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:
It may seem as counter-intuitive, but when you say:
You actually do more harm than good.
Back in 2006-2007, I took some theater classes. One of the locations for the classes was far from city center. For a couple of months, I traveled by metro, then I had to switch two buses. During the end time of that period, I found out there is a tram which goes right from the front of my block to a place very close to the location.
George Pruteanu had a show on TV. At one time, he spoke about a letter he received, in which he was praised for being „wise”.
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.
You go to a store, and the sellers invite you to: Have a free sample. Feel the goods (clothing, apparel). Try the product in some way or another. Why does this happen? We tend to get more attached to things we touch. Thus, we will price a good higher when we have contact with it. Simple trick – when the sellers invite you to touch a good, they actually invite you to buy the product at a higher price. And, surprisingly, you do. :) The morale? Just notice the thing, and at times avoid touching, if you see it makes it more difficult for you to avoid buying a good.
It may seem obvious – in order to succeed, you need to feel good with yourself. Have a meaning, feel nice, enjoy life. After all, what good is success which only comes at the end of the life?
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.