Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Should You Pay an Affiliate to Promote Your Product

September 18, 2009 @ 3:53 pm posted by John Brython

Many product owners wonder whether they should pay an affiliate to promote their product. While I think the answer is generally yes, there are exceptions to when you want to pay an affiliate.

You can only get so many people to come to your website on your own. Your pay per click resources are limited and you can only write so many articles and create so many back links before your time is exhausted. If you have an army of affiliates promoting your product, you simply will be able to make more sales. If your affiliates aren?t poaching off of the sales you would make yourself, paying affiliates to market your product is a no brainer.

If you were selling chocolate chip cookies, each additional dozen cookies would cost you money to produce. But digital products are different. It costs you almost the same amount of money to produce one product as it does to produce a million. Therefore, why wouldn?t you want to pick up low hanging fruit by paying affiliates to promote your product?

Additionally, once you get a customer, you can sell to him or her for life. If you have structured your product line correctly, you can pay an affiliate 75 percent of the original purchase price, but continue to market to that customer for the rest of his life without paying the affiliate any additional money.

Affiliate marketers are very good at their area of specialization or they wash out quickly. Some are experts at pay per click and know how to deliver traffic to your site that converts. Others put in the time to write articles that pre-sell customers on your product before they ever land on your page. Video marketing, forum marketing, and classified ads are other specialities of affiliate marketers.

So, are there times when it doesn?t make sense to pay affiliate marketers? Yes, there are.

If you are only going to sell 100 of an item and you have 1,000 responsive people on your personal email list, you will probably not want to pay affiliates. When you can sell out the subscription yourself, there is no need to split the proceeds.

Another time when you may want to consider not using affiliates is when you want to control how the product is marketed. When you open the product up to affiliate marketers, you lose control of the advertising process. Marketers could spam safe lists or classified sites and give your product a bad name.

Most product owners, however, find that the benefits outweigh the down sides of paying affiliates.

Clickbank is the most popular way to set up an affiliate program for digital products. PayDotCom tried to give Clickbank a run for its money, but hasn?t taken off as well as the promoters hoped. You can also set up a script to run an affiliate program. The $7 script and Rapid Action Profits are two scripts which let you pay affiliates.

What Is the Definition of Marketing

September 17, 2009 @ 3:50 pm posted by John Brython

If you asked many people for the definition of marketing, you?d get many wrong answers. At the very least, some would be right or be on the right track, but still give an answer that?s incomplete. Many people would answer that marketing was advertising or promotion when actually that?s only part of the answer. Marketing is everything you do to get your product or service noticed by the customer, and that include advertising and promotion.

If you learn the definition of marketing from a textbook, it?s even more involved and detailed. Marketing is broken down into what?s known as the 4 P?s. These make up the ?marketing mix? as it was defined by Harvard business professor in the 1960s. Product, price, placement and promotion. Product simply means the product you?re offering an all that it entails like its warrantee, guarantees, etc. Pricing is simply the act of choosing an appropriate price for the product. This can include things besides money, like time and energy.

Placement is the distribution of the product?how it gets into the customers? hands. Point-of-sale, retail, online, which area the product is sold in, the demographic and exact selling environment all make up this part of the definition of marketing. And finally, the last P, promotion include advertising, publicity, selling philosophies and branding rounds out what marketing is and what a good marketing strategy must take into consideration.

This 4 P model works best when applied to consumer goods of fairly low to moderate cost. High-end items require adjustments to the definition of marketing to make them successful. And the terminology used when it comes to marketing a service is different and a bit more complicated, warranting 3 more Ps on top of the original 4.

People become one of the crucial factors in the definition of marketing a service. Each person a customer comes into contact is even more important than usual when service marketing. This P can also refer to the customers. Process refers to the process of providing the service. Physical evidence is a part of the definition of marketing services that no one would consider purchasing a service without. This makes up all of the testimonials and case studies that demonstrate how other people liked or were helped by the product. Since a service is something that can?t be seen or felt until it?s delivered, this evidence that others benefited from the same thing is very important.

Web marketing has its own set of 4 Ps, as well. Personalization is an important part of marketing online because it allows customers to create their own products. Participation in a company?s website and activities attracts customers. Predictive modeling is a term that refers to the mathematical formula for sales models that most of us never need know about it. And peer-to-peer is an important and relatively new term. Social networking and social bookmarking are two prime examples of this. Peer-to-peer or word of mouth is a crucial part of the definition of marketing successfully online.

Incredible Importance Of Marketing Positioning

September 16, 2009 @ 3:47 pm posted by John Brython

When you?re trying to promote your business and its products or services, don?t overlook your marketing positioning. You?ve identified your target market, done your keyword homework, monitored and tweaked your various promotional strategies, so you?re off on the right foot. But there are more things to consider to really promote your brand and see your company succeed. Positioning yourself within your market can make a huge difference in sales and your customer base.

Many people new to marketing might not even know what marketing positioning is. It?s simply how you are perceived by your customers and potential customers. You might think this is something out of your hands. While it?s true that each person sees things through his or her own filter and makes his or her own opinions, there?s a lot you can do to position your company in a more favorable light. This is where marketing becomes less about your company specifically and a little more about the entire market in general.

Consider the environment in your particular market right now. What problems does your industry face at the moment? Is there a downturn industry wide, or is business booming? Are customers? needs being met, or is there room for improvement in certain areas? Also think about how your competition uses marketing positioning to improve their business, and how costly and inconvenient it is for customers to switch from one company or one brand to another. If you find that a hindrance, make it easier for customer to come to you.

Now, focus on your business. Think about what sets you apart from your competitor and what advantages your company has over your competitors. Compare your prices, convenience, level of service and even company size. Do you have excellent customer service that?s more personal and prompt that the bigger company in your field? Are your prices lower, or your guarantees more iron clad? How does the quality of your product or service compare with your competition?

When it comes to marketing positioning, you have a variety of choices in how you go about it. You can focus on specific products or services and their qualities. You can focus on how the customer benefits from them, or how and when the product or service can be used. Identify your target users and appeal directly to them. You can also position yourself against one of your competitor?s in a comparison situation, or conversely, do everything you can to disassociate yourself from them to avoid comparisons.

Your marketing positioning strategy should focus on which of those options stands out to you as the best and obvious choice. If your company is smaller than Corporation X, but you give better, faster, friendlier service that such a huge company could ever hope to give, focus on that. Brand yourself as the small business with heart that listens to customers, and portray larger business as out of touch with customers and suffering under the burden of their own size. That?s an example of good marketing positioning.

How to Improve Your Adsense Conversion Rates and Increase Your Profit

September 15, 2009 @ 3:44 pm posted by John Brython

Why do some web site owners find that they only get a 1 percent Adsense conversion rate while others report a 20 percent or better average? Adsense conversion depends on a number of factors and there are many things you can do on your web site to increase the number of click through?s.

First of all, what is Adsense?

When people buy ads on Google, they have the option of also placing the ads on the content network. Actually, they default to placing the ads on the content network and have to remove that option if they want to only place the ads on Google?s search pages. These ads on Google are called Adwords.

Adsense, on the other hand is Google?s word for you, the website owner, who places their ads on your pages. You get a percentage of the amount of money that Google gets for each ad.

Of course, people have to actually click on the ad in order for you to get paid. So, your job as an Adsense merchant is to do two things. First, you have to get people to come to your site and then you have to get them to click on the ads on your page.

Getting people to your site is beyond the scope of this article, but I am going to show you how to get people to click on your ads.

First of all, you want to have laser-focused content. A blog about your life where you talk about breaking up with your girlfriend one day and about memories about fishing with your grandpa the next is not going to make much money. If you want to slap Adsense on a blog to make a few pennies, that?s okay. But as a business model, it stinks.

Instead, create a website or blog around one highly focused, high earning concept. For instance, a site about car insurance or personal injury law is going to make more money than a site about hummingbird feeders. It?s a matter of supply and demand.

Next, you want to have a lot of pages of content. Articles over 500 words just perform better. People feel like they?ve gotten some ?meat? from your site and don?t hit the back button as quickly. You should have at least 20 pages of content on each Adsense site and many have hundreds of pages. Not only does that give a visitor multiple places to enter, they can also navigate within your site to have a good experience. Then, when they click away, it will likely be through one of your Adsense links rather than through a back button.

The look of your site also matters. You don?t want the ads to just ?blend in.? Make the links stand out so people will know to click them. Many studies have shown that the 250×250 leaderbox put flush left under the headline with the article wrapped around converts the best.

Of course, you should do your own testing on all of these features. Adsense is a moving target. The only way to stay on top of Adsense Conversion is to continually monitor your performance.

Why Strategic Marketing Planning Is Critical And Necessary

September 14, 2009 @ 3:41 pm posted by John Brython

Why Strategic Marketing Planning Is Critical And Necessary

Even before the days of the Internet when advertising was done solely through television, billboards, magazines, radio and direct mailing, strategic marketing planning could often make or break a company. Considering the high cost of all forms of marketing, making a mistake about where to advertise and whom to focus the advertising on could lose a company thousands upon thousands of dollars. While some forms of advertising and promotion are much less costly today, planning your advertising strategy for success is still just as important.

An old saying says that embarking on anything without a plan is a little bit like trying to get to a place you?ve never been without a map. And it is true that people who make plans and write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than those who just have a general idea where they?re going and no real concrete plans about how to do it, and no definite idea about when they should arrive. Your strategic marketing planning can give you a road map, and even an idea of when you should see results, and how good those results should be.

Let?s continue the idea of the traveler with no map and no real sense of his destination. What happens when he gets where he wanted to go, and it turns out to not be the place he?d dreamed of. What then? Without a plan, he?s got no real recourse except to keep going aimlessly or to go back the way he came. With strategic marketing planning, once you see your results and they?re not what you?d hoped for, you have a plan in place to deal with it. You have set measures for how to make changes and improvements to work toward the results you wanted in the beginning. You?re working toward a goal, not meandering aimlessly and using intuition and guesswork to build your business.

When you?re ready for strategic marketing planning, consider sitting down with the experts and building your plan. You can find a consultant who will just help you with the plan, should you not want to hire someone to handle promotions altogether. But just having an expert help you with your promotion planning can confirm for you that what you?re doing is sound. And it can make sure that your goals are achievable, too, so you can avoid the disappointment of setting goals that are too high to reach.

Strategic marketing planning gives you a concrete result to aim for. You know what you want, now it?s just up to you to take the steps to achieve it. And as the results come in, you?ll have methods of adjusting your plan to build upon those good results, or steer your promotional activities away from methods that aren?t working. You?ll know how to adjust certain promotions to make them work better, and how to judge whether a specific type of promotion just isn?t right for your business. With strategic marketing planning, you?ll always have a step ready for you to take next.

Why Hire An Internet Marketing and Advertising Company

September 13, 2009 @ 3:38 pm posted by John Brython

When it comes to promoting your company online, you might have considered hiring an internet marketing and advertising company. Because of the importance of marketing and time and effort it takes, hiring someone to do it for you can be a good idea. Not only will it allow you more time to work on your business instead of worrying about marketing, you?ll also benefit from having an internet marketing and advertising company working on your campaign.

Unless a person spends a great deal of time keeping up with internet marketing techniques, it?s very difficult to stay abreast of new ideas and methods of marketing. An internet marketing and advertising company however, makes this their business, so they always have the latest and best information when it comes to marketing a business online.

A long-term campaign with an internet marketing and advertising company will probably be a considerable expense. But before you discount it based on cost, consider the value of what you?ll receive rather than the dollar amount you?re putting out initially. A good internet marketing campaign can offer returns far and beyond what you spend?of course, it wouldn?t be worth it otherwise. But the returns you?ll receive from expert advice and promotion from an internet marketing and advertising company won?t start and then stop, they should continue for some time.

If you?re already in an established business and your numbers need a boost, hiring experts shouldn?t be too much of a hardship. You already know that the money you put into advertising and promotion flows back to you many times over, and you probably have more capital available to enter into such an agreement. If you?re just starting out in business, consider the money you spend on good promotion and advertising now a very vital expense. If you can get started out on the right foot getting your brand recognized in the right way and in the right places, you?ll have overcome one of the hurdles everyone starting an online business has to face.

Working with an internet marketing and advertising company doesn?t take you out of the promotion equation. Usually it?s more a partnership than a simple delegation of promotional tasks. Once you together decide which direction to move in, then the company may handle many of the day to day promotional activities like blog posts, social networking and social bookmarking, for instance. But not before you along with them have decided which aspects of your business to focus on, and which market to target.

Working with the experts, especially in the beginning, can also be a learning tool should you ever want to get more involved with your business? internet marketing and promotional efforts. Or you can have staff who work with them closely and learn the many techniques that they use to best market your company. Then you can take back some of the promotional tasks should you want to, or should you want the internet marketing and advertising company to focus on another area of your business.

Your Advertising Business Internet Marketing Plan

September 12, 2009 @ 3:35 pm posted by John Brython

One of the built-in benefits of running a business that involves helping other businesses promotional effort is the built-in testimonial of an advertising business internet marketing plan. When you take part in a business where advertising is a key service you provide, then the ability for your customers to find you and be swayed to employ you is a testament that you understand internet marketing and advertising. If this is the kind of business you?re looking to go into because you want to consult or handle promotions for other businesses, then don?t miss the opportunity to point out to potential customers that you grow your own business with the very techniques you want to provide for them.

While it?s inherent that an advertising business internet marketing plan must be successful if they do find clients, you must also bring this to the potential client?s attention. Of course you?ll want to have concrete results from other companies that you?ve helped promote products and services. But don?t neglect to use your own promotional techniques and results as tools to market your own business. While your knowledge of advertising business internet marketing techniques maybe be clear since you?re earning their business, it might consciously occur to them so be sure and point it out.

Advertising business internet marketing has the benefit that many other online businesses don?t have–built-in testimonial information from within their very own business! Take screen shots of your search engine rankings on various searches and use those. Describe your own company?s efforts towards promotion and the results. Reiterate the ways in which customers find you?when you mention the manner in which that particular client found your advertising business internet marketing campaign, they?ll be impressed?and stress that you can do for them what you?ve done for your own company.

An advertising business internet marketing strategy of this sort is especially key for a new business with no other clients to give testimonials and no other sites on which to show real results. In a case like this, it?s not going to be easy to convince a potential client to sign on, since there?s no real evidence that you can do what you claim as far as their promotional efforts go. But if you show your marketing efforts and the good results, you do have evidence for them to see.

While it might not be as compelling evidence as another site with concrete results, it will still show potential clients that you do know how to market a business online, and you do know how to implement a promotional plan. For someone starting out in an advertising business that focuses on internet marketing, in order to get some evidence beyond your own website, create one or two websites based on varied interests.

They don?t have to be businesses, just general information. Use all your promotional skills in tweaking the site and the methods of marketing you use for it. Then your advertising business internet marketing skills will have more good results to show potential clients.

Secret Of Effective Internet Marketing

September 11, 2009 @ 3:32 pm posted by John Brython

When you hear complaints from people who?ve tried going into business online and failed, chances are that it?s not that their efforts were wrong, they just weren?t practicing effective internet marketing. This is where many of the internet marketing center and programs you can purchase fail the average business person. They give an introduction to different ways you can promote your business online, but they only go that far and stop. They don?t give in depth information about how to tweak these techniques to make them work for you, and what to do if they don?t seem to be working.

There?s only one true secret to effective internet marketing: Reevaluate often and change tactics when necessary. Most sources of information you?ll find on internet marketing urge you to try many different models of promotion. Traditional ads, pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization, joint ventures and a variety of other very good suggestions for ways to get your product or service out in front of those who would need or want it. So you?re introduced to all these various ways of marketing. Then many people think that?s all the information they need, so they jump in with both feet, blow their budget on pay-per-click advertising or some other expensive promotion. The reasoning is that the profits made from this promotion will replace the funds spent and even increase them for the next advertising campaign.

Unfortunately, it rarely works just this way. Very often a person will put these marketing techniques into effect all at once hoping for a large return, but instead very little happens and now there?s little budget left to try again. While there?s nothing wrong with advertising campaigns that cost, like pay-per-click marketing, this type of promotion isn?t right for every business, despite what the expert might say. And it?s hardly effective internet marketing to start out with pay-per-click spending.

Where most fail is that they don?t carefully monitor the response of every type of marketing they have in place. Effective internet marketing isn?t done once and forgotten, left to work behind the scenes to generate huge profit. It?s an evolving process, one that takes regular adjustment and change to be truly successful. And you really can begin this process without spending very much money, and sometimes without spending anything at all.

Aim for the lower cost forms of marketing first. Article marketing, for instance, and filling a blog with fresh keyword optimized content to attract good search engine ranking effective internet marketing and a great start. Yes, you?ll want to optimize your web content, even if you have pay someone to do it correctly.

But hold off on the expensive pay-per-click campaign until you see which keywords and which articles and blog post are referring you the most customers. Then put your money where your customers are, in essence, by creating a pay-per-click campaign based on results you?ve already seen with other methods. Effective internet marketing requires you to reevaluate all of this often, because your best keywords can change even from day to day.

Huge Benefits of Business To Business Marketing

September 10, 2009 @ 3:29 pm posted by John Brython

Business to business marketing has advantages over marketing to consumers that make marketing even easier. Business to business companies market their products and services to businesses rather than consumers in general. Some of the most successful businesses exclusively supply to other businesses. This is one of the most lucrative business models possible today, and it has proven to be especially profitable when the business is conducted online. If you?re considering going into business providing products or services, then you?ll want to look into operating a business to business company.

With online business to business operation and marketing, many of the expenses of running a traditional business are gone or greatly reduced. This positively affects all the other aspects of running the company. Less expense means less time spent managing the money going out, and more money for important things like business to business marketing and promotion. No company will succeed without an advertising and promotion budget. And as many large, worldwide corporations have shown, the more money spent advertising, the more people become familiar with the brand. That breaks down into more customers and more profit.

A company that does its business chiefly online won?t need the storefront that a traditional business does. And company that relies on business to business marketing wouldn?t benefit from a traditional storefront anyway. Since traditional customers won?t be coming in and out browsing goods or asking about services, the need for a traditional shop area is eliminated. This drops overhead costs dramatically. There?s no huge warehouse or building to pay heating, cooling and lighting bills on, and no need for insurance to protect customers.

There?s also no need to pay a staff to man such a store, which eliminates many of the expenses associated with being an employer. An online company that chiefly exists through business to business marketing may still have employees and some expense, but the lack of a storefront will greatly reduce the costs associated with managing employees.

Now, money that would have been spent on necessities like payroll and utilities can be better spent business to business marketing and increasing the customer base. The expense of promotion is also lessened with this business model because it?s so much easier to identify a target market. There?s not as much need to figure out exactly which consumer to market to as there would be with most consumer products.

With business to business marketing, what it is that you?re offering to business automatically identifies your target markets for you. If you?re selling general business products like paper or office supplies, then your market is large and wide open, and you?d do best finding a particular angle to market your products to each specific industry. But if you choose a product or service that?s very specialized, your marketing research is simplified a great deal.

The internet is great for b2b marketing because of its word-of-mouth properties. While many of your customers will find you thanks to your business to business marketing and promotion, many more will because of social networking.

Adwords Elite How to Make Money Online With a Home Study Course

September 9, 2009 @ 3:26 pm posted by John Brython

Adwords Elite is a home study program put together by Jason O?Brien which will show you how to begin making $200 a day within one week of starting the course. Does it sound incredible? Well it gets even better. You?re not going to be working 14 hour days to earn this kind of money. Jason shows you how to do it in less than 2 hours a day.

Jason uses Google Adwords to drive traffic to affiliate sites. If this sounds like ?mumbo jumbo? to you, read on anyway because it could make you a lot of money.

When you type a search term into Google?s search engine, there are two types of listings that pop up. One is the organic search results which Google?s computer programs have determined to be the best matches for your search terms. You can?t pay Google to get these rankings.

But, there are also ads that appear on the search page. These are also determined by the search term a user enters. But, an advertiser can buy these ads which are listed above the organic results and on the right hand side.

These ads have a 25 character headline and two 35 character lines of copy plus a link to a web site. That?s not much space to get your point across.

Yet some people have mastered the art of short copy and they turn it into empires.

They do this by promoting affiliate products. Affiliate marketing is simply connecting buyers to sellers. The seller pays you a middleman fee to drive traffic to their site. In the case of some digital products, the middleman fee is up to 75% of the total purchase price.

Adwords Elite is a complete guide to conquering Google Adwords using affiliate marketing strategies.

Many beginners find that they lose money using pay per click techniques such as Adwords. They either get no clicks at the price they are willing to pay or they get too many clicks that don?t convert into sales. Either way, you?re pouring money down the drain.

Adwords Elite helps you to zero in on the best converting keywords. You?ll learn how to filter out the losers. You?ll also learn how to write ads that people can?t help but click on.

There?s a little known technique for getting higher rankings while paying less than the advertisers under you. Adwords Elite reveals this secret for the first time.

The best part about Adwords Elite is that it provides a step by step plan that anyone, no matter how much experience they have, can follow to make money right away with Google.