Facebook Timeline – Don’t Complain, It’s Good For Business

How can you even begin to keep up with Facebook? As soon as you get used to their last changes, they spring something new on you. The latest is Facebook Timeline – it’s been forced on us without our consent! All fan pages now use the Timeline format. Well, stop your crying because this is a good thing and here’s why.

Timeline offers a lot more than the old format did. You can engage more easily with your customers and brand your business better. They’ve listened to our feedback and created something that’s all-around better.

The Cover

First, you’ll notice that at the top of your profile is a huge picture. This is your ‘cover.’ It’s the most powerful branding opportunity you have on Facebook. Don’t believe me? Look at Coca-Cola’s Timeline. Check out the New York Times’ profile. They’ve used their cover in a cool, creative way, and that’s what you can do too.

New and Improved Tabs

Remember those boring tabs on the left-hand side of the page? Actually, you might not because what’s to remember? Timeline offers ‘views.’ These are basically the same except that their thumbnails instead of text. I smell another branding opportunity!

Control Your Posts

On the old profile format, whenever somebody posted on your wall, it appeared at the top. Whenever somebody came to your wall, they’d see whatever random thing somebody posted last. If you wrote a really cool post that you want people to see, it would get buried under all the new stuff. This is why I always advised people to backlink to their info, not their wall.

Timeline lets you control which posts are seen first. One way is the Starred Post feature. You ‘star’ a post and it stays on top. Another feature is the Weekly Pinned Post. You choose the week’s greatest hit and keep it there for all to see.

Multimedia Wall Posts

Have you ever tried embedding a video on your wall with the old profile? You needed to be basically an amateur coder to do it. You had to use iFrame and it could be messy if you weren’t a pro at stuff like that. Timeline makes it as easy as copying and pasting to put multimedia on your wall. This includes videos, music, slide shows, testimonials, custom apps and just about anything else you want to slap up there

PM Me ASAP

I mentioned better engagement with your fans. Well, Timeline lets your fans send you a private message. If they want to communicate through your page, they don’t have to post publicly or send a message to the admin’s profile. This may seem like a tiny change and it is really, but it has serious consequences. You’re put in much more direct contact with your fans and if you use this to your advantage and communicate with them well, it can really help with your branding as the nice guy/gal. Timeline is good, trust me. Once we all get used to it, we’ll realize that this is a change for the better for Internet marketers and business owners.

Simple Guide On How Mobile Marketing

Works One of the greatest features of mobile marketing is that you can instantly reach your customers with up-to-date offers and information. If this appeals to you, check out the rest of the tips and tricks here in the following paragraphs.

When you send people to a link, do not expect them to perform complex actions such as creating a user’s account or reading a lot of text. Make sure you redirect your customers to a website that will provide them with useful and concise information that they can easily read on their mobile devices.

Keep the speed of your customers’ cell providers in mind when you are designing your mobile marketing campaign. If it takes too long for your content to load on their phone, they are likely to give up and back out of the message. Keep things simple to avoid having extreme loading times.

Offer cell phone users a free gift if they subscribe to your mobile content. This can encourage users to opt-in to receive your adverts, which means you don’t have to fear being branded a spammer. You could also offer a gift which requires users to spend money with your company in the future in order to receive all the benefits of the gift.

Use your traditional site to drive a lot of traffic to your mobile platform. Urge people who visit your regular website or blog to visit you on their mobile phones when they are out and about. This will give you yet another way to stay close to your customers and potential customers.

You need to have a home base involved with any mobile marketing strategy. Do you want your customers at your website, or do you want them to go to your Facebook page? Everything needs to be built around the home base of operations online and the rest are fingers protruding from the hand.

Do your research. Understanding how mobile marketing works is the most important step to take before you get into it. Search for other marketing campaigns, and see which ones worked out well, and which did not. Having this information to back you up can put you on the successful track to marketing well.

Mobile Marketing

Do not make mobile marketing a goal. You will not be successful if you rely only on this kind of marketing. You should approach mobile marketing as a way of communicating with your audience, among other techniques of marketing. This method might be more appropriate for a certain group of customers.

Keep your mobile marketing messages short and sweet. Although many cell phone and smartphone users are signed up with plans that offer unlimited data transfers, not everyone has this luxury. If your ad consumes a great deal of their monthly allotment of data, chances are good that your efforts will go unappreciated and even resented.

The old rules of telephone marketing also apply to mobile marketing. The telephone call from a sales person during dinner time is one of the quickest ways to lose a sale and a customer. Time your marketing messages for mid-morning to early afternoon. Do not send messages in the middle of the night or at dinner time.

Mobile Marketing Company

To make sure your needs as an advertiser are met, take the time to find a mobile marketing company that’s a good fit for you. Many companies specialize in marketing certain types of products or in certain aspects of mobile marketing, and may not excel at what you need them for.

To summarize, you have a message to get to your customers and you want it delivered without hesitation. You want to grab their attention. Well, mobile marketing provides the means to do this, and hopefully you picked up on some of the best methods to do so in this article. Spend a few minutes to review these pointers and get to work on studiously applying the suggestions to your business.

All about YouTube Marketing

Promoting a business can be extremely taxing, especially when you’re just getting started. If you’re into checking out marketing blogs, you’ve probably come across some information about YouTube marketing. This form of advertising falls under the umbrella of video advertising, which falls under the even larger umbrella of Internet marketing. Take a look at some specifics of this business strategy to deepen your understanding about its importance and utilize it to help popularize your products or services.

Why Online Video Advertising?

Video marketing is one of the leading advertising platforms on the Internet. People of all ages and from different backgrounds are taking advantage of this promotional opportunity in an effort to maximize the visibility of their business. It falls under the concept of showing rather than telling and continues to draw an abundance of viewers if done correctly. There are several types of video marketing. The primary kinds include article video marketing, viral video marketing and social video marketing. Individuals can utilize one or multiple forms according to their specific needs and intentions. If you’re not certain about how to implement videos, it’s a good idea to consult with a professional or consider audio production schools in your area that’ll provide thorough instruction:

Article Video Marketing – This type of video marketing typically interests those who prefer the less time-consuming practice of watching informational videos rather than reading articles. Video marketing involves businesses or individuals developing numerous short clips that display the contents of articles written beforehand. Most videos are between two and five minutes and cover a wide range of topics. After the videos are created, they’re uploaded onto popular video-sharing websites to target an audience.

Articles can be converted into videos in a number of ways. One of the most popular ways is to turn the written pieces into a PowerPoint presentation or animated slide show. Pictures and a voiceover narration are usually added to the presentation before it’s recorded via screen capture software and put on the Internet for viewing pleasure. An alternative involves recording an article and saving it as an MP3 file. Afterwards, video layout software is used to change the audio to a video. The finished product is then exported and uploaded to relevant websites for exposure.

Viral Video Marketing – Another form of online video advertising is viral video marketing which contains humorous events, eyewitness incidents or clips from comedy sketches on television. Many clips are shot by amateurs on mobile devices and edited with the use of economical tools and software before being published on video sharing sites, social networking sites and personal websites.

Most viral videos are created as a dialogue and shared with the intention of entertaining family and friends, although many people use it as a way to engage prospective customers. This option has benefited word-of-mouth marketing and was preceded by email-sharing. These videos continue to increase in popularity in a variety of sectors, including education and music. However, fans of this concept must be careful not to violate copyright laws, as this has been a major downside to viral video-making and has been the result of several problems within the entertainment industry.

Social Video Marketing – This choice is equally significant. Social video marketing (SVM) is similar to viral video marketing in that it engages a wide audience through the distribution of video. However, the notion of self-expression tends to be more evident. This form of video marketing relies heavily on social theory, consumer culture theory, and economic theory.

Social Video Marketing (SVM) also intends to leave a deeper contextual message, rather than simply being a pass-along model between sender and recipient. In other words, a more individualistic approach is taken and the finished product tends to have more depth as it forms solid relationships and builds trust between publishers and viewers.

Introducing YouTube

Despite the kind of video marketing used, many advertisers can attest to the benefits of sharing their clips on YouTube. This video-sharing site attracts millions of visitors on a regular basis and contains a large host of products, including music videos, TV clips, movie clips, video blogs, and original clips. Although mostly individuals upload videos on the site, several major corporations have been known to make contributions as well.

Content is constantly investigated by YouTube’s employees. Explicit or offensive material can only be viewed by registered users. This group also has the privilege of uploading videos, as well as watching them. Unregistered users, on the other hand, solely have the right to view distributed clips.

Besides uploading, YouTube also contains other valuable features. Playback is a major attribute on the site and enables users to view finished products if an Adobe Flash Player plug-in is installed on their computer. Browsers that support specific HTML5 versions, such as advanced video coding and WebM, also afford individuals the opportunity to view videos, although some clips are still inaccessible with this alternative. Additional features include 3D videos, various platforms and a new localization system.

How it All Began At the beginning of 2005, YouTube was established by three former PayPal employees. The entire concept of the video-sharing website was developed over the course of a few months and started out as a technology start-up company. Its headquarters were initially located in San Mateo, California.

After its inception, the site grew faster than anticipated. By the summer of 2006, it was reported that thousands of videos were being uploaded every day and millions of viewers were watching clips per day. Numbers continued to increase and moved into the billions by 2010. Since then, YouTube has embarked on several new concepts, such as the ability to upload full-length videos and the free streaming of specific content. A new design was also launched to provide additional benefits to users.

Today, YouTube is headquartered in San Bruno, California. After being acquired by Google, the Google+ social networking site was integrated with YouTube which allow the site’s videos to be viewed from Google’s interface. YouTube is a dominant force in the online business market in the United States and it also ranks relatively high in other regions, including the United Kingdom. As of 2012, more than 4 billion videos are streamed per day.

6 Ways To Make Money From Affiliate Programs Without Your Own Website

Most Internet marketers will tell you that the best way to make money with affiliate programs is build your own website and/or email marketing list. I do not disagree with this. However, I also know that there are ways to make money as an affiliate marketer without building a website or getting an autoresponder and building a subscriber base to mail to. The keys regardless of which route you go is to be able to drive traffic. Pre-selling your traffic before passing it through to your affiliate sales page is smart, but not always necessary.

1. One thing I do not like about affiliate urls is how bulky and unattractive they are. Therefore, one strategy is to purchase a domain name and redirect it to your affiliate sales page. This way if you promote your website address you’re promoting a professional looking website address. This also gives you the advantage of buying a domain name that contains keywords relating to the offer of the affiliate product you are promoting.

2. Another thing you can do is set up a landing page and redirect your new URL to it. With this strategy are not promoting your affiliate offer directly, but you are trying to build an email list before sending traffic to your affiliate offer. You would not need to build a full-blown affiliate website, but you would need to set up an an auto responder. Of course the big advantage to this is you would now have names and email addresses you could promote other offers to in the future as well.

3. Some forms of paid advertising such as pay per click and discussion forums do not really want you promoting your affiliate offer directly. One way around this is to again promote your landing page, or you could even promote a social networking sites such as your Facebook page. This is easy to set up and serves the purpose of adding social media to your affiliate marketing mix.

4. Another thing you can do is write articles and submit them article directories. In the resource box you could hyperlink a keyword phrase to your affiliate sales page. You can also promote your new Facebook page, or even promote your landing page and build your subscriber base from your article marketing efforts.

5. Starting a blog is yet another thing you can do. Google will help you set up a free blog at Blogger.com. You can then add affiliate banners to it and make sales whenever people go to your affiliate website from your blog.

6. You can also purchase website hosting and set up a WordPress blog. This doesn’t take any real technical skills and it also serves the purpose of being a pre-sell website when you do it correctly. I’ve never been one that likes to build websites. However, I also understand that making money in affiliate marketing requires a little bit more skill than just directly referring your affiliate sales page. The ideas in this article should assist you in doing that.

How to Generate an Ongoing Stream of Qualified Leads For Your Business Copyright © 2011

A lead generation system is a way to convert your visitors into prospects, and your prospects into clients. By setting up an well-thought-out system, you can attract and convert leads on an on-going basis. The following steps should be taken to ensure an effective Lead Generation System:

1. Attract Traffic

First, you have to create content through various media. · Videos · Reports · Podcasts · Articles · Newsletters · Membership Sites · Social Media After creating content, you need to drive traffic to it. Traffic comes from various sources: Search Engine Optimisation Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting your website found when prospective customers do a search for it on a search engine. Better search engine rankings mean you get seen by more people – and that increases traffic to your website. The following ways help search engine traffic to your website. · Basic Optimisation – keywords, meta tags · Google AdWords · Facebook Ads · Social Network Marketing · Article Marketing · Newsletters · Directory Listings · Classified ads

2. Capture Leads

In order to capture leads, you need a powerful and irresistible “magnet” offer. This usually takes the form of a free report, free ideo or free newsletter. You have to have a lead capture form to capture the name and email address of your prospect. The prospect giving you their name and email address is a sure sign that they are interested in your service, and want to know more.

3. Nurture Prospects

Most of your prospects won’t immediately buy after seeing your advertisement. They usually buy when you have won their trust. Research has shown that people need contact from you an average of seven times before they feel they know you. You therefore need a systematic approach for developing their trust and converting them to sales. It is not a secret that many small businesses don’t follow-up with prospects like they should. However, consistent, valuable follow-up messages create a huge competitive edge for your small business. As long as you follow-up with a clear plan. Prospective customers who sign up for your news want to hear from you, but no-one likes being overwhelmed by too many messages. You need to create a consistent timeline that follows up with the needs of your customers. Some businesses can get away with daily messages, but most would be happy with once or twice a week. You can’t over stay your welcome. Your messages should be personalised, using the prospect’s name. This creates a higher response rate than a mass email.

4. Convert Sales

There are various ways you can convert a prospect to a customer. If you have physical products to sell you can do so through a shopping cart feature. If you sell a service, it can be done through email marketing and a call to action resulting in a physical sale. At this stage it is important that you have a customer relationship management system where you keep the details of the customer.

5. Deliver and Satisfy

It is important that you have good customer service and after sales service. This will keep the customer coming back to you if they need one of your other products or services. You can also have satisfaction surveys or surveys finding out the needs of your customers so you can provide an even better service.

6. Upsell Customers

One of the very first lessons business owners learn is that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. Also: obtaining a new customer costs 5 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer. Yet most small business owners spend all their time focusing on getting new customers. On-going communication with your existing customers is essential, and shouldn’t end once you’ve made one sale. If your customer service was good, customers will be more likely to make a repeat sale from you rather than looking elsewhere. This is why you need to continue to nurture your relationship with your existing customers. We can automate this process as well.

7. Get Referrals

Getting referrals is a free way of getting new customers. Many small business owners leave this to chance, not realising that this should also be a process, and can also be automated. There are also other ways to get referrals than getting it from satisfied customers. You can get affiliates to sell for you. The best thing about affiliates is the Return On Investment that it gives you. You pay a percentage to the affiliate. This could yield amazing returns. Having an online lead generation system like this will ensure that your profits keep growing as your website is effectively turned into a sales person that can work 24 hours 7 days a week. All your processes should be automatic freeing you up for what you love to do and what you’re good at. —————-

 

What To Avoid When Starting Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Now that you quit the job that you hated and you are your own boss, what’s next? You are ready to start your new career in affiliate marketing! You are probably very happy and ready to work as many long, hard hours as it takes to make your business succeed.

You constantly monitor your website and you watch your sales go up and up! You are using a lot of the strategies you learned to sell as much as you can. Then, it is finally the time you have waited for. The day you are going to get paid. However, when you open the check you are surprised to see that it is not as much as you thought it would be. You made money, but you had expected to make a lot more money. When you call the merchant to see why your check was smaller than you thought they tell you they deducted items that were returned after the purchase.

No one wants to experience this but most affiliate marketers do. The merchant won’t pay you a commission when people return goods. That is why you need to know the return policy of the company you are dealing with so you know what to expect as far as your payments.

When people decide not to keep an item they bought, it is considered a return. A charge back may also occur, which is where a purchase is disputed with the credit card company. When you see a lot of orders being charged back that are high value purchases, you may be being scammed. It could be that the affiliate marketing company is falsifying the information in order to pay you less commission and keep it themselves.

A lot of charge backs could also indicate a different problem that needs to be taken seriously. Are the charge backs occurring in the trial period or the period where a person can get their money back without penalties? If so, that may mean that you are promoting a product or service that the customers are not satisfied with.

Another of the pitfalls to avoid when starting an affiliate marketing business is marketing items that are not commissionable. You need to know what products are going to be profitable and which ones are not going to make you money.

You should also check to be sure you are not selling any items with conditions that may lower your commission. A commission may be paid only if the customer makes the purchase right away. If they add an item to their cart and shop some more, you may not get a commission because they go to other links and then come back. If they make a large order but check out other websites first, you lose a lot of commission.

You can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. You cannot rush in and sign an agreement until you know all the terms and conditions, though. You may even want to have a lawyer look at the terms and conditions to make sure you are not falling for any of the pitfalls to avoid when starting your affiliate marketing business. If you are careful, you can avoid disappointment.

Making Money On The Internet Requires A Plan

More people would be making money on the Internet if they just took the knowledge they have gained and put it into action. In this article lets analyze that statement a little closer.

This isn’t really for beginners. Beginners don’t really have any knowledge yet, and they are still feeling their way around the various ways to make money online.

There are literally millions of people who do have enough knowledge to make money right now. Some of these people are professional  Internet marketing surfers.

Would you classify yourself as one of those? These are people who spend every day looking for something better than what they  already have!

To me this is a very frustrating way to spend your time. However, some people would prefer to pretend they are doing valuable research. This is actually very easy once you learn how to navigate your way around the search engines, discussion forums, and social networking sites.

One important point that can totally change your life is learning how to hold yourself accountable for what you do every day. The best way to do this is to actually write down some goals and read those every morning.

Your goal should include immediate action items, intermediate goals, and long-term goals. The long-term goal should be something that is so big it takes a really good effort to hit.

Intermediate goals could be something you want to accomplish this week, this month, or accomplish this year. These take a little bit of time to hit, but are achievable.

Your action items are things that need to be done right now. This list is constantly changing based on what’s
going on with your own Internet business.

What you are really doing right now is establishing a plan for your business. I would venture to say that the
majority of Internet marketers do not really have a plan for success.

Making money on the Internet comes down to creating a plan and then implementing it. This is no different from what a football coach does, or a sales manager for a business does.

The big difference here is you do not have anybody telling you what to do. You are the boss and are ultimately
responsible for whether you succeed or fail.

Accomplishing something every day in your business will go a long way towards helping you succeed. It
will also put you closer to achieving your intermediate and long-term goals. When you do this you will be making money on the Internet.

Effective And Profitable Online Business Ideas For Everyone

Are you trying hard to locate effective and profitable online business ideas that will allow you get a business of your own started? There are many different ideas you can decide from to begin a business, you just have to be told which ones are the most effective and profitable for you.

You need to be the one that decides on the best business idea for you since no one knows you better than you know yourself.. The following are the internet business ideas you want to start
exploring to locate the perfect one for you.

1. Affiliate marketing – You can literally locate thousands of affiliate programs that you can easily
promote for free.. You just need to determine which niche you want your business in and then find programs that will allow you to earn money..

You will be given all that is needed to begin earning money at home such as, a website, marketing materials and other things. You are the person that chooses when you begin earning money by the time, effort and hard work you put into promoting the affiliate programs..

2. Business opportunities - You can also locate a variety of business opportunities that you will find to start your business with. It is smart to take time to learn all of your opportunity options.

It may take some time to locate the best opportunity for you, but if you look at many of them you will easily be able to spot it.

3. Online auction sites - There are numerous people that sell products using online auction sites.. This is a great way to begin a business at home; you just have to determine the products you are going to sell.

You can find them in your own home, garage or estate sales, wholesale companies or even use drop shipping. The key is to do your homework and find out which products are going
to be profitable for you..

4. Niche marketing – This idea is very effective because you are going to be targeting a particular niche market. If  you begin a business in the right niche, then you are going to easily earn money
since many of your customers will be prepared to spend their money for your product, but you have to be sure you can offer it to them.

These are just a small handful of effective and profitable online business ideas. Remember
that you are the only one that can decide on the perfect one for you so be sure you give yourself time to make your choice and this will let you be confident that you are beginning the correct business for you.

Tips For Starting Your Keyword Research For Niche Internet Marketing

Your website and blog require targeted traffic and for targeted traffic you need to ensure you know how to start your niche internet marketing keyword research to find the exact keywords with the most oomph for your niche. It is vital that you do not skimp on any part of your keyword research as this is in effect creating the foundation for you to then build your profitable internet business upon.

What are the two factors that you must remember when undertaking your keyword research? In the first instance, you need to investigate the demand for a keyword or phrase. This is the number of people who use that exact keyword or
phrase when searching on Google. It is important to pay attention to the word “exact”. The search figures that are of interest are the “exact” figures, which indicate the number of times per month that exact phrase it typed into Google.
Forget about any other type of more general search as the results will not be focused enough for your research purposes.

You have now discovered the amount of times, the demand, that each keyword or phrase is used. Look at
derivations of your initial search term to form a greater in-depth knowledge of the size of the market. It can be the case that the niche’s demand is concentrated around just a few search terms with sizeable results. Concentrate on these keywords and see how many variables of them are used to search for the information being sought.

The next very important step once you have found where the demand exists is to find out what is already supplied by way of web pages. Just go over to Google and enter the exact search terms that you have identified making sure you use hyphens around them as this will return all the exact web page matches for that keyword or phrase. Don’t forget to make a note of the total number of web pages that have been found for the keyword.

Just make sure you adhere to this important criteria. If a search term has a high demand compliment with a high supply of web pages this is obviously a very competitive keyword search term. Don’t dismiss this niche or sub niche on the basis of this search but it does indicate that you will have to put in more effort and be astute on how you are going to break into this market. On the other hand, if there is a keyword or phrase that again has a very high demand yet a comparatively low supply then it could very well be time to jump in the air and smile. Congratulations as you could well have just found a little goldmine!

So this is how to start your niche internet marketing keyword research for you to get a feel for a potential niche market. By undertaking this work, you will quite quickly find whether there is potential for you to enter the market or not. It does not take long and you will have very valuable information to know if you want to progress, where within the niche there is a demand without much competition and also, exactly which keywords you should be targeting with your marketing.

Online Home Business Momentum-Do You Have It?

I have always felt that the reason most people quit their online home business is because they are not accomplishing anything. Developing momentum in your business is not easy, but it is necessary!

Compare this to a train engine. When you get first get started it takes a while to get up a head of steam. Eventually it will get going
and an Amtrak train will go over 150 miles per hour. It did not start out that way.

Do you have momentum in your own online home business? If not maybe I can offer a few tips that will help you make money.

1. Hire a coach.
There are successful Internet marketers that provide coaching to people who are serious.

Think of this as going back to college. I know firsthand that one year of college at a state school runs about $15,000 a year.

Most people would never think of spending this amount to get their online home business going. However, in reality this could be very inexpensive if you develop a six figure income that lets you stay at home and work for yourself.

2. Join a discussion forum.

This is one of the first things I did and I’m glad of it. I joined the Warrior Forum and started hanging out with other Internet marketers who were just like me.

All of us wanted to make money online, but most of us didn’t have a clue what we were doing. Discussion forums let you interact with other people who are going through the same problems as yourself.

You can participate in the discussions, or just hang out and read the various threads. There is a tremendous amount of free training available in these forums.

Plus it’s very motivating to see people who are becoming successful. It makes you think that maybe you can as well.

3. Paid training.

The Affiliate Power Group is a membership site that offers excellent training on how to make money online with affiliate
marketing only a dollar to join.

This gives you access to a private member’s only discussion forum. It also gives you access to updated tools on building your Internet business.

There are other paid membership sites you can join. Generally these run a little over $1 a day and is money very well spent if you need help getting your momentum going.

I have no doubt that you are going to experience the ups and downs of building an online home business. Initially getting the momentum going in your business can be difficult, but if you implement some of the strategies listed in this article it makes it a lot easier.