Internet Marketing Promotion: Jul 4, 2007

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Cause Based Marketing As A Low-Cost High-Impact Marketing Strategy

Did you ever ask yourself Why should someone buy from me and not from my competitors? If not, you should consider how your offering is different from those of the many competitors who are vying for the same customers as you are. One of the ways to make your business stand out from the crowd is to link your business with charity work and non-profit public service.

Everybody is chasing after the all-mighty buck, but only a few firms really do more than pay lip service to social service. Lets take a look at how charity work can help your firm as well as the wider society around it.

1. It will give your business an extra edge

As mentioned above, when you become involved in social work in a significant way, then you begin to stand out from the crowd. It gives you that something special, which may be the difference when your potential customer makes up her mind and decides which firm to go with. I have had customers confide to me that one of the reasons that they chose to do business with my firm is that they know that some of their money will be allocated to charity.

2. It increases your credibility

Credibility and trust are vital if you are going to sell anything. If someone is going to part with their scarce resources they want to be sure that they are doing business with the right people. When you show that your firm is doing something meaningful for society in addition to the normal work of making money, then you and your whole team are viewed in another light.

3. Charity work is inexpensive

It doesnt take any money to set aside part of your website to explain your companys participation in charitable activities. Similarly, it doesnt cost you anything to mention your charitable activities along with your primary information in other media. Messages in your firms internal bulletins and media are likewise easy and inexpensive to implement.

4. It helps you to convince people whom you would otherwise not reach

Charity work appeals to the nobler side of human nature, and, believe it or not, deep down inside of every one of us is the desire to do something that is good. When you get involved in charitable work you will reach civic minded individuals who are oftentimes community leaders and prominent in social, economic and political sectors of society. It might take you years of normal business activity to make contact with people like that and in fact, you might, like most people, never connect with them.

5. It lifts the morale of your staff and your clients

High morale is one of the intangible factors that can be the difference between great success and mediocrity and even complete failure. Your team will in fact become a team when it works not only for financial gain but also for civic betterment. Your customers will also feel good about the charitable aspect of your company and will be more likely to refer you to others.

6. It builds your legacy to society

A successful financier told me recently, In a hundred years who will remember the hotels that I built? But, they will still be attending and benefiting from the university that I am now helping. We have to take care of our core business, no doubt, but we should also have an eye on leaving a lasting mark on the world around us.

What we do for ourselves dies with us....but what we do to improve our society will last forever.

So, take a look at your marketing strategy and do whatever you can to incorporate charitable activity into your overall plan of action. You, your company and society will be the winners.

Work Goal

The foolish work for money,

Not other values, so they get only money.

The clever work for improvement,

They gain success and money.

The wise work for goodness and charity,

They receive friends, success, money,

And happiness.

This article is part of the Dont Go Broke While You're Getting Rich business series, presented by Darrell Berg-Smith, CEO of DBS Worldwide Marketing Co., Ltd. He is a speaker, author, consultant and entrepreneur who specializes in teaching low cost, high impact marketing and business building resources to businesses worldwide. For lots of free resources visit http://www.darrellberg-smith.com Darrell is also the founder and CEO of The Land of Smiles Foundation...a charity working throughout Asia. You can access it at http://www.landofsmilesfoundation.org

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Darrell_Berg-Smith

Darrell Berg-Smith - EzineArticles Expert Author

Affordable Small Business SEO - Know What Your Money Buys

Background
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. SEO primarily handles what is known as organic search results, also known as the results the search engines present users, excluding paid advertisement.

The main reason people seek high rankings in the organic search results is to increase targeted traffic to their websites. SEO offers a very cost effective alternative to obtain that traffic. Other means such as pay per click advertisement or banner advertising can potentially be expensive, particularly with competitive terms where the cost per click can be several dollars.

Targeting the Right Keywords
As a small business this is particularly important. Traffic for itself is not necessarily the ultimate goal. Targeted traffic is. Selecting common generic search phrases can be a poor marketing strategy for a small business because it can generate a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little revenue.

A small business will probably obtain much better results when targeting highly specific keywords that indicate a prospective customer who is ready to buy their product. Moreover, the more specific a keyword is, the lower competition it has, therefore the higher chance to win that keyword for a relatively low cost.

Result Driven Approach
Lets leave all the marketing pitch aside for a moment and really get down to the facts. What really makes an SEO firm affordable? Well, we can start by looking at what is NOT affordable. Paying thousands of dollars upfront certainly does not make sense for a small business, where every dollar spent has to provide a clear return on investment (ROI), especially since the marketing budget is not too high to begin with.

That leads us to next big question how should we measure the ROI for SEO? SEO has one objective that is to generate targeted traffic to your website, period. The good news is that traffic can easily be measured. Every web hosting company provides visual server log files that record and analyze the websites traffic across time. So SEO effectiveness can be easily measured.

Affordable SEO is first and foremost based on a result-driven approach, meaning you should only pay when you see results. Results can be measured in various ways, for instance top page placement in the major search engines or a certain increase (%) in your website traffic. Think of it as placing an ad in a newspaper, it serves exactly the same purpose as SEO that is generating targeted traffic to your business. So why should it be any different?

If an SEO firm is as good as they claim to be, let them bite their own bullet and guarantee your money back if they fail to deliver top page results within a reasonable time frame (usually 4-6 months). It is only fair.

How Much Should You Pay?
So things are starting to feel right. Your website finally appears on the first page of Google when you type in your search phrases and you are starting to experience a significant increase in your websites traffic. How much should you pay?

This is a tricky question. My belief is that every keyword has a price tag. It consists of two main factors: keyword popularity and keyword competitiveness. Obviously, you should strive for keywords with the highest popularity (number of searches per day or per month) and the lowest competition (number of web pages competing for the same keyword, knowingly or unknowingly).

Keyword pricing is not a straightforward task. It takes into account multiple data sources that measure popularity and numerous elements to evaluate the competitiveness in the major search engines. At my company, we have developed a mathematical formula that takes all the relevant elements into account and set the right price tag per every chosen keyword. Bottom line, it has to make sense to you, the customer, in terms of ROI. For example, if you pay $300 a month for a specific keyword you want this keyword to generate revenue higher than $300 a month.

As a small business, this method offers you a modular approach that can be expanded over time. You can start with a single keyword, and pay as low as $100 per month. Then gradually, upon success, add additional keywords to increase your traffic and your income. This way, you decide what is affordable to your business at every point in time.

To conclude: SEO can genuinely take your business to the next level if done right. Keep it simple, make sure you understand what your money buys and make sure you can measure the results before and after.

Written by Tomer Harel, SEO specialist and founder of Key Scouts, a search engine optimization company providing affordable small business SEO services and result-driven programs, focusing primarily on the needs of small businesses.

Please feel free to republish this article provided this resource box remains together with a working hyperlink.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tomer_Harel

Internet Marketing Promotion

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Cause Based Marketing As A Low-Cost High-Impact Marketing Strategy

Affordable Small Business SEO - Know What Your Money Buys

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