Archive for the ‘Viral Marketing’ Category
Monday, March 24th, 2008 |
In a matter of weeks a new web 2.0 site will launch and quite possibly change the internet forever. Toksee is the new communication tool that will allow users to talk to and see their contacts online. It is a social network that focuses on things people are more passionate about.
Here are 5 critical factors that could help TokSee take the internet by storm:
1) The popularity of social networking sites is well established and growing: Here is the proof. Over 148 million people registered for web 2.0 sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. Facebook adds a million over 25 year old adults per week to their site. Youtube gets 50 million unique visitors per month. MySpace.com get over 1.6 million visitors per day. I think you get the point.
2) Users can get the TokSee widget for free. The best word on the internet is “free”. This will create a viral or word of mouth component that will quickly expand its user base.
3) Toksee will share revenues from ads and upgrades with its free users. This could be huge! Myspace, Youtube, and Facebook are great sites worth billions. However, they don’t share much revenue with the end users. Toksee will pay even its free users.
4) TokSee has the backing of a Publicly Traded Company. Wouldn’t want amateurs making decisions for such an opportunity. The parent company, Intelecom, Inc (IECM) is a 10 year old company that also markets VOIP around the world.
5) The current pre-launch status provides the opportunity to maximize earnings. The opportunity to profit is always greater if you participate early. Timing is everything. If you think this will be a good opportunity then you should register for a free account as soon as possible.
About the Author:
Mark Hall wants to share an opportunity to join the Internet’s next Billion Dollar Company, TokSee. His TokSee site is generating significant interest as 23% of the people who visited his site signed up as free users.
Tags: Could Be the Next Internet Giant
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Thursday, November 29th, 2007 |
If you could run your own business, would you want to keep going to work everyday for someone else? All it takes is your imagination and one good idea to start a business. Yep, one idea and YOU can be your own boss. We all have ideas running through our heads. So what is keeping most of us from making our own business dreams come true? Examine the daunting task of small business marketing and we will get to the root of it.
Reaching out to customers is the most important part of any business, whether the business is old or new. How else will they be able to see or even understand what products you offer or what services you provide? Letting your customers know about new products, special offers, or current discounts will encourage more traffic to your site and more return business.
All these activities can be summarized in one phrase - small business marketing. Marketing requires you to examine the nature of your offerings and delineate your potential customers. After that you need to study customer behavior and preferences. These findings along with studying the nature of your competition will form the core of your small business marketing strategy.
Once you have decided on a marketing strategy, you need to select the proper media for implementation. Many small businesses are often strapped for cash and unable to consider expensive media options such as advertising on television, glossy newspaper ads, or direct mailings. Whatever your constraints, make the most of whatever is available and affordable. Fortunately, new innovations in small business online marketing and small business offline marketing are an excellent affordable solution to your marketing needs.
Let’s start by summarizing the promotional strategies you can use online. An online presence is important, so it’s essential to have a company website, even if you aren’t involved in electronic commerce. A website is a great way to provide information and attract customers.
Having a web presence also allows you to focus on techniques like search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, email advertising and placing ads in free classified sites like usfreeads.com or craigslist. You can even create short informational videos and place them on Youtube, Google Video and othe video sharing sites to get traffic to your small business website.
Offline strategies for small business marketing can be as innovative as you can make them! Depending on your local bylaws, you can use banner advertisements posted across shopping malls, theatres, bus stops, metro stations and so on. You can also hire people to do door-to-door marketing or even get some friends to place a sign on the van or truck and drive around town. You can also sponsor events at colleges, clubs and discotheques to attract customers, if this is the age group your are targeting.
There are no boundaries to creative thinking. Successful small business marketers come up with their own innovative ideas and put them into action. So go ahead and be creative. Develop a plan, use your imagination to promote it and you will be surprised how easy it is to be successful.
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Thursday, November 29th, 2007 |
Who would want to work for someone else if they could run their own business? Not very many. All it takes to have a successful business is one good idea. Yes, that’s it; one good idea, properly executed, and you can be your own boss. Everyone can think of an idea, and we all certainly do. So, what stops us from realizing these ideas - from translating them into successful small businesses? If we examine closely, we will get to the root cause. It isthe daunting task of small business marketing.
No matter what venture you start, you will need to attract clients. They need to know that your product or service exists to meet their needs. They also need to know how what you are selling differentiates itself from competitors in the market. You also need to let them know about promotions and coupons that are available.
The phrase small business marketing encompasses all of these activities. Marketing demands knowing the essence of your product or service and identifying your customer base. Next, customer behavior and preferences need to be identified. The results combined knowing your competitors should form the basis of the strategy of your small business marketing.
After developing a marketing strategy, you need to plan a method for implementing it. Small businesses are usually unable to spend a large amount of money on expensive advertising like television commercials or newspaper promotions so you will have to be inventive. There are, however, a variety of methods appropriate for small business online marketing and small business offline marketing.
Let’s first consider online promotional strategies. To get anywhere these days you need an online presence - a company website or blog - even if your business does not sell things directly online. Your website or blog serves as a good platform to inform, attract and retain customers.
Having a web presence also allows you to focus on techniques like search engine marketing, pay per click advertising, email advertising and placing ads in free classified sites like usfreeads.com or craigslist. You can even create short informational videos and place them on Youtube, Google Video and othe video sharing sites to get traffic to your small business website.
Your real world small business marketing strategies are only limited by your own innovation. Consider hanging advertising banners in any number of locations, including malls, movie theatres, metro stations, bus stops and more. Stick a magnetic sign to the side of a van that drives throughout the area, or look into marketing door-to-door. If you sell a youth-oriented product, you may also want to consider sponsoring events like college sports, or special nights at dance clubs or discotheques.
There are no boundaries to creative thinking. Successful small business marketers come up with their own innovative ideas and put them into action. So go ahead and be creative. Develop a plan, use your imagination to promote it and you will be surprised how easy it is to be successful.
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Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 |
When you decide to have an opt-in list, it is not just a matter of sending your subscribers your promotional newsletters or catalogs. There are many things to consider in avoiding many complications. While there are so many ways you can make people subscribe to your list, there are also some things you must do to avoid subscribers from wanting to get off from your list.
Aside from that, you also want to avoid any problems with the law and your internet service provider or ISP. There are now many laws and rules that are applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted mails. With the popularity of the electronic mail as a medium for marketing because of the low cost, many company’s have seized the opportunity and have flooded many people’s e-mail accounts with promotional mail.
But, with an opt-in list, you avoid this annoyance because people subscribe to the list; they want to receive the newsletters and promotional materials. They have consented to being on the list by subscribing themselves, just don’t forget to put an unsubscribe feature everytime in your opt-in list so that you avoid any confusion. There may be times when an email account was provided when the real owner didn’t want to subscribe.
It is essential that you keep your list clean and manageable. Arrange it by using the many tools and technologies available for your opt-in list. Do not worry; your investment in this marketing strategy is well worth it with all the coverage you will get which will likely be converted into sales then to profit.
Keep yourself and your business out of trouble and potential run-ins with the law and the internet service providers. Keep your operation legit and clean. Your reputation as a legitimate businessman and a legitimate site depends on your being a straight and true marketing strategist. As a tip, here are three things to avoid when emailing your list.
1) Take notice of your unsuccessful sends. These are the e-mails that bounce. Bounced emails, also known as undeliverable messages, are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully received by the intended recipient.
There are bounces that happen or occur because the server was busy at that time but can still be delivered in another time. There are also bounces because the inbox of the recipient is full at that time. There are those bounce messages that are simply undeliverable ever. The reason for this is that it may be an invalid email address, a misspelled email address, or an email address that was abandoned and erased already.
Manage your list by putting markings on those that bounce. Erase an email account from your list so that you have an accurate statistics and records as to how many are actually receiving your mail. You may also want to check the spellings of your email addresses in your list. One common mistake is when an N instead of an M is placed in the .com area.
2) Always provide an unsubscribe feature in your site and an unsubscribe link in your mails. When someone in your list files a request to be unsubscribed, always take that request seriously. If you don’t take them off your list and keep sending them your e-mails, you are now sending them spam mail.
When you are reported as a spammer, you and your business can get into a lot of trouble. You can be reported to the authorities and maybe blacklisted by many internet service providers. You will lose a lot of subscribers this way and many more in potential subscribers.
3) Do not provide pornographic or shocking and disturbing content in your newsletters. It is hard to decipher the age of the recipient and many complaints may stem from these. Controversial issues also are to be avoided to not be branded by your subscribers. Stick to the nature of your site and business.
Always remember these tips in this article so that you can have a healthy relationship with your subscribers as well as be kept within the boundaries of what is allowed in sending mails to an opt-in list.
Tags: Affiliate Cash Secrets, Email Marketing, Marketing, Howto, Reference, List Building Strategy
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Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 |
An affiliate marketer may have all the things needed for him to be able to succeed in a business such as affiliate marketing. He may have the necessary drive, diligence and perseverance to be able to understand how the system works. He may have all the tools necessary in maintaining the business, including a really unique and interesting website which could earn him a fortune if only the whole world could see it. However, all these would prove useless if he does not know how to drive traffic to his website. His business would sink into oblivion together with all the sales, fortune and dreams that he might have realized if he only knew how to do this particular task.
Getting people who matter to see one’s website is a difficult undertaking if he tries to consider the fact that there are rivals everywhere waiting to pin him down. The immensity of the internet as well as the affiliate marketing world has given birth to the fierce competition between affiliate marketers, each of whom has his own great product to offer. With all the websites piling on top of each other, how would one be able to stand out? The seven best ways to drive laser-targeted traffic to one’s own website would help those who are bent on sticking it out with this business wherever it is bound to take them.
The first step in driving traffic to one’s website is by relying on search engines and what they can do for the affiliate marketer concerned. Because they are popular for driving free targeted traffic, they should not be ignored by all means. Having top search engine rankings is vital in building popularity links, and the use of the right keywords is important in attaining this goal. Once a website is on top of the list, it is easily accessible to anyone who wants to see it for himself.
The second way in driving traffic to one’s website is by contacting other webmasters for a possible link exchange partnership.? Locating websites that are related to one’s own website is the primary task. Once there, he should be able to establish communication by personalizing everything as much as possible. It is then possible to make reciprocal link exchanges between webmasters whichever way the affiliate marketer prefers.
The third way is through writing one’s own articles. This is an effective way in promoting a website, because good content that are appreciated by readers will lead them to visit the writer’s very own website out of sheer interest.
The fourth way is through joint venture marketing. This is one of the most effective ways of promoting a product or a service. Having a partner through ad swap or link exchange is beneficial to both parties as it allows them to reach a wide customer base in a short amount of time.
The fifth is through joining affiliate programs. Having affiliates to do the work means allowing them to bring tons of traffic to a website. Skyrocketing sales would be realized as a result, and both the affiliate and the website owner will benefit from the situation.
The sixth is by having a list of subscribers that one can refer to every so often, because they are those which would prove to be valuable assets for the marketer concerned. The use of autoresponders and personalized newsletters is one way of keeping track of them all, and holding on to them by letting them know about new products and services is an essential task that should be done by the affiliate marketer concerned.
The seventh is by knowing one’s market through and through. It is important for traffic to be targeted to those who might have a special interest in the theme or topic of one’s website. This way, a solid customer base is going to be created. Once a potential customer shows an interest in a particular website by paying it a visit, one must not waste time in trying to show him that his effort is worth it.
Traffic generating strategies are important in trying to make one’s affiliate marketing career inch forward. It is always advantageous to plan one’s moves in any business that he might undertake. This is particularly so in affiliate marketing. If one knows how to get people to see what he has to offer, then he is on the right track.
Tags: Search Engine Marketing, Targeted Traffic, Traffic Secrets, Traffic Building, Website Traffic, Your Traffic Formula
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Posted in List Building, Niche Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Website Traffic, Traffic Building, Internet Marketing Strategy, Viral Marketing | 6 Comments »
Thursday, February 1st, 2007 |
Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.
To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.
Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.
Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.
Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.
For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.
While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.
You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.
Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.
With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.
It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.
Tags: Search Engine Marketing, List Building, Online Business, Traffic Building, Internet Marketing Strategy, Affiliate Marketing
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Wednesday, December 27th, 2006 |
If you haven’t heard the word ‘niche’ being batted around by Internet Marketers then you haven’t been listening. Finding a niche has become the antidote to competing in overly saturated online markets.
What is a niche?
According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary a niche is described as “a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted… a specialized market”.
Have you noticed that despite the closing of many businesses in these harsh economic times, the local hobby train store is still around? That the ‘hole-in-the-wall’ eatery is thriving? Or that trends such as scrapbooking can start with a bang and still close within a year when four similar businesses start up in the same area?
The online business world reflects the same trends as experienced in the offline world - often with faster turnover and startup rates. Those who promote a product or site that targets a small, select audience can tap into a market that is otherwise not being served. Despite the limitations of the client base, the targeted nature of the business creates a devoted and active market - the aim of any business.
How do I find a niche?
Finding a niche requires diligent research. Whether you have access to software that harvests and sorts information or you take a manual approach you must first start with ideas.
With a pen and paper (or computer, if that’s more comfortable) brainstorm a list of businesses, products and industries. Create a list of keywords and phrases you think would be used by individuals looking for these items online.
Use a software program such as Wordtracker or a free resource such as the Overture Keyword Selector Tool to find keywords for your niche that have a high amount of traffic.
Although a program like Wordtracker makes it easy to find details such as how many sites compete for that market, you can also do your own research.
Concentrate your attention on question phrases such as “how do I…” or “where can I…”. These questions will clue you into potential markets that need servicing.
Next, look in Google Answers. Type one of your keywords into the search area. What questions are being asked and how much are people willing to pay for answers? If you find a group of keywords with a high number of questions then enter these words in your browser’s search engine.
What sites come up? Do they provide answers or solutions to the problem? How are they making money? Can you see an opportunity to service these individuals?
Finding a niche can open the door to a profitable online business. Research the market and be certain that your product or service is valuable to this group. Find forums or groups that target this audience and pay close attention to their concerns.
If you can help these people you WILL make money. The best of both worlds!
Tags: Reference, Tips, Business, Howto, Niche Marketing, Online Business
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