Posts Tagged ‘online marketing’

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.

Another tool to grow your business using online or internet marketing is to create Online Presentations: A slideshow is a series of pictures used for artistic or instructional purposes. It allows you to add visuals to an oral presentation for greater impact.

Tips for using presentations for online marketing:

• Create an online presentation to share with your customers or prospective customers. Educate, inform or inspire them about your products and services. Create excitement.
• Use an online presentation creation and posting service and embed it on your website and share it with other sites. This is a way to drive traffic and increase links back to your site.

6 Online Presentation/Slideshow Sites:

• SlideShare – Upload and share your PowerPoint presentations and Word documents on SlideShare. Share publicly or privately. Add audio to make a webinar.
• Zoho – Zoho.com is a comprehensive suite of award-winning on-line business applications. Customers use Zoho to run their business processes, manage their information and be more productive while at the office or on the go, without having to worry about expensive or outdated hardware or software. To date, Zoho.com has launched 19 different applications.
• SlideRocket – SlideRocket is the leader in online presentation software. With SlideRocket you quickly make stunning presentations, manage a library of slides and assets, share them securely with colleagues, and measure how they’re used. Has some web conferencing capabilities.
• 280slides.com – You can download to PowerPoint or share at SlideShare. Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world. With 280 Slides, there’s no software to download and nothing to pay for. 280slides.com
• Myplick – Upload your slides, sync with audio, and share with friends.
• Google Presentations – part of Google docs.

Do you have any tips you’d like to share? What’s worked for you?

You can get more lists like this by downloading my FREE REPORT: “187 Free Ways to Explode Your Business”.