#1
“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
Advertising is life made to look larger than life, through images and words that promise a wish fulfilled, a dream come true, a problem solved. Even Viagra follows Mark Twain’s keen observation about advertising. The worst kind of advertising exaggerates to get your attention, the best, gets your attention without exaggeration. It simply states a fact or reveals an emotional need, then lets you make the leap from “small to large.” Examples of the worst: before-and-after photos for weight loss products and cosmetic surgery—both descend to almost comic disbelief. The best: Apple’s “silhouette” campaign for iPod and the breakthrough ads featuring Eminem—both catapult iPod to “instant cool” status.
Read the rest - Visit our parent company Ideas4Rent Marketing
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This is one of my favorites.
Success
To laugh often and much
To win the respect of intelligent people
And the affection of children
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
And endure the betrayal of friends
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others,
To leave the world a bit better
Whether by a healthy child, a garden patch
Or a redeemed social condition
To know even one life has breathed easier
Because you have lived
This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Have you seen an increase in business in the past 30 days? Poll.
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Sales copy online can make or break your business. A good sales letter must lure visitors, create trust and motivate readers to purchase. You can spend millions of dollars on ads and still have low or no response. But just pay a little more attention to your sales copy and then watch the response you get to your advertisements. Here’s some fundamental rules you could apply to see some magic work with your ads:
· No matter how “wow” your words are, you have to have a good product for sustainability. Keep away from false claims, over exaggerations, just put in pretty terms what your product really does and why people should buy it.
· Your first copy will not be absolutely brilliant. You will have to play around with it and make changes. Test it. Ask for opinions. Select a pilot market to test effectiveness. All this takes time, hence plan well
· Follow the well known AIDA strategy [source: Strong, E.K. (1925). "Theories of Selling". Journal of Applied Psychology] – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Your copy must grab the intention of people at just one glimpse of it. It should create an interest to probe in further. It should make the customer want to really buy the product and most importantly, now and not later!
· You should have a killer headline. It should really make the reader go over to the next line. Headline says it all. It should really be a class apart. Here is a great headline tool that I written about and use quite often. Headline Analyzer Tool - Check out the score of the headline above.
· Go in a descending order in terms of your product features – put the best ones on top and the less interesting ones in the end. The ones right on top grab interest and create desire.
· Stories always inspire. So tell a story and connect it with your product. The convincing power of stories is greater.
· Answer all the queries that you think your buyers might have. Your copy should not leave out any information. Think of prospective doubts and apprehensions and steer them clear by offering a good, valuable explanation to them. This way, you will earn trust and the customer will feel like you have really understood them.
· Use bullet points for each feature. It is just easier on the eye. Bold and italicize whatever is most important. Do not over use these features though.
· Set time limits. Example: limited period offers! This will get your prospects to act now, and not read and forget about it.
· Show testimonials. This is a wonderful way of convincing people, especially if the testimonial is from a well known or important person.
· Make the process of buying simple. The process should not require the buyer to spend loads of time online, looking for your product which is just lost somewhere in your website. Design the buying process in easy steps.\
· Substantiate your facts with proofs and numbers– Eg: Research carried out by the well experienced team of professionals here shows that our products contain the highest amount of natural compounds in cosmetics in comparison to others available in the market.
· Ensure you take opinions from a lot of people before actually releasing your copy.
These are some of the tips you could follow to make your copy better than it looks now. Understand your prospects and give them what they want rather than what you want to thrust on them.
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Stupid Marketing Watch: Hurting Two Brands with One E-mail Click here
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Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.
Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.
Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.
Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.
Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.
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It may surprise you to learn that one of the very first steps to achieving your own success is something unusual. It is the exact opposite of what most people, including you, would do. And that is precisely why it is out of the ordinary; it’s something that most people wouldn’t dream of doing!
Listen carefully and hear me out before you dismiss this as a ridiculous notion. If you want to achieve a meaningful measure of success, then the very first step toward this goal is to… do something different.
Take a few moments first to re-read that statement, and then allow it to sink in. Think about what it says. It did not tell you to try something different. No, the intended action is to do something different. Stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.
Look, if you’re current efforts aren’t bringing you any closer to achieving your success goals, then you have two choices. Keep doing what you’re doing and get the same disappointing results. Or, choose to do something else to make your goals happen. You must realize that it will require a conscious effort on your part to purposely do something different. There is nothing else that can help you move more quickly toward the achievement of your desired level of success than this one thing.
The problem is that most of us conduct our lives through a series of habitual responses that have been learned over time. Much of our daily activity is done on “automatic pilot.” Because of this fact you need to realize that it will take a great effort to begin to climb out of your “automated” comfort zone. We are prone to follow the past of least resistance. Thus, anything that is truly worthwhile is only accomplished as a result of a deliberate, concentrated effort.
Here is the heart of the matter. If you want to implement this first step effectively, you must make a consistent and concentrated effort to enable yourself to break free of old habits and thought patterns. You cannot replace something without removing it first. You need to replace the thoughts and behavior that control your life with new ones that focus on your new and purposely chosen direction.
If this seems a bit confusing still, then allow me to help you get started on the right foot. Take a moment right now and ask yourself: ”Which is more important?”
A.) Achieving your goals for personal freedom and financial success Or…
B.) Maintaining the “status quo” in your comfort zone.
If you answered letter A, then it would seem that you’re fairly serious about fulfilling your personal success goals. What you need to do now is to begin taking specific steps that will allow you to make a consistent, concentrated effort to focus on your goals and discover the means to fulfill them.
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Last week this website made the change to wordpress. Most of the postings on this site are coming from my old blog. I am picking and choosing my favorites.
Recently, my 95 year old grandmother passed away in Florida. While my siblings, cousins and I were helping my mom pack up her house, I found this old piece of paper in the attic. I did change a couple of words because it was circa 1913 and I had no clue what they meant until I looked it up in the dictionary.
Boys, you will get out of life just what you put into it. A smile and a kind word will be repaid in kind. A brooding and grouchy disposition reaps similar fruits throughout life. Labor diligently with your studies and play just as hard after school. Many a man owes his success in life to the buddy of his school days. Learn to lead clean and wholesome lives. Become thoroughly saturated with the love of country. Always salute her glorious flag, which ever waves for freedom and liberty. And strive to live all your days that they will end in peace and happiness.
Still as powerful today as it was over 90 years ago.
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