5 Reasons You Should Market Online

If you’ve got a website you’ll need to let the world know about it. This is called internet marketing. Believe me, it wasn’t too long ago that I didn’t know a single thing about this concept. However, ever since I committed myself to learning about the ins and outs of online marketing, my sales have dramatically increased. Marketing online is a completely different challenge than offline marketing but it has its benefits. If you want to take your website to a different level, drive more traffic, and increase your sales, you need to consider the benefits of marketing online.

1.) First of all, with internet marketing, you will dramatically increase your world of potential customers and clients by simply having a web presence. With a contact email or web form, you have also proven to site visitors that you are reachable.

2.) Online marketing allows you to network with people you would not be able to meet otherwise. Joining newsgroups and networking communities allow opportunities for sales that just would not have been likely to happen offline.

3.) You have complete control of your web image without your potential customers ever needing to see you in person. If you are concerned about maintaining a professional appearance, you won’t have to worry about this online. You can slip over to your computer in pajamas, chat with your clients who live clear across the world, and never have to worry about ruining your business profile.

4.) Online marketing offers a vast variety of ways to add clientele to your business. With all of the many proven marketing techniques available, you are bound to find one or several that fit your desired level, and you can tweak these strategies and implement them any way you see fit.

5.) Last, but not least, marketing online can become very automated, and require less of your time, focus, or energy, depending on the techniques you use. Not only is there software out there that can automate your marketing processes for you, but there are a world of marketing freelancers who are available for outsourcing, and can dramatically help your business.

I’ll have to admit, when I figured out how to market my business on the internet, I was ecstatic! These are just a few of the benefits of internet marketing. I am certain that as you begin to market online, you’ll soon be able to add to this list.

Demetria Zinga is the founder and owner of http://www.faith-media.com, a technology and consulting firm which specializes in web design and hosting, graphics and print designs, internet marketing, and e-training. She is also the founder of http://www.christianladies.net, an interactive ezine, blog, and podcast for Christian women.

Networking Meetings - Creating Rapport with People You Meet

How do you feel when you meet someone, perhaps a business person, who you’ve only seen once before at meeting… and they remember you AND your name?

It feels great doesn’t it? And, be honest, rather flattering too. And because of that you probably have more rapport with them.

Now let’s turn that around and say it’s you who always manages to remember people and their names. Do you think they just might be more interested in doing business with you? Or recommending you to their business colleagues who are looking for what you offer?

Here’s how to make remembering people easier…

* When you are introduced to someone make sure you hear their name clearly.
* Repeat the name and ask if you’ve got it right.
* Check the spelling with them if it is unusual… they will be flattered that you consider them important enough to take the trouble.
* Repeat the name twice, silently in your mind, to give yourself a better chance of remembering it.
* Ask a question and listen

Listening is a Skill – Take Time to Develop It…

The challenge we all have is to silence or ignore our own thoughts. Especially whilst other people are talking.

How often have you drifted off in your mind whilst someone is talking?

Perhaps, like I used to be, you are guilty of finishing people’s sentences for them? It took me a while to stop that one, I can tell you! Especially with people who were more precise in their conversation and took their time to finish a sentence, it could be agonising for me.

Or if you don’t interrupt, perhaps you are busy thinking about what you are going to say just as soon as they stop to take a breath. Yep, been guilty of that too!

Guilty, that is, until I found this neat trick. Peter Thomson told me about it in the late 1990’s and it’s a real gem. He calls it Active Listening, which is a pretty good description.

It’s great for group meetings; presentations; 1-to-1 meetings; in fact any conversations at all.

Here’s what you do…

Repeat, internally, everything the other person is saying.

It gives you 7 clear benefits:

1) You don’t miss anything important that is being said
2) You understand the communication better
3) You give the impression of being very interested in what the other person has got to say
4) Your reply, which you won’t be in a position to make until the other person finishes speaking, appears considered and relevant because of the slight pause
5) Your reply is more relevant because you have completely understood the previous part of the conversation.
6) You do not annoy the other person by interrupting them

and the definite bonus…

7) You can recall the conversation and important details more clearly, when you need to, at a later date.

By the way, it is a good idea to practise this technique in private or with a group of friends or business colleagues before ‘going live’. The other person will find it a bit disconcerting if you stare at them with a glazed look in your eyes. And they certainly will not be flattered if you move your lips whilst repeating their words internally!

©2005 Original Work by Carol Bentley

Learn more about Persuading People to Buy… Subscribe to your free reports, with no obligation, at http://www.CarolBentley.com

Carol is the author of ‘I Want to Buy Your Product… Have You Sent Me a Letter Yet? (How to create powerful sales letters, advertisements, flyers, brochures, web pages and newsletters that persuade hundreds, or even thousands, of additional customers and clients to buy from you!) by Carol A E Bentley (Rated 5-star on Amazon.co.uk) This book is available at a special offer at http://www.CarolBentley.com/offer

Carol is one of the highest paid direct response copywriters available. If you would like to talk to Carol’s office about having her work on your current or next sales project you can use the contact form on her website http://www.CarolBentley.com/contact.asp

How Speakers, Exhibitors, Consultants, and Meeting Planners Partner-Generate More Money and Value

• “Make Every Moment Count” is the title of a CD that a pharmaceutical company gave away at their exhibit booth at two major conferences.

Half of the CD covered the company’s new product news and “how-to’s”; the other
half featured tips from a speaker at those conferences. The gift was announced with
on-the-seat cards during the speaker’s sessions.

• A fullflilment house inserts a speaker’s “Communicate Clearly” tips sheets on top
of the informational updates that the fulfillment house mails out on behalf of their
corporate clients in the fields of insurance, credit and healthcare.

The tips are a welcome relief from the important, but highly technical reading below
it.

The speaker provides the camera-ready tips to the fulfillment house that offers
them as an extra benefit to their corporate clients.

Those clients pay for reproduction. Each sheet has a line at the top, “(name of
company) supports your personal success.”
• The largest beer producer in India introduced an upscale beer for women.
Hanging from a gold cord around the neck of each bottle is a card entitled, “Live
Well” that promotes a free 3” x 3” book of 100 lifestyle tips for women buyers.
Buyers get the book from their store when they turn in ten bottle caps. The book is
co-authored by an American woman speaker and a popular Indian woman
journalist.

These are examples of cross-promotions among speakers and people from different
industries or professions. Like all successful cross-promotions, they are aimed at
better reaching and/or serving a mutual market.

Successful cross-promotions build customer-attracting visibility and value.
Unsuccessful joint promotions can create irritation and lose credibility.

Some speakers are avid cross-promoters. Several have written about partnering and
joint promotions including Jeff Slutsky and Ed Rigsbee. Some informally or formally
share speaking leads. Some refer to each other in their speeches, articles, ezines,
web sites, books and media interviews. Some sell each other’s products.

To truly stand out in an over-advertised world, some speakers and other
consultants are beginning to partner with people a step or two outside the meeting
industry.

For your partnering opportunities, look more closely at your key stakeholders,
including your “hot list” of fans who have heard you speak, meeting planners,
speakers bureaus, exhibitors at trade shows where you appear, other speakers,
vendors who support the industry.

Now look at the markets and organizations that are important to them. In each
case, you may have a way to partner with a stakeholder - or with an organization
that is important to that stakeholder - to better reach or serve one of their markets.

Your “product” is your message, delivered in person, or in some other package.
More credible than traditional advertising, your helpful and inspiring stories, tips
and examples can naturally attract prospects to you and to your cross-promoting
partners.

Do you speak to manufacturers?

• What if your pertinent tips appeared on their packaging, along with your contact
information?

• What if your product was inside the package of a big ticket consumer product?
For example, techno-savvy speakers’ pertinent ideas could add a human touch if
they appeared on or inside computer hardware or software packages.

Two Lexus dealers will be placing a speaker/singer’s CD, “It’s a Beautiful Life”, on
the front seat of their newly sold cars.

For many years, speaker Bob Popyk has produced sales publications for retailers and
other distributors of big ticket consumer products, ranging from boats to musical
instruments. His clients are the manufacturers of those products. All these
publications pull people to his “Creative Selling” magazine.

Agilent Technologies sponsored my presentation for their clients and prospects.
Each attendee received a card pack with their technology tips on one side and my
communication tips on the other.

Offer your clients the opportunity to co-author articles with you for their
professional or industry publications. Tell them some of the titles of your timeless
articles so they can choose one to revise.

Via email, send your client the article she selects, with places marked to insert
examples and quotes from their industry.

Include brief instructions for completing the revision.

Ask her to send the version back to you for your final approval.

Offer to submit the article to the appropriate industry and professional
publication(s).

Now, more than ever, people are open to innovative ways to capture attention, offer
genuine value without price-cutting and reach new markets. Your suggested cross-
promotions can demonstrate your care for customers and your capacity to be
cutting edge.

Kare Anderson is the author of LikeABILITY (see Grand Store at
http://www.SayitBetter.com), Make Yourself Memorable and SmartPartnering. A popular
speaker on SmartPartnering and on how to be more frequently-quoted to become
your kind of customers’ top- of-mind choice, she also publishes the SayitBetter
newsletter, with 32,000 subscribers in 28 countries.

Four Brainless Self-Promotion Techniques To Avoid

Many workers think that their hard work will speak for itself. They quietly do their job and stay late at the office hoping that their boss will notice their efforts. However, when a job promotion or pay raise goes to someone else, many employees retreat into a corner, wondering what happened.

Many don’t realize that talking about your accomplishments in a confident way is the best way to get ahead in your career. Promoting yourself at work doesn’t need to be shameless and you don’t have to brag.

Instead, you need to develop a savvy approach to self-promotion so you can get ahead in your career. Being able to effectively toot your horn without blowing the wrong tune can only happen if you avoid these four common mistakes.

1. Don’t piggy-back off a tragic event to launch your self-promotion campaign

   The recent hurricane that hit the American states of Lousiana, Mississippi and Alabama left millions homeless and cities in ruin. Hurricane Katrina is turning out to be one of the most expensive natural disasters ever in the continental United States. The tsunami that decimated 11 countries in South Asia in December 2004 is yet another extremely devastating natural event. Many people were displaced and to date, over $2-billion has been donated world wide to help the victims of the tsunami.

   However, it’s getting to a point where the publicity surrounding who’s giving gets more attention than the people who lost their homes, belongings and family members. Celebrities, companies and even countries are taking this opportunity to boast about the amount of money they have donated. Some companies are even buying full page ads in newspapers just to show what they’re doing to help.

   While Hollywood and Fortune 500 choose this time to brag about their contributions, this approach lacks dignity, tact and modesty. Don’t make this mistake with your career. If your company just lost a major customer and is now facing a lawsuit for breach of contract, it’s not the time to brag about a new process you developed while working with that customer. That shows poor timing on your part and you will look bad in front of your boss and colleagues.

2. Don’t brag by putting down the competition

   On Season 2 of the hit show The Apprentice, one contestant, Ivana, was the project manager of a losing team. As she was making her case in front of Donald Trump as to why she should not be fired, instead of focusing on her strengths, she started to bad mouth another contestant. What made Ivana’s comments so bizarre is that she focused on someone who wasn’t even on the same team as she was. Incidentally, Donald Trump didn’t look too highly on Ivana’s comments and he fired her with little hesitation.

   Saying negative things about a co-worker may make you feel good, but this approach does little to raise your profile at work. When you do this, you appear to be uncomfortable with your own accomplishments. Instead, develop a 30-second commercial about what you do well. That way, you focus on your triumphs and resist the temptation of making your co-worker look bad.

3. Never include cheating in your self-promotion campaign

   Remember Enron, WorldCom and the adventures of media tycoon, Conrad Black? The executives of these companies cheated in order to gain success. Despite the fact that he was being investigated for diverting company money to his own pocket, Black was outraged and claimed that people should be thanking him for creating so many jobs, not spending their energy accusing him of stealing.

   The things you do at work may not include being investigated by the Securities & Exchange Commission, but there are some activities you may be doing right now that undermines your company’s bottom line.

   Whether you take office supplies home from your company’s stock room, take a two-hour lunch or overcharge your company for gas on your expense report, these actions are all dishonest. You’ll make enemies at work very fast if you gloat about your dishonest deeds in the lunch room. Plus, this is a sure fire way to bring your career to a grinding halt as no one wants to work with a cheater.

4. Don’t over-brag

   There’s a business woman I met recently. I had read her book and I attended a few of her teleclasses. When I heard she’d be in my city on business, I sent her an email requesting we meet for coffee.

   We met and I immediately regretted it. You see, this business woman spoke endlessly about herself for the entire 30-minutes. Here I was, one of her biggest fans and most loyal customers, and my idol boasted about her product line and how much money she was making. This business women didn’t take any time to find out who I am nor to learn why I’m her biggest fan. I walked away from that meeting and never bought anything from her website again.

   It’s important to let others know about your achievements, but don’t do this at the expense of bad manners. Find the balance. Know when it’s appropriate to talk about your accomplishments and when you should hold your tongue. A good self-promoter knows the value of listening to others. This skill can work wonders for your career.

The way for you to advance in your career rests in your ability to self-promote. If you won’t talk about your achievements, don’t expect anyone else to do so, but remember that your goal is to be savvy in your approach and leave the brainless techniques to someone else.

Leesa Barnes, The Schmooze Coach, helps consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers, coaches and solopreneurs avoid cold calling by developing a fearless networking plan. Leesa is author of “Schmooze Your Way to Success: 9 Fearless Networking Tips for the Shy, Timid, Introverted & Just Plain Clueless.” Go to http://www.schmoozeyourwaytosuccess.com/ecourse.html and sign up for her free 8-lesson ecourse called “From Clueless to Fearless: Secrets from the Schmooze Coach.”

How to Build a Forum That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Months Later, Part 1

If you can get a big enough following from customer lists and newsletters you might want to start your own forum. But I always see people trying to start a forum and it falls flat on their face, mainly because they make it too big and they never promote it.

The main reason is because nobody eats in an empty restaurant. Don’t setup a “multiple topic” forum like phpBB where it allows you to partition the thing off into different subjects. You have to start small, get enough traffic to that forum for THAT type of forum to become self-sustaining before you build bigger.

By that I mean start off with a blog.

This blog (and eventually your message board) HAVE to have a niche. You can’t just have a general purpose hang-out message board, or have it based on something really vague like “Marketing,” or “Finance,” or “Computers.” Instead go for something specific like a Copywriting message board. Or a message board about home loans. Or a message board about digital video.

You supply all the posts, and any user “posts” will just be comments to this journal. Don’t require any sort of signup in order to post.

Give people an option to sign up for e-mail updates but DO NOT use the autoresponder built into the blogging software. Instead use a separate autoresponder script. Why? Two reasons:

1.) You can write a quick teaser message that will entice more subscribers to read your posts than any boring automated notice could.
2.) This way it will be easier to move subscribers over once you graduate from a blog (keep reading).

(WordPress works great for this and is free.)

Start off allowing anyone to post, but once you start getting traffic to that page and the blog spam starts rolling in you will either have to require approval by you for a comment to go through or require the poster to type in a code to prove they are human (you’ve seen the kind).

It will be easy to get SOME traffic to the blog, if you keep most of your entries to it in article format, because then you can submit these articles to ezines and the article directories with a link back to the blog.

Keep the blog format going, be SURE to post regularly and if possible write content in advance (Post To Future) so that if you miss a week your content will still be updated as if you never left. If you feel ambitious setup RSS feeds for the blog and submit to the feed directories.

Continue posting until you reach the point where after you make a post, you receive comments from 10-20 different people within a day or two of the post. This 10-20 has to happen without any e-mails being sent out, or any kind of active promotion.

Until you reach this point stay with the blog, it means you haven’t reached critical mass yet and any attempt to change over to a more complex kind of site will never work.

Once you’ve got those 10-20 spontaneous posts you can go ahead and make the move from a blog to a forum. But be very very careful. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, especially if your forum doesn’t “unfold” properly, which is a technique I’ll discuss with you in Part 2 of this article…

Free (humorous) video for you about how to promote an affiliate program without seeming spammy. Take a look: http://www.affiliatebattleplan.com/Rewrite.html

Computer Network Management

Today it is almost inconceivable for a business not to have computers, whether it is a construction company or a high technology firm. When a business has more than one computer, they are almost always connected together in a local area network. These networks may be more or less advanced and therefore more or less costly.

Companies invest so much (in terms of both money and time) in a local area networks because there are many advantages that a local area network brings to a business and how it is administered.

Some businesses use a local area network in such a way they are highly dependent on it always working. If the company’s network fails, then you may see all the employees chatting away in the corridors because they can’t do their work. This means big losses for the company and causes stresses on the employees. All companies must consider their local area networks a vital asset and downtime must be avoided. This imposes huge demands on the network staff to keep such networks running almost 100% of the time.

The advantages of Computer Network Management

One of the main advantages of installing and maintaining LANs is the opportunity they create for better communication and cooperation between employees and customers.

Security considerations: Local Area Network security can be both a help and hindrance. Comprehensive security is beneficial because it provides a central and safe strategy for data access and disaster recovery. All information is protected by the design and implementation of the network security solution. On the other hand, interconnecting computers in local area networks creates a security risk, since doing so makes it technically possible for intruders to access many machines on the network at once.

Cost considerations: Installing a local area network is a relatively expensive project. Servers, cabling, switches, routers and software can all be expensive and should never be purchased without expert advice. Keeping the network operating and secure also requires a lot of resources and can be costly.

Surprisingly, a local area network can bring a number of cost savings. Sharing resources avoids the need to purchase equipment for each individual. Even more important is the security that a local area network can provide. Data loss could cost a business a great deal of money and in some cases, cause the business to shutdown altogether. Computer Network Management should require a consistent routine for data backups with regular checkups of data quality - a practice that will save a company huge sums in the event of a mishap.

Computer Network Management: preliminary analysis phases

The first phase of computer network management is to determine the source of the problem (a preliminary study that looks into several options of differing scope may be useful here) and defining it in a specification of requirements. Examples of what should be evaluated are different network operating systems, mail systems, and other applications. The choice of hardware components should also be evaluated. This phase is generally aimed at establishing what the system should do, not how it should do it.

Computer Network Management: design phase

The purpose of design phase is to determine how the requirements of the specification are to be met. The current approach to large, complex projects is to break them down into smaller, more manageable subprojects.

Computer Network Management: implementation phase

This phase involves the physical installation of the local area network. Cables are run, software is installed, and computers and other hardware are put in place.

Computer Network Management: integration and system testing phase

In this phase, commissioning of the network begins, and routines are adapted to users and the operating personnel. The system must be tested, both to ensure that the network meets the requirements set out in the specification and that it is stable enough to perform the central function it has in the organization.

Computer Network Management: operation and maintenance

Local area networks have complex operating routines. This is because there may be serious consequences when faults occur or unauthorized persons gain access to the system. Many companies have employees devoted solely to take care of running and maintaining computer networks. These system administrators may deal with network issues such as performance, reliability and security of both hardware and software.

Computer Network Management: tools

Although an organization may have computer administrators on site, they must also monitor the network more than eight hours a day. In fact, some of the worst trouble that arises with networks can happen during the night hours when nobody is using the network. With the right computer network management tools, your organization can receive the security of knowing that problems will be foreseen, prevented, and taken care of - and that your network administrator can be notified at a moment’s notice, should anything go exceptionally wrong.

Frank Hughes is the Vice President of Technical Solutions at SecureMyCompany, Inc. Mr. Hughes has over 14 years experience in the IT industry, with the last 10 serving as the Senior Solutions Consultant for BellSoutions.net. Get more information on network management tools.

Frank Hughes hold several vendor certifications including Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Sonicwall and many more. Mr. Hughes is a recognized expert in managed services including remote desktop managment, network monitoring and help desk software.