There are two perceptions on what Internet marketing is: A guy in the middle of the street, with a big megaphone, yelling about your services. “Buy from us! We’re good! Buy from us! Expiring offer! Buy! Buy! Buy!”. Winner in this scenario is the guy who can yell loudest, to the largest number of people, with the least resources. By following this path, you can get easily into spamming. A guy in a closed building, talking with a normal voice about things. Persisting in this until he has a small audience. Inspiring that audience to believe that he actually knows what he talks about. Making those people want to tell others about the product/service. Creating fans & communities, by providing the desired quality of products & services. Making everybody feel good, and telling others. In other words, putting free megaphones in other people. Letting other people promote the brand. Unfortunately, a lot of times when people come to me for Internet marketing services, they expect me to have a big megaphone and to start yelling. They are, themselves, too embarrassed to yell by themselves, so they tend to give others the “chance” to speak. And when they to speak, not-so-great things happen. The other solution, creating content which is actually very good & inspiring, is hard. You have to come up with a good idea, work hard to make it polish, and create a community. Not so easy. It’s much easier to break the rules and start spamming.
Let’s say you organize an event want to tag 15 people on Facebook. There are people you know and you want them tagged. How to do it in an optimal way?
My suggestion is simple:
I use AdBlock plus for Chrome (the browser I currently use 95%+ of the time). Why? There are pros and cons of using it. As a plus, you don’t see the ads. As a con, some web sites display with some faults if you hide the ads. This is debatable – are the ads really useful in how a page should look like? This is unclear. What is clear and is the drop which has filled my glass of patience are re-marketing ads. The principle is simple – I visit SEOmoz.org, let’s say, and log into my account, which is a free one. They see this and have an option to display on other web sites, around the Internet, ads which invite me to become a premium member of SEOmoz. The first time you see the ad, it may be OK. After the ads start haunting you all over the Internet, specifically targeting me to do a specific set of actions, it gets annoying. I start to feel bad I don’t have a premium account of SEOmoz. I want to return to web sites I don’t particularly like. AdBlock Plus may be worth it only for that.
There are a lot of reasons for which a store (online or not) should have promotions such as:
I will bring in this article some light on why you might consider not having this kind of offers.
Let’s say you have a document with 20 pages of information and you want to put it on a web site. You structure it, simpler, or more complicated. But, in the end, you will have to pick between these two:
Find out why I favor scrolling to clicking.
How should one company handle the policy for returning products?
You have probably read my previous article, which told you the reasons for which you should be very “real” on your web site:
Now, how to make the “About us” page?
On LinkedIn, whenever I fill in my profile, there are always some fields which seem irrelevant to me. BestJobs.ro also has some fields which don’t seem necessary to me. On the other hand, for the fields which are necessary, I’m pretty attentive and I work hard to fill them in correctly. Yet, LinkedIn always bugs me – you’re only 95% complete. BestJobs also insists I should get to 100%. How should things be, in my opinion? Do ask me for more data when I’m below 65% complete. Do always ask for things which greatly improve the user experience, such as a photo for LinkedIn, a current job position, some links to some top sites. Don’t bug me if I’m over 65% complete. Don’t ask for more data. Also, If I’m more than 50% complete, and I filled in all the important data, missing some details, don’t bug me. Don’t force me to put everything on my CV / profile. It’s irrelevant and actually hurtful to both the service provider and the user.
La Zilele Biz 2012 am auzit de la Gabriela LUNGU o idee care m-a pus pe gânduri: PR-ul (relațiile publice) comunică cu elitele, nu în masă. Se adresează formatorilor de opinie. Inițial, am rezistat gândului, m-a surprins. L-am acceptat însă și acum ader ideii.
