Oct 5

Have you ever read a company mission statement that sounded like it can be applied to any organization on the planet? Or have you ever gone to a website to try and figure out what a company does only to be overwhelmed with buzzwords? This sort of messaging gobbly gook can happen to even the most pragmatic of marketers when multiple people become involved in the messaging for a product or company. I have certainly sat in my share of mission statement meetings where we spent several days off-site to come up with something that just about anyone with 10 minutes could come up with if they thought in generalizations.

My most recent experience with this is my current company. We are building a product that is so vast in its capabilities that we could fill up two full pages with all the potential applications. This is unfortunately what we did when we first went to talk to investors. I even know better than that! Remember, just because your product can do everything does not mean you should burden your audience with those details. Your target market will not wade through the words to try to find some relevant to them. Here are two things you can do to avoid this trap:

Narrow it Down

Even though your company or product does a lot of things for a lot of people, where does it add the most value? Who are the competitors and how, specifically, are you different? Don’t talk about all the things you can do, talk about the one thing you do - better than anyone else.

Understand your Target Market

Who is the one person who really needs this product or service and will recognize that they need it? What are their current issues and why is your product relevant? What are their emotions associated with either their problem or your product that solves their problem?

Armed with this information you can do a product positioning exercise that should help you effectively position your product and solidify your messaging.

See http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_one_time?id=454 for information on how to do a product positioning.

Barbara Tallent is a former CEO and is currently working on a new startup. She also maintains a website with resources for technology product marketing managers. http://www.infrasystems.com

High Pagerank - SEO
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Oct 4

Want to get the very best return on your Yellow Pages investment? Keep these three simple steps in mind:

Be FOUND, be NOTICED, be CHOSEN

1. Be FOUND

Make it as easy as possible for your repeat, former and referral customers to find you - or for people to find you once they’ve seen your other advertising (or trucks on the road) and want to look you up.

Make sure you place an ad (or at least a listing!) in all the headings where people might search for the product or services you provide. You can’t control where people will look for you - all you can do is make sure you’re there when they do.

Don’t expect a Return On Investment for just doing this first step. Your monthly Yellow Pages bill will be a just another necessary expense of your business, like your rent, electricity, etc.

2. Be NOTICED

To take your Yellow Pages advertising to the next level (break even or make a small profit), you’ll want to start attracting attention from people who aren’t already looking specifically for you — prospects who are looking for a provider of your type of product or service, but don’t have a particular name in mind.

Studies show the average Yellow Pages shopper looks at 4.6 ads. So, in any heading with more than 5 advertisers, you’ll need to make use of size, color, layout, illustrations and a compelling headline (your company name is NOT a headline!) to make sure you get noticed. Ideally, you should use all of these elements properly and strategically.

3. Be CHOSEN

If you want to get exciting results and rake in consistent profits with your Yellow Pages advertising, don’t stop now! Make sure to take this final and most important step of all.

Make sure to give people one or more compelling reasons to choose your business instead of one of your competitors. Simple, right? That’s why it’s amazing how few Yellow Pages ads actually do this! Instead, if you open up any phone book anywhere in the country, you’re likely to be bored to death over and over by ads that insist on using the same standard photos, bulleted lists of features, and clichéd phrases as all of their competitors. And if you’re bored to death, think about the poor shoppers who opened their phone book hoping to find a business they can feel good about calling.

By definition, if your ad is just like all the others in your heading, it’s not standing out!

Give people some compelling reasons to choose YOU over your competition (guarantee, offer, etc.), and they will! That just plain makes sense, doesn’t it? And when your ad is the one consistently chosen, you will be raking in the profits while your competitors make excuses like “No one uses the Yellow Pages anymore”.

Most small business owners have virtually no clue how to put together a killer Yellow Pages ad. And very few sales reps care enough (or even know how) to create a killer ad for you. That’s actually great news — that’s why there’s so much opportunity for you to make huge profits with your local Yellow Pages if you just follow the simple, proven rules of success or use an expert consultant to help you.

And now I’d like to invite you to receive my free 21-day email course “How To Turn Your Yellow Pages Into Gold”. Just visit http://www.YellowPagesGOLD.com right now.

Steve Sipress — entrepreneur and expert in how to get more profits from the Yellow Pages and Internet Search Engines. I’ve built my own businesses through innovative, powerful and highly-effective marketing, and have also helped thousands of other small businesses owners increase their profits and improve their lifestyles over the past 20+ years. Learn from my mistakes — it’s a lot quicker and cheaper than making your own!

High Pagerank - SEO
High Pagerank - SEO

Oct 4

There are many times in the career of a marketing person where this issue will come up - which agency should I use? From the perspective of the advertising agency or the marketing agency, the answer is simple, “Use us!”

The client is usually pressured from many quarters, among which are the pressure to deliver results, the watching eyes of everyone anxious to see a “great advertisement” and of course, the pressures from various Account Executives and Account Directors to make the big decision

There are many resources available that discuss various criteria that can be used to select the best marketing or advertising agency. Over the years, we have found that all of these boil down to just 4 key factors. Do we dare say that these are the “4P’s” of selecting an advertising agency? OK, we dare.

So, here are the 4P’s to help you select the best advertising or marketing agency for your all-important marketing campaign.

People

There is a very important element in the selection process that many miss. In today’s high pressure, results-oriented business environment, we often forget a fundamental truth. The world, even the hard-nosed business world, is made up of PEOPLE. You can work with the most creative minds, the strongest marketing teams, and maybe even pure geniuses. The reality is, if you simply cannot “get along”, it is highly unlikely that you will come up with a winning campaign. The People element cannot be over-stressed. Even a mediocre team, inspired by great team spirit, can produce astounding campaigns. The sense of belonging, of ownership, spurs people to greater heights. In an advertising campaign, where emotions, values and vision play such important roles, it is the people who will win through. Not the genius. If you cannot trust your agency, you can forget about doing anything great.

Proposal

If people were the only considerations, then the business world will be filled with friends and lovers. How wonderful. Unfortunately, true substance is still a very necessary ingredient in the success of any marketing campaign. This is so important that most of the time, the Proposal, the Big Idea, the Grand Creative; have formed the linch pin of all decisions. This can work. This does work. So, this is an element that must not be overlooked. The proposal should cover not just the creative vision, but all the elements that make the campaign successful. Some things to look out for in a good proposal would be:

- Clear vision and objectives
- media plan (if applicable)
- Great creatives (usually mistaken to be the ONLY element for a winning proposal)
- Project Planning and Timelines (project management elements)

There are many things to look out for depending on the type of campaign that is planned. But this should give a good idea. Like I said earlier, judging proposals have been a long standing practise in selection of advertising agencies and marketing agencies.

Process

But a great proposal and a nice team of people might be present, however, to ensure the success of a marketing campaign, the proper processes must be in place. You must have a good understanding of the organisation, the resource and the way of working of the selected agency. In a major advertising campaign, the number of elements could mean that different teams are involved in different aspects. Does the agency have enough manpower and talent to support the scale? If they have the people, do they have an established, well rehearsed way of communications and coordination? This might seem trivial, but once you are in the middle of a major campaign, and the key Account Manager calls in sick, you will surely appreciate a rock solid process.

Price

Yes, price is indeed a consideration. Don’t we all wish we had budgets the size of a mountain? Even Bill Gates have to thing about budgets. While this is important, it is also the last piece that needs to be considered. Pay peanuts to get monkeys. Sounds familiar, right? While it is true that the most expensive is not necessarily the best and the cheapest, not always the worse; price is indeed a poor guage of the potential success of a marketing agency. Work out a realistic budget. Your local 4A’s (or whatever the association of advertising agencies is called in your neck of the woods) should have a price guide available on request.

There you have it. 4 P’s as promised. With this, you should be in good standing to make an intelligent decision on the marketing agency to be selected. This is by no means the best, the only or even an assured way to make the decision. However, this is a good starting point, and if used prudently can help tremendously. Here’s to your next successful marketing or advertising campaign!

*********************************************************

Vivienne Quek is a seasoned veteran in the advertising industry. She has worked in small local outfits to large international marketing/advertising agencies servicing multi-million dollar accounts. Today, she runs two marketing agencies providing a wide range of marketing and communications services

Vivienne continues to play an active role in her agencies and blogs to share her experiences with everyone at http://www.versacreations.net

To continue to benefit from her shared experience, VISIT HER BLOG

High Pagerank - SEO
High Pagerank - SEO

Oct 3

Finding a good SEO (search engine optimizer or search engine optimization firm) is not easy in Utah. Sure, everybody and their brother currently offers SEO services, but very few have the experience and industry knowledge needed to help you get your website to the top of the search engines.

If you own a business in Utah and are considering different SEO firms make sure you take into account the following tips:

Does the SEO company rank on Utah terms?

Let’s say that you are a cosmetic dentist located in Utah and you want to drum up more local business. Would you trust a firm that didn’t rank itself on terms such as “utah seo” and “utah internet marketing?” There is an old saying that you should never trust a skinny chef - the same goes for SEO.

What are the contract terms?

Many companies try to lock you into excessively long contracts to guarantee payment even if they aren’t able to deliver results. While it is true that good SEO typically takes some time good SEO’s will tend to set those expectations up front and allow you to choose when to terminate the contract. Your SEO should have to earn your trust every single month.

Talk to references

This is probably the most obvious, yet neglected step of the process of finding and SEO. A creative spin on this question is to ask for a reference that has had out-of-this-world success and another client that has just had moderate success. When the SEO is choosing who you talk to they will most likely avoid anybody likely to say anybody bad about you. By asking for a moderately successful client you will have the chance to talk to somebody most likely to give you a realistic perspective on what you can expect from your campaign.

Avoid “up to $X marketers”

A lot of Utah companies take the popular weight-loss infomercial approach of promising to spend up to a certain amount of money per month on PPC. Having an SEO manage a PPC campaign makes sense, but when the incentive is for the company to spend as little as possible (since they pocket the difference), your interests are not aligned. The goal is to align your interests as closely as possible with your internet marketing company. Decide on a fair amount for a PPC campaign and ask them what they will charge you to manage that budget.

In conclusion, finding a Utah SEO firm is easy, but finding one capable of maximizing your earning potential can take some time. Approach this decision as you would any other business decision and make sure that you can feel good knowing you found the best for your needs.

Preston has provided internet marketing consulting to firms for over five years. He has a blog dedicated to internet retail marketing and is the President of Sewell Direct, an internet retailer of computer hardware and accessories.

High Pagerank - SEO
High Pagerank - SEO

Oct 1

For those who operate online businesses, or simply have a site on the Internet, attaining more visitors, or getting more Web sales is a must for the survival and viability of that Web site. For those who wish to further improve their standing online, calling a search engine optimization (SEO) expert or firm would be the best thing to do.

It’s quite easy to fall for the smooth sweet-talking salesperson, and directly believe in what they say, however you may just be wasting your time and money on someone who doesn’t actually do any of the search optimization work, or may only act like they know how to do it. As a consumer, you need to be armed with the capability to ask direct, intelligent questions about how an individual expert or company manages their SEO campaigns.

Learn More About A Company’s Methods

As you shop around for potential SEO candidate firms, it would be best to learn from each firm that is willing to offer you information. Although, you need to be aware that the more time someone can spend giving away free info, the more likely they are to charge you large professional fees in the end.

It would also do well if you could call many companies and ask direct, good questions about SEO strategies. Don’t waste anyone’s time by asking the same questions over and over, and expecting different answers, however take notes and get good answers.

By doing so, you’ll be quite surprised when you get a lot of different answers from these people, but be more inclined to believe something if you hear it a few times. In addition, ask each SEO firm who they would recommend if they were too busy, because some credible firms are too busy and will be happy to tell you this.

Your SEO Firm Should Be Well-Versed In Other Internet Marketing Ideas

Aside from selecting the most competitive and right keyword phrases, your potential SEO experts should be well versed in other Web marketing areas.

If your site traffic is leaving as soon as they get there, or if people get lost on your site, your SEO company should be able to help you diagnose this. They should also be able to help you measure the efficiency of your campaign by showing you how to analyze your log files. The optimization companies or individual experts which are the most popular are the ones you should consider.

Ask A SEO Firm To Outline Their Methods

If a prospective SEO expert or firm tells you that they will only be implementing changes to your site itself, this could probably mean that they won’t be spending any time working on your site’s link popularity.

As link popularity plays a tremendous role in determining rankings in every major search engine, good-quality and credible SEO firms will spend a great deal of time looking for industry-specific directories and portals where a link to your site can be added. These firms should also review all of your existing incoming links, and ensure that the Web site owner has configured them in such a way as to give your site the highest chance of attaining higher search engine rankings.

Because of the significance of search engine optimization, there are many individuals and online firms that will offer to optimize your Web site for a fee. While most of these experts are credible and professional ones, there are a number of them that use questionable, or outright illegal techniques, and others are complete scams.

Identifying the right aspects and methods will help in choosing the best SEO firm. A top-quality optimization expert will have a number of characteristics which will set them apart from the rest.

http://7seo.com - 7 SEO

Vanessa A. Doctor from Jump2Top - SEO Company

High Pagerank - SEO
High Pagerank - SEO

Sep 30

First thing I wish to highlight, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a rocket science. You do not have to be a PhD holder to understand the mechanism behind SEO. But SEO services can be very expensive because it involves laborious work which needs a lot of creativity, imagination and excellent writing.

There are many SEO Experts in Singapore, who guarantee top position. And yes, a small handful of them are very skilled. Whether you can identify the good ones is another matter.

It is fairly important that you do not have to believe in everything what a SEO consultant might say (at least for the initial meet up), invest some time researching about SEO guidelines from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search sites before making the decision.

Top 5 Statements you can pass to the garbage collector

  • We can guarantee you No. 1 position
  • We have special relationship with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Search Live engines, we can perform a priority submit
  • Setting Title tag, Meta tags values is everything about SEO
  • Your search engine ranking requires only our one time SEO effort
  • Keywords or keyphrases are not necessary in our SEO effort (Domain content is not relevant in SEO implementation)
  • Once you have understood the SEO fundamentals, and have talked to a few SEO consultants. You should be able to identify the better ones. In choosing your SEO consultant, sincerity and honesty are two important attributes. SEO development process usually takes a few months to complete and it is best that you are comfortable with the person delivering the service.

    Say Kin Lee is the web strategist for a Singapore-based web services Company - http://www.bizengine.com.sg Web Strategist
    BizEngine Private Limited
    Building Value-Assets on the Web

    Els
    1prank

    Sep 29

    SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.

    Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. Another class of techniques, known as black hat or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Some search engines have also reached out to the industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars.

    Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. You should never have to link to an searche engine. Avoid marketers that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. Some marketers may try to sell you the ability to type keywords directly into the browser address bar.

    The objective of Search Engine Optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the organic results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

    Search engine can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. They look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indexes.

    Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves a combination of free website submissions and paid search engine listings, to ensure your website reaches customers using search engines to research purchase decisions. Search engines work for you non-stop 24/7. The answer is entirely dependent upon your web site’s visibility amongst the search engines. The goal of web optimization is to create consistent and targeted traffic through search engines and directories to your web site. Search engine optimization is not just to rank in search engines but mainly to achieve a good click through rate from the targeted visitors. This means that your web site should come up in the search results of the search-engines with targeted keywords that are related to your content or theme of your site. If your web pages are dynamically created from the database, it’s likely that many search engines have difficulty to crawl and index them. Disadvantage of dynamically created pages are that many search engines like Google for example don’t like dynamically created pages because the crawlers might get in an infinite loop on your server if they follow dynamically created web pages with a query string in it.

    SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be found by the search engine.

    Milan Stapar
    For more information visit our site:- http://www.domainhostinfo.com

    Gethighprdomains
    Pfsyc

    Sep 29

    Google have just recently ‘re-iterated’ the fact that they will ‘penalizing’ companies that buy links on the Internet in the hope to manipulate their rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This has been known for a while in the world of search engine optimization marketing and has been hotly debated amongst the top search engine optimization specialists for the last two years.

    Google’s definition of what a paid link is not one where you pay a guy to submit your site to 500 SEO friendly directories, neither is it a ‘quality link’ purchased in a Directory like Joe Ant, Yahoo or Green Corner; these directories ensure anchor text and relevancy. However, a forum poster that offers to sell you links based on a toolbar PageRank, high PageRank websites that feature a sponsored links section and the links within, deep links and paid directory submissions are indeed ‘paid links’; as Matt Cutts himself puts it “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.”.

    People are still in a large debate to whether they can be moderated at all and if the negatives associated with the ‘Google Slap’ are as harmful as made out by Google. The main point that is bought up is how Google are going to detect bought links; if direct contact is made between two webmasters via E-mail or telephone and money is sent via post there is no way Google could know. This point is valid, until somebody doesn’t like the prices, declines to buy an ad on your site and then turns around and reports you to Google for selling links. Google’s reporting system for letting them know who is buying and selling links is well known in the SEO community and I suspect they take this very seriously.

    As well as reporting, Google has other methods for detection. For example, if the user you have just sold links to has bought links on other sites that have got caught, this will end up getting reflected back on you. It might be that they get reported for other negative actions or their competitors report them, thus coming back to you. Google, which is a multi-billion dollar company, with more advanced technology than most of us have even heard of, is not going to be easily fooled.

    The long and short of it is, whatever you do, you do at your own risk. Google has its rules and regulations and does not appreciate people breaking these rules; considering Google holds the power, is it worth paying the price?

    Check out Search Engine Optimisation Specialists at http://www.search-engine-optimization-marketing.co.uk

    High Pagerank - SEO
    High Pagerank - SEO

    Sep 28

    The number of these web sites is increasing at a very fast pace these days. Keeping this in view the marketing of these web sites becomes very important. The web surfers usually visit the search engines whenever they have to look for anything in particular on the web. A web site is thus properly promoted when it becomes a search engine favorite. Getting a fair share of search engine traffic is important. If the search engine generated traffic is not taken advantage of, it is not possible for the web sites to stay in competition with each other on the web. If you want to take advantage of search engine marketing, you can do that in the following ways.

    1. It is good if you submit your web site to the search engines. Submission to the web directories also helps in improving your page ranking.

    2. Make the content of your web site keywords rich. This will help you in getting noticed by the search engines when a related search is conducted.

    3. Place the links to your web site on proper places on the web.

    4. Place the banner ads of your web site so as to attract your target market.

    5. You will need to supplement these efforts with email marketing and article marketing techniques. You can also use RSS feeds for this purpose.

    6. Refresh the content of your web site every now and then. This will help you in getting a better page ranking.

    7. In this way the web site will start getting more web traffic. This will in turn convert the visits into sales made. Thus your website will be able to generate more money for you.

    Do you want to discover the secret to generating over $180,356 per year online?

    Download this: How to Make 6 Figures Online

    ———————————————————————————————————–

    Sean Mize is an internet marketing strategist who teaches internet marketers how to increase their income by creating high ticket classes and coaching programs.

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    High Pagerank - SEO

    Sep 28

    I want to begin by explaining that link building is just as important as writing clean html pages, finding key words & having clean key word driven content in your site pages.
    This link building process can very time consuming and very difficult because there are lots of sites that will do anything to block there outgoing links from the search engines and this is a very frustrating thing to those who try so hard to do this the right way.
    What I want to present here is a few steps you can take to help build links to your site:

  • First thing is if you have used web services from high ranking sites or used any services is to see if you can write a great testimonial for them and include your sites link. There are many companies online that like to post testimonials and it is a fair trade for a well written one to have a link placed to give you some credibility.
  • Find forums that are ranked well in the search engines and that are related to your industry. Check them out and make sure they are using a mod-rewrite to that the your postings will count and can be read in the search engines
  • Create a web blog with well written posts and articles about your industry. It is not so important to sell your service as it is to have well written content and include at least 3 links on each blog pointing back to your site. Now remember that there is no reason to spam others blogs with your sites links, it is okay to search for blogs and makes posts on them but don’t add your link to your site, your blog link will be added automatically and your main blog is your focus for linking back to your site. Please don’t just make posts on others blogs trying to sell yourself, make a profound comment.
  • Find web directories that you list your site on like dmoz or yellow pages. Make sure to have great keywords and content. Remember that content is your key
  • Find link exchange directories and sign up for them. Find link partners but choose them carefully. If you are using a link exchange program, make sure you have full control of the category names so that you don’t get dinged for duplicate content. If you need help finding a decent software feel free to ask me.
  • If you have 2 sites then try this 3 way linking. Ask someone to link to your main site and in return you will link to their site from your other site. Make sure that your other site is build clean and has plenty of great content and use the techniques above to get that site ranked high as well
  • As I said this is not the only thing to do but it is important. To organize this process write out a plan or schedule and try to spend about 15 minutes a day on this. After that go on to something else. Be patient and you will be successful.

    Darren Dunner Internetzone I, Inc. http://www.buildpr.com

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