Welcome to Michael's Article Collection

Feature Your Benefits

Sales Copy… eventually every small business owner must consider what needs to be included in order to produce a successful advertisement or piece of marketing material.You begin with a fancy graphic, your company logo, a slogan, and perhaps a special offer. However, more needs to be included in your sales copy to actually get your customers to buy. You need to include some your product’s featur. . .

Shameless Self-Promotion

Hi! My name is Janice Byer and I am the owner of Docu-Type Administrative & Web Design Services (http://www.docutype.net). I am the winner of several prestigious awards (information is on our website) and have a slew of happy customers, as the testimonials on our site will attest to. My services are professional, creative and in demand. Now, wasn’t that easy? In one small paragraph, I have sha. . .

Is Your Ezine Being Zapped?

About a year ago I wrote an article titled 'Winning The War On Sp^m'. Unfortunately, the war on sp^m is not being won at all. In fact, the problem is now so serious that sp^am is shaping up to be the greatest threat to online marketing. The threat comes not from sp^mmers themselves, but from the filters that are being used to block them. These filters are hitting hard at the very core of ecomme. . .

Press Release, An Alternative For Paid Advertisement. Step 1

What's a press release? This is generally a one page story about your business, your product/service or an event happening related to your business that is about to, or recently occurred. These publicity stories are generally "shot gunned" to newspapers, radio, television and the trade publications. Then imagine having your products/service written on newspapers, trade publications, aired on ra. . .

5 Specific Questions Your Sales Letters Must Answer To Ac...

Here’s a surefire method to guarantee you achieve the best results from your sales letters. Rather than make a sales pitch that your prospects will very likely ignore, instead present your products or services as the answer to their problems. When you offer the help that your target audience is looking for it won’t be hard to make sales. You can show that you really do understand the needs of y. . .

Editorial Calendars: A Key to Business Publicity

Editorial Calendars: A Key to Publicizing Your Businessby: Bill Stoller, PublisherFree Publicity, The Newsletter for PR-Hungry Businesseshttp://www.PublicityInsider.com/freepub.aspWhat is the one thing that all of the best public relations agencies do every year?They research and compile editorial calendars from publications that are pertinent to their client's business.You should too.What's an. . .

Is Your Domain Costing You Traffic?

You visited a great website some time ago that had some fantastic information on it. It is not easily found in search engines results so you decide to type the domain name into your favorite browser. The problem is that the url spells out something like www.keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword-keyword.com. Does that sound ethical to you? It maybe helpful with those search engine rankings but for man. . .

Marketing Via Messageboards & E-mail Discussion Lists - A...

One of the most suggested means of getting traffic to a site in the early stages is to get involved in messageboard and e-mail discussions on your topic of choice. The idea is that you can show your expertise and therefore get traffic to your site via your signature file (most discussion lists allow you to include your signature file with your post - a few lines with your name, site address and. . .

The Power of Word of Mouth

Most of us remember the commercial that said, “I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and…”, well you get the picture. This commercial, which represented Breck Hair Shampoo, ran so many times that even I remember who the commercial represented. The reason I mention this particular commercial is not because of the number of times it was aired but rather because of t. . .

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder…

However, in the world of business, this cliché may not necessarily be true. Sometimes it can be more like ‘Out of Site, Out of Mind’. Your existing clients are your most important business assets. They are already aware of the exceptional products or services that you provide and you have already built a trust with them. These happy clients will be the first to recommend you and your business t. . .

Winning the Search Engine Wars!

Creating and building effective Search Engine marketing campaigns is like trying to nail jello to the wall! The challenge can be daunting to many, requiring very specialized knowledge of process that must be blended with unique and disparate technology. Here is some insight gained from years of experience providing these services to clients.SE marketing is very effective in driving qualified tr. . .

7 Tips for Testing Your Sales and Marketing

One marketing technique may work wonders for someone, but that doesn't guarantee that it'll do the same for you. The only way to really know what works for YOUR products and YOUR target audience is to experiment. Testing and experimentation are crucial to increasing your profits. 1. Try using the occasional pop-up window to get more subscribers to your newsletter. Some people *really* hate thes. . .

Viral Marketing Tips: Greeting Cards

When we speak about viral marketing, we are not talking about the newest disease. We are not talking about a Mad Cow Disease variant or something that you need to be vaccinated for. In fact, we are not referring to a disease at all. What we are talking about is literally the most powerful traffic generation technique available on the internet. Viral marketing is so powerful that it makes the se. . .

Sex and the Gods of Internet Marketing

Sex and the Gods of Internet MarketingBy Linda Cox J.A.M.G. (Just Another Marketing Guru)Whenever I mention my occupation to a non-wired person, it seems to generate the same response: "Isn't there an awful lot of porn on the net?" The question floats toward me like a smoke ring and forms a halo around my face, framing me as a pornographer, nymphomaniac, and all-round corrupter of inn. . .

Secrets Of Network Marketing Success

Network marketing and the internet were made for each other.The world is your oyster. It's as easy to send an email around the globe as it is to talk to your next door neighbor.If that's true how can we explain the fact that 95% still fail in network marketing?What are the traits of the top earners?They have a solid bullet proof marketing system.They have the patience of Job.They have the persi. . .

Leveraging your Reputation - Making PR Work for You

We rely on all kinds of tools and advice to help our businesses grow, from accounting and legal advice to graphic design and sales seminars. But what are we doing for the important job of building our business's reputation in the community? Public relations skills and techniques are a powerful part of any growing business, but many small organizations believe that the cost of getting into the P. . .

Don't Become Another .com Road Kill

Remember those Super Bowl and World Cup commercials where you saw talking hand puppets, scantily dressed women, cowboys herding cats and crude lettering on cardboard? Can you actually name one .com company that paid for these millions of dollar/eurodollars for brand awareness ads?Doesn't this type of marketing remind you of a IPO.com frenzied "drunken sailor school of budgeting" - meaning, spen. . .

Creating Effective Opt-in E-Mail Campaigns

It's been said before, but important to re-emphasize, e-mail is the "killer application" of the information age. According to the latest Forrester Research numbers, the permission based e-mail industry is projected to grow from $164M (USD) in 1999 to $7.3B by 2005. E-mail is also rapidly moving from a textual communications process to one that is rich in multimedia content via server-based stre. . .

Book Summary: Networking For Professional Success

Book Summary: This article is based on the following book:Effective Networking for Professional Success: "How to Make the Most of Your Personal Contacts"by Rupert Hart, Stirling Books, 1997ISBN 0 949 142 09 3125 pagesWe are all “self-employed” now.Today there is absolutely no job security. We are living in an age of corporate downsizing, and freelance consultants, or self-employed workers are g. . .

Tracking Dilemmas

One time or another in your marketing efforts you will want to track your advertising's effectiveness, and in that tracking you will need to track outside your website (ie. Where are these hits coming from?). You may want to know: Are my FFA submissions doing any good? How many are clicking on my link from my email ad? The average webmaster with limited web abilities and hosting constraints wil. . .

How To Make Your Best Ever Presentation

The most important tip...EVER! Make sure that you always think of your audience - when preparing your talk, writing it and presenting it. Put yourself in the audience's position at all times and your presentation will go with a swing. Remember your audience does not want to know how marvellous you are, or how brilliant your product is. What they do want to know is something that will help them.. . .

Understanding The Basics Of Advertising

I get the L.A. Times delivered to my door every day, but I don't read it for the articles. It is a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper, but the articles just don't interest me. Unlike most people, I read the paper for the advertisements because there is a lot to learn from them.Over 90% of the ads run in the Los Angeles Times are horrible! Most of the ads I see are either ego-driven, have no headl. . .

More Than An Ebook

The following in an excerpt from the E-Book of the same name.Utilising the Full Resources of the Internet to Promote your FictionFiction writers appear to be the despised members of the internet writing community. Our product doesn't promise the reader financial success or the prospect of an early retirement. We don't claim to know the one true secret of how to make a million or how to drive th. . .

Ready, Aim, Fire...Oops...Where's The Target?

Everywhere you go on the Internet you find the words, "target market." What do they mean? What does it have to do with you? Well it has everything to do with your success in sales. Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago an online entrepreneur asked me to review a direct sales presentation for him. Let's call him "Joe". His product and service is excellent. Top qualit. . .

Building Trust For Lifetime Success

Trust. One word. One very powerful word that can increase both first time and repeat sales to an unlimited degree. Trust. What is it? Why is it so important? How do you get it? Confidence in you from your cutomers, builds relationships and as a result, more sales, and through excellent customer service. That's the short and sweet of it. Now, how about a little more meat to it. What is trust and. . .

Oh No! I Can't Sell!

What's that you say? You can't sell? Oh, you must be right, although you are selling me right now! A good friend of mine once said to me, "Life is sales." What a profound statement! Think about it! Life IS sales. We sell all day, every day. We just don't realize or acknowledge the fact that we are selling. Why is that? I believe it is because we have adopted some misguided belief. . .

Email Marketing - How Best To Manage and Distribute Your ...

This holiday season 15 percent of consumers in the US plan to buy online, spending an average of $585. That’s 9 percent more revenue for online merchants in comparison to last year’s results.A recent report estimates that Canadians will spend half a billion dollars online for gifts this holiday season. Even by conservative estimates the total number predicted is double the $282 million predicte. . .

Quick and Instant Marketing Soup

Everything happens Quickly and Instantly on the Internet. In the blink of an eye your easily transported around a whole planet. It's a smorgasbord !! The web site you just visited could be in Singapore, the e-mail your reading now could have come from Alaska. The Internet is just one big Soup Bowl of Information just waiting for you to come and gobble it up. We live in a world of "Everythi. . .

Internet Marketing- The Two Faces of FREE

'FREE' is the reason people are successful, and make a fortune marketing on the internet, yet 'FREE' is also the reason 90% of people fail miserably!It is all to do with your approach to your business and your careful use of 'FREE' things.You will never make any money placing your own ads on other people's FREE classified sites and/or FFA links, even if you have submission software.And you will. . .

Restoring The Personal Touch

There are now 126 Billion websites where you can buy anything from disposable diapers to nuclear weapons. More business is done on the Internet in one month than France has done in the last 10 years. You can email any human being on Planet Earth in less than 15 seconds.Those are algore facts - meaning I just made them up. My point is, we're living on a planet that gets more wired every day. As . . .

Internet Marketing - A Leap Of Faith

Do you remember as a child having to do something you really didn't want to do because it was difficult?Was it music lessons? Or dancing? Or some kind of sporting activity? I am sure you can remember something that your parents really wanted you to do, but you rebelled against!With almost everyone there is something they tried, and failed to do as a child.Can you remember how good you felt, whe. . .

The New Marketing Landscape

Many of us in the marketing services and/or agency business are starting to see some real tangible marketing patterns emerging that businesses need to be aware of if they want to leverage their marketing dollars in this "post .com implosion economy." Good Web Site Design increasingly More Important It's imperative for a company to have a quality web site today - but many firms are still throwi. . .

Online Advertising Sinks into the Abyss!

Back in the ancient days of 1994 when Mark Andreesen and his band of hardy programmers were inventing a ground-breaking product/application/way of life called a browser, a dedicated group of entrepreneurs started publishing Netsurfer Digest a modern day "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" for the web. I subscribed to this wonderful newsletter and reference guide back in those heady days of yester. . .

Marketing Trends from the Digital Frontlines

The web and ways to market on the web continue to evolve at warp speed - we see some positive and negative changes occurring - our observations du jour:1. Publishers are finally starting to charge for branded content. It's still difficult to do, but we are seeing many newsletter publishers charging from $30-100 per subscriber per annum. And, most importantly, many people are finally starting to. . .

Maximizing ROI via Web Site Traffic Analysis

We are clearly well past the innocent “golden age” of the Internet – Darwinian economics have become the order of the day today. Any company worth their salt must maintain a web site as an information resource and/or to generate incremental ecommerce revenue. Qualified traffic is the name of the game, as it’s the oxygen that keeps a good ecommerce web site thriving. Cons. . .

Marketing to Today’s “Distracted” Consumer

The average person today is exposed to a never-ending deluge of 1,700 marketing messages during a single 24-hour period. Look around you, we marketers have pasted, integrated injected and/or overlaid advertising in any possible place imaginable! Case in point, NBC will start to digitally insert commercial “billboards” into advertising content to be broadcast during the winter Olympi. . .

Absolute Top Five Search Engine Marketing Myths Uncovered!

It’s no secret that Search Engine marketing can drive significant amounts of very qualified traffic to a web site – as 85% of Internet users utilize search engines to find/research for goods and services. The problem for many companies is the difficulty they face sifting through conflicting information and hyperbole! Here is my top five list of myths that need to be run to ground.Bi. . .

Developing a Winning e-Commerce Strategy

One bright spot on the economic horizons around the world seems to be continued consumer spending and e-commerce is clearly a part of this, with sales estimated to be in excess of $9.9 billion in the next three months according to ACNielsen. But there is a dark cloud hovering over this sunny e-commerce landscape called poor web site design. Let's explore some of the reasons why consumers are no. . .

Speed Kills on the Web!

I only have to point to the 555 plus failed .com companies (according to Web Mergers) as the poster children of the "speed at any cost" business mantra that clearly doesn't work. And these were companies who burnt through significant amounts of capital (in the millions, tens of millions or hundreds of millions in many cases) while they were rushing to get to market.Do you wonder why every time . . .

How To Rescue Your Graphic Design Project When All Else F...

Whether you're giving a critical sales presentation to a client, producing visuals for a meeting, event, trade show or seminar, or unveiling the new company logo before an audience of shareholders, top-notch graphics will help ensure that you, your products, and your message receive the attention they deserve. Yet when you decide to do the graphics in-house to reduce turnaround time or cut exp. . .

9 More Writing Tips for Successful Email Marketing

A few months ago, I wrote a guide entitled: 101 Writing Tips for Successful Email Marketing. In fact, many COPY TIPS subscribers have a copy. Since that time, I have worked on dozens of successful projects and have discovered some additional tips for boosting response.1. Ask a question in the Subject line. This almost always gets the email opened. I suspect this is because questions are so much. . .

Fast Forwarding your Business with Instant Messaging

Instant Messaging is rapidly becoming accepted in the business community as a viable communications tool and process - it's faster than e-mail, free on the client side, even a novice user can easily grasp the interface in just a few minutes and it enables remote workers and business partners to "talk" and share files and information effortlessly using the in-place infrastructure of the internet. . .

The Happy Jar

I just delivered a free speech. I am a great believer in free speech, but an even greater believer in paid speech. However, there are good reasons why someone like me would deliver free speeches. For instance, to support a charity or a cause I believe in. Or if the audience is full of people who hire speakers.If you've ever spoken at a dinner or ran a workshop at a conference, you'll wince . . .

E-Mail Newsletter Marketing Essentials

If Gutenberg were alive today he would be in publishing heaven! Forget the printing press, the web has fast-forwarded self-publishing in ways that are evolving so rapidly it's becoming difficult to integrate technology and process to leverage the opportunities. Any company, regardless of their size and marketing resources should be publishing an opt-in e-mail newsletter - it's a very low cost w. . .

All Along the Digital Watchtower

It's no secret interactive (web-based) marketing has arrived. The IDC research group just released a study in late June of this year indicating 99.9% of a survey of executives and entrepreneurs said they currently conduct online marketing activities, or, are in the process of implementing or initiating some form of interactive marketing. The problem or challenge that many of these executives (m. . .

Driving Qualified Traffic Using Directories

Some education is essential to enlighten you about this form of interactive marketing. Directories aren't Search Engines; they are web sites or information portals which use analysts on staff to review submissions from companies who want to be listed in their Directory. Yahoo would be the penultimate example of this type of a portal. But there are literally thousands of other sites that group a. . .

LookSmart Not Small Business Friendly

There is a firestorm of negative press regarding LookSmart's recent marketing stumbles via numerous discussion groups, including two of the oldest and most influential, I-Search and I-Advertising Digests. Most of the critiques center on LookSmart's inability to develop viable programs for SMB/SME ("small to medium business or enterprise"), the difficulty in managing their new pay per click "Sma. . .

Marketing Maxims for Today’s Challenging Times

These are turbulent times for all businesses - necessitating streamlined marketing processes that are finely honed to mesh with today’s sputtering global economy.1. Don’t stop advertising because the economy is sluggish - increase it, as many of your competitors are foolishly slowing down and you can grab market share! Look at what Dell has done to Gateway in the last eighteen month. . .

The Key to a Successful Affiliate Program

Two Christmases ago I tugged on one of those paper crackers and after a small bang, out popped a piece of yellow paper the size of a credit card. On one side was a riddle that didn't make much sense, but on the other side was an 'Inspirational Quote' that made a lot of sense. So much so, that I still have it in my wallet. This is what it said: "The shortest and best way to make your fortune . . .

5 Reasons Why Headlines Are Crucial To Your Website’...

Without a powerful headline, your message stands little chance of being noticed in an increasingly competitive marketplace. If your headline doesn’t capture attention and pull prospects into your sales copy, than your marketing effort is a total waste of energy and resources.Nothing is more important to getting your message noticed than your headlines. If you’re not allocating a siz. . .