Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Why Should You Use Solid Marketing Values in Your Marketing Business?

By Glenn Mosser

The facts show that Network marketing has a 90% rate of failure. Newbie's do not realize that coming into this business should not be taken lightly. There has to be a serious intention and desire to make Network marketing a success.

Do you know of many every day businesses that started out selling to friends and family that were successful? The old system of approaching your family, friends as your "warm market" is out. You and others know that it did not work before and it will not work in the future! Would you want to have products, service or an opportunity pushed on upon you? They did not like it either. The new approach and reality is you need to start selling to people who actually want to purchase your product, service or opportunity. What is the public demanding, what are the demographics? Have your researched your prospective business? In addition, is it a product that you will promote?

By using suitable, authentic, established marketing values, you can reach targeted clients who are actually interested in your opportunity. The technology of today, the Internet is a valuable tool in generating leads. Using the internet, you can create systems that can be duplicated.

Getting traffic to your homepage or site is your main objective. There are blogs, forums that can help get your circulating. You want to sell to people who are like of mind, who have already expressed in interest in your opportunity. Make friends, be honest and have an honest product, service or opportunity. Do not make a failure of all of your efforts trying to sell to people who are simply not interested.

The growth of your network marketing business can grow only with solid marketing values and make your dreams come true. Do not become one of the statistics in the 90% failure.

Glenn Mosser is an expert Online Marketer, known as "The Meetings Millionaire". He and his team have produced in the excess of $10,000,000 in revenue in the home-business industry combined. Glenn is a very sought after speaker and trainer to some of the biggest earners in the Home Business and Online Industry. To see what Glenn is up to visit http://www.ActualSuccess.biz

Use Your Graphics to Convince Your Readers to Buy

By Kaye Marks

Catalog printing is like brochure printing as it also has more pages to write your products' descriptions in one marketing tool. Cheap catalog printing for one not only allows you to include multiple items in the collateral but helps you work within your budget as well.

This only proves that not all of the cheap catalog printing is well, cheap. With the multiple pages that you have in your catalog printing, even the not-so salable items get a chance to be promoted. Grouping them with the more popular products might provide them opportunities for your target clients to notice them.

More than your design and content, catalog printing is well known for the graphics and photos that visually represent what you have to offer. Your photos in fact, play a big role in the whole marketing scheme of your marketing campaign. This is the reason why consumers are attracted to full color catalogs - because of the pictures and graphics that accompany the products and services.

So how do you make your graphics work for your marketing campaign? Try these suggestions:
Make it simple - No matter that your design has been created by the most popular specialist in the world of graphic designing, a simple design always gets more positive response than the complex ones.


As the basic KISS principle states, keeping it simple and sweet is the best way to ensure that your target clients understand your message. If your graphics and photos do not serve any purpose in your cheap catalog printing, then do not force it. I'd rather see a custom catalog that has fewer photos than one which is so full of graphics that I don't even understand which is which from the list.

Furthermore, do not complicate things just so you would come off as a business that is informed and skilled. The more complex your illustrations, the more confused your readers would be that they get distracted from the real story of your collateral.

Make it informative and relevant - Not only should your marketing collaterals be visually appealing, but they should contain enough relevant information to make it easier for your target clients to decide on your favor.

Do not try to include so many graphics that you forget to provide your readers with the proper and up-to-date description of your products and services. What you have as your content is half as important as your photos to convince your readers of ordering from your print catalogs.

Make it consistent - If your graphics do not emphasize your overall look, and then drop them. Generally, this particular principle should not only apply to your photos but to all elements as well. Everything you include in your collaterals should always have one purpose - to complement your overall appearance so your message is highlighted.

The bottom line to your catalog printing is to have an effective design with all your elements in place. You would not want your target clients to be confused in the middle of reading your catalog, would you? A well thought of and planned catalog will always have clients every time.

Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of the developments in catalog printing and cheap catalog printing industry.

Social Networking Landing Pages - How to Turn Your Social Networking Friends Into Customers

By Michele Pariza Wacek

Isn't social networking fun? You get to meet all these people and connect with them and spend hours looking at their profiles and videos and photos and...

Okay, so clearly social networking can take an awful lot of time. The question is, is it worth it? Will spending all that time doing social networking lead to an increase in sales?

And the answer is, yes it can. But you need to be strategic about it -- just like you need to be strategic with all your marketing. And one way you can do that is to have a social networking landing page.

So what the heck is a social networking landing page? Well, it's a special page on your web site or blog designed specifically for your social networking folks. This special page continues the conversation you started on other social networking sites. (This is very important, you should always design landing pages as continuing the conversation started elsewhere, whether it's your prospects clicking on a Google ad or followers intrigued by something you tweeted about on Twitter.)

You see, many people send their social networking friends to the home page of their web site or their blog. And while that's not a terrible thing to do, you could definitely do better. You see, the home page of your web site or the first page of your blog is more general. It has to be. You don't know how people are finding your site. They could be on it because they just heard you on a teleclass or read an article by you or someone referred you. You don't know so you have to keep it pretty generic about the problems you solve and the solutions you provide (and of course, push them to give you their email address).

So by creating a landing page specifically for your social network buddies that continues the conversation already started in the social networking scene, you'll be that much closer to transforming them into eventual customers.

Okay, so what do you put on this social networking landing page? Do you try and sell them there?

In a word -- NO! Remember, social networking is all about building relationships and making connections. And, through those relationships people will naturally want to support you and become your customer. The last thing you want to do is send your social networking buds to a page and try to sell them.

(Now, that doesn't mean your page can't include a couple of links to some products so they can read more and buy, but no hard core selling.)

Instead, share more about yourself, your family, your interests and your business. Then invite them to give you their email address in exchange for a free gift from you.

By getting on your email list, you are now in a position to deepen the relationship. Along with getting your regular newsletter (you HAVE one, don't you?) which contains great information and content, you can also invite them to your free teleclasses, which also contain fantastic content but also includes an invitation for them to become a customer, or you send emails to them also inviting them to become a customer.

See how this works?

So take a few moments to put together a social networking landing page and see how it can start transforming your social networking activities.

Michele PW (Michele Pariza Wacek) owns Creative Concepts and Copywriting LLC, a copywriting, marketing communications and creativity agency. She helps people become more successful at attracting new clients, selling products and services and boosting business. To find out how she can help you take your business to the next level, visit her site http://www.michelepw.com Copyright 2009 Michele Pariza Wacek.

Build a Successful Marketing Plan - 15 Key Business Success Factors

By Kris Bovay

Every marketing plan needs to include an industry analysis. Why? Because it is of critical importance to understand the industry you operate in, and to identify and track your performance to key business success factors (KSFs) for your organization.

Understanding your industry and identifying your KSFs will help in building a successful marketing plan; one that is based on measurable progress and results. A key success factor is an element of a whole that affects your business' ability to do well in your market.

Most businesses focus on between three and five of the most important (to their business) success factors. From time to time, or year to year, these key success factors may change, as the industry or the market changes.

15 Examples of Key Business Success Factors (and this is not a comprehensive list) are:
  1. Number of new customers per year;
  2. Number of lost customers per year OR the number of customers retained (it is important to understand and measure the potential customer lifetime value for each customer on a regular basis);
  3. Hire and retain excellent employees (measured by employee turn-over, job vacancies, customer satisfaction);
  4. Successful new product introductions (measured by sales and costs);
  5. Successful promotional programs (measured by sales and costs);
  6. Good/healthy financial indicators: for example, working capital, acceptable ratios (in particular debt to equity ratios), profit margins, cash flow, receivables and more;
  7. If in the manufacturing industry, high operating capacity utilization;
  8. Strong supplier network;
  9. Strong distribution network or channel;
  10. Successful product positioning;
  11. Low cost structure;
  12. Niche product/service - track the number of competitors entering and/or leaving the niche. Is the cost of entry into the market high or low?
  13. Market leader or follower or challenger, and is your relative market position and why? Are you able to support that position if under 'attack'?
  14. Product differentiation: Do you have technology or service advantages that others can't easily copy? How unique and differentiated is your product or service?
  15. Time to market: is your product or service able to be delivered quickly and easily; from the first point of contact to the time shipped and subsequently invoiced?
Once you have identified your specific KSFs, build strategies around those factors and integrate those strategies into your marketing and business plans to ensure business success. Develop measurement programs to help you track your progress against your success factors. You also need to assess your competition and see if your competitors' key success factors are similar or different than yours (depending on your strengths and weaknesses and your marketing and business strategies, they might be very different). One way of comparing and assessing is to do a competitive strength analysis; find out what your competitors' strengths and weaknesses are and build your competitive strategy accordingly. (A sample swot analysis can show you how to analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that your business faces.)

For example, if retaining your existing customers is a key success factor, your business objective must be to grow sales with your existing customers. How do you do that? First, do a customer satisfaction survey to assess how satisfied your existing customers are (or aren't). Then determine what needs to be changed and what you need to focus on. Make sure that you understand how your customers chose between competitors: is it price, service, quality, knowledge, reliability, relationships, or all of these factors? What product or service attributes are most important to your customers? What is the unique difference between your product or service and your competition's product or service (from your customer's perspective)?

Once you have identified your key success factors; built measurement devices to track them; assessed and compared your competitors' KSFs - and the industry's; built your strategies and objectives into your marketing and business plans(phew!); you need to act! Build your business on these key success factors.

Strategy and analysis is a key part of any marketing plan. Check out a sample swot analysis to see how to do your own swot analysis for your business. Kris Bovay is the owner of Voice Marketing Inc, a business and marketing services company. Kris has 25 years of experience in leading large, medium and small businesses. For more pricing strategies and other small business resources and services go to http://www.more-for-small-business.com/Copyright 2008 - 2009 Voice Marketing Inc.

Three Critical Strategies For Every Web Marketing Campaign

By Corte Swearingen

Every business owner with a website has some particular goal for visitors. It can be as simple as signing up for a newsletter or as complicated as completing a large purchase.

Whatever the conversion goal is for your website, there are three basic strategies you should follow.

Strategy #1: Find Out What Your Visitors Want
As a business owner, it can be easy to convince yourself you know what your customer wants. But that assumption can prove false many times over.


The only way to really find out your customers wants and needs is to simply ask them. If you already have an electronic newsletter, then send out a link to an external survey in your next issue. Ask questions that will help uncover the need for your product or service idea, and be sure to offer an incentive for your customers and prospects to complete the survey.

If you don't have the ability to create online surveys within your website, than try a 3rd party service like Survey Monkey.

Another great way to uncover potential demand for a product or service is to see how many people are searching for that particular topic. This involves investing in a good keyword research tool. Yes, there are free keyword tools out there, but if you own a business and are serious about utilizing Internet marketing, than you really must subscribe to a good keyword research tool. I recommend wither Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Wordze.

Researching keywords will allow you to identify high demand keywords with low competition, giving you the ability to rank high for these keywords in the major search engines. Without knowing the best keywords to target, you will have to rely on luck to carry the day. And you may have already heard, luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it!

Strategy #2: Create a Compelling Landing Page
Your product can be a hard good, a service or a downloadable report. Whatever it is, you need to find a way to convey the benefits of this item in a direct and simple way. I recommend you create a focused landing page for each of your products or services.


An effective landing page:

- Concentrates on a single compelling message
- Has a clear call-to-action
- Captures contact information
- Avoids distractions
- Contains bonus offers
- Contains testimonials


Today, it is quite common to see landing pages existing by themselves with no real content-based website wrapped around them. This strategy forces you to rely heavily on pay-per-click to drive traffic to the landing page. I recommend you leverage your own free organic traffic and only use pay-per-click as a supplement, if at all

Strategy #3: Test Your Landing Page
How do you determine the best price for your product? How do you decide the best photos and images to use in order to increase conversion rates? What's the best headline to grab your visitor's attention?


The answer is - I have no idea. But there's one way to find out - test, test and test again!
The easiest way to test multiple parameters within your landing page is to use the Google Website Optimizer. This free service allows you to perform A/B split testing. An A/B split test allows you to test one page parameter against another in order to determine which yields a higher conversion rate.


For example, suppose you're unsure about how to price your product. One way to zero in on a price that yields the greatest profits is to test. To test three different pricing levels, you would simply upload three versions of your landing page. Each page would contain a price you wish to test. The Google Website Optimizer would then randomly serve up one of the three landing pages to each unique visitor on your site. These pages would be served evenly and conversion measurements calculated for each one. At the end of the testing session, you would get a summary of conversion results to determine which pricing structure brought in the highest profits.

The Google Website Optimizer is free and one of the most powerful tools you can have in your marketing arsenal. Use it to test headlines, pictures, captions, bonus offers and anything else that affects conversions.

Taken together, these three tips will help maximize your website landing page conversion rates.
Corte Swearingen is the creator of the
Integral Marketing System and CEO of SmallBiz Marketing Tips. For additional information on landing page strategies, visit Website Marketing Campaign Tips.

Another Side of Marketing

By John Parks

Many people feel hard times during wars, economic distress or plain losses that create feelings of inadequacy and depression. Many companies are extending their hands towards providing a small amount of assistance during these times in a form of advertising that acknowledges the fact that they are in periods of suffering or distress. Many examples of this can be found around various cities that have begun installing advertising benches with warmed seating, or providing simple luxuries that most people could not afford during such periods of hardship. This in turn offers many people comfort, and in return they offer loyalty and will continue to use products or services associated with the companies that helped them get through adversity.

Aspects of Sympvertising
The main purpose of this type of advertising is to create a publicity awareness of what you are doing to help better people in times of hardship. Offering amenities that are usually reserved for those with a higher class of living to those who cannot afford, or were once able to afford such luxuries encourages others to increase in sympathetic gestures towards those less fortunate. This creates a good view on such companies providing these services which will channel more consumers towards them through their good actions. Whether the good intentions were genuine or not, we will not know, but it sure does help as a way of advertising.


Sympvertising is an evolutionary concept that provides services and products in a similar fashion to promotional giveaway items. You offer these services for free, and in turn the sympathy factor allows people who justify those actions towards good tidings will assume that the company has a reputation for great customer service and cares about their consumers. While this may be true, some companies will take advantage of the good nature and trusting willingness that others will gladly give for realizing that the company is good in nature and intentions as well.

Another aspect of sympathy advertising is through commercialization of the fact that people could feel safe in your hands. If they can believe that there is a company out there that is willing to care for you, then they eat up the bait and are hooked through sympathy gestures. Many people will not feel like they are receiving assistance, rather they feel like they can count on a company to keep up their end of the trust they are perceived to have.

True Sympathy
Even though many companies take advantage of their consumers, it is possible for there to be genuine charity and other forms of care giving to be provided. This type of sympathy creates awareness about a certain cause that needs to be addressed to genuinely create change in a community towards bettering the people. This type of assistance creates publicity in a positive manner that will eventually help increase the popularity of the certain companies involved. They will do better to offer their assistance in various matters without calling attention to themselves, letting others promote the business through news and interviews will often encourage more people to use products or services by a certain company, as well as creating awareness about the struggles of other people in these situations.


For more information on sympathy advertising, visit http://sympvertiser.com and http://sympathyadvertising.com