Do you want to promote your company? “Issue a Press Release”

Posted on | July 16, 2011 | No Comments

One of the first things you want to do is make a public announcement, in the form of a press release, that your business exists and is open. This may be the first time anyone has the opportunity to learn about your business and you want to make a good impression on the readers. Very few local publications will print a press release just because you write it and send it in. OK, so maybe they are not as excited as you are about our new endeavor. Find an angle that will make them interested. Once you are certain that the information is indeed newsworthy, a good heading is a great place to start. If you study the regular articles in your daily or weekly papers, you’ll see that the titles of the articles are written to attract the readers’ attention. You need to make their job easy: if they have to work to pull interesting or relevant facts from your piece, they won’t bother. Stick to the facts.
Get the good stuff out up front—in the first ten to 12 words if possible. Don’t use a lot of adjectives. Edit harshly. If you can’t do it, have someone else edit it for you. Provide your contact information:
_ Phone and fax numbers
_ Address
_ URL
_ E-mail address
Use some creativity to get people interested. Look for an interesting angle, an offbeat, comical, or ironic twist. Create your press release with the readers in mind. Make it short, interesting, and above all, give it a catchy title. If you stick to this plan you’ll have a better chance of seeing your press release in print.
As for press kits, don’t waste money on fancy folders. Most of my press kits are e-mailed, faxed, or downloaded from one of my web sites. Include some or all of these in yours:
_ Press releases
_ Bio
_ Company background
_ Clips of other coverage/list of media appearances
_ Suggested interview questions (may be different for print, radio, or TV)
_ Product sample(s)
Include your contact information, including e-mail, web address, and phone on every page.
Many weekly community papers have a feature called “Business of the Week” or “Business Person of the Week.” You’ll have an easier time getting into that feature—at least in the edition that covers your geographic area—if you do a little paid advertising in the publication now and again. Call the editor and ask him or her to consider you for the feature. Provide a photo of you inside or in front of your location. Put together some black-and-white photos, as well as color, for different opportunities that come along.

Why Content Management is Important

Posted on | May 4, 2011 | No Comments

Managing content is important to both content requestors and content providers.
When information is requested, it must be assembled correctly so that it can be provided quickly and clearly. It is very easy to overwhelm a request for information by not limiting the scope of what has been requested. In addition to what the user sees, he or she should be guided through web services. These services should help consumers make choices, as opposed to offering too many choices, and prompt optimal choices.
Content Management is also important to content providers because timeliness of the content provided to the user communities is critical so as not expose them to obsolete or premature information. Examples of this have occurred many times for example, when prices of items for sale are marked in error several hundred dollars below what they should be.
Another example of why content management is important is in the case of a large-scale logo change. When a company changes it’s logo or it undergoes a large-scale product branding, it could happen that every page on their site has to be changed. When content management is automated, this change can be made much more quickly and easily.

The importance of Business planning

Posted on | February 13, 2011 | No Comments

There are thousands of companies beginning its operations each day. The majority are an outcome of a brilliant idea with great prospects. What is the problem for the early death of the startups? The biggest issue is the lack of a serious business plan.
The business plan consists of a narrative and several financial worksheets. The narrative template is the body of the business plan. It contains more than 150 questions divided into several sections. Work through the sections in any order that you like, except for the Executive Summary, which should be done last. Skip any questions that do not apply to your type of business. When you are finished writing your first draft, you’ll have a collection of small essays on the various topics of the business plan. Then you’ll want to edit them into a smooth-flowing narrative.
The real value of creating a business plan is not in having the finished product in hand; rather, the value lies in the process of researching and thinking about your business in a systematic way. The act of planning helps you to think things through thoroughly, study and research if you are not sure of the facts, and look at your ideas critically. It takes time now, but avoids costly, perhaps disastrous, mistakes later.
This business plan is a generic model suitable for all types of businesses. However, you should modify it to suit your particular circumstances. Before you begin, review the section titled Refining the Plan, found at the end. It suggests emphasizing certain areas depending upon your type of business (manufacturing, retail, service, etc.). It also has tips for fine-tuning your plan to make an effective presentation to investors or bankers. If this is why you’re creating your plan, pay particular attention to your writing style. You will be judged by the quality and appearance of your work as well as by your ideas.
It typically takes several weeks to complete a good plan. Most of that time is spent in research and re-thinking your ideas and assumptions. But then, that’s the value of the process. So make time to do the job properly. Those who do never regret the effort. And finally, be sure to keep detailed notes on your sources of information and on the assumptions underlying your financial data.

Branding Without a Brand

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | No Comments

Most marketing professionals still believe that true branding is based on the logo. But they also know that branding is much more than developing a familiar consumer image.
I realized a couple of years ago, when one of my colleagues was asked by a major U.S. airline to write a standard announcement to be used by the airline’s captains, that many operational elements, as well as deliberate promotional strategies, are all integral to branding and the establishment of image and identity.
The speech was carefully composed incorporating the advice of a psychologist and a marketing expert, and the writing of one of the country’s best copywriters. The aim was to achieve an announcement that would carry the airline’s image message to the passenger, just as the company’s logo did. This event made me realize the full potential of branding: the 360 degrees that I briefly discussed last week. And 360-degree branding is everything.
Singapore Airlines is an example of a company cognizant of 360-degree branding. A decade ago, the airline developed what is now the well-known Singapore Airlines smell. The hot towels the flight attendants distribute before and after takeoff all emit a characteristic aroma that, once experienced, is not forgotten.
So, what has a smell got to do with branding? Everything. We have five senses, and for some reason we often think only of using one or two of them. Research conducted a year or so ago showed that aural communication is just as important as oral communication. Testing Intel Inside, the researchers documented the interesting result that the Intel melody was as recognizable and memorable to the consumer as the Intel Inside logo.
What does this have to do with the Internet? The fact is that we have achieved only the management of what I define as the “level one” web site: a web site that sort of handles the graphics but falls short of integrating other sensory stimuli.
The reason why I say “sort of” is because I still, day after day, see web sites that don’t exploit visuals well. Do you remember the story about the Coke bottle? It was designed so that if it was smashed, you’d still be able to recognize that the fragments were once part of a Coca-Cola bottle. Now, that’s branding!
What if you were to remove your logo and your company name from your web site? Would I still be able to recognize your brand? I bet I couldn’t. Everything on your web site has to reflect your core philosophy, the spirit of your brand, just like Singapore Airlines’ hot towels and the captains’ announcement.
Every single element you employ should be an extension of your logo: The copy should be the voice of your brand; the navigation should reflect the spirit and ethos of your brand in every degree; your site’s sounds should be your brand’s voice. Think of the identity that AOL’s “You’ve got mail” communicates.
Every element of your site’s construction and operation should be fully conveyed by your branding aims and integrated to communicate a seamless and comprehensible story. The integration principle is crucially relevant to all your channels and their intercommunications so that, wherever consumers encounter your business, they are able to recognize it instantly: in your store, on billboards, dealing with your staff, on the radio… even without seeing your logo. That’s 360-degree branding: branding without using a brand.

Doing Business on “Niche” Markets

Posted on | October 25, 2010 | No Comments

What Is a “Niche”?

Let’s get down to business and define just what the term niche means. It sounds like kind of a fancy French term (which it is). It sounds like it rhymes with riche, as in nouveau riche (which it does). And while the nouveau riche (the newly rich) are often made fun of, it is better to be nouveau riche than never riche at all! The word niche brings to mind something small. Something manageable. A realm in which you can build your business and avoid many of the pitfalls waiting for any entrepreneur. And so a niche business is…what, exactly? Simply stated, it is a business created to profitably serve the needs of a niche market. And doesn’t that sound like where you want to be?

Why Niche?

What’s so great about starting and running a niche business? Business is business, right? After talking with hundreds of businessowners we’ve come up with some compelling reasons why you, too, should niche and get rich. v You’ll stand a great chance of succeeding. Now that is a big claim to make. Why should a niche business be any likelier to succeed? Because you are positioning yourself as a bigger fish in a smaller pond. With that comes greater market power and with greater market power comes greater stability, pricing power, and profitability, and a more loyal customer base. You aren’t as exposed to the whims of the economy, nor to those of the competition.

• It will be easier to find customers. Easier? Why? Because the tighter your niche, the better you will be able to capture customers, focus on their needs, and meet those needs. The customers you capture will be the right customers—ones you can do business with over and over again.
• You’ll have less competition. A famous American general maintained that the secret to winning is to “get there firstest with the mostest.” You’ll be the first to serve your niche and should therefore capture the largest market share. Market leaders control markets so long as they preserve their advantage. They are the first to respond to trends, set the pace on product and service deployment, and set the terms on price. Isn’t that where you want to be? You understand the market and lead the way in meeting its needs—creating what Warren Buffett would call a “moat” around your business and protecting it against competition as long as you stay in touch with your niche. Competition may happen, but you’ll have a leg up, especially in the beginning.
• You’ll make more money. Not only will you have more control over pricing and profit margins in your business, some operating expenses will be lower too. With a captive niche less will be spent for promotion and advertising to acquire new customers and preserve market share. Word-of-mouth is a powerful advertising tool in a well-defined niche.
• You’ll be able to do it over and over again. Once you’ve built one successful niche business and understand the thought process behind it, what is to stop you from using that same knowledge to build a similar business that serves a slightly different niche? Or to add products and services to more profitably serve the existing niche? Such crossover niching works well—to identify new products and services to serve your existing niche or find new niches receptive to your current products and services. Online entrepreneur John Drummond and his wife, Amy, founded Unicycle.com, and quickly built a successful business shipping unicycles to customers around the world. “Now that I know how to build a Web site that caters to a specialized niche, I’m on the lookout for more ideas. Ideally I’d like to have five different niche Web sites, each pulling in a million dollars a year,” says John. Maybe accident and health insurance is a good “crossover” product to introduce to the unicycle niche? More seriously, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other “ephemera” would work, and who’s to say unicycles couldn’t “cross over” to the extreme sports, scooter, and skateboard crowd?
• You won’t be caught off guard by market changes. In many niche businesses you are the perfect target customer; when your interest or needs shift or change, you’ll know your customers will soon be shifting as well. Large corporations run from remote headquarters offices are the last to hear their customers have changed, defected, or otherwise moved on. But if you run a store for middle-aged surfers because you are a middle-aged surfer who didn’t feel comfortable buying in an atmosphere designed to appeal to young boys, you will be smack dab in the thick of things. And when your customers start looking for bright green shirts instead of pale yellow ones, you’ll know it immediately. As a niche business owner, you will be nimble and swift. Just as in the example above, you will be able to quickly adapt to changes in your niche. A niche seller of ethnic cooking ingredients will be able to adapt much faster and more favorably than a supermarket to the latest cooking trends.
• It is often easier to get financing for a niche business. A lender who thinks you understand your market and are well positioned to serve it profitably is more likely to invest in you than another “me too” business and business plan.

Website Tips: Keep it Simple!

Posted on | October 20, 2010 | No Comments

ONE OF THE GOLDEN RULES OF WEBSITE DESIGN IS: Keep it simple. This applies to your overall site, its graphics and the copy or words. Let’s tackle them one at a time. First, make sure your site is not loaded with so many bells and whistles that your pages are slow to load. The faster people can navigate around your site, the more likely they’ll be frequent visitors and buyers. Make sure you monitor your pages to check loading times and fix any broken links.
Sites don’t need to be flashy (see: www.booking-world.com). When designing your site, keep your target audience in mind. Use bandwidth-consuming audio and video judiciously. Don’t put something up just because it wows you; it needs to wow your customers as well. And that wow shouldn’t be restricted to design—it should encompass site functionality as well.
You want to create a site that’s enjoyable for visitors to browse. Design your pages to allow customers to easily find what they’re looking for. Users get bored and move on when they have to search through pages and pages of information to find what they need.
Don’t clutter up your web pages. Some web entrepreneurs find that offering fewer products with more detailed descriptions translates into higher sales. For others, success comes from offering lots of products but categorizing and displaying them in a way that enhances the customer experience.

Word-of-mouth in digital communities (social networks)!

Posted on | September 9, 2010 | No Comments

Today, people are organized in social networks and can take action together. They can discuss isolated instances of bad customer experiences and place them in context. Thus, they express concerns and dissatisfaction more loudly than they have ever been able to. What is more, they can take action to challenge business activities and people in power. In the digital environment, the voice of a few can inspire and reach many. The facilitated (and constant) flow of information among different social networks makes the voice of every single customer that much stronger. This is where customer evangelism becomes critical.

The fact that the customer’s voice has gotten louder shouldn’t scare you. On the contrary, it should motivate you to be a better marketer. It highlights the idea that if your customers are happy, they will share satisfactory experiences with a broader social network and earn you more followers.

In fact, people who share positive emotions tend to have a larger following. (Tweet this)This premise is backed up by HubSpot’s social scientist Dan Zarrella’s analysis of over 100,000 Twitter accounts. Negative remarks, which included negative feelings and morbid comments, belonged to people with smaller reach.

Positive Comments Are Shared More Often

Positive remarks, on the other hand, are exchanged a lot more frequently. Zarrella’sresearch of linguistic content shows that positive comments are the second most shared item among Facebookusers. So how do you take advantage of this phenomenon? By encouraging your customers to become marketing evangelists.

Online Κρατήσεις Ξενοδοχείων με το Booking-World.com

Posted on | July 14, 2010 | No Comments

What is affiliate Marketing?

Posted on | June 8, 2010 | No Comments

How affiliate marketing began

The most famous story about how affiliate marketing began places Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, as the father of the channel. Around 1996 he was chatting to a woman at a party about how she wished to sell books about divorce on her website without becoming a merchant in her own right. Bezos reputedly came up with a method of linking her site to Amazon and receiving a commission on any books sold. 1999 saw the birth of the affiliate network in the UK with DGM, Commission Junction and Tradedoubler setting up within a few months of each other.

Implications for advertisers

The benefit for the advertiser is obvious; they only pay out on results. From the affiliate’s perspective, they only need to become experts in driving relevant traffic to merchant websites in order to maximize return for themselves. Remember, the affiliate spends their own time and money driving traffic to the merchant and only gets paid if they deliver results.

Making money and the importance of tracking

The affiliate model requires all clicks and sales to be tracked in order that the correct revenue is assigned to each affiliate. Tracking can either be run in-house by the merchant, or more commonly it will be independently tracked by an affiliate network. An affiliate network is a third party that offers services for affiliates and merchants such as account management, campaign advice, independent tracking and maintenance of relationships with the affiliate base. The affiliate needs to use special links and creative banners from the merchant or affiliate network with code embedded in them that allows for tracking. These links and banners are then placed on the affiliate site and allow all clicks through to the merchant site and subsequent sales to be tracked. It’s then the responsibility of the merchant to validate these sales as legitimate before the affiliate can be paid their commission.

It’s not the size of the affiliate, but what you do with it that counts

Affiliates come in all shapes and sizes. Similarly many sectors benefit by using a network of affiliates. Vertical sectors that traditionally see great success through the affiliate channel include financial services, travel, retail, telecoms, broadband and gaming. This is far from an exclusive list and whatever the merchant is looking to achieve they will virtually always find someone willing to promote them. – providing the price is right.

Basic Steps to Get 95% of Your Clients from Internet Marketing

Posted on | March 5, 2010 | No Comments

If you’re starting an online service business from scratch, or even if you’ve been in business a few years, here are the 21 steps I recommend that you follow to get 95% of your clients from Internet marketing:

1. Describe your target market. Understand fully what they do, where to find them, what their most pressing problems are, and how they will benefit from your solution.
2. Know your keywords. Begin searching for the words (keywords) that potential clients will search for when looking online for the solution you offer. Use these in articles, article titles, title/content of blog posts, your business, and your web site URL.
3. Outline your client attraction device. Create a description and outline of your ethical bribe (client attraction device) to give away to entice visitors to opt into your list. To complete this task, you must incorporate the problems of your target market and your keyword research as you describe this device.
4. Purchase a keyword-rich domain. Get the .com version of the domain if at all possible. People stop listening after you say “dot”, so they think you’ve said .com even though you may have said .net or .biz instead. That’s why it’s smart to find a keyword rich domain in the .com version.
5. Set up your hosting account. Get a hosting account that permits you to host an unlimited number of web sites, offers unlimited bandwidth, and offers WordPress as an option that you can activate when needed.
6. Create your blogsite. Start a blogsite (blog/web site hybrid) focusing on your target market niche. Using a blogsite as your web site platform enables you to update your site regularly rather than having to hire someone to do it for you.
7. Purchase your email marketing system. Sign up for an email marketing and payment/shopping cart system so that you are prepared to capture your visitor’s contact info and sell to them, as well. Some solutions offer both of these as one service.
8. Write your autoresponders. Write a series of 10 autoresponder messages to send to prospects after they request your client attraction device using your email marketing system. These autoresponders serve to keep you in front of your new prospect as well as to continue to educate that prospect about what you do.
9. Create your opt-in. Add an opt-in box to your blogsite where visitors can sign up for your client attraction device, get on your list, and thus become a prospective client. You can easily do this through your shopping cart/email marketing system.
10. Create your client attraction device for your ethical bribe. It can be an ebook, audio, video, special report, etc. Make sure offer is valuable enough that people would be willing to pay for it. Have a graphic image designed to represent your client attraction device on your web site (visitors like to “see” what they’re getting) and put a value on the download.
11. Begin blogging. Submit blog posts 2-3 times per week, 200-300 words per post. Don’t fret too much over these posts. Write about a problem you helped a client solve (without mentioning specifics, of course), a new resource your discovered, an ah-ha moment you had in your business, or your response to some remarkable occurrence in your industry.
12. Design your ezine template. Create your template for an email newsletter. An ezine is most effective is it sent out weekly to your list. If it seems overwhelming to begin a weekly broadcast, start out monthly with plans to increase frequency from there.
13. Begin social networking. Join 2 social networking sites (the ones your target market uses) to help you build your list. Install or begin to use one of the social networking management tools like TweetDeck, Seemsmic Desktop, or HootSuite to help you better manage your social networking efforts.
14. Become active on discussion forums. Get in front of many members of your target market all at once by answering questions on 2-3 active discussion forums in your industry. This is a great way to easily demonstrate your expertise. Log in several times a week to see how you can help out the other members on the forum.
15. Write the content for your first ezine. Insert the content into the template you created, and send out your email newsletter via your email marketing system.
16. Begin article marketing. Begin writing articles that provide valuable content to your target market. Be sure that you use keywords and keyword phrases from your earlier research and incorporate two of these into your article headline and article content. Submit your articles to articles banks and directories. You can begin this process by taking the primary article from your ezine and submit that to the major article directories.
17. Repurpose your content. Create a repurposing plan for your articles and implement the plan. This might include creating a podcast, video, press release or teleclass from your written article content.
18. Create an information product. Once you have created a number of articles or conducted several interviews, you have enough material to create your first information product for sale.
19. Write your sales letter. Create a list of the features and accompanying benefits for your product. Use that, along with an introduction that tells your story of why you created a product, to write the sales copy for the product.
20. Create an affiliate program. One of the best tools available to help you sell your product is through an affiliate program, or an unpaid sales force who loves your product but doesn’t get paid until they sell your product/service to someone on their list. Your shopping cart program may include an affiliate management piece that will help you set up and run an affiliate program.
21. Build your list with a telesummit. Hold a telesummit (a virtual conference on a telebridge line) for your target market/industry to help you drive traffic to your site, build your list, and create some revenue in the process. By asking well-known industry experts to speak at your telesummit, you’ll gain a higher profile in your industry.

How many of these steps are you implementing in your business? Remember, consistent action is the key to business success. Go down the list, complete each step, continue repeating some of the steps as appropriate, and watch your business soar!