Devour The Web

The basic principles used successfully by brick and mortar storefronts in moving your potential clients through a successful sales process is also the most effective way on the web.

But how?

You do this by following the five step process in your marketing strategy by attracting potential clients, building trust, helping them choose the right product, presenting the product, and then closing the sale.

Step One- Marketing / prospecting:

Prospecting is the delivery of qualified visitors to your website. It can be achieved by many forms, such as, search engine marketing, pay-per-clicks, and e-mail advertising that draw people to your site.

Once they are there, it’s your responsibility to show them how your product can fill the void in the marketplace and what sets your product apart from the rest. Deliver your ‘Unique Selling Proposition’, USP.

Step two- Building trust:

Just like in a brick and mortar business where you greet a person when they walk in the door or physically help them find what they are looking for, you can build trust by doing similar things on your website by the elements that surround the design and development of your website.

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Yes, if need more web traffic, this free list building tool could be a painless way to steadily build more prospects, more web traffic, and more income.

If you are in business for the long haul and have the guts to persevere…

If you could advertise directly to to 362,797 Targeted Leads — 100% FREE! each and every week, would your business grow?

What if they were a different 362,797 leads every week… would that be better?

And what if you could do that withoug spam accusations?

What if these were people who are eager to join a profitable home based business or your multi-tier affiliate program - like yours?

That would be pretty darn good - if it’s really free, really spam, free and it really happens!

Now let’s say you’re already promoting your income opportunity somehow.

You’re paying for ads, generating search engine referrals, and otherwise out there marketing.

But not everybody joins or spends money with you right?

Some will even follow your links, insert their own affiliate code, and rob you of a commission!

Obviously they’re not very interested in help you. They’re only looking out for number 1… them!

Free Website Promotion…Why Not?
 by: Ken Crowe

Can you ever avail of free website promotion? Is that even feasible?

Of course yes! Nowadays, your Mini website can amass huge traffic in no time, thanks to free website promotion.

How does this free website promotion go anyway? What are things to be done?

1. Enlist your website.

Look for the hottest Internet directories and enlist your site there. This is the easiest and most effective free website promotion tactic. Start with this step and the rest of the good things will follow.

Just don’t forget to prep your website and make it all spruced up for a higher chance to get accepted in your directory of choice.

2. Know your forums.

One reason why forums are created is for free website promotion for everyone. Log in, post actively, let them know about your site in every post and you attract instant visitors right there.

3. Write a press release.

Release your writing prowess and start up a press release that advertises your site! This is a free website promotion tactic that you can do anytime. Type a brief paragraph or two and email it to your friends, colleagues, internet e-zines, newspapers and other media and massive traffic will come to you pronto!

Possibly the most-heard phrase in panels and meeting s of the various conferences this week: “Move the needle.” It came up a few times, and while it’s relevant to the discussion, it’s moving beyond buzz-worthy.

Are You Really Measuring for Return on Investment (ROI) with Search Engine Optimization?

Puzzling studies and reports suggest that businesses are missing out when it comes to ROI, including a whole host of metrics that should confirm or shape search engine marketing strategies.

You can’t accomplish much if you’re not even implementing SEO the right way. We’ve seen web site after web site that includes scores of individual keywords in the META keyword set (that many search engines ignore anyway). The SEO team not only used the wrong individual keywords (search phrases are better), but they didn’t bother to include keywords in the page title or description. And, of course, they didn’t think it was worth their time to focus on multiple pages? not just the homepage.

Hint: If you’re selling dinnerware, "laundry" probably shouldn’t be one of your keywords.

A WebTrends report cited in an eMarketer in 2004 showed the following ROI:

Using Complete ROI analysis 35.4%

Click-through rates only 24.2%

Conversion metrics 18.7%

Don’t measure 21.7%

Barely one third figured a thorough ROI analysis was worth the effort.

Following a self-aggrandizing press release from Nielsen//NetRatings in which the measurement firm boasted that it’s leading the Media Rating Council accreditation process, its competitor comScore has just announced that it will indeed go through with a full MRC audit. It had been in the pre-audit phase till now.

Sure, the IAB has cracked the whip on these guys to get their systems and methodologies audited, but does this really need to be a race?

It looks like Vonage, which has been embroiled in a couple patent suits, is on track to spend a heckuva lot less on online ads than the $185 million it spent in ‘06. Among the biggest online ad spenders last year, Vonage has fallen steadily from that lofty position since January. According to TNS Media Intelligence monthly data reported by ClickZ, Vonage spent about $26.2 million thus far through June, dwindling its spending as the year’s gone on.

Vonage was told in April it would be barred from acquiring new customers, as part of a U.S. District Court in Virginia patent suit decision in which Vonage was found guilty of violating Verizon’s VoIP patents. At the time the broadband phone firm was granted a temporary stay allowing it to continue to round up new customers.

Now it’s back in the news as decisions have been against the firm made this week in the Verizon case, as well as another patent suit brought by Sprint Nextel. To be brief, the earlier Verizon decision was upheld. As for the Sprint situation, Vonage was found to have infringed on six of the telco’s patents, and has to pay $69.5 million in damages and patent fees for future use of Sprint’s patents. It also has to pay Verizon for use of its patents.

Will the online advertising and marketing industry be held back by a shortage of people who possess the right mix of creative and quantitative skills? That was the assessment of some practitioners at Advertising Week in New York City.

ClickZ posed that question to Laura Thieme, president of Bizrearch, a Worthington, OH, consultancy specializing in search marketing. She recognizes challenges in finding talent, but says the industry’s growing pains can be attributed to other factors — especially technology.

The biggest obstacle? “The sheer number of [software] tools that exist,” she said in a telephone interview this week. “Considering the tools that are getting updated, the acquisitions that are occurring or the new platforms getting rolled out, quite frankly, an analytic or IT [information technology] person would find it difficult to keep up with change,” she said.

To quantity the problem, Thieme and her team identified the tools used to service the firm’s top five accounts. Guess what? For a single account, they work with as many as 27 tools.

Of the 27, about seven to 10 were productivity tools such as Excel. The rest? Web site analytics, social media tracking, HTML authoring and paid search tools.

Performic’s VP Emerging Media Cam Balzer and I were chatting at an Advertising Week lunch. When I asked what was new over at his shop, he had an interesting tidbit. Clients are allocating dollars into designated Web 2.0 budgets.

Now, plenty of marketers have “experimental” budget, money put aside specifically to experiment with new Web technologies and marketing techniques. So I asked Cam if that wasn’t perhaps what he was referring to.

Web 2.0 is different, he explained. These really are Web 2.0 budgets, dedicated to mareting on patforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, in allocations of up to $200,000 per quarter. The experimental budgets are flowing into things that are, well, experimental but not Web 2.0. Mobile, for example.