Social Marketing - A double edged sword

Social marketing takes advantage of current relationships to further your business agenda.  While this can be effective and inexpensive, it can sometimes mean the termination of your relationships.  This is a large problem of the Multi-Level Marketing programs.  When engaged in social marketing, you are taking on the products or services of the business program with your reputation.  If the product or service does not live up to par, or the startup costs are high, your relationship is the one that will suffer.  Caution should be exercised when engaging in social marketing.

• Tapping into your social circles.  There are a lot of free resources online to help you to get more business.  Myspace and Facebook are some free places to get a little bit of extra traffic.  Use these resources sparingly, no one wants to "friend" a business, and unwarranted friend requests are as bad as spam.  Use every effort not to create ill will against your business.
• Word of Mouth.  This is one of the simplest ways to ensure your success in business.  Word of mouth is generated when you provide service above and beyond expectations.  Many businesses today do not realize that word of mouth is karmic.  To please a customer, you may take a loss in the short term, but find big gains in the long run.  It is impossible to know how far-reaching word of mouth can be.
• Chain Emails.  Chain emails can be effective, but most of the time chain emails have a superstitious, or karmic twist to them.  If you are going to make a chain email, you should first of all make it engaging, and second, it should accomplish something good.  A charity donation on your part will help to offset the "free" advertising that you would get from a chain email.
• Blogging.  Blogging can be a great way to showcase your business and get some extra traffic through linking.  If you have access to concise and well written articles, you may see some benefit to the traffic of your website over time.  Get started now.
• Media Response.  Sometimes just getting an ad from another business or person can afford you great opportunities in trade and networking.  If you receive a contact from a business, take a moment and explore the possibilities for a partnership.  It can't hurt to ask.
• Free Resource Sites.  There are a variety of sites that exist already that can help you provide an outlet for your business's services and products.  Craig's list, Ebay and other sites can generate some leads for nothing to a few pennies.  (Some services do not allow you to list your  website, but there is no reason that you cannot send a post-business email to your customer afterward.)

Guerrilla Advertising - Cheap but illegal

Guerrilla advertising is inexpensive, but it skirts on legality in many cases.  Some of the advertising lumped into this section is not necessarily illegal, but it tends to create littering problems and does not have a high rate of return, usually because the materials that are sent out are unpolished.

• Stickers.  Some companies in the past have used mass produced stickers to get their message out to the public, usually placed in off-the-wall places.  Stickers are vandalism and can have a detrimental effect on your business in criminal charges.
• Small Roadsigns.  Buying small roadsigns and placing them at busy intersections can generate some business, but are risky.  You may be slammed with fines that will far outweigh the benefits of advertising on this scale.
• Personal Ads.  Some publications allow for personal ads to be placed for little or no cost.  Engaging in a personal ad for the purpose of selling an item or service is shady.  You should always advertise your product or service up front, and inform the customer exactly the extent to what your product or service will perform.
• Spam.  Who likes spam?  Do not annoy your prospective customers with a bunch of junk emails.  If you want to stay in touch on a mass scale, do it easily with our Express Email Marketing.

  Print Advertising -  The Mainstay

Despite what some people say, print is not dead.  There will always be a market for in-print advertising.  You can not afford to wait on the traffic that may be generated by organic search engine optimization as that tends to be a long term goal.  There are a lot of free print advertising avenues in your local community that are willing to help you out.  If you are willing to spend a few advertising dollars on magazines and newspapers, just be sure that the market that you are targeting are reading those publications.

• Business Cards.  The business card is a testament to validity of your business, if you are going to make a personal contact, you better be sure that you have a business card on you.  You should also make sure that the business card that you present to your contact has:  A great logo, is well laid out, and contains no misspellings.  A business card should be your most polished piece of literature.
• Brochures.  A brochure is still important as you do not need internet access to see it.  A brochure should be polished and slick.  If your brochure is lacking, we can help.  Call 480-310-5280.
• Vehicle Decals.  You can opt to get some attention through your own vehicle.  There are magnets that you can put on your door and bumper, vinyl stickers that can go on your window, or you can even wrap your entire vehicle.
• Mailers.  There are a lot of direct mailing companies that will allow you to reach a wide variety of consumers.
• Newspapers.  Less and less people are using newspapers to get their information, but many newspapers have gone online and can still give you some great response.
• Magazines.  Target your market with a magazine ad.  Many magazines deal with your prospective customers and allows you to make an educated decision as to where to best spend your advertising dollars.
• Billboards.  Get your site into the public eye with a billboard.  Make sure that you have a memorable message and domain name.
• Sponsorships.  Move your business into the spotlight with sponsorships.  A lot of free press can be generated by opting to fund athletes and scholars.  Charities benefit greatly with sponsorships.

You should always use professionals to create your ads.  Do not assume that you can write an amazing ad without some training.  If you are going still going to do it on your own, here are a couple of quick tips:

• Your ad should be either very light or very dark.  Stay away from grays, try to make sure you get a bold look to your ad to grab attention, especially when making a black and white ad.  If you are competing for attention, you need to make sure you grab it and keep it.
• If you can't say it great - say it straight.  Do not try to be witty with a headline if it just does not fit.  If you get too cerebral, you can lose your audience before you ever even had them.  Also, tricking your customer into reading your body copy may just annoy them.  Refrain from "teasers" if you are not putting together a campaign.  Teasers are ads that are meant to incite curiosity about a product by not revealing what it does.  Teasers require some participation on the part of the customer and can be amazing if done right.
• Never try to be punny.  "Puns are the death of wit." -Voltaire.  As a general rule, puns make you look stupid.  If you are to get away with a pun in your ads, it must have a 'play-on-words' connotation.
• Don't neglect the body.  Your body copy should be concise, to-the-point and easy to read.  You should also take extra care to make sure that you have no grammatical or spelling errors.  Do not choose a font that is too difficult to get through.  Keep it to 2 fonts: one for the headline and one for your copy.  Refrain from running your copy over a background image.
• KISS.  Keep it simple stupid!  There is no way that you can really put all the information on even a single product on an ad.  After the headline payoff, just include contact information or where to obtain the item.  If you wrote your ad correctly, you will get the call.
• Be truthful.  Nothing kills a product faster than promising more that is delivered.  Never give a reason for your customers to be disappointed. If the product is substandard, charge less for it.

  Web-Based Advertising

There are a wealth of inexpensive advertising methods for your business online.  In addition to paid methods, there are a few free methods that you can explore, but typically the free methods require a deeper investment of time with smaller returns.  Over time you will begin to generate organic search results if you have used the proper techniques to get listed and ranked highly on the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

How do I gain ranking?  SEO is the focus of a lot people who are getting on the web.  This refers to the "organic" methods of acquiring ranking.  The "organic" method tends to deal with natural popularity because of links and content.  SEO is a long term goal, this also requires constant attention over time.

To gain ranking with top search engines is quite basic:

• Content is King.  Your content should reflect the kind of search words that your potential customer is typing in.  This is especially important for sites that are looking for a localized market.  Be sure that the names of the surrounding towns and counties appear on your website.  You can always put this listing at the bottom of your site where your customers won't be distracted.
• Link up.  Your site should have plenty of links funneling into it from outside (legitimate) sites.  Be careful of services that promise to link in from sources that can actually harm your ranking.  You can actually email different websites with requests for links in exchange for a link from your own site.  You will want to do so to sites that have about the same ranking as you do and for products or information that is not in direct competition with your own.
• Domains.  Register your domain name for the maximum amount of time.  Search engines are beginning to count domain name registration as a factor in compiling searches.  Google was granted a patent based on this in 2005.  Domains that have been committed to a long period of registration are given higher status as they plan on being around a while.  Search engines can find this information through a whois lookup.  This tip may honestly be a small factor, but in the world of SEO, every advantage translates into hits.
• Submit your site.   You should be consistently submitting your site to the search engines and alerting them to your updates.  Many of the search engines are pretty proactive about finding you, but you cannot leave that up to chance if you want to be successful, they can take as long as 8 months.  Submitting your site means that you need to approach each individual search engine and find their submission link, and enter in your URL.  If you want to save time and make sure that you are getting a comprehensive submission out, pick up our Traffic Blazer here.
• Don't forget the Meta Tags.  Many search engines do not deal with meta tags anymore as a general rule.  You will still want to make sure that you include concise meta tags, the more direct and simple; the better. The description meta tag should be short and sweet, containing a few keywords for the search engines and enticing text that will prompt Joe Public to click.

Black Hat SEO
When attempting to gain ranking, it is a big temptation to use underhanded tricks to circumvent the natural or organic methods that make search engines fair and easy to use.  Avoid these techniques that can get you blacklisted:

• Keyword stuffing.  Your content should not contain keywords over and over again, the language of your content should be consistant and meaningful.
• Keyword hiding.  You should not make keywords the same color as your background in an attempt to hide the content from the user.
• Link farms.  You should not link to your site from web pages that are setup to do nothing but send traffic to your site.
• Doorway, or Redirect Pages.  Do not create a page that a user is not meant to see that redirects to another site.  They do not create a good experience for the surfer and leaves you exposed to regulation and censure.  If you want to broaden your audience, make individual sites with real content and links to the site that you intend customers to visit. 

Affiliate Marketing 

There are two main aspects of affiliate marketing that will be covered here:  Pay-per-click advertising, and affiliate marketing.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising is the practice of simply paying for traffic to be redirected to your site via search results links or links that appear on sites that are willing to advertise your products and services.  There are some problems with PPC ads as they cannot truly be regulated by the customer, they can be faked by dishonest people using bots to surf the web and click on ads, or even people who have been hired to click on competitor ads just to drain their ad budget dry.  Some types of businesses cannot benefit very much from pay-per-click ads. 

If you are paying for people to come to your site, you want to make sure that you avoid the following issues:

• Never over-hype your site.  Make sure that your ad matches the expectation of the customer.  You want to make sure that there is still a surprise when they visit your site.  Do not "Bait and Switch".
• Your site must look professional.  Be certain that your site is clean professional and easy to navigate.  If your site is substandard, contains misspellings and broken links, your customers will probably not trust you with their money.  Other small issues may include:  poor layout, bad text aligning, hard to read text on background, troublesome fonts, cheesy animations, bad color choices, missing pictures.
• Do not use popups.  Using popups or other means to trap a customer into your site or direct them to unwanted information will waste your money in a hurry.  If you feel that you have to trap your customers, look at the real problem and reinvest your time to making a stellar website that people will feel good about visiting.
• Do not forget to secure the site.  Where necessary, make sure that you add an SSL certificate whenever you are asking for personal information, passwords, or credit card information.
• Make sure that you are reaching your target audience.  If you are not crafting your ad to appeal to your target audience, or if you are not using the right keywords - that is wasted money.  Also, make sure that you do not enroll in PPC programs if you have a site that may generate "Curiosity Clicks" such as adult type sites or specialty items that average people cannot afford.
• Monitor your PPC account closely.  Stay up-to-date on the usage of your account so that you can be on the lookout for PPC fraud or ads that are less effective.  If you feel that you are being overcharged, contact your PPC provider to let them know.  Most of them have teams dedicated to fighting PPC fraud.  If you find that the traffic that is generated to your site is not worth the money, PPC may not be the answer that you are looking for.
   

Affiliate marketing is a term for static links that you will provide other users to put into their site.  You will need to ensure that the information that is gathered through these links will be deposited into a database for review and compensation.  This is usually done through some sort of ID number that is captured once the potential traffic visits the site and purchases an item.  Affiliate marketing links are potentially messy on the compensation side, but can be useful if they are administrated correctly.  Here are some hints that will make affiliate marketing an asset to your marketing strategy.

• Be ethical.  Be sure that your payout system functions perfectly and is fair.  You can save yourself a horde of headaches by ensuring that you are avoiding fraud charges and ill will.
• Back up financial records.  You will need to store backups of all the information databases to avoid lost records and potential legal issues.
• Set reasonable limits.  Create an account and update information on a server as each commission comes in.  Set your payout amounts to an accrual of a specified amount of money (say every $50).  This way, you do not have to pay out as often and this system is easier to manage.
• Advertise.  After you implement the system, put it to work, advertise the business opportunity on everything, emails, receipts, and PPC programs.

Domains With Existing Traffic 

It is possible to buy domain names that already have some traffic coming through on them.  You can find an assortment of auction sites where you can buy preowned names that may serve up the traffic that you need to your site instantly.  There are a few reasons why these domains might be enjoying visitors.

• It is just a great domain name.  If you can obtain a .com domain name that people would just type in, you can expect some unadvertised business.  The name should be intuitive and natural for this to be a factor.
• Links.  There may be a boosted amount of links on the site.  If it is possible, visit the site before you buy it.  Does it have great content?  If not, you can expect that the seller is just snowballing the system to show that there is a lot of traffic on it to boost the selling price.  If there is a 3rd party selling it, (closeouts or expiring domain names) this is usually not a factor.  You can expect this type of traffic to taper out over the next few months, as people fix their links.  If you can replace the content that was there, they may never fix the link and you will retain the traffic.
• Search engine results.  There may be some left over hits that trickle through the search engines.  If you are planning on taking over a domain name but want to change the content of the site, you will want to try to preserve it and the meta tags that were on the old site to help retain that ranking.  As you do not know the last submission of the old site, be sure to wait 45 days before submitting to the search engines just to be certain you are not guilty of spamming.

Premium Domain Names

Acquiring a premium domain name means putting down some real money nowadays.  The domain name market can be viewed as virtual real estate.  It is not unrealistic to be putting out a couple of thousand dollars for a decent domain name.  Check out our premium domain name listings here.  If you ever broker a domain name and pay a lot of money for it, go ahead and register that name for 10 years.  It will help you to protect your investment, and it will help with your search engine optimization.  Google was granted a patent based on domain name registration time in 2005.

Radio Advertising

Advertising on the radio can be an effective tool.  Most radio stations will have some extensive information on the demographics of their listeners

• Be sure that your demographic is covered by the station that you approach.  You need to take into account age groups and times of day that they would be available to hear your message.

Television Advertising