Most online businesses provides great service to generate satisfaction among their customers. As each and every customer receives satisfaction from the products or the services they get, there is a great chance that they will become a repeat customer and are hungry for more of your great information. Better yet, they will most likely recommend you to other people that could generate more business for you and your site.

As more traffic is driven to your site, you can entice many of them to subscribe to your mailing list or opt-in list. An Opt-in list is a list where website visitors agree to be sent promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and such that could keep them updated about your site or the niche of your site and in return for them sharing their email with you, you offer them something great that you have developed.   Many successful online marketers give-away their best, or at least a taste of their best work as a reward to opt-in to their list.

When using e-mail as the media of your marketing and advertisements, you eliminate the need for high costs. Email is very low cost marketing and sometimes it can even be free!  With an opt-in subscribers list, you are more confident that what you are sending out is received, viewed and read by the subscribers and not simply being deleted. They have signed up for service and have consented in receiving it.

This means that there are constant reminders to your subscribers about all your products, new products and services as well as any promotions and special deals you are having. There is also the chance that they can be forwarded to other potential customers as they tell their friends and families about you and your site.

Of course, there will be many subscribers who may unsubscribe if they feel that they are not getting what they want or expected. So be sure that they are satisfied with you the information you share with them and keep them excited to receive your newsletters and catalogs.  Try some of these tips to help you build a list of eager and hungry subscribers.

• Make your promotional materials interesting and fun.  Use a little creativity but don’t over-do it. Build around what your product or service is about. For example; if you are selling motorcycle parts, put some pictures of what is new in the cycle parts world.

• Do your research of what people are looking for, this way you stay one step ahead of them all the time and you will be their go-to person for all things new. They will be eager to receive what you are sending them because they know you always have fresh and new things to share with them.

• Write good content that can is informational but light at the same time. If your subscribers enjoy your articles, they will go to your site by clicking the links that you will be putting on your newsletter to read some more. You can provide articles that can connect to many people. Be diverse in your articles. Put something humorous, then put something informational, then put something that has both.

• Do you procrastinate because you don’t like writing? No problem, there are many professional and experienced article writers that  can do the job for you for minimal fees. They know what they are doing and can provide great content for your newsletters.  The money that you pay for your articles will be well-worth it by the many sign-ups and the potential profit from the sales that you will get.

• Create and send an E-book to your customers about anything that is related to your business or site. Use your knowledge and expertise in the field you have chosen to help other people who are similarly interested. Offer this e-book for free. You can write about anything informational and helpful to your subscribers. For example; you can do manuals and guides in so many things. This e-book could be used as a reference for many people.  Another great idea is to make a Kindle book, with so many iPads, tablets and Kindles out there now.

• Share this e-book with everyone, even other sites; just make sure that they don’t change the links in the e-book that will lead people to your site. If you want, you can even get someone to write it for you just like your articles. Your investment once again will be covered by the great marketing this will generate.

• Add e-coupons in your newsletters for special discounts on an upcoming product or service.  Put a control number in your e-coupon so that they can only be used once. When people get discounts that can be found in your newsletters, they will be hungry to receive your newsletter each month/week to see what you are offering.

If your subscribers can get benefits from your newsletters, they will be very eager and waiting to receive them.  Just be careful not to flood your mailing list with emails so that you don’t annoy your subscribers.

You’ve got your brilliant idea for a start up, you’ve got a product that you’re certain people will be falling over each other to buy, and now you just have to get out there and sell the thing. So, you just need to find yourself some of those “customers” you’ve read so much about. How do you do that then?

Working out your target audience is one of the toughest marketing jobs there is. If you know who you’re selling to, it’s fairly straight forward to work out how to market to them, but actually finding that market is a challenge. Fortunately, we’re here to get you started.

Make It A Niche Market, No, A Really Niche Market

If you ask your average start-up who they want to sell their products to, the first answer that will pop into their heads is probably “Everyone”. This… isn’t much help. You can’t please all the people all the time. Instead, try and please one person all the time. Or at least, one very narrow demographic all the time. The more specific your target audience is, the easier it will be to aim your marketing at them.

Find a narrow group of people, and work out what they need and how your product meets that need. Everything else you do to market your company is an extension of this.

Work Out Why Anyone Would Buy Your Product

This is called an Initial Value Hypothesis. Decide what it is that’s special about your product and why customers in your narrowly selected target market would want to buy from you rather than any of your competitors. A common mistake many start-ups make is to stick religiously to their business plans. Don’t- none of your customers care about your business plan. All that matters is you work out what people want, and how you can sell it to them.

Put Your Ideas To The Test

Established companies are learning more and more about their customers every day. The big companies use everything from loyalty cards to iPhone apps to work out how their customers behave and what they prefer. Sometimes this gets to the point where it’s actively creepy, such as recently when Target’s marketing department figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her dad did.

Now, as a start-up, you don’t really have access to all that Orwellian machinery, so you’re going to have to test out your ideas in much smaller arenas. Some of the ways to do this include surveys and polls.

A particularly useful one is to arrange a one on one meeting with someone in your target market, and simply talk to them. The trick to making this work is not to lead your interviewee. Ask them about problems in the area of your product. Ask what they would be looking for in a product to solve that problem. The results might surprise you.

Offering free samples to see how people respond to them

Equally, a good option is to collaborate with other businesses in your industry. It’s easy to get paranoid and insular with your “industry secrets” but sharing knowledge can actually help everyone involved.

Draw a Portrait of Your Perfect Customer

By now you should be fairly well along in your market research. You’ll have found a narrow demographic you want to sell to, worked out why they would want to buy your product, and talked to members of that demographic to get a better idea of how they think and what they’re looking for in a product. At this point you can start thinking about customer relationship management, or CRM, by creating a custom profile of your target customer, using all the information you have gathered..

Apply What You’ve Learned

Now it’s time to put what you’ve learned into action. Has what you’ve learned changed your business plan? Is there anything that needs to change about the way you present your products, how you sell them, or even the products themselves?

If you’ve gone through this whole process and not discovered anything that needs changing, then it’s possible you’ve not been doing it properly.

Barry Magennis is an SEO executive working with Haymarket Business Media. In his spare time, he writes about numerous subjects, including jobs in media. 

Looking for a great way to stay in touch with family, friends and business contacts? Want to show appreciation easily and quick? Send Out Cards is what I use!

The retail packages are:

• $9.80 Retail Subscription for 20 points which is about 10 greeting cards. This option gets you a greeting card for about a $1.
  
• The second option is a $31/month preferred customer option. It gets you a standard two-panel greeting for $.62 per card (which is wholesale cost). As a preferred customer you end up getting 20-30 cards and 4 or 5 gifts a month for $31. Postage is not included in these packages, this is just for access to the system and to design and send your own custom greeting cards and gifts. The gifts are great for realtors, mortgage lenders, car dealerships, etc. to send a Thank you card and attach a basket, or box of brownies or cookies.

Take a look at the system and give it try for a month or two and let me know if it makes you a better card sender.  You can stop at any time. 

As an Internet Marketer, I have developed audio recordings of business tips, and many training videos.  So I began to think about another way to re-purpose that content.  Such as turning them into transcripts and re-purposing them as an ebook, a seven-step series on “how to” do whatever I was discussing, or a free tips sheet for my opt-in box.

I had used a virtual assistant in the past to to listen to the audio and transcribe it for me. Which took several hours to complete and was very costly.  I needed something quick and easy (and free would be great too!).  After some research, I found VoiceBase.  This free web-based program allows you to upload files manually into VoiceBase or automatically through their API.  They support many different file types and accept files up to 750MB.  You can also record audio or video directly from your computer using your microphone and webcam and upload it to VoiceBase.

VoiceBase has a unique feature in that you can “search” your uploaded files by typing in your keywords.  Also, there is a public search feature where you can find public radio and podcasters who have content on VoiceBase.

The free version allows you to store your files for one year.  Any time during that one year period you can choose to permanently store your files for around $1 per hour of audio.  Also available for an additional cost is human transcribing, which takes approximately three days to complete.

I uploaded a couple of webinars that I had previously done.  They were 45 minutes to 1 hour in length.  Both files uploaded quickly and in less than two hours, the transcripts were complete.  I didn’t see an easy way to save a file, so I just copied and pasted it into a Word document.  The transcribed content is not usable and will have to be reviewed extensively in order for it to be re-purposed.  However, they did state that the clearer your audio is, the better the transcript will be.  So I’m not giving up on this program as a great resource.  Keeping in mind that I should speak clearly and slower, I believe the next audio that I upload will produce a much better transcript.

VoiceBase also has a free iPhone App so that you can record from your phone.  Overall, I like it and will continue to use it for now.  What program are you currently using for audio to text conversions?

I LOVE Comment Luv!  How about you?  That almost sounds like a cheer doesn’t it? 

But I do really love the plugin, CommentLuv and there is a hot new WordPress plugin coming soon! Cathy Stucker is giving away a free copy at her book marketing site, SellingBooks. Learn how you can enter and win by visiting Cathy’s CommentLuv Premium giveaway page.

If you are not familiar with this plugin, it builds backlinks, increases traffic to your blog, makes it easier for your readers to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter and others social networking sites and leaves a link for your last post on any other blog you comment on that has the plugin installed.

I highly suggest you take a look at this plugin and install it on your WordPress site.  You’ll LUV it!

Just when you think it’s safe to read your news feed on Facebook…they have changed it again.  But it has strange similarities to the original news feed of long, long ago. 

Basically, they have done away with the Most Recent tab and have combined those updates with the Top Stories.  But, so we don’t miss anything while we are away from our beloved Facebook, the  Top Stories are being highlighted that Facebook believes might be important to us.  These appear at the top of your page and are marked with a Blue corner in the upper left.

The criteria for pulling Top Stories is based on the relationship you have to the person, how many people are commenting on the post, how many “likes” it received and what kind of story it is.  If you find stories that you really don’t care to read as Top Stories, you can hover over the right side of the post and click the down arrow to remove it from your Top Stories.

So basically you might see Recent Stories, then Top Stories and more Recent Stories while viewing your News Feed.  But when you log in after being away for a while, the Top Stories should pop to the top of the News Feed.

Also, you can once again view updates based on your Friends List.  To do this, from your Home page, click “More” on the left side bar at LISTS, and select which friends list you would like to view. 

I’m happy about the news feed changes, because it makes it easier to keep up with those friends and pages that are most important to me and my business. 

What about you?  Do you like the changes?

Using traditional offline marketing techniques to market your online blog seems like it could be a daunting task, rife with frustration and needless papers and phone calls. However, by doing all of your marketing online, you leave out a huge number of potential readers. If you are blogging for fun or for money, the point is you want people to read what you write. Without readers, all of your work and fantastic writing is for nothing.

You don’t have to worry; though…integrating tried-and-true offline marketing methods with more modern techniques is not as hard as it sounds. There are 3 easy ways you can get started advertising your blog offline. Each of them is unique and helpful on its own, and they work well together. All of them are low-cost, and have proven effective time and time again.

Business Cards

One of the best ways to get the word out about your blog is with the use of good, old fashioned business cards. Keeping these handy in your wallet, glove box, and jacket pockets (don’t wash them!) will enable you to network everywhere you go. They are relatively inexpensive to print – you could even do them yourself, if you really wanted to save money. Here are 3 tips to help you with your amazing business cards:

•  Don’t print too many. Your contact information, address, job title, or logo may change. It is recommended that you print no more than 1000 cards at a time for the heavy distributor; 500 should be sufficient for the average at-home self-promoter.

• Don’t be too flashy. The goal of a business card is for people to be able to contact you at a later date. Unless you can do it tastefully, try to avoid a multitude of sparkles, glitter, graphics, and logos. Utilize the free space on both sides of the card. Remember: people will contact you and have a better chance of visiting your blog if your business cards are neat, clean, and easy to read.

• Do treat them like candy. Give them to everyone you know. Post them on community bulletin boards. Check out local businesses and schools; a lot of them have cork boards available for community and business-related information.

Fliers

Fliers can be an invaluable resource when you are thinking about reviving your blog with some updated offline marketing techniques. With virtually any option available in size, color, cost, and quantity, using and creating fliers is easier than ever. A number of popular office services companies are available to help you design a flier, or you can hire a graphic designer. Just like with business cards, you can post them everywhere. Be sure to do a little research with your city or county to make sure you are only posting fliers in appropriate areas.

Conventions and Lectures

Depending on your prime reading target, there may be conventions or lectures held in your area – or even outside of your immediate area if you are willing to travel relevant to your blog topic. Purchasing space – or getting it free – at a convention is a great way to draw potential readers to your blog. If you choose the right place, you are guaranteed to have patrons that are already interested in what you have to say. They did come to the convention, after all.

Regardless of the method you choose, remembering the many options available to you via offline marketing will be helpful in increasing your overall reader base. When you blog, you want people to read your blog. Taking advantage of some offline techniques will help to ensure people find you…even when they are away from the internet.

Jen Silva is a writer for Choosewhat.com. ChooseWhat is a company that provides product reviews and test data for business services and products such as business cards and PBX services. Their goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

Enjoy this guest post by Ben ~

Social media has become an essential part of web promotion. Not only is it effective and helpful for increasing the popularity of your business or website, but it is absolutely necessary! Proper use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook will not only help your site gain exposure, but it will act as a catalyst for making your content more prominent and even viral.

The easiest and most important step to take when stepping into the “social” scene is adding buttons to your site to help visitors share your content. In other words, make your website “shareable” because the last thing you want to do is inhibit their ability to advertise your business for you. People love to communicate and we also love to share. Social media is the Internet’s analogy for word-of-mouth advertising. Neglecting to add buttons on your site for visitors to share your content is a lot like stripping them of their voice – let them talk!

TweetMeme is a fantastic tool for making your content very shareable. It adds a simple button at the top (or bottom) of all of your posts that people can use to tweet your content with literally 2-clicks. A common trend you will notice when observing popular sites in almost every niche is the overwhelming amount of tweets in comparison to “likes” on Facebook. Tweeting is easier and faster, and in an online world where we skim almost everything we read, we need to have quick sharing options for our visitors.

A common and effective layout for making your site easy to share is to include a button at the top of every post for Twitter and/or Facebook, a set of buttons at the bottom for a few popular social sites, and also the presence of similar sharing buttons consistently displayed on your sidebar. For the sidebar, the most important inclusions are Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS Feed. You might have other sites like LinkedIn that you like to use or a series of videos on YouTube – these would be good additions for your sharing buttons.

To further emphasize the importance of properly using social media, lets cover a scenario:

1. Someone visits your site and reads an article. They really like it, but they don’t see any sharing buttons and so it may not even cross their mind to tweet it or like it, so they move on with their day.
2. This same visitor comes to your site and reads the same article. However, this time there are social sharing buttons featured prominently on the page. This visitor tweets the post and it is quickly exposed to all of this user’s followers (dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people).

And it doesn’t stop there. The people who see that tweet might tweet it too, they might look through your site and tweet another post, or they might follow you on Twitter and become exposed to all of your new tweets. Simple processes like this can quickly multiply and expand upon your daily traffic, and all of this happens simply because you have made your website shareable.

Supplement your social media strategies with SEO. Check out our FREE SEO Course or download our FREE OnlyWire Account Creator to make social bookmarking effortless.

I love friends!  I love meeting new friends and getting to know them and how I might be able to help them in some way.  I really do.  But I wouldn’t just walk up to a stranger and say, “Hey, I want to be your friend! I don’t know you or really anyone else you know personally, but you look like someone that I would want to connect with!”   Seriously!

So why do people do that online?  I get friend requests daily from people I don’t know and they NEVER indicated why they want to be connected with me.  At least a small message saying, I’m a friend of Joe’s and he thought we might be able to help each other in business.  Or something!

Many of my online friends feel the same way and basically “ignore” those requests.  If we don’t know you personally or you don’t write a small note telling us why you want to be friends, then chances are….it won’t happen.

I don’t think people really get the concept yet of Facebook.  Your personal profile (where you have friends) is intended for people you personally know and your family.  Thus the name…Personal Profile!  The Fan Page is intended to have people who you might not know personally, but have an interest in your business or the products and services you sell.  I would love to have more folks join me on my Fan Page (psst, here’s the link Online and Social Media Training)  I would never turn you way, unless you were being rude or obnoxious.

It’s just common courtesy as my friend Kathleen Gage said on my Facebook wall during a recent discussion. When you are requesting to be someone’s friend on Facebook there is a little section in the lower left corner to Add a personal message.

As Nike says, Just Do It!  Remember online social networking is first and always about building a relationship.  You can’t build a relationship with people you don’t know.

How To Determine What Kind of Online Business Suits You

Starting an online business is simultaneously simple and challenging. Working on the internet eliminates many of the problems that sink businesses, like overhead costs, employee insurance and location selection. But at the same time, it provides its own set of obstacles.