Online Marketing for Local Business
jhaynes
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Posts by jhaynes
Article Marketing in 7 Easy Steps
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Article marketing is a great way to improve your credibility and boost your website traffic. But you can’t just submit any old rubbish to the directories. Here are the seven pillars you should consider every time you want to write an article.
1. Prepare
A good article requires good research. This requires visiting websites, reading the news, spending some time surfing forums in your niche, reading blog posts and comments, and reviewing sites like Yahoo Answers. Find problems that people have that you can provide a solution to.
2. Produce
When you have your article idea you are ready to start writing. Your article needs to be well structured. In the introduction to the article you need to outline the problem for the reader. Then break the solution down into a series of short paragraphs; walk them through it step-by-step. Finally you need to summarize the solution. The first two steps in this process are often the hardest for business owners and others with limited time and resources, which is where companies similar to Hat Trick Associates and other freelancers come into play.
3. Polish
When you’re finished re-read your article. Does your article provide the reader with enough useful information to make them want to take action, but lacks the final piece of the puzzle (that you can gladly provide once they contact you, btw). You need to spend time polishing your article. Make it shine. It has a specific purpose, so make sure it achieves this!
4. Promote
Hopefully by this point your reader will be chomping at the bit to take action so now is the time to use your resource box to promote your offer. Give the reader what they want; a way to maximize the information you just gave them in the article.
5. Proof
If you want to encourage your reader to trust you enough to take you up on your offer then you need to present high quality information to them. That means that spelling mistakes and grammatical errors are a no-no. If you write the article yourself, ask someone else to check it over for you; a second pair of eyes is sometimes required to spot mistakes.
6. Publish
Now it’s time to publish that article. Send it out to your favorite publishers. Submit it to the top article directories. Don’t forget to send it to your prospect list too! There is no point spending time and effort writing a compelling article if you don’t put it in front of many readers.
7. Profit
If you’ve covered all the bases that I’ve mentioned then you should start to profit when your article is published, and business comes directly to you – and the backlinks the article creates enhances your SEO score so that future consumers or clients can find you. Now you can just take time to be proud of your accomplishments, before you write another article!
Building Your Email List
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
Building an email list is like building a business. Taking shortcuts to hurry the process along, such as turning to third-party mailing list rental or purchase, can backfire in a big way. Use your best selling tactics to promote your email list-building campaign, just like any marketing campaign you use to sell your products or services.
The potential ROI on email newsletters and other e-marketing campaigns is immense, often higher than any other marketing or advertising option. Which leads some to ask, why not just buy or rent a promising-looking list from a broker and start mailing to it? Because these addresses lack relevance, interest and trust, the three key ingredients that support every successful email marketing program. The reason why email marketing can produce such a high Return on Investment is because you typically have these three ingredients with legitimate email recipients. Otherwise:
* Relevance: You’re sending email to people who didn’t ask for it, which equals spam to most recipients, no matter how regulations may define unsolicited email.
* Interest: You also have absolutely no idea if they will be interested in your company, products or services.
* Trust: Unsolicited email can make recipients suspicious, which can cloud any future contacts they may have with your company.
At best, you might get a few nibbles, but the $$ spent on those email addresses could have been better directed elsewhere, like a search marketing program designed to attract browsers to your opt-in or preference center. More likely, enough recipients will complain via the spam button to prompt ISPs either to filter or block your email marketing.
As with any marketing campaign, your list-building program has an objective, strategies to achieve it, and ways to measure whether you achieved it. Yes, you want to create and build a mailing list. But with what kind of subscribers? Create a profile of your ideal email subscriber, and use it as a template to guide your strategies and tactics.
Also, be able to clearly define the content, format and frequency of your messages to be able to communicate the benefits of subscribing. Here are some strategies that can help you achieve your list-building goals.
1) Transparent and trustworthy email opt-in process: Permission is both the law in most countries of the world today and the expectation among email users. A transparent opt-in process explains exactly how to sign up for email, what recipients can expect and how you will use the information they give you. Provide this information on your opt-in or preference page with a link to your privacy policy.
2) Relevant, well-written and useful content: You can’t build a list without good content. (That is a primary focus for everything written by HTA, high-quality content is job #1!) As your program grows, track and analyze activity on your messages to see what does or does not engage subscribers.
3) Benefit-based invitations at every place where you encounter your customers or potential subscribers. First, tell subscribers what they’ll get in exchange for giving up their email address, “Sign up here for email-only discounts…” is far more enticing than “Sign up for our emails.” Then place this invitation where you will encounter customers or prospects, like posting on various pages of your site and seeing which one generates the most action. At Hat Trick Associates, we have quite a few other ideas on how to uniquely and effectively share your invitation that we share with clients.
You can measure your success in a number of ways. How many email subscribers do you want by what deadline? Setting a goal of 10,000 active subscribers in six months is good, but you need to factor in list churn and inactivity of up to 50 percent in order to achieve it. That could raise your goal to 15,000 subscribers in order to come up with an active base of 10K.
This sounds like a big challenge, but you increase your chances of gaining active email subscribers when you lay the groundwork first with a trustworthy opt-in process, engaging content, a wide network of invitations and careful list management.
The Social Media Wildfire Effect
14 years
by jhaynes
in Uncategorized
It’s a businesses greatest fear, but may very well be their most powerful tool: viral content. Over the past couple of years, the term “viral” has reared its head exponentially more and some have yet to understand the full meaning of the term when it’s applied to marketing and the digital atmosphere. Allow us to raise the curtain for you with wikipedia’s definition of viral marketing:
“Viral marketing and viral advertising are buzzwords referring to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of virus or computer viruses. It can be delivered by word of mouth or enhanced by the network effects of the internet. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.”
The most important take-away of the definition: self-replicating viral processes. Next time you’re in a marketing meeting and someone blurts out “hey, let’s just make a viral video!” don’t succumb to the concept of sending it to your friends and family and expect them to send it to their associates. It is never the company or business that “makes” anything viral, it’s the audience that spreads the message. For your message to even have a fleeting chance at going viral, regardless of form, there are three requirements:
1. Make it genuine
2. Make it enjoyable
3. Make it memorable
From that point on, you are on your own, for the force is powerful and may turn against you. Social media and the closely connected internet has made it possible for negative comments to appear quicker than ever and spread like wildfire, sometimes forcing the hand of executives to act quickly and creatively for a (hopefully) appropriate response. Here are a handful of cases showing the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Old Spice Guy
If you have children between the ages of 12 and 24, there’s little doubt that they have heard of “the old spice guy.” Weiden + Kennedy, the ad agency for Old Spice, simply stuck a guy (well, a quite ridiculously handsome man) wearing a towel in a bathroom armed with a camera, some props, and a computer and wound up snagging the most prized Grand Prix award at the prestigious Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June 2010 as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial in July 2010. Users online were given the opportunity to ask the Old Spice Guy a question and a response would quickly be posted. The message was direct, enjoyable, and comical thanks to intuitive writing, making it irresistible for people to share the videos. The Old Sprice brand was not shoved down viewer’s throats, but the videos were enjoyable, genuine, and definitely memorable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqoc6wTNotI&feature=relmfu
Domino’s Pizza Fiasco
In the spring of 2009, a video of two Domino’s employees surfaced and tainted the brand’s image with sights of the workers sneezing on ready-to-serve meals and even stuffing cheese up their nose and returning it to its proper place on the dish, of course with some extra “personal” ingredients. Within several days, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sites helped this image-destroying video rise to over a million views, putting hot pressure on Domino’s executives to take action. Eventually, an apology was posted on the company website and current employees were even asked to spread the link through their own personal social media accounts. While the decision on whether to fan the flames or let it fizzle naturally is a tough slice to swallow, the company gained high marks for taking action and playing on the customer’s side of the field.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Z2x4SClaE
Taco Bell’s Mystery Meat
In January, 2011, a concerned California woman filed suit against Taco Bell with false advertising claims, stating that the advertised “beef” was actually more of a “filling” and didn’t fit regulated standards for considering the substance beef. As the news media caught wind of the story and began to air segments, Taco Bell was already hard at work getting to a viable solution. The first release was to an Alabama television station (WSFA) in a written statement: “Taco Bell prides itself on serving high quality Mexican inspired food with great value. We’re happy that the millions of customers we serve every week agree. We deny our advertising is misleading in any way and we intend to vigorously defend the suit.” Well that sounds great, but if someone did a simple Google search for “Taco Bell” what would they find? At first, the results were flooded about the lawsuit, but as the Mexican fast-food giant created online content through blogs, twitter, facebook, and other accounts, the sharing of positive content overpowered the negative, drastically reducing the lawsuit-related pages coming first in a search result list. To round out an aggressive stance on their passion for real beef, Taco Bell purchased a full page ad in the Friday, January 28th edition of the Wall Street Journal headlining “Thank you for suing us” followed by a full ingredient disclosure of their product.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/28/taco-bell-beef-meat-lawsuit-ads_n_815303.html
If you decide to try making a viral campaign, make sure the resources used have the characteristics to naturally spread and be shared and if your brand ever encounters an emotional upset by someone who has access to a computer or a lawyer, be prepared to fight back with content—and quickly.