SiteProNews |
- How to Produce a Winning Webinar
- Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising
- Producing A Marketing Campaign That Works With Google
- Letting Google lead you to students: How to use location-based SEO to target students
- Video That Sells: Using Memory Triggers
| How to Produce a Winning Webinar Posted: 28 Sep 2011 09:12 AM PDT 
Webinars can help your business by allowing you to train your recruits and/or sales team. They can also be useful in building relationships and generating sales leads. Producing a successful webinar does take some work and you need to know what you are getting into. There are several styles of webinars including a single speaker, guest speakers, interviews, panel discussions and also interaction from the audience. A successful webinar must be efficiently planned out. You need to determine what tools you will be using, what style you will be producing, arranging schedules, deciding whether you will be charging for your webinar, etc. If you plan on having people from all over the world attend pick out a time that is most convenient for all time zones. If you are having guest speakers, confer with them on their schedules. Mid-week and midday seem to be the best times to schedule a webinar. Deciding what tools and or visuals you will be using in your webinar. Visuals such as flash presentations, charts, graphs, slides, etc., are always effective in helping people focus on what you are saying and keeping their attention. Because you are not there, face-to-face with your audience, you should have other visuals available for them. Also, have a photo of yourself available so people can visualize you while you are talking. Compare webinar software so you can get the features you will need. I’ve heard good things about (although I have not yet tried them) Microsoft Live Meeting, GoToMeeting, and Adobe Connect. Do not turn your webinar into a sleep inducing lecture. Encouraging audience participation is a good idea as it gets people more interested and excited about what you are teaching them or explaining to them. Use a chat function to take questions and comments from your audience and/or trainees. You can also think of some activities to engage your audience. Get your participants to share via discussions, polls, feedback, questions, storytelling and more. Contact participants before the event. This can be important because it can help you to assess what topics and points of interest to cover in your webinar thus getting better results. Once you have the style, tools, pricing, schedule and everything else decided be sure to “rehearse” your webinar. This can be crucial in the success of your event. You want everything to flow smoothly and all activities, speeches, presentations, etc., to fall into place so be sure to do a few practice runs to make sure all is well. Now that you have your webinar all planned out and ready to go, you have to promote it. You want to give yourself several weeks to get the word out about your webinar. And of course you will want to take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to let everyone know about your webinar. Send an announcement to your mailing list/subscribers. Announce the webinar on your site. Use online event calendars such as Full Calendar, Events Setter and webinar announcement services such as Seminar Announcer. You can also promote it via print newspaper event calendars, TV network event calendars and other event calendars online and offline. Don’t forget about your email signature and your article resource box. Webinars are very effective when done professionally and effectively so put the time, work and practice in to make yours one of the best ever! Terri Seymour has over twelve years of online experience and has helped many people start their own business. Visit her site for free articles, resources, information, resell ebooks and more. Sign up for the RSS Feed for a free business ebook with MRR. http://www.SeymourProducts.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising Posted: 28 Sep 2011 08:37 AM PDT 
What Is Pay Per Click? Pay per click advertising, or PPC for short, is online advertising that works for any organisation whether offline or online and is certainly a method for helping advertisers drive highly targeted traffic to your site or offline business as well. . Here’s the History Bit It started in 1997 with Yahoo’s Search Marketing and since then has grown into a variety of different programs. There are a number of different options you can try. The top 3 pay per click search engine advertising programs are Google AdWords, Yahoo’s Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter. Google AdWords This is probably the top pay per click network and the one you’ll have heard most about. It has an interface that is friendly, clean and easy to use. It takes just a few minutes from the time you create your account until your ads are live and ready to go. It offers lots of different options for your marketing campaign. It costs $5 to get started, and you can bid for as low as $0.01 per keyword, so it’s really flexible. Free to Use Keyword Research Tool It also has its own free keyword research tool to help you choose keywords and phrases to target. No for me I reckon its one of the best and real easy to use so even if you don’t use AdWords the keyword tool I would sincerely recommend you check out and use. Yahoo’s Search Marketing This is the search engine that started it all. It has gone through several name changes from Yahoo to GoTo, and then Overture, and finally it’s back as Yahoo Search Marketing. Like Google, this search engine enables you to reach a massive number of users with its ppc advertising, and also offers sponsored ads on all of its searches. It is also a comparatively cheap service and they offer special deals from time to time, just go & check it out. Microsoft’s PPC offering is top notch. Like the others, it has campaigns to help you customize your ad campaign. It also has its own free keyword research tool that lets you really target your customers, you can narrow it down to gender, age, time of day, geographical location, and just about anything else you can imagine. This feature makes it a wonderful all-in-one package. The Disadvantages Of Pay Per Click Whilst pay per click sounds very appealing, you should be aware that there are some areas you need to watch out for. You may have trouble winning your keyword bids at a competitive price and within you advertising budget, there’s lots of competition for most keyword phrases, so it can take quite a budget to get ones that you may want if they carry very high traffic levels. Top Tip - drill down from top line keywords to cheaper less obvious ones and also consider long tail keywords which can produce some really stunning results for not a lot of advertising budget outlay. Don’t forget PPC is about driving traffic and more importantly targeted traffic so your keyword research is the real key to success. Think Through Your Objectives First Also a word of caution here, with the boom of ever increasing traffic, affiliate marketing growth etc, these major PPC search engines have instituted tighter regulations and restrictions. This makes it tougher for new marketers to get in on the ground floor especially if your budget is pretty small. Google is still viewed by many as the reigning king of search engines, but both Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter are cheaper and not quite so regulated. Since Internet marketing is about targeting smaller niches to make sales, it might be worthwhile to consider using these search engines instead of Google. But here’s my recommendation – try them all out with small amounts of budget, you need to find one you like, feel comfortable using and as I’ve said before it’s about having as many marketing guns in your arsenal as possible. Before launching a full-scale pay per click ad campaign, test drive each of these search engines and see which one you like best. It’s possible that the advanced keyword research tool offered by Microsoft AdCenter is just what you need to help you get started. You may like one interface more than another. Think about what you want your campaign to achieve, and then choose the search engine that you are most comfortable working with and you believe is going to work best for you. So there you have it the beginner’s guide to pay per click advertising. Toby Russell, Internet Marketer, Publisher & Property Investor offers tried and tested methods to help you succeed on line. Want to know more about Google Adwords & Other Online Advertising Methods? Get his popular Free Special Report -Chapter 12 tells you how to use PPC advertising, available at => http://www.startinternetmarketingonline.com Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Producing A Marketing Campaign That Works With Google Posted: 28 Sep 2011 08:11 AM PDT 
In actual fact, getting a higher website ranking and the accompanying upsurge in visitors is really very simple: 1 – First, you have to focus on your website or blog. Fill your site with lots of really interesting and helpful information for your viewers. It’s a great idea to have a website that is loaded with valuable content and that is updated with new information regularly. Your first task is to make a website that is really pleasing to your viewers. If your viewers are happy, then Google will be too. Google’s goal is to please its search customers, so if its customers (who are also your viewers) are happy with what they find at your website, then Google is going to be delighted as well. 2 – Once you have produced a fantastic website you start to think about marketing it. In the same way that a brick and mortar store has to market itself to attract customers, so you must also market your website. Don’t forget that both you and Google have the same agenda – you want to please your customers and Google wants to please its customers. By delivering value to your customers via the content on your website, search engines will understand the value of your website and rank it accordingly. It would be easy for you to get the impression from other website owners that Google and the other search engines are their enemy, something they feel they need to outwit and is a little scary. This is just not true – just like a travel agency can be an ally to a hotel that it refers to, so The search engines can and will be an ally to your website. Within the world of search engines and website marketing, the main language is links. The links that are going to your website tell Google a lot about the topic and value of your website. A link serves at least two main purposes on the internet: * It’s a kind of transportation. By clicking on a link on one web page, you are “transported” to another web page. * It communicates information to Google and the other search engines about your website’s topic and value. It is possible for you to affect where your website sits in a search engine’s rankings by how consistently you market your website and the quality of the information on it. Submitting articles is a fantastic way to promote your website. It achieves these goals: 1 - Marketing with articles builds good quality links to your website. Niche specific publishers are always on the lookout for good quality, relevant content, so there is a good chance that your article will be published on a site that is on a topic related to your own website. Keyword terms can be utilised in your resource box to create the link back to your website. The words that form a link are called “anchor text”, and they also help Google and the other search engines to understand how to rank your website and what it is all about. 2 - Article marketing gets the word out about your website and drives traffic to it to it. Ezines and other websites can republish your articles. People who see you article either in an ezine or on a website simply click the link in your resource box and be taken to your site. 3 - Article Marketing grows client confidence. As soon as a potential customer of yours reads a well-written and very knowledgeable article they will think, “Do you know what, this person really does know what he is talking about, I am sure they can give me more excellent advice”. The more confidence that prospect has in you, the more likely that he will become a customer of yours. The articles that you produce with article marketing are referred to as ‘free reprint articles’, this is because publishers are able to republish them online without any charge. The author benefits from the process through the 3 items above. The vehicle for receiving these benefits comes via the author resource box, which usually will include a link to your website, a brief description about you and your company and a good reason for the reader to visit your homepage. Your Homework: * Start creating articles that teach your readers something they need to know. * Create a well thought through resource box designed to inspire readers to click the link to your site. * Start submitting articles to publishers on the internet and article directories. Steve Shaw has helped thousands of business owners worldwide build traffic, leads and sales to their websites, and he wants to help you do the same – grab his free report giving you a blueprint for attracting sustainable, dirt-cheap, long-term, targeted traffic to any website … including yours! Go now to http://www.submityourarticle.com/report – some people have used the same information to boost their traffic by up to 600%! Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Letting Google lead you to students: How to use location-based SEO to target students Posted: 28 Sep 2011 08:04 AM PDT 
Since the Panda update, Google has been placing more and more emphasis on finding information relevant to the searcher. For a lot of shopping results, that means pulling up stores and results that have local ties. Likely, a big-name brand will have the first result or two. For students, you'll want to pick a couple of college towns. Try for the biggest universities, of course, as well as those with thriving cultures. Once you've decided where you're targeting, you have a few different options. One great way to really boost your local rankings is to have a page for each location you're trying to pinpoint. Host events to promote products to local college students and raffle off gift cards at their freshmen orientations. Not only are you building brand loyalty, you can also take photos and write about it on your blog. The more you get students to visit it and the more you have about the college on your blog, the faster your result will come to the top in a student-based search. The golden apple of collegiate marketing, of course, is to create a partnership with the institution. Sometimes that could mean having an actual living, breathing, acknowledged partnership. Depending on the size of the college, though, it will likely be costly and too hard to negotiate. Better options for most companies are to co-host an event with them or sponsor a scholarship or internship every year. The more you can get your name on their website, the better you'll do in Google's results. If you're running an e-commerce site, keep in mind that you don't have to have a physical location to create a page. You can also just run specialty deals for that area or talk about shipping rates or highlight products that are popular. Location-based marketing isn't solely useful by city names, though. Students enrolled in a college have likely left a huge online footprint that leads back to their school that Google knows about. If you have a page with personalized items, feature some from the colleges you're targeting. The next time the student searches for "personalized coasters," your name is more likely to come to the top if Google knows you have something in common. Sometimes colleges are just as internet-based as e-commerce sites. When it comes to online schools, it becomes harder (though not impossible) to market to their students. Much of it comes from just using the school's name, like you would in the regular location-based marketing tactics. By using the school's name and sponsoring scholarships to their schools, you can still target their demographic. Joseph Parker is a freelance writer living in the Midwest. He enjoys working on his novel and drinking large amounts of Earl Grey tea. He writes this article behalf of American InterContinental University. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
| Video That Sells: Using Memory Triggers Posted: 27 Sep 2011 10:00 PM PDT 
Marketing videos can serve any one of these purposes, or they can serve all of them. What is important is the audience remembers the message and the company that delivers it. Without penetrating the audience’s consciousness and making an indelible impression, the resources invested are wasted. Of course the lasting impression you impart must serve your branding and sales objectives. Creating effective marketing videos entails a lot of creative skills in order to take a self-serving business message and make it not just palatable but memorable. To begin, you need a concept, script, performers, and technical expertise in video, editing, and sound design; as well as the psychological insight to understand, and the creative ability to manipulate, emotional reactions while emphasizing key points. Knowing how to implement those kinds of subliminal mnemonic memory triggers is essential; after all, if your audience doesn’t remember your message you’ve wasted their time and yours. Defining The Message Defining your marketing message seems like a simple task but in reality it’s one of the hardest questions for entrepreneurs to answer in a clear concise manner: the core ingredient needed to build an effective video marketing campaign. We all take pride in our businesses, that’s only natural; and we all love to tell people we are the best or the cheapest, or that we offer the most features, but as nice as all of that sounds, these are not credible concepts to build a campaign around. In order to define your core message you must go deeper into the psychological impact your product or service provides. The Maslowian advantage you present is what creates the motivation to purchase; all the other benefits are merely justification for an emotionally based decision. Developing the Campaign Concept Once you understand what you’re really selling, it’s time to develop a presentation concept. The best ideas are the ones that can sustain a campaign so that each new variation builds on the preceding ones. TD Canada Trust for example, uses two old crotchety seniors reminiscent of the two Muppet balcony curmudgeons to deliver the bank’s message. The features presented are mostly irrelevant, as any that turnout to be successful will quickly be copied by the competition. The key to the success and longevity of the campaign is the two pensioners who humanize an otherwise sterile corporate monolith that people have trouble relating to. Using Multimedia To Communicate When you meet someone for the first time, you want to make a good impression. You wouldn’t show-up for a meeting with a new client wearing the same clothes you used to wash your car. Of course you’d put on decent clothes and make yourself presentable; it’s natural to want to be viewed favorably. But here comes the problem, just because you want to be viewed favorably and you do what you think is appropriate, doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. It’s the subliminal details and subtleties of a presentation that make a difference between success and failure. The Web’s natural remoteness makes it even harder to connect with an audience, which in turn, makes it harder to persuade that audience to respond to your message. It doesn’t take much to turn people off. The wrong tie, a bad haircut, a dress that doesn’t fit, or even a distracting ‘tchotchke’ in the background can send your audience to the competition. On the Web, people are sitting a foot away from the screen staring intently at the images you’re presenting, and they better be communicating the right message both directly and indirectly. Mnemonic Memory Triggers When it comes to Web video, every presentation element is magnified, and if you don’t know how to control each and every mnemonic memory trigger, the result will be instantly forgettable at best and disastrous at worst. 1. Colorful Focused Scripts You need a script! There aren’t too many people who can just ‘wing-it.’ Even the best so-called ad-libs are usually well scripted in advance. Your script is the heart of your message and most business videos fail before they even start because the script lacks character, focus, and style. Even the best actor can’t do much with a lame script and the results can be even worse when you combine a bad script with the company president’s poor delivery. Even a great script will fail if the performance is subpar. To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, ‘A good script is how people speak, with the boring parts taken out.’ In other words, it’s how people would like to speak, but don’t. The script should focus on the one main point you want your audience to remember because that is all they’re going to remember anyway. Too many ideas all at once only confuse the viewer. If you have to make more points, make more videos. Once your audience is hooked they’ll want to hear more. Colorful language, the clever use of metaphor, and convincing performance combine to paint a memorable mental picture for your audience. 2. Fast Pace Editing Directors tend to get all the credit when it comes to movies, television shows, and commercials, but the person who is intently responsible for delivering what you see and the story it tells is the editor. Let’s take a seemingly simple talking head format on a white background with an actor delivering a company message. A simple enough scenario, but how many times should the scene be shot? Even if your actor nails the script on the first take, which is unlikely, you should shoot several more backup clips because once you get into the editing suite, all kinds of issues can crop-up. But that alone isn’t good enough if you want to hold your audience’s attention. We shoot the same scene from three or four different positions or focal lengths so we can cut them together creating a visually interesting presentation. That means the editor has to go through a lot of raw footage to find the best takes. Quite often you find the best visual take isn’t the same as the best audio take which means the audio from one clip has to be matched to the video of another putting a premium on the ability of the performer to deliver consistent pacing, and the skill of the editor and sound engineer to put it all together. So if you thought Web video was just a case of pointing a camera, you’d be wrong. 3. Multiple Characters Clients are always worried about an audience’s attention span but the issue isn’t attention span as much as it is creating intrigue and interest. A video has to connect to an audience and peak their curiosity in order to hold their attention. If your video is boring, confusing, and bereft of any meaningful message or hook, you’ll lose them. Sometimes you’ll notice commercials with an actor walking quickly through a scene talking all the while like he or she is in a hurry to find the closest washroom; it’s an attempt to inject some excitement or action into the scene but in fact it’s a poor substitute for a bad concept and a dull script. And worse still, it’s an expensive technique that generally requires a long dolly shot that can eat-up a lot of budget time and money. We’ve already talked about using different clips from different angles to maintain pace and interest but another way is to use multiple actors, with each one setting up the pitch for the next, or each one finishing the last one’s sentence. This technique in the hands of a good editor can even make a static or mundane presentation work. 4. Clever Motion Graphics Motion graphics are another way to help people remember your key points, but like everything else, the devil is in the details. If you turn your video into a glorified PowerPoint presentation you can be sure you’ll lose your audience. The clever use of motion graphics helps bring your points to life by instilling imagination and creativity into your presentation. In the same way your script uses colorful language and metaphor to be memorable, so too your motion and static graphics must employ visual metaphor to be effective. 5. Multi-Layered Sound Design Sound design is another area that is often ignored in corporate videos. Poor quality audio like severe room tone is not only a distraction it’s an irritant. On the positive side the right music and sound mnemonics can be as powerful as motion graphics. Music is used to create mood and atmosphere putting the audience in the right frame-of-mind to receive your message, and sound effects help embed the message in the audience’s memory. Good sound design is one of those features that when done correctly goes unnoticed but nevertheless has a powerful psychological effect on the audience. It’s the sound design that tells the audience what’s important and what’s not. And it’s the sound design that provides the emotional and psychological subtext that actually pushes the audience to act on your call to action. 6. Color Code The proper use of color is also very important. Most high profile brands are associated with a color or color palette. Kodak is yellow while their competition Fuji is green. Activia yogurt uses their signature green to great affect in their packaging as well as in their TV commercials and print advertisements. The consistent use of color is an inexpensive way to help distinguish your brand from all your competitors. In short, when it comes to video, everything matters, from the ambient background music score to the color of the dress or tie your presenter wears. A Final Word There is a lot of misunderstanding about what makes a commercial message persuasive and effective. The success of any video campaign must be measured by its ability to deliver the right message in a meaningful memorable manner; it’s not just about hits or even sales, it’s about exciting your audience about what you do. Like the old saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Your audience maybe watching but are they responding? If your video campaign excites the imagination, and you deliver the promise of your message, you will make the sales; otherwise you’re just blowing smoke and people will head for the hills. If you’d like to see an example of a video campaign that uses all of these elements, go here. Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design and marketing firm that specializes in Web-video Marketing Campaigns and Video Websites. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com, www.136words.com, and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246. Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources |
Today’s technology allows us to connect with and form relationships with people all over the world right from our home or office. A webinar is a great way to do this because of all the tools and technology available to us. A webinar is just like a seminar only it is done online via your computer. Webinar is short for web-based seminar and they can be very instrumental in building your business.
Hi now for all of us in the Internet marketing or information publishing arena we will undoubtedly use pay per click advertising at some stage. Now for those just starting out, it can all be a bit confusing so here’s a real beginner’s guide to the main ones – who they are, what they are and what you can expect. But as I’ve identified many times before you really need once you’ve been through this brief outline to go off and have a go, there’s nothing like DIY, you need to see and understand the nuts and bolts of how PPC advertising works.
Oftentimes when marketing with articles, it’s easy to get the impression that you need to do something tricky or fancy to make your marketing efforts “work”.
Student-based marketing and some companies go hand-in-hand like a hungry co-ed and Taco Bell. Tech manufacturers, local eateries and apparel companies will all benefit from targeting students. Of course, there are the usual channels. Commercials, print ads and social media outlets can all be utilized in your quest to find students. These traditional ways produce incredible results. However, using location-based SEO tactics can step up your marketing game. 
Web videos have many purposes: they display, present, inform, educate, enlighten, and entertain; they also persuade, motivate, and sell.| You are subscribed to email updates from SiteProNews Recent Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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