Category Archives: Marketing

General marketing comments, ideas, etc.

Commentary

Be Potentially Kinetic

In Physics, there are two basic types of energy: potential and kinetic. Potential is energy not in use. It just sits there. Waiting for an opportunity, but really doing nothing. It is all there to be used. It has great possibilities. It could lead to something, but alas, it does not. Imagine a battery, full-charged and ready, but never used; an object held aloft, waiting to be let go, but never released. That is potential energy.

Kinetic energy, on the other hand, is energy in use. It is the roller coaster car moving about the track. It is the battery powering the radio. It is the fuel in the tank being pumped into the engine to make the vehicle move. It is taking full advantage of an opportunity. It is movement. It is useful.

Everyone possesses some level of each. Everyone has potential to be far more than they are. When there is no action, no attempt at movement, there is only potential. Opportunity knocks, but it is not answered. The potential energy never becomes kinetic.

Which are you? Are you all potential and far too scared to try to become kinetic? What is your fear? Will you let it win? Turn that fear into your own source of kinetic energy and succeed.

Business, Marketing

Searching For A Home Business Opportunity

In my more personal blog, I present this exercise as a searcher looking for a home based business opportunity. Now to do this from the marketer perspective. After all, if you do not choose your keywords properly, either your site will get no traffic or it will get the wrong type of traffic. Having 5,000 hits a day from visitors who leave as soon as the page loads is not going to get it done.

Looking for key words starts with the Google Adword tool. Entering the term “Home Business” seems promising with 1,000,000 global monthly searches! Awesome! Let’s see how many results that returns. Click the link and look. Oh, 1,290,000,000 results. That’s one freakingly long list. A long keyword is going to be needed.

The offering is for an opportunity, so what about adding that to the term and search for “Home Business Opportunity”? Global searches amounts to 60,500. That ain’t bad, but what about the search results? 170 million. Ok, better than over a billion, but still one huge crowd to try to be heard. More terms will be needed.

What about a review site? Surely that will help. What about a way to talk about the top opportunities? How many of these are out there? The term “Top Home Business” brings back 1,310,000,000 results and “Home Business Reviews” 627,000,000 results. Wow! That’s huge and huge. Way too much noise there. Gonna have to think better.

Legal? Legitimate? That’s it! After all, no one wants to join a fly-by-night opportunity. Being legitimate is very important. Searcher are bound to want to find that. Search volume for “Legitimate Home Based Business”? Turns out, that is a bit low at 4,400 globally. Hmm…might work. Search results? 15,8000,000. Yelp! That is a really bad ratio. So much for legitimate.

Google Adwords does have a suggestion: Legitimate Home Based Businesses and it has a thousand more searches a month. Clicking the link brings bad, but less bad, news: 5,320,000 results. The ratio is better, but that is still some serious competition. Might be on the right track though.

Do you believe in your business opportunity? Do you believe it is the best? Does it have duplication? Does it allow owners to carbon copy the masters of your opportunity? Does it have residual income? Will adding all that help? What are the results for something like “Best Legitimate Home Based Business Carbon Copy Residual”? Well, no searches and no competition, but 33,600 results. Hmmm…that really will not help much.

So goes the art of finding proper keywords. Here a blog site can help as different posts can contain different key words, all focused on a single overall topic. This is also a technique used by Google sniping sites. Start with promising key words, build content around each, then use the less expensive adwords to pay-per-click.

Business, Marketing

Are Your Doors Open?

It seems such a simple question, but are the doors to your business open? Are you diversified in your advertisement portfolio or have you placed all your hopes and dreams into one basket? Just as with stock investments, the advertising for your business needs to be in more than one stream.

Socialize

Social media sites are a great way to get your business heard. From Facebook to MySpace to Twitter, these sites can help target a niche audience. Though powerful, this is just one stream for your ads. Create fan pages for your business. Make a twitter profile to promote. Are you your business? Are you your brand? These social sites are even more powerful. Build your brand and your web presence at the same time. A two-fer. Learn the edicate expectations of these venues and get started.

Search Engines (SEO)

Yes, the Google algorithm keeps changing and it does seem to be a moving target, but search engines are still a good way to drive traffic for your business. Don’t enter SEO alone, but be careful. There are many hucksters out there who will gladly separate you from your money and give you no traffic results. A good one? Start with LinkNetworker.

Articles

Article marketing is a bit of a hybrid strategy. Posting to numerous article sites not only builds brand awareness and expertise, but it also creates more links to your site which also increases your SEO. More than just words, it shows you and your brand in context and creates greater depth.

Success Training

Ok great, but what about personal development? What about working on me as my brand? Get some serious success training. Dani Johnson is a great resource for such training. Affordable and accessible, Dani’s style is down to earth and direct. Her story is incredibly inspirational. She helps many people in all lines of businesses.

Offline Marketing

Having an Internet based business is not a reason to forget about offline marketing. Who hasn’t heard those radio spots for some do-ra-me.com or work-hard-and-fast.com? This can be a great way to generate leads for your business. This may also create a chance to lead share, depending on the type of business you have.

Now how are your doors? Are they closed or way wide open? Diversify your ad streams and they will stay wide open.

Marketing

Seven Tips for Video Marketing

So, you want to get into video marketing. Getting a good camera is easy enough. Setting up a YouTube channel is not too difficult and there are many free themes and layouts available. Making your presence known by commenting on the videos of others, subscribing to other channels and finding favorites just takes time. But what to shoot? What about guidelines? What about getting a pro to do it? Well, here are seven tips of video marketing.

Know Your Audience

For whom are you making the video? What would they expect to see and hear? This is the first step. Do your homework on your audience. It will guide your content, attire, mood, tone and style.

Appropriate Location and Attire

If you ware making a video on how to rule the sand in beach volleyball, clearly wearing a three piece suit and white-boarding plays and techniques in a conference room will not be appropriate. On the other hand, if you are providing business advice or opportunity, an office space and business clothing will be expected. Choose wisely and keep your audience in mind.

Plan Your Words and Actions

Just hitting record and starting to talk over your topic will not get the response you want. You will tend to ramble and forget information. Plan what you want to say. Think about your topic and write an outline. Is the topic too large? Do you need to do more than one? Knowing your topic and what you want to say will help you determine flow and keep your audience’s interest. While writing every word may not be necessary, it can help. Practice your monologue. This will help your delivery, especially if you are nervous about being on camera.

Have Subdued Enthusiasm

Sitting there speaking as though you are a robot will not work well. Neither will speaking with so much enthusiasm that you come across as phoney. No puking into the microphone. Understand and practice the appropriate level of enthusiasm for your topic and audience. A video about new cheer leading moves should probably have more enthusiasm as a business opportunity, but keep it real. Boring your audience will turn them away just as quickly as lack of authenticity.

Be Yourself

Another layer to acceptance and belief by your audience is being yourself. You want to connect with them on your level, so don’t fake it. Don’t say you are an expert on a subject when you are not. Don’t make claims about yourself that are not true and don’t try to take on someone else’s personality. Light on a subject? Study up. Seek some advice and learn. After all, this is YOUR video, so own it.

Uniqueness

Unless your video is over some absolutely new discovery, chances are someone else (or many such) has do a video on the same or very similar topic. To be seen in all the noise, find a way to make yours unique. This can be done in the location, your delivery, appearance or approach. If appropriate, perhaps be silly: wear a brightly colored wig, film sideways, do it all handheld in first person, shoot in black and white, etc. See what others have done and let it inspire you into new directions.

Own It

Most importantly, take all the tips and own your interpretations. Make the video yours and yours alone. Own the results. Apply your stamp and let the world hear you.

This post can now be seen on YouTube: 7 Tips for Video Marketing

Commentary, Marketing

Penny A Day Doubled???? Or $60,000 Cash Today?

In the world of financial questions, a famous, or perhaps infamous, one is the “Which would you rather have, a penny a day doubled for 30 days or $60,000 cash today?” It is more than a math question, it tests the perspective of the person being asked.

Many people will quickly state they want the cash. This is quite a typical answer and shows someone who lacks vision. The more thoughtful and vision minded will go for the penny. But why?

On the first day, the penny person gets just a penny. On day two, they get two cents; day three, 4 cents. At the end of the first 7 days, the person who took the penny doubled gets a whopping 64 cents. Their total take for that week is $2.55. Holy cow! They are in to money now!

In the second week, the principles of duplication start to really take hold. Day 8 brings $1.28 and by the end of the second week, a total of 16,383 pennies have been collected. Yep, a total of $163.83 in two weeks! That really rocks! The person choosing the money is no doubt still laughing all the way to the bank.

Day 21 ends more interestingly with a payout of 1,048,576 pennies. Yes, over a million pennies or $10,485.76. The total collected by this person is $20,971.51. Still less than the person who took $60,000, but at least it seems to be gaining. What do the next 9 days bring?

The end of the fourth week, day 28, has a payout of $1,342,177.28. Now we are talking! It took time, but the penny doubled is clearly pulling way, way ahead of the $60,000. The question could go as high as $500,000 for the single payout and still the penny wins. The total collected by the penny miser? $10,737,418.23.

The principle of this exercise is to see the vision of a person. Those that can see further than their current circumstance will work hard to get those pennies doubled every day. They know the power of duplication. They know they want to do things differently. Just as the locomotive needs a long way to get up to speed, so will building duplication take time. Once going, it becomes just as hard to stop as the locomotive. Put inertia to work with you and learn how to build a business that duplicates.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

The Marketing Event of the Year

On May 21st in Phoenix, Arizona, the most amazing event will take place. It will not be witnessed by many people and some of the attendees will not doubt miss the significance, but for those who are prepared, it will change their lives forever. Though billed as a marketing event, it is really a journey of self-discovery for the leaders.

In the realm of marketing, branding is king. Creating a brand that has appeal to your target audience is a never ending process. When that brand is, it is of more import that you build correctly. The event in Phoenix is meant for such. Discover your brand, build your brand and market true to your brand.

Being true can be one of the hardest ideals of marketing to maintain. All too often it is too easy to over-hype and over-promise on your brand to not deliver. Once jaded about your brand, it is very hard to reacquire a good reputation. The wrong news spreads faster than the correct. Tread carefully and with integrity.

One may wonder how this event will be helpful. Getting to meet and be with the founders and leaders of CarbonCopyPRO is how. While it is true that many other business hold such events, very few limit the attendance to the serious and allow such up close access. Attend your typical MLM event and there will be thousands. The speakers, though leaders, are not close to the founders nor are they are accessible. If one has earned enough, one might get to sit closer, but that is it. How is that helpful? It isn’t. It is just a “Rah, rah, we rock!” party not an event geared to help you build your dream. This event is.

How can you get to the Master Marketing Event? Easy, plug into the system and get your ticket. Your next 90 days will never be the same.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

Keeping the conversation

This post comes in support of the effort to move the blog to a new site without doing a bulk copy of every post. It was originally posted on 18 April 2011.

A search of the web will reveal all manner of ideas on what makes a blog well attended. Is your topic interesting? Do you engage the reader? Is the information timely or are you commenting on old news? Is the grammar and sentence structure correct? Does it make sense? But what does it really?

In the world of business, timing and positioning is everything. Sometimes the pioneers of an industry survive, while others are eclipsed by the late comer. At the dawn of social media, MySpace became king. Here the narcissistic could trumpet themselves to everyone. It grew rapidly and pulled the concern of some parent groups. But what of now? Sure, it still has many members, but it is nowhere close to the likes of Facebook. What happened?

MySpace was first and acquired a bit of a party town atmosphere. It was young and hip. Facebook grew from colleges only to be something that your mom or dad might want to join. That was the biggest difference. With an older, more fiscally established crowd came better demographics for advertisers. That’s positioning right there. Being able to get the correct eyeballs to see content generated more corporate interest and thereby money.

Being at the right place at the right time is an ever changing mix of know-how, luck, experience and planning. Knowing what came before, knowing what your customers want, knowing where the markets are. Those are some serious keys to success. Some of it can be gained by study, focus groups, surveys, etc, but knowing how and when to strike, that is the portion that few seem to have. Many times, it is not just striking at the right time as it is persistantly striking. Trying new ideas and approaches. Constantly adapting the tactics and motives. Finding new streams and ideas. Tenacity.

Nice ramble, but what is the bottom line? All of these ideas are correct and incorrect, simultaneously. Not all blogs are popular with all people. Keep writing. Find new ideas. Post and tweet. Advertise on other blogs. Learn to use keywords. Get your friends to tell there friends etc. Position and timing, mixed with hard work and some luck.

And if there weren’t enough clichés, keep on keeping on.

Commentary, Marketing

Take a break, worries or not

The article “Take a break, worries or not” appeared on the original blog on April 12, 2011.

The point of Richard Carlson’s focus changing book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff” is to aide in getting priorities straight. Too often, it is quite easy to get so lost in the little details of life, they become fair more important than is necessary. Does it really matter if a piece of furniture is .001 inches to far to the left? Or if a child leaves half a green bean on their plate? Let the small things take care of themselves and handle the truly large stuff.

In business, these same ideals apply. Far too often, there is such a concentration on marketing (surveying customers, collecting customer data, well placed advertising), that the larger picture is lost. Is one more back link really going to matter? Does a particular print need to be one more shade of pink toward red? The larger picture is why are you in business.

Get passed the “to make money” answer and dig deeper. What really needs to be accomplished? Move the world? Make a change? Nice lofty goals, but what does that mean? Move the world to where? Make what kind of change? A change for whom?

Clear the mind and release the small things. The small goals and details. What is behind? How do business survive and thrive? Stop looking at what is special about your products. Get behind the small things. Of all the things that have impacted the world the most, what was the underlying motive?

Service.

It is by serving others first that allows one success. The greatest movers in this world, from Jesus to Gandhi, looked to serve others first. The well remembered Greek philosophers sought to teach first. Plato established the western world’s first academies. Socrates is not known for what he wrote, but what he taught others and they in turn recorded. Jesus preached that service to others was bound in God’s Law, while Gandhi pursued his non-violent revolution through service to his fellow country men.

Service not bound by expectation of reward is one of the greatest gifts one may give to another. When reward is reaped, the prize is more sweet. Serve your customers not in anticipation of a purchase, but of a grateful attitude. Those who are touched will buy. Not due to some level of coercion, but out of respectful consideration.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

To Backlink or not to Backlink

Creating backlinks was an early want to get traffic to your site and have it known around the Internet world. In a way, one could argue that Yahoo started out as a large backlink site, though organized by topic. With the advent of crawling search engines, backlinks became one of the ways to measure of a site’s popularity. Knowing this, many site owners created pages of nothing but backlinks. As search engines became smarter though, out of context links were filtered.

Various methods arose to give the search engines more reason to view the links as relavant and meaningful. Placing links inside of text such as an article or a post help provide more information to not only the human reader, but the engines as well. Link pages started to content text and keywords to give more weight to sites. Services such as 3 Way Links aide in giving sites meaningful and context reach links. With the current algorithms in use, such links help to give a site more weight and move it up the SEO ladder.

In the area of article and post writing, an idea as risen on automatically generate different versions. The idea is quite simple, though it involves some rather ingenious methods. Write three different versions of an article, upload them to Unique Article Wizard and it will generate multiple versions of your article.

Sound like good services? What about a combined one? One that delivers both strategies and more. Does such a combined service exist? Indeed. Enter LinkNetworker. Write articles or have them written for you. LinkNetworker will also post your articles to various article websites, saving you time and money.

In answer to the title, “To Backlink or not to Backlink,” if you want your site to be found and measured in your favor by search engine, then yes. Want your website to be amongst the crickets? Then do nothing and that will be the result.

**In need of help marketing your business? We can help.**

Internet Marketing, Marketing

An SEO first stop or: How a Geek Experiment took over the World

As promised, here is a repost of an article from the old blog location. It was first posted on 13 April 2011.

I quite fondly remember a time in the late-mid-90’s when Yahoo had a Standford address and was more an exercise in manually linking websites than some version of an automated spider. It was the pioneer days of Internet search engines and no one really had a clue of what was to come. Over the next few years, various ideas of how to index and search the web were being tried. Soon to arrive were the likes of AltaVista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. To index what eventually became known as Intranets, a resourceful programmer could download Glimpse onto a Unix box, run make, install and start indexing a list of sites. A rather simple CGI form was needed to provide a user interface and away it all went.

Times have changed since those days. Yahoo left the confines of the .edu domain and became its own business. Alta Vista became a favorite of self-filtering junkies with the use of + and -, as well as finding +links. Lycos dropped off the face of the Earth and along came Google. The technology wars were eventually eclipsed when it was figured out how to monetize searching. Pay results, sidebar ads and AdWords are now the norm. Without resources to back link like mad or not having a site that is already very popular many are linking on their own, attention has to be made to key words and content.

In real estate, the saying goes that there only three rules: Location. Location. Location. For websites, content is key and traffic is King. It is more than just making sure the content serves the keywords. It is about properly choosing keywords based on how users you want search and how they will find you. The business is marketing and marketing is the business. It is really no different than the old way, just made global. In brick and mortar, just putting out your sign and placing an ad in the Sunday paper will not drive business to your door. The same ideas apply on the Internet, now they are in an electronic environment. On-line advertising follows the same rules as off. Know your audience and how they will go about finding you. Then place yourself in their path, get their attention (and not their scorn) and give them a value proposition geared to why they should purchase. Some will, some will not, so what? Sell to those who buy and chase not those who wish not.