In this short intro course to marketing I will show you many online and offline methods of marketing a business. This is an outline of the knowledge I personally spent a great amount of money and time acquiring. There will be both paid and free marketing ideas shown, as well as online and offline methods. At no point will I ever tell you there is one magical way of marketing that works best. This would be a complete lie and I am not trying to sell one of those disgraceful ebooks that are full of them. I am a professional marketing executive and the information I have to share is one that I normally only share with my fellow business colleagues and the reps in my team of network marketers. With that said lets get to the good stuff.
ONLINE MARKETING
I am sure you are familiar with the term online marketing or Internet marketing. This has been one of the most explosive forms of marketing ever in the history of marketing. But if you have no knowledge of what to do you are quite literally sheep amongst wolves. Here are a few ways to market online that will allow you to become the wolf.
PERMISSION MARKETING: Free
You may know this more as email marketing or its new name Direct Messaging. Email marketing was once the most cost effective way to market online. This was true until auto responders destroyed the great way of marketing by flooding the email world with spam. I know all the laws pertaining to the CAN-SPAM ACT OF 2003 in great depth if you wish to know them. This act by congress made email marketing harder for marketers to promote their product using this method. It was not until the last few years most had thought permission marketing was dead. Most no longer even know what permission marketing means when the term is spoken. What changed in the last few years is that 100's of millions of people have started to flood the internet and have joined social websites. It's also referred to as web2.0. Social websites like facebook, twitter, myspace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Friendfeed, Digg, and countless others have given permission marketing new lifeblood. The heavy hitters in this industry have known this for years now and have used connect, prospect, & follow-up method on these sites to make a killing in this industry.
The CAN-SPAM ACT OF 2003 states that you must first make a connection request with someone before you try to sell them to your business. So what these new social websites have given us marketing experts is the opportunity to make a connection with hundreds of millions of people from all over the world by simply clicking on a request friend/connection/add button. Once the person approves your connection request you can now introduce yourself and your current promotion in a professional and polite manner. This is where you will spend most of your time in permission marketing. Studying which messages yield a higher click through rate will allow you to increase your conversions. GDI gives you a hit log in your member's area that allows you to see when people are visiting your website and where they originated from. This basic tracking would normally cost about an average of $50 to $100 a year. GDI includes it in your membership at no extra charge and the heavy hitters know how critical this tool is.
The first thing you need to do is designate a notebook with sections for each of the social websites you will join. Then make sure you register with the same email account on each. This will allow you to check one email account and record on paper each person who accepts your connection request in their designated sections. Facebook under facebook friends. Twitter under twitter followers. Be careful when creating connections with people on these websites as a couple of these websites have certain guidelines to follow and limitations in place (Facebook for example has limits as to how many messages you can send in an hour and a day) Once you have recorded your new prospects/FREE leads you can now contact them about yourself and your product. I would open a file on your computer that you can copy & paste quickly from to help increase how many people you can contact in a day. HINT: Always include the name of the person you are contacting in both the subject and start of the message. This will increase your click through rate 100 fold. I would only use one message per every interval of a 100 people you contact. This will help you determine which messages yield higher click through rates, which in the end is the name of the game. Get as many people to your website as possible. If your click through rate is lower than 10% I would suggest working on your message until you see a higher click through rate. Again this can be seen by using the tracking provided in your membership area under hit logs. Once you have contacted the new prospect make note by either checking, crossing off, highlighting, or what ever method you wish to use. One method will be for initial contact and one will be for follow ups. In general I would give someone about 2-3 days before sending a follow up message. You will also want to study the effectiveness of your follow up message as well. HINT: Use a different website link in this message like the Freedom.ws/yourusername. This will give the prospect a different website to check out and possibly more information they may have been looking for.
This concludes the permission marketing short introduction and should give you something to start with. For questions please contact me at web20expert@marketingexpert.ws.
There are software packages that you can pick up at an office store or online that will track this for you, but I would suggest using a $6 notebook instead of a much more expensive software utility. A quick note, most heavy hitters will use Permission Marketing to generate and contact hundreds of new prospects every week. So contacting a few people a day is the old school way and quite frankly never works. This is marketing hence the term network marketing.
WEB DIRECTORIES: Free to low cost
Live webs directories are what determines your popularity on the internet and as a direct result your Alexa ranking. Having your link listed on as many live directories as possible will boost your popularity ranking with Google, Yahoo, and many other top search engines. Now this can be done a couple different ways. One way is to post as many blogs/messages as possible in a given day to as many forums and blogs as possible with your link included in your message. This will help your link get picked up the natural way by the search engine robots. Now this can be done for free but is very time consuming as well. Another way is to submit your link to each directory individually. This can also be done for free but will take you a huge amount of time. The final and usually most time & cost effective way is to submit your link to a web directory submission service provider. Here is a link to one that is highly effective and provides many affordable packages to choose from. www.UnlimitedTraffic.net I use this service when providing marketing for my business clients as well. In just a couple months after submitting your website.ws/yourusername link you will start to see a very large flow of traffic on autopilot.
You will usually have to provide a few topics like Site Title, Site Description, Keywords, and possibly a category as well. Here is a suggestion to use for this information. Site Title> Income For Life. Site Description> Official website.ws registry for all .ws website domain names. Incredible income opportunity. Keywords>website.ws,www.website.ws,website.ws domain,website hosting,businessopportunity,income opportunity,income for life. Category> BusinessOpportunity
This completes the web directory section. You can purchase a larger directory submission package later if you wish. Some even purchase a new package every month or so. FYI. Do not purchase more than one package per month as some live directories may ban you from their directory if they receive numerous requests per month with the same link.
BANNERS:Free to low cost
I believe most of us know what a banner is. On the Internet it is an advertisement that is usually created and placed using html code. GDI offers free banners for us to place on any website we may already own that would send someone to our affiliate business website when someone clicks on the banner. I have found this to be quite useful as I get a few prospects a day through these links and the GDI system stores and does the following up for us. If you don't already own a website, don't worry this is not one of the top ways of growing your team. A one-on-one conversation will always be best. For those of you who do own your own website, there are many other banner makers out there who create very low cost and attractive banners as well. I can give you some links if you are interested in checking them out for yourself. I find that the banners GDI has for us are pretty nice though. Plus GDI has already paid for them!
RECIPROCAL LINKING:Usually costs time not money
The reason I say this costs time and not money is mainly due to the fact that although someone offering to put your link on their website can usually be done for free. It is the time you may have or will have spent getting to know a business associate who would be willing to cross promote with your business that can be very costly. Reciprocal linking is just as it sounds, you put someone else's link (sometimes as a banner) on your website and they return the favor. This is also referred to as "Trading Links".
PAY-PER-CLICK CAMPAIGNS:Low to very high cost
Finally, we come to the dreaded PPC Campaigns. These can cause even the most well educated marketers to pull their hair out fighting to get their cost per click down or their CTR (Click through rate) up. In the end we must remind ourselves it is about getting as many people to our website as possible for as cheap as possible. So I always say to only focus on CPC (Cost per click) and getting it as low as possible while bringing in targeted traffic. Getting your CPC down while still generating targeted visitors to your website can be quite the annoying and very time consuming task. For those of you who have no prior PPC campaign experience or education in this field, I would suggest having an outside source make a campaign for you. Here is a link to another company I use when creating quick marketing campaigns for clients. www.wpromote.com I would suggest their QuickList packages as they are very productive and fast working. There are also many package prices as well. If you want to learn how to effectively create your own campaign this is something I can teach you at a later time. This will take some serious commitment and would require a great deal of time. Something I could not include in just a short educational piece such as this. I would suggest using all the other resources first and start generating an income first before even worrying about PPC Campaigns.
This completes the Online Marketing Section
OFFLINE MARKETING
Offline marketing is a very broad term for many different marketing strategies that do not have anything to do with the Internet. This can include things as simple as flyers/DVDs/business cards, Stickers on your car, newspaper ads, sponsor programs, or home presentations. Another popular term used commonly in offline marketing is word-of-mouth advertising. As a common practice I usually try to develop success online first before taking the campaign offline. The main reason for this is that the number one question most people ask today is "How is it working for you"? There are many ways to tip-toe around the answer to this painful question when you are starting out. But it is usually much better when you can say to someone's face "It's going awesome, I can not believe I have over 1,700 people in my team and are making more money every month w/out having to do anything if I don't want to". The power of being able to say this with confidence and proof is unbelievable. All you have to do is promote your business online first. Follow the steps as I have shown you and put in the time and commitment, then your offline marketing will fly!
PROMOTIONAL ITEMS:Low to high cost
Promotional items can include anything from a business card to a flyer or a DVD. The DVDs GDI offers are sold at cost and are actually quite nicely done as are the business cards they offer through a partner site with Vistaprint. These items do have an initial upfront investment but are great offline marketing tools. A relatively low cost alternative promotional product is the flyers they offer as well. This will only cost you the amount in paper and ink usage. This can add up very quickly in volume though. If you decide to print out colored flyers in volume I would suggest going down to your local copier center and having them copy it for you. In the long run this is usually much cheaper than the amount you would spend on the printer paper & ink. **Always remember to get something in return when passing out promotional items. These items cost you money and you at least want to be able to follow up with someone to see what they thought. So try to get an email address or phone number in return. Be polite and straight forward and you should have no problem getting at least an email address.
STICKERS OR BANNERS:Medium to high cost
Stickers to put on your car are excellent ways to promote your business. Wherever you go people will see your business. If it is tastefully done it will do the work for you by pulling leads/prospects to you. This can cost some decent money to do if done right. Banners or billboards on businesses are another way to promote as well. These are usually even more expensive and I would definitely not suggest them until you have the revenue coming in to pay for them.
NEWSPAPER ADS: Medium to high cost
Placing an ad in your local newspapers under business opportunities is always a great way to generate leads. This can ad up quick in the expenses column, so I would also wait until revenues are being generated to cover it. I would ask the newspaper what promotions they are currently offering new advertisers as well. Sometimes you can get sweet first time deals!
SPONSOR PROGRAMS: Medium to high cost
The easiest way to explain sponsor program advertising is to take you back to little league baseball or another organized children's program. These programs are usually always looking for sponsors and this is an excellent way of promoting a business while helping out today's youth. This will generate a vast amount of positive atmosphere for your business. The one slight drawback to this is that it can be very costly at times and the immediate return is slow.
HOME PRESENTATIONS:Low to medium cost
In general a home presentation is one of the most effective offline marketing tool any network marketer has at his/her disposal. The conversion rates are very high with this form of marketing. This is why you see so many businesses using home presentations today. Almost everyone knows someone who has a Tupperware, Pampered Chef, Adult Party, etc. The DVD that GDI offers at cost is a great short video to play to a group of guests who you invite over for a social gathering or cookout. Make the presentation short and only part of the reason people are coming over. Make the main reason be to have a good time meeting new people while enjoying some beverages and food. Close the presentation by giving people a copy of the DVD for them to keep and give them your contact info. This is the one and only time you would not ask for anything in return for obvious reasons. They have seen the video presentation and have your contact info. If they don't sign up on the spot they will contact you later. Especially seeing how it is free to try and only $10 a month after. This is much cheaper than the other home presentation offers floating around.
This completes the Offline Marketing Section
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How to become a Marketing Expert 101*
*All statements made in "How to become a Marketing Expert 101" were made by Clifford J Covill AKA Global Marketing Expert and CNA Global Enterprises, LLC. These statements were for entertaining purposes only and in no way are Clifford J Covill or CNA Global Enterprises, LLC to be held responsible for any damages to one's person or business for utilizing such information in their business practices. Statements in "How to become a Marketing Expert 101" are made by Clifford J Covill and CNA Global Enterprises, LLC and in no way represent any statement on behalf of the following companies; facebook, twitter, myspace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Friendfeed, Digg, GDI, Vistaprint, Tupperware, Pampered Chef, unlimtedtraffic.net, or Wpromote, Inc.
