Category: Marketing

Software for Webinars

There is a lot of software to choose from when it comes to conducting webinars. Before you look at the products, write down the features you want the software you use to have, as well as how much money you can afford to spend on the technology that you choose.

* InstantTeleseminar – Using this software for your webinars is a great choice because it’s not expensive. And it has a lot of features that make marketing easier, such as automatic recordings and playbacks so you can record a webinar once and resell it over and over again. They offer a $1.00 trial for a week.

Link – http://www.instantteleseminar.com/

* GoToMeeting – This webinar software is a little more expensive but it has the ability to set up webinars easily as well as charge for attending the webinars. It offers top-notch professional features that enable you to run truly professional conferences. However, the space can be more limited without paying a lot more money.

Link – http://www.gotomeeting.com/

* Adobe Connect – With different plans up to 500 attendees, whiteboards, screen sharing, easy recording capabilities, and a relatively low price compared to other similar services, this is a winning choice for pretty much anyone who wants to do webinars.

Link – http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html

* Anymeeting – This free service offers the ability to conduct webinars without having to spend a future. You can upgrade to get more features. Their screen sharing lacks some bells and whistles and the host has to download to use it, but it is sufficient.

Link – http://www.anymeeting.com/

* ClickWebinar – This very modifiable service allows you to set up webinars that don’t look too cookie cutter. But, it’s harder to monetize this software than some of the others; however, there are always ways to work around it.

Link – http://www.clickwebinar.com/

* MegaMeeting.com – This choice is only good if you and your viewers use PCs, so it can be limiting. But it is a choice that you may want to consider when choosing software for webinars. This is a fully featured system that offers monetization tools, marketing tools and more.

Link – http://www.megameeting.com/

 

* WebinarsOnAir.com – This is software that will turn your Google Hangouts On Air into money-making webinars. They enable you to build your list, charge attendees, sell things, and even offer automatic playback so that you can run a recording as a live event. This is a really good choice if you’re looking for something simple with full-featured marketing tools.

Link – http://www.webinarsonair.com/

These various software choices come with many differing benefits and price points. Most of them have a free trial version that you can test out. The best software in the world isn’t good enough if you cannot figure out how to use it comfortably.

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What’s Included in an Online Marketing Plan?

When developing your online marketing plan, you have to take into account all your goals for it. You need to understand who your audience is, how to make them aware of you, and what their buying process is, so that you can create the best online marketing plan for them.

Here’s what an online marketing plan will consist of.

Website Management and Updates

From the start, create a website that takes into consideration all the rules of SEO. Do this from the first page created, to every page that links in, and every article, blog post or image that you include. Everything should be something that you know will advance your marketing goals.

SEO: On- and Off-Page

Learn everything you can about SEO, because getting organic traffic that you don’t directly pay for via pay per click or other types of advertisements is worth even more than paid traffic. Why? Audience members who seek you out, rather than the other way around, will be more likely to convert to paying customers. They’re going to be much more likely to buy than someone who reads and responds to an advertisement.

Link Building On and Off Your Website

Link building helps search engines, but it also helps your audience find your information in a more organized fashion. Consider your link-building strategy and create a plan of action going forward that will provide links from outside your website to your content, plus links within your website to more of your content.

Locally Optimize

One way to ensure that people find you, especially if you have a locally focused business, is to ensure that you use keywords that help local people find and discover you. For example, if you’re a local dentist you want to use the name of your location as well as the name of your business within meta descriptions, headers, titles and tags.

Press Releases

Many people dismiss press releases as offline marketing, but today with PRWeb.com you can send out press releases online, too. This will provide information for your audience in numerous ways. You can put the press release on your website, as well as send it out to those who might want to pick up the story.

Email Marketing

No online marketing plan is complete without email marketing. Email marketing is the lifeblood of your online marketing plan, and will infuse your online marketing program. With email marketing you have a way to capture leads, turn them into customers, and more.

Blogging

Everything starts with your website or blog. All the content you create, all the products you promote, and all the services you provide, live on your blog or website. Even if you have a store front, the website or blog is the central hub of your online existence.

Social Media

Using social media to promote your content and information to your audience is a fabulous way to get the word out. Plus, it’s a great way to engage and build trust with your targeted audience. You can have conversations, share interesting things you read, share the information that others share with you, and more.

Pay Per Click

Using Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and more, you can conduct pay-per-click campaigns that get great results and are a good addition to the other types of market that you do online.

Reputation Management

Use articles, eReports, white papers, posts, messages and more to boost and manage your online reputation. This is a useful aspect of online marketing that should not be ignored.

You can make an online marketing plan in a page or two, or you can create a page for each aspect with a step-by-step to-do list of what you will do to ensure that each part of your plan is realized. The worst thing you can do is proceed without a plan.

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Habits of Highly Successful Mobile Marketers

Successful mobile marketers share many characteristics with other successful marketers – such as the ability to stay ahead of their market, understanding their audience, knowing their niche inside and out, and then knowing how to impart their message onto the world in a unique way that resonates with their audience.

1. They Listen to Their Audience – No marketer worth their salt will ignore their audience. Everything they do is about the audience, from product creation, to services they choose to provide, to promotions they push out to their audience. It’s all about them, so they find ways to listen from watching via social media, to surveys, to being involved with the community.

2. They Know How to Be Authentic – Successful people in general seem to draw others to them in a way that seems almost supernatural. But, the truth is, they just know how to appear authentic. You can appear authentic too by actually being authentically you. If you’re not sure who that is yet, devote some time to self-discovery.

3. They Use Personalization – All marketing works better when it’s more personal. What’s more is that it doesn’t matter that people know that a lot of personalization is now automated. Consumers still respond better to personalization. So, the more personal you can be with your audience, the more successful you will be.

4. They Ensure Each Message Is Relevant – Don’t just send out messages to get a message sent out. This is a mistake that content-centric marketing often causes. You do want a lot of content on a regular basis, but you also want content that has a point with a relevant message.

5. They Are Always Unique – This isn’t to say you can’t use PLR or get ideas from others, but you must put your own unique and personalized touch on every bit of content that you put out to the world along with your products and services.

6. They Update Content Consistently – Sending out content on a consistent and expected basis is one of the keys to maintaining audience appeal. If that content is also relevant, speaks to the audience, and has a point, you’ll be even more compelling and successful.

7. They Make It Simple for Their Audience – Mobile devices are harder to use than a PC since mostly people are using fingers on a small keypad or more commonly a touchpad. Asking your audience to enter too much information will only cause them to stall in their purchases and consumption of your content.

8. They Pay Attention to Trends – Successful mobile marketers keep one ear to the ground at all times in order to pay specific attention to niche trends in regard to mobile marketing. They read industry news, learn all they can about mobile marketing and how it affects their niche and their audience.

9. They Are Mobile Obsessed – Instead of making mobile an afterthought, successful mobile markets are focused first on mobile and then everything else. After all, good design is good design. If it works well on mobile it will work well via PCs too.

If you want to be a highly successful mobile marketer, it’s imperative to incorporate these nine habits into your life as a mobile marketer. In fact, most of these habits can be important for any type of marketing.

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How to Use Keyword Match Types Effectively

Keyword match types essentially help a search engine determine how close the searcher must use your terms before your business shows up in the search results. This is a way for you to more closely screen the audience that will see your ad and have a chance to click through to your website. The closer you require a match, the fewer clicks you’ll get because the fewer people who will see your advertisement. However, having fewer viewers if they’re highly targeted isn’t a bad thing.

There are different types of keyword matches that you can get, such as:

* Broad Match – This is the basic keyword type that is set up automatically by default. So, if you’ve chosen the keyword phrase, “yellow wooden ducks”, when someone searches for any of those words a search could result. That means when someone searches for “yellow”, “wooden” or “ducks”, your property could appear in the search results. As you can see this isn’t really very helpful.

* Broad Match Modifier – Being able to modify the default of broad match is very helpful, because you can eliminate searches of individual words like “yellow” and “wooden” and only include searches that include either all the words or different combinations of the words so that the searcher finds what they’re looking for.

* Phrase Match – You can also choose to have your search result only appear if the searcher enters the phrase within their search. So if someone typed in any words, but also “yellow wooden ducks” then your page will show up in the search results.

* Exact Match – Of course, you can choose to have your property only show up with perfectly matched searches. So a searcher would have to type exactly as you typed it, “yellow wooden ducks” to find your property in the search results.

* Negative Match – You can also further modify the keyword match type by including negative words. These are words that you do not want used to find your property. The negative matches are words that if they use them to search will eliminate your search from the results.

* Content Match – This is when a search engine matches the search query with the content on your website. That’s why titles, tags, and ad text are important places to put keywords that people might use to find your products and/or services.

These match types are how the search engine connects keywords that you bid on to the searches conducted by your audience. Refining keyword match types can take a non-performing ad campaign and breathe new life into it without changing anything about the ad, or even really the keywords.

It’s just all about the matching structure and including negative keyword matches into the mix to help trim the ad views down to size, allowing only the most qualified candidates to see the ad. Having a well thought-out keyword marketing strategy is an important component of marketing online.

Whether you are writing keyword-rich articles or buying PPC keywords and phrases, it’s important to understand how it all works together so that you can spend your money effectively and experience a good return on investment.

It’s important to learn everything you can about using keywords effectively when buying PPC ads so that you can get the most out of your marketing dollar. As you test different methods and see success, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t work for your market and your audience over time.

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Ten Reasons to Add Webinars

Webinars should be an important part of your online marketing mix. Webinars have the ability to bring in new potential leads from all over the world, as well as help you engage with your audience in new, more personal way. If you’ve not tried having a webinar yet, maybe these ten reasons to add webinars will convince you.

1. Connect with More Customers – Just like video is shared more than text content, webinars are enjoyed on a higher level than other types of educational materials. Webinars feel more personal, even though they can actually be recorded and replayed.

2. Build Your Email List with Qualified Leads – People who will pay to attend a webinar of a certain topic are your ideal audience and will consist of highly qualified leads that want what you’re offering.

3. Establish Your Expertise – If you need a way to prove what you know, webinars are a great way to choose. Giving talks about what you know has long been a way to show authority on a subject, but doing it online is even easier than flying all over the country to do it. Both are fun and useful, but webinars offer some benefits over in-person events because you can do them from anywhere for anyone anywhere.

4. Develop New Information Products – Due to the ability to record webinars, you can use them as future information products. Not only can you sell the recording as is, you can also transcribe the recordings and turn them into eBooks.

5. The Cost to Entry Is Low – The software involved can be very expensive, but there are some great choices to use that aren’t as expensive, such as InstantTeleseminar, Adobe Connect and GoToMeeting. These vary in price and features, so check them out. There are other systems, too.

Links:

InstantTeleseminar – http://instantteleseminar.com/
Adobe Connect – http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html
GoToMeeting – http://www.gotomeeting.com/

6. Engage Audiences Easily – There are many different types of features that you can use to engage audiences, such as the ability for the audience to ask questions live during the event, and the ability to hand over the speaker controls to a guest. Not to mention the ability to screen share and watch videos together and more.

7. Add a New Stream of Revenue – Not only can you charge for webinar attendance if you want to, but you can also turn the webinar into information products as mentioned before and sell them that way. There are so many things that open up to you. For example, you can turn each good question into its own new product.

8. Easy to Repurpose – The recording ability makes webinars simple to repurpose. Turn questions into blog posts, break up videos into eCourses, put the transcript of a webinar into book form, and more. The sky is the limit; you can even make cuts into short YouTube videos.

9. Great Way to Network with Others – The webinar itself, if you add in an intermission with an open chat window, is a great way to network with others. Plus the preparation for the event, finding guests and JV partners (joint venture) is going to help you with reaching out to others.

10. It’s Not Hard to Do – Believe it or not, if you can use your online banking system, or Skype, you have the technical knowledge to use any of the webinar software mentioned. You may need some help with planning, organizing and implementation, but the technology should be straightforward to use.

Planning and hosting webinars isn’t costly, and they’re not hard to do either. You’ll gain so much more out of hosting webinars and adding webinars to your marketing mix that you’ll wonder why you did not start doing them sooner.

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What You Can Learn from Your Competitors’ Copy 

While you should not steal your competitors’ copy, it’s important to read it as often as possible. Sign up for their email lists, follow them on social media, and get reminders about new blog posts. Also follow your competitors when they post a guest article or blog post or conduct an interview. Why? You might learn something important that you can use to make your own copy work better.

1. Identify Content Marketing Gaps – When you go to your competitors’ websites, how do you feel as you read the copy? Are you confused by the navigation or does it lead you right where you want to go? What do you like about the website copy and what do you dislike? Take notes so that you can find deficiencies in your own website that can be fixed.

2. Determine Effective Content Types – By watching the amount of engagement on any article or blog post, you can see first-hand what types of content works best for your audience. Since you share an audience, you can be reasonably sure that this method will work. On their blog, notice which types of blog posts get more likes, shares and comments. If you can identify popular topics and types of content, use these in your own work.

3. Help You Find Your Voice – If you’ve identified more competitors, you can compare which type of content is more fun to read. Which one is closest to a style you’d like to write? As you read, take notes on styles that you like and those that you do not like. Is there a missing component of style that you can add to your copy to make it more interesting and feel more like part of you?

4. Push You to Do More – When you observe how your competition is motivating, engaging, and grabbing customers right out from under you, it will make you do more. You’ll produce more content, post more on social media, create more products, develop more services and just do more. Because when you see someone else doing it, you know you can do it better.

5. Teach You What Not to Do – When you read copy that is poorly written, or fails to reach its potential, you’ll be able to tell that it’s bad. When you realize your competitor has made a mistake, you’ll be able to avoid those mistakes.

6. Teach You What to Do – Sometimes your competitor will do something right. That’s great, for you too. When you see your competition delivering effective copy to customers, you see what can be accomplished. Remember that competition is never bad. Have you ever noticed that gas stations and coffee shops tend to open in pairs? There is a reason. If there is a profitable coffee shop or business on the street and you open one that’s just a little better or different across the street, you’ll be successful too.

7. Help You Find New Resources – As you read your competitors’ copy, you will be introduced to new resources that will help you in your business. You may find resources that are great, and you may find some to avoid.

8. Learn New Keywords – A really useful aspect of your competitors’ copy is the keywords that they choose to use. They may use some keywords that you didn’t think about before. You don’t have to copy their content in order to use the keywords in your copy.

You can learn a lot from your competitors’ copy. You can learn what to do and not to do, new resources, keywords and more. Keeping track of your competition is an important part of making your business better. It helps you craft better copy that gets your message across effectively.

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How Mobile Marketing Affects Paid Advertising

Mobile devices are outselling PCs by leaps and bounds. That is going to continue for 2015 and beyond. As you make plans for your advertising dollars in 2015, it’s important to take into consideration the effect mobile marketing has on paid advertising. With over two billion consumers using mobile devices, it’s time to pay close attention.

How Is Your Audience Using Mobile?

It’s important to study your audience and find out how many of them are using mobile devices and how this affects the choices you make about where to spend your ad dollars. If your audience uses mobile for search and social media while on the go, or sitting on the couch while watching TV in the evenings, you need to know so that you can place your ad dollars where they need to be placed.

Does Your Audience Use Paid Apps?

Whether or not your audience will use paid apps, and will shop through their paid apps, is a question that should be on your mind. You can create two streams of income, or waste your ad dollars if you don’t answer the question accurately. Many mobile users love to use branded apps to do their shopping and searching. You should know if your audience is counted among them.

How Social Is Your Audience?

If your audience is super social, you may want to spend your ad dollars on social networks using PPC strategically where your audience lives. Mobile and social go hand-in-hand. Most marketers believe that social drives mobile and nothing can be truer than that statement. When you realize this, you’ll spend more ad money on social ads.

When you consider these questions, you quickly realize how much mobile affects paid advertising because without mobile, social might not be as popular. Without those things, mobile wouldn’t be as useful as it has become with increased ability to read and consume content, interact with others, and even make purchases directly from mobile devices.

Your Audience Matters Most

No matter how much mobile is affecting ad dollar expenditures overall, it’s more important to look at your own audience to determine how it affects your business and your ad dollars. If your audience is highly mobile then you best be highly mobile. If they’re not, keep an eye out because more than likely they will be in future. And as the younger audience ages, they’re going to stay mobile.

Keeping aware of the trends and the growth of technology is an important aspect of doing business today. If you want to be successful with your PPC campaigns, know who your audience is, what technology they use, and where they “hang out” and you’ll be that much more successful regardless of any trend.

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How to Write Social Media Posts That People Respond To

One thing to do on social media is to write posts. Posts are what keep your social media active and your audience engaged. However, it’s imperative that you have a strategy so that you can get the most out of your social media interactions. For the most part, your social media strategy should involve building your email list or sending them to your website so that they can become customers.

* Understand Your Customers – You need to know who your target audience is so that you can recognize what type of posts will get more traction with them. For example, some audience members will be insulted by certain types of comedy. Others will respond very well to it. Know who they are so that your posts can be targeted.

* Watch Your Competition – It’s always a good idea to check out what your competition is doing in regard to social media posts. Don’t just copy what they are doing. Instead, observe whether or not the competition is getting a result or not from their actions, and note how you can do it better or differently.

* Know the Goal of the Post – What action do you want your customers to take when they read the post? Do you want them to click through to read more? Do you want them to like, follow and share? You need to be clear about what you want them to do in order to get action.

* Add a Relevant Image – People respond best to relevant images on social media. You can make memes and infographic using free software like Canva.com for your social media posts. A nice image, watermarked with a relevant quote will do wonders.

* Write a Blurb that Gets Attention – When you share a meme or a blog post or other type of post on social media write a blurb about it, and what you want your readers to do about it.

* Link to the Rest of the Story – Don’t just post most of your updates without linking to the rest of the blog post, more information about the meme, a newsletter sign up, or your website.

* Ask Your Audience to Share – Never forget to ask your audience to share your posts. You can also invite them to take memes and infographics off your website to share. Just set up a new page that lists all the watermarked images that your audience can share.

* Respond to Comments – Don’t just ignore the interaction that is happening on your social media pages. Always respond, and add comments to the discussion. Answer questions, and be kind. Even if someone is rude, don’t respond rudely. If you have to, delete the rude comment and let it go.

Writing social media posts that get a discussion going and inspire people to share and interact is an art. You’ll need to try different tactics to see what works with your particular audience. But, be sure to always have a call to action on the post so that your audience knows what to do. Remember that your goal is to get them on your email list so that you can market to them on an ongoing basis.

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Webinar To-Do List

There is a lot to do to host a successful webinar. But, if you arrange to do each thing in advance and have a cheat sheet or a to-do list to help you not forget anything, then you’ll run through it with no problem. Let this be the start of your cheat sheet.

* Choose Software – Write down the functions you want the software to have so that you can run a smooth webinar. Try out some different types of software, and then choose the software you want to use.

* Define Your Audience – Who do you want to deliver your message to? It might seem weird to choose your audience first, but doing so will make it simpler to choose the topic. If you know who you’re talking to then you can customize any topic to fit them.

* Write Out Descriptions – When you know who your audience is, it will help to write down exactly who they are down to descriptions of them as individuals. Choosing two or three specific personas is very helpful moving forward.

* Develop a Narrow Topic – Your topic should be something that solves one major problem for your audience. For example, perhaps your audience consists of home-based service providers like virtual assistants. What is one big problem that they have that you can solve? Summarize the topic and the event so that you can market it to not only attendees but also to potential JVs.

* Set a Date – Setting a date early in the planning process is essential to getting it done. If you wait too long to perfect everything, you won’t do it. Set a date, and then work your way backwards in your calendar setting everything up. The least amount of time you need to put on a successful webinar is six weeks.

* Choose a Title – Using this information, develop a working title. You can also use the working titles to tease your audience a bit. You might develop a poll to let them choose one of the titles.

* Set Your Goals for the Event – Set specific goals for your webinar, such as adding 100 targeted subscribers to your email list, or selling five new memberships to your exclusive inner circle club. Write it down so that you can look at it each time you start to develop copy.

* Create an Email Autoresponder Series – When people sign up early for the event, it’s great to have them on a list with an autoresponder series plugged in to keep them informed and excited about the coming event.

* Build a Landing Page – Using your title and the summary of your event, add on to that and create a landing page that makes people want to sign up for your event. Make it as simple as possible; don’t ask too many questions of attendees or they’ll run away and you will miss out.

* Develop Any Forms You’ll Need – Both your JVs and your attendees are going to need forms. You’ll need to use forms to collect information on everyone from both sides of the fence. You can use something like Gravity Forms or even Google Forms.

* Invite Joint Venture Partners – Once you know the focus of the event, you can invite JVs to do the event with you. Decide on the rules and the speaker responsibilities ahead of time, and then invite about four times as many as you think you need to apply to be speakers.

* Craft the Web Copy – Get to work on writing the copy for the event, or have someone do it. Even before the rest of the work is done you need to start marketing your event as soon as possible.

* Get Art Created – Find someone to create graphics for the event. Consider graphics for the sales page, for the speaker information, for attendee gifts and more. For example, wouldn’t it be useful to have a graphic to say an attendee is attending, which can easily be tweeted after they purchase their ticket?

* Prepare an Event Page – Using that information, make your event page with all the information on the speakers, the topic, and benefits of attending.

* Collect Speaker Information – As speakers turn in their information, which needs to have a strict deadline, add it to the event page.

* Send Out Press Releases – As soon as the date is set, the title chosen, and the event is scheduled, you need to send out a press release regarding your event.

* Invite Everyone – It might seem like something you’d think of, but invite everyone you know on your lists, and have the speakers invite people on their lists. Create a deadline by which to start doing that.

* Create a Bonus for Attendees – Everyone loves unannounced bonuses and opportunities. You can use these bonuses as they come in to tease your audience that has not signed up, but keep them secret from people who have signed up.

* Collect Speaker Slide Shows – You never know what can happen, so it’s a good idea to collect the speaker slides. They are also great bonus material for webinar attendees who may want to download them to follow along with a speaker.

* Practice – Have a practice run with the speakers about a week before the live event. Make it private, and just have each speaker show up, share their screens, check their volume and just take five minutes to make sure everything works.

Successful webinars are possible with the right advanced planning and with specific goals in mind. You can host webinars and add another income stream to your business fast.

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Why You Need a Marketing Plan for Your Business

A marketing plan is actually part of a business plan. It informs you how you’ll get the word out about your business to your audience. You don’t have to write a huge book about the marketing plan, but you do need to write out something to help you with marketing. Don’t move forward without a plan because it’s like shooting in the dark. With a plan you can actually plan for success instead of hope for success.

* Helps You Complete Market Research – It’s imperative that you learn about the market you’re doing business in. You need to know about all aspects of the business, the competition, and your audience.

* Helps You Determine Competition – Who your competition is, is just as important as what types of products or services they promote. It’s obviously not going to be just exactly like yours, so learning all you can about them helps you differentiate yourself and your products from theirs.

* Helps Plan Marketing Strategies – One of the most important parts of the marketing plan is your strategies that you will use to get the word out about your business. Will you use a website, blogs, content marketing, brochures, online ads, offline ads, or something else entirely? What type of results do you believe you’ll get for each of these?

* Helps You Create a Budget – When you learn more about your market and what it takes to get a customer, you can make a budget that is realistic to help you get more customers and make more money.

* Helps You Make Goals – Without knowing a lot of information about your demographic, product, service and budget, it will be hard to make goals. But while creating the marketing plan you’ll determine this information, and it will help tremendously.

* Helps You Evaluate the Plan and Results – One part of a marketing plan that is continuous, even after it’s put down in black and white, is the fact that periodically you need to evaluate where you are. What type of results are you getting, and are they what you expected? Can you change anything to make it better?

* Helps You Determine Your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – When you create a marketing plan, you are also doing research that helps you conduct what is called a SWOT analysis. This will help you get a 360 view of your business and the things that can affect your business, for good or bad.

* Helps You Make Smarter Decisions – All of this information combined will help you make a lot smarter decisions about your business. The decisions you make will save you money and make you money.

The marketing plan is one of the most important parts of your overall plan for your business. It helps you determine how you’ll get the word out about your offerings so that you can make more money and have a more successful business.

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