New Article By Matt Bacak
posted by Matt Bacak at 11:19 PM
Monday, October 31, 2005
How to Organize a Seminar or an Event
How to Organize a Seminar or an Event
Seminars and events have always been implemented as a holistic experience to participants. Thus, organizing an event requires extensive planning and preparation with most work implemented at least a few months before the actual event. Most of the time, seminars seem to run like clockwork with all events flowing smoothly according to schedule. In reality however, much groundwork has been worked on with the purpose of developing the right atmosphere in addition to a beneficial experience to partipants.
Establishing the theme of the event
Each event follows a theme and purpose which will drive the event set-up, the target audiences or the participants, the guests and the marketing approach. In general, a business event such as an international conference for a particular industry will appeal to participants conducting businesses within that industry as well as sponsors who gain mileage out of publicizing their products during the event.
Apart from that, the theme of the seminar will also determine the type of marketing channels to be used to for publicity. This also holds true for the seminar marketing team who will need the event theme to correctly identify target participants and companies to sell the event to.
Selecting a venue
Venue selection is highly dependent on the scale of the event. Usually this is determined by the number of participants, the presence of any guests of honor (such as royalty or politicians) the activities during the event, or if there are additional floor space required for exhibition purposes.
A typical seminar of about 100 – 200 can be comfortably implemented in a hotel seminar room, possibly in a theater style setting or classroom setting. However, larger scale events with participant numbers scaling between 500 – 1000 may require a large hall, ballroom, auditorium or a convention center.
The location and quality standard of the venue is also important especially if the event involves the participation of VIPs. With this, a reputable location would be imperative, including good quality and wide range of seminar facilities available. It is always wise to explore the possibility of a few venues and examine their location suitability, level of services, ambience, and costs before coming to a decision.
Seminar Marketing and Publicity
Seminar marketing is by far the most critical and often most challenging task in event organizing, and is often regarded as the most critical factor of an event’s success. This is because the number of participants turning up for a seminar is highly dependent on the strength of marketing activities and publicity. Whether or not the event achieves its objective or whether the organizers will walk home with a profit or loss largely depends on the marketability of the event. This means that the right marketing strategy and seminar positioning must be adopted in order to draw adequate event sign-ups.
Most of the time, event organizers who have large budgets will turn to above the line marketing such as newspaper and magazine advertisements as well as radio and television advertising to publicize the event. Press releases may also be sent in to major newspapers, in order to create the awareness of the upcoming event. Additionally, large advertising media banners and posters can also be purchased to advertise the event in high human traffic areas. When using print advertising, the specific magazine or newspaper used must have the target audience of your event as their primary readership base. Also all print media should be copy written with an enticing approach, highlighting the extensive benefits of participation.
However, if budget is a problem, then below the line marketing may also do wonders. If the event is industry specific, mass faxing to companies belonging to the industry would be feasible. Telemarketing is a very effective marketing channel to create awareness within the right participant group. Additionally, dispatching sales personnel to attend to the requirements of large participant groups is an ideal and effective strategy. Mass emailing has become one of the most cost-efficient methods to reach out to large target audiences. This would be really useful if the event organizer already have an existing database. Otherwise, a list of names can be rented from database companies to attain the same results.
Collaboration with sponsors
Getting reputable sponsors to participate in an event will help boost the creditability of the event, as well as reduce costs. Sponsors can also help with marketing, as they also help publicize your event to their customers. Apart from that, some of the sponsors can chip in on venue rental in exchange for exhibition space or publicity for themselves. Some sponsors also require a short message of their company to be given to the participants during the event. Others give away sample products or door gifts to participants.
Managing People and working with speakers
A seminar will not be successful without the people running it, as well as the speakers sharing their knowledge to the participants. Invite speakers who are of caliber and reputation to the event, and who will provide the participants with relevant information to their work, industry or business. Prepare the speakers beforehand and work with them on their Power point presentations as well as pre-inform them of the logistics processes, timing as well as the expected audience size. Check with them on any special requests, such as the requirement for an overhead projector or additional microphones to be used for question and answer sessions.
All events require a good team of people handling tasks on ushering, registration, customer service as well as handling financials. Familiarize the team with any required event protocol to eliminate the possibility of confusion or error. In order to ensure smooth implementation, each person should be familiar with their individual roles. This can be ensured through a preparation of a detailed schedule of events coupled with roles and responsibilities for each person. Ideally, a project manager should control the whole team and ensure that everyone is carrying out their duties efficiently. Apart from that, the project manager also has the delegated authority to deal with all parties such as the venue management as well as the sponsors and event exhibitors.
Actual Day – Preparation, Registration, Ushering, Feedback
All seminar planning and preparations, constituting 80% of total work involved, cascade to the actual event which may last only for a few hours or a few days. On the day before the event, visit the venue to ensure that everything is in order according the requirements and specifications. Microphones, projectors, audio and video systems must be all checked to be in excellent working order. Over at the office, have a packing list prepared and get all require items transferred to the actual venue at least a day before the event. Event staff should be dispatched to work on site preparations, including setting up booths, decorations and posters, the day before the event.
On the actual day, staff should be present at the venue at least 1 ½ hours before commencement. They should report to their duty stations and must be ready to receive participants half an hour before they are scheduled to file in. Registrations must be made at the door to ensure authorized access. Name tags, door gifts and event schedules or booklets will be given out at this point and ushers will show participants to their seats in the event hall.
Staff will also be responsible for providing advice or help to participants during the event. Finally, feedback forms should be distributed and then collected from participants to determine the satisfaction level on all aspects of the event experience. This is in order to receive pointers, ideas and advice for future improvements.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
Seminars and events have always been implemented as a holistic experience to participants. Thus, organizing an event requires extensive planning and preparation with most work implemented at least a few months before the actual event. Most of the time, seminars seem to run like clockwork with all events flowing smoothly according to schedule. In reality however, much groundwork has been worked on with the purpose of developing the right atmosphere in addition to a beneficial experience to partipants.
Establishing the theme of the event
Each event follows a theme and purpose which will drive the event set-up, the target audiences or the participants, the guests and the marketing approach. In general, a business event such as an international conference for a particular industry will appeal to participants conducting businesses within that industry as well as sponsors who gain mileage out of publicizing their products during the event.
Apart from that, the theme of the seminar will also determine the type of marketing channels to be used to for publicity. This also holds true for the seminar marketing team who will need the event theme to correctly identify target participants and companies to sell the event to.
Selecting a venue
Venue selection is highly dependent on the scale of the event. Usually this is determined by the number of participants, the presence of any guests of honor (such as royalty or politicians) the activities during the event, or if there are additional floor space required for exhibition purposes.
A typical seminar of about 100 – 200 can be comfortably implemented in a hotel seminar room, possibly in a theater style setting or classroom setting. However, larger scale events with participant numbers scaling between 500 – 1000 may require a large hall, ballroom, auditorium or a convention center.
The location and quality standard of the venue is also important especially if the event involves the participation of VIPs. With this, a reputable location would be imperative, including good quality and wide range of seminar facilities available. It is always wise to explore the possibility of a few venues and examine their location suitability, level of services, ambience, and costs before coming to a decision.
Seminar Marketing and Publicity
Seminar marketing is by far the most critical and often most challenging task in event organizing, and is often regarded as the most critical factor of an event’s success. This is because the number of participants turning up for a seminar is highly dependent on the strength of marketing activities and publicity. Whether or not the event achieves its objective or whether the organizers will walk home with a profit or loss largely depends on the marketability of the event. This means that the right marketing strategy and seminar positioning must be adopted in order to draw adequate event sign-ups.
Most of the time, event organizers who have large budgets will turn to above the line marketing such as newspaper and magazine advertisements as well as radio and television advertising to publicize the event. Press releases may also be sent in to major newspapers, in order to create the awareness of the upcoming event. Additionally, large advertising media banners and posters can also be purchased to advertise the event in high human traffic areas. When using print advertising, the specific magazine or newspaper used must have the target audience of your event as their primary readership base. Also all print media should be copy written with an enticing approach, highlighting the extensive benefits of participation.
However, if budget is a problem, then below the line marketing may also do wonders. If the event is industry specific, mass faxing to companies belonging to the industry would be feasible. Telemarketing is a very effective marketing channel to create awareness within the right participant group. Additionally, dispatching sales personnel to attend to the requirements of large participant groups is an ideal and effective strategy. Mass emailing has become one of the most cost-efficient methods to reach out to large target audiences. This would be really useful if the event organizer already have an existing database. Otherwise, a list of names can be rented from database companies to attain the same results.
Collaboration with sponsors
Getting reputable sponsors to participate in an event will help boost the creditability of the event, as well as reduce costs. Sponsors can also help with marketing, as they also help publicize your event to their customers. Apart from that, some of the sponsors can chip in on venue rental in exchange for exhibition space or publicity for themselves. Some sponsors also require a short message of their company to be given to the participants during the event. Others give away sample products or door gifts to participants.
Managing People and working with speakers
A seminar will not be successful without the people running it, as well as the speakers sharing their knowledge to the participants. Invite speakers who are of caliber and reputation to the event, and who will provide the participants with relevant information to their work, industry or business. Prepare the speakers beforehand and work with them on their Power point presentations as well as pre-inform them of the logistics processes, timing as well as the expected audience size. Check with them on any special requests, such as the requirement for an overhead projector or additional microphones to be used for question and answer sessions.
All events require a good team of people handling tasks on ushering, registration, customer service as well as handling financials. Familiarize the team with any required event protocol to eliminate the possibility of confusion or error. In order to ensure smooth implementation, each person should be familiar with their individual roles. This can be ensured through a preparation of a detailed schedule of events coupled with roles and responsibilities for each person. Ideally, a project manager should control the whole team and ensure that everyone is carrying out their duties efficiently. Apart from that, the project manager also has the delegated authority to deal with all parties such as the venue management as well as the sponsors and event exhibitors.
Actual Day – Preparation, Registration, Ushering, Feedback
All seminar planning and preparations, constituting 80% of total work involved, cascade to the actual event which may last only for a few hours or a few days. On the day before the event, visit the venue to ensure that everything is in order according the requirements and specifications. Microphones, projectors, audio and video systems must be all checked to be in excellent working order. Over at the office, have a packing list prepared and get all require items transferred to the actual venue at least a day before the event. Event staff should be dispatched to work on site preparations, including setting up booths, decorations and posters, the day before the event.
On the actual day, staff should be present at the venue at least 1 ½ hours before commencement. They should report to their duty stations and must be ready to receive participants half an hour before they are scheduled to file in. Registrations must be made at the door to ensure authorized access. Name tags, door gifts and event schedules or booklets will be given out at this point and ushers will show participants to their seats in the event hall.
Staff will also be responsible for providing advice or help to participants during the event. Finally, feedback forms should be distributed and then collected from participants to determine the satisfaction level on all aspects of the event experience. This is in order to receive pointers, ideas and advice for future improvements.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 12:22 PM
Friday, October 28, 2005
Hiring the Perfect Fit Through eLance.com
Hiring the Perfect Fit Through eLance.com
Outsourcing has moved upward in the most-improved columns of efficiency and respectability through eLance.com. This website offers time-saving access to high-quality expertise that enables you to offload projects for quick completion, while maximizing your budget and letting you focus on those items not easily delegated. If the project you have in mind falls into one of the twelve categories currently supported by eLance, you are literally in business: 1) Software & Technology, 2) Writing & Translation, 3) Sales & Marketing, 4) Management & Finance, 5) Legal, 6) Website Development, 7) Graphic Design & Art, 8) Search Advertising, 9) Administrative Support, 10) Training & Development, 11) Audio, Video & Multi-media, and 12) Architecture & Engineering.
Once you are registered on the site as a Buyer (a sliding scale of fees is involved), eLance provides an extremely user-friendly series of steps and links that guide you through the project listing process. This article serves as a summary of those steps, with a few suggestions and tips merged in along the way for added success. First, you need to select one of the twelve categories, and then a sub-category (e.g., Writing & Translation→Editing & Proofreading). You will then select a Title for your project and give a detailed description of the job-at-hand, including specific expectations, any required expertise, and so forth, followed by the total number of days and the date range that your project will be open for bidding. Next you will establish the timeframe for job completion once a bidder has been selected, and you will set your budget.
Let’s take a sidebar for a moment here to discuss the subject of budget. Although outsourcing does enhance your ability to save money, eLance is not a marketplace for slave labor. There are always exceptions, but for the most part, the Service Providers bidding on your job(s) are sincere professionals eager to return a quality product at a fair price. Prior to setting the budget for your project listing, take a little time to understand the market for the type of work you are posting. Google your main and sub-categories, and then check out websites and pricing to get a feel for going rates. You might also want to consult with applicable local businesses and with colleagues as well, to help determine a price that is affordable for you but not insulting to prospective bidders. Buyers who attempt to milk the system—or who are sub-contracting, for pennies, work they themselves have acquired through bidding—will quickly discover that only the very least qualified suppliers are submitting bid proposals for their jobs. Simply put, be reasonable and fair in your pricing expectations.
Once you’ve established your budget, you will have a couple of options that can assist you in pre-screening in-coming bids. You’ll have a choice of whether or not you wish to allow Service Providers to communicate with you, via Private Message Boards, prior to their actually placing their bids. This communication is optional but advisable, because you will receive more comprehensive bids if the Service Providers are able to clarify their questions in advance of bid commitments. You will also be able to list up to three questions you’d like bidders to answer, which will further assist you with your pre-qualification.
Perhaps the most important decision you’ll make as you’re creating your listing is whether you want your project to be at the Basic or the Select Level. Either one will give you access to top-notch Service Providers, but there is one key difference between the two: At the Select Level, Service Providers cannot see the other bid proposals being submitted. This results in more detailed but fewer responses, generally from the most seriously invested tier of registered providers. At the Basic Level, where Service Providers can read each other’s submissions, you will still receive bids from highly-qualified individuals, but you’ll have a larger number of responses, with less proposal detail. This Basic level also produces a lower bid range, since providers view all the other bid amounts and competitively bid against them. Participation in the Select Level costs more for both you and the Service Providers than Basic, so you’ll need to decide the best option for each of your project listings. eLance gives you additional information on the listing levels to help you make the most advantageous choice.
Once you’ve paid a fully-refundable deposit of $25 to re-confirm your identity, your job will be posted and bids will begin pouring in. This brings you to the most difficult part of the entire process: hiring the best match for you and your job-at-hand. Some bids will be rejected right away due to inflated pricing or an obvious qualification mismatch, but you will generally end up with a collection of contenders. If your project has been listed at the Basic Level, you will have received bids from both Select and Basic Service Providers, and in the upper right hand corner of each proposal, you will see the eLance statistics for each bidder: average feedback rating, number of feedbacks, and total dollars earned through eLance projects. These statistics, in addition to the bidders’ Profiles, Feedback Comments and Portfolios, will help you complete the “pictures” created by each proposal submitted. On a number of proposals, you will also see the words “New Provider.” Please don’t discount these bids out-of-hand, even though there might not be much of an eLance track record yet. You will frequently find the most qualified, cost-effective option in someone who has just signed on to eLance and is eager to build a strong clientele base and a solid reputation. If your project was listed at the Select Level, you’ll see all of the statistics as before, but only Select Service Providers will have placed bids. There will be “New Providers” in this category as well, though, so take the time to review their credentials.
Once you’ve read all the relative proposal and background material and then made your selection, you will go into the Buyer Activity section of “My eLance” and “offer” your chosen Service Provider the job. When the Service Provider “accepts,” you will pay him or her according to the terms stated in the proposal (usually a deposit of 25-50% of the total bid amount), a process most easily accomplished using eLance electronic funds transfer or Pay Pal. At that point, you and the Service Provider can begin communicating directly, based upon your mutual agreement, through the Private Message Board, email and/or telephone, to get the project started—and voila!, you can cross that task off your list.
Assuming your outsourcing requirements fall into one of the twelve eLance categories, you will discover that managing those demands has just become immeasurably more…well, more manageable. There is a legion of talented freeLancers out there, ready and willing to do everything possible to help you get your you-fill-in-the-blank job accomplished through new, efficient partnerships. As you begin building associations with a group of Service Providers, you’ll soon find that you’ll want to avail yourself of the option enabling you to invite individuals to bid on projects, a time-saving feature that lets you quickly hire your favorite(s)—and together, you can make each other’s day—one right after the other—the eLance way!
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 1:01 PM
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Matt Bacak Learns to fly...
I'm sitting here in my office with my flight instructor. I
don't know if I told you yet, but I'm learning to fly. Ya,
better get out of the skies. Now, the reason that he is here
is becuase I'm sharing with him some of my marketing strategies
for his new website to he can dominate the search engines for
certain keywords.
So, If you live in Atlanta, and want to learn to fly you got to check out Matt Tanner before you do any thing else. Here is his website: http://www.matttanner.com
He will help you become a private pilot and get your private pilot license.
To the skies,
Matt Bacak
don't know if I told you yet, but I'm learning to fly. Ya,
better get out of the skies. Now, the reason that he is here
is becuase I'm sharing with him some of my marketing strategies
for his new website to he can dominate the search engines for
certain keywords.
So, If you live in Atlanta, and want to learn to fly you got to check out Matt Tanner before you do any thing else. Here is his website: http://www.matttanner.com
He will help you become a private pilot and get your private pilot license.
To the skies,
Matt Bacak
posted by Matt Bacak at 7:05 PM
Google Adwords
Google Adwords
Description: With over 70% businesses getting leads via search engine placements, it is high time you added online campaigns to your marketing plan. Here is quick snapshot on how the popular Google AdWords programme works.
The beauty of Google Adwords set up is its simplicity. Google programmers seem to be a close follower of the maxim taught by Edward Debono when it comes to simplicity. Signing up and getting started is very easy and takes a few minutes to get your campaign rolling.
If you are new to the Google Adwords programme, all you need to do is relax, and go through the simple steps mentioned below to get you started off on one of the most technically advanced advertising plans on the internet:
Step 1: Define the eyeballs:
The first step would be to define the target group for your advertisement. There are multiple fields to select from which help you get the geography and language preference of the audience set up so that your ads are shown only to the relevant audience. This process results in an Ad Group, and you can define multiple Ad Groups for various campaigns.
Step 2: Word your ad:
All Google ads are text based and they are displayed in varying font sizes and color to define order and importance. Once your Ad Group is defined, you need to start putting the advertising message together. This is a bit tricky as you need to get the communication within preset character limits. You can write a headline of up to 25 characters, and a two line message of 95 characters. It might be a good idea to take a look at other Google ads in order to understand the choice of words for the ad. After the descriptions are done, you can enter a display URL.
Once the ad itself is put together, you can select the keywords for which the advert should show up. You need to careful with your selection here as your selection of keywords is going to be the key to success (as well as critical for your billing at Google) of your campaign. You can get a lot of help from the keyword tool which helps you find alternate keywords as well. It is recommended that you start with a few keywords in the first place and then proceed to add keywords as the campaign progresses.
Step 3: Define the commercials:
Here’s when we need to start sorting out the preferred currency of billing and display. Google does not allow you to change currency of preference once you have set it so you need to be sure which currency you would like to be billed in.
Google Adwords allows you to set pricing of each click. The system would suggest you a maximum cost per click (CPC) which you can choose or define a CPC which you are willing to spend. The ‘Traffic Estimator’ allows you to see a hypothetical scenario of the traffic you can expect with each type of CPC you choose along with the cost of campaign. This helps you in choosing the keywords effectively.
The commercial section does have a number of sub steps to follow! You now need to finally define what you would like to spend on the campaign. Google will display your ad only till such time the budget permits and then inform you about the expiry of budget. This feature allows you to stay within a pre-defined budget. Google Adwords also recommends a budget based on your previous selection. You can set your budget based on this recommendation.
Once you have completed setting your preferences on the system, Google Adwords gives you an opportunity to review all the details and then click on the final process of signing up for the service.
Step 4: Signing on the dotted line:
True to the rest of the process, the signing up process is really quite simple. All you need is a valid and frequently accessed email account and set up a password and you are ready to roll.
Getting started on Google Adwords is quite simple as you can see from the above steps. All the best with your online marketing campaign with Google AdWords.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
Description: With over 70% businesses getting leads via search engine placements, it is high time you added online campaigns to your marketing plan. Here is quick snapshot on how the popular Google AdWords programme works.
The beauty of Google Adwords set up is its simplicity. Google programmers seem to be a close follower of the maxim taught by Edward Debono when it comes to simplicity. Signing up and getting started is very easy and takes a few minutes to get your campaign rolling.
If you are new to the Google Adwords programme, all you need to do is relax, and go through the simple steps mentioned below to get you started off on one of the most technically advanced advertising plans on the internet:
Step 1: Define the eyeballs:
The first step would be to define the target group for your advertisement. There are multiple fields to select from which help you get the geography and language preference of the audience set up so that your ads are shown only to the relevant audience. This process results in an Ad Group, and you can define multiple Ad Groups for various campaigns.
Step 2: Word your ad:
All Google ads are text based and they are displayed in varying font sizes and color to define order and importance. Once your Ad Group is defined, you need to start putting the advertising message together. This is a bit tricky as you need to get the communication within preset character limits. You can write a headline of up to 25 characters, and a two line message of 95 characters. It might be a good idea to take a look at other Google ads in order to understand the choice of words for the ad. After the descriptions are done, you can enter a display URL.
Once the ad itself is put together, you can select the keywords for which the advert should show up. You need to careful with your selection here as your selection of keywords is going to be the key to success (as well as critical for your billing at Google) of your campaign. You can get a lot of help from the keyword tool which helps you find alternate keywords as well. It is recommended that you start with a few keywords in the first place and then proceed to add keywords as the campaign progresses.
Step 3: Define the commercials:
Here’s when we need to start sorting out the preferred currency of billing and display. Google does not allow you to change currency of preference once you have set it so you need to be sure which currency you would like to be billed in.
Google Adwords allows you to set pricing of each click. The system would suggest you a maximum cost per click (CPC) which you can choose or define a CPC which you are willing to spend. The ‘Traffic Estimator’ allows you to see a hypothetical scenario of the traffic you can expect with each type of CPC you choose along with the cost of campaign. This helps you in choosing the keywords effectively.
The commercial section does have a number of sub steps to follow! You now need to finally define what you would like to spend on the campaign. Google will display your ad only till such time the budget permits and then inform you about the expiry of budget. This feature allows you to stay within a pre-defined budget. Google Adwords also recommends a budget based on your previous selection. You can set your budget based on this recommendation.
Once you have completed setting your preferences on the system, Google Adwords gives you an opportunity to review all the details and then click on the final process of signing up for the service.
Step 4: Signing on the dotted line:
True to the rest of the process, the signing up process is really quite simple. All you need is a valid and frequently accessed email account and set up a password and you are ready to roll.
Getting started on Google Adwords is quite simple as you can see from the above steps. All the best with your online marketing campaign with Google AdWords.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 10:38 AM
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
My wife's pregnant again....
Hey,
If you have been with me for a while you
may remember my heartbreak and email letting
you know that my wife and I lost our baby.
(That was the beginning of this year)
Well it happened again!
This time a little different, though.
You see a few months ago I wanted to
take my wife on a get-away for
a few days to relax and have fun.
Well, we did. And we wanted to not
tell anyone about Steph being pregnant
because of what happened the first
time. (The first loss was devastating.)
While we were on this vacation a couple of
months ago Steph was pregnant again and we
were both trying to keep it quiet.
The last day that we were on the trip,
Steph came out of the bathroom again crying,
telling me that we lost to baby again.
Oh, she knew. It was not a pretty picture.
I didn't know what to do. I got very
angry and wondered if it was me. If
I had something to do with this.
We had to wait for about 2 days till
we could get to the doctor because
we where out of the country and had
a long plane trip back.
We got back, went straight to the
doctor to be told that we needed to
go to the emergency room for possible
surgery (again). From horrible to
even worse news.
There I was in the waiting room - we
has been there for 5 hours and I was
waiting for her without any idea of what
was actually going on. And then all the
sudden a doctor comes and grabs my arm
and doesn't say a word. Just dragged
me to the room where my wife was. I had
no idea what was going on at all.
I get inside the room. Thinking that
now something happened to my wife. But,
lo and behold the doctor told me to
look up and look at the screen.
They said that she had been pregnant
with twins, and we lost one but we still
have one. I had no idea. But, happy
were we. Boy, what a roller coaster day.
Yes, Steph is still pregnant... :-)
I'm heading to the hospital right now to find
out if it is a boy or a girl, and I'll send you a
email in a bit to let you know what I find out.
Talk to you soon,
Matt
P.S. I'll also tell you about special telecall
that I'm going to do just for you because
I'm just so excited about the new addition
Marketing Tip Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
If you have been with me for a while you
may remember my heartbreak and email letting
you know that my wife and I lost our baby.
(That was the beginning of this year)
Well it happened again!
This time a little different, though.
You see a few months ago I wanted to
take my wife on a get-away for
a few days to relax and have fun.
Well, we did. And we wanted to not
tell anyone about Steph being pregnant
because of what happened the first
time. (The first loss was devastating.)
While we were on this vacation a couple of
months ago Steph was pregnant again and we
were both trying to keep it quiet.
The last day that we were on the trip,
Steph came out of the bathroom again crying,
telling me that we lost to baby again.
Oh, she knew. It was not a pretty picture.
I didn't know what to do. I got very
angry and wondered if it was me. If
I had something to do with this.
We had to wait for about 2 days till
we could get to the doctor because
we where out of the country and had
a long plane trip back.
We got back, went straight to the
doctor to be told that we needed to
go to the emergency room for possible
surgery (again). From horrible to
even worse news.
There I was in the waiting room - we
has been there for 5 hours and I was
waiting for her without any idea of what
was actually going on. And then all the
sudden a doctor comes and grabs my arm
and doesn't say a word. Just dragged
me to the room where my wife was. I had
no idea what was going on at all.
I get inside the room. Thinking that
now something happened to my wife. But,
lo and behold the doctor told me to
look up and look at the screen.
They said that she had been pregnant
with twins, and we lost one but we still
have one. I had no idea. But, happy
were we. Boy, what a roller coaster day.
Yes, Steph is still pregnant... :-)
I'm heading to the hospital right now to find
out if it is a boy or a girl, and I'll send you a
email in a bit to let you know what I find out.
Talk to you soon,
Matt
P.S. I'll also tell you about special telecall
that I'm going to do just for you because
I'm just so excited about the new addition
Marketing Tip Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 11:33 PM
Google Adsense: What You Need to Know!
Google Adsense: What You Need to Know!
Description: Heard a lot about Google AdSense and not sure what it has for you? Here is a quick listing of benefits which can be derived by adding Google AdSense to your website and how it helps you generate revenue via your website traffic.
We read about how to develop a Google AdWord campaign, but where do these ads get featured? To think that the advertisements feature only on Google depending on the keywords searched by users is not true as that isis only part of the ad exposure. Google AdSense can be considered the other half of AdWords. AdSense allows website owners to feature relevant Google ads on their website which matches user profile with the profile requirement of each ad and also allows website owners to EARN revenue via the traffic generated by website.
So if you have a website which attracts decent number of hits every month, Google AdSense is probably a good revenue generation model for you and the below mentioned benefits should be effective to get you convinced:
Add a revenue stream to your business:
Google AdSense provides an added revenue stream to your business which is very easy to set up and has a robust backend application which delivers the most relevant ads to the most relevant target group.
Set up procedure is very simple:
You do not need any technology know-how when it comes to signing up with Google AdSense. A simple sign up process, subsequent approval, and copying some basic html code onto your website will get you started with Google ads on your site right away.
Immediate advertisers on your site:
Since Google already operates a very successful AdWords program, where thousands of advertisers sign up, you get immediate advertisers who would like to be featured on your website. No sales or marketing is required by you to get advertisers at any stage.
Continuous Technology enhancement at no cost to you:
Google research team spends thousands of man hours in improving the AdSense programme so that users are directed to the most relevant ads and all this is available to you with no cost.
Don’t fret if you don’t have a high viewer ship rate on your site:
You can still earn via Google AdSense. You can feature the Google search box on your site and the subsequent page displayed with the search results has ads featured on them which can be your revenue generating AdSense Campaign.
No Junk ads displayed on your website:
If you are concerned about displaying junk advertisements which might have no relevance to your website visitors, then Google AdSense is for you. Only relevant ads are displayed to users and that is picked by both the profile that you put together as well as the content on your website. A number of well defined filters work behind the AdSense programme allowing the application to be ‘intelligent’.
Find Google ads a tad boring?:
You are not the only one. Even Google engineers realize that the ads need some colour to them and you can add that to the display option. This does not eat into the users’ bandwidth and yet displays using a good colour combination on the website.
Google also operates a premium program for webmaster for the AdSense program if your website is attracting more than twenty million page views and five million search queries per month and this is known as AdSense Premier.
Getting started is easy:
It is difficult not to be convinced about the AdSense program, and you can start off quite easily with a single page form which requires basic information about the type of account you would like to have ( business or individual), website information, select product ( AdSense for Content or AdSense for Search) and contact information. Login needs to be created simply with a valid and frequently accessed email address. All the information submitted is sent to Google for approval and on approval, you receive a link to fetch code from which you need to post on your website and you are ON!
AdSense is an easy program to understand and implement and has already provided a steady source of income for many a net entrepreneurs! What are you waiting for?
Description: Heard a lot about Google AdSense and not sure what it has for you? Here is a quick listing of benefits which can be derived by adding Google AdSense to your website and how it helps you generate revenue via your website traffic.
We read about how to develop a Google AdWord campaign, but where do these ads get featured? To think that the advertisements feature only on Google depending on the keywords searched by users is not true as that isis only part of the ad exposure. Google AdSense can be considered the other half of AdWords. AdSense allows website owners to feature relevant Google ads on their website which matches user profile with the profile requirement of each ad and also allows website owners to EARN revenue via the traffic generated by website.
So if you have a website which attracts decent number of hits every month, Google AdSense is probably a good revenue generation model for you and the below mentioned benefits should be effective to get you convinced:
Add a revenue stream to your business:
Google AdSense provides an added revenue stream to your business which is very easy to set up and has a robust backend application which delivers the most relevant ads to the most relevant target group.
Set up procedure is very simple:
You do not need any technology know-how when it comes to signing up with Google AdSense. A simple sign up process, subsequent approval, and copying some basic html code onto your website will get you started with Google ads on your site right away.
Immediate advertisers on your site:
Since Google already operates a very successful AdWords program, where thousands of advertisers sign up, you get immediate advertisers who would like to be featured on your website. No sales or marketing is required by you to get advertisers at any stage.
Continuous Technology enhancement at no cost to you:
Google research team spends thousands of man hours in improving the AdSense programme so that users are directed to the most relevant ads and all this is available to you with no cost.
Don’t fret if you don’t have a high viewer ship rate on your site:
You can still earn via Google AdSense. You can feature the Google search box on your site and the subsequent page displayed with the search results has ads featured on them which can be your revenue generating AdSense Campaign.
No Junk ads displayed on your website:
If you are concerned about displaying junk advertisements which might have no relevance to your website visitors, then Google AdSense is for you. Only relevant ads are displayed to users and that is picked by both the profile that you put together as well as the content on your website. A number of well defined filters work behind the AdSense programme allowing the application to be ‘intelligent’.
Find Google ads a tad boring?:
You are not the only one. Even Google engineers realize that the ads need some colour to them and you can add that to the display option. This does not eat into the users’ bandwidth and yet displays using a good colour combination on the website.
Google also operates a premium program for webmaster for the AdSense program if your website is attracting more than twenty million page views and five million search queries per month and this is known as AdSense Premier.
Getting started is easy:
It is difficult not to be convinced about the AdSense program, and you can start off quite easily with a single page form which requires basic information about the type of account you would like to have ( business or individual), website information, select product ( AdSense for Content or AdSense for Search) and contact information. Login needs to be created simply with a valid and frequently accessed email address. All the information submitted is sent to Google for approval and on approval, you receive a link to fetch code from which you need to post on your website and you are ON!
AdSense is an easy program to understand and implement and has already provided a steady source of income for many a net entrepreneurs! What are you waiting for?
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 11:34 AM
First review is up on Matt Bacak's Reviews
The first review that I have posted on www.mattbacakreviews.com and is titled: "The Truth about Internet Radio and using it to Make Money..." Go here right now to read it: www.mattbacakreviews.com
Enjoy,
Matt Bacak
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
Enjoy,
Matt Bacak
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 12:07 AM
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Brand New Blog That Reviews Internet Marketing Sites
I just put up a brand new blog that reviews seminars, products, and teleseminars to save you time and money! It's called Matt Bacak Reviews go here: http://www.mattbacakreviews.com
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 6:58 PM
cPanel Fantastico - Features and Benefits
cPanel Fantastico - Features and Benefits
With cPanel Fantastico, you can quickly install a variety of open source scripts on your website. So make sure your hosting company offers cPanel Fantastico.
Fantastico is a 3rd-party cPanel add-on and can be purchased and added to the standard cPanel interface. Fantastico allows you to quickly install a variety of open-source scripts. By selecting a script and providing some basic information for each, you can install a script within minutes. Fantastico is designed so that the script you install is always the newest available.
Below is some of the scripts available for installation in Fantastico:
Blogs
b2Evolution : A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages and search engines friendly URLs.
Nucleus : A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts, future posts and bookmarklets.
WordPress : A personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors and bookmarklets.
Content Management
Drupal : An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging and news aggregator.
Mambo : A professional level yet easy to use CMS featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.
php-Nuke : One of the most popular community-based portals with a big choice of languages and modules.
SiteFrame : A straightforward CMS designed for rapid deployment of community-based websites. Nice-looking templates, oriented toward document-sharing, clean interface.
Customer Relationships
Crafty Syntax : A Live Help chat system featuring monitor your visitors, proactively open a chat session, multiple chat sessions, referrer tracking, page view tracking, multiple operators, canned responses/images/URLs, multiple departments each with different icons, leave a message.
Help Center Live : Very powerful all-in-one help center including Live Help, Support Tickets and FAQ. Features include unlimited operators/departments, monitor visitors, initiate chat, collect visitor's information, track visitor's footprint, auto save chat transcripts, canned messages, leave a message, auto-assign tickets to operators, unlimited FAQ topics.
osTicket : Featuring email piping, pop3 login, unlimited email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, avoid autoresponder loops, limit maximum tickets user can have opened, accept attachments and limit size, pager alerts for admin.
Support Logic : A support tickets system featuring multiple email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, canned responses, HTML tags support, email limit on a per user/day basis, attachments.
Discussion Boards
Invision Board : A widely-popular open-source bulletin-board package, works well, simple user interface and admin panel, clean look, scales well, and can be customized.
SMF : Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources.
E-Commerce
CubeCart : An easy to use yet powerful shopping cart featuring unlimited categories and products, multiple payment gateways, downloadable products. The design is very easy to modify.
OS Commerce : A power-user shopping cart with a big variety of modules and support of almost every payment gateway.
ZenCart : Zen Cart is a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.
Image Galleries
4Images Gallery : Unlimited categories/subcategories, web-based and FTP images upload, auto-thumbnails, comments, send a picture and rate a picture.
Coppermine : With categories and albums, thumbnails and intermediate size pics, search feature, new and random pictures, user management and user comments.
Gallery : Featuring albums within albums, thumbnailing specific picture area, captions, rotate, reorder pictures and album mirroring.
Mailing List
PHPlist : A powerful mailing list featuring multiple mailing lists and attachments.
Apart from the above scripts, Fantastico has a whole load of other scripts ranging from PHPAcution to WebCalendar.
If your hosting company uses cPanel with Fantastico, you will be able to add attractive features to your website free of charge by installing one or more of the scripts mentioned above. Without Fantastico, it is still possible to add these features but you will have to manually install and configure the scripts yourself. To make life easier for yourself, make sure you choose a hosting company which offers Fantastico.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 1:25 PM
Monday, October 24, 2005
Benefits of Gmail
Benefits of Gmail
So you need to be invited by someone to get your own Gmail Account. But that is probably the only downside of the Gmail free email service. Gmail has so many unique benefits for users that one does want to thank Google and ardent Gmail users often wonder how they have been managing without Gmail till recently.
If you are still wondering why you should switch to Gmail (for which you would anyways need to beg someone to send you an invite!) here are some primary reasons which answer your questions:
Size does matters: Sure it does and with 2 GB e-mail space; you don’t need to worry about another email bouncing back for quite some time. I am sure you have heard about this key feature of Gmail more often that not and it has been one of the unique selling points of the Gmail email service.
So you need to be invited by someone to get your own Gmail Account. But that is probably the only downside of the Gmail free email service. Gmail has so many unique benefits for users that one does want to thank Google and ardent Gmail users often wonder how they have been managing without Gmail till recently.
If you are still wondering why you should switch to Gmail (for which you would anyways need to beg someone to send you an invite!) here are some primary reasons which answer your questions:
Size does matters: Sure it does and with 2 GB e-mail space; you don’t need to worry about another email bouncing back for quite some time. I am sure you have heard about this key feature of Gmail more often that not and it has been one of the unique selling points of the Gmail email service.
The days of deleting emails as soon as they land in your inbox in fear of having important emails bounce back, are a thing of the past thanks to the generous inbox size of Gmail.
Powered by Google: Thanks to the fantastic search technology of Google, setting up folders and marking of emails is a thing of the past. You can search the entire account quickly and with highly accurate results with Google search.
Mail management tools: it must have been one frustrated online email user who developed the feature list for Gmail email management tools. All features are developed to remove the aggravation faced by users when using an online free email account. With Gmail, you don’t need to manually create folders; you can create labels for them and dump them there. Gmail also lists emails in contextual form when searched and in chronological order.
If you have emails which you need to keep on record, you can store it and not worry about using up precious space since you already have over 2000 MB to take care of your email back up requirements. It is almost like having an external hard disk available to you and a number of Gmail users actually use it to store critical documents as well.
Kill the spam: Span is the bane of existence for all email users and Gmail tackles this issue with ease of use which you wish other email providers had. All you have to do is report the SPAM and that email address is blocked once and for all.
No ads to clutter your space: Gmail is not 100% ad free (It has to earn revenues some how you know!). Yet it is not cluttered with mindless advertising. Google’s AdSense comes into focus here and delivers only relevant adverts to users and that too in a non-obstructive way. So you are spared spending precious bandwidth on downloading heavy advertising banners…Google select ads are featured as text links in a preset area of the screen which you can just ignore if you are not interested in it.
I have Gmail: Due to the ‘by invitation’ only concept, it is quite a prestigious thing to have a Gmail account as of now. You can call it snob value, or just pure luck.
Gmail is definitely becoming the king on free online email services and you can only expect to see new user-friendly features being added to the service sooner than later!
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 10:21 AM
Friday, October 21, 2005
Adsense – The Powerful Passive Income Generator
Adsense – The Powerful Passive Income Generator
Webmasters have a revolutionary new method of collecting income from their websites.
Whereas in the past advertising revenue was reserved for those sites with large a coming and going of visitors, now even teenagers are making a quick buck with their online hobby blogs. People place adsense on their online family photo albums, their blogs and their business sites. The minimum you would get, even with a small amount of traffic, is for adsense to pay for your hosting costs.
Adsense revolutionized the world of paid advertising; banner advertising is based on the number of visitors you attract to your site, so the number of “banner impressions” dictate the revenue you receive. Google Adsense is quite different; it is the number of visitors that actually click on the advertising that determine how much you earn.
There is also a great disparity between payouts; because advertisers bid up the price for certain keywords, some ads pay more than others. As such, a site with few visitors but expensive keywords in their google ads can potentially still pull in a hefty payout.
Google really has taken the web by storm; attracted to passive income, more and more people are seriously capitalizing on their Google adsense advertising. Some of the highest earners manage to attract enough visitors to make a four figure monthly income, just from using adsense alone! This is not one of those get-rich-quick schemes and Google’s adsense success is largely thanks to the fact that Google already enjoyed a fantastic reputation before introducing the program. They are a publicly traded company with physical headquarters. This, and the fact that anyone can apply to use adsense for free, has caused millions of people to sign up. For google it was a smart move, because now they extend their presence to countless websites and generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue. People were never reluctant to sign up, because the program is free. Google benefits by more people using adsense, so offering it for free was the best thing they could do.
One of the driving forced behind the program are its relevance to each and every page on a website; the program picks up keywords appearing in the website copy and automatically displays relevant ads. This increases the chances of people clicking through, and the webmaster collecting more revenue.
People are leveraging their income by operating several websites and attempting to attract as many targeted visitors as possible; in many instances we can observe that people work hard at a site, then once it is established they can largely leave it alone, yet still collect significant checks.
A major concern for entrepreneurs was the danger of a competitors ads showing up on their site; thanks to the adsense feature where it only displays relevant advertising. However this problem was solved by offering webmasters the option of filtering out unwanted ads. They can submit the URL of the competing site in their account, and any ads from the website will be blocked.
Google recently came out with a new feature: small targeted keywords based on the site’s content are displayed; then as people click on those, a page opens showing a variety of pay-per-click ads based on that keyword. This gives webmasters the chance of displaying more advertising in less space.
Adsense also adds creditability to your website; the more focused the content, the better the ads will be and this encourages people to built high quality websites. These make the net a better place and generally provide a free service; site owners can afford to share their expertise or passions because they can receive indirect revenue’s. The visitor does not pay for the information; instead the advertisers do, making the website’s existence possible in the first place.
It is no surprise Google adsense is the most widely used form of advertising; they have created a program that is beneficial to both advertisers and users with their “no click no pay” mechanism, or more popularly called “pay-per-click”. Advertisers do not pay for ads that are not drawing visitors, and website owners are paid more for each click than they would if the system were based on the number of people viewing the ads, instead of clicking on them.
All in all Google adsense has developed itself into a powerful tool, used by large corporations and the kid next door. They have truly revolutionized how the web thinks about advertising and made the process more profitable for site owners, while less costly for advertisers.
Webmasters have a revolutionary new method of collecting income from their websites.
Whereas in the past advertising revenue was reserved for those sites with large a coming and going of visitors, now even teenagers are making a quick buck with their online hobby blogs. People place adsense on their online family photo albums, their blogs and their business sites. The minimum you would get, even with a small amount of traffic, is for adsense to pay for your hosting costs.
Adsense revolutionized the world of paid advertising; banner advertising is based on the number of visitors you attract to your site, so the number of “banner impressions” dictate the revenue you receive. Google Adsense is quite different; it is the number of visitors that actually click on the advertising that determine how much you earn.
There is also a great disparity between payouts; because advertisers bid up the price for certain keywords, some ads pay more than others. As such, a site with few visitors but expensive keywords in their google ads can potentially still pull in a hefty payout.
Google really has taken the web by storm; attracted to passive income, more and more people are seriously capitalizing on their Google adsense advertising. Some of the highest earners manage to attract enough visitors to make a four figure monthly income, just from using adsense alone! This is not one of those get-rich-quick schemes and Google’s adsense success is largely thanks to the fact that Google already enjoyed a fantastic reputation before introducing the program. They are a publicly traded company with physical headquarters. This, and the fact that anyone can apply to use adsense for free, has caused millions of people to sign up. For google it was a smart move, because now they extend their presence to countless websites and generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue. People were never reluctant to sign up, because the program is free. Google benefits by more people using adsense, so offering it for free was the best thing they could do.
One of the driving forced behind the program are its relevance to each and every page on a website; the program picks up keywords appearing in the website copy and automatically displays relevant ads. This increases the chances of people clicking through, and the webmaster collecting more revenue.
People are leveraging their income by operating several websites and attempting to attract as many targeted visitors as possible; in many instances we can observe that people work hard at a site, then once it is established they can largely leave it alone, yet still collect significant checks.
A major concern for entrepreneurs was the danger of a competitors ads showing up on their site; thanks to the adsense feature where it only displays relevant advertising. However this problem was solved by offering webmasters the option of filtering out unwanted ads. They can submit the URL of the competing site in their account, and any ads from the website will be blocked.
Google recently came out with a new feature: small targeted keywords based on the site’s content are displayed; then as people click on those, a page opens showing a variety of pay-per-click ads based on that keyword. This gives webmasters the chance of displaying more advertising in less space.
Adsense also adds creditability to your website; the more focused the content, the better the ads will be and this encourages people to built high quality websites. These make the net a better place and generally provide a free service; site owners can afford to share their expertise or passions because they can receive indirect revenue’s. The visitor does not pay for the information; instead the advertisers do, making the website’s existence possible in the first place.
It is no surprise Google adsense is the most widely used form of advertising; they have created a program that is beneficial to both advertisers and users with their “no click no pay” mechanism, or more popularly called “pay-per-click”. Advertisers do not pay for ads that are not drawing visitors, and website owners are paid more for each click than they would if the system were based on the number of people viewing the ads, instead of clicking on them.
All in all Google adsense has developed itself into a powerful tool, used by large corporations and the kid next door. They have truly revolutionized how the web thinks about advertising and made the process more profitable for site owners, while less costly for advertisers.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 4:09 PM
Thursday, October 20, 2005
The Power Of The Blog
The Power Of The Blog
Can a Blog earn you a prison sentence? Ask Mojtaba Saminejad. He is an Iranian whose Blog, published in the Farsi language, earned him a two-year prison sentence in June 2005.
The online community is fast waking up to the power of blogs which have spread across the internet like wild fire. If you are still grappling with the word BLOG, these are online websites which are diary-like in approach and people are free to publish news or their ideas and thoughts. Blogs are very popular as they are simple to use and in most cases, free.
However, professional bloggers (people who have a decent no. of hours of blogging to their credit) will admit that blogging is not as easy as waking up in the morning, checking out some posts and putting together a few witty lines before you brush your teeth. You do need to be knowledgeable about the subject you are writing on or you are likely to be torn apart by people who are.
Having a Blog has its own set of inherent advantages which are obvious and some which are not so obvious. The better known advantages are:
Freedom to express: If you like to build a chain of communication and use that as food for thought and for your existence, a BLOG is the best way to create this outlet. You can express your opinion openly and you just might be surprised by the number of people who would agree with you. Such communication channels also help build momentum for a particular line of thought.
Networking at its best: If you own a blog which has genuine exchange of ideas it can evolve onto a good platform to network and grow your business. It is easier to impress potential customers with a strong and valid point of view rather than a price quote.
Excellent advertising platform: The sheer size of community generated at a popular blog provides an excellent advertising platform for advertisers. With the hunger for new advertising platforms which is both innovative and cost effective, blogs seems like the next location for the big bucks of advertisers.
Gauging public opinion on products and services: Bloggers post comments at a fiery pace. It is not uncommon to see a couple of comments posted within a few minutes of the original post. The topic and title of the blog needs to be alluring enough to get such quick responses. Blogs thus become an excellent forum to gauge public opinion on products and services and even political and business events.
Useful tool for inter-company communication without the red tape : IBM recently started a blog for its employees on the intranet. Reason? Simple, to get employees interacting with each other and building up a knowledge based community for putting together new ideas as well as provide good human resource practices. More and more companies are ignoring the naysayers for blogs and going ahead with using this tool for fostering better employee relations within the company. The knowledge sharing is also excellent and HR personnel can monitor comments to get an idea about new policies or identify troublesome issues head on and well in advance.
Other benefits which are worth mentioning if you own a blog is search engine optimization due to the high volume of content featured here, updating yourself on the latest trend in the marketplace which subsequently helps you identify new opportunities which helps you stay ahead and allows you to be tech-savvy in your social and professional circle. The benefits outlined above should be enough to inspire you to start a blog at the earliest!
Can a Blog earn you a prison sentence? Ask Mojtaba Saminejad. He is an Iranian whose Blog, published in the Farsi language, earned him a two-year prison sentence in June 2005.
The online community is fast waking up to the power of blogs which have spread across the internet like wild fire. If you are still grappling with the word BLOG, these are online websites which are diary-like in approach and people are free to publish news or their ideas and thoughts. Blogs are very popular as they are simple to use and in most cases, free.
However, professional bloggers (people who have a decent no. of hours of blogging to their credit) will admit that blogging is not as easy as waking up in the morning, checking out some posts and putting together a few witty lines before you brush your teeth. You do need to be knowledgeable about the subject you are writing on or you are likely to be torn apart by people who are.
Having a Blog has its own set of inherent advantages which are obvious and some which are not so obvious. The better known advantages are:
Freedom to express: If you like to build a chain of communication and use that as food for thought and for your existence, a BLOG is the best way to create this outlet. You can express your opinion openly and you just might be surprised by the number of people who would agree with you. Such communication channels also help build momentum for a particular line of thought.
Networking at its best: If you own a blog which has genuine exchange of ideas it can evolve onto a good platform to network and grow your business. It is easier to impress potential customers with a strong and valid point of view rather than a price quote.
Excellent advertising platform: The sheer size of community generated at a popular blog provides an excellent advertising platform for advertisers. With the hunger for new advertising platforms which is both innovative and cost effective, blogs seems like the next location for the big bucks of advertisers.
Gauging public opinion on products and services: Bloggers post comments at a fiery pace. It is not uncommon to see a couple of comments posted within a few minutes of the original post. The topic and title of the blog needs to be alluring enough to get such quick responses. Blogs thus become an excellent forum to gauge public opinion on products and services and even political and business events.
Useful tool for inter-company communication without the red tape : IBM recently started a blog for its employees on the intranet. Reason? Simple, to get employees interacting with each other and building up a knowledge based community for putting together new ideas as well as provide good human resource practices. More and more companies are ignoring the naysayers for blogs and going ahead with using this tool for fostering better employee relations within the company. The knowledge sharing is also excellent and HR personnel can monitor comments to get an idea about new policies or identify troublesome issues head on and well in advance.
Other benefits which are worth mentioning if you own a blog is search engine optimization due to the high volume of content featured here, updating yourself on the latest trend in the marketplace which subsequently helps you identify new opportunities which helps you stay ahead and allows you to be tech-savvy in your social and professional circle. The benefits outlined above should be enough to inspire you to start a blog at the earliest!
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 10:44 AM
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
How To Do Keyword Research
How To Do Keyword Research For The Internet
If you own an e-commerce website or going to own one then you unquestionably need to be acquainted with the concepts of web promotion and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Both of these aims at indispensable motive of any e-commerce business and that is generating more traffic. More traffic means superior visibility, increased number of visitors to the site and henceforth more business and more revenues. Other way round is to look out for advertisements carried through PPC (Pay per Click), which requires an extensive advertising budget.
Keyword research is therefore enormously necessary for ranking a site higher in the search engine. Content is the king of the web and use of proper keywords makes it visible to the world. In simple vocabulary it can be explained that keyword research is searching for keywords that are capable of attracting potential customers for products or services offered on a website. It is well known fact that a large amount of the visitors reach a site through search engines, nearly 60-70%. Lets take a look at the most important factor in selecting the keywords for a site i.e. KEI. Well KEI is a measure of how effective a keyword is for your web site. The derivation of the formula for KEI is based on three axioms:
1) The KEI for a keyword would increase if its popularity increases. 2) The KEI for a keyword would decrease if it becomes more competitive.
The KEI is calculated as a ratio between the popularity and competitiveness of the keyword. The KEI measure explains the popularity of keywords, higher the better.
Now the question arises, how to generate keywords? So far, Word tracker and Overture endow with the best source for keyword research. Word tracker offers keywords from a huge database of 340 million search queries using which one could build keyword lists for use in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. It exactly displays the number of counts for which a keyword or a phrase is being searched with number of websites focusing on the same. It also depicts the KEI. The competition search helps to find the number of competitors for a particular keyword or a set of keywords most suited for a site.
The online Word tracker keyword research tool is very easy to use and generates results within minutes. One could start by choosing a generic keyword. The system will present list of these keyword (in hundreds) for which one has to only enter the keyword phrase describing product, services or business like Diamond jewelry, Real estates etc. An appropriate keyword from the list could be selected that generates whole lot of related keywords. Once the keywords are selected it will be added in a keyword basket where it could be further used for export or import new keywords. One could also do a competition search based on different search engines as required. The final list will be the keyword phrases and the associated KEI, count and competition through which one could select the keywords based on competition and traffic it would generate.
Overly broad keywords rarely work well. With "flower" as a keyword, your site competes with many thousands of other sites for attention. However, the more targeted "Florida flower vendor" phrase increases your chance of appearing near the top of the results list. If you really want to get specific, your site would always be at the top of a search on "Florida flower vendor" - if any users were to actually search on it rather then on simple "flower”. Find out what keywords people actually use to query search engines before you make a final selection.
Overture is the other giant that is considered important for keyword research. Using similar steps in Overture based keyword research tool you can determine your primary keyword. Major drawback in overture tool is that it does not differentiate between singular and plural words. This could lead to targeting wrong keywords as search engines differentiate between the two.
If you own an e-commerce website or going to own one then you unquestionably need to be acquainted with the concepts of web promotion and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Both of these aims at indispensable motive of any e-commerce business and that is generating more traffic. More traffic means superior visibility, increased number of visitors to the site and henceforth more business and more revenues. Other way round is to look out for advertisements carried through PPC (Pay per Click), which requires an extensive advertising budget.
Keyword research is therefore enormously necessary for ranking a site higher in the search engine. Content is the king of the web and use of proper keywords makes it visible to the world. In simple vocabulary it can be explained that keyword research is searching for keywords that are capable of attracting potential customers for products or services offered on a website. It is well known fact that a large amount of the visitors reach a site through search engines, nearly 60-70%. Lets take a look at the most important factor in selecting the keywords for a site i.e. KEI. Well KEI is a measure of how effective a keyword is for your web site. The derivation of the formula for KEI is based on three axioms:
1) The KEI for a keyword would increase if its popularity increases. 2) The KEI for a keyword would decrease if it becomes more competitive.
The KEI is calculated as a ratio between the popularity and competitiveness of the keyword. The KEI measure explains the popularity of keywords, higher the better.
Now the question arises, how to generate keywords? So far, Word tracker and Overture endow with the best source for keyword research. Word tracker offers keywords from a huge database of 340 million search queries using which one could build keyword lists for use in search engine optimization and pay per click advertising. It exactly displays the number of counts for which a keyword or a phrase is being searched with number of websites focusing on the same. It also depicts the KEI. The competition search helps to find the number of competitors for a particular keyword or a set of keywords most suited for a site.
The online Word tracker keyword research tool is very easy to use and generates results within minutes. One could start by choosing a generic keyword. The system will present list of these keyword (in hundreds) for which one has to only enter the keyword phrase describing product, services or business like Diamond jewelry, Real estates etc. An appropriate keyword from the list could be selected that generates whole lot of related keywords. Once the keywords are selected it will be added in a keyword basket where it could be further used for export or import new keywords. One could also do a competition search based on different search engines as required. The final list will be the keyword phrases and the associated KEI, count and competition through which one could select the keywords based on competition and traffic it would generate.
Overly broad keywords rarely work well. With "flower" as a keyword, your site competes with many thousands of other sites for attention. However, the more targeted "Florida flower vendor" phrase increases your chance of appearing near the top of the results list. If you really want to get specific, your site would always be at the top of a search on "Florida flower vendor" - if any users were to actually search on it rather then on simple "flower”. Find out what keywords people actually use to query search engines before you make a final selection.
Overture is the other giant that is considered important for keyword research. Using similar steps in Overture based keyword research tool you can determine your primary keyword. Major drawback in overture tool is that it does not differentiate between singular and plural words. This could lead to targeting wrong keywords as search engines differentiate between the two.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 1:34 PM
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
How to Hire a Freelancer Using Elance
How to Hire a Freelancer Using Elance
If you have a project that you need to outsource but don’t know where to turn, Elance might be your solution. Elance connects businesses with a pool of professional providers from around the globe. When you post a project on Elance, providers compete against each other to give you the best price and service. You can choose either an open bid where all qualified Elance professionals can bid or an invitation only bid where you can peruse portfolios and choose which providers you’d like to invite to bid on your project. Signing up with Elance is easy and it’s free. Here’s a step-by-step guide to start you on your way to finding the professional that’s right for you.
Go to Elance.com and click on the “Buy Services” tab located at the top of the page. This will take you to the next screen.
On this screen you’ll be presented with three choices: “Post Your Project”, “Search For Providers” or “Get Project Review”. For this guide we are going to focus only on posting a project for open bid. So, click on the first button, “Post Your Project.” (You can always come back later to investigate the other options.)
Here, you’ll need to enter your contact information. If you do not already have a username and password, click on the “click here” underline next to the password box to get to the next screen. If you have a username and password, enter it now and skip to step 5.
You’ll see a screen with eight empty boxes. You’ll need to create a “username” and choose a password. Enter each within the assigned boxes. Re-enter your password in the “Re-enter password” box. Remember to choose both a username and a password that you’ll remember. Next, enter your e-mail address, first name, last name and phone number. You’ll also need to re-enter your email address for verification purposes. Then, click “continue”.
Choose the category which best suits your project needs. There are 11 categories to choose from. These include: Administrative Support, Architecture & Engineering, Audio, Visual & Multimedia, Graphic Design & Art, Legal, Management & Finance, Sales & Marketing, Software & Technology, Training & Development, Website Development and Writing & Translation. Once you choose your main category, you’ll be asked to choose a subcategory. This allows you to receive bids that better match your project. After choosing your subcategory, you’ll be taken to the next screen.
On this screen there are three main boxes of information to provide. In the first box, you’ll need to Choose a Title for your project (e.g., 12 Business Articles), describe your project in detail (how many words, project deadlines, etc.), choose how many days you will allow providers to bid on your project, choose an estimated start date, a projected budget and attach any files that may be relevant to your project. The more detailed you are in describing your project, the easier it will be for qualified providers to give you detailed proposals regarding your project.
In the next box, you’ll be asked if you want providers to able to seek clarification on your project via the private message board. If so, check the box. If not, skip to the next box.
Finally, you’ll be asked to choose how you receive your bids. The Select Level will provide you with higher quality providers. Providers will give you more competitive bids as Elance charges providers a higher rate to list as a Select Provider. You’ll also be seen as more serious about your project if you choose this level. The lowest amount you can receive for your project is $250 and you also must pay a refundable $25 deposit to post your project. If you choose not to go this route, you can pick the Basic level which allows you to post your project without a deposit but you’ll still need to be credit card verified (so that Elance knows you can pay for projects you award.) After filling in the required information in each of the boxes, click “Continue” to move to the next screen.
Here, you’ll need to provide your credit card information. Unless you chose Select providers you won’t be charged. If you want to pay your provider with a credit card through Elance, you’ll need to verify your credit card. Elance will make two small posts against your card and then refund them once you’ve posted your project. Once you supply the required information, click on “Continue”.
On the next screen, you’ll confirm the information you supplied regarding your project. If you need to make any changes, this is the place. You can either click on “Post Project Now” to make your project active or on “Save & Post Later” to post the project at a later date.
Now that your project is live, bidders can bid on your project. When you receive a number of bids, pick the provider best suited to your needs and your project is on it way to being completed.
If you have a project that you need to outsource but don’t know where to turn, Elance might be your solution. Elance connects businesses with a pool of professional providers from around the globe. When you post a project on Elance, providers compete against each other to give you the best price and service. You can choose either an open bid where all qualified Elance professionals can bid or an invitation only bid where you can peruse portfolios and choose which providers you’d like to invite to bid on your project. Signing up with Elance is easy and it’s free. Here’s a step-by-step guide to start you on your way to finding the professional that’s right for you.
Go to Elance.com and click on the “Buy Services” tab located at the top of the page. This will take you to the next screen.
On this screen you’ll be presented with three choices: “Post Your Project”, “Search For Providers” or “Get Project Review”. For this guide we are going to focus only on posting a project for open bid. So, click on the first button, “Post Your Project.” (You can always come back later to investigate the other options.)
Here, you’ll need to enter your contact information. If you do not already have a username and password, click on the “click here” underline next to the password box to get to the next screen. If you have a username and password, enter it now and skip to step 5.
You’ll see a screen with eight empty boxes. You’ll need to create a “username” and choose a password. Enter each within the assigned boxes. Re-enter your password in the “Re-enter password” box. Remember to choose both a username and a password that you’ll remember. Next, enter your e-mail address, first name, last name and phone number. You’ll also need to re-enter your email address for verification purposes. Then, click “continue”.
Choose the category which best suits your project needs. There are 11 categories to choose from. These include: Administrative Support, Architecture & Engineering, Audio, Visual & Multimedia, Graphic Design & Art, Legal, Management & Finance, Sales & Marketing, Software & Technology, Training & Development, Website Development and Writing & Translation. Once you choose your main category, you’ll be asked to choose a subcategory. This allows you to receive bids that better match your project. After choosing your subcategory, you’ll be taken to the next screen.
On this screen there are three main boxes of information to provide. In the first box, you’ll need to Choose a Title for your project (e.g., 12 Business Articles), describe your project in detail (how many words, project deadlines, etc.), choose how many days you will allow providers to bid on your project, choose an estimated start date, a projected budget and attach any files that may be relevant to your project. The more detailed you are in describing your project, the easier it will be for qualified providers to give you detailed proposals regarding your project.
In the next box, you’ll be asked if you want providers to able to seek clarification on your project via the private message board. If so, check the box. If not, skip to the next box.
Finally, you’ll be asked to choose how you receive your bids. The Select Level will provide you with higher quality providers. Providers will give you more competitive bids as Elance charges providers a higher rate to list as a Select Provider. You’ll also be seen as more serious about your project if you choose this level. The lowest amount you can receive for your project is $250 and you also must pay a refundable $25 deposit to post your project. If you choose not to go this route, you can pick the Basic level which allows you to post your project without a deposit but you’ll still need to be credit card verified (so that Elance knows you can pay for projects you award.) After filling in the required information in each of the boxes, click “Continue” to move to the next screen.
Here, you’ll need to provide your credit card information. Unless you chose Select providers you won’t be charged. If you want to pay your provider with a credit card through Elance, you’ll need to verify your credit card. Elance will make two small posts against your card and then refund them once you’ve posted your project. Once you supply the required information, click on “Continue”.
On the next screen, you’ll confirm the information you supplied regarding your project. If you need to make any changes, this is the place. You can either click on “Post Project Now” to make your project active or on “Save & Post Later” to post the project at a later date.
Now that your project is live, bidders can bid on your project. When you receive a number of bids, pick the provider best suited to your needs and your project is on it way to being completed.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 11:30 AM
Monday, October 17, 2005
The Power of Ezines
The Power of Ezines
Free publicity is there for the grabbing. All it takes is a little creativity and a powerful ezine. Writing an ezine (commonly known as an email newsletter), will assist you in building credibility while marketing your company service or product.
Approaching the Concept
Before you jump into writing an ezine, take a few days to research what is currently circulating on the Internet. To do this, visit search engines like Google or AskJeeves and type in the keyword phrase “creating ezines”. On Google alone, you will receive 167,000 possibilities for resource information just for that day. Now tomorrow the number may increase.
You can use these same search engines to find an ezine directory. Don’t be surprised if you receive a large number of ezine resource links from your search. Most sites will offer you the opportunity to join its directory for a low monthly fee. Doing so will increase your odds of making money with a monthly ezine.
Whether you’re a business owner or a freelance writer, you should join as many ezines in your target market as possible. By doing so, you will always stay on top of “what is hot” and “what is not”. Subscribing doesn’t always mean you’ll need to shell out money. In fact, a smart business professional will GIVE IT AWAY free.
Ezine Success
If you’re Internet savvy, you’re probably familiar with a number of websites that promote ezines. From ‘How to Make Money in Real Estate’ to ‘How to Do It Yourself Home Improvements’, everyone who is anybody is promoting their service or product through ezine articles and the success rate is growing rapidly. This is due to the high demand for information on self-help topics, health and fitness, business and investments. No matter what the industry, there is a definite way to make money using ezines.
Online you’ll find FREE and SUBSCRIPTION ezines. Most ezines that are delivered free are done so to ‘perk interest’ of perspective customers. The consumer is given a taste of what is to come and the result is the purchase of a service or product. The intent of subscription ezines is the same, but cost the consumer a small annual fee. Sometimes the consumer will receive a package for their purchase. For instance, a free e-book on marketing or selling on eBay is received by every subscriber. And tucked inside each e-book is more money making opportunities for the ezine publisher.
Many publishers will permit a copy writer to submit a small article on topics that pertain to the publisher’s ezine. The writer gives the publisher permission to publish their article, free of charge, in exchange for the publisher including the author’s bylines. Normally, this small 3-line blurb directs traffic to the writer’s website, which in turn, creates more business for the writer. To me – this seams like a WINNING OPPORTUNITY
Without a doubt – ezines pack a powerful punch! Whether you’re a publisher or writer, you can make a monthly residual that exceeds a $1,000. It’s begins with understanding your market and ends with giving them what they demand.
Free publicity is there for the grabbing. All it takes is a little creativity and a powerful ezine. Writing an ezine (commonly known as an email newsletter), will assist you in building credibility while marketing your company service or product.
Approaching the Concept
Before you jump into writing an ezine, take a few days to research what is currently circulating on the Internet. To do this, visit search engines like Google or AskJeeves and type in the keyword phrase “creating ezines”. On Google alone, you will receive 167,000 possibilities for resource information just for that day. Now tomorrow the number may increase.
You can use these same search engines to find an ezine directory. Don’t be surprised if you receive a large number of ezine resource links from your search. Most sites will offer you the opportunity to join its directory for a low monthly fee. Doing so will increase your odds of making money with a monthly ezine.
Whether you’re a business owner or a freelance writer, you should join as many ezines in your target market as possible. By doing so, you will always stay on top of “what is hot” and “what is not”. Subscribing doesn’t always mean you’ll need to shell out money. In fact, a smart business professional will GIVE IT AWAY free.
Ezine Success
If you’re Internet savvy, you’re probably familiar with a number of websites that promote ezines. From ‘How to Make Money in Real Estate’ to ‘How to Do It Yourself Home Improvements’, everyone who is anybody is promoting their service or product through ezine articles and the success rate is growing rapidly. This is due to the high demand for information on self-help topics, health and fitness, business and investments. No matter what the industry, there is a definite way to make money using ezines.
Online you’ll find FREE and SUBSCRIPTION ezines. Most ezines that are delivered free are done so to ‘perk interest’ of perspective customers. The consumer is given a taste of what is to come and the result is the purchase of a service or product. The intent of subscription ezines is the same, but cost the consumer a small annual fee. Sometimes the consumer will receive a package for their purchase. For instance, a free e-book on marketing or selling on eBay is received by every subscriber. And tucked inside each e-book is more money making opportunities for the ezine publisher.
Many publishers will permit a copy writer to submit a small article on topics that pertain to the publisher’s ezine. The writer gives the publisher permission to publish their article, free of charge, in exchange for the publisher including the author’s bylines. Normally, this small 3-line blurb directs traffic to the writer’s website, which in turn, creates more business for the writer. To me – this seams like a WINNING OPPORTUNITY
Without a doubt – ezines pack a powerful punch! Whether you’re a publisher or writer, you can make a monthly residual that exceeds a $1,000. It’s begins with understanding your market and ends with giving them what they demand.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 12:47 PM
Friday, October 14, 2005
Information Products For Profit
Information Products For Profit
It is no secret that the internet has created the new generation of millionaires in only a few short years. Every few seconds a person starts a home business somewhere around the world, and the amazing thing is that the market does not seem to be getting saturated anytime soon! Business is booming, and for quick easy cash people are turning to the internet.
However faced with the fact that many of us do not have a product to sell, nor do we have the infrastructure set up or the manpower necessary to distribute products. Nevertheless a growing group of people are selling products right out of their home office or their kitchen table; how? Information products! Now regular bookstores and music stores are getting serious competition from our very own neighbors. The technology available to all of us makes it extremely easy to create your very own information product; whether that is a book, a music CD, a course, you name it! All you need is a computer and an internet connection, some time and virtually no investment!
Here are some products that you can create right now!
E-books
E-books are electronic books; it is like a regular book but they can be read on your computer, or printed out with a regular printer. Because you do not produce a “physical” product you also do not have any printing costs! So therefore, you can already guess, you will keep 100% of the profits you make. Even more powerful however is the fact that you can sell unlimited numbers of your book, and do not need any inventory. Nor will you be stuck with piled of unsold books. You create something now, and you can profit from it forever! You can write about anything you are knowledgeable about, or anything you would like to research further. If you do not feel comfortable with this you can easily hire a ghostwriter who will do it for you.
CD’s
The only thing you need is a CD burner and the sky is the limit; you can publish your e-book on CD, or a collection of books. You can also record you own music CD or publish a course. If you know how to write simple programs you can even make your own software. Or again; all you need is a good idea because you will easily find a professional willing to develop your product for you!
Audio Cassettes
These go along the same lines as CD’s; you can sell a product people can listen to in their car, on their way to work. You can even publish an e-book and a cassette version of the same product to maximize profits! Generally all you need is a tape recorder that can produce good quality tapes, and preferably one with two tape decks so you can easily reproduce the initial tape you made. Audio Cassettes are a bit more labour intensive than CD’s, but if you truly want to reach your entire target market, they are a must.
Special Reports
These are relatively short “books”, or just a collection of pages on a particular topic. Remember those reports you wrote back in school? Think a few of those bunched together, on a topic people want to learn more about.
Self Help Products
All the products above can be used in this category; people are always hungry for information, regardless of the state of the economy. In fact; when there is an economic downturn sellers who specialize in books on how to save money or make money see their profits grow faster than normal! Knowledge is profit; and you are unique like anyone else.
How to Create a Product
You more than likely possess enough knowledge to create hundreds of information products; however because you are unaware of the fact that there are people out there who do not know what you know, you are more likely to think you do not know anything special or worth selling. Think again! Have your friends ever asked you for advice or help on something? Whether in a hobby, at work, or a relationship? Are you good at your job? Or extremely involved in a special hobby? This little brainstorming session should already give you plenty of ideas that you can put to work right now!
The next step is to think of topics you want to know more about. It’s likely that if you are interested in something, other people are too. Now all you need to do is some research and then develop the product of your choice; you will be doing all those other people a favor by presenting them with a solution to their “problem” without having to do any research themselves.
It is no secret that the internet has created the new generation of millionaires in only a few short years. Every few seconds a person starts a home business somewhere around the world, and the amazing thing is that the market does not seem to be getting saturated anytime soon! Business is booming, and for quick easy cash people are turning to the internet.
However faced with the fact that many of us do not have a product to sell, nor do we have the infrastructure set up or the manpower necessary to distribute products. Nevertheless a growing group of people are selling products right out of their home office or their kitchen table; how? Information products! Now regular bookstores and music stores are getting serious competition from our very own neighbors. The technology available to all of us makes it extremely easy to create your very own information product; whether that is a book, a music CD, a course, you name it! All you need is a computer and an internet connection, some time and virtually no investment!
Here are some products that you can create right now!
E-books
E-books are electronic books; it is like a regular book but they can be read on your computer, or printed out with a regular printer. Because you do not produce a “physical” product you also do not have any printing costs! So therefore, you can already guess, you will keep 100% of the profits you make. Even more powerful however is the fact that you can sell unlimited numbers of your book, and do not need any inventory. Nor will you be stuck with piled of unsold books. You create something now, and you can profit from it forever! You can write about anything you are knowledgeable about, or anything you would like to research further. If you do not feel comfortable with this you can easily hire a ghostwriter who will do it for you.
CD’s
The only thing you need is a CD burner and the sky is the limit; you can publish your e-book on CD, or a collection of books. You can also record you own music CD or publish a course. If you know how to write simple programs you can even make your own software. Or again; all you need is a good idea because you will easily find a professional willing to develop your product for you!
Audio Cassettes
These go along the same lines as CD’s; you can sell a product people can listen to in their car, on their way to work. You can even publish an e-book and a cassette version of the same product to maximize profits! Generally all you need is a tape recorder that can produce good quality tapes, and preferably one with two tape decks so you can easily reproduce the initial tape you made. Audio Cassettes are a bit more labour intensive than CD’s, but if you truly want to reach your entire target market, they are a must.
Special Reports
These are relatively short “books”, or just a collection of pages on a particular topic. Remember those reports you wrote back in school? Think a few of those bunched together, on a topic people want to learn more about.
Self Help Products
All the products above can be used in this category; people are always hungry for information, regardless of the state of the economy. In fact; when there is an economic downturn sellers who specialize in books on how to save money or make money see their profits grow faster than normal! Knowledge is profit; and you are unique like anyone else.
How to Create a Product
You more than likely possess enough knowledge to create hundreds of information products; however because you are unaware of the fact that there are people out there who do not know what you know, you are more likely to think you do not know anything special or worth selling. Think again! Have your friends ever asked you for advice or help on something? Whether in a hobby, at work, or a relationship? Are you good at your job? Or extremely involved in a special hobby? This little brainstorming session should already give you plenty of ideas that you can put to work right now!
The next step is to think of topics you want to know more about. It’s likely that if you are interested in something, other people are too. Now all you need to do is some research and then develop the product of your choice; you will be doing all those other people a favor by presenting them with a solution to their “problem” without having to do any research themselves.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 12:05 PM
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Tips for the Self-Proclaimed Guru
Tips for the Self-Proclaimed Guru
You have an inspiring message, a wonderful solution, or a great product. You have something people need. Now, you have to let them know about it. You want to teach people to think of you as a guru in your subject of expertise. Fortunately, that’s not as hard to accomplish as you might think. The hard part is to convince yourself.
Who me? A guru? An expert?
Yes, you. Absolutely. A guru is simply an acknowledged leader or teacher. An expert is just anyone who has mastery of a particular subject. Neither of these words means that you know everything there is to know. They DO mean that a particular subject is your specialty. If you have delved so far into a subject that you have created new ideas or product around it, you have already exhibited mastery in your specialty.
But you’ll need more than intellectual understanding to give you the motivation to get the word out. So take a few minutes to do an inventory. Think back to your beginnings in your area of expertise. Remember your first published writings in the school newsletter. Relive your glory days as the class clown that held your audience in the palm of your hand. In the years since then, how many hours have you spent working, reading, talking, writing, and thinking about your subject? Add them up as best you can. You didn’t realize it, but you were a guru in training!
Word Power
The more you give voice to your identity as an expert, the more you’ll become recognized as one, both by people you know and people you’ll never meet. Create a memorable tagline that stamps your unique perspective on every promotional item you send out into the world. You don’t have to say, “Jane Doe…Parenting Guru,” but you might say, “Jane Doe…Connecting Parents and Kids.”
When taking on a new identity, it’s human nature to feel a bit like an imposter at first. But when you are comfortable with your role, other will be, too. Give yourself a job title. The more you own the fact that you are a parenting coach, a speaker, a writer, or an executive consultant, the more other people think of you that way. Introduce yourself as a speaker, even if you do it “only on the side.” Sign your email and business cards as a consultant, and people will begin to say to their friends, “I know of somebody who does that…”
When that happens, it creates a powerful upward spiral. You believe in yourself, you convey that in your presence and promotions, your prospective clients and audiences believe in you, and you believe in yourself even more, which starts the cycle all over again at a higher level.
You have an inspiring message, a wonderful solution, or a great product. You have something people need. Now, you have to let them know about it. You want to teach people to think of you as a guru in your subject of expertise. Fortunately, that’s not as hard to accomplish as you might think. The hard part is to convince yourself.
Who me? A guru? An expert?
Yes, you. Absolutely. A guru is simply an acknowledged leader or teacher. An expert is just anyone who has mastery of a particular subject. Neither of these words means that you know everything there is to know. They DO mean that a particular subject is your specialty. If you have delved so far into a subject that you have created new ideas or product around it, you have already exhibited mastery in your specialty.
But you’ll need more than intellectual understanding to give you the motivation to get the word out. So take a few minutes to do an inventory. Think back to your beginnings in your area of expertise. Remember your first published writings in the school newsletter. Relive your glory days as the class clown that held your audience in the palm of your hand. In the years since then, how many hours have you spent working, reading, talking, writing, and thinking about your subject? Add them up as best you can. You didn’t realize it, but you were a guru in training!
Word Power
The more you give voice to your identity as an expert, the more you’ll become recognized as one, both by people you know and people you’ll never meet. Create a memorable tagline that stamps your unique perspective on every promotional item you send out into the world. You don’t have to say, “Jane Doe…Parenting Guru,” but you might say, “Jane Doe…Connecting Parents and Kids.”
When taking on a new identity, it’s human nature to feel a bit like an imposter at first. But when you are comfortable with your role, other will be, too. Give yourself a job title. The more you own the fact that you are a parenting coach, a speaker, a writer, or an executive consultant, the more other people think of you that way. Introduce yourself as a speaker, even if you do it “only on the side.” Sign your email and business cards as a consultant, and people will begin to say to their friends, “I know of somebody who does that…”
When that happens, it creates a powerful upward spiral. You believe in yourself, you convey that in your presence and promotions, your prospective clients and audiences believe in you, and you believe in yourself even more, which starts the cycle all over again at a higher level.
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 1:05 PM
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
How to Effectively Hire a Ghost Writer
How to Effectively Hire a Ghost Writer
How to Effectively Hire a Ghost Writer
In today’s busy world, whether your business is large or small, it is easy to become over whelmed with day-to-day tasks. Suddenly you realize that you need to update your web presence content or you need to have a processes and procedures manual on-hand in case of key personnel being out. It just becomes too much to handle! Or perhaps you need to produce articles to promote your business, but writing simply isn’t your forte. What do you do? It’s simple; hire a ghost writer to assist you in performing your writing tasks.
Professional, well-qualified ghost writers can be contacted via any number of freelance project posting sites such as http://www.guru.com/ or http://www.elance.com/, and others. These freelance project posting sites permit a buyer who needs writing projects completed, while maintaining all rights to the material upon payment, to post a project description and allow “Work for Hire” freelance writers to bid on your project. You can set the time length during which bidding is permitted and even request samples of the writers’ work for review.
When posting a freelance writing project for bid on any project posting site, you should strive to communicate facts clearly so that service providers can bid accurately on your project.
ü Establish exactly what length, in number of words or pages, you are requesting to be written for you.
ü Define exactly the content and purpose of your requested project. Some examples of content types are web content, search engine optimized web content, magazine article, resume, processes and procedures manual, how-to report, ebook, or white paper. The type of writer that will bid on one type of job may not be well suited to another type of project.
ü Define format requirement. These requirements include exactly what format you want the data should be delivered to you as a final product such as MS Word, plain text, or rich text format.
ü Determine precisely the deadline for delivery of your final products. If you have an exact need date for your material, state that date in your project description. Those writers who can not meet your deadline will simply not waste your time reading their bids.
ü Communicate any other requirements. You may want content to have bulleted points, or to have margins of 1.5 inches on every side. Any requirements that you desire in your final product should be stated in your project description. Most freelance writers, upon accepting your project award, copy your exact project description into their information files to ensure they are working to your specifications.
The online freelance project posting systems allow you to review the portfolios of the writers who are members of that system. You can select based on criteria such as previous feedback, length of time on the system and other factors to view a selection of service providers’ information. You can then select a few service providers which appear to fit your needs and invite them to bid on your project, if you wish.
Keep in mind when reviewing service providers’ feedback reports that no one makes everyone happy all of the time. If a 5.0 is a perfect rating, and a writer has over 20 projects on which they have received feedback, you can expect at least one client to have not given even an exceptional writer a perfect score. Be realistic and look for service providers with a feedback rating near the top as well as those at the top of the ratings.
Once bids have been placed on your project, review those bids. It is wise to identify which service providers bidding on the project included in their response your exact project requirements. If you stated that you desire 30 articles written and the bid stated the provider will write 15 articles for you, it is clear that they did not read the project description. That kind of inattention to detail when bidding can indicate a general lack of attention and your project deserves to be treated with care. A good service provider will tell you in their bid exactly what services they will provide for how much money and within what timeframe. If those key items are not contained in the bid, move on and review the ones that have clearly responded to your request.
If you request samples of work from the service providers bidding on your project, you can expect to receive anywhere from one to two articles per bid to as many as ten articles attached to bids. Read at least one sample from each bid to learn about that writer’s style and tone. If the sample style fits with what you have in mind and their bid reflected care and precision in bidding, you should add that writer to your “short list”.
As soon as you have honed the respondents down to three or four bids that are from reliable providers, choose based on price and turnaround time that best suits your personal needs. There are many, many wonderful freelance writers working in the global marketplace of the Internet today. Let them relieve you from some of your job stress by writing documentation and content for you!
How to Effectively Hire a Ghost Writer
In today’s busy world, whether your business is large or small, it is easy to become over whelmed with day-to-day tasks. Suddenly you realize that you need to update your web presence content or you need to have a processes and procedures manual on-hand in case of key personnel being out. It just becomes too much to handle! Or perhaps you need to produce articles to promote your business, but writing simply isn’t your forte. What do you do? It’s simple; hire a ghost writer to assist you in performing your writing tasks.
Professional, well-qualified ghost writers can be contacted via any number of freelance project posting sites such as http://www.guru.com/ or http://www.elance.com/, and others. These freelance project posting sites permit a buyer who needs writing projects completed, while maintaining all rights to the material upon payment, to post a project description and allow “Work for Hire” freelance writers to bid on your project. You can set the time length during which bidding is permitted and even request samples of the writers’ work for review.
When posting a freelance writing project for bid on any project posting site, you should strive to communicate facts clearly so that service providers can bid accurately on your project.
ü Establish exactly what length, in number of words or pages, you are requesting to be written for you.
ü Define exactly the content and purpose of your requested project. Some examples of content types are web content, search engine optimized web content, magazine article, resume, processes and procedures manual, how-to report, ebook, or white paper. The type of writer that will bid on one type of job may not be well suited to another type of project.
ü Define format requirement. These requirements include exactly what format you want the data should be delivered to you as a final product such as MS Word, plain text, or rich text format.
ü Determine precisely the deadline for delivery of your final products. If you have an exact need date for your material, state that date in your project description. Those writers who can not meet your deadline will simply not waste your time reading their bids.
ü Communicate any other requirements. You may want content to have bulleted points, or to have margins of 1.5 inches on every side. Any requirements that you desire in your final product should be stated in your project description. Most freelance writers, upon accepting your project award, copy your exact project description into their information files to ensure they are working to your specifications.
The online freelance project posting systems allow you to review the portfolios of the writers who are members of that system. You can select based on criteria such as previous feedback, length of time on the system and other factors to view a selection of service providers’ information. You can then select a few service providers which appear to fit your needs and invite them to bid on your project, if you wish.
Keep in mind when reviewing service providers’ feedback reports that no one makes everyone happy all of the time. If a 5.0 is a perfect rating, and a writer has over 20 projects on which they have received feedback, you can expect at least one client to have not given even an exceptional writer a perfect score. Be realistic and look for service providers with a feedback rating near the top as well as those at the top of the ratings.
Once bids have been placed on your project, review those bids. It is wise to identify which service providers bidding on the project included in their response your exact project requirements. If you stated that you desire 30 articles written and the bid stated the provider will write 15 articles for you, it is clear that they did not read the project description. That kind of inattention to detail when bidding can indicate a general lack of attention and your project deserves to be treated with care. A good service provider will tell you in their bid exactly what services they will provide for how much money and within what timeframe. If those key items are not contained in the bid, move on and review the ones that have clearly responded to your request.
If you request samples of work from the service providers bidding on your project, you can expect to receive anywhere from one to two articles per bid to as many as ten articles attached to bids. Read at least one sample from each bid to learn about that writer’s style and tone. If the sample style fits with what you have in mind and their bid reflected care and precision in bidding, you should add that writer to your “short list”.
As soon as you have honed the respondents down to three or four bids that are from reliable providers, choose based on price and turnaround time that best suits your personal needs. There are many, many wonderful freelance writers working in the global marketplace of the Internet today. Let them relieve you from some of your job stress by writing documentation and content for you!
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 12:24 PM
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
How To Pick a Hosting Company
How To Pick a Hosting Company
If you are seeking a new hosting company let me give you some words of wisdom because I have been through a few. One company even went belly up in the middle of the night giving me no notice. That was disastrous for me as well as my customers. If you are tired of hosting companies with poor service and excessive downtime then get ready to print this page out.
First thing first, you might take a step back from your website or E-business and think about what you want it to look like in the future. Then start making decisions about the hosting. Think about things like: How much traffic are you expecting? How many more sites will you build or could possibly build in the future? Are you going to load software to the server? Some of the best programs that smart marketers use need to be loaded: such as; affiliate programs and autoresponders and require a dedicated IP address. If you intend on growing then make sure these things are an option.
If you realized that you will want to have more sites in the future or currently are moving a lot of sites from one account to another. One thing you can do is get a dedicated server or keep your money in your pocket and find a hosting company that’ll allow you to have add-on domains. Did you realize that you could have one account for around $25 a month and all your domains on it? You, for the cost of $25 a month could host 2, 10, 15, 26, 45 domains. There ar e accounts out there that will let you do this. But here’s what you should know about these types of accounts, you are not limited in domains, but limited in the amount of space you have. So if you need more space, just ask and they’ll be happy to give it to you for a price.
If you want to market your website you should get your own IP address with your accounts. This will play a big part when it comes to search engines finding you, as well as increasing the utilization of your autoresponders.
One big thing to watch out for:Make sure that you find out what type of control panel the hosting company is using. If they don’t tell you I would be scared. I believe that the best hosting companies out there will use cPanel. If the hosting company is using cPanel then they will probably be bragging about it since it is designed very well.
Now here’s a quick checklist:
ü Step back and think about what you want
ü Check to see if they allow you to have add-on domains. If so, then what will it cost in additional fees? (Some companies have a one time fee for this).
ü Make sure you own your own IP address, not a shared IP. Most companies call this a dedicated IP address.
ü Look at the control panel, is it cPanel?
Now for the biggest question I always get: What hosting company do you highly recommend? I recommend a company called Frontier Power Hosting because of their specialized knowledge, excellent customer support reputation, and they meet these criteria. You can find them at http://www.frontierpowerhosting.com
If you are seeking a new hosting company let me give you some words of wisdom because I have been through a few. One company even went belly up in the middle of the night giving me no notice. That was disastrous for me as well as my customers. If you are tired of hosting companies with poor service and excessive downtime then get ready to print this page out.
First thing first, you might take a step back from your website or E-business and think about what you want it to look like in the future. Then start making decisions about the hosting. Think about things like: How much traffic are you expecting? How many more sites will you build or could possibly build in the future? Are you going to load software to the server? Some of the best programs that smart marketers use need to be loaded: such as; affiliate programs and autoresponders and require a dedicated IP address. If you intend on growing then make sure these things are an option.
If you realized that you will want to have more sites in the future or currently are moving a lot of sites from one account to another. One thing you can do is get a dedicated server or keep your money in your pocket and find a hosting company that’ll allow you to have add-on domains. Did you realize that you could have one account for around $25 a month and all your domains on it? You, for the cost of $25 a month could host 2, 10, 15, 26, 45 domains. There ar e accounts out there that will let you do this. But here’s what you should know about these types of accounts, you are not limited in domains, but limited in the amount of space you have. So if you need more space, just ask and they’ll be happy to give it to you for a price.
If you want to market your website you should get your own IP address with your accounts. This will play a big part when it comes to search engines finding you, as well as increasing the utilization of your autoresponders.
One big thing to watch out for:Make sure that you find out what type of control panel the hosting company is using. If they don’t tell you I would be scared. I believe that the best hosting companies out there will use cPanel. If the hosting company is using cPanel then they will probably be bragging about it since it is designed very well.
Now here’s a quick checklist:
ü Step back and think about what you want
ü Check to see if they allow you to have add-on domains. If so, then what will it cost in additional fees? (Some companies have a one time fee for this).
ü Make sure you own your own IP address, not a shared IP. Most companies call this a dedicated IP address.
ü Look at the control panel, is it cPanel?
Now for the biggest question I always get: What hosting company do you highly recommend? I recommend a company called Frontier Power Hosting because of their specialized knowledge, excellent customer support reputation, and they meet these criteria. You can find them at http://www.frontierpowerhosting.com
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 2:42 PM
Monday, October 10, 2005
Best-Selling Book Secrets
Best-Selling Book Secrets
Everyone says, “Some day I’m going to write a book,” but few actually do. So congratulations on a noteworthy achievement! Now that you’re holding your book in your hands, after years of research, writing, editing and rewriting, the last words you’ll want to hear are, “That was the easy part.” Well, unfortunately, that was the easy part. Unless you don’t mind your only fans being family and close friends, or unless you’re already a celebrity with a big publishing house behind you, your new challenge will be letting the world know about your book so someone will actually read (a.k.a. buy) what you’ve so laboriously created. And the hard reality is that, in the madness of today’s publishing environment, the onus for successful book promotion lies almost exclusively with the author. Whether you fought your way through to a mainstream channel or decided to self-publish—whether you’ve written a self-help tool or a novel—odds are good that a publicist won’t be calling you tomorrow morning with a jam-packed itinerary of book signings and television interviews. Some of you may have a little help if you’re mainstream, but all of you will carry the lion’s share. So, where do you begin?
First of all, your book is no longer “your baby,” but a business—and as with any business, you must have a Marketing Plan. Number One in your plan should be creating a website that will help facilitate everything else we’ll cover in this article. If you already have a website (business or otherwise), add a banner headline announcing publication on your Home page. If you don’t have a website and/or don’t know how to create one, Google how to create a website, and plenty of user-friendly links will come up. The point is that your website should showcase your book as the feature, and you should offer the book for sale right there. Sign up for a Pay Pal account, if you don’t already have one (http://www.paypal.com/). This is an easy, affordable way for you to offer buyers a means to pay with a credit card, and that feature alone will help drive more books out the door.
Next you’ll need to develop a Sell Sheet consisting of: a) a summary of your book in 50 words or less; b) an author biography in one paragraph; and c) your field of expertise and how that relates to your book (not always relevant with fiction). Then identify your Target Audience—the “who” you had in mind while you were writing. If you’ve written a novel, will interested readers be male or female, young, middle-aged or seniors, action or romance devotees? If your book is non-fiction, are you targeting a certain business or profession? Do you already have a client or seminar base that will be a built-in market? If you don’t have a built-in base, what media outlets (radio, television, print) will help you build one, and which will be relevant and feasible? How do you get to Book Reviewers? (Reviews are golden, even if they’re not glowing—and reviews are mandatory for success. Without them, you don’t get interviews, and the good ones become marketing tools.) Each category and media market, by the way, can be easily researched via the Internet, and each will have to receive a Review Copy of your book. Once your target audience is clear, identify your book’s Position with a single sentence that explains why someone would want to buy your book over others in the same category. This is an extremely important element because, with every Review Copy you send out, you’ll have between 5 and 15 seconds to catch someone’s attention. Finally (and you’ve probably figured this out already), you need to decide how much money you’re able and willing to spend on your book promotion. Guess who buys all those Review Copies, for example? You’ll also need business cards (focused solely on your book), bookmarks, “Just Published” posters, announcement post cards, travel expenses and so forth.
But before you send out for oxygen, this new challenge isn’t as daunting as you may think, because the majority of Best-Sellers begin their successes locally. Your first contact won’t be to the New York Times, but rather your local newspaper. Send a copy of your Press Release (similar to your Sell Sheet but a more familiar format to the media). If you Google how to write a press release, you’ll find a wealth of tutorials. Then use a “local author” angle to approach the Manager or Event Coordinator in nearby book stores (small independent book sellers and big chains like Barnes & Noble), first about scheduling a book signing, and second about stocking your book on their shelves. (The former will be easier than the latter.) Check each store’s Event Calendar and attend several book signings to see how they’re done. When you have a signing scheduled, send invitations! Include everyone you’ve ever known, if you can afford the stamps. Although you’ll want to do a broadcast email to announce your book’s publication, signing events require old-fashioned invitations to bolster turnout. The book store(s) will also do a little advertising (usually very little, i.e., a flyer by the cash register), but your best hope for a large crowd resides in the people you already know.
Use your successes with local papers and book stores to secure interviews with other media outlets. Google to seek out venues in your area such as noon television news broadcasts and radio talk shows that are willing to feature new authors. Remember, every contact you make—through media, book stores, book reviewers, libraries, everyone—will need to receive a Review Copy of your book. Be sure to write REVIEW COPY in big, black magic marker letters on the inside front cover to minimize bootleg sales of all the books you’re sending out. Distribute widely and generously all of your other promotional materials, as well (Sell Sheets, Press Release, Business Cards…), and never travel without two copies of your book. Take a handful on your vacation. You just never know when a future fan will be standing in front of you.
This local focus will not only build success from the inside out, but will also help minimize cash outlays for airfare and hotels in the beginning. At the same time, however, expand your base by listing your book for sale on sites like Amazon and eBay (both sites have links that walk you through the process), and by entering your book in contests (have four or five on-going at any given time). Google again for those contests germane to your book, but research the sponsoring organization(s) before entering. Some are less reputable than others. Contests offer tremendous publicity potential, though, and many judges return valuable comments whether you win anything or not. Lastly, set up an automatically inserted tag line promoting your book at the bottom of every email you generate. That’s free advertising that could circle the globe.
Obviously, the how-to’s of book promotion could fill volumes—but the short version begins and ends with you. If you believe with a passion that your book can be a Best-Seller, then others will believe, too. Just keep in mind that, as with any project or craft, the devil is in the details. Orchestrating a book promotion can be a little like managing a goat rodeo, if all the basics aren’t in place. Make your plan, have your props, and then start calling on your local segment of the world. Every success will breed another, and the boundaries of “local” will continue to expand as far as you wish to push them. Of course, none of this happens overnight, and wisdom suggests putting your plans in motion while the book is still in the production cycle. Then allow yourself a few captivating moments when you first hold the “real thing” in your hands. Celebrate and feel that well-deserved pride. Okay. Time’s up.
The window of marketing opportunity is the first year after publication, which doesn’t leave room for many wasted days. Even though writing your book was the easy part, selling your book is the fruitful part—and nothing compares to the sound of someone saying, “I bought your book, loved it, and recommended it to my friends.” May those words ring familiar time and again along your personal path to your own Best-Seller!
Everyone says, “Some day I’m going to write a book,” but few actually do. So congratulations on a noteworthy achievement! Now that you’re holding your book in your hands, after years of research, writing, editing and rewriting, the last words you’ll want to hear are, “That was the easy part.” Well, unfortunately, that was the easy part. Unless you don’t mind your only fans being family and close friends, or unless you’re already a celebrity with a big publishing house behind you, your new challenge will be letting the world know about your book so someone will actually read (a.k.a. buy) what you’ve so laboriously created. And the hard reality is that, in the madness of today’s publishing environment, the onus for successful book promotion lies almost exclusively with the author. Whether you fought your way through to a mainstream channel or decided to self-publish—whether you’ve written a self-help tool or a novel—odds are good that a publicist won’t be calling you tomorrow morning with a jam-packed itinerary of book signings and television interviews. Some of you may have a little help if you’re mainstream, but all of you will carry the lion’s share. So, where do you begin?
First of all, your book is no longer “your baby,” but a business—and as with any business, you must have a Marketing Plan. Number One in your plan should be creating a website that will help facilitate everything else we’ll cover in this article. If you already have a website (business or otherwise), add a banner headline announcing publication on your Home page. If you don’t have a website and/or don’t know how to create one, Google how to create a website, and plenty of user-friendly links will come up. The point is that your website should showcase your book as the feature, and you should offer the book for sale right there. Sign up for a Pay Pal account, if you don’t already have one (http://www.paypal.com/). This is an easy, affordable way for you to offer buyers a means to pay with a credit card, and that feature alone will help drive more books out the door.
Next you’ll need to develop a Sell Sheet consisting of: a) a summary of your book in 50 words or less; b) an author biography in one paragraph; and c) your field of expertise and how that relates to your book (not always relevant with fiction). Then identify your Target Audience—the “who” you had in mind while you were writing. If you’ve written a novel, will interested readers be male or female, young, middle-aged or seniors, action or romance devotees? If your book is non-fiction, are you targeting a certain business or profession? Do you already have a client or seminar base that will be a built-in market? If you don’t have a built-in base, what media outlets (radio, television, print) will help you build one, and which will be relevant and feasible? How do you get to Book Reviewers? (Reviews are golden, even if they’re not glowing—and reviews are mandatory for success. Without them, you don’t get interviews, and the good ones become marketing tools.) Each category and media market, by the way, can be easily researched via the Internet, and each will have to receive a Review Copy of your book. Once your target audience is clear, identify your book’s Position with a single sentence that explains why someone would want to buy your book over others in the same category. This is an extremely important element because, with every Review Copy you send out, you’ll have between 5 and 15 seconds to catch someone’s attention. Finally (and you’ve probably figured this out already), you need to decide how much money you’re able and willing to spend on your book promotion. Guess who buys all those Review Copies, for example? You’ll also need business cards (focused solely on your book), bookmarks, “Just Published” posters, announcement post cards, travel expenses and so forth.
But before you send out for oxygen, this new challenge isn’t as daunting as you may think, because the majority of Best-Sellers begin their successes locally. Your first contact won’t be to the New York Times, but rather your local newspaper. Send a copy of your Press Release (similar to your Sell Sheet but a more familiar format to the media). If you Google how to write a press release, you’ll find a wealth of tutorials. Then use a “local author” angle to approach the Manager or Event Coordinator in nearby book stores (small independent book sellers and big chains like Barnes & Noble), first about scheduling a book signing, and second about stocking your book on their shelves. (The former will be easier than the latter.) Check each store’s Event Calendar and attend several book signings to see how they’re done. When you have a signing scheduled, send invitations! Include everyone you’ve ever known, if you can afford the stamps. Although you’ll want to do a broadcast email to announce your book’s publication, signing events require old-fashioned invitations to bolster turnout. The book store(s) will also do a little advertising (usually very little, i.e., a flyer by the cash register), but your best hope for a large crowd resides in the people you already know.
Use your successes with local papers and book stores to secure interviews with other media outlets. Google to seek out venues in your area such as noon television news broadcasts and radio talk shows that are willing to feature new authors. Remember, every contact you make—through media, book stores, book reviewers, libraries, everyone—will need to receive a Review Copy of your book. Be sure to write REVIEW COPY in big, black magic marker letters on the inside front cover to minimize bootleg sales of all the books you’re sending out. Distribute widely and generously all of your other promotional materials, as well (Sell Sheets, Press Release, Business Cards…), and never travel without two copies of your book. Take a handful on your vacation. You just never know when a future fan will be standing in front of you.
This local focus will not only build success from the inside out, but will also help minimize cash outlays for airfare and hotels in the beginning. At the same time, however, expand your base by listing your book for sale on sites like Amazon and eBay (both sites have links that walk you through the process), and by entering your book in contests (have four or five on-going at any given time). Google again for those contests germane to your book, but research the sponsoring organization(s) before entering. Some are less reputable than others. Contests offer tremendous publicity potential, though, and many judges return valuable comments whether you win anything or not. Lastly, set up an automatically inserted tag line promoting your book at the bottom of every email you generate. That’s free advertising that could circle the globe.
Obviously, the how-to’s of book promotion could fill volumes—but the short version begins and ends with you. If you believe with a passion that your book can be a Best-Seller, then others will believe, too. Just keep in mind that, as with any project or craft, the devil is in the details. Orchestrating a book promotion can be a little like managing a goat rodeo, if all the basics aren’t in place. Make your plan, have your props, and then start calling on your local segment of the world. Every success will breed another, and the boundaries of “local” will continue to expand as far as you wish to push them. Of course, none of this happens overnight, and wisdom suggests putting your plans in motion while the book is still in the production cycle. Then allow yourself a few captivating moments when you first hold the “real thing” in your hands. Celebrate and feel that well-deserved pride. Okay. Time’s up.
The window of marketing opportunity is the first year after publication, which doesn’t leave room for many wasted days. Even though writing your book was the easy part, selling your book is the fruitful part—and nothing compares to the sound of someone saying, “I bought your book, loved it, and recommended it to my friends.” May those words ring familiar time and again along your personal path to your own Best-Seller!
Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips
posted by Matt Bacak at 11:25 AM
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