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Archive for June, 2008


Custom Embroidery on Company Shirts

Jun 18, 2008 Author: Epolos Articles | Filed under: Advertising
by Epolos Articles

Embroidered company shirts are a great idea for any type of company - large or small. If you own a business, then you know that image is everything. A company’s image says many things about a business - from how they treat their customers to what their rates are likely to be. Following are three messages you can get across with custom embroidered company shirts.

3 Ways Custom Embroidered Company Shirts Instill Confidence in Your Customers

Security: Embroidered logo shirts inspire confidence in your customers by literally dissolving the fear of interacting with strangers. One of the most touted pieces of safety advice touted by experts is look for company uniforms, name badges, etc., when you are approached by workers at your home.

There are literally thousands of small businesses who fit this profile. Lawn care service providers, painters, movers, gardeners, roofers, etc. can all benefit from embroidered logo shirts. As these types of businesses tend to be micro businesses who can really grow, embroidered logo shirts can be an an inexpensive first step in the growth process.

Professionalism: When you’re a small business, standing out from the crowd is not only important, it’s necessary. You can literally leave competition in the dust when you and your employees were embroidered logo shirts. Customers will more easily recall you, which is the first step in getting repeat business.

While many very small, micro business operate without so much as a business card, you’ll can be a two or three steps ahead, branding your business and priming it for growth. Many small business experts advise small business to figure out what the big boys are doing, and copy them. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel. To be big, act big, and you’ll grow big that much sooner.

Success is Organization: Customers like to do businesses with professionals. This is why the business suit is so popular. It sends a message, namely, “I am an expert, I know what I’m doing and I can get the job done for you.” This is exactly what customers want. They hire your business to handle their problem - whatever it is. Custom embroidery on shirts is a simple, effective way to brand your business for success.

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Using Promotional Candies To Market Your Business

Jun 16, 2008 Author: Kay Petronelli | Filed under: Advertising
by Kay Petronelli

If you ask anyone that works in an office all day or somebody else that drives a truck, undoubtedly they would say that they like candy. So, why not use candies as a way to promote your company.

With promotional candies you will be able to offer something that people are going to be interested in as well as get people to hear about your business.

In order to be able to use promotional candies as an advertising item you must have your company logo or name imprinted on the wrapper or the surface of the candy itself. Every time someone goes to have one of your candies they will be reminded of your company. This is how you can get people to be constantly thinking of your company.

One of the most popular kinds of promotional candies is mint. These are great for advertising a business because you put your name right on the wrapper. Most mints are individually wrapped so each time someone pops a mint they have to look at your name.

If you would prefer something of a bulk nature then you would be interested in getting small mint tins. This kind of advertising is more successful being at a reception area when visitors come to an office. Therefore, when someone reaches for the mint tin to get a candy they will see who is advertising with free candies before they even get to enjoy the treat.

These mint candies are very affordable, not to mention an effective advertising technique. Individually wrapped mints can be anywhere from 10 cents per piece or a bit lower. In addition, you are not limited to only mint candies but other kinds and flavors such as jellybeans and cinnamon candies which are good promotional candies too. Also, giving a candy for a particular theme like Valentine’s Day or Halloween is another concept to consider.

Chocolates are also a great way to advertise for you business. You can go for the cheaper option, which is to offer individually, wrapped chocolates with your company’s name or logo on the wrappers. However, you can spend a little more money and actually have that information printed right onto the chocolate itself. This can get rather expensive depending on the design of the chocolate. However, this is an effective way to advertise because it always gets people’s attention and gets them talking. It will typically cost about $2.00 a chocolate bar to do this. However, the more you buy the cheaper they will be.

If you are a business and are looking for a fresh way to advertise your business then you should consider promotional candies. Everyone likes to have something that they can munch on throughout the day, so why not attach your logo to it. There are a variety of types of candies that you can use and in several different ways.

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Passive Income is Financial Freedom

Jun 12, 2008 Author: Troy Smith | Filed under: Internet Marketing
by Troy Smith

Would you rather work 40 hours a week to achieve the same amount of income as someone else makes working an hour a week? The answer to this question is pretty obvious, yet many people do not know to make this happen. A great financial legend, James D. Rockefeller, once said that he would rather earn from 1% of 100 people’s efforts than 100% of his own. He couldn’t have put it any better. Do you find it hard to make enough to get by?

The solution to this problem is the idea of a passive income. Passive income is the money-making principle that separates your time from your work. Once you set up a stream of passive income, it is on autopilot and you will have the opportunity to make money while working on other interesting projects.

Before we go further, I’d like to ask this: are you getting ahead of inflation? Statistics show that most Americans are not. Did you know that the average household income for Americans has only increased by 30% since 1968, and yet inflation says that a dollar in 1968 is worth 6 times that of today? That means that we need to earn around $225,000 a year to live at the same standards as the average income of 1968. We can get to this level by having multiple passive incomes.

The idea of residual income is a form of passive income that relies on making money off of a product that you only work on once. After you create this product, you establish an automated service to deliver and receive payment for this product.

You can also create a residual income by selling e-books. You do not even need to create an e-book yourself, simply buy resell rights and profit from that. Some other methods may require work such as an insurance worker phoning a consumer to renew their policy. For these tasks, you can hire someone to do this for you.

Leveraged income allows the labor of additional individuals to establish an income for you. In this method, you create an income off of others people’s toil, instead of your own. This strategy may or may not second as residual income, which when combined with leveraged income, is twice as efficient.

Another type of leverage is active leveraged income. This type does involve your efforts, but by getting more people involved in your project, you can earn even more money. You do not have to hire someone because your recruits will want to do this for you. This can greatly enhance the return and get you closer to your financial freedom.

Having financial freedom seems to be harder than ever, but with knowledgeable experts willing to assist, it is also easy. There are a lot of make money online programs out there, so be sure to get with one that has established partners and ways to grow within the company. By correctly establishing different streams of passive income, you can create financial freedom and have a happy, successful life.

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Pay Per Lead Services Versus Pay Per Click Advertising

Jun 11, 2008 Author: Josh Prizer | Filed under: Advertising
by Josh Prizer

Tired of watered down, poor quality leads from your lead generation company? The last several years, we have been noticing a trend being discussed by our clients. They are telling us that the quality of leads that used to come in from their lead generation services have dropped off the map. At the same time, they’ve noticed that the quality of leads coming from pay per click has remained superb and even gotten better.

A lot of lead generation companies are using pay per click search to gather their leads. They will then mark up the cost it took to acquire them, or they will send them to multiple vendors and the quality to you is often poor. If this is your problem, maybe it’s time you skip the middle man and go straight to the source.

Getting into PPC advertising is not as simple as it used to be. Sure, you can set up a website with some contact info, but the competition has gotten more sophisticated in recent years. In order to really compete and push down your cost per acquisition, you’ve got to throttle up your effort and skills.

When you launch a paid search campaign, you need to realize that everything in your pipeline, from what keywords to appear on, what ads to run, where to send them, how to get them to take action, etc. — all of that can be managed and optimized. Let’s examine two of these areas.

Let’s start with your PPC ad copy. You can certainly just place an ad and let it ride, but with the PPC algorithms placing more and more importance on Quality Scores, you need to pay close attention to your ads. If you can’t conduct daily split testing on your ads because of the time and effort, then try outsourcing to a PPC management company. A good firm should be able to double or triple your click through rates.

So, why is this key? Pretty simple. Double and triple that relevant traffic and you can double and triple your leads. If you are not working on this, trust me, your competition is. It’s worth the time and expense.

But this is just one place to focus your efforts. Take a look at the destination urls — the landing pages where you send visitors. Are you using a contact form? How simple is your contact form? Is your phone number too small? There are always a variety of items you can optimize and test to increase conversions.

If you can optimize your landing pages over time, you can now take that traffic and double or triple your lead conversions. We’ve seen it time and time again. So, put in the effort, it is worth the time.

If you don’t know where to start when it comes to Pay Per Click search, hire a PPC management company. They will develop keyword lists, find keywords from your competition, advise you on some ideas for your landing pages and conduct those daily split tests.

Once you dump those watered down leads and go straight to the source…the results can be phenomenal.

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Keyword Research - SEO Management Step One

Jun 11, 2008 Author: Terry Stanfield | Filed under: Search Engine Optimization
by Terry Stanfield

Keyword research is a discipline embraced and used in SEO management by experts to allow them to determine which search terms people are searching on in the search engines. At its simplest level, this research is about studying the phrases that work for your audience and it is a real art. It is one of the most effective ways to identify niche markets that others have failed to recognize. Keyword research is very important so that the content of the pages are more attractive as much for the users as for the robots. Keyword research is not an exact science and shouldn’t be discussed like it is.

I like to focus on finding long tailed keyword phrases that have a significant number of monthly searches for that exact term with 5,000 to 300,000 competing websites. Long tailed keywords, are multi-word keyword phrases. Most folks searching with a one or two keyword are just “browsing”. Most people who use long tail keywords know what they want. Remember, you want to focus each page on 2-3 keyword phrase.

There are many free keyword research tools online. Most SEO software tools include these tools as well. Google, Yahoo and other search engines have free tools also. You want a tool that will give you the number of daily or monthly searches and competing web pages. There are even sites like “spyFu.com” that will let you see which terms your competitors are using.

How many keywords you have in an article is known as keyword density. Your keyword density should be anywhere from 3% to 7%. For example, if you were to write a 100 word article you would need to write the keyword in 7 times to achieve a 7% keyword density. For a 500-word article you would need to use your keyword 15 times to get a 5% density. I use a tool called “Content Composer” that does a fantastic job of keeping me on track.

Keyword research can be defined as choosing the words, which describe your product or service as, seen from the viewpoint of your target market is the most important step in the SEO Management process.

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PPC Bid Management Techniques

Jun 11, 2008 Author: Maxine Stirling | Filed under: Advertising
by Maxine Stirling

When it comes to PPC (pay per click) advertising, it seems like the marketplace is getting continually more saturated and competitive, making it harder than ever to run a cost-effective campaign. This is true to some extent, but there are still ways to run a campaign that gets great ROI. Here are a few PPC bid management techniques you can utilize to do just that.

First, don’t outbid your own budget. Just because there is a bidding war going on doesn’t mean you have to get caught up in it. Remember that if you spend more to get customers than the profit you earn by converting them on the backend, your entire campaign is not only a waste of time, it’s actually a waste of money also. It is much better to have fewer clicks and get them at a price where you can achieve ROI (return on investment) then to get caught up in a bidding war you can’t win. Plus, with fluctuations in the PPC market, just try to ride the low waves, and avoid the high waves.

The next bid management technique you should take into consideration is never bidding for the top spot. All too often, people want to feel the thrill of seeing their ad up there on the top spot of SERPs. But this is not financially realistic for most campaigns, and is a quick way to chisel away a good chunk of your margins. You need to let your ad sell your product or service, not the placement of your ad. Plus, consider that many people click on the top spot much more readily than the eighth spot. This means that you will be getting clicks from people who have no intent to purchase your product or service. Now you are playing a high price for low-quality leads, a double whammy. If you pay money for a click, you want that prospective customer to genuinely be interested in what you have to offer.

Another bid management technique that you can make work for you is bid jamming. Certain PPC services have a bid system that is public, allowing you to see the bids of all your competitors. If you have a very direct competitor, you can consider jamming their bid. Basically, PPC services operate similar to an online auction site. If you bid .25 per click, and the next closest competitor bids .13 per click, you will pay .14 per click not .25. So, if your competitor is bidding .25, you may want to bid .24 so that they pay full price for the bid. If you do, they may not be able to keep the top spot for as long.

Utilizing these three simple PPC bid management techniques can help you stand apart form your competitors and maximize your PPC campaign without overspending. This way, you can win the bidding ways the smart ways - without breaking your budget.

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How to Manage Your Google AdWords Campaign

Jun 11, 2008 Author: Maxine Stirling | Filed under: Advertising
by Maxine Stirling

When managing your Google AdWords campaign, there are several things you should take into consideration in order to maximize the benefits of your effort. This article will cover a few of the basic Google AdWords campaign management strategies you can make use of in your pay per click advertising campaign.

The first tip you should consider utilizing in your Google AdWords campaign is the use of keyword optimization. The best place to start when it comes to keyword optimization is being selective and researching your keywords. After this, you should figure out those keywords that have a very low conversion rate, and block them out by using negative keywords.

Some people who institute a Google AdWords campaign are not necessarily trying to sell a specific product, but simply trying to establish broader brand awareness. If this applies to your situation, then you may want to consider a cost-per-impression campaign. With this type of campaign, your text ads will show up on the web pages of relevant sites, and you will pay by gross impressions instead of clicks. This can be a cheap way to garner brand awareness, and put your name in front of a broader group of potential customers.

If you are very certain of your ability to convert potential prospects, then you may want to consider the Google AdWords campaign strategy of maximizing your keywords. This strategy is based on bulk sales, and relies heavily on your ability to convert potential prospects into sales on the backend. Some strategies for maximizing your keywords include adding typos of your keywords, reversed letters, and plural and singular versions of keywords. This will increase your potential audience and likely increase the number of clicks you get. Of course, you don’t want clicks that aren’t at least somewhat relevant to your product or service.

One other thing you may want to consider is putting a spending cap on your budget. You can do this either by the day, week, or month, and this will help you learn to maximize the efficiency of your campaign. If you don’t do this, your Google AdWords campaign can quickly drain your online advertising budget. Remember that you should never have to increase your spending if you aren’t getting clicks. If you aren’t getting clicks, there is likely a larger problem, such as a poorly written ad or a non-targeted campaign.

These Google AdWords campaign management techniques can help you increase the efficiency of your campaign without stretching your budget too thin. Depending on the goals of your campaign, these strategies can be very effective.

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Getting Visitors Using Article Marketing

Jun 11, 2008 Author: M.S. Williams | Filed under: Internet Marketing
by M.S. Williams

You’ve got a website, now what?

When you first start a new website you have the dilemna all internet markets have - how do you get visitors. It doesn’t matter why you started the website or for what purpose you are going to put it, you need to get into search engines and you need visitors for it to succeed.

Article Marketing to the Rescue

Of course there are a lot of ways to get visitors to your website, from advertising to trading links with other sites to getting your link into established link directories. All of these have their merits, but one of the easiest and least costly alternative is article marketing.

What are the Advantages of Article Marketing

With article marketing, you can get links coming into your site from hundreds or even thousands of other sites that will use your article. Article marketing costs nothing - all it takes is your time to create original content that others might be interested in reading. Article marketing gets your name out on the internet as someone who has an interest in your niche area - soon you might be seen as an expert.

Article marketing can be considered a hidden source of traffic - you don’t have to advertise for traffic. Submitting articles can get your site listed in search engines quickly. The content you create causes search engines to index your page, including the link that you include in your “about” or “resource” box at the bottom of the article. The search engines follow that link and find your site - exactly what you are looking for.

It’s Not All Rosy

You have to write original content (or pay someone else to do it.) Writing articles is actually easier than you would think, especially if you are writing about your product or your niche website. As long as you are writing about things you know about, writing a 400-500 word article can be accomplished in as little as twenty minutes.

If you really don’t want to do the writing yourself, there are a number of sources where you can hire others to do the writing for you.

The other major obstacle is the time it takes to submit your articles to the article directories and niche sites. The problem here is there are thousands of sites that accept articles - to submit to a large share of these sites takes a lot of time.

However, there are article submission services that will place your articles for you. And, you can alway hire freelancers to do that job too.

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Promotional Apparels - An Excellent Tool for Business Promotion

Jun 11, 2008 Author: Kay Petronelli | Filed under: Advertising
by Kay Petronelli

People always love to get free stuff. Just think of the caps and t-shirts that some companies give out at a sporting event or any other type of occasion.

Businesses that purchase apparel as promotional items will be greatly effective in marketing their products. Having their company name embossed on things like t-shirts and hats will give a lot of visual exposure to their business name or product.

Shirts are probably the most popular type of promotional apparel that is used and probably the most inexpensive. There are several major apparel groups such as Hanes or Fruit of the Loom that work with companies who make bulk purchases for shirts that are used to print your designs on or other items.

For only $5.00 per shirt or less, if you bought in bulk, you can see how you can’t go wrong with choosing such an effective promotional item.

Another popular apparel choice used for business promotion is a hat. You can easily print your company’s name or logo on the front. This will get people to immediately notice your company name when they are looking at someone who is wearing the hat. Hats are an attractive item for anyone to wear and will draw attention to anyone. This is why it is a great choice as a promotional item. They are also relatively inexpensive to purchase. You can keep your costs below $5.00 per hat if you don’t choose something that is overly complicated.

Did you ever think to use kitchen items for promotional products? It is certainly a different market group that you will be catering to but items such as aprons, oven mitts and towels are used in every kitchen on a daily basis. An attractive piece of kitchen apparel will be used many times over until it is worn out. So think about purchasing attractive items and put your company name or product on them.

Last but not least is athletic apparel. Many people today exercise and will be grateful for anything that they can receive for free. If they wear any of the apparel in a huge event like a marathon race this would be another example of free advertising for a company. Hundreds of people will see your company name or product. Something as inexpensive as a headband or wristband is only $2.00 per piece.

As you can see, there are many benefits for companies to use apparel as promotional products. They not only give your company a continuous stream of free advertising but your product or business name will be recognized everywhere. Maybe the next time somebody wants to buy a particular item it could be your company that they choose.

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How to Profit From Internet Article Marketing

Jun 11, 2008 Author: James Comer | Filed under: Internet Marketing
by James Comer

Internet article marketing is a type of advertising which businesses use to advertise by writing short articles which are related to their industry.

I’m here to tell you that internet article marketing works! Why do you think so many article directories are popping up all over the internet the past couple of years? Internet article marketing is a great method to get tons of traffic to your website without breaking the bank by spending your hard earned money on advertising services like Google Adwords(tm), Yahoo Search Marketing(tm), or Microsoft adCenter(tm).

Depending on how competitive your niche is, the costs can begin to add up very quickly. Often times you end up with a negative return on your investment. This can be easily overcome by using internet article marketing.

With article marketing, it’s very easy to become known as a subject matter expert in your chosen niche.

Article marketing builds lots of incoming back-links for your website from all over the internet.

How Do I Go About Using Internet Article Marketing?

As you know, the world wide web is made up of many websites. These sites all contain content. People search for content about a specific subject. They find the information by using a search engine. What search engines do is ’spider’ or ‘crawl’ the internet visiting each page. They take this content and index it using the descriptions and keywords found on the page.

The search engines are able to give you the best information possible by carefully indexing and cataloging what they find by using the information that they discovered when they were crawling the internet. The information that they provide to you has to closely relate to the search term that you used as well as be accurate. When written well, articles are considered a very good source of information.

If a website is to keep it’s visitors returning on a regular basis, the webmaster must provide their visitors with interesting, timely, and accurate information. These factors are vitally important for someone who maintains a website or blog on a daily basis. If the webmaster wants to climb high and remain there in the search results for his particular niche, he has to post new information to his site every day.

As I’m sure you are aware, you need to post everyday to your website, and this can gobble up alot of your valuable time. As a webmaster, you can supplement the content on your site with quality, well-written articles authored by other people. The only requirement is that you leave the author’s resource box intact including keeping the links live if that is how they were when you retrieved the article from the article directory.

Tell Me What An Article Directory Is

An article directory is a website that contains a wealth of articles in one large database. These articles are categorized by topic. Authors can post their articles there. Publishers (such as bloggers, and other webmasters) can find free articles relevant to whatever their website is about. Article directories contain a vast array of information on almost every niche that you could think of, and probably several that you never thought of.

Some article directories only accept articles written on certain niches such as computer technology, or internet marketing or even particular health issues. All that you have to do is read their submission rules and see what is allowed and what is prohibited. At most large article sites you can submit your article on just about any subject as long as it doesn’t promote hate, put down someone’s religion, or sexual orientation, or advocate violence. Other than that, the world is wide open on what you can write about.

What Do I Get Back For Giving the Articles that I’ve Written to an Article Directory?

At the end of each article there is a place where the author can place his or her ‘resource box’. This resource box contains a short blurb of one or two sentences about the author as well as a sentence or two with a link embedded pointing them to the blog, or website of the author for more information regarding the subject that the article was written about.

You’ll gain many benefits from submitting your article to article directories. You will get lots of free exposure and free marketing from it.

Research is Important

Just like any aspect of marketing, internet article marketing is not any different. You need to research the topics of your articles. You can do this by looking at and reading blogs and visiting forums which are relevant to the subject that you are writing about. Often a good place to start is to see what people are “talking about”. Now that you have a topic, or probably several topics to write about, you should be able to write an article between 300-700 words without too much trouble.

Ok, Now That I’ve Written My Article, What Next?

You should post your article on your own blog or put it on your website, first. Then wait for a couple of weeks or a month until your article is crawled by the search engines. You’ll be able ton find out if your article has been indexed by searching for your article’s title in the search engines. When you find it, then you can submit it to the article directories. The reason you would want to do it this way is that you’ll want to avoid duplicate content possible.

Wait a month? Are you Serious?

There is a new method of writing unique versions and submitting them to your articles directories and your own website. It’s possible to easily submit this article to over 700 websites as well. This serves two purposes- first, you aren’t trashing the article directories with more duplicant content, they get enough of that everyday. All you have to do is pick a few articles from one of the top directories, and search for them and then read the links you find and you’ll see how almost completely, if not ‘comepletely’ the articles are word for word the same as on other sites.

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