Monday, June 23, 2008

Marketing Tips to Trump Your Competition

Business owners all over the nation are feeling the pinch from new small businesses cropping up in every niche imaginable. New businesses offline and online are starting to crowd markets that previously were dominated by only a few niche businesses. And, due to the Internet, consumers can buy anything they want from the business of their choice from the comfort of their homes. Location doesn’t hinder buying practices any longer.

To make sure you don’t lose customers in the crowded business market, try to employ these tips into your marketing plan:

1. Know your competition. You need to understand as much as possible about your competition – what products do they sell? Who is their marketing targets? If their targets are the same as yours, you need to know so that you can be sure to offer incentives to your target market to shop with you instead of your competition. This information can help you directly: let’s say a brochure printing company offers many types of brochure printing services that their competitor doesn’t – the brochure printing company needs to bring that fact out in the open and spell it out for potential customers. If one company can print full color brochures and the other one can’t, that’s a distinct advantage that customers need to know about and it only comes from knowing the competition.

Also, iIf you find that your competition offers products or services that are selling well, you may want to take a look at your offerings to see if you can expand your product line to include similar products to gain some market share.

2. Try a new target market. If you feel you’ve reached everyone in your target market, then you may need to go after a new target to expand your business. You could extend your product line to include more people that might want your products or you could offer variations of your product that will garner sales from an entirely new set of customers. If you target a new market, you’ll need to come up with some different marketing materials – full color brochures that work for one group may not work for another. A television commercial that appeals to one group, like teens, won’t have the same effect if you turn your sights onto an adult niche. Be sure to alter your marketing campaign accordingly.

3. Mix up your sales techniques. If you’re currently selling only through your brick-and-mortar store, adding another sales technique, such as catalogs or on the Internet, can increase your sales. By giving your customers more choices to reach you, it’ll be easier for them to spend money with you rather than your competition.

4. Don’t only use discounts. Although offering discounts is one of the more widely-used marketing tactics, that doesn’t necessarily make it the best one. If you and your competition offer the same product or service, and you discount yours, you could end up looking cheap and customers will get suspicious. People might wonder what’s wrong with your company that makes you have to offer a discount. So instead of going the discount route, offer something with more value – like one-on-one time with a consultant.

5. Get customer feedback. You may think you know what your customers want, but the definition of what they want can change in an instant. Make sure that you keep up with their changing tastes and trends by asking them – either directly when they’re in your store or through surveys. You can post a survey on your Web site, email surveys or send them through the postal mail. If you use brochure printing as a marketing tactic, include a link to the survey on your Web site. When you solicit this feedback, be sure to include an incentive, like a free or discounted item to make it worth your customers’ time to give you this important feedback.
For More visit http://www.printplace.com/printing/full-color-brochure-printing.aspx,

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Managing and Investing Your Time Well With Home Based Business

Laying the foundation for a successful business involves two key aspects: time management and market research. If you can work efficiently at home and find the right niche with considerable profit potential, you are very likely to come out ahead in your home-based venture.

Getting your home business up and running will require a larger investment of time at the beginning, but the need to organize your work time effectively will never end. Discover the secrets to home-based business success so that you can enjoy what you do and prosper.

Practical Considerations for Working at Home

1) Have a separate office. You must distinguish when and where you work from the rest of your life at home. Your productivity depends on it. Use a calendar and track your work time to keep yourself focused on your tasks and goals.

2) Minimize the distractions of modernity. You will accomplish far more if you do not allow phone calls and other interruptions unrelated to your business to intrude on your work time.

Researching the Market - A Worthwhile Investment

Merely being a good time manager will not guarantee success, especially if you don't choose the ideal business before you start working. Finding a winning niche will yield big payoffs once your business is up and running. So make the investment before you begin to make sure you will be directing your efforts in a lucrative direction.

If you can discover a segment of the market that has a need or problem you can uniquely address, you may have a gem of a niche that is just waiting to jump on your offer. Before you move ahead with your idea though, take time to research the following:

- Short term and long term demand: Is there a current market for what you offer? Will your product or service continue to sell to the same group of people and get you valuable repeat business or will you be limited one-time purchases?

- Competition: Who else might be offering the same thing? If you have direct competition, you will need to examine those companies thoroughly and find ways to surpass them. You need to win over their customers in addition to drawing and keeping your own.

- Prospects: Will your product bring in paying customers? Make sure the same thing is not already available online for free. Your offerings should be unique, valuable and attractive.

A huge percentage of home based businesses never get off the ground because of poor planning and follow through. You can avoid failure when you discover and implement these secrets to home-based business success. By structuring your home environment to allow you to work effectively and researching the market to choose the best business niche, you stand a better than average chance of being counted among the success stories in home based business. For more http://secretsinmlm.com/

Monday, June 9, 2008

How To Buy Backlinks To Improve Your Rankings

Finding the best deals is one of the best ways to get rich. That alone should be enough to motivate you to make a bit of research.

You can start by using search engines and forums. Forums related to making money online, that have sections where to buy, trade or swap links are the ones you should look for. The more popular the forum the better.

Here is what to look for when buying links.

Side wide links are not as much powerful as they seem. A site wide link means you get a link from all the pages, or many pages within the same website. For example ten thousand backlinks from a website which has ten thousand pages.

The thing is that Google does not count a lot of backlinks from the same site. They will not count as ten thousand backlinks for sure. But obviously you still get some value.

More deals you can find include, article submission, directory submission or links from a network of blogs. You cannot buy five different directory submission services, because probably they will submit to the same sites. For directory submissions find out the best deal, take your time on proper research. Usually a deal where you get a thousand directory submissions is good.

Article submission again you need to make sure you are not buying services where you get submissions to the same directories. You need to ask for a list or sample of the directories.

Once again, a deal where they submit to a thousand article directories is great. It is not suggested to keep researching for a better deal, because it will be very hard if you are not very lucky.

Remember buying links can also mean a lot of links fast pointing to your website. It is not bad at all, however you need to make sure you use different anchor texts. Create some variations of your main keyword and use all of them. Some six or eight variations is probably enough.

Variations means simple pick up your keyword like for example blue cars then create new keywords out of it, but always use your main keyword.

We get blue cars for sale, cheap blue cars, low cost blue cars, blue cars cheap and so on. But you want to use your main keyword almost all of the time. Do not take this too seriously, just make sure you change it sometimes.

Another important thing to look for when buying links on a network of blogs is that the blogs are not on the same Ip address. It does not matter if they have no pagerank, but make also sure the blogs are indexed at least. A network of blogs is simple a big list of blogs.

Certain deals consist of purchasing links from high pagerank websites, but these usually are more expensive. You should not take these deals if your budget is limited. Buying a lot of links but from pagerank zero or low pagerank websites is still great. Always make sure the websites are at least indexed.

I mentioned the term deals in this article simple because the most popular services charge a monthly fee for just one link. However if your budget is limited, you need to look for deals, which exist. For more visit http://www.outranksmart.com/Affiliates

Thursday, June 5, 2008

The 4 Reasons You Won't Succeed In Network Marketing

Before you read this article know that it's not meant to discourage. The point of this article is to educate you on the main pitfalls of the beginning network marketer. Once you know those pitfalls you can better learn how to avoid them. Education is the one thing that will set you apart from the struggling new home business owner.

To start, the first main pitfall of new network marketers is lack of action. Now lets make the distinction between the two types of action. The first type is what I see most new Networkers do is what I call busy action.

This type of action kills new home business owners. This is the type of action where you can find 14 different things to do other than build your business.

You know exactly what I'm talking about, this is what is termed "getting ready to get ready." I suffered from this for about three years and I try to help others break away from busy work.

The second type of action is revenue producing action. This type of action is how you make your money, mainly talking to prospects and getting your advertising out there.

Well now that we're talking about advertising that leads me to my second downfall. The second downfall is when network marketers have a severe lack of marketing dollars. If you're not investing in your business then you're obviously not taking it seriously anyways. This is what Jeffrey Combs refers to as a "hobby" not a business.

If you want a hobby income then treat your business like a hobby. If you want a full time income that you can quit your job with then treat it like a business. So a marketing budget for every month is essential.

The third downfall is a general lack of people or prospects to talk to. If you aren't in daily contact with people you aren't being productive. Having a lack of serious prospects will kill your business fast. On the other hand, having an abundance of prospects will put you into a totally different mindset. This will put you into a prosperity mindset and will really explode your business.

The last downfall of new home business owners is underdeveloped skills. You MUST learn new skills if you want to be successful in this industry. New skills are essential to your advancement not only in this industry, but as a leader. Once you start adding value to yourself you become more attractive in the prospects eyes. When prospects actually think they can learn something from you then they will want to join you.

I suggest you start getting yourself educated and learn new skills. This will not only help your business, but it will also help your confidence. In the end the skills you have will decide your fate, so start adding value to yourself today. For more visit http://myinternetbusinessreview.org/
http://myabunza.org/

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Web Design and SEO Tips for the Newcomer

Find your Keywords!

Keywords – the words that people will use to find your website. Choosing the right keyword and being consistent with it is vital to your websites success in the search engines.

There are many tools on the market to help you make the right keyword decision. Tools such as Wordtracker will highlight keyword opportunities. We are looking for popular keywords in terms of expected traffic delivery but have a low competition score from other competing sites. This score can be called KEI.

KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index is a measure of performance. KEI is a ratio of business against competitiveness. The lower the KEI number the harder to get results in the search engine results pages.

As a general rule avoid any keyword with a KEI of under 0.1 as this will be very difficult to target and you could be wasting your efforts.

Go for longer, perhaps 3 word keyword phrases that carry good traffic. The benefits being that they are usually easier to target and provide better, more qualified traffic. Try to avoid broad, non specific terms.

Competitors to that keyword?

Find out how many backlinks your competitor sites have - there are many to choose from, just do a search for backlinks tool. They all give varying results but don't get distracted by that, just find a tool and use that in all cases, this will ensure that the results you get are at least relative.

No1 competitor HTML

Have a good look at the top two or three websites HTML for that keyword. Have they done anything that you can improve upon? usually be looking closely at three different sites you can arrive at a best method to use for your site. Ensure that title, heading and other tags include your keywords - remember to be consistent as mentioned earlier.

Improve your HTML

Aim to write valid HTML code. The search engine robots prefer clean code and a valid site will usually guarantee that all of your site will get crawled. Always take the time to write original content too - avoid the copy / paste syndrome that plagues many sites. The search engines thrive on original content, make sure that they notice yours.

Search engines are always looking out for duplicate content and will choose not to display your pages for a given search if it thinks your site is not the originator.

Some HTML tips with SEO in mind:

Description tag - take the tine to write an appropriate description tag for every page of your site. Google will display this in it's results pages and a well written description here should lead to more searchers actually clicking your link and becoming a visitor.

Title tag - This is probably the most important piece of HTML. Always include your keywords here and write an accurate keyword rich title tag for every page of your site.

Keywords tag – It is good practice to put a list of related keywords into this tag although don't overdo it and do not include any keywords that are not relevant to your web page.

Keep the code clean, use DIVs and not Tables where possible as this has many benefits and it means the ratio of content to code is greater. Try to use your keywords in heading tags throughout the pages.

Take the time to write original copy that uses the chosen keywords throughout. Write the text for a human to read though and not as though you've written it for a search engine. Over use (or spamming) of keywords will work against you always.

Try to get the good text content as near to the top of your code as possible. You could use CSS positioning to help with this.

Navigation – Use keyword rich absolute text links with a title where possible and not relative links.

Link to the domain name itself when linking back to the homepage and not /index.html. The search engines will then find the content in one place and not try to index two URL's - a very common mistake.

To target several keywords, create several pages to do this using the above methods. You cant expect one page to perform for everything. For more visit http://www.studio-40.com/

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

SEO - One way links or two way links

This is a big question that is playing on the mind of almost all search engine optimizers. There are many forums and blogs where this is being discussed to make it easier for the SEO analysts to know the best possible way to get backlinks. Now we all know what can more and more backlinks mean to a website when its performance on search engine results page is considered.

Let us first analyze the case of reciprocal links or two-way links. You would want your site to be linked by a PR3 and above site. This is normally possible when you too have a PR3 site else the other site administrator might not be interested for all justified reasons. But in case you have a lower page rank or no page rank at all, then it becomes a very difficult process. Why would a PR3 site link to your site when you have a zero Page rank?
There is also one more reason why one should try to avoid two ways links though it can generate more backlinks. More and more outbound links decreases the overall page rank of the site.
So today more and more sites are trying to get inbound links and that too one-way links. This is possible through article posting. Great articles when submitted in hundreds can boost up the page rank. You can post articles to sites that accept them with a link to your website. So you don’t have to link your site to others whereas your site is getting linked. But one point needs to be remembered that the articles should not be sloppy and of no use. The article should be easy to read, informative, have all the answers that one is looking for to make it viewed by more and more number of users.

Reciprocal links can be very helpful once you have already achieved a high page rank. Then you can get links easily from other PR3 and above sites. It is not always possible to continue writing great articles. It is then that the two way link procedure can be of real help. But for the initial stages article posting is no doubt a better option to get one way inbound links.

The ground rule for search engine optimization is to make your website popular on the web. When you don’t want to spend on advertisements and paid links, getting one-way links through article posting is the best possible option. For more visit at http://www.seo-specialists-india.com/seo-services.html

Monday, June 2, 2008

Online Way Of Marketing Your Business

If you are searching for more online customers due to your business growth, then reaching online users becomes a completely new way of marketing a business. It could eventually develop into your new way of doing business completely, changing your focus, strategies and the way you do things entirely.

Website marketing and business marketing are two different styles for online marketing. With web site marketing the goal is to have people searching for particular services or products find your web site while conducting an online search through the major search engines. There are many facets involved in web site marketing and once a business is able to get them all clicking together, there is a good chance they will experience a major influx of new visitors to their web site.

One the other side are businesses that heavily promote their availability aimed at the internet users more so than the search engines. Buying internet advertisements, sending out emails and other promotional marketing materials that are designed to bring visitors to their online web sites, are just a few of the online marketing strategies being used today.

One of the things to remember with online marketing is to consider your home page as a billboard along the side of the road. If there is little traffic along the road, there will be few people who will see your billboard so your efforts should be focused on getting people on the right road. Taking it all into view, a specific brand of a personal care item may have thousands of websites, operated by different people who got their site free when they signed up.

If a person searches for the brand by name, there is no telling whose web site is going to pop up in the search results. If you own one of these thousands of sites, specific marketing will need to be done to guide that potential traffic to the site you own. To do this you can use pay-per-click advertising that you pay for based on the number of visitors who click through to your site.

Another popular way to drive customers and visitors to your website is affiliate marketing. An affiliate will drive the traffic to you, then you pay an agreed percentage or dollar amount. You'll only pay for it if your site makes a sale, therefore gaining free advertising. You could potentially turn search engines against your site by having too many unrelated links. Although link exchange programs can be good, unrelated links may turn your site sour to their results pages.
For more visit at http://sweethealthy.com/