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Brand Your Business Correctly as First Impressions Count

By admin in Featured

When someone has a great idea for a business, they often fall over themselves in excitement and anticipation. They can’t wait to get to market, unfold their vision and ride the high waves to financial freedom. Whilst enthusiasm and vision are important, you need to sit down alone for a little while and work out some of the basics. Before you even start telling anybody about your idea or what you may have to sell or promote, you must first figure out your branding.

When you create a brand, you set yourself apart from the competition. This differentiation allows you to create a potential bond between yourself and your target audience, convert your prospects into clients and then retain them. Branding has many elements to it, and you must ensure that you pay attention to each one.

Before you start, you’ll need to work out what your overall message is. People out there will perceive you and your organization according to your message; first impressions are crucial and you have to make a great one.

One of the initial things to do when you’re setting up a brand is to choose a company name. Many people incorporate the company name with their website domain name and make them one and the same. Note, that while your legal corporate name may be one thing, your “doing business as” name, whatever it may be, should receive your full branding attention, and be fully reflective of your business goals.

If you’re very clever with your trading name, you can much more easily go on to achieve great heights. You’ll realise you’ve attained the summit of success when your corporate name also becomes a well-known verb, like “Hoover”, “Google”, or “Xerox”.

Along with the selection of your company name, you must make sure that your domain name is perfectly relevant. Realistically, no enterprise can survive without a website nowadays, and your website will probably be the first point of contact when it comes to client marketing. Creativity is the key, but you must make sure that – technically speaking, your domain name will make sense in the world of search engine optimization and have a high level of viewability. Your domain name should ideally incorporate your primary keyword or keywords, which relate exactly to whatever you are promoting or selling. So, in an ideal world, the keywords relating to your “hot potato” new marketing idea should appear prominently within your domain name and within your company name.

Keyword selection is quite a complex subject which we have already touched on in (R – Right Keywords) but, as we have seen, is important within your branding set up. Keywords should appear within your mission statement and in all marketing materials. It’s vital that they accurately illustrate what your potential client is seeking from you.

Visual image is everything. Once you have a great company name, domain name and the keywords selected, you can move on to create visuals. Your logo should essentially sum up what you’re trying to achieve. The logo doesn’t necessarily have to incorporate your company name or your domain name or your keywords, but it should be a great visual representation of all of these and project the very reason for your company’s existence. The logo is one of the first things that a potential client will see, so take as much time as you need in this area, as it’s likely to leave the biggest impression.

Once you’ve established your logo, you should create all your marketing materials according to a particular style and presentation. Maintain this throughout your organisation and don’t dilute your message by going off point.

Your website is your window to the world. A correctly composed website speaks volumes about your business. Don’t forget that in business it’s all about perception, and if you don’t maintain a storefront of any kind in the real world, people will judge your business by looking at your website. You should always maintain a high degree of professionalism and clearly display this throughout your site. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-man band; you should still give people the impression that you’re a highly successful, well-organized and thoroughly established enterprise.

Pay careful attention to branding and maintain your position throughout your business cycle.

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Michelle Dale is The Managing Director of Virtual Miss Friday, an accomplished Executive Virtual Assistant Service which helps companies of all sizes reach their commercial targets. Want to get more information about online business building success strategies that really work? Contact VMF Today!

Is Social Media Worth Your Time?

By Meredith Liepelt in Featured

Everyone – from politicians, businesses, musicians, celebrities and many other groups of people – uses social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social networking outlets to spread their message, build their businesses and connect with others.

Do they know something we don’t?

Networking, whether online or offline, is a great use of time when done properly. As with anywhere you spend your time, knowing why you are doing it, how you will measure success and having a plan is the best approach.

A Comparison of Paid Search Advertising Models

By Bill Platt in Featured

As webmasters, we are all chasing customers. We are looking for human visitors to come to our websites and to buy what we are selling.

To serve our needs for targeted traffic — potential customers — the search companies have begun to offer us a share of their significant traffic through many paid advertising methods.

The most common advertising offer at the search engines is the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising model. There are also other search advertising models such as CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) and Featured Listings.

In this article, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of each advertising method.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising Model

By far, PPC is currently the most popular advertising model. From the buyer’s perspective, it is usually the most expensive type of advertising and the one that generates the most fear of fraud. In fact, many experts suggest that click-fraud might be as high as 20 to 25% of all click-traffic.

Pay-Per-Click is exactly what it sounds like. The advertiser bids on keywords and tells the advertising company that they will pay X number of cents or dollars for every click that they receive to their website through the PPC-provider’s website.

Advertisers compete for position within the search results with the highest bidder getting the best advertising spot at the top of the results. The second highest bidder gets the #2 spot, etc.

Generally, Pay-Per-Click providers serve three listings on the first page of search results. Only when there is strong competition for a particular keyword term and a number of advertisers vying for placement, will the PPC-provider show results with more than three advertisers.

If you bid the minimum five cents per click (the standard for most PPC systems), then it is possible that you might not see your listing on page one or page two of the search results. Let’s face it; PPC providers are interested in making the most money they can from the traffic they send to people. So, if one advertiser is paying a dollar per click and you are only bidding five cents a click, who do you think will receive the best placement? Yep, the one-dollar per click advertiser will get the most attention and the best placement, even if it requires pushing your placement back to page three of the search results.

The top two PPC-providers are:

http://adwords.google.com/

http://www.content.overture.com/d/ – Now owned by Yahoo!

Other not-so-well-known providers of PPC traffic, in alphabetical order, include:

http://www.411web.com/

http://www.7search.com/

http://www.abcsearch.com/

http://www.adbrite.com/

http://www.ask.com/

http://www.brainfox.com/

http://www.enhance.com/

http://www.kanoodle.com/

http://search.looksmart.com/

http://www.lycos.com/

http://www.miva.com/ – Formerly FindWhat.com

http://www.search123.com/

http://www.searchfeed.com/

http://turbo10.com/

The biggest advantage to these systems is that they serve large pools of consumers online, and they let you target specific search keywords.

The disadvantages are numerous. Those most often cited include: the high cost of bids for certain keywords, poor conversion rates on purchased clicks, and click fraud (generally regarded as people clicking your link just so they can get paid for it).

Personally, I have paid as high as a dollar per-click for a service that sells for $35, and $20 in volume. I have spoken to others who operate for-profit websites and have paid as much as $2.50 per click on an average keyword. In some really competitive markets, people pay as much as $30 per click.

If you use the Web-Professor bid tool to check keywords at Overture ( http://web-professor.net/tools/bidstats/ ) and you type in the keyword “mesothelioma”, you’ll find 30 bidders vying for that term and a maximum bid of $29.88 per click! If the maximum bidder converts traffic to sales at the national average of 3%, then he or she is paying an average of $900 to get one client! Insane, but true.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) Advertising Model

CPM advertising is most often associated with banner advertising, but can now be purchased for text ads as well. This type of advertising is available from many sources, including:

http://adwords.google.com/

http://www.realtechnetwork.com/

http://www.joetec.net/

CPM advertising can be cheaper than PPC, but it fails to address the effectiveness of your advertising copy. Before undertaking a large CPM campaign, you need to be confident your advertising copy will deliver results.

As with any other type of advertising, you need to track click- through and conversion rates to determine the advertising copy that is most effective for your business.

You also need to have a solid understanding of how many impressions it will take to generate a visitor, and how many visitors you will need to generate one sale. And, on the backside, you will need to know what the average earnings from your sales will be. With these stats in hand, you’ll know how much you can afford to pay for CPM advertising or any other type of advertising.

Using Google Adwords, you can buy CPM advertising for as little as $2 per thousand impressions. The one time I went that route, thinking my advertising might be cheaper, I ended up dropping $180 in three days with only one sale to show for my investment – — utilizing the exact same ad that generated a 4% click-through rate (CTR) in Google’s PPC advertising system.

The major appeal of CPM advertising is its perceived low-cost, with rates ranging between $2 – $3 per thousand impressions.

The major disadvantage to this type of advertising is that you need a good handle on how well your advertising is performing. Your advertising copy can make or break you. Additionally, you need to keep an eye on your advertising budget. From first hand experience, I can tell you that although CPM advertising can appear inexpensive, it can in short order surpass the costs of PPC advertising.

Featured Listing Advertising Model

Featured listings differ from the other two advertising models in that you do not pay for “ad clicks” or “ad impressions”. With featured listings, your advertisement appears in the purchased location for 30 days, 90 days, or one year.

Featured listings can be bought on individual websites and even on networks of websites. Below are a few examples of advertising networks that offer featured listings:

Geek Files ( http://www.geekfiles.com/advertising/ )

Geek Files offers various Featured Listing placement options with ad rates ranging from $19 to $179 per month. You get two months free if you buy advertising for a full year.

Aardvark Travel ( http://www.aardvarktravel.net/featured/ )

Aardvark Travel is a travel search engine. Featured listings appear in a colored box between the top five listings and the bottom five listings in the travel-related search results. There is a $50 setup fee for each Featured Listing and a $10 per month recurring charge for as long as you keep your listing active. Aardvark claims featured listings generate 40 times more clicks than any other listings on their pages.

The Independent Search Engine and Directory Network ( http://www.isedn.org/ )

The ISEDN offers a program that allows you to purchase Top Ten exposure for your website(s) across their network of 200 plus member websites.

The network is comprised of specialized search engines, search directories, and article directories. Featured Listing placements for specific keywords are displayed across the entire ISEDN system.

The cost of a keyword term (the word or phrase associated with the listing) is $12 for three months or $36 for 12 months. The price drops for each additional 5 listings you purchase. If you are buying in volume, discounts can be significant. For example, the cost for 16 to 100 listings is $6 per listing for 3 months and $18 per listing for 12 months.

The main drawback to the ISEDN program is that the network, although large, does not yet have the traffic volume of the major engines.

The major benefit, of course, is that you can buy a lot more bang for your advertising dollars. Additionally, you can see your ads appearing on pages in a position that will attract more attention and click-through traffic to your website.

Which Advertising Model Is Right For You?

It really depends on your business model. More so, it depends on your absolute click-through averages and your website conversion rates.

Your advertising needs to cost you no more than what it earns for you. Ideally, your advertising will cost less than it earns for you.

Some businesses trade on the lifetime value of customers and are willing to pay more to get customers than what they earn on their first sale, but not all of us can afford to build a customer base in the same way that Amazon built theirs.

If your advertising budget is small, your goal should be to make every advertising dollar count. Grow your business to the point where you might be able to afford some of the more expensive advertising solutions. But then, if the lower-cost solutions generate sales for you, why would you want to pay more?

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Bill Platt has owned and operated http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001. If you would like to learn more about his article distribution service, visit his website. To read 100′s of Bill’s Tweet-sized tips for article marketing, SEO, and more, visit: http://thePhantomWriters.com/tips/index.php Bill is also active on Twitter @contentmanager

List Building – What It Takes and How to Do It

By admin in Featured

Knowing you have to have a customer-based list in order to have massive success in your online business is one thing but getting to the point you are actually growing a list that bring you consistent income is another. What have you done to initiate your list growth? Below are 5 list building tips you can add to your marketing arsenal:

1. Lead Capture Page
Using a lead capture page is a sensible way to start building a list because it allows you to give visitors a glimpse of what they can expect on the other side. Nothing is complicated – you just need some strong bullet points to arise people’s curiosity.. If you are using a quality autoresponder, they usually provide some squeeze page templates to use – but of course, it is much better if you go with your own design.

2. Remaking Content
It has never been easier than this. You just take old articles from the past to create a free report to entice subscribers. Combining articles that educate or tell a story can put you in contention with other top marketers. Be creative and position yourself differently to attract more people to your list by reusing your past content.

3. Free Membership
You can also offer your membership site or newsletter for free – your subscribers will love it!. Doing so will result in you being considered as an expert in the field and open the possibility to develop the membership further. Keep one or two premium content for future streams of income, so you may not want to give it all away from the beginning.

4. Free Ebook
Try using an incentive to attract new subscribers. People’s favorite for incentive are free ebooks. It can be in the format of a PDF report or follow-up emails as an e-course. Either way provide valuable information that is both helpful and informative.

5. Free Media
You might want to mix your incentive with the other forms, as free ebooks are somehow a little devalued today. Today, it is no longer difficult to turn any written content into something as advanced as audio or video recordings. There are also advanced stuff like podcast or screencast to make your information looks more shiny.

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Once you have good system in place you can automate your list building and make consistent sales 24/7. To take your Internet business to the next level and learn more about List Building, consult Guru Domination Blueprint review. Click here for Guru Domination Blueprint best bonus.

5 Tips for Building a Unique Brand for Your Blog

By SEO Sapien in Featured

Nearly 1 million posts per 24 hours are being published in the blogosphere. Overwhelming? Perhaps… but just because you’re new to blogging doesn’t mean there is no chance for you to succeed as a blogger.

The key to success as a blogger is developing a relationship with your audience, which has to be willing to comment on your content as well as share it and link to it. You can also give your blog an extra advantage by building a unique brand for it. Whether you want to revamp your current blog or you are planning to build a brand new one, follow these 5 simple tips to build a unique blogging brand.

95% Click Fraud? Sweep it Under the Rug!

By Mel Strocen in Featured

Reported click fraud percentages have varied wildly over the years, depending on the source and the bias, but few have ever claimed that click fraud topped 30%. Now, a July/09 study published by ad optimization company Mpire and compiled/analyzed by Radar Research reveals that more than 50% of ad impressions and 95% of clicks in online ad buys are fraudulent.

In any other industry, news like this would spark a panic or at least a few sleepless nights. Unfortunately, this report is unlikely to be anything more than a minor news blip, ignored by both advertisers and ad publishers. Makes you wonder.

More on the story at: MediaPost.com

Twitter Who?

By Mel Strocen in Featured

Despite all of the recent hype in the media about Twitter, its valuation at $1 Billion and an injection of $50 Million in funding, around 49% of Americans know little to nothing about Twitter and of those that are familiar with the micro-blogging phenomenon only 3% consider it to be a reliable source of news. These figures compiled in a survey conducted by the First Amendment Center indicate that Twitter may have difficulty shedding its fad status. Only 1% of those surveyed claimed to have learned of major news events from Twitter and another 1% from social networking sites.

TV was still number one as a news provider with radio, newspapers and search sites coming in a distant second.

The survey provides stats on numerous questions posed to respondents and can be read online at:

FirstAmendmentCenter.org

Is Email Marketing Dead?

By admin in Featured

Is Email Marketing Dead? I have been told that since 2004 and I not only don’t believe it, I have proof that it is one of the most effective marketing tools you can use. Email is here to stay and I use it on a daily basis for:

• Keeping in touch with clients and customers
• Sending out information updates
• Providing a monthly ezine
• Mini courses
• Eclasses
• Tips
• Sales promotions
• Recommendations
• Autoresponders
• And more

Does it still work? Well, I am in regular contact once a month with over 20,000 people just by email and that enabled me to sell out in just 48 hours a webinar I set up. Want more? Well in just 30 minutes I wrote an email that brought in 42 sales in the first 36 hours for a Chinese cooking ebook. Yes, it works! That certainly proves to me that email is still a powerful sales tool, but in a more competitive market you need to have an edge.

Here are 6 tips you can use to increase the power of your email marketing.

1. Ask your subscribers to filter your email. I always ask people to filter my email into a special folder for email they want to keep; or ask them to apply a color filter so when my email arrives it changes color and stands out. Make sure you tell them how to filter it in both your thank you and first email and give details for the most popular email programmes.
2. Send out a ‘Gentle Nudge’ Email People get lots of emails, and there is a chance yours will get lost in their spam filter. You can avoid this by putting your message or ezine on your website so people can view it there. It’s goo idea to also ‘remind’ your list of a new posting on your website as they may not have got, or deleted, your original email.
3. Respond to confirmation requests If you have signed up to any newsletter or ezine you always get asked to confirm you want to receive it and are a genuinely ‘live’ person. This avoids junk mail reaching you, and you can turn this to your business advantage. I always reply to confirmation requests because these people have taken the trouble to set up the filtering process and it will be on their primary email account; which means they will look at it on a regular basis. This way I get to build a relationship with them, which then results in more sales.
4. Use double opt in to build highly targeted and responsive lists I’ve used this method to build a highly responsive list of buyers in one niche I operate in. I emailed them first about a product I was launching and to find out more they had to email me back. Once they took that action I then asked them to confirm their request. Yes, this meant I reduced the overall number of people on my list BUT the people who were on it were eager for the information. The result? 31% of that list bought the product. .
5. Use S-P-A-M- filters to check your email before you send it out There are some words that will trigger a reaction in many email filters so avoid that and use an email checker before you send out your messages. This increases the chance of your email being received and you can find filters by just searching on Google.
6. Use additional methods to deliver your information Emails are an important part of your marketing mix, and you can also hook into alternative methods to actually put your message across. You could try, as I have, sending an email to your offering an mp3 recording or PDF report to download. Offering a PDF report means you can offer a lot more information, including graphics.

The great thing about PDF’s is that people tend to keep them longer than emails so you have a longer presence with them. Using an MP3 gives you a VERY easy way to send information out. All you need is a microphone plugged into your PC then record your information and upload it to your website. Then just email your list telling them it is ready to download.

And finally…… Emails are very far from dead, or even sick, but they still remain a very effective way to grow your business online.

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Neil Stafford is Editor and Publisher of the Internet Marketing Review the UK’s longest running PRINTED Internet Marketing Newsletter. ‘Test drive’ the Newsletter for FREE – Visit this special web page for more information: Internet Marketing Review Newsletter

Calculate your SEO requirements

By Greg Newell in Featured

Search engine optimization delivers predictable results. Many people might argue with that, but it’s absolutely true. I can’t think of another advertising medium that provides the data you need to precisely determine your requirements the way the web can.

From a business viewpoint, every SEO campaign should be run with the idea that there is a significant return on investment. Very often in advertising, it is somewhat of a guess relative to what you can expect. Marketing on the internet is a much more predictable process.

Establishing SEO requirements starts with an easy question. “What increase in revenue should your site generate in the upcoming year?” Bear in mind that the more unreasonable the answer to this question is, the more difficult it will be to reach your target. Set achievable goals!

Once you’ve established your revenue target, you’re done. That’s it. That’s your goal! OK, so not exactly. The point is, your revenue targets are your goals. Goals should not be expressed in terms of traffic, hits, or even how much the site shows up in the search engines (but it sure helps : ). But let’s say that our sights are set on meeting our revenue targets via search engine results. That’s the purpose of an SEO campaign.

HOW MANY CLIENTS DO YOU NEED? You should be able to state clearly your revenue targets and the average annual value a client brings to your business. If you know that, then simple division will tell you how many new clients you need. You should also have a “gut feel” for how many of a hundred people on your website turn into clients. So with that, you should be able to determine how many visitors you need to generate to your site to develop those clients.

The number of visitors required is equal to the number of clicks that are required. The purpose of a good SEO campaign is to increase the number of visitors who are searching for your products and services. Successful SEO creates enough impressions on the search engine results pages (SERPS) to deliver enough visitors to meet the revenue targets.

Getting on the first page of the SERPS generates an impression, or a chance that the visitor will click on your site. Since very few people advance beyond the first page of results, a conservative SEO specialist considers the first page of the SERPS the ONLY place to be and of course number one is best if you can get it.

AOL published information showing that first place in the search results gets almost half of the organic clicks. Second gets 10-15%. Third gets 5-10%. The remaining scrounge around 3-6% but at least they made it to the party. Conservatively, you can estimate that with a well executed SEO campaign, that you will get 5-10% (we’ll use 7%) of the search volume. Predictably, you’ll be somewhere on the first page of the SERPS. So, if you need 100 visitors, then you need impression in 100/.07 (1,428) total searches.

Once you’ve established your total search volume to optimize for, you then move into keyword selection. The best strategy is to choose a broad range of keywords instead of going after the more popular ones. Remember this: Most of the time its easier to rank for many low volume keywords than a single high volume one that equals the same number of searches. Further, lower volume keywords are usually more relevant and more specific to the needs of the visitor. Ultimately, they convert better. You’ll also discover that once you know your total search volume requirements, your keywords collectively will meet the search volume requirements without extending into a range that’s impossible to optimize for. You can develop a much more practical approach to your SEO campaign.

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Greg Newell – Try the SEO Requirements Calculator. Click>>SEO Dayton

Google’s Flying Objects: Identified

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Earlier this month, Google began a series of mysterious logos with a UFO-related theme, that caused quite a buzz of speculation.

The first one (which I blogged about) showed a UFO *abducting* one of the “O’s” in Google. Google accompanied the logo with a tweet in binary code that translated as “All Your O are Belong to Us” – a clear reference to computer game Zero Wing.

The next in the series showed the Google logo as a series of crop circles, with the “L” being abducted by another UFO or being formed by a tractor trail (opinions vary on this). This was accompanied by a tweet consisting of Google Map co-ordinates leading to Woking – the town in which the Martians first land in H. G. Wells’ science fiction novel The War of the Worlds.

A few people began to speculate at this point about the doodles being a lead up to the 143rd birthday of H.G. Wells on September 21.

Well, it seems they were right! Google have today launched a new logo showing a village under attack by alien tripods, with only the “G” and the “E” in Google clearly visible with the rest presumably abducted or barely hinted at within the design. A click on the logo leads to search results for H.G. Wells. I expect we’ll see a tweet from Google confirming this later today.

At the moment the logo is only viewable on Google New Zealand and Google Australia but expect to see it roll across the regional domains as the rest of the world wakes to September 21.

Happy Birthday H.G. Wells!

Updated: Google has now acknowledged via Twitter and on their official blog that the logo doodles have all related to the 143rd birthday of H.G. Wells.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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