Apr

Online Marketing: “What’s In It For Me?” Asks Your Customer…

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline, businessfromhomework

By Kenneth Koh |

If you are serious about doing business online, it’s important to learn how to do online business advertising. Whether the traffic source is free or paid, if you do not understand the basics of doing online advertising, the traffic you’ve generated will be wasted.

Recently a ‘rich’ surveying company advertised with us. When I looked at the ad, I almost fainted. It was a simple sign up form, expecting people to sign up without telling them anything about the company or the offer. Isn’t it common sense to ask oneself “will I act on this ad?” before one spend money advertising the ad?

In today’s discussion on how to do online business advertising, I’m going to share with you 3 “MUST-HAVE” elements in your ad before you even start thinking where to advertise it.

Hope that helps.

1. WIIFM “in 5 seconds”

WIIFM stands for “what’s in it for me”.

If you don’t tell people what’s in it for them, they are not going to be interested in your ad, not to mention taking action.

The problem with many advertisers is that their WIIFM is scattered all over the sales copy. One has to seriously read through the sales copy to identify them. Unfortunately, most sales copies are not read and thus the WIIFM message is not delivered.

For effective online business advertising, your ad must address the question of WIIFM within 5 seconds after a prospect first look at your ad. If not, you are losing them, period.

This means your headline, subheadline and the first paragraph of your sales copy play an important role in deciding whether a prospect will continue reading your ad or simply leave the page.

2. Become their friends “in 10 seconds”

Once you successfully capture their attention with WIIFM, you next objective is to gain their confidence in you and/or your offer.

Common ways to achieve this include the follow tricks:

- adding testimonials, especially ones with photographs;
- showing your own photograph and disclosing your name, email address and even contact number;
- showing other proofs such as earning screenshots, samples of completed work etc.

3. “Impossible-to-miss” call for action

Lastly, you must tell your prospect what to do next.

The problem with many advertisers is that their call for action is hidden somewhere in the sales letter. If it takes even 10 seconds for the prospects to search for the call for action, most of them would rather click the close window button.

The 3 elements above are the bare minimum that you must have in your ad if you want to do any online business advertising.

In additional to these 3, try to build a list regardless of what online business you’re advertising. The main advantage of online advertising vs offline advertising is that it’s easy to capture clients’ database. In the world of business, winners are those who own the customers. Think Walmart vs wholesaler. Think Ebay vs its sellers. The ones with huge customer base win. Regardless of what business you’re in, you are in the business of building customers.

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Apr

What Twitter Search Can Mean for Businesses

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline

The business and marketing implications in using social media are staggering. People are tired, fed-up and down right resistant to ‘hype’ marketing. People now are realizing that the majority of commercials are blatant lies of large companies desperately trying to squeeze one more buck out of a defective, poor or dangerous product. So what are today’s consumers doing to fill their need to find quality products or services? Easy, they are asking their families, friends and extended online social communities for recommendations. It’s called RECOMMENDATION MARKETING.

Well, that’s no big surprise BUT it is called RECOMMENDATION marketing which implies that you need to be asked first for your opinion…ahem…your recommendation. In order to be asked for a recommendation you must be known, trusted and perceived as knowledgeable or an expert in whatever it is of interest. So how do you manage to be this trusted expert that people go to for recommendations? It is really quite simple…you care about them FIRST. You establish relationships with them FIRST. Learn more about establishing relationships in social media by watching Perry Belcher’s ‘Cocktail Party” video. ‘Nuff said.

As Chris Crum from WebPro News states, social media (specifically Twitter) is A Gateway to Potential Customers.

While many still struggle to find a purpose for using Twitter, and Twitter ceases to generate revenue for itself (though it’s coming sooner or later), the social network continues to take the world by storm. Naturally there are plenty of opportunities there or businesses to capitalize on.

New data from comScore indicates that Twitter approached 10 million users in February. That’s a growth of over 700% from February 2008. On top of that, worldwide visitors climbed over 5 million more. Just in the US, visitors climbed over 1000% in a year’s time.

The two largest age demographics on Twitter are the 45-54 crowd, and the 25-34 crowd. Interestingly, the youngsters (12-17) are the smallest demographic as comScore notes, referencing info from Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters.

There are still many unanswered questions about the best ways to use Twitter for marketing. Not everyone agrees on the best practices. Mike McDonald of WebProNews had an interesting discussion about this with SageRock’s Sage Lewis that is definitely worth checking out.

All that being said…social media is THE new marketing in a kinder, gentler manner. Join me to find out exactly how to become the known, trusted expert in your field to advance your business.

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Apr

Digg Says Diggbar is SEO Friendly (But You Can Still Block It If You Want)

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline

When Digg launched the Diggbar last week, it seemed to follow a trend that social media and bookmarking is taking. But for most, there was just one problem: in the URL box in your browser is a tiny URL created by Digg instead of the full URL of the site. Naturally, SEO concerns over PageRank and canonical issues arose.

Digg is responding with this:

Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.

We launched a few additional updates early this week to address some lingering concerns in the SEO and publishing communities around the infamous (and sometimes mysterious) search engine \’juice\’. We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=\”canonical\” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.

There\’s also been some discussion about how traditional web analytics and panel based companies like Quantcast, Compete, Nielson and Comscore track shortened URLs. While we don\’t claim to represent any specific methodology, we\’ve reached out to Comscore and Nielson and they both confirmed that publisher traffic statistics won\’t be impacted by the DiggBar implementation. Also, any quantitative tag employed by Quantcast, Compete and Comscore\’s new hybrid methodology will also register the source as the page view.

Still, there are those who are not BiggFans of the DiggBar. Take John Gruber over at Daring Fireball, for example. He\’s shared a code that blocks the DiggBar.

I\’m not a big Digg user myself, but I do use StumbleUpon and, of course, click on links from Twitter, and have been coming across the DiggBar. It comes across as not really wanting to share information and/or network, they just wanted a Digg.

What do you, dear reader, think of the DiggBar? Do you trust Digg or will you go Gruber\’s route? Let us know in the comments.

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Apr

FTC\’s Proposed Social Media Marketing Regulations Target Bloggers

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline

If the Federal Trade Commission has its way, bloggers and social network users will soon be liable for their reviews of businesses and products. New regulations would allow them to be sued for anything they write that would be false.

Supposedly, these new regulations would be restricted to \”pay-per-post\” content, but I\’m sure lawyers will find a way to target all content. (Hint: they already do. These regulations would help, yes, the lawyers!)

The FTC should go back to elementary school. That\’s when kids learn that opinions are not true or false - only facts are. They even have homework assignments about it.

When you see a celebrity endorse a consumer brand in traditional advertising, does anyone really believe that celebrity uses the brand? Or do we ~~know~~ think that they use some high-end brand that 0.000001% of America can afford?

Is the FTC suddenly going to be tailing Padma Lakshmi to see if she really does eat Hardee\’s Western Bacon Thickburgers on a stoop in New York City? Especially since there isn\’t a Hardee\’s in New York City? (Oh you thought that was Chicago? It\’s not. There are no Hardee\’s there either.) (Apologies to Chris Applebaum.)

And here\’s the clincher. Are they going to punish politicians for all of their false advertising? Both the promises that never get fulfilled and the attacks that stretch the truth?

For a government agency full of people staffed by politicians, going after bloggers for truthiness is like the pot calling the kettle black.

That\’s just my opinion. What\’s yours? Leave a comment below, if you dare. The FTC may allow you to get sued for it later.

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Apr

Digg Search is Now Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline

Digg has introduced an updated search to their social bookmarking site. Design head Daniel Burka outlined the changes in a post on the Digg blog. The updates include:

Filtering by factors such as Digg count, topic, time, etc.

Advanced shortcuts to search for specific promotion characteristics. Add +p to your query for only promoted stories, +u for upcoming stories, and +b for buried.

Common search tricks - quotes for exact match and a negative sign before the term to keep that term out of results

A graph demonstrating the historical trend of a term

Searching for stories from a particular domain is much more effective. Filtering results by domain is also available.

New RSS feeds allow users to create feeds for a given topic but filter out results they don\’t wish to see

Digg search is faster

What do you think of the Digg search updates? Let us know in the comments below.

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Apr

YouTube and Universal to Partner for New Music Site, VEVO

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline

Apparently, if you want to start an online video site, you must come up with a name that is two syllables and heavy on the vowels. Cases in point:

YouTube
Veoh
Hulu

Soon, there will be one more to add to the list: VEVO. The site is a partnership between YouTube and Universal Music Group to feature the record company\’s video content.

It was just last December that Universal was part of talks with other music companies to form a Hulu-like site for music videos. It seems that YouTube stepped in and was able to at least stave off one of the big guys from starting the thing.

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Apr

Yelp to Allow Local Business Response to User Reviews

Posted by admin as businessfromhomeonline

There have been many a tale of a business owner here or there who is none too thrilled with the review the get on Yelp. Even doctors are requiring patients to sign forms saying they won\’t give a negative review online because of negative reviews on Yelp.

Of course, there are those who take it in stride, such as the San Francisco pizzeria that decided to start printing their 1 star reviews on T-shirts. (And then customers started giving 1 star reviews in the hopes of seeing their review on a shirt.)

But let\’s face it, not everyone has a good sense of humor.

So, Yelp has decided to let businesses respond to user reviews. Sense of humor or not, this is a wise decision on Yelp\’s part. And hopefully, physicians will take advantage of it instead of bullying their patients into keeping them un-accountable.