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Marketing strategies for the recession

November 13th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | 1 Comment »

During a recession, there is generally a reduction in discretionary spending by businesses, as well as of course consumers.

And one of the first things to often be reduced is, you’ve guessed it, a marketing budget. Hmm, big, big mistake!

Now I know you’re possibly all thinking “Well he would say that, wouldn’t he?” but let me explain why I feel it is a huge mistake.

First of all, pretty much every business will be thinking the same way, so by continuing to market your business relatively aggressively you could pick up additional business from your marketing budget cutting competitors.

Secondly, the single biggest challenge in a recession is getting people to spend money and if you’re not advertising special deals, services, packages – whatever it is you’re doing, you’re not going to bring in the level of sales that you need.

I’m not talking about throwing silly money at advertising (in fact, this is something I would NEVER advise, let alone in a recession) but strategic, targeted and focused campaigns with a specific goal in mind.

A recession can sometimes help a business

Strange statement some of you may think eh? Well, let me tell you that in the leaner times, a business often has to adapt much more stringent and focused tactics and strategies – and these can often set a good tone for future business.

To succeed in a recession, every part of your marketing campaign should be accountable so that you know how to react in a down market, to get maximum returns for all the money you invest in marketing. Equally though, this should be your strategy when the good times return too. You need to test, tweak and improve everything, and know where your sales are coming from (ie: which form of advertising).

Know your unique selling proposition

Next, you have to take a look at your unique selling proposition, as this is what helps grab the attention of prospective customers. It helps differentiate you from your competitors. So if you find that your USP does not clearly tell prospects how they will benefit from using your product or services, you may end up an irrelevant commodity.

It is important that your USP be prominent, easily found and is updated in your TV, direct, mail, website and all other marketing media. In fact, before you start your new marketing campaign, you should place your USP at the forefront of your marketing campaign – this is absolutely critical to success and something that many of your competitors will NOT be doing.

Ok, so that’s it for this post. I’ll be back in a few days with some more strategies and as ever, if you have any questions then please do contact me.

Quality or quantity in email marketing

November 6th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, List Building, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

As I have alluded to in previous posts, email marketing is a great tool for effective internet marketing. By sending out emails to prospective customers, whom you have pre-qualified and educated about your products or services, there is a decent chance that a good percentage will consider buying or using your product or services.

So obviously, the idea would be to have a list of prospective customers to send your emails to, right?

It’s an old adage in the internet marketing world that “the money is in the list”. This is most certainly true to a degree, but a word of warning in that a large list is not necessarily best.

That may shock a few people. Surely a large list is better than a small list? Well yes, but it all boils down to the quality of that list. It can be quite easy to build a large list but what I opt for is a list of educated, highly targeted prospects, not a list comprising of dozens of ‘tire kickers’ who are not really interested in your business, or your emails for that matter.

I have learned this over the years, and so I can now pass my knowledge on to you.

What the professionals do

The art is in ensuring that people that opt in to your email list have a valid reason for doing so. Sure, you’re always going to get some time wasters and ‘tire kickers’ as they’re called, but it is very possible to minimize that.

Having a quality, valuable call to action that your prospect is genuinely interested in is a great way to get them to opt in to your list. Once you’ve got them, you need to give them more quality, valuable content – not too much, but just enough.

You don’t want to bombard them with emails, but educate them on your products and services and let them get to know you better. This develops trust, credibility and rapport.

Ok, well I think that should keep you motivated until my next post, so see you all soon.

How to write a killer press release

October 26th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, List Building | No Comments »

Here are some additional tips that will help you in creating a great offline press release. With the help of these tips, you will hopefully have calls ringing in response to your press release or visitors coming into your business wondering what it is all about!

1.    First and foremost, you have to ensure that your press release is a catchy and newsworthy one. This can be best done with a tie-in, so this means that the press release should be written in such a way that it triggers the reader’s curiosity through headings that attract human interest, has novelty in it, is inspirational or has something extremely newsworthy.

2.    The second rule is to ensure that it is short and sweet. If the press release does not fit onto an A4 page, then it is too long for a press release.

3.    This is because of the third rule of an effective press release, which is that the press release is meant to be a prologue to an actual story. You should never be telling the whole story through the press release, as it should have sufficient content to make readers call on you for the continuation of the ‘story’.

4.    The best way to do this is by using ‘teaser’ types of questions and statement in your copy. These should be constructed in such a way that the reader’s curiosity drives them to want to know the answer to the questions.

5.    Also, when having a press release done for you, it’s a good idea to ensure that you use some sound bytes or good one liners. This makes the press release more interesting and memorable to the reader, as well as keeping it short and snappy. And this all contributes to having an interested and intriguing piece of writing that readers will want to read, and importantly, want to know more about.

Tips for effective press release copywriting

October 22nd, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, List Building | No Comments »

The success of a press release lies in its construction and its words, as the intention is to get it as many views as possible. As I have experience in writing several press releases I thought today that I’d give you a few tips for the effective copywriting of press releases.

If you are writing offline press releases, make sure you write them in such a way that they don’t tell its readers absolutely everything. One of the purposes of a press release is to tease its reader, and have them curious to find out more.

This is why you should write a short press release that has lots of white space, plenty of paragraphs so it just isn’t big blocks of text, and perhaps most important of all, it should have a great headline that pulls the attention of readers.

Offline and online press releases are different

Creating the right story for the press release is the key to distribution of the press release, as well as its readership. If the press release doesn’t look worthy for the front page of a newspaper, then don’t expect too much of a response from it.

Bear it in mind that offline and online press releases are different entities. While the objective of an offline press release is generally to get media coverage, in case of an online press release, its objective lies in search engine optimization. So never expect much media coverage from an online press release, as they tend to be written to promote a business in the search engines.

I must add this point however, that there are now specific companies out there that I use that CAN promote the press release in order to get additional media coverage. But as a general rule, it is used solely to promote a site.

While writing online press releases, your focus should be on the keyword phrase you want to optimize on. This is the keyword that should be present in the web page that is linked to the online press release.

Give them a reason to click

To ensure readers click on the keyword to your website, you have to give them a reason to do so. This means you should offer a free bonus, a free service, a free e-book or even the completion of the story you had started in the press release, to the reader.

Remember that while offline press releases can often directly lead to sales, online press releases may not necessarily have the same instantaneous effect. They will primarily drive visitors to your website, and so it is the job of your website to convert that visitor into a sale. If you want to learn how to create a killer press release, just wait for my next post!

Copywriting tips for autoresponders

October 15th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, List Building, Useful Software or Tools | No Comments »

I discussed in my last post about using autoresponders to provide interested prospects with information about your products and services.

I have always felt that an autoresponder is an often under-utilised piece of software, as they can be used to educate your prospects, pre-qualify them into using your products or services, provide answers to frequently asked questions, provide information to quicken a sales transaction and for building client loyalty by providing quick response.

However, copywriting for an autoresponder series can prove to be difficult for most people, and so I have some advice today for this very subject.

One of the biggest initial challenges is to get your prospect to open your email, and the most effective way of doing this is by using a compelling subject line. Once you have achieved this, you must continue with some useful, compelling content in your email which will coax your prospect into clicking from the email to a site, or to take some course of action.

For either reason, you have to be able to first make your prospect read at least a part of your email instead of sending it to the recycle bin, like other promotional and spam emails. In addition to this, you have to effectively write your email so that it goes past the spam filters and ISPs which just go on dumping emails.

Legitimate white hat tips for search engine optimization

May 19th, 2009 | By Simon In Lead Generation, List Building, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

The previous post gave you an insight to some of the most common, and effective white hat SEO techniques to use for optimum search engine optimization (SEO). Here are a few more tips you could and should use.

Besides uploading your website files on the server, you can also upload the robot txt file, because this file is effective in telling crawlers which directories to crawl or not to crawl. This way, you can prevent the crawling of pages of your site that you don’t want, such as a “terms of service” page or a “policies” page, or even other pages that don’t actually give value to users from search engines.

The pages you make should be meant for users, and not for search engines. This does not mean you have to try displaying different content to search engines and users. This is considered a form of deceit, and is called ‘cloaking’.

Web spammers are of no use

Though web spammers may have sites with a decent page rank at the moment, it is very short term focused, and therefore not advisable to link up with them. Any alliance with them will only lead to your ranking and PR getting affected by the links.

Similarly, you should not take part in any link schemes that seem to increase your site rankings and PR, these do not work either.

It is always better to submit your website to directories and search engines manually. This way you are sure of where you submit your website, and are sure you are not involved in any black hat techniques.

Never attempt to use hidden text or links on your website as this is a black hat technique. Similarly, don’t attempt using cloaking or any other form of sneaky redirects.

Doorway pages only block your passage

Though it is better to have more web pages in your website, you have to ensure they are unique. Creating various pages, sub domains and domains that lead to duplicate content will only end up with your site getting blacklisted in Google.

In the meantime, don’t create any ‘doorway’ pages that have little or no original content in a bid to increase the number of web pages in your website. This is not entertained by Google.

Don’t attempt sending automated queries to of any form to Google and don’t attempt to use any unethical tricks to improve your search engine rankings. It may create a momentary increase in your page rankings; however you eventually end up blacklisted in Google.

Tips for optimum Google optimization

May 15th, 2009 | By Simon In Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways to ensure long term quality racnkings in the search engines.  Though there are many legitimate forms of search engine optimization, there are many webmasters who use unethical methods.

This type of strategy, often called “black hat” can lead to the removal of the site from Google rankings and even getting penalized by reducing the site’s page rank. A penalized site will not show up in Google rankings as prominently, if at all, and so you may want to take a look at these tips for a legitimate means of SEO.

• The site you create should have clear navigation, text links and hierarchy. Make sure all its pages can be reached from a minimum of a static text link while other relevant sites link to your website.

• Include a site map in the website which your users can easily use to link to all parts of your website. However, limit the number of your links to less than 100. It is better to create an information rich website that has pages which accurately and clearly describes all the contents of your service.

• It is always better to include words in your website content that users will most probably use first to find your pages. It is also better to use text instead of images to display the important keywords, links and content of your website.

• The site HTML has to be correct, whilst there should be no broken links around. In addition to this, your Title and ALT tags should be accurate, descriptive and relevant to your website content. However avoid JavaScript, frames, cookies, Flash and DHTML as with all this on the website, search engine spiders find it difficult to crawl your site.

• It is very important that you submit your site to Google, while submitting an xml sitemap file at Google. This way, Google can learn about the structure and coverage of the site.

• Besides Google, you could submit your site to relevant directories like Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory and other related expert sites. Failing that, if your site is good quality (in terms of content) then the other search engines will more than likely find and index your site anyway, so this is worth keeping an eye on.

There are many more tips you should follow for legitimate, “white hat” SEO, and these will be discussed in coming posts.

More article marketing tips

May 9th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

After discussing a few effective article marketing tips in a previous post, there are a few more tips I have to mention to help with effective article marketing. I have to mention that it is not sufficient to just write an article and post it onto article directories; you need to also ensure that you use the resource box effectively.

The resource box is an area at the end of an article where you can define your company details or information about yourself, in order to prompt the visitor to visit your website.

So by defining your company, what it is you do and including your website’s URL –visitors interested in learning more about your website and your product will just have to click on the link to reach your website.
Another effective article marketing tip is to submit your articles to ezine publishers, who are always looking for fresh articles. This way, your article becomes familiar and popular on other websites, meaning you should get more traffic and also importantly, your website gets more incoming links.

Your resource box cannot be changed

Other website owners who decide to pick up your article to post somewhere else have to do it while maintaining your resource box, so they cannot change it to look like their work. This way, you can expect more traffic to your website as more people visit it while clicking on the URL of your resource box found in these articles.

It’s certainly a good idea to post as many articles about yourself and your website as possible as this is likely to improve your ranking in the search engines. Also, the more articles prospects see written by you, the more authority you appear to have in your field and this is also a very important asset.

Once other people see your articles in search engines and article directories, there is potentially a better chance of your receiving more visitors and therefore more business. Article marketing is definitely a relatively inexpensive, but effective means of marketing your business.

And if you are not comfortable writing articles, remember that there are many writers out there who will be more than ready to write your articles for you, so you don’t necessarily have to do the work yourself.

Unethical search engine optimization techniques

April 18th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

There are many unethical (also referred to as ‘black hat’) search engine optimization techniques doing the rounds. You have to be well versed with many of these techniques so that you refrain from using them in your search engine optimization.

•    Use of trademarked keywords in domain names is illegal. So if you are thinking of registering a domain name with a trademark keyword (such as Sony), it is illegal as it violates federal trademark laws. According to the law, this move creates confusion amongst consumers, giving the impression that there is some affiliation between your site and the owner of the trademark.

•    It is also not permitted to use trademarked keywords in Meta tags, where you could possibly get sued if you did. It is however possible to use trademarked terms as keywords in the visible part of the page, when quoting or referring to the company or one of its products.

•    Resorting to advertising using trademark keywords is also a no-no. If you attempt to present your web page with searches using trademarked keywords for maximum traffic, you will only end up getting into hot water with the trademarked company.

•    Pagejacking is a black hat technique where you copy another person’s web page and submit it to search engines as your own. This is done to get high rankings; however, this is a form of stealing copyright content and is about as unethical as it gets.

So this gives you a quick snapshot of why you should stay away from black hat search engine optimization techniques. They are short term, and only spell trouble for you and your website. I suggest you always opt for, and use white hat SEO techniques on your website, which are proven to be beneficial in the long term, and I will write about some of these in a future post.

Tips for improving page rankings with Google

April 8th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Google is the most popular of the many search engines on the internet. Being the most popular search engine, many people work at getting high page rankings on it and the benefits that come with that; increased visibility of your site for one. And to get a good page ranking, it is vital that you understand these two Google ranking factors.

The first factor to take into consideration is PageRank of your site. This is primarily determined by the number and the quality of links that are pointing to pages on your site. This means that you have to consider both the quantity and quality of links that link to your website and also have them pointing to other pages, not just your home page.

It is always important to get links to your website from web pages that have a PageRank rating that is higher than yours. Work at getting as many links as you can from quality, relevant sites to a minimum of a page of your website. Although you want links to more than just your homepage, it is advisable to get at least 50% of the links to your home page.

Importance of the right incoming text link keywords

The second factor to take into consideration for a good page ranking in Google is incoming text link keywords, known as ‘anchor text’. Remember to always provide text links to your site, and not image links.

This is because though Google does index image links, without any text links, the image links are of no help in increasing the link popularity rating for important keywords. In addition to this, you have to remember to always include the most important keyword phrase in the text link, as this will enable your website to begin ranking for that keyword or phrase.

With the right keywords in your text link, you have an increased number of clicks on the link. And to help you get the right keywords, you can use the help of the many keyword search tools available on the internet. You just have to mention the topic you are writing about and the tool will produce a list of relevant keywords to use in your website and URL link.

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