Above And Beyond Promotion

Posts Tagged ‘success’

4 Steps to Unbeatable Advertising

Word Count:
441

Summary:
It’s difficult to reach your buisness goals if you don’t have the right materials and/or the information to help your buisness reach the success it’s capable of. These four competitive marketing strategies are needed to produce an extremely successful buisness.

Keywords:
advertising, marketing, publicity

Article Body:
1. Negotiate
Have you noticed that some people seem to always get the best deals? Yeah, you pay full price and think you did OK until they show up with the same thing, only they paid several hundred dollars less. It really get your goat! How do they do it? They’re not afraid to ask for an extra discount.

Yep, don’t sell yourself short because you didn’t ASK the next time your advertising rep makes an appearance! Even if you’re already getting a discount, ask for a bigger one. You have not…because you ask not.

2. Trim
Bigger is always better…or is it? When it comes to advertising, don’t be surprised if some of your short ads meet with more success than larger more expensive ads. Trimming down on the size and cost of advertising doesn’t mean you’ll be trimming the results!

3. Exploit the Freebies
What’s the difference between advertising and publicity? …who’s doing the talking. Yeah, when you sell yourself, it’s advertising. When someone else is selling you, it’s publicity…and it generates credibility and interest that you don’t want to miss out on.

Think about the different ways you can get your business in the spotlight. Do you have some news? write a press release? Write some “how to” articles with a short byline at the end and release them to ezines, magazines, newspapers, and other publishers. Why not promote the product of a non-competitor in return for them promoting yours…think of the totally different market they affect!

Yep, there are a lot of ways out there to get free advertisement that will benefit your business. Of course you won’t be able to rely solely on the freebies, but hey, you can get a little extra for nothing!

4. Improve Your Offer
Is your deal too good to pass up? If not, you need to improve it. Hey, I’m not talking about cutting prices even more…you’ve still got to make a profit. You can make the deal sweeter just by increasing the readers knowledge of the value of the product, or adding bonuses that are perceived as valuable, but cost you little.

Motivate buyers with expirations. Yeah, an open ended offer encourages procrastination…which leads …yep, nowhere. When the customer knows he has until Saturday to purchase an item he’ll pay more for on Sunday, he’ll make it a priority to head for your shop.

Advertising doesn’t have to wipe out your bank account to be effective. When you learn to negotiate, know when smaller ads are as effective as large ads, ask for discounts, and create an irresistible offer, you’re on your way to skyrocketing profit margins!

Site Promotion Tools ? Twisting The Cube

Word Count:
513

Summary:
If you’re old enough, think back two or three decades. Everyone owned one of these and you wanted one even if you deny it today. You could just imagine yourself twisting and turning the item trying to unravel its mysteries. It was both mind numbing and time consuming, but always left you with the urge to come back and try it again.

Some would get frustrated with the square shaped toy and simply remove the stickers and place them where they wanted. The Rubik’s Cube was a ph…

Keywords:
marketing,internet marketing,site promotion

Article Body:
If you’re old enough, think back two or three decades. Everyone owned one of these and you wanted one even if you deny it today. You could just imagine yourself twisting and turning the item trying to unravel its mysteries. It was both mind numbing and time consuming, but always left you with the urge to come back and try it again.

Some would get frustrated with the square shaped toy and simply remove the stickers and place them where they wanted. The Rubik’s Cube was a phenomenon that captured the world’s attention. Children and adults spent hours on this low cost entertainment. It became a part of a pop culture phenomenon.

I would wager that many of you still have a Rubik’s cube somewhere in your belongings, perhaps in a box in storage or maybe sitting on the desk in your office. Maybe your cube even sports stickers that curl on the end from too many ‘replacements’.

Site promotion tools may be described as the Rubik’s Cube of online marketing. Most of the tools you can use to promote your site may not cost much, but like the Rubik’s Cube may take some time to learn.

Site promotion tools can seem like a six-sided cube with multiplied thousands of possible combinations that could lead to the successful completion of your promotional endeavors.

Site promotion can seem a bit intimidating because it appears complicated. Sometimes you have to be willing to settle for small victories like three greens in a row or better yet one side of the cube that is all the same color.

However, once this victory is achieved you will want to keep working the combinations to find an even greater level of success in your business. Even the Rubik’s Cube had manuals available that could help the serious Cube student learn how to find the right combination for success.

As a cyber store owner your online visitor will not see your proverbial site promotion cube, they are simply drawn to the success you’ve been able to achieve as you twist, turn and think about what site promotion tools will help you best achieve your objectives.

Perhaps this is why when it comes to site promotion there have been so many different success stories and none of them take the exact same path to success. They simply twisted the site promotion cube until they found a combination that worked for their business.

I suppose the owner of the site promotion cube could leave it fully intact with no twisting and turning, but the game doesn’t actually begin until that first twist is taken ? then there is no looking back.

As a business owner you want your site to succeed and you can’t do that if you can’t generate traffic to your site. To get to this place of success you must work toward marketing and site promotion strategies.

So if that site promotion cube has been sitting on your desk gathering dust perhaps it’s time to do the twist.

Most business owners do not explore new marketing strategies until they experience a sharp decline in their revenue. Avertising campaigns are not evergreen. They evolve and grow, improve and degenerate. Most work at home, or small business owners shell out a substantial amount of money for a good ad campaign and then let it run dry.

The first strategy for success is found in the way you view the advertising campaign’s purpose. A good advertising campaign needs to do three things. First, it needs to collect data on the market. Who is buying. What is hot, and what is not.

Second, it needs to collect vital information about the people who make a purchase from your website. This can be compiled into a profile that helps you determine how to best reach your target market. It is a market research tool that helps determine what types of advertising works, at what times of the year.

Third, it should ‘brand’ your name and logo. A successful advertising campaign will imprint the company name and logo onto people’s subconscious. This increase their ‘decision to buy’ response when they visit the website

For example, online shopping increases dramatically just before Christmas, but only if the payment gateway is fast and easy to use. However, if the user must leave the website to use the payment gateway, like paypal.com uses, then the statistics do not change. However, the payment gateway does not effect sales in the summer.

You’ll notice that no aspect of an advertising campaign is to sell the product ? that is your website’s job. A successful marketing campaign manager never measure’s an advertising campaign’s success based on sales.

Large corporations will tell you that a successful advertising campaign may run for months before the results appear on the income statement.

The advertising campaign should be reviewed often, and compared to new methods, in the hunt for new ‘hot markets.’ However, hot markets burn out very quickly. The whirlwind of change that continuously sweeps through the marketplace is a powerful balancer. It gives small businesses an edge over the elephants that move slow and react to change in months, not weeks.

This is true, but there needs to be balance. Always keep 80% of the marketing budget in the tried and true marketing methods ? even if they do not offer the big rewards. The other 20% of the marketing budget is free for exploration of new advertising mediums. Don’t discount anything. Look at the fortunes made when youtube.com and myspace.com skyrocketed to fame. For a few months, advertisers were raking in millions.

It is also important to keep a finger on the pulse of the population. There is a time to brand your company, and a time to break away from the pack and create a new image for yourself like Calvin Cline did with their underwear commercials.

The important thing to remember is to focus. Calvin Cline didn’t try to sell underwear to all age groups, they focused on a narrow niche. Work at home and small business owners need to learn this lesson ? niche marketing is the secret to making millions.

The potential is expansive. Clever competition and new technology should be seen as marketing tools, not threats. Staying on the cutting edge is all about innovation and creativity. Money is no longer the #1 element to success. Many small businesses are becoming international on small budgets.