Showing posts with label marketing. Show all posts
Sourcing Balloons At Wholesale Prices
A gift shop can be an enjoyable and profitable business that only requires the bare minimum of start up costs and overheads. Although you could open a traditional storefront, this is not necessary. It is possible to be fairly successful, while running your business from home. However, for your gift shop to get off the ground, you will require a few essential items of equipment. These are as follows:
Stock
For a gift shop, balloons are an excellent product to sell. However, you will need to purchase weights, glue and string as well. You should buy your stock from a wholesaler, not from a different shop that has marked the price up already. You can locate suppliers of wholesale balloons on the web, or in the telephone directory. Make sure that you compare the prices of different suppliers, prior to purchasing anything. Also, you can find suppliers by attending the Balloon Artists Convention, which takes place every year.
Vehicle for Deliveries
Balloons that are inflated occupy a great deal of space. Thus, to transport them to customers, you will have to purchase a big delivery vehicle. Also, you might have to transport tanks to inflate the balloons with. Several gift shop owners use an SUV (or big van) that has the back seats taken out. Your vehicle ought to display a sign on its’ side with your telephone number. This will allow you to advertise your shop, while you are on the move. Your sign can be painted professionally or (for a more cost effective alternative) it could be stuck on magnetically. An additional cost is that you need to insure your vehicle for commercial purposes.
Effective Marketing
If your gift shop is to attract customers and be a success, you need to have a marketing strategy. You could use a website, business cards, fliers or telephone book listings to advertise your shop. Also, you can attract customers by personally visiting businesses that might use wholesale balloons, like banks, schools and car lots. However, there are cities like Houston that have laws banning outdoor balloon advertising. Hence, always know the laws in your locale, prior to approaching businesses.
Equipment for Your Office
Whether your shop is offline or online, you will need office equipment. Firstly, and most importantly, you need a telephone. Your business telephone number ought to be a cell phone number, or redirected to your cell phone. This way, you can still take orders, whilst making deliveries. Also, think about getting a fax machine. You will require a PC, with an Internet connection and printer. This will enable you to monitor stock and financial details, print receipts and process orders by credit card.
Helium Tanks
Gift shops need helium for inflating balloons. Helium weighs less than air, so the balloons will float and not drop to the ground. Wholesale suppliers can provide you with helium tanks. Finally, you will require a helium/air 60/40 regulator, as endorsed by the International Balloon Institute. This regulator is hooked to the tanks that fill the balloons.
Five Brilliant Internet Marketing Strategies
A lot of people dream of making money online. However, from dream to reality there is a long way. One of the best ways to generate profits online is by creating an online business.
Nevertheless, not all of us have the necessary funds to start big. For those who have already started to put their plan into action, we have five great internet marketing strategies.
Not only are these golden nuggets of wisdom extremely useful, but they are also designed to help businesses with tight budgets.
1. Content Marketing
There is no better strategy for an online project, than to create great, well-written, original content. This method won’t cost you one dime as long as you do it yourself. However, it is time consuming.
As a result it is imperative to consistently create helpful content for your blog, guest-blog in order to generate good-quality back-links and also post on free blogs for more credibility.
If you don’t have time to write articles yourself, you should work with someone who has your best interests at heart.
Nevertheless, content marketing isn’t only about the written part. You also have to engage with your readers in order to gain more outreach. I cannot stress the importance of social media enough.
In this day and age, not having a Twitter, Google+ or Facebook accounts means that you are pretty much non-existent.
2. Outsourcing
Another useful marketing strategy is outsourcing. The term of outsource defines the practice of hiring an online entrepreneur or affiliate agency to promote your business. If done correctly it guarantees great results.
However, if you are new to the world of internet marketing you should choose a less risky strategy with low-cost fees.
There are several great online platforms like Odesk and Elance which provide a huge database of freelancers to hire. I recommend that you hand pick your employees.
Moreover, you should keep a close eye on their activity, especially in the beginning, or you might end up spending more than you can had bargained for.
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3. Affordable Web Hosting Solutions
Affordable Web Hosting services is a risk you have to take. The truth is that there are a lot of scammers online, but for most there is no other possibility.
We recommend that you conduct extensive research before picking a provider. Cloud hosting is one of the safest and most reasonable deals you can get.
Cloud hosting offers unique domain names, easy to use control panels and reliable hosting.
4. Provide free information to people
Assuming that you have already picked your niche (It is imperative to pick your niche from the very start), you can provide information, tips and tutorials which can attract people to your blog.
For example, if you are trying to sell colored crayons you can create guides and how-to posts about drawing and arts.
It is this type of content that will make people want to connect with your business. Moreover, there are a lot of free forums, where different users ask questions.
You can provide them with much needed information, be seen as an expert, and gain more credibility. Add your website in your signature and wait for people to visit your page.
5. Online Marketing Sites
Every business has its unique set of marketing challenges and opportunities. This means that you will need specific strategies in order to grow your company.
Nobody is born an expert, and this means that you should not shy away from useful tips given by experts.
There are plenty of websites which offer great learning tutorials and tricks which might lead you to solutions that might have never crossed your mind.
info | Youtube In Your Marketing Campaign
YouTube in Marketing Campaign - YouTube is a popular online video wonder. More than a medium, it serves as an excellent tool to promote your business or online content. If you have not used it until now for promotion purposes, then just give a thought for it. Until now, billions of views have been recorded overall for all the videos and 45 terabytes of videos have been uploaded. It is one of the best online video medium and the top rated website for browsing and watching online videos. There are some issues associated with YouTube. That could be the poor quality of some videos, no special features etc. However, YouTube remains the No.1 website for watching and downloading online videos. With such a popular website available online, you can make use of it for promoting your business, film, article content or blogs. The content or business promoted through YouTube attracts a huge base of customers. Now, just imagine how much a marketing campaign can be benefited from YouTube
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The latest trend in the cine market is to advertise and promote their films on YouTube. The teaser will be posted on YouTube and millions of users would view it. The film will become a big hit even before it hits the screen. However, there are some points that you have to keep in mind and think about that. With so much of videos present online on YouTube, how would you make your video content get noticed uniquely among the others? You do not have any facility in YouTube to make your content exclusive and unique, but still you can do something to drive more traffic towards your video. This article is going to help you on that i.e. how to make use of YouTube for promoting your business. Below are mentioned top 10 ways by which you can use Youtube in your marketing campaign.
1. Come up with your own channel on YouTube
Creating an own channel for your business is the first and basic thing that you have to do after entering into the YouTube and before posting your videos on the website. Generally, a channel will be automatically created when you sign up with YouTube. The thing is you have to maintain it properly. Within the channel, you can create your own profile, organize contents and create playlists.
2. Choose perfect account type suitable to your Marketing Campaign
You will be given an option during the sign up process of YouTube to select an account type for your YouTube account. Different account types will be there and the basic type is standard. Each type has its specific role on the website. For example, ‘a director account’ lets you produce your own web videos and allows adding custom logo to your profile. Similarly, each account type has its unique feature and you should select the one based on your business needs.
3. Create short videos
The best way to make your users to watch your video is to make it short and sweet. The running time of video should be 5 minutes or less than that. If you have long videos to play, then break them into different segments and attach them in the playlist.
4. Tag videos properly
After creating your video or uploading from any sources, just make sure that you have organized your video under perfect category and tagged it. You can always check with other videos about how they are tagged and categorized, which will finally pay off. It may not be possible to fit your content exactly under one category, but still a related category will work when doing a similar search through keywords option.
5. Create playlists
You might be adding your own videos to the list or include videos from some other sources, whatever it is do create a playlist for all the videos that you include in your channel. It makes the user experience great and easy in searching for your channel videos and they will sure express their gratitude for it.
6. Use YouTube promotion facilities
You do not have to wait to see who has visited your profile and watched your videos. YouTubeoffers you some self-promotion facilities. Make use of that to promote your videos. Such a facility is sending emails to the users. Similarly, you can create bulletins from your profile or from other people’s channels. Bulletins are nothing but short messages to the users.
7. Create video responses for other user’s videos
It is so simple to create video responses. Instead of commenting on a video of other users, you can create video responses right below the main video player. You can even record your video using your webcam or upload from your previous videos. However, make sure that your response is related to the content of the main video.
8. Join Groups
YouTube has a great community groups online. You can search in YouTube for different groups and you can join a category that is related to your marketing campaign. You will get more audience in a group. People joining your group will view your content and it directly increases your traffic.
9. Make use of YouTube streams
You can contact the YouTube team directly through the streams. You can share your videos online and discuss about your videos in real time through YouTube streams. This gives you an option to chat with the users in real time about your videos and know their feedbacks on your work.
10. Active sharing
It is a latest feature that lets you drive more traffic to your content. This feature will make your name visible on the side of the video that you are watching. If another user who is watching the same video gets curious about your detail, then he will visit your profile page to see your videos. This is another way of attracting users and drying traffic to your content.
Corporate Web Marketing Using Seo Strategies
Presently corporate world fully depend on Internet marketing for advertising and management. But interestingly there is no official textbook on proper strategy or tactics of internet marketing. If you are a business owner then it completely depends on you and fully strategies can be performed with search engine optimization (SEO) with professional firm or individual(s).It will be done as you or your business wants. As per my 4 years experience in marketing and SEO consultant, I have applied a lots of new or fully invented methods to maintain corporate web marketing SEO strategies.
It is seen that a large number of SEO professional as well as marketers are doing mistakes in theirSEO strategies. My article tries to find out a few of them. Just check these mistakes and avoid them to start healthy web marketing SEO strategies.
1. Real Time Onpage content strategy:
There was no problem before Google’s Panda algorithm update but time has changed and with out value added content , you site will never come to top in SERP . Just you have to add value able content to your site. Content must be related to your business. A few suggestion about value added content
- Content with quantity and quality.
- Social sharing with quantity and quality.
- Real Time grammar and spelling.
- Real time text formatting.
- Using of subheads
- Informative length of content
- Natural inbound and outbound links
Your first criteria in SEO startegies are valued and informative content which may be ever lasting effective.
2. Poor offsite content strategy:
Offsite SEO strategy normally depends on link building and article marketing. On the other hand inbound links are the heaviest-weighted factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.
As it is known to all that links are like roads to your website which can bring potential clients and customers. So your link building strategies must be white hat and natural. Content marketing (guest posting) is one of the best white hat method of link building.
Using black hat method is the easiest way to shut down your website as well as your business too.
3. Time management Concentration:-
A large number of online marketers fail in their SEO strategies due to lack of time .When you hire some to start SEO strategies then you must be involved in the strategies. This will give more interactive in online community which is one of the most effective path of trust worthiness among the clients and customers.
4. Lack of enough budgets for campaign:
It needs to hire high quality SEO experts to start your strategies such they can do with devotion on your site as well as your business too. So high quality firm or individual can provide your needs .Unfortunately, a large number of low-budget SEO providers are stuck in a pre-Penguin era of Search Engine Optimization helps business owner via spamming (black hat tactic) but it quite impossible now.
5. Unequal distribution of workload:
Now this days , Online marketing is too vast field of business , so it is quite impossible to manage by a single person . That is for why, it is needed to hire freelancer or virtual assistant to distribute your work among them. Work distribution can safe time and energy which can manage more clients and customers.
Conclusion
Your SEO strategies depends on your activeness and willingness. If you hired some one experts but you must monitor their works in real time basis which may be a source of your business success . So my best point in this context , if possible then must try to know your basis SEO strategies .
How To Use Gmail Like A Marketing Machine
Marketers spend a lot of time on Gmail. For most of us that means staying on Gmail from the second we get up to the second we sleep. Email is an important tool in any marketer’s arsenal so whether you are a blogger, webmaster, or an entrepreneur using Gmail is a must. Here are five solid ways you can use Gmail like a marketing machine.
If you use Outlook or some other email client, this post isn't going to be of too much help to you. Sorry about that.
1. Manage Your Gmail Better
If you are sending a lot of emails to potential clients or bloggers for potential guest post opportunities, you understand how difficult it can be to manage all those emails and stay on top of replying to all the right people. There is nothing worse than missing an email from someone who could have been of great help to you. This is where Streak comes in.
Streak makes management of important emails easy by allowing you to not only categorize different emails but also make sub categories for where each email thread is in your process (are you still making the pitch, negotiating, is it a closed deal, etc..). You can even group all the emails from the same person together.
You can also use streak to preset when to send the email. You can write the email whenever you want and send it at the time they are most likely to read it. Write an email and set it to send tomorrow morning exactly at 9:30 AM and you can sleep right through 9:30, wake up at 10:00 and see that it has been sent. Isn't that enough to make you get Streak? All you have to do is click on the send later button when you are composing an email and choose a timing.
With Streak you also get the option of creating email templates. Like most marketers you probably have to send a lot of emails that are very similar to each other, with only a few minor changes. A perfectly crafted outreach email asking for a guest post for example. You can create a template for this in minutes and save a lot of time not recreating the same message over and over again. This will make sending out reach emails a lot quicker. The only thing you have left to worry about is coming up with great blog post ideas to pitch to bloggers.
Get Streak. It will make your life easier.
2. Use Gmail Faster
If you are not careful, Gmail can suck your time away. It is a great tool to help you procrastinate when you are trying to put things off, but even when you are trying to actually be productive, Gmail can eat up your time. I like to think that I have learned a few life lessons throughout my existence. One of the most important ones being that you should always use time efficiently. Here are a few ways you can save time on Gmail.
- Multiple Uploads. I like to include images in my posts, even if I am writing that post as a guest author at someone else’s blog. When I am sending that post, I generally have to attach all the images along with the word document. This used to take a few minutes because I would attach each image one at a time. This is a mistake that you can easily avoid. You can save time by uploading multiple files at once. When you click attach a file and the window pops up, you can simply hold control and click on all the files you want to upload to the email in one fell swoop (multiple images and docs all at once).
- Use Gmail Shortcuts. Anyone who is a PC gamer knows that it is faster to do most things with your keyboard than it is to do with your mouse. You save time by using keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse to click on the appropriate button on your screen, and this time adds up fast. You can find the full list of Gmail shortcuts here, but here are the most useful ones: undo: z, reply: r, reply all: a, forward: f, save draft: ctr + s, compose: c.
- Make Search Easier. When you get a lot of emails, searching through your archives to find a particular email can be a long process and if it is an especially old email, it can even take hours to find. Usually this happens because most people do not delete any emails and archive everything, so that they never have to lose any email. This is great and all but when you need to go search through your emails to find something, you now have a huge clutter to weed through. Delete emails that you absolutely do not need, especially if it spam. There is no need to archive that.
- View more in your inbox. Aren't you a little annoyed that you have to click next every time you want to see more than 25 messages in your inbox? This just wastes time. Go to your Settings and change the maximum page size in the General tab to 100.
3. Get A Better Understanding Of Your Contacts With Rapportive
You talk to a lot of people and naturally, keeping track of who all these people are, what their likes and dislikes are, and what their deal is, can be difficult. Rapportive does this for you. Every time you are emailing someone or reading an email from someone, Rapportive will display important information about them as well as their recent tweets. You can even attach notes to each of your contacts.
It even gives you the option of connecting with your contact via social media right from your Gmail. Sure, this won’t take the place of any social media management tools but it still a great convenience and just adds to the list of awesome things that Rapportive can do.
4. Undo Sending Stupid Emails
Sometimes you look over an important email a million times before sending it and find no mistakes. You only realize that you had made a horrible mistake in that email seconds after sending it. This is where this very awesome undo-sending email link comes in. It actually allows you to un-send an email for a few seconds after you sent it. (It just doesn't send it for a few seconds after you click send and just cancels it when you press undo) This new undo button can be an absolute life saver.
Set it up by going to Settings and clicking on Labs.
Scroll down until you find Undo Send, click enable and click Save Changes.
5. Tweak Your Inbox: Show Unread Messages First
Weeding through all your messages to find the ones that are unread just makes you less efficient. You can change this by tweaking your inbox to display unopened messages first. Since all your unread messages now float to the top, it will be hard to miss any important emails. As an added bonus, your inbox will also look a lot cleaner and more organized which will make it much easier for your brain to process what’s going on in your inbox. This will also make you less likely to procrastinate because you won’t be tempted to browse through all the emails that you already opened.
Setting this up is simple. Go to Settings again but click on Inbox this time. Where it says Inbox type, choose unread first.
6. Bonus: Remote Sign Out
You may sometimes have to log into your Gmail from an computer that is not yours. If you end up forgetting to log out from that computer, it could end up coming back to bite you. Luckily, you can log out of all computers from anywhere. If you scroll to the bottom of your Gmail page, you should see a link that says details. Click on details and a window will pop up and if you are logged into any other computers, it should give you the option of logging out of all other computers.
How do you tweak Gmail for marketing?
