Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts

September 12, 2008

How to Make More Money with Your Website (without Getting More Traffic)

money, making money, making more money
It’s possible to increase the amount of money you earn from your blog or website without increasing the amount of traffic you currently receive. While the amount of traffic greatly affects how much money you earn, all income sources can be tweaked to generate more revenue without an proportionate increase in traffic.

One simply needs to strategically optimize your website in order to best accommodate whatever traffic you are currently receiving.

This article will provide some useful details on the various methods and principles you can immediately use to improve the overall net revenue from your website or blog.

Main Principles to Follow for Greater Income

There are three main principles you should remember when trying to increase the overall income for your site. These are conversion, leverage and diversification:

* Conversion. If you want to make money from the same ad space on your blog without an increase in traffic, you need to develop greater conversion rates for affiliate programs and contextual ads. This includes restructuring your website to highlight specific webpages, projects or advertisements.

* Leverage. To expand your income beyond on-site advertisements, you need to start using your site as a platform towards something a specific service or product that brings in an external income.

* Diversification. To increase your overall earnings, you also need to gradually develop a diverse income stream by experimenting with multiple ad programs and monetization strategies which fit the overall content and direction of your site. This also involves the development of content that can be easily monetized.


5 Ways to Gradually Make More Money from Your Website

These five methods are practical explanations of how you can apply the three principles outlined above to your own website or blog. Consistent application of these methods will ensure that you increase the income generated from each site.

1. Make an Effort to Use Affiliate Links Regularly

Reviews of products like books and software or other websites will allow you to generate income via affiliate links. Conversions for affiliate links will always work best when combined with personal recommendations within content.

Strive to write objective reviews of these products or websites on a regular basis. Write one review every week and you’ll gradually develop a substantial archive of monetized content accessible by search engine traffic and other visitors.


2. Develop and Display a List of Recommended Websites/Products

This list of websites should be prominently displayed on a sitewide level although you can choose to display it on its own webpage. Each of the recommended websites should preferably be linked to a presell page on your website.

This can come in the form of a review post or a short note detailing your experiences with the website or product. I highly recommend creating your own presell page, instead of sending your visitor directly to the affiliate product or website because presell pages will lead to higher conversion rates.


3. Focus on Conversion: Optimize your Existing Ad Placement

Income generated from on-site advertisements can vary a great detail depending on placement, particularly if they are contextual CPC or CPA ads. Try experimenting with ad formats and placement on your site while monitoring your click-through rates and ad earnings at least once every week.

This should gradually give you a good idea of where to best place your ads for maximum earnings. You can also choose to place ads on specific areas of your website for greater overall performance. For instance, effective monetization of your single post pages will provide an additional source of income.


4. Diversify Your Income: Try New Monetization Tactics

Diversification of your income is one method to make full use of your blog’s earnings potential. Sign up with new ad networks and run ads to test if they produce equal or higher earnings. Some websites work very well with Adsense, others would probably do better with text link sales (aff) or direct ad sales.

A good way to pick up different ad-models is to observe the various sites in and outside of your niche. How are they monetizing their site? Can you apply the same method to your own site?

Another method of monetization would involve offering premium features or content for subscribing members. This requires a substantial amount of work but may work if your site already has an established audience which trusts your product or brand.


5. Leverage Your Blog to Promote Your Services or Business

If you have a particular skill such as web design or writing, I would recommend putting up a page on your site promoting your services. This aim of this page is to let visitors know that you are available for hire and will encourage interested visitors to contact you for assignments on specific projects.

This indirectly increases your monthly income by providing a revenue source on top of your regular monetization methods. David Airey is a good example of a freelance graphic designer who leverages his site to promote his services.

David’s blog clearly shows that he is available for hire and prominently displays his portfolio. A collection of featured articles on topics such as graphic design, advertising and branding demonstrates his knowledge on the topic to prospective clients. It also helps that he has optimized his site to rank well for local search terms like ‘graphic design edinburgh’ and ‘web design edinburgh’.


Building Traffic is Still the No.1 Priority

While the above methods will definitely increase your online income, building regular amounts of traffic to your website is still of primary importance because it exponentially increases the amount of money you can earn from every single ad format or program that you run.

Should you need more information on traffic building, do check out my category of articles specifically on how to get more visitors to your website.

Strategic Collaborations: A Powerful Way to Promote Yourself

Sometimes you can’t do everything yourself. You don’t have the budget to launch a big marketing campaign. Or you don’t even know where to start. One of the best ways to promote your website or business is to work together with others to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

The legal form of this is known as a joint venture, where two or more parties create a new entity by contributing equity and sharing revenue, expenses and control. Another form of collaboration is known as a strategic alliance, whereby the parties involved pursue common goals while remaining as independent organizations.

No matter what you call it, collaboration with others will benefit you in ways that go beyond what you can do on your own. Think about it. Each involved party comes with their own established audience, reputation, brand, networks and strengths. Some of them may overlap with your own but usually, they’ll reach people or own assets you don’t.

Some people may have more media contacts. Some may have a specific skill (e.g. design, programing) and others have an audience or customer base that you’re trying to reach. Partnering with them for short or long-term initiatives is a smart way to promote your business, on top of all the online marketing that you’re already doing.

How can you collaborate? The possibilities are endless. For example, you can run joint contests/competitions, set up incentivized referral networks, promote a co-op web product, create content together, exchange ad space or trade skills for exposure. There are many ways to collaborate for mutual benefits. It’s just about finding what works for you.

So how do you get started? Four simple steps:

1. Identify your goals. This is what you want to get out of the collaboration. Your goals will determine who you should work with and having a clear idea of what you want from the beginning will give you an immediate idea of what kind of marketing strategy you want to take, and hence who is most suitable for you.

2. Determine what you can offer. Make a list of benefits you can offer to the opposite party. For example you might have specific personal skills or a website with a built-in audience. Perhaps you’re launching a new product and give away free samples of it away. In other words, this list consists of what you can do for the other parties.

3. Create a List of Potential Collaborators. Start writing down a list of people you want to work with based on your goals, what you can offer and who you think will be potentially interested. Make the list broad: there’ll always be people who’ll turn you down so you want as many secondary options as possible.

4. Pitch the people involved. Draft up an email template and send it off to the people on your list. Try to customize your pitch by using each recipient’s name and including unique information/comments. Keep the emails short and frame them in terms of benefits. Alternatively, try pitching over the phone or a face-to-face meeting. Remember to follow up before permanently striking a recipient off from your collaborators list.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. There’s no harm in reaching out to people, all you have to risk is your pride. When it comes to partnerships, you’ll be surprised with the people who will be interested in working together. Don’t automatically write yourself off, especially you have something valuable to offer to another party.

If you’ve never tried any strategic collaborations before, why not start today?

September 6, 2008

How to Write an Interesting & Appealing Articles, Practical Information

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Writing an article that arouses the interest of the potential readers is one of the most difficult challenges that article writers are facing at this time. Below are some of the suggested tips and techniques that article writers can use in order to write an interesting and appealing articles:

1. Create a powerful and enticing article title. By creating a powerful and interest title for your article material, you are half-way through catching the attention of the reader to open and read your article material. and that What you basically need at first is to get the attention of the potential reader prior to catching his attention to listen to what you will have to convey.

2. Sustain the interest by giving them a very aggressive and revolutionary content. In order to sustain the interest of your readers that you were able to successfully take on the headline that you have, you need to make sure that you have an equally attention-grabbing content for them to read. This is important because it allows you to entice your potential readers to read the material until the last portion of your work.

3. Give your article content a twist by including some graphical or numerical figures as part of your content. This gives your material an air of certainty and factuality on the perspective of the potential readers.

4. use conversational style, if you write in a formal or academic style, you are going to bore people away faster than if you use conversational style.
People like to read very fast online and if you help them do so by using simple and straightforward language, they are going to appreciate that.

5. Deliver one idea at a time in an article and split longer articles with a few ideas into two or more articles.

6. Your articles should have substances. It doesn't mean that it has to be long and contain a lot of information, but it has to be useful. we talking about practical information instead of just theories.

A "what" article can be very boring but a "how" article without anything else can be very interesting.

In the end, Don’t forget; Content Is Always The KING,
So Make your article always helpful & useful.

August 30, 2008

Basic Rules In Marketing 3

Rule 9.
Look To the Words, Keep the Idea
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There is a difference between messages and copy. A message is an idea or concept that you communicate to a target audience through a variety of activities. Copy is the articulation of the message for a specific activity.

Copy can and should change frequently. Messages should not. Copy should reflect current industry trends, cultural icons and social phenomena. Messages should focus on a single core idea. This may sound like a contradiction, but in fact it is an important distinction. The core idea your company or product stands for is fundamental to your business strategy. Therefore, shifting this message should be considered in the same league as shifting your business strategy.

Unfortunately, sometimes you get bored with your messages. You spend hours fine-tuning and testing them. Finally, by the time your campaigns launch and the message is out there, it feels old and stale to you. But you have to remember that your customers are just beginning to see the messages and that it takes a while for them to get through. Even though you're bored, your customers are not. They need to see your messages over and over again for them to register. Not necessarily the same words, but the same idea supported by the same brand.

You wouldn't change business strategies just because you're bored, yet marketers change their messages all the time to their detriment. You want to keep the message fresh and alive by changing the copy. This means using unusual language, a clever play on words, or a connection to a current event in your copy that adds life to a message while giving it some "staying power."

Your goal is Make your copy memorable, interesting, and quotable. People can remember It .To becomes a commonly- used phrase that people begin to use in everyday life, and make it always in your mind.


Rule 10.
Involve Your Customers In and They Will Understand
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Confucius said "Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I'll remember. Involve me and I'll understand." He was a brilliant guy.

There are basically three ways your potential customers learn about your business:

• They hear one of your messages directly.
• They are told about an experience someone else had.
• They have an experience with your company.

Your message and the experiences you create are the common threads that tie these three things together. Think about it. As a consumer of stuff don't you appreciate it when you get to experience something first hand before buying it? Why wouldn't your customers - business and consumer - appreciate the same thing?

Involve your customers in a dialogue. Show them your products, your facilities and your people. Pull them in to something that matters to them and they will understand (and remember).

Rule 11.
Lead the Crowd and Be Different
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Differentiators are, by definition, those things that make your company, product or service different. Today in high-tech industries, technology at a product level is usually only a short-term differentiator. In consumer markets things like product design or brand image can be very compelling differentiators.

Differentiation is the way you go about separating your product from the crowd so it is more attractive to your potential customers. Not only do you need to differentiate your product from the competition, but also from your other products that might serve a similar need. The objective is to create a position for your product (or company) that others perceive as unique.

Quality can be a powerful differentiator but only in markets where quality is a really powerful customer desire like Medical equipment, it's heavily reliant on both product quality and brand image. quality ingredients are important factors to some consumers.

Promotional activities and incentives can also serve to differentiate products. These tactics tend to have a very short-term impact on sales figures - purchases pick up when there is a promotion or special. Then as soon as the promotion is over, purchase rates go back to their former levels. Not a bad thing, but you need to understand the dynamics of promotions in order to use them as a differentiator.

Where do you start? What do you do to actually differentiate your products? Well, you can start by summarizing what you know about your customer's problems, challenges, needs and fears. Follow that with a short description of how your product addresses what your customer needs and how it makes their life better. Map this against your customers' alternatives - the competition. This is where you find your real differentiators. They are often not technological, but rather business differentiators like service, quality, efficiency, relationships, and so on.

If nothing jumps out at you, then you have an interesting piece of information. Look beyond the basics. Look for opportunities "outside the box" and you might be surprised by what you find.


see you soon with more new rules.

August 27, 2008

Basic Rules In Marketing 2

Rule 5.
Study Your Customers And Get Ready To Know Them.


There is a different between describing your customers, and "getting to know" your customers.

" describing your customers" depend on (age, sex, location, decision-makers, vertical markets, company-size, or revenue).
In other words, "demographic data".
The demographic data is very important to describing your customers, and to make some basics lines of your marketing campaign, but doesn't help you "get to know" them.

Psycho graphic data, on the other hand, helps us understand the "why" behind the demographics. Psychographics focuses on attributes like personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles.
Psychographic profiles are really helpful when you are trying to define more personalized and targeted messages and campaigns.

Finally, there are behavioral attributes. these attributes refer to a person's behavior - or their actions or reactions to different products, messages, offers, etc. Behaviors can be either conscious or subconscious and provide an important final piece of information needed to "get to know" your customers.

keep it in your mind that:

Demographics = Who
Psychographics = Why
Behaviors = What

Rule 6.
Target Your Messages


like the old saying in the real estate business - "The three most important things in real estate are location, location, location."
In marketing the three most important things are targeting, targeting and targeting.

To create targeted messages, you first have to identify your audience - who are you talking to? You can use a variety of data (demographic, psycho graphic and behavioral - refer to Rule 5) to
divide your customers into distinct groups based on similar characteristics, needs or actions. By design, each group has fairly similar needs, so you can assume they will respond consistently to a given marketing tactic. They are likely to have
common reactions, feelings and ideas about a specific message. They are likely to respond in a fairly predictable way to a marketing campaign focused on a specific product, sold at a given price, and distributed and promoted in a certain way.

Use this kind of targeting to improve the focus and impact of your marketing activities. Understanding how different groups of customers perceive their problems helps you define your messages more clearly. Understanding behavior helps you to select the right marketing activities to reach your customers.

the bottom line:
You can sell more efficiently because you are targeting the right customer with the right product, with the right message in the right way.

Rule 7.
How You Can Be Heard?


A Persona is a detailed account of the daily life of a fictional customer.
but how we can use this advantage?

Statistics and data are useful in helping us paint a picture of who your customers are, what they value and how you can expect them to behave. But at some level it is very impersonal. You talk about your customers in very generic terms. You don't connect with them as individuals. The only way to be heard is to make this data more personal. "Persona-based marketing" goes beyond simple data.

Persona-based marketing describes who a prospect or customer is, by answering questions such as: What keeps this person awake at night? How do they spend their time? How do they like to receive information?

Personas create a dramatic, concrete portrait of your customers. It allows you to build a marketing message that's relevant to them and their lives. A Persona is a detailed account of the daily life of a fictional customer. It is usually written in real-life terms, even going so far as to give a personal name to each Persona. Persona descriptions typically include:

• A day in the life scenario.
• Daily work activities.
• Household and leisure activities.
• Goals, fears, and aspirations.
• Computer skills, knowledge, and abilities.
• Market influence.
• Demographic attributes (age, marital status, religion, etc.)
• Psycho graphics attributes (lifestyle, values, beliefs)
• Technology attitudes.
• Communication methods.
• Cultural considerations.
• Personal quotes.

Rule 8.
Look To the Big Picture And Always Be Aware Of What Happening Around You.


"The Big picture" mean be aware of what happening and what your competition are doing or Planning to do.

Your customers have many options. It is up to you to communicate to them in context of the overall universe of possibilities - the market in which you operate. Your job is to convince customers that your product, service or solution is obviously the best choice for them.

Understanding how your company, product or service stacks up against the competition is a logical step towards creating a message that is convincing and compelling.

you must know your relative strengths and weaknesses and positioning your offer accordingly. It's important to look beyond the walls of your cubicle and get a sense of what is going on around you. It is sometimes really easy to get caught up in the internal perceptions of the market.

Look always To the Big picture and always be aware of what happening around you.



hope you enjoyed the lesson and find it useful.
see you soon with new rules in marketing.

August 26, 2008

Basic Rules In Marketing

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Rule 1.

Marketing is important stage must lead to increased sales.

what really matters in your ways of marketing. Is that helped the company sell more products. it's that simple. In other words, marketing is the way you create and distribute messages to get people's attention so you can convince them to buy more of your products or services.

Rule 2.
Plan a Little and Do a Lot More.

We can classified marketing people into two groups: Planners and Doers.
The Planners: They are endearing for their need to always "have a plan." They think, analyze, request more data and then reassess their assessment. Then something changes! After a moment of panic and deep breathing, they get to work. They go back to the plan and test their assumptions, review their contingencies and are quite proud to report that the plan is still workable "with a few tweaks.". they plan and plan and plan but actually don't do very much. Of course Planners are important and we need them, Without them the Doers will be in big problems, it's like a body with out their head!

The Doers: they on the other hand, must be doing something. Doesn't matter what they do, the most important thing that they are doing something, Anything. It doesn't matter what they do as long as they are "moving " and "making progress." They have great ideas, and are excited and energetic. They are generally fun to be around. Because of the infectious spirit of the Doers.
The issue is whether the Doers are doing the right things. Are they consistent with the strategy and business objectives? Are they integrating with other activities going on? Are their activities repeatable? Can they grow over time?

The point is, you need both Planners and Doers in order to get things done. The biggest issue - the lack of balance between strategy and tactics.
You need a strategy must be practical, and tactics must be integrated.

Rule 3.
Know What's Your Goals

one of the first questions you need to ask Before you start any marketing project is "What are our goals? What are we trying to accomplish?"
one of the most important questions you must be asked to your self. with this questions you will know what to do, showing to you if you've been successful, if you are worked right .

How can you choose between the two approaches if you don't have a clear understanding of what you're trying to accomplish? Without knowing your goals, you have no basis to evaluate your options. That means you can't make decisions effectively. On top of that, you can't evaluate the results of your project - because it isn't clear what you were trying to accomplish in the first place.

Rule 4.
Choose Your Priorities.

you must know Which option/s helps you reach the objective.
How to reach the objective:
• Faster?
• For less money?
• With better results?

Prioritization doesn't have to be complicated and doesn't have to take a lot of time. Try following these simple steps next time you're faced with a difficult prioritization challenge.

• Brainstorm a list of everything you'd like to accomplish in order to achieve
your objectives.
• Outline the potential impact of each activity on the business objective.
• Estimate the cost of each activity (time, money and resources).
• Evaluate the likelihood of success.
• Identify the activities that provide the biggest return on investment (ROI).
• Prioritize the activities according to their ROI.

Having laid out an articulate, well thought out assessment of the options, you have done everything in your power to help the organization pick the problem they want to solve. Rest assured - there will always be more problems to solve. Can you think back to a situation where prioritization would have helped you more effectively achieve your objective? I know I can.


Next lesson in "Basic Rules In Marketing"

Rule no.5 study your customers and Get ready to Know them.
Rule no.6 it's the most important thing ……
And other new rules.

See you in the next lesson.
 
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