SiteProNews |
- Is There a Brand in Your Stand?
- 7 Reasons To Love HootSuite
- Google Instant Means The End Of SEO
- Maximize Your Sales Online With These Ten Tips
- Video Email – The Future Of Communication
| Is There a Brand in Your Stand? Posted: 15 Sep 2010 07:30 AM PDT 
Good, now that we have frightened off the undesirables let’s address some fundamental questions about branding and offer you some probing questions to consider. That first paragraph demonstrates the three rules of creative positioning as explained below. Should you have a brand? Maybe. It depends on the goals of your business. You need to ask yourself some questions. Will the brand give you the return on your investment? Will you invest the resources to claim and sustain the brand? What is a brand? A brand is the emotional bond that your clients have with you. Ask your best clients how they would describe you to others. Look for the common message in what they say – especially the emotion. That might be your brand. Brand is the feeling others experience when they think about you and your product. Brand can help them think of you first – or better yet – only you. Brand can justify higher prices – or even better – make price a non-issue. Not Branding Branding is not about creative logos, pretty fonts and pantone colors. Fire anyone who attempts to sell you that pabulum. Those things are only images. Have you noticed that the successful brands change these images every few years? Branding is a marketing strategy. It is only one of many marketing strategies from which you might choose. Is branding an accident or on purpose? Because branding is about creating emotional messages you are always branding. However, are you aware of your messages, are you consistent and are you effectively branding yourself? You could create or claim your brand. Domino’s Pizza created their brand – “Pizza in 30 minutes or its free.” They own that brand. It’s simple, memorable and unique. Some companies look for an opening and build their business to create that brand. Some companies discover their brand by accident. Feedback from clients, remarks from the media or a competitor’s comment reveals the brand that was hidden in plain sight. In that case it is up to you to claim the brand and run with it. Avis claimed their brand by turning a disadvantage into their brand when they launched their marketing campaign with “Avis is only Number 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.” And with cheekiness they leverage further on their “disadvantage” by adding, “The lines at our counters are shorter.” That brand has been successful for over 40 years. How do you create your brand? There are two ways. Like Coke, Nike and McDonald you could throw gazillions of dollars at it. Or you could use creative positioning. Look for the holes in the marketplace. Go to where your competition is not and claim that position. Take a stand like Harley Davidson, Buckley’s Cough Mixture and Nova Scotian Crystal. Each of these companies claimed positions in the market the competition was unwilling to take. Folks either love or hate Harley Davidson. Buckley’s proudly claimed that “it tastes awful but it works” along with a money back guarantee. Nova Scotian Crystal is proudly the only Canadian crystal manufacturer and they offer an incredible one year breakage warranty. Drop your whiskey glass and they will replace it; no questions asked. You can read the interview with Rod McCulloch, President and CEO of Nova Scotian Crystal on my “Business in Motion” blog. Each of these companies was willing to take a position that would drive some folks away while attracting a loyal crowd of fans. The three principles of creative positioning are best explained by UK entrepreneur BJ Cunningham, who as CEO of The Enlightened Tobacco Company sold a cigarette called “Death Cigarettes”. It was presented in a black package emblazoned with a white skull-and-crossbones logo. Just imagine how this might appeal to the rebels. Everyone except the tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoking was bad for your health. BJ did what none of the other tobacco companies were willing to do. He took a stand. Cunningham’s three principles of creative positioning: Branding starts with market review and self-examination. Standing alone can be scary, exhilarating and hugely profitable. It you are going to claim a powerful brand take a position away from the crowd. Stand where no one else is standing. George Torok is co-author of the national bestseller, “Secrets of Power Marketing: Promote Brand You!” He helps entrepreneurs gain an unfair advantage over the competition. Get your free copy of “50 Power Marketing Ideas” at www.PowerMarketing.ca. To arrange for a keynote speech or executive briefing visit www.Torok.com. To arrange a media interview call 905-335-1997. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:00 AM PDT 
Twittering has progressed from a social “message burst” to a full-fledged social media tool, and more applications are being developed around its unique appeal. There’s a new player in this scenario, and it’s a hoot to use! The newest in social media, HootSuite, is pegged as a “social media dashboard”, offering a lot of valuable Twitter resources for those of us that like to Tweet a lot or have multiple accounts. Below are the reasons why we love this great new tool: #1 Multi-tasking is a breeze. Got two or multiple Twitter accounts? It’s much convenient to maintain these accounts without having to crack your head open. The Multi-Editing feature allows you to access and maintain your tweets in each account with easiness, and still maintain privacy of your own Twitter password. Switch back and forth or post to all of your tweets using the HootSuite dashboard and you no longer need to log in and out again! #2 Ease in running a business. Social networking has turned in to an income-generating channel, and HootSuite has taken that into a new direction with Multiple editors. You can have a “business” Twitter account with Multiple Editors, and have someone else Tweet information as needed, perhaps have one person tweeting about sales and marketing promos, while another respond to direct messages you may receive! You can even embed your Google Adsense code to your account, and generate additional revenue! #3 No sweat tweet scheduling. Scheduling an event, and decide on sending out tweets at various times informing people that the event is coming up? This tool makes it pretty easy to schedule using its date and time feature and send it out later. That way, you don’t have to spend all of your time tied up to the screen and tweeting every so now and then. #4 Link shortening for optimum impact. HootSuite shortens links within the system. This amazing tool also allows you to monitor your mentions, even your RTs (tweets re-tweeted by others). Apparently, it’s like a miniature Google Analytics program for your tweets, where your tweets have metric value! #5 Light and not hard on your computer’s memory. HootSuite won’t affect the performance and speed of the computer since it’s online based. A very much similar applications like TweetDeck eats up a huge deal of processing time on the hard drive. #6 Saved keywords. This great tool allows you to save some of those keyword searches and recover them at the click of a button. No more searching or deciding on the keywords to join in a trend or continue one, as you can have them accessed with ease. #7 Fantastic navigation. The HootSuite dashboard is set up with ease in mind similar to the Twitter homepage and easily tabbed. Tabs like “Home”, “@Replies”, “DM’s”, and the like make it a no brainer to use. The display lets you look at information appropriate for a certain account, including keyword monitoring, direct messages, and Groups. Certainly, HootSuite can change the way your business engages online with its great features! It’s a great tool to use, and I give it two thumbs up! Elmar Sandyck Highly Recommends To Check Out HootSuite Twitter Tool In Establishing Successful Online Marketing Strategies. For More Tips Visit www.InternetMastermindStrategy.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Google Instant Means The End Of SEO Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:00 AM PDT 
The internet marketing community, however, will never be very enthusiastic about Google Instant. SEO consultants, who try to get sites listed at the top of Google’s organic search rankings, and SEMs, who battle for their clients’ sites to be placed near the top of Google’s Adwords Sponsored Listings, have been blogging and tweeting as if Armageddon is here. The SEO community is paranoid at the very best of times, and perhaps with good cause as: a small change in the Google algorithm can determine the future of many websites. In this instance, however, the reaction is not necessary, essentially the results are the same, the sole change is you can see potential results of each word as you type it in, so if you are typing in ‘Italian restaurant’ you will observe everything Italian prior to getting to the restaurant results and then you will have to include your location unless you are very flexible about your travel arrangements, so in fact long tail key phrases are far from dead. And this time round the latest Google scare is ‘much a do about nothing’ or will it be? There isn’t any denying that Google’s original innovation in search transformed how the Internet worked and made the business of finding stuff considerably quicker and easier. It also created an enormous market – one Google still dominates – that allowed companies to market us things depending on whatever we had entered in that box and all was well, for a while. But something happened. Social networking, social media, whatever you want to refer to it as… suddenly, content was coming right at us, without us even looking for it. We couldn’t escape it. Several hyperactive egotists in each community began curating content and spewing it out to their friends. People were sharing photos, stories and links so we found that we were spending less and less time foraging around for things and increasingly more time sitting back and allowing it to wash over us. Fast forward to 2010, and we’re being assaulted by more stuff than we could possibly consume. Facebook, Twitter, and email are shoveling pictures and video down our throats more and more quickly. Feedback loops enabled by sharing and retweeting functions imply that each of us has now changed into an over-sharer as well as an over-consumer. If you are not confused and over loaded with information, you soon will be. The author is an expert in the field of Internet and extensive knowledge to help those seeking careers in Internets. Areas of expertise in fact include any qualified route to finding Internet jobs. To search and apply for thousands of Internet jobs go to internetservicesjobs1.co.uk. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Maximize Your Sales Online With These Ten Tips Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:00 AM PDT 
1. Increase your page rank in Google (SEO) Search Engine Optimization To do this, it is important to know how to write clear, concise articles and page content that will draw fresh visitors. Write interesting, informative articles, and post them in the article submission sites. Include in the article a link back to your site. Hyperlinks are best, for when they click these, they will create incoming links. This will create back links. They will serve to help increase your sites visibility to search engines, and help improve your sites overall optimization. 2. Link Exchange Find sites, which are related to your product/service, and get them to exchange links with you. (Sites that are getting good traffic are best.) When people click your direct link, it will help to build even more incoming links to your site. The more incoming links you have, the better your site will rank in the search engine results. 3. Search Engine Submission We have all seen the ads (submit you site’s URL to 80,000 search engines here). While it is wise to submit your sites URL to the major search engines, some of the smaller engines are quite obscure. Get your URL listed in all of the most popular search engines. Do a search on “search engines,” and find the ones which will best serve your interests. 4. Optimize you Keywords Use tools like Google analytics, and find keywords that are used most often in search queries. It is important to have the right number of keywords in your site. Avoid “keyword stuffing,” for to do this proves to be harmful to you sites page rank. It can even cause penalty, or “blacklisting. Some sites have even lost their domain over such issue. 5. Avoid duplicate content While there may be many other sites having content relevant to your sites objectives, it is not wise to copy and paste this information. Search engines will find such, and flag them as spam. There are many software applications that search and find such pages. Many try changing the words around, or adding words here and there, but this still, will not result in having new or fresh content. Google and other search engines will find and flag such. To avoid these pitfalls, use only fresh new content for your Website. 6. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing has become a boom to many who understand how to create pages that get good rank in search results. You promote other peoples products through your web site and earn up to 60 to 75% commission per sale. Click-bank and Amazon, earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year, in e-book sales alone. You can get your share of this pie by creating great page content, then promoting their latest best seller. Many affiliates create multiple pages, optimize them, and then sell the hottest products selling on-line. 7. Adsense Earnings When you have a page that gets a good rank in the search engines, you can earn cash per clicks by having Adsense ads of various types placed on a page, which is relevant to the ads. You get paid every time someone clicks through the ad. This is where having lots of targeted, high-quality traffic comes in. The more traffic, the more clicks, the more money. 8. Pay-per-click I would not advise one who is just beginning to start with a huge budget with pay-per-click. This is where you use Google Adwords to send traffic directly to your site. Because you are paying a good price for every click, it is important to send them to a sales page that is converting well. To use Google pay-per-click advertising, you in effect pay them so much per click (70 cents to $10 per click) depending on the market value of the word, and they give you a sponsored link that shows up when someone chooses keywords you have bought. This listing displays in Google search, on the right side (or on top) of the generic search results. Since you only earn when someone buys the product/service – it is vital to know exactly what you are doing, in this, or you could lose your shirt. 9. Adsense Marketing ‘with Affiliate Marketing’ One can really earn while they sleep, once they figure out how to incorporate Adsense along with affiliate marketing. This is having a huge site, getting tons of clicks. This type of high profile Web site earns money two different ways. The Adsense placement ads earn cash every time someone clicks them (whether a sale is made or not) and the affiliate links within the site, make money every time someone clicks through the ads and makes a purchase. Having a Web site like this takes research and testing on a regular basis, but it has the potential to earn big bucks for the owner. 10. Super Affiliates Super Affiliates have an established Web presence, when you click keywords they have bought, their name comes up in Google search results listing as page one – number one results. It takes some money as well as time, to reach this status. Several examples of Super Affiliates are names which are easily recognized such as: Amazon, Click bank, or Google. They have incorporated so many keyword phrases into their paid searches, they have top placement in all of the search engines. To get near the top, where they are, takes total optimization, and hundreds of thousands of back and incoming links. Be sure that the content on your Website is class “A” Web copy. Have rich, clear, concise information, which your visitors will be glad they found. Have every page optimized for targeted keywords, and get sales copy that will pay you! Stephen E. Monday is a Professional Web Copywriter, Creative Writer, and Web Content Manager. Get your FREE Sales Page evaluation. Go to my Copy writing Web site: www.AAAWebcopyservices.com. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Video Email – The Future Of Communication Posted: 14 Sep 2010 10:00 PM PDT 
What You Can and Cannot Do First, right now, embedding a video in an email is not possible. One day it might happen, but right now email servers don’t have the necessary software for this. This means text links or graphics. Research suggests that using a graphical representation of your video and then providing a direct link to the video email is the best way to achieve video emailing right now. The Case For Video Emails In an article by Mark Brownlow, “Video email: current practices”, he discusses the research on video emailing. There are some interesting statistics. Looking at this statistic, it is obvious that video is now acceptable to most Internet viewers. “According to comScore, US Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January, with YouTube alone scoring over 100 million unique viewers in that same period.” Finally video has come of age, and we are all conditioned to use it. Comparing emails with or without a video link – “When not linking to video his click through rate is between 20-27%…when linking to online video it’s consistently between 51-65%” says Anna Yeaman. We know that a video link receives a much better open rate than a simple text message. With an image in the email, views are 5-10 times as many! Campaign Monitor reported that: “the screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link.” Mark Brownlow says of his own email campaigns: “In my own newsletters, a video image attracts between two and ten times the clicks that the accompanying text link gets.” Do you get this? If you have a properly constructed image in your email, 5-10 times more people will click on the link and view your video. If you are in sales, information dissemination, or advertising what would you pay to have 5-10 times more people view your message? Direct Video or Video With a Link When considering video email, there are three possibilities; 1. A text link. 2. A video thumbnail. 3. The video plays within the email. Video Text Link We are all familiar with text links pointing to videos. These are common in emails now. The challenge is that the link is usually a bunch of numbers and meaningless symbols and not very sexy! The author puts a catchy headline in there to entice you to click. Now you get about double click through rates when you direct your emails to a video, so it is pretty good compared to sending them to a text blog entry for instance. Video Thumbnail A Video thumbnail is where you get a picture to click on in order to play the video email. A really well produced image looks like a play button. When you click on the image it opens up a browser and plays the email seamlessly. When using a video thumbnail like this, the research suggests a 5-10 times better response than a standard text link! This is huge. It is not intrusive, as you only see the video if you click on the link. We believe this is the best way to use video email right now, and the research backs us up. Compared to an email with a simple text link to a blog post, you are likely to see a 10-20 times greater open rate. This is phenomenal. Video Within the Email There is an email company or two around now that will send an email with a video in it. While this seems great, imagine receiving 20 emails and every time you click on one a video starts paying! I think this is intrusive, and many are likely to get angry at the invasion of their personal space. As well, with most of them you need special software or plug-ins to view them. Because of this in your face aspect, I would suggest that the best form of video email now and into the future will be the thumbnail version, where with the click of a mouse a high quality video plays seamlessly. What Video Email Service Should You Use? I think by now you can see why I am so excited by the concept of video email. It is exciting, new and I believe in the same space as TV was when it first appeared. Right now video emails are not that common. This means sending a message this way is very likely to get opened. As people become more familiar with the technology, expect even better response to video emails and reduced openings of more traditional text links. After I was Introduced to Video Email, I did my homework to see what was available. Formerly hello, hello, this company has been around for a while. The cost is $39.95 for up to 5,000 email addresses and bandwidth is limited to 40GB. There is no commission payable at this level and to earn residual income you need to pay $99.95 a month. Their video templates are fairly ordinary and in my opinion, unattractive. Deliverability is fine. There is no mention of free autoresponders. This is a free service if you want to send videos less than 1 minute long. You can upgrade to a 5 minute service for $99.95 a year with tracking. No referral commissions are payable, and there are no autoresponders. Once again, the actual video template is fairly ordinary and not eye catching. Nevertheless, for a free service, providing you only want to send short messages to people you know, it would be okay. There is no video conferencing and the basic service can’t be loaded onto YouTube, etc. At $99.95 a month this is a premium service. You can have up to 60 minute videos, although I am not sure why you would have one that long in an email! There is a free trial, but you have to enter credit card information to do it. There is no compensation plan, but they appear to have good training. For most people this may be a little expensive, but it appears to be one of the better services. They suggest the $99.95 price point is for a limited time to increase urgency. Talk Fusion offers a very easy to use interface, enabling video emails to be on their way in less than 5 minutes from the first mouse click. The templates are great and they will even design a professional template for you with the Executive package. Talk Fusion has a very professional web site and autoresponders and video conferencing. One great feature is the ability to put your videos on your blog and social media sites. The autoresponders include a subscription form you can place on any website. Subscribers are automatically sent a pre-established video and or text email message series. This is very effective in communicating with prospects or customers. There is an affiliate plan and after an initial joining fee of $175 a month, your monthly spend is just $20 for up to 1,000 clients on your mailing list. This product has recently had a makeover and features beautiful templates, high deliverability, ease of use, and a very nice feel. With so many video formats, the ability to upload many formats seamlessly is very important. One more thing – you can combine different video segments in the same email. For instance you could have a video introducing a customer to a new property for sale. This could be a personalized message of 15-30 seconds. Then you immediately switch to the second video, a tour of the property you are offering. At the end you could splice in a third video with a call to action. Conclusion Video Email is the new emerging technology in video. Right now you can capitalize from this new wave. Television used to get tremendous response from their ads when it first started. The same is true of video email right now. In future years when it becomes more common, the results will probably diminish, so why not take advantage of it right now. John Gaydon is an MLM and internet entrepreneur. He currently operates 4 profitable businesses. He has a University Marketing Degree and many years of corporate experience. You can read more of John’s articles on his blog at www.johngaydon.com or contact him direct at john@pems.com. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
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