Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Perils of TheInternet and What You Can Do To Protect Yourself

"Spamming is not something you want to do. It will get your site shut down, your domain blacklisted, your ISP accounts closed, and cost you a lot of business" (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 222)

With the advent of the Internet and access to e-mail, many users are getting spammed. E-mail can be used to attack machines and outright destroy them. With this in mind, spammers use robots and dictionary based attacks to fill our Inbox with junk mail. Luckily, we can use filters to stop them dead in their tracks. With blocklists and content filters, we are able to ignore threats as well as malicious e-mails.

Harvesting e-mails from the visitors to a site will usually produce the most effective email lists. The only issue I have with this is that this can take years to achieve.

Secondly the volumes of spam messages on the web is so high these days that it becomes difficult for recipients of messages to tell the difference between genuine mail that they have requested to receive and spam. This greatly hinders the effectiveness of email advertising.

In conclusion, e-mail marketing is good because it allows us to personalize our outbound email that are effective opt-in email messages, distributed to targeted prospects, and will result in a higher, more positive result.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Mastering E-Mail Marketing

"Prelaunch registrations. A prelaunch registration list is another great list. You could have thousands of members ready to become active even before youur project is completed" (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 202)

With the idea of marketing lists, we can time to really go after a segmented group. We can find out who we want to market our materials towards. We can save time and money by patiently extracting our users from our database list. By having our target audience voluntarily join and register with what we present to them and believe in, we can then use it to give them desirable content. We can include them in future e-mail marketing campaigns. Really, we have a lot of options with them as long as they are active members. Once they sign up, it is then our responsibility to maintain the relationship with them.

By having their e-mail addresses, we save more. The cost to send e-mails versus other ways is really nothing. Also, we can have global reach. Borders are no obstacles in e-mail marketing. Furthermore, if we so would like it, they can be interactive. We can send them a video, we can send them an animated graphic, etc. In addition, we can do this around the clock, since the Internet is 24 hours. Our audience can read our mail any time of the day, and they can also forward it to their friends. With this in mind, e-mail marketing will also have a faster response time .

Ebay - The World's Online Marketplace

"One of the reasons eBay has been so successful is buyers essentially set the price they are willing to pay. The end result is rarely are retail prices ever reached on eBay." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 141)

One of the best advantages of eBay is that you can find anything, at any time. When only actions come to mind, most of us don't think uBid or Yahoo Auctions. We tend to thing eBay. With this in mind, we can buy anything anywhere in the world, with the convenience of having to stay at home. Not only that, but we can buy things cheap. Furthermore, their powerful search engine lets us find what we need without having to know exactly what it is we are looking for.

One of the downsides (as with anything in life) is that one is open to fraud and scammers. Some people don't leave negative feedbacks against bad sellers/buyers because of their that in turn, they will also leave the good individuals negative feedbacks.

In conclusion, eBay is a terrific place for targeting a market. As long as you are aware of the negatives and the downsides it possesses, and as long as you know how to get ahead of your competition when trying to sell/buy an item, then eBay is the best place.

Speed Selling on the Internet

"Everyone is obsessed with having a great Web site. They spend countless hours and thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars to come up with cool, slick graphics that dazzle the eye and boggle the mind." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 130)

There are better reasons to have a Web site than to just be in. To just have one because you can. Better reasons to have a web site is to be able to reach a larger market. Large corporations have advertising budgets that are difficult to keep up with. However, a personal site can reach the ever-growing market of internet-connected customers. Even if a business is limited to a geographic area, there are still more prospects there than one can reach in any other way.

A second reason would be to attract new prospects, for example, by providing something free (samples, newsletters, or marketing gifts) which will attract prospects to the site. Once there, they can learn more about the company or individual and if interested, they can take the next step to becoming a member.

A third reason would be to keep up with the competition! If my competitors are online and I'm not, what does that say about my business? More and more, everyone we meet will expect us to have a website. If they don't find it, they will find the competition's.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Building Youru Business Using Audio, Web, and Video Conferencing

"Using cutting-edge technology, you can reach out to your markets, bringing your products and services right ot the consumer's computer desktop. This audiovisual collaboration is delivered easily and effortlessly through the Web." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 120-121)

It is no surprise that as soon as streaming media technology was developed, people wanted to broadcast events on the Internet. While there are some arguments on what webcast means, most people typically refer to webcasting or cybercasting as a live stream on the Internet.

Webcasts can include audio, video, and other data types such as PowerPoint slides, animation, or whiteboard-type applications and are typically referred to as an interactive webcasts when such components exist.

Also, many webcasts include some form of communication between the audience and the talent. This is one advantage that webcasting has over traditional forms of broadcast.

There are a number of other benefits as well: digital data stream. It's asynchronous. There is bandwidth asymmetry. There will be a downstream backbone. It can be high speed (up to 20 Mbps if money allows). It's universally accessible and not limited by geography (it can be local or international.)It has unlimited spectrum (it is not currently regulated by any governmental agency and does not require a license.) It is low cost (webcasting does not require a large amount in infrastructure) and it can be targeted (it can be cost-effective for smaller audiences.)

How To Automate Your Online Marketing

"Testing and tracking bring you extremely valuable data to measure and improve your online effectiveness." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 114)

Google has a wonderful tool for web developers. It is called Google Analytics. It is the free successor to the previously commercial Urchin Analytics software. This online tool is constantly being updated and improved, and is a must-have resource for anyone's search marketing campaign. It will show you valuable data about your visitors that you can use in combination with Google Sitemap, another must-have arsenal, along with other Google services...

Google Analytics allows the developer to view statistics on users visiting the web site. Such what is being click most often on the web site, where the users are coming from, what king of web browsers they are using, what kind of computer and connection they are using, time frame they stay on a particular page, their arrival source, etc.

Furthermore, one can know whether the visitor rate is going up or down by the conversion summary. We can also find the top five sources to the site and top five keyword if we use adwords. We can know which article's popularity is increasing and which is decreasing with the content summary.

This allows us to better adjust the page and improve it. Furthermore, this will allow us to reduce the bounce rate.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Traffic Conversion Secrets

"The most important point is to focus on principles, not tactics. Principles are enduring. Tactics can become obsolete overnight. Anytime someone teaches you a tactic, ask yourself, What is the principle behind this tactic? What is fueling this tactic to work?" (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, Meyerson, 103)

Mitch Meyerson gave us a lot of insight in how conversion works. Most importantly, he shows us how to use the principles he as learn. They are very basic, but obviously play an important role. The examples of the geniuses at McDonald University with there "Would you like to add fries with that?" paints a vivid image on what it takes to bundle users. From that example, the corporation had a net profit of $35 million the following year, simply by using this tactic. Furthermore, I can see how using the other principle drivers is beneficial. For example, the notion of engaging your target audience by giving them a free 15 day trial of a piece of software is smart. It's really not that long, but long enough to win them over. By engaging my audience through clicking from page to page, I am getting them used to feeling comfortable with the content that is on my website. The only issue that I have had with this is, sometimes people forget which day they are on and they end up getting charged $77. Maybe that person didn't really enjoy the Video Professor CD, but still got charged with the price tag.