The Lava Bot

Having difficulty knowing what to offer people online? Worried that your prospects are too bombarded by sales pitches to pick yours out from the hundreds they get every day?

Try something different - an event!

Events have a number of benefits over standard marketing approaches. Some of these benefits include:

• Events are perceived as informational and are often more accepted than sales pitches.

• Events generate a sense of urgency as they are scheduled on a certain date with a registration deadline.

• By sending an event e-mail, you can reach people’s inbox, a place they look at nearly every day. With a web site, people have to remember to visit.

• Regularly changing events give people a reason to come back to your web site.

• Regardless of whether the event is held online or offline, an event can offer a better opportunity to build relationships than e-mail, mail, phone or a web site visit.

Building your list

To market your events well, it is important that you regularly build a list of people interested in what you offer and the events you create.

Make sure your web site invites visitors to sign up for your newsletter and event schedule. Ensure each contact with a client or prospect ends with an invitation to join your mailing list.

You can easily manage your subscriber system, send broadcasts and create professional looking invitation, event schedules and newsletters using an affordable service like Constant Contact.

Tips for promoting an offline event

Here are some tips for promoting your offline event:

1. Be sure to tell people the benefits of attending.

2. Offer something interesting to get them to come out.

3. Include the address, time, contact info for more information and how to register (if required)

4. Provide a link to a map so they can easily find it.

5. Include a “refer a friend” link so they can pass the invitation on to others.

Tips for promoting and holding an online event.

1. You can hold online web conferences or other events using a system like Voice Café. Voice Café lets you bring people together with audio, video and PowerPoint presentation capabilities.

2. If you are using a web conferencing system, try to get people to log in early and test the system. This will ensure they get the best experience from your event.

3. Find web sites and newsletters that reach your target market and post or advertise your event in them. A free place you can advertise events online is The Ryze Network. The Ryze Network is an online community of over 20,000 people that lets you participate in discussion groups, connect with others and list events.

Event ideas

Here are a few ideas for your events, whether they are online or offline.

• Offer contests and door prizes

• Have a guest speaker or a way that people can connect with experts

• Offer “how to” demonstrations

• Open houses and customer appreciation days

• Free food is often a draw. Or unique food - I used to go to an ethnic festival primarily to try the different foods, even though the food wasn’t free.

• Provide information and resources

• Entertain - Include hypnotists, magicians, clowns, singers, dancers, etc.

• Inspire - Offer inspiration speakers and stories

• Let them network - One unexpected benefit of my both my offline and online courses is that my students meet each other and often start doing business with each other or form strategic partnerships.

So add some urgency to your marketing - schedule and promote a memorable event!

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Permission to publish this article on your own web site or in your newsletter is granted as long as the complete article is used and the final paragraph and link to our site is intact. Our affiliates have permission to change the final web site link to their text affiliate link.

About The Author

Garland Coulson, “The E-Business Tutor” is an acclaimed speaker, author and coach in the field of Internet marketing for small business and home business. For more information, visit The E-Business Tutor web site at www.ebusinesstutor.com or call toll-free in North America at 1-866-413-0951; gcoulson@ebusinesstutor.com

Filed by admin at 11:48 am under Marketing
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Web sites and real estate? I might be joking, right?
What could be possibly similar between those two entities?
Actually they are so similar that I could call them twins. 2 sides of one coin. Let me explain my point.

(Please note that I’m talking here only about investment properties, not about the house that you call your home. Your home of course can’t fit into this category - it serves completely different purpose. Your home is about your family and love and friends and memories and Christmas Eve and about all your hopes and plans - so it’s impossible to place a price tag on this special piece of real estate.)

No, I’m not talking about home. I’m talking about real estate property, either commercial or residential, that you bought to create a positive cash flow and passive income by renting or leasing the space in it.

You know the average market price. And you have pretty good idea how much exactly you would get per month for renting it.

What factors have determined this price?

- Location (prices in New York, NY differ from those in, say, Lincoln, Nebraska);

- Neighborhood (whether there are good schools there, malls, theaters, nice restaurants, low crime rate, and so on);

- Condition and specific features of your property;

- Square footage;

- Number of bedrooms and bathrooms;

- etc.

Now, I’m not going to give you a crush course on real estate investments, it’s just it’s important that you see all those factors while I’ll analyze another side of the coin - a website.

When you create a web site, what do you do with it? Provide some useful information for your visitors, and either sell something on it or use another monetization mechanisms, such as AdSense or you rent your web site’s space to other advertisers.

Or wait, did I just say “rent your space”? Yes, I did. You rent a space on your website exactly the same way as you do with your investment real estate property.

And you can get pretty good money by doing this. As a matter of fact, there are many guys who’re raking many thousands of dollars each and every month placing AdSense ads.

What factors do determine the price of your web rent?

- Location. Your web site’s position in major Search Engines. There are hundreds of different search engines, but what really matters is your site’s position in Google,Yahoo and MSN.

Are you on a first/second/third position for many popular keywords in your niche market? (Popular in this case means that those search terms are entered by actual live people thousands of times per month).

Are you on a first or at least second page of the results displayed for those keywords?

If you are on a good position then you get a lot of traffic and, hence, many targeted visitors to your web site.

- Neighborhood. Two most commonly used factors to estimate the “prime neighborhood” in web site terms are Google Page Rank (known as Google PR) and Alexa Rank. Both those estimation parameters have their own flaws, but nevertheless they are used by all webmasters and internet marketers.

Basically, PR is estimated based on a quantity of incoming links for your site (quality of links is also taken into consideration, but not too much). The higher the PR the better.

Alexa ranks the traffic flow to your site. The lower the Alexa number the better.

So the good neighbors to do business with are the sites with higher Google PR and lower Alexa rank.

There are also bad neighbors and the whole bad neighborhoods. Those are websites and networks of websites banned from search engines for the attempts to trick search engines in order to receive higher position on the search engine result pages.

Usually it happens when some sort of automatic site building or cloaking or another way of search engine spamming is involved.

Watch out for those sites. If you have an outcoming link from your site going to one of those sites, as part of link exchange, remove it immediately or search engines might think that you’re part of the gang and will ban you too.

- Condition. Pretty much self-explanatory. What is the quality of your website, how valuable it is for the visitors, etc.

- “Square footage”. In case of your web site it’s the size and the position of the ad on the web page.

- “Number of bedrooms and bathrooms” - on how many web pages are you willing to place the ad from the advertiser for the certain price.

As you can see there is much more common between website and investment real estate than you could think.

That’s a reason why websites are called Virtual Real Estate.

So start building your Virtual Real Estate today and you will have all the benefits of real estate investments without the risks of that business.

After all, you’re not paying taxes simply for keeping your site, you don’t have all the hassles with tenants. If you don’t like the advertiser - you simply don’t rent him your space anymore. No house or flood insurance is required either (just make sure you regularly back up your site).

There you have it. On a golden platter. The business with minimum risk. Just start creating your web sites! Today!

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Filed by admin at 1:54 pm under Marketing
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