Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

There is nothing like attending networking events – whether regular ones or special events. Sometime you may not be as keen to go, especially if you are presenting for the first time.  Standing in front of all of those people has great advantages.  So put your best foot forward and reap the benefits.

Someone may ask you to speak at a bigger and live event or networking event. Maybe you have done small sessions at your own networking meetings and it was a thrill because you were networking and getting your name out there. Also, someone wanted YOU. Your marketing has paid off in big ways and involving yourself in these activities increases your credibility and expert status.

Now, you are going to take part in a live event where you will actually stand face-to-face with those in the audience, it can be nerve-wracking as well as exhilarating.

Take a deep breath and get ready. You want to shine and the only way to do that is to prepare.

Know the main focus of the event

Share with the group in the session your knowledge and expertise based on what the event is trying to highlight. If it is geared towards a niche then feel free to discuss how you got into your niche, what marketing techniques you use and new ways to expand the niche.

Know the other presenters

Some of them may be sitting in your audience. If they are more seasoned than you, prepare a few questions for them about how they stay calm and at ease before a presentation.

Practice a lot

There is no substitute for this one. The way to avoid those dead silent moments when it seems that all your thoughts fly away is to get up and go over your speech many times. This is also how you prepare to deliver well-timed jokes. The more practice you get in, the more comfortable you will feel going off script when the inspiration hits you.

Have materials in place

The audience will want handouts. Prepare something eye-catching as well as informative for them to read and hang on to. You can create a packet of material including your business card and other pertinent information about how to reach you. Don’t forget to place a sign-up sheet at the door so you can contact them later.

Present your products

Don’t forget to bring along some freebies and priced products so that as soon as the presentation is over, they can get everything they need right away. One tip though, don’t make your presentation a pitch fest. You’ll do better if you remember that it’s about the giving of information and the helping. The rest will happen naturally.
When you take center stage, make sure you TAKE CENTER STAGE and Shine! Use your presentation as a platform for gaining new business partners, new customers and more sales.

Speaking at an event can do lots for your business – whether a live event or even as I have done sometimes with an online event.  Have you been a speaker before?  Any other advice to pass along?  Please share your tips.

Technorati Tags: event, live events, speaking tips

Seems everyone is always asking, what’s the best way to build links to your site? This is an easy one to answer. Hands down, the absolute best way to get others to link to your website is to offer them quality content that’s worth linking to.

Link building is a valuable way to increase your page ranking, website or blog exposure and help increase your traffic, sales and business.  However, not all back links are created equally and therefore it is important to decide what your goals are and how you will achieve them.

Quality content can vary depending on what your niche is and your target audience. But it will almost always include fresh and original content on various aspects of your niche, resources to help those who are looking for what you have to offer and information that website visitors want.

Quality content—the kind that encourages others to link to your website—is relevant to your topic, offers value to your visitors and potential customers, fits within the overall industry of the topic of your site (such as related products or services), and provides value to your site visitors.

Building links involves offering your website visitors what they want and that’s what quality content is all about. It’s the old WIIFM thing… (What’s In It For Me?). If you can answer that question with your website visitor in mind, and create content aimed at that visitor, you’ve just provided quality content. The odds of your visitors linking to that content will increase tremendously.

If your website deals with cocker spaniels, there will be some competition there, that’s probably not one of the most popular topics online. It should be relatively easy to create original content to build links to your site.

What if your niche is more common and your competition is stiffer? What if your site focuses on Internet Marketing? You can still create quality content to build links to your site.  For instance, your content could include original reviews of Internet Marketing (IM) products that you write yourself or have someone write for you. You can include resource lists of software products, eBooks and websites that are truly useful to other Internet Marketers.  It could include original articles and tutorials on every aspect of Internet Marketing.

The idea—regardless of your niche—is to create a site with content that is just a little different, or just a little better than anyone else is offering. Content that others will say, I need to tell my contacts about this.  When people ask me what’s the BEST way to build links to your site, my response is Quality Content, without a doubt.

If you want to establish yourself and your business for the long haul, then offering quality content and encouraging your readers to link to it is by far the best and most effective strategy.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, promote business, Small business

I am back from a lovely vacation in sunny Florida – my family and I had a blast.  The kids loved Disney World and with all the walking we did I even shed a few pounds.  Now it’s back to work and checking on how things went while I was away.

One of the big things I check monthly are my analytics – setup with Google’s Free Analytics tools – on my websites. A big part of any online marketing and business should be ensuring this is set in place so you can check that your efforts at online marketing are working. You can learn a lot from finding out what words used in online searches bring people to your site – what page they view the most – what page they linger on the most and also whether you have any issues with your website.

As I was reading through my emails and blog updates, I saw that the Social Media Examiner published a blog post while I was away that explained how you can add Google Analytics to your facebook fanpage!  If you are at all serious about checking your traffic, stats and getting this information I suggest you take a read and follow their steps to add this feature to your fanpage. The instructions are very detailed and helpful.

Don’t forget that you can always look at the Insights on your facebook fanpage account as well. They keep stats and graphs on the traffic to your fanpage as well.   Very easy to read info and helpful in knowing what kind of visitors are coming to and joining your fanpage.

Analytics don’t have to be scary – if you are intimidated then take them slowly and just check the basics.  But at least do that much; the info you gather can be very helpful in modifying your online marketing of your business.

Technorati Tags: efficient business, website planning

When I was doing my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five marketing strategies that I intended to carry out. Number one on that list…Article marketing. I set a  goal to write and submit an article at least once every two weeks (I am short by one, so not too bad)

In case you’re not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves writing informative and useful articles and distributing them to article directories – giving permission to anyone to republish your article as long as your author resource box is left intact.

Two of the main results you can experience from article marketing are:

1. Traffic to your website
2. Increased rankings in Google and other search engines.

High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy a lot of traffic (we’re talking millions of visitors every month). Many of those who read articles invariably click on the links in the author resource box and end up going to the author’s website. This is free traffic that otherwise would not have been able to learn about my site!

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that one of the most important ways to get high Google rankings for your target keywords is to have lots of links from other sites pointing to yours. The trick is the anchor text of those links should be the keywords you’d like to rank high for.

This strategy works so well that a Internet marketing guru once succeeded in having his website rank number one in Google for the keywords “coolest guy on earth” (or something like that!) – just by having all his buddies link to his site with that anchor text. That’s how powerful linking is.

These are the same links you get from the usually high-authority article directories all linking back to your website through the author resource box.

I realize many of you will immediately think – No way – no more writing! I have no time for that.  You have to think about it as marketing not writing. Write what you say to clients when you are telling them about your business and how it helps clients. Tape it if need be and just write down what you say – or hire a Virtual Assistant to take your words and turn them into articles.   Be targeted and use key words – words that people will use when searching for solutions on the internet.

A simple marketing strategy every business can use.  Are you?

Technorati Tags: buzz marketing, marketing strategy, online marketing

We are in the process at Time on Task of switching to 1 Shopping Cart for our newsletter and auto responder system.  That has meant checking into our list of subscribers and cleaning up the names and information to import to the new system.

I had been thinking that this is a task to do regularly with an email list – check your reports – especially after talking to a new client and discovering she had been using an automated newsletter system for a few years now and never once checked her bounce/delivered reports.  One quick call determined she had many errors, current clients on the bounce list and many old and out of date ones as well.  She also had no idea how many were getting opened every month and if anyone was clicking on the links in her articles. Keeping this list up to date is important for a few main reasons:

1. When you are paying a different fee with different subscriber levels -you will want to ensure that invalid emails are not going out every month – causing your numbers and thus your fees to be higher.
2. Knowing if there are entry errors on your list and that people who should be getting your emails are not.
3. You are investing time and money into creating your newsletter – what if not one soul was reading it? Would you change things around with your content, try something new or maybe even stop altogether and use your time/money elsewhere?

You would not know the answers to these questions if you are not checking your reports.

It is important to take a few minutes and review your bounce list each month and see if anything is out of place. Bring it up to date, fix the errors and get rid of the invalid emails. Sometimes you will come across emails you are uncertain what to do with.

Mickey.... one of my email Subscribers

Which brings me to the point of my post today… Mickey Mouse is on my Newsletter list. Yep – Mickey Mouse. The big-eared one himself… and I am sure it is him because of the email address – mmouse at a Disney domain name (I can’t publish full email addresses you know). An interesting dilemma…

I was going to delete him, but then realized his email was being delivered and opened – I checked my reports, again the importance of checking these reports comes out.

Curiouser and Curiouser…  I think for now I will leave Mickey alone and be happy I have such a celebrity on my list.

What would you do? and more importantly, do you regularly check your reports/list?

Technorati Tags: Business planning, efficient business, email marketing, newsletters, Organization