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March 31, 2008
Lead Generation
Lead Generation is generally regarded as necessary to run a business. Whether you have a Fortune 500 company or a small home-based operation, people who are interested in what you have to offer are essential if that business is to be viable and you are to make a profit.
Of course, word of mouth benefits all sorts or businesses - and there are ways of stimulating this - but getting started in a small business, or growing an already existing operation, requires more proactive steps.
A common approach is to buy leads. However, very often buyers will simply lose their money doing this, especially if you buy generic leads or those who've shown only a marginal interest in your business.
One of the worst strategies would be buying a list of email addresses for generic leads, especially those sold to multiple users. When someone receives an email and doesn't know who you are, forget about selling to that person. You can send out many thousands of emails and the response will be negligible - except for hostile, abusive replies!
Safer, and more profitable, is developing an automatic lead generation system that is either free or else costs very little to set up and maintain. In particular, you require the exact steps that will put your lead generation on auto-pilot - techniques that come with step-by-step instructions. The yellow brick road will then be paved with gold.
If your business requires phone numbers, this can be taken into account when you set up your free lead generation system. Design it so that your leads are not only pre-qualified but you are able to obtain telephone numbers at this time.
Postal leads are another solution - meaning the snail-mail variety. This is also risky, as well as being expensive. For instance, a common mistake is to mail a full package to unqualified leads. A better, and cheaper, approach is to first send a post card so that you aren't incurring costs on people who simply aren't interested or who may have already joined your program.
However, it isn't easy to even recover costs with postcards. Many find it really hard.
It isn't all just doom and gloom, though. You still need leads and there are methods which enable you to set up an automatic lead generation system, put them into an autoresponder for a series of emails, and send them a postcard later! However, to just buy leads and mail postcards has been a huge money loser for thousands of people.
The secret is to pre-qualify. The essential ingredient in building a lead generation system is to be sure you pre-qualify them for your offer! Fortunately, there are free and low-cost methods for doing this. Some of them will be mentioned briefly here. You should follow-up with a fuller, in-depth study of each.
Method 1. Viral List Builders. Techniques that encourage users to pass the product onto others, such as ebooks, jokes, cartoons, pictures, and important information.
Method 2. Ad Co-Op Publishing. Co-operative ventures with others who agree to place your advertising on their web pages in exchange for you doing the same with their ads.
Method 3. Forum Tricks. There are thousands of forums covering just about every topic. These provide opportunities to become known and to introduce readers to your informal advertising, as with your forum signature.
Method 4. Article Marketing Strategies. Articles are valuable as sources of content and information, as well as providing back links to your web site and pages.
Method 5. Special Bonuses. There are many ways incentives can be used to join your email list and to convert visitors to buyers.
Method 6. Reverse Marketing. Join every offer you can find that is related to your market and contact the person making that offer. They have already demonstrated an interest in your particular niche and are likely to require more quality information.
Method 7. Joint Ventures. Contact others who have shown a similar interest and invite them to JV with you. They provide leads and you just close the sales, offering a discount to their list.
Many of the costly lead generation approaches are costly failures for internet marketers wanting a profitable online business. However, it is possible to set up a successful low cost system that will automatically capture leads and build a long-term, profitable relationship with them.
Posted by LaurieMoser at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2008
Social Marketing
Social sites have become the latest craze on the Internet. Social Marketing can also be seen as the next wave of internet marketing. Everyone has heard about social sites and benefits from such sites. Social sites provide a lot of freedom and interactivity to the user. Such sites are powered by the latest technologies like AJAX and allow users to personalize page backgrounds,style,post their music, post videos, store documents, share their favorites and connect with people. Users can also post their pictures, share them with friends and even invite or search for new friends.
But how exactly do these sites help your site and its rankings? By sending huge amounts of traffic and getting you a good ranking on search engines.
There are two types of social sites. One is social networking and the other type is social bookmarking. Social networking sites provide you an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests like you. Sites like MySpace, Orkut, Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster are popular among users. These sites have a huge user base and provide an excellent opportunity for advertising your site. There are also specialized social networking sites like 43Things, MomJunction, Mothersclick which cater to specific interests.
Some social networking sites group people with common interests, but some sites are "traditional networking sites" and allow you to search for friends based on your interests. In any case you will always have a larger audience for showcasing your site. Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, provided you are not spamming. If you have a really good site, you will surely find a large visitor base just by showcasing your site on your profile.
Social bookmarking sites provide you easy way to store, organize, manage your bookmarks as well as share them with your friends. You can bookmark any URL or page you liked and even mark them for public or private viewing. Social bookmarking sites also provide you with the option of tagging your bookmarks. Some of the bookmarking sites link directly to your URL’s thus helping your site in getting valuable back links and quick indexing. Sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious are known to send huge traffic to your site. If you manage to get on the front page of these sites, you should be prepared to handle a huge number of visitors to your site.
Search engines spiders love social sites and usually follow links on these sites. This means if you have your site link on social networking and bookmarking sites, your site will be indexed quickly.
If you happen to be using Wordpress for your blog, you should use some good plugins like Socialmarker, Socializer and Addthis. These plugins provide your site visitors a quick option to bookmark your site. Getting bookmarked from different users and different bookmarking sites will definitely help your site rank better on search engines. Some plugins like Onlywire automatically bookmark your post to 20 different bookmarking sites as soon as you publish your post.
It is a known fact that the video and photo sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr are visited by millions of people everyday. If you think out of the box and use your creativity, your published video will get your site the traffic you've always wanted. Some video sharing sites like Metacafe also pay you a part of their revenue just for publishing your video.
Like it or not, social sites have become an integral part of the internet. You need to use this opportunity to you advantage before it is too late.
Posted by LaurieMoser at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)
