Archive for September, 2009

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.

Magic List Bot Review

@ 11:32 am posted by John Brython

Today I am going to give me review of Magic List Bot Getting your business started can be a very tedious task especially if you rely heavily on internet traffic. In this day and age where everything is accessible with a click of a mouse, you will have to be able to compete with the giants in getting your share of the market. We must all learn to adapt faster and get the word out ahead of the competitors. But how do you get the word out there?

Lists.

Building your lists of clients is crucial to make your business a success and at the same time, making money from just having a list. The Magic List Bot creates a list for you with a few clicks of a mouse and makes your life a whole lot easier than building it from the ground up. You don’t have to dig around to find your clients and potential clients when the Magic List Bot can do that for you.

What makes Magic List Bot even more amazing is that you don’t even have to have a website to reach out to your customers or clients. The software reaches out to many users who are part of social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and makes them aware of you.

How will Magic List Bot help you?

Magic List Bot harvests clients from websites that generate a lot of traffic like Facebook and Myspace. It redirects users to your page and makes them aware of you whilst generating income from site traffic. Once it increases your popularity, it will be easier for you to get your product across without even having to pay an enormous amount of money to market your product.

How do you use Magic List Bot?

The software is easy to use. It does not require a lot of thinking and circumventing processes to get it up and running. If you’re not technologically confident, there are tutorial videos for you to follow and loads of help is available to you. Just a few clicks of a mouse and you have yourself a pool of people. If you have a twitter account, you can even convert your followers into subscribers and generate income from them!

The Magic List Bot comes with three other products if you decide to avail of the software- The Magic Pop-up, the Twitter List Builder, and the Paypal 1-click Upsell for less than a $100. Not bad considering you’re getting four softwares that will help you generate income by having a list.

The Magic List Bot and all its extra products are good if you want to earn extra income without having to make a lot of effort. It is also a very good idea if you have a product to sell and you don’t have the website to market it in. Overall, the software is a very good idea especially when it does not require much money from you.

Read More information by clicking here Magic List Bot

Avoiding the Risks of SEO

@ 9:10 am posted by John Brython

Even though SEOs have been considered as very cost-effective and useful tools for online marketing, it is important that you understand the risks and potential drawbacks. You can help your business run more efficiently by staying prepared for the possible consequences. You can also determine which approaches will work best for your target customers, thereby giving them quality service and unique content each time. Here are some proven tips.

The Risk Level

You first have to determine your current risk level to know what more you can do to protect your business completely. First of all, you have to gauge your level of expertise and experience in using SEOs. The more experience you have, the less problems you may encounter since you may already have gone through and solved a number of common pitfalls and problems. Consider the types of SEOs that you have used in the past, then check which ones can still work for your current industry.

Black Versus White

Black hat SEO users are putting themselves at risk for losing credibility and even getting penalized or banned. Some web sites and webmasters have been banned by search engines because of the abuse or misuse of certain techniques. There are plenty of black hatters who still believe that overstuffing keywords and using irrelevant content that boosts visibility can work for them in the long term. You are only waiting for search engine crawlers to find the site and render it useless.

White hat SEOs are very ideal since these promise you long term visibility and a good reputation. Your target customers can better relate to you if you follow the guidelines and rules given by search engines to boost rankings. It will take some time before you score high on search results pages, but the wait and experience will be worth the wait.

Some of the Common Risks

Reward is not proportionate to the workload given. A single click may be enough for some web sites to instantly land on the first page of search engine results. The hard work of other webmasters who practice ethical methods can be trampled by unapproved techniques like spamming, content aggregating, scraping and plagiarism. Manipulating an algorithm may temporarily catapult your site into the front page, but you can face greater consequences once your actions are discovered.

Boosting Your Experience

Although several black hat approaches can offer you visibility instantly, the results are only temporary. People cannot refer to you or your company as reliable if you resort to unapproved techniques in trying to get their attention. You can boost your reputation and experience by following the right guidelines and patiently waiting for the right traffic to start flowing into your web site. Over time, you will find that your client base expands continually as long as you maintain good content and quality service.

Try to write good and informative articles yourself. Visit online discussion boards and listen to what other online experts have to say. Check out other ethical methods used by top web sites and learn over time how you can also become a master in your chosen industry. You can start learning more about keywords and meta tags to improve your visibility. Review how search engine crawlers work and what items and elements are needed in your site to make it easier for them to find you.

Secret Affiliate Weapon 2 Review

September 16, 2009 @ 6:29 pm posted by John Brython

Secret Affiliate Weapon 2. It sounds like some war espionage tool,  but it is actually a guide for online marketers and affiliates alike on how they can triple or quadruple their profits through their websites and blogs. And I agree that  it could really  be a marketer’s best kept secret for winning the proverbial internet war, with a stable income from internet marketing as the prize.

The instructional Secret Affiliate Weapon 2 eBook is created by an individual named Ewen Chia, who shares some strategies and steps to achieve the following things:

  • An exclusive blog for his members, which he updates with tips, tricks, and examples – this sounds great because not all marketing products offer live support. It guarantees that Ewen Chia takes care of his methods and is constantly mentoring his own affiliates.
  • The tools necessary to update and maintain any form of affiliate program – this is not very different from other marketing products. These include things like signing up with affiliate networks like ClickBank, disguising or “cloaking” URLs, how to make autoresponders, and instructions on how to write persuasive emails, and other marketing strategy suggestions.  He also offers ideas on where to successfully place promotions or articles.
  • Tutorials on affiliate marketing, in the form of articles or videos – the instructions are more for beginner marketers and affiliates, because it explains the whole process of internet marketing and affiliate programs from scratch. Experienced marketers may not benefit much from the first half of these guides anymore,
  • Five ways to create income from promoting the Secret Affiliate Weapon itself – an added “safety measure” of making money from the method if the method’s earnings are not sufficient yet for the user or marketer

Pros and Cons of Secret Affiliate Weapon 2

There are a lot of products on the Internet that are offering fast cash, and most of these methods are money-grabbing scams. At least, Secret Affiliate Weapon makes no secret of the hard fact that its readers or users would really need considerable time before they can reap in good earnings.

The Secret Affiliate Weapon might be too basic for people who already have considerable leverage in the affiliate and internet marketing arena. It is more recommended for writers and marketers who are simply starting out in the business. More so because its price is only $9.97 – it’s one of the most affordable rates for these types of things around, and it is practically commitment free.

Seasoned affiliate marketers,  however,  can still benefit from Secret Affiliate Weapon 2 in order to fine tune or improve the strategies that they are already doing. Secret Affiliate Weapon 2 does feature sections which showcase new tips and strategies, even if these do not comprise the entire product. Check out  Secret Affiliate Weapon 2 to see if it  is the best option for you.

Secret Affiliate Weapon 2

Commission Blueprint Review

@ 6:05 pm posted by John Brython

Commission Blueprint is a product that was developed by Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton which aims to teach you how to increase profits by using Google Adwords and Clickbank. The product claims to share proven and effective techniques in increasing profits through these web-based ad services.

Cost?

Commission Blueprint costs $77, and this package includes three ebooks and a set of videos that discusses the techniques in effectively utilizing ad services to gain more profit. For those with extra money to burn can opt to add the $67 membership fee to get access to a website that promises to help nurture and follow up on the things that you have read and watched. If you’re not sure yet, you can just pay for the $4.95 trial membership fee and try it out for your self.

Creators

Tim Godfrey is an internet-based marketer whose interest in other aspects brought him success. He has run various blogs and information websites. Steve Clayton, on the other hand was the expert on running businesses, and was the vice president of a company based in Burlington.

Information

Commission Blueprint contains videos and ebooks that carry the following topics:

  • How to balance quality with quantity in Adwords.
  • Picking the best products and using them to get profits.
  • How they use statistics provided by Adwords to their advantage.
  • The importance of researching on the keywords.
  • Explained the importance of owning your own domain and the factors to consider in choosing your domain name.
  • Taking advantage of the fact that Adwords’ information are available and you can use it to maximize profitability.
  • How to determine if your business is mature enough to increase your profits.
  • How to determine if you have to move to offline advertising.
  • Offered help in budget management.

Advantages

The information presented in Commission Blueprint was easy to understand because the topics are placed in that way. The flow of topics was reasonable and logical.

Disadvantages

This guide is not for novices or beginners, as Steve himself explained. Experience and some knowledge is necessary for this guide.

Although very helpful and logical, the authors moved on very slowly from topic to topic. It seemed like he wasted a lot of time pondering on an issue or a topic when there is a lot to discuss. Also, there are a lot of technical problems with the videos.

Conclusion

The topics are good and really helpful, but it is problematic that they waste a lot of time on one topic that it gets dragging. The information that it contains are easy to understand and easy to apply, and so it is easier to put into application what is just heard or watched.

In general, Commission Blueprint is worth learning from because it can really help you with your advertising.

Incredible Importance Of Marketing Positioning

@ 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.

SEO For Law Firms

@ 9:10 am posted by John Brython

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a useful tool for a lot of businesses, especially those that aim to attract possible clients online. This is actually being utilized by a lot of businesses already, including law firms, since this can allow them to get ahead of their competition. By optimizing their site?s visibility online through the use of search engines, lawyers and law firms are able to beat other, more well-known law firms by making their name more visible and easier to find for possible clients online.

Keep in mind that people are now more educated in using the internet as their means of locating businesses and firms that offer legal services. Although more well-known law firms would appear more attractive to most, if they are not able to find those firms online, then there is a great possibility that they would be directed to another law firm, one that is easier to find online.

Here are a couple of steps that you must do in order to be able to get a competitive edge over other law firms, and finally get more prospective clients.

Create a website

The first thing that your law firm must do is to create a website. You will not be able to get traffic to check your business online if you don?t have any website to direct them to. Make sure that you try to find a website designer that will be able to capture your vision on what your site will look like. If you find it difficult to picture out yourself, you can always seek help from professionals to design the site for you specifically.

Keyword choice

Once you have successfully created your website to your specifications, you must now try to figure out what keywords or tags you will need to associate to your site. Remember that people will use certain keywords to try and find law firms on the web through the use of search engines.

Choosing the right keyword can help determine the success of your site?s optimization in search engines, which is why you must make sure that the keywords that you choose reflect directly on your site?s content. This will make it easier for your chosen keywords to get the right market or prospective clients that you aim to get.

Create relevant content

Creating the right content for your site is also one of the more important things that you should focus on, especially if you want to keep the people that are already on site. You need to make sure that you use the keywords that you have chosen on your site?s content. Having keywords or key phrases would be pretty useless if you haven?t created any content that relates to them, so make sure that you take the time to write down meaningful and relevant content.

Build links

You must also now try to improve the page ranking of your website on search engines. A site that is page ranked number one has a much better of getting more traffic directed to it than those ranked lower. If you want to make your law firm to become more visible online, then you must now focus on how you can increase your site?s page ranking, and you can do this through the use of effective link building.

Link building can help get your site indexed on search engines. All you need to do in order to get the right type of market directed to your site is to link your site to those that have the same content as your site. Remember that people who are looking for legal aid regarding a particular issue will be looking for sites that directly relates to their situation, so make sure that you link to relevant sites only to help boost up your site?s page ranking when users type in a particular key word in search engines.

Doing these steps is not a guarantee that your sales will go up with the increase in your possible clients list, but it can guarantee the improvement in how much traffic you can direct your way. Let this serve as your starting point, the rest is up to you.

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.

SEO And 301 Redirect: How They Work Together

@ 9:10 am posted by John Brython

One of the worst things that can happen to your site is to have an internet user try to locate your site through the use of search engines and encounter a ?page not found? or a ?404? error screen simply because you changed or retired your old URL?s SERP position for a new one, and you forgot to provide a way for your site visitors to get redirected to your new URL.

This can be disastrous for your business as this can have a negative effect on your possible clients. Keep in mind that it is very easy for them to go to another, more accessible and easier to find business. One way that you can actually prevent this from happening is by providing them with a 301 redirect that will basically lead them to your new URL even if they try to access your old URL found on search engines.

What is a 301 Redirect?

Before anything else, we first need to discuss what a 301 redirect is in order for you to get a better idea as to what steps you need to take for the entire process.

A 301 redirect, or a permanent URL move, is actually the most efficient, and the only acceptable means of redirecting URLs or web pages from a search engine standpoint. Using other types of redirecting can get you in trouble with most search engines, so if you want to be able to preserve your search engine rankings, make sure to use this type of redirect for your site.

When do you need to use a 301 Redirect?

When you decide to retire your old URL, or change your old URL?s SERP position to a new one wherein you may need to move pages around or change the names of your files while preserving your site?s page ranking in search engines, then this is the time that you should use the 301 redirect since it can offer you exactly that. Using the 301 redirect basically lets the search engines know that all links currently on the web will now belong to the new web page.

This is also a great tool for you to use if you want to be able to consolidate websites and avoid duplication. This is useful when you have affiliate sites? ID?s linked to your home page?s unique URL since you will be able to let the search engine crawlers know that these affiliate sites are actually the same page. This can actually benefit your site?s search engine page rankings sine you get credited for the other affiliated links to your site, while preventing the search engine robots from indexing them, creating duplicate contents in its database.

Also, when you do acquire a competing site, you do not need to run two separate sites anymore, but simply use the 301 redirect to simply get all the traffic going to the other site redirected to your site instead.

What is the difference of a 301 redirect with other similar programs?

You can actually achieve the same type of redirecting process using other types of similar programs, such as a 302 or JavaScript redirect, or a meta refresh. These types of programs will be able to redirect traffic to your site just like a 301 redirect, but it is only with the 301 redirect that you can inform search engines that the other sites actually belong to you already, thereby avoiding any problems that may arise later on, such as getting flagged down as having duplicate content.

How do you use 301 redirect

There are a number of ways that you can use the 301 redirect, depending on what it is exactly that you need to redirect and to where. The most common type is to redirect your old URL to a new one. All you need to do is to simply go to the control panel of your web host?s page, and select the ?redirect? option there. Simply fill in the blanks with the necessary information and select the ?permanent? redirect option to activate the 301 redirect.

Redirecting an additional domain using 301 redirect requires that you set it up with your web host as an add-on domain by registering that additional domain under your domain registrar and changing the domain name servers (DNS) to that of your web host, after which you simply need to select on the ?add on domains? option under your web host?s control panel.

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.