Mediaboss Marketing

Marketing in general is a vast and complex beast which requires knowledge and effort to truly master and leverage it to its full potential to grow your brand, let alone your business. Any good internet marketing strategy can effectively help you build your business online. However, as many internet entrepreneurs look to expand their online presence and grow their businesses further, I find that many of them fail to create a complete marketing and business development strategy, focusing the majority of their efforts online. Sadly, this is a HUGE mistake on their part.

Over the course of my career as an entrepreneur, business owner and web designer, I've connected business with many individuals and businesses all wanting to increase their reach, develop a strong brand awareness and build a strong internet presence. Yet throughout all their questions, two common fears continually rang through during my discussions with many of them. They either feared the idea of taking on a major internet campaign or they felt that internet marketing would replace their trial and true traditional marketing methods. Both these fears have their roots in the fact that the vast majority of them simply lacked the proper knowledge necessary to see that both an internet marketing and traditional marketing strategy should compliment each other providing reciprocal support of their various strengths. I like to refer to this more complete picture of a marketing strategy as "blended marketing".

Why Do I Need to Do Marketing

If you plan to generate any kind of income online you need to gain an understanding that your blog or website is simply and extension of your true business. You must develop your business model first before you can properly identify how to apply your blog / website as a useful tool in your overall marketing and business development strategy. Any successful business has a marketing strategy to grow their business. You can not simply set up a blog or website and expect the business to come rushing in. You must have a strategy in place to help bring in the interested buyers you desire.

Gain a Little Perspective

As a successful internet entrepreneur and internet marketing expert myself, I've been using a blended marketing strategy for well over a decade to maximize my reach, increase my exposure and better market to my target audience to grow my online business. I'd like to share with you how a blended marketing strategy can benefit you and provide you with some techniques I use when constructing your blended marketing plan.

To help you gain a better perspective on the concept of blended marketing I suggest you have a quick read of Rena Bernstein's post over at Social Media Today entitled "Integrating Social Media with Traditional Advertising to Gain Higher Returns". It is a great read and provides valuable insight into the benefits as well as examples on how effective it can be if done correctly.

What is Blended Marketing

Blended marketing is essentially a mix of both internet marketing and traditional offline marketing methods to create a more complete, overall marketing and business development strategy. Many businesses fail to integrate both internet marketing and traditional marketing strategies together. By taking advantage of the strengths of both an internet marketing and traditional marketing strategy, you will better position yourself and / or your business for greater success.

The idea of a blended marketing strategy is to create a complete marketing strategy which takes advantage of the various strengths of both an internet marketing strategy and a traditional marketing strategy where you work to increase your search engine rankings and internet exposure, while at the same time Increasing your reach and exposure offline as well.

Different aspects of a blended marketing strategy can be for example, utilizing an email marketing campaign in conjunction with a direct mail campaign to provide a specific promotion to a select group of respondents. Some email marketing systems provide a service where they will also send a direct mail piece to your email list provided you have addresses for each recipient in your list. This is just a high level example of how a blended marketing strategy can work to ensure leader reach from multiple fronts.

Benefits of a Blended Marketing

The benefits of a blended marketing strategy are vast allowing you to really grow your business at a much more rapid pace than if you did not have one. A blended marketing strategy allows you to:

These are just a few of the many benefits in which a blended marketing strategy can provide.

Creating a Blended Marketing Strategy

Creating a blended marketing strategy is not all that difficult if you know your target audience and have identified how to reach them. From that point, you can craft a marketing strategy that will allow you to reach your target audience through multiple fronts to ensure your message is heard.

The first step is to conduct market research (yes you have to do this and you can not skip this step). When conducting market research you need to identify:

Identifying a market for whatever you are offering is essential to the success of any business whether online or off.

The second step is to begin crafting your blended marketing strategy to incorporate the various resources available to reach your market. This is where the fun begins! Be creative with this and make sure you explore all possible options to get your message out to market. For example, you may want to include the various resources to syndicate your content not just for online purposes but also for offline purposes, such as industry magazines and journals. If you're creating an email marketing campaign, how will you mirror this effort offline through direct mail pieces? If you are going to utilize the Third Tribe concept for your online marketing, what real-world business networking and industry convention events are you going to attend to create brand awareness? Consider how you are going to integrate social media into your blended marketing and how can you drive people to follow you from your offline efforts?

The best way to create a blended marketing strategy is to mirror your online marketing efforts with potential real-world offline efforts that my accomplish the same if not similar task as your online efforts. Simply ask yourself: "Self, what offline marketing effort would be similar to this online marketing effort" then make a list of all related marketing strategies and decide which to integrate into your complete blended marketing strategy. Dedicate a lot of quality time to this process, because the more time you spend on market research and development to create your blended marketing strategy, the more effective your blended marketing strategy will be.

I hope you found this information useful and will apply what you've learned to create your own blended marketing strategy for whatever your business maybe.

To Your Success!

Source by Sean M Smith

The rest is here:
Marketing With a Blended Marketing Strategy For Maximum Visibility - JOSIC - Digital Intelligence

Small business marketing companies give out a lot of different advices to thousands of business owners each day. One of which would be to make use of the internet in spreading the word about their small business companies. It is without a doubt true that most of small businesses today are preoccupied with the thought of running the business well. Most of them tend to focus a lot on this to an extent that they already overlook the marketing aspect of the business, which is one of the most essential ingredients that will help define the success of the company. Aside getting overlooked, other business often give out the reason that they do not have enough time or money to handle a marketing campaign. Well, they dont necessarily need to deal with these issues or problems if they opt to choose the internet as their marketing medium.

Starting an online marketing campaign is perhaps one of the greatest ways for a small business to improve its sales. One of the greatest advantages of doing a marketing campaign online is that doing so does not require a huge amount of investment both in terms of time and money. In addition to this, doing a marketing campaign will also provide you with a wide array of options when it comes to choosing a particular manner as to how you are going to carry out your promotion. In here, you can choose to go for social methods; content creation strategies; paid advertising; and SEO or search engine optimization options. In going over these online marketing methods, be sure that you pick one that will match well with your experience online and the type of budget that you have. Moreover, you need to take into consideration the amount of time you have available for this as well.

If you have decided on using the internet for your business marketing campaign, the first thing you need to do is to get yourself a website. If you are equipped with some basic computer skills and knowledge, you will be able to perform this task with ease on your own. Having a good website will serve as the foundation of your online marketing campaign. If you are not equipped with the skills necessary for making a website look good, you can choose to hire the services of an expert designer. Doing so will help you draw in more customers, which will later on give you large amounts of sales. Now, this may mean that you are going to spend a few extra cash but I tell you that this is going to be worth it. Why? Because you wouldnt want to save money by setting up a bad website that will not help you in boosting your sales. Being thrifty in this way, may actually be a huge waste of time and money.

After you get your site up and running, the next thing you need to do is to find different ways on how you can get people to go to your website. Doing so will involve different marketing strategies such as SEO or search engine optimization. This is basically done to improve website traffic.

Source by Daniel Hatcher

See the article here:
Small Business Marketing Companies - Making Use Of The Internet ... - JOSIC - Digital Intelligence

What are the key issues which can ensure success (or failure) in the field of internet marketing?

All successful people in any walk of life have a plan. I read once that all business plans should have goals which are SMART that is: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed. Different people have different approaches to setting their goals; some will concentrate on the longer term targets whilst others set themselves a series of short term goals. I tend to fall into the latter category. Some people incorporate both into their master plan. However, you conceive your business plan, remember the old business adage: Fail to plan and you plan to fail.

A second important piece of advice is to always remember that you are working at a business not dabbling with a hobby. Running an online internet marketing business should certainly be enjoyable, or there is not much point in doing it; money isnt everything! Apply yourself to the task and stick with it. Getting an internet business up and running is a tough assignment so you must believe in your ability to succeed in the end. Many who fail do so because they just dont have the self-belief to see it through.

Having a great passion for both life and business will keep you focussed and committed to the job in hand. If you go at things in a half-hearted way the possibilities in both life and work will be greatly reduced. Believe in your work, believe in your ultimate success and, most of all, believe in yourself. One aspect of an online business which helps the building of confidence and belief is that you can earn as you learn. For many newcomers to the business there are a lot of new skills to take on board. To be able to do this whilst beginning to bring in, at least, some income brings with it the reassurance that the business works and success is within reach. If you want success you must always work to be the very best that you can be. A failure to do this will lead to failure in your business.

One other issue to bear in mind is: How do you define success? If you were to ask ten people that question you would probably get quite a number of different responses. Some people see success purely in terms of how much money they have in the bank. Others would express a similar idea but in terms of specific possessions; two classy cars in the drive; a large house; a holiday home in the country. On the other hand, some may see success in a much more spiritual light relating to family and friends, etc. Never make the mistake of mixing standard of living with quality of life. Standard of living is about material things, whereas quality of life comes from the more spiritual side of our nature. As the proverb says, Money cant buy happiness. Money only has value in terms of the freedom and the quality of life it can provide. Sorry if this sounds a bit like a sermon, but see beyond the money and look for the satisfaction, the sense of achievement and the happiness which genuine success can bring. Dont dote on the money which is a means to an end and not an end in itself.

Success is a process rather than a destination. Be enthusiastic about your business and enjoy the journey. It will be fulfilling in every sense.

Source by Rob J Hinchliffe

See the original post here:
How To Succeed, And Fail, At Internet Marketing - JOSIC - Digital Intelligence

In my last three articles, I talked about my ups and downs in affiliate marketing, the two sides of that business model and why giving value to people is more important than anything else including self-belief in your business success. Here, I am going to explain the 6 different models of internet marketing which is quite general by its definition.

1. Affiliate Marketing

The first model is by far the most basic and yet essential for all newbies to get started. That is by promoting other peoples products and services be it digital or physical and get paid in return. There are many ways you can go about doing so but that is another topic I will cover for the day.

2. E-Commerce

The second model is e-commerce.

While it may seem similar to promoting physical products as affiliate at first glance, it is not.

What this essentially means is that instead of having a physical store which can cost you tens of thousands in rent, staff and inventory costs, you can have a virtual one in the form of an e-commerce website instead.

In contrary to the traditional model, you do not need to have huge inventory at home.

You just need to have good connections of reliable suppliers who are willing to deliver the products for you to your customers while making sure they are in great condition and exactly what your customers required upon placing orders.

The only con is that building an e-commerce store is very challenging. Especially for a beginner who does not know anything about web design.

Even if you hired a freelancer, you may have to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars because of the perceived value as in your store can earn you much more than what you invest initially in the long run though you do not get to make that money immediately.

3. Local Business Consulting

If you are already proficient in building websites and getting them ranked on top of Google, you can be a local business consultant to offline business owners whether they are running companies, cafes or shops.

If you are able to get customers throughout other online strategies as well, that will be even better.

However, I do not recommend this to newbies as most business owners are very selective in who to hire the same way as who they should employ in job interviews.

4. Freelancing

You can also do freelance work for internet marketers if you are good in building websites, writing content like articles, blog posts, e-books and short reports, designing banners, e-covers and graphics.

But do not expect to get high pay unless you are an experience programmer and software developer.

You may head down to sites like Elance, Fiverr and Guru to offer your services.

5. Mobile Apps

This is another profession you may consider if you like to learn and earn from designing mobile apps for people.

Given the fact that iPhones are very popular these days and people tend to surf web through those to laptops and desktops, this is another model you should consider.

6. Creating And Selling Your Own Information Products

I did cover this topic briefly in my article on the Two Sides Of Affiliate Marketing Coin.

What this means is you write your e-books and design your own video tutorials teaching people on how to do certain things based on your expertise and experience.

It does not have to be just internet marketing.

It can be other things like smart business investing, wise financial management, personal development and health-related topics.

Or even hobbies based on your personal passion as well as that of others.

Source by Amuro Wesley

Follow this link:
6 Different Models Of Internet Marketing - JOSIC - Digital Intelligence

Life is been governed by laws, principles, or theories. It follows that every business you do in life must be done in accordance with such relevant, established, and natural laws if you sincerely want to succeed.

In internet marketing, just like any other business, theories abound. The first theory in this context is called the theory of speed. This theory states that you must consider how fast your product or service is produced or delivered in comparison to your competitors. This theory is very significant in the management of software development. Software programs are often expected to run fast.

As a matter of fact, if the delivery of your goods and services is faster than your competitors own in the same niche people will prefer your products and services to your competitors. So you must, as a matter of necessity, consider the theory of speed when you are involving yourself in any area of internet marketing.

The second theory is known as the theory of cost. Dear Mr. Internet Marketer, the cost-effectiveness of a product or service you render is a very important determining factor in the school of internet marketing. Believe me, people like cheap products no matter how they pretend. So you must try as much as possible to make your goods and services to be cheaper than your rivals own. I advise you to check out the price of your competitors products and services in order to maintain a reasonable price. Strive as much as possible to ensure that you have a better price.

Thirdly, there is the theory of quality. Are you thinking of delivering inferior products to your customer? Then you should as well be thinking of becoming a failure in your chosen niche. If you ask me, your failure rate is 99.9 per cent; it then means that you are most likely to fail for just selling inferior products or rendering inferior services. Your products and services should be of very high quality if you really expect to make very high amount of money you can only reap what you sow. Only thieves or criminals are known for taking what they do not deserve. Let me warn you before you lose out, even the poorest of all men like high quality goods and services poverty notwithstanding.

Source by Edeh Chijioke

Read more from the original source:
The Basic Theories of Internet Marketing - JOSIC - Digital Intelligence