Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!
Creativity.
This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.
It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.
While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.
While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.
Viral Marketing Overview
Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.
In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.
Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.
Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.
Using Viral Marketing to your advantage
The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.
Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.
Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moirĂ© popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?
Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.
Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 | 0 Comments
3 Necessary Tools for the High Rolling Affiliate Marketer
What does it take to become a successful Affiliate Marketer? What are the ingredients of an affiliate marketing success story? Is there a shortcut to Affiliate Marketing glory? All these questions play around in the minds of affiliate marketers who want to make it big in this business.
Although affiliate marketing is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it is not as easy as it sounds. The wise affiliate marketer plans every action and executes it the best way he can. He should also maximize the potential to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Marketing business. We have consulted some of the most successful affiliate marketers in the business and below are the top three necessary tools for a successful affiliate marketing business.
Important Tool #1: Your Own Website
The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.
The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.
Important Tool #2: Incentives
Competition is extremely tight in the internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free softwares, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.
Important Tool #3: Link Popularity
The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign.
One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website's link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.
These are but three of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination. You can always explore other ideas and adapt other strategies, which you think might help you become a high rolling affiliate marketer.
Thursday, December 11, 2008 | 0 Comments
Don't Make These Common 4 Affiliate Mistakes!
Myths concerning affiliate marketing are appealing and attractive. People who do not know the entire system the wrong way round are prone to believing that it is something capable of giving them great fortune overnight. Stories concerning affiliates who earn tremendous amounts of money swim in their heads, and while these stories are as true as they can be, there are those who believe that they are going to have the same fortune once they indulge in this particular business.
It is true enough that affiliate marketing is financially rewarding. People who have gone through everything to be able to succeed in this business are reaping the seeds that they untiringly sowed. Many of them enjoy the kind of existence that was not possible for them to have had under ordinary circumstances. Having gone through the A-Z of affiliate marketing, however, these people are the ones who know that while such business is lucrative, there is absolutely no easy money in it.
Ignorance of this fact is one of the main reasons why there are people who fail miserably in the internet business. There are those who believe in myths concerning the easy money involved in systems such as affiliate marketing. They do not know that there are those who have wasted time, effort and too many resources in trying to pursue the life of ease that they believe this business will give them. And so they go into affiliate marketing armed with nothing but myths and fantastical notions of wealth swimming in their consciousness, never realizing that they bound to make mistakes that would prove to be their downfall.
What may be the reason why in businesses such as affiliate marketing, many are called but few are chosen? Perhaps the answer lies on the fact that many affiliates make mistakes that result from their ignorance of facts concerning how the entire business runs. Affiliate marketing is not as simple as an affiliate promoting a merchant's wares through his website and getting paid for it. It is also about knowing the market and the customers at hand.
Discovering what the most common mistakes affiliates make can perhaps dispel the gloom about myths surrounding affiliate marketing by correcting some wrong notions about it. It might also be able to make those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and donts involved in this one if they want to make each of their steps count. The first common mistake affiliates make is their lack of knowledge concerning principles involved in their business. This refers to the affiliate's knowledge of search engines in particular.
Affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet could not have been better without the existence of search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely. This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.
The second is that affiliates make the mistake of stuffing their sites with banners that do not provide enough information about the product at hand. The best way to battle this mistake is to provide good content hand-in-hand with such banners. It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them realize this goal.
The third is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting only one product. Consequently, customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales as compared to having more options for customers ponder about. It is always better to give them a few better alternatives than to give them only one.
The fourth is that there are affiliates who make the mistake of promoting too many products. As a result, customers are confused and end up beyond making a choice. It is perhaps good to give them only the best choices. This is because it is ultimately up to them to judge which one is the best for them to patronize.
All in all, affiliates that are doomed to fail in this business are those who do not exert enough effort to understand everything involved in the industry that they are in. Knowing their path step by careful step will prove to be beneficial to them, as there is no other way to succeed than to go through any path slowly but surely.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 | 0 Comments
Finding Hot Selling Products to Sell
In order to locate products that sell online, we need to understand what people already want to buy. Finding a good choice of idea or product is always accompanied by interfacing the demand for the product in the current market and the level of competition or market share that the product will be having in the long run.
"What should I sell? What products are hot selling? These are the questions most people are trying to find an answer in order for them to make the definite decision. And if we really wjavascript:void(0)
Publish Postant to know the answer to this question, our only choice is to do some research. There are all kinds of twists along the road that may lead you to think you have a high-demand idea. We must be able to understand and satisfy the need, wants and expectations of our customers on a certain product that they're trying to buy. This three are called the basic needs or minimum requirements in a purchase. Needs are the basic reasons or the minimum requirements consumers are looking for in a product or service. They are called the qualifying or "gatekeeper" dimensions in a purchase. Wants are the determining dimensions among many choices. Expectations, on the other hand, are values or intangibles associated with a product or service. Expectations are actually part of "wants" but they become extremely important when products or services are not differentiated.
For example, in reading a logic book, university students look for the following: Relevant logic concepts use of simple language, easy to understand and affordable prices. These similar ideas can be applied to Internet Sales as well. After all, the Internet is just another place to sell products. The basic concept of demand is the same there as it is anywhere else, and has been all the time.
Now, the second thing that must be considered in finding "hot" products to sell are the level of competition or the market shares do your product will have. Market share or level of competition means the ratio of your brand sales versus the total market sales. While companies would naturally define its target competitors, it is actually the consumers who ultimately decide the competitive frame, or the list related products or services that consumers consider when exercising their purchasing power. We must therefore choose the market segment where we can have a potential leadership or at least a strong challenger role. Because the overriding objective of getting into this business is not just to satisfy the needs and wants of our customers but to do so profitably better than his competition. Otherwise, our competition will end up satisfying the customers better than our own interest.
Third factor to be considered in finding hot selling products is finding out the general interest level about the product. General interest in a product helps us to gauge where our demand and competition numbers fall into the big picture. Simply saying, if there isn't much demand for the product, and there isn't much competition, it would seem that it might not be good a good put up for sale. But the research doesn't stop here; there is one last thing to be considered to exactly find the hot selling products that you've been looking for. We must also learn how others are advertising those products. If there are a good number of them doing so, it may mean that it's a good product to get into. Coming to the last phase of the process is analyzing and evaluating all the information that has been collected. We have to look at all of the data we have collected on demand, competition, and advertising, and make decision as how they all balance out.
And here are several factors or aspects that must be measured: (a) not enough demand means not enough people are going to buy (b) too much competition means not enough of a profit to go around (c) too much advertising drives up the price of pay per click ads, and competition as well (d) not enough general interest, combined with low demand, means there may not be a good market even if there is competition trying to make the sales.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008 | 0 Comments
How to Set Yourself Apart From Other Affiliates
Considered today as one of the best and easiest way to earn some money, affiliate marketing is now attracting many people to represent themselves in this type of business. But as competition is getting a bit bigger, you may need some ways to distinguish yourself from the rest of the affiliate marketers. For the major reason that many of your competitors including you are promoting the exact same program, in the exact same zone or on the exact same websites perhaps. Now here are some tips that you may consider in order for you to stay in this business and have the chance to outwit and outplay other competitors of yours.
The first thing is for you to have your own website. It is very essential for you to have your own website in considering affiliate marketing as your professional career. Secondly, potential customers primarily go to websites in order for them to search and sometimes purchase items they were looking for. For the same reason that it is much easier to remember than a certain URL that you may be using and you can just point to your visitors the affiliate page in your website.
Another thing to remember is to have your own ad. A lot of times affiliates marketers have published the same ad two or three times done by advertisers. In this case, you may email the owner of your affiliate program asking that you make your own ads. This way, people may not become immune to ads, because sometimes seeing the same ads over and over again, may just make your potential customers to just skip it all together. Besides, your primarily purpose is to attract or encourage people to click and read your ads and be curios enough to click through your website.
Step three, have some products of your won which are only available through your website. Once you have your website going, it is important to have some products or services that your customers can't find with other affiliate's site. You want your customers to keep coming to your site and the best way to do that is to have something on your site that they can't find on others. Being an affiliate marketer we must then choose a certain market segment where you can have a potential leadership or at least a strong challenger role.
The fourth step is to build a strong relationship with people who already buy your product. Now, in order for you as the marketer to fully answer the query of your potential customers, it is best to try and buy the product by yourself. With this particular notion, you can better sell the product that you are trying to market. You can share to your potential customers what a great experience you had with the product, and this can make them interested enough to buy the product. You may also be able to provide a support if necessary or you may provide a confident tutorial or steps on how to use the product that you are trying to market based on your personal experience. Entailing this idea is to be totally honest about the product that you are trying to market. If you find out that the program you were promoting is a scam, stop promoting it and inform your readers about it. This will help you build credibility with your lists.
We all make mistakes and admitting your mistake will boost your reader's confidence in you. Lastly, don't try to market everything you see. With services such as click bank, it is easy to become overwhelmed and try to market everything in the click bank marketplace. That is not a good idea. It's better to focus on one market and market products that they would want. This is called niche marketing.
Try also to promote a certain product, which conforms to the specifications measured through indications of customer-satisfaction, rather than indicators of self-gratification. It is the customer who decides what to buy and not the company or the affiliate marketer. The company simply produces products catering to the needs and wants of their chosen market segment.
Today, different types of business are emerging from all over the world in a multinational level to reign supreme on their specific market segment that they are trying to dominate, and affiliate marketing is one of them. Affiliate marketing is definitely here to stay and it can become a great way to earn extra or even part time income. However, it won't happen overnight. Like everything else in life, you're going to have to put a lot of hard work into it. Good luck to you in your new venture.
Monday, December 08, 2008 | 0 Comments
How You Can Become a Super Affiliate
The humdrum existence of going to the office day after day doing the usual 9-5 shift is a trying task for those who have lived all their lives doing so. This is why the convenience of doing work at home under amazingly flexible working hours is a dazzling prospect to them. Doing work at home that is as fulfilling as having a career working for a computer on the 19th floor of a skyscraper is already a possibility in these modern times. This is because the jungle-like network that is the internet has given birth to a business that has given some people practically new lives doing nothing but so.
This particular business allows people to work at home under flexible working hours. There is no boss to scream around putting pressure on everyone about the deadline at hand. There is no clutter of messy paperwork that needs to be completed the soonest possible time. Conveniences such as these are experienced by those who are into affiliate marketing, the newest way to earn money without having to go through all sorts of routine found in regular employment.
Those who have been in the business long enough can attest to the fact that it is a lucrative business indeed, one that can actually give people things that they could not possibly possess or experience under ordinary circumstances.
The business called affiliate marketing involves an affiliate's promotion of a merchant's website. Here the website owned by the affiliate is made to advertise and market the website of the merchant through the affiliate program that they run. Whenever someone clicks on the merchant's website promoted by the one owned by the affiliate, the affiliate is given a commission. This is in recognition of his effort in helping the merchant make a sale.
The system involved in affiliate marketing seems easy, but it also takes a lot of diligence and perseverance for one to be able to penetrate it thoroughly. Those who want to get into this type of business should possess the necessary skills to be able tread through the industry with confidence and self-assurance. Still, other factors are needed by one to be able to really break in. Knowledge about the business at hand is very important as it dictates the actions that are to be done by people who are into it.
The leading figure in affiliate marketing is the super affiliate. He is basically an e-mail marketer who collects large databases of e-mail addresses through newsletters. Super affiliates are also those who know the business even better than affiliate managers as a result of their knowledge about the affiliate marketing industry inside out. Those who want to be super affiliates should know that becoming a super affiliate is not easy, because it takes a lot to be able to master the marketing craft.
Becoming a super affiliate means having one's own website and autoresponder. These tools will help a lot in one's facilitation of the business. Building one's own list is another. Creating a loyal customer base and taking care of it is one secret that successful super affiliates have. Making good customer relations is also important if one wants to be a super affiliate to reckon with.
Continuing to market to the people on one's list is another must if one wants to succeed as a super affiliate. Sending out quality content in lieu of ads is an advantage as products are marketed better whenever enough information is given about them.
Building traffic to one's own site is also one of the most essential points in the affiliate marketing business. Making one's affiliate links his own business will allow him to build a strong relationship with his customers, enabling him to market to them over and over again.
The most important thing one should remember if he wants to become a super affiliate is to treat affiliate marketing as a business first and foremost. If he is capable of doing this, then he will never have to go back to the humdrum existence of working the 9-5 shift. A career as a super affiliate in the business which will change his life forever could possibly take that unexciting job's place.
Sunday, December 07, 2008 | 0 Comments
Fox in the money with "Secret Millionaire" bow
LOS ANGELES, Fox's new reality effort "Secret Millionaire" performed much better than expected Wednesday, suggesting that the short-run altruistic series could have a future on the network.
The evening's two episodes of "Millionaire" averaged 7.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. Although not a huge number, the premiere was only modestly promoted and aired in December -- when new programs typically have a tough time attracting audiences -- so Fox's expectations were low. The show is considered a softhearted departure from the network's usual reality brand of more competition-oriented and envelope-pushing fare.
There's four more episodes of "Millionaire" left to air in the coming weeks, and Fox likely will get its promotional machine rolling to see if it can turn a December effort into a returning show.
Also during the 9 p.m. hour, NBC's "Life" averaged 8.2 million viewers, followed by 7.8 million for ABC's "Private Practice," and 7 million for CBS' inaugural telecast of the Grammy nominations.
Saturday, December 06, 2008 | 0 Comments
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