Posts Tagged ‘internet marketing’

Have you ever heard someone say “I don’t need a blog, there isn’t enough to say about my product/service/subject?” Have you ever said it yourself? I used to think that way as well. How would I ever come up with enough to say about one particular subject? Well, there are all kinds of blogs with all kinds of purposes. The key to a successful blog is to know why your doing it and having a clear focused mission and strategy behind it.

Let’s say you are a crafts-person. A photo blog would be a practical and very effective means of sharing your custom work. A photo blog would do many things for your business, such as:

1) Create a portfolio of projects for your customers to review before making a purchase decision. For example, a painter, you can post before and after photos of her work.

2) A crafts-person could post photos of their booth and customers at the latest event they attended.

3) Allow your existing clients to post comments about the success of the project or event, thereby improving trust and probably conversion of potential clients and increasing the connection and relationship you have with your existing customers.

4) Your clients could link back to your blog post, increasing your search engine rankings and improving traffic to your site

5) When you add comments about the event/project/etc. in your post you can include keywords and increase your traffic and SEO.

6) It gives you more pages to be indexed by an search engine.

Just something to think about. There are many different types of blogs and many different reasons for creating them. One way to think of a blog is that if your business is involved in something informal, dynamic, changing, or current, perhaps it belongs in a blog. A blog is a great way to create an informal portfolio and to market your business or service.

Ratings and Reviews

Rating or Review sites are websites that allow you to vote on, rate or provide a review of products, web sites, services, companies, people, etc.

Why are ratings and reviews valuable? The use of ratings and reviews on your business website increases your customers trust in using your website and confidence in your brand. The ratings and reviews feature can help to establish a customer community giving your customers a way to interact with you. Your customer’s interactions and comments can be a reliable feedback mechanism to help you improve your product or service.The use of online ratings and reviews will reveal under-performing products and unexpected stars, thus giving you information and trends to use in your marketing. This is a highly measurable feedback mechanism that engages customers, gives them control, and gives you quantifiable results.

Tips:

• Get your product, service or store rated and reviewed (ratings service) on ratings sites. This also increases search engine rankings.
• Add Ratings and Reviews systems to your website.

Resources: Get rated

• Bazaarvoice – Bazaarvoice captures their opinions, questions, and stories to help organizations like yours gain sales, operational efficiencies, and – ultimately – real cultural change.
• Epinions – read and write reviews on millions of products and services
• BizRate – the BizRate consumer feedback network that collects millions of consumer reviews of stores and products each year.
• Rating System -Add Rating & Review and Q&A Solutions to your website, quickly and easily, without expensive software or custom programming.

Do you ever feel like marketing and entrepreneurship is a leap of faith? Many people think entrepreneurs are risk takers. But today, I’m really feeling like an eternal optimist. The keyword there is eternal. You can plan and plan and research and analyze and in the end, you just have to go for it and enjoy the ride, for better or worse. It’s kinda what I image skydiving to be. Of course, I see no sane reason to jump our of a perfectly good airplane, so I can just imagine the ride. As a skydiver, you plan, you take a course, you get trained, you test your equipment, and in the end, you have to jump. And then you free-fall down for a while and pray that the equipment is going to work, that you land in the correct spot, you don’t hit anything along the way, and oh, yeah, you pray you don’t crash. And some how through all that fear of failure (or praying for success) you enjoy the ecstasy of the moment, the wind blowing through your hair, the beauty of the earth beneath you.

If something goes wrong after the leap, you can sometimes self correct, change your course, or make changes to salvage the trip. However, in Skydiving, if you crash, odds are that you won’t get a chance to get back up again. That’s why I’m an entrepreneurial marketer and an eternal optimist. I take that leap of faith over-and-over-and-over again. And no matter what the results (win or lose), I get back up and do it again. And that’s what I call entrepreneurship.

In 30 minutes, a new internet company will launch to the world. I am grateful to have been in the right place at the right time more than once in my life. And it doesn’t matter whether we crash and burn or rise to the top. Lessons will be learned and it sure will be a wild ride! Actually, it will be a BLAST!

Oh, you can jump with me and enjoy the ride at…

http://my.blastoffnetwork.com/debzimmer

When you use an email marketing company to send out your ezine or newsletter, the company’s email marketing software does some verification to makes sure your ezine complies with the CAN-SPAM laws. But what if you don’t use a paid service? How do you keep your email newsletter compliant?

You can always check the FTC’s Spam site at http://www.ftc.gov/spam/ for the latest updates on legal regulations. If you are sending out email for commercial purposes, these are the main points to follow (excerpt taken from The CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business):

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.