Archive for July, 2010

Affinity Marketing Doubles Your Effectiveness for a Fraction of the Effort

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

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Selfmade Burger ... da kann MC´s abstinken
Creative Commons License photo credit: lambda_X

You don’t have to be in competition with everyone! Instead, build a stronger business by seeking out companies that share a meaningful connection. Essentially, you’ll gain the power of another marketing team, increase your business exposure and broaden your audience.

The key is to search online for businesses that offer a complementary product or service that in no way competes with your own. It’s like selling a hamburger and then offering lettuce, tomato and cheese through your affiliates.

Those with the Most Allies Always Win the War

You significantly increase your chances of bringing in new business when your name pops in more places on the Internet. Affinity marketing promotes lucrative exposure at no cost—if you do it right. You should approach your affinity marketing with the confidence that your business has something amazing to offer. This will help you feel completely comfortable asking other online businesses if they’d like to enter into this form of reciprocal marketing with you. If you present your affinity marketing offer tentatively then you might run into some fat-headed businesses that will feel as though they have the right to ask you to pay for posting a link on their site. Present your offer with full confidence and your prospective affinity business will think they’re getting an exceptional deal by not having to pay to post a link on your site! (Hint: It will help if you can point to Web analytics and prove that you consistently bring in a significant amount of website traffic.)

Your Name Is on the Line

Since the integrity of your business is on the line when it comes to products or services that you offer it’s a good idea to actually get someone on the phone. You can learn a lot more about the business owner when you take the time to actively speak with them. Have some questions ready that will help you qualify the way they do business. You should also conduct some basic background checks online to see if any negative comments or testimonials surface in forums or product review sites. Beware of any red flags during your discovery process as linking to a dishonest company could bring yours down with it.

Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

Affinity marketing also provides an excellent opportunity to execute effective link building. Search engines boost websites that feature a significant number of inbound links. (Hint: Beware of posting too many outbound links on a single website as search engines may determine that your site is a link farm and will penalize you for it.) You’ll also naturally come up more often in search engine results if you have more active links on the Web.

You will add a great deal of power to your link if you search for businesses that feature a PageRank (PR) of at least 2. This ranking system goes up to 10, with 10 indicating a kick-ass website. You’ll want to avoid linking to those rated at 0 as this could actually harm your ranking. You can either download a quick and simple PR tool bar for your Internet browser or insert the business in question in a dedicated PR checker.

Comprehensive Offers Bring in Bigger Fish

Another reason why affinity marketing has been so successful is because it allows even the smallest shops to offer a comprehensive suite of products and services. You have a much greater chance of bringing in new clients if you have the means of filling gaps in your business offer. For example, even if you offer the best copywriting service on the Web, a prospect may be turned off by the fact that you can’t help them with their video content needs. Since video content is becoming more and more popular on the Web, and more businesses are recognizing how effective this type of online marketing is, you would do well to incorporate video content in your business plan. How do you do this?

First, as always, think of your friends and business associates—are any of them online video experts? If not, you can easily do a local search for “online video business specialists/services/professionals.” If no one you know has this ability then it’s good to conduct a local search so you can meet face to face and hammer out clear details as to how you’ll market each other’s business.

Once you post a link to their video content services complemented with a brief description of their offer, you’ll now be able to offer a comprehensive suite of content services, making you a much more convenient option for businesses looking for both video and copywriting help.

Finally, maintain a database of all your affinity activity so you can check once a month to see that your links are still live on the sites you’ve traded with.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Business Tips, Online Marketing | No Comments »

Go Offline to Get More Business Online

Monday, July 12th, 2010
the fisherman
Creative Commons License photo credit: raggio(ALL4HIM)productions

There certainly is an excellent variety of online marketing tools that can effectively drive traffic to your website and generate impressive sales. However, the offline world of marketing has almost been completely forgotten about by some companies. Even companies that conduct 100 percent of their business online can still greatly profit from incorporating offline methods in their business marketing campaign. Remember when we told you how putting more marketing lines in the water will help you catch a whale of a client? Employing the power of both offline and online marketing methods will sweeten your arsenal, giving you the fire power you need to blow the competition out of the water.

Build a Sales-boosting Bunker

Combining offline and online marketing will establish a lucrative symbiosis within your marketing—where all your marketing pieces strengthen each other (as opposed to marketing parasitism where one marketing piece simply feeds off the results created by your other marketing pieces).

You will create the most solid marketing campaign if you continuously execute a campaign that ties all of your marketing together. For example, if you’ve created a landing page for a specific product promotion, you can complement this by sending out mailers to your target audience, directing them to visit the landing page online. This combination of marketing can actually be really fun as it adopts the aura of a chess game, putting multiple elements into play through strategic maneuvers.

Sales-generating Seminars

Go public for increased exposure: Informational seminars put another marketing line in the water to attract big fish to your online efforts. Offer a free seminar that will help prospects build their businesses, live healthier lives, have more fun—the possibilities are endless. Just make sure to maintain an information-based approach and keep the sales speak out of it. Presenting a helpful seminar is sure to set you up as an authority!

This is also one of the best ways to simultaneously generate a large group of leads. Presenting a free seminar will make it obvious that your business is the real deal, so you won’t even have to actively pitch your actual business here. Make it very clear as to how they can get more information about your product or service (post your website URL everywhere throughout the room), and then let them come to you. And even if they don’t contact you, you now have their contact information from the seminar and can start email marketing to them or put them into your drip campaign. An easy way to get their contact information is to explain that you need it in order to send them the details about the seminar, such as time and place. Multiply the number in attendance by offering a free gift to anyone who brings 10 friends with them. (Use a simple three-step form: 1) Name, 2) e-mail and 3) Referred By.)

As if these reasons weren’t solid enough, you may also consider hosting a seminar in a vacation destination and writing it off as business expense…did we just write that?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Your Marketing

While it’s always a good idea to be as efficient as possible with your budget, reusing your marketing pieces in the wrong places could end up doing more harm than good. For example, many companies are unfamiliar with the issue of duplicate content on the Web (also referred to as dupe content by extra cool Web techies). Repeatedly posting the same content within your website or across platforms such as on your blogs could end up penalizing you in the search engines. Search engines pick this up as either a form of keyword stuffing or a fraudulent business plagiarizing other people’s content. (Use a professional article distribution service to submit mass articles in a search-engine-friendly manner.)

The good news is that you can reuse your current online articles as much as you would like offline. For example, you can print your online articles and send them out in direct response mailers to your leads. Providing helpful information in your mailers adds a great deal of value and helps establish why your business is the clear choice. Plus, adding an information-based piece in any marketing you do helps soften your sales approach, making it much more attractive than a standalone promotion. Due to a daily bombardment of advertising, people are naturally skeptical about these standalone promotions. When you provide something for free that people can use to make their lives better they’re much likelier to let their guard down and actively consider your offer.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Distribution Service, Article Marketing, Business Tips, Distribute Your Articles, Offline Marketing, Online Marketing, Publishing Articles, Quality Article Distribution Service, Submit Articles | No Comments »

Altruistic Marketing Makes Money

Friday, July 9th, 2010
free 'sweet' hugs
Creative Commons License photo credit: kalandrakas

Regardless of whether it’s for business or personal matters, if you concentrate on giving something for nothing you’ll eventually get everything. Businesses have an outstanding opportunity to bring in new business by providing their prospects with free resources. This will help you establish your business as a comprehensive, caring and credible resource which is guaranteed to eventually improve your sales.

Providing free information will also create a tremendous foundation for trust. Let your prospects know you’re there to answer questions and address concerns and they’ll think of you as a credible online friend—one they’re willing to write checks to!

This free information approach also provides an ideal opportunity to create a wedge between you and your competitors. If your business is coming in even with a competitor, provide certain elements for free that most other competitors would charge for and you are sure to gain the competitive edge. It’s simple—as a consumer, would you rather spend money with a business that just gives you the bare minimum or a company that goes above and beyond to provide you with additional value?

Some of the best methods for providing free information include e-books, newsletters, Web conferences and training sessions, Web videos and e-mail marketing.

Free Info Creates Need

Not only will your prospects appreciate free information, the information you provide could provide the missing link which will motivate them to buy. First, free information has the ability to maintain a friendly, soft sales approach, which prevents prospects from automatically putting their guard up against your offer. With their guards down and their listening caps on, prospects will be much likelier to pay full attention to the information you provide.

Take advantage of this, ethically of course, by using your information as a catalyst. Whether your prospect is in a state of procrastination or simply isn’t aware of how they could benefit from your product or service, the information you present to them will catalyze them into action. Your information-based marketing grants you an ideal opportunity to both persuade and educate your target audience.

You should also use this opportunity to illustrate specific examples of how people are using your product or service to better their lives. Concrete examples of how others are experiencing an improved quality of life will always sell more than a list of your business’ features.

Web Training Sessions

You can easily create a series of Web training sessions, webinars, regarding highly relevant material within your industry. There are several very simple options available online that allow you to present material online. Those who attend your virtual presentation will be able to view your desktop and listen to audio, allowing you to show them specific material, discuss the material, and actively field questions from your audience. (Hint: Try typing “free webinar software” or “free webinar hosting” in the search engine.)

The focus of these sessions must concentrate on providing useful information. You must stay away from sales speak or your attendees will quickly perceive your session as a thinly veiled sales call. Maintain a friendly, relaxed and informative tone for the best effectiveness here. For example, let’s say you’re a moped dealer. Pitching how your mopeds are the best in the industry will quickly disgust your audience and leave them feeling as though they’ve been duped. Instead, educate them on what exactly makes a moped environmentally friendly, how they can repair their own moped to mitigate maintenance costs, etc. By providing all this information and free value it will be readily apparent why your company is the clear choice, making it completely unnecessary to blatantly point out why they should buy from you.

These free Web training sessions and presentations create the perfect opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your field. And they also provide an excellent opportunity for direct interaction with your prospects. They’ll get the chance to see exactly how you do business and how much you truly care about helping others.

Web Videos Make You Money

You can just as easily mirror this approach by generating a series of online videos. Producing these Web videos also creates another excellent opportunity to show up in search engines and boost your rankings. For example, YouTube is now considered the second largest search engine on the Internet; behind Google but ahead of Yahoo and Bing. Get your business message into videos and you’ll unlock a huge market for new clients!

Build a Herd

While you’ll obviously be hoping for some direct sales from your free-information marketing, the most lucrative element you’ll gain from this is the leads you’ll generate. Providing free information is one of the best ways to get people to provide you with their contact information. Every time you get someone to opt in for one of your free e-books, newsletters, Web videos or Web training sessions that’s a qualified, exclusive lead. Build yourself a herd by logging those leads into your database and then continuously marketing to them.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Article Marketing, Blogs, Content Distribution, Email Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO and SEM, Social Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Focus Groups for Sound Financial Decisions

Wednesday, July 7th, 2010
Magnified Dollar
Creative Commons License photo credit: Brooks Elliott

Every business owner should be absolutely in love with their product or service. If you don’t have a passion for what you do you’ll surely wind up in an insane asylum from unhappily grinding through all of your work. However, passion for your product can also blind you. A budget-draining pitfall occurs when businesses simply assume their offer is superior and fail to diligently gauge their audience’s response.

Even if you know that your product or service can truly help others live better lives, you must make a strong effort to keep a pulse on the public. That massively beneficial offer of yours could simply be suffering from the wrong marketing angle. Incorporating focus groups in your business plan will help you understand exactly how the public views your offer, and how you can best present it to them in the future as well as how you can improve specific parts about your business or service.

Improve Focus for Targeted Marketing

Focus groups support the most efficient and targeted use of your budget and marketing energy. Polling a focus group could tell you that you’re wasting a huge amount of money on marketing and advertising that simply isn’t reaching the right people. Getting direct feedback will let you know what marketing tools are making their way into people’s lives, what direct response mailers get opened at home and which got tossed without hesitation, which emails are clicked on, whether they pay attention to radio or TV ads regarding your industry, and much more. It’s similar to an army campaign: War never goes as planned, and sometimes you’ll need to reposition your troops to win the battle.

Plus, the valuable feedback you’ll garner will help you best tailor your offer to the public. Perhaps the public actually loves the idea of your product or service but thinks your marketing message is too spammy, sketchy, cheap, snooty, or detached. There may be six reasons why people love your product, but a dozen more reasons why they simply don’t like the way you’re talking about it. Get focused feedback to correct these issues.

Achieve Focus on what to Fix

Focus groups will also clue you in on specific, potential problems, helping you foresee them instead of jumping right into a budget-draining catastrophe. These groups also help you maintain a positive public image instead of cleaning up a massive, public faux-pas. The effort you put into focus groups now will be much less than the effort required to put out major fires caused by not keeping a pulse on the public.

How to Select Your Focus Group

Here’s where some simple statistics come into play. You must be sure to use a random selection for your focus group for the most accurate results. Select from a very specific pool of participants and your feedback will be highly biased, which could easily steer your business in the wrong direction.

You must also choose your demographic wisely to get accurate results. For example, if you’re selling high-end TV’s and you do a focus group in the projects, you’re probably not going to get the feedback you were looking for. Yes, that was an extreme example, but it’s definitely worth noting since many businesses test the wrong market or target audience.

While your friends and family may provide a good place to start for some immediate feedback, this will surely produce some naturally biased results. Instead, you can use online polls, customer and prospect newsletters that feature a quick questionnaire, or a link to a quick and simple form on your website. You can even publish a notice in your local newspaper, promising free breakfast for an hour of their time. (Offering something for free always increases participation.)

And what do you do after you’ve conducted a successful round of focus groups? Magnify that focus and test again a few months later. Even Donald Trump is still finding ways that he can improve his business—test, test and test again to continuously increase your sales.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Online Marketing, Public Relations, marketing | No Comments »

Boost Your Net Worth with Networking

Monday, July 5th, 2010
Frosty Morning Web
Creative Commons License photo credit: foxypar4

Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store or work solely on the wonderful world wide web, if you’re not networking then your business is slowly dying. Networking helps keep the blood flowing through your business. Here are a few networking tips for on and off the Internet to generate leads and improve sales—put them into action today!

Who do you already know?

Whether it’s personal or business, those you already know always form your best resource. Talk to your friends, family members, and business associates about your business. Those are the people who truly want you to do well and will surely have the most open ears.

Even if they’re not interested in your offer, if you deliver your pitch well enough there’s a good chance that they may know someone else who could benefit from your offer. And don’t hesitate to straight up ask them if they would tell others about your business. The simple act of asking them for a referral dramatically improves your chances of successful word-of-mouth marketing.

It’s understandable that many people don’t like to talk about their business with friends and family because they feel as though they’re pressuring them, guilting them into the purchase. But you can easily prevent any discomfort by delivering your business message in the softest of selling voices. Maintain a genuine excitement (excitement is contagious) and discuss specific examples of how your product or service has helped others. People want to hear about how they can be helped with their needs, not the features of your business.

This is also an excellent opportunity to use testimonials from your customers. Bring a printout along that features both written testimonials and pictures of you and your customers. You can top this by bringing your laptop and showing them video testimonials.

Offer Something for Free to Get Everything You Need

One of the best ways to initiate a new networking contact is to offer them something for free. Doors will swing freely open if you initiate contact by offering something instead of asking for something. You automatically build a degree of trust, introduce them to your business, and get them to try your product or service; all at the same time.

The presentation is key here. First, you must fully believe yourself when you say that you want to help others. Come at this from the angle that you don’t even care if you get the sale—just as long as you made the effort to help someone today. This will help you avoid too hard of a sell in your networking efforts. What will probably take you less than 30 minutes could earn you 30 years of loyal clientele.

Two Ways to Play

You can take a super soft, yet highly effective sales approach: Help them for free and then simply walk away—they’ll come to you.

You can take a slightly harder, still highly effective sales approach and offer something for free in the same message.

Here are a few examples you can incorporate in your business today:

Consulting:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, I think your approach is a bit scattered. I’m sorry to be a bit brutal there, but I’ve seen all too many businesses fail because they lacked focus in their approach. So I’d like to offer you a free 30-minute consultation to see how we can help you make more money.

Copywriting:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, I’d like you to take a look at some of the errors in your copy that I highlighted in the attached document. I also added some copy that will help you convert more readers to active buyers.

Web Design:

I took a look at your website and I love what you have to offer. However, when I tried to click through to your virtual shopping cart your site navigation got a bit confusing. You could be losing dozens of customers every day just because they’re getting lost within your site.

You can significantly improve your sales by improving your website’s navigation and ease-of-use. I can also give you a free crash course on how Web analytics can help you catch these leaks and plug them before you lose any more potential customers.

Online Social Networking

And one of the other most popular ways to network today is done online, using highly effective tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Profiles, Twitter, and Google Buzz. First, these social networking tools will help you establish more touch points for the search engines. Second, you can use social media tools to remind people of what you can do for them. Third, by getting your profile, name or business on someone else’s social media account or linked to their profile, you automatically multiply your exposure. Think of it this way: Connect with just one person on LinkedIn and you will then be connected with all the people they are connected to. Potentially 100 more contacts through just one extra networking contact—now that’s using the power of leverage.

Fortune Is in the Follow-up

Every lead you generate for your business should be considered a gold nugget. Generating leads can easily be considered one of the most challenging tasks for any business. But the potential return far out ways the difficulty of the challenge. Follow up with every single person that has ever had anything to do with your business.

Maintain Meaning with Your Marketing Messages

And with all of the networking you do, it should all lead back to your website or main point of sale. Sad but true, many people go through all the motions of networking without having a purposeful message behind it all. Always make it very clear as to what your prospect’s next action step should be.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Content Crooner, Email Marketing, Online Marketing, Public Relations, Social Marketing, marketing | No Comments »

Follow-up is a Key to Financial Freedom

Friday, July 2nd, 2010
A Matter of the Heart
Creative Commons License photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Maintain consistent follow-up with your prospects and never let another lead slip through the cracks again. The most challenging part of marketing is to generate the initial lead. You’ll improve efficiency and sales while getting the most out of your budget when you use the power of follow-up to capitalize on your leads. Fortune is in the follow-up!

Before we dig in, it’s worth clarifying that follow-up comes in countless forms. Any time you make some type of connection with a prospect, current client or past client after initial contact it can be considered following up. Common methods of following up include: call, e-mail, newsletter, postcard, and text message.

Last Bird Gets the Worm

Follow-up repositions you and helps you return to the front of your prospects’ minds instead of the dark, cobwebbed recesses. It’s actually a fairly simple theory. That which the mind learns or processes last is also the same thing that it recalls the quickest. If you’re dead even with another company in terms of price and quality of product or service, then your business will almost always be chosen over your competitor simply because you were the most recent contact.

Plus, you know how crazy things can get with your business—sometimes people just lose your contact information and will appreciate you getting in touch with them.

Natural Procrastination Breaks Businesses

Unless you’re Paris Hilton, people are natural procrastinators when it comes to buying products or services. It’s your responsibility to move them from procrastinator to proactive consumer. Often enough, what many of those fence-sitters, looky-loos, tire kickers and generally unassertive people need is a simple follow-up.

If someone doesn’t buy your product right away, then the chances of them motivating themselves to once again visit your offer rapidly decline. But if you get your offer right back in front of them then you will significantly increase the probability of getting their business. Following up creates a spark that reignites their interest and motivation.

Another way to look at it is this: Aside from Vegas, most people don’t get married the same day they meet. Especially for higher end products and services, you will need to court your prospects.

Friends Follow Up with Each Other

For any prospects who might be a tad reluctant to move forward due to doubt or skepticism, a friendly follow-up could be all that they needed to feel confident in buying your product or service. It shows you care about their needs. People buy from those they believe genuinely care about them over others any day of the week.

Follow-up also serves as an additional touch point. You promote customer loyalty with each and every communication and touch point you establish.

Plug Money Losing Leaks

You can also take this opportunity to be very candid with your prospect and ask them what prevented them from making the purchase. You’d be surprised at how much helpful feedback you can get just by doing this, and catch a lot of sales-killing errors you might be making. Few things fuel a person’s desire to write more than anger or frustration. Let them vent and you’ll pick up some key areas where you can improve your sales process, and keep your prospects moving smoothly through your sales funnel.

As part of this, you must pay special attention to your sales funnel at all times. Study your website analytics to find potential points where your prospects might be slipping through the cracks. For example, if a website visitor clicked all the way through to your shopping cart page and then just disappeared, testing a different website layout may be the answer. By incorporating follow-up tools and actively collecting feedback, and pairing that with your Web analytics, you will be able to plug all the leaks and maintain the fastest boat in the fleet.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

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Posted in Business Tips, Email Marketing, Online Marketing | No Comments »