Ninja Marketing

Bookmark me!

Marketing online can be complicated. So many segments, audiences, and offers, finding the right Internet marketing mix is more difficult than ever before. With the help of some online tools, a good strategy, and careful management of your campaigns, you can significantly improve your marketing results even in a difficult economy.

If you are an established business, chance are you already have a website or blog. In fact, you may also have tons of visitors coming to your website each and every day. The key is to leverage your visitors and build long term relationships that can pay dividends.

I have developed a number of methods to best leverage the traffic I receive to my website. With smaller budgets for PPC and other forms of online advertising, getting visitors to convert is more important than ever. These techniques are simple to implement and can really improve conversions.

A great method for improving conversions is with the help of a free report. Offer your website visitors some valuable information in exchange for their name and email address. Keep your sign up forms brief. This helps to improve conversions and sales. If you want to improve your conversions, try giving something away in exchange for some basis information, then communicate to your contacts regularly.

Use an auto responder. Communicate with your website visitors on a regular basis. This is a great way to convert your browsers into customers. After users sign up for your free information or download, use the auto responder to send messages on a regular basis. Auto responders are very inexpensive and can provide a significant boost to sales.

Create a compelling reason for website visitors to return. One great way of creating a strong reason to visit your site again is the production of a weekly contest, information exchange (like a forum) or some other type of event. Keep things new and you will see more and more repeat visitors.

Lastly, think about starting a newsletter. Newsletters are great for opening up a dialogue with your users and helping them solve problems or issues they may be facing. Create topical articles that are relevant and leverage your list to increase sales. Newsletters are inexpensive to produce and improve relationships with customers.

Leveraging your website visitors into customers is still very important, even more so in today’s difficult economy. Get creative. Think of new ways to attract visitors and get them to convert. One of the most popular ways is with free information or content. Experiment with different offers to see what converts the best. Once you’ve determined what works, focus on moving your customers through the purchase process.

As you experiment and find new ways to convert your visitors, communicate with them regularly and continue to create value. Over time, these individuals will convert into full paying customers.

Bookmark me!

Are you confused by all the talk about SEO services and how you need to make your website search engine optimized in order to increase the amount of web traffic that your web site gets? It can be confusing at first to know what SEO services are all about and what SEO services you need to implement some search engine marketing into your website and to increase your ranking on the search engine results pages. If you have never worked with a consultant before you’ll find that working with a qualified consultant is the best way to make sure your website is 100% search engine optimized.

SEO services are more than just writing search engine optimized content. An experienced consultant can change your website and increase your web site hits almost over night. SEO services range in price but how can you put a price on success? You should be willing to pay for experience when you’re hiring a consultant because the right services can make your business successful or take an already successful business to the next level. If you don’t know what SEO services you need the best thing to do is to have a consultation with an SEO expert.

Show them your website and ask for a written proposal documenting all the services that you need to increase the traffic to your website and to make sure that your site ranks higher in the search engine results pages. Be willing to pay the SEO consultant for the consultation but many will offer new clients a free consultation so you might not need to pay anything. Once you have a better idea of what services you need you can plan a budget for the project of overhauling your website and making it more search engine optimized.

Not sure that you need any SEO services? Well search engine optimization and search engine marketing are more than just buzzwords. These days the Internet is overflowing with millions of websites and blogs. The only way to make sure that your site gets noticed and gets traffic is to use search engine optimization and search engine marketing. If the cost of SEO services or hiring an SEO consultant seems high think of the cost in terms of advertising. Every business needs to advertise. Would you rather spend your advertising budget on proven SEO methods that are almost sure to drive more traffic to your site and to reach your target market or would your rather spend your advertising budget on an a blanket internet ad campaign that might not bring in any web traffic at all? Spending the money to hire an experienced SEO consultant to provide SEO services is well worth the cost.

Your website will only be successful if you are bringing in daily web traffic and getting an SEO overhaul for your web site is the best way to bring in that traffic. When you see your daily website traffic double or even triple after hiring an SEO consultant you’ll be glad you spent the extra money.

Bookmark me!

When you set up your trade show display, it is very important that you promote yourself as much as you can. It is this promotion that is going to get you the customers that you need to make your business a success. But you have got to have the right stuff to promote yourself. If you don’t have the right items, then it isn’t going to make a difference either way.

So what sort of low cost promotional products do you need to use at your trade show display to get people to come to your business?

- Candy - Candy is a great promotional tool. When you are trying to “get to people,” there is no better way than through their stomachs. If you can provide them with a yummy treat, they are not going to forget you for it. They will always remember that you gave them that candy. You’ll be able to etch a physical image of your trade show exhibit in their head.

- Ink pens - Ink pens are another great promotional item. Take women, for instance. You can give them ink pens and they will place them in their purse. Every single time they take that ink pen out to use it, they will be reminded of you and your business. Other writing utensils such as pencils and highlighters also do very well.

- Note pads - Note pads are another great promotional item that is of a low cost. You can have a lot of these note pads printed up for a very low cost. Everyone needs a piece of paper at one time or another, so you might as well provide it to them.

- Balloons - Don’t forget the helium balloons because there are going to be kids at the trade show. With kids around, your balloons will be floating everywhere and the kids will be happy. This is a great way to pacify a fussy child or to help a child simply have a good time.

- Stress balls - People love stress balls because people are just stressed. They like to throw them around, squeeze around on them, and bounce them around on their desk. You can have your logo printed on this stress ball so that the individual using it will think of your business every single time they use it.

With all of this free stuff, your display booth is going to be a hot spot at the trade show. And don’t’ forget that you can conduct contests as well. You can give away low cost items such as balls, mirrors, and much more. You can also have that one big prize that someone can win at the end of the day. It is entirely up to you and your budget. Just keep in mind that people will come to your trade show display to win something. They don’t care what it is as long as they are able to experience the high of winning something.

So go ahead and take a look at those promotional items that you can purchase for your trade show exhibit. Fortunately, there are enough items for you to be able to stick to your budget and pull in the customers the way that you need to. They love free stuff. And don’t forget to have business cards on hand or brochure holders too! If your competitor is giving away stuff and you’re not, it is your competitor’s trade show exhibit that will get the attention that you should be getting. And if you’re the one giving away the stuff, then you’re going to be the one getting all of the attention. So make sure you have promotional products you can give away.

Bookmark me!

The goal of any web presence should be to improve the business as a whole and complement its offline marketing and sales efforts. In other words, to help it achieve maximum profitability. In order to do this, your online strategy must: Drive targeted traffic to your site, persuade site visitors to take the desired actions you want them to take, and use Web metrics to analyze and measure user behavior. Performing these objectives correctly will ensure that you have an effective marketing campaign and increased sales for your business.

Driving targeted traffic begins with a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign including pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. It’s important to determine which keywords are worth pursuing in your PPC and SEO efforts. Determine how frequently each phrase is searched for, and evaluate which are feasible enough to put efforts into by checking how steep the competition is. Make your selections and test them out in your PPC and SEO campaigns Researching and selecting effective keywords is extremely important. Be sure to select keywords that your target market would use to find you.

With web metrics and analysis in place, you will be able to tell where people are coming from, what keywords they used to find you, and whether they are taking the desired actions on your site. If the wrong keywords are chosen, you may find that you have high rankings, but the wrong audience is visiting. Whether you are selling a product or service, obtaining newsletter subscribers, or enticing people to download a software demo, your ultimate goal is getting your site visitors to take a desired action. In order to do this you must have a compelling site that draws the visitor in, and then guides them to the goal. Design and site architecture factors such as usability, navigation, content, and ad copy all come into play here.

The key is to monitor how well these factors work at persuading your visitors into taking action. With web metrics you can monitor everything and see what’s working and what’s not. Armed with this knowledge, you can make the appropriate changes to your site; continue monitoring, and repeat the process until you get an increase in the desired outcome.

The area of web metrics and analysis is new and evolving. Compared to traditional offline marketing, the Internet provides an unparalleled opportunity to specifically measure how a customer interacts with a business. Web metrics and analysis will help you to monitor and improve objectives. This is done by paying close attention to where visitors are coming from, learning what keywords were used to find your site, seeing how they navigated through it, and what actions they took along the way. This information becomes a powerful tool in growing your business.

Bookmark me!

One of the best ways to convert website guests into patrons is through your integrity and credibility. This is the ground or basis of your performance in presenting the results you can provide to your customers and clients. Convincing them that you are capable of quality performance may yield more leads and more profits.

The following approaches to convert clicks into purchases are given to intensify your marketing credibility:

Strategy #1: Express the reasons

A specified explanation of the accuracy of the claim will enhance the sincerity of the messages according to persuasion expert Robert Cialdini of “Influence” fame.

e.g. If you pitch yourself as “The Lowest Priced Luggage Retailer in Australia”, explain the reasons why this is so.

* You buy container loads at a time and take advantage of bulk discounts (show photos of the containers)

* Explain that your lower overhead makes your cost of sales equally lower.

* Your strategy is to sell more volume at lower margins in order to build a loyal base of repeat customers

* Explain that your media costs through the internet are much lower.

Start explaining the rationale behind what you do and watch your credibility and conversions climb. Remember that it’s also important to explain the rationale behind a particular OFFER (especially discounts or sales). A Jay Abraham marketing aphorism that has always stuck with me is “You can’t discount your way out of a marketing problem - you need to educate your way out”.

Strategy #2: Case Studies and Testimonials Section.

Case Studies / Testimonials are two of the perfect credibility enhancing techniques.

Positive RESULTS are what you achieve to give to the customers and case studies and testimonials are mostly comprised of details about results. They are certainly concrete and specific as conveyed by customers. Keep in mind that results are what customers are after and not the product itself.

Testimonial must come across as true and genuine. There are some websites that feature fake testimonials. They use flowery words as if copied from an award winning-script.

To make the case studies and testimonials realistic, guide your customers with standard questions and let them react using their own opinions and thoughts.

The testimonials section is a major feature of the website but Visitors can easily ignore them. You can do some strategies to highlight them.

You can “Promote” a Testimonial or Case Study by:

* Adding a headline

* Display it in a Johnson Box.

* Making graphics for key phrases and results.

* Adding a photo, audio stream or video stream from the testimonial provider

* Put on view the particular famous trademarks and logos of clients.

* Exhibiting graphs, scanned documents, screenshots or visual images of results.

Strategy #3: Association Marks, Qualifications and Certifications

Certifications and indicators of membership in established associations can also be displayed in the website. It will not only enhance the credibility of your site and industry, but will also constitute endorsements from a third party.

Official recognitions as verified by distinguished certifications such as ISO 9001 will be clearly recognised by your visitors. Some may come out unknown; it is your duty to EDUCATE and inform the clients about it. Here are a few tips to do that:

* Give proper details of the membership and certification.

* Describe how you obtained it.

* Clarify the perspective of the certification (e.g. ‘Marketing Results’ is one of only 16 Google Adwords Qualified Companies in Australia)

* Explain the benefit to the customer

Certifications and qualifications are helpful in your goal of giving satisfaction to customers. It will not only boost your integrity, it will also lift the perception of your customers towards the site and the industry.

Strategy #4: Awards, Credits, or Acknowledgements

Recognitions as outstanding in your industry will heighten a good impression in the eyes of visitors and clients, but avoid complacency and don’t overlook your objective of giving positive results and satisfaction to customers.

A great example for this is the Combo IT’s “Awards” page detailing the recognition they gained including the entry to the prestigious BRW Fast 100 list. It’s not only about the reputation of the awards; it is also about the outstanding performance of the business that facilitates the good impression and competency of the site in giving quality products and results.

Strategy #5: 3rd Party Verification Services

Verisign, the Better Business Bureau and HackerSafe are services that assure the legitimacy of the business policies and customer services. Look for the well-known ones with enough recognition for better credibility of your website.

Bookmark me!

Advertising your products and services using a PPC (pay per click) campaign can be one of the most effective methods of spreading the word about your business. However, it’s vital to do this with a good plan, since doing it wrong could actually end up costing you money. Paying attention to all the details will result in a more effective PPC campaign, and will allow you to avoid all the pitfalls. Here are some great PPC tips to help you get all the benefits of this advertising method, without the downsides.

Picking the right keywords is the first step. Saying a common keyword will best serve couldn’t be farther from the ideal truth, but it may get you several clicks. Visitors who are clicking on a general key word are less likely to buy. Using a targeted key word phrase might not get the clicks of a more expensive common keyword, but is the best way to get a wide and suitable audience for the lowest cost.

Experiment with a few, more specific phrases by searching Google or another popular engine to find the one that gives you good results for your product. You can also use some of the available tools for finding good permutations of keywords, and which can offer hundreds of viable phrases for your business. Test these keywords to find the ones that are most effective.

Even the best key words will not save a poor advertising, though. You have to a have a catchy or enticing headline to interest a potential customer and that will also encourage him or her to click and find out more about your site. Avoid clicks that don’t lead to sales by making sure your advertising has an accurate description of your product or services. When you are certain you already have the best keyword list you can start to design your advertising.

Make sure your ad copy includes a sense of urgency, as well as the chief benefits of the products and services you offer. Let your customer know that clicking on the ad now to make a purchase has advantages. Many ads do well by including promotional or discount information in the third line - a limited time offer is an excellent choice.

Trying to get the highest ranking on a search page is where you need to really look at negatives and positives. It’s true that many people click on that first-ranked ad. That could mean more sales for you, but it could also mean empty clicks, as visitors realize they were looking for something else. Don’t waste resources by putting all of your eggs in the one basket here. Focus on targeted advertising aimed directly at your audience.

Be aware of what your competitors are doing, too. Adjusting your key words and advertising copy according to what works with them is a great idea, but you should avoid copying. Instead, find out what works best for them and try to go that step further.

PPC ads are a new and uncertain entity and careful thought needs to be put into any advertising campaign for it to succeed. The best way to do this is to make sure you know what you’re doing. Here’s to reaching your target audience, and lots of sales.

Bookmark me!

Email marketing can be an extremely effective means of marketing your products and services. It is used by large and small companies, by non-profits, and every type of organization imaginable. It is so widely used because it works.

Email marketing has the following advantages: relatively low cost, speed, viral (messages can be easily forwarded to others, without your direct involvement or knowledge), can drive traffic to an offline offer, and with the right systems, messages can be customized.

If you’re wondering just what I mean by customization, consider Amazon.com. Amazon sends product suggestions based on what the customer has bought in the past. This is a smart system. People are interested in some subjects but not others. The closer the the message is to what interests the individual, the greater the chance that it will be read.

With an email campaign, you can prompt traffic to an offline offer. An example of this is coupons. The bookselling company Borders often emails me coupons to use in their local bookstore. This is also applied in service businesses, which will issue “good for one day only” coupons to help fill in empty slots.

Don’t have the tools to manage an email marketing system yet? You have two major choices. Your first is whether to buy a program that installs on your own server, or whether to go with a hosted service and have your email database stored on a third-party’s server.

There are many advantages to purchasing your own program, such as increased flexibility, no monthly fees, and customization. Auto Response Plus and Mailloop are acclaimed examples.

Hosted services like Aweber, GetResponse, 1ShoppingCart, and EmailAces are pretty common options. There’s usually a small, upfront cost if at all, but they also require a monthly fee. These kinds of systems can be advantageous in that you don’t need to deal with spam or server maintenance.

Email marketing can be an excellent part of your marketing mix. If used properly, it can easily increase your revenue and help you retain customers.

Bookmark me!

One way to attract extra traffic to your website is through having a contest or giveaway. Although it is true that a large portion of the new visitors you receive may just come looking to get something for free, there will create lots of good publicity that is beneficial.

Consider the products and services offered by your website and then use your imagination to create a fun contest that will appeal to the average customer you will be targeting with this promotion.

For example, for a website whose content focuses on issues relation to parenthood one creative contest might be that people have to tell the story of the most embarrassing thing their kids have said in front of others or the funniest mistake they have made in parenting.

Contests can also be used in conjunction with the release of a new product. Suppose you had a website for busy women which offers tips on how to manage time better and that you were preparing to present a new product that discusses what to do to make it through the holidays. A possible contest that you could hold is asking for funniest Thanksgiving food disasters or best tip for holiday shopping time-saving.

Contest prizes can be arranged by owners of other websites or can come from your very own products and services. If you choose to go with a different website for prizes, you won’t have to spend any money on them and the other website’s owner will probably be happy to receive some free publicity. If you do this, be sure to mention the name of the provider of the prizes on your website.

If you are not the creative type, you can simply hold a giveaway. Your visitors can enter their information into a form and you can randomly pick a winner. Again, you can offer one of your products or services as the prize or you can seek out prizes from other business owners.

Giveaways can be used to keep customers coming back for more from your business. In a service based business like graphic design, you could allow customers that have paid for your services to fill out a giveaway form each time they do so and offer a monthly prize. This might be added incentive for customers to return in an attempt to win your monthly prizes.

To be successful, you’ll want to promote your contest as much as possible. You’ll want to send a notice to your mailing list as well as putting information about the contest on the main page of your website and blog. If you offer a podcast, make sure you mention it to your listeners.

A large number of other sites will allow you to advertise your contest with them as well. Google “contest submission sites” to get a hold of some good possibilities. Press releases can also be well utilized to stimulate interest for your event.

Giveaways and contests can boost the amount of traffic your website receives, greatly benefiting your business. As you use them, think about the results and how you can adjust your ideas in an attempt to match your customers’ interests as well as possible.

Bookmark me!

Do you have a website? If so, you absolutely need traffic.

You may be asking: what do you mean by “traffic”. I’m glad you asked. Website traffic refers to people checking out your site. Consider the possibility of laying out the investment to build a website, and thousands of dollars later, you have nice-looking site that no one knows about and thereby not earning you money. You may as well put a McDonald’s smack-dab in the middle of Death Valley.

There are numerous methods for getting traffic to your site. If you are in a hurry, the two methods I explain below should get your special attention.

First, you can borrow traffic. Most businesses can use some form of this method, and I encourage you to creatively adapt it to your specific situation. In essence, you simply get another website owner to agree to recommend your product or service to their “list” of interested individuals. This usually involves offering a referral fee or commission to get them to agree to this.

This procedure gets results for these two reasons. First, the other website owner has already invested the time and money required to collect the names and contact information of interested individuals, sparing you from doing the same. Second, this method allows you to get “credit” for the credibility of the other website owner. Think about your own experience. Do you normally seek out self-serving, traditional advertisements, or do you rely more upon the advice of friends and trusted acquaintances when making a buying decision? The answer is obvious.

The “borrowing traffic” method can generally be performed without upfront cash, though you will have to pay a percentage of sales.

The next fast-traffic method we’ll discuss is paid advertising. There are several types of paid advertising, and the very first you should consider is pay-per-click advertising. Google’s Adwords program is the easiest to begin with, and eventually you will want to research using Yahoo and MSN as well. Pay-per-click advertising’s great benefit is the ability to hone in one certain keywords that people are looking for, and as an added bonus, you can start getting traffic in 10 minutes or less.

This method of advertising is attractive for numerous reasons. Chief of these is the ability to match the words people are searching for with your particular ad. Another great benefit is you can track many aspects of your pay-per-click campaigns.

This method does mean you will pay before making sales, although Google probably won’t charge your credit card until the end of the month. As a caution, in the beginning you will want to monitor your Adwords account often to make sure you are not spending more than you intended.

These are only two methods of getting traffic to your website. Future articles will reveal many more methods.

Bookmark me!

Video Sharing Web Sites seem all the rage right now, and a quick check on Alexa reveals that traffic to the established sites is soaring. So how to get in on the action and set up your own video sharing site.

1. Choose a niche for your video site. This will help in gaining some leverage initially in the search engines, and differentiate it from the very popular and well established sites such as YouTube and Google Video. A niche might comic or funny video’s, internet marketing, howto’s and tutorials or a particularly type of cooking.

2.Once you’ve decided on your niche, the next step is a great domain name for your site. This domain should ideally be short and memorable (though many of the short domains have now been taken). There are two approaches, use some of the keywords for niche in your domain, or think of a unique zany one, the latter is what a lot of Web 2.0 sites do.

3. Obviously you will need a web host for your video site. The cheapest option would be to go for shared hosting. So you may need a more specialist video provider. Once your site gets established you will need more resources, perhaps a dedicated server. A virtual private server is a good compromise.

4. Normal web hosting might need the requirements for video sharing so check out web hosts, and Google for “ffmpeg hosting.” FFMpeg is a utility that powers a lot of video sharing sites as it will encode video in varying formats to flash video player format (.flv)

5. This is important as your shares will upload their films in a variety of formats. You server or host will also require php (safe mode off) ffmpeg-php, libogg