The ongoing financial crisis and talk of recession has left a lot of Internet marketers worried about whether they will be able to stay in business over the coming months and years. Many people who now work from home on the Internet are also worried about whether or not they will be able to continue selling their products and services.
However, an economic crisis also offers opportunities as well as dangers. In times of anxiety and economic uncertainty the business that responds to customers’ needs and wins their trust is the one that will survive and prosper in the midst of doom and gloom.
Because of the interactive nature of the Internet it offers many opportunities for online marketers to get to know their customers and website visitors, learn what they want and respond to their needs by engaging them in a friendly, informal dialogue that develops into a relationship of trust.
This relationship building process can be done in several ways, for example by inviting people to comment on your blog posts and then responding with follow-up comments. Another option is to participate in forums that attract your target market. Social network marketing sites, email, instant messaging and Skype all offer the Internet marketer opportunities to communicate with clients at various levels of intensity in order to discover where they are coming from and build rapport with them.
The key is to build trust by listening and then following up with products and services that meet their needs at prices that suit their pockets. Remember, it takes time to build trust. Trust is a two way process that is both rational and emotional. You cannot win a prospect’s trust without putting in some preliminary spade work. Rushing at them with products first is not a great way to raise your credit rating with your prospects.
One good way of getting to know your target market better is to set up an online survey and offer your prospects an incentive to complete it. The great thing about online surveys is that they take full advantage of the interactive nature of the internet and are cheap or even free to run as well as being easy to set up. You can use online platforms such as Surveypro.com or Surveymonkey.com to set up and manage your survey from.
You can use a customer survey to find out about your customers’ impressions of the products or services you offer. Another approach is to keep the survey focused firmly on the customer. Either way, make sure you have a clear focus from the beginning so that everybody knows why they are taking the survey.
Offer your prospective survey takers an incentive to do the survey such as a free report or ebook that can be downloaded on completion.
Keep the survey short, invite “yes” or “no” answers by asking closed-ended questions, include some multiple choice questions and assure participants that any private information they give you will remain confidential.
When you look over the results keep an eye out for trends and surprises.
Publish the results of the survey on your website or blog and invite comments.
The whole process of survey taking and reporting should be treated as a trust-building exercise and an opportunity for increased interaction with your client base.
A successful survey campaign will also have brought you a lot of valuable information about your target market which you can now use to present your prospects with goods and services that more closely match their needs and win their loyalty.
So, in recessionary times, a customer survey is an excellent tool for building stronger ties with your target market, winning the trust of your clientele and thriving in the midst of recession.
Darrell Howell is an Internet Marketer and Blogger. Check out his Blog at http://www.blueridgemoney.info Sign up for a free Internet Marketing Newsletter here.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Use Online Surveys To Build Customer Trust And Loyalty And Thrive During The Recession
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Use Online Surveys To Build Customer Trust And Loyalty And Thrive During The Recession
I’m lazy by nature and like to do as little work as possible. Therefore, when I have the opportunity to automate tasks, I jump at it. As I started getting heavily involved in social networking, I quickly became frustrated with having to update my status at several sites, as well as trying to figure out how to introduce my blog, my articles, and my ezine to my social networking audiences.
After much trial and error, here’s how I connect and repurpose all of my social marketing strategies:
- Set up accounts. Make sure that you have current accounts with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, and any other social networking platforms you regularly use.
- Open an account at Ping.fm. The Ping.fm service automatically updates your status on all of your social networking sites, 21 of them at the current count. Depending on the number of networks you use, it will take you 10-50 minutes to connect your Ping.fm account to your various social network accounts. However, once everything is set up, you simply log into your Ping account, post your status update (no more than 140 characters), and your status is automatically updated on all of your social networking profiles. Rather than posting updates directly on Twitter or Facebook or MySpace, I instead use Ping.fm as the starting place for my daily status updates.
3. Display Twitters on other accounts. If you go to your Setting tab in your Twitter account and then down to “More Info URL”, you will see a link to “Add Twitter to Your Site.” By clicking on this link, you’ll be taken to a page where you can add your tweets in a separate box (not the Status updates area) in your MySpace and Facebook profiles, on your blogger or Typepad blogs, or get the Flash or HTML widgets to add to other sites like Squidoo lenses or to your website. Just follow the instructions connected to each application. If you use Typepad for your blog, you can also do this through the Widget gallery by finding Twitter widget in the “Publishing Tools” section.
4. Connect your blogposts to Twitter. Twitter Feed, http://www.twitterfeed.com/, enables you to feed your blog posts to your Twitter account. Simply create an account, go to “Create New Twitter Feed”, and enter the RSS feed of your blog. You can control the frequency with which Twitter displays your blog post, as well as the text used to preface your blog feed. I use “Blog update” to preface my posts.
5. Connect your blogposts to Facebook. I use Typepad for my blogs, so if you use a Wordpress blog, there are probably plugins that handle this, as well. When you create a new blog post, you can choose to send a link to that post into Facebook. These links will appear in your Mini-Feed on your Facebook profile, and may appear in your friends’ News Feeds.
In your Typepad account, go to Weblogs > Configure > Publicity, select “Prompt me to share new posts on Facebook.” When this item is selected, TypePad will automatically display a prompt from Facebook when you create and publish a new post on TypePad. The Facebook prompt will only appear if you have selected the option in your weblog’s publicity settings, and only when you create and publish a new post. The prompt will not appear when you save a post as draft, when you edit a post, or when you change the status of a post from Draft to Published.
6. Update your EzineArticles.com account. Article marketing is a smart and easy way to drive traffic to your site. If you’re submitting articles online to article directories, you definitely want to be using EzineArticles.com, the biggest and most popular article directory online. To connect to Twitter, click on “Profile Manager” in your account, then “Edit Author Bio” in your Author’s Area. Add your Twitter account information here. Each time a new article is accepted and published at EzineArticles, a post is automatically made to your Twitter account.
7. Update your aWeber account: I use aWeber as my email marketing service. You can now send an automatic Twitter post to all your followers on Twitter with a link to the HTML version of your ezine. When you create a broadcast in aWeber, select the option to publish a broadcast via RSS feed or to an archive, and then enter your Twitter account info, When your ezine is published, all of your Twitter followers will be notified.
There are probably others ways to connect the social networks and to repurpose content on social networks, but these 7 steps are all I need at the moment. Take 30 minutes out of your day to connect and repurpose your social networking, and watch your traffic and list begin to grow!
Online Business Manager and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at OnlineBizU.com . Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at AskDonnaGunter.com
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Social Networking: 7 Steps to More Traffic by Connecting and Repurposing Your Social Marketing
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Social Networking: 7 Steps to More Traffic by Connecting and Repurposing Your Social Marketing
Google has raised the collective eyebrows of the SEO industry this week with the release of their free PDF download: the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.
The Guide offers a very thorough introduction to SEO, including advice on creating search engine friendly pages and optimized META tags, as well as excellent tips on general web site usability and best-practice design methodology.
As a tutor in SEO, I was very impressed with the level of detail included in the 22 page document and will be recommending it to my students as an additional resource for their studies.
Apart from the more obvious elements of search engine compatibility, the Guide includes coverage of usability topics often overlooked by SEO advocates such as:
- - Best practice for URL structuring
- - Site hierarchy and navigation flow
- - Using a custom 404 error page
- - Best practice for using anchor text
- - Link formatting and styling
- - Correct usage of robots.txt
- - Offline site promotion
- - Usage of web site analytics
The Guide began life as a list of best practices for teams within Google, but staff felt that external webmasters would benefit from the advice, which could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.
Google’s Search Quality Team plan on updating the guide at regular intervals to keep the technical advice current.
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
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Google Releases Guide to SEO
Every business owner has this thought, “I know I need to be marketing my website–but how?” And then you keep hearing about article marketing, how it’s a great and simple (and cost effective!) way to bring exposure to your website, build links, increase traffic and bolster search engine ranking.
After hearing the dozenth colleague recommend it, you decide to take the plunge yourself.
Now what? What do you do, where do you start, what should you write? How do you really ‘get into’ article marketing?
A legion of questions jumps into your brain stopping you dead in your tracks.
Whenever we start a new endeavour, there’s a bit of trepidation, but if you can take a few practical steps going in the right direction that feeling of nervousness and confusion will start to fade away.
Whenever a newbie article marketer asks me how to get started, I give them these 3 simple steps:
1) Write an article.
Duh, right? You probably already figured that part out, but before you start writing keep these guidelines in mind:
*Write on your area of expertise. If you happen to sell products at your site, please don’t write specifically about the product you sell. To do that would make the article appear sales oriented, and with article marketing the articles are always educational. Write as if you were a teacher trying to help a newcomer understand your niche.
*Do you have already content that you can re-purpose into an article?
If you have a blog or helpful articles on your website, you may be able to save a little time by using the original content as a launching pad for a new article.
The idea is to *teach* your reader something, so you can look through your previous blog posts, find some that are of the “how to” variety (posts that teach folks how to do things) and then use that post as an outline for an article.
Please note: it isn’t advisable to use content from you blog or website verbatim in an article–re-work the content so that the post or articles on your website remain unique.
*Keep your articles between 450–1500 words, but ideally try to shoot for 700-800 word articles. The first parameter are word limits that most publishers will accept. The 700-800 word articles are ones that are most attractive to ezine editors because they fit nicely in most newsletters.
*After you’ve written your article, be sure to proofread it thoroughly–remember that once you submit this article it will be published on websites over which you have no control, so you want to be sure your article is free of typos and grammatical errors.
2) Find a publisher.
There are 3 main publishing avenues for article marketers–article directories, ezine editors, and announcement lists.
For your first article you may just want to do a Google search for “article directories” and choose one to submit to. You will need to register at the directory, filling out a “new author” form, and then do the various steps to activate your account.
3) Submit your article.
*Be sure that your article is in text format only before trying to copy and paste it into the online form. By having your article in text only format, it helps your article appear with the correct line spacing and formatting. If you do paste your article directly from Word (which is not text only), you may need to fiddle with the article for a while until the formatting is correct.
*Choose the appropriate category for your article. The category is determined by the topic of your article–this is one reason why it’s extremely important to write articles on the topic of your website.
*Spend time crafting a strong resource box. Wtih article marketing the resource box is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The author bio that includes a link to your website makes it possible for traffic to flow from your article to your site. That’s what you’re going for, isn’t it? More traffic!
For the most effective resource box, be sure to include these 4 items:
Your full name. A little bio info and a few of your credentials. A reason to click through to your website. A link to your website.
That wasn’t hard, was it?
They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step–this is your single step.
As you get used to submitting articles, you’ll be ready to learn more advanced techniques, but for now these basics will serve you nicely. As a beginner, the idea is simply to get comfortable with the writing and submitting process–do these 3 simple steps and you’re on your way to becoming an expert!
A trick that many expert article marketers use is to submit article automatically, saving time and increasing their article exposure. Steve Shaw created the web’s first ever 100% automated article distribution service, SubmitYOURArticle.com, which distributes your articles to hundreds of targeted online publishers with the click of a button! For more information, go to =>
http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Article Marketing: 3 Simple Steps for Getting Started
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Article Marketing: 3 Simple Steps for Getting Started