Corporate America has been downsizing and job security has faded into dimly remembered history.
Statistics show that most new jobs now come from small business.
Home-based business has become a reality for millions of Americans - inspiring millions more to dream about opening one.
The term "networking" has become a buzzword in the business press, as more people realize the crucial role of referrals in the economy.
The Internal Revenue Service has adapted its rules (somewhat) to the new home-based economy by recognizing independent contractor status and publishing specific tax-preparation guidelines for "direct sellers."
In Tune with the Times
There are a number of reasons why the network marketing industry reached maturity and respect in the 1990s.
As millions of Americans launched home-based businesses and entrepreneurial ventures of every kind, they created a climate in which network marketing could flourish. For instance, it was not so strange anymore for an attorney to leave his practice in
order to run a new company of some kind out of his den. Most people have come to know someone who dropped out of the 9-to-5 world and turned entrepreneurial. Hourly and salaried employees have become intrigued with the idea of financial freedom and economic autonomy. Suddenly, they are much more open to change - and better prospects for network marketing.
Another change that favors the networking industry has to do with sex. In the past, most direct sellers were women. As a result, this was often seen as a woman's business, which tended to discourage male recruits. But as opportunities in the industry have increased, more men have been attracted to it; in turn, the all-female
perception has faded, increasing the industry's ability to attract men.
The sheer number of network marketers also has exploded. By the end of the 1990s, more than 10 million people were involved in the industry here in the U.S., racking up more than $20 billion in yearly sales. Worldwide, the number of distributors has topped 30 million, generating more than $80 billion in annual sales.
When an industry gets that big, even corporate bureaucrats begin to notice. Major multinational corporations are taking account of the networking phenomenon, building it into their own plans for distributing products and services. Here are a few of the marketing partnerships that have been formed: Avon-Mattel; Tupperware-Disney;
Amway-Rubbermaid; DuPont /ConAgra-Legacy.
The new "virtual networking" company will outsource almost all its activities: manufacturing, customer service - even accounting.
One of the world's largest banks, Citigroup - formed of the merger between Citibank and Traveler's Group - has a network marketing division, Primerica Financial Services (formerly the A.L. Williams Company) that is one of the most profitable distribution channels for the corporation's many financial products. These range from insurance policies to checking accounts.
Corporate America has validated the success of the industry by embracing public offerings of network marketing companies on Wall Street. Excel Telecommunications, Amway Asia-Pacific, and Nu Skin all successfully launched initial public stock offerings on major exchanges. Herbalife, Mannatech, Market America, Nature's Sunshine, Pre-Paid Legal, and Rexall, to name a few, are also publicly traded.
In the 1990s, high-tech and financial companies became enamored of the networking industry, as network marketing companies broadened their lines to include services as well as consumer products. Soon, it seemed every high-tech company was looking to networking as a means of guerrilla distribution in competitive markets. Companies in telecommunications, paging, Internet service, satellite TV, financial, and travel services were the chief beneficiaries of alliances with networking companies. Today,
even electric power is being sold by network marketing.
Why did conventional corporations cast their lot with the wild and woolly entrepreneurs of the network marketing industry?
Because they could see that it works. Specifically, network marketing distribution has several distinct advantages:
It is a powerful technique for introducing brand-new products - especially items that require demonstration or testimonials.
It generates strong "word of mouth," by directly rewarding consumers for sharing their excitement about a company's products or services.
Network marketing techniques can penetrate new markets quickly.
Since commissions are only paid on actual sales and since word-of-mouth replaces costly advertising campaigns, network distribution is an efficient and economical way to market a product or service.
Going Global
As it entered whole new business categories in the 1990s, the network industry also planted its flag in dozens of new markets around the world. Amway and Nu Skin had singular successes in Japan, which proved to be as amenable to network marketing as the industry's birthplace, the U.S.A. Nu Skin pioneered global seamless sponsoring, which allows a distributor to sponsor people living anywhere in the world into one down-line organization - as long as the corporation does business in the country where the recruit lives. For many of the largest networking companies, sales outside
the U.S. proved to be the majority. The Internet, global communication, and satellite TV provided the tools for global expansion.
It wasn't just Yankees who have been on the march during this decade. Many foreign-based networking companies set up shop in the U.S. One of the major success stories of the 1990s - health products giant Nikken - came to the U.S. from Fukuoka, Japan,
at the beginning of the decade with virtually no American customer base. Nikken posted annual U.S. sales in the hundreds of millions by the end of the decade and established its new worldwide headquarters in California.
Read All About It
Finally, the decade just ending has seen a sea-change in media and public perceptions of the network marketing industry. In the 1980s, the press acknowledged the existence of network marketing - but the attention was often negative. Stories had names like "The mess called MLM" and "Here come the scam artists." Some of the abuses cited were real, but good companies were usually lumped together with bad - effectively misinforming the public about a major industry.
In recent years, this trend has begun to turn around. Positive stories on network marketing have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Success, Entrepreneur, Wealth Building, Business Startups and Home Office Computing. Articles continued to treat the industry to its dose of honest criticism, but they also began to include the positive side: the fact that millions of Americans were finding opportunity where they had never expected to see it - among their relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues.
Unless you have been living in a cave, you can't have missed experts' predictions that the Internet will be one of the most powerful business forces in the 21st Century. As available bandwidth increases, ever more information - and more money - will be exchanged over the Net. As a future-oriented industry, network marketing will respond, adopting the new technology enthusiastically.
The Internet will become the prime means of communication, training, and ordering for network marketing distributors. Sales kits and videos may become obsolete as sophisticated multimedia demonstrations on laptops (and over e-mail) become the main recruiting tool, and cyberspace becomes the chief venue for training. The Internet will encourage rapid expansion on a global scale with instantaneous communication between network marketing corporate headquarters and the distributor force.
Documentation, sales kits, distributor agreements, and policies and procedures will reside primarily on Web sites, where new prospects can download them. (Courts already recognize electronic signatures as binding.) Distributors will order directly from the Net, reducing the need for call centers and human operators.
Companies will pay commissions by direct deposit to bank accounts or credit card accounts. The new, "virtual networking" company will out-source almost all its activities: private-label manufacturing, customer service, fulfillment, graphics - even genealogy and account processing. The technology revolution will level the playing field.
But don't let all this technological razzle-dazzle distract you from the basics. Regardless of what gadgets they adopt, the network marketing companies that succeed will always be those that maintain their respect for personal relationships. Get as virtual as you like - you will always need to get out there and press the flesh.
About the Author
Jeffrey A. Babener
Network Marketing Lifestyles
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Your Total, Effective Online Marketing Plan
Everyone is looking for that magic formula that will propel his or her web site to phenomenal success. Sooner or later, most people give up their search for this mythical online marketing secret and accept a mediocre level of online business performance that they know deep in their hearts is not what it should be. But a few people discover the secret. As you now will.
The secret is that there is no super-duper secret method of marketing that will get you all the success you dreamt of. But there is a formula which when done in totality, without taking any shortcuts, will multiply your online business success many times over whatever it is now. The ingredients of that formula consist of very basic and low-cost tasks that I am sure you have heard of before but ignored or applied partially, as most people do. The 'secret' is that you have to apply all the methods correctly and in totality. And you should spend 80% of your daily work time doing this (or get someone to spend 80% of their time doing this for you).
This article might disappoint you initially because it pretty much talks about what you have heard before, but please read through it and you will be glad you did. It shows you the right way to use that 'old' knowledge for great results. These results may not instantaneously come crashing through in a few short days, but they will solidly build over a few weeks and months to create a large stable and permanent success base.
Before we look at the methods, let us briefly take a look at some items or tools you need to gather for use. You need a collection of:
1. Signature files - these are simple text files, the electronic equivalent of your business card and should be no longer than 8 lines long. They carry your contact details and a quick intro to your business. Make a few different ones and append one at the end of your outgoing emails and postings. You can also use them to track the source of inquiries resulting from your postings and emails.
2. Blurbs - short one-paragraph text pieces about your business or related topic that you can post or paste to emails when required.
3. Reports - these are the longer version of blurbs, detailing your business or any other related topic. Post these to selected places on the Internet and provide them whenever required.
4. Newsletters - for a wide variety of reasons, it is very important that you start your own newsletter and work at getting subscriptions. There is a lot of information on the internet about how you can start, grow and manage a newsletter so I wont get into it. The only idea I would like to give you is this: actively ask your current subscribers to forward your newsletter to their friends. Offer a free gift that has true value to those who forward the newsletter to 20 friends. That will get you amazing growth in newsletter subscriptions and sales! You can start one free at www.listbot.com.
5. Banners - make sure you have professional quality banners of different sizes. My favorite place to get custom professional banners at an affordable price is www.buyabanner.com.
6. Press Releases - create professional press releases for everything about your web site, from new product announcements to site changes. Post them in appropriate places on the Internet and to press release services.
7. FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions files. Create a few of these about your industry or any other related topic. Make them in a question-and-answer format and post them in appropriate newsgroups and email them when necessary. They should not be blatant advertising of your products but they should have your signature file at the bottom and maybe a 'Created By...' line at the top to get you the recognition. A well done FAQ can find itself copied all over the web and referred to by thousands!
8. Autoresponders - if appropriate for your business, it can be a great idea to get a powerful autoresponder that will be able to read incoming email and automatically and instantly send out information files and answers that are appropriate to the query. That way you can manage thousands of email inquiries on time without any effort. Find one at www.web-source.net/links/.
9. Articles - write a few good articles every so often that are related to your industry. Contribute these for free publication in various ezines and web sites (make a list of a few hundred sites and newsletters that can take your article).
This is one of the most effective tools in your arsenal as it reaches thousands at one go, grabbing their attention for extended periods of time. The article should not be blatantly marketing your business, but at the end of it you should have your signature.
Now let us look at the methods that build success. Basically it works this way: apply the above tools to each of these methods frequently, daily where possible. It's that simple, but remember the key point here - frequently, all the methods, daily where possible. All the statistics below are taken from the GVU WWW User Survey of October 1998 (http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/).
Incoming links
88.3% of people find new sites through links on other sites. The smart way to approach this is to start a good affiliate program that pays a commission to people linking to your site for sales, leads or clicks. I highly recommend that you get any of these three affiliate program management companies to run yours: LinkShare.com, BeFree.com or CommissionJunction.com. These are the leading ones, with Link Share being the biggest and most well known and CJ being the most affordable but significantly smaller. The advantage of going with Link Share, for example, is that your total affiliate program will be run by them including check writing and reporting. You will get immediate exposure to over 1 million affiliates who use them, many of them immediately starting to promote you, and people will believe in your affiliate program because of the reputation Link Share carries. So with your affiliate program in place you can now contact the webmasters and site owners of heavily trafficked sites in your industry - resource sites, sites selling complimentary products, directories, newsletters, clients, even competitors - you would be surprised at what you can get! Offer them a special affiliate commission package (with Link Share you can customize your commission rates). Give them banners and promotional text. Maybe even offer a small discount to their clients - that will help them promote your products. Make a contact list of as many sites as you can daily and contact them and follow them up until you get the deal done. Start with a few hundred. All they would have to do is recommend your products or site to their customer base by placing your links, banners and reviews on their site and newsletter or mailing list. It is a very easy job for them, but one that will earn them a guaranteed commission of 10 - 20% through an affiliate program that they can trust. Considering that some sites have mailing or customer lists in the tens or hundreds of thousands, plus online visitors, this will work very well. Again, use your tools here to the maximum effect.
Search engine and directory positions
84.8% of people find new sites through links on other sites, but in terms of sheer numbers, this is the leading provider of traffic to most sites. Note that it says 'position'. A listing on a search engine or directory doesn't count for much, unless it is positioned well in the eyes of search engine users. Otherwise a search engine listing just gets lost among the millions of other pages on the engines. Only the top 10 to 30 links returned for any given search count - the rest is almost always ignored. Positioning is the easiest and most affordable yet most evasive and misunderstood method you can use. There is a lot to learn about this, especially if you want to do it manually. But lately there a few good software packages you can use to avoid the hassle and get positioned well quickly and safely. Two popular packages include PositionWeaver (www.positionweaver.com) and WebPosition (www.webposition.com). For most sites, the search engine traffic makes or breaks their success and it is very important to know how to work well with them. Using software tools, you should be spending some time every day tracking, improving and managing your positions.
Friends
64.7% of people find new web sites through friends. On your site, make it easy for people to recommend your site, product, page, special offer, or article to their friends. Add some scripts that make it a one-step process at any page for the visitor to enter their friends email addresses and send a quick but effective recommendation. Make a nice letter that will go out with the recommendation. If you want advanced features in your recommendation feature, use a customized CGI script. To get many more recommendations, offer the person making the recommendation a chance to win something for his or her effort. You can use www.recommend-it.com or find a script at www.cgi-resources.com. This is probably the only method that doesn't require your daily or frequent review and attention.
Printed Media
62.6% of people find new sites commonly through the print media - advertising, press clips, articles, whatever. Identify magazines, newsletters and journals around the world that could have an appropriate audience. Then give them your articles, reports, blurbs, etc. build a database of journalists that you contribute these items to. Send out press releases to publications and writers. Use a press release firm for best effect. Again, this is a method you should be doing something about very frequently. If you have the budget, you can also do display and classified ads where appropriate.
Newsletters and Mailing Lists
These are really underrated, yet so effective. What you need to do is find as many lists and newsletters as possible that are related to your business. Yes, that will get you a lot of email every day but it is worth it. Read the postings and respond to them when you can, preferably daily, using your blurbs, signatures, FAQs and articles. Many lists have thousands of subscribers and by becoming an active contributor to a number of them you will be getting exposure to thousands of focused prospects for free - very powerful yet underrated. Make sure you do not become overtly commercial in your postings - just let your signature do the work of directing the reader to you for business. Your actual posting should be a helpful bit of information, not advertising. You can find lists at www.listz.com and Yahoo.com's categories.
Newsgroups and Forums
Newsgroups are under-estimated by most. Yet over 20% of Internet users use them at least once a week. Forums are like newsgroups, the most popular being the forums on AOL and CompuServe. Subscribe to all the newsgroups and forums that are related to your industry. You can find them at www.deja.com, www.listz.com/news, and by joining AOL and CompuServe. Read new messages regularly, daily when possible, and reply to them using your arsenal of signatures, blurbs, reports and FAQs. Just don't be overtly commercial in your postings.
Other Things You Can Do
There are obviously many other ways you can promote your online business. You can learn a lot of tricks by visiting successful sites and seeing what little gimmicks and techniques they are using and copying them. Depending on your budget, industry and audience, you can get into banner advertising, offline advertising, promotions and contests, coupons, selling through auction sites like eBay, classified ads on AOL and CompuServe, sponsorships, and much more. You might want to buy some good books at Amazon.com on online marketing for a thorough look at many of these techniques.
The Bottom Line
The Internet is a complex place and concentrating on just one marketing idea will not get you any long term, huge gains. Your best bet is to follow the time-proven strategies we have talked about in their totality, daily. And this marketing should consume 80% of your daily work time (or get someone to spend 80% of their time marketing for you). I guarantee you that if you spend this time daily enjoying yourself as you get into the things we have talked about, your traffic and online success will grow to amazing proportions! It is a time-proven 'secret' success formula.
About the Author
David Gikandi (support@positionweaver.com) is CEO at SearchPositioning.com (http://www.positionweaver.com).
The secret is that there is no super-duper secret method of marketing that will get you all the success you dreamt of. But there is a formula which when done in totality, without taking any shortcuts, will multiply your online business success many times over whatever it is now. The ingredients of that formula consist of very basic and low-cost tasks that I am sure you have heard of before but ignored or applied partially, as most people do. The 'secret' is that you have to apply all the methods correctly and in totality. And you should spend 80% of your daily work time doing this (or get someone to spend 80% of their time doing this for you).
This article might disappoint you initially because it pretty much talks about what you have heard before, but please read through it and you will be glad you did. It shows you the right way to use that 'old' knowledge for great results. These results may not instantaneously come crashing through in a few short days, but they will solidly build over a few weeks and months to create a large stable and permanent success base.
Before we look at the methods, let us briefly take a look at some items or tools you need to gather for use. You need a collection of:
1. Signature files - these are simple text files, the electronic equivalent of your business card and should be no longer than 8 lines long. They carry your contact details and a quick intro to your business. Make a few different ones and append one at the end of your outgoing emails and postings. You can also use them to track the source of inquiries resulting from your postings and emails.
2. Blurbs - short one-paragraph text pieces about your business or related topic that you can post or paste to emails when required.
3. Reports - these are the longer version of blurbs, detailing your business or any other related topic. Post these to selected places on the Internet and provide them whenever required.
4. Newsletters - for a wide variety of reasons, it is very important that you start your own newsletter and work at getting subscriptions. There is a lot of information on the internet about how you can start, grow and manage a newsletter so I wont get into it. The only idea I would like to give you is this: actively ask your current subscribers to forward your newsletter to their friends. Offer a free gift that has true value to those who forward the newsletter to 20 friends. That will get you amazing growth in newsletter subscriptions and sales! You can start one free at www.listbot.com.
5. Banners - make sure you have professional quality banners of different sizes. My favorite place to get custom professional banners at an affordable price is www.buyabanner.com.
6. Press Releases - create professional press releases for everything about your web site, from new product announcements to site changes. Post them in appropriate places on the Internet and to press release services.
7. FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions files. Create a few of these about your industry or any other related topic. Make them in a question-and-answer format and post them in appropriate newsgroups and email them when necessary. They should not be blatant advertising of your products but they should have your signature file at the bottom and maybe a 'Created By...' line at the top to get you the recognition. A well done FAQ can find itself copied all over the web and referred to by thousands!
8. Autoresponders - if appropriate for your business, it can be a great idea to get a powerful autoresponder that will be able to read incoming email and automatically and instantly send out information files and answers that are appropriate to the query. That way you can manage thousands of email inquiries on time without any effort. Find one at www.web-source.net/links/.
9. Articles - write a few good articles every so often that are related to your industry. Contribute these for free publication in various ezines and web sites (make a list of a few hundred sites and newsletters that can take your article).
This is one of the most effective tools in your arsenal as it reaches thousands at one go, grabbing their attention for extended periods of time. The article should not be blatantly marketing your business, but at the end of it you should have your signature.
Now let us look at the methods that build success. Basically it works this way: apply the above tools to each of these methods frequently, daily where possible. It's that simple, but remember the key point here - frequently, all the methods, daily where possible. All the statistics below are taken from the GVU WWW User Survey of October 1998 (http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/).
Incoming links
88.3% of people find new sites through links on other sites. The smart way to approach this is to start a good affiliate program that pays a commission to people linking to your site for sales, leads or clicks. I highly recommend that you get any of these three affiliate program management companies to run yours: LinkShare.com, BeFree.com or CommissionJunction.com. These are the leading ones, with Link Share being the biggest and most well known and CJ being the most affordable but significantly smaller. The advantage of going with Link Share, for example, is that your total affiliate program will be run by them including check writing and reporting. You will get immediate exposure to over 1 million affiliates who use them, many of them immediately starting to promote you, and people will believe in your affiliate program because of the reputation Link Share carries. So with your affiliate program in place you can now contact the webmasters and site owners of heavily trafficked sites in your industry - resource sites, sites selling complimentary products, directories, newsletters, clients, even competitors - you would be surprised at what you can get! Offer them a special affiliate commission package (with Link Share you can customize your commission rates). Give them banners and promotional text. Maybe even offer a small discount to their clients - that will help them promote your products. Make a contact list of as many sites as you can daily and contact them and follow them up until you get the deal done. Start with a few hundred. All they would have to do is recommend your products or site to their customer base by placing your links, banners and reviews on their site and newsletter or mailing list. It is a very easy job for them, but one that will earn them a guaranteed commission of 10 - 20% through an affiliate program that they can trust. Considering that some sites have mailing or customer lists in the tens or hundreds of thousands, plus online visitors, this will work very well. Again, use your tools here to the maximum effect.
Search engine and directory positions
84.8% of people find new sites through links on other sites, but in terms of sheer numbers, this is the leading provider of traffic to most sites. Note that it says 'position'. A listing on a search engine or directory doesn't count for much, unless it is positioned well in the eyes of search engine users. Otherwise a search engine listing just gets lost among the millions of other pages on the engines. Only the top 10 to 30 links returned for any given search count - the rest is almost always ignored. Positioning is the easiest and most affordable yet most evasive and misunderstood method you can use. There is a lot to learn about this, especially if you want to do it manually. But lately there a few good software packages you can use to avoid the hassle and get positioned well quickly and safely. Two popular packages include PositionWeaver (www.positionweaver.com) and WebPosition (www.webposition.com). For most sites, the search engine traffic makes or breaks their success and it is very important to know how to work well with them. Using software tools, you should be spending some time every day tracking, improving and managing your positions.
Friends
64.7% of people find new web sites through friends. On your site, make it easy for people to recommend your site, product, page, special offer, or article to their friends. Add some scripts that make it a one-step process at any page for the visitor to enter their friends email addresses and send a quick but effective recommendation. Make a nice letter that will go out with the recommendation. If you want advanced features in your recommendation feature, use a customized CGI script. To get many more recommendations, offer the person making the recommendation a chance to win something for his or her effort. You can use www.recommend-it.com or find a script at www.cgi-resources.com. This is probably the only method that doesn't require your daily or frequent review and attention.
Printed Media
62.6% of people find new sites commonly through the print media - advertising, press clips, articles, whatever. Identify magazines, newsletters and journals around the world that could have an appropriate audience. Then give them your articles, reports, blurbs, etc. build a database of journalists that you contribute these items to. Send out press releases to publications and writers. Use a press release firm for best effect. Again, this is a method you should be doing something about very frequently. If you have the budget, you can also do display and classified ads where appropriate.
Newsletters and Mailing Lists
These are really underrated, yet so effective. What you need to do is find as many lists and newsletters as possible that are related to your business. Yes, that will get you a lot of email every day but it is worth it. Read the postings and respond to them when you can, preferably daily, using your blurbs, signatures, FAQs and articles. Many lists have thousands of subscribers and by becoming an active contributor to a number of them you will be getting exposure to thousands of focused prospects for free - very powerful yet underrated. Make sure you do not become overtly commercial in your postings - just let your signature do the work of directing the reader to you for business. Your actual posting should be a helpful bit of information, not advertising. You can find lists at www.listz.com and Yahoo.com's categories.
Newsgroups and Forums
Newsgroups are under-estimated by most. Yet over 20% of Internet users use them at least once a week. Forums are like newsgroups, the most popular being the forums on AOL and CompuServe. Subscribe to all the newsgroups and forums that are related to your industry. You can find them at www.deja.com, www.listz.com/news, and by joining AOL and CompuServe. Read new messages regularly, daily when possible, and reply to them using your arsenal of signatures, blurbs, reports and FAQs. Just don't be overtly commercial in your postings.
Other Things You Can Do
There are obviously many other ways you can promote your online business. You can learn a lot of tricks by visiting successful sites and seeing what little gimmicks and techniques they are using and copying them. Depending on your budget, industry and audience, you can get into banner advertising, offline advertising, promotions and contests, coupons, selling through auction sites like eBay, classified ads on AOL and CompuServe, sponsorships, and much more. You might want to buy some good books at Amazon.com on online marketing for a thorough look at many of these techniques.
The Bottom Line
The Internet is a complex place and concentrating on just one marketing idea will not get you any long term, huge gains. Your best bet is to follow the time-proven strategies we have talked about in their totality, daily. And this marketing should consume 80% of your daily work time (or get someone to spend 80% of their time marketing for you). I guarantee you that if you spend this time daily enjoying yourself as you get into the things we have talked about, your traffic and online success will grow to amazing proportions! It is a time-proven 'secret' success formula.
About the Author
David Gikandi (support@positionweaver.com) is CEO at SearchPositioning.com (http://www.positionweaver.com).
Your Website Sucks: The Value of Shock Value Marketing
It worked, didn't it? Here you are and why? Because my article title is absurd.
Welcome to the world of shock value marketing. How many businesses are you competing with? Tons. How boring is most of the ad copy you see? It's really boring. It's really unoriginal, and therefore, it is not nearly as effective as it could be.
So take advantage of this. Make the audience you are advertising to laugh or smile, and you can be assured they will click on your ad. It doesn't mean that your website has to employ the same vulgarity. It is simply a powerful tool to get traffic to your site. Once they are there, you can use any means you want to keep their attention.
So what specific techniques to you use? Well, this is up to you. You can pretty much do anything. You can insult them, you can be lewd or vulgar, you can insult yourself, you can say something funny and outlandish. The bottom line is that you have to be creative, you have to think past all the boring ad copy and put yourself in the shoes of those people you are marketing to. How many times have you been subjected to boring ad copy and have simply moved your eyes right past it without giving it a chance? Well, there you go.
Have fun.
About The Author
Mitch Van Dusen is the creator of www.GuideBible.com, a site devoted to business optimization. It contains thousands of pages of free articles about everything from Marketing and RSS to SEO and Traffic. In addition it offers a free consultation evaluating the profitibility of your website.
(c) 2006 Mitch Van Dusen
mymail@guidebible.com
Welcome to the world of shock value marketing. How many businesses are you competing with? Tons. How boring is most of the ad copy you see? It's really boring. It's really unoriginal, and therefore, it is not nearly as effective as it could be.
So take advantage of this. Make the audience you are advertising to laugh or smile, and you can be assured they will click on your ad. It doesn't mean that your website has to employ the same vulgarity. It is simply a powerful tool to get traffic to your site. Once they are there, you can use any means you want to keep their attention.
So what specific techniques to you use? Well, this is up to you. You can pretty much do anything. You can insult them, you can be lewd or vulgar, you can insult yourself, you can say something funny and outlandish. The bottom line is that you have to be creative, you have to think past all the boring ad copy and put yourself in the shoes of those people you are marketing to. How many times have you been subjected to boring ad copy and have simply moved your eyes right past it without giving it a chance? Well, there you go.
Have fun.
About The Author
Mitch Van Dusen is the creator of www.GuideBible.com, a site devoted to business optimization. It contains thousands of pages of free articles about everything from Marketing and RSS to SEO and Traffic. In addition it offers a free consultation evaluating the profitibility of your website.
(c) 2006 Mitch Van Dusen
mymail@guidebible.com
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