Avoid the Bottomless Pit of Failed Internet Promotions

Keywords: Internet Promotions

Did you realize there are only three types of online promotion?... This statement may seem odd and even untrue in your mind, but I am speaking in more general terms than you might be thinking.

Let me explain.

The three types of promotion are Junk, Active and Passive promotions.

JUNK PROMOTIONS ARE MONEY PITS

Junk promotions are those that seem to produce results, but by their very nature are really only illusionary promotions.

For example, let me begin with FFA (Free For All) pages. You might find yourself subscribing to a submission program that tricks you into believing you are submitting your links to tens of thousands search engines.

According to the Open Directory website, they have only approved 1705 search engines and directories for inclusion in their database (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/).

Turn Customer Complaints into More Sales

Keywords: Increasing Sales

Customer complaints can cause you to lose future sales from customers and from everybody else who hears about their bad experience. Or you can turn customer complaints into more sales from these same customers and the people they influence. How you handle your customers' complaints determines which of these two results you get.

Here are 7 simple actions you can take to turn customer complaints into more sales.

1. Plan for Complaints

You can never eliminate every customer complaint. Some mistakes happen regardless of how carefully you try to prevent them. Expect to get a few complaints periodically. It's part of operating a business.

Handle complaints with a positive attitude. Strive to preserve your relationship with the complaining customer instead of your immediate profit from them. Make your customer happy now and they will reward you later with more sales.

2. Make Resolving Complaints a Priority

Surprise your customer with a quick response to their complaint. If you cannot solve the problem immediately, let them know you consider it a priority. Then do whatever you can to resolve the problem fast.

The Golden Rule of Small Business Marketing: Solving the Marketing vs Operations Riddle

Keywords: Marketing and Operations

As a current small business owner and corporate marketing manager, I have seen marketing from both sides of the fence. The big corporations tend to rely on their buying power and large advertising budgets to convince their potential customers to buy their products, while small business owners tend to be more crafty with their modest marketing budgets, looking for unique opportunities here and there that will enhance their sales efforts. There is one rule, however, that is applicable to both the big guys and the little guys. I call it the Golden Rule of Marketing, and here it is:

Marketing will never solve an operations problem.
As much as marketers hate to admit it, the bottom line on marketing is that it tends to cause more harm than good when a company's operations are not running smoothly. So if sales are down and you're considering ramping up on your marketing dollars to "solve" the problem, you should first ensure that the problem is not with your operations.

Evaluate your Operations

How To Use Banner Ads Effectively

Keywords: Banner Ads

It's no big secret that banner ads have become less effective than text links over the years. This phenomenon is called "banner blindness". Banners were so ubiquitous in the early years of the Internet that users simply began to ignore them.

So what did many advertisers do to combat banner blindness? They made their banners harder to ignore by causing them to flash, rotate, jump around, and all sorts of other annoying tricks.

This of course led most users to like banners even less!

Does this mean that banner ads are useless? No, not at all!

There are several things that you can do to make your banner campaigns more effective. First of all, ensure that each of your banners is pleasant to look at and blends in well with the web page it's displayed on. Match up the design and color scheme with those of the site.

This means you'll need to create a customized banner for each and every site you advertise on, but the results will most definitely make the extra effort and expense well worth it!

Where is the Best PR Value?

Keywords: Public Relations

Wherever the fundamental premise of public relations is practiced.

Look at what it suggests. People act on their own perception of the facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action those people whose behaviors affect the organi-zation, the public relations mission is accomplished.

What a positive message for those business, non-profit and assoc-iation managers who don't really understand the role public relations can play in helping achieve their organizational objectives. Nor, that reliance on public relations' fundamental premise even identifies the tools they need to put such a plan into action.

If, sadly, you are one of those managers, here's how you can make up for lost time and actually boost your chances of reaching your organizational goals.

Effective Ezine Advertising Part 2

Keywords: Ezine Ads

Continuing on from last week's article, today I will discuss writing and tracking ads. Effective ezine advertising can provide your business with a substantial boost!

* Writing the Ads

Once you make the decision and choose an ezine or two to advertise in, you must write an effective ad. If your ad does not get a response, it is not always the ezine's fault. It could be in your ad copy. The main points to remember when writing an ad are:

1. Keep it brief.
2. Grab their attention in the headline.
3. Emphasize the benefits to the purchaser.

Example:

Headline: Do you want to lose weight?

Better Headline: Lose 3 Pounds a Week!

When you simply ask if they want to lose weight, the benefit is not clearly defined. But when you say lose 3 pounds a week, that is quite clear and more apt to grab the reader's attention.

PR Going According to Plan?

Keywords: Public Relations

Think carefully! You're a department, division or subsidiary manager for a business, non-profit or association and you really need to achieve your operating objectives.

But even a yes response to the headline above leaves the really big question unanswered – does your current public relations plan help persuade your most important outside audiences to your way of thinking, then move them to take actions that lead to your success?

If the answer to that question is uncertain or even no, change is in order. Change that gives you a public relations blueprint that helps lead to managerial success and, some might say, survival.

I refer here to the kind of blueprint that moves the emphasis from communications tactics to an aggressive plan for reaching those outside groups of people with a big say about how successful you're going to be – your key external audiences.

Grassroots Internet Marketing Campaign

Keywords: Internet Marketing

Many people, in a rush to spike sales through the roof, think too big and end up completely missing out on one of the best free marketing opportunities on the net: discussion forums. Instead of focusing on individual sales, they go immediately for ads that promise thousands of visitors, pay-per-click search engines that could potentially expose them to thousands, and even sloppily-produced and sometimes fraudulent spam submission programs.

Even though it is essential to increase your rating with search engines, to purchase pay-per-clicks, and to participate in link exchanges and banner exchanges, discussion forums can often provide an extra, non-conventional sales medium to your campaign that allows you to quickly pull in customers with personal contact and conversational presentations of your product.

You can find these boards by searching for the specific product you sell and then adding the word " messageboard" or "forum" or "discussion forum" after it in quotations. For instance, I sell marketing tools and online business-builders on one of my websites, so when I look for forums to market my products in, I go to google or overture and type in "business messageboard" or "marketing forum." Find as many of these highly-trafficked forums as you can and sign-up. Some of them will require you to confirm it through your email address.

How To Use Database Marketing To Skyrocket Your Online Profits

Keywords: Database Marketing

Here's some simple yet POWERFUL ideas on how to use Database Marketing to skyrocket your online profits...which will have a GREAT effect on your bottom line.

Database Marketing is the gathering and storing of specific information about your prospects or customers. This information is usually stored in a database program on your computer. You would then use the information to market and advertise to them. It can save you time and money because you can target your promotional efforts to your best prospects or customers.

The Types Of Information To Collect

The information will vary depending on the product or service you're selling. If you're selling a product that costs $2 you wouldn't collect information about their yearly income. If you're selling web space you wouldn't collect information about what type of books they read. The basic information you need would be all their contact information, purchase history, and birthday. You will need to decide what other information would benefit your business.

How To Collect This Information Online

Get Maximum Profit from your Advertising

Keywords: Effective Advertising

Tips to ensure your ad dollars go further

Most small businesses operate with very small advertising budgets. It is critical to the success of any business to ensure that their advertising dollars deliver as much value as possible to the bottom line. Here are some steps that you can take to make sure you get the most bang for your advertising buck:

Target your Advertising - Ideally, every ad that you place would be seen only by potential customers for your business. In reality, you won't find very many advertising opportunities that deliver such a utopian business proposition. The real key is to locate advertising opportunities that will target your potential customers as closely as possible. When evaluating every advertising offer, ask yourself "How closely will this hit my target audience? Could I do better?". If you are advertising your new website that offers a new vitamin supplement for dogs, advertising on a pet website would not be as advantageous as a dog related website. A website on the topic of dog food and nutrition would be even more targeted, as almost 100% of the visitors to that site would have some interest in dog food and nutrition That's exactly the audience you are looking for.

10 Powerful Marketing Tips

Keywords: Marketing Tips

1. Print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. People read postcards when the message is brief. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your web site and generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

2. No single marketing effort works all the time for every business, so rotate several marketing tactics and vary your approach. Your customers tune out after awhile if you toot only one note. Not only that, YOU get bored. Marketing can be fun, so take advantage of the thousands of opportunities available for communicating your value to customers. But don't be arbitrary about your selection of a variety of marketing ploys. Plan carefully. Get feedback from customers and adapt your efforts accordingly.

Increase your web page traffic by up to 100%!

Keywords: Search Terms

Have you optimized your web pages in order to receive traffic from the major search engines (SE) like Google, Yahoo or Msn?

If you have, then I'll show you a simple method you can use to increase your traffic further by up to 50 or 100%!

With "keyword" we mean the search phrase.

The most common practice is to optimize each page with one keyword. The reason for this is that in order to be rated high in the SE, the keyword needs to be found in the page's title, in the headlines and to be included a number of times in the main text.

You can have maximum two relevant but different keywords included in the title. If you include more than that the optimization for those additional keywords will dilute your result.

This is because the optimal length of the title is limited only to a few words for effective SE optimization.

The best option is to optimize for just one keyword per page.

10 Explosive Ways To Elevate Your Sales

Keywords: Increase Sales

1. Publish an ezine.

Your ezine will provide you with a powerful way to continue to keep your marketing message on your visitors' minds.

Get more of your visitors to subscribe to your ezine by stressing the benefits your ezine will provide to them, and by providing a bonus for subscribing to your ezine.

Also get more of your "almost subscribers" to join your ezine by making a sample issue available on your site by autoresponder or by publishing an archive of your past issues on your site.

2. Have an about us section.

This section will help you to better tell your visitors what you can do for them.