Six Questions That Produce Successful Web Advertising
You would think that everyone in business would be able to tell you what they do and why you should be doing business with them; unfortunately the sad truth is many business executives can’t. In fact one of the biggest problems in designing websites has always been getting appropriate raw material that can be turned into meaningful presentations: a handful of badly written brochures and a few out-of-date photographs are not going to make much of an impression.
And now that the Web has involved into a sophisticated communication platform, able to deliver audio and video content, the problem has become even worse; not only do websites need to deliver appropriate copy and image content, they need to present audio dialog and video performances that demonstrate how products and services improve the business or personal lives of website visitors.
As a company we are good at what we do, we can turn the mundane into the memorable but we can’t do it if clients don’t know or can’t express their own marketing story, or are unwilling to allow their multimedia advisor to develop that story for them.
At the heart of the problem is fear, fear of making a definitive statement, declaring loud and clear what you do, and why anyone should care. It’s no longer good enough to apply technical solutions to marketing problems: you are not going to engage your audience with SEO, XML, CSS, or PHP. You must have a story to tell and you can’t be afraid to tell it as boldly as you can.
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20 Must-Have Tools to Automate an Online Business
With all the information online about tools and techniques available to help someone effectively manage and run an online business, how do you ever decide which ones are truly useful to have in your business management toolkit? Here’s my listing of the 20 indispensable tools that I cannot live without:
1. Article Marketing: SubmitYourArticle.com automates the article submission process by allowing you to submit up to eight articles each month and then distributes the articles to hundreds of web sites, article directories and ezine publishers. Without a doubt, this has been my most effective online marketing tool that has produced tremendous results for my business.
2. Audio Recording/Podcasting: AudioAcrobat.com makes audio streaming fast and simple, whether you want to add an audio greeting, audio testimonials, podcast or videos to your website or send out an audio postcard or record a teleclass.
3. Backup: Carbonite.com offers an unlimited amount of data storage for $50 per year. Carbonite is very intuitive and went directly to my email files and Roboform files to back them up without me having to manually select the backup files. I frequently use this service to find the original version of a file that I’ve accidentally overwritten, as well.
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How To Compete With The Big Boys
Every business needs to do everything it can to stand out from the crowd, to differentiate itself from the competition. This is a major challenge for companies that sell substantially the same thing as their competitors. The average business does not have the resources of a multinational corporation that often uses its substantial marketing muscle to buy market share or to drive competition out of the marketplace. Big business also uses its deep pockets to flood various media with advertising, making them a pervasive presence.
The Web has always been an egalitarian environment where smaller companies could present themselves using the same techniques as the big boys, and if these companies did it well they could stand side-by-side with their competitive behemoths.
One thing that small and medium sized businesses should take some comfort in is that many large corporations are notoriously poorly run, relying on brawn rather than brain to get the job done. Many survive because over time they have acquired huge resources, become oligopolies, or they use predatory marketing practices to stifle competition.
As the Web becomes more and more a multimedia environment, corporations are starting to use their financial resources, and inventory of commercial assets and programming (not to be confused with computer programming), to deliver their marketing messages. The question is can smaller businesses compete, and if so, how?
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