Marketing Tips

Archive for October, 2011

Social Networking: Getting The Most Out Of These Sites For Your Business

The mistake many people make in marketing on social networking sites is to not familiarizing themselves with the site before jumping in to participate. Each social networking site is different and each site has certain requirements as well as certain things they allow and disallow.

Prior to jumping in and participating you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the site you are on so that you can get the most out of the site.

Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Read the Terms of Service.
Again each site is different and certain sites allow certain things while others don’t. Read these terms first to find out what you can and can’t do. I’ve found that by respecting the terms of service of a site not only will you get more out of the site but your marketing efforts will be more effective.

2. Study the help section.
The help section will often contain information on the different features on the site. Some sites offer free classifieds some don’t. Some offer instant messaging while others don’t. Look for the features that you want to make sure that they’re actually offered.

3. Look for opportunities to promote yourself.
As I mentioned in the last tip some sites offer free classifieds. You can study these sections to see what you can offer. Some will offer video and you can create videos to promote yourself and your offerings.

Some of these sites offer blogs and with your own blog you have a platform you can use to talk about what you care about. Beware though: don’t just write reviews about how great your business is or something like that. Provide real content: reviews articles industry trends. In other words offer content that will make others want to take an interest in your business and what you sell.

Other sites like Facebook offer all kinds of tools and widgets you can use in your profile to promote your products and services as well as promote your favorite books or other resources.

Almost all of these sites have communities of one type or another whether they’re forums groups or both.

4. Browse through the forums and groups.
Depending on what topic you are interested in you should be able to find forums or groups to discuss your topic. On some sites these two functions are combined.

Sites like Facebook call them networks.
What you can post on a particular group or forum will depend on the topic as well as the rules for that forum or group. You should always look for posting instructions within the group or forum to see if there are any additional rules when posting. This way you avoid getting spammed or worse banned for posting the wrong thing.

You may also want to learn to write a little HTML or at least enough to create your own links. Some of these sites will format your HTML for you but with others if you don’t create your hyperlink it will simply be a plain link others can’t click on.

Avoid creating me too posts. These won’t get you any fans. Make sure you read the forum or group first to make sure you don’t post about topics that have already been covered.

The important thing to remember is that once you understand how a site works get out there and participate. Then when others get to know you they’re more likely to want to do business with you.

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Want to learn how top marketers use social networking to expand their businesses? “Social Marketing” teaches you how to easily bring in more profits in just a few minutes a day. Meet me on MySpace.Jinger Jarrett is the author of “Internet Marketing for Free: The GUIDE.” On Amazon.

Sneaky Ways To Get Use E-Mail Addresses For Viral Advertising

Viral marketing has an array of possibilities and ways to achieve your overall goals. However just like everything else preplanning and the right setup to create success are the things you will need to make it work for you and your ebusiness.

The first thing you want to be sure you don’t do is get overzealous. The one thing you need to avoid at all costs is spamming. Spamming is still used widely but with the government establishing more restrictions and fines you don’t want this to be a problem for you. The professional image of your site will also suffer if you send mail blatantly.

Spamming requires a database that contains a huge list of email addresses set up so that the message can be delivered with one click. The problem with it aside from the governmental restrictions and associated fines is that it irritates the recipients and kills the validity of your campaign which in turn kills the factors that would motivate someone to refer your site.

You need to personalize by creating your website with personal appeal. You must see to it that your website makes your customers feel safe secure and cared for. Email is important because it is going to be one of the most affordable ways to keep in touch with your customers.

The proper way to handle email permission is to first let your customer know that you will not transmit their email addresses to third party companies. The next thing to do is to attach the need for their email addresses to benefits they can receive.

For example: Coupons or discounts that are only available to members who receive email notifications. With each email you send the viral marketing effect takes place.

A study by Sharpe Partners an interactive marketing agency revealed that 89 of adult Internet users in America share content with others via email. This is excellent news for those companies who use selfpropelling wordofmouth email techniques to sell their products.

The study generated some interesting results regarding the type of content that is most often forwarded as well. The most popular content is humorous material.

The second most popular category is news followed by healthcare and medical information religious and spiritual material games business and personal finance information and sports/hobbies in that order. So it is easy to see that humor is the best content for your viral email campaign.

Cartoons jokes and funny video clips are among the things that can be added to an email to insure that it will go viral. People will want to pass along something that makes them laugh.

They are a lot more likely to hit the forward button and send your email to their friends and relatives if it is an “advertainment” rather than an advertisement.

Not along ago about 35 million people got an email containing a picture taken in Disneyland. It took a minute to see it but there was Donald Duck lying prone in front of the famous Cinderella Castle. The title of the picture was “Bird Flu has hit Disneyland”. It was a viral email advertising Disneyland and used the edgy strategy of making light of what’s serious and it works.

I’d guess that most people who own a computer have seen that picture and thus the advertisement for Disneyland. The bird flu epidemic is newsworthy and has the potential to attract an enormous amount of attention to any brand that might for whatever reason associate itself with it.

Remember that people are much more likely to share a joke or a funny picture than anything else so you would be well advised to include humor in your email campaign.

So there you go! Those are the sneaky ways you can apply to your subscriber’s email addresses and thus increase your viral marketing potential.

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp;Jo Han Mok is the author of the 1 international business bestseller The ECode.He shares his amazing blueprint for creating million dollar internet businessesat: http://www.InternetMillionaireBlueprints.com

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Snakes A Chicken And Viral Marketing

With mass communication being achievable with just the click of a mouse the internet has become the world’s biggest marketplace. That is why most advertisers believe that viral marketing is the most effective way to get customers to buy your product. As Tom Kinnear executive director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan tells Forbes.com “It viral marketing can be referred to as wordofmouth on steroids.”

The movie “Snakes on a Plane’ is a good example. While the film didn’t do so hot at the box office it got a huge amount of buzz when people started writing songs and creating videos based on the title. When the media picked up on it word of mouth for Snakes on a Plane took off like wildfire. This required no effort from the filmmakers after their initial advertising push. That’s the essence of good viral marketing.

You may not have a movie studio or Samuel L. Jackson to help you out but there are ways you can adapt viral marketing to your internet business.

The Fun Page

If you are a serious marketer and you don’t have enough funding for a major advertisement this is one of the best techniques that you can use. Make a page on your site with funny or interesting videos or images or even create a minigame that is focused on your product. Be sure to include a ‘tell a friend’ link to ensure that your ‘fun page’ gets circulated. Creativity is the key. If your ‘fun’ page is cool enough you can be sure that you’ll get more hits for to your website.

Kind of Weird

Remember the Subservient Chicken? Burger King created a webpage that contained a ‘video camera’ with a command line below it. On the site you just typed what you wanted the subservient chicken to do and voila the chicken did it. People were born curious. If you have some idea in your head do it. The Subservient Chicken became so popular that people forwarded the links to their friends and all Burger King had to do was to maintain the website. The downside is this strategy might create ‘bad’ publicity but as the old saying goes bad publicity is still publicity.

Email Forward

Create a message with funny pictures or a video and then send it to your friends or list of subscribers. If it is funny enough you can be sure that this little message will reach a lot of people. Remember that the images or video should contain at least a brand logo or a website address. The best thing that you can do here is to include your ‘name’ on the video itself like for example a guy wearing a tshirt with your brand name on it or a bunch of funny pictures dealing with your products. Most forwarded emails are viral marketing strategies. In this technique you can always be sure that your emails are going to be opened because they came from the friends of the email owner.

Free is Good

Most people search the internet with ‘free’ as one of their keywords. Free stuff can boost your website’s popularity. There are a lot of items out there that you can give out for free. Creating a downloadable Flash game is one of the most used today. But of course you should make it interesting and make the people think that without this free stuff on their desktop they’re missing out a lot.

Viral marketing may not answer all of your promotional needs but it will surely help you in creating a buzz. It’s cheap easy and very effective. What viral marketing does so brilliantly is fuel our irresistible urge to tell somebody about a good experience. Its hard to find any advertising better than that.

About the writer:nbsp;nbsp; Daryl Campbell provides you with more free traffic and internet marketing tips video and news updates tools and a free step by step video coaching package to profit your business right now. Check it.
http://winthemarket.com/traffic