Marketing can be a tricky thing and you can spin your wheels and dollars if you don’t have the right mix of inbound and outbound marketing strategies. The above video explains the differences between inbound and outbound marketing strategies; it gives a snap shot of what to expect from your ROI, which should be the first thing you calculate when your deciding on how to market yourself or your biz.

Your marketing strategy is often influenced by what you preceived to be working at the time when you try multiple things. To really find your strategy, you have to test one variable, one new strategy at a time. And yes, there should be room for trial and error, which means you have to be willing to fail and that is often the difficult part. Failure is very much apart of the road to success. I failed at many things and I know that I just need to be success at the one thing to make a difference in my life.

Browse through the BizIntros Blog for more information about Inbound marketing strategies. More on how to get your prospects find you.

New Format, Coming coon on our .org extention i.e. Bizintros.org!  What type of format? Something like Facebook that gives you automatic updates of who’s doing what and when, where or why. Facebook works as a great networking tool and we’re going to be modeling there monutmental success.

The Benefit to You:  The ability for you to learn and run a successful marketing campaign, to be  more productive with your time and to boldly go where no man as gone before (sorry, I’ve watched one to may Star Trek movies).

Seriously though, undertsanding marketing and running a successful maketing campaign are two different things entirely. It’s our goal to help people master the art of marketing by sharing and learning from each others trials and errors, success and moments of ah ha(s)!

What’s new on Biz? Two new members:

Meet MChrest of 360pics in Calgery, Canada. Indusrty: Real Estate and Photography. As the business name would suggest, it’s all about the virtual these days. People want to be mentally stimulated before getting out to look at property in person. The real estate agents, owners or investors who are providing more property details online, get highly specific calls from people who want to see properties in person.

Next, meet Brian Butler of Butler Consultants. Butler’s mission is to provide entrepreneurs and business owners with a source for their business planning needs. Butler Consultants offers two levels of business plans; Level 2 and Level 3. Level 2 is designed for Small Business Association (SBA), Bank or Grant funding. Level 3 is designed to meet the requirements to attract Angel Investors, Private Investors or Venture Capitalists. Here’s a great contact for small business start ups looking for funding or maybe direction.

Updates on an existing member’s progress. Check out Juan’s new video game review site at GR2U.com. Unbiased Reviews and more! He is also working on his fan site for Gears of War and God of War where you can doanload wallpaper of from the video game. Visit his fan site here.
Your sunday reading:

Who’s blogging and about what from Bizintros Members:

Coack Chuck: Networking with passion, improving your results and getting face to face.

MarketSmarter: Social Marketing works when you have something to say; Do you have your marketing checklist and your audience has changed, have you?

Angie_Perez: How To Be Personal in an Email Blast and How to Write an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

To your success as always, keep marketing, keep networking.

Last week, I’ve signed up for several different websites and as if it were in the sign up guidebook, there was an option to opt in into the company’s email marketing campaign. I know it a email marketing campaign. Why do they still call it a newsletter? Anyways,  I’ve been thinking about the check mark that says something like this: Would you like to sign up for our newsletter about our new products and services, discounts and sales and how to blah, blah, blah.

I always check no. Who really wants more email? More non-personal Email? Not, I. I’m web savvy enough. I’ll find it when I need it. Then, the other day, as I am signing up for something, I see something specific:

• Would you like to know when blank comes out?
•  Would you like a free trail or demo of blank when it becomes available?
• Would you like to know when we are going to be in your area?
• Would you like a copy of our free ebook on blank when it is ready?

This specific thing that they were offering me was interesting to me. I WANTED IT. So, I subscribed and I gave them permission to market to me and keep me informed.

When you give the consumer what they want and when they want it, you have a better chance of selling to them at the time you want to sell it to them.

Now that your customer has signed up for something specific, the trick is how to be personal in a email marketing blast. If your customer wants something specific, you can give it to them in the same email that services multible customer/client groups. Ergo, the need to create groups in the first place. You can create the groups physically and divide the list (two campaigns, instead of one) or create a email template where your groups know where to look. In their hast to get to their section, it is likely that they will skim the other sections and receive more information then they would have received had they clicked no from the beginning.  

In conclusion, offer something specific when you want people to opt-in. Generics are a thing of the past. People know how to get the generics from your site. Give them what they want when they want it.

 Agree, disagree, like or dislike? Your comments are much appreciated?

P.S. If I saw something like: “Dude, we don’t have time to waste your time, but we would like to update you when we have something good to share? What say you?” I think I would opt-in.

“Sorry! This area is for official members only. Bizintros.com is a marketing and business sales self-help group. Generally, people who join Bizintros are entrepreneurs looking to promote their business and capture new clients, small business owners (SBOs) looking to start a business, or SBOs who have an existing business and need assistance with marketing and ways to generate more sales.

Membership on Bizintros is free and generally our members assist by listening to and offering sound advice in the business forum on variuos topics pertaining to starting and running a successful business. You too could be making more money today just by learning the fundamentals of starting a business. “

Meet other successful people who are willing and able to show you how to live the life you always dreamed about. Find out more on the other side by creating your profile today!

Yesterday, we sent out a Facebook message to our sphere of influence (past clients, old and current friends, other realtors) about a new Bizintros Member. Our contact on Biz, had a simple, yet informative profile that gave the reader/potential clients the option to contact her directly or visit her additional sites for more information.

Just from one facebook message (I have 165 Facebook Contacts), she received 37 url clicks. What was the cost of me sending out my update to my sphere of influence? Absolutely nothing. I did it for free and as an experiment.

It got me thinking though about how well does your landing page(s) convert? Does it give too much information that the client doesn’t need you? Does it encourage the potential client to sign up, buy, revisit or call?

We are going to give you a brief overview on how to optimize and test your landing pages based on our experiences.

We are also going to change the design, text and outlook of some of our landing pages to live what we teach and help you decide what you can do to get over the converting hurdler.

Quick definition of landing page. It’s quite simple actually. It’s where your potential customer goes after you spent some time or money to get them to there. For some people or businesses, your landing page is your home page. For others it is one page designed and dedicated to give away a free ebook, or an offer to sign up for a newletter, or some other promotion to get future clients and customer’s contact information.

Why is collecting contact information so important? As we have stated in a previous blog entry, people don’t buy on the first visit. If you are a start up, the customer needs to see your brand more than once, sometimes 4 times before they make a decision to purchase. So, collecting contact information allows you to market to the consumer; it allows you to build trust over time; it allows you to get more personal in a low trust world.

Rule number one on how to create a better landing page: offer something for free to collect contact information ex: ebook, newsletter, informational material, other promotional products to get customers to share.

Rule number two: Your landing page has to be appeal to how people receive information: It has to be contextually appealing; it may be audiotary and visually appealing at the same time.

Rule three: you need a follow up system to stay contected with your potential customers. Once you have this contact information, verify it and set up a marketing campaign that will place your brand, product or service in front of the consumers periodically and consistently before they buy so that they buy with you.

Rule Four: Don’t waste your good clicks. When someone lands on your page, track the results. Change one or two varaibles at a time to attribute which change leads to the best results.

Sometimes the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person in Charge of Your Biz) might suggest a simple change that does not lead to big results. It is often too hard to change one thing only and one thing at a time. Thus, agree to change several variables at a time and give ample amount of time to test and track results.

That’s it for now. Stay Tuned for our changes and post your results.

Having said all that, you are reading this article because you want to start a business and you want to do it from scratch. Great! Being a business owner is like all things in life: it can be rewarding and frustrating at the same time.

I am here to tell you how you can minimize your frustrations and reap the rewards sooner rather than later with the following 6 simple tips on how to start a business from scratch. This article focuses on the theory of how to start a business and I do not advocate or advise you to start one business over another. That’s a different topic and we’re are going to divide a section on our blog for great startup ideas.

Back to the theory: Here are 6 simple truths that will get you started down the road to financial freedom.

1. Write a business plan. Oftentimes we start a business out of passion or disgusting for working for someone else. We jump head first into the deep end of self-promotion, yet we forget to take the appropriate steps that lead to the best results. A Business plan can be as simple as writing down your company’s vision, mission, objective, strategies and action plan(s) or it can be as sophisticated as showing income projections over the next few years, marketing efforts, sales strategy, cash flow, etc. Regardless on how simple or sophisticated your plan is, you have to start with something, but not something that stays in your mind, but rather something written. Then, when you have a clear vision of what you want to do, how you want to do it and how much you plan to charge for it, you can invest in a sophisticated plan.

2. Identify your secret ingredient. Starting a business can be an overwhelming process if you are unsure what makes your business unique. Offering lower prices for something that already exists is not necessarily a good reason to start a business. Oftentimes, you cut yourself to the point where you can’t afford to stay in business. You may not need to be the first person to do something, but you have to offer something of value so that people will pay. Generally, a good start up solves a legitimate problem. For example, do you remember life without Google and page rank? Google was able to solve the problem of poor search results. They were the first company that banked on people wanting smarter search results and look at them now?

3. START. “I am so grateful for my clients for they buy my products before they are perfect.” Bill Gates. You cannot allow yourself to get stuck in the proverbial fork in the road. If you have a burning desire to do something, just do it. Then, speak it out loud to friends and family, even if they are not immediately supportive. You have to say it out loud to subconsciously see yourself being the entrepreneur you always wanted to be. It’s similar to wanting to lose weight. If you keep it to yourself, you risk putting yourself down. But if you speak it out loud, you not only accountable to yourself but to others as well.

4. Hire a Business Coach. You may be in business for yourself, but you certainly don’t have to do it alone. A good business coach listens, teaches, keep you accountable, and can model the same activities he or she recommends to you. A coach can take you through the development process and knows how to give “constructive criticism.” That’s the type of criticism that hurts, but helps us grow at the same time.

5. Take Calculated Risks and Track Your Results. Tracking is the most important part of any small business’s owner’s life. If you invest $100, $1000 or a million dollars, you will want to know what will be your return on your investment to decide if the risk was worth your time.

6. Understand and accept that starting a business is a journey. You may find that what you started out as is not what you end up to be. In fact, as you are going through your business building motions, you may find your secret ingredient and live out the life you’ve always dreamed about. “I am a small business owner and I am proud of it.”

In order to understand what it means to have good marketing, you might want to learn how to recognized broken marketing, product or poor customer service.

In the above following video, Seth Godin explains what does it mean to be broken and why somethings are broken.

http://www.bizintros.com/videos/id_32/

Check out forums on BizIntros for hearty discussion on things that are broken.

Here’s one example of broken marketing from one BizIntros member: When Personal Service Forgets To Be Personal

Summary and Takeways:
New York Times calls Twitter one of the fastest growing phenomena on the Internet.
The Washington Post calls Facebook a Class-Act Website.

If both websites are so popular, how can they be used as Marketing Tools?
By definition, Facebook is a social utility i.e. a tool used to help people stay connected. Users use Facebook to stay connected with business associates, friends, family members and just about anyone in the user’s sphere of influence. The cross chatter on facebook is generally more personal in nature and users tend to be candid with their updates and posts in comparison to how one might communicate in an email, voice mail or on the telephone. Twitter, on the other hand, is a service that allows users to send quick, frequent 140 character messages using the Internet, text messaging or instant messaging. Generally users are responding to one simple question: What are you doing?

Companies like Dell, Apple, Amazon and so forth use twitter to stay connected with their customers, monitor comments and concerns, and provide special offers or promotions to customers who follow their company.

By staying connected to their customers, these companies are able to use the feedback they receive to enhance their services and product offering. At the same ti,e, they are building a relationship with their most important customers i.e.the customers who follow them and as a result, they are able to build customer loyalty.

Facebook is best for one-on-one communication with your perspective customers.
Facebook is ideal for salespeople who want to connect with their prospects on a more personal and candid format.

Twitter on the other hand is better for the one to many communication. It can also be use to monitor the “chatter” going on between your customer and prospect base.

When using Twitter, be sure to offer fun and informational tweets with your twitter followers.Companies that want to stay at the forefront of how their customers are receiving information should consider using twitter, facebook and other social media websites to stay connected.

My takeaways:
Just last month, Twitter had 7 million unique visitors. Not bad for a company that started a little over two years ago. With 10 million dollars in venture capital, the company has yet to turn a profit, which some say is about to change with twitter focusing on how to offer services to the big name companies like the ones listed above. Twitter plans to focus on offering analytics i.e the ability to track tweet and re-tweet of messages. Great, but there are some underlining things at play here that need to be address.

First, if you are going to use facebook and twitter as marketing tool, you need to know how to use them effectively to get the most bang or your time. I would have said “bang for your buck,” but these tools are free, which makes them so appealing to small business owners and business professionals.

The video above makes some inherent claims that are not necessarily true and as positive as the video would like you to believe. Facebook can be an effective marketing tool, but there is a lot of cross chatter among your friends and contacts that is not always business orientated or productive for that matter.

Just this morning, my facebook friend sent me an invite to see which video game character best matches my temperament. Even though it was a short 6 question survey, it was a time suck for me. In fact, all of the quizzes and surveys, invitation causes, and virtual gifts that facebook offers makes the site sometime undesirable.

Another misleading inherent claim in the video above makes is that you can communicate with prospects on facebook. I believe facebook is better at servicing your existing customer or client base and not so much prospecting since you generally have to know the person before you are able to share profiles. And if you are prospecting on facebook, you could be seen as a marketer and turn off our audience.

I was not using facebook until recently. In fact, when I was on facebook, I was merely using it to stay connected with friends and family. Then, I decided that I would try to promote myself and my business to the same sphere of influence. I am not sure how my contacts are taking my transition. I have no idea whether or not they turned down their updates from me, which is a neat setting you can use to customize your facebook interaction or net-action.

I can say that since I started to talk or post more about my business, I am getting more inquires, which is evidence that facebook works, but there is a lot of cross chatter that can be a turn off and counter-productive.

Twitter on the other hand is a great way to handle or service your exiting client/customer base i.e. the people who follow you are doing so because they are somehow interested in your business or brand. But without any program or way to analyze how your promotions or offers are being received or acted upon, I believe that it remains to be seen if twitter is an effective marketing tool, but I an agree that it is an effective customer service tool with the nature of it’s immediacy.  That’s just my take for now. It could change once the young company comes up with a way to get analytical tools or metrics in front of marketers.

The research ties in with the launch of Tesco Mobile’s Pay-As-You-Go tariff. While Tesco Mobile can’t offer customers £2,458 a minute, they can triple their credit – proving that celebs are not the only ones to benefit from talking more.

At the top of the list of celebrities reaping high rewards for their natter, was London hypnotist Paul McKenna, who values his talk time at a huge £2,458 per minute – substantially more than any of his counterparts.

Other TV presenters raking in the pounds include X-Factor star Simon Cowell who charges up to £224.30 every minute he roasts another aspiring performer, and the nation’s favourite Cheshire lass, Strictly Come Dancing presenter, Tess Daly, who earns a respectable £133 each minute.

Not to be outdone by her English rivals, Welsh warbler Charlotte Church proves that she’s a mum that can still bring in the big bucks at a competitive £48.10 per minute – that’s £2,886 an hour.

Find out who are the most expensive UK Celebs? Click here for more info.