Marketing Quickies

Article marketing is possibly the most cost effective way to generate fresh leads for your business. In fact, article marketing can be totally free.

Marketing with articles to gather leads involves simply submitting quality, interesting articles to article directories and databases. There are many great article directories online that serve to host thousands of articles on all different topics. Ezine Articles is one of the top directories and should be a focus for you as they receive a lot of search engine traffic.

It is possible to generate thousands of leads per month if you can successfully submit articles that rank high in the search engines and also lead people to click through to your website and then submit their email address through your opt in form.

So where do these articles come from, you ask?

There are several options:

- You can write them yourself – You can outsource the article writing

If you are a decent writer, then you can get away with writing quality articles yourself. They only need to be between 300 and 400 words, but should contain no fluff and only quality information that will lead people to become curious about your business (without being self promoting as that is not allowed), as well as determining that you are an expert on the topic.

Or you can pay someone else to write your articles. In some cases this works perfectly, but in others only you have expert knowledge on your business and what you want to convey within the articles. But if you can brief your writer on this, a good quality writer will be able to write from your perspective. Expect to pay $10 and upwards for a quality 400 word article. The top article writers will charge up to $50 per article, but this is generally not necessary just for submitting to directories. Save those higher quality articles for your own website.

The important part of the article is your resource box at the end. This is where you can link to your website, say a bit about yourself, and provide incentive for readers to click through. Often mentioning a free report or invoking curiosity by asking a question is a good tactic.

The beauty of article marketing for generating fresh leads is that it’s totally free, it keeps working long after your article is first published, and there is no limit on how far reaching your articles will go. Thousands of websites could potentially publish your articles and link back to your site, thus bringing you more fresh leads.

There are more than 100 millions of blogs in the blogosphere. If you own a blog, you definitely want to drive as much traffic to it as possible to make it visible in that huge list.

The following are effective blog marketing methods to capture more visitors and traffic to your blog:

1. Optimized your blog posts, title tags, headings, metatags and many other parts of a blog with popular keywords to maximize your search engine rankings. The higher your blog ranking in the search engines, the better you can gain traffic relatively quickly.

2. Pinging your blog, whenever you post new content, is an efficient technique to improve its popularity and helps search engines to crawl and index your blog properly. Pinging notifies all the major blog directories of your updated content to make it available for a larger audience.

3. By adding a Google sitemap to your blog, you can more easily submit your site to the Google search engine spider. You get better coverage by the spider, than by simply submitting your blog to the Google search engine.

4. Contributing valuable comments on relevant blogs can also draw visitors to your own blog. As long as you post well-written and informative comments, chances are, people would want to know further about your expertise and be clicking on your link.

5. Search for link partners and build quality, relevant links to your blog. Quality of relevant links are far more important than quantity. Having other sites linking to your content is a sure fire way to get readers from that blog

6. To increase your blog’s “clickability”, place Adsense units in strategical places within your blog. Cluttering your blog with Google AdSense units will leave a bad impression on your readers and drive them away.

7. Post quality, original content to your blog often. The more quality content you provide for your readers, the higher the chances that your audience will link to you and share the information you are presenting to others. Great content is what makes readers stay and keep coming back for more.

Whew! The hard work is done right? You’ve put blood, sweat, tears and cash into the creation of your video content and now it’s up on the web. If you publish it, they will come right? Wrong! You’ve got some more work that needs to be done before the masses come rushing to watch your videos and the first thing you need to do is to get the search engines indexing your videos. So here are a handful of tips so get reading already because time is a wasting.

Keywords “If you don’t have good keywords then you might as well quit now. These are vital pieces of information that will help categorize your videos and make them findable in search engines. When people search for video what do they do? They put words into a text box on a webpage and that’s how they search. So make sure you choose specific words that correctly describe your video and then use those words in the title, description and the keyword areas when you post the video up on the web.

Video Sharing Sites “You will not be surprised to learn that YouTube gets more traffic than your website does. So why not put your video where the most people can find it? YouTube is one of the most popular sites on the web and one of the great things about it is that you won’t get hit for duplicate content in Google’s index when you post your videos up there. A pretty cool advantage for a small amount of work really. Making a channel to group all of your videos together will also help to strengthen brand awareness as they will be easier to find.

RSS and MRSS “These two protocols allow you to tell the search engines when your site updates and when you post something new on the web, specifically for MRSS a media file. There are very specific formats required for these files but they’re easy enough to research. Many CMS software packages even make them automatically so you don’t even really need to worry about making it, just submitting it. This will really help the search engines find you content when you tell them where these files are and soon your videos will be shooting up the search engine results charts.

Three simple things you can do to help get your videos noticed by the search engines. No they’re not the only things you can do but are more like the tip of the iceberg. These are probably three things that you will most often see suggested by SEO people. They are not the only things you can do and others include good content that’s interesting and easy to share with others.

E-books are the future and the future is now! The printed word on paper and bound into books used to be the main way information was given and received. They were great…. you could take them with you and put them on shelves. Books still exist and will continue to for the foreseeable future but the time of the E-book has arrived.

The marketing E-book is slightly different from just an E-book. Marketing E-books contain text, images, links to web pages and navigation controls. The marketing E-book has become a very important part of marketing on the Internet.

With a marketing E-book you present your story in an effective way and include links to your web sales pages. Your E-book can become your best salesman.

Your E-book needs to be interesting and informative. It always has links back to your web site and to your sales page.

Make sure that you have a prominent section telling readers that they are free to give your E-book away. Let them know that they can post it on their site as a free download, that they can use it as a bonus, and that they can bundle it with other products. This is the way to create viral marketing for your products or services. Remember those links back to your site contained in the E-book?

Finally, before you send your E-book out to the world, double check spelling and grammar and be sure that you have tested every link to verify that it goes where it is supposed to go. Obvious errors will reflect badly on you and will not be of much value to you, it could even by damaging.

Post your E-book to some of the E-book directories. Many let you post it for free, or will let you post a link on their site to your E-book.

Each year, thousands of companies consistently raise prices to increase margins and offset growth in various costs. For anyone working in corporate America, you are quite familiar with this tactic. For marketers, rising costs are always a challenge.

Price increases can negatively impact the sales and marketing efforts for today’s busy marketing professional. A price increase on products or services that haven’t changed creates a difficult scenario for current customers familiar with a lower cost. This is especially true when we hear objections from our customers expressing their dissatisfaction. With few or literally no changes to a given product overcoming objections is difficult.

One of the biggest concerns that marketers have about price increases is that of customer attrition. This is especially true in markets where your competitor is priced are lower or about the same as your offering. There is always someone else that your customer can buy from. A recent study I read indicated that even though price can be an obstacle to buying, current customers are less likely to leave you after a price increase.

There are a number of reasons why customers do not jump ship so quickly. The bottom line is that switch has costs associated with it. These costs are both and emotional as well as financial.

Your customers, and all consumers for that matter, have been conditioned to find the lowest price possible for any given product or service. When rolling out a price increase, customers do not want to pay full price. This is why they continue to ask for discounts even after a price increase has been put into affect.

Here are some ways to overcome objections related to price increases:

Add value that is greater than or equal to your price increase. Customers do not want to pay more for the same old thing. When they do, their perception of value diminishes. Provide additional services, support, or terms to deliver additional value that is substantiated by price.

Focus on switching costs. If a customer has to leave you, there are direct and indirect costs associated with doing so. Make a list for yourself. By moving to a new vendor, does you customer have to pay a new fee of some sort? Will they lose money by canceling with you or your services? How much time and effort do they need to put into finding a new vendor?

Not all customers are equal. I know that saying so is not going to be popular but its the truth. Your customers are different shapes and sizes and mean different things to your company and organization. Price increases should reflect the individuality of your customer base and be designed for maximum impact.

In closing, one thing to keep in mind is that you should really understand who your customers may consider purchasing from if you weren’t providing them products or services. Then, be sure to understand what their pricing structures look like.

If you have a stronger package at a better price than you competitors, switching is not an issue. If your offering is less valuable and more expensive, then perhaps you need to reevaluate your pricing. As a marketer, your job is to create a perception of value or remedy for a given need. Identify that need and focus your messaging on meeting that need. When you do, price is rarely an issue.