Maximum Benefit of a Marketing Plan Strategy

You know the importance of marketing your business. You may even have written a marketing plan and are now implementing it. But is simply marketing your business going to bring you the results you need? Doyou have a way to measure the success of your marketing? If your marketing isn’t successful, do you know how to find out where you went wrong?

These questions are some of the important reasons why you need a properly set-up marketing plan strategy. A marketing plan strategy will help you gain maximum benefit from your marketing. It goes a step beyond a marketing plan.

A marketing plan describes the activities you are going to do to promote your product or service. A marketing plan strategy establishes the basis for your marketing and provides the goals for all your marketing activities. It gives you a tool you can use to define your market, position yourself, and increase your sales.

Here are some of the things a well thought-out marketing strategy will tell you. This information will help you gain maximum results from all of your marketing efforts.

* Describe your business and your objectives. This is where you will write down what your business does and what product or service it provides. You will also consider what the goal of your business is. When you have established your goals, you will be able to choose marketing activities to help you reach those objectives.

* Describe your products or services. This describes what you do and how you provide your product or service. It is important to understand exactly what service your business provides so you can tell others about it effectively. This may seem obvious, but many business owners can’t describe exactly what it is they do. Including this in your marketing plan strategy will ensure that you understand what you do and why it’s important, and can relay that information to others.

* Profile your target market. Who are you providing your product or service for? This will tell you who you should be marketing to. Research your market to find out what appeals to them about your product. This will help you market it to them effectively. Learn everything you can about your market so you can speak their language and make sure your marketing is appropriate.

* Know your business’s role in relation to your competition. This will help you understand your unique position in the marketplace. Find out how you’re different than your competitors, whether it be stronger or weaker. You can use this in your marketing to make yourself stand out from the competition.

Your marketing plan strategy will provide the goals for all your marketing activities and help you reach them. It will also simplify your marketing, because you have done your research ahead of time. For these reasons, a marketing plan strategy helps ensure that you gain maximum benefit from your marketing.

So who is right? Are forums a timewaster or a great place to network?

The answer is both.

An online forum is what you make of it. Say you visit your favorite marketing forum and end up getting drawn into discussion after discussion without having much to show for it – then it’s safe to say you’re wasting your valuable time.

On the other hand, if you visit a forum for a specific period of time each day and spend that time wisely – sharing tips and discussing interesting topics for example – then it’s safe to say that forum is a great contribution to your business.

Many valuable friendships and joint ventures have been made through online networking forums. The key, like with most things, is to use moderation and common sense.

Here are a few of the most common pitfalls of online forums and how to avoid them:

1# – They can be negative places. Sometimes you can visit a forum, get dragged in for two hours and leave feeling uninspired and even depressed. The truth is, when you visit an online forum you don’t always know who you’re dealing with – this is the anonymity our online world offers us. Unfortunately many forum regulars can be quite negative and even downright nasty.

To avoid this trap, visit forums that inspire you and make you feel good. If you leave the forum feeling you have gained something and feel ready to get back to work on your business, then it’s likely a good place to spend time in.

#2 – You can get sucked in to meaningless discussions. While it’s okay to make friendships as well as network, you really don’t want to spend half of your day talking about non-business related topics (not while you’re meant to be working). It may be fine to contribute an answer or two, but keep your end goal in mind at all times – are you there to simply socialize or are you there to network as well?

To avoid this trap, use your time wisely. Be friendly and contribute to the informal chitchat from time to time, but don’t make it the emphasis of your time at the forum. If you apply this rule from the start, it’s easier to avoid this trap. It’s a lot harder to switch back to being more business-like after you’ve been very socially chatty and informal for a while.

#3 – You give more than you get. It’s good to give back; there is no denying that. But if you spend a lot of time on forums helping others and not achieving much in return yourself, then you may want to ask why you’re doing it in the first place?

There is nothing wrong with helping someone from time to time. But not to the extent that it takes away from your own work.

To avoid this trap, give out a few helpful nuggets of information here and there and include a link back to your website for further information. For example, if someone is asking a lot of questions about search engine optimization and you’re an expert, give them a few tips then direct them to the search engine optimization section on your website for further help.

Most forums will allow you to do this as long as you have been helpful and provided information in your original post. At the very least you can include a link back to your website on your signature line.

Forums can be a great addition to your business success or a complete time-wasting exercise. It’s ultimately up to you how you use your time and if in doubt keep the old saying in mind – “time is money.” Are you using yours valuably?

Five Article Writing Tips

Writing and creating content for your website is perhaps the single most important marketing and business-building strategy available to online
business owners. However, in addition to simply creating content, you want to have your articles read. Articles that are compelling pull the visitor into your website where they’ll continue to search for more valuable content. They will begin to not only remember your website as a source of good content but also as a reliable business.

Here are five article writing tips that will help get your articles read:

#1 Compelling headlines are a must. Your headline is the first thing that your visitor or reader will notice. It must grab their attention by appealing to their emotions, making a promise, offering a benefit, inciting controversy, arousing curiosity or stating something newsworthy.

#2 Your article’s layout is very important. How you present your content may very well be the next most important factor in getting your article read, right behind your headline. Articles that are heavy with long paragraphs are often skipped. Not because the reader isn’t interested in the content, they’re just not interested enough to spend the time reading the article for value.

In general, people tend to skim when they read online, and an article that is difficult or cumbersome to read won’t be read. Instead, use shorter paragraphs, short sentences and formatting like bold type, bullets or numbers, and subheadings to help your reader make a decision to read your article.

#3 Your intro paragraph is next in line in importance to getting your article read. It should be short and to the point, yet still compelling.  Your intro paragraph is used to set the stage for the rest of the article. It’s where you let your potential reader know what you’re going to tell them.

#4 Photos, graphics and illustrations come next. For some reason we’re attracted to content with images. Maybe it’s because it breaks up the content or maybe it’s because a few good images can help you tell your story. If you can include relevant images in your content, it will draw the eye of readers.

#5 Credentials is the last tip. Sometimes a website visitor does two things: they read the headline and then they scan down to see who wrote the article and if they’re qualified to talk on the subject. This is particularly important if you’re publishing articles on websites, blogs and ezines that are not affiliated with your business website. Create a bio paragraph that puts you in a good light and boosts your credibility and authority.

Getting your content written is half the job, getting it read is the other half. And in addition to these top tips, it is of course essential that you market your content with a variety of marketing and traffic generation strategies.

Get Targeted Traffic To Your Site

Website traffic is good; in fact for many business owners, driving traffic to their website is their primary business – building traffic. And while traffic may be all well and good, what you really want is targeted website traffic. You want the people visiting your website to be potential prospects. You want them to be future customers, not tire kickers or looky loos.

Here are seven effective strategies to guarantee targeted website traffic.

#1 PPC ads. Of course, not all PPC ad campaigns generate targeted traffic. You have to study your prospects and design keyword-specific ads that send traffic to a web page related to the ad. For a website about dog training where they have to dig to find your potty training information, you’re not sending the right kind of targeted website traffic to the right place. Send them directly to your potty training product page.

#2 Classified advertisements. Use the same advice and strategy as with PPC ads above.

#3 A squeeze page, opt-in list and targeted email messages. A squeeze page is essentially a way to capture the email addresses of people who are actually interested in receiving your information. True, they may be after your giveaway but that’s okay – they’re still a qualified prospect. Once you have their email address, you can begin sending them informative, entertaining and slightly promotional messages, all of which are designed to send them directly to your website – targeted website traffic.

#4 Article marketing. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate targeted website traffic. When you publish quality content, and it gets published online on article directories and republished on other websites, you’re reaching a wider audience. The link(s) in your article and in your bio box can all send targeted traffic right back to your website. The more articles you publish, the more targeted traffic you generate. It’s a simple equation.

#5 Blog and guest blog. Use the same advice and strategy as with article marketing above.

#6 Socialnetworking. Social networking can send tons of traffic to your website simply because people are curious about you and your business. However, if you’re strategic about your social networking strategy you will occasionally include links to your website with attention-grabbing posts or headlines. The result: targeted traffic.

#7 Comment on blogs and forums. On most forums and blogs when you participate and comment you can post a link to your website in your signature. This does generate curious folks who just want to know “who said that?!” However, when you participate in forums and blogs that are relevant to your website and industry niche, you’re sending targeted traffic to your website.

You can also try unique approaches like posting reviews on websites and directories for products related to your industry and include a link to your website in your review profile, for example reviewing on Amazon.com. You can post answers on Yahoo! Answers and you can post videos or podcasts on directories and drive traffic to your site much like you would with article marketing.

There are a number of creative ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic is where the money is. Analyze your traffic-generating strategies and tactics to ensure you’re sending the right kind of traffic to your website.

Hmmm...

I just wanted to let you know about a couple of changes I have made for the new year 2010.

First off, I have changed this blog from a Nofollow to a Dofollow and I have added the CommentLuv plugin for wordpress.  What does all that mean for you?

WordPress 1.5 and above automatically assigns the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc).  This was done to discourage comment spam.

As described in the Google Blog:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.

Basically, by removing the nofollow tag, I am telling the search engines that they should follow your link, because it is an authoritative website on the other end.  The commentluv plugin gives you an additional link if you are a blogger.  This second link will go to your latest blog post.  This can help you with page rank with google.

I am using the NoFollowFree plugin to disable the nofollow tag in my comment section.  At present I have set the number of comments to 2, so as not to give the “drive by commenters”, the same love as a regular reader.  You have lot’s of control with this plugin such as how many comments by an author are made before the no-follow tag is disabled. It supports many different languages and also has a top commenter’s side widget you can use.

The best way I have found to discourage spam comments is to use a captcha in my comment area.  I am using the Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress plugin.  It’s the one thing spammers have not been able to write a script for so that they can automate their spam.  I apologize for the inconvenience, but to be honest, I just don’t have the time to go through all the spam comments to figure out which one’s are legitimate.  I have better things to do like building my online business.

Last but not least, you no longer have to give your name and email to receive the free reports listed in our “Free Reports” category.  You will be able to read them directly in .pdf form.  If you would like to download them for future reference, or to use as your own giveaway report, just save the report by using the save button at the top of the .pdf.  Relatively simple.

Have a Really Great 2010,

Mona

Free Advertising for Online Business

If you want your business to make you money or even just get off the ground, you’re probably going to have to advertise.  For many companies, advertising becomes a huge chunk of the overall budget, but it doesn’t have to be.  There are plenty of free or inexpensive ways to let people know about your business and get them coming back.

* Email

Email is a great, cost-effective way for get your name out there, contact potential customers, and keep existing customers up to date and coming back.  And while developing an email list may take some time and effort, sending out an email once you have a list takes very little time.

You can get email addresses by simply asking for them on your webpage about a related topic to your products, asking for them from your customers when you take an order, or offering a free product or service in exchange for an email address.

Many people get emails by offering people products in exchange for the email addresses of their friends, but these are often far less useful than when people give you their email addresses themselves.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, the friends really aren’t going to be interested in what you have to offer.

* Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is also a great way to get word about your business out there, and it generally costs you nothing.

The key to starting word of mouth business is not only to tell people to pass the word on to their friends, but more importantly, to treat the customer right so they want to spread the word.

Social networking sites are a great way to start a word of mouth campaign about your business.  These are sites like MySpace, Facebook, and other sites where people can ad their friends, bands they like, and businesses or products they might be a fan of.

Then, if someone is a friend, the site will often automatically suggest they become a friend with or a fan of the same things.  Soon, you’ll have a bunch of people who are all fans of your business – then you can use the page to send updates to all of them about new products, services, and promotions.  It’s all free and pretty simple to get started.

* Blogs

Blogs are another way to get people interested in your products and keep current customers up to date.  Starting a blog is simple, there are tons of blog sites that will pretty much set the whole thing up for you.  The trick is actually getting people to read it.

You can use different SEO techniques including microblogs like Twitter, but you also need to provide quality content that people actually want to read.  Start your blog by not only talking about your business and ideas, but also those of other people.  If you refer someone to a good article or great deal, they’re much more likely to keep reading.

While you may decide to spend some money on your advertising, you can still supplement with these methods to boost your exposure even more.

Online Payment Systems

In order to do business online, business owners need safe, efficient and effective ways to collect payment.  While PayPal might be the most notable and familiar, is it necessarily the best?  Let’s take a look at some of the more common secure online payment systems and compare.

PayPal – Offers an all-in-one solution so you can accept payments online, with or without a website and accept payments online.  If you already have a merchant account then you can utilize one of two options including Payflow Gateway, which offers a secure connection from your online store to your internet merchant account or PayPal Express Checkout, which creates a 3-click customer checkout.  Most options require a $30/month fee and like any merchant account, you’ll pay a percentage of each sale ranging from 1.9% to 2.9% depending on your chosen package.

The benefit PayPal offers is that it’s available in 190 markets and 19 currencies around the world.
Alert Pay is a growing payment provider with members in more than 190 countries and supports 21 currencies.  All monies deposited with AlertPay are FDIC and CDIC insured.  While Alert Pay doesn’t offer the myriad account options PayPal does, it does offer low transaction fees of 2.5% + $0.25 per transaction, enables you to manage multiple online businesses with one account, use “Buy Now” buttons for one-time and recurring payments and it easily integrates into third-party applications.  Additionally, they offer a number of business tools like sales reports and mass payment solutions.
CCNow offers only payment systems geared toward your business size, including, Start-Up, Small Business, and Established.  Their fees include a one time set up fee of 9.95 and a monthly fee of 9.95 if your sales are less than $100.01 each month.  Additionally, you’ll pay a fee of 4.99% of Gross Sales plus $0.50 per transaction
CCNow makes it possible to accept payments from common methods like Visa & MasterCard but also lets you accept payment via PayPal.
2CO Checkout.com Easily integrates with other shopping cart systems, supports recurring billing and automatic payments.  They also don’t charge any monthly fee however there is a $49 sign up fee, a 5.5% of Sale Amount and .45 per sale.  They offer free code for your website, free shopping cart solutions and no fee to wire into a US or Canadian bank account.  While they don’t support as many currencies as other vendors, they do support US, Australian, Canadian, Danish Kroner, Euro, GBP-Sterlings, Hong Kong Dollars, Japanese Yen, New Zealand Dollars, Norwegian Kroner, Swedish Kroner and Swiss Francs.

Other options include:
* e-gold which is an online payment system that exchanges currency in gold rather than dollars
* Authorize.net
* Securepaymentsystems.com
* RBSWorldpay
and many more.
When it comes to finding the right secure online payment system, there are many to choose from.  Keep your budget, sales volume and the security of your clients and customers in mind before making your decision.  Make sure they’re easy for you to use and integrate well with any system you currently have running.

Social Media Traffic

Social media is all the rage. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace have become a daily part of mainstream culture. Celebrities tweet, have Facebook pages and everyone seems to be connecting via these online mediums. Business owners are smart to tap into these tools to drive traffic to their sites, yet many are missing the mark. Here’s how to lure social media traffic to your website.

1. Offer insight about your industry. When you’re online at your social networking site of choice it’s absolutely important to participate, but how you participate can make all the difference. If you’re merely commenting about what you had for dinner and your new car, then you’re not optimizing the site or your time. Instead, make sure to offer insight about your industry. This doesn’t mean every post has to link to an article or postof yours.

You can link to relevant content on other sites, offer quotes and data. So while it’s great to share your personality on these sites, it’s also important to establish your credibility and authority. Provide relevant and useful information, and people will automatically go to your site to learn more about you and what you have to offer.

2. Use attention-grabbing headlines. Embrace copywriting techniques and post curiosity-driven headlines. Use questions – for example, “Do you want to know how to make $100 in 5 minutes?” You can also use comments, controversy, how-to statements and other attention-grabbing headlines. Don’t forget scarcity and urgency too. “Only one day left to grab your copy of________”

3. Offer giveaways. People still like getting something for free and you can promote your freebies and giveaways on social networking sites. Reports, online courses or tutorials, blueprints, ebooks and video and audio content are all great ways to motivate traffic to your site.

4. Use special promotions for your unique social media audience. If you have Facebook fans, consider offering them special promotions for signing up and for being a fan. You can do the same thing if you have a twitter account and so on. Consider giving each new friend/follower a coupon via a direct message to them. That coupon will motivate them to at least visit your website and may turn them into a customer or subscriber.

Be willing to test and track to see what works. You can create a special webpage to drive social networking traffic to. You can even duplicate that page and use a unique URL for each site you participate on. This way you can track your traffic from each post and from each social networking site to see what works. It’s a great way to gain insight to your audience and to ensure you’re optimizing your time and efforts.

Promotional Marketing

When it comes to promoting a product there are definitely tools and tactics that work best. Much of the success of these tools will depend on when in the promotion cycle they’re implemented, the type of product and of course your target audience. Assuming you’re marketing to an opt-in list, here are a few suggestions for perfect product promotion strategies.

Make sure you’re not over promoting in your email communications

Email communications, like ezines and newsletters, are meant to be informative first and promotional second. That doesn’t mean you can’t promote in them, but it’s important to keep it to a minimum. A general rule of thumb, and this is by no means a hard and fast rule, is to make sure at least 80% of your content is valuable and informative.

How to articles, reviews, case studies and so on are great ways to provide value to your opt-in list. The other 20% can be promotional content. This can be an advertisement, links within your content, banner advertisements, promotional message at the bottom of your content and so on. Test and track to find the best mix and strategy for your audience.

Make sure your content is valuable and beneficial

One excellent strategy to provide 100% valuable content to your audience without any hard sell is to provide a review of the product you’re promoting. Reviews, particularly if they’re written in an unbiased tone, give your reader insight to a product. A well-written review will summarize the product’s purpose, highlight the strong points, perhaps tell a story about your experience with the product and then list a drawback or two.

The drawbacks can be written to sound benign or like strengths – much like you would do in an interview when the interviewer asks for you to tell them about your weaknesses. You turn your weaknesses into strengths. Then a quick sentence or two summary and of course a link to the product and voila, you have a great review (and promotional material for your product).

Make sure you’re not promoting all of the time

While your opt-in list expects and accepts that you will be promoting your business products and services, they don’t want to be inundated with promotions all the time. Time your promotional content right so that it coincides with launches, special promotions and even the holidays.

Your subscribers have come to expect the best from you, and product promotions are going to be held up to the same high standards. Treat them with respect, continually offer value and time your promotions well, and you’ll be on the road to more profits and a growing subscriber list.

Prep Your Site For The Holidays

One of the best ways to ensure your business website capitalizes on holiday sales is to take extra care to prep your website before the holiday season is upon you. Not sure what a holiday website prep entails? Simple, just follow these five easy steps.

Step #1 – Holiday Search Engine Optimization

Assuming your search engine optimization is effective and running smoothly, website holiday preparation involves creating a separate search engine optimization strategy for the holidays. Spend some time researching the keywords and keyword phrases your customers might use during the holiday season to find your information. Optimize your site and new holiday content for these holiday keywords and keyword phrases. Add the required HTML coding and create a strategy to build incoming links for this seasonal strategy.

Step #2 – Make your website more user friendly

Broken links, graphics that take a day and a half to upload, and difficult navigation are all ways to lose a potential holiday customer. Make your website experience as positive as possible for your visitors. Give them every reason to want to stay on your site. Give them  every reason to recommend your website and to come back often. This includes making your site searchable, enhancing navigation, adding holiday graphics and products or services, and offering a wealth of valuable content.

Step #3 – Is your server up to speed?

Are your website, software, and server, prepared for a rush of traffic and transactions?  Find out how much traffic your website and supporting software can support and make sure it’s more than enough to cover you during those peak buying times. Additionally, take some time to back up your site just in case it crashes. You’ll be glad you did.

Step #4 – Protect your customers

In addition to making sure your policies, procedures and privacy statements are easy to find and up to date, make sure your customers’ transactions are secure and protected. Update your SSL and only participate with vendors who do the same. Identity theft is scary and customers will be more likely to purchase from you if they know they’re protected.

Step #5 – Is your shopping cart functioning optimally?

Spend some time running through test transactions so you see what your customers see. How can you improve the user experience and make shopping on your site, and paying for products or services, as easy and enjoyable as possible?  One of the most common causes of lost sales are abandoned shopping carts. If you need to get some new shopping cart software or tweak the process, do it now before the holidays hit.

The holidays are an optimal time to boost annual sales and to capitalize on an increase in website traffic. Making sure your website is ready for the influx of visitors and sales is the best first step you can take. Come December, you’ll be glad you took the time to perfect your customer experience and website now.