Marketing Online

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Five Ways to Improve Your Writing and Strengthen Your Online Presence

Writing is more than just taking a pen to paper or tapping away on the keyboard. A good writer has a working knowledge of basic grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary. You may be thinking you could never be a writer because your grammar and spelling skills are terrible. That’s simply not true. You can improve your grammar, your spelling, your vocabulary and ultimately your writing. It takes dedication and hard work, but it is possible. Start with these five tips.

1. Less is more with so many things in life, writing is no exception. Keep your writing concise. Say what you mean. Don’t go on and on and on. Your readers will get lost and become confused and eventually give up. Audiences appreciate writers who get to the point.

2. Don’t add a bunch of flowery words. You may think they make you sound interesting or more intelligent, but again, you run the risk of confusing your readers and eventually losing them. Save the flowery words for your poetry. Anything you’re writing for a client should be clear.

3. Keep your use of “that” to a minimum. Many of us use “that” when we write and it is as irritating as listening to someone say “uh’ or “like” when they talk. When you’re finished writing, do a search for “that” and see how many you can delete. You’ll be amazed at the difference just this one tip will make in your writing.

4. Make sure you use the correct words. If you have any question as to whether or not you should use compliment or complement or except or accept – make sure to look it up! A few seconds of research could save you from an error that lives forever in print. We’ve all seen it. Nothing kills your credibility faster.

5. Proofread, proofread, and proofread. And then when you’re done, proofread some more. Don’t rely on spell check and make sure to have someone else read your piece. When you’re checking for spelling errors – read the piece backwards. It forces you to look at each word and it’s harder for the brain to compensate and hide the errors.

Oh, and one last thing – spacing! I learned in high school to put two spaces after the punctuation at the end of a sentence. Of course I also learned to type on a manual typewriter! I’ve since had to break that habit because the only reason that two spaces were used after a period during the 'typewriter' age was because original typewriters had monospaced fonts -- the extra space was needed for the eye to pick up on the beginning of a new sentence. That’s not necessary on the computer as software expands or contracts depending upon the available space. So get in the habit of using one space. It really does look much more professional.

 

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List Building! The Number 1 Secret To Big Money Online

Internet marketing is one of the most powerful methods of marketing and is so varied by nature that the modern business entrepreneurs are left with a huge number of options to choose from. Either adopting a single method or a combination of methods and styles, the modern business people owe gratitude to the Internet business and marketing modes.

However, list building, is one of the most effective and strongest ways to market a product over the Internet. In fact, once you create a list you can then also take it and market offline.

The list building concepts are quite simple and if done correctly will help you create the perfect online business, which is stable and ever growing. It is a concept so smart and so transcendental by nature that the modern day entrepreneurs admire it and accept it as one of the pivotal tools for marketing and running their businesses online.

The list building concepts are usually built around searching for people who have an interest in your chosen niche.

Making a list of people with a strong interest in your product or services online is the basis of building an amazing long term business. For example, if your products or services are related to the flower business, you would obviously target people who have an interest in growing flowers, nursing them, treating them, selling them, reading about them, etc, etc.

The more targeted your niche, the better. For example I would rather build a list of people interested in flowers, than I would build a list of people interested in gardening. You can even go deeper with this and build a list of people interested in the rose flower.

It is extremely important to understand why people would want to join your list. What drives these people to be interested in this particular subject, what are they looking for, is it answers, advice, tips, products.

The number 1 point regarding this, concerns the emails you send to your list, the emails must contain information that interests and excites them. If the emails do not contain valuable information, then your business will suffer, but more importantly, you will have a list of unresponsive subscribers, who will eventually cancel their subscription.

Once you have a list of hungry, flower lovers or even better, rose flower lovers, they will obviously be happy to receive interesting emails regarding their beloved flowers. This leads us to the most important part of list building.

How to build a relationship with your subscribers!

The strength of the relationship between the list owner and their list, is the secret to having a highly responsive list. They must feel like they know, like and trust you, to do this takes a little time, but the rewards are immense.

Be yourself and be honest, only give information that you know is of the highest quality. Once you have a relationship built with your list, you can send an email with a call to action (product offer) and you will get results.

Well, there you go, a quick over view of list building. The secret to building a massive online business.

 

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Get Ready For Online Christmas Marketing

If online christmas marketing is important to your business you need to know when to start. Waiting too long to market your products or services can have a negative effect on your christmas sales.

For most businesses on and offline, October through to mid January is the months that generate the most revenue. This is because these months represent the christmas season; the biggest worldwide shopping event. Thus, if you want to be like other knowledgeable retailers, you need to take advantage of the ever expanding online users who use the internet as their shopping tool.

What can you do to make the most of online christmas marketing and increase your chances of success? Essentially there are two strategies you need to employ:

1. Marketing early 2. Effective keywording

Here’s what you need to know:

Marketing early – The best time to begin the christmas marketing season for your business is in the early summer months. This is because it takes an average of three to four months for a well established site to reach a top ten ranking in search engines. Therefore, it will take even longer for a smaller, newer and less recognized business site to make it in the top ten placements.

Hence you need to start your campaigning early, so you have the chance to appeal to customers when they are searching for the right products to buy. Your website needs to be developed effectively so you can achieve the christmas season revenue you desire for your company.

Effective Keywording – You need strong keyword phrases if you want online christmas marketing to work in your favor. The keyword “christmas” is searched by online users in astronomical numbers by the time the month of November comes. However, the search for “christmas” really begins to take off in as early as May.

There are two types of search engine advertising that you can use to prepare for christmas marketing and they are:

1. Organic advertising – These ads are free, and are ranked 1 – 10 under keywords or keyword phrases they are related to. Most business owners tend to choose organic advertising. This should come as little surprise as it is no secret that earning a spot among the first top ten placements is imperative for anyone who wants to be noticed in the upcoming christmas season.

2. Paid advertising – These ads are usually placed above or to the right side of organic search results. They are also dispensed across networks of millions of web pages. Paid advertising also gives you the chance to appear under keyword phrases you have selected to bid on. Moreover, once you enter your ad copy and place click-through bids, your ad will begin to show up on search results.

The vast majority of expert search marketers believe that it’s a good idea to use both search engine advertising options, as this is a way to raise the bar of competition during the high online christmas marketing season.

Online christmas sales have increased every year over the last five years, and so have holiday-related keyword searches. Thus, knowing the online christmas marketing trends, and how to effectively use them, is how you will achieve success.

 

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Powerful Copywriting Secrets

The key to success in your online marketing campaign is having attention grabbing copywriting. There are a couple things that you must have in your marketing copy. You need to write a good 15-30 word headline. The purpose of this marketing copy is to drive traffic to your website. You want customers to subscribe to your list.

Your 15-30 word headline needs to grab a website visitor?s attention. You need persuasive, eye catching headline copy to achieve this task. A great way to write your headline is to include ?Power? words.

Examples of Power Words include:

Proven

Success

Free

Power

Secrets

Unleash

Power Words are effective because they prompt Internet website visitors to take action. You can also use power phrases.

Writing marketing copy can be easy. You have to believe in your product. Don?t let limitations or negative thinking complicate the process. Be truthful in your marketing copy. You need to be able to explain why Internet visitors should ?know? more about your product. You are not selling your product in your headline. You are simply garnering interest for your product. Many people will be turned off by an instant sales pitch. First, you want to entice them with an attention grabbing headline. Let the customer read about your product. Then after that you can sell your product or service.

Think about how the television news works. They have teasers during the commercial breaks before the news. The teasers are meant to capture your attention. The news doesn?t give you the full story right off the bat because they want you to watch the entire news. Therefore, they constantly send preview teasers so you will be interested in watching the entire news program.

Do not use too many power words. Too many power words will lessen the impact. Plus, too many power words may not create a sentence that reads smoothly. Avoid writing the headline in bold. Bold can wreak havoc on the eyes. It can turn away many potential subscribers.

Take the time to sit down and write your marketing copy. It doesn?t have to be perfect yet, you just have to get started. Don?t forget to use power words to increase the effectiveness of your copy.

 

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How To Reach More Customers Online

Many coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, solopreneurs and online business owners only offer two different items to their clients. One is a free subscription to their newsletter where they share tips, articles and business news with their subscribers. The other item is one-on-one coaching or consulting service offered at the regular hourly rates.

If you only offer a free newsletter and a one-on-one service to your clients, you are losing customers. Some people simply can't afford your one-on-one services at this time, while others may want to get exposed to your expertise at a cheaper rate, before trying your more expensive services.

So, how can you reach the people who are not ready for the one-on-one service, but are still interested in your expertise? You do that by creating products that you can sell in addition to the services that you already offer. Here are several different products you can create for your business:

- Digital products. As a professional who works with customers, you already know what your customers are interested in. You know what problems they want to solve, and since you are the expert, you know how to solve these problems.

Turn this information into a marketable digital product by publishing and selling it. Depending on the topic and the information, you can create digital products of various lengths.

- Audio products can be delivered through two different channels. They can be instantly downloaded from your web site in a popular audio format (MP3, Wave, etc.), or you can burn them onto a CD and physically ship the product to the customer.

- Teleclasses and Teleseminars. Teaching classes over the phone is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise to many people at once and to offer your coaching or consulting sessions at a lower price point.

Teleclasses are a great example of repackaging your knowledge and selling it over and over again. Material taught and discussed during teleclasses can be reused to create special reports, e-books and audio products.

- Workshops. Workshops (teaching classes in person) can be used to teach to many people at once, instead of doing one-on-one sessions.

Start a list of products that you can create for your business. These products will help you reach a wider audience, increase your revenue and promote your expertise. Your products are also a vehicle for landing speaking engagements, cross-promotional opportunities and press spotlights, which in turn results in additional promotion to your business.

 

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The Real Value of Online Marketing Tools & Those Freebies

The other day I happened upon a site where I was invited to subscribe to the webmaster's ezine. All good and well and of course good marketing to have a subscribe page and way of capturing visitors emails on your site. But the webmaster purported to say that the newsletter had a value of $399 but I would be one of the lucky ones and get it for free.

Well I produce a newsletter and I think it is fairly good quality so what value would I put on that...certainly not $399, and I would have no idea what to value it at, after all only the subscriber can properly put a perceived value on the ezine they receive. So how can this other ezine have a value of $399?

And what about all these ebooks which apparently have a resale value of $47, or $97 or more. Who are you going to get to buy these ebooks when everywhere you look the same ebooks are being given out for free...you know the ones - 'Million Dollar Emails', 'Scientific Advertising', 'Magic Letters' and so on....

Many websites and sales pages will attempt to persuade you to buy their product by throwing in a large number of bonuses.....worth hundreds of dollars of course and what are they, the same old ebooks again. And while some of these ebooks are actually worth reading, they now have no real value as they are distributed for free everywhere you look.

If you want to get someone to signup for your newsletter or buy your product or service you need to offer something of real value...something they cannot get hold of anywhere else, or certainly not for the price you are offering it at.

If you produce a newsletter or report, don't place a fictious value on it that cannot be backed up. We are so used to having freebies, bonuses, extras etc pushed in our faces that they no longer really work and to stand out from the crowd, you need to be different. Stick to real quality, proper value and you will get subscribers, sales and signups.

 

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Internet Marketing for Professional Organizers

It is very important to put a lot of thought into marketing your professional organizer business. Even if you are a great professional organizer you will not be able to get any clients if no one knows about you and your business. Marketing is the process of getting the word out and letting others know about your professional organizer business.

Using Internet marketing to market your business is an excellent solution for professional organizers. Even if you are looking for local clients, marketing and promoting your business online is a great way to get the word out. Here are five tips to help you reach your potential organizing clients using Internet marketing:

- Create A Great Looking, Professional Web Site For Your Professional Organizer Business. Since you help your clients to organize, eliminate clutter and streamline their lives, make sure that your own web site is streamlined and easy to use.

Your professional organizer web site should have a professional look and feel and have information about you, your business, and services that you provide to your clients. There should be a way for potential clients to contact you. After all, you would like these people to get in touch with you and start working with you.

- Optimize Your Web Site for Search Engines. A great looking web site is not enough if you want to have a thriving professional organizer business. You need web site traffic. You need people visiting your web site, learning more about you and your services and contacting you for more information and to hire you.

A good way to drive more traffic to your web site is by doing search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. By optimizing your web site for search engines you can get more people looking for professional organizers in your area to your web site.

- Decide How To Monetize All Web Site Visitors. While you might be looking to work with local clients, some non-local visitors might visit your web site as well. While you cannot work with these people in person, can still monetize them by offering them phone consultations. You may also offer organizing e-books and special reports on your web site that you can sell to people who are not in your local area.

- Publish A Newsletter. Not everyone who comes to your web site will hire your immediately. Many people will need some time to make a decision about hiring you. You need to be able to keep in touch with the people who come to your web site, but are not ready to hire you yet.

Your newsletter is a great tool to keep in touch with your web site visitors, share information with them and educate them about your professional organizing products and services.

- Publish Your Articles Online. Writing and publishing articles on professional organizing topics is a great way to show off your expertise and let others know about your business. When you write and publish your articles, other web site owners pick them up and publish them on their web sites, while giving you a link back to your web site.

Use the techniques above to get more potential clients to your web site. Using online marketing is an excellent way to promote your professional organizer business.

 

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Autoresponders = Automatic Internet Marketing Success

What if you could send out all the information that your potential customers have requested without checking your email or answering a phone? While this may seem impossible, it is becoming more and more popular among the most successful Internet marketing gurus. This is all due to what is called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an automatic method of responding to emails sent by existing or potential customers and is an must for any Internet business. Time is money and answering emails personally take a lot of valuable time for both you and the customer. Not only do autorespnders allow you to spend the time elsewhere in your business, but it gives the customer access to the information almost immediately.

Since there are so many different uses for autoresponders, they can be of value to virtually any type of business. Some choose to use the autoresponders to answer frequently asked questions about a product or service. Others use them to provide information about pricing or product information. Autoresponders are also a nice way to welcome new members to a website or group as well as thank them after a visit.

One might ask what would be the advantage of using autoresponders as opposed to simply listing the information on the site. An important feature of autoresponders is that they send you an email notification each time a response is sent out. This allows you to track the success of your promotions as well as have the email addresses of potential customers at your fingertips so that you can easily send out updated and new information to them.

It is of the utmost importance to choose an effective autoresponder. An autoresponder should be as personal as possible and send out follow-ups to potential customers since it has been proven that persistence pays off. It could take up to seven contacts before a final sale is conducted. Generally speaking an advertisement should be short and to the point. However, in this case, the customer has asked to see this specific information and therefore an effective autoresponder should allow you to place as much text on the page as you desire. The autoresponder that you choose should provide automatic updates to customers free of charge.

The autoresponder is one Internet marketing tool that will not cost you an arm and a leg. You can get free autoresponders online from several sources. The automatic responses will be a welcome addition to your marketing strategy and will help to automatically increase traffic to your site all while you do nothing. Be sure that the one you choose includes all the extras that will send you site to the top and your profits through the roof.

 

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Finding a Niche with Domain Expirations

As internet marketers, we are continually looking for was to maximize traffic to our respective websites. The methods we use vary from paid advertising, pay-per-click opportunities, writing articles, banner and classified ads, etc. Additionally, we follow as closely as possible the methods to improve our overall search engine optimization criteria. But is that enough? Often times, "no it is not" is the sad but simple answer. What other ways then are there? We have a great looking website, doing all the (w)right things, but they still do not come to your site.

One of the most commonly overlooked techniques for increasing web traffic is having a website domain name that closely matches our niche market, while being easy and associated with the market we are trying to get to the top in.

For many, expiring and expired domains are the answer. According to Google, in excessive of 3 million clicks or url hits to targeted traffic are lost or receive website not found errors on a daily basis. This common occurrence happens for a number of reasons, ranging from simple neglect by the owners to abandonment due to poor performance, lost interest, and the list goes on and on. To look at some of the traffic information about these sites, some were never started, while others received respectable traffic, sales and revenue. All of which have been abandoned.

The opportunity exists to acquire these sites, single sites or in bulk at a fraction of what it might cost you otherwise. Think of it, being able to start up a site that already have traffic, reciprocal and one-way links to it, targeted clients, all under new management – that’s you!

As a secondary activity there is a lucrative market on the internet (some through eBay) for auctions specializing in resale of domain names (some expired, some not). When you have a chance, do a search of domain auctions. You will be surprised at what some of the highly sought after web domains are selling for. Many are beginning to see these as investments. And the great part, many of these can be obtained for future use or for resale potential with merely the cost of registration, which can be very inexpensive ($5-$15 dollar range).

The list of possibilities is endless, with thousands more expiring each and every day. With a little bit of background research to investigate the previous use of the website and traffic information where available, you could find yourself with a lucrative niche with additional revenues before you know it.

 

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The Internet: The Perfect Business Tool

If you own a current business, or wish to start a business, the internet serves as the perfect tool to increase customer traffic. Why? Consider this statistic. There are literally 10 million hosts and millions of domain names on the internet today. The good news is it's still growing. Internet traffic is expected to double annually for the next five years. Sixty percent of that traffic will be customers looking for product, the rest will be business users.

Unbelievable, right? This translates into millions of customers at your literally at your fingertips. No other business tool can provide such a massive customer base. Now is a great opportunity to get in on the Internet business craze.

However, where do you start? If you are like me, this whole Internet thing can be a little intimidating, and there are thousands of so called 'gurus' giving all sorts of advice. I tried lots of product claiming to make me an overnight success in Internet marketing. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as overnight success, which I learned the hard way.

I was fortunate enough to discover a tool that definitely pointed me in the right direction. The e-book, Dotcomology, is full of advice on how to get an Internet business up and running. Some people are paying over a $100 dollars to receive the same information that is contained in Dotcomology.

Stone Evans, the author, has made Dotcomology free to the public. Stone is a successful home business entrepreneur who has decided to share his secrets to the world. Lucky for me, I discovered Dotcomology and it proved instrumental in navigating my way through the confusing realm of Internet marketing.

Before reading Dotcomology, my only internet experience was limited to answering e-mails and web surfing. Weeks later I had my own money-making website. I learned how to promote it through autoresponders and google adwords. I learned how to get traffic to my website by submitting articles on the web and creating my own blog. I learned how to take advantage of solo e-zine advertising.

The helpful content found in Stone's Dotcomology helped me to accomplish all this in little time. It took some work. There is no such thing as overnight success in any business. Internet businesses are no different. However, with a little determination it is well within anyone's reach.

There is nothing that should hold you back from taking advantage of the Internet as the perfect business tool. There is simply no other way to have millions of potential customers at your disposal. Remember, Internet traffic is predicted to double annually for the next five years. Just think of the opportunities.

 

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Building an Opt-In List to Optimize Your Internet Marketing Success

Would you like to find out what those-in-the-know have to say about Opt-In? The information in the article below comes straight from well-informed experts with special knowledge about Opt-In.

In order to make a success of your website or online business, it is obvious that you will need customers. Although everyone who visits your page will not become a customer, they must have some interest in your product or service that brought them there in the first place and therefore they are a potential customer. Potential customers are much more likely to become actual customers if you make an effort to keep in touch with them. This essential marketing tool is called an opt-in list.

An opt-in list will allow you to keep track of your potential customers by obtaining their email address in order to keep them informed about the latest updates for your product or service. You can create your own opt-in list or you can use an opt-in list creator that is available online from several sources. The benefits of creating your own opt-in list is that you will be able to send personal messages to the potential customers and they will not need to do anything, whereas with commercial opt-in lists, the customer will receive a generated message and will be required to verify their acceptance of the message.

Think about what you've read so far. Does it reinforce what you already know about Opt-In? Or was there something completely new? What about the remaining paragraphs?

An important part of creating a successful opt-in list is to keep in mind that potential customer will visit your site from many places and may not see your homepage. Therefore it is imperative to have the ability to subscribe to the mailing list from all pages of your site. You should not, however, make the subscription information a focus point of every page. It is a good idea to put it at the bottom or top of the page where it is visible but not distracting. It is also a good idea to promote your mailing list by using a give-away. You could offer a service, a discount, or an ebook. You can also drive potential subscriber to join your mailing list by writing articles that will benefit the reader and at the same time, build your credibly as an expert. You can include the subscription information in the byline of the articles. You could also write an ebook with your subscription information on each page, which will allow the customer to easily access the information and join the list with ease.

Once you have created the mailing list and now have your potential customers within your grasp it is your responsibility to keep them updated and interested. Provide them with quality information that is up-to-date and of interest to them. Offer discounts or a newsletter, something that the reader can use. This will keep them interested and will drive them to your site over and over, eventually they may make a purchase and if not, they will be informed enough to use word of mouth advertising for your site.

That's how things stand right now. Keep in mind that any subject can change over time, so be sure you keep up with the latest news.