I love linking my social networking sites, blogs and video sites together using the power of Posterous. The best thing since sliced bread.
Google Take Over The World?
If you haven’t already figured it out, the line between a desktop Internet experience and a mobile device experience has been blurring. Now Google is setting up to completely open new doors in the field of mobile surfing and search. This video really dials in on the focus of Google, as shared by Eric Schmidt. Enjoy
Categories: Getting Google Love, Web Presence
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The End Of The Phone Book Era?
When was the last time you used The White Pages to look up a person’s phone number? If you can’t recall that incident, you are not alone. In fact, you are a part of the 89% of the North American population that has moved on use the internet rather than flip through the white pages when they want to reach out to someone.
Verizon has already pulled the plug on residential phone books in New York, Florida and Pennsylvania and Virginia is next in line. AT&T plans to conduct a similar two-year trial in Jacksonville, Miami, West Palm Beach and central Florida.
Other states that have granted permission to quit printing residential listings or that have requests pending include Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Wisconsin. And there is little doubt that this list is only going to get longer with time. It makes me wonder if it’s the beginning of the end of the golden phone book era.
Most carriers argue that residential phone books have outlived their expectancy and should be phased out sooner than later. They also use the “environment” factor to pitch their cause to regulatory authorities as lesser phone books would mean less paper and ink. WSJ reports an interesting finding that the number of traditional land lines has been declining for the better part of the decade, and now are being disconnected at a rate of nearly 10 percent each year. While I agree that this number is hardly substantial to support the business case for mass production, still a part of me refuses to accept the inevitable.
There’s no question that the decline in number of phone books being printed every year is great news for the environment. But with regulatory authorities playing into the hands of wireless carriers, what about the people who do not use the internet at all? What about the Baby boomer generation who still prefers to use a landline phone because they find it difficult to understand how a smartphone works? Would newspapers have the same fate? After all, it’s about the environment, right?
Obviously not. There’s more than what meets the eye here. The White Pages are no longer a lucrative commercial proposition for carriers and therefore it’s unsurprising that they are about to be axed. In contrast, Yellow Pages still represent a flourishing business prospect and the Yellow Pages Association says that it’s doing just ”fine” as 550 million residential and business directories are still printed every year.
Carriers like Verizon have adopted a “Please All” approach by saying that they will continue to deliver directories that contain business and governmental listings along with the consumer guide information provided in white pages directories, but the residential listings would only be available by request.
I’m also concerned over our increasing dependency on the internet for just about anything and everything. Though it sounds old school, I’d rather be off the internet for at least some of my daily communication needs. I do not know if Internet “really is running out” but going online for everything doesn’t appeal me.
Time sums it up beautifully that the end of residential phone books is “yet another sign of the analog communication tree falling in the forest of the digital landscape”. What’s your opinion on hard-copy phone books? Do you think that the explosion of internet and social media has splent doom for phone books? Please share your opinion by leaving a comment below this post.
Simple Mistakes That Are Costing You Customers
The shocking video proof on how your business is losing more and more customers every day you continue to make these crucial mistakes. Learn what mistakes you’re making and what you can do to take control of your online marketing before it’s too late. At the end of the video we leak a largely unknown secret that we use for our clients which is probably the most powerful advertising tactic to ever hit the marketplace. Be sure to leave us a comment and subscribe to our feed for more great videos.
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Shocking Video Proof
The shocking video proof on how your business is losing more and more customers every day you continue to make these crucial mistakes. Learn what mistakes you’re making and what you can do to take control of your online marketing before it’s too late. At the end of the video we leak a largely unknown secret that we use for our clients which is probably the most powerful advertising tactic to ever hit the marketplace. Be sure to leave us a comment and subscribe to our feed for more great videos.
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Categories: Local Advertising, Web Presence
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Internet Marketing Your Local North Bay Business
Internet marketing strategies for your North Bay business that won’t dry up your bank account.
Your North Bay business will benefit a lot from various Internet marketing methods. But you don’t have to spend millions of dollars just to get some decent exposure for your local company. There are ways to make your business be seen and felt without doing overkill with your advertisement expenses.
Make use of your online power – through Internet marketing. Here are simple methods that you may employ to boost the visibility of your business without shelling out more than what you can afford. However, these techniques need patience and some footwork to produce agreeable results.
Firstly, you need a website before you can make use of these low cost Internet marketing strategies. So go create one or hire a web developer. It will display your products and services. This will be used in employing the following Internet marketing techniques.
1. Affiliate Marketing
This is the process of recruiting a network of smaller websites known as affiliates to drive targeted traffic to a website. Ad copy and links will be provided by the advertisers. You will have to pay a certain percentage of the sales profit to your affiliates.
2. Links
One of your goals should be to attain a good ranking with search engines. One way to do it is through link building. This could be done through trading links to other businesses that are related with yours.
3. Newsletters
Sending out newsletters to your subscribers (those who signed up for your newsletters) will help greatly in establishing a good working relationship with your customers or prospective customers. It has to be short, sweet, consistent and written for a general audience.
4. E-mail Marketing
As one of the best cost-effective Internet marketing tools, it stays as a very important method of keeping your customers aware of your products and services. Just make sure to avoid spamming or soon enough you will have to close down you business due to complaints.
5. Articles
If you put quality content in the form of articles in your website along with your products and services, search engines will have to index your website. Getting you website indexed by popular search engines means more traffic for you.
6. Forums
Expand your Internet network is through joining forums that mainly discusses stuff regarding or related to your products and services. Actively posting responses or answers and asking relevant information will build your reputation as that forum’s member and boost your company’s visibility through your signature files. These signature files are those that go with your every post. Links to your website could be included in this signature.
These are simple yet very effective techniques to use when leveraging the power of the Internet to market your North Bay business. You need only practice one or two methods at a time to see results… like anything else, you need to be diligent about your efforts. Stay with it, in this race it’s always the slow and steady that wins. Of course unless you get yourself a MakeFast Marketing rep to put your campaign on a bullet train.
Marketing Assassin, With You or Against You?..
Knowledge is power. It makes an individual an “expert” or the “person in authority” of a certain field of endeavor. By knowing the basics and the “ins and outs” of the subject as a whole, you will not just be known as the expert on that particular subject, but also successful in the field you are into. Moreover, you can also help other people since they look upon you as the person in authority.
Knowledge is powerful in different applications, especially in the business community. It is considered as an important tool in order for entrepreneurs to succeed in their investments. It is important that they learn the basics of their business so that they will be able to determine the marketing strategies necessary for their business.
This holds true, especially for Internet marketing. Knowledge is considered to be the most important Internet marketing tool—it is evident that you will not succeed in your quest of earning more money through your online business if you do not know how you will earn money over the Internet. Success on Internet marketing requires sufficient knowledge about the subject. In addition, it will save you from unnecessary stress and spending, since you know how you will address the problem with regards to your Internet marketing business.
Probably you will ask where you will acquire such important marketing tool. Most aspiring Internet marketers are blinded by the thought that Internet marketing is a “get-rich-quick” financial scheme, thus they are convinced to enter the market even without learning the basics. Most of its features are quite new to the ears of neophyte online marketers—online shops, blogging, search engine optimization, email newsletter, and others.
If you will notice, the things mentioned in the previous paragraph are some of the tools used on Internet marketing. If you do not have the knowledge about these features, how you will be able to use such tools to your advantage? Definitely, you need to learn the basic knowledge before getting to the next step.
Since Internet marketing is an online business, the knowledge that you are looking for is definitely within the portals of the Internet. Where will you start looking for such knowledge? Below are some of the valuable resources where you can find information on Internet marketing (keep in mind that acquiring the knowledge through the Internet is a self-learning task).
• Internet marketing has its own experts. These experts are the individuals who have mastered the skill of Internet marketing from their first-hand experiences, lessons learned along their career and drawn from several failures. They have gained knowledge not just from the text they read from different Internet marketing websites but also through their own experiences. They are one of the best resources for knowledge on Internet marketing.
• One of the Internet marketing tools these experts have used is the article directories. From there, you will be able to read hundreds to thousands of articles about Internet marketing. They themselves produced some of these articles; the rest are written by successful Internet marketers yet avoided the fame brought by thousands to millions of dollars on generated revenues. You will be able to pick up some useful information that you can add to your Internet marketing knowledge bank.
• There are hundreds to thousands of Internet-marketing websites where you can learn the art of online marketing—from the basics to the complex yet effective strategies used by hundreds to thousands of Internet marketers. Some of these sites are offering free information; however, some of them are selling valuable information for a small fee. Be selective on the Internet marketer you will deal with. Not all information acquired for a fee is effective and valuable.
Before trying several marketing software or getting in touch with different online advertising programs over the Internet, make sure that you have acquired the necessary knowledge, particularly the basics of Internet marketing. Keep in mind that the success of every Internet marketing tool will depend on the range of knowledge that you know about Internet marketing.
In other words, without the basics, you will not be able to use other marketing tools, thus decreasing your chances of success as an online marketer. Meaning; if you can find one of these self taught online marketing assassins… hang on to him. With the right tool in your hand you can virtually eliminate your competition.
North Bay Business’ Are Increasing Local Sales Through Strategic Internet Marketing
The Internet has now become an important medium for product and service advertisements. Almost every company that can afford print, radio and TV advertisements have also ventured into placing ads on the Internet.
But with millions of websites out there being visited by millions of computer users, how can you make sure that your ad can be seen by your target customers and that your leads will be followed by these users? Here are a few tips.
1. Place an ad on the websites frequented by your target customers. Before doing this, you need to define who will be your target customers. Placing an ad on sites that they usually visit will increase the possibility that your ad will gain the attention and will be followed by local customers.
Also, consider the website’s search engine placement, traffic, external linking and the other ads placed on it. External linking will determine if there are other sites that link to this site. This will mean that people can get to the site where your ad is placed, even if they are browsing a different site. Check if many of your North Bay competitors have ads on this site.
2. Placing ads on some sites cost some money. However, there are also sites that can place a link to your site, product or service in exchange of having their link being displayed on your site. This is also true about the newsletters sent by site owners to its mailing list members regularly.
Also, having helpful links placed on your site and having sites link to your pages help in boosting search engine ranking. This is similar to making a statement that your site’s content is important that other sites have links to your web pages.
3. Pay-per-click (PPC) is also a good method in Internet marketing. You will only need to pay for the ad if the link is clicked. If you prefer this method of advertisement, make sure that you are using services that set limits on daily expenses. There are also services that help you determine effective keywords and monitor the PPC results.
4. Choose your domain name wisely. It is still being debated if domain names matter when it comes to search engine placement. Whether it does or not, having product related domain names help consumers remember your domain, that they can go back to your site even without the links.
5. Make sure you have useful content on your sites. While keyword density is important in search engine placement, having useless information or annoying repetition of keywords will not increase your customer’s confidence in your site. It may even affect your sites traffic and can get your site removed from search engines. So make sure that keywords are used strategically.
6. When thinking of keywords, think like your target customers. What do you think are they going to search so they can get to your site? Also, use specific keywords or key phrases. Submitting a single word or a very general phrase to a search engine will not get you to the top of the search results compared to submitting specific keywords that describe your product and services perfectly.
7. Track your ads. Always check how much you have spent on placing links on frequently visited sites and on PPC. There are services that allow you to monitor PPC transactions and how many of these end in sales. You always need to consider if the ads that you have placed on these websites are getting you to your target consumers and if these ads can lead to revenue.
One final tip on marketing products and services, sell the benefits. It will help your marketing strategies a lot if you highlight the benefits of choosing your products and services instead of merely discussing the product specifications. Product specifications may not mean much to customers, unless they know what these stand for (how these specifications affect the quality of the product or service).
Many people say getting to the top of search engine results is difficult since millions of websites exist, which can be using the same keywords. While this is true, this doesn’t mean that your website has to stacked under your competitors’ websites when presenting search engine results. Strategic advertising and linking, together with useful content, can also get you to the top of the search results.
If all this seems very complicated…it’s because it is. Thats were me and my staff can help out… we’re trained visious marketing dogs… we eat the competition. Just make sure you’re the one to hire us, and not your competition.
Grrrr….
Categories: Local Advertising
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North Bay Marketing Case Study
It’s not always easy to grasp what exactly new tactics and advertising methods can do for you. Hell it may even be hard to grasp exactly ‘what’ these new methods are. I’ve decided to post an interesting case study to illuminate the point in question, but first let me shine a light on the most important detail…the prospect…the customer, in reality, the online “searcher”. By far the most important part of the equation.
If for example the searcher is looking to make a high ticket purchase, lets say a kayak. In today’s market the searcher has the world at his fingertips, literally, he is able to shop on the spot he stands with portable hand held devises such as an I-Phone. Even the eldest generation have become comfortable with “at minimum” comparing prices online. The searcher types into the search bar what he or she is looking to purchase in this case “kayak’s”… the searcher soon realizes they have gotten results back from all around the world. So the searcher refines they’re search term to include the city they are presently shopping in, and “Bingo” a list of all the competing kayak shops in town…how convenient.
Stick with me here…now lets say your a kayak shop owner and lucky to be one of the 10 or so listed on the first page of results. Not bad…right? Now what if you were able to push all of you competitors off that page of results? How effective do you think that type of advertising would be? I thought so. Here’s the case study. I did a small test in the “Tanning” market, I did some marketing magic and voila… now when a searcher is looking for the best place in town to get a tan there’s a pretty clear choice as to who’s the best or in their eyes the most popular. Here’s the results…when you type in “North Bay tanning”… keep in mind these results are “fluid” and change constantly, but always remain showing my friends business in the best possible light.. Click Here For The Case Study Results
Categories: Local Advertising
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Top Local Marketing Tools
World’s Best Internet Marketing Tools Are Cleverly Disguised
Most of the world’s best are listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. The best motorcycle stunt ever performed, the best circus trick that will make your eye drop, and other best performances executed by extra-ordinary individuals.
But there is another “world’s best” that is not listed on Guinness Book of World Records.
And that is the world’s best Internet marketing tools.
Just like other existing industries, Internet marketing has its own set of the best marketing tools. If you are not new to the world of Internet marketing, many of these marketing tools are quite familiar to you—search engine optimization special software, content management services, affiliate marketing programs, auto responders, and others.
And the list continues to expand as the industry grows over the years.
However, Internet marketing possesses other non-traditional and effective marketing tools that you should know to maximize your potentials as Internet marketers. Some of these marketing tools are said to be “cleverly disguised”, yet these are the world’s best online marketing tools that you can integrate to your online business system.
Here is the quick rundown of the world’s best Internet marketing tools and some pointers in using it with your preferred system.
DOMAIN NAME- you will not easily notice it, but domain name is the first best Internet marketing tool that you must remember. Picking the right domain name will gear your way towards success yet getting it wrong will tell you that your game is over.
What are the things that you should consider when picking up your own domain name? First, you should pick a short, memorable, and keyword-relevant domain name. Picking a domain name that is relevant to your main keyword/s will help you in getting high search engine page ranking of your website. Moreover, it can be an ideal promotional tool, giving a hint to your potential clients what your website is exactly all about.
Internet marketing experts suggests that you set up a particular server for your domain. One server will only carry one domain. Web hosting companies typically have your domain name co-hosting hundreds of domains on a single server. Since all domains are under the same server, this may result to adverse consequences especially if one of the domains is allegedly spamming or behaving unscrupulously. Thus, it is wise that you have a separate IP address for each domain name.
KEYWORDS- it is what Internet researchers type into search engines to locate the information or things that they are looking for. These are one of the most important elements on any online-based marketing venture. Thus, you need to pick the right keywords and you are on your way towards success.
How you will find useful keywords for your Internet marketing business? You must have special keyword research tool or online keyword generator that will help you pick the right keywords. Such tools will supply useful information such as number of searches made monthly, the degree of competition, and the websites that targeting such keywords. Make this as your guide to get targeted traffic to your site that will patronize your products and/or services.
ARTICLES- marketing your website largely depends on organic SEO strategies. One simple strategy is to write and submit keyword-relevant articles to article directories and Internet publishers. As articles directories and Internet publishers displays your articles, you will be able to gain valuable links back to your website. Search engines follow these links and rank your website according to the keywords incorporated on these articles. Maximize the potential of your articles and bring the targeted traffic to your website.
LIST- any Internet marketing system is supported by list. This is a huge database of contacts or individuals who have given you permission to communicate with them through email or newsletter. Most Internet marketers are keeping various databases for each product that they are targeting. Aside from emails and newsletters, you must also set up a list of affiliates that can help you promote and sell your products to your clients. Once you have acquired a huge list of loyal subscribers and affiliates, the door of opportunities will now follow.
Utilize the world’s best Internet marketing tools and see a bright future ahead of your online business career. The first step is getting a consultant to help… ya…that means calling me.
Categories: Marketing Goodies
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