Social Media Marketing (Web 2.0 Marketing) For Fun and Business
Social media marketing uses social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to engage with prospects on an ongoing basis. Social media sites encourage discussions, feedback and sharing of information between you and your prospects.
Social media marketing has really sprouted its wings within the last couple of years And its no wonder, YouTube has about 28,000,000 viewers and Facebook has over 100,000,000 users…and over 50% log in daily. That’s why social media marketing is essential to your businesses success.
You’ll see immediate benefits like prospect awareness of your “brand”, you’ll become closer to your customers and find out more about their needs, you’ll build customer loyalty by relationship marketing and social media marketing is cheap but very powerful.
There is several different types of social media marketing, from social media networks like Facebook and Twitter to social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon and it can easily overwhelm you if you don’t have a strategic social media marketing plan.
One important point before you jump into the social media marketing area. There’s a saying that “When a promoter moves in, the prospects move out”. What that means is that you should not use social media only to promote your business. You should visualize it as a public relation tool and a customer retention system. Nothing drives people away faster than self promotion…so be careful, only use “soft promotions” when using social media sites.
So how does social media help your business? That’s a good question and once again it all comes back to back linking to your business website. When done properly, you’re social media sites will drive prospects back to your business website and create back links. The more back links your site has, the more relevant it is seen by the search engines and therefore the higher rankings you will receive. It will be seen as an authoritative site for your industry, bringing your company more and more customers.
As you can see, social media marketing is a very powerful tool and should have a place in your business’ overall marketing strategy. But be careful, you may find yourself spending too much time “posting” and “tweeting”. You should find a web developer who can integrate many of these social media sites and link them together so when you post content to one, it will automatically post to all of your accounts instantly.
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Top 10 Reasons Why Online Marketing Is Better A Than Yellow Page Advertising
Ever had the guts to win in this competitive world? Ever had the courage to compete with and possibly beat even the wisest and most strategic business people in the world?
Certainly, this world has grown fast and changes have been fast as well. From the traditional ways of doing things, people have become more advanced and when you want to keep up with the Jones’ you had better know what to do. Businesses that are slow get left behind. Businesses who are eager to reach the turret of success continue to search for higher degrees of learning so as not to lose in the game.
Who would not want to succeed in business anyway? Everybody wants to generate income; everybody wants to be known in his or her own field. But how is it possible to succeed, especially in the business world?
One Word – Strategy. That single word alone already means everything. It actually defines everything about success.
Today, people are hooked on the internet. Almost everybody knows how to “surf the web”. In fact, most businesses have already seen its potential that is why online marketing has also become a phenomenon.
You may be skeptical about this strategy because you still think that yellow page advertising is better but let us delve into the ten major reasons why online marketing is more effective than yellow page advertising.
Reason #1: You Save More Money
The life of any business is money. Without this, it will not run. That is why savvy businessmen are very skeptical when it comes to their expenses.
With yellow page advertising, you pay a huge amount. In fact, for every inch of space in the yellow pages, there is a corresponding price. Imagine how much it would cost you if you had a full page ad? In New York, Manhattan, each inch of space costs $2,500 while a whole page ad costs $92,000!
With online marketing, you just have to pay for your monthly website, your website design and marketing, which could be less than $100/month to keep your business’ online advertising up and going.
Reason #2: You Have More Space For Content
Space does count when it comes to advertising. If you want your customers to know more about your business, limited space won’t work. In online marketing, you have all the space you need to advertise and promote what you have. In yellow page advertising, you only have a very limited amount of space to work with.
Reason #3: More People Hear About You
Have you ever noticed that when you are surfing the internet, you always come across a lot of things and then you suddenly became interested in them? That’s what online marketing can do for your business. If you know how to optimize your site, then more people will know about you. Can you do this with yellow page advertising?
Reason #4: Online Marketing Is Measurable
Why is this important? With tracking, you always know what are the most commonly keywords used by your visitors and can you monitor everything. When you develop a list of your best keywords, you can generate more traffic to your site and you’ll definitely gain more buyers.
With your yellow page advertising, you’ll have no ideal what prompted a prospect to take action.
Reason #5: You Can Use Videos With Online Marketing
Advertising on television is very expensive right? With online marketing, you get to promote your products or services at a very affordable price and even show your business’ benefits and features through online video. This is more visible and reliable than yellow page advertising which is plain words and photos, right?
Reason #6: You Establish A Relationship With Your Customers
How can you establish a relationship through a yellow page advertisement? With online marketing, you have the chance to develop relationships by sending email tips or online newsletters to visitors who keep coming back to your site. You can also get better business ideas by allowing them to leave comments.
Reason #7: You Can Easily Build Trust And Credibility With Your Visitors
When using online marketing, you have the chance to express your desire to help your customers and not just benefit from them. When you are able to build rapport with them by simply giving them simple ideas for free, you will quickly earn their trust.
Reason #8: You Are The Only Choice
With yellow page advertising, there are a lot of advertisements under each category. If you are the reader and you have 500 choices to choose from, would you still continue? Instead, you’ll probably just hop on your internet and type the keyword of what you want and you’ll have it! That’s online marketing! If you know how to do it right, you will be the only choice of your buyers.
Reason #9: You Can Promote Your Business All Over The World
Can yellow page advertising reach the whole world? Certainly not. With online marketing, the World Wide Web will do the work for you. Your products and services will be known throughout the nations with just a click.
Reason #10: Online Marketing Is Eco-Friendly
Imagine how many trees are being cut down just to come up with yellow pages? Imagine how much waste is thrown out when people dump their yellow pages? With online marketing, you are at peace with the nature. You gain without hurting the ecosystem.
Amazing isn’t it? These ten are just some of the million reasons why you should choose online marketing over the yellow pages. You save money, you save effort, you save the environment, but more importantly you gain more wealth!
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Ten Unbearable Sins For Any Business Using Online Marketing
You are probably very excited about the idea of starting to market your business online. In fact, you may have a lot of things running through your mind right now. You may be thinking of your web page’s color, design and everything else. You simply cannot contain your excitement. But sometimes you may fail to realize the most important things about marketing your business online; thus committing some of the top ten sins in the world of online marketing of you business and the next thing you know you’ll wake up one day flat broke with nothing to show for your efforts.
It is therefore important that you educate yourself with these common mistakes that businesses often make when using online marketing so that you don’t loose your shirt.
1. Poor Planning
It is not enough that you have the resources and have the willingness to succeed when it comes to marketing your business online. The most important thing is actually your marketing strategy. How are you going to put your site in the limelight? How are you going to advertise what you have? How will you sustain your web page?
Basically, everything starts with planning. The reason why many businesses fail with online marketing is because they never planned. They’ve been too excited and they forgot to build the foundation of their online business plan. At first, everything went well, but when the point of frustrations came, they packed up and ran home ******* their thumb because they were never prepared for such circumstances.
2. A Lifeless Site
If you were a visitor and you came across a site that was dull, plain text and no life at all, would you even spend a minute to go over the page? Probably not. The design of your page is very crucial in attracting visitors to stay at your site. A common mistake of businesses is that they often cut costs so much that they neglect even the physical features of their site. Remember, people usually look at the appearance first before they delve into the content. You can also show pictures and videos just to make your site realistic. If you don’t capture visitors’ attention, how can you expect to capture their sales.
3. No Defined Product Services
Knowing your products’ edge from your competitor’s is very vital. You can never sell what you have when you can’t even compare its advantages to other similar products from your competitors. Businesses fail because they are very general when they market their creations. What happens is, visitors feel that what you have is the same as what other businesses offer and so, you lose sale.
4. No Identity
As much as possible, most businesses always want to save money. So we choose to have our business in a free web space rather than having our own domain. The result is, when buyers type in the keywords for the product or service they want, your site won’t even be recognized because you don’t have your own web address. The probability of online marketing failure is then very evident because without anyone visiting your site, how can you even sell your product or service ?
5. No Target Audience
Focus is very important in any business. When you lose your focus, you end up a loser. The common mistake of the business owners when it comes to online marketing is that they lack concentration and they cannot think of the most specific technique to get their consumers’ attention. In other words, if you sell women’s products, then focus your attention in reaching out to women. Don’t beat around the bush because it will do you nothing but loose you money. If you know your target audience and you know how to approach them, then get ready to fill up the money train!
6. Poor Customer Handling
Relationship with customers determines the life of any business. Many businesses assume that once a consumer buys from them, that’s the end of it, which is undoubtedly wrong. Many businesses die because they do not know how to keep their visitors coming back. Just by interactive communication, you can build your trust and have the favor of your customers. However, if your mindset is purely on profit, then you probably won’t survive.
7. Vintage Information
How would you like to read a newspaper article from six months ago? Online marketing doesn’t work well unless you continually update your website because no visitor wants to visit a site that is not updated and is stale with old news. People love to be a part of a trend, so if you have outdated content on your site, just don’t expect to gain many new visitors.
8. Wrong Marketing Strategy
We tend to think that if we have more advertisements, we win the game. We spend our money for ads, we hire a lot of people to optimize our site, and we do everything and spend everything we have too quickly. This is the reason why businesses often fail. Because we don’t know what a good strategy is. We keep on spending money without even thinking if it will be effective for our business. In the end, we will learn that if there’s no more money, there’s no more business. This can be very frustrating.
9. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow Style
If you were a customer and you went to a website that you could view today but was gone tomorrow, would you close a deal with that site? Of course not. Online marketing is something that should be paid attention to by the business owner. It is not enough that you have your site; you must maintain it and you should not allow even a single day for your site to be unavailable for customers. If this happens, you will lose the trust of your buyers.
10. Spamming
This is the downfall of many businesses who use online marketing to build their business. Sometimes, we are in a hurry to generate income. Sometimes, we’re very eager to earn money that we opt to do business the wrong way. Many businesses are already banned by search engines such as Google simply because they spam using unverified email addresses they bought from brokers. When caught, kiss your online business goodbye!
So, there we have it. These are top ten sins that can lead your business’ online marketing into a dead end. Nobody would want to see his business bankrupt right? So it’s important that you heed these things as you start your online marketing, especially these ten. But, if you are able to do good job with your online marketing, then business success is within your reach!
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The Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes Which Dooms Your Business
Internet marketing is considered to be the most effective and vastly-exposed way to promote your business to the biggest majority of potential customers. The problem is that one small mistake in the way you advertise your venture online can jeopardize the whole process in a way that will make it difficult to gain creditability and exposure among customers again. Thanks to online marketing gurus and specialized marketing companies, you won’t have to experience severe mistakes; as most of the common mistakes are known and can be easily avoided by the help of those experts.
In the past decade, online marketing has been a field of testing by many marketing and advertising professionals. Due to the rapid changes in the conditions of the world, online marketing is changing faster. Everyday, new methods, techniques, and programs are made to enable business owners to make the most use of the online marketing phenomenon. But with each new thing comes new mistakes. Online marketing experts show the marketing mistakes that they have been victims to, so that we would be safe and know how to avoid them. There are hundreds of those mistakes, and we are going to list the ten most devastating mistakes which have been done in the past and caused a lot of losses and damages.
1. NOT LISTING YOUR BUSINESS WITH THE MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES
It is known among all the online marketing experts that more than 80% of traffic comes to a website from the search results of the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. Not taking advantage of these search engines will make you lose a lot of potential customers. There are dozens of ways to make the search engines recognize your business like Pay-Per-Click advertising and Search Engine Optimization, but the easiest way is just to submit your website address (URL) to them.
2. NOT USING VIRAL MARKETING
Viral marketing or word of mouth is the most cost-effective method to marketing your business online. It involves you giving away an e-book, newsletter or similar items to your visitors as a gift which will contain your website address and other ways to reach your business. This give-away can travel to unlimited number of people. This way you will make your customers advertise for you. Not fully utilizing this method in the right way will not spread the word about your business fast enough.
3. NOT COLLECTING EMAIL ADDRESS
Another great way for advertising is email marketing. You get the email address of who ever visits your website, and then email them a series of emails about you and/or your business on a timely basis. This way you will ensure that this visitor will respond to your offer one day if they don’t respond to it the first time.
4. BEING A SPAMMER OR A SCAMMER
The most hated people online are spammers. You can be one unintentionally. This happens when you chose to advertise through unauthorized ways and without permission. This occurs mostly in email marketing. Scammers are people who don’t deliver what they promised to.
5. USING THE WRONG CONTENT
Content is the most important factor determining the quality of your website. Using third grade content will damage the chances of your customers having interactions with what you are selling or offering them. High quality content with a little ”persuasion” through words inside your website will do the trick.
6. NOT RIDING THE WAVE
Online marketing approaches change almost daily. And not accepting the changes and not trying to develop your business strategy accordingly will make your business old fashioned and you will attract fewer customers.
7. TARGETING THE WRONG CUSTOMERS
You have to take into consideration the value of your business and what type of customers and which segment of the market you wish to reach. Doing this process in the wrong way online will leave you broke and crying.
8. USING THE WRONG ADVERTISING METHODS
Some people try to buy traffic, others use free advertising like classified ads to cut down advertising costs, many others uses Pay-Per-Click to achieve the highest exposure. Whatever method you choose, consider your advertising budget and the quality of the visitors the different types of advertising methods will produce. Using the wrong advertising methods will not help you achieve your required return on investment and eventually your business will be scoring losses instead of profits.
9. NOT TESTING AND TRACKING THE RESULTS OF YOUR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN
You have to be aware of how good or bad your marketing and advertising promotions are performing. You have to test the efficiency and the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. Tracking the results is essential to make the required modifications to your marketing campaigns.
10. TECHNICAL DEFECTS
Online users have to be aware of how the internet works. Using the wrong website templates, slow servers, slowly-uploading graphics, highly-advanced software and web applications, the wrong domain name, and non-secured web zones will cause you to lose most of your potential customers.
Well, there you have it, the top ten online marketing mistakes that could doom your business. Avoid these mistakes and watch your revenues soar.
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The Top 10 Reasons To Use Article Marketing To Grow Your Business
Several methods of promoting businesses have been created and developed in recent years. Traditionally, article marketing is published in paper-print form but as the marketing world is evolving, as well as technology, article marketing is now available online through the internet. Article marketing is considered as one of the most effective and fastest ways to promote products, companies or businesses in the world through write-ups. You can’t just set aside the benefits your company can achieve by using article marketing. Here are the top ten reasons to use article marketing as part of your business plan.
REASON #1: INCREASED ONLINE PRESENCE WITH ARTICLE MARKETING
Most businesses nowadays desire to make their presence known to the online world in order to have increased exposure with their target audience and one of the best ways to achieve this is by using article marketing. Making your products or services more visible in the market is one good reason to use article marketing as a marketing tool. All you have to do is write quality articles related to your business that include useful links leading back to your website and submit them to the article directories available on the web. By this, you influence people in your particular niche to become your customers and persuade them to buy your products on a regular basis.
REASON #2: ARTICLE MARKETING IS INEXPENSIVE AND COST-EFFICIENT
You don’t even need to spend a single cent to have online exposure for your business. Several free article directories can publish your articles on the web or you may also consider your own site or blog to promote your company. With article marketing you are earning but not spending…that’s a pretty good return on in investment, don’t you think?
REASON #3: ARTICLE MARKETING OFFERS A GREATER BRAND AWARENESS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
Article marketing is not intended just for exposure but to improve your company’s visibility on the web and increase the awareness of your products or services to target consumers. Websites with new and updated content are more preferred by search engines. So, your article must be of high quality and with a bulk of information that will catch the attention of many prospects. Well written articles will be re-distributed to other web pages and will further promote your own web site. Also, if you publish a good quality article with high ranking article directories you can attract millions of visitors each and every month. Article marketing creates great exposure for your company’s brand by including your business’ signature, information and most importantly links leading to your website.
REASON #4: GENERATION OF BACK LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE WITH ARTICLE MARKETING
Page rank in Google and other search engines are often based on the number of inbound links and also the page rank of the provider of the links. The higher the page rank, the higher the importance of the content of such a particular website. Article marketing is a highly effective technique to increase the number of back links to your company’s web site. Whenever your article is published and re-distributed it will benefit your business by receiving a link back to your website, increase traffic and attract more visitors. Article marketing will be more beneficial if you publish a high quality article in a high ranking page of article directories.
REASON #5: ARTICLE MARKETING IMPROVES YOUR COMPANY’S REPUTATION AND PROMOTES YOUR EXPERT STATUS.
If you write more than a couple of high quality articles concerning your business it will enable you to establish a degree of authority and improves your reputation from other authors and companies on the web. Publishing many articles with good quality will prove your expertise in the field and thereby improves your article’s visibility and business’ exposure.
REASON #6: ARTICLE MARKETING WILL PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS, PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Millions of people are surfing the internet so it is a great opportunity to promote your products or services compared to what traditional advertising can give you. Expanding your reach to people all over the world to promote your business is possible with article marketing. Provide your readers with useful information that they can use and share among other people and your business will spread to thousands of readers around the world.
REASON #7: ARTICLE MARKETING INCREASES YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKING
Article marketing is a known technique for making your page rank higher with search engines. Your website will also benefit with additional traffic from the directories where your article was published if their web pages are also high in ranking.
REASON #8: ARTICLE MARKETING ATTRACTS MORE CUSTOMERS
Making your articles place on high ranking pages from search optimization will attract more actual and potential customers, especially if you provide the information they are looking for. The possibility of referring your articles to others is clear if you meet the criteria and publish high quality articles.
REASON #9: INCREASE YOUR SALES WITH ARTICLE MARKETING
Letting the world know about your and your products or services though article marketing will increase the awareness of your target customer and they may consider your company the one who can satisfy their needs, hence they will become your regular customer and your business will generate higher sales.
REASON #10: USE ARTICLE MARKETING TO PROVE YOUR BUSINESS CAPABILITIES
By utilizing article marketing, your business will be well known for its expertise not only in your particular niche but also in any associated fields, which will help to develop trust from potential customers. You can prove your business’ capabilities by lending your audiences useful information by which your company can provide.
With the increased tension of competition in the marketplace, article marketing can make your products or services stand out among the others. You will not appreciate the benefits article marketing can give you unless you try it and see the unexpected success it has on your business throughout the world. You must be practical in this time of global recession and make the right move! Start achieving your success through article marketing now!







