With the potential to reach millions of customers around the world, the Internet is a powerful business tool. The opportunities for promoting your business and products are abundant and don’t necessarily have to cost a lot of money.

If you can do three to five things every day to market your business, you should see significant results within just a few months. The following are low-cost and no-cost strategies to propel your business success. Not all these strategies are right for every business, so prioritize them to suit your needs.

Send A Newsletter or Ezine

This marketing strategy should be used by virtually every type of business. A newsletter creates ongoing communications with your customers and allows you to advertise new products, services, or events. Give readers a reason to read and keep your newsletter by including a special coupon, or useful article. You can even turn your newsletter into an additional revenue stream by selling advertising space to other businesses.

Sending newsletters through e-mail is virtually free. In most cases, the biggest investment will be in your time. If you don’t want to write all the content yourself, you can access free articles on a variety of topics from web sites like IdeaMarketers.com, www.ezinearticles.com, and www.amazines.com. You could also have your employees or even your customers contribute some of the content.

Tips for Newsletter Success

• Encourage new subscribers by making it easy to sign up from every page on your web site
• Figure out what your subscribers want to know and earn their loyalty by delivering valuable content.
• Be consistent with delivery. If you promise a weekly e-zine, send it out on the same day each week.
• Remember to include your business contact information, hours of operation, and web site URL in all your correspondence with customers.

Sending the newsletter via e-mail becomes challenging as your list grows larger. If you are using an e-mail program such as Microsoft Outlook, the system may choke when you attempt to send too many messages. Once your list exceeds 100 subscribers, you should consider investing in a newsletter management system. There are numerous providers to choose from and the fees range from $10 to $100+ per month depending on the number of subscribers you manage.

Press Kit

A press kit is a collection of information and facts that the media can access to learn about your company. In the past, press kits were traditionally delivered by postal mail in hard copy format, but the Internet has led to more and more companies making their press kits available online. When developing your kit, include enough details that the media not only could write a story based on your information, but would want to write about you because the copy is so compelling.

A press kit should provide the following information:

• Company history or overview, contact information, & your biography if you are the heart of the business
• Photos of you and your business (high quality)
• Testimonials from others including their contact information (make sure to get their permission first)
• One-page fact sheet about your business
• Frequently asked questions with answers (written as if conducted as an interview)

Totally Terrific Tips

Tips sheets can be a fantastic marketing tool. Assemble a list of helpful tips that are of interest to your target audience; you can either sell them or use them as bonus items. A financial adviser could assemble a tips sheet called “Twenty Ways to Save on Tax Planning.” A marketing company could give away “The 10 Most Common Internet Marketing Mistakes“

Offer your tips as a free bonus for buying a product or registering for your e-zine. I personally send out “10 Must-Have Features for Your Blog” free to reward newsletter subscribers. If your web site is set up with autoresponders, you can automate the entire delivery process. By offering something of real value, people will be more likely to hang on to your list and refer to it over and over again, thus providing a consistent reminder of your business.

Online Classified Ads

A fabulous venue for getting the word out about your business is Craigslist. There is no charge for listing your ad in a variety of categories, and Craigslist has a presence in most major cities. Ads are archived for two weeks, so be sure to resubmit regularly. Try different ads to see what works best. You can even offer a discount or special offer for people who mention the ad when ordering from you.

Maximize Your Signature

Your e-mail signature is an important billboard for your business and you can make it as long or as detailed as you want to. You can include your contact information, web site URL, and any other details that you want people to know about your company. You can also highlight a product or service or announce a sale. Consider modifying your signature periodically to keep the content fresh and interesting.

If you’re communicating with the public through e-mail, your signature is essential. You never know where your messages will be forwarded or whose eye you will catch. It’s best to avoid inserting images. Many e-mail systems will route your message straight to the trash can if it includes attachments.

Strategic Alliances

Your business networks can reach to Australia, England, Japan, and back if you want them to. Get in touch with business owners across the Internet and see how you can work together.

The key to successful alliances is to offer up something that is beneficial to both parties. You also want to make sure you are partnering with businesses that reach your target audience. In some cases, you may even want to partner with your competition. You know the old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?” When you stop viewing your competition as the enemy, you could uncover some great ways you can complement each other. Here are some ideas:

• Swap links to each other’s web sites or trade advertising space on web pages & Ezines.
• Publish each other’s articles in e-zines.
• Support each other with new product releases. Though your time lines may be different, make sure each is committed to helping with announcements when a new release date approaches.
• Offer affiliate programs to make it financially worthwhile for others to promote your products. See PayDotCom.com or PayLoadz.com for free affiliate accounts.
• Coproduce a new product or even a web site. Two small companies that work together can create one big company or even just a campaign.

If your business is small and you want to align with a more established business, you can still create an opportunity to work together. Make sure to personalize your initial contact with the business owner. Send a thoughtful e-mail or pick up the phone and call. Introduce yourself and give a genuine compliment about the business owner’s site or product. Suggest ways that you can help him. Then wait and let him offer up some ways to help you. If he has a mailing list of 10,000, and you only have 1,000, offer to run his ad for six months versus the one or three months that he runs yours.

Forums & Message Boards

A forum is a public meeting place for open discussion on various topics. They work really well as a marketing medium because they encourage participation of visitors. Establishing your own forum or message board can attract visitors to your site through keyword searches. Hosting an active forum on your web site can also encourage visitors to return frequently.

Keep in mind the amount of time involved in monitoring message boards as well as the possible legal implications. Angela Hoy, owner of writersweekly.com, operates active message boards for writers. One of her boards called “Whispers and Warnings” is a forum that allows writers to log complaints about publishers who didn’t pay on time or who do not have ethical business practices.

Hoy was forced to change the way that the message board operates after spending thousands on legal fees to deal with publishers who complained of slander. She also ended up working with law enforcement personnel, including the FBI, in a few circumstances. She provides a great public service, but there was a downside in attempting to allow free speech. The forum still operates, but Hoy personally manages the posts that are allowed and no longer permits the public to freely submit complaints. If you are concerned about the potential content you want to allow on your message board, be sure to seek the advice of a lawyer before you begin.

Get Active On Message Boards

Visiting online forums and message boards may seem like a time waster; however these venues create an opportunity for exposure. When you respond to a message on a popular forum, you can include a signature file with a brief description and a web site URL.

The trick here is to make intelligent posts that readers in your target audience will notice. Not only can this help you build name recognition for yourself and your business, but there is a high likelihood that readers will click-through to check out your web site. Literally thousands of online forums are available. Start by checking with the trade associations you belong to. Many magazines also have forums.

Host A Free Day

The comic books industry has an annual “Free Comic Book Day” that prompts comic collectors to flock to local comic stores. Select a day to give something away and advertise the heck out of it. Most will not only log on to claim their free prize, but could end up making a purchase from your site as a result.

Start An Affiliate Program

An affiliate program is a way to offer incentives to others to help sell your products by paying a commission for each sale. In most cases, you can offer a percentage or flat dollar amount for each sale generated by your affiliates. I would personally recommend ClickBank and PayDotCom. Affiliate sales can account for a large percentage of your revenues if marketed correctly.

If you offer affiliate sales, make it as easy as possible for your affiliates to be successful. Offer complete product descriptions and graphic images that they can use on their web sites. You may even consider offering training programs online or with a teleseminar to help your affiliates sell your products.

Get Testimonials

Whenever anyone says something nice about your business, use it to your advantage. Print testimonials on all marketing materials, in your business location, and on your web site. To obtain testimonials, just ask! Contact your best clients and ask them to write a paragraph about your business. Be sure to get permission to reprint from anyone who provides you with a testimonial. You can also send testimonials to sites that you admire. Most sites have a place where these are listed and will happily include a reciprocal link back to your site.

Hold A Contest

People love to get stuff for free and contests are a great way to attract new customers. This is also an excellent way to earn exposure for your information products since you can use them as prizes. Be sure to alert the media about your contest. Here are some contest ideas:

• Have customers submit funny business slogans.
• Hold a poetry contest with a theme related to your business.
• Have people submit their best solutions to problems related to your business. For example, if you own a garden center, people could submit their best gardening tips.
• Ask people to review your website, and what could be improved. This gives you valuable information about your website, and what your readers want. You can then offer the prize to the best review. Darren’s Post at Problogger recently is a perfect example of this.

Get creative with your contest ideas. I’ve seen web site owners host contests as a way of gathering testimonials, and others have given away consulting services as an award for the best story submission. Find something that creates a buzz so you can reel in new traffic and exposure for your products and services.

Preannounce New Products

It’s never too early to start building excitement around a new product offering. When your product is in the development phase, it is perfectly acceptable to begin mentioning it on your web site and in your e-zine several months before the product will be available. In fact, you can even set up a preorder system to solicit orders prior to the product release. If you do this, make sure you set a safe release date that you know you won’t miss.

So, there are a few ways in which you can promote your product or service online; there are literally infinite ways to market your website or business online. Whether it be utilizing Online Classified Ad’s, or setting up Strategic Alliance’s; These methods, if done correctly, can almost certainly make an impact on your business.

Leave me a comment telling us what online marketing methods you have used to get your business ‘out there’. Which methods worked really well, and which methods didn’t go so well? Id be interested in hearing your online marketing experiences!

Watch out for the next post in the series, “Offline Marketing Methods - An In-Depth Look” - Subscribe to my feed to get notified of my next post in this series.

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All of this week, we have been looking at the different methods of creating Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Marketing, and doing it right! In our first edition we looked at Buzz & Word-of-Mouth marketing, then we examined Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Success Stories, & in our last post, we looked at ways to Actively Work to Promote Buzz. Today in our final addition to the series, we hit the streets, figure out where to find our big mouths, and creating a business blog. Lets jump straight in…

Hitting the streets

Another way to promote buzz is to take your product or service literally to the streets: to pound pavements where people are out and about, walking and driving. This method isn’t the same as outdoor advertising on billboards, signposts and car livery; instead, it’s more about meeting and greeting potential customers.

For example, we recommend doing such simple and low-budget advertising as putting stickers on every lamppost to build awareness of your brand. When The New York Times started its online service, it hired a small ad agency that gave out paper spoons with the company’s Web site on them, and when those people logged on, they could print out a coupon for a cheap but yummy meal at Daily Soup, a popular café in midtown New York City. That strategy generated buzz about the Web site.

Figuring out where to find your big mouths

In addition to finding the right type of big mouth, you need to know where best to reach him. Finding your market maven requires creative thinking on your part, because you know best (or at least you should!) where your customers are most readily found.

For example: A nurse in San Diego wanted to make more black women aware of and knowledgeable about diabetes and breast cancer. She began in what she thought was the right place, by targeting black churches, but she found that the women who stayed after services were already knowledgeable, and the rest of the congregations just wanted to get home.

So she thought about finding a place where black women would have more time and be more relaxed and therefore be more open to receiving information, and she realized that the best place for her to generate word of mouth was at the beauty salon. So she taught hairdressers to be her mavens, her big mouths, and she generated the buzz she wanted in order to educate women about these diseases and to encourage them to get mammograms and find out even more about how they can protect themselves.

Creating a blog about your business

WOMMA (See Getting the Terminology Straight) also offers a Womnibus (another great name) that posts useful information on the WOMMA Web site for people interested in word-of-mouth marketing trends. WOMMA touts the Womnibus as the primary resource for advertisers wanting to get involved with word-of-mouth strategies. One Womnibus described a study conducted by the Pew research organization about the prevalence of blogs (short for Web logs) as of mid-2007. Among the key findings:

• Eight percent of consumers (12 million U.S. adults) keep a blog, up from 7 percent in 2006.
• Thirty-nine percent of consumers (57 million U.S. adults) read blogs, an increase from 27 percent in 2006.

Pew concludes that blogs have become one of the key media for word of mouth marketing. Maybe this strategy is something that could work for your business, if your target market spends a lot of time on the Internet. If you plan to start a weblog to encourage buzz and word of mouth marketing, i would suggest Darren at ProBlogger would be a good place to find out exactly what is involved in starting a weblog, and the various different ways in which you can market your blog.

Conclusion

As you can see from this series, there is still a lot of buzz about buzz marketing & word-of-mouth marketing, and it is still an essential part of any marketing campaign you run for your product or service. Whether it be utilizing a big mouth to talk your product or service, hiring beautiful people to promote your company, or just . All will go a long way to increasing the buzz around your product or service, and when you have good buzz, you have word-of-mouth too. Perhaps you have a particular method of creating buzz, or good word-of-mouth marketing? Id be delighted to hear your thoughts, so leave me a comment with your suggestion or questions. Ill always do my best answer all comments or emails i receive.

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As i mentioned in the last article, Word-of-Mouth Success, you don’t have to just sit around and pray for good word of mouth or great buzz — you can actively work to promote it. Check out my suggestions on generating buzz for you, your product, or your service, in the following sections.

Coining a great new phrase

One way to get people talking is to come up with a new expression associated with your business. People love to be in the know and ahead of the curve, and many people love things just because they’re new — and that includes language. In fact, many great ad campaigns were successful because they (often unwittingly) created a new expression that people started using in everyday life and conversation. Think of the saying “Where’s the beef?” This expression was first used in a Wendy’s commercial, where a gruff little old lady was literally looking for the meat in her hamburger, but the expression came to be used in any situation where the substance of something was missing.

Tip: One way to coin a new phrase is to turn your business’s or product’s name into a verb. For example, think of the example of Google.com, an Internet search engine you’re probably familiar with. People now talk about “I Googled it to find out more about it. . . .” So now, when someone needs to look something up on the Internet, Google.com is probably one of the first search engines to come to mind.

Companies used to hate this appropriation of their names. For example, Kleenex and Xerox fought to prevent their brand names from becoming synonymous with the product itself (in this case, face tissue and photocopying). Now, however, many companies are delighted to have that “problem,” because it means that consumers view their names as the brand readers. If your company or brand name becomes part of the popular lexicon, that’s a great way to advertise your business!

Hiring beautiful people to promote your product

Another way to get people talking is to give them something interesting to talk about. If your product or business isn’t already fabulous, try to attach it to something that is. And if your business is already exciting, associate it with something even more intriguing!

For example, Vespas are little known in the United States, though these little scooters are everywhere in Italy. Vespa helped make inroads (pun intended) into the U.S. market by hiring gorgeous models to ride around Los Angeles, stop in at various cafes and have a coffee while chatting with other customers about their cool mini-motorbikes. The models weren’t famous, but they were beautiful, and they attracted attention to themselves first but then to the product they were promoting, and the whole stunt generated buzz — in a city where that’s tough to do!

Taking advantage of celebrity endorsements

If you can get the attention of a celebrity — either purposely or serendipitously, you should leverage that attention as much as possible.

Okay, you can’t solicit spontaneous celebrity mentions, but you can leverage them if they happen on their own. For example, Sandra Bullock became a one-woman marketing machine for Listerine PocketPaks (those little tab-sized breath strips that were introduced in 2005) when she talked about them nonstop at the Oscars in 2002.

Similarly, Rush Limbaugh created buzz for The Millionaire Next Door, a very interesting book that was little known until Limbaugh mentioned it on his radio show, which has an enormous listening audience. The book has since sold more than 2 million copies, and it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 3 years.

If I were working to promote either of the above products, you can bet your last dollar I would do everything possible to maximize that exposure. For example, I would have copies of the Oscar footage where Sandra Bullock talked about the Listerine PocketPaks, and I’d send that video and quote her in all future marketing for that product. And I’d get in touch with her to find out whether she’d be willing to go further and become a spokeswoman for the brand or whether I could use her endorsement in future ad campaigns. Regarding Mr. Limbaugh, if I had been the publisher of that book, I’d have immediately contacted him to get a written endorsement of the book, which I would then feature on every future copy and edition of the book and all subsequent marketing, advertising, and sales materials. You should look for the same opportunities.

So how do you maximize on celebrity exposure? Here are a few things that I would do:

• Get a copy of what the celebrity said about your product or business, or request a written endorsement.
• Obtain permission from that celebrity (in writing, of course) to use his comments in your future ad campaigns.
• Consider asking that celebrity to be your spokesperson.

Throwing a party

Generating buzz by throwing a big bash is considered a publicity party, and publicity isn’t advertising, of course, but parties can generate word of mouth as well as publicity in newspapers, magazines, and other media. The party itself probably won’t be free (unless you can get friends and fans to provide the space and the food and drink, and send out the invitations, which you quite possibly can!). But even if you do have to incur some costs to throw a party, it can be money very well spent because of the word of mouth it can generate.

You can throw a party to announce a grand opening of your store, to introduce a new product or invention, or to celebrate an anniversary, such as the tenth anniversary of your being in business — or anything else that’s new with your business. Of course, you should invite news people, from all the local newspapers (your major city paper as well as smaller neighborhood papers, and freebies around town), local magazines, and local TV and radio personalities, but you also want to invite everyone you know who you think can talk about your product or business in an interesting, exciting way. If they have a great time at your party, they’re more likely to tell all their friends, colleagues, neighbors, and acquaintances about it — especially if you’ve done something unique at the party or given away something fabulous.

For example, one publicity party I attended for a book about a very successful black entrepreneur generated lots of word of mouth. Why? Because the hostess invited Coretta Scott King — and she came, with one of her sons! That was exciting: She and her late husband, the Reverend Martin Luther King, are legends in the world of civil rights, and many people at the party welcomed this unique opportunity to meet her. Mrs. King’s presence at the party got people talking, and it helped the book become a business bestseller and sell more than 100,000 copies, which is terrific for a business book.

Tune in next time, when we look at how you generate buzz by taking your product or service to the streets, blogs have become one of the key media for word of mouth - find out how to utilize them to best effect, and figuring out where to find your big mouths! (see the last article).

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Yesterday i started off this series of articles with getting the terminology of Buzz & Word-of-Mouth Marketing Correct, and seeing what the power of Buzz marketing can do for your business. Today we are going to look at some word-of-mouth success stories, and how you can put them to use for your own business. You also need to watch out for negative buzz, and how to avoid it. So without further a due. Let’s get started.

Examining word-of-mouth marketing success stories

You can find plenty of real-world examples showing how successful word-of-mouth promotion can be. You probably have even experienced it as a consumer. In order to launch your own word-of-mouth campaign, you can glean some valuable tips by first looking at the success stories of others.

Emanuel Rosen describes a broad spectrum of these successes in his book The Anatomy of Buzz. Rosen describes how buzz was completely and absolutely responsible for consumer awareness of a software product he was involved with (called Endnote, a program to help academics footnote their sources more easily, to meet different guidelines without having to re-type each source). He was able to track consumer awareness to buzz (something he considers synonymous with word of mouth) because the company hadn’t done any marketing or advertising or publicity when people started to call and ask about it. In fact, the product wasn’t even available when the company received its first order! But the company had done a sneak preview locally, and word spread about it nationally. That first order came in from 3,000 miles away.

Word of mouth has been responsible for the success of other high-tech products as well. But it’s not only the geeks in the world of computer technology who buzz about a product; it happens in the larger world, too. When was the first time you considered getting an MP3 player or a PDA? For most people, these gadgets became enticing only after hearing a friend or coworker rave about his new toy.

How many people make travel and vacation plans based on what people they know recommend or buy cars because of buzz about a particular style? How many times have you gone to the movies based on what your friends are talking about or recommend — often, even when you had no interest in a particular movie until people we know start buzzing about it? For example, remember The Crying Game? The Sixth Sense? And The Blair Witch Project? All of those movies benefited from buzz and word-of-mouth marketing.

Books are another typical product that benefit from great word of mouth. In fact, book publicists typically send a copy of a new book to a targeted list of “big mouths” whom they know will talk up a book that they enjoyed. To book publishers, being a big mouth isn’t a bad thing at all. Those people know a lot of people, they talk to many people regularly, they’re free with their opinions, and people listen to what they say and what they recommend. Big mouths spread the word about a new book, and they can help it get noticed and sell — which is increasingly tough to do given the enormous number of new books that are published every year.

You may be surprised at the success stories of many titles you’re familiar with. I remember how buzz contributed to the success of one such book: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. And Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, writes about another book that caused a sensation: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells. Interestingly, word of mouth was responsible for the enormous success of each book, but the buzz on the two books happened in very different ways: One was top-down, and the other was bottom-up.

In the case of Cold Mountain, the buzz was driven from the top-down. The book started to sell as soon as it was published, but it became a bestseller because the publisher wrote personal letters to key booksellers and sent copies to people he thought would be key readers (and therefore had big mouths).

In the case of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the book didn’t sell particularly well at first. It got a few good reviews and sold a modestly successful number of copies in the original hardcover edition. When the book came out in paperback, though, the author noticed that groups of women would come to bookstores to have her sign their copies, and they were buying several copies of the book for their friends. What had happened was that readers had identified with the theme of the book and were reading it in bookclubs and other communities, and those communities started to buzz. That word-of-mouth groundswell caused the book to sell 2.5 million copies.

Beware of negative buzz!

Warning: A product can also be affected adversely by negative buzz. Remember the problem with Intel’s Pentium chip, back in the early 1990s? Someone found a small error in the chip, and news about it spread furiously fast on the Internet — so fast that Intel couldn’t contain it and didn’t remedy it fast enough. That negative buzz cost the company $475 million in write-offs — but it offered a great lesson in what to do and what not to do when someone discovers a weakness in your product or service.

Tip: Keep in mind the old adage that a happy customer may recommend your product or service or store to someone else, but an unhappy customer will definitely complain about you to at least three people. The power and speed of the Internet have increased that nightmare scenario exponentially. Do your best to keep your customers happy — no matter what.

In tomorrows post, i will throwing some ideas around on how to generate buzz for your business or website, hiring the right people to promote your product or service, and taking advantage of celebrity endorsements.

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