Dont Baffle Me Talk To Me

Writen by Andrew Eklund

Congratulations, all you Internet marketing people you. You now command a whopping 3% of total advertising and marketing budget. Hey, it's better than, well...2%. And the number is trending higher. That's good too.

But what if I told you that people spend nearly as much time on the web as they do in front of the television?

Did you know that TV commands almost 40% of all ad spending, while the web gets only 3%? How about newspapers? Businesses spend almost as much on newspaper ads as television, but guess what? Consumers spend less than 10% of their time reading newspapers.

Clearly, if you judge just by the numbers, the web is underfunded. Why?

I have a theory: to most business decision-makers, the people who sell the web channel are geeks. They talk in web jargon and acronyms. For example, if I was a business owner (which I am) and had an inkling that email marketing might be successful for my business (which I do) and called an Internet marketing consultant to meet with me, here's what I might hear:

"Thank you for calling me in. What we provide is an ASP email solution that has easy-to-use WYSIWYG tools which, in addition to providing you outstanding content management, tracks click-throughs, white list status, and user conversions in real-time."

As a business decision-maker, I think: What did that geek just say to me?

Or let's take search marketing: "Sir, I'd like to talk to you about how we can dynamically measure your keyword PPC programs within the Google AdWords or Overture network to, again, track real-time user conversions using state-of-the-art web analytics systems, which, by the way, are an ASP model so your IT guys don't have to get involved. Isn't that great!?!?!"

Yeah. Not so great, pal, because YOU'RE NOT TALKING TO ME!

And we wonder why web marketing might be underfunded? The fledgling field is so proud of itself for its snazzy lingo and sizzling software that it's forgotten that this is just marketing -- only possibly a whole lot better in many ways than traditional marketing.

To get decision-makers fired up about investing in the Internet marketing channel, strip out the jargon and the acronyms and get down to business. If you do so, then you've finally got what everyone wants to buy: better marketing. Instead of selling "conversions" and "ASPs" -- which have no language connections to traditional advertising and marketing -- talk in real business language. A conversion is a sale or a lead. A user is a customer. Keywords are just words and language. Every Internet t erm has a seasoned business equivalent. Use them.

If we want to justify more than a 3% budget allocation for our web marketing efforts (which we can and should), then we need to talk about business in language that decision-makers use everyday. And whatever you do, if you say "it's just marketing" then don't make it sound like IT.

Until next month,

About The Author

Andrew determines Cicerons strategic direction and leads the team in its ongoing quest for client success on the Internet. His 10 years of experience in Internet marketing provides a perspective that combines visionary creativity with common business sense.

Under Eklunds spirited leadership, Ciceron provides web marketing services to a diverse client roster that includes Best Buy, Jostens, US Bank, Hazelden Bookplace, Minnesota Environmental Partnership, Trend Enterprises, and Coldwell Banker Burnett.

http://ciceron.com

andrew@ciceron.com

Stop Committing These 10 Common Viral Marketing Mistakes

Writen by Portia David

Unsuspecting computer users consider themselves to be doing favors for their friends with whom they are sending these referrals, but they are not the only ones jubilant with their discovery. They do not exactly feel it, but they are part and parcel of the mechanism which makes viral marketing promote and increase website visits like luscious pancakes.

Viral marketing is currently being used by most online business people because it works. Who would pass up the opportunity to have a website endorsed exponentially by all its users and viewers? However, not all viral marketing ploys work. Before you concoct your own viral marketing portal, here are a few basic things you need to avoid.

1. General Unhappy Perspective-- One cannot do viral marketing without having a good dose of confidence that it will actually WORK. Even if you don't communicate that directly to your marketing ploys, a disbelief for whatever you have set out to do has already started to sabotage your attempts.

2. Not-So-Viral Marketing-- You need to be very competent or at par with other websites in viral marketing. Study other existing excellent viral marketers online and see what makes them secure the top spot. Timing is essential. Your viral marketing can backfire if you do it without researching first on your target groups and executing your moves in an unproper time. Conditioning is just as essential as the actual marketing itself.

3. The WIIFM (What's in it for Me) Factor is Missing-- Most people are encouraged to refer to friends only if they have something to get out of it. Some viral marketers forget this very important thing. Giving out rewards or incentives can boost or motivate every visitor to pull more people in. Watch out for the extremes of giving too many rewards, though. It must boost and not take the limelight off the main concept.

4. Marketing without Asking-- Some websites employing viral marketing techniques forget to let the customers interact. Javascripts are useful tools.

5. Giving up the first time-- Some users tend to get irritated the first time they receive recommendations from friends. People behind viral marketing fail to anticipate this and end up giving up on what could have been a most promising buyer.

6. Too Many Details--This is a common and often commited mistake! No one would want to hang around that long just for one offer. There are other websites which would be less concise and yet drive the point home with pizzazz that yields a lasting impression. Time is not just gold in viral marketing. It is everything. The fact that a person is surfing the Internet for information already communicates that he or she is already trying to save time by retrieving information in the fastest possible way. If websites offer good products but takes forever to load or for one reader to get to the bottom of the page, it still would not be worth his time or looking effort, for that matter.

7. Hoops and Hurdles in Transactions-- Related to the mistake above is the transaction hurdle itself. Given that you have already convinced or gotten a buying signal from a customer, if the whole process is tedious and hard to follow, it will most likely dropped by the customer. No one would want to buy or refer something which is too intricate or complicated.

8. Lack of Uniqueness and Follow-up-- Viral marketing needs to be continuous and not just a one-time big-time shot, and it must not merely duplicate what is already available with other competitors. There must be something unique about the offer, and at the same time, you must have a line of products prepared after the first purchase, in order to experience the long-range effects of viral marketing.

9. Forgettable By Clicks-- Some viral marketing websites do not make use of javascripts. A user or viewer may easily be distracted by other links within the page and click it in the middle of his or her evaluation of your offer. It may be an affiliate website or an outside link, but it totally diverts the attention off your product and may lead him away from your page.

10. Lack of Assurance in Privacy-- Privacy concerns are also important for every person who wants to take part in the process of viral marketing. Asking for referrals without making any assurance that the personal information to be given will be kept confidential and not forwarded to other websites makes a person think twice before typing up those email addresses.

After learning the abovementioned viral marketing boo-boos it will be definitely easier to work out your viral marketing campaigns.

Note: This article may be freely reproduced as long as the AUTHOR'S resource box at the bottom of this article is included and all links must be Active/Linkable with no syntax changes.

For more SEO know-hows please go to http://alfamercado.com/blog

7 Simple Steps To Web Wealth

Writen by Sopan Greene

A lot of people and companies have websites. They also have products and services they want people to know about. Unfortunately, most of these people and companies waste most of their time on things that don't help them to make money. Here are 7 areas to focus on that will help you make more money:

1. Remember that marketing is more important than what your product is. If you have the greatest product ever and no one knows about it you won't make any money.

Direct response marketing online is very similar to direct response marketing offline. 90% of your time should be invested in marketing because nothing else will make you money. Don't waste time figuring out how to do it right. Study the people who have already spent time and money on learning what does and doesn't work. Then you can spend more of your time on collecting cash.

2. You must have a back end product to make good money. The way to make the most money is to first offer FREE information that is valuable. This will begin your relationship with a customer. Then have a product that is under $50 for a front end. Make sure the front end product is somehow connected to the back end product. For example, if you sell a $10 book on shaving points off your golf score, you want to have a back end product like a $300 course on the best proven techniques for the most effective golf swing ever.

3. Your product needs to be valuable to your customers. They need to believe that what they receive is worth a lot more than what they paid for it. That will make them a life-long customer. Sell them something worthless and they will be unhappy and they will be gone forever. Sell products you believe in or don't sell anything.

4. Give your customers FREE bonuses and more than you promised. Under promise and over deliver. Make your customers say "Wow!" when they receive your products. Don't just make them happy, blow their minds with how much value they get from you.

There are thousands of low cost bonus products you can throw in as a thank you. Even better, these low cost bonuses can make your customers a lot of money and they will appreciate you more. Besides, it's more ethical and fun and creative to build in great extras and bonuses for people. The bottom line is the more you give the more you get.

5. Get opt-in e-mail addresses. This is like gold for you. The only real purpose for a consumer website is to capture leads and to sell products. By leads I mean e-mail addresses. You want to build up a customer list and then you want to work it repeatedly. Send out a monthly e-zine that offers FREE valuable information and mentions similar products they may be interested in. They may see something that a friend of theirs will want to buy from you.

The key here is that these people ask to be on your list, you give them FREE information that has value, and they can unsubscribe at any time.

6. Build a relationship. It is much easier to sell someone who has had a good experience with you than someone who has never heard of you. Most companies ignore this fact and spend thousands of dollars each month trying to bring in new customers while they ignore people who already bought from them. Pretty stupid, but that's how most businesses operate.

7. Never stop learning. The best and richest marketers in the business spend the most amount of money buying books, tapes and courses that keep them on the cutting edge. Why? Because no one knows it all and new and better ways to market are discovered every day.

There is a lot of valuable FREE information available online that is easy to find and can make you a lot of money. One good idea can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars in future sales for you. So invest in yourself and your future.

These 7 simple steps can mean the difference between struggling to stay in business and struggling to keep up with all the orders coming in. Which struggle would you prefer?

About The Author

Sopan Greene M.A.

http://www.NetMarketingMastery.com

Grab Your 2 FREE eBooks & a FREE report: "Million Dollar Emails" "How To Start Your Own Traffic Virus" & "The 13 Deadly Internet Marketing Mistakes Almost Every Business Is Making..." mail to: webmaster87-5956@autocontactor.com

Some Tips About Creating An Infoproduct

Writen by Patric Chan

We all have problems right?

Products and services are there to help us solve those problems. Your products created are the solutions to problems. So when there's a problem, there's an opportunity for you to make money online.

But sometimes, when you've found a problem, there's already products created to solve it. This does not means that you no longer have the opportunity to tap into this problem. Make the product better, faster, cleaner, more reliable, more cost effective, better presented, you get the idea.

If you look at the bright side, it means that there are a lot of people who are willing to pay to get their problems solved.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not telling you to go out, buy peoples stuff, and just clone it and give it a fancy new name and change the layout a bit and sell it on. Aside from probably getting you into trouble with copyright laws and such, it's just not practical or ethical. What I am showing you though is that you can take basic ideas, and you can make them a better solution to a specific problem from the ground up.

Be innovative.

You'll probably find these products in Clickbank.com's Marketplace. There are plenty of info-products for you to look through there.

No matter how weird or crazy your product creation idea seems, no matter why you think it won't work, don't give it up. Never calls it quit before you give a deep consideration about how it can BE SUCCESSFUL. You'll never know whether that idea could be your big money-maker one day.

Open your mind a little, and don't start dismissing things on a whim because they seem impractical or even impossible at first glance. Sometimes, it has a lot to do with your self-confidence.

Some ideas you got there, when you wrote them, they look impractical. It seems like there was no market for them or couldn't afford to create them.

Keep an open mind and don't start placing these limits on yourself before you start. Once we remove those limits, the ideas will start flowing. Start recording them. One of them may well be the next big thing in your field of expertise. Sort out the good from the not so good ideas later.

Then, evaluate your ideas.

It's hard to start creating an info-product, but once you settle into this idea of bringing new concepts to the front of your mind and exploring them, you'll see that things will become possible and you'll never run out of ideas for new products.

There are 4 types of formats you can use to create an info-product. Four of them are ebook, software, audio and video types of info-products. The easiest and fastest way is to record an audio product. Then, transcript it and you'll have the ebook version product immediately.

If you can't create an audio product by yourself, interview an expert in your niche market. I'm sure many people would want to learn from him.

How can you convince him to be interviewed?

Do a tele-conference call to promote his product as an affiliate to your mailing list and record it. He won't be able to resist that.

Software and video info-products are slightly more complex to create. The reason why these 2 info-products are being created by marketers very often lately is because of the high-perceived value that they can sell it for.

"Is there a market for my product?"

And can you reach them?

An important question indeed, because incidentally, if there's no market for your product, or you have no way to reach them, then no ones going to find out about your product, and you simply won't sell any.

It's easy enough to head over to google.com and do a search for your product, or a different version of it.

Also, when running your search, if there are other products out there offering either the same as you, but in a different way, you can bet your life that there's a market out there. Specifics and how's aren't really important right now, as long as you know not to go launching a product that's going to be impossible for you to reach the people that want to buy it, or even worse; there aren't any people who want to buy it.

Copyright 2006 Patric Chan

Patric Chan is an internet infopreneur, international speaker and author. Subscribe to the Chan Do Internet Success System Newsletter for free to get first-hand and the latest internet marketing tips at http://www.automateinternetmarketing.com.

King Kong Size Link Building Tips

Writen by Mark Walters

After recent changes in search engines ranking mechanisms, relevant link building has become one of the most important ways of Search Engine Optimization. Now it is almost as important as having a web site loaded with good content.

Why do you need link building?

It's simple: the more relevant links to your website the more important your site appears to search engines and that should lead to better your page ranking. Search engine spiders are restlessly traveling through the Internet, constantly evaluating existing web pages - the keywords they use and the number of relevant links to your website. Because now relevant links are deemed more important than keyword density, some one way and relevant link building strategy is necessary if you hope to get to the top 10 or at least top 100 of web pages in your category.

While you have to create your own link building strategy that will fit into your situation, there are a few general tips. If you follow them, you will avoid many common link building mistakes and you can hope for greatly improving your website ratings in just a few weeks.

1. Use short URLs

When you submit your link to other sites that have a theme relevant to yours, make sure that offer a short URL. You can speed up the link building process by almost 50% if only you would use shorter URLs. Most webmasters will agree on adding a axbxcxex.com link, but won't accept a link that will look like axbxcxexg.com/articles/general/index.php/id=brnd. Even if your link building strategy relies on submitting deep links, they need to be as short as possible.

2. Be careful with redirect links

No site owner likes redirects. If you want to make your link building easy and fast, you should avoid them every time it is possible. They are often used to avoid long URLs, but it's often a deadly mistake. Instead of redirects, you may consider simplifying your website map and making the URLs shorter. While it may be easier for your web site builder to have long addresses, every sophisticated link building strategy calls for making them as short as possible.

3. Keep the same URL over time

Don't change your URL unless you have really good reason to do that. If you do change, you will have to do all that link building again from the beginning. Even if you redirect from your old web address to the new one, you have to consider the possibility that many webmasters delete redirect links from their websites. As a result, you can expect that you will lose about 25% links just because you've changed your website URL.

Just what are the searching engines looking for in the way of relevant links? No one knows for sure, but common sense tells us that links from a gardening site to a dirt bike site are not complementary.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for gardening information on the internet. They come to your gardening site and feel they've found helpful information. Oh look, they think, there's a link there by pansy graphic. I'll just click that and get more good information. Yeow, what does a girl in a bikini sitting on a dirt bike have to do with gardening? … And there goes your credibility with your viewer and the search engines.

It appears that the value of links is swinging to a reasonable number if good quality links rather than a thundering heard of indiscriminant links from anywhere.

Mark Walters offers everything you need to build a powerful linking strategy at http://www.LinkingUniverse.com