Whooah Biz

This is the second part of the internet Marketing plan, from here:

http://whooah.biz/2008/08/is-your-blogbusiness-getting-noticed-your-internet-plan

In the months 4 to 6 you will have to think about the following:

Links

• Using www.linkpopularity.com follow the links for popular sites similar to yours and submit pages from your site to those sites as suggested links.

Discussion groups

• Research the most active discussion boards in your area for sales, and other relevant topics and visit the top half dozen or dozen once a week to participate.
• Subscribe to two new discussion lists and participate regularly on favourite lists in a way that helps promote the newly released products.

 
Web site and infrastructure

• Add excerpts or long explanatory copy for products and services that don’t yet have that.
• Make changes in the wording of key pages to attract traffic on relevant keywords that I have totally missed.
• Check outbound links for accuracy and remove dead links.
• Change or add to the sample makeovers/upgrades at my site.

Marketing Plan Months 6 - 9

Search engines

• Continue to monitor the amount of daily traffic, which search engines are sending you visitors and which keyword phrases are bringing people to your site.
• Register new pages or features in the free search engines and directories.
• Research appropriate keywords for promoting new products, services or informational pages.

 
Publicity

• Distribute at least one press release this month designed to produce more web site traffic and more Marketing Minute subscribers, customized for each of the target niches.
• Distribute at least one press release tied to sales or marketing information form the company.
• Brainstorm with other professionals on ideas that can be implemented.

Direct mail

• Send Marketing postcards to old, not-used-in-two-years mailing list.

Product development

• Create two more audiotapes based on feedback from distributors
• Lay out and prepare for printing the anthology of your site
• Create and polish viral marketing tool and post at my Web site.

 
Posting content

• Convert this month’s press releases into articles and post at free content sites.
• Post your Marketing articles at free content sites.

 
Links

• Follow the links for intriguing sites I’ve recently come across and submit pages from my site to those sites as suggested links.

 
Discussion groups

• Visit the top half dozen or dozen discussion boards once a week to participate.
• Subscribe to two new discussion lists and participate regularly on my favorite lists in a way that helps promote my newly released products and services. Web site and infrastructure
• Complete and launch a new blog type web site on related topic.
• Offer services and inter link to the new web site.
• Consider design or technical improvements to boost site’s perceived professionalism.

Summary

The outline above covers a nine month periods where effectively one would begin again and re-apply the plan in one form another. May be by bring a niche information site online to help drive sales or by working together with partners/distributors.

One notable point with this blog post is that there is no cost attached. How much time would it require to implement a plan like this depends. A basic rule of thumb can be applied. The more time spent on carrying out the related tasks the more effective the results. To reasonable implement this plan one would be looking at 2 – 3 days (16 -24 hours) per a week for the duration of the plan.

I asked these questions a couple of months ago, and today I posted the last answer. Enjoy.

How effective is social media?

Answer here:http://tinyurl.com/5cdt2y

How long is it going to be around?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/3o989x

How much does it cost in relation to other media forms?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/5znakl

What is the biggest growing age group?

Answer here:http://tinyurl.com/4lmpk5

What can it do for my company?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/4d3veg

What can it do for me as a director? Can I do it my self?

Answer here: http://tinyurl.com/3kk325

There are some key factors that one will need to consider if they want t set up their own networking site. This is best explained by the Night Rider comparison. Face book has managed to amass over 6,000 people that are interested in the eighties Hit TV show Night Rider. It has its own Night Rider page. When the original star of the program, David Hasselhoff, heard about this, he decided to start his own net working site and cash in on the shows staying popularity.

What does this teach us about networking?

1. If you are a member of a group or share a passion, you can start own Networking site. A group of people with similar interest is an important ingredient in setting up Networking site.
2. If you lead this by setting up such a site, you can than reap the rewards and/or advertising and related products.

I do see many more companies setting up there own networks where you can interact with the company. As the value to social networking is in the people. Why would any company want to source that out? Especially considering that software is readily available for such endeavours. What sites can you imagine?

You have been out somewhere and had a great idea for generating some money or starting a business. We have all been there. What should you do next?

If your idea is to be anything more than just an idea you will have to test it. It is important to test each idea as potentially you can save yourself alot of time and money. A well tested idea is of a benefit to everybody involved. So how do you test your idea?

The first step is to write it down. Writing things down focuses the mind more clearly on what you are trying to achieve. Below is a step for step plan on how to test any new idea. If your idea can make it to the end of these questions then you may well be ready for stage two, a business.

1. Write the idea down in its pure simple form.

2. Go onto the internet and see if there are any related products or services that compete with your idea.

3. If the idea is serving a local area, check local newspapers and magazines to see if anyone is doing something similar.

4. Write your ideas down on paper so that you can present it in email or paper form to a small group of people related to the project.

5. Gather a small group of people who will benefit or help you and do a brain storming session. The objective of the brain storming session is to find faults in the plan and reasons not to do it. Not the other way around.

6. If your plan survives this far you are ready to build a prototype. A prototype can be a model of your idea or a process flow chart if it is a service. For example, if you are designing a new sort of gear system you are going to have build that either in model form of for real to see if it works and if there are any possible problems that may exist with it. If it is a service (a non physical object) than you will need to document the process flow including as much information as possible.

7. After you have done this, one will have established any potential problems and to see if the idea is still feasible. But you are not finished yet. A second round of group analyses is necessary to see if the idea still stacks up. If you succeed in this, you can pat your self on the back and start on your business plan.

I have just come across a very cool site that lists all kinds of stats. Statistics although considered to be more evil than dam lies, this one does a great job at putting a human face to the figures for all the main social media sites. Maybe www.WorkConneXions.com can get a mention. Where would management information be without its stats. Enjoy

http://socialmediastatistics.wikidot.com/start

This being my three hundreth blog post I am going to publish an Internet Marketing Plan in several parts. With so many sites competing for traffic you have to stand out. What I hope to do with this series is to give my readers a clear strategy to building/marketing an e-commerce website and getting traffic to those carefully crafted blog posts. I will be publishing a step for step on how to best do that .

Goals

One needs to start somewhere and I am sure that if you are reading this you already have an idea of what you want to create. Goals are intimately related to every aspect of your business plan. You’ll want to massage your goals again and again as you research various aspects of your marketing plan. Goals ought to be both financial and non-financial and be related to the length of your marketing plan’s timeline. Below are some examples:

Non-financial goals:

To grow steadily in market share each year from the current ? to 32% over five years.

To grow the percentage of sales from our store’s website from 5% to 45% over five years.

Move from hobby site to a profit centre within two years.

Year one: add e-commerce capability.

Year two: develop an advertising revenue from both website and Rss/e-mail newsletter.

Increase the number of visitors and page views per a month, respectively over a period of six months using a combination of traffic-producing strategies.

Redesign the site using Web 2.0, E-commerce technology. Make the site visually attractive, interactive, and easy to maintain, over the next 9 months.

How to do it - Months 1-3

Links

• Inbound links not only bring appropriate traffic to one’s site but also improve rankings in certain search engines, such as Google.
• Find informational sites on writing, on small business and on marketing and submit pages from your site as suggested links.
• Discussion groups; Join and participate in about six discussion lists/forums (topical discussions carried on among subscribers by e-mail). Serve as a moderator of one of these. Of course, there are lots more where I can have an influence and attract subscribers, visitors and clients.
• Post something related to this month’s new product in each of my regular discussion haunts.

Web site and infrastructure

A web site is an ever-evolving entity. It is constantly changing, and needs adding to and improving.

• Make sure every article and feature at my site contains appropriate keyword metatags, which help for some search engines’ rankings.
• Revise or remove outdated information.
• Create and install “e-mail a friend about this page” utility.
• Install bookmarking tools
• Ponder changes I could make to convert more visitors to buyers.

Starting a Member Web Site?

Setting up a member website where distributors and sale agents can meet on line and gain product knowledge, and discuss products in a closed website that is only accessible to selected members. Websites like this can give a big input into you business. Such websites like this can be set up using technology from http://www.ning.com/ or www.drupal.com

Search engines

• Continue to monitor the amount of daily traffic which search engines are sending to you- where your visitors are coming from and which keyword phrases are bringing people to your site.
• Search engines can provide a wealth of information , in particular when used in relation to competitors website.

Publicity

• Decide on 6-12 industries to target for the rest of this year and compile PR contact lists for each niche.
• Distribute at least one press release this month designed to produce more Web site traffic and more RSS/Newsletter subscribers.

Direct mail

• Send Webcards of your business to executive directors of professional organizations for selected niche markets.

Product development

• Convert existing special reports into downloadable products and use them for selling material for users/distributors. Find third party outlets on the internet to sell your products.
• Persuade appropriate site owners to sell course/product knowledge from their site in exchange for a commission.
• Convert special information into audiotapes and make them downloadable

Posting content

Write, Post and Convert press releases into an articles
Post Press releases & Internet Marketing articles (previously written) at free content sites.

Is there anything you would add?

Check back soon for part 2

Top pages Views for July/Augustus 2008:

It has been while since I have done this, due to a problem with my stats system, I must remember also do this on Work Connexions site. Any where here they are as chosen by you.

At number five:

How to sell a product simply but effective advice.

5. http://whooah.biz/2008/08/7-selling-skills-using-the-word-payment/

At number four:

All about the domain name game. My story about small domain names, ones that are easy to write like wcx.com or delight.biz

4. http://whooah.biz/2008/08/domain-names-what-are-they-worth/

At number three:

Simple but effective advice for page rank.

3. http://whooah.biz/2008/08/top-trick-to-increase-page-rank/

At number two:

How are you keeping your data safe. Explore the world of options

2. http://whooah.biz/2008/07/how-is-everybodies-backup-procedure-an-easy-backup-plan/

Number one is:

What sort of return do you expect from your advertising, the million dollar question

http://whooah.biz/2008/08/expected-roi-return-on-every-marketing-dollar-spent/