Bigger is better is a saying that is believed by many. That’s exactly what some of the small firms think when they want to advertise their product. They think bigger and select a medium where they need to invest a lot of money, but do not reach the targeted market. Like if a company specializes in designing diet plans and want to help out people who had disappointing results from their individual diet plans, and the company chooses to advertise a full page in the local paper instead of running advertisements in a health magazine, obviously not many of the dieters will notice the advertisement and it therefore doesn’t get the desired attention.

So the point is to come up with the best campaign, which will increase the probability of the ad getting viewed and the right customers trying to buy the product or sign up for the service. Studies and research can be carried out on the market and targeted audience can be narrowed down. Once getting the list of newspapers and magazines meant for the customers in mind, find out how many readers they have and the cost they ask for posting the ad. Special deals are offered from time to time and can only be found by the watchful eye.

It is estimated that every day people are subjected to around three thousand commercials. That is a huge number and if someone desires to be noticed, he should certainly be different. Not only the services and product sold should be unique in the market, so should be the advertisement.  For example, if a business selling mattresses says, “We sell mattresses”, it will not make a statement and will be passed over as just another mattress advertisement. But if they say, “Our mattresses are of the finest quality”, it will make the advertisement stand out from the crowd. Other catch lines are “Are you suffering from back pain? Perhaps you need to try our mattresses ”, are more specific and will catch the fancy of the people who are suffering from back pain for a long time. The advertisement should also focus on the uniqueness ( is that a word? ) of the product and how it stand up when compared to the competitors’ product.

Focusing on the problems of the customers and giving a solution for them, is what a customer demands. A customer does not buy a product – they buy benefits in the form of a product. The real value of the product should be realized and a clear picture of it should be presented to the customer so they will be able to relate with the product. If the advertisement doesn’t specify the solution it can provide, the customers will never know of it. So focusing on the customers problem is what some ads miss.

The last thing missing in most advertisements is motivation for the customers. If the advertiser has designed the advertisement and the customer had read the advertisement, all efforts and money invested will be wasted if they don’t get up and do something about it. It shouldn’t be assumed that the customer knows what to do – the advertisement should influence the mind of the customer and should tell them what to do. A “call to action” is the final job of the advertisement. It should call for information, or visiting the store or even visiting the online store. The message should sound confident and clear.

Preselling can be seen as selling yourself to the customer before you sell your product. When you sell yourself to the customer, you are making your customers think “okay, this guy is not one of those greedy marketers. He’s actually here to help me out.” so that they will let their guard down and listen to your sales pitch.

Preselling is also the art of building up anticipation. If a friend told you his chronic headache has been solved overnight by “some new medicine” but did not mention what it really was, would that leave you wondering what the medicine really is? More so if you’re having a chronic headache yourself! That’s why by mentioning a benefit which would get your prospects’ ears perked up again and again but not really revealing what the solution is, you will get your prospects dying to hear what you have to say next as you reveal slightly more about the solution each time. When you finally uncover the whole thing, your prospects will be crawling all over your website looking for the buy button!

However, preselling is not just about unveiling your product bit by bit. In fact, that was only one of the various ways one can presell. For example, you might run a weekly newsletter on acne problems and coincidentally you have just written this great ebook called “10 Ways to Solve Acne Woes Once and For All”. In your newsletter, you can presell by including a snippet or two from your ebook and mentioning it as a viable solution to acne problems. If people get good advice from your newsletter, they will perceive you as an expert on acne problems and naturally will be curious to find out the ways you can teach them to solve their problems.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to giving value to people before you ask people to buy something from you. If you can help people to solve their problems, they will, more often than not, be very willing to buy products from you.

It was just yesterday that an old friend of mine got in touch with me by Googling my first and last name. He found all sorts of articles, which mentioned my name, including my own website as #1.

Googling Your Name is Money in Your Pocket

This reminded me of a client I had who was nowhere to be seen when you Googled their name. This was a huge problem since they were 100% referral and many people searched for their company name on the Internet to find their website. It took two months for them to start showing up, but when they did, it was a HUGE money maker for them. Potential customers who had been referred were finally able to find them.

With the pursuit of optimizing a site for certain keywords, so many companies forget to optimize for their own company name.

The Proof is in the Puddin’

A recent study by Nielsen//Netratings suggest that when web users know the name of a website, they prefer to type in a domain name in the “search box” of Google or Yahoo, rather than typing a domain name into the browser bar.

What does this tell you? Well, it says that if someone has heard of your company, they’re either going to type in your website name or your domain name into the search box and your website better be ready and waiting at the top of the search engines.

Do YOU show up when your name or company name is Googled?

Here’s How You Do It

To search engine optimize (SEO) your company name on your website, here are some tips. (This isn’t an exhaustive list of all that you can do, but it’s enough to get you started.)

** Choose one page on your website to optimize for your company name. It might be your Home page, Contact Us page or About Us page. I recommend your About Us page – it seems that it’s easier and better to talk about you on that page than any other page. Conversely, the Home page should be all about them (What’s In It For Me?) – not about you.

** Add your company name to the ALT tags where possible. ALT tags are the tags that are connected to the images of your website. Search engines don’t index images, so any text on your site that is in the form of an image won’t get indexed. The search engines read the text and the keywords in the ALT tags instead.

** Add your company name to your Meta Tags: namely, Meta titles, Meta description and Meta keywords. A recent study showed that only 34% of Web site owners knew enough to include a simple keyword Meta tag on their website. Therefore, if you add a keyword and properly optimize the rest of your page, you’ll be doing more than 66% of website owners. Of the 34% of owners who DO add Meta data, so many forget to add their company name to the titles, description and keywords! They only remember to add keywords related to their products/services. If YOU remember to do this, think how much further ahead you’ll be…

** Add your company name as a keyword to your chosen page’s body and work it into the content at least 3-4 times. Try to place it one time nearer to the top of the page body. Repeat your company name at the start and end of your paragraphs and near the end of the body. That way, search engines won’t make any mistake about the content since your company name is used repetitively and throughout the content.

** Where possible, include your company name within your hyperlinks. For example on the Home page, you could include the words “Contact XYZ Company” within the hyperlink copy instead of just “Contact Us”.

** Finally be patient. With these steps and ONLY these steps, I helped one company go from not showing up on Google at all, to #1 in Google for their company name.

Think about how a virus spreads from on person to another. One person gets sick and just by sneezing they can give the virus to many more people… those people get sick and share their germs with everyone they know and the next thing anybody knows is that there is an epidemic. That is the very concept of viral marketing. The idea is to get everyone to spread your marketing message around because they want to.

Now let’s look at using an E-book to start your viral marketing campaign. First you create an E-book… a really good one that has links to your website, to your sales page and affiliate links to products and services that you recommend… and you give it to three people. In the book you encourage those three people to give it to their friends and family.

Before you know it the E-book is spreading across the Internet like wild fire. Digital information duplicates easily and quickly so before you know it, thousands of people could be reading your free E-book.

Make certain that you let people know that they have permission to forward the E-book around the Internet. When you create the E-book, you have the right to give people certain rights. One of those rights could be that you allow them to give the book to other people. Make it clear that this book is free to give away.

You can write the E-book yourself, use private label content or you can hire a ghostwriter to prepare the content. There are a lot of ways to create an E-book. Once you have your E-book written, use software to create your E-book and an attractive cover to grab your potential customers by the eyeballs. The nature of viral marketing dictates that the rest will take care of itself.

For people whose literate capabilities extend to that last school essay that they handed in with a sigh of relief, writing an article is a daunting task and the end result often looks like a wasteland of grey text. A good article is written in such a way that it pulls the reader in and guides him through the content.  Conforming to a standard format also makes it easier for article directories and sites that publish content to pick up your article and publish it. It also contributes to a professional image of you, the writer.

Here are the components of an article and how you should use each one for maximum benefit.

~ Title ~
The title of your article, like the title of your website, is probably the most important part of your article. And, much like the title of your website, you are writing for both the search engines as well as human beings. For the sake of the search engines, include your main keyword or keyword phrase in the title. For the sake of your reader, you have to create a title that will “pull the reader in”. In other words, your title must persuade the reader to read the rest of your article.

But here is a tip from Chris Knight of EzineArticles – do not start your title with:
“7 tips for …”
or
“5 ways to …”
The first 3 or 4 words are the most important, and by doing this you are wasting important space! Rather use your keyword or keyword phrase at the beginning, followed by the number or ways, or tips that you are going to discuss.
For example: Organize your office: 7 tips for never losing that $1000 check again

Another tip for coming up with a killer title is to use some of the headline making software that helps you come up with compelling headlines for your sales letters, like Headline Creator Pro. While you might not actually use the headlines it suggests, you will quickly have a list of 100 headlines to play around with and modify. Just be careful though of not loading your title with too much hype – you are, after all, writing an article and not a sales letter!

~ Summary or Introduction ~
The summary, or description, of your article is often overlooked. This might be the only piece of text that will be displayed when your article shows up in an article directory. Sometimes you have the option of submitting the summary separately, other times the article directory software simply takes the first paragraph or so of your article. I suggest that you focus on the first paragraph of your article to provide you with your summary and introduction at the same time.

Like the title, it should create curiosity in the mind of your reader to entice them to read further. Please remember that a good article tries to solve some problem for the reader – try and describe what problem THIS article will solve. Describing the problem by means of a story or example help to make it real in your reader’s mind. A personal example also helps to establish you, the writer, as a real person and creates a rapport with your reader.

~ Body ~
The body of your article will bring across your main solution to the problem that you have sketched in the mind of your reader in your summary and introduction. Please remember to stick to ONE topic! It is very tempting to branch off into different directions, especially if you are enthusiastic about your area of expertise. If you find that you are wandering off into other areas, even if they are related to your main topic, consider saving that information in a scratch pad and make another article out of the material.

DO use bullet points or subheadings to break up your article. Bullets and headings catch the eye and once more pull the reader into the text. But some article directories do not allow HTML code or other formatting inside your body. My suggestion is that you write for ‘text only’ as a standard. Simulate bullets and headings by making use of numbers, capitals, or a special character, like the tilde (~), or star (*).

~ Ending ~
The ending should summarise the reasons why the article solves the problem stated in the title and the introduction. Try and end with an interesting point or final quote, to invite readers to further investigate the topic.

~ Resource box ~
The resource box is the place to write a mini-ad for your site, service or product. You can send people directly to an affiliate link here, or direct them to your site. Try to make the link contain your major keyword or keyword phrase, for maximum ‘backlink’ benefit – if you can.

If you follow this simple layout structure (obviously combined with great content!) for your articles you will find that
-         more article directories will accept your articles for submission
-         you present a professional image that instills confidence in your reader
-         your articles will get published on more websites, leading to more traffic

Follow these guidelines and your articles will get the exposure they deserve!

As advertisers decide to put Adsense into their website over banner advertising, the question still remains – Which is the best for advertisers and which is the best for publishers?

On one hand advertisers may feel that image adverts are more responsive yet less likely to stimulate a sale. On the other hand text adverts may convert more, whilst being less visible to the consumer.

Text based adverts are considered the least intrusive of the two formats. However, does that mean that Graphic advertising is better? Not necessarily.

Consumers are used to graphic advertising from signing into free email accounts, and from using other web based services. Through being used to graphic advertising they have almost programmed themselves to ignore it. Through the adverts being untargeted, the consumer is used to brand advertising which they feel is generally less purposeful. This may cause the consumer to ignore the graphic advert from the assumption that it will be the same.

Text adverts are not forced upon surfers. Through being less obvious some people will not see them at all, however those who do see them, and read them are significantly more likely to click on them. This is for a number of reasons, but the first is that they provide more information. Generally, someone who is reading text on a page is not going to be fully satisfied by what they read, and if they check adsense adverts they will most likely read something which will further supplement whatever their intention is next. With an image advert, it is far more of a gamble for the surfer.

Graphic advertising is often paid per impression. This is because the advertiser may be trying to promote their brand, instead of promoting a specifically useful service. They therefore are assumed to have worse conversion rates and hence text adverts are, in the consumers eyes, more effective. However, if the text contained within an advert was placed in graphic format, which would be the most effective? Well firstly it can assumed that the surfer will be more likely to view it, however if their were multiple image adverts appearing next to each other they may feel overwhelmed.

Graphic adverts are also harder to regulate. Let’s consider Google allowing adverts to be changed frequently and without regulation. The advertiser could claim affiliation from the website they are advertising on, and contain keywords such as “ipod” which cannot be contained within a text advert. Although more regulation and quality control could be in place, a pornographic image for example could be made to appear in an advertiser’s adverts unknowingly.

Text adverts also have a broader market appeal, as advertisers don’t generally have the in-house resources to create an image advert, but do have the in-house resources to write a text advert. This could mean that a wider array of advertisers find text advertising accessible, through text adverts being less burden on the advertiser, and being easy to change.

Text adverts are also cheaper for the advertiser to create, where as a graphically designed advert may cost in excess of $200. Through removing this fixed cost advertisers may be willing to allot a higher rate to advertising itself, thus benefiting the advertiser and the publisher.

Text advertising appears to be the preference of the advertiser. They pay a CTR (click through rate) and only receive targeted traffic. This removes risks from businesses that previously had to worry that adverts were not only seen, but clicked on and stimulating sales. As CPC (Cost Per Click) is more relevant to text adverts, advertisers are able to gain exposure without needing a high click through rate to be effective.

The big brands are willing to advertise in both formats however the broad market appeal of text inevitably makes it the winner. As flash websites disappear with image adverts, it is becoming clear that text and information is the preference of the website users.

For a little more control over your ads and a choice of which products you are promoting, as well as several different options on how those ads are displayed, I recommend you take a look at CBProAds. You will be glad you did!

Of course, even for people who have spent months or years blogging, money from advertising revenue may not add up to a large sum. The amount of money that you can make as a blogger depends on a lot of different factors, but perhaps the most important element of the equation is the topic of your blog. If your blog is on a subject that appeals to a demographic that advertisers have a strong desire to reach, you will be more likely to be able to turn a large profit on your blog than if your blog is on a fairly obscure subject that does not draw the kind of audience that advertisers need to appeal to.

Of course, the only way to find out where you fall on this spectrum is to try hosting some ads. If you are already blogging, you have nothing to lose.

1. The server-based tools
2. The client-based tools.

Both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages and it is up to you to choose the one that is right for your blog.

The Client-based Tools
One of the two blog software tools that you can choose from is the client-based tools. These tools’ purpose is to aid you with publishing your blog and they are normally installed on your computer and also run from there. Additionally, client-based tools are also categorized as small blogs that are able to run from your hard drive.

Client-based tools also have text editors that allow you to perform word processing applications from your own computer. Thus, a text blog editor enables you to create and publish your own content at the comfort of your own desktop.

Obviously, the first advantage of using client-based tools, like the text editor, is convenience. Most bloggers choose to publish their work with a desktop tool rather than a Web browser, which entails logging into the blog software’s control panel and accessing the Web-based text editor.

Additionally, client-based tools can be managed either locally or remotely. Such tools can allow you to manage and edit your posts remotely. More so, the content of your blog can also be managed locally by saving drafts to a local computer. These can be very beneficial to those with limited Internet connection since accessing and managing the content of your blog remotely and locally can be done without the need of being connected to the Internet.

Lastly, you can manage multiple blogs through the use of client-based tools. If by any chance you are publishing more than one blog, it might be easier if you consider using a blog editor. The blog editor can be easily configured to manage all your blogs. You only have to enter the same information that you use to log in into your server tool combined with the particular kind of server software you are using and the blog editor can save that information in its
configuration.

The Server-based Tools
Another kind of blog software tool that you can choose from is the server-based tools. There are two varieties of such tools

1. Blog hosting service provider tools
2. Server-based publishing tools.

The first variety is automatically provided by your blog hosting service provider. Hosted blog software tools are very easy to use and you do not have to install any software or manage any configuration too difficult to comprehend. These kinds of tools can help you focus on publishing your content.

With the use of hosted software tools, you are also provided with an assortment of design templates. These can help you in choosing the desired layout that suits your blog. More so, the layouts can be easily customized, including the fonts, columns, colors, etc.

On the other hand, publishing tools you install on the server has the advantage of giving you the level of customization and control you need over the configuration settings. Through the use of these kinds of server-based tools, you can decide how much storage space you allocate, extend the features of your blog through plug-ins or add-ins and make custom layouts and pages.

1. They have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how much money they will make, and when these expectations are not met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging.
2. Lack of planning. If you want to turn a profit as a blogger, the key to success is to make a realistic plan and stick with it.

To succeed at blogging for profit, the main thing that you will need is a large readership. The higher your traffic, the more advertisers will agree to pay you. However, cultivating the regular visitors that you will need in order to make a profit isn’t easy. As more and more blogs appear each day, having a great idea or a wonderful writing style is no longer enough to get attention. You need to be able to market your blog effectively.

Too many bloggers spend all of their time writing posts and almost no time marketing their project. Certainly, updating as often as you can is a great way to keep your blog high on blogrolls and high in blog search engines like technorati, and once your readers know that you update frequently they will return to your site on a regular basis. However, it does not matter how often you update if nobody is reading your page, so don’t skimp on the time that you spend drawing visitors to your site. To make your dreams of blogging for profit a reality, try decreasing your number of posts and using some of that time to draw new visitors by building backlinks, setting up link exchanges with other bloggers, making contacts in the blog community, and following other established modes of winning traffic.

Of course, even if you are a marketing genius or have a really great idea for a blog, success is not going to happen overnight. Building the kind of readership that blogging for profit requires takes time, and in all likelihood it will be at least several months before you are able to turn much of a profit. Try to stay committed to your blogging project during this initial rough period. To stay motivated, set goals for how often you will update and how many readers you want to attract, and then reward yourself for sticking with your plan.

The things that people view as ‘problems’ run the gauntlet of possibilities… everything from a hang nail to a golf swing to a chronic disease are people problems that they are looking for help to solve.

A good way to find out what people consider a problem is to visit the online forums. People talk about anything and everything online. They discuss subjects that they wouldn’t talk about with their best friends for the simple reason that they can remain anonymous. They look for solutions online for the very same reason. By visiting forums and taking note of what people are most concerned about you can search the Internet for products and services that will help them solve those problems. Gather the information about the topic. Write or have written for you articles about the topic. In this way you can find a topic and build a content-rich website for niche marketing that helps with the problem you have identified and that will serve the needs of people.

An additional way to use forums to help you build a niche market website is to join a forum, identify the problem being most often discussed, post a question that will produce many responses and use those responses to write an e-book on the topic. The fact is that many people will buy an e-book that is filled with information they could actually gather for themselves. They will also purchase e-books that will tell them what other people with the same problem they have think about or are doing about their common problem.