The Power of Publicity

No matter what type of business you’re in, you can’t beat the power of publicity for drawing attention to all that you have to offer. Whether you’re selling luxurious cashmere sweaters, nutritional supplements or painting murals, your fine products or natural talent won’t matter if your target clientele doesn’t know about you. Simply put, it’s your opportunity to put a friendly face on your business and acquaint your target audience with who you are and what you do.

Before we go any further, let’s take a close look at what publicity actually is. It’s non-paid media exposure that promotes your company in a positive light. That’s right; it’s when you’re interviewed by phone on talk radio shows around the country, or appear as a guest on TV shows and/or get editorial coverage in newspapers and magazines.

Being on the air and in the news is undoubtedly one of the best ways to create a buzz about you and your business. Let me give you an example. In the early days of my career, I worked for a Beverly Hills based money manager who had about $20 million under management. As Director of Sales and Marketing, my job was to generate leads and bring in new clients who had a minimum of $100K to invest.

One day a reporter from The Robb Report called because they were writing a story on money managers. While talking with my boss, the reporter discovered that he lived in the 90210 zip code (this was during the height of the TV show’s popularity), drove a brand new Mercedes and was married to a famous actress. When all was said and done, my boss’s picture was plastered on the magazine cover and inside was a feature story detailing the great earnings he’d made for his clients.

Once the story ran, I practically became an order taker because the phones were literally ringing off the hook with investors who had $100K and more and wanted their money managed by my boss. As you can imagine, that $20 million under management prior to the magazine article hitting the stands, became $50 million in an incredibly short period of time.

Now let me tell you why this phenomenon occurs. Publicity helps alleviate the apprehension some people feel when trying a new business. Publicity also helps you develop a rapport with your target audience. And there;s just no better way to boost your credibility because the media has chosen to put you in the spotlight as their expert authority! Anyone can pay for an ad in The Robb Report -but not everyone is featured in a cover story the difference is universes apart.

Let me give you some basic tips on how to attract media attention:

The best way to gain credibility with the media is by writing a book. Short of a book, you need a booklet or at the very least a white paper. Don’t be intimidated by this idea-- if you don’t have time or the skill to write a book hire a ghost-writer who will capture your voice and pen the book for you.

Pay attention to current events. Find ways to tie your expertise or business into relevant and newsworthy topics.

Present yourself as an expert. Don’t pitch yourself, though. Instead, pitch the issue then offer your insights as a knowledgeable expert.

Write a press release focusing on a problem that your product solves. Again, don’t pitch the product. Pitch the problem and the solution.

Create photo opportunities such as a fundraising event and invite the local media.

Write a tips or how-to article for the newspaper or magazine journalists who covers your industry. You’re generating goodwill by giving away valuable information while also establishing yourself as an expert.

I promise, once you’ve learned how to harness the power of publicity, your business will never be the same.

Search Engine Marketing- Optimizing your site for success

Search engine marketing or SEM is the best way of creating visibility, enhancing rankings and getting more traffic to your website. Marketing has always been integral to sales and a sound marketing strategy can always help you to achieve your short-term and long-term goals and increase your profit. Search Engine Marketing or SEM originated somewhere during the late 1990's. It was propelled by the sudden increase of websites on the Internet. Internet became a revolution as more and more people found it easier to use the Internet for different purposes. Internet became a repository of information and soon people needed tools to search and locate relevant information and these tools later evolved as search engines.

Seeing the boom, marketers seized the opportunity and created search engines for promotion of websites on the Internet. During this period of evolution, search engine optimization introduced pay-per-click programs offered by Google and Yahoo followed by search marketing in 1997, and Google AdWords in 2000. By the end of 2006, the pay-per-click campaigns had achieved tremendous success and today are the primary money-making programs for search engines.

In the age where the Internet is the prime platform for advertising your product or service with the help of a website, a sound search engine marketing strategy can do wonders. Today, there are many people who market their businesses through the Internet so that more and more visitors can see the website and become prospective customers. Now most businesses use the SEM strategy to enhance search engine optimization so how can you make a difference? Is your strategy any different from what others are using?

To distinguish your business and be different, you can use some advanced ways of using search engine marketing to help increase your ROI. At the end of the day, the only thing really matters is the visitor conversion to customer. All the methods and various engine optimization methods that various businesses or individuals use are to help them derive a profit. This is exactly the reason why you have also created a website.

SEO - Search Engine Optimization:

First things first, you need to get your website included in the top 10 search engine results to maximize web traffic. To do this successfully, you will need to devise a strong SEO or search engine optimization strategy. Using SEO, your website ranking will improve considerably. SEO uses keywords, which are words specific or relevant to the product or services offered by you. For example: If you are offering tour packages then you can use keywords like travel packages, honeymoon packages, wildlife tours, hiking tours, trekking etc. Using relevant or specific keywords for SEO purposes will help you to get the desired traffic on to your website and at the same time, increase your website ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Now when we speak of search engine marketing, it includes various methods of increasing the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERP). Some of the top SEM strategies include:

SEO Strategies:

The main aim of a search engine optimization strategy or process is to improve rankings based on relevant keywords through search results. A SEO strategy can only be successful if you improve a web site structure, content, and layout and also provide a relevant back link from any other website to your website. Successful SEO strategies are not just limited to text content but it also includes image optimization, and other documents like PDF. The hardest approach to implement is the Organic search engine optimization but it is the more cost effective in the long run.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising:

Pay-per-click advertising, which is one of the most commonly used method of driving web traffic and improving sales uses paid ads. As an advertiser, you will have to bid in an auction based market place for keyword driven advertisements. These customized ads are displayed on the search pages and you pay every time someone clicks on the advertisement.

Paid Inclusions:

The third important SEM strategy is paid inclusion. Using paid inclusion, you will be able to feed listings into various search engines. As an advertiser, you will have to pay a certain amount for the inclusion of your web pages in the index of the service provider. You might have to pay a pay-per-click fee in addition to the inclusion fee depending on the SEO provider.

Online Visibility solutions:

Lastly, except press release services, one of the free methods of increasing visibility is through social media optimization. Through this process, you can promote your website by placing content within online communities so that it can be spread virally. This method is used by websites like YouTube, MySpace etc.

To Achieve success a well planned mix of methods and other more innovative techniques are necessary. If you hire a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) expert make sure that he/she has a holistic approach on that combines a mix of legitimate techniques.

PREVENT MISTAKES IN AFFILIATE MARKETING

Today, affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular and powerful ways to earn extra income online. Anyone who plans to make money online can think about trying affiliate marketing. Since most of the affiliate programs are free to join and paying sale commission on a regular basis, more and more people are now entering into affiliate marketing industry.

However, like other businesses, there are downsides in affiliate marketing business. Making mistakes in affiliate marketing will mean making losses in term of money and time. So it is vital for an affiliate marketer to know how to avoid mistakes or he will regret later. Below are the 3 mistakes that affiliates commonly make:

Select The Wrong Affiliate Program
A lot of people want to make money from affiliate programs as quick as possible. In their hurry, they tend to choose a hot product without actually thinking about whether the product appeals to them. This is not a very wise move obviously. Instead of picking the affiliate product that you know nothing about, try to look for a product you are passionate about. You should take some time to plan and figure out your actions before investing money in advertising.

Do a little research on the product you are interested to find out the product's demand. Marketing an affiliate product that appeals you is easier than promoting the one that for profit only.

Promote Too Many Affiliate Programs
There are tons of interesting affiliate programs on the Internet and they are free and easy to join. This could attract you to join multiples of affiliate programs to maximize the affiliate commission you can earn. There is nothing to lose to join many affiliate programs. In fact, this could be a great way to have multiple sources of income. But the problem is joining too many affiliate programs will stop you from focusing on each one of them.

Often the result produced isn't as expected. You might even suffer a loss due to promoting too many programs at the same time. To generate good result, you should start off with one affiliate program. Try to choose a program that pays more than 40% commission. Then put your best effort to market the product. Once you are making a steady profit with the product, then maybe you can look for second affiliate product to sell.

Selling The Affiliate Product Without Testing It First
The main job of an affiliate is to effectively promoting the product to the customers. One of the important things you must know is that you need to promote and recommend your affiliate product convincingly to the potential buyers. You should also create a desire in your customers to avail any of what you are offering. It is hard to generate any sale if you fail to do both.

If possible try and test the product personally before really signing up the affiliate program to find out whether the product is as described by the seller. After experiencing the product yourself, you will then clearly know about the pros and cons of the product. If the product is good, you can confidently recommend the product with a convincing review to your potential buyers. This will trigger them to try the product themselves.

You should try your best to avoid falling into the same mistakes made by many affiliates as mistakes will lead to losses.