TP Javeton WebNet

Category: Advertising & promotion

  • Hiring a Web Marketing Consultant

    Pay for success

    If you are thinking about getting into the world of Web marketing but lack necessary experience or formal training in this type of promotion, it is definitely worthwhile to consider hiring a consultant to help you establish yourself and/or business online and guide you through the many tasks involved in Web marketing. Hiring a consultant is important because s/he can do a great deal to ensure that your marketing effort is a success.

    You may pay more for their services than you would to handle your Web marketing activities on your own but the results you will get from his/her involvement would likely be significantly better. Hiring a consultant to help you jumpstart a Web marketing campaign is a worthwhile investment even if you have some experience in this vocation, because if you are competing in a niche that proves to be one of the more competitive you’re really going to need professional help to accomplish marketing goals, if not objectives.

    Hiring options

    The key to hiring a consultant to help you navigate any Web marketing campaigns you want to start is to make sure you hire the right consultant because, if you haven’t already, you will find there are many different options available to you since Web marketing has become a huge and very specialized industry; and not all consultants are created equal. You may also find that some consultants can create significantly better results than other consultants, but this is true in just about any industry in which you do business.

    There are however a few characteristics to look for when looking to hire a qualified Web marketing consultant and, surprisingly, cost is not among the most important considerations. Experience and past performance are much more important and since you can compare costs among consultants who are similarly qualified, using cost as a primary method of evaluation is not recommended.

    The experience factor

    Experience may be one of the top two qualifications to consider when selecting a consultant to assist you in a Web marketing campaign. In fact it is critical because consultants who have a great deal of experience is expected to have an excellent to superior knowledge of which techniques are most effective and those that are not as effective or simply get poor results. This can save you a lot of time and money due because the need to experiment in order to determine what works will be greatly reduced or eliminated, unlike the case with a consultant of less experience.

    More experienced consultants will also be more skilled in dealing with clients and will likely answer your questions more quickly and keep you better informed about the progress of your Web marketing campaign(s). These are all important factors which must be considered and since you are paying for this service you’re probably going to be very interested in receiving progress reports and staying up to date on everything that is going on with your Web marketing campaign(s).

    The resume

    Searching for and finding a consultant in the Web marketing industry with an excellent resume and great reputation is most important because consultants who have had a great deal of success in the past will likely have a great deal of success while assisting you as well. Needless to say, past performance is considered one of the best indications of future performance.

    This does not to say that new consultants are necessarily going to perform poorly, but there is some risk involved in selecting a consultant who does not have a great deal of experience or who has not performed well in the past. You can feel much more confident putting your Web marketing campaign(s) in the hands of a consultant who typically generates the type of results you are looking for; results that will be more in line with the goals and objectives you wish to accomplish.

    Pricing
    Get started today!

    Once you have evaluated consultants on the basis of experience and past performance, it is time to start thinking about price. Considering price early in the process of seeking a consultant may cause you to be influenced by price over performance. Some consultants may be incredibly affordable but if they are not capable of producing the desired results, it may end up being a complete waste of money.

    However, once you have narrowed your list of potential consultants down to a few qualified candidates, it is definitely time to start comparing prices. Once you are confident each of the candidates on your list is well qualified, choosing the least expensive candidate from among them is an easy decision. However it is important to note all of the fees involved to ensure you are making an accurate cost comparison.

  • Web Presence Vis-a-Vis Web Marketing

    Business

    Will you join me in a little exercise? Take a moment and consider how you would answer this question: Are you already marketing on the Web? If you really think about it, just about any business owner who utilizes the Web for any purpose will likely find that, whether or not s/he intentionally organized a Web marketing campaign, s/he may already be marketing products and services on the Web. This article will examine some subtle ways business owners may already be marketing their businesses on the Web even if they did not set out to.

    Let’s begin with your website as it is most probable that if you own and operate a business in today’s world you probably have a website for your business; and if so you are, therefore, already marketing your products or services online just by virtue of the fact that you have a website online.

    This is true because the mere fact of having a live website means there is the potential for curious Web surfers to access that site. And although you may not be actively engaged in promotional activities, you may still find that it creates interest in your products despite the lack of sustained marketing efforts on your part. Such activity without effort is known as passive marketing.

    SEO

    Another area of participation without promotional intent is commonly known as message boards, and if you participate in such an online venue and put a link in your signature that leads back to your website, you would be considered by most to be marketing that website online. Savvy business owners realize the importance of participation in industry-related message boards to create an interest in their products and services, thereby establishing themselves as knowledgeable about, or expert in, their industry by offering a link to their own website, even if it is in the signature line of information they provide in their posts.

    In fact, even business owners who do not realize it, may already be inadvertently enjoying the benefits of Web marketing as a result of message board participation simply just by doing something they enjoy as a form of leisurely activity.

    You’ve heard of, and probably are knowledgeable in, the use of keywords in the sense that when you include keywords in the content of your website that are relevant to your business you will likely answer yes to the question, do you use keywords? And in view of that answer you also are, therefore, already marketing on the Web by optimizing your website for such keywords. Search engine optimization (SEO) have an affect on websites whether or not website owners are even cognizant about the concept of keyword density and how it can help to optimize a site for the benefit of search engines.

    Business owners will likely use certain words – often depending on the type of products and services they offer – simply because it is natural and logical to do so. This tendency, however, can result in search engines boosting their website rankings for the particular keywords used. The concept of SEO is much more involved and complex than employing the frequent use of keywords, though; but business owners can gain some benefit just by naturally applying relevant keywords to their website.

    Feedback

    Do you solicit feedback from your customers online? This is yet another example of how business owners may accidentally be marketing their business on the Web. Most business owners realize the importance of soliciting feedback from customers for business purposes, and business owners who offer products online might solicit feedback in the form of online surveys. Although the business owners may be doing this simply for business purposes, the fact that it is done online, puts it into the category of Web marketing.

    We have discussed several ways in which business owners may already be marketing online but, what about business owners who do want to have an increased online presence? If you are a business owner who may already be marketing online accidentally and wish to launch full scale Web marketing campaigns, you can do so by hiring a consultant with experience in Web marketing to assist you in creating an effective and worthwhile campaign which is optimized for your target audience. Best of luck!

  • Free Web Advertising – Priceless!

    Free Web advertising is one very important method for promoting your products and services. Once you have established your space on the Web with a good domain name pointing to your reliably hosted website/blog on which you’re promoting a needed product or service, all that’s left to achieve any degree of success is to drive traffic the site.

    Most of these free advertising websites give you the power to facilitate marketing with features such as classified ads submitter forms. Features like this give free Web advertising an extremely fast way of getting your products or services the exposure necessary to be seen by a vast audience. It is a service that is accessible 24/7 allowing you access it anytime, and it’s also very effective and efficient with most of it coming free. No downloads. No sign-up fees. No hidden charges. No annual or monthly fees. No sales fees. It is absolutely free!

    Free Web advertising makes it easy for you to put free ads on several of the premier quality web sites whenever you want; and this kind of benefit you get from free Web advertising can only do miracles for your business, in the sense that it affords your products/services maximum exposure. Most of these free Web advertising companies give you 3 slots to advertise any product or service you want for free.

    Free Web advertising is the perfect way and best way to make your products or services known to the millions of prospective consumers in the Internet and make your web site start producing money. There is such an enormous audience for free Web advertising of products/services that is made available to the Internet, that the probability of buyers needing your services or wanting to buy your products is very high. There are free services out there that may suit your services, products and website. Browse the internet for the best free Web advertising for assessment on their amenities and learn about how to advertise or join your web site for free Web advertising.

    Most websites promoting free Web advertising have features like classified ads submitter where you can get a enormous exposure with instant results and expand your sales by large volumes over night, opt-in email lists (non-spam) bulk emailing program, guaranteed 100% legal. Opt-in email lists are created by people who have volunteered or ‘opted-in’ their email addresses to these lists which are very effective for creating personalized emails to prospective clients.

    Free Web advertising provides a great technique for building traffic. People constantly search on online free Web advertising ads for specific services or products, and free internet advertising target clients who are inclined to buying a particular kind of product or service. And the best reason to advertise in free Web advertising platforms is because it is absolutely free.

     

    Get started now… Free!

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  • The Home-based Business Phenomenon

    Present-day American dreams

    Present-day American families have the same dreams shared by families a few decades ago; buy a home, provide for the health and welfare of their children, and send those children to college. But the price tag for fulfilling these dreams climbs higher and higher every day, making it much more difficult to achieve the same standard of living that families enjoyed in past decades.

    It used to be that a husband went off to work in the morning and the wife stayed home doing household chores and taking care of the kids; but the days of one-income households are long gone and both parents must now go out to work – when they can find it.

    However, as the old familiar adage suggests, “necessity is the mother of invention” and accordingly, many enterprising single moms & dads, and even husband & wife teams are finding ways to stay home, and still earn a living via opportunities that are springing up all over the country as a result of the tremendous growth of an industry that makes work at home possible.

    The (HBB) industry has made it possible for anyone with some basic skills, a computer and Internet access to start a business at home. For example, an individual with a background in word processing can create his/her own in-home word processing business.

    Getting started

    Before you begin your however, it is important to do your research. Find out what kind of software program will be most suitable for the type of business you intend on doing. You will also want your computer system to be compatible with your clients and customers.

    Next, look at the make-up of your industrial area. An arts community, or a thriving business area? By checking out the demographics of your area, you can make a decision regarding the type of advertising you want to use.

    In the beginning, you will want to try all sorts of advertising. Neighborhood newspapers are an inexpensive way to advertise, but they usually only published on a weekly basis and that may not be enough to keep the clients rolling in. You can put your name on the bulletin board at your local supermarket and pass out flyers door-to-door in large office buildings or other business complexes.

    Although it may be more expensive than neighborhood newspapers, you may want to run an ad in your local daily newspaper (in the business services section). Church bulletins and university newspapers that sell advertising may also be a relatively inexpensive way to go. You should also get your business cards printed up right away; and don’t let a client walk out the door without one or two business cards. Repeat business and word-of-mouth may well be your best advertising tool.

    Get started now… Free!

    Whatever methods you choose to employ in your advertising, do yourself a favor and track the responses. Put a check list next to your telephone and whenever a call comes in (whether you get hired or not) ask the prospective client where s/he found out about you. It won’t take long for you to discover where your most cost-effective advertising comes from and when you know that, you can punch it up and drop the ones that aren’t doing anything for you.

    Do your homework!

    One telephone call will be the only opportunity you have to sell your service. If you hesitate when asked a price for a particular project, you will probably lose the job so do your homework. Call the competition and ask what they are charging. If the competition is out of your immediate geographic area (and you are therefore not a threat to their livelihood), you may want to be straight with them and tell them you are starting a in their field and ask for their input. You may be surprised to find them willing to help out with important information.

    Keep in mind that there are myriad of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to establish the fundamental operations of your new home-based business. Whether you expect to get clients from the Internet or not, it is necessary to set up your business in a manner that will accommodate local clients/customers. So business letter heads, envelopes, forms, business cards, invoices and other paraphernalia will be necessary.

    It will also become necessary to establish your pricing policies and have them available upon inquiry. Depending on your business, you could set a basic rate which can be a flat rate or a percentage.

    For example…

    …Using the business of word processing for a pricing example, a prospective client may call asking what you charge for 4 single-spaced pages. Your answer might be $45.00 per page straight text and then when the client comes, you discover that what s/he has is 4 pages of extremely complicated tables – definitely NOT STRAIGHT TEXT.

    By not making firm pricing commitments over the phone, you will have the flexibility to charge a more accurate price when a client brings you something other than what you were expecting.

    Elaborating further on the word processing example, to some clients a resume may be a single spaced page, but it takes a lot longer to type than a business letter and you will want to charge more for resumes. You will want to establish an hourly rate for tables, transcription and other more time-consuming jobs.

    Always keep in mind that your pricing will change as you become more familiar with what your clients demand, and you may find yourself doing a lot of list maintenance and merge letters, or you may be doing work primarily for doctors, or attorneys; so you need to have a good basis for your pricing… but be flexible.

    There are several models you can choose from, each one giving you the same flexibility to create your own USP (Unique Selling Proposition), as well as your own operational balance sheet. After all, the income & expense aspect of any business is usually an excellent indicator of that business’ prospects for success or failure; and truth be told, no business – new or old – start out with failure as an aspirational milestone. Therefore, it is success to which they aspire and choosing the type of home-based business to launch could make all the difference.

    Choice of business types

    The two business types that came to mind – based on my own – experiences are: Promotion and Distribution. You can choose to be a promoter or a distributor in addition to all the other choices that are available; but I have provided a glimpse of each vocation with the help of two other publishers whose knowledge of the topics is unquestioned.

    According to a What is Promotion? article published to the Slide Player website, “Promotion is any form of communication a business or organization uses to inform, persuade, or remind people about its products and improve its public image. Product Promotion: 1) Explains the major features and benefits of its products (especially in relation to competitors), 2) tells where the products are sold, 3) advertises sales on those products, 4) answers customer questions, and 5) introduces new products…”

    …And Distribution is described in the following manner: After a product is fully developed and offered at a competitive price, it must be delivered to an identified target audience. The place element of the marketing mix is where product production and distribution channels are decided and planned. The decisions made in this step directly affect the types of communication that are used to tell the target audience about a product.” This description is provided in the article, What Is the Difference Between Place & Promotion in the Marketing Mix? Written by Tim Burris for the Chron website. And there are so many more!

  • Article Writing – Affordable Web Marketing Task!


    From Overture, a keyword suggestion tool, you will see the millions of searches done for a certain keyword. When these keywords are typed in search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. And this is what leads traffic to websites with keyword-rich articles. Yes, the magic word is articles.

    Content is king. You can say that again. That is why writing articles is one of the most utilized in Web marketing activity today. Web surfers just can’t get enough of information on various fields. Providing information through these articles is a surefire way to drive hot traffic to your web site.

    Why is this so?

    Following are few benefits that can enhance your Web business from writing articles:

    1) It’s absolutely free

    Too good to be true? Not really, although you do have to pay your Internet Service Provider; but that’s it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will make you complete that article for your website. So for which aspect of that process did you really shell out a red cent? Not immediately, but perhaps later when your electric bill come.

    2) Your website will be noticed in a shorter period of time.

    Submit that article of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic and in no time your web site will be crawled. That is if you don’t forget including your resource box or byline.

    3) Obtain back links automatically.

    When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your article too. With the copyright terms of your articles, the URL of your website will still be in tact and will subsequently direct more traffic to your website.

    4) Improve your reputation.

    As an Internet marketer, if you plainly display your products on your website, you will not gain much conversion rate. Conversion is when your traffic converts to sales. You have to show that you are knowledgeable on your field. And what better way to show that than by writing articles that will allow you some bragging rights, right?

    Just make your creative juices flow and jot down or key in those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, a writer’s block is the last problem you will ever be able to surmount.

    Keep in mind that your writing need not be restricted to articles, because there are other modes of writing that are just as attractive to search engines. Those include: ebooks, blog posts, newsletters and public announcements, among others. So write! And write some more…just make your writing interesting and compelling for both humans and the search engine bots.

  • Seven Swiping Secrets

    Meet the guest writer

    Get started today!

    Today’s post is brought to you by our esteemed friend at the Copywriter’s Rountable. So without further ado, here are the words of Copywriter, John Forde…

    I guess first I should define terms…

    “A swipe file is a collection of tested and proven advertising and sales letters. Keeping a swipe file (templates) is a common practice used by advertising copywriters and creative directors as a ready reference of ideas for projects.
    “Copywriters are not the only ones who can benefit from having a swipe file. As book publishing coach Diane Eble points out, authors and publishers can benefit from creating a swipe file of best-selling titles to give them ideas for their own titles.

    “Publicists can create a swipe file of great press release headlines. Swipe files are a great jumping-off point for anybody who needs to come up with lots of ideas. Swipe files are also commonly used by Internet Marketers who need to gather a lot of resources not only about products but also about marketing methods and strategies.”
    Well, that clarifies things a little, yes? Try this, too…

    “There is nothing better or more productive a copywriter can do – and this applies to experienced copywriters as well as novices – than to read (almost to the point of memorizing) the best work of their fellow writers.” The first is just from Wikipedia, and not so much swiped but copied and pasted. The second from my old friend and mentor, as well as master copywriter, Michael Masterson.

    Okay, now it’s my turn to try my hand at an original thought…

    A swipe file defined

    A swipe file is that place where you store those dazzling promo pieces that not only worked… but that are so good they make you sick with envy. Because you wish you’d written them yourself. In other terms, it’s the stack of stuff you go through, to help jump-start your creative engine… because you know that most everything you’re looking at, in those “swiped” samples, is something that worked.

    Back in my earliest days, my swipe file filled a green milk grate. And then another. And then seven or eight more, until somebody made me get a filing cabinet. And then a second filing cabinet.

    These days, thank merciful God for the Internet. Because now my swipe file — and yes, I still keep one — is a folder on my desktop labeled “Promos to Study.” In it lands links to VSLs, PDFs of magalogs somebody else has generously scanned, black and white ad clips the ‘70s and ‘60s, even back to the 1920s (thanks to the excellent InfoMarketingBlog.com), covers and screen captures I’ve used in presentations, and more. 
    Thanks, merciful Zeus as much or more for the iPad, which I also use every morning to markup whatever promo I’ve set aside to review.

    The way it goes, most mornings, is that I load up any oft-seen sales letter that comes with a transcript. Then I “print” it to a PDF that gets stored on my iCloud account. From there, I open an app called “Goodnotes” and import the file, where it gets circled, scribbled upon, and partitioned into what seem the best bits. And yes, I do try to do that daily. More so now than before. And yes, it’s eye-opening. Every time.

    But the real reason I’m writing this… or rather, updating this old CR classic… is because I recently got a question from a CR reader about where and how to swipe from other sales letters. So I thought I would go ahead and provide some answers. And away we go, starting with… 

    Reach wide. No easy answers

    1) Reach wide – Before you can “read” the secrets buried in a swipe file, you need to fill it. And when you do, naturally you’ll want to start with the kinds of ads you expect to write most yourself. But don’t stop there. Reach way back to the classics. You’ll be surprised what Claude Hopkins and John Caples ads, Ogilvy, Schwartz and others still have to teach.

    If you’re lucky enough to have the courier typed sales letters of the ‘70s and ‘80s… or magalogs and bookalogs of the ‘90s… read them too. Almost everything we know works now, they knew then times ten. And then, yes, do keep it current with the working VSLs. Just make sure you click and get the “transcript” where it’s offered too. Print it to a PDF. Some of the copywriters today do some of the most enviably good stuff I’ve seen yet, anywhere.

    2) Don’t expect easy answers – What’s the right question to ask for any piece of copy you’re about to study? Assuming you’re only studying stuff that worked, the right opener — obviously — is “Why?” Unfortunately, it’s also the most unanswerable question. You won’t know, for sure, why anything worked. Because it will always remain a guess.

    3) Look past the copy – That is, remember that it’s not so much that the copywriter sold something well… as that there were lots of readers out there that wanted to receive the message he used to sell it. What’s the distinction?

    The twist & style

    When you look at swipes, especially the most current ones in your market, what you’re looking for first is every clue you can get about the prospect, not so much the product. If there’s a promise that you see working everywhere, it’s because it promises to fix a problem that’s keeping target readers everywhere up at night. Isolate the single biggest promise the copy makes and flip it — what problem is it solving?

    4) Find the twist – More and more, we see copy make a promise or throw out a solution-demanding premise… and then up the ante with an extra “twist” to the message. That is, a kind of early “but it gets [an] even better” or “gets [an] even worse” turn in the message, just at the moment the reader was thinking “I’m kinda hooked already…”

    Of course, this is classic storytelling. Our hero struggles. And just at the moment you thought it couldn’t get any worse… or better… the drama dial clicks up another notch. Just about any sales message could benefit from a twist, both in the lead and the close. Look to your swipes to see how it’s done.

    5) Soak up the style – All writers in all genres pick up a style. Dense. Lean. Even. Excitable. Some copy drips with adjectives but works in spite of itself. Other copy undersells, yet manages — somehow — to hit hard. This is one of those things you can absorb best by just copying out a good piece of copy a few times until the secrets of style sneak into your subconscious.

    Structure & closings

    Even now, I keep a piece of the latest, greatest copy open on my screen or a second desktop (on the Mac, at least, you can move between multiple desktops). When I’m stuck, I swipe over to it and read for a little, then come back and try to trot out my message in the same mindset. Be careful here, because you’re not stealing words. At least, not mindlessly so. You’re trying to get a “feel” you can transfer back to your writing.

    6) Study the structure – This is something else that writing out a full promo — by hand — can help you do. If not that, at least try to re-outline a finished copy control. You want to see how long they took to get through the lead, where they first started laying out the benefits or naming the offer, how they packaged up the testimonials and how long they spent on proof.

    Build your own library of promo outlines and use them as templates, next time you’re getting started. This isn’t stealing. It’s just good sense.
    Also, look for the segments that seem to show up across several different samples. Just about every sales piece, for instance, is going to have testimonials and a close and some freebies with the offer.

    But do all promotions have “Imagine this outcome” sections, transcendent mission statements, a personal story, show-me-the-money examples, etc.? Probably.

    7) Collect closes – Copywriters sure do love to talk about headlines and leads. And with good reason, of course. It’s where we put flame to powder. Still, if the lead is what sparks prospect interest, the close is where we pile up the dynamite. And you’ve got to pile it up just so if you want the right result.

    Let the swiping begin!

    It’s worth pulling closes from a lot of working promos and studying just those, one next to the other. A little tweak to your guarantee, your price rationalization, your push for urgency, can make a huge difference in your results.

    Hope that helps… now get swiping!