Struggling With Lead Generation?
Thinking back just a few short years, anybody could build a nice homebased business just by purchasing some leads and picking up the telephone and calling each of them. Depending on the quality of the leads, people having a home telephone instead of a cell phone and the use of 3-way calling, you could find many good customers and distributors. .
Then came email and the whole picture changed. It was much easier to purchase a bunch of inexpensive leads that were a few days old and dump them into an autoresponder program. Even though the percentage of prospects that responded and requested more information was fairly low, this seemed like a much easier and faster way to generate good customers and distributors.
But alas, it seems like all good things eventually come to an end. The spammers capitalized on this new trend and started flooding cyberspace with tons and tons of unwanted and even aggrevating personal emails. As the result, it became harder and harder to get legitimate emails delivered and read by prospects. Legislation was passed to try to curb this huge influx of junk mail… but many of the larger broadcast emailers just went offshore to do their mailing.
Pay per click, focused landing pages, super-attractive websites, online sales letters, video, audio, etc. have all evolved as major ways to develop good prospects. However, each of these methods has their drawbacks and as a general rule are too expensive or too difficult for the masses to use. Also, regardless of the method used to attract the potential client, the telephone still adds the personalization needed to really be effective.
Currently, there are many different sources of lead sources and turn-key programs like ‘drip systems’, automated dialers, etc. to help obtain good prospects for our products and work-at-home businesses. In fact, a whole new industry has developed of primary and ancillary services to provide good leads and prospects for networkers and others who need a source of prospects. Many of these programs are too costly for the beginning marketer or offer only part of the needed lead generation system.
So, what is the next step in lead generation evolution? Actually, it is to provide a complete, turn-key system that incorporates many of the tried and true technologies of the past… while at the same time adding all of the newest, state of the art techniques that have been developed. The best part is that a complete system is usually less expensive than the sum of the parts and is much easier for a new marketer to master. These type of programs also offer great training and keep the user more focused on their goals.
Don Moor has over 18 years of experience in network marketing and has owned several brick and mortar businesses. He is an advocate of ‘Attraction Marketing’ and is personally utilizing a complete lead generation system. For more information about this system and how to get a trial, go to http://YourLeadSystem.com
Yahoo or Google For PPC?
When it comes to pay per click advertising, you will find that there are a number of pay per click programs that you can choose from. Two of the most popular programs include Yahoo Search Marketing and Google Adwords. With both programs coming highly rated and recommended, you may find it difficult to choose between the two. When it comes to deciding which pay per click program is the best for you, you will want to examine the advantages and disadvantages of each.
For starters, let’s examine the Google Adwords program. Hands down, the biggest advantage to using Google Adwords is that it is a well-known and established program. In fact, Google is considered a household name; everyone knows what it is. When it comes to pay per click advertising, Google’s Adwords program is the most recommended. This wouldn’t be the case if Google Adwords wasn’t successful. By choosing Google Adwords, you know that you will see results; good results.
Although Google Adwords comes highly rated and recommended, there are also a number of disadvantages to using the program. There are some individuals who claim that the Google does a poor job of monitoring their advertisements, namely where they appear. It has been reported that advertisements appear on web pages that are unrelated to the advertisements that are being shown. This is most commonly seen with blogs. With blogs, posters regularly change the focus of their posts each day. This often results in different keywords being used, which can make it difficult for consistency.
As it was mentioned above, aside from Goggle Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing is the other most recommended pay per click advertising program. As with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing has a number of advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage of using Yahoo Search Marketing is that it is still a relatively new program; they recently started working with affiliates. These affiliates will host your advertisements on their web pages. While this is considered a disadvantage, it can also work to your advantage. Having a relatively small number of affiliates makes it easier for the affiliates and their websites to be monitored.
One of the biggest advantages to using Yahoo Search Marketing for pay per click advertising is results. For an example of this, just visit www.yahoo.com and perform a standard internet search. Unlike Google’s search results page, where sponsored advertisements are only displayed on the right-hand side, Yahoo has advertisements displayed on the right-hand side, the top, and the bottom.
Although both Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing have their own unique advantages and disadvantages, it is important to touch on what they have in common. Both programs only charge you for your advertisements if a user clicks on one of them, thus the name pay per click advertising. Both programs also monitor what is known as click fraud. Click fraud is when your advertisements are clicked on, maliciously, just to increase the amount of money that you have to pay.
Despite multiple disadvantages, both programs are great and they both come highly rated and recommended.
Marketing By Video
Using streaming videos in the internet as a form of marketing is a relatively new approach. Currently, most marketing brochures and newsletters are using text and pictures in combination to attract a consumer’s attention. Some pictures are a combination of still and animated objects to better the chances of attracting a prospective customer. But, if there is anything advertisers and consumers have learned about marketing, television advertisements are still the best way to attract attention for a product and keep it in the consumer’s memory.
To fully understand why internet streaming videos are the next step in online marketing, we need to be able to grasp the objective of advertisers and the effects of the different methods of advertising.
To begin with, online advertising began mainly with newsletters in the form of emails or pop-up screens containing pure text and some inanimate pictures. As internet users became more and more accustomed to surfing the WWW, these newsletters and pop-up advertisements gradually turned into annoyances. Marketing newsletters started to look like junk mail and pop-up screens became similar to billboard advertisements that you see everyday. Also, pop-up screens disturbs the rhythm of internet surfing. There you are browsing away when you see a link or article which you decide to follow or read. Just as you are about to click on it or just as you are in the middle of reading it, the pop-up appears and displaces your current browser window behind it.
In short, these common forms of advertising soon became major annoyances in most cases that anti virus software developers soon added anti pop-up features in their products thereby drastically reducing the number of consumers that these pop-ups were able to reach. To add emphasis to the drive against pop-up advertising windows, Mozilla developed a built-in anti-pop up utility into their web browser,
As far as email newsletters and advertisements are concerned, a similar phenomenon is occurring where they have suddenly evolved into what is known as junk mail or spam mail in internet language. Again, anti-virus protection software creators incorporated spam mail protection within their software while numerous sites in the internet make available free, downloadable anti-spam software. The biggest blow to spam mail marketing was when e-mail providers decided to add anti-spam or spam blocking utilities in their website.
This is where streaming video comes in. It is undisputed that television commercials are still the best way to attract attention. The advertiser needs to make the product look good in TV, but their primary objective is to attract the consumer’s attention. Their second goal is to make the video memorable enough so that the customer remembers the brand name when they have need of the product. The most famous brand names like Marlboro succeeded in their advertising campaign videos so much so that people still remember the Marlboro man. In this advertisement, the first thing you see are wild horses running. This is quite an attention drawer since lots of people like horses even when they haven’t seen one in person.
The main advantage of videos is their ability to instill curiosity in a person. An apt demonstration of this ability is when people are seen stopping at display windows of stores that have television displays in them. When you see a moving picture, you are immediately interested in what it is all about and what will happen next. Even if you don’t stop in front of the display, you will spare a glance or two. The uncanny part is this, in the instant that you see people gathered in front of something you haven’t seen yet, you will take time to look to satisfy your curiosity.
This is the strength of internet marketing through streaming videos. It immediately grabs attention. The only thing that you as an advertiser have to do is to make the video interesting enough that it maintains or improves on that initial level of interest. When the video is old enough to become common place, you replace it with a new one. Unlike pop-ups or spam messages or newsletters, they cannot become an annoyance because the first thing it does is to grab the consumer’s attention and curiosity.
With the use of videos, the consumer gets a clear picture of what your product or idea is all about. This is an added bonus to the attention grabbing feature of using videos for your marketing or advertising campaigns. When a consumer knows what you and your product are all about, they can begin to trust you. After all, having the trust of your customer’s is better than the bottom line. As good as your advertising video is, it is still the quality of your product that matters in the end.
To make a video interesting enough, try to place some humor and social relevance into them. You also need to make your customers feel a need or craving for your product. This is especially true for entrepreneurs who wish to create a niche for their product line. A good video advertisement will pull in people more than newsletters, pop-up windows or spam messages will.
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