marketing – Page 2

Keep Your Marketing Simple to Achieve More Success

May 12, 2009 By Dee Barizo

I’ve found that the best marketing plans are pretty simple. Especially if you’re busy, you don’t want to overplan your marketing because you’ll get overwhelmed by too many marketing activities and end up being less productive.

Over the years, I’ve gained a good amount of marketing experience and knowledge. I’ve done these types of marketing: social media, SEO, blogging, video, and email. I could apply every single thing I’ve learned to each of my projects, but if I did that, I would have too much going on. I would be much more effective if I just picked a few appropriate tools for each project.

The execution of marketing plans is actually harder than it looks at first glance. It takes focus to carry out a plan competently and it’s easier to focus with simple plans.

Also, productivity is all about getting things done – not having the best plans. Therefore, you don’t want to spend too much planning. Plus, most plans inevitably get changed anyways as you spend time on a project and find out what works and what doesn’t.

Right now I’m doing SEO for a client and I’m focusing 70% of my work on just guest posting. Guest posting is not the flashiest SEO activity but I feel in this case, it’s a good plan. I did some research in my client’s niche and found that many of the popular bloggers in the niche link out liberally, so guest posting should provide good returns.

Here’s another example. I recently met a door to door salesman at gaming tournament. He told me about his work and surprisingly it seemed like lucrative business. The entrepreneur in me thought that his business could work well online, so I looked at some relevant keywords to check their competitiveness on Google.

They keywords were not competitive at all so I sent him a proposal to partner with him by creating a site that offered his products. My plans are very simple. I’ll just optimize his site for local search since he only sells in the city we live in and I’ll ask a couple of my friends to link to the site.

Because his keywords are not competitive, I think these two simple activities will be enough to get him a front page ranking.

Here’s the takeaway. Each project is unique and requires its own set of marketing plans. And the simpler the plans, the better.

How can you apply this? One place you can start is your skills. If you have some writing chops, then create a blog since blogs are great marketing tools. Then, be consistent and write 2-3 posts a week and also create a guest post once every two weeks. If you execute this simple plan for the next couple of months, you’ll attract a lot of traffic to your site.

If you’re interested in video, try creating videos and then uploading them to YouTube.

How simple are your current marketing plans?

Here is a Method That is Helping Web Designers Get More Clients

February 10, 2009 By Dee Barizo

One of the best ways to build your client base is to spend your marketing efforts on high profile bloggers.

Two popular web designers, Chris Pearson and Unique Blog Designs (UBD), have used this method do build their brand and increase their clients. Chris did the design for Brian Clark’s Copyblogger. This led to many other clients. Many people saw his design since Copyblogger is popular. Chris writes:

Although I had no idea at the time, that design [for Copyblogger] would basically end up serving as the foundation for a career niche that I actually enjoy.

I have no clue how many emails and referrals I’ve received from the little link at the bottom of that site , but I can safely say that it probably rivals the attention I’ve received from all my other designs combined.

UBD did a similar thing. In the early days of their business, they offered to do a redesign for John Chow, a popular make money online blogger. John took them up on the offer. Jeremy Schoemaker, another popular blogger saw John Chow’s design and ordered his own redesign. By landing these two popular bloggers, UBD was able to get a lot of traffic and sales.

Go After the Big Players

Some web designers are scared to target popular webmasters. However, if you have the design skill, you shouldn’t be shy. Many webmasters want a new design but they haven’t found a designer they like or they haven’t had time to search for one.

Also, keep this in mind. Even if you don’t land that big client right away, be persistent. You oftentimes just need one popular client to turn your business around.

Making the initial connection can be tricky. You can just send them a “cold” email, but that can backfire since they might think you’re a spammer.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some non-spammy ways to promote yourself to popular bloggers. Until then, make a list of popular bloggers that could use your services.

Over to You

Have you targeted any popular webmasters with your services?

A Review of OmniStar Mailer

August 16, 2008 By Jim Reyes

There are many ways to make a website or a blog an effective communications tool for businesses. I think you would agree with me that the days when websites merely function as online brochures are over. Sure, you could just have a static page telling people what the company does and how great their products or services are. But this will usually just go ignored. People want interactivity. People want something engaging.

According to Google Analytics the average website keeps a visitor for about 20 seconds before they navigate elsewhere. And most of the time, when users leave your page, they forget to come back. They forget you ever existed.

What can make your audience visit you frequently and stay a little bit longer? Aside from your site being interactive, you have to help out people by telling them what’s happening on your side of the forest! Tell them what’s new and why it’s important for them to know. A handful of popular blogs these days offer newsletters. While a lot of savvy blog users already read updates on their RSS readers, there are still a lot out there who appreciate being sent updates by email.

And this is where an email marketing service would come in. These applications can be useful as newsletters or as public relations tools.

Email marketing systems are usually applications or services that can send email en masse to target audiences. This can be for purposes of sending out newsletters, promotional materials or other messages to opt-in subscribers. Such software would usually contain a database of contact information, campaign statistics, and reports.

Of course, these can also be used for bulk, unsolicited emails, but that would depend on the intent of the sender, too.

There are about 20 million results for “email marketing software” on Google, and if you’re in search for an effective system, we’ve been approached to try out one such service by Omnistar Mailer.

OmniStar’s Mailer service was created with efficiency in mind, with the aim of helping businesses reach out to customers effectively without having to funnel money towards administrative employees who spend countless hours sorting through spreadsheets and emailing clients.

Introduction

Now I’ve used several Email Marketing Systems for the past 5 years. And one of the very first things I look out for are the following: a free trial and/or a money-back guarantee, immediate installation and quick support responses, and an interface that’s easy to operate.

I tried an OmniStar demo account and to tell you frankly, my first impressions were “clean”, “uncluttered”, “organized”, and a “pleasing workspace”. Check out their Admin Main Page below.

I think this Admin Page tells a whole lot about what’s under the hood. It’s not scary, nor undaunting even for the first-timers. Now let’s see the other areas and find out what makes OmniStar useful.

Features Set

OmniStar Mailer has numerous features that will surely address your personal or corporate needs. While it tries to offer the best features available, OmniStar stands out by understanding that not all would immediately understand the use of such tools.

They have conveniently placed a Getting Started Wizard to immediately get you developing your first newsletter. I think that is very important. They have taken that extra step to make you understand what steps are needed to get you on your toes.

Installation & Set-up

I’ll have to say it’s easy. Once you sign up, OmniStar will send an email to you explaining the steps needed for you to get going. You will need to download the application software and install it on your webserver. Your clients or future subscribers do not need to download anything at all. However, if you have problems with the installation process, you can also request a free install by their engineers, which I think is very very cool!

Setting up your subscriber database is very easy too. I have a small mailing list of 3,000+ saved in CSV format. OmniStar works well with it and took me a few moments to get all my subscribers in and active. They have said that they’ve worked with lists that are as huge as 250k subscribers. Not bad at all!

Ease of Use

Because of OmniStar’s uncluttered interface, I personally loved using it. Important areas are easily understood and provision for easy navigation was excellent. They offer quite an extensive FAQ and 24-hour tech (telephone or email) support! Great!

Email Creation

There are just many tools to help you build your first spectacular newsletter. It is very easy to add/customize your project with your images/pictures, texts, hyperlinks, special characters, anchors, lines, table, time, date, post/sub scripts–the works! Alternately, you can also choose to develop your newsletter as an HTML file using either DreamWeaver or FrontPage, and then import that whole page into OmniStar to send it out.

Reporting

OmniStar offers in-depth reports on every email campaign you send out. For example, if your email contains links, OmniStar will tell you which of your subscribers clicked on those links. It will generally track every click your subscriber makes on your emails.

A very important matter to me. When I shoot my arrows, I’d like to know if I am hitting the target or not!

Summary

I can say that OmniStar’s web based email marketing software is within the league of useful and user-friendly Email Marketing Systems currently available. It’s almost turn-key, scalable, robust, private and secure (because it runs on your own web servers) AND is intuitive to a great degree. It just has all the standard things I would look out for in these systems. I would just mention 2 things though

That the application price of US$257 per website is a little “out there”, but with all the bells and whistles OmniStar offers, the price may be “just right”.
When I entered the search key “report” in their knowledge database… their system doesn’t seem to know what “report” means.

Finally, Omnistar Interactive has offered all readers of this blog 20% off by simply entering the promotion code devlounge when you order Omnistar Mailer.

Other than that I’d tell you to go get your FREE demo account right now and give this baby a test drive. We’re all on the semester of the year where there’s just several holidays every month. You’d need OmniStar to catch on that holiday fever!

Disclosure: The above review was done upon the request of OmniStar, and written by guest poster Jim Reyes, who is a regular contributor on Splashpress Media blogs Blogging Pro, Froodee, Gadzooki and Forever Geek.

Building the Perfect Newsletter

November 28, 2006 By Devlounge

How many times have you found yourself subscribing to the next big web 2.0 applications’ launch mailing list, and then never getting a single email? Or joining a weekly newsletter that is completely disorganized and has more information than a month worth of site content? Just like websites, newsletters can be essential and extremely useful when used the right way, or damaging if their purpose goes to waste. Which direction are you going to head in with yours?

A Newsletter

news‧let‧ter – a written report, usually issued periodically, prepared by or for a group or institution, as a business firm, charitable organization, or government agency, to present information to employees, contributors, stockholders, or the like, and often to the press and public.

First, it’s important to understand what exactly a newsletter is. A dictionary.com search reveals that the meaning behind a newsletter is a written report published for the publics convenience.

And yes, breaking the word down into two parts would reveal two individual words: news and letter.

While all this seems like a pointless English lesson, it seems like many people have forgotten that a newsletter is intended to contain news. Because of this, other names get thrown around such as “mailing list”. No matter what you happen to be calling the damn thing, the bulk of the content is and should be in some way – news. Whether it’s straight from site content, announcements and updates, or information on a launch, it’s all still news to the reader. Let’s try not to forget that.

Design

Getting a visitor to pay attention to a newsletter requires a bit of design and organizational skills next to the ability to include something worthy of reading. The days of plain text email are dying away, with most email providers allowing html based emails. HTML allows you to do everything you could do with a regular site, including structuring an emails fonts, colors, and layout with css and remotely hosted images.

Don’t sit there saying “what makes a good newsletter design?”, because the question can be both answered and solved simply by looking around. Emails just appear in a persons inbox – they are no different than sites.

A good place to start is by mimicking your own site design in a newsletter design. This doesn’t mean if your site is split across 9 columns and two thousand pixels wide that your newsletter should be the same, but pull the colors, logos, link styling, and fonts from your actual site layout to let the reader get a feeling like they’re at the site themselves without leaving their inbox.

DL: Version 1 Newsletter

When Devlounge first launched, we had our own newsletter which was styled to match the design at the time. Split into two columns, the left featured a few of the latest post excerpts and the right contained a feedburner subscribe now link as well as links to Astereo and 9rules. It wasn’t incredibly advanced, but it matched the site well enough that I thought its purpose was served.

The list of where to get quality newsletter inspiration from goes on and on. I like to grab some inspiration from the Campaign Monitor Blog, which always features some excellent examples of in use newsletter designs. Take a look at this gem I found on the blog while I was writing this. Very well organized, and very well designed.

Depending on the type of newsletter, designs can range from simple to highly advanced. Hollister usually sends around extremely simple newsletter showcasing a new product or two for men and women. Nothing over the top, but effective at the same time.

HCO Newsletter Preview

Next we’ll get into creating and publishing your newsletter and getting subscribers and keeping them.

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Creating That Perfect Project

October 5, 2006 By Devlounge

New Internet projects and ideas capture entrepreneurs imagination all the time. If you’re one of these people who dream up the next big thing for the web, then start it but never get it off the ground, you’re missing your shot.

This is because, regardless of the uniqueness of the idea, there will always be a place for it. That’s what happens when billions upon billions of people all use the internet for all different reasons.

Original or Not, There’s Room for You

Of course, project originality helps, and it helps a lot. The first to create a web based application that helps do something no other application has yet to do (and if its executed right) will always dominate over copycats. But still, copycats have their place.

Take a look at Basecamp. The original project management web application spawned the creation of many similar applications, with many of the same features and few of their own. Some were even the same thing, but with just a refocused main purpose.

The same can be seen for just about every web service. These days, it hard to find an original idea – and even when an original idea sprouts up, someone takes it and puts it into their own version, making it harder to figure out “just who was the first to come up with this anyways?“.

With it apparent that there is room for any project – no matter how many of the same there are out there – it seems there’s always room for yours.

Marketing Can Help Anything

In the end, the success a project will or wont have comes down to the execution. Take a look at our buddy Shaun Andrews’ latest venture, XHTMLGenius. Upon a visit, you’ll notice that the entire site is two pages – an index, and a submission page. The purpose? Getting psd’s turned into validated xhtml & css quickly and easily for $250 bucks a pop. As designer and developer myself, when I first came across this site I found myself asking, will someone really pay $250 to have their site coded? I soon found out the answer, as Shaun reported on Mintpages that in two days he had two customers. I consider that pretty good myself, seeing how two customers is about 6 days work and a quick $500.

So how is it successful? I can tell you what, it’s all about marketing. I could see myself launching the same site, and receiving complaint after complaint about the price being way too high – but yet, Shaun can pull it off?

For starters, reading the index takes about 5 minutes, and explains to you in plain English (no technical mumbo-jumbo, because the target audience doesn’t understand it – which is why they need coding in the first place) exactly what the purpose of Xhtmlgenius is about. By having a strong portfolio to back him up, it becomes evident fairly quickly that you’re getting what you pay for – and it works.

Now we could have used many different sites as examples of marketing helping projects and startups get the ball rolling, but we decided to use Xhtmlgenius because it demonstrates how, even in a few days, if you do something right, it will work.

Be Original in Your Ideas & Let Them Flourish

Following these few tactics listed above can help an otherwise useless project find its own in an internet where there’s always a need for something, regardless of what it may be. Who would have known that starting a site for people to buy 1 pixel worth of advertising for $1 would have actually sold all 1 million spots. There is always a need out there, it’s just up to you to find one and put your ideas to work for you.

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