Online Marketing Articles

4 TIPS ON HOW TO SURVIVE THIS ECONOMIC MELTDOWN AND BECOME A WINNER.

2009-07-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

With the current global economic meltdown, you need to do different things to remain profitable. We are all feeling the pinch and it is not about to go away. Right now you need to develop a strategy to stay afloat.

This time you need to pull that book you read about leadership in crisis time. If you have no such book them I will give you some ideas, which will save the day if well implemented. The economy is ducking and diving like a Spitfire plane under fire and in such a case, we need to know how to navigate through the enemy line.

You need to behave like a general during war; you need unquestionable loyalty from your troops. This can only be achieved if you have undisputed leadership quality to steer your men away from imminent danger. Here is the tool kit you need to do become that general:

Quality customer service:
Quality customer service should be inherent in you business, this is not time to start; you need to have started yesterday. I have always said that customer service is too big to be left to one department; it should be the motto and the mission of the entire business. Make sure that you dazzle and wow your customers to make them feel that you made that business for them; after all without them you have no business.

Strategic innovation: Think innovation, innovation. Look around you to identify unoccupied territories, unmet needs, segment the market further and further, listen to you customers more to find unmet needs. Remember you competitors at this time are trying to survive but you are innovating, putting you ahead of them.

Become the undisputed leader across the board: Command respect from foe and allies alike. You must be there to offer leadership services to you team. They are looking up at you to carry the day for them, so please do that without failing.

To prepare for what comes next: This could be the beginning of the storm and it could be far from being over. Save where you can, not by cutting the marketing budget, but by reducing waste. Lease don’t buy, because at the end of the day, you need to make quick decision and unnecessary assets will be wasting you time. Like a soldier travel light.
This way you make it through the night.

With the above tips, you will win the war without many casualties. You will have a more strong business after all these. This meltdown could be an opportunity to grow your business.

Become the business leader we want you to be, rise up to the occasion by using the tested toolkit provided.

MARKETING ONLINE - GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG FOREVER

2009-07-18T06:35:00.000-07:00

As a business blogger you must be having the desire to have many people like and come more times to your blog. You need to drive and maintain traffic. Traffic drives you. You also need to enjoy high search engine optimization. For you to achieve this, you must make your blog a brand. A brand so strong, that it will stand out against your competitors.
But how do you make your blog a brand?
Many times people use the word brand without actually understanding what a brand mean. The marketers define a brand as:-
• A name or a term
• A sigh, symbol
Thus a brand is a combination of a name, sign. A symbol well designed to enable identification and differentiation by the customers. Without a clear brand, your blog is a generic; your competition can attack you in ease. For your blog to get to the brand league, it must have what the marketers would call, the blog quality. This will bring your blogging ability out and make you succeed both in blogging and marketing online.
The blog quality is the ability of your blog to perform its function which includes retaining the visitors, reliability among other varied attributes. As a blogger, you need create a blog that will stand out as a brand. For your blog to become a brand it has to be maintained and protected, always remember a brand identifies you and so should be your blog.
Being a business blogger, you need a tool for the buyer as well as the sellers. For the buyers, your blog will help them in identification and elicits the perceived benefits. A brand is a promise to the buyers and your blog must be a promise to its visitors. It's a mark of quality and your blog must be a mark of quality.
To succeed in branding your blog must offer consistency, bundled benefits and it must never fail. Giving your blog a name and good colors is a good thing, but that does not make it a brand. For it to become a brand the blog must be more than just the name or symbol; it must capture the customer's preference/loyalty. Your blog must represent customer's perceptions, feelings, expectation and benefits of the product you are selling.
A branding expert suggests a brand reside in the mind of consumers and over time a brand develops good brand equity and so will be your blog.
As a brand your blog must develop a master plan based on its understanding of its primary customers, their needs and what drives them to buy from you. You as a blogger must understand what makes your customer tickle?
Your blog must deliver strength by:-
• Relevance to its core customers.
• Uniqueness.
• Differentiation from its competitors and other bloggers.
In summary, for your blog to become a brand, you must do the following:
• Your blog must offer unique selling proposition and be different in solving your customers need.
• Your blog must offer many benefits to its core customers
• Your blog must build its equality over time or it will lose relevancy and die.
In short your blog must live, survive and conquer. Based on that, how is your blog doing to remain become or remain a brand? Always remember branding is about the customer's perception your offer. This perception is based on how satisfied the customer is.
Make it happen and enjoy repeat traffic to your blog.

WRITING YOUR WAY TO MAKING MONEY ONLINE.

2009-07-18T04:49:00.000-07:00

Growing you online business is not easy as many of us have realized. The key to internet successes is traffic, nothing else, no any other magic formula. Bringing traffic to your site and making them take an action is time consuming and at times very discouraging. It is totally a different type of ball game. I know most of us have tried many tricks in the books to achieve desirable results. If there was a book that would sell is a book titled “Getting traffic now”, and I doubt if it would provide any magic. Traffic is important because it is the fuel that drives any business. Well I am not about to write such a book, but I will tell you simple proven ways to drive traffic to your site.

First and foremost, the easiest thing to do is write articles. Write articles and post to article directories. This has worked for many entrepreneurs and should work for you too.

But what sort of articles should you write?

Like marketing, you need to identify the target group for your product. Identifying the target is important because you cannot write articles about weight loss, while your site is selling fattening formula. This would be wrong target and you will not get the right traffic and nobody will click to that Adsense advert or buy your fattening formula. It will be wasted traffic.

Article writing is part of your marketing activity and marketing means getting the right consumers for your products. For you to leap benefits with your article writing, target the right segment and the right customer for your products.

The other thing about article writing is keyword research. This is done by carrying out keyword research on the niche that you want to write about. Keywords research tools are available in the internet. Try Google Adword Keyword Tool, or Yahoo.

Many people go for the most sought for keywords, but this is very competitive. Popular keywords create great competition and your article may get lost and you may not enjoy the traffic you desire and eventually giving up. Get niches while researching for your keywords, don’t get very competitive keywords.

The other thing that could provide you with traffic is writing e-books and giving them away.

Make good e-books following the marketing principle I have detailed above. Target the right people and have links to your websites. The tick is to give them for free. This will create viral effect and you will see the benefits. It is as simple as that.

With the above tips you can start enjoying traffic to your site, however if you write only one article, you may never realize this traffic. Write more than 10 articles and submit to as many directories as you can and you will start enjoying traffic.

Try that and you will see the search engines will index you page. However remember that search engine look for fresh content, so don’t get free articles in the internet, it will be a waste of time, write fresh contents.

HOW MONEY HAS EVOLVED TO FIT TODAY’S ONLINE TRANSACTION.

2009-07-18T04:16:00.001-07:00

They say if you do not know where you are coming from the you cannot know where you are going. By understanding the way the trade and money has evolved over the year will make you appreciate the role of different types of money in existence today. Let’s start by understanding the different business postures which have existed in this world. Some of those postures are old and dead, some are still around. We start looking at the historical changes in trading and different currencies used.

First there was subsistence stage, here we produced what we needed, our needs were few, however as life improved, we could not produce everything we needed. Trading came in and in the beginning there was the barter trade, here the mode of exchange was you bring your goats; I bring my wheat, them we exchange. This mode of transactions had its own shortcomings; for example how many goats for a bale of wheat? The method lacked standardization and measure, the buyer and the sellers had to bargain for the right amount of exchange for each commodity and this wasted time. Transactions took long.

Business realized that they needed a more standardized mode of transacting their business. They developed some kind of measures by using sea shells, ivory, animal skins among other form of exchanged developed then. India for example used their spice as a form of trading currency. It was the most sought currency then, making people search for the shortest way to India by sea.

Eventually the governments were becoming more focused on trade as a way of making that extra coin. These central governments developed some form of coins which were used by its citizens to pay for tribute and taxes. Precious and other metals were used in making these coins; the amount of the metal used determined the value of the coin. Gold, silver coins started getting into the business. Pirates flourished, if your stole gold coins from a merchant ships you could sell them and become rich.

Security become an issue and it was at this juncture that the governments developed the concept of central banks, here you could deposit your gold and get a receipt for the value. You could use the receipt for transactions; this receipt was and is still known as the legal tender. The legal tender is what we call money today. The money you have is equal to a specific amount of gold held at the country’s central bank and you can use it anywhere within that country and its value is standardized, i.e. 100 dollar bill has the same perceived value either in New York or Hawaii.

Now we have moved further to plastic money. All these efforts were driving to a point where one could get what they want anywhere anytime without much hassle. All was driving towards what we call today the marketing posture. There could be no marketing without the legal tender. The legal tender was the core of brick and mortar business. The plastic money is core of today’s on-line business.

To ignore the role of plastic money in our present day is a disaster because the customer is not the guy who lives down the street but another person in a foreign country.

TIPS OF WRITING EFFECTIVE MISSION STATEMENT THAT FITS WITH YOUR ENTIRE MARKETING STRATEGY

2009-07-18T03:04:00.000-07:00

Many times you get into a company and the first thing that greets you is the receptionist and the companies' mission statement. The mission statement is either hanged in a huge board for all to see. It will also be on the top page of the brochure, which will be on top of the table at the waiting room.
To hang a mission statement for all to see is a great thing; however I have been reading many mission statements in my visits in many offices not in one country but in many and one thing come out clearly.
The mission statements of all those companies look the same, the only change is in different wording here and there, but they all generic, and no one is original. This prompted me to start studying anything written on mission statements and I am about to share with you some tips of what I have learned in my long search.
First, I think there is a lot of copy and paste when it comes to mission statements. Nobody wants to go back to the origin of mission statements and ask themselves whether that is the only way it can be written.
The other thing is that mission statements are written by the executives as part of the website and other office vintages, mission statements are treated like the doors, the interior decor and once they are written nobody in the organization ever refer or think about them anymore, they become like a memorial.
I have seen companies with mission statements indicating that their staff is the most valuable assets in their company and yet staff has gone on strike because of very justifiable issues. I have seen how in return the executive of those companies starting with the CEO treat the staff grievances and there is nothing about the staff being assets about it.
If you want to know that the mission statement is a creative work of some executives, ask any of the employees what their mission statement is and if you lucky to find anyone who knows what it is, they will recite it like a poem, a bible verse, their national anthem or a loyalty creed.
It is unfortunate that many mission statements are not executable and they mean less to the organizations they are made to guide; this is because they are just words that are hanged on wall as fad or fashion. It is just a trend that every office or business must have something called the mission statement, but why, very few know.
You do not want your mission statement to be like this, I am sure that you want your mission statement to be taken more seriously than your national anthem. If that is what you need, here are some few tips of how to achieve that.
To avoid all these problems of none adherence to mission statements, we need to write very effective mission statement and mean what we say. This easier said than done. But what is a mission statement?
A mission statement is guide to determine the basic business goals, culture and values of your business. It is written to help your business take a strategic position to exploit the available business opportunity. It is an enabler for your business success.
You mission statement must have your business philosophy for it to be taken in by the entire staff. It is part of branding because it must bring out your image and show the world what you stand for. Thus a poor written mission statement will affect how your brand is viewed.
For a mission statement to succeed it must have the following objectives:
• It must ensure uniformity and consistence of doing things in your business.
• It must act like a guide to create efficacy in the use of your resources through effective allocation and management.
• It must describe and help execution of your business culture and other values.
• It must act as a lighthouse that gives your business the ultimate direction.
• It must have synergy with entire strategic plan as it is the ultimate strategic tool.
• It must be looked at by the entire business as the anthem, or creed or mantra, because it is your organization's bible.
When making a mission statement, remember that it is core to your overall business strategy and objective. A mission statement must echo your business objective and if you find that it is not working in synergy, you then must change it. Remember it is not cast on the ark of covenant and that it cannot be adjusted.
A mission statement like the strategy is all inclusive; it is the glue that binds the different personalities and department of your business. To achieve this wholeness, involve everybody in you mission statement making and look for a way to accommodate as many as you can, after all they are the ones who will need to adhere to it. Have a referendum to vet your mission statement and have a tracking policy to see how far you are off the mark once in a while.
I have heard of business that hires agencies and other outsiders to make the mission statements for them, this is wrong. An outsider cannot define your business objective. Remember a mission statement is who we are, what we do, and how we do it and hence it is the heart of your business. How can a stranger even understand about your business?
You mission statement is so important to be left to strangers as it must include the following about your business:
• Your business goals and objectives.
• Your business philosophy.
• The description of your products and services in the shortest term possible.
• Your strengths, your values and other priorities.
Your mission statement must manifest itself in your company profiles. At times you read the company profile of a particular business and then read their mission statement and you can tell that they are as different as death and sleep. There must be no disconnect between the two. The mission statement and the company profile must echo the same theme, values, tools and other intrinsic of your business. Your profile is the executive summary of your mission statement.
Your mission statement is a product of your strategic formulation; it is a guide to all stakeholders of your business, who include your employee, your customers as well as the shareholders and the general public.
Your mission statements role is to help your business achieve its objectives and goals, for this reason it cannot be treated like a doormat by anybody, you have to fight for it. Before I finish this article I would like to tell you one African saying "the oilskin of a homestead cannot be used by strangers" this means you mission statement is very important to be left to strangers at all.
Always remember that without an effective mission statement, you are like a ship that has lost its direction.

HOW TO MARKET YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS AND DRIVE MASSIVE TRAFFIC

2008-10-22T04:30:00.000-07:00

My first day in a marketing class the lecturer asked me what the relationship between the product and the market place. Those days I was newbie in marketing and all I knew about marketing was the word sales. Therefore I had no clue what marketing was. To me marketing was sales.

The lecturer went to tell me that the role of marketing in an organization is to chart the way forward on:

What products to produce.
Whom to distribute the products to.
What channels to use and
How to communicate about the product.

The lecturer concluded that the above is what marketers refer to as the marketing mix and is the core of any marketing activity.

For the first time in my life a person talked about marketing without mentioning the word sales, promotion, advertisement etc.

The role of marketing in your business is to enable your business attract and keep customers. These customers must be willing and are able to pay for your products. Your fist role as a marketer is to locate your and identify your customers in terms of where they live, work, pray and play.

After locating them, you need to understand and know their needs, wants, desing values, lifestyle, and demographics, once it’s accomplished; you need to create products that will satisfy their needs and wants.

After all this is done you will need to take your products to where they can access it and communicate that information to your customers. And that is marketing.

Marketing plays a critical role in meeting the customer’s needs, by producing products that create utility. Utility is the ability of your product to satisfy both functional and emotional needs of your customers.

Always remember satisfaction of your customers is the goal for your business. For a product to offer satisfaction its consumers, it must have benefits that are inherent to it, such that it will always satisfy that customer every time he/she uses that product. That is commonly referred to as a product at performance.

A satisfied customer will tell others and this will lead to more customers and a good product is supposed to do exactly that. In marketing this is referred to as having a customer for life that leaping maximum benefits from the entire life of a customer.

When you have a customer for life, buying x units every day, continuously for 30 years, this is called customer value.

X customers multiplied by y customer values multiplied by z years is what is called brand equity. High brand equity is a dream of every marketer worth his/her salt.

Always remember that marketing is a process. Your online business makes money by satisfying your target customers’ needs. This is based on their lifestyles, values, needs demographics and any other underlying attributes of your target customer segments.

Catch up with my other articles on marketing online business at my blog's archives.

Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for market segmentation across many products, new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name, this includes t http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ .

How to drive massive sales by using market segmentation: By Francis K. Kamau.

2008-10-20T03:44:00.000-07:00

Mass market is dead, people are no longer part of the one big family, but are members of small “tribes”. These “tribes” share a lot in common and it’s due to this that marketing has evolved from mass marketing to segment marketing.

Each of this “tribe” share similar psychographics and demographics. The global market which is what we serve online opened up geographical borders, making it hard for anyone who uses geographical segments to succeed. Thus the marketer is left with other demographics, psychographics, needs, and other segmentation criteria to succeed online.

With the customer having many options to get his /her needs satisfied and with a lot of product information allover the internet, you as the marketer must understand which “tribe” your customers come from and who they are. This process is what marketers call market segmentation.

Market segmentation is making of markets segments. A market segment is a group of people or organizations sharing some common attributes. These attributes could be demographics, i.e. similar race, come from the same geographical location, same age groups, and same social economics attributes. A market segment could be psychographics oriented i.e. similar lifestyles, values etc. A market segment could be based on needs, i.e. patients in a private hospital, passengers in a train, and football fans in a stadium.

In marketing segmentation you as a marketer must make sure that a market segment is homogeneous. This is within the segment and in their shared attribute (s).
But a market segment must be heterogeneous across different segments i.e. the football fans segment is different from the patient is a mental hospital, even if both segments could be shouting at the same time. This is because their motivation to shout is different between the football fans segment and the mental hospital patients segment.

Market segmentation therefore is a classification of your market into distinct segments having similar demographics, or psychographics or needs, or lifestyles, or purchasing patterns.

Market segmentation presents you with the “tribes” that your product fits best. These “tribes” are what marketers call market segments. A market segment consists of a group of customers who share a similar set of needs. As a marketer you must identify the most suitable segment for your products and services.

Unlike the mass market product, the market segment product is fine tuned to fit the profile of the intended segment. The marketing mix which includes the price, product, promotion, people and place must fit with the target market.

This way you will be able have niches that requires their own marketing strategies, marketing mix and a certain way of selling to them. This way, you will achieve your marketing efficacy that will improve you sales tremendously. This way your profit and overall customer satisfaction will improve for the better.
Get more tips on marketing online at http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ . and you can also visit the following blogs for other tips on online marketing: http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ Plus you can also catch my other articles here at: http://onlinemarketing-articles.blogspot.com/ .
About the Author
Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for market segmentation across many products, new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name.

BECOME SCIENTIFIC IN YOUR ARTICLE MARKETING SKILLS

2008-10-11T04:50:00.002-07:00

The aim of this site is to enable and to give tips to the online marketers who will use article marketing as a way of driving traffic to their sites. Your site is your online store. I would like to share my insights on things that have worked for me in my article writing. Ask yourself, whom I’m I writing for. Research is important, writing is both and art and a science. If you are writing about Health, read magazines, journals, to get the most recent information. First the title, it is very important that the title be a summary of what the body of the article is all about. Don’t forget to use relevant keywords on your title. I hope by now in your internet marketing you have a list of directories that publish articles. This is important because for your article to get noticed, Submission into as many article directories as possible is important. People always ask me what the right number of words in an article. There is no right number of words; however an article of less than 400 words is not an article. To be on the safe side let your article is between 400 words and 1000 words. If you have more information and you pass the 1000 mark, I would advice you to cut the article into two, and have part one and two, you are not writing a journal. Do not put so many links in your articles; otherwise it will look like it’s a billboard to the reader. Articles that describe a way of doing things i.e. how to; are better that the essay type, you are not teaching the readers you are giving them a solution. People in the internet business are always looking for better ways of doing something. Giving a summary at the end is a good writing skill. Lastly, always use the resource box to your advantage; it’s your brand, exploit everything. Remembers you are branding and marketing yourself with your article. Use your article as an ad. Submission to as many directories, magazines and papers as possible is equally important. If you do it right you will see results after about 10 online articles, your business will start to grow.

Make more money with your blog by Francis K. Kamau

2008-10-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

This article is for those of us who at least have a blog, if you do not have a blog already, please visit http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com/ and get tips of how you can start your own blog. It will take you 15 minutes to set one up. If you don't have anything to sell in your blog, these two sites http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ will help you in that too

In the world of internet business, getting traffic is an uphill task. Keeping them coming back is even harder. There is a lot of information on how to get traffic to your blog, starting from pay per click to traffic exchange programs but very little information on how to retain them. We are always trying to get more traffic but never trying to keep them coming back for more.

Your blog need to get traffic as well as make them come for more, over and over again. You need what marketers call repeat customers. In marketing is said that repeat customers constitute a big percentage of your sales and advert clicks. With repeat customers you reduce your cost of advertising because your visitors already know your blog and you benefit from the best and free advertising mode in the world, commonly known as word of mouth.

For your blog to accomplish its core objective of driving sales for your products, affiliate programs and Adsense money, you will you need to have a clear purpose or mission. Before designing or adding a new post to your blog, always ask yourself the following question. What is my business, who is my customer, what do my customers value?

Always remember: All successful companies have a mission statement. They stand for something. A mission is like a guardian angel, invisible hand that is always guiding you. Your mission can be written or unwritten; it doesn't matter, but you need to know it by heart.

Your mission written or unwritten should be a) Market oriented: This means that it is for the target market that you want to tap. It should be reassuring the visitors of your commitment to delivering value and meeting their expectations. b) Customer focused: This means that each customer will feel the mission every time they visit the blog. It should appeal to the heart. c) Achievable: A mission is a commitment, it is not some statements to make you feel good but a commitment to something, thus unachievable mission is nothing but a set of words.

The above will make your mission TRUE.

With a TRUE mission on your blog, your viewers will always come back for more and you will get the right traffic for your products. If this doesn't work, then you will surprise all of us.

About the Author

Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name.

BRANDING YOUR BLOG: THE TEN SUCCESS TIPS by Francis K. Kamau

2008-10-04T06:23:00.000-07:00

As a blogger the need for branding is huge. You cannot achieve the desired marketing growth if your lack proper marketing communication. A blog will do just that, it will communicate and help your online marketing. But how do you brand? The following are ten tips on successful branding of your blog.

1. Segment the market: This way you will be able to identify your primary target and develop benefits that will appeal to them. With a segment for your product or your blog, you will be able to specifically target your offering; you will be having a clear picture of who your intended customers are.

2. Know your target: understanding why they are buying from you is a big move that will help you in tailoring your products and designing your blog. Understand what sort of people they are, know their nitty gritty. This can be achieved by using subscription to be able to talk to them as often as you could make it personal

3. Have your unique selling proposition: This will make your offer unique. You will be different from your competition. Differentiate the way you sell your products, how you treat your customers. Have consistency in messages fonts, color schemes. Get professional advice if you must but do it.

4. Know your competition: Your competitors will crush you if they get the chance, know them, and understand their plans, their customers, and their offer. Track, monitor their every move, anticipate their moves, it's a chess game, don't let the check mate you.

5. Turn your brand inside out: Look at what is working and retain, throw away what is not working, innovate, turn your brand younger by the years, extend your brand, give your customers new experiences and change the rules of the game. It's the only way out.

6. Create loyalty: People by nature want to be part of something larger than them. People need a hero. They hero worship anything bigger than them. Niche marketing is your best shot. It creates niches which eventually turn into small tribes. Tribal brands are worshiped by clique of people and guarded secretly.

7. Be a good brand: A good brand is consistent, gives clear messages to its customer. Provides details of its benefits. Its benefits include both the extrinsic and intrinsic of the brand. It caters for its customers both functionally and emotionally. A good brand keeps its promise

8. Give consistency in quality: Consistence should be all round. The product quality should be the same. A bottle of coke is the same whether in a store in Atlanta or hawker cart in Tajikistan. Quality of a brand is in the color scheme, the way the name is written. Consistency is part of the promise. Part of the offer. It reassures your customer of lifetime relationship.

9. Be distinct, relevant and memorable: Since you know your customers very well, then you know what they want, why they want it, and you will always be able to remain relevant. While your competitors are stuck in old ways, you become distinct, standing out. Have easy tags, lines that even kids can recall. Live memorably to live longer

10. Offer more than your competitors: This is the golden rule in marketing. Yes, with all the above then you will be offering more than your competitors.

By adhering to these ten tips in your branding, you will leap benefits by getting traffic and your marketing online efforts will start paying off.

Get more tips on blogging for profit at http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com/ and you can also visit the following blogs for other tips on online marketing: http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ and http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ .

About the Author

Francis K Kamau has been in marketing for the last 12 years. He has experience ranging from advertisement research to New Product Development. He currently owns five blogs.

MARKETING ONLINE: GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG FOREVER by Francis K. Kamau

2008-10-03T08:25:00.000-07:00

As a business blogger you must be having the desire to have many people like and come more times to your blog. You need to drive and maintain traffic. Traffic drives you. You also need to enjoy high search engine optimization. For you to achieve this, you must make your blog a brand. A brand so strong, that it will stand out against your competitors.

But how do you make your blog a brand? Many times people use the word brand without actually understanding what a brand mean. The marketers define a brand as:- * A name or a term * A sigh, symbol Thus a brand is a combination of a name, sign. A symbol well designed to enable identification and differentiation by the customers. Without a clear brand, your blog is a generic; your competition can attack you in ease. For your blog to get to the brand league, it must have what the marketers would call, the blog quality. This will bring your blogging ability out and make you succeed both in blogging and marketing online.

The blog quality is the ability of your blog to perform its function which includes retaining the visitors, reliability among other varied attributes. As a blogger, you need create a blog that will stand out as a brand. For your blog to become a brand it has to be maintained and protected, always remember a brand identifies you and so should be your blog.

Being a business blogger, you need a tool for the buyer as well as the sellers. For the buyers, your blog will help them in identification and elicits the perceived benefits. A brand is a promise to the buyers and your blog must be a promise to its visitors. It's a mark of quality and your blog must be a mark of quality.

To succeed in branding your blog must offer consistency, bundled benefits and it must never fail. Giving your blog a name and good colors is a good thing, but that does not make it a brand. For it to become a brand the blog must be more than just the name or symbol; it must capture the customer's preference/loyalty. Your blog must represent customer's perceptions, feelings, expectation and benefits of the product you are selling.

A branding expert suggests a brand reside in the mind of consumers and over time a brand develops good brand equity and so will be your blog.

As a brand your blog must develop a master plan based on its understanding of its primary customers, their needs and what drives them to buy from you. You as a blogger must understand what makes your customer tickle?

Your blog must deliver strength by:- * Relevance to its core customers * Uniqueness * Differentiation from its competitors and other bloggers

In summary, for your blog to become a brand, you must do the following: * Your blog must offer unique selling proposition and be different in solving your customers need. * Your blog must offer bundle of benefits to its core customers * Your blog must build its equality over time or it will lose relevancy and die. In short your blog must live, survive and conquer. Based on that, how is your blog doing to remain become or remain a brand? Always remember branding is about the customer's perception your offer. This perception is based on how satisfied the customer is.

Make it happen and enjoy repeat traffic to your blog. Get more tips on blogging for profit at http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com/ and you can also visit the following blogs for other tips on online marketing: http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ and http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ .

About the Author

Francis Kamau has been in marketing for over 12 years, his experience in marketing spans over 30 countries in Africa and his specialization includes advertisement, market research, new product development among other areas. Currently he owns 5 blogs.

4 Genuine Methods For Starting A Home Business by Richard Larcombe

2008-10-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

Starting a home business is becoming ever more popular. The reason? We can all do with some extra cash and the fast growing Internet is the place to provide you with a home business opportunity. With a little research you will be amazed at what you will find and the resources available.

One work at home opportunity is Affiliate marketing, for which there are thousands of products to promote. Individuals or companies are quite willing to pay handsome commissions for other people to promote products and services over the Internet. To make the most of this home business idea, you will need to carry out some research. The best way to start is to find a hungry market, then find a product to feed that market.

To ensure your home business idea is a success, follow these 4 genuine ways to promote your chosen product.

#1:Writing articles about the subject and submitting them to directories. You can write them yourself or pay someone to write your articles for you.

#2: Using a Squidoo lens to promote the product. This is like a single web page and is free to set up.

#3: Creating an Adwords campaign to promote the product. This is paid advertising, and if done correctly can be very lucrative.

#4: Creating a blog for example at Wordpress or Blogger and adding regular posts about the subject of your home business idea.

When starting a home business you have to build credibility, so that people who start to read your blogs or articles will begin to trust you if you have good content. Eventually they will buy from you. You donâ€™t have to be an expert writer, as material for written information can be found on the Internet.

The good thing with articles and blogs are that the content is out there for a long time, so you can earn an income for months or even a year or two down the line. This can be a useful income stream for your home business idea.

Now to begin with you may think that this is beyond you, but with a bit of application and a will to succeed you might surpass yourself. Any home business opportunity does not require you to be a computer expert; so long as you have pc basic skills you can apply yourself and learn how to run a real home business.

Starting a home business is an ambition of many people, but not all are prepared to take action. If you need that of bit extra cash, then look for a home business idea online. Once you get started you can then start to build it into a home based business to give yourself a secure future.

About the Author

Get a free report and some great courses for starting a home business Also visit http://www.squidoo.com/pureprofits

LEARN HOW TO CREATE ADVERTS THAT WILL DRIVES TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG. PART 2 by Francis K. Kamau

2008-10-03T04:31:00.000-07:00

I hope the first part of this article has been helpful. Now you can be able to ascertain whether your product is at introduction stage or not. For this part, I am going to write on the remaining three productâ€™s life cycle, which is the growth stage, the mature stage and the decline stage. The Growth Stage: By this stage the market knows about your product and people have tried it and liked it. The stores are keeping your product enhancing your distribution. This stage is characterized by rapid market expansion. By now more and more customers are recruited. Customers make repeat purchase. At this stage, your product reaps massive benefits. The advertisement expenditure reduces and actually you start to realize the much desired results or profits. This continues until the mature stage sets in. This stage the advertisement should be geared towards, brand building, customer satisfaction and adverts that recognize the role your customers have played in growing your product. The Mature stage: At the mature stage everybody wants to get on board and reap the benefits. Your competition is coming up with substitutes. Other alternative solutions to the customers are competing with your product. Competition becomes horribly stiff. The number of your customers reduces. This is the point that what matters most is not the product but brand and how well you have been treating your customers. If they are unsatisfied they can punish you by taking the substitutes being offered by the competitors. This is the time for a new product. If you feel that your product has converted itself to a brand then it is time to extend. To survive you need what is called brand extension or innovate to new product. Extending your brand is rejuvenating and restarting the cycle. If a product in this stage is not rejuvenated at the mature stage, the products gets to homeward, decline sales decline and RIP. The advertisement in this stage should be about new ways of using the product and if you have an extension of the brand, you will need to talk about it.

For each advertisement that you come up with, one must understand the status on your productâ€™s life cycle. This will give you the advertisement strategy. Your question of what you want the advertisement to do for you will be answered by the following answers: a) Inform/create awareness b) Building your brand c) Satisfying your target customers d) Introducing extension of the brand

If you understand your product life cycle then your advertisement campaigns will reap benefits for you business because they always be relevant to the product life cycle. Get product to sell at: http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com, register for PTC at http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com or get blogging tips at http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com.

About the Author

Francis Kamau has been in marketing for over 12 years, his experience in marketing spans over 30 countries in Africa and his specialization includes advertisement, market research, new product development among other areas. Currently he owns 5 blogs.

LEARN HOW TO CREATE ADVERTS THAT WILL DRIVES TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG. PART 1 by Francis K. Kamau

2008-10-03T04:05:00.000-07:00

Today one can have a blog without any hassle. Getting a blog is as easy as 123. If you want to get tips on how to get a blog of your own right now, visit: http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com. But that is not the end, one need traffic to get value from the blog. For one to drive traffic to their blog one must advertise. This cost money and in the long run if one does not get the amount of traffic expected then that is a loss and it mean more money.

The role of advertising is getting people to know about the existence of our products. Some of you could also be trying to refer; the point is we never rest. We try Google Adwords, and many other pay per click services. But after all is said and done, you need to understand what you want your advertisement to do.

Critical success factor in advertisement is to understand why you are advertising. So every time you are about to launch a new advert campaign and you are about to start checking the economic benefits of the keywords that you want to use, ask yourself this question, why are you advertising? This will tell you whether you want to inform about your new product, or you want to reinforce and already existing product or you want to rejuvenate a dwindling product.

Introduction to the Product Life Cycle Letâ€™s first understand some basic factors about product and what the marketers call the product cycle. A product life cycle is like a human life cycle. We are conceived, born, we become teenagers.mature, get old and eventually die. Each one of us must go through this cycle. A product goes through a cycle too. Understanding your productâ€™s life cycle will save you a lot of time and money as it will answer the question of why you are advertising.

The following is a product life cycle stages: 1. Introduction stage 2. Growth stage 3. Mature stage 4. Decline stage Introduction Stage: This is when a product has just been introduced to the market. Nobody knows about it and you as the marketer, the affiliate, the producer must educate the customers. The customer need to know the new product existence, this is called awareness creation. The customer need to be educated on the product uses, the benefits, why should they buy it, the pricing issues and where found, who is selling it.

The marketer needs to come up with a pull strategy this is to get people to try the new product this is by advertising the right message. The following is just a hypothetical introduction advert. The product initial message: â€œIntroducing a revolutionary product that changes your hair from white to black by just adding it to you drinking water once daily. The products benefits are: â€œNow you do not have take that drive to the hairdresser and wait for eternity, just do it at home and if you donâ€™t like the result changeâ€�. The price and the availability: â€œThe new product has the right price for all of us, its cost is US$ 30 for a 30 days pack and itâ€™s available in all supermarkets or you can order online atâ€¦â€�

But you will need to have had push strategy: this is about encouraging distributors and dealers to stock display and promotes the new product.

This stage of introduction calls for expensive advertisement budget and it does not benefit your product alone but the entire market for that product benefits, this means including your competitors. But eventfully the sales will start to grow. In the product cycle we will now be in the growth stage. This is the end of part one of this article, we continue with the other stages in part 2 of this article. You can visit the following sites and get free product to sell and free affiliate programs to register: http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com .

About the Author

Francis Kamau has been in marketing for over 12 years, his experience in marketing spans over 30 countries in Africa and his specialization includes advertisement, market research, new product development among other areas. Currently he owns 5 blogs.