Web Design Barnstaple: Viral Marketing 101 – Not Using It Could Kill Your Business! - Updated for July 2016

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Creativity

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, or a funny story.

Many ideas are still out there. Self promoting has been going on way before social media! Create a gossip or a buzz – many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to get them noticed!  So try it – create your own publicity!

What Next?

If you have been thinking about setting up a new website, or your existing site doesn’t work for you – or just needs updating – call us on 01271 324 841 or get in touch with us without any obligation.

We’ll do our level best to answer your questions without resorting to complicated jargon and industry-speak and then you can decide for yourself whether this service is something you would be interested in.

Web Design Barnstaple: Blogging and Internet marketing - Updated for July 2016

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People blog mainly for two reasons. Some bloggers blog just for
fun, meaning they don’t have any intention in making money with
their blog. They merely want to share their views and thoughts
with other people online.

On the other hand other bloggers blog to make money online.

There’s a few ways to make money with your blog. By the way,
if you don’t know what a blog is, it is a website that
contains a continual amount of posts that a marketer
makes – about whatever they’re wanting to talk about at the time.

The blogger controls what gets posted and controls what people can
comment on. The posts can contain information on their niche,
product reviews, rants about any topic they wish, recommendations,
etc… basically anything they want to talk about, can be on their
blog.

If you post valuable information often, you can end up
with alot of visitors that come to read your blog – which means
money for you. How you ask? Well when you get visitors you can
have Google Ad Sense ads on your blog which earn you money
when visitors click on the ads. These ads will show advertiser ads
to your visitors related to what is being talked about on your blog.

You can also make money by placing ads to other people’s
products on your blog, this is called being an “affiliate” for them.
If your visitors click on your banners or text ads and make a purchase
you get paid for referring them. Another way to make money
with your blog is to sell ad space on your blog for a monthly fee.

If you get a substantial amount of visitors to your blog
every month and can prove it, you can easily rent this ad space
out to other marketers who want to tap into your blog visitors.

And of course, if you have your own products, that is the 1st
thing you should be promote on your blog!

You can make a great income with you blog by promoting affilate products,
placing Ad Sense or promoting your own products and services.

The key is to get started.

CALL TO ACTION

Web Design Barnstaple: Sell It With Copy - Updated for July 2016

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What’s just as important as the quality of your product and the organization of the site it’s located on? The copy that sells it, of course!

Consider your copy the same way you’d consider yourself before going on an interview for a job. You’d be clean, you’d look professional, and you might even rehearse a little bit about what you were going to say. Your copy should present itself like it’s going in for an interview as well – this is your business speaking for itself, after all!

What are the cornerstones of good copy? Well, let’s start off with the obvious – good copy is first and foremost well organized and free of grammatical errors. If your copy is hard to read and misspelled, it looks unprofessional which sets off red flags in the mind of your customers. Don’t let the incorrect usage of semicolons drive away potential revenue. Also, if nothing else, be sure to run everything through spellchecker before putting it up.

But if you want your copy to truly pop, you’ll need to do more than make sure that you cross your Ts and dot your Is. Good copy can accurately describe the product or services that you sell, as well as inform the customer why your product and services are better than what’s offered by the competition. It paints you, the seller, as credible and honest, and it adds a touch of urgency to the transaction, convincing the customer that it’s in his/her best interest to make a purchase as soon as possible. Good copy is convincing, but not overbearing.

There are two obvious ways to go about getting good copy for your online business. The first is writing it yourself. The second is outsourcing. The first is definitely the cheaper way to go, and even if you are utterly incapable of designing a website, it’s likely that you know how to work a word processor and use spellchecker. You could write your own copy very persuasively and well.

But this is another area in which potential online business owners should not scrimp. Be honest with yourself. Will you be able to represent your services and products to the extent they deserve – and need to be represented in order to be profitable – with your writing abilities?

Many people opt to outsource their copy just as they outsource their web design. Just as there are people who have dedicated themselves to the art of making web pages, there are those who make a living out of writing the copy that fills these pages. Many of these places are also versed in writing copy that will make your website appear higher in search engine rankings, which is a worthy consideration as well.

Either way, be sure not to forget about spellchecker.

Web Design Barnstaple: Email Marketing Makes It Happen - Updated for July 2016

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One of the most valuable assets an online business can have is an opt-in list. What’s this and how does it work? We’re here to help!

An opt-in marketing list is where a customer (or potential customer, but it’s most often somebody who has purchased something from your site) gets an option to include themselves in on an email list that your company sends out.

This is very different from spam, which is where unscrupulous business owners go “phishing” for random email addresses that they find on the Internet and relentlessly pelt these poor souls with emails. Spam does nobody any good and basically ends up costing a business a lot of money only to irritate people.

An opt-in list, though, is a brilliant for business because the people who receive your emails are actually interested in receiving them. You can send this list of people who are interested in keeping constant correspondence with your business occasional emails – no more than twice a month, usually, and only when you have something of worth to say or offer – which can detail everything from the current goings-on of your business to deals and offers and promotions. Many companies offer special promotions to those who join their opt-in list as an incentive to, well, opt in.

Opt-in lists give customers who are interested in you your attention. Even better, the effect of an opt-in list is entirely traceable, as if you start offering promotions through your list you’ll be able to tell how many of them get redeemed. Opt-in lists are also another great way to get out more of that free expert content you offer, specially designed for those who wish to follow you. Many smaller businesses offer Q and A sessions through their opt-in list, where followers can ask specific questions that can be answered through the general forum of your email.

These lists are also the digital equivalent to having “regulars” at a store and engaging them in casual chat. Through an email list you can develop more intimate relationships with customers as compared to the normal “anonymous buyer” that hops into your site to pick up a few items, and then hops out without you knowing anything more about them other than what they bought. Close relationships with customers generate brand loyalty, which is a hot commodity.

Want another bonus? Email marketing can also be entirely free if you manage it yourself. Even if you choose to outsource your email marketing or leave it to an employee to handle, it is much cheaper than print advertising because of how targeted it is. Individual customers make specific requests, and you fill them by sending out the information direct to those who asked for it. It’s a very simple, yet incredibly effective method of advertising that is guaranteed to optimize conversions and get people talking about you, particularly if you make your opt-in list a plum deal to join.