Wellness Obsession » Internet Advertising

How To Increase Your Business By Relinquishing Control

cgseo — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:00:23 +0000

If you’ve been studying social media, or even half paying attention to it, for the last few years, you’ve heard some truisms proffered that are scary to most business people. One of the most recited is that in order to be successful in social media you must face the fact you no longer have control. But it’s hard to find good examples of companies that have accepted that fact, embraced it and starting winning customers like gang busters. Enter Eric Brown. Eric Brown. Image by urbaneapts via Flickr In 2004, Brown decided to stop spending money on traditional media to advertise Urbane Apartments , a small network of apartment properties in Southeast Michigan, which happens to sport the highest unemployment rate in the nation. He stopped spending money on paid Internet advertising a year later. As the economy began sagging seriously low, Brown started looking for something new to jump start his small business. In January of 2008, he started a blog . He actually started a brilliant blog, but didn’t know it at the time. “The blog was not and has not ever been about our apartment business,” Brown said. “It’s about everything local, hip and cool businesses, cool bars and such.” The brilliance was the fortuitous decision to make the content about everything but the business. In a sense, Brown relinquished control of the content. It wasn’t a big, fat ad for his apartments. But wait, there’s more. “It just puttered along with only a handful of readers and followers through the fall of that year … maybe 30 visitors a month,” Brown told me. “I was basically ready to scrape it.” But he didn’t. He had an idea he wanted to try first. He wanted to turn control of the blog over to the apartment residents . After an internal battle with his marketing director, one that would even lead to her leaving the job, Brown’s Urbane Apartments experiment took hold. The business relinquished control. “Once we handed things over to our Urbane Evangelists, the blog took off like a rocket,” he said. “We still stayed pretty involved, but more on the fringes and from a leadership angle. By March of 2009 our monthly following had grown to 4,000 visitors per month and has grown consistently each month thereafter.” What does this lack of control get Urbane Apartments? No. 1 rankings in Google searches for several important keywords in the local apartment market. Website traffic to the now three company websites ( UrbaneApts.com , UrbaneLobby.com and UrbaneBlog.com ) has increased 108 percent from September of 2008 to September of 2009. Their continued out-of-the-box thinking resulted in a fun Sharpie art promotion that got the pen company’s attention (and valuable link love). Nice, but not enough, Brown says. “Great news, right? Web traffic soars from the effective use of social media, but who really cares?” he asked me, rhetorically. “Did we rent more apartments? Because if we didn’t, the practice of social media marketing is just a hobby. ” (I love that line.) “Our physical traffic did increase,” Brown said, proudly. “We did 54 percent more tours and showings (from 2008 to 2009).” Then he gets worked up. “But the real metric, which is renting apartments? It increased by 69 percent! ” Brown admits he didn’t really have a strategic plan to relinquish control. He did have good instincts, though. Urbane Apartments embraced the notion than they are just caretakers of the brand. The people control it. And it has increased their business in a time when Southeast Michigan is mired in a devastating economic vacuum. An isolated example? I’d think not. Tell your story, or one you know, in the comments. I’ll happily give you control. Subscribe to the blog | Subscribe to the newsletter | Follow Jason on Twitter

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How To Increase Your Business By Relinquishing Control

Internet Advertising Blunders You Need to Prevent

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:23:05 +0000

Internet advertising is a boon to businesses of all sizes and industries. It allows online companies to market to their niche audience at a fraction of the cost of conventional advertising. But everything can go wrong if online advertising is done without proper planning and tools. When that happens, your business can suffer instead of flourish in the online market. To ensure that you will reap the rewards of Internet-based marketing, you have to stick to time-tested rules. Below are some of the most common errors that businesses commit when they do online promotional campaigns. You have to avoid them at all costs.

First off, you need to pay extra attention to your email marketing campaign as part of your Internet advertising. It may be easy to click on the send button, but the message that you have written on your mails spells the difference between more customers or zero growth for months. Forget about sounding too promotional or pushy in your email marketing. Online readers would appreciate it more if they can find some useful information in your emails. So make sure to promote your product or service in a more subtle way. If your target audience sees that your messages only have empty words, you can bet that they will consider your emails as spam and you will lose a very good opportunity of boosting your bottom line.

Next, you really need to focus on your niche market when you do Internet advertising. As you may well know, there are millions of people using the Net. So you cannot just market your product or service to everyone, including people who obviously would not be interested in what you have to offer. For example, if you are selling comic books online, you should narrow down your marketing strategies to that particular market segment. There’s just no use if you include in your marketing those people who are into real estate. If you want to make your online ads more cost efficient, like in pay per click programs, it is always a good idea to aim at your niche.

Finally, you have to do your homework before you implement any online advertising. You cannot just jump on the bandwagon and spend money, no matter how affordable Internet-based advertising can be. Apart from knowing your market, you have to know how things work in Web marketing. You can always use online marketing companies to help you out. To learn more about Internet advertising or marketing techniques, click on to www.Majon.com.

Slip Ups to Avoid in Internet Advertising

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:53:19 +0000

Internet advertising is the way to go if you really want to focus your marketing on a well targeted audience. Even small businesses can now compete with big companies on a global scale, as long as there is an effective online advertising in place. But it must be emphasized that no matter how advantageous Internet based marketing is, if it is not done right, the results can be dismal. As a matter of fact, many businesses that did not have well thought-out Web advertising plans have failed to market their products or services to millions of consumers. Here are the most common slip pups that you risk committing when you implement your own online ad strategy.

When doing Internet advertising it is hard not to mention email marketing. This technique is very effective for as long as you know how it works. The biggest mistake that you can make in email marketing campaigns is sending email messages that do not have quality content or information. Many online marketers try to sound too pushy in their emails, such that the recipients have no other choice but to put such mails in the trash box and tick the sender’s address as spam. In short, if you are careless with what you put in your email, you will never be able to get your message across to your recipients.

Another big foul up in Internet advertising concerns how much you know about your customers. As a rule of thumb, you always have to know your target market. How will you give them the right information at the right time if you do not even know who your target audience is? You have to remember that even if online marketing is more affordable than conventional strategies, you will still spend some of your time and money to make it all work. Take the case of an online toy shop. Do you think its Internet ads will reach the right people if they were placed in fitness or religious sites? If you have to spend money on online marketing, make sure that every cent counts and that you are reaching potential customers.

Finally, implementing online marketing or advertising without really knowing how it works can be the biggest mistake that you will ever commit in your online business. Just like in other types of marketing, you need to know what you are doing at all times. If not, you can always use an online marketing company to help you out. To better understand effective Internet advertising, visit www.Majon.com.

Internet Advertising Mistakes to Avoid

cgseo — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 22:04:19 +0000

If you want to promote your business to a targeted audience or niche market, you can never go wrong with Internet advertising. In fact, a lot of small businesses are raking a lot of sales despite the global financial crisis simply because they have online presence. But it is worth noting that online marketing done incorrectly can harm instead of promote your business. So if you want to ensure that what you are doing will boost your sales and make you successful online, you must avoid the common mistakes in web marketing.

One of the hottest and most inexpensive Internet advertising tactics is email marketing. Many entrepreneurs claim that through email marketing, their sales have tremendously grown within months. However, it is important that you avoid spamming. Don’t be tempted to send the same email over and over again. Remember that the reason why people have opted in and accepted to receive emails from you is because they want more information on what your company can offer them. It is worth noting that if you provide people with what they want, they would continue to accept email advertising from you.

The key to Internet advertising is to know your niche or target market. If you really do not know who your customers are, how are you going to provide them with the information and data that they need? Since you are spending money on online marketing, you want to ensure that every penny that you spend will help in promoting your brand, company or products very well. Thus, it is truly essential that you first do your research. Know the type of people who need or want the items you are providing. For instance, although you can sell cherry-colored rubber boots to bikers, you need to accept that they are not really your main market, so spending money on this market is not really a wise thing to do.

Another grave mistake that you need to avoid in online marketing is jumping on the bandwagon without really understanding what to do. If you do not have any idea about what you are doing and how to go about website promotion on your own, then you might want to seek the help of professionals. On the Internet, once you have made the wrong move, it can be hard to recover from it. Thus, you need to make things right from the very beginning. If you want to know more about Internet advertising, just go to http://www.majon.com.