Archive for July, 2011
Online promotion has become an absolute necessity with the numbers of competitive websites increasing everyday. With so many options available to the online customers, you cannot afford to wait for visitors. Rather you should promote your site and take your products and services to them. And unlike in a conventional market, in an online market, it is only a matter of few clicks which separates you from your competitors. This means you should have a cutting edge over your competitors which can be achieved through active online promotion. So how do you promote your site? The first step is to approach a company offering online promotion services. Such companies use multiple methods to promote your site online. One technique use by online promotion services companies is link exchanging. This is a process in which your site is linked to the pages of other sites and in reciprocation, the other sites link back to your site. The sites you choose for link exchanging should be the ones that have similar contents and themes with yours. It is the responsibility of the service provider to find these partnering sites. Through link exchanging, your website is promoted via these partnering sites. This method also increases your site’s popularity and consequently its rankings on search engines result pages. Article marketing is also another method employed by these website promotion services companies to promote your site. Professionally written articles related to your site are submitted to various e-publications which have sizable amount of web traffic. At the end of the article, you can highlight your website and create link leading to your site. Interested readers are likely to follow your site. However, you should seek professional writers because only high quality articles are accepted for publication. You can also make use of meaningful online forums to promote your site. You can start a thread or post comment in an existing thread. These forums are excellent platforms to reach out to potential customers. You can promote your products or services in such forums. Wherever feasible you should highlight your website and encourage people to visit it.
This is the first article marketing tip of three. If you want to beat the competition and bank the big bucks from writing articles you need to look at three areas: headline, body and resource box (or call-to-action).So let’s get going with your article headline – which if you look around at the competition, usually stinks!What’s the purpose of your article headline? To get someone to read the article of course. So you need to throw out a hook there with some nice juicy bait on it that someone’s going to bite on. Your article will not usually appear on its own. It’ll be with lots of other articles or it’ll be in a list of search engine results. Folks will have lots of choice, why click yours?You only get one chance to make a first impression. You have seconds to grab those eyeballs or click, they’re gone.To get that vital click your headline must either offer something that the others don’t – like a secret this, or a promise of that – or startle people into taking action. Give them a bit of a shock. Good shock, bad shock, doesn’t matter. Just get that click!That’s why this article marketing tip starts “Your Headline Stinks!”It could have started “How To Write Good Headlines” – but how dull is that? How about “Good Headlines Are Important”. Doesn’t really get you going, does it.What about “Your Headlines Cost You Money”. There’s an example of something else we can use – fear. Fear of loss, fear of looking stupid. Fear is a great motivator.Of course we also want to make sure we rank well for the phrase or market we’re targeting, hence “Article Marketing Tip”. Let’s not be shy here – we need to tell people what they’re getting. Two part headlines work usually well.Another article headline tip that you’ll see a lot is lists. People love lists. 7 secret success thingies. 5 ways to a better something-or-other. Top 10 winning web articles. Usually odd numbers work best (with the exception of 10). Don’t ask me why, I’m no psychologist I just use what works.The final important part of this article writing tip is to monitor your results. Directories will give you statistics – so use them. Try different styles of headline and see how they appeal to your market. Some won’t take to shocks, some will take to you being surprisingly blunt. Test and monitor – it’s a golden rule of anything you do to make money online.Next article marketing tip coming soon. Headline will be – now that’s a great body!
Branding is a hot topic in marketing these days, but it’s defined in different ways and looked at from different angles. There are many components that make up a brand, and we call each component a Brand Layer.
Here are our definitions of some of the most important Brand Layers:
Brand Foundation
The base from which all brand elements will be created and measured against for accuracy. This layer consists of the following elements:
- Brand Vision is your company’s plan for itself-how your company wants to appear to the world, and how your company wants to grow and change in coming years.
- Brand Mission is what your company wants to create in the world, through its products or services.
- Brand Values are those ideas that your company brand stands for and that you believe in-and also what you don’t want to and won’t do. These values help your potential clients to decide whether you can help them, and they also help you decide who you will help and what you can’t offer or deliver. Brand Values are largely an internal measure against which you can process incoming jobs, but they will also be communicated through all of your marketing materials.
Brand Basics
These components of your brand form your business’s “face” to the public. Brand Basics shape and direct your customers’ views of your business. Telling your customers how you want to be perceived is an essential piece of a Brand Strategy for any small business, and the easiest way for you to do this as a small business owner is through your:
- Brand Identity, the suite of visual elements that are used consistently in your marketing, including:
- Brand Names of your company and product or service lines
- Logo
- Visual Vocabulary
- Collateral system/stationery set (business card, letterhead, envelope, and so on)
- Marketing materials (brochure, postcard, flyer, and so on)
- Website
- Brand Content, the way you write and talk about your brand, including your:
- Marketing Copy
- Tagline
- 30-second Pitch or Elevator Speech
- Brand Marketing that integrates both visuals and text about your brand, and that gets your message out to your audience. This is made up of your:
- Advertising
- Trade shows
- Public Relations
- All other outreach/marketing programs
- Brand Offerings, the products or services that you present, along with the quality, warranties, and value that you include with your products and services.
- Brand Experience, the process of working with you as seen from the clients’ perspective. But in order to create a positive experience, you have to have a strong foundation of systems, procedures, and processes built in to your business-this is a basic level of professionalism that’s expected of every business. Things that factor in here include:
- Returning calls
- Availability
- Turnaround time
- Professional interaction and communication
- Process
These Brand Basics can also help to shape your Brand Personality, which is the persona that your business projects to the world. This is defined through the way that your brand expresses itself-the characteristics that give your business a life of its own, outside of your own personality.
Competitor Comparison
These components of your brand speak about your business’s relation to the competition:
- Brand Positioning is basically how your brand compares with that of the competition. There are probably many businesses that provide the services or products that you provide: Brand Positioning determines where your business falls in the continuum of businesses in your field.
- Brand Differentiation is another, more specific piece of your Brand Positioning. Your Differentiators are those things that make your business stand out from your competition-the things that you do or offer that are unlike anything your competition offers.
You can control these Competitor Comparison factors through careful market research, market monitoring, and your definition of both your Brand Positioning and Brand Differentiation.
Internal Measures
These components of your brand are defined largely through your business’s actions:
- Brand Environment is the atmosphere at and within your company.
- Brand Promise is the underlying guarantee or benefits that you offer as part of all of your services. These promises can be of quality, service, greatness, affordability, or speed of delivery; regardless, every business presents a Brand Promise to the public, promising what the experience of doing business with them will be like or what benefits the consumer/client will get from doing business with that company. While your Brand Promise is often initially shaped by promises made in your external communications, it must be fully realized through the internal execution of your services.
- Brand Values, which are an important part of your Brand Foundation, are also helpful in deciding
External Measures
These components of your brand are defined by the public’s perception:
- Brand Awareness is the level of public awareness of your brand-who knows who you are and what you do. This is influenced by the strength and effective distribution of your Brand Basics, as well as by word-of-mouth.
- Brand Gap is the difference between your Brand Positioning and Differentiation and how your consumers and clients actually view these things.
So, what is a Brand?
Your brand is really the combination of all of the above Brand Layers. A brand is both your presentation and public’s perception of your business. It’s the way that people think about your business, and it is shaped through all of the layers described above.
Once you’ve established your brand and started putting your Brand Basics before the public eye, there are some other branding issues you should consider:
- Brand Alignment is the biggest challenge in building a brand comes from creating alignment across all of the Brand Layers described above, and in creating that same alignment between your audience and your message: making sure that the message that you’re presenting is the same message that your customers and contacts are walking away with.
- Brand Management is the process of managing all of the Brand Layers and achieving or maintaining Brand Alignment. It is a constant process; you should check up on your Brand Layers and Brand Alignment from time to time.
When all of your Brand Layers are working together, you’ll have a strong Brand that will help your business to grow and prosper.