How To Get More Visibility Through Networking

The most effective form of advertising is also the oldest: word-of-mouth. Bright ads and slick brochures don't compare to an informed recommendation (or warning!) from someone trusted and respected by potential customers. Word-of-mouth can be just as effective when the information comes directly from you.

By networking with colleagues, allied businesses, and potential customers, people can learn more about who you are and what you do. Networking is also a great way to become more attuned to the issues that affect your customers-their needs, concerns, and preferences-giving you a better chance of being in that proverbial "right place" at the right time.

Networking is no different than attending a social gathering. In fact, it's better because you already have something in common with nearly everyone you meet. Of course, you should never adopt a "who are you and what can you do for me" attitude. Networking works best when there's no pressure to make a sale. Ask questions and always listen. First impressions are important, but they also can be enhanced or changed over time.

To begin building your business network, consider the following:

Professional societies. Nearly every type of business has a national association that represents their members' interests; most have local chapters with regular meetings and activities.

Along with providing a great source of contacts, professional societies offer volunteer opportunities where you can demonstrate your initiative, cooperative spirit, and leadership qualities. 

Customers' professional societies. If you really want to know what your customers are thinking, get involved in organizations that represent their interests. Do some research before you sign up, however. Some groups may have restrictions on membership, while others may have fees that exceed your expected returns. On the other hand, many groups may encourage businesses such as yours to advertise in their publications or participate in special programs.

Chambers of Commerce/Business Roundtables. These groups offer valuable exposure within a particular community or region. While other members may not be in your target market, they can provide valuable leads and referrals (there's that word-of-mouth advertising again!). Many also provide opportunities for small businesses to "show their stuff" via trade fairs, demonstrations, and media features. 

About The Author

Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, an advertising network company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and advertising.  www.msmedianetwork.com

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How To Become A Better Business Marketer ?

It's a fact that business these days is more competitive than it's ever been. To stay alive, you can't just offer a quality product at a fair price. You have to know how to market effectively. And as you know, marketing goes hand in hand with advertising.

Unfortunately, most business owners have no idea of how to get the most out of every marketing dollar they spend. You should demand that you get the best possible results from every dime you drop into marketing.

Does this seem too obvious? Look through your yellow pages. Pick them up right now and glance through them. Answer this question: are most of the ads telling you what benefits you get if you become a customer? Or are the ads telling you about the companies, where they are, how wonderful they are, what they do, how great their quality is, how great their service is, and all about them?

Around 95% of the ads are totally focused on the business and not on what the business can do for you, the prospect. Pay attention to advertisements in newspapers, on the television, and on the radio. You'll find the same thing happening in those places, consistently, every day. This type of selfish advertising falls into the terribly wasteful category of "institutional" advertising.

 

Institutional advertising produces, at best, deferred results. At worst, institutional advertising is ineffective, unproductive, and a wasteful expense that accomplishes no profitable purpose whatsoever.

You know it's institutional advertising when it tells you how great the company is, or how old and stable they are, or some other frilly, fancy, cutesy and other non-compelling foolishness.

Your selfishness is what kills most of your marketing. From brochures to flyers, sales letters to advertisements, your marketing message should let your prospects know that you are concerned only with what they want.

Anything about you should always come last. Your customers should always come first. All marketing materials you create should focus on what the prospects want and need. Every sentence should show that you understand their wants and needs. Until your marketing efforts focus on the prospects first, your marketing is handicapped.

Determine who your market is. Ninety percent of the businesses out there never precisely determine who their market is, and what the desires, needs, wants, and passions of the prospects in that market are. This is a grave mistake.

The successful marketer can tell you precisely who he's marketing to, and what they want in a product or service. He can tell you his best prospect's approximate age, location, education level, income level and other critical information. You must know the who first, and then you can focus on the why.

Why do your customers buy from you? What do your customers want or need most in the products or services you offer? Remember, you need to focus on discovering what the "why" is so that you can focus your marketing efforts on showing your prospects that you can meet the "why" in the most satisfactory fashion.

Think about it. How can you expect to adequately fill someone's needs if you never take the time to understand them? It's simple, yet few companies ever bother to work at meeting their customers' needs.

Companies that is successful with their marketing understand their customers' needs and attempt to satisfy those needs better than the competition.

If you want to own your market, find out what your customers really want. Discover their desires. Search out their passions and needs. Once you have this information, you will be armed to corner your market.

apture Your Customers & Prospects Names And Addresses.

Of all the terrible marketing mistakes made, I feel that this one has caused companies to lose the most money. I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. Why a company would spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to get a customer in the door and then let them walk out without getting their name and address and other vital information from them is beyond me.

I can't understand it, but 90% of the businesses in America don't ever bother to keep track of their loyal customers, let alone any prospects. Your mailing list, or customer database, is your biggest source of lifetime profits.

keep track of every customer and every prospect. According to Fortune Magazine, it costs five times as much to generate a new customer than to resell to an existing customer. Existing customers are almost as good as money in the bank.

Your existing customers already know and trust you. They bought from you and (hopefully) had a positive experience with you. They know you'll deliver on your promises, because you've done it before with energy and promptness.

All you need to do is develop a systematic way of keeping track of them, and then ask them to buy from you more often. By establishing a long term relationship with your customers and prospects, you can maximize your business success. Especially if your products or services help solve your customers' problems.

About The Author

Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, an advertising network company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and advertising. www.msmedianetwork.com

Web's #1 business automaton and list management service. http://www.imediamarketingtools.com/

http://www.besucessfull.net/

A Powerful Web Site Traffic Building Method

When most people get their website live online they tend to forget the most important steps to drive traffic to it. Your site may get a few visitors to start with, but now is the time to focus on driving more traffic to your site.

Besides having an affiliate program, which should be your #1 traffic building method, there's one other traffic building method you must consider- writing articles. There are, of course, other methods such as search engines and directories, banner advertising, links from other sites, ezine advertising, posting to forums as an expert giving advice, pop-up, pop-under, exit traffic etc...

I have found that these methods do not yield high enough results to warrant the time and money spent implementing them at this point in the process. Posting in forums is inefficient. Sure, you will get hits, and yes some people will grow to regard you as an expert but the time spent on this strategy is rarely proportional to the pay-off.

I hear this advice often but for most businesses this just isn't the best way to go. Only bother with this if find you have free time. Banner advertising, unless highly targeted or paid on a PPC basis, is often hit or miss. Pop-up, exit traffic, and other traffic building methods of the genre are worthless unless you are using it to collect email addresses by giving away something free.

Take into account the interests and needs that the stream of traffic has and create a page that will appeal to them so that they will opt-in to your list. This is the only way that I have been able to get any money out of this kind of traffic.

Even then, it wasn't as profitable as other methods and this is why I don't recommend it. Getting links from other sites isn't recommended because it usually provides no way to establish credibility. I recommend concentrating most of your time on writing articles for several reasons:


¤ They can be permanent

¤ They can reach large, targeted audiences

¤ They have the potential to establish you as an expert quickly

None of the other methods allow all of these qualities. To get maximum sales by writing articles should go without saying by now that anything you produce should be your absolute best work. Articles, as your primary method of building traffic, will be many of your prospects first experience of you.

This first experience should be absolutely breath-taking. They should be so impressed by your article, so amazed at your knowledge, and so curious about what other problems that you can solve for them, that they will click through to your site.

About The Author

Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, a company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and advertising.
www.multiplestreammktg.com

Web's #1 business automaton and list management service. http://www.imediamarketingtools.com

How a Professional Autoresponder can benefit your Online?

How a Professional Autoresponder can benefit your Online Business By Abe Cherian - Copyright © 2005 Classifying web hosting services can be done by placing into two categories, free hosting and professional hosting. To work out what service is best suited for your business you'll need to decide what type of features and benefits you'll need to run your business. If you use a free hosting account, you won't be able to use your own domain name, you will find it almost impossible to get listed in the search engines and you'll appear to your visitors as an amateur and they will be reluctant to take you seriously. However, free web hosting can form an integral part of your marketing strategy but not as your primary service. If you want to be seen as being serious about your online business, I highly recommend you grab yourself a professional web hosting service. Your professional web hosting service should be able to provide at least 10GB of bandwidth, 500MB of space, as well as the usual technical benefits such as Cpanel, PHP, MySQL, 99.9% uptime and other features. You may pay a little more per month for this type of service, but just like a tradesman needs high quality tools to make a professionally finished product, you need to be seen as being professional to your visitors so that you can deliver what your customers want. There are many great web hosting service providers on the net. Open up your internet browser, go to Google and perform a search for "web hosting" and you'll get over 6 million pages of results. As you can imagine, finding a good professional web hosting service from all these pages can be a difficult and time consuming process, and most times it can be hit or miss if you get the right one. There are some web hosting service providers that permits you to use various tools, one in particular are autoresponders. Basically an autoresponder is an automatic ecommerce management system that allows you to place your follow-up system on autopilot, so you can concentrate on other areas of your business or family activities. All you have to do is place a special form on your web pages to capture the contact details of your visitors and it will automatically manage your email list by inserting and removing contacts as necessary. You can also pre-program hundreds of messages that can be sent to many thousands of people on your list at the same time on any day in the future, starting from when your visitor first subscribed. Included in most web hosting services is a fairly basic, low cost, limited autoresponder. While this may suit the needs of "hobby" sites, it is not designed for multiple contacts or multiple accounts. These are not true follow-up autoresponders. You can also get a variety of free autoresponders but for reasons similar to those mentioned, unless your running a hobby business, it is best to avoid these services. As a serious marketer you will need the benefits that only a professional, unlimited autoresponder service can provide. This will allow you to set up unlimited accounts, unlimited message sequences and professional list management so you can place your follow-up system on autopilot. The key benefit of using this type of software is that you will be able to manage literally thousands of email addresses at the touch of a button to place your subscriber management process on complete autopilot. This service will automatically add all incoming requests for info into any one of an unlimited number of autoresponder accounts that you can set up for your own specific purposes. It may take some time, but you will find that the benefits of an unlimited autoresponder can quickly become your biggest time saving feature in your online business. About The Author: Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, a company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and automation. http://www.multiplestreammktg.com Web's #1 site to find "free resources to Plan, Build, Market, and Maintain your website": http://www.multiplestreammktg.com/resources.html

The most overlooked method to get free Publicity

The most overlooked method to get free Publicity By Abe Cherian - Copyright © 2005 In most cases, you can use the normal media channels to get the publicity you need for your product or service. And, although you don't need to come up with schemes to get attention, they do work. Sometimes promotion departments of manufacturers' stage marathon events or contests with their products - especially with toys and games. Apparel companies may sponsor athletic races; manufacturers of motorcycles sponsor races. Although promotion schemes do cost money to stage, the efforts usually pay off in a long run with the number of customers sold on the product. For local coverage, charity drives and dinners are good ways to get in the paper. Some enterprises strive for a more national coverage with special prizes connected to sports events. If you are clever enough, and there's no big news break that day, you may get your scheme on television. Even local footage reaches thousands and thousands of people. What gimmicks can you think of that will pay off for their investment? How is your product or service used that it can commercially be exploited by the news? Can you keep going with it-making it an annual event, drawing customers from near and far? What if you don't want to do the publicity yourself? If your product or service is a natural for free publicity, you can hire a company or a person to do your public relations work. There are many freelancers in the large cities who have a number of clients that they publicize. They've already broken the ice with the editors and the media, so they can get their releases printed. If you want to hire someone for a special project, get a person who has the contacts and who specializes in your product line. If you're a celebrity, use someone who has a reputation in the entertainment industry. If you are a manufacturer with new appliances, likewise consider a person with expertise in that field. Check out the person or firm. Talk to other clients and find out what has been done for them. Have they increased their sales or public exposure? Investigate the reputation with people in the media you want to publicize in, and be sure there is a clean slate with the local business associations. Then work efficiently with the person who will handle your publicity. Communicate effectively and be sure your ideas are understood. Listen well and absorb any ideas thrown your way. Between the two of you, you can come up with an excellent publicity campaign that will make your business boom. The wonderful thing about free publicity is that you have nothing to lose. A few phone calls; a few personal letters, maybe some investment in quick printing news releases. And, you can reap many times that investment in additional sales and orders. Whether you have an international personality to publicize or a community barbecue, you can get that information to the public at little expense. What is unique about your service or product? Is it the best? The most used? The longest lasting? Do customers return year after year? Consider all the angles, then consider again. Be sure to make solid contacts and be thorough with your follow-ups. Being polite and efficient will always create effective business relations. Then exploit your own publicity. Use it again and again; post it in the store or rewrite it for more national distribution. Go as far as you can with your ideas. And, it doesn't cost you. That is the true joy - with a little effort and persistence, you can reap great profits from free publicity. About The Author: Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, a company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and advertising. www.multiplestreammktg.com Web's #1 business automaton and list management service. www.imediatools.com