Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Serving your Customers Well

Before the age of mass production and computerisation all businesses were small and relationships with customers were very personal. No automated phone answering, no web orders, not even a phone to create distance between the owner and the customer.

These days we are all tired of the endless auto-answering loops we get into when trying to make a simple telephone enquiry only to eventually get through to the wrong person or department anyway! We want more individual attentive service from those we do business with and want to be able to call someone who is familiar with our purchase when we have a problem.

Does this create an opportunity for small and home businesses? Of course it does! You may not always be able to compete on product price but you can certainly compete on individual attention.

Treat your customers well, in fact treat them as if they were your only customer and you’ll not only feel good about your business you’ll improve it too. That’s because customers talk, they tell others about the great service they got. Serve your customers well and you’ll pick up extra business as a result!

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Hitting Customers Emotional Triggers

When marketing your product or service, what is it you are really selling? Is it the product or service itself or is it the benefit the customer feels afterwards?

Too many marketers try to sell the product and its features, which is just fine if you have a hot prospect who already knows what he wants but to the not-so-hot prospects the approach is a waste of time.

When people buy something they generally do so because of some want need or desire which is more often than not an emotional one. As a marketer you need to find out what a prospects emotional drivers are and pitch your product or service accordingly. Try to sell the outcome and feelings the prospect will have after the purchase.

People make purchases for emotional reasons such as:

To gain pleasure
To relieve a problem
To save time or money
To make more money
To be loved or popular

If you as a marketer can figure out what the emotions involved are you greatly increase your chances of success. So don’t sell how your weight loss program has been used by others successfully, instead sell how good the customer will feel after they have shed some weight and gotten fitter.

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Boost your Online Credibility

Many home businesses and small businesses have websites, either to promote the business or to sell products but overlook the fact that there are millions of people out there who are slow to trust websites and even slower to use their credit cards on one. If you have a work at home business it can be especially important to improve your credibility online. Here are a few tips to help you boost your online credibility.

- Professional Looking Design
The more professional looking the website, the more likely people are to trust it. Don’t use counters, pop-ups, avoid the comic sans font and have a good menu structure. Ensure the site is easy to use and read by avoiding garish backgrounds.

Include an ‘about us’ page along with a privacy statement. Inform your customers how Read more…

More on Article Writing

I’ve been doing a little more experimenting with using the power of article sites and Squidoo and am pleased with the results so far, it really is possible to get on the first page of Google in a day or two if your articles are constructed correctly.

A good title seems to be the major key. In short, use the keyword phrase you’re targeting. So if you’re targeting the search phrase “unusual birthday gifts” then make sure that exact phrase is the title (or the start of a longer title) of your article. Use the phrase again at the start of the first paragraph and use it a few times in the body of the article.

Writing a similar article for posting on a blog or another article site and put a link from it to the first one also seems to help. Obviously you need to target very specific phrases which don’t have to many webpages optimized for the same phrase so target “thick blue widgets: and not “widgets”.

Whoops I nearly forgot to mention the Wealthy Affiliate has a massive amount of info on the subject with lots of comments and even detailed success stories you can easily duplicate. If you want to see how several folks have actually done this and talk freely about their successes Join the Wealthy Affiliate

You will be amazed at the level of detail given freely there and they’ve also just included an amazing new website builder for members who want to easily put webpages together. They already give members free website hosting! Building websites is not actually required for article marketing but it can certainly add to the success if you want to take article marketing to the next level!

Affiliate Marketing – A Closer Look

So what exactly is affiliate marketing? Put simply it’s the business of marketing somebody else’ product or service in return for a commission or payment. There are tens of thousands of merchants looking for more sales and willing to pay from 5% to 70% of the sale value to whoever introduces the customer. This tends to work best with website sales as it is relatively simple to automate the administration involved in tracking which customer was introduces by which affiliate.

Check out the Wealthy Affiliate Here

Typically the lower commission shares are on high value physical products where there is limited margin to begin with, however 5% of a $500 dollar product is still $25 just for introducing a customer. Downloadable products like software and ebooks tend to have higher commissions as there is little physical cost involved in copying the item to the customer therefore the merchant has a high profit margin after recouping the initial development cost.

There are several affiliate networks that make the whole process simple. By signing up with Read more…