Online marketing solutions

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.

Whether you create targeted direct email campaigns or are the recipient of them, there is one point on which we can all agree, we want and demand our freedom of choice.  This passion for options and choosing is instilled within all of us.  That is why the opt-in plays such an integral part of our HTML or e-newsletter email campaigns.

Opt-In Email Marketing is a powerful marketing tool when we want to reach a very specific and centered audience of possible purchasers.  If understood and implemented correctly, you will be building a top quality client base to interact with, while rewarding them with valuable offers and service.

The Right Attitude Attracts the Right Client

What are your goals when you send out your e-campaigns and e-newsletters?  Your two primary goals need to focus on building your opt-in subscriber list which in turn, is building a solid client database.  This will be the most valuable resource you will own, as this list will represent those clients that are waiting for and anticipating your email on a somewhat regular basis.  These are not lists bought and rented; they are yours and yours alone.  Clients that opt-in are exhibiting trust and a willingness to see what you are offering.  A client base built on opt-ins opens up the door for honest and open communication and a future list of loyal subscribers and buyers.

What’s in it For Me? – Where’s the Beef?
Do you remember that great TV commercial by Wendy’s?  People advertise value, but what they receive is not what was promised.  Going into a restaurant anticipating a large and juicy hamburger, then receiving one that can hardly be seen, creates distrust while pushing away a possible loyal patron.  What a great parallel example to your e-mail campaigns.  What valuable offer have you promised your recipients?  When your e-mail is opened, will they be disappointed having expected much more?

According to MarketingSherpa, “consumers want special treatment. They are giving up their precious time in exchange for the benefit of content – so that content should convey some real benefits.”  In a sampling of over 1,400 nationally representative consumers, most wanted to opt in if there was a worthwhile exchange.”

Value Added Tips

•    Sell to help – not just to make money: Your service or product should answer a need.
•    Offer valuable information or tips your recipients can use
•    “How To” instructional type tips are very well received
•    Offer discounts to first time subscribers
•    Offer special sales and discounts to repeat buyers
•    Create interesting content that appeals to your entire target audience
•    Always encourage feedback.  This creates an ongoing dialogue with your customers.
•    Follow up is a Must!  Once a sale happens, that is just the beginning.  Communicate with your client.  Let them now they are valuable and you are standing behind your product or service.  We all appreciate the personal touch.  You can’t communicate with an office or building.  Let them know that you are a real person and can be trusted.

Lastly, use all communication and feedback received to help you continue gathering a more accurate and detailed personal demographic profile for your email database.  This gives you the ability to create a more targeted future campaign, helping you become more successful; one campaign at a time.

Using these techniques effectively will increase your sales and opt in subscribers.  With the power of the internet and viral marketing, word of mouth will spread quickly from one happy customer to another.

What are you waiting for?  Get out there and build some long term trusted relationships right now.

Website Optimization is the process in which you specifically design and fine tune your website content to receive a high ranking in the Search Engines.   E-mail and internet marketers know, that this is no longer an option if you are seriously marketing your business online.  It is an absolute must.

Whether you are starting a new site, or re-evaluating the old, you need to know the building blocks of success.  You are building an Internet presence and becoming a worthy competitor in this savvy, hi-tech world.

Where to Begin? Keywords, phrases, title, images, and text  all play an important and integral role in determining website rank.  Your content needs to be keyword rich.  What are keywords?  Simply put, keywords and keyword phrases are the words you want to be found under when people search.  Don’t make them up in your head!  If you want to see how people search for your product or service, there is a free and powerful tool called “Keyword Tool” by Google.

Another way to be “keyword creative” is to list the brand or model name, as well as the keyword.  If you sell telephones, you should also list the brand names like V-Tech, Panasonic, and Uniden.

Placement of Keywords: Place your keywords throughout: header tags, titles, first paragraph of your body text, and the ALT Attribute of image tags.  The ALT attributes help get your images ranked higher for image searches.

How many Keywords/Phrases per Page? There is no right or wrong answer.  After researching this specific question for myself, the general consensus seems to be one keyword and phrase per page.  Others have suggested several more.  You will need to research your niche and see what others are saying and what their experiences have been.  You can also use the Google Keyword Tool to extract the main keywords of your competitor’s sites.  This will help determine what words they are using for a higher ranking.

Creating a Site Map: Site maps provide search engine spiders an easy access to site pages, as well as giving easy access to your site visitors.  Because search engines and visitors access your site map differently, different methods need to be applied that are friendly for both engines and search spiders. Google’s Tutorials on Creating and submitting site maps.

Search Engine Friendly: JavaScript and Flash navigation menus are cool, but  search engines don’t read JavaScript and Flash very well. Therefore, a workaround would be to have simple HTML links at the bottom of the page.  This guarantees a friendlier search engine page.

Submission to the major Search Engines and Directories. For a list of free directories, please visit:  Free Web Submissions.

Submission to Social Media: Social Media Sites are growing daily with thousands of new participants.  Submitting articles to these free sites, increases your Search Engine exposure.  Do you have a blog on your website?  It is time to create one.  Reaching out to clients and prospects with your personal voice puts a name and face on someone they can contact and respond to.  This is the age for personal communication.

Content is Still King: Nothing but nothing takes the place of  relevant and interesting content.  What good is it to have people find your site, and then click off out of boredom or frustration.  Is your content self serving?  No one cares if you think your company or product is the best thing since sliced bread.  People want to know, what’s in it for me?  Make sure your call to actions are clear and your text is to the point.  I personally hate going to someone’s site and having to keep scrolling and clicking to find out what I need to know.  Your most important information and capture leads, should be on your home page – standing out – easy to find.

Website Appearance:  I have been to many websites where the background was too distracting.  Make your site clean, use web safe colors.  Too many graphics and textures within your site make it hard to read and parse.

Lead Links: The most important links for any prospect to click on should be on your homepage.  Try to have your main links in plain sight.  I have seen websites that are literally over linked, if that is a real expression. Remember, most surfers have short attention spans and if they cannot see what they want quickly, they will most definitely find it somewhere else.

Promoting Your Business Online.  Today, many people search for local businesses on the Internet. Make sure they find you.  There are several ways to put your business and services online.  Please see our article entitled: Google and Yahoo Local Maps for Online Marketing.

Having done all, visit Google Webmaster Central and learn all you can directly, from the masters themselves.

As e-mail marketers know, life is constantly changing.  The ever growing global population relies more and more for its knowledge and communication on the Internet, as its heartbeat and sustenance.  From interest to need, from hobby to livelihood the years have produced great change in the world around us.

A large part of that change includes our prospects and clients that we target and communicate with through our direct e-mail campaigns.  We spend many hours compiling data, information, stats and studies in order to create compelling and valuable targeted messages, worth opening and reading.

E-Mail Overload

As we plot and plan our next e-campaign strategies, we join hundreds of others desiring the same goals – walking the same path – turning prospects into clients, turning clients into repeat sales.  Daily, all of our in-boxes are constantly being bombarded not only with legitimate mail from our friends and family, but with the latest announcements of sales and specials from so many other companies.  Illegal spammers create stress and annoyance, affecting even those whose campaigns are legitimate and anticipated.

With all our good efforts, the surveys still assure us, that people are going to unsubscribe at some point in time.  Marriage, divorce, children and relocation, play a large role.  Our e-mail preferences change along with our new perceptions of e-mail and its relevancy to our daily lives.

Just give me the facts and stats

So what can we do?  Can we change or influence the number of unsubscribers?  Yes we can.  Knowing all of this is important, but applying these truths, must be done knowing the facts.  If we have to invest our time and money, making costly decisions and revisiting our strategies, we need to know that we are not wasting our time on someone’s opinion.  Here are some of those facts from MarketingSherpa.  Make it work for you.

Why do consumers unsubscribe? According to MarketingSherpa, people unsubscribe for the following reasons:

Relevancy:  One Size Does Not Fit All.  If we do our due diligence with our e-mail list demographics, it is obvious.  Each campaign must have its own targeted segment.  Age, gender, and profession are strong influences in a purchase decision. Our offers must fit their interests and lifestyle.  Make your campaigns meaningful and valuable.

E-Mail frequency:  How many e-mails constitute too many?  The consensus seems to indicate that keeping in touch at least monthly to maintain a dialogue with your clients is good.  The most important rule is to keep your communications fresh, relevant, and timely.

E-mail bankruptcy: (a form of e-mail mental breakdown.) There are consumers that have reported they are just overwhelmed and overloaded in their in-boxes.  They have had enough.  In one swoop, they decide to unsubscribe to every mailing list that they see.

Wrong person – Wrong timing: Maintaining up-to-date database lists are the key to successful campaigns.  Using accurate metrics and stats will quickly help you see how each e-campaign performed and who your active and inactive clients may be.  Keeping accurate and regularly updated demographic e-mail lists, helps modify, target and optimize all future campaigns.

Social Media:  The report states that a small percentage of people have unsubscribed and are using text messages and social media to remain updated.  Maybe it’s time for a e-mail marketing coupon campaign?

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  Here are a few creative suggestions:

1. Reward your customers: Give them a special discount or bonus on their next purchase.
2. Awaken the Inactive Buyer: You can send a special sale to those who have bought in the past, and have not returned.
3. Prospects: Offer a special discount for first time subscribers.
4. Valuable Tips: We are all experts with loads of experience in some area.  Whatever your service or product is, offering some helpful tips or a “How to do” tutorial.  Free is always good – when it is relevant and meets a practical need

Do not fear the unknown little grasshopper.  Dare to be different and innovative.  Reach out to your mail recipients and ask them why they unsubscribed or stopped purchasing your product.  Listen and learn.  Everyone has an opinion and appreciates being heard.



Why Use Market Segmentation?

Segmentation helps guide us as we focus on the prospects that will be a good candidate to purchase our offer, service, or product.  As an arrow is carefully aimed at a target, positioned strategically to hit the mark, so must our campaigns be accurately focused and targeted for the greatest receptivity and results.

When direct bulk email campaigns are carried out properly, it helps insure the highest return for our marketing sales and expenditure expectations.  Whatever the service or product you are selling, who you sell it to, will define the design, content, and message.  Each segment has its own unique demographical makeup.

Segmentation strategies have traditionally been used by email marketers for years…Clients or prospective customers are classified according to different demographic criteria and are then selected for different types of marketing activities or communications. Models can be used and tested to predict which segments are most likely to respond to which types of e-campaigns based on their previous histories.  Identifying profitable segments to be targeted, results in a much higher return on marketing investments (ROI).

Defining the Main Areas of Segmentation

Depending on whether you are selling to individual consumers or a business, there are definite differences in what you will consider doing, when defining market segments for your e-campaigns. To apply this knowledge accurately, you need to devise a specific segmentation strategy, designed and crafted around your message according to your subscribers’ preferences and action history.

Each Segmentation Focuses on a Different Aspect of the Targeted Client

Demographic Segmentation: The focus is on who they are:

• Gender
• Marital Status
• Age
• Profession
• Income
• Location
• Education
• Family Size

Using demographic segmentation research to determine subscribers within a particular age range and income is a real eye opener.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, “women drive the world economy. They control $20 trillion in consumer spending, and that figure could reach $28 trillion in the next five years. Women make the decisions in the purchases of 92% of vacations.”

These stats alone might cause you to modify your next campaign and its focus.

Behavioral Segmentation: The focus is on what they do. For example, how to people purchase?  What are their criteria?

• Benefit Preferences
• Brand Loyalty
• Readiness to Buy
• Impulse Shopper
• Price
• Time Constraints
• Need

When studying the stats from your last email campaign, following the behavior of your recipients is crucial to improving the future effectiveness of your next strategy.  What link did they click on in your newsletter?  What links did they visit on your website?  Did they click on the call to action?  Did they visit your landing page?  Each site experience is different.  With the help of behavioral segmentation, you can personalize their experience.

Attitudinal Segmentation – The focus here is on what they think.  Attitudinal Segmentation categorizes target customers, grouped together by a shared set of attitudes.  How someone responds to the world they live in, the things that they buy, and the services they desire, is what makes a person tick.  This is the most interesting segmentation, because it crosses over every other segmentation profile.

How a person reacts or what their goals and drives are, helps create a persona.  Personas cross all industries, markets, and culture.  Personas are created as a guide to help the seller or service better understand how to relate and understand that individual.  Whether you are a restaurant owner, designer, technical writer or developer, you need to create personas to market the right tools, and services, to the right audience.

In Conclusion:  No matter how much data we may collect, it takes time to get insight into our customers, visitors, and prospects.  Using surveys online along with customer feedback, we can begin to understand our prospects and clients on all levels.  With the right understanding, we can continue to create and modify successfully targeted campaigns.  So what is the right segmentation to use?  The right segmentation is the one that works for you.



As Internet marketers we know that the only way to have a successful campaign is to target the right message to the right people.  How is that done?  By obtaining cutting edge demographics, we track our e-campaign results, as we continue to fine tune and modify them, for the best optimal results.

The Internet and Worldwide Web have not only broadened our markets, but have made them international as we market to totally different cultures that are unique and not our own.  That changes everything.  How?

Well, I can give you a small personal example.  I moved from the United States to Israel.  Both countries have two totally different cultures with their own individual languages and ways of living their lives.  Some things are just not as important to them as it is in the US.

Their buying habits, clothes, and culture, is dissimilar in so many ways from my own.  Using generic internet marketing will never cut it when striving to reach a global international audience.

Tracking Online Behavior

As marketers we need to personalize our messages and campaigns to the right segment and market.  We need to understand a person’s personality and makeup – not just push a product or service they might need.  So the goal and challenge is how to market a global brand, making it relevant to each culture and individual.

Another factor to consider are the differences in the decision making process.  Each group may base their decisions to purchase on totally different factors. For those of you who send out email campaigns, the use of technology in tracking a recipient’s click through rate and purchase response to a call to action, is not new.

Today, with just an ISP address, we can access a great amount of detailed information on what people do, where they go,  and where they click when they visit a website.  We use this information to give  ourselves a better direct marketing advantage helping us target their choices and buying habits.

Know What Might Offend

Not only are the words we use responded to differently by another culture, but the images and symbols we project for our brand or services can affect our market as well.  I remember when I was taking a technical writing course, we were shown how an innocent symbol used in a United States technical user manual, when translated into another language, could greatly offend a different country and culture using the same product, graphic, text and symbols.

We learned when translating technical documents from one language to another, we had to research the words, graphics, and symbols that might offend the target country and replace them.  An entire marketing niche could be lost by one misunderstood symbol or graphic.

Whether we market internationally or not, at the end of the day, our marketing strategies have one and only one basic objective.  Our goal is to reach out and connect with our target audience on a personal, relevant, and meaningful level.

As we learn how to develop a broader marketing base, with the inclusion of culturally informed strategies, this will not only engage a more accurate recipient, but further enhance and develop our global market niche.

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.

Email Marketing is on the Rise

E-Mail Marketing is still the fasted and most cost effective method of sending large amounts of e-mail communications anywhere in the world.  E-mail campaigns seamlessly work with and harness the power of this successful and highly effective Worldwide Web Internet market.

But it doesn’t stop there.  Supporting statistics and facts are constantly mounting, leaving no room for doubt of its role and influence in the lifeblood of any business.  So we thought we would share some with you.  Calling all email marketers, your future looks very bright – very bright indeed.  Let the facts speak for themselves:

Forrester Forecast:  US Email Marketing Spending To Reach $2 Billion In 2014

Forrester Research explains that falling CPMs (cost per thousands), higher ROI (return on investment) and growing consumer use of social email accounts will all contribute to the use of email by direct marketing professionals. The firm says that in five years consumers will opt-in to receive over 9,000 email marketing messages annually.  The following information below will be the key grown for the future of email marketing.

Forrester’s research cites the following as key growth areas for shaping the future of email marketing:  We quote:

-” Retention email — email that recipients have blessed with their permission — will continue to replace paper communications and will make up the largest share of marketing messages. Retention emails will account for more than a one-third of all marketing messages in consumers’ inboxes by 2014, representing increased competition for marketers.

- While the bulk of the market will continue to deploy email marketing on a self-service basis, the growing complexity associated with data integration and new tactics to increase relevancy will drive healthy growth in use of email service providers.  Spending on opt-in ad-sponsored or ad-supported newsletters will double over the next five years as traditional print publishers face falling circulation and ad revenue.”

How much greater the proof of the awesome power of email campaign marketing, than the enclosed.

Email Campaigns helped save Circuitcity.com

CircuitCity.com Returns.  “After shutting down operations in January 2009, CircuitCity.com is back.  Much of the surge in traffic can be attributed to an email campaign to reach out to potential. CircuitCity.com customers, since nearly 33% of the upstream traffic, was referred by web-based email services.

The campaign was successful in driving visitors to the website that hopefully were previous customers that wish to re-engage with the brand.”

According to Nielsen Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, 2009, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. With statistics like this, Social Media is proving to be the largest channel for marketing and communication ever.

What is Social News?

Social News websites allow its users to submit news stories, articles and media (videos/pictures) and share them with other users or the general public. An article’s importance is determined by the value or importance placed upon it by the voting community. Users have the power to influence the visibility of content. Whether the voting process is fair or not, the people rule.

As any business email marketer knows, getting your company and website noticed means putting it in front of as many people as you can. Social Media marketing has become a hot new avenue of marketing, and an absolute must to incorporate into your marketing mix. With thousands of people hitting these sites daily, you cannot afford to walk away from such a large audience.

Which sites to join? Each site attracts a different community. Be aware that there are many sites where marketing type articles are not permitted and will be deleted.  However, there are some Social News sites that marketers can use:

• http://www.reddit.com/
• http://digg.com/
• http://www.propeller.com/
• http://slashdot.org/
• http://www.mixx.com/
• http://shoutwire.com/
• http://tweako.com/
• http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/index.php
• http://www.iliketotallyloveit.com/

Here are some helpful guidelines when creating and posting your articles:

1) Create a catchy headline. Make your headline short, engaging and maybe a bit mysterious.

2) Ask your friends to Vote for You! Email your friends and ask them to submit a vote, if they really like it. Hmmmm…..this will give you a head start. Don’t be shy, get some honest feedback

3) Make it easy to vote. Have a simple, clickable call to action. Don’t make people click through to sub links in which to cast their votes. They just might get a bit frustrated and not vote.

4) Timing is everything. As soon as you publish your article, try to have your friends vote for it right away. The more votes in the shortest amount of time will put your article on top.  Top articles receive a higher search engine ranking. Bottom line, you want quick, and relevant traffic.

5) Become an active community member. Don’t just submit your articles to the social news sites, take the time to vote for articles that you might find interesting, as well. See which articles are getting the most votes. This will give you a better understanding of what type of communities each site is attracting and what they are writing about. This gives you a “heads up” on what these communities like to read.   Customize your article to fit into the community.

6) Success is never guaranteed. No can predict which articles will be successful and which ones will not. Just keep writing good copy about relevant subjects. Social Media News is just a part of your marketing mix. Keep working on all the channels of marketing towards building your ROI.

Know your target sites. With over 50 social news sites and growing, it can be a bit overwhelming. Joining and posting your articles to just any site, is a waste of your time and talent. Focus on what sites and communities will give you the most success.

Social news is getting more mainstream everyday. Within 5 years, we might see a social news site for every conceivable topical or business niche.

All B2B or B2C email marketers know that email campaigns are an important part of their marketing mix.  With the explosion of social media, further avenues and channels must be explored and incorporated for reaching your targeted audience.  A good ROI does not depend on one strategy alone.  In a recent survey advertising and PR professionals stated that 95% of their clients incorporate blogs as part of their online marketing mix.   Nearly 88% have successfully increased measurable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging.

“Build it and they will come” was a great line in the movie, Field of Dreams.  But that is not how it works in the real world.  Every day, thousands of new blogs are being created by companies and individuals alike.  Putting up a blog, as with a website, is a great start.  Then you need to optimize both for the Search Engines.  But that is just the beginning.  As with your website, no one can read or subscribe to your blog, if it cannot be found.  So how do you promote and market a new blog to the vast internet public?

First and foremost Content is always King – The foundation of any good copy is content.  Good content is vital to the health of your website or blog.  No one wants to read nonsense or fluff.  Make sure you have something to say, and it is relevant.  If you are targeting a particular audience, do your research and join other blogs and RSS feeds to see what your niche audience is talking about.

As I researched the web, I have found some really good tips to share.  Here there are:

1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or ideas.
2. Maybe you can write a “How to Guide?” Spend time making this awesome.
3. Write some articles and submit them to some article sites:

• Enzinearticles.com

• iSnare.com

• ArticlesBase.com

• SearchWarp.com

For a full list of the 25 top article submission sites, please go to:  http://www.wilsonweb.com/linking/wilson-article-marketing-1.htm

4. Need ideas?  Check out different blogs and see what people are blogging.  You can always modify content for your own niche market.

Don’t Forget About Facebook

Facebook is hot.  If you do not have a Facebook account, you need to create one today.  Take advantage of this powerful marketing tool.  If you have one and just let it gather cob webs, it is time for action.  Use Facebook’s great potential.  Here’s how:

Break of out the box. Join other groups that interest you, reaching out to people you would really like to get to know.

Have a voice – don’t be shy.  The whole purpose of having a Facebook account is to reach out and interact with the other members.  Write encouraging comments, ask relevant questions, letting people get to know the person behind the name.

Create a catchy profile. – Facebook has applications that let you do some cool stuff.  You can add YouTube applications that allow you to embed videos.  If you have some videos on there related to your profession or some you have made, that is being savvy.

Keep an up-to-date profile. – If your profile is not kept active, it will start dying down.  It is a commitment, but one worth keeping.

Online Videos

What a creative way to market your product, service, or company.  People like seeing and hearing a person.  No one wants a relationship with a company brand.  Letting people see who you are and what you are all about, is a way to reach out and touch your audience.

Once you have created your video:
•    Put it on your Facebook Page
•    Include your website and blog address below
•    Upload your video to different video sites
•    Put the video on your website
•    Share the video with friends
•    Remember to use rich keywords in the title

There are so many great ideas out there in Internet space.  Research and read the best ones and start implementing your strategies towards getting your blogs noticed.  And when you do, don’t forget to send them your replies.