Newsletter Marketing – Mixing Fascinating Content with Enticing Ad Copy
Newsletters offer a way to inform, entertain, and sell to your customer base. This form of marketing is great at making the soft sell. You can create savvy consumers who know all the uses for your product and understand all its benefits. Publishing an online newsletter takes some creativity, some technical knowledge and often some research. Here are a few things you need to do when setting up your newsletter.
1. Topics
Start by making a list of all the topics you would like to cover in upcoming newsletters. You can write about how your industry relates to current events in the news. You might want to introduce new products or talk about new uses for long-running products. A newsletter is a good place to launch a promotion or to give a company profile. Brainstorm up a list until you have many options from which to choose.
2. Layout
Make a preliminary sketch of the way you want your newsletter to look. Draw boxes where you will have text and photos. When you have a general layout, work with a newsletter designer or someone in your company who is technologically knowledgeable to create the basic look and template for your newsletter.
3. News
Your newsletter should be informative above all else. Otherwise, it would be called a sales brochure and not a newsletter. Make up a general theme for each regular newsletter and write articles around that subject area. For example, you might sell skin care products. In a December newsletter, you could base your theme on winter weather. You could suggest ways moisturizing products can be used to greatest effect in winter. Another article might be a news item about the effects of sun exposure on the skin during the winter. Finally, you could introduce a new product that would make a great stocking stuffer for Christmas. In June, you could do an equally informative summer theme.
4. Special Features
One nice thing about online newsletters is that you can include links. Because of this, you can use video in your company newsletter. Just place a link in the body of the newsletter along with an instruction to view the video for information on X topic. Of course, you will have to make the video if you are not going to use one you already have on hand.
Another special feature might be a coupon code or special offer for the month. Although the words you put with your featured item technically amount to sales copy, the pitch should be subtle, pleasant and informative. You have a great deal to offer; you are just sharing the news with your loyal customers.
Newsletter marketing can help you build loyalty to your brand. With your newsletter articles, you can make your customers better-informed shoppers. They will want to tell others about your newsletter, and about your product. Ultimately, the point of the newsletter will be served when you make new sales to existing customers and find new customers in the bargain.
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Tie Your Marketing Video to Nostalgia to Go Viral With Baby Boomers
The Baby Boomers represent a very large segment of the market for many products and services. If you want to reach them with viral video marketing, you need to find subjects that speak to that generation. Here are a few facts to consider when you try making your video go viral with this crowd.
1. Baby Boomers remember certain products from their childhoods that are now obsolete or gone.
If you get a chance to show Baby Boomers a product from their past, they will enjoy looking at it. They will share the experience with others whom they know remember the same thing. This works best if the item is one that is rare or unusual now, but was common back in the day.
A great way to find out about these little items is to have a chat with a Baby Boomer and let her reminisce about the past. If you are a Baby Boomer, think back about your daily life and look at old pictures. You are bound to find old products that you had forgotten existed. Your video will be even more popular if you can show these products in action.
2. Social, cultural and political attitudes have been in a state of change throughout the lives of the Baby Boomers.
If you can aim your camera at the remaining evidence of a cultural revolution or a social shift in attitude in the past decades, you can capture the hearts and minds of the Baby Boomer generation. This group of people wants to be seen as intelligent, sensitive and caring people, and they want to see signs that their efforts to reform the world made a difference. Looking at signs of past successes reminds them that they can have a great affect on the world. It stirs them up and makes them want to share. Your marketing video will go viral in no time.
3. Baby Boomers like to see styles of dress and appearance that they had all but forgotten.
You can touch this group with images of people dressed and made up in the same ways that they saw them in past years. To get accurate portrayals, look at old photos or home movies. Make a compilation video, incorporating your own marketing message. You could also use the details of the images to make up period-accurate dress and style for a nostalgic-looking video you make yourself.
The Baby Boomer generation is a group with money to spend. They are particularly prone to purchasing health products and services, retirement homes and leisure products. What is more, they are a great market for general products such as cars, clothes and furnishings. Target them for your viral video by using nostalgia to wonderfully engage them with your company.
Free Stock Photo: FreePhotos.com
How to Serve Your Niche in Blog Marketing
When you are marketing your business through your blog, it is important to serve your niche with your posts. Basically, all that means is that you should stay on the general subject of your industry. It may sound like a no-brainer, but many bloggers have fallen into the trap of commenting on anything and everything, whether it pertains to their business or not. Stay true to your niche, and your readers and subscribers will appreciate your consistency.
One way to do this is to get organized. If you have several general subjects under the main heading of your business and industry, you might set up a rotation of these subjects to make sure you cover them all. It is better to shift focus within your niche than to get sidetracked altogether out of boredom.
It is important to stay excited about your industry. You will be a better blogger if you keep up with educational opportunities in your business niche. If you run a small business that has a larger parent company, you might get that education at a convention or company school.
If you are an independent small business, you might go to local classes or meetings on your type of business to renew your interest. An Internet business can always find online resources for learning more about their business. The more you know, the more you will want to share.
Stay focused on the overall theme of your blog. It is one thing to educate your audience on your products and services. It is quite another to slip into discussions of subjects that have nothing to do with your business. For example, the theme of your blog might be about tools, how to use tools and where to find tools. You could make a very interesting blog about that subject, especially if your business was selling tools and you knew all the tips and tricks of the trade.
However, your tool blog is not the place to rant and rave about political issues, legal matters or anything else outside of tools that is on your mind. If you want to run a weblog that is filled with your observations about life in general, make it a separate blog. For your business blog, stay on the subject of your industry. Your readers and subscribers come to your blog to profit from your expertise on your subject, not to get your take on unrelated matters. Serve your niche for more faithful followers.
Viral Video Status – A Secondary Concern
Everyone wants their videos to go viral, and why not? It is a great way to get your message out to hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers in a very short time. Viral video is certainly an effective way to market your products if you can. There is only one problem: a lot of video that is made up to be viral video simply falls flat.
Much of the supposed viral video content is silly and stupid. That would be excusable if it were funny, but much of it fails in that regard as well. A video created with the sole purpose of making it reach viral status often misses the mark, maybe because it is trying just a little too hard.
It is easy to fall into the trap of pursuing the viral video into inane ideas, shoddy performances and shaky video production values. When your focus is on making something outrageous enough to catch fire with the audiences, you can lose all sight of the brand image you want to present to the public.
A better alternative is to place your emphasis on creating good, quality videos. It is okay to think about the possibility that your video might be seen by millions of people, but if you leave that as a secondary concern, your videos may actually have a better chance of achieving it.
Think of it this way – it is just like the kid in junior high school that wanted to be popular and tried way too hard. The harder he tried to be liked, the more desperate he seemed. In the end, nobody wanted to be his friend at all. You do not want your company to be that guy.
Instead, be the confident one who is relaxed in the knowledge that he is likeable, and does not have to keep shouting it into everyone’s faces to be noticed. This one lets his character speak for itself. You should too.
That is not to say that you should not promote your video through as many channels as you want to, or even that you should have a low-key video. Your video can and should be as interesting, funny, entertaining, outrageous or silly as you want it to be. Just do not sacrifice the quality of your content to promote an idea because you think it will go viral.
If your content is great, and you execute it well, you will have an excellent chance of having a viral video on your hands. You might have to promote it through other channels such as the social media networks and blogs, but it can happen. Keep the viral aspect secondary and focus on quality content. Your videos will be more viewer-friendly and you will have a shot at reaching that elusive viral zone.
Woman Holding Video Camera by Petr Kratochvil
Do Not Forget Search Engine Optimization When Writing and Posting Your Blog
Sometimes it is easy to get so focused on putting new content up that one forgets all about the importance of blog post SEO. After all, just having new content on your website is a plus. However, if you really want to get noticed and get high SERP rankings, it pays to spend some time and energy working on the SEO for your blog.
Before you even write your blog post, come up with a list of keywords you can use in the blog post SEO. If you already have a topic, find keyword phrases within that topic. If not, start with keyword phrases within your industry and brainstorm for a topic using those keywords. Then, use the best search engine optimization practices to get the most mileage out of your keywords by correct placement, density and emphasis in the blog post.
Even after you have written the blog post, including SEO keywords, you can still do several more tasks to promote good search engine optimization. One is assigning relevant and distinct meta tags. These will be placed at the bottom of your blog post, and the search engines will pick up on them. Make sure to use as many as you need to include all facets of your blog post, and use specific words or phrases that will stand out in a crowd.
Furthermore, you can optimize the blog comments you make on your own blog. If you encourage blog comments from other people, you can answer questions or comment on their responses. While you are doing so, keep in mind that you will continue to attract the search engines if you use your specific keyword phrases within your comments in a reasonable way. (Remember that you should never overuse keywords to the point of excess.)
Blog post SEO is important if you are going to get the kind of traffic to your blog that you expect and need. It does no good to link to your website if no one is reading your blog. Use search engine optimization within your weblog, and you will get more readers visiting and following on to your website.
Search by Kosta Kostov
The Homepage Conundrum – Working Out the Possibilities
You cannot be all things to all people, and neither can your homepage. Your Internet marketing campaign will have better success if you nail down exactly the right amount of content and optimization on your website’s homepage. You obviously want to put your best foot forward, but you cannot show everything on the first page. This creates a puzzle that you have to figure out to make the most of that single most important page on your site.
Main Keywords
The homepage is the place for your main keywords. These are the keywords most identified with your company, your product or your service. You only have room for just so many main keywords, so make them count. Do not make them overly general, and make sure they relate specifically to your niche. It should be natural to incorporate them into your homepage content.
Keywords from Additional Pages
Each of the subordinate pages on your site will have specific keywords that go logically with their subject. Those pages will be optimized for those keywords or keyword phrases very easily, since the range of choices will be limited. Yet you cannot include all these keywords from all those pages on your homepage, especially if you have many pages on your site. The best solution is to use as many keywords from the ancillary pages as possible without disrupting the flow of the content on your homepage.
Product Descriptions
Unless you have a very small website, product descriptions are best left for secondary pages. You can mention products. You might want to put in a clickable link so visitors to your website can move on to the mentioned product if they are interested. However, the main theme of the homepage should be a general overview of your company and products, not intimate details of each and every one.
Video
Video is a great addition to your homepage. An interesting introductory video will keep your visitors happy long enough to look around your site and to discover the benefits of your products. That being said, there might be such a thing as too much video on your homepage in some cases. Mixed media usually works the best, so you capture the audience that likes to read as well as the audience that enjoys video and photos. You have to know your target demographic, though, in case yours prefers only watching video.
Your design, layout and navigational tools are also important, but not really part of your content. The most important thing about content and optimization on your homepage is to balance the general with the specific. Your overall theme should be the general, with hints of the specific information waiting on the inner pages. When you have found a good balance of ideas and images, you will have solved the puzzle of the homepage.
Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net