out to customers in a way that best simulates the face-to-face interaction that you have with them at your store. If you can post videos of yourself talking about your product, it goes a long way toward creating that kind of proof of expertise that you have when you speak about your product in the store.

    A great way to augment the engagement factor you’ll get through working with social media is to have a blog or website to center everything on. This means that you’ll have a place to reference your potential customers to visit. It’s even better if you can offer an online shopping center as well with your website, as this allows you to take even better advantage of the engagement of social networking. It’s important to be able to engage customers local to you so that they’ll visit the store, of course, but don’t forget about the rest of the world, as well! Offering an online store allows you to make the entire world your selling market, not limited to the locality of your physical store.

    Essentially, as a business owner who owns a physical store, you are in a unique position to use social media as a weapon both online and offline. You can use it to think both globally and locally at the same time, and end up with incredible increases to your revenue. Don’t let the social media revolution pass you by – even though it might sound like a daunting arena to enter, it’s an entirely free way to up your engagement level with customers both locally and around the world.

  • Less is Always More

    Say you are about to launch a new product. You spent months or even years developing the product and studying your target market. And after what seemed like eternity you are finally ready to introduce your creation to the market. The big day arrived; you opened up early and are ready to flaunt your biggest smile to everyone who comes in. By mid-day you noticed that even though many people come in to check out your product only few actually buy it. Now this gave you something to think seriously. What could possibly be wrong with your product? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with your product but there can be something terribly wrong with your marketing strategy.

    When people are looking for products or services to avail they usually go for ones that they are familiar with or have long used. This way they can be sure that they are getting the most of their money. So for a business owner like you who is just starting up in the business industry, it is important to make a good first impression. Sure, you can do this by offering discounts and other special offers. You can even put a large banner in front of your store announcing your special opening sale. But when are not able to offer the right image you may as well consider hiding in your den and reflect on what you need to improve in your marketing strategy.

    But then again you may be doing the right strategy and using the right advertising trick. But have you looked at your logo? That’s exactly what I’m thinking. You could have overlooked the most important part of your product – your logo design. Logos often tantamount to a company’s image, hence, whether it is hip, chic, interesting or boring it is essential to create a logo that gives the right impact to the customers. It doesn’t really matter if you, your friends or employees like or does not like the logo. What is important is the impression that it gives to your customers.

    A good logo must represent the business image appealingly and effectively. It must likewise be practical and functional as complicated logos often leave customers confused and wondering what is actually being sold or presented. Keep in mind that less is always more. Hence, a simple logo design will most likely seal the deal and help you grab more customers. Certainly a colorful and over-designed logo will catch more attention but no company achieves success based solely on their logo. So a simple flexible logo is more likely to entice prospects to actually buy your products and avail of your services.

    A combination of art, science and psychology often creates a good logo. A designer should know this, so if you do not know how to design your logo you can ask their help. Remember that a poor logo can ruin your image but a good one can instantly create name recognition and can boost company sales and services.

  • What Does a Good Headline Look Like?

    No matter how well crafted the body of your content, a headline that grabs attention will always make a difference. Of course, you want to grab the right kind of attention. That is, you want the reader to be attracted by the headline and thus want to read the body of the text.

    You do not want the reader to read the text simply because he or she wants to find out what type maniac would come up with a title like that. Here are three simple tips to keep your headlines interesting, compelling, and attractive to your audience.

    Tip # 1 – Keep it simple, stupid. Yes, the old KISS principle that Toastmasters have used in public speaking for decades also works with the printed word. When it comes to your headline, don’t get too prolific with the word count. Choose your words carefully and use no more than you need to grab attention. A headline is not meant to tell the whole story, but it should help your prospect know what is coming next. is to come.

    Tip # 2 – Make it relevant. Headlines that are misleading may grab attention quickly, but you will lose the reader in just a few seconds if the content has nothing to do with the promises made in bold. It is okay to use double entrendes or other plays on words with your headline. Just make sure that by the time your readership has made it through the first paragraph, they get the relationship.

    Tip # 3 – Make the headline memorable. You want people to recommend the content to other people. If the headline is so bland that it really doesn’t stick with the reader, then you will lose a lot of attention. While you want simplicity and relevance, you do not want boring. Make the headline zippy and something people will want to repeat.

    Headlines are often overlooked as being unimportant or just a formulaic construct of writing copy. Neither concept is true. Headlines are essentials and can play a huge role in grabbing attention. When coupled with compelling copy, a great headline can make all the difference between success and failure.

  • 3 Way To Succeed as an Affiliate

    Now every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.

    There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

    What are these three tactics?

    1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing.

    Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

    Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them. Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

    You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

    2. Offer free reports to your readers.

    If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

    Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

    Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

    3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product.

    Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

    Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

    Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

    The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

    Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.

    Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving!

  • Useful Mortgage Marketing Strategies

    For loan officers and mortgage brokers, marketing the benefits of your products to your potential customers is very important to the success of your business. It is also important that you keep up with your competition’s marketing concepts.

    Marketing can rear its head in many ways. Verbally, through networking. Business cards, mailers, flyers, billboards, radio, television, etc.

    The point of the above named marketing methods is to get yourself and your products in front of your potential clients.

    In the 21st century, the internet has become a very important and powerful medium in the world of marketing.

    So it is very important that you keep up with it, because you better believe that your competition is.

    Most mortgage companies, if not all mortgage companies by now, have web sites that you can refer people to, so that they may learn more about your company.

    These web sites are great, but it doesn’t tell the consumer anything about you personally. And, more than likely, there is an 800 number leading them in a direction other than yours.

    Here is where you might want to consider building your own personal blog about yourself and the services you have to offer. This way, you can direct your potential customers here to learn more about you and your products and services.

    One of the many benefits to having a blog is for when you are dealing with a customer that is out of state, and you would never have the opportunity to meet them face to face.

    Best of all, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist in order to build a blog. They are free, easy, and fun to build.

    The internet provides a lot of great resources for building your own blog. You just register with a blogging site, choose a name for your blog, and they will provide you with the URL, and template.

    The entire set up of a blog takes no more than five minutes.

    Once finished setting it up, be sure to add a photo of yourself and a brief biography. As well as mortgage material you feel is important to your customers along with a description of your products you believe will be beneficial to their needs.

    Than, every day you can add something new about yourself, your products, or the mortgage industry to give your customers a reason to keep returning to your blog day after day.

    Once all is in place, be sure to add your blog address to your e-mail and your business card.

    End conversations with customers by asking them to visit your blog, it is a great way for them to get to know you better, which is very important when it comes to building relationships.

    Building a blog is very easy and very fun. And it can really be beneficial to you when it comes to building your book of business.

    So give it a shot, you won’t regret it.

  • Safelist Solo Ads and Solo Ezine Advertising: Which is Better?

    If you have spent any amount of time looking into advertising your business online, then you know there are all kinds of options available to you. All of them seem to be screaming that they are the best method, but the truth is that any internet marketing can be effective if you know how to use it. The two methods we’re going to compare are solo ezine advertising and safelist solo ads. First, let’s take a look at what each one is.

    An ezine is basically a newsletter that is delivered to the subscriber’s computer via email. The ezine will cover one topic and appeals to those who are interested in the topic. Each issue of the ezine may contain ads, but such ads will be competing with other ads as well as the actual content of the newsletter. That’s where solo ezine advertising comes in. This is where the publisher of the newsletter will send your ad to all of their subscribers, without anything else competing for the reader’s attention.

    Safelist solo ads are a bit different. A safelist is an email exchange. Everybody that signs up agrees to read email messages in exchange for their message being read. Readers click a special link within the email to prove that they have read the message, so they can receive credit. The more messages you read, the more people you can randomly send to. However, if you pay for a solo ad you can normally choose how many people will get it, or (at the highest level) have it sent to everybody participating in the safelist.

    The big benefit of solo ezine advertising is that the newsletter covers one topic. Therefore, if you sell a related product or service, then you can be sure that you are targeting people that will be interested in your offer. Safelists typically don’t have any requirement as to specific topics, so the targeting of safelist solo ads is more tricky. Your best bet with safelists is if you’re selling something safelist users would want; such as information on how to make more money with safelists.

    Another big difference between the two is that ezine subscribers are more likely to actually read each issue they receive. So when they receive your ad, they are more likely to spend time to read it, and consider your offer. Safelist messages, on the other hand are not typically read all that closely. Why not? Because most safelist users are only trying to build up credits to get more people to read their ads. So, instead of reading each message, they are just hunting for the link that will give them credit, and then they move on to the next one.

    Does this mean solo ezine advertising is better than safelist solo ads, or vice-versa? Not at all. It just means that you should understand the pros and cons of each one before you use it to market your own business using either one, or both, of these methods.

  • Keyword Assessment For Your Best Chances At Success

    You should never tackle a list of keywords without first analyzing traffic and competition. It’s a waste of time and resources to focus on keywords that are too competitive or don’t get enough searches.

    There is a specific “formula” I use to determine which keywords I want to focus on:

    At least 1,000 monthly searches

    No more than 30,000 pages in Google “in quotes”

    No more than 10,000 results for “allintitle”

    When you get your list of keywords from the Google keyword tool, it will tell you approximately how many searches each phrase receives each month. I don’t generally use keywords that have less than 1,000 searches per month, because they don’t usually bring enough traffic to justify the effort.

    Next, you have to assess the competition. You want to make sure to target phrases you have a good chance to rank for, otherwise you’re wasting your time, because you probably won’t be able to rank on the first page if there is too much competition.

    There are two steps to assessing competition. First, you need to find out how many people are using each keyword phrase on their pages. You do this by entering the keyword into Google in quotes. This will tell you how many other pages contain that exact phrase.

    As you can see in the image above, the phrase “keyword in quotes” is used on about 6,090 other pages. This means you should have a fairly easy time ranking on the first page for that phrase.

    Next, you need to see how strong those other competitors are. Google and other search engines usually give a tremendous amount of weight to the words appearing in the title of the HTML document, so you need to see how many of those pages are also using the phrase in their title.

    This is done by entering this into Google:

    allintitle:”keyword in quotes”

    As you can see from this image, only 3 pages have the phrase “keyword in quotes” in the title. This is great news if you want to rank for that phrase, because it means you will almost certainly be able to rank on the first page for that phrase if you use the phrase in your title.

    After you have used all of the keyword phrases you found that fit the main criteria, you can expand and use other keywords. Just stick to those that do fit the criteria in the beginning, because you will get better rankings quickly, so you can start seeing traffic and income sooner.

    There are automated tools that make keyword research easier, but you will have to invest some money if you want to use them. For example, Market Samurai makes it very fast and easy to find and assess keywords, but it is pricey.

    If you’re interested, you can check it out here:

    http://www.marketsamurai.com

  • Write Blogs and Let Money Come Tumbling Down on Your Palms

    There is no doubt that we are struggling through a troubled economy right now, but nobody seems to know how long this downturn is going to last. Unfortunately, this makes a lot of people so nervous that they don’t know what to do. While some of you may have heard of this “making money online” thing, you aren’t really sure what it all means. First, let me put you at ease and let you know that it is completely possible to make money, and not everything is a scam. For example, a lot of successful people like to blog for money.

    Let’s start with some of the basics. A blog is really nothing more than an online journal, and is a short for web log. The best part is that you can start blogging for no cost. Even better is that there are some online blog services that make it really easy to get up and running, regardless of how computer savvy you may or may not be. It typically takes anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or two to get your blog started.

    Your first task is to decide what the main topic of your blog will be. Your goal is to blog for money, but if you can choose a subject that you’re interested in, it will be much easier to keep on blogging. On the other hand, if you just want to make as much money as possible, then you should take some time to learn about the various methods of choosing hot niche markets. This will give you more return on your efforts if you go about it the ri