Category Archives: eMarketing

How Can I Get Advertisers And Sponsors For A Website?

eMarketing, Starting Out, ,

I have a fun website that is free for everyone to communicate within the community. I am in need of help on how can I get advertisers and sponsors to be on my website. This is my first time and I need to know what do I do first.

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The key to getting advertisers/sponsors is answering the question, “Why should they pay money to be on your site?”. When you approach a potential advertiser, you’ll want to have such information as the following on hand:

  • How many people are registered?
  • How many are active?
  • How many unique visitors do you get
  • Do you have their email addresses? (i.e., can you contact them?)
  • How much profile information have you compiled (age, sex, location, income, etc.)

The advertiser is going to think, “How much is it worth to have my product/service in front of this group?”. You need to help them to figure out their ROI. They’ll also care about ad placement/size, click-through, viewing stats, competition, etc.

Before you accept an advertiser, you’ll also want to answer, “How much will it help/hurt my site to have this product/service advertised?”. The wrong ad will turn off your hard-won traffic.

How Can I Find Obscure Slogans On The Internet?

eMarketing,

I am working on a paper for school and need to find the proper brand /entity for 50 slogans. Evidently I do not watch enough television and can only come up with about 25 of them.

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Here are some sites for you:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_slogans
http://www.adslogans.co.uk/hof/
http://advertising.utexas.edu/research/slogans/index.asp
http://www.textart.ru/database/slogan/list-advertising-slogans.html

What Are A Call Center’s Compelling Home Page Headlines?

eMarketing, Services, ,

I read this on a marketing website “If you want people to read what you have to say on your website, you must start each webpage with a compelling headline and use sub headlines to keep your visitors reading your text”

I am developing a web site and need to headlines for the front page. We are a call center for outsourcing telemarketing inbound and outbound services. We are nationwide and have the top technology in the industry. Our service is superb and we have a state of the art facility.

Any suggestions for headlines to the front page introduction to us headline, then a secondary headline with what content would be most important? If you were going to outsource to a call center what would you be looking for?

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Is Your Business Overwhelmed With Phone Calls?
Tired Of Answering The Phone?
Tired Of Cold-Calling?
Rather Be Working Than Calling?
Wasting Too Much Time On The Phone?
We Love To Find You New Customers
Because Calling Isn’t Everyone’s Cup of Tea
Leave Phone Calling To the Pros
Do What You Do. We’ll Answer The Phone.
Stop Phone Interruptions.

How Can I Market My Commercial B2B Loans?

eMarketing, Services,

Our company works with banks to underwrite commercial real estate loans for their borrowers. The majority of our marketing efforts are integrated with our sales team — who works diligently to build and keep relationship with our client banks. From a marketing standpoint, we communicate with clients through a monthly newsletter, DM, collateral, etc. I recently heard from a few clients – who apparently are not reading our newsletters — that they didn’t know about the most recent developments in our company. What are some fresh, successful, and cost effective marketing mediums for staying in front of our clients so we can maintain/grow our company presence and remain top of mind?

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When you have something of note – host a luncheon for your bankers.

If they aren’t reading your newsletters – find out why. Is it the content? Format? Appearance? If you move to e-newsletters (which will probably save you money and allow you to send out “flash” notices), you could easily suffer the same problem – your marketing gets ignored or labeled as spam.

What is your competition doing? You don’t want to necessarily copy them, but you do want to make sure you’re not missing something obvious. To find out, take a banker to lunch and find out what’s the best way to get their attention, when, etc.

Who Can Help Create A Personal Direct Mail Campaign?

eMarketing, ,

The other day I received a postcard in the mail that was clever. The postcard was personalized with my name front and back. It pointed me to a URL which also included my name: myname.company.net. When I followed the URL the landing page greeted me with my name as well. This was I imagine done with a single technology that generates the postcard and the web site address and populated the page with my name.

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The personalized postcard was produced using variable data printing (VDP). A number of companies also package VDP with direct marketing (as you saw). Here are some leads:

http://www.vdpcomplete.com
http://www.easypurl.com
http://variabledataprinting.printpelican.com/

How Much Should I Budget For Online Marketing?

eMarketing, Starting Out,

I’m not interested in knowing how much to allocate towards online marketing, but how much to allocate between online marketing activities? Banner ads vs keywords vs content development, etc. Is there anything about online marketing activities that would make this analysis any different that were I doing it for off line activities?

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Online, you have a much easier time measuring ROI.

There’s no simple answer to your question – each business is different. My suggestion is to try everything and measure the results. Make sure that you’re also split testing your ads to find the best combination of text, color, text size, etc.

As for how much money – it’s based on how much a new customer is worth to you (think lifetime relationship, not just the initial purchase). Then balance that with the cost to “acquire” that customer.

How Can I Improve My B2B E-Newsletter?

eMarketing,

I work for a B2B software company, and I am about to send out the second issue of our quarterly e-newsletter. I would like to send out issues more frequently, but since I am the only one developing content, I am limited in what I can do.

My question involves what to do about new subscribers – is it advisable to send out back issues to new subscribers, and then follow up with the next issue in a week or so? I’m also putting back issue articles on our website, so it may not be fresh content for some.

Or, if I cannot produce a 5-article newsletter every month, should I start breaking the newsletters into smaller chunks? Maybe offer monthly news briefs? I don’t want to spread the content thin, but I don’t want to wait 4 months to touch base with subscribers again, either.

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Since the ultimate purpose of your e-newsletter is to generate more sales, the more frequent your name is in front of your prospects/clients, the better. One well-written article a month is much better than 3-5 every quarter.

Don’t forget to ask your clients what articles they would be interested in seeing – you might be surprised.

As for back issues, archive them online, and send new ones at the next cycle, making sure each of your newsletters have a link to your previous issues as well.

What Is A Sub-Domain?

eMarketing, ,

My hosting company offers up to 6 websites hosted for the one low price. I created a website which is ranking very well and have now created a second site (unrelated in topic) to the first site on the same hosting plan. I now realize this second website is considered a sub-domain of the first website according to my CPanel, although they have completely different domain names. Will this 2nd site be considered of lesser importance by the search engines or is this whole sub-domain thing just visible to me in my CPanel? Should I move the 2nd site to a separate new hosting plan

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You might be confusing subdomain with the folder structure of your website.

A subdomain is a name that comes before your domain name. In the case of www.google.com there’s also images.google.com, maps.google.com, etc. Each of these are websites in their own right, but their names share the domain name. Search engines see these as their own website. Subdomains are a handy way to organize a logical “entity” of a website.

The folder structure is how the websites are organized on your web hosting server. If your package provides 6 websites, then it’s probable that each domain’s files & folders are kept in a single domain folder (which in turn, is kept in a folder for you, the hosting user). At the “top level” of your web hosting folder, you’d have a different folder for each domain.

The cpanel allows you to map a folder to a (sub)domain.

You DO want your different (unrelated) websites to have different domain names as a start of your “branding”.

Should I Send Out Press Releases?

eMarketing, Publicity, , , , , ,

A few months ago I published a new on-line boutique website offering designer laptop bags. I have a small budget and would like to know if there really is any GOOD FREE PR websites; or any PR firms that you could steer me too. I have no experience in this area at all. I have written my own press release but don’t know where OR what to do next.

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Press releases are great for disseminating something new (that may be of interest to the media). However, they’re not a substitute for marketing / advertising.

What I think you want is targeted traffic for your website that converts into customers.

Before you get more traffic, I would encourage you to enhance your website. To actually see a good picture of one of your bags for sale (ignoring the 2 that are on the home page), it took me 3 clicks to get to the page. My suggestion is since you have an ecommerce site, make the site easier to navigate, and quicker to see the merchandise to entice me. For example, when I want to buy bags, I don’t want to read about your bags (which is basically text that you’ve artificially created for the search engines) – I want to see them. Once the site is enhanced, then increase your traffic.

If you don’t have a big budget, then start by doing a keyword investigation to see what people are searching on and what’s (and who’s) ranking well. Given your price point, a PPC campaign may make sense as well.

You also want to get mentioned in the various fashion magazines, blogs, and websites if you have something special/unusual. For the magazines, a targeted press release to the proper editor would be better than an press release “blast”. On blogs, feel free to post something of value and get a backlink. On fashion websites, contact the owner and see if they’d be willing to give you a mention.

How Can I Record High-Quality Webcast Audio?

eMarketing, ,

How do I get the best sound quality for recording a webcast?

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If you’re recording your own voice, pull the sound from the microphone. If you’ll also be recording the participants, you’ll need to do a bit of post-processing to get their voice to the same level as yours, remove background noise, etc.

If your webcast host offers it, let them do the recording and get the raw audio for editing. They’ll generally do this for little or no money.

Also, test it out your system ahead of time before the “big day”. It’ll let you tweak the various parameters to find something that works.