Dont Forget Bob

Writen by Kathryn Thomas

So you’ve got everything in place, busily working away for you. You’ve got your banners out, you’ve exchanged links, you’ve optimized your site for the search engines, you’ve got ad and P.P.C. campaigns bringing site visitors, your sales copy is converting them to customers or getting them on your list. But did you forget B.O.B.?

B.O.B. - the Best Of Both worlds. Man does not live on the Internet alone, you know. Those same people who become your customers online actually live and breathe in the outside world. Let B.O.B. help you integrate the outside world to the Web world, and increase your bottom line.

There are many ways to bring in additional streams of income using B.O.B.

One of the best ways, of course, is by referrals. Just as you use testimonials on your site, also get your customers to refer you to others on the outside. REMIND them (frequently) to tell their family, friends, and business buddies about your site. Getting a short and memorable Domain Name definitely helps in this regard.

Providing a special incentive, such as a discount or gift to both your customer and her referral makes both of them feel that you are giving them a special deal. People like to feel special, and they like special deals that others can’t get. This adds to customer satisfaction, which will, in turn, get you more referrals.

Thus, one more stream of happy buyers!

Another technique is using business cards as ads to increase your online sales. A properly designed business card for this purpose would be geared toward getting the card-holder to visit your site. Don’t just put your name and website on the card! Give them a reason to go there. Give them an incentive, or make them curious enough to want to check it out. Also, don’t try to sell your product on your card - just create enough interest to get them to your site, where your sales copy will either get the sale, or get them on your golden list!

Whatever you do, don’t mislead the prospect just to get them to your site! That will only serve to use up your bandwidth, and irritate what could have been your newest customer.

Be sure to give your card out everywhere you go - the gas station, the grocery store, the restaurant, the mall, the symphony, the museum - everywhere.

Leave a trail of cards behind you - one more easy technique to add to your bottom line!

There are many more ways to increase your online sales by coordinating the outside world with your Internet marketing techniques. Be creative in your integration, and you will find your site getting more and more visitors.

So don’t forget to use B.O.B. (Best Of Both worlds) in every marketing campaign to build your business to the max!

About The Author

Kathryn Thomas, born, raised, and living in Texas, believes in doing things in a BIG way. Be sure to visit her at http://www.HeresTheMoney.com to get free advertising, list-building, gifts, cash & prizes!

Bursting With Benefits

Writen by Anita Larson

Do your clients or potential clients know the benefits of working with you? Are those benefits outlined on your home page or services page?

In a printed offline brochure or flyer you can say so much more than on a website. When someone has something in their hands and is reading it, they will spend minutes rather than seconds. Online text is best when brief and bullet-pointed. Online it's a matter of seconds for someone to connect with you or your services. If they don't see the benefits or what's in it for them, they will click on over to the next website.

Benefits that speak to emotions are very powerful and work better than stating boring company facts. Here is an example of a great benefit. Anyone who has hired painters will surely relate to this.

I recently got a flyer from a Colorado painting company. On their offline printed flyer they print their top benefits. One of the benefits is: "No Nonsense Work Ethic: As we work on your house, you won't find any loud music, smoking or undesirable language, just clean-cut gentlemen, painting your home quietly and efficiently. We only have one job going on at any given time and that's yours."

WOW! Doesn't that speak to your emotions? When I went to their website I found the brief, bullet-pointed benefits right on their Home page. Next I clicked on Our Methods and saw more details similar to what is in their printed flyer. Very well done!

Products and Services are what you GET from a company. Benefits tap into the emotional needs or concerns of your ideal client. What is the common emotional thread that ties all of your clients together? How are you meeting their needs? What are the words used to describe their emotions, beliefs and needs?

When your website is bursting with benefits you will attract more of your ideal clients.

Anita Larson, The Web Muse & Co., Creating websites and marketing strategies to attract your ideal clients. Sign up for the free Museletter for do-it-now marketing tips and web wisdom at http://www.thewebmuse.com/museletters.html

The Web Muse & Co Website: http://www.thewebmuse.com Phone: 303.791.9539 Email: anita@thewebmuse.com

Six Key Online Marketing Techniques For Internet Success That You Cannot Afford To Ignore

Writen by C. Bobo

I. Email campaigns.

These are best accomplished through having visitors submit their email address on any page on your site (ensuring that you offer a privacy guarantee). The input field must be made clearly visible on all site pages, and invite the visitor to submit their address in order to obtain a special report, newsletter, or some type of informative piece of great value to them.

A database is then built over time behind the scenes, as a result of this lead generation, and a monthly e-mailer is sent in order to stay in touch. This establishes, on a regular basis, expertise on the part of your company, exposing the receiver to many topics and aspects of your industry. In order to provide an additional pull, each email should also contain an incentive at the bottom for 10% off products or services, a free consultation, or the potential for winning a prize.

Many positive effects result from the above-mentioned actions and incentives. The email recipient is educated ongoingly, they warm up to what your company has to offer, expertise is established, and they are already educated when they are ready to hire you – meaning your company saves on time and effort getting them up to speed!

II. Landing pages.

Creating Landing pages is another effective, but under used, method of marketing.

A landing page is a detailed information page about a product, service or offering that users click through from an advertisement (Web, Print, word of mouth, etc.), email or search engine result.

Landing pages are superior to a home page because they are targeted to a specific task that controls the user's experience and leads them through a process (sale, email collection, survey, and so forth).

There are a number of ways to market a landing page and each strategy is specific to the content on the page.

III. Archive of articles.

The creation and addition of informative articles is a powerful way of pulling visitors into your site. These can be written by your company and/or others, and are simply placed on your server with a top-level menu that makes it easy for search engines to go through all the pages and index them for searchability. There are many writers who make their work available as long as they are credited and contact information is provided.

The benefit here is in placement with the search engines. By having a plethora of keywords on these pages, there is a greater likelihood that a visitor will be pulled into this domain when they search. Each page has the site's design "wrapper" around it which provides the visitor with navigation into the site, if they wish to pursue it.

These archives can be available through your main site via a link, or not at all. Perhaps these articles don't tie in well with the main site and are simply used as good information to pull in an audience. In other words, lead generation.

IV. The "chapter" concept.

Incorporating the following concept has great potential for enhancing your marketing efforts.

Simply place the chapters of a book or mini-course on your site as separate pages, where each chapter has fields at the bottom for the visitor to sign up and receive one article per week. Each article is then emailed to them and again, has an incentive at the bottom for further pull. Note: If you are publishing someone else's work, be sure there is no copyright infringement!

Once again, these can be simply sitting on your server to register on the search engines, or somehow tied in to the main site. A random chapter, for example, can be placed on your home page, which then leads to the signup page.

V. Building an online community.

One effective method of drawing people to a URL that can be easily tracked is by inviting them to answer a particular question or join a discussion. This can be in the form of a bulletin board, or a more simple method of posting their comments (as illustrated at the end of this very article!).

As always, the user signs up first, submits his/her comments in a field, and then gains access to a listing of all submissions for further reading. This not only allows visitors to see how others are thinking, but gives your company a wealth of information on people's views and attitudes for further shaping of your products, services, and marketing efforts.

VI. Tracking online.

As mentioned above, URLs for tracking are very powerful. Through Web statistics, all these mechanisms can be tracked to see what is working: hits on individual pages, emails submitted, responses to incentives, etc. It's all a numbers game!

Tracking, of course, includes constant monitoring and adjusting, in order to discard what is not working and to optimize the schemes that do yield results. We highly recommend Claude Hopkins' "Scientific Advertising" as a reinforcement on this core concept.

The key is implementing and maintaining systems that have proven to be effective over and over again. Email campaigns, landing pages, archiving articles, building an online community, applying the "chapter" concept, and tracking results are truly the tricks of the online marketing trade for the continuous growth and vitality of your business.

____________

Red Frog, Inc. is the Portland, Oregon ad agency that provides worry-free experiences and powerful results in the areas of Marketing, Print design, Video production and Web/CD-ROM development.

(888) 955-0550 | http://www.RedFrogInc.com

© 2005 Red Frog, Inc. You have permission to distribute this article as long as all of the text contained herein remains intact.

5 Tips To Ranking Well At Search Engines

Writen by Lynn VanDyke

Do you have a product or service that you want to sell on the Internet? If so, there are a few fundamental components that you must know. Putting your product or service up for sale is easy. You can find a cheap hosting plan and get a 1-5 page site up within a few hours. But what happens next?

Unfortunately, most businesses will never sell their product successfully on the Internet. Their sites may be flashy, but they are not receiving visitors. To receive an endless supply of free, targeted, leads from the search engines you should consider a few of the 5 tips below.

Tip #1- Provide High Quality Content

Providing content does more than give out generic information. Providing content builds trust between you and your visitor. The more content you give, the bigger the bond. Your content should focus around very specific keywords. Each page on your website should be optimized and focused on one keyword.

Finding keywords is a task in and of itself. I will be the first to admit that hunting down keywords with a high demand and low supply is not the easiest task in the world. It can be boring and repetitive. After awhile the numbers will blend together and you will feel a bit dazed. But do not stop now! Keywords are the foundation for your content pages and for your business.

Tip #2- Find Relevant Linking Partners

The days of trading links with any old site are gone. There was a period in time when search engines counted how many links in you had to your site. They factored that and determined if your site was good or not. So if your site had 300 other sites linking to it, search engines would have probably considered it a better site than one with only 10 incoming links.

Search engines have wised up since those days. Now search engines place more emphasis on relevant links. Your site should only link to other sites that are high quality and relevant. If your site is about cookies then you should not be linking to a site about gambling. It doesn't make sense for your site visitors, and it doesn't make sense to the search engines.

When you trade links with a relevant, high quality site be sure you specify where your link should be placed, for how long, and what it should say. I often see people exchange links and within a few days the linking partner has taken down the link. Only do business with trusted webmasters.

Tip #3- Submit Your Site to Site Directories

This is a great way to get high quality and high ranked sites to link to you. Think of a link to your site as a vote of confidence. Site directories are less popular than search engines, but their link to you helps you increase in search engine rankings. Be wary of any site directory that makes you pay for submission. There are plenty of great directories that allow you to submit your site for free.

Getting as specific as possible with site directories is a great idea. If your site is about cookies, you should try to find a site directory that only deals with desserts or foods. General directories are fine, but be sure you submit your site to the appropriate category. General directories tend to have a category for almost any topic.

Some site directories will ask you to link to them first. This is your choice. I do not link or pay to get into any site directory. There are too many free ones that do not require a link back. Remember to place only relevant links on your site. Would your cookie site visitors want to click on a link for a site directory?

Tip #4- Add a Site Map

A site map is a single webpage that contains links to all the other pages on your site. Adding a map will help your visitors find information quickly. Besides being a helpful tool for visitors a site map also helps search engines find pages. When a search engine spider visits your site it crawls through a page. It visits all the links on your page and it checks for keywords. This is why keywords and relevant linking partners are recommended above.

Once the search engine spider finds the site map it will find all of your other pages. Search engine spiders do not like to dig very deep into sites. They like to search through 2 or 3 'levels' of information. So pages that are hard to find will not rank well or they will take much longer to rank well. A site map helps the engines find all your pages at once.

Tip #5- Be Patient and Find Other Means of Traffic

Waiting for the search engines to scour your site and rank it could take a bit of time. I recommend a lot of patience. When I post a new content page on my website, it takes a few weeks to get noticed. Some search engines are fast and rank the page immediately. Others are a bit slower.

While you wait for your pages to rank well I recommend finding alternative ways to drive traffic to your site. You can look into PPC (pay-per-click advertising), article writing, off-line ads, buying ad space in newsletters, doing a joint venture with a fellow webmaster or post in relevant forums.

These 5 tips to ranking well at the search engines are tried and true methods. I have built a site using these 5 tips and can personally attest to their sheer power. Patience is the hardest part. Keep building relevant content, link to relevant partners, submit to site directories, add a site map and then keep going.

Persistence pays off. Building a web business takes time. Your business needs to develop and mature. Using some or all of the above tips can ensure a big payoff down the road.

Copyright 2006 strength-training-woman.com

Lynn VanDyke builds successful websites. She provides several options for business owners including a "Jump Start Your Online Business" CD-ROM. Visit http://www.LynnVanDyke.com to learn more about her and her services. Lynn's content website is ranked in all 3 major search engines and is in the top 1% of all websites worldwide according to Alexa.

Marketing Using Minisites

Writen by Paul Jesse

When it comes to making money online, there are a wide variety of web sites with different graphics and copy with some being very detailed and some not. The important thing is that both generate cash. If you have a home based internet business and are interested in marketing and selling your product, but don't have a lot of money to invest in a fancy, professionally created Web site, then you should consider setting up minisites for your various products.

If you don't know anything about website creation, this might sound a little intimidating to you. However, there really is nothing to worry about because setting up a minisite to market and sell your product does not require a lot of web page knowledge or experience and best of all it will not cost you very much.

First you will want to find a company to host your minisite. There are many companies online to choose from, so the best thing to do is search for ones that support the kind of web page you want and are within your budget. Then you can read reviews on them and find out which one will be the best fit for your minisite. Then, you need to register your domain name with them. Generally, you can register any domain name of your choosing, as long as someone else has not already registered it. If they have, be creative and come up with a new one that is just as pertinent to your product and also easy to remember. Then, you will pay a monthly hosting fee, which are generally under $10 a month if you find a good company. There are companies that host for free, but you will want to compare all of the services before you make a choice.

If you are not good at creating web pages on your own, then you probably want a hosting company that also has a web page builder included in their services. This will walk you step by step through the creation of your mini web page and it is easy and quick. You will have your very own mini web page before you know it with little investment and little to no stress. Don't let yourself get over excited however and think that you need multiple links and pages and the like. You will want to keep it simple, especially if you are just selling one product or service. You will want to have a description of the product and a "place order now" link. That is all you need. Once the order has been placed, it is a good idea to have Paypal or some other payment web site that accepts a range of payment options in a variety of currencies so you do not limit yourself to one particular region of the world or people with credit cards.

Setting up a Minisite will not only increase your web traffic, but will also increase your business. Set up a minisite today and watch as your business grows.

Copyright 2005 Paul Jesse

Paul Jesse is a retired government employee, private pilot, and author of numerous home business articles. It you are interested in starting a Internet home business visit: http://www.sheamarketing.com