Bring Your Marketing Into The Mobile Age

Oh, mobile marketing. Promoting your business on mobile devices could open up new opportunities. It can be hard to know which approach would be right for you. This article will provide you with the knowledge you need in order to be a successful mobile marketer.

Before you go live with your mobile marketing campaign, be sure to test your advertisement first. Your campaign will not work if your messages do not display properly or have other problems. Get your coworker's impressions of your campaign messages before starting.

In a mobile marketing campaign, consider an interactive quiz or trivia contest to attract customers. A quiz or a game popping up on their phone is more likely to engage consumers than a plain advertisement. While gaining interest from your consumers, you can gain feedback about your business through mobile quizzing.

Location can play a huge role in a great mobile marketing campaign. Mobile marketing is location based, which is unique to this style marketing. This ability opens up a world of possibilities that are exclusive to this particular type of media. Consider all the ramifications for your business and how you could create a strategy that is location-aware and effective.

Go viral to make sure that your adverts are reaching the widest audience. They may pass it to their associates, and your marketing will expand by a whole degree.

Consider including promo codes that offer discounts as a part of your mobile marketing strategy. If a consumer gets a message that has a discount offer, the chances of them going to your site is high, leading them to check out what you have to offer.

You can grow your profits by using mobile marketing. With the explosion in mobile usage and smartphone applications, the audience is huge on mobile platforms. Both of these areas are ideal starting points for expanding your mobile marketing campaign. Bring the marketing directly to the customer.

Be sure to research enough about the needs of your target audience, so that you are not trying to cover them with a blanket of sales related information. This enhances the chance that your recipient will respond with interest to your campaign and follow up as you desire.

The best mobile marketers out there take things a progressive step at a time, continuing to climb the mobile ladder. You can make use of the same strategy. You can start with a text messaging campaign, expand into using mobile websites, then incorporate mobile apps and eventually deliver videos to mobile devices. Keep progressing and improving your overall mobile marketing campaign. Use everything at your disposal.

When starting a mobile marketing campaign, make sure that it works correctly for the major mobile platforms. Not every potential customer is using the same mobile device, and you would not want to eliminate any that your campaign was not able to reach. You will need to make your mobile campaign compatible for all mobile devices.

Mobile marketing is an interesting subject. Businesses are like snowflakes, in that no two are identical; so no two market in identical manners. What works for one type of business may not work well for another. You should have a good idea how to start your mobile marketing campaign with the tips provided above.

All Aboard The Successful Mobile Marketing Train!

Mobile marketing is flexible. You can do it full-time or just enough to make a supplemental income. The guidelines in this article represent some of the best practices for mobile marketing.

Give users a way to give feedback so you will know if your mobile marketing techniques are effective. Customer input is valuable, regardless of whether it's positive or negative. You should seek out customer feedback at every opportunity.

Send coupons via Multimedia Messaging Service as a way to reward current customers or entice new ones. Your coupons can include promotional codes. A specific tracking code links these promotions to your mobile website. Both coupons and promotional codes are wonderful ways to reward your customers and attract new customers.

If you want to be able to send out effective emails, make sure they are mobile friendly. Allow them to click on phone numbers (instead of links), and make sure your pages look great on the mobile devices for any links you do include. Many people deal with email on their phones and smaller devices these days, and your mobile campaigns should reflect that.

Before your company decides on creating their own mobile app, make sure it's something that is needed by your customers. Potential customers have no use for junk apps that serve no useful purpose or interesting function.

Here are some things you should bear in mind when you add SMS to your strategies in mobile marketing: Remember to add a way for your visitors to opt-in for your text list and be realistic regarding how many texts you plan to send monthly. Without controlled usage and monitoring, SMS will have a negative result with mobile clients. Customers may feel angry about the amount of texts they are receiving. Go with the opt-in letting the customer decide whether to receive your messages. Again, be honest about the number of messages you will be sending and stick to that. If you go over your stated limit, customers may feel you are dishonest.

Be wary of the time of day you text your customers. Not too late not too early. Sending out text messages at bad hours will just annoy customers.

Consider implement many marketing pieces at a time as a means to maximize your mobile marketing strategy. For instance, send direct mail containing information on an event, like a 50% off sale. Email your customers a little while before the event, then send then an SMS on the day of the event.

By implementing the use of QR codes, you can broaden your customer base as you offer easily accessible information to customers. These QR codes are an excellent way to expand and entice your customers by offering coupons and discounts. These codes are easy to implement for the vendor and easy for customers to capture with a phone camera. These codes help you communicate with an increasingly digital audience.

It should be apparent that mobile marketing is pretty complex. Mobile marketing takes a lot of time and will require patience, it is well worth the trouble in the long run and will boost your business. Just use the advice given in this article and you will see level of success raise considerably.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How to start with it ?

Ahh, so you have made it to here finally. I am glad you did.

You might have heard of Affiliate Marketing — No ?   Strange, but not to worry, there’s a lot ahead in this post and you will get to know much about it (and more) by its end.

First, lets have a look at the Wikipedia Definition of Affiliate Marketing :

    Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.

Well, Here’s my simplified definition :

“Affiliate Marketing is promoting other people’s (Company’s) product and earning a commision in return (If a sale is made).”

It works the same as in the offline world, however the profit and scope is much bigger over the Internet (Not to Mention that people had exploited this too much though).

So basically what you do as an affiliate is :

    You promote other people’s (or Company’s) Product using a special link with a code only being used by you embedded into it (this is required by advertiser to track the leads referred by you).

    If someone buys that product (or in some cases completes a task like signing up or completing a survey) using your link, it gets tracked by the advertiser and you are rewarded a commission (which is a percentage of the sale price but can also be a fixed amount as set by the advertiser).

This way both the advertiser and the publisher is benefited. Advertisers get more sales of their product when many publishers (or affiliates) promote their product and Affiliates in turn generate revenue by promoting the product. Moreover Advertiser pays only when a sale is made so there is no risk of getting non converting visits like in some PPC campaigns.

This is the reason why most of the product creators and Advertisers provides an affiliate program for increasing their product sales.

How do I get Started with Affiliate Marketing ?

There are a few things to keep in mind before choosing to get into this business. Firstly, you must find the right Affiliate Product to Promote and secondly you must have an audience that will be interested in that product.
Finding the Right Affiliate Product

This is the most Important Step (literally). If you get wrong here, you will definitely fail in this business. You will have to choose a product which will help your audience. If you have a Weight Loss Blog, then promoting a forex product will be completely useless as it will not get you any sales. Moreover, If you promot a low quality product (lets say,on your blog) , you could be hurting your brand as well.

Remember, To get the best results, always promote a product that you have tried yourself  or you must be confident enough of the quality of it.

Below are some of the tips that will help you find a related Affiliate Products :

Browse Affiliate Networks – The easiest way to get started with promoting products is to search though Affiliate Networks. An Affiliate Network act as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and merchant affiliate programs. There are a few affiliate networks that list many affiliate programs. You can use their search option to get related products to your blog’s niche. Some of the most famous Affiliate networks are : ClickBank (This is my favourite and also, the first affiliate commission that I earned was by promoting a clickbank product) , Commission Junction (aka CJ), ShareaSale etc.

Search Google – Other way to find relevant affiliate product that you can promote is by doing a simple google search. Just type : “your keyword + Affiliate Program” (Replace “your Keyword” with your niche like “Weight Loss Affiliate Programs”) and you will easily find the appropriate product.

Checkout Online Stores – Almost all of the famous online stores (like Amazon, Ebay) have affiliate programs. You can just sign up for that and then promote any of the stuff that is listed there. Generally the commissions are not big here but as these online stores have a huge range of products, it is not that difficult to get referral sales through them.

Check Your Competition – If you can’t find the products by above methods, you can simply have a look at what your competitors  (sites in your niche) are promoting and you can start promoting those products.

Now, these were the ways by which you can select a product to promote.

Promote using your Blog : If you have a blog with good following, you can simply put a banner of the affiliate product on your sidebar with your affiliate link, or you can write a review post for that product with your affiliate link in the end of the post. This is a very effective way but make sure the products you promote are self tested by you or which you are confident about. This is because, your blog acts as your brand. Promote useless stuff and you will be destroying your brand.

Use Social Networks : As you all know, social networks are growing at a rapid rate and will continue to grow. Facebook, for example, has nearly 600 million users and twitter has 200 million. And that is what you can make use of.

If you use twitter, you can search for tweets in your niche and reply to them with helpful product links (masked with your affiliate code). For Example : You search for your loved niche, lets say “Weight Loss”, in Twitter and you find a tweet of a desperate person asking for help to loose his/her weight. Now If you know of a product which you think can really help that person, you simply can reply to that tweet with your affiliate product link.

If you use Facebook, you can create a Facebook page or group in your selected niche and once that Page/Group has got good number of fans/members, you can share the affiliate link of a related product (of course, if it is useful) on your Page’s wall. This way you are exposing your affiliate products to targeted people (your Page’s fans) and you will easily be able to get sale of that product.

Write and Submit Articles : Article Marketing is the most exploited way of getting affiliate sales and Guess what ? It works every time. You just need to write an article related to your niche and then submit it to various article directories. You are given a chance to add a resource box in your article where you can add hyperlinks of your choice.  But the drawback is that most of the reputed Article Directories do not allow the use of affiliate links in your resource box. So, to get the most benefit, you have to first write a review of the selected affiliate product on your blog or elsewhere (where you can add your affiliate links) and then create a related article, for article directories, containing your review post’s link in the resource box of that article.

If done effectively, this can get you a good amount of targeted visitors to your blog post where they might end up buying that affiliate product. Few things that you need to keep in mind is that you need to create an effective resource box (or Call to Action Box) paragraph which urges the reader to click the link in that box.

Create Videos : Video Marketing helps you get tons of targeted traffic easily (Yes, i said ‘easily’). All you have to do is Create a Video Review of the Product you are promoting and upload that video to popular video sharing sites like Youtube. In the description field for that video,  Add your affiliate link and that’s it. Videos gets viral too easily, All you need to care is about the Title and the Content of the video. Try to create a catchy Title which makes people view your video.

You can work on Keywords and link building to get the video rank higher in search engines but there is an easy way to get traffic to your video. It is by getting your video listed in the “Related Videos” sectrion of Popular Videos in your niche. This can be achieved by adding the same tags to your video which are used by other Popular Video in your Category.

Create Web 2.0 Properties : Now this is fun. You might have heard of Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, Hubpages etc. These are mostly like article directories but these are community driven, i.e, other users can comment upon or like/dislike your article and accordingly your article is ranked. All you have to do is create an Article around your affiliate product and include your affiliate link in that article. Now you have to work on building backlinks for that article (with your anchored keyword). Web 2.0 sites are loved by Search Engines and it will not be too hard for for you to get it ranked higher for your keyword.

Join Online Forums : This is also a popular form of Marketing Online. First find Forums that are related to your niche and create account there. Next, set up a Signature line there and include your affiliate link in it. The last thing left for you to do is to stay active on these forums and post useful threads there and answer to other posts. If you post useful stuff, People will start trusting you and will browse through your signature links. This way you can easily get affiliate sales.

Build an Email List : Someone rightly said : “The Money is in the list.”

Yes, that’s right, If you have a large number of E-mail list or subscriber to your website, you can often send them Newsletter with an affiliate link. You must craft a cool email that will get your subscribers click through the links in it. This way you can really get good number of affiliate sales for your product. But Remember, If you start sending them affiliate driven emails everyday or emails promoting unrelated products, Your subscriber will unsubscribe from your list and will left you in the vast ocean alone. So use it Wisely.

Create Niche Sites : You might have heard a lot about Niche Sites/blogs these days. Well, a niche site/blog is that which is made around a very specific keyword or niche which has quite a low competition and could be easily ranked for, in Google, with minimal effort. What you have to do is, Research for a lucrative “Low Competition”, “High Traffic” Keyword using some keyword tools and then create a website/blog around that keyword and a few related ones. This type of site might not contain a lot of pages but 5 – 6 content rich (& SEO rich) pages will get you going. Then Start Building backlinks (Off Site SEO) according to the level of competition and in a few days, you would ranking well for those keywords. Now, all you have to do is to place banners or direct affiliate links in your sidebar or Content and see the conversions coming in within a few days.

You could even create a niche site reviewing a product (real life or digital) and that way you will be directly targeting buyers. Make use of keywords like “Product Review”, “Buy Product”, replace “Product” with the name of the product you are promoting. That’s it.

These were the best methods to promote your affiliate links and get sales and commissions.

By Now, you must have attained great knowledge about Affiliate Marketing. So what are you waiting for, Go on and and Get your First Affiliate Sale today.

Article from: Garish wasil

Beat The Competition With These Social Media Marketing Tips

Social media for personal use and social media for your business are two different worlds. If you are used to using these sites for your own personal satisfaction then you are ahead of the game in understanding, but you will still need the advice of this article to show you how you can best market your business through them.

Take advantage of what makes social media so powerful, and actually interact with your consumers. Messages, comments, and forums can all benefit the business owner and help you learn what to do next. By interacting, you will build up personal relations, while also being given an opportunity to find out what you may have done right or wrong.

Consider opening an account on the growing business oriented site LinkedIn. This site is designed for business professionals to communicate with one another and their customers. It has incredible features that include ways for satisfied customers to recommend you to others, increasing your reputation and credibility. You can also join conversations relevant to your business interests.

Remember to speak to your potential customers as people. You may run a business or corporation; however, this does not mean you need to speak like one. Trust is built from personal relationships. If your potentials see you as a person who cares about their needs and how your product meets them, it will go a long way in establishing this trust.

Regarding retweets, acknowledge them when you do them and when they are done to you. What this means is if you like what someone tweeted, use "RT" and paste in their @name and the message. This gives them credit for the content. And, if someone retweets your content, thank them. These are simple courtesies.

Utilize RSS feeds. These all people to subscribe to your feed and have the posts go into their Google Reader account once your feeds are published. This makes your content accessible in an easy-to-access way for your customers. Make the button to subscribe easy to identify, so the whole process takes no effort on the part of those visiting your site.

If you run a blog, install social media buttons! Social media buttons will allow people to share your posts on sites like Twitter and Facebook with a simple click of a button. Include these buttons at the end of the post so that there's virtually no effort on the visitor's part. You'll see your content shared all over.

To get the best possible customers from your social media marketing, keep your content coming regularly and with consistency. When a customer sees you post on Facebook every other day, it is enough they remember you comfortably, but not so much that they get annoyed with you showing up too much. When it comes time for them to spend money on something you might offer, they will go with you because your brand feels like a trusted friend.

As you can see, there is a lot of information regarding how to set up your business on social media sites. Hopefully the questions you had were all answered here. If not, then use this as a starting point to research many other ways in which you can use these platforms to increase your business.

SimpleTexting SMS API Enables Text Marketing from Third-Party Apps

SimpleTexting, text marketing service, offers its full suite of text services via its SMS API. Developers can integrate SMS capabilities within third party apps to better engage customers. Whether developers want to send or receive texts, update contact lists, or take advantage of SimpleTexting’s other features, the SMS API provides simple access to a robust service:

    “SimpleTexting has a single mission – to help…customers deepen existing customer relationships and add new customers through low-cost, simple text communications.”

A group of digital marketing executives launched SimpleTexting in 2010. Still in its early years, SimpleTexting has grown a customer base that spans many industries and continues to expand its reach. Not only does SimpleTexting offer top notch products, the company believes text marketing increases customer attraction and retention; and thus, SimpleTexting launched Mobile University to better equip its  users. As SimpleTexting continues to offer new services and products, expect to see more growth in an increasingly text-based world.

The SMS API uses REST protocol. Through the API, users gain access to SimpleTexting’s full capabilities. Marketers can send and receive messages, manage contact lists, check messages count, check keyword availability, rent keywords, schedule messages, and more. Those interested can request a token at the API site.

The text message, now 20 years old, has progressed into a major form of modern communication. Text messaging has commanded attention from everyone, lawmakers to marketers. As texting moves towards a dominant method to communicate, marketers who effectively take advantage of texting nuances stand to rise above those who fail to capitalize on this avenue of mass appeal.

Article from: Eric Carter

Know about sms api, Text messaging software & gateway to improve your sms campaign

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) August 11, 2011 -- This article is for business owners who want to increase the presence of business in the market with minimum possible expenditures and for the business owners who are considering to use messages as an integral part of their business services. First of all I would like to tell that with messages no magic happens and only focused approach with accurate use of technology and creative ideas can bring traffic to your business. Many business owners claim that sms from computer are not very effective and yield very low results which is absolutely not correct and infect sms from computer is the most economic and most effective way to promote businesses these days. Following statements support my these lines.

1. Sms is the most widely used value added service by any telecommunication service provider worldwide.

2. Around 2.4 billion active users frequently use sms services on there mobiles and number of people using text from computer is not included here.


3. Around 75 percent of all mobile users use sms service across the globe.

4. In 2008 alone 4.8 trillion messages were sent or received.

5. Massive use of messages can be identified in the revenue generated by sms in year 2006 which was $ 81 billion approximately.

Now you must have got an idea that how much benefit a bulk sms campaign can offer to your business. There are many sms service providers providing mass sms services in the nearby area but to choose the right one is a little tricky. Any sms from computer or text from computer service provider uses sms api, text messaging software, sms gateway to send thousands of messages in a little frame of time lets get some idea of each.

sms gateway is a portal on the Internet which can be used to send messages in bulk and messages sent using this gateway are like the normal messages by mobiles and receivers can not identify that this particular messages is a text from computer. Every telecommunication service provider offers sms gateway for their mass sms services and often the cost associated to get such one is very low.

sms api or sms application programming interface is an important thing to understand. We all know that different service providers use different type of technology to operate on their telecommunication services. Sms api plays an important role to convert messages in accordance to each technology and ensures the delivery of each message pushed to the sms gateway. SMS API is implemented in a software to help successful interactions in an IT System. Use of sms api is very common in network management systems, CRM (Customer relationship management) system, work flow management and help desk support systems.

Text messaging software is a specially designed software to send thousands of messages with just a click of mouse. As you are aware that any bulk sms campaign needs to send thousands of messages and sending these messages by entering each mobile number manually is next to impossible therefore specially made text messaging software is used to send thousands of messages with just a single click of mouse. Any text messaging software can easily be downloaded over the Internet and runs well with all type of operating systems.


Article from:free-press-release

Enhancing Your Bottom Line With Social Media Marketing

To stay current with your competition, use social media to your advantage; many businesses do not do this. They fail to realize the power of social media marketing. If properly used, you will find yourself with more customers for your business. You will gain some knowledge of how to begin your social marketing campaign.

To succeed in social media marketing, you must be careful about the information that you are releasing. It is very easy to use a site like Twitter to give small tidbits of information to your followers. Grammatical errors and untrue information could be very damaging to your image, causing you to lose customers. Despite the aura of informality surrounding these sites, it is always important to remember to remain professional while using these forums.

You should do your homework and find out what works best with social media marketing. Each one of these social media websites has its own unique set of offerings, and learning what they are can help you get the most benefit from your time spent on them. You could discover a single site is the best one to use because it reaches more people. It is up to you to find this out.

You can maintain interest in your page by automating Twitter. This allows you to instantly tweet links to blogs that you like. Find timely and trustworthy blogs to share with people who follow you. This helps your page stay current and helps satiate your followers when they want to find good content.

Think about having a blogger that is an expert in your field write for you or do the same for them. This method helps both you and the guest blogger to get more traffic to both of your websites. Whenever you decide to guest blog on someone's site, always include links that go back to your own site. Always, be willing to reciprocate for your own guest bloggers. The blogger's followers are likely to come check out the post as well as your site in the process.

You want to eliminate any overlap between your professional and personal Facebook presence. Professional contacts shouldn't have the ability to access information about which games you have played or see family pictures from your vacation. If using your real name on a professional Facebook profile, try using a nickname on the personal page to prevent being found via a search.

Update your Twitter regularly so that your followers actually get a chance to see your post before it gets pushed further down their page. Post short content through Twitter often. Divide your message about a specific event into multiple tweets in order to get the most mileage out of it.

When your company's page gets new Twitter followers, follow them back. Don't act like you're too cool to be following potential customers. Most people prefer to do business with a company that reciprocates the favor and is appreciative of its customers. While it only takes a click or two to follow another Twitter user, the effect is often overwhelmingly positive for the customers.

By following the advice here you can create a marketing plan that will assist you in bypassing your competitors. Stay up-to-date with new trends, and do not hesitate to try new things.