The Silent Avatar Speaks

Happy New Year and let’s hope you don’t buy into the doom and gloom sayers and have a prosperous 2009!

So let’s get into my first post of 2009…

The silly season of 2008 is now behind us , however I wanted to share with you my observations as I went about my shopping with the throngs while paying particular attention to the marketing strategies being used amongst the retailers to win business, and how that can translate to online marketing.
Quite obviously, Christmas is a bumper time for retailers as they vie for the largest slice of the pie they can when people are willing to open their wallets and spend. The same can be said for online marketing.

Pay particular attention to these strategies for boosting revenue and customer numbers:

1. The first thing I noticed was the big, bold claims which literally jumped out at me from the shop windows. If the “offer” (like 20% to 50% off everything” was good enough shoppers would be attracted to come into the store and spend. This mirrors the strategy of capturing the site visitors attention with the view to keeping them on your site.  So what does this tell you? Make your offer compelling. Words really matter.

Learing to write good sales copy is an art, and it takes time, patience and skill to put together compelling sales copy which converts to sales. Top internet marketers will tell you that long sales copy converts better than short copy. though more and more I see video being utilised to deliver the message (and backed up with written copy).  This has a two fold effect by a) drawing in the site visitor by giving the site credibility (OMG.. there is a “real” person attached to this website”, and b) using emotive copy which has an effect on the reader.

2. Another thing I noticed was the “add ons” to lure purchases.  Offers like “buy one, get one free”, or additional products which were given free if you brought a certain product. Again this mirrors offering your site visitors your premium product for a fixed price, and then including additional products to entice them to buy your main product.

3. For customers who didn’t know what to buy as a gift, gift certificates were freely available. This is one area I felt could be utilised by Internet marketers to gain additional sales. Why not include gift certificates on your site? Those who are interested in a particular Internet marketing product could let friends and family know that your product/service you are offering is something they would appreciate as a gift and therefore sending a gift certificate to the recipient would give additional revenue.

4. One thing I found which was completely under utilised was the lack of capturing email addresses from the shoppers. At a time where there is an influx of buying customers not once did I come across an outlet which took advantage of increasing revenue by getting their staff to obtain email addresses to send promotional offers to their customers after the sale.  I find this lack of awareness by business owners and franchises quite astonishing, as in Internet marketing having a list of prospects (and your best prospect without a doubt is customers who have purchased from you before), is guaranteed money in the bank!

5. The other area I felt was extremely under utilised was “up sells”. Again, not one outlet when I purchased an item promoted additional products at the time of the sale. Maybe the staff had no incentive to sell additional items or just couldn’t be bothered, but without a doubt this is sales going begging. McDonald’s would have to be the king of up sells using their “will there be fries with that?” tag to customer orders.  Others call up sells “suggestive selling” and getting into the habit of offering (or suggesting) additional products at the time of sale will significantly increase your revenue turnover. It’s obvious that staff have be trained, or you havr to integrate this trategy into your web site, however with little effort this strategy can be implemented with great results.

One person to bring up sells to the front of Internet Marketing was Mike Filsaime. Mike launched the Butterfly Marketing Script with all the fan fare of a Royal Command Performance, setting the pace for successful Internet product launches. So impressed by the script and the ability to up sell to customers I purchased the script myself (when I purchased it it was significantly less to buy than it is today).  You can get a copy of the Butterfly Marketing script by clicking here.

6. Offering a “gift wrap service”. Again, offering a service like gift wrapping at this time goes a long way to show that you care about your customers, and this type opf service can mean the differnece between whether the customer recommends you, or returns for additional sales.  Gift wrapping can be brought quite cheaply when you are buying in bulk, and having a person whose sole job is to gift wrap and get email addresses can significantly increase customer perception of your business.

Any online business can offer this service as an “addon” either by charging a small additional fee, or using it as a selling point to increase sales.

7. Last but not least it was plainly obvious that the larger stores started planning well ahead for this time of the year and the additional revenue it would bring. It just makes plain good sense to plan your promotions well in advance to give your business every opportunity to succeed.

I’m the silent avatar… and I have spoken

Did you notice any other areas of marketing which were used (or not used) which impact sales? Let me know by posting a comment.

Tags: Advertising, Business Tips, Copywriting, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, Web Development by the silent avatar
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Evening all,

This post I want to bring you up to speed on what you should be doing when your website is finished,

I’ve always said that a website is nothing more than html code stuck in cyberspace unless you dive traffic to your site.

Given that there are over five and a half billion websites on the Internet and growing at an exponential rate, this figure is enough to scare the pants off any would be Internet merchant, or home entrepreneur.

There’s good reason that Alexa does not rank website unless they are in the top 1000,000 as below this you really aren’t getting enough traffic to warrant being part of their statistics. So unless you are considering throwing a LOT of money at advertising and branding, don’t worry about having a high ranking,

Your goal is to drive a steady stream of people to your website to give you an income, or increase your “authority status”, through your blog, articles and  comments posted back to your website.

To produce a website and not consider how it is to be marketed is just plain stupid.

The time money and effort to produce a website is for naught unless you promote your website.

So how do you promote your website?

This will depend on the type of website (which I will discuss later) but at the least all website owners should be doing the following:

1. Using their web address in all of their emails, along with their tag line.  I wrote about it using email signature sometime back. Review the post “Quick Tip – Using Email Signatures“.
2. Using their web address on all stationary – including business cards, letterheads, with compliment slips, invoices, brochures… In fact anywhere you can put your web address – put it! This includes all electronic stationary as well.
3. If you have a motor vehicle have a magnetic sign made to put on the side of your car (or if you’re really committed get the car sign-written with your website details. Driving around as much as we do this is a great way to advertise your website. Just think of how many people can see your mobile advertisement!
4. If you have a shopfront your web address should be clearly visible from the street.
5. If you have a product tag, your website address should be on the tags, labels, stickers (whatever)

It takes time for something new to sink into people’s consciousness. Repetition is the key. Whether you website name is reinforced through a variety of means doesn’t matter.

Let’s now look at specifics…

[Read more →]

Tags: Advertising, Blogging, Business Tips, Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Newsletters, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing, Traffic Generation, Web Development by the silent avatar
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It doesn’t matter what business you are trying to build online, you will need sales leads as part of yor overall promotional strategy if you are ever going to make sales, and sales leads are what you are trying to generate if you are marketing on the internet. In order to survive, any web site needs a steady flow of qualified leads.

The aim of any lead generation campaign is to build your mailing list. Internet marketers often say “the money is in the list”, which is totally true. A list of responsive buying customers that trust you is worth its weight in gold!

While spam filtering has lessened the impact of email marketing, it’s still a viable means to getting your sales messages out there. In theory, email is marketing is free, although of course its costs you in terms of your time. The theory behind email marketing is that by using a “hook” such as a free product or some other incentive, you can “funnel” interested parties onto specific products and services.

When you consider generating leads via an email campaign there are basically three avenues you can

No Spam

explore: email signatures, joint ventures and safe lists. One word of warning though, and that is avoid spam at all cost, one spam complaint can seriously damage your online business. You should familiarise yourself with the laws concerning spam, and at the very least ensure you include a un-subscription link in ALL your marketing emails. Due to spam, it is advisable that you avoid buying leads, no matter how reputable the company, buying leads can easily lead to a spam complaint, you have been warned!

In its simplest form, email marketing is a matter of putting a signature in all your emails that contains a link to your main product.

If you are looking to vastly increase your list quickly then a joint venture (JV) may well be the key you need. In its simplest form, in a JV you supply the product and a fellow marketer supplies the leads and you share the profits. Hopefully, you will then get the emails of your fellow marketer’s customers, so you can then mail them with further offers.

When considering a joint venture there are many considerations you have to think about, but the main one, before you consider contacting anyone about mailing to their list, is “what’s in it for THEM”, not “what’s in it for me”. NEVER write to a fellow marketer unless you can offer them something of value in return for their help, and that is not necessarily just a share of the profits, be inventive!

Finally you have safe lists. A safe list is a list of people that have agreed to receive marketing emails in return for being able to send their own marketing email. The value of this form of marketing has never been that good. After all you are trying to sell to people who are only interested in selling to you!

You can use pay per click advertising such as overture or Google adwords to advertise your site and draw in interested leads.

One other highly effective way of generating interested leads is posting in forums that are related to your area of business. Include a link to your site in your signature and people interested in your sphere of business will often click it if your forum post was interesting.

Three other popular sales lead generation techniques are submitting articles to e-zine publishers and article directories, press releases and testimonials for products in your target market.

No matter what lead generation technique you employ you will need a way to capture your leads email address when they arrive at your site.

The traditional method has been to use a pop up or pop under which contains some incentive to get someone to sign up. With the invention of pop up stoppers their effectiveness has dwindled and therefore unstoppable pop ups (also know as hover ads or slide in ads) have evolved. This new generation of pop ups are built into your webpage and as such cannot be stopped. Simply do a search on Goggle for “unstoppable pop up” and you are sure to find a software solution to produce these types of pop ups for you.

The other alternative is to use what is called a “name squeeze page”.

In essence a name squeeze page is a web page whose sole purpose is to capture an email address.

They generally contain a small amount of information about the product or service you are selling as a “teaser” for the reader and will contain a sign up form, with a message like “to find out more simply fill in the form to be immediately directed to further details on this amazing product”.

A name squeeze page not only helps build your list, this information can also be used with certain software to help personalise your site for your visitor, a technique that has been shown to increase sales. Again, simply do a search for name squeeze page generators.

No matter how you generate sales leads there is one thing always to bear in mind, and that is to be effective your leads must be in your targeted market. If, for example, you are selling internet marketing products, then it’s no use advertising on a site that is all about scuba diving!

When you start to build your online business, ensure you include a well thought out sales lead generation strategy from the beginning. Do not make it an afterthought; this should be in place from the very beginning if you want your business to be a success

I’m the silent avatar… and I have spoken

Tags: Internet Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Online Business, Promotion and Marketing by the silent avatar
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Whether you want to search for “i need cheap promotional items”, “free sample promotional items” or “cheap business promotional items ” you will surely get lots of information online.

The Internet is a great arena of information that can help you to learn new business skills and that includes business promotion techniques.

Here’s more…

Although the top goal of providing promotional items is to develop publicity for a company, don’t let it to be obvious to the clients; make it look like the company is sincerely attempting to give back to the consumers as a technique of saying “thanks” for being constant consumers to the company.

A company which sells PC components and accessories should explore offering those forms of promotional gifts which are relevant for the persons that will utilise the computers, such as mouse pads; anytime the consumer makes use of the mouse pads which have the business trademark name on it, they can remember the company and also buy things from the company when they require a certain PC accessory or component. If you have no idea where to get the right promotional products, don’t forget that there are loads of stationary and even office supply super markets out there, even online, which can provide your company with the pertinent promotional items it desires.

Find more here:
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I’m the Silent Avatar.. and I have spoken

Tags: Marketing and Advertising by the silent avatar
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