Radius Online Launches New Website & Local Online Marketing Solution for Small Businesses

Radius Online, an interactive marketing agency specializing in http://www.radiusonline.com [local online marketing services for small businesses _title_local online marketing for small businesses], today announced the launch of its new Local Online Marketing program for small businesses. The Local Online Marketing program provides small businesses with a website, http://www.radiusonline.com [local search engine optimization _title_local search engine optimization], local directory submission and management for $129 dollars per month.

Radius Online has been providing small businesses website development and design for nearly eight years and currently serves more than 1,500 customers nationwide - primarily auto repair shops, bars, restaurants and moving companies. The new local online marketing program will enable Radius Online to expand the reach of its services to more than 50 new small business categories over the next six months.

"The way consumers search for goods and services in their local area is rapidly changing," said Vu Hoang, founder and president of Radius Online. "More than 86 percent of Internet searches are now local - and more than two thirds of people use the Internet versus phone books to search for local businesses in their area. We've created an easy and affordable website and local online marketing solution that enables small businesses to capitalize on the more than 1 billion local searches performed every month."

Radius Online's basic Local Online Marketing solution includes the following features:

• A professionally designed and developed website, customized from a library of more than 100 templates (the company does offer custom design for an additional charge)
• A free domain name (such as yourcompanyname.com), Web hosting and email addresses
• Easy-to-use content management system, including pre-developed content widgets for features like online coupons, calendar of events, photo gallery or online video
• Search engine optimization of website and initial submission to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com
• An initial Google AdWords credit of $50 - to begin driving traffic to your website in the first month
• Free Web analytics for monitoring site traffic and other useful return on marketing investment information
• Customer support and solution training - guiding small business owners through the local online marketing process
• Initial submission to free local directories, such as Google Maps, Yelp!, Yahoo Local and more

[chiroeco]

Direct Marketing Strategist Recommends Top 11 Ways To Recession-Proof Your Business

Direct Marketing specialist John Anghelache shares his little to no cost marketing strategies. These strategies have been used by many of the great direct marketing professionals to generate large returns for their clients.

John Anghelache, a direct marketing strategist who has worked with some of the biggest names in the business such as: Gary Halbert, Joe Vitale, David Garfinkel, Yanik Silver and Michel Fortin, has just released a list of the top 11 ways to recession-proof any business.

According to Mr. Anghelache, these smart marketing strategies cost little to nothing to implement but can generate a lot of new customers and bottom line revenue for just about any business. Here are five of those strategies with a brief explanation of each:

Strategy #1: Reactivate Past Customers. This is (by far) the easiest and fastest way to produce a surge of sales and profits. Most customers want to do business with a company they feel good about. They have a lot of choices. A simple invitation or special offer often brings them back and prevents them from patronizing competing businesses.

Strategy #2: Email Campaigns. Email marketing is the cheapest way to stay in contact with customers and prospects. What most business owners do wrong is they don't email their list enough. And they don't make sales offers. Emailing a list at least three times a week paves the way for more sales.

Strategy #3: List Swapping. When advertising budgets are tight this is a great way to get new customers. Non-competing businesses can be contacted with an offer to swap lists. Each business promotes a product to the other's customer and prospect list. It's a win-win for everybody.

Strategy #4: Up-sell At Point Of Purchase. Whenever someone buys a product immediately offer them an up-sell. McDonald's does it by having the cashier ask if it's okay to "super size" the order. Up-selling at the point of purchase can be done by adding more product at a slightly higher price, or by offering an additional product. A portion of the people will make the additional purchase on the spot.

Strategy #5: Stick Letter. This is so simple. A stick letter is nothing more than a thank you letter presenting another product offer. A good stick letter thanks the customer for purchasing in the first place. It lets them know they made a good decision. It restates the main benefits of the purchase and presents another product or service offer.

[chiroeco]

Responsys Data Integration for Marketing Campaigns

New self-service, data-driven marketing solution designed to give marketers increased transparency and control over how customer data is utilized.

Multichannel marketing solutions provider Responsys has released Responsys Interact Connect, a data integration tool designed to help marketers define, schedule and automate data transfers between external systems and the company's campaign management platform.

This announcement follows a Forrester report last month that predicts spending on email marketing to rapidly expand to nearly $2 billion by 2014. Citing the growing complexity associated email marketing the report identified data integration as a key growth area for marketers.

Interact Connect gives marketers more control over customer data by providing increased transparency and the ability to build automated campaigns, according to a company statement. Using a Web-based user interface, the new self-service product eliminates the need for scripting and decreases reliance on other IT resources according to the release.

John Lovett, Forrester senior analyst, wrote "Customer data is perpetually amassing for marketers with each new campaign, Web site visit and email delivered, thus creating unprecedented stores of Web data. This information is often siloed within disparate applications providing shallow customer insight, but nearly 80 percent of Web site decision-makers are unlocking value by integrating Web traffic data, customer profiles, email and survey data using various tools," in a February 2009 Forrester Research report titled, "What's Your Web Data Integration Strategy?"

[information-management]

Cosmetic Surgery Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

There are plenty of cosmetic surgeons out there, who have a website, or have thought about getting a website. The one thing they haven't thought about, is marketing. A number of websites that exist today can only be found when you search some really obscure terms as they have not looked to implement an internet marketing strategy. Maybe they don't believe its worth it, or maybe its just because they've not got round to it, but they could be missing out on a significant number of bookings each day.

If, for example, a company where paying for adwords or pay per click advertising, then they could be spending an awful lot of money, really quickly. Google traffic estimator tells us that at a possible cost of £4.43 per click, with an estimated 87-109 per day, you could easily spend £490 each day. If you think there is on average, 30 days per month that is £14,700 as a possible spend to generate a few leads.

There are plenty of cosmetic surgeons out there, who have a website, or have thought about getting a website. The one thing they haven’t thought about, is marketing. A number of websites that exist today can only be found when you search some really obscure terms as they have not looked to implement an internet marketing strategy. Maybe they don't believe its worth it, or maybe its just because they've not got round to it, but they could be missing out on a significant number of bookings each day.

If, for example, a company where paying for adwords or pay per click advertising, then they could be spending an awful lot of money, really quickly. Google traffic estimator tells us that at a possible cost of £4.43 per click, with an estimated 87-109 per day, you could easily spend £490 each day. If you think there is on average, 30 days per month that is £14,700 as a possible spend to generate a few leads.

[hitsearchlimited.com]

Internet marketing: Upload videos to YouTube and other video-sharing sites

If you think uploading videos to YouTube and other video-sharing sites isn't an effective internet marketing strategy, think again.

It appears that people seem to have an endless appetite for watching short videos of some of the silliest things imaginable.

Of course, as book marketer John Kremer discusses in his 10 million eyeballs marketing course, funny videos are much more likely to go viral.

Still, serious videos also get eyeballs (just not as many). And whether you have a small business or a large business, whether you have a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, you should definitely consider making short videos and posting them for free in cyberspace.

These videos should be about different aspects of your products or services. And, of course, the videos should have your website URL in the credits at the end of the video.

And you don't need fancy video or sound equipment. You do need a decent camera and you need to think about what light source you're using. And a tripod is a good idea so you don't have a shaky video. (You also need a simple video editing program so that you can add the credits.)

Here are a few tips for your video:

• Make your videos like a good news story. All the important information first and then the additional information (in case people only watch the beginning of the video).
• Do not have a cluttered background behind you that detracts from people paying attention to your words.
• Follow all the in-person speaking rules, such as not wearing dangling earrings that detract from what you're saying, maintaining eye contact with your audience, speaking slowly and distinctly, not gesturing too much with your hands, and having good body posture. (Slumping gives the impression that the information you're imparting isn't important.)
• Follow the rules of persuasion – don't tell your audience what you want to tell them. (My widget is the best there is.) Tell your audience what they need to hear to act on what you want them to do. (My widget will solve your widget problem in five minutes, so buy it now and get started.)
• Shorter is better. (Yael made a video for the launch of our Miller Mosaic Internet Marketing Program. The video came in about eight minutes, so she broke it into two videos: the first announces the launch and the second explains how we got to this point.)

As with all my other internet business/internet marketing recommendations, do not feel that you MUST do all of them. Choose some strategies to start with, and you can add more as you become proficient with the first strategies.

And if you want to learn more about internet marketing in easy-to-implement steps, check out our Miller Miller Internet Marketing Program now.

[examiner.com]

Internet Marketing, Video & Facebook Marketing - Are You Missing Out

Internet marketing has taken a massive change in the past year or two. When everyone was just concerned about links from other sites and rankings in the natural search engines, then internet marketing was a whole lot easier to implement. Now we have a variety of ways to successfully market business' online.

Video marketing is becoming huge, with websites such as youtube where an average of 100 million videos are watched on a daily basis, its no wonder people turn to this as a way to market their product. Its probably easier to have a press release on youtube as a video presentation format to enable you to get your message across in a lighter way than just a text based article that people would very rarely finish. This is also fantastic for media companies who wish to use it as a way to get their dvds and films in the public eye.

Facebook marketing and other social networking websites are also a great way to target a large number of people. As people love using these sites, then advertisements are never usually frowned upon as they sit within the context of the site and don't over power, they do however, get placed in a way in which they will get seen by a huge number of the users. Facebook has grown so quickly to an extent where they have 200 million active users and more than 100 million log onto the site atleast once a day.

With internet marketing having this new look, you could well be missing out on a huge number of visitors or sales every single day with a poorly manged and out of date marketing strategy.

[hitsearchlimited.com]

The Landing Page as a Multipurpose Tool

Landing pages are always worth a review because their use is often misunderstood. A landing page is any web page to which users are sent for a particular presentation, result, and/or measurement. Landing pages, in short, have uses beyond simply presenting information.

People sometimes talk about landing pages in one capacity only, paid search advertising. Certainly, landing pages are extremely important with regard to pay-per-click advertising because the search engines include the quality of the pages to which paid search ads point in their overall evaluation of when and where ads are displayed. In theory, the better a landing pages is with regard to focus and keywords, the better the placement of an ad will be.

But landing pages can be used for much more. Not only can they affect conversion, they also allow for traffic measurement via website analytics.

Email Marketing Campaigns

A landing page can be a great way to measure the effect of an email marketing campaign, especially if you use an entry-level email service that provides limited analytics. The page's appearance has a definite effect on click-through rates. If it is well designed, it can prompt people to continue on to a purchase or perform another action within the website, while a bad design will likely prompt users to go away.

Social Media Outreach Campaigns

The most basic way to measure the effect of a social media outreach campaign is to create unique landing pages for each campaign combined with website analytics. A landing page focused to each campaign is the most plausible tool for conversion, and, again, good landing page design will usually improve conversion rates.

Banner Ads

A banner ad landing page shouldn’t be much different from a paid search landing page, except that there is no search engine policing its quality. You can police it yourself – the more focused the landing page is to your banner ad, the more likely it is to convert. Additionally, the page can offer secondary analytical information to augment ad server numbers.

Press Releases

Most online press release services offer some form of analytics, but they are rarely enough to fully measure the actual effect. Placing links to well-defined landing pages in press releases can, like banner ads, offer improved analytical information.

External Blog Links

Participation in the blogosphere can pay big dividends, whether through comments, guest blogging, or garnering mentions of your website on external blogs. Although analytics can track traffic from individual blog addresses, a landing page can augment this analytical information and offer content focused to the blog post, thus enhancing the likelihood of maintaining interest or converting a visit to a sale.

Offline Marketing

A landing page can also be a great tool for traditional, offline marketing. Print ads, postcards, promotional items, and other physical marketing entities can be hard to track. But a unique landing page for each item, tied-in with the specific offer, can help to define some representative numbers.

Summary

While landing pages are extremely important for pay-per-click ad campaigns, they can also be used to track your online and offline marketing tactics. In situations where a marketing campaign seems hard to track, use landing pages as a multipurpose tool for both tracking purposes and conversion.

[practicalecommerce.com]

Tool Aims For Easy Data Integration And Targeting For Email Campaigns

Having quick and easy access to data has always been a barrier that prevents marketers from implementing targeted and integrated campaigns. Marketers have had to call on the IT department to mine customer behavior or transaction history in a data warehouse, or use Web analytics.

Responsys -- which provides on-demand marketing services for email, Web, print, mobile, and social media -- on Monday is expected to release Interact Connect, a tool that allows marketers to define, schedule and automate data transfers with external systems through a Web-based user interface. The tool can now integrate internal data from multiple platforms. This eliminates the need for scripting and reliance on IT resources.

Marketers can point Interact Connect toward an Oracle, SAP or Teradata data warehouses, among others, and automatically pull in data from a specific customer segment.

John Berkley, VP of product marketing for Responsys, believes the technology has a "behavioral targeting" twist. The difference is that the Responsys platform integrates data to rely on email as the delivery mechanism to target and remarket to known customers from a list.

Marketers can target a specific behavior. "If you know through a Web analytics platform that someone has been looking at a specific set of products, but they have not bought anything, you can target that behavior," says Berkley. "You can also target the segment of customer who you know has abandoned a shopping cart."

Several weeks ago, San Bruno, Calif.-based Responsys released a product that integrates external data from analytics platforms to personalize email marketing content. Now the product does both, giving marketers control over how they use customer data to build timely campaigns.

"I can do a campaign in Responsys to all people who have abandoned a shopping cart, and with one click I can direct the system to use Baynote to determine the exact product relevant to them," Berkley says. "The recommendation is provided by our partners, but the campaign is served up by us."

Data integration remains a challenge for most companies. Infrastructure and technology constraints prohibit many integration initiatives, notes Forrester Research analyst John Lovett. For example, 54% of large organizations -- representing more than $1 billion in annual revenue -- are challenged by infrastructure constraints, according to the Forrester report "What's Your Web Data Integration Strategy?"

To understand how data integration issues affect marketers, Forrester Research surveyed 275 Web site decision-makers about business practices. The report, released in February, revealed that one-third of large companies do not have the staff or the resources to integrate data. More than 40% of mid-size companies are handicapped by resource constraints. And 21% of companies, from large to small, cite difficulties in finding a technology solution capable of satisfying integration needs.

Responsys supports companies such as Avis Europe, Continental Airlines, Deutsche Lufthansa, Intrawest, Lands' End, LEGO, and UnitedHealthcare.

[mediapost.com]

Trust 'key to email marketing'

Building customers' trust is a key strategy to successful email marketing, according to one expert.

Writing for Examiner.com, promotions expert David Hale stated that building a good relationship with the customer is vital as "reputation is everything".

He said this can be achieved in part by making email marketing communications targeted and relevant, to avoid irritating customers.

The expert added that happy customers are likely to tell friends and family about a service and boost a company's profile by word of mouth, while it is easier to attract a return customer than a new one.

"Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than expensive advertisement," he explained.

"Like in any sales environment, a person is more likely to purchase an item from someone they know, like and trust. In the internet marketing world, this is done with sporadic, but constant email contact."

According to the recent Email Marketing Metrics Report by MailerMailer, email marketing messages delivered to small and medium-sized contacts lists have a better chance of being opened than those sent to over 1,000 subscribers as they are better targeted.


[globalgold.co.uk]

List building - 4 top strategies to build a long opt-in list

Internet marketing may have developed a sudden surge these past few years, but many in the know, have felt its rise even more. As more Internet-based businesses are developed, the need to design new marketing skills and awareness have come about. New marketing strategies are being discovered and developed almost on a weekly basis to manage the evolving business to business world.

The demand for Internet marketing tips and strategies have significantly evolve, thus creating d a new business model, Internet marketing. While there are companies that are all too eager to assist web site owners develop a large opt-in list a fee, there are also many free or low-cost strategies that can provide more visibility to a web site. One such strategy is opt-in email marketing, also known as permission marketing.

Opt-in marketing requires the permission of a person to subscribe to your marketing material, such as newsletters, products and promotional e-mail. The more opt-in email sent to a list, the more chances there is to develop paying customers. To do this, a web site owner must build a list of subscribers who wish to receive further information by opting in.

From a developed opt-in list will come targeted customers. these are hot leads as they have already shown an interest in obtaining the initial offered information by subscribing to a list. Many Internet marketers believe that building a list takes a lot of hard work and effort to collect names and email addresses. This does take a bit of time, but like anything, effort is rewarded by results.

The Internet abounds with reference material and articles on list building. Like all industries, Internet marketing has as many list building strategies as it does marketers.

Here are four of them that I have found most useful:-

• Design a professional looking opt-in web form for visitors to enter their name and email address. The location for this form is very crucial in that it should be placed above the top fold of the web page. The fold of a web page is the portion above the screen bottom when scrolled to the top of a respective web page. Research has shown that form placement is vital as to whether a person enters their data or not. If your home page does not command a visitor's attention and the form does not stick out, they are likely to leave.

• Designing an attractive opt-in web form is not difficult to do. Any autoresponder service will offer this feature, such as Aweber or 1Shoppingcart . Once a form is designed on their site, simply copy and paste the html code provided into the html code page of a website and Presto, the exact form that was designed appears. Because the form is linked to the autoresponder, once a person enters their data it is automatically collected into a database, which is then used to send marketing emails.

• As described above, the web site must be professional looking. Adding informative and topic specific articles will assist in providing sticking power for visitors. Make a web site useful and easy to navigate will also add to the attraction of search engines, thus providing a higher Page Rank (PR).

• Any Internet business web site should provide good services and product offerings. It is easier to sell to a returning customer than to attract new ones. As in retail stores, satisfied customer will always recommend a business to their friends and family. Word of mouth and recommendations alone can rake in more business than expensive advertisement. As a web site's visitor list and opt-in list grows so shall profits. Like is any sales environment, a person is more likely to purchase an item from someone they know , like and trust. In the Internet marketing world, this is done with sporadic, but constant email contact.

• Privacy above all else. If an opt-in visitor or customer finds out a web site owner passed on their email address, and thus start receiving spam mail, the web site owner will lose a list very quickly.

In the Internet marketing world, reputation is everything and will assist in attracting an avalanche of traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers.

[examiner]

Volume of marketing e-mail will surge over next five years, study says

Over the next five years, spending on e-mail marketing in the U.S. will grow at a compound annual rate of 11%, reaching $2 billion by 2014, Forrester Research Inc. says in a new study.

The study, "US Email Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014," by Forrester analyst David Daniels, notes that the permission-based e-mail campaigns designed to retain existing customers will account for the largest share of e-mail marketing messages, at one-third, by 2014.

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers, Daniels says, will be in managing e-mail marketing campaigns to take advantage of social networks on the web. "Over the next five years, marketers must bridge the gap between social and traditional inboxes with social sharing tools," he says.

The report also notes that e-mail marketing will become more complex as marketers integrate it with customer and product data amid efforts to increase the relevancy of e-mail messages. Without relevancy, e-mail campaigns will wind up in junk folders, it adds.

"By 2014 direct marketers will waste $144 million on e-mails that never reach their primary target," Daniels says. "Successful direct marketing pros will alter their tactics to overcome inbox clutter and increase relevancy."

The report adds that spending on ad-sponsored e-mail newsletters will double over the next five years, coinciding with declines in circulation and ad revenue at print publishers.


[internetretailer]

Email marketing 'is business-critical'

by Greig Daines

Email and mobile telephone messaging are becoming increasingly business-critical in small and medium-sized companies, a new report has said.

Many businesses are building "failover protection" into these technologies, especially because email continuity is now central to firms, CBR Online stated, which could highlight the importance of email marketing in reaching out to new customers.

Staff may also want the security and flexibility that they can conduct their email marketing from any location.

"In the lead-up to events, employees rely on email to manage marketing activities and during an event engage in social media activities such as Facebook and Twitter, which has become an increasingly important element in creative client campaigns," the publication noted.

Writing for Small Business Computing, Drew Robb, a technology and engineering specialist writer, stated that small businesses not only use reliable web hosting firms for their email, but have also expanded into enterprise resource planning.

Having a reliable web hosting firm look after email could allow companies to deliver more reliable email marketing to increase brand awareness and improve search engine optimisation.

[globalgold.co.uk]