INTERNET MARKETING: THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: How to Take Your Website Off Life Support and Still Get More Business!

Internet Marketing: The Science of Success with Joyanne Sloan

Despite the countless success-in-a-box systems that riddle the Internet, you may still feel perplexed about marketing and effective prospecting in the digital age. Let's advance your learning curve with a pretty radical concept... ditching your website once and for all!

A good many of you might be thinking "What the (&*#!) is she talking about?" Am I honestly suggesting that you let your website die a long-overdue and merciful death? Actually, I am.

For those of you wondering if I'm either:

A. a few fries short of a happy meal

B. living under a moss-covered rock

C. both...

let me offer you the following bite of a reality sandwich.

Denial is an effective coping mechanism but it changes NOTHING

So, if you don't want to change anything about your life or your business, then stop reading now!

Most of you have a very worn-out and unhealthy relationship with your website but, like most bad relationships, you're probably afraid to end it despite the fact that it provides little or no revenue or leads.

Are you wondering:

• "How will I survive alone?"
• "What if, one day in the future, my website starts giving more than it takes?"
• "How could I possibly get sales leads without a website? It would be professional suicide!"

Or would it? There are more than five BILLION web sites in existence and the number keep on going up. I know of small business folks who have twenty or more sites and still get no business from them. Okay, I admit it's un-American but... more is NOT always better. The statistics are these: at least 95% of people will fail at their Internet-based business.

Gulp.... Now what? What do you do with a 5% probability of success? You could see those numbers as a reason to give up before you even get started or you could see it as an absolutely HUGE opportunity to step in and take advantage of the consumers who clearly aren't being served by the other 95% of those trying.

You might begin by recognizing that perhaps YOU might do things differently than the status quo and that doing so might lead to DIFFERENT results. But what is it that you should be doing?

Hint: Yes, I am 2000% aware that 85% of web traffic is generated by the search engines and that getting traffic is an ever-escalating fight to the top of the search engine results. Still you do NOT have to have your own individual web site to have a web PRESENCE.

How to have a web presence without a website

I'm writing this article via a website called The National Networker which is a considerable online community of emergent and growing business people. It's not unlike many other sites like Facebook, Ebay or Craigslist where absolutely huge numbers of visitors congregate each day.

What do those top-ranking sites have in common that should matter to you? An aggregated audience. What these sites offer to publishers of content, or sellers of products and services is a huge pool of potential customers in the form of web traffic.

In other words, by publishing this article via The National Networker, I'm finding you where YOU ARE rather than attempting you to come back to my own website to read this article. That's called going WITH the flow.

By including your products and services on web sites where large audiences aggregate allows you to has accomplish something you and I are highly unlikely to accomplish on our own: MOMENTUM, SCALE, SCOPE and last but not least, TRAFFIC. And getting access to that is what you call LEVERAGE!

A site's volume of visitors is a function of its rank with the search engines. The appeal to you is the fact that it has AGGREGATED content which makes for great Google Juice (the yummy stuff that puts a site higher and higher in search results thereby exposing you to far more prospective customers).

When you have a presence on high-ranking sites (or another online community relating to your business sector), you're significantly more likely to generate business as a result. There's power in numbers, and there's safety in numbers too.

Take Away: to leverage the power of the Internet to your own advantage, use someone else's site! Benefit from other's rank, rate of growth and upward momentum instead of struggling to do it yourself.

Action Step: To locate useful sites whose traffic rank you would like to benefit from, you can go to www.Alexa.com and discover tons of useful information about other sites including audience demographics, important keywords and so forth. With that information in mind, you can decide which sites are appropriate for you to partner with in your Internet Marketing strategy.

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Joyanne Sloan is a strategic marketing expert sharing insights on effective Internet marketing for low-tech entrepreneurs. Her articles and information products provide practical, plain-English marketing solutions that get real results. For private consulting, you may reach her at 206.388.3882 or by e-mail at synergyseattle@gmail.com

For more information, please visit Joyanne's TNNWC Bio.

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Capital, Traffic Building, International Customers and unique SERVICES.
The National Networker Publications™ produced by TNNWC Group, LLC
“Empowering Emerging Enterprises”

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INTERNET MARKETING: THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS: How to Take Your Website Off Life Support and Still Get More Business!

SALES AND MARKETING: Social Marketing -- Online or Face-to-Face?

Sales and Marketing with Bill Doerr

15 Second Executive Speed Read:

The underlying paradigm of today’s marketing is shifting. From a ‘push’ or promote approach that was common in the past to a ‘pull’ or attract approach that is becoming increasingly popular and effective. Social Media is a hot topic among business owners who are seeking to market their products and services. At a recent seminar on the topic of "Social Media Marketing" I learned as much from the conversation after the seminar as I did from the seminar itself.

The Social Media Seminar

I recently attended a local seminar on ‘Social Media Marketing’. This topic is all the rage and, as expected, it attracted a good number of business people who are hungry for insight into this growing area of marketing.

Unfortunately, there are more alleged gurus on this topic than bona fide experts. Fortunately, in this seminar, there was a lot of good, solid and very practical information. I was glad I attended.

“How Do I Get Business Using Social Media?”

This was THE #1 question the attendees brought with them to this seminar. Afterall, these were small business owners who are responsible for generating revenues for their firms.

Marketing with Social Media really involves so much more than just getting your profile up on LinkedIn, becoming friends on Facebook, or tweeting on Twitter.

Social Media = TLC

TLC stands for the main outcomes Social Media offers you and your business:

Traffic

It’s what you want to generate more of right? Social media can do this very well.

List Building

You want to grow your audience of people who want to hear from you. Giving you their permission means they’re giving you their attention. In marketing that is tremendously valuable.

Conversion

It’s what you must do or all else is for naught.

The Five KEY Concepts

1. Learn To Listen

There are a number of ways to listen in on what’s being discussed in the social media. The CIA does it all the time. Literally! It’s called setting up a ‘Listening Post’. This means gathering intelligence about what people are saying about you, your company, your products and services. It also means learning what people are saying about your competitors. And, what your competitors are saying about themselves, too. Armed with all this insight, it makes it much easier to position your business in a competitive manner. It also makes ‘joining the conversation’ that’s already underway with your target market that much easier. Check out Filtrbox as an easy way to do this!

2. Gain Visibility For Your Brand

There’s a game that’s the asian counterpart to Chess. It’s called ‘Go’. It’s a game of strategy. The idea is to surround your opponent to capture him and avoid having your opponent do that to you, first! That’s how Social Media works. You want to establish as many points-of-contact on the ‘board’ (Internet) as possible. Of course, that means using not only the obvious social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. but also sites like Flickr, Stumbleupon, Delicious, etc. Each contact point is another opportunity to connect with a huge number of people and ‘invite them back’ to your place – your website. (Drinks are optional!)

3. Establish Your Credibility and Voice

The #1 medium for doing this is your blog or blogsite. Blogging is effective because it creates fresh and relevant content and positions you as an expert on the topic you write about. Also the SEO built into Wordpress blogsites makes it easy to build your points-of-contact easily, effectively and efficiently.

4. Develop Your Presence on Social Networking Sites

You know about sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. There are hundreds more. But if you don’t complete your profile on each one, it will be difficult for people interested in the topics that you’re an expert in to find you. There are numerous applications and plug-ins to help you make the most of your profiles on social networks. Use them!

5. Control the Beast

There’s a lot of information that will be generated as you become more active with social media. That’s good. And, bad. It’s bad if you don’t manage to distill the ‘river of relevant’ information from the ‘sea of sewage’ – all the data that you can find but can’t use to generate that TLC mentioned earlier. Here’s the secret. Set up an online ‘dashboard’ to monitor, in one place, all the relevant information you need to stay on top of your marketing and use it to build relationships, opportunities and revenues for your business. Check out Netvibes for a good example of an online dashboard.

The Importance of 'Know, Like and Trust'

I stayed around after the seminar talking with several attendees. Listening to what they said, I learned a lot. They still had many questions. More than answers. But the conversation focused on a simple truth . . . all the miracles of modern marketing using social media notwithstanding, there’s still no substitute for building a relationship as the best foundation for building revenues.

Any marketing media that helps you develop the ‘know / like / trust’ factor, is a good thing. Social media may the latest and greatest media but if you lose sight of the significance of building a valued relationship that helps differentiate you from your competitors, you’ve missed the concept of why we do marketing in the first place.

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Bill Doerr is CCO of SellMore Marketing. He helps professionals and other service providers to market their problem-solving expertise simply, effectively and affordably.You can reach him at www.sellmoremarketing.com, or by phone at 860-798-6964.

For more information, please visit Bill's TNNW Bio.

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Published by THE NATIONAL NETWORKER Newsletter. All rights reserved. Subscribe Free For Your TNNW Newsletter and THE BLUE MONDAY REPORT! - Click HERE.
The National Networker Companies

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SALES AND MARKETING: Social Marketing -- Online or Face-to-Face?

NET-TECH REPORT: Using Facebook for Marketing and PR

Net-Tech Report with Chris Kauza

For the last few months we've been exploring how to use various online tools to build relationships and enhance your offline networking abilities. We've already written about Facebook and some of the reasons you as a business owner should integrate it into your business and networking plans. We've also published articles on how Facebook has promoted more authentic networking, a brief overview on Facebook and it should be an integral part of your social media plans, transcendental and timeless perspectives on life and living in the networking world of Facebook, the fantastic growth of Facebook among online Candians (did you know it was HALF?!?!), and even setting up our own National Networker (TNNW) Fanpage on Facebook.

But this month, we're going to talk about using Facebook for Marketing and PR.

Here's one approach that Mike Nierengarten of Anvil Media, used to promote one of his clients, Animation Mentor. Animation Mentor is a four-year old, online animation school. In additional to Animation Mentor's already-existing website, Mike established a presence for them on Facebook, using a three-tiered approach:

1. Profile

2. Facebook Page

3. Fan Page

The profile was set up first, as a way to connect with current students. With an ever-increasing user base, it is likely that whatever your business is, you will find many of your current and potential customers on Facebook. Once you have people coming to your profile, you can more easily convert them into Fans on your Facebook page. Fan pages are great because they are indexed by Google and other search engines, and are viewable to unregistered people. This is important for building awareness and driving online reputation management. However, you can't send out “group messages” through the Facebook fan pages, so some of your communication will be limited.

Two other important things that Mike did:

1. created a Prospective Animation Mentor Student group for prospective students to connect and share their thoughts

2. promoted the page off of Facebook using an Animation blog

Last August, the Facebook page they created ranked for targeted keywords on Google (e.g. #23 for "animation school", #9 for "character animation"), they had over 700 fans with a mix of currents students and interested students interacting online, and also an area for prospective students to address their concerns and interact directly with someone from the school in their space. They also had an approximately 3% conversion rate (i.e. complete an application) from the Facebook page. As of this writing, they have over 2,200 fans. They have put together a low-cost (practically free) marketing engine for Animation Mentor.

In future posts we'll talk about press releases and article marketing, and how to use your blog and sites like HARO to enhance your credibility. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at Chris@AskABusinessGuy.com.

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Posted to THE NATIONAL NETWORKER. All rights reserved.
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NET-TECH REPORT: Using Facebook for Marketing and PR

Interview with John Follis; Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

foundercontact group

By Lydia Sugarman

Entrepreneurial Editor

Lydia's article is brought to you by foundercontact group

1. Please tell us a little about yourself, personally and professionally.

My career has been, and continues to be, an adventure. After flunking out of my first advertising class in college, I eventually co-founded what became one of the most award-winning agencies on Madison Ave: Follis/DeVito/Verdi. I’ve personally won over 3 dozen major creative awards. I speak nationally and write for ADWEEK. My clients’ campaigns have been the focus of national press, a Harvard Business case study, and a Prentice-Hall marketing textbook. I’ve been honored at both the UN and The White House for my agency’s anti-child abuse work. And, I’ve also been fired four times.

More recently, I’ve become an expert on Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Marketing. In ’05, I coined the term “G-Cred” for Google Credibility (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-Cred) and was a featured speaker at Social Media 2007 in Chicago. I author an active blog The Follis Marketing Report (http://thefollisreport.com) and host a top 20 marketing podcast The Marketing Show (http://themarketingshow.net). I also have something called “Marketing Therapy” for entrepreneurs with limited budgets who realize the need for professional marketing help. For a full bio, see my Wikipedia profile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Follis

Personally, I swing dance, bike, play guitar and sing, play tennis and racquetball, and performed stand-up comedy at The Gotham Comedy Club in NYC.

2. What is the single biggest reason you have followed an entrepreneurial path? Was there a signature event as you were growing up?

Well, getting fired 4 times definitely helped. After the second or third time I began freelancing.

I also came from a family of entrepreneurs, so maybe it’s genetic. One summer, as a kid, I had a lawn mowing business. I created a flyer that said “You Grow It, We Mow It!”

3. Are entrepreneurs born or can it be learned?

A bit of both, I’d say. Like with many things, having a natural disposition for something definitely comes into play. But I also believe that desire is key. If someone wants it bad enough, they’ll learn how.

4. What makes entrepreneurs different? What do you think are the qualities/characteristics that make entrepreneurs different?

I’d say that most entrepreneurs are very independent-minded, self-motivated, and creative thinkers. Leaders, not followers. Perhaps even rebellious. Most are also passionate about what they do.

5. Do entrepreneurs network differently? What networking lessons can others learn from entrepreneurs?

Good question and I think the smarter ones do. Personally, I hate the feeling of being part of the herd at a crowded, noisy networking event. Which is why I’ve decided that if I’m going to meet people, I rather do that as the person that everyone is coming to hear – the speaker. It’s the best way to have everyone in the room meet you.

Unlike most people, I also have a very creative, slightly bizarre, business card that most always sparks a conversation. (See: http://www.follisinc.com/cardstory.htm)

6. What have you found to work well when networking? What caveats can you offer? What's unique about networking from an entrepreneur's perspective? Do entrepreneurs have an advantage in the networking arena?

My comments above addresses some of that. Regarding having an advantage, perhaps they do for the reasons I mention in #4.

7. What is the “successful” model for a master networker.

Well, this can easily be an article, and I’ve read many.

• Be a giver – focus on the other person and how you can help them.

• Be a listener more than a talker.

• Don’t shove your card in the person’s face after 30-seconds of conversation.

• Arrive early.

• Don’t spend too much time with any one person, especially if they’re sucking your energy.

• Etc

8. What are the primary goals for most networkers? Do you feel these differ from those of an entrepreneur?

In any scenario I believe it’s about sharing information and creating mutually beneficial relationships. Out of that, and over a time period of building trust, comes the potential for doing business together.

9. How do you help other entrepreneurs find and network with each other in your business?

Email has become my primary mode and I’m always happy to match folks where I see good synergy. I also make a point of staying in touch with valued associates either face-to-face, or via phone chatting.

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Interview with John Follis; Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

First International Real Estate Blogging Initiative, From PR Web

Blogging Systems Group, Leading Provider of Blogs and Social Networking Technology to the Real Estate Industry Partners to Create the First International Real Estate Blogging Initiative

In a first-of-its-kind approach, Blogging Systems Helps Buy Property In Israel provide real estate blogs, social media lead generation features and MLS-like listing tools to real estate professionals in Israel.

Princeton Junction, NJ (PRWEB) August 23, 2007 -- www.bloggingsystems.com - Blogging Systems Group, the leading provider of blogs and social networking technology, has partnered with Buy Property In Israel (BPII) to offer blogs, social networking and MLS-like tools to the Israel real estate industry.

Blogging Systems, led by founder and CEO Richard Nacht, offers a unique technology platform that includes a variety of blog and social networking tools enabling real estate professionals to communicate directly and personally with customers, prospects, employees, and website visitors.

We are dedicated to helping real estate professionals world-wide realize the potential and power of blogging for lead generation, search engine optimization and community building.

With their new partnership, Buy Property In Israel has exclusive rights to sell Blogging Systems' blogging platforms in Israel to the real estate industry.

BPII is the leading website about all things related to buying property in Israel. BPII helps put buyers around the world directly in touch with Real Estate Agents in Israel.

"Blogging Systems is excited to partner with BPII creating the first push to integrate blogging into overseas real estate," said Nacht. "We are dedicated to helping real estate professionals world-wide realize the potential and power of blogging for lead generation, search engine optimization and community building."

Blogging Systems and BPII are working together to offer the Israel real estate industry the following blogging platforms:

• Single agent blog sites
• Lead capture and listing features
• Enterprise blogs & social networking platforms
• Company blogs
• Intranets

"Blogging Systems' unique blog and social networking technology allows Buy Property In Israel participating real estate professionals to reach out and engage with potential buyers," said Lyle Plocher, Director of Buy Property in Israel. "We are excited to offer agents a platform in which they can create a unique blog, post property listings and generate inquiries from interested buyers."

Interested agents have the exclusive opportunity to be one of the first agents to launch a blog in partnership with Buy Property In Israel. Contact Lyle Plocher at 1+602-373-3725 today.

Others interested in launching a blog for their overseas real estate initiatives outside of Israel, please contact Richard Nacht, at 1+609-203-3300.

About Buy Property in Israel
Buy Property In Israel was conceived and founded by Lyle Plocher, a U.S. Resident and Real Estate Broker. His desire to see people outside of Israel have information about purchasing property in Israel and access to actual Real Estate Listings in Israel was the driving force behind this website. Think of Lyle and Buy Property In Israel as matchmakers putting buyers around the world directly in touch with Real Estate Agents in Israel.

Lyle is the owner and Designated Broker of Urban Connection Realty in Phoenix, Arizona and is also an Associate Broker with Venice Properties in Venice, California. In addition, Lyle has earned the designation of "Certified International Property Specialist" from the National Association of Realtors in the U.S. During Lyle's visits to Israel, he has traveled throughout the country and met personally with many of the Agents whose Listings appear on this site. If you have any questions or comments about the site or about buying property in Israel, those are always welcome. You can reach Lyle by e-mail at lyle(at)buypropertyinisrael.com or by phone at 602 373 3725 in the U.S.

About Blogging Systems
Blogging Systems provides blog and social networking platforms that produce a low-cost, high results tool for Community networking (both offline and on the internet), effective communication and collaboration, competitive marketing, lead generation, sales and customer relations.

Blogging Systems provides turn-key blog and social networks which are the ultimate communication, collaboration and marketing tools. Ours is a "soup to nuts" approach with experienced blog and social networking professionals who guide clients through the process step-by-step. Not only do we provide the most robust blog and social networking platform on the market today, we back it up with training and technical support. Clients receive a turn-key system and the training and knowledge needed to use it as a complete marketing system.

For more information about how to add a blog to your real estate marketing tools, visit: www.BloggingSystems.com or call: 800-985-BLOG (800-985-2564).

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First International Real Estate Blogging Initiative, From PR Web