Improve Your Convincing Power With These 4 Strategies

1. Be Simple and Concrete

Are you convincing people with your words? If you talk so formally to your prospects, you don't convince them. Chances re you will only suggest that you are pretentious, that what you're saying is artificial and you're only doing this for the sake of glory to yourself. On the other hand if you use simple and short words, you build a connection between you and your prospects. Your message becomes more vivid and real so they begin to understand and see your point of view.

2. Develop your interest in other people

People love their selves and appreciate those who understand their needs and desires. Take the time to talk with people about their hopes and fears, their beliefs and doubts, their careers and hobbies, their families and loved ones, their experiences and values. You make friends with them. If you develop this quality, what you say will naturally suggest far more to them than the words you use thus improve your convincing power.

3. Explore new fields of knowledge.

If you do this, you'll get your hands on a broader understanding and wider experiences. And while you do this, the talking you do with your prospects will enrich the meaning for them and they will come up with more meaningful images in their vague thoughts. How do you do this? There are lots of opportunities everywhere - books in your home that you seldom read or in the public library, training or study courses in the Internet. Make sure they're reliable information. Also activities like joining a club of your interest and taking part in civic projects lets you meet new people, new experiences and gives you a wider perspective as you impart you knowledge to your prospects.

4. Know What You're Talking About

Get to know them as much as you could if you intend to suggest authority and confidence. Suggest the best about yourself and your message by careful preparation of what you say. So go to your reference, seek out someone who is more knowledgeable in the subject and talk with him, review what you have learned and evaluate yourself. In short, find out whatever you must know to talk with authority and conviction. If you do that, your prospects will think "These guy is smart, he knows his subject well. Ok, I'm convinced. Knowing what he knows, he certainly can't go wrong."

By Claire Basilona

Future Marketing Trends

These are just a few observations I've made from a lot of research, reading and taking an objective standpoint regarding issues that will directly affect marketing trends in the future.

Originality and creativity will provide the key to success:

- Digital marketing is becoming more prominent within the industry and is becoming more heavily relied on by marketers and web designers to achieve their online objectives and make their campaign strategies successful.

- Creating empathy using the creativity of design and the implementation of this creativity to emphasise with behavioural patterns of consumer will be vital to enable the five impulses that are associated with sales.

Keyword orientated marketing will continue to flourish:

- Providing a clear path to increase the return of investment for customers will be vital, illustrating exactly what you have achieved and the potential benefits to the customers business will be key to separating your services from another. As competition within the market continues to increase so will the demand for the keywords with the highest search volumes. Naturally this rise in demand will have an impact on the cost of each search lead therefore the need for providers to illustrate precisely which links the customers are coming from will be further emphasised.

- Juniper Research juniperresearch.com concludes that cost per click inflation will fluctuate to 20% across all markets for 2009. This figure will steadily remain constant throughout 2010 due to the shift in behavioural trends by business owners gradually accepting the need to focus their remaining spending power on online marketing resources.

- The fact that such qualified leads can now be pre determined before you pay for your ad by power advertisers such as Google and Facebook has created a competitive market for business to compete for certain demographics on Facebook and Key Phrases on Google. As long as it suits your product or target market I cannot emphasise enough the necessity to have a clear marketing strategy for both of the providers if you are seriously looking for the best return of investment online.

Optimising conversion figures will be the route to marketer's success:

- For the online marketer these days the hard parts over. The business owners and clients are starting to knock on our doors as they seek see the massive growth potential from the implementation of strategic campaigns online. However the hard part is reaching an understanding with your provider as to what your actual goal is and setting reasonable objectives in respect to your investment. People are spending online and this is increasing at rapid rates for every industry year in year out and this is one trend that will inevitably continue for the foreseeable future. If you are paying for and receiving traffic from advertising and your figures are not resulting in the sales figures that you forecast, then something is wrong. It could be time for a review of your design, your content, Ease of site use or simply concentrating on strengthening your brand credentials. Point being there's always numerous tactics you could be applying or applying more successfully if you take advice from a skilled online marketer.

- It is vital for you as a customer or even a provider to evaluate, analyse and measure all of your results and document them in way that is easily accessible to your cause. You must then illustrate the value to the consumer of the changes that have been made to solidify your position as a worthwhile spending output for the business in order to encourage repeat purchases or continued use of the services that you provide.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will become more competitively negotiated:

-The biggest companies in the world are focusing in excess of 70% of their entire marketing budgets on CPA Media. This impressive increase has been supported by the constant influx of small businesses focusing their marketing efforts online. The shift in demand has forced the whole CPA model to become more widely negotiated, especially as there are plenty of alternative services to any particular solution chosen by a business online.

- Another aspect of this shift has been encouraged by the worldwide economic slump. This has forced an emphasis on the importance of direct response rather than the development of brand management. This is one of the principal reasons why more and more advertisers are focusing on this model.

Security and Privacy issues will continue to be of vital importance:

- In the UK particularly they have been a number of breaches of security issue recently and online fraud and deception remains a constant issue for marketers online. Therefore the need to focus on offering a secure platform to conduct business is vital. In addition to this maintaining all privacy of data will obviously be of paramount importance.

- Many overlook these issues and simply lose customers who eliminate you from their buying possibilities solely on the payment processor that you use or the method of conducting business that you have chose. Getting this correct in respect to your market is key. Those who get this wrong can witness a negativity aspect on your brand and there are other consequences for those that get this wrong.

There will be more emphasis on Qualative Analytics:

- Having the knowledge of understanding what users are doing on your site is a luxury but actually understanding and analysing the behavioural patterns of your traffic will become crucial to moving the business forward, thus helping ensure better decision making based on the findings of your results. Have a look at Facebooks analytic tools and another great example is Google analytics google.com/analytics which offers a number of options to help you understand the basics to the nature of this theory. Once you're familiar with those give me a shout if you want to really take this to the next level.

- A few more basic platforms to provide you with some initial respect with this concept will be including:

..User surveys, email questionnaire, internal search analysis, user compatibility, customers service forums, FAQ's, feedback options. A to B multivariate testing, eye tracking and click density analysis.

- All this and more will become essential tasks however seemingly menial as they will establish the information needed to understand your qualative data that will optimise your ROI. It's all about reviewing your strategy and making informed decisions based on your analytical findings; this is what will ensure you maintain consistent growth in results.

Mobile Advertising will flourish:

- Mobile companies have been concentrating greatly on their efforts to create a more sustainable advertising platform from their handheld devices as a way to extract more cash from their customers. As mobile technology continues to improve the advertising capabilities will get better and their place in the advertising world will become clearer and more apparent to business owners and consumers.

- We will also see a rise in the phenomenon that is Bluetooth marketing and again we will have to see what direction the mobile companies choose to orientate themselves towards regarding this. However early signs are indicating great potential for this services especially for small business with low spending power.

- Google and Facebook and other browsers are working hard to ensure they are fully compatible for this in the future. If the fact that they are taking the venture so seriously doesn't convict you to start taking this into consideration for the future of your company, then I don't know what will.

Localised search services importance will explode:

- The main reason why this will happen is due to the fact that search engine and browsers will need this conceptual process to improve. This is due to three main reasons: 1) Improves the relevance of results 2) Advertising can be more accurately targeted 3) It allows search engines to focus on local businesses as well as maintaining their stranglehold on national businesses.

- Browsers like Mozilla, Yahoo and Google are continuing to offer searches based on demographic analytics and searches focusing on IP locators. This is simply to offer searches to help gear advertising in terms of the specifics of the consumer demand.

- RSS newsfeeds will continue to gain importance through the mainstream:

- Really Simple Syndication or better known as the acronym RSS is simply good for communications involved with online marketing. It provides marketers with 100% deliverability and ensures a qualified audience from the results. All RSS capabilities will compatible for the changes that will emerge from the launch of the Internet Explorer 8 browser so it's interest and growth is likely to continue.

- Advantages of RSS: 1) Users will only receive contact from those that they personally subscribe to, so it decreases the prospect of receiving any spam, if spam does occur then simply relieve your subscription. 2) Users can develop specific segmentations of newsfeeds so that you will only obtain information on the topics chosen that relate to your objectives. 3) There are many platforms you can obtain newsfeeds from: mobile, email, your browsers, desktop. This puts the user into pole position so the user is in control and therefore a more qualified prospect than email.

The Google Algorithm will continue to apply user behaviour metrics:

- Search results are affected directly by click through rates and bounce rates are also relevant. In the process of time websites that perform badly in respect to Google's algorithm will be downgraded in the search results whilst well performing websites will be pushed up in the results. With a billion search results everyday coming from Google, there is no comparison in terms for importance for everyone. However niches can be found for certain markets in relevantly targeted markets

Notebooks will impact Net Design:

- The fact is that notebooks are increasing in sales and prominence within the laptop market. In 2009 they are looking to account for over 10% of the laptop market. This trend looks set to continue throughout 2010/11, so designers will be compelled to accommodate for the capacity of the screens. A more accomplished designed will de demanded and the 'screen estate' must be used more economically in order to alleviate this issue.

User Generated Content is vital for future consideration:

Studies imply that people are more likely to trust recommendations in comparison to trusting a website or an advertisement. That is why trustatrader.com and ratedpeople.com and other similar alternatives are gaining more momentum in terms of marketing for businesses. It is suggested that up to 80% trust recommendations rather than adverts so it's time to seriously consider getting some testimonials and feedback forums implemented into your site. What's more, don't just put them there, you need to promote them and encourage people to generate their own user content, with incentives and other ventures.

By Nate Lauder

How SEO Can Increase Your Sales in Internet Marketing

Is your company taking a plunge in terms of sales though you have tried all known internet marketing venues to raise it up without much luck? The solution to your problem could be as simple as changing your strategy and employing new techniques for approaching internet marketing. What you have to do to turn the situation around is invest in search engine optimization also known as SEO.

On a daily basis, more people are coming up with sites that equally deal with what you are dealing with and if you want to optimize on traffic coming through your site, then you have to capitalize on creating more SEO words that will ensure you get more phone calls and orders and as such, increase the amount of revenue your company brings in. For instance if you are dealing with baby clothes, then you need to use that word as much as possible for you to be located easily because chances are, there are other people who are dealing with the same products too.

Your company is displayed and classed on the internet in accordance to how easy people are able to locate you. If you use less SEO words, you might find yourself displayed on page twenty seven or five on the search engine and this does not do your company any good. The SEO words you use should be able to provide more results than those used by your competitors and this is one of the major reason why you have to consult with a SEO company that has a competitive staff able to use the proper SEO words to increase traffic to your site. It is important to note that while most companies that offer SEO services promise to increase your visibility on the internet, there are those who are better placed at it.

As such, ensure that you carry out proper research before you decide to consult any of them. Find out websites they have offered their SEO services to before, to establish if they were satisfied with the outcome. However, it is important to note, ensure that your website adheres to some of the rules set by search engines to eliminate chances of making getting permanently removed from search engines.

Remember that the purpose of investing in SEO services is to increase the amount of traffic coming into your website and consequently increase your revenue. Though you might have to pay a certain fee for this service, it will give you more returns than you could possibly imagine.

By Musa Aykac

The Purpose of a Marketing Plan

The purpose of a online marketing plan is to set the direction your business will go to promote the business, build a customer base and determine any opportunities to make a profit.
When you are writing your plan, you are predicting and deciding how your business will meet your client's needs while generating a profit for your business.
Your online marketing business plan will need to highlight:

• What you will offer
• Who you are selling to
• Where you will sell your product
• Where you will distribute your product
• What type of customer service you will offer
• Who your competitors are
• Where you plan to be in the market
• How much you will sell and when
• How you will promote your business
• What your prices will be

When you are writing a business plan you will want to include a marketing plan because it will help you manage your projected expenses and possible projected income. The marketing plan will help define times of financial outlay so that when those lulls arrive they aren't unexpected.
You may already be involved in different forms of marketing for your business, but having a clear plan, even at this stage, will help lend focus to your path.
Clarity in direction is one of the major benefits of a marketing plan. It will decide not only when you advertise, but how and to whom. Potential venture capitalists will definitely want to see a marketing report, as they will want to know what your plan is for the money they are bringing to the project.
Planning is a key point and a core business principle that will help determine the future of your business and at the core of your business is the marketing plan. It's not just the finished marketing plan that will help you, but the thoughts you will encounter when writing the plan and the obstacles you will overcome in the process will have a major effect on the way you do business. You will understand your customer and their needs on a deeper level and you will be better equipped to meet the needs of your customer.

By Scott Brooks

How to Increase Your Affiliate Marketing Profits

Probably one of the easiest ways to get an online business going would be to get into the affiliate marketing business. If you want to be able to make some extra income while being at home on your computer this is probably the ideal choice for you. This is very easy to get started with and once it is started you will probably want to figure out how you can increase the commissions that you can make by being an affiliate. Below, you will find three different ways that you can increase your profits.
It's a really good idea if you promote the best programs, the programs that sell or market the best products or services. It's obvious you don't want to be promoting something that not only doesn't promote what you believe in on your site or have something that offers an inferior product or service. The whole idea for you is to promote a good product and one that is going to give you the highest profits in the shortest time.
Here are some factors you should consider when you pick which programs that you want to promote on your website:

• Does the program offer you a really good commission structure?
• Are the products that they offer going to be valuable for the audience that visits your site?
• Know for sure when they pay and how they pay their affiliates.

If the affiliate program you have doesn't increase the amount of your return for your investment then you need to find another program that is going to fit in better with your efforts of promoting them. You don't want to do a lot of work for an affiliate program and end up getting pennies for your efforts. There are virtually thousands of different affiliate programs so there is room for you to be picky and you should be. Make sure the programs you pick have products that also work for you.
If you want to stand out, you can always write a special report or an e-book on your site about the product that you are promoting. Make sure to offer the e-book for free, no matter what it is, almost everyone love something for free. The word free almost always encourages a person to click on that link to learn more about what you are offering.
Don't think though that free should mean sloppy or poorly put together material. You need to provide information that is going to be helpful and interesting and that will help the reader decide whether or not the product or service is something they really want to try.
After a reader has downloaded your free product you should have their email address and you can use this to send out follow ups, see how they liked the free product and if they are interested in learning more or ask them if they have any questions. When you send these follow ups you can at the bottom somewhere include the product owners website and this is a subtle way of advertising for them. It can sometimes be an easy way to earn more commissions.
Another thing you can do is create a blog or an E-zine that can have subscriptions, here you can provide another free service for your readers that might focus on a different product being promoted for your affiliate program. You can write these types of blogs or E-zines in very casual and readable styles so that it doesn't look like an advertisement but more like information that the reader is going to want to read. Through a blog or an E-zine you can gain trust of your readers which can turn into extra commissions.
Another way to try and make more is that if you have been doing well with sending people to your different affiliate programs and they've been making sales from your promotions, ask for a higher commission. If your promotions have been consistently sending them customers then they should have no problems is agreeing to something like this.

By Tony Robbinson

How To Increase Your Sales By Successful Marketing

The one thing that every business needs is sales, without sales you have no business! So... how do you successfully attract new customers to your product or service? The simple answer is, you need an attention-grabbing marketing / advertising campaign using the right words to trigger the emotions of potential buyers.

One of the most successful exponents of this art is Ted Nicholas, the words he has used in both the headlines and main copy of his sales letters have motivated people to buy $5.9 Billion of his and other peoples products since he began in 1973.

Ted is in no doubt that the most important part of a sales letter is the headline. The words in the headline must grab the attention and stir up the emotions of the prospective buyer... If they don't the chances are very remote that they will actually read the sales letter. It is essential that your passion for your product or service comes through to whoever is reading your sales copy.

Remember, it doesn't matter how fantastic your product or service is, if you don't make people aware that you have something wonderful to offer, how can you expect them to come beating a path to your door.

Most potential buyers are not interested how fantastic you think your product is. They are only interested in finding a solution to their problem, or how your product will improve their quality of life.

As well as selling the benefits of your product you most also show examples of how your product has actually helped people in the past. That is why testimonials are like gold!

The key to a successful advertising / marketing campaign boils down to these vital ingredients.

An attention-grabbing headline
How your product / service will benefit the customer, or solve their problem
Proof of how the product has actually helped previous customers

The product has a robust guarantee - in other words the potential customer is more likely to trust you and commit to buy if they are offered a guarantee as they feel that they will be taking less of a risk!

There is no rocket science here... just solid products / services and effective communication. These proven methods have been tried and tested by all of the worlds successful marketers over many years. One of the very best, Ted Nicholas has achieved phenomenal success not only with his own products, but he has been retained by many "blue chip" companies to write their compelling advertising and marketing campaigns.

The strategies he uses can be adopted by anyone to sell any product or service.
By Steve Remson

A Marketing Database - Your Business' Central Nervous System and Trigger Marketing

In this day of Web 2.0 of blogging, websites, search engine marketing, and You Tube, we lose site of the most important fact in marketing. Each of these vehicles represents different contact points of your business' prospects and customers. The "central nervous system" of all this information was (and still is) a "marketing database".

The late Bob Stone in his book, "Successful Direct Marketing Methods, 7th Ed (co authored by Ron Jacobs), defined direct marketing as follows:

Direct Marketing is the interactive use of advertising media, to stimulate an (immediate) behavior modification in such a way that this behavior can be tracked, recorded, analyzed, and stored on a database for future retrieval and use.

The database, and I will refer to it as a "marketing database", is a central part of direct marketing. Without a means of collecting all the information into a logical and meaningful order, your marketing will fail because you lose the ability to track and analyze each campaign's effectiveness and ROI. What is a database? It is a collection of information stored on a computer. A "marketing database" is more than a name and address of an individual or company. It is a collection of customer and prospect information from all contact points. Contact points include in part:

• Search Engine Marketing visitors to your site (that left some contact information)
• Inbound telephone
• Direct Mail Responses
• Sales orders-on or off line
• Prospects: website visitors, catalog requests, BRC's responses, post cards for additional information, subscribers, past customers etc.
• Responses from Infomercials

A marketing database collects and organizes this information and has at least the following pieces of information:

• Name
• Address
• Telephone number
• Source of customer or lead
• Email address
• Ongoing sales information related to each contact/purchase-(date of sale, sale amount, number of purchases, skus purchased)
• A unique identifier for each record on the database
• Responses (and their key codes identifying the specific campaign and media) from all campaigns linked back to the specific recipient.

Having this information, you can begin to develop multiple initiatives. They are designed around the data collected to improve marketing initiatives, and identify historical customer value to your organization. These are not mutually exclusive. The more analysis you perform improves future marketing campaigns. These initiatives fall into two broad categories:

• List segmentation for marketing campaigns
• Customer analysis of data

List Segmentation

• Segmentation by Sales -conduct an analysis by RFM-Recency, Frequency and Monetary variables. These are three metrics found on any transactional database. Having this kind of analysis will identify the old "80/20" rule. 80 per cent of your sales come from 20 percent of your customers. Identifying who they are and having the ability of scientifically selecting them saves a lot of wasted advertising dollars.
•   Select by trigger event-maintain and update RFM information on each customer. Evaluate the change in behavior month-to-month. If there is a decrease at a set amount, say 10%, pro-actively create marketing programs to change the customer's behavior.
• Segment by Communication Channel response information to identify best customer or channels of communication. For example, you can evaluate ROI by channel. You might find that a two step lead generation and telephone follow-up produces a higher ROI than mailing a large catalog for an immediate sale.

Data Analysis

• Use analytical information to pro actively trigger marketing campaigns. For example, update your RFM scores. Based on the customer's historic value, create a VIP club with sliding scale of rewards. The more valuable customers receive greater rewards
• Overlay demographic or firmagraphic information onto your marketing database. Identify customer penetration by demographic or firmagraphic criteria. When I worked at a b-t-b catalog marketing company, we overlayed SIC code and employee size data. I found that there were significant pockets of customers in SIC codes other that our core groups. Based on this profiling, I looked for advertising vehicles reaching the uncovered SIC's.
• For more sophisticate analytical procedures, conduct a model to predict behavior. You will need a specialist for this who understands statistics and data. The beauty of this procedure is that you are able to predict behavior and identify the likelihood with a certain degree of probability that action will take place. You can select only those customers or prospects most likely to exhibit that behavior. This saves you a lot of money because your advertising dollars are spent on those people most likely interested in your service.

The size of your customer base and your technology budget will determine your database software needs. For many small companies, a MS Access database is sufficient. You have to know database technology to properly set it up. Access databases can easily accommodate several hundred thousand records.

In summary, you can lose sight of the key components needed for marketing in Web 2.0. You need a professionally designed website, email communication, direct mail AND a database to maintain a logical order of all of this valuable marketing information. Without a database to analyze the data, you could be spending a lot of advertising unwisely.

EBM Direct Marketing Services LLC's focus maximizing a company's customer revenue base. By incorporating online and offline marketing solutions, we increase customer revenue through a combination of data driven, analytical and quantifiable solutions and long term branding through branded items achieving the highest top line sales returning the optimum return on investment. By Eric Mohr