Securities Market Line

The most successful businesses have a strategic marketing plan in place and they refer to it often. They use it as a living document and not something that sits on the shelf collecting dust.

When developing your strategic marketing plan your first priority should be how you weight the different marketing activities available. Here is a suggested breakdown for you to consider when developing your strategic marketing plan:

Spend about 50% of your time and money on a combination of marketing through organizations and referral marketing.

Spend about 20% of your time and money on doing things related to speaking and teaching and seminar marketing. This part of your strategic marketing plan includes your solo seminars as well as those that you joint venture with accountants and other niche technology providers.

Third priority in your strategic marketing plan is direct mail. Plan to spend about 20% of your time and money on direct mail. Here, targeting is extremely important. In fact targeting is a factor for consideration with all of the elements in your strategic marketing plan.

The last and smallest facet of your strategic marketing plan should be the marketing activities that tend to work for some and not for others. These are all the other types of marketing activities available from door hangers and telemarketing to targeting specific industries. This part of your strategic marketing plan will include a lot of hit and miss items but you won’t know what works until you actually test it. Read the rest of this entry »

Mouth it All
Well, they say mouth publicity is the best way to market and publicize your business. Start off by telling your friends and relatives about the retail store. Ask them to throw in the idea to their acquaintances. Somewhere down the line, you would have gradually created a customer base. Easy and hassle free?

Go Net’ty’
What is the internet for? It is such a potent medium of communication that it can help your business boom to a great extent. Make full use of this amazing medium. Put details of your business on social networking sites and have a website made of your retail business. Ask all of your acquaintances to check out. Ensure that the website has maximum information about your business. This is a pre-requisite for this retail marketing idea. Read more on internet marketing for small business.

Go the Offering Way
If it is been sometime you have had the retail store, try and incorporate some offers to impress your existing clientele and attract new customers. Give discounts and make sure that these are communicated well to your customer base. This is one of those really run of the mill marketing ideas for retail stores, but it works!

Publicity on the Go
Park benches, buses, buildings having offices are good areas to target for promoting your business in the market. If allowed, stick bills in parks and behind buses and so on. Have fliers and small pamphlets ready, if anyone asks. Have your cards ready, so whenever you meet anyone, who could be a prospective client, you can just handover the card to that person. Think of creative places to let people know about your retail store. Read more on effective small business marketing strategies.

Media Medium
Having press release with all the details of your business and then getting the media to publicize you is another good idea. However, to convince the paparazzi, you would have to make sure that your product is good enough. Otherwise you might get a bashing by the media, and everything will go for a toss. In addition, placing advertisements in newspapers and magazines would further help. However, apart from all that, this is one of the best retail store marketing ideas. Read more on retail sales tips.

Free’dom Read the rest of this entry »

There is a variety of ways to get professional internet marketing training, but by far the best is to attend a live workshop – the networking opportunities are priceless.

What to look for in a training event

• Speakers’ background

You’ll want to learn only from the very best Internet marketers who practice what they teach, and who are not just mere speakers. A demonstrable – with clear proof – successful business is the best indication of the skills that a trainer will be able to share with you. Learn what you can about the presenters at an event before signing up for any product. A quick search online should come up with positive or negative feedback about the speakers.

• Advanced topics

Training events cost money and make worthwhile investments if they can teach you intermediate or advanced skills for Internet marketing. The promotion materials should give you a glimpse of the topics to be discussed in the seminar or workshop.

• Limited seats

A low teacher ‘to-student ratio boosts learning in a live seminar or workshop. With fewer participants to attend to, the event’s speakers can answer most of your questions and coach you as well. Organisers that sell to a large audience are more concerned about their profits and less about your chances of succeeding after the seminar so you should avoid their events.

Training Subjects

• Webinar strategies

With a webinar, you’ll never have to leave your home or business behind just to talk to people around the world. This valuable conferencing tool is also useful for coaching sessions, training a group of people, holding meetings as well as creating a downloadable product for your website. Learn how to set up a webinar and the right way to hold one as well.

• Domaining

An economic recession is the best time to build your domain portfolio when prices are low. Sell at a high price when the economy recovers or develop your domains into SEO websites that you can rent out or resell for thousands of dollars to competing businesses.

One segment that I’ve noticed this in, quite frequently, is in the realm of electronic cigarette affiliates. I have seen many, and when I say many, I mean MANY, good stop smoking articles butchered by spinning programs that included their brand of e-cig product. I, myself, have had numerous Ezine articles spun and manipulated to appear that I endorse their products. Which, of course, I do not.

I’m not going to call out any of these affiliates by name, because that just isn’t my way. However, it did irk me enough that I wanted to write an article expressing my frustration with these mislead internet users. I would like to list a few reasons as to why spinning other people’s articles is a bad idea and does not help you with your long term SEO plan.

1. First of all, the articles do not spin very well. It is obvious that the articles in question are spun, and spun rather poorly. This does not really help your business other than to get your anchor text on the internet. But, because they are spun so poorly and are very hard to read, people do not keep them published for very long. So all those efforts to get your anchor text on the web, disappear rather quickly. Google does not appear to like rapid fire bursts of anchor text splattered hither and yon for short period of times.

2. Lets say the spun article gets read by a couple of thousand people. They will quickly realize that the information has been stolen and manipulated. They will see what company is linked AND what site is posting the bogus information. This will soil (for lack of a better word) your brand identity or message. People will not think very highly of your product or service and will often ignore it, even if it’s the number 1 rank on the web. The publishing site may also view the hard to read information and then no longer post your content.

3. Finally, article directories will begin to find out who you are and not accept your plagiarized work. This simply makes it a little harder for you to get your message out. Not impossible, but it is just one more inconvenience for you as you implement your SEO plan. Plus, Google seems to heavily weight organic growth in their formulas. Although it is true that plagiarized work is simple and easy to get out to the masses, it is also true that Google doesn’t seem to view that kind of burst as organic growth. So, it may boost your rankings a tiny little bit, but in the end, your goals will not become realized.

I hope you are now inspired to build your online presence the ethical way, through honesty and hard work. I’m sure many are simply laughing at this article, and thinking to themselves, “poor idiot, he really thinks honesty and integrity are the best policy”. Well, they’d be right. But at least, I’ve said my peace and I can now go back to my naive ways.

Only 50 more original articles to go and maybe then I’ll get off the 25th page of Google. Wish me luck.