Toddle.ie offers free four week email marketing course

Alan & Mary at Toddle.ie have condensed their workshop material into four week email marketing course. It’s a great opportunity to learn the basics.

What you will get is four emails. One a week for four weeks. Each email will guide you through the process of:

• Getting started - The basics.
• Where to get subscribers and permission.
• Content - What to write about and where to get it.
• Design.
• Managing your subscribers.
• Sending and tracking what interests your readers.

Sign up at http://www.toddle.com/stuff/email-marketing-course-now-available-by-email/

Next course starts on Monday 13th of july.

3 Must Dos When Undertaking a Pay Per Click Campaign

One of the most cost effective, measurable and profitable ways to promote your business is to use Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising. When I first started in the Internet industry back in 1997, banner advertising was the only real way to promote your business, in terms of advertising. Dare I say it but it was a lucrative time for advertisers. Companies that wanted to advertise their company, product or service paid for an advert to be displayed on a web page.

Every time that a web page was displayed, it was called an impression and the advertiser charged the company an amount per impression. Even though a visitor to the website may not have even noticed the ad, the company was still charged.

Pay per click was revolutionary. It now meant that a company only paid for the ad when someone clicked on your ad, not when it was displayed. This meant advertising on the Internet was cheaper than banner advertising. Companies bid on keyword or keywords(s) and the company has control of their budget.

Make the most of your budget by employing these five tactics when undertaking a PPC campaign:

1. Determine your Value Proposition

This is the one thing that should be top of your list. You need to know what it is so that it can be put into your sales and marketing messages.

By answering the following questions, you should be able to determine your unique selling proposition or value proposition:

1. Why should someone buy from you?

2. What can your products do that others can’t do?

3. How are your products different to your competitors?

Once you can answer these questions, you should be able to bring down your words to make a sentence for your advert. This is your starting point.

2. Do your Keyword Research

Keywords are what you bid on so therefore it makes sense to spend time on working on your keyword research. If you approach your keyword research that every keyword is a thought that your client or prospect client has, then it will make it easier to draw up a list of these keywords.

Check emails, questions that prospects, visitors to your website and customers ask. Examine your website analytics or statistics to find out what keywords people use to visit your website.

Use a word research tool like wordtracker to assist you with the knowledge you’ve gathered from your own research.

This will help with deciding the keywords to bid on and the keywords to place within your ad.

3. Test your Landing Page

After spending so much time working on your USP, your keywords, your sentence structure to attract people to your website, the next thing to spend time on is your landing page. Your landing page is as much a part of your PPC campaign as your ad.

Your landing page is the page that creates the interest, keeps the prospect on your website and encourages them to buy from you.

A word of caution – always make sure that your landing page corresponds well with your advert. Don’t mislead anyone with your ad. If you are selling weight loss products, for example, don’t mention in your advert free advice or product to disappoint your visitor with a request for money to get the free deal. It’s misleading and won’t do you any favours.

When you have a chosen a particular landing page, always make sure that you have access to change it. You need to be able to test the following regularly:

• Headline
• Opening Paragraph
• Offer
• Price
• Photos
• Further content (below the fold)

A small change in any of the above could make a huge difference but you need that ability to change the page, without it costing you.

There are many more tips that I will share with you in future articles but these are the big 3. If you have these right, then the other tips will strengthen your advert and increase your click through rate as well as your conversion rate.

In Summary

1. Like all strategic marketing initiatives, determine your USP. Know why people should buy from you.

2. Undertake keyword research. Don’t leave it to assumptions that your client and you think the same way.

3. Test your landing page. Content, layout and structure, all key elements to copy-writing should be tested regularly.

3 Ways to Promote Your Business at No Cost - 1 out of 100 published

Last week I posted about the 100 articles in 100 days challenge. Easter got in the way aswell as writing my home study course on Pay per Click home study course. But I’m back on track and will start numbers 2-5 this evening.

I’m delighted to say that number one article - 3 Ways to Promote Your Business at No Cost - was accepted onto ezinearticles website.

Check it out - http://ezinearticles.com/?id=2198835

I’ll keep you updated with my continuing challenge.

IIA Net-Visionary Short-Lists Announced

I turned on Twitter late today as I was deep in Internet marketing work today. Trying to do two days work into one! Don’t you love the bank holidays?!!

The first thing I noticed was the list of short-listed entries for the Net Visionaries. I’m delighted to see some of my favourite net people on the list.

Well done to everyone but in particular to:

• Damien Mulley & Mary Rose Lyons in the Best Business Blogger section. I’ve got you guys on RSS feed.
• Krishna De in the Best Podcast & Social Media Category. Krishna - this means another coffee!!
• My new friend, James Kennedy in the Internet Entrepreneur category for piehole.ie
• Adrian Weckler, John Collins and Niall Kitson in Journalist award

I have voted, have you? Make your voice heard at http://www.iia.ie/net-visionary/vote/

I put forward Derek Hardiman of RocketJobs for an award. Next year, Derek - you’ll be there. You’re a winner in my eyes.

What is the difference between online and offline these days?

Mary Rose over at Brightspark posed an interesting question to the grammar police yesterday - http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/2009/03/when-to-use-punctuation-on-bulleted-lists-a-question/

It was to do with question marks, full stops and bulleted lists.

It got me to think about how we write full stop. (Excuse the pun!). Do we write differently for the web than we do for print? I posed the question back to MR and her response was a really interesting one. She said:

“I believe that web writing has risen the bar for offline writing. If we don’t put up with waffle and marketing fluffle online, why should we put up with it on a piece of printed paper too?”

An interesting perspective, especially as earlier on today, I sat down with a cuppa and read the Sunday Business Post main section - in 10 mins!

I got the gist of most of the articles, I have an idea of what ones i want to go back and read and now, I’m ready to move onto the Agenda section of the paper.

What happened to leisurely Sundays reading the papers?

I’m now applying my ‘read-at-a-glance’ technique to offline media now. Is it just me?

Someone said to me recently that “This Recession will slow us all down”. Maybe that person has a point.

And if she does, then the way we promote our businesses and brands will change. If we have more time, then we’ll chat more on the phone rather than SMS or Twitter. And that’s one simple way our life could change.

But will we ever go back to being slower? People want information now and have come to expect it….so it’s part of our psyche now.  And if that’s the case, then bite sized pieces of information to attract customers will stay important.

So getting back to my original point - if we write differently for the web than print, then we and our audience read differently. So right now, there is very little difference between offline and online in terms of reading and writing.

The essentials of life…and business!

Differentiation with a Favicon

Last week was another week of firsts for Achieve Marketing! Well maybe just one first! I have a favicon. Yep, I asked my web designer, John at Connectit about it and he installed it on Friday.

I am quite disorganised when it comes to my favourite websites or bookmarks. I don’t file them in folders (it’s on the to-do list). I merely have a long list and at this stage I know their relative position on the bookmark listing!

But some just stand out more than others – and it’s those that have a favicon.

A favicon according to wikipedia is short for a favourites icon. It is that little 16×16 pixel square icon that is associated with a particular website, the one that you see to the left of the web address.

I counted over 50 bookmarks on my list and only 13 had favicons. They are great ways to make your site stand out from the crowd – no more blue-ish box for me.

They also help to build your brand – if you have an image associated with your website on the address bar, then your viewer is soaking it up and drinking in your brand at another level.

Christmas Shopping is Still Alive & Well…

….but it is moving toward bargains, value and online.

I find the Guardian newspaper a real gem - it has so many interesting and different articles. One article that I found most interesting was one about the UK’s Poundland and bargain hunting and shopping.

The article talks about a particular Poundland shop in Croydon. It said that this particular outlet “serves nearly 30,000 customers a week and they spend an average of £5.98 each, which means this 6,000 sq ft space is raking in more than £9m a year.” 9 million a year?! And with its recession beating prices, even the price aware shopper will take a browse through it.

This got me thinking about US shopping and how American Holiday Spending was coming along. Everytime you turn on the news, the American economy has taken a further nosedive. Thanksgiving weekend shopping is traditionally one of the busiest weekends of shopping in the retail calendar.

Pricegrabber.com, which is a price-comparison site, reported that there was an increase of 11% in traffic to the site compared to Black Friday 2007.  Black Friday is the term of reference for the Friday after Thanksgiving.

They revealed in their press release ” that economic conditions motivate value-driven consumers [and] that online consumers are taking advantage of promotions on popular electronics.”

It’s not alone in seeing an increase in traffic. The US National Retail Federation reported that an increase of 25 million people visited stores and websites compared to last year!

According to their press release “Shoppers spent an average of $372.57 over the weekend, up 7.2 percent over last year’s $347.55.” (The weekend was Thursday, Friday, Saturday and projected for Sunday).

I’d love to see Irish statistics to see how Irish sales are faring. But it is fair to say that holiday shoppers are out there, eager to buy, but have value on their mind. Which isn’t a bad thing - maybe we all got carried away over the past several Christmasses.

Retailers next year ought to look at their propositions and USPs - unique selling points- and maybe it’s time to offer real value to customers and not inflated profit margins.

I’m loving Wordle

Con, my lovely husband introduced me to Wordle tonight! What fun!! It is a great tool. It takes a bunch of words and puts it into a lovely picture. It is a colourful keyword density tool!

At the moment, Drogheda is quite prominent on the blog, what with the Drogheda Business Awards and Tom Costello visiting the Chamber.

Marketing, obviously is the main word…I’ll be doing more Wordles - to see what new words I introduce to the site. I think I’ve found a new toy! (That will be my excuse for not doing any marketing plans!)

Tom Costello of Cuil.com visits Drogheda

On a recent visit back to his hometown of Drogheda from the sunny shores of California, Tom Costello visited the Council members of the Drogheda & District Chamber. Costello along with his wife have created a new Internet search engine, cuil.com.

As I sit on the Council table of the Drogheda Chamber I went along to meet the man who is taking on one of the biggest challenges in Internet living history - rivalling google.com!

What an unassuming man! He was a student of late 80s/early 90s and as such, with no jobs in Ireland, he moved to the US. His journey is one of interest, success and a longing for a hometown unlike his current one.

As he said himself “The climate is a little bit cooler and there is a great sense of community spirit in Drogheda”.

He was fascinating to listen to how he and his wife got his business off the ground while arranging childcare and schooling duties.  It was a pleasure to be there when he was presented with a life-long honorary membership.

Tom was delighted to receive this honour, the first in the Chamber’s history. As a Council, we wanted to wish him the best of luck in his new venture.

The day ended with lunch in Scholars Hotel where the Drogheda & District Chamber Council members and Drogheda Borough Councillors got regaled with further stories of success from Tom.

The Fun (and Despair) of Viral Marketing

I am putting the final touches to my new Marketing Review/Metric and was very open to a distraction. Why is it that the closer you get to the end of a goal, the further away it seems?…or is that just me?!

Anyway, I left my inbox open - I know! I know! All you time management experts are climbing the walls with me. But I left it open and obviously, I was open to distraction.

But what should enter my inbox only a viral email from a neighbour. It went as follows, you’ve probably seen it:

— > Hi everyone,
> Thought this might be useful