It might not roll off the tongue very smoothly but in business it’s very important to keep your customers as customers. Basically that just means keeping them coming back for more. It’s no different with an internet marketing business where you need to you keep your customers happy so they will remain loyal to you and hopefully spread the word to bring you more business.
The problem is that this is something many internet marketers tend to overlook when they are building an online business. They don’t think about keeping customers around because they see the internet as having an unlimited supply of new customers always coming in. But brand loyalty is very important in internet marketing because you can earn a lot more money from repeat customers than trying to convince some random person to purchase who landed on your site from wherever and doesn’t know anything about you.
I’d say a good definition of internet marketing brand loyalty is the ability of an internet marketer to retain customers over a period of several months to several years, and to receive referrals from those customers. It takes time and resources to find new customers even online, so you might as well work on retaining the ones you already have to save yourself the effort while making money in the process!
The best way to retain customers is to create value, and lots of it. Underpromise and overdeliver! If you are selling a product make sure it is extremely high quality and useful. Create a forum and training videos only available to your customers. Give your readers a reason to stick around, not just through your mailing list, but other areas as well. No one likes to feel used, so by creating value you can also create a market for your future products.
Maintaining a sense of community can be one of the hardest parts of internet marketing but also one of the most useful. You need to remain engaged with your customers and target market on a regular basis or you will lose them very quickly. A forum that you visit daily and a regularly updated blog can both be very helpful in doing this.
Also, providing incentives or ways for them earn money such as through an affiliate program can also help you to keep your customers coming back. If they have a potential to make some money off of your great products that they already purchased, why wouldn’t they want to? Provide them with a reason to stick around through quality content, great support, exceptional value, delivering on promises, customer service, bonuses, free updates, training, trust, and so on.
Keeping your customers coming back should be one of the main focuses of your internet marketing business strategy. Repeat business is the best kind and building a solid brand with loyal customers should be something you strive for all the time.
Posted in online business
Not long ago Facebook was only for college students to share pictures and keep in touch with each other, and was untapped as an internet marketing business resource. Now it is open to everyone and has become a very popular place to market businesses and products in a social networking environment on the internet. People can publicly support a cause, product, or business by “Liking” their Page on Facebook. The more people you expose it to the more “likes” you will get so it benefits you to promote your FB page.
One thing that you need to remember when it comes to marketing on Facebook is that it is a public and social website. When someone likes a page on there it becomes public knowledge that they like that page and all their friends can see it. Therefore, some businesses, products, or services may not be appropriate for Facebook marketing.
I am sure you already know there are many potential benefits of having your business on Facebook, but you may not know how to promote your page for maximum exposure. So below I have outlined three of the best ways to promote your Facebook business page.
1) Hold a Contest – This is one of the best ways to gain fans on your Facebook page. You can hold a contest for almost anything and give people various ways to enter the contest (one of them would obviously be to become your FB fan) then hold a random drawing of fans who will get a prize. You can spend a lot of money on it out of your own pocket or get money/prize donations to give away. You could also give away some of your own products or something else as the prizes.
2) Give an Incentive – Sometimes just giving people an incentive to join your Facebook fan page is enough. For example, you could give people a free gift or product discount for becoming your fan or give away free information and resources only to your fans. Even though all people have to do is click a little “like” button to become your fan it often takes an incentive to get them to do that simple task.
3) Link to It – Linking to your Facebook page from your blog, website, emails, other social sites, and everywhere else you possibly can is a great way to get more exposure for it. You should quickly see your fan count increase if you do this.
Combine all the resources you have available to you in order to get more Facebook fans and you will start to see your efforts pay off. Using FB as one of your internet marketing strategies can be very powerful if done correctly and consistently, so don’t overlook it.
Posted in Social Networking
As an internet marketer one of the most important things you can do for your website or blog is to make it user friendly. Many people focus on the theme and design of their website or how SEO friendly it is, but they don’t think about whether or not it is actually user friendly. After the major components of the back end of the site are done and the SEO plan is worked out, it is important to have a user friendly site that people want to stay on and come back to.
I don’t know how many times I have been to websites or sales pages and wanted to find the back button as fast as I could in order to get away from it. Some website designs are just plain awful. If the website design isn’t good, the reader will often lose their place, get lost in the clutter, or have a hard time knowing where to go or what to do next.
The reason so many sales pages for products are only one page and have a fairly simple design is because it works. The simplicity of the design allows the user to know exactly what the product does, where they need to go next, how to order, and all of the other information the designer/company wants them to see.
In contrast, a highly cluttered sales site with multiple pages, pop-ups, flashing banners, movies playing automatically, and an unfriendly design will have a much harder time getting their point across in a way that allows the user to feel they benefited from their visit. Most visitors will want to get away from a site like that and the internet marketer will lose the potential sale.
There are so many reasons to keep your design simple, from a user’s standpoint, the ability to find the information they need without searching the entire site is a huge help. Keeping navigation straightforward and in the same area will allow users to always know they can go back there to find what they need next.
Using large enough fonts and adequate reading room is a must. You want your user to be able to easily scan your site for content to read. Most people don’t read an entire sales letter. So make it easy on them by using headings and bold when appropriate to highlight the main points of the copy as well as bullet points, numbered lists, etc…
Having a user friendly website will save you a lot of time and hassle dealing with issues later and will certainly help you to make more money with your internet marketing business. Keep advertisements organized and friendly, content in an easy to read column with minimum clutter, and always have a good navigation structure so it’s easy for users to get where they are going and benefit from your site. If the user enjoys their time on your site they will most likely become a subscriber, customer, loyal reader, or do whatever else it is that your site is trying to get them to do.
Sometimes internet marketing strategies can be applied before you actually go out and start promoting. Having a user friendly site is one such case.
Posted in Blogging
One of the most important things you can do when it comes to internet marketing is to write good content for your website, blog, or sales page. This is probably the most basic internet marketing strategy of all but it is also essential, and far too many people don’t do it. If the content on your site is junk, then your entire website is going to be considered junk by anyone who visits it. On the other hand, if your content is really good then your site will be considered high quality even if it doesn’t have the best theme or look the greatest. High quality content matters a lot more than how “cool” your site looks.
It’s best to write the content yourself if you at least have some decent writing skills because good writers are hard to come by unless you want to pay a ton for every article/post you get. If you look at internet marketing forums or various webmaster forums, or even freelance writing sites, you will find many people with writing services claiming to be good writers. In reality, a lot of writers you hire online are not worth the money, even if their articles are cheap.
If you need someone else to write for you because you aren’t a good writer or you simply don’t have enough time to do it all yourself, then you really need to look around and check out many different options before you settle on someone. Don’t fill your website full of low quality content just because you found someone to write cheap articles for you and you don’t think you have any other options. Trust me, you do!
Now, here are a few notes for new internet marketers and bloggers, or anyone else needing a refresher on writing good content:
Don’t use fluff content – Make sure your words actually make sense and use short and specific sentences whenever possible. Do not ramble on about a subject for two paragraphs restating the same point over and over again just to fill space.
Include images in your posts – Always try to include related images in your blog posts and other website content if at all possible. Including images with proper formatting and SEO strategies will not only draw your reader’s attention to the post or article, but can also help you in ranking on search engines and can bring more traffic to your site. This is actually something I really need to work on myself. I have never gotten in the habit of using images but I do need to start.
Make it useful – There’s no point in writing just for the sake of updating your site. Make your content useful and informative for the reader. You want people to keep coming back and they aren’t going to do that if your content isn’t worth coming back to read again and again.
Use spell check and proof read – There’s nothing worse than an article/post full of spelling mistakes and other mistakes that could easily be avoided by simply using a spelling/grammar checker and proofreading your content before you publish it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, especially when writing online, but by minimizing your spelling and grammar errors, you will gain more respect for your work and more readers of your blog.
That’s about all there is to it. I’m sure you can handle that without any problems and if so you will be ahead of a large portion of your competition and on your way to a successful internet marketing career.
Posted in Blogging, Internet Marketing
If you are aspiring to make money online as an internet marketer, or are already doing it, then you are certainly looking for ways to make your internet marketing business even better. There are many ways to do that and in this post I have given you 5 simple ways to improve your internet marketing business.
1) Write a Business Plan
One of the most important and simplest ways to improve your internet marketing business is to write a plan to follow. A business plan will help give you direction and will go a long way in making sure that your daily tasks are leading to you earning more money.
2) Set Long Term and Short Term Goals
Setting goals for the short term and long term is another simple way to improve your internet marketing business. Goals should be integrated into the plan that you made in number one above. Every time you sit down to work you should have a specific short term goal that you want to complete and that short term goal should be leading to completing an overall long term goal for your internet business.
3) Follow a Daily Schedule
Another simple way to improve your internet business is to follow a schedule. Your plan and goals will dictate what type of schedule you have each day. See how these first three all tie into each other? Your schedule should include how long you will work and what you will work on.
4) Keep Your Work Area Clean
This is often overlooked by many internet marketers, but simply keeping your work area clean and orderly can greatly improve your online business. It helps you feel better and more productive in addition to making it easier for you to find your notes and anything you need to work on. Nobody likes to be sitting in the middle of a huge pile of clutter.
5) Take Breaks
You might think you need to work constantly if you want to build a successful internet marketing business but that is simply not true. Taking breaks is vital to improving your business because it keeps you fresh and allows you to actually get more done in the long run.
Okay, that’s it; I told you they were simple! Doing these 5 simple things will certainly improve your internet marketing business and help you make money online.
Posted in Internet Marketing
