small business marketing online – Page 6

November 14, 2011November 14, 2011

Posterous Offers You the Email Blog

Posterous is a unique site that offers you the option of an email blog – blogging via email. The whole purpose of Posterous is to make sharing easier and they achieve this through the simple process of email. The developers make it quite clear that simplicity of sharing is the essence of Posterous:

Since we first opened our doors in July of 2008, Posterous has continued to find new and better ways to make sharing simpler, more fun, and just plain awesome. It’s a commitment to never-ending improvement that runs through every bone in our body, every thought in our mind.

Since that time, Posterous has achieved a Google Page Rank of 7/10 and is ranked in the top 500 sites in the world in terms of traffic (refer the excerpt from an email post to my Posterous account shown above).

Your email blog with Posterous

The ease of this site is highlighted by the fact that you can create your account just by sending an email to post@posterous.com – and including a subject line. The subject line of the message becomes the blog post title.

You can attach most types of files and Posterous will post it along with the text of your email (the blog post). Posterous will convert the files to the most web friendly format available. It will resize individual photos and convert attached multiple photos to an image gallery.

So via your email you can post videos, photos, documents, audio files and links. If you attach an MP3 file, Posterous converts it to a Web MP3 player. An attached video file becomes a flash player.

URL’s (web addresses) are converted to hyperlinks and a YouTube link in your Posterous email is converted to an embedded YouTube player. Posterous can also convert URL’s from other video sites.

Posterous can handle a wide range of attached file types when you are email blogging. This graphic gives you some idea of the range of accepted files:

The email blog facility provided by Posterous is incredibly flexible and easy to use. Email blogging gives you a quick and easy way to communicate information. Posterous also offers you the option of editing your email blog online via a simple HTML/text editor.

Simplicity is the essence as far as Posterous is concerned and the email blog option provides busy small business owners with a quick and easy way to market online by sharing ideas and files on a high traffic site.

November 12, 2011November 12, 2011

Run a Webinar for the Price of a Burger!

The webinar has become the most powerful form of online marketing for small business. One of the leaders in the field of online conferencing, GVO Conference, now offers state-of-the-art webinar facilities for the cost of a burger (per month).

The benefits of conducting a webinar

Why would you use a webinar? Well, the benefits speak for themselves. I have seeen many benefits through participating in numerous webinars and running my own in the area of social media marketing. Through a webinar, you can:

use visual aids – slides, photos and video (…and Squidoo lenses as I have done)
build trust as participants get to hear your voice and see you
easily explain complex ideas
demonstrate products or services
quickly build awareness and credibility
interact with your audience via voice and text chat
reach a wider audience (even global)
achieve a sales conversion rate of 4 to 10 times that of other marketing methods.

Webinars make you and your expertise visible and engender personal relationships with your existing and potential customers.

What would you use a webinar for?

Well, you are really only limited by your imagination here. The webinar is such a flexible format that you can use it for many marketing endeavors. Here are some applications:

launch a new product or service
promote other products to existing customers
introduce your product and services to potential customers
provide ongoing training for customers
conduct meetings or training for geographically dispersed staff
develop product ideas with your customers or staff
conduct surveys or obtain feedback from customers
extend your customer base beyond your limited geographical area.

A webinar is a flexible medium if you purchase the right facilities at the outset. I have used four different webinar platforms and have found the GVO Conference facility to be the best in terms of cost and features.

Features of the webinar facility from GVO Conference

Online conference facilities vary widely. GVO Conference provides the most comprehensive facilities at the cheapest price. Here are some of the features of this webinar platform:

auto-display of conference room when participants click on the link provided by you
slide presentations such as Powerpoint
video streaming
electronic whiteboard
inbuilt (text) chat room
voice chat via headsets
no dial in required (so no phone costs for participants)
display browser results
record webinar (video and audio).

The last time I checked, you could get access to a 50 person conference room with GVO Conference for under $10 per month with no limit on the number of webinars you run.

How to use a webinar for promotion of a product or service

Professional Internet marketers increasingly use webinars for the launch of new products/services or re-launch of rejuvenated products/services.

The most common approach uses the following steps:

create a webpage with a sign-up form for the webinar
advertise the web page and send an invite via email to your mailing list
capture the email address of participants via the web form
offer valuable information during the webinar that is relevant to the new product/service (teaser information)
explain that there is a lot more to the problem/solution than can be covered in the webinar
introduce new product/service as a solution to customers’ problems/issues/needs
offer the new product/service at a discount for webinar participants (via a special participant-only webpage)
follow-up participants via the email addresses captured during the sign-up phase (and extend the discount period if desired).

The webinar is a very powerful form of online marketing for small business as it builds trust, credibility and understanding while extending the reach of small business to a global audience.

November 2, 2011November 8, 2011

Social Media for Small Business Marketing

You have to search really hard to find someone who relates social media to small business marketing and does so in an easy-to-understand way. However, Social Media Today has achieved this sharing by assembling a panel of experts who can guide you through the social media maze.

The YouTube video presented above gives great insights into how to use social media to advance the marketing of your small business. They effectively cover Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube and relate these to small business marketing. The information is really well grounded and focused on “how to” information – it does not go into the technicalities of each of the social media sites.

The video covers the practicalities of social media marketing:

How to use social media to build your small business
What social media to use for small business marketing
How to avoid the risks associated with social media
How to connect with your customers (current and future) through social media
Ways to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing.

Without this kind of guidnace, you can easily waste time, money and resources on social media and inhibit the success of your small business.

Core messages for small business marketing using social media

After watching the video and related Slideshare presentation, I distilled eight (8) key messages that relate to the use of social media for small business marketing:

Social media are designed to build community, not to offer a platform for direct marketing (overt marketing can result in account deletion)
Social media marketing is a form of indirect marketing (unless you use paid advertising on social media sites)
Your goals should be to build connections and relationships with current and potential customers
Unless you have a specific strategy when you visit social media sites, you will waste a lot of time for no productive outcome
The essence of social media is conversation with others and sharing – about yourself, your small business, your interests and information relevant to your niche
Effective marketing on social media requires content creation on your part – blogging, podcasts, e-books and videos
It’s important to personalise your business and your staff – profiles and videos help greatly here (you have to present as a real person, with real interests and real staff)
Profiles are critical – make sure they are relevant to your business, up-to-date and keyword rich (for SEO purposes).

Small business owners can use social media effectively if they follow some basic principles and develop a marketing strategy. The potential of social media is enormous but the realization of this potential requires focus, targeting and discipline.

November 2, 2011

7 Benefits of Focus in Small Business Marketing

Focus is a key component for small business success. When we write about focus in the context of small business, we are talking about your focus on a target market, on specific offerings for that market (products and services) and on specific marketing strategies.

Without focus, you are attempting to be all things to everybody, and that is a recipe for failure.

This article is not about how to decide your focus, that’s another issue. What I am exploring here are seven (7) benefits of focus in the hope of assisting you to build and maintain your own focus.

1. Focus builds commitment

When you decide your focus, you are immediately inspired to action. You suddenly see a way ahead and your goal is seen as achievable. The act of choice – deciding what to do and what not to do – frees up your creative capacity and enables you to move forward. The experience of progress builds commitment to your chosen course of action.

2. Focus saves time

Focus stops you from trying to be everything to everybody. Trying to fulfil everyone’s needs is both time consuming and exhausting. Focus saves you time because it enables you to let go of a lot of things and concentrate on the things that are important.

3. Focus overcomes information overload

In this era of endless information, your focus helps you to decide what to look at and what to avoid. It becomes a benchmark for deciding relevance. For example, I used to focus on affiliate marketing and I would read everything I saw about the subject (a massive area). Now that I have re-focused onto small business marketing, I can let all the affiliate marketing information pass me by.

4. Focus attracts others

When you are focused you demonstrate commitment, enthusiasm and energy – all personal qualities that attract others. Think of someone who is really focused and recall the energy they emit and how much easier it is to be attracted to them and their business In contrast, think of someone who is “all over the place” in their activity. This lack of focus makes it really hard to get on board and get energised by what they do. In fact, this kind of person can actually repel you because they tend to “suck up” your own energy because their energy is so dissipated.

5. Focus develops disciplined energy and enhances productivity

You have to have discipline to focus your energy in the first place. Then, as you grow and maintain your focus, you strengthen your discipline and you begin to develop productive habits. Your deepening focus enables you to ward off distractions, to set priorities and to choose activities that will lead more directly to your small business goals. Focus brings into play the power of concentration.

6. Focus develops expertise and Trusted Authority status

Through your focus, you are better able to increase your knowledge and understanding of your target market and their needs. You feel more committed to use your expertise and core competence to help your customers solve their real, everyday problems. Through this assistance with problem resolution you are able to build your status as a Trusted Authority – one who is not just an expert but who has demonstrated the capacity to use their expertise to help customers solve their problems. So you become the Trusted Authority in your marketplace.

7. Focus creates wealth

Focus enables you to direct your energy and creativity to identifying and meeting your customers’ needs – the foundation for real small business growth and personal wealth. As a friend of mine, Jennifer Ledbetter, often states in the context of small business marketing:

If you are willing to do for a year what others won’t, you can spend a lifetime doing what others CAN’T.

Focus brings multiple rewards. It builds your commitment and develops your Trusted Authority status. Through focusing you save time, overcome information overload and attract others. Focus helps you to develop disciplined energy, to improve your productivity and, in the final analysis, to create wealth.

November 1, 2011

Creating a Free E-Book from Your Articles and Blog Posts

One of the most effective forms of small business marketing is creating and marketing a free e-book. These e-books can be developed very easily by drawing together articles or blog posts that cover a common theme and then organizing them into a logical sequence.

I have recently completed an e-book, “Building a Team through Performance Conversations”, for my own small business. It is available for download via our website at the following URL;

http://www.meritsolutions.com.au/products/

Identify the purpose behind your free e-book

The purpose behind my free e-book is threefold:

create awareness of our business, Merit Solutions Australia
promote our training program
promote a specific training program focused on performance conversations

To achieve these ends, our website address is prominently displayed on the front cover and on the footer of each page. The “about the author” page includes details of our training programs. Reference is made to the performance conversation workshop throughout the text and these references are hyper-linked to the sales page.

The purpose behind your free e-book should drive the length, focus, format and overall design. You can add images, illustrations, diagrams, mindmaps and screenshots to add interest, aid understanding, assist memory retention and facilitate action by the reader. It is important that the images reinforce your content and do not distract from it.

The “Building a Team” e-book is my 6th free e-book and I find that, as with any writing, creating an e-book gets easier every time.

Converting your free e-book to a PDF Document

Typically, e-books are written as Microsoft Word documents in the first instance and then converted to a PDF format. The PDF format enables easy upload and download, retains formatting and facilitates security over your content (you can lock out the facility to highlight and copy).

If you have 2007 or 2010 Microsoft Office, you can save your Word document as a PDF file with clickable links. There are many free PDF converters on the Internet but most of these display hyperlinks that are not clickable, so you lose one of the major advantages of a PDF file.

However, there are paid programs that have all the required features. A low-cost option ($10) that I have used is eWriter Pro. This software has the following features:

You can create your content directly inside the software or just paste it in from your text editor (like MS Word).
You can include active hyperlinks to websites or email (clickable links)
You can password-protect your PDF document (for security purposes)
You can disable the copy/paste function or print function to prevent people thieving your e-book
You can easily insert pictures, footers & text frames
You can include page breaks & automatically add page numbers and footers
You can manage, store and categorize all your ebooks, articles and works-in-progress from within the software.
You can create an unlimited number of full-featured PDF files. No restrictions, no royalties, no 3rd-party ads.

So there is no limitation on how many free e-books you can create and distribute to market your small business and your products and service.