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Small Business Taxes Gone Wild In California

I estimate that 99% of Californians do not understand the implications of the new small business tax that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law yesterday. This law would mandates online sellers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to start collecting sales taxes on items shipped to California if they have some sort of relationship with an affiliate. [...]

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You Got the Opt-in, Now What? Here Are Some Top Email Strategies

The first part of email marketing is to get your visitor to opt-in your email list. Once they opt-in, the visitor becomes a prospect. The second part of email marketing is to move the prospect along your marketing funnel towards them becoming a customer. An important element of that is relationship marketing done via trust. [...]

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Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

There was a time when Linkedin was cool. Well, maybe “cool” is too strong of a word for this early social networking site. Let’s just say that Linkedin was *the* place to network as a business professional. You sign up for Linkedin, you make connections with people you work with, you ask for a recommendation, [...]

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A Way to Promote Your Business with Facebook Events

Let’s assume you’ve already set up your own Facebook profile and a separate Facebook Page for your business. Maybe you’ve also created a Facebook Group that relates to a type of product or service that your business provides. What are some ways that you can promote the special events your business sponsors? One way is [...]

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How to Remove Antispyware Soft

Marketing online is fraught with risks. One category is business risk. The other category is technical risk. Business risk is when you try to execute a digital marketing strategy and it fails. Technical risk includes the risk of not implementing your websites and/or scripts correctly. But technical risk also includes the risk from cyber-attacks. One of the most common form is viruses pretending to be a friendly program ... like a trojan horse. This blog is about how to remove Antispyware Soft. … Read More...

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Using Surveys to Generate Leads in 3-Steps

May 19, 2009 By Alex Leave a Comment

Using surveys to generate leads

One of the best ways that you can generate leads is to have people fill out surveys. This gives you a good idea of what they are looking for, what their age group is, and so on. But there are a few things that should be considered when you are composing surveys.

1. Keep it short

You don’t want to ask too much information of the clients because it may scare them off instead of making them interested in your company or product.

2. Respect their privacy

Assure them that the information that you collect is going to be for your eyes only, and that it won’t be sold to another company. This is something that is important to people and when you make this promise, it shows that you
respect them and their wishes.

3. Offer them a thank you

Let them know that you appreciate the time that they took to do the survey and offer them a thank you present. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive, but people like to know that they are appreciated.

When a survey is done right, and in the right manner, it can be a very useful marketing tool. The thing to remember is that in order to make them work, people have to be willing to fill them out.

Respect their time, respect their privacy, and respect their effort, and you will find that people will give you answers that will be useful and helpful to you and your company.

An easy way to conduct surveys is to do it online. Here is a good and free resource to quickly create online surveys:

http://surveymonkey.com.

The free version allows you to get 100 responses per survey. Surveymonkey is a worthwhile service.

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Filed Under: Lead Generation Tagged With: , ,

Business of Marketing Free

February 1, 2009 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

Survivors of the early Internet or Web 1.0 undoubtedly remember that the business of marketing “free” online was all that was required to secure millions of dollars in venture capital funding. The business of marketing went something like this in 1999: Dream up a great widget (no need to flush it out); build a website; show venture capitalists your website; tell them a great story about how it will scale if they just add money; get the money and build up the website; give widget for free to get subscribers and a few customers; make a few dollars back on a few million dollars worth of investments; file for IPO; cash check; repeat. Simple, right?

Of course I left a few details out of the above marketing process in order to make this article short, but the main story back then remains the same … build it, give it away for free, and they will come. You can always make up the dollars you lose to acquire each customer by your volume. The scary thing about this marketing scheme was that it almost worked. Some of these Web 1.0 companies built up subscriber lists of hundreds of thousands. A few built lists of millions. Today we realize, as they did back then, that a confirmed subscriber list with full contact information is worth a lot of money. The problem back in Web 1.0 was that they did not have a back end strategy to their marketing funnel. So they spent the money to acquire the subscriber list but they didn’t have a way to make money off of that list.

Here is how you can make money today in the business of marketing free information. You can do this in 7 easy steps. Keep in mind that this is but one strategy. Be creative. There are many ways to build a list of followers online using Web 2.0.

1) First you will need a place to store your subscriber list. I’ve tried many services, both free and paid, and this service is the best in terms of deliverability of your email and ease of use. Sign up at their website below:

http://www.lowcostautoresponder.com

2) Create a 10 part how-to video series or a 10 part how-to article series or a 10 part how-to audio series on something that you know how to do really well. One example might be on how to use Photoshop to remove wrinkles or shrink some wide body curves. Another example might be on how to make the best smoothies that rival Jamba juice. A third example might be on how to remove spyware from your computer without having to spend a lot of money for a technician. Use your talents and know-how to create this free information series.

3) If you created a video series, post it on YouTube. But here is the trick: Take the signup email that you received from lowcostautoresponder.com and put it as the first piece of text in your YouTube video description. YouTube will make this a hyper-link. What this means is that when viewers click on the link to learn more about your really useful how-to video, they will be prompted to sign up to your list to see the next video in the series.

Here is how to test the sequence: Show video one, then ask them to click on your YouTube link to see video two. Use lowcostautoresponder to send them to video two without much fuss. However, put a note at the end of video two and in your confirmation email that if they want to see video three, they will have to confirm their subscription to your list. If they confirm, they will be sent to videos three, four, five, and so on. If they don’t confirm, you’ll know right away that your video was not very appealing to them. You don’t want that prospect on your list anyways.

4) Post videos three, four, five and so on on Google video and make them private. This prevents the general public from being able to find your video. Take a note of these video URLs on Google and put it in your autoresponder.

5) Advertise your YouTube video by:

a) Asking your friends to rate and comment on it.
b) Point links to your video by submitting the very same video on other video sites like Veoh, Viddler, Google video, Yahoo video, and so on.
c) Ping your YouTube video URL.
d) Hand bookmark your video URL.
e) Write an article about your video and submit it to Goarticles.com with a link pointing to your video. Then ping your article on Goarticles and bookmark it too.

6) Once people subscribe to your list, write a series of 10 to 20 autoresponder messages. Talk about your how-to subject in more detail. Let them know that your “ezine” or “newsletter” is supported by sponsors. If you need sponsored offers to use to make money from your list, I suggest you sign up here for free. They don’t accept every application, but if you mention that Alex Tran sent you, you will stand a better chance of getting in.

http://alextran.com/bookmark/bestcpa

7) Ask them to go to your YouTube videos and rate them and leave their comments.

That’s it!! You can do the same for your how-to articles or your how-to audios.

Good luck and happy subscriber list building. About the only piece that you will have to pay for is the autoresponder. It sure is a whole lot cheaper than VC money though. Trust me on this…

http://www.lowcostautoresponder.com

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Filed Under: Lead Generation Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Online Advertising Campaign In Today's Internet

November 12, 2008 By Alex Leave a Comment

During the early days of the internet, it was far easier to compete because there were fewer websites to compete with. Today in the 21st century, if you want to successfully compete with hundreds of thousands of competitors, you’ve got to have a well planned and strategically sound online advertising campaign in place. Do this before you ever publish your website. If you’ve got all your planning done ahead of time, you’ll get traffic to your website sooner rather than later.

Maintaining your website is an expense. If you’re also paying for ads, the income you derive won’t add up to much without sufficient traffic. The time you spend planning your online advertising campaign and developing the best strategies for your product or service will pay you big dividends, decreasing the time between launch and profits. Let’s take a look at how you can customize your advertising campaign to your advantage.

The *big* search engine is Google. They handle about 75% of all searches online. So it makes sense to make your website Google friendly. Google.com provides detailed information on how your website is ranked, how the spiders work, good links versus what Google deems spammy, along with a wealth of resources which show you how to increase your visibility. In fact, there’s so much information, it will take a while to go through it all. On the other hand, what you’ll learn will help you tailor your strategies for a successful online advertising campaign. This makes your effort entirely worthwhile. Think of all your competitors who neglect to make this thorough investigation!

For example, we’ve all seen websites which have advertisements which are completely unrelated to the page content, trying to sell you cell phones, gadgets and books on a page with an article on obtaining a mortgage. Perhaps the website owner figures if you can buy a home, you can thus afford these items. However, search engines will penalize you for irrelevant advertising. Target your ads to each page as the product or service pertains to the interest of the reader. Google’s AdSense program uses a variety of algorithms to scan the content of your page and match your page with ads of likely interest to that reader. While you can certainly add affiliate program ads, using Google AdSense drives traffic and revenue to your site far more quickly. This single element can give your online advertising campaign a hefty jump start.

Everyone knows that linking is important to a well planned online advertising campaign. What’s not so well known is that the quality of the site you’re linked to impacts your rankings. The search engine spiders are pretty “smart” and sophisticated these days, so be choosy when you select your links. If the Google spiders detect that most of your links within text are click-throughs to a potential sale, rather than information of value to your reader, you’ll take another hit in the rankings. The spiders may even exclude that page from future indexing.

It’s most important that you do your homework and find out what helps and what harms your search engine ranking. If you don’t, your online advertising campaign may become a failed campaign, setting your online marketing efforts back.

Publishing some of your content in relevant e-newsletters with high readerships is another excellent technique for any online advertising campaign. When you’re brainstorming for new ideas, always keep “relevance” and “quality’ in mind. Then watch your profits grow.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Website Design
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