July 28, 2009
Online Business, Promotion and Marketing
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There was a time when network marketing meant meeting at a friends place to sell your products and make associates. How to sell network marketing online is much more complex than this. For more information please visit Online Marketing
But broken down into its basic elements the question of how to sell network marketing online can be a simple exercise. The basis of network marketing is building networks of people who buy and sell products. What better place to build a network of people than on the ultimate worldwide network-the internet.
It’s no wonder that the internet is the place to go to build a network marketing business.
The benefits to building your business online are extensive. You can work in shorts and a T-shirt, you only talk with people who are highly interested and your business is working for you 24/7.
Moreover, your maintenance costs are low, and it is easy to expand internationally. Most important, anyone can do it–you do not have to be a computer genius to find success.
The first aspect of selling network marketing online is to have an internet presence. This means having a website . Usually network marketers have a website which runs into a few pages . A good ,imaginative and attractive front page ( called capture page) should work well . Keep things simple. Let your audience know what you are all about.
The second step of using web 2.0 tools to sell network marketing is a bit more involved than a passive web presence. Social sites like Facebook and Myspace have millions of subscribers ,each with different tastes and preferences. For more information please visit Internet Marketing
Joining likeminded forums and getting people to join your network marketing business makes good sense. You have to spend some time to understand the dynamics of social sites but the time spent is well worth it. Using forums you can sell network marketing to a world wide audience.
Blogging is a great way to sell network marketing . You must have several blogs hosted on different popular blogging sites. People are keen and interested in knowing about different things happening around the world. Selling network marketing through blogs is a fantastic idea.
Let people know about your network marketing scheme and how people can benefit from it. Get others excited about your ideas and see how they make a beeline towards you. To sell network marketing online is the best way to increase traffic to your business. Exploit all web 2.0 initiatives to grab a pie of the worldwide market.
As you attract prospects, you will need a database to keep track of them. Outlook has a great contact manager, though if you create something on your own, make sure it has enough room to keep track of a prospect’s name, e-mail, phone number and address. It must also have an area where you can write comments.
Once a prospect is in your database, send them a personal e-mail to see if they found the information on your site to be valuable. This will also determine their level of interest in your business. Use e-mails to create a rapport with the prospect and move them toward a phone call.
If you have an effective web presentation and follow-up system and a prospect agrees to speak with you by phone, there’s a good chance that person will join your business or purchase your product. For more information please visit Marketing
July 26, 2009
Search Engine Optimization
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Alexa and Google PR ranks are a quick measure how strong a site is in traffic and from the search engine perspective. They measure very different things but are both important.
An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alex rank the better. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. And if you are in the top 100,000, congratulations! If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.
A google PR (page rank) is a little harder to explain as very few people know exactly it is calculated, but it is a measure of how popular and how much of an authority it is. Google PRs range from 1-10, with 10 being the most coveted.
There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.
July 21, 2009
email marketing
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Like many of you, I belong to a few business networking and education groups. They are a valuable source of potential leads, joint venture partnerships and even great ideas. So imagine my disappointment when one of the group’s members started spamming us with emails that was marketing speakers and websites with obvious affiliate links.
His facebook friend request? That got the “ignore” click. His emails? The delete button. His potential to provide a service to me? Nonexistent.
As a marketer he should really know better. With just a little education and use of the right tools, you can avoid following in his footsteps. As soon as you start using email to talk about your business and your services and products you need to avoid the “spammer” trap.
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
In 2003, President Bush signed into law the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. I think it is helpful to know what CAN-SPAM stands for: “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing”. The key is “Non-Solicited”. Just like you may not like uninvited salesman at your front door selling you vacuum cleaners, un-solicited marketing by email has the same taint to it …. and it’s illegal to boot.
While covering the CAN-SPAM Act in it’s entirety is beyond the scope of this article, here are the two things you need to know.
- You must give the receiver of your email a way to tell you they don’t want any more emails from you. This is calling “opting out” and usually done by providing an “unsubscribe” link.
- You must honor the removal request within 10 days according the Act(but really it needs to happen a lot sooner than that).
Many privacy activists felt the CAN-SPAM Act was ineffectual and didn’t go far enough. Some went so far to call it the “I can spam Act”. For these reasons the ESPs (more on what that is in a moment) that legitimate businesses use set a higher standard. The removals happen quickly, usually within 24 hours. And many businesses take advantage of the “double opt-in” feature and send invitations for you join their list before even one marketing email is sent. That perfect client you met at last week’s business event may need a reminder to remember you, and an invitation to continue the conversation by joining your list is a graceful way to keep you in the forefront of their mind.
What are ESPs?
ESPs are email service providers. There are a number of excellent ones on the market, and for a monthly fee they will store your contact list, send the emails for you, help you build in your opt-in box or link, and handle all the details of email marketing, such as complying with the CAN-SPAM Act by: 1) automatically generating the unsubscribe link in each email you send through their tools and then 2) doing the right thing when someone clicks on it.
Some of the ESPs even enforce the “double opt-in” feature, where any existing list of contacts you upload into their system will be sent an email asking permission to be placed in their system. While it can be painful to lose those contacts that don’t respond, your resulting list will be of higher quality.
If you remember one thing from this article, it is that you want to do Permission based email marketing. You always want to have a user’s permission before sending them an email.
If that business network member had gone through a few extra steps to have an unsubscribe link in his email, I would have thought so much higher of him. And maybe I would have even clicked on one of his links, earning him a commission.
July 16, 2009
Web 2.0
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Interesting thing about observing trends, you can watch move them through groups as a wave. Let’s take twitter for example, it first became popular with the tech hip as a cool way to share just about anything, in 140 characters or less. I loved twitter at events such as the Web2.0 expo, following the instantaneous commentary on the speakers, and of course knowing where the cool party was.
In the last six months, it’s become the latest must have tool for entrepreneurial marketing. Talks about using social media for marketing your business have become a staple at business networking events. And with good reason, MarketOutLoud filled seats for it’s marketing events with it’s facebook connections. Some became social media divas. For the savvy it’s been a great lead generation tool.
But twitter has recently become less fun to use, at least for me. It seems like every day I get a follow request from someone that has less than 40 updates (boring!), or even worse, zero. And people that I chose to follow, immediately DM’ed me with a tweet with a link to their product. These get unfollowed really quickly.
On the other hand, facebook which I initially didn’t like much has become a better place to hang out, I have enough friends who post interesting things to catch my interest. The walled garden aspect of facebook, derided with frustration by some, seems to keep the riffraff out, the quality connections in.
And surprisingly, teenagers, a group you would have thought been the early adopters, don’t use twitter either. As my son’s sniffs “my Dad uses twitter”.
So if you have never used twitter, is it safe to ignore it now? Absolutely, not. Twitter is still a major force to be reckoned with. As evidenced by the recent Iranian election unrest, twitter is where the news breaks first. Fast breaking events that grab broad interest is where twitter shines, and it can be an excellent way to search for news. And there are influencers in the twittersphere that can direct significant traffic, if you want to play in the twitterspace for business reasons, at the very least find the ones in your industry to keep a pulse on your market.
And if you didn’t know what a DM was, it’s high time you figured it out.
July 12, 2009
Web Development
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If you are campaigning for small scale business, you require all the more planning and scheduling.The smaller the business, it seems, the more tightly the plan should be.For the huge companies advertising is not a big problem as they have huge budgets and so if online advertising did not work for them, then they can go ahead with the traditional method of advertising which can do much more for them.When it comes to smaller businesses, they have stringent budget and so they cannot carry out traditional advertising.Internet marketing becomes the main stay of marketing. So it is essential that it is well planned.An advantage that small businesses can have over large corporations when it comes to marketing online is that they’re more likely to have a very focused niche.
Understand the concept of internet marketing for small business with Secret Cash Blueprint.
The issue with large businesses is that they have a wide base of products and services to offer the customers.Then marketing each individual niche has to be a separate campaign.While marketing your small business you will only have to work on particular niche.Once you are aware of the needs of your customers, you can then concentrate on fulfilling their needs through your marketing campaign rather than spreading it over a large group of individuals.Internet marketing for small business, because of the smaller budgets, often doesn’t involve heavy pay-per-click advertising..PPC ads include more money than what you can expect in return
If you have a fixed budget on PPC and are keen on implementing it, keep a close look on the returns generated. Abandon those keywords that are not that profitable and focus on those key words that are pulling more customers.You can easily market your small business effectively with SEO.You may have to shell out a few bucks on employing an expert or an SEO service to handle your campaigns, but the money spent is well worth.
Here is mostly where small businesses become unsuccessful.They don’t make sure their content is optimized for the search engines, so it’s very difficult for someone to find them unless they’re searching on the company name.Internet users mainly search for the things they are looking for and not by the company name.So an efficient method for marketing in case of small business is to get your website higher in search engine rankings. This can be achieved by using best keywords for your company.One more aspect that should be included in the plan is that get other sites link to your website.Only keywords are not taken in to consideration by search engine but they also pay attention towards reputation of the site.Most search engines consider your information advantageous when you have more other sites to link to yours.
With these small business online marketing strategies, the small organizations can rank their websites much higher to other organizations without spending much on advertising.
July 10, 2009
The Online Life
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The Story of Suzie is a fable, written for Internet Marketers and anyone else who wishes to succeed with a project, business, or endeavor of any kind.
Every morning she had cold-cuts for breakfast. When when guests came to her home, she served them only croissants and jam, because she had never heard of cooking.
One day her friend Mary called her, in great excitement. Mary told Suzie that she had just discovered a something new and wonderful, and that it was called cooking. Mary hastily explained that she had come across an advertisement on the Internet, which explained what cooking was.
After hearing a few sentences of explanation from Mary, Suzie got very excited herself. Amazing! One could actually put food into pots and pans, heat it up, do different things with it, and then one would not have to live off of croissants and cold-cuts.
But it got better. Mary went on to explain that cooking wasn’t only for experts, but that that anyone – even someone like she or Suzy, could learn to cook. And that in fact, they could do it right from the comfort of their own homes.
“Wow!” Suzy said. “How do I learn this?” Then, a little timidly, she asked, “Do I have to go to expensive night school? Because I don’t have ….”
“Oh no!” Mary said. “You don’t have to go to night school. I found a wonderful website online, and there is a very nice girl there, who will teach you how to cook. All you have to do is buy her eBook for $37.00. You can download it any time (even if it is 2 am!) and start cooking right away!”
Suzy ran to her kitchen computer and logged on. She quickly bought the eBook entitled “Cook at Home.”
The next day, Suzy was so excited, she even skipped her cold cuts. She grabbed a glass of milk (she had never heard of coffee yet, because that would have involved cooking) and opened up her eBook. She began to read it avidly.
On page 3 of the eBook, the author recommended a free software program which would help Suzie measure her flour and sugar, in case she needed to double or triple a recipe. So Suzy downloaded the software. (Of course, she had to enter her email address first, but that was okay, because it was free. Besides, they offered to send her a very helpful free newsletter!)
On page 10 of the eBook on cooking, Suzie arrived to her first recipe. It taught her how to make scrambled eggs. Suzy went to the kitchen, and got out an old frying pan that had belonged to her great-grandmother. “Ah, so that’s what this thing is for!” she said. She had butter, but no eggs. So she went to the store.
Suzy got caught in traffic and by the time she came back from the store, it was two hours later and she was very tired. She logged on to check her email. She was pleasantly surprised to see that already had the first issue of her newsletter!
The newsletter explained to her that, while most people tell you to cook with a frying pan, that’s really old-fashioned and slow. And that the best way to really cook was to get a special pan called the Super-Sonic-Fryer – which would “fry her eggs in less time than it takes a sun beam to get to the other end of the milky way”! That sounded exciting, so Suzy went to buy that Super Sonic Frying Pan.
The next day before Suzy started on her cooking exercises, she decided to search around Google a bit to see if anyone else had tried the super sonic frying pan. She got a bit distracted through, but that was okay. Because she came across something very exciting. A bread cookbook!
The advertisement explained that there are lots of things to cook, but nothing as powerful and effective as bread. And that, if she really wanted to succeed as a cook, she had to bake bread.
So Suzie of course downloaded that eBook and began to make bread.
Half-way through the recipe she realized she needed to buy yeast, so she went out and bought some.
When she returned, another newsletter had arrived. And this was exciting! It said, “Forget scrambled eggs, forget bread, that stuff is for the birds. What you really should make, is Italian pasta!!” Not only that , but if she signed up now, she would be eligible for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (which could expire at any moment). She could sign up for a free online course, and for only $29 per month, she could learn how to make all kinds of Italian Pasta – everything from tortellini, to ravioli, to spaghetti, and more.
So of course, Suzy forgot about her eggs and her bread, and she hastily purchased this new Italian Cooking eCourse. Her incomplete scrambled eggs project was no longer useful, so she threw it away. She had some bread dough rising, but while she was studying her new Italian Cooking eCourse, she forgot all about it – and it eventually fell flat and had to be thrown away as well.
A week later Suzy was depressed. She had bought all these eBooks and materials on how to Cook at Home, and had been working furiously at it, but she had yet to make a single dish!
All was not lost, however. She saw an ad for a new cookbook, which was said to be quite excellent. According to the testimonials on the sales page, many people had been trying for years to learn to cook at home, but only had success after they read that cookbook.
So, with a sigh, she bought it. Maybe this one would have the answer she was looking for.
Two months later, Suzie had accumulated an entire bookshelf full of cookbooks. Her refrigerator was full of leftovers of incomplete dishes she had begun to prepare. But she had not yet completed a single dish. Not even a piece of toast!
Suzie sat back in her big chair and let out a long, sad sigh.
“Well, she said. I guess those people who tried to warn me were right. I’ll never Cook at Home. Cooking is a scam!”
The above is a true story. But its not about Suzie, and its not about cooking.
Its about Internet Marketers like you and me.
Some people succeed at Internet Marketing, and others don’t. Why? Well, there could be many reasons.
But first and foremost – do you finish what you start?
Or do you hop and jump from one idea to the next, in search of the next great recipe?
Do you start to generate income with a certain method, only to receive an email which tells you how “that method is really slow and if you really want to make money online, now, fast, then what you should actually do is …..”
Do you have so many good ideas that you start on all of them, so that none of them can get the amount of attention they truly need, in order to succeed? Well, if you do, don’t be surprised at what you probably wind up with – a bunch of incomplete projects that haven’t yet begun to generate substantial income.
You’ve heard people say “take action,” and that’s true. You’ll never get any eggs scrambled if you sit around reading cookbooks all day, and you’ll never make any money online if all you do is read eBooks.
But there is a little more to it. Suzie took action, but she never followed through. She took on more cooking projects than she had time for, and none were completed.
As an Internet Marketer, you are most likely trying to build up streams of income. It might be a website which generates regular sales or ad revenue. Or it might be another successful campaign. So, in a sense, those projects are never really “done” (unless you drop them).
But there is a phase when you are still establishing and building up that income stream, and there is a phase when that income stream is actually creating regular revenue (which can ideally be maintained without a lot of work).
If you don’t carry your projects through past that first phase, you will wind up with a bunch of projects that are still in the “establishment” stages, but not generating substantial income.
It takes self-discipline and control to stick to a project and carry through with it until it is successful. It can be very easy to be led off in many different directions in search of greener fields.
Its a continuous pull. Call it what you like – diversion, distraction, persuasion, or “the call of the inbox …” It will always be there, perched on the side of the highway, ready to pull you off the road at any moment, like a vulture waiting for vulnerable prey to pass.
Be alert to it, and continue to push forward with your current project.
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Anna Williams article, “The Story of Suzie” was originally posted on Holly Mann’s Blog
Anna has written a basic and succinct post following this story, which contains some simple rules you can remember, to keep you on track and progressing. To read this post please visit If You Want a Project to Succeed at Anna’s blog.