Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

No matter what level of marketer you are, if you’re doing marketing you have to learn how to copywrite. Some people hate copywriting. I know. I used to be one of them. And truth be told, it still drives me nuts from time to time. But when you have guides, rules, and techniques it become a lot simpler.  Well, good news, because I’ve got some good ones for you.

The little guide has a very specific use: Include these three things every time you have a marketing piece that is selling something. These three tools are what separate the men from the boys. This is how you tell if the person who wrote the sales copy knows a damn thing or not. If they are missing these things, the person’s an amateur!

The Copywriter’s Arsenal:

1. Risk Reversal
2. Bonuses (aka Stacking the Cool)
3. One Strong CTA (Call To Action)

Risk Reversal

Risk reversals are under utilized and hugely powerful.  This is the ’30 day Money Back Guarantee’, ’14-Day Trail’, ‘Return it and get double your money back’, ’3-year Warranty’ on whatever it is that is being sold. The first business I ever had was a painting franchise for one of the largest painting franchisors in Canada, Works Painting. Everybody in the painting industry has a guarantee.  Most are only one or two years.  In fact, I’ve never come across anyone other than Works Painting who had a guarantee longer than 2 years. And let me tell you, it sold jobs.  When all else was equal, I always got the job. Because the guarantee really meant something.

Here are some great tidbits from the Harvard Business Review.

More and more companies are introducing social networking tools to help employees connect. However, these should not be considered “work versions” of Facebook or Twitter. These platforms are intended to support your work, not give you a place to post pictures of your poodle. Here are three ways to make good use of these tools to advance your work:

1. Narrate your work. Talk about your current projects: where you are, what you’re struggling with, and what you’re producing. This will help others who may be doing similar work find you.
2. Ask questions. There is often collective wisdom out there. If you’re stuck, ask the crowd to help you out.
3. Talk about social stuff. If your company softball team won last night’s game, put it out there. Socializing is an important part of work and these tools are perfect for supporting it. You may want to dedicate a specific part of the platform to socializing, however, so people can avoid it if they want to.

Technorati Tags: black card marketing, drive traffic, Gerry Robert, harvard business, how to marketing, internet marketing, lead generation, marketing, marketing consultant, marketing solutions, small business marketing

Craig Engler is the general manager and senior vice president of Syfy Digital. He’d love to talk you about TV or Syfy, answer your questions and hear about what you had for lunch. You can look him up on Twitter at @syfy.

I tried using Twitter three separate times before I figured out how truly useful it can be. The first time was early on, when no one I knew was using it, and I had no idea what I was doing. I tried searching for friends and followed a few random feeds and thought, “Meh, what’s this possibly good for?”

My second jump into Twitter was after the initial big wave of hype hit. I decided I should rejoin to figure out what I missed the first time. This time around, I found that Twitter was flooded with people randomly talking about their day (and their meals — people really do love to talk about food on Twitter) and again I thought, this is definitely not for me.

The last time, and the one that clinched the deal for me, was almost by accident. I wanted to see what people were saying about the finale of our hit series, Battlestar Galactica. I was looking at Facebook and on our own Syfy message boards, and the feedback wasn’t keeping up with the pace of the show. I wanted to see instant, real-time reactions. So I wandered over to Twitter.

Technorati Tags: article marketing, black card marketing, Gerry Robert, how to marketing, lead generation, marketing, small business marketing, social media, Toronto Marketing Consultant

Here is an awesome video from the people over at www.commoncraft.com.

“Social Bookmarking in Plain English” introduces the basics of bookmarking services like Delicious.com. The video uses an example of teachers using Social Bookmarking to share links to useful websites. The video includes:

• The difference between online and offline bookmarks
• How to use a bookmarking website
• An introduction to organizing bookmarks with tags
• The value of sharing bookmarks with others

I hope you enjoyed this closer look at social bookmarking. Hopefully you can put it to use for your online business!

Cheers,

Corey Robert

Production Director

Black Card Marketing Group

Technorati Tags: black card marketing, bookmarks, business, corey robert, delicious, dify, internet, links, marketing, reddit, social bookmarketing, social bookmarking, website

Editor’s Note: This blog post was discovered and brought to you by Jeff McLeod of the Black Card Marketing Group.  The author of the original post is Derek Gehl.  He is Entrepreneur.com”s “E-Business” columnist and the CEO of the Internet Marketing Center , an internet marketing firm that has helped thousands of people learn to start and run their own online businesses. IMC hosts a new Search Marketing Lab Forum , where members have their strategy questions answered by search marketing specialists.

2005 was a busy year for the internet. Last year more than a billion people went online, more than 250 billion searches were done, and total online sales accounted for over $170 billion (Forrester). More people than ever are turning to the internet to find–and buy–the products they need.

This year, resolve to get your business off to a great start and make more money in 2006. To do that, here are the top three sure-fire strategies you need to boost your profits this year!

Strategy #1: Know How to Beat the Search Engines and Drive Free Traffic to Your Site
The key to getting your business name to pop up in search engines is to use sound online marketing principles, rather than trying to manipulate the search engines with tons of keywords and inflated link popularity. That means you should:

• Provide useful information, valuable content and links that are related to your business.
• Make your domain names and page titles relevant to your business and keywords.

I got called out.  By my buddy, and colleague Jean-Guy Francoeur.  He did a great post about how a big bank in Canada, ING Direct, just did an online campaign using classic Internet Marketing Techniques (eg, launch sequencing, squeeze page, social media, etc). And he asked me to do a little commentary on it, so here goes…

** Author’s note**: After publishing this post on Sept 8th, I decided to seek some feedback from ING’s head office. Actually, I went straight to the top: President Peter Aceto, the man featured in their video. I found two accounts for him on Facebook and one on LinkedIn.  I messaged all three. About 36 hours later, he sent me this message:

I am very impressed with your very thorough coverage and analysis of our work on the marketing of our new THRiVE Chequing account. You do hit a few nails right on the head and I do agree that there are areas that need improvement which we plan to discuss for next time. This is why I love SM as it allows us to get this type of feedback from so many people. Thank your for taking the time to share your thoughts and all in all quite a complimentary review of the work we are doing.
Peter.

Now back to the original post:

We are doing a 65 city tour throughout the U.S. and Canada.

The Rapid Results Marketing Workshop is a practical small business marketing workshop that teaches entrepreneurs how to quickly attract prospects, increase profits and grow like never before.

Bestselling author Gerry Robert’s goal is to help small businesses increase profits. To provide small businesses with actionable strategies that they can use to grow beyond anything they ever expected, or even hoped. He has been fortunate in his life to have worked with, and become friends with, some of the leading figures in the entrepreneurial world. He is endorsed by the who’s who in marketing.

www.RapidResultsWorkshop.com

Some Benefits,

1. Be a part of a marketing campaign aimed at 650,000+ small businesses on a 65 city tour across the U.S. and Canada.
2. Get in front of 13,000+ small business owners during a 7 hour workshop.
3. Free tickets to give away to potential clients
4. Exhibit table at workshop.
5. Category exclusivity.
6. Contact information of workshop attendees who opt-in to receive.
7. Company Logo on cover of program.
8. Banner on workshop website.
9. Banner for your website of workshop.
10. Follow-up sequence to attendees on your behalf.
11. Door prize in your name.
12. Speaker endorsement.
13. It will provide you with the best qualified leads and also a shortened buying cycle because the speakers endorsement of your product.

We all know that Google rocks. Not just for finding things like; what to cook for dinner or movie listings. Google is arguably the most powerful and useful tool for your internet marketing needs. Its so powerful in fact that you are definitely going to want some help to get the most out of it and of course pull top rankings on Google searches. Here are 10 Google applications that you have probably never even heard about. You thought Google was great before?… wait until you get your hands on some of these apps!

See all 10 Google applications here: http://tinyurl.com/p74bsj

You can definitely make use of these apps to grow your business and online presence. But hey its very time consuming and it can get pretty complicated. Don’t forget, we’re always happy to Do It For You!

————————————–

Corey Robert
Production Director
Black Card Marketing Group

Technorati Tags: alerts, applications, base, book search, code search, flight simulator, google, google earth, internet marketing, keyboard shortcuts, marketing, online, page creator, SEO, sketch up, tracking, trends

Hey everyone, here is an awesome little trick that can help you grow your fan pages, groups, and events exponentially. We’ve all been through the tedious work of adding hundreds of friends one at a time. But thanks to a little nifty javascript manipulation you can suggest or invite your entire friends list all with a few clicks. Watch the video below!

Here is the code you will need to paste into your browser’s URL bar:     javascript:fs.select_all()

Enjoy this little trick courtesy of the Black Card Marketing Group!

Technorati Tags: article marketing, BCMG, black card marketing, blog, dify, Do it For You Marketing, drive traffic, facebook, Gerry Robert, internet marketing, leads, marketing, marketing tools, potential customers, rules, social media, strategies, twitter, video marketing, Youtube