Virtual Impax

Effective Strategic Digital Marketing

Business Basics

Web Promotion Advice

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Sometimes, when you’re trying to promote your website (be it a blog or a traditional website) it can feel like you’re in a tiny row boat being tossed about on a roaring sea. It’s easy to feel lost in the sea that is the internet. Website promotion via the web is a “natural” but to really stir things up, create a website promotion strategy that includes OFF LINE promotion tactics.

Website Promotion Advice

Web Promotion Tool #1: Off line or hard copy newsletters

Darren Rowse of Problogger.net recommends allowing offline publications to print your content. In Darren’s case, he gave permission for a newsletter to translate and reprint an article he had written. As a result, he got 50 new sign ups for his photography website.

Web Promotion Tool #2: The Postal Service

ScribeFire suggests using snail mail as a website promotion tactic in the post Offline Blog Promotion Techniques:

Go Postal – this morning I got to my PO Box to find that inside it was a rather large parcel. Inside was two things – a book and a T-shirt. I didn’t know the name of the person who sent them to me but on the accompanying business card and note was the name and URL of a blog which I will check out later today.

A popular blog gets hundreds, sometimes thousands, of emails each day. Most of the time it’s people seeking the opportunity to be showcased on the popular blog. Its a great website promotion strategy to partner with a popular blog to promote your own website, however you need a way to stand out from the crowd. Taking the time to send a card via snail mail can be the difference between making contact and getting marked as spam. Including a T-shirt, a book or another promotional piece in the mailing is even better!

Web Promotion Tool #3: Traditional Media

Way back in the late 1990’s, if you listened to AM radio, you would have heard ads for the largest bookstore in the universe. These wacky radio ads featured such silliness as trying to rent warehouse space on Mars because no where on earth was big enough to house all the books offered for sale by this emerging online bookseller. You’ll probably recognize the name of the online merchant that ran those ads: Amazon.com.

Traditional media has been slammed of late because it’s a “spray and pray” approach to marketing. In most cases you’re reaching tens of thousands of people who are NOT prospective customers. However, if you can create a compelling and captivating message, you’ll find that traditional media can be even very effective at driving traffic to your website.

When people find your site via a radio, television, newspaper or magazine ad, this is known as a DIRECT REQUEST. According to the WWW Observer, this is what is known as Low Bounce Rate Traffic and is exactly the type of traffic you should be striving to create.

Web Promotion Tool #4: Social Networking Media

BlogGrrl in her post A Very Long List of Ways to Get Blog Traffic lists 13 different social networking sites plus another 36 tips on ways you can introduce your website to new people.

Web Promotion Tool #5: Commenting on Blogs

This one usually makes my skin crawl when I read someone who advises people that they don’t need a blog, they can just comment on other people’s blogs and get all the benefits of blogging without the time and expense of maintaining your own blog.

Commenting on blogs is NOT a substitute for having your own blog, but it can be a great way to promote your website.  The key here is to find the right blogs to comment on.  Rather than go over that, University Kid has a post on the subject Make Money Online By Blog Commenting.

When making a comment, make sure you give it the care and consideration you would take if that information were appearing on your website.  A blog comment can act like a banner ad for your website so watch what you post!

These 5 Web Promotion Tools are just a few website promotion tactics.  What ones have you used to promote your website?

Trust Building Business Practices

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The letters on the soap box I stand upon frequently around here read “Building Trust”.  Blogs are great trust building tools.  They offer businesses the opportunity to begin the difficult process of building TRUST with potential clients and customers.

Trust is so hard to gain and so easy to lose, which is why business owners must pay careful attention to follow trust building business practices.

Building trust is such a HUGE part of marketing and advertising, yet I don’t hear anyone talking about trust and marketing in those terms. Marketing is just an invitation to your business. Advertising is paying to deliver those invitations.

However, if you aren’t engaged in trust building business practices… how can your marketing invitations build trust as well?

Trust is a HUGE deal for anyone engaged in making Major Sales.

5 Essential Trust Building Business Practices

1: Under promise… over deliver

Trust is established when behavior matches expectations. Set the expectations too high and you’ll destroy the trust you’re trying to build with current and potential customers.

The easier software way of creating marketing messages is to scream “Bigger Faster Stronger” . However, the dirty little secret that marketing professionals know is that when you set expectations too high, return rates can run 25% and higher for products marketed in that fashion – for services, those rates can run even higher.

However, when your marketing messages set realistic expectations and you end up delivering more than your marketing messages promise – well, that’s what it takes to ignite the holy grail of marketing… word of mouth advertising!

2: Transparency = Trust

If you’re transparent with your customers as well as with your employees, then you’ll be laying a foundation for building trust.

Transparency’s hard when you’re not being authentic.

For example, I have a friend who works in sales training for a large company. The company has been calling for employees to make sacrifices for the good of the company. They’ve had to turn in their corporate credit cards and they’ve had to share hotel rooms on trips. Imagine their surprise, not to mention disgust, when the CEO drove into work one day in his brand new Bentley.

Word of the CEO’s new ride spread like wildfire throughout the company. Within a few weeks, sales had taken a dramatic downturn and suddenly, the sales training department was assigned the task of coming up with outlining a new marketing campaign to increase sales. (Don’t you LOVE how corporate works!)

Oh, did I mention that the top 6 sales reps left the company in the three months following the CEO’s new car purchase?

Transparency’s hard when you’re not being authentic. Losing trust almost always hurts the bottom line.

3: Focus on meeting your customer’s needs.

When your customer does business with you, it’s because your customer expects you to provide a product or service for them. They are not patronizing your business merely to fatten your wallet or improve your bottom line.

Your customers are doing business with you to meet their needs – to satisfy their wants – to solve their problems. When your focus is upon meeting your customer’s needs… you’re automatically engaging in trust building activities.

4. Make it easy for customers to buy….

I am AMAZED at how hard some companies make it to do business with them. If I, as a potential customer, have to chase you down to get you to take my money, how hard is it going to be to reach you when I have a problem AFTER you have my money and I’ve become your customer?

Trust me, if customers are having to chase you down for the opportunity to buy your product or service… you’ll soon be facing competition that will make it easy to buy the product or service you’re offering. PERIOD.

5: First Impressions Mean a Lot!

Trust is so hard to gain but so easy to lose and little things mean a lot, especially in the beginning.  Dead links on a website… a typo in the sales letter… a forged testimonial…. all can destroy the trust needed for a potential client or customer to make the move from potential to paying.

The obvious point to make here is make sure all your marketing materials make a GREAT first impression.  The old “design vs content” debate doesn’t apply.  Design + Content = Professional Presentation!

For example, I was visiting a blog about business blog consulting.  The design is less than crisp and professional, so that should have been my first clue.  There are 6 different business blog consultants who publish articles on this blog.  They’re great articles… but when you click to learn more you get broken links and error messages.

If you’re in the market for a business blog consultant, you’ve got to ask yourself… are you willing to trust these people with your business blog?  If the links on their own blog don’t work – links which promise to lead to you to the information you need to go about HIRING them- how can you trust them to build links on your blog that work?

Hey, believe me, I know that broken links happen ALL the time.  However, this wasn’t just one broken link – it was several.  One was simply the result of putting two sets of [http://] in the link.  The thing is- these people claim to be blog professionals and that’s a rookie mistake!

Blogs are great trust building tools.  When done correctly, they offer businesses the opportunity to begin the difficult process of building TRUST with potential clients and customers.

Building Trust with Blogging

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Marketing wisdom teaches that it takes 8 “touches” to build enough trust with a stranger (a.k.a. a potential client/customer) for them to contact you for more information. This is just another way of saying that you have to build trust with potential clients/ customers before they will consider doing business with you.

Trust is built through communication.

Blogs and blogging are the buzz words of the day and with good reason: Blogging is a GREAT way to communicate and communication is essential to building trust.

The question that has plagued business owners for generations is HOW do you get the opportunity to make those touches or build that trust up front.

In the old days, small business owners would rely on using traditional media to make those touches. It was strictly one way communication, by the way, but it was all that was available at the time. Business owners would buy ad space in newspapers, magazine and air commercials via radio and television to establish a basic level of “trust” with their potential clients. If nothing else, spending the money to air those ads assured potential customers that the business being promoted was a legitimate business…. the first brick in building the wall of trust.

Using traditional media to reach a large audience is still a GREAT way to begin the communication upon which trust is built!

I strongly encourage my clients to consider using “off line” media to promote their businesses. Traditional media is a GREAT way to introduce your business to a wide array of strangers. When you use traditional media to promote your business, be sure to set the “call to action” for them to visit your blog. Think of the radio, television or newspaper ad as an “introduction” to learn more… via your blog.

However, before you issue such an invitation, be sure that the your blog is doing what it needs to do: BUILDING TRUST!

That means your blog posts will need to be written with your customer/client in mind. The chiropractor who blogs about how a song speaks to his soul is NOT going to be inspiring trust with potential patients. The chiropractor who blogs about how chiropractic helps relieve back pain will find that his blog is indeed inspiring people to call for an appointment.

If you have a blog… then take a fat felt tip pen and a piece of paper. Write the following in big letters and put it where you can see it as you blog:

I’M BLOGGING AS A WAY TO BUILD TRUST WITH MY POTENTIAL CLIENTS/CUSTOMERS!

What do you know? Why should I trust you? Can you really do what you say you can do?

Those are all questions running through your blog visitor’s mind. Make sure you keep that in mind as you post to your blog.

The Importance of Creating Great and Creative Blog Titles

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Why the most clever blog titles may kill your blog’s readership.

In the world of copy writing, headlines make or break the ad. A great headline isn’t just important for advertising, a great headline can make or break a blog post as well.  There’s no doubt about it,

Great Blog Titles grab attention.

Great creative blog titles not only grab the attention of human readers, but the search engines as well.  However, clever blog titles, while they may capture attention, may not encourage your reader to click and read more.

Dharmesh Shah discovered this harsh truth when he wrote a guest post on Hubspot: Forget digg: Join Mixx Where You Can Still Become A Power User.

He reports on his home blog SEO 2.0 in his post Top 10 Reasons Why Great Content Fails on Social Media that he suspects that the wording of the headline played a significant factor in the failure of a GREAT article.

The headline is crucial, without a proper, intriguing, kick-ass headline the best content will fail.

What the heck is it about? Nobody knew and thus it failed even on Sphinn where otherwise it would have ruled the homepage. I was silly enough to submit it without changing the headline.

Basically the original title just does not give you a clue what the post is about and why anybody should care for it.

Remember, when you’re creating content for the largest publication in the world (the Internet), your audience isn’t seeing this article within a specified context. A blog title that generates a ton of clicks from your RSS subscribers may elicit a big YAWN from other sources such as Digg, Sphinn, Stumbleupon or even Google.

Creating great blog titles takes time.

Make sure that your blog title gives the uninformed reader a clue about what information the post contains. Sometimes the most clever blog title may be the worst thing you can slap onto your great blog post.

Want to learn more about creating a successful blog?  Pick up a copy of the 8 Week Power Blog Launch today.  It’s one of the many essential blogging tools we have to help beginning business bloggers learn from OTHER people’s mistakes.

Do You Twitter? Do You Need to Twitter?

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I forget when I first heard of Twitter, but I signed up and quickly lost interest.  With a 140 character limit, I could not IMAGINE why anyone would care about how I spent the mundane parts of my day.

Rewriting the htaccess file for yet another client as I trudge through the endless process of updating their WordPress installation to the most

Oops… no more room.  Maybe I’m just too chatty to use Twitter.

Most importantly, I couldn’t imagine getting anything of importance DONE if I tried to Twitter about it.

My closest Twitter moment was when the Space Shuttle had to be rerouted on it’s landing and passed over my house.  The sonic boom was incredible and once I’d met and talked with my neighbors about it, I went in and posted probably the only “relevant” Twitter post of my Twitter career.

Not only have I not been able to get “into” Twitter… I just haven’t been able to get inspired to “follow” anyone else’s Twitter.  I know that when I say, “I just don’t have time”… it usually means I can’t see any reason to do it.

There… I admitted it.  Twitter just doesn’t strike me as a productive use of my time.

I ignored Twitter and Twitter ignored me.  Then came the SXSW 2008 conference and top bloggers began Twittering about what was going on and suddenly, everyone wants to talk about Twitter.

I’m reminded of the scene from Zoolander:

Mugatu: SHUT UP! Enough already, Ballstein! Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look, for Christ’s sake! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

My feelings exactly regarding Twitter.  Micro-blogging!  WTF?  Blogging restricted to 140 characters or less… WHY?  Please… someone… tell me… WHY?

When you promote your Twitter… Are you saying, “Hey, I’ve plenty of time to micro blog about nothing… follow me on Twitter.”

(HORROR!!! I just logged into my Twitter account and I have followers!!!  WTF?   I had to have my password emailed to me as a reminder because it’s been so long since I’ve used it!)

Thankfully, I’m not alone.  Mark posted “Twitter is Stupid” over at Courtney Tuttle’s Internet Marketing School.  Since he broke the ice, I don’t feel nearly so alone.  Mark writes:

A noteworthy blogger talks about how he loves twitter, but then he disclosed his traffic sources: Google – 42%. Twitter – 1.87%. I think that pretty much tells the story.

Go build some links.

Thank you Mark!!!

I truly thought I was the only one…. I truly thought maybe someone had been slipping crazy pills into my morning coffee.

As for the limited number of Twitter followers… sorry to disappoint you with the lack of updates in my life.  Rewriting htaccess files just isn’t that glamorous.