Online marketing solutions

Obviously if you are planning on launching an email-marketing campaign, you want to send emails to your customers and as many consumers as possible. Emails are a great way to advertise your products and services, while also building a relationship with you customers. But you shouldn’t force your customers into signing up for your emails.

Some businesses make their customers and potential customers signup and offer their email, before people can start browsing or buying their products. On one hand this can be a great way to keep track of your customers, while updating them about sales and new products. However, on the other hand you might lose some potential customers if you force them to signup to your service or give an email, just to browse or buy your products.

Just think of when you enter a store and you want to take a look around, you might even have something specific in mind that you want to buy. And as you walk in, a salesperson begins to pester you and repeatedly asks you if you need any help. All you wanted to do was be able to look around or buy something nice without being bothered. But now you’re annoyed and don’t want to spend time in the store and so you leave.

This is the same for people who simply want to browse a site. If they have to fill out a long form giving their information and email, they might just choose to leave the site and look somewhere else where they don’t need to give their information. Instead of forcing consumers to hand over their email addresses, try to entice them with some advertisements or special deals, maybe a 5% discount for all members (and of course to be a member, they need to join your mailing list).

You should also be careful of your wording when asking consumers for their emails. Don’t make them feel as if you are pressuring them or forcing them into anything. Tell them about the benefits of giving you their email, the updates, exciting news, special offers. Just don’t make it sound like you are going to send them spam or an email everyday.

No business wants to spend money on a marketing campaign if they can’t see a return on their investment. Recent reports have estimated that for each business that spends a dollar on an e-mail marketing campaign, they can see over 40 times that amount in profits. That means $1 spent is equal to over $40 in profit for a business. Of course, it helps if you know how to make a good e-mail marketing campaign. If you listen to the following tips, you might end up with much more money in your pocket than when you started.

Plan your campaign before you begin

Don’t just send out emails with a loaded message of advertisements, coupons, and the life story of your business. An email campaign is not a one-time thing, it takes place over a longer period of time, like a year. You have to introduce yourself to your customer, gain their trust, and tell the customer about your business, a little bit about your products and services. Give the customers and prospective customers time to believe in your expertise and your excellent service and then you can make some friendly offers for sampling your services.

Send the right messages to the right people

Remember that not everyone is interested in the same thing. Certain customers will want to know about your new products and others will want to know about your sales. If you specialize in selling both paper and puppies, you can’t sell both of them together. A printing shop will be much more interested in the paper than the puppies, and a pet shop will be more interested in the puppies than the paper.

On a different note, you can’t send the same message to the same people because they have different roles in their businesses. It’s different if you’re trying to make a small individual sale or if you’re trying to be the sole supplier for a large company. You wouldn’t talk to an individual customer the way you would to the CEO of a large corporation.

Make it personal

Remember when you’re organizing your emails to customers or potential customers that you can’t just think of them as a mass of people. You have to tyr to use language that makes a person feel as if you’re talking only to them. Try to stay clear of the stereotypical marketing lingo that makes people want to automatically click delete.

Pay Attention to your own e-mail address

The name of the email address that you send your messages from matters. It shouldn’t look like spam and it should be something that customers will be able to easily recognize in their mailbox.

Don’t use words commonly used in spam

Remember you don’t want your email to be filtered as spam and you don’t want the customer to automatically delete it. If you start with an advertisement with the word “FREE”, and write a generic message, no one will be interested. Look up words commonly used in spam, and don’t put them in your emails. Also learn the spam rules so that your emails don’t automatically get shoved into spam.

Sample different colors and texts

Every email doesn’t have to look the same. If you think that a color change might improve traffic, then try it, or maybe a font change or different words. But try one change at a time, to see which is working and which isn’t.

Use few images

Don’t overload your messages with graphics. If you do use some that are related to your business or brand, try to make them look custom-made. Don’t steal others’ graphics.

Create a nice landing page

If the customer decides to click on a link you attached in your email, you should have a nice landing page that goes into greater detail about what you began talking about in the email.

YouTube is one of the most popular websites that exists today and it can be a great method for online marketing, no matter what business you’re in. Everyone on the web has had the experience of seeing a video from YouTube or seeing a video embedded onto another blog or Website. After launching the site in 2005, and being purchased by Google for $1.65 billion dollars in 2006, there seems to be no chance of stopping YouTube from being the leader for online video sharing.

YouTube is both amazing and unfortunate at the same time for the same reason. It’s amazing that anyone can post a video easily on the site. It’s unfortunate that really anyone can post a video. Every other person is reaching out for their 15 minutes of fame as we speak with their video blogs, talent shows, Star Wars routines, karaoke, and so much more. Nowadays news stations use clips from YouTube, people can watch clips from their favorite TV shows as well as theatrical trailers for new and upcoming movies, music videos…. Why bother staying tuned to listen to the President’s Inaugural Address when you can watch it later on YouTube in your spare time?

YouTube is as simple as…

Anyone with a video camera or web cam with a microphone can post content on YouTube.

To open an account, you must confirm that you’re 13 or older and create a username and password for the site. Once you are confirmed, you can begin uploading anything you want to show on video to the world, as long as it’s not copyrighted material (unless you own the copyright). If it is copyrighted, it will be removed, perhaps not the second you put it up, but probably very soon after. If just one person claims the material is copyrighted, it will immediately be removed. Each video can’t be longer than 10 minutes. You can have a succession of 10-minute videos if you want. After that you’re done and perhaps even on your way to getting your 15 minutes of fame. People can view your videos, you can view others, comment on them….

Learning with YouTube

YouTube is not just a place to show your favorite music videos, it’s a place where you can learn and teach others. Offer your expertise with tutorials on video. Learn how to draw like an architect, escape from handcuffs, pick a lock, moon walk like Michael Jackson, get really White Teeth. Pretty much anything you can think of someone has created a video about it and how to do it.

Marketing with YouTube

If anyone can use YouTube, why can’t you? Why can’t you market your business on YouTube or your school or University? The non-profit online Western Governors University established a contest amongst students. Students were given the opportunity to create a video about how a degree from WGU can enrich a person’s life. The contest promotes creativity amongst the students and it also advertises the university in a positive light.

At one point, Swiffer established a contest for people to make a video about how to break up with their mop. This was great exposure for Swiffer, people were entertained with the entries, and some lucky winner got $15,000.

So how can you use this if you’re a small business? Just make a video about your area of expertise or the products that you sell. See if others like it, comment on their videos, link your video to theirs, and already you’re getting viewers and comments. Now do it again and again and you increase your SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Now link your videos to your website and blog, which helps you increase traffic to your website, so you should have a blog in addition to a website. And there you have it; you have successfully used YouTube as a marketing tool.

Before you begin developing your new website, you might want to take some time and come up with a plan. That plan should include the way in which you’re going to use SEO to better market yourself online. If you wait until you finish writing your code and content for the site before you begin SEO, you will have wasted a lot of your time and probably money. Whenever you incorporate SEO, it’s necessary to adapt the code and content anyway, so why not use it from the very beginning.

SEO & Web Development

First, begin by planning your SEO project. Decide on the Web development technology you want to use to build your site and consult with a SEO expert and ask how easy it will be to incorporate SEO into the development itself.

Know your Customers

It’s also important to do some keyword research. You need to understand your customers if you plan on keeping them. Know how your customers describe your products or services and what their top searches are when they choose your business or company. If you understand this, you understand the key words and the content you need to use in your site.

Don’t forget about Content!

The most important thing you have to keep in mind for your website is content. If you have well-written, good content about the services and products you provide, you will certainly get more traffic to your site. Why do you think Wikipedia appears at the top of every search engine when you type in a key word? Because Wikipedia has at least one page that is multiple paragraphs dedicated to that topic, its history, its place in the modern world and so on. Don’t just mention your services, explain them and let people read about them. Became an expert on what your business has to offer and share it on your website.

Link Building

It’s not fun and people wish they could ignore it, but you can’t if you want to have a successful site. For all those who are unfamiliar, Link Building is a process in which you create inbound links to your websites. Link building is necessary to get traffic and rankings. It gives your site exposure, credibility, and visibility.

It will be helpful for your business if you know about search engines and SEO. I recommend having some training for your staff, including the decision makers of the business. The more knowledge you have about the subject, the more equipped you’ll be for the development.

How will you market your site?

How do you want to market your site and your services and your products? First, what are your products and services? What do you want to be able to do online to see your services? What do you want to say about your products? How do you think your website will help? Do you want to use Social Media to expand your business? How will you use other sites to link your site? How will you get other sites to make a link for your site? What will the structure and design of the site be? You have a whole lot of questions to answer before you start.

You have to find a way to have your new site stand out from the rest of the sites that are selling the same exact products. Somehow you need to have creative content, good key words, great links, a media campaign, and web development that will incorporate all of these things. And there you have it folks; numerous reasons for beginning with SEO.

Link Building is not cheap and can be pretty costly, particularly in competitive or popular markets. But there are ways to work around it, even if you are a small business with an even smaller budget, but are in need of expanding your online marketing.

It’s really all about exposure. Remember that saying, “all press is good press,” well it’s partially true. But it helps a lot more if the press is good.

Volunteer your areas of expertise

Within your company, you must have any area of expertise, some amazing service that you’re offering to your customers. So how can you market your skill to the world?

1)      Offer a service for free. Let the community know about your donation, by contacting community service groups and the local media.

2)      Contribute to a website. Write a weekly or monthly column in an area of your expertise.

3)      Don’t be scared to ask your loyal customers to link your business through their blogs, websites, or social media platforms. If they like you, they probably won’t be against expressing it on the Internet.

Let’s pretend you’re a veterinarian, but word of mouth is not really cutting it in terms of marketing. One way to help is by volunteering your services once a week to a local animal shelter.

Let the community know about your volunteering. This gets your name out there, your business out there, and people begin to trust you and your services. Maybe the local media will pick up on it or groups within the community will start publicizing your services. You’ll build up contacts. No matter what, you’ll be doing something good and you’ll get only good exposure from it. Basically this becomes your own marketing campaign.

Write for Blogs and Websites

Every time you read a magazine or newspapers, there are always columns out there, e.g. financial experts giving their expert opinion on the economy. You can become a guest writer for a blog or contributing columnist once a week. If you’re words are out there and the readers like your advice, chances are you can pick up some more clients right there and they’ll tell their friends.

Add Links

Find your business’s name online. There might be plenty of websites out there that mention your business, but they might not have links attached to the name. Email the host and try to get a link attached to your name.

Join Local, National, and International Business Groups

Become a member of various business groups that are related to your company’s interests. Link your website to their members’ directory. If they don’t have one, ask them if they can link your website on their site, wherever you are listed.

All of these ideas for marketing your small business take time and effort but it’s worth it. Most of these things are small and may be a bit tedious but they help. By having links attached to places where your name is mentioned is simple. By volunteering, you’ll feel good and you’ll get your name out there. By writing a column, people will begin to trust you as an expert in your field. Remember, it’s all about exposure.

Now raise your hands if you know the difference between SEO and SEM that is if you know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are to begin with. I’m sure many of you out there are looking a bit lost now, and really it isn’t your fault. We have been using these terms interchangeably for awhile now and it’s time to stop and end the confusion.
SEO is actually a smaller aspect of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEM includes everything that is all the methods to promote a website on search engines, a form of online marketing. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique of promoting a website in natural or organic search results using key words.

The one, two, threes of SEM

Organic/Natural SEO

This method naturally improves a website’s rankings on search engines. The trick is using specific key words or phrases that represent the services offered on a company. The words should be used pretty often on the website itself within articles, links, headlines, and more. Those who are experienced in SEO can really improve a website’s results. SEO brings more readers to the site, which will bring more clients.

Using Local search

A local search uses SEO strategies in conjunction with info on state, city, and zip codes. This particularly helps users searching for local businesses. This can also include local directories, Google’s directory, profiles, and more.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is advertisements on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Bing… The advertisements will appear under the sponsored results each time a user types in a key word that relates to the subject of the ad. Advertisers only have to pay for users that click on their websites, explaining the name “pay per click.”

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing is the use of Internet applications to communicate and market yourself. This includes blogging, Twitter (micro-blogging), using social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and YouTube to advertise yourself, your business, or your services. Set up a profile on one of the sites and begin to market yourself and your skills.

Article Marketing

This is a type of advertising in which businesses write articles about their industry, business, services, and more. The articles are then published in the marketplace or on their own websites. You can add links in your article to get users to your site.
Marketing works best when you use more than one method. Use SEO and try some other SEM techniques. Come up with a plan when you are creating your website. Discuss traffic to the website, plan SEO into the structure of the website instead of after your finished and see where it leads you.

If your business is ready to expand its products to the outer reaches of the globe, it might be time to research your potential expansion. Nowadays you can use search engines to investigate your options and see what’s popular using online marketing tools. If your search marketing tools haven’t come in handy yet, just wait and see because now is your chance to use them.

Find out which Services and Products will succeed in the Global Market

Do some research before you begin wasting money sending out shipments of your products. You need to figure out who wants your products?

Come up with a list of key words that are relevant to your products and services. Test them out in search and see how many results appear. Now you have to be careful with this if you are writing in English and you want to market your products in China or Italy or Israel. You won’t be helped if you translate your keywords, especially with an online translator. You will not get the correct results and the whole process will have been useless.

A keyword that is translated from English is never going to give you the right amount of results on a Search Engine and instead will most likely tell you that there isn’t a possible market where you’re looking. You could potentially lose an opportunity to expand your products to a new market if you trust results from translated keywords. The solution for this problem is using native-speaking professional search marketers who understand keywords and can use the right ones in their native language to conduct the necessary research.

The most beneficial part of this type of market research is that it’s incredibly fast. The not so great thing is that your competitors are probably doing the same thing at an incredibly fast speed as well.

Plan your Market Entrance

You must figure out how you’re going to distribute your products and services to the public. Will you go through agents, your own offices which you’ll have to set up, separate distributors, or simply online? Whether you decide to work exclusively online or with physical distributors or agents, your website will still be a great resource, but your market research will be different based on each method.

Make a list of Companies to test your products on

Just because every time you type your product into Search and there are more results in Australia instead of China, does not mean that there is actually more interest from Australia. It just means that China uses English less in their search. This means that there are plenty of markets out there they just use different key words.

If you use the keyword process correctly, then you can use it for coming up with possible countries that might be interested in your products, just as you did originally to choose which products to market globally. But your research isn’t done there.

You need to read a little bit about the country and learn about the prices for products in each country and if people will buy your product for an equal or greater price than you are already selling it for in your HQ country. You need to know if it’s worth opening your product up and if you’ll earn money in that country, as well as knowing how easy it is to take your money out of the country of interest.

Time to Experiment with a Test Market

After your initial research, it’s time to test out one of your potential markets. You don’t want to invest too much in case it doesn’t work out, so be careful with your initial investment.

Also it’s not necessary to completely rewrite your website for specific market but it helps to make it more user-friendly. A great way to test the waters is by using PPC (Pay-Per-Click). This is an efficient, cost-effective method to test out the market.

Branch out with SEM and Online PR

After you’ve finished testing the waters with Keywords and PPC, it’s time to step up the game. Use some more SEM methods to establish your business in the country of interested. Expand your PR online, localize your website for that country using a Native-speaker and see how well you succeed.

You’ve succeeded once, so do it again!

Go down the list of potential markets that you created and do the research for the next one and the one after that. Start with the keywords, check the results, use Native-Speakers, try PPC, increase your online PR, and the process continues.

Social Media has become a fantastic way to market yourself or your business. With easy accessibility to the Internet these days, it makes sense that we would learn to take advantage of it. We can share our whole world with people with one simple click of the mouse. We can meet new friends, connect with old ones, blog about our lives, share our inner most thoughts, and sell our skills and businesses. All this is possible through Social Media. This all sounds amazing, so how could there possibly be a downside to it?

The Bad

With the ability to share our whole world with the whole world that means everyone can know everything about you. People used to be able to have a public life and private life. Our private life, that time that we spend with friends and family, when we are at home enjoying meals with our significant other has become part of social media. Who only knew that their friend was single because his Facebook status was changed from being in a relationship with (insert any girl’s name, I’m sure she’ll be on Facebook) to single? And who hasn’t seen hundreds of wedding pictures and babies’ births on Facebook of MySpace? Some people may like the idea of showing their friends these special intimate moments in their lives, but they are forgetting that once it appears on the Internet it can travel anywhere and to anyone.

The Ugly

Some people out there might be wondering why they’re having such a hard time finding a job these days and maybe it’s not just about the economic recession. Maybe it’s because you sent your resume to a company who has interns that look up potential employees through Facebook. And maybe, just maybe, you forgot to take down those pictures of yourself wasted at a bar during your Spring Break when you were 20. It doesn’t matter if the pictures are 5 years old or 10 years old, if they are linked to your name, chances are you just lost a job opportunity because your potential employer chose someone who didn’t have evidence of them being a drunken mess. This may seem hard to believe but some businesses actually do look at your facebook profile and your MySpace profile when they’re looking to hire.

Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

This doesn’t mean that you should automatically become paranoid and delete your Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Blogger accounts in the next 30 seconds. It just means that you should be careful what you publish about yourself. Don’t tell the whole world about your fetishes, don’t add your personal videos if you don’t want people that aren’t your friends to see them. And even though all of these sights have Privacy Policies, there are still ways around it. Sure you think only your friends and subscribers can see what you post, but their friends can see it which leads to their friends’ friends seeing it and so on.

The whole idea of Social Media is to effectively branch out and communicate with others around the world by introducing yourself and your business. People have never been so connected before. Companies can market themselves in Israel even when they are based in the U.S. or India. The key is to market your skills, the positive points of yourself that will make others interested in you and the services you can offer them.

You can now determine whether or not you can open your products up to a new market just by using SEM techniques for research on the web, by typing in the right keywords and within a few minutes you can already begin to understand a different culture and how to become a part of it.

So take part in social media, the benefits certainly outweigh the risks. Just be careful and stick to advertising your skills, and don’t share information that you would regret if it got out to the world.

During an economic recession, very few businesses have the option to expand their budgets. Most businesses are strapped for cash and are cutting all extraneous expenditures wherever possible. This being said, it’s hard to imagine any business being able to spend as much as they want on a marketing campaign. I know every business dreams of having TV spots during the Superbowl reaching millions of potential customers in 30 seconds, but chances are that your business can’t afford it.

But without marketing, how will you continue to stay in business? You can’t just rely on your old customers, especially if you’re a new business because you don’t have any old faithful customers. No matter what, you have to continue to maintain some kind of marketing campaign. Email marketing is an effective way to market your products, services, and/or business to those old faithful customers and to potential customers as well.

Why use email marketing?

There are so many reasons to use email marketing, especially in a time of financial crisis. One reason being, that it’s just cheaper. Sending emails into the inboxes of all of your customers and potential customers is much cheaper than using snail mail. Direct mail involves extraneous costs for paper and postage stamps. Let’s not forget that it is much less effective than email marketing.

Email marketing lets you directly communicate with your customers, instead of sitting and waiting for them to get in touch with you. It reminds them of your presence and what you have to offer them. You can your customers updated, entice them with sales and post direct links for certain services or products that you know they’ll be interested in. The truth is that Google does this all the time. They watch and take note of all of our activity on the web, and then they begin to advertise certain products that they know we’re interested in.

With an email marketing campaign you can see how effective your advertising. You can see how many people click on your links through CTRs (Click Through Rates) and want your services. And you’ll see more traffic to your website. The nicest thing is that email marketing is fairly simple and there are products all over which will help you set up your campaign and continue tracking it to see how effective it is.

Whenever you’re attempting any type of marketing campaign, you need to get the word out about your company. You want clients and potential clients to feel comfortable knowing that your company or business is an expert in its field. And one way to do that is by keeping your customers updated with news and reports and worthy advice on products and skills that are related to your field. So since, the Internet is the king of all kings for marketing these days, a great way to be constantly in touch with your clientele is by writing to them through blogs and articles.

Articles have been around since the dawn of journalism. And articles come in many different forms. There are news articles, magazine articles, academic articles (in academic journals and papers), encyclopedia articles (anyone familiar with this thing called Wikipedia?), marketing articles (generally a little bit of content that tells you a lot about a product or business), and usenet articles (which is a bit more complicated, so we won’t go into it right now). If you look at Wikipedia, they’ll tell you that blogs and podcasts fall under the article category, but I beg to differ.

The closest type of writing that blogs relate to are columns, mostly personal opinion pieces in newspapers. The difference is that these days, anyone can write a blog, and you don’t need to be hired by a magazine or newspaper to get your opinion out there. In fact, at this very moment I am writing a blog. I’m telling you my opinion on producing and displaying content to the world.

There are pros & cons to writing both articles and blogs. On one hand, articles demand a specific type of format, including: a headline, lead, body, and conclusion. Articles are restricted in their type of writing and they tend to be more formal. Articles tend to follow a schedule. The reader expects to see a new article on the website of a company’s page, around 10:30 am on Friday, every week, in the same way that he or she expects to receive a monthly newsletter, on the 5^th of every month.

On the other hand, the opposite is true with a blog. Blogs are much more informal in their style, their content tends to be a bit more subjective and opinion-based, and also a little bit more unreliable. It doesn’t mean that you’re reading blatant lies as you read a blog, it just means that you don’t have 5 interns in the background fact-checking the content of a blog.

The downside of blogging is that if you want to keep your readership, you have to update your blog much more often than your articles. I remember once telling a friend I was going to start a blog and that I would write one blog per week and she laughed at me and told me that I was a fool and no one would read it, and if they did, they would get frustrated because I wasn’t updating my blog often enough. She was right. You can’t expect people to continue to read your blog if you don’t update it at least a few times a week. Ideally, you should write daily to keep people interested. I have a theory on why this is, blogs are not just informative, but they’re fun. Because they are informal and you have freer reign with your topics, it’s still more of a guilty pleasure for someone to read a blog. And we really can’t deny our guilty pleasures.

Blogs are also a great way to publish your link all over the web