The Fantastic Blog

Mobile devices, mobile phones and PDA’s are one of the last great frontiers of viral advertisement opportunities. However, we have become experts at filtering everything, our air and water, our e-mail and pop-ups, and our mobile devices as well. We are good at filtering.

The very idea of unwanted advertising streaming through our Blackberries is abhorrent. Mobile devices are the ultimate opt-in medium and, therefore, a great way for marketers to connect with users…if that’s what the users want. “WANT” is the key word here. How should marketers approach the medium?

There are three main ways to achieve this. They are:

1. Offer exclusive content.

Anyone can offer ring tones. It’s the unique content, such as exclusive mobile images of new brand concepts, that drives interest and calls them out in other media like e-mail campaigns, newsletters, websites, etc. So a wireless campaign is most effective when it offers exclusive content for wireless devices.

2. Make it useful and timely.

Think about what would be handy and helpful to have on a mobile device. Last year, for example, Food Network enabled Sprint customers to download shopping lists for their Thanksgiving dinners. There was a lot of “Sprint-envy” going around among non-sprint customers.

3. Clearly define objectives.

Usually, one of two business objectives drives successful mobile experiences: incremental revenue of brand intimacy. On the intimacy factor, a text message usually takes priority over almost any other form of communication. Why? Because we haven’t yet been saturated with mobile spam, and this is what causes us to prioritize wireless messaging over voice.

Mobile marketing has been out there for a while but we marketers have new territory to explore. Video offers fantastic opportunities for engagement. Consumers already bypass their filters for highly useful or entertaining content and will do so for rich exclusive, compelling content.

Once you’ve drawn the buyers in with your title, the next thing to do is to tell them all about your item with the description. But just what should you write in your description?

At its heart, your item description is an ad. Without making it too obvious, you should be writing sales copy. You’re trying to get buyers excited about your products, and that’s usually hard - but on eBay, if you have the right thing to sell and give enough details, the buyers almost excite themselves.

Technical Details.

Include every technical detail you know, including the item’s manufacturer, its condition, how big it is, where and when it was made, its history, and anything else special about it. Don’t be too boring, though: the best descriptions are written in friendly, conversational language, and show a real knowledge of the item. Whatever you do, make sure you tell the truth!

Remember that most of the people who’ll be buying your item will be just as knowledgeable about it as you are, if not more - this is their hobby, and they’re experts. Don’t feel like you need to explain the basics of the item: just go into as much technical detail as you can. As a rule, don’t write anything in the description if you don’t know what it means, as the chances are someone will, and if you’ve got it slightly wrong then you’ll look like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Interesting Details.

You might find that you enjoy writing a few things about how you got the item, why you’re selling it, and who you think might like it. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it gives your auctions some character and a personal touch, and can make people more likely to trust you. People might wonder what you’re doing selling 500 CDs all at once, and if you tell them the reason, then they’ll feel reassured that nothing dodgy is going on. If you’re selling them because you’re having a baby and you need the space, just say so.

Write as Much as You Can.

Leave nothing out of your description, even if that seems to you like it makes it cumbersomely long. There is no way you can be too thorough: someone, somewhere will appreciate that you took the time to write the extra information.

Don’t assume that anyone who wants extra information will email you to ask a question: many buyers are shy and won’t do it. Think of questions that buyers might have and add the answers to your description, as people generally tend to ask the same questions over and over again.

Each time a buyer does email you with a question, you should both answer their question and update your description so that it will include the answer next time. If people ask questions that are answered in the description, try putting these parts of the auction on a line alone, or in bold, to make them easier to notice.

More and more advertisers are adopting video as broadband continues to rise and ad-serving technologies become more sophisticated. Online video advertising is really taking off. Users’ attention can be captured and ads stand out from the crowd in an increasingly ad-cluttered online environment.

It is true that video formats cost five to ten times more to serve than standard banners and they involve a lot more production and implementation work but they may well be worth all of that if they achieve greater response rates.

Where to use online video if wishing to maximize its effect, is what advertisers must carefully consider. Video to be used on the Internet should be information and communication focused while video to be used on television should be focused on entertainment.

Like everything else, there are good ways and bad ways to use video advertising. Right now most marketers are incorporating their audio-visual content into existing embedded ad formats like banners or over-content formats like pop-ups. Though this could reach a potentially large audience, viewers are likely to be less captivated and more annoyed by these disruptive and distracting placements.

Cached or streaming video on a specific destination site offers the best chance of interesting consumers in brand messages, but it is not likely to reach a large audience unless it generates a viral outcome.

Whatever you come up with, don’t forget to make it easy to open and distribute. File size is important, as is the media format. If your viral video has been created for a particular type of software that not many people use, how will you get people to spread it like wildfire?

Also, if you’ve made a video the impact will be better if you send the clip as an attachment rather than stream it. It’s cheaper and, if you’re not hosting it, it’s more viral, too.

Trying to be help your buyers find your auctions can be a truly daunting task. Most people only search eBay by title, not by description, and that means that you only have those 55 characters of the title to cover all the possible search terms. That’s not easy. In this email, I’ll give you a few pointers.

Don’t bother with eBay clichés: There are plenty of eBay auction titles that say things like “Super rare camera wow look low price”. These are stupid things to put in your title, as no-one is going to search for them.

Think like a buyer: If you were looking for your item, then what exactly would you type into that box? If you think it’d help, try searching yourself to find someone else selling your item. What were the first things you thought of typing?

Think like other sellers: Keep an eye on which sellers are doing best with items like yours, and try to copy their title styles - if it works for them, it can work for you.

Be specific: You should be sure to write the item’s brand and specific model number in the title, as people will often search only for this information. Make sure that you also say exactly what the item is.

A Few Examples.

Here are a few examples of good titles. They’re real, and they’re on eBay right now, making their sellers money. So what makes them good?

“Dell Latitude Laptop P3 500mhz Notebook PC Computer”

If you know about computers, you’ll know instantly what this auction is selling. It has manufacturer (Dell) and product line (Latitude), followed by a few technical specifications (P3 500mhz is the processor speed). Notice also that the title includes the four words ‘laptop’, ‘notebook’, ‘PC’ and ‘computer’, as the seller wants people looking for any of those words to see his auction.

“OASIS Don’t Believe the Truth CD Album (New)”

This auction for a CD is well formatted: it gives the artist name in capital letters, followed by the album name. It then manages to include the two key words ‘CD’ and ‘album’, as well as the word ‘new’ - that means that anyone searching for ‘new oasis cd’, ‘oasis new album’ and so on will find this auction.

“1840 Penny Black stamp, certificate, four margins”

Here’s a slightly more obscure one, from the exciting world of stamp collecting. A penny black is one of the oldest and most famous stamps. It uses a few key words that collectors will consider important: ‘four margins’ indicates that the stamp has been cut out with some margins around it and so isn’t damaged, and ‘certificate’ tells you that the item has a certificate of authenticity - it’s a real penny black. Remember to use every bit of space to squeeze in as much important information as you can in the title.

So now that you’ve written a winning title, you need to start on a great description. The next email will show you how.

by John Colanzi

The “Magic Bullet” seems to be what so many marketers are
looking for. They want a secret technique or method to
guarantee their success.

I’ll let you in on a secret. They’re looking in the wrong
direction.

True success and prosperity start on the inside. It comes
from within yourself, not from some magical technique or
method.

There are no sure fire tools. There is no guaranteed
m.oney making program. There is only your patience,
persistence and most of all your mind set.

Lasting success begins in your head and radiates from your
inner core.

Once you’ve developed an attitude of abundance, no one
can take it from you.

You’ll see opportunity at every turn. You’ll realize that
setbacks are really lessons to be learned on the road to
freedom.

Once you know with all your being that you can succeed,
you’ll realize that your success depends on you.

There are no gurus to blame.

There are no programs to blame.

There are no methods to blame.

The buck stops with you.

You are the master of your fate.

You determine what works for you.

Don’t give away that power.

Learn everything you can about your business and how to
promote it, but make the final decision on how to
succeed yours.

Realize that every step you make along the road to
f.inancial freedom is profitable either in terms of money
earned or experience learned.

If you take two steps forward and one step back, you’re
still further along than if you did nothing.

Get your head right and success will come.

Stop looking outside yourself for success. Start marketing
from the inside out.

***
Copyright (c) John Colanzi.

John Colanzi uses the Plug-In Profit Site
to earn multiple streams of income from
home on the Internet. What about you?…
CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS
***

by John Colanzi

I hope you’ve got all your “why to’s” in place.
Reading them will help keep you focused on your goal.

They’ll help keep you on course when the going gets a
little bumpy.

Now it’s time to put together your battle plan.

Your goal when developing your battle plan is to put
together a well oiled system that will work on auto -
pilot.

The time you spend putting your system in place will
save you time and energy down the line. It will also
help you get a jump-start on building your downline
wide, fast.

The goal of your system is to capture email addresses
to allow you to follow up on all your prospects.

You want to cast your net wide. Don’t use a fishing
pole, use a wide net and get as many addresses as
possible.

The weapons you’ll need in preparing your battle plan
are a method for attracting leads and an autoresponder
to follow up on all your leads.

Most of the better autoresponders have an email capture
form you can place on your website.

You’ll build wide faster if you send your leads to
an email capture form rather than have them go directly
to a sales page.

You have to woo you prospects the same way you’d court
a new date. Some will respond on the first visit and
some will need a little more courting.

Your autoresponder will do the courting for you.

Depending on your program, your autoresponder should
be loaded with at least seven follow up messages.

Each message should be designed to move your prospect
closer to closing the deal.

Once you’ve got your email capture form up and your
autoresponder in place, it’s time to start casting
your net.

There are many methods for gathering leads, but I
prefer the shoestring methods that kick in fast.

I only use a handful of methods for promotion. I’m
sure there are many others that work well, but I
like to stick with the date that came to the dance
with me.

1. My newsletter

Having your own newsletter can be the best tool in
your arsenal. Gear your content to the individuals
who want, need and desire what you have to offer.

Be honest with them in your dealings and you’ll not
only build your business, you’ll find a lot of new
friends along the way.

2. Ezine writing

Ezine writing is the core of everything I do.

What is ezine writing?

It’s writing and submitting articles to the online
newsletters. Most weeks I have more people reading
my articles than I could ever hope to reach in my
own ezine.

At the end of each article is my resource box that
leads back to my email capture system.

3. My signature file

A signature file is that little tag under your name.
You should have a signature file at the end of all
your outgoing email.

If you answer a lot of emails, that can add up to a
lot of free advertising.

4. Ezine advertising

I don’t use this method as much as the other methods,
but if you want to get your message out fast, placing
ads is an excellent low cost method.

Make sure you target your ads to the right markets.
Your goal is to target the right market and to only
use quality zines.

Before you start placing ezine ads, make sure you
subscribe to the ezines and read a few issues. If
possible read some of their archives.

Your goal is to find ezines that have the right blend
of content to ads. You don’t want your ad buried.

You also don’t want to compete with other marketers
advertising the same offer.

Once you’ve got the ezines picked out for your ad
campaign your best results will come from top sponsor
ads and solo ads.

To jump start your downline it’s better to advertise
in less ezines with good ad placement, than it is to
blast out your ad and have poor ad placement.

There are a few other methods I use, but these are the
simplest and the most cost effective.

Put your system in place and let it do its work.

Once you’ve got your system in place, you can modify
it to fit any offer.

Build wide fast and you’ll be smiling on the way to the
bank.

***
Copyright (c) John Colanzi.

John Colanzi uses the Plug-In Profit Site
to earn multiple streams of income from
home on the Internet. What about you?…
CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS
***

by John Colanzi

One of the secrets to making money with network
marketing programs, or two tier affiliate programs, is
to build wide fast.

Before I tell you how I do it, I want to tell you why.
“How” is the mechanical, but “why” is the reason.

“Why” is your motivating factor. It’s what causes you
to take action.

So why is building wide fast so important?

1. It keeps you motivated.

No matter how excited you may be at starting a new
program, it doesn’t take long for the excitement to
wear off and the doubts to creep in.

This is especially important on the Internet. Online
marketers have come to expect results overnight.

Many have developed shorter attention spans. If you
doubt that, look at how quickly visitors leave a slow
loading web page.

That’s also the reason for so many impulse buying
decisions. Once we get used to the Internet, we want
everything yesterday.

2. People go where people go.

That’s true online or off. Once a place gets known for
heavy traffic, the traffic gets even heavier.

Word spreads fast about a heavy traffic site. Some
visitors will want to see what’s so good that others
are flocking to get there.

Others will want to see how it’s being done. They want
to find out how they can duplicate it.

3. You can expand faster.

Your war chest will grow faster, which means you can
roll out your marketing campaign at an accelerated
rate.

Your program begins feeding its own growth. If you
take 50% of your profits and put it back into
promoting your program, it can’t help but double.

Imagine that every time you launch a campaign your
program doubled.

The more you make, the faster you’ll grow.

4. You’ll dig out your diamonds faster.

No matter what program you’re promoting, only a handful
of your affiliates or downline members will be active
marketers.

The more members you recruit, the odds increase that
you’ll dig out a few diamonds. Once you’ve grabbed a
few of those, there is no telling how fast you can grow.

5. Geometric Growth will kick in.

This is especially true in network marketing. The key
to building a large downline and making real money is
the power of geometric progression.

Instead of growing one member at a time your growth
is geometric.

2 x 2 = 4
4 x 4 = 16
16 x 16 =256

If you don’t think it can happen like that, think
again.

How do you think those network marketers that say
they’ve built a downline of thousands did it?

Do you think they recruited everyone themselves?

Think again.

They jump started their downline by going wide fast,
but once they hit a certain level, geometric
progression kicked in.

Geometic progression plus the help of the diamonds they
recruited built their downline.

Now you know why to build wide fast. In part two we’ll
talk about how to build wide fast.

***
Copyright (c) John Colanzi.

John Colanzi uses the Plug-In Profit Site
to earn multiple streams of income from
home on the Internet. What about you?…
CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS
***

If you know what you’re doing, you can quickly find what you’re looking for on eBay - and the more you know about how buyers find you, the easier you’ll find it to be found. Here are a few golden searching rules.

Be specific:

If you’re searching for the first edition of the original Harry Potter book, you’ll get further searching for ‘harry potter rowling philosopher’s stone first edition’ than you will searching for ‘harry potter’. You’ll get fewer results, but the ones you do get will be far more relevant.

Spell wrongly:

It’s a sad fact that many of the sellers on eBay just can’t spell. Whatever you’re looking for, try thinking of a few common misspellings - you might find a few items here that have slipped through the cracks.

Get a thesaurus:

You should try to search for all the different words that someone might use to describe an item, for example searching for both ‘TV’ and ‘television’, or for ‘phone’, ‘mobile’ and ‘cellphone’. Where you can, though, leave off the type of item altogether and search by things like brand and model.

Use the categories:

Whenever you search, you’ll notice a list of categories at the side of your search results. If you just searched for the name of a CD, you should click the ‘CDs’ category to look at results in that category only. Why bother looking through a load of results that you don’t care about?

Don’t be afraid to browse:

Once you’ve found the category that items you like seem to be in, why not click ‘Browse’ and take a look through the whole category? You might be surprised by what you find.

Few people realise just how powerful eBay’s search engine is - a few symbols here and there and it’ll work wonders for you.

Wildcard searches:

You can put an asterisk (*) into a search phrase when you want to say ‘anything can go here’. For example, if you wanted to search for a 1950s car, you could search for ‘car 195*’. 195* will show results from any year in the 1950s.

In this order: If you put words in quotes (”") then the only results shown will be ones that have all of the words between the quote marks. For example, searching for “Lord of the Rings” won’t give you any results that say, for example “Lord Robert Rings”.

Exclude words:

Put a minus, and then put any words in brackets that you don’t want to appear in your search results. For example: “Pulp Fiction” -(poster,photo) will find items related to Pulp Fiction but not posters or photos.

Either/or: If you want to search for lots of words at once, just put them in brackets: the TV example from earlier could become ‘(TV,television)’, which would find items with either word.

Don’t get too tied up learning the ways of the search engine, though: a surprising number of eBay users don’t search at all, preferring to look through eBay’s category system and save their favourites in their browser.

by John Colanzi

Good old Archimedes said it best, “Give me a place to
stand and I’ll move the Earth”.

Powerful statement.

He was talking about the lever, but there are all types
of levers.

We live in a society that’s lost sight of how everything
is connected. We look at the trunk and mistake it for
the elephant.

But if we just open our mind’s eye and look at our world
with a more open view, we can see how “Give me a place
to stand”, relates to succeeding at every endeavor we
put our hands to.

Want to leave the rat race and succeed in your own
business?

Find a place to stand.

Pick your vehicle.

I see marketers struggling over

* What really sells online?

* What is the best product to promote?

Forget about it.

1. Pick your place to stand.

2. Plant your feet.

3. Take your lever and move the Earth.

Your place to stand is any product or service that
fits you. Stop wasting your time on the internal
debate.

Are you ready to assure your success?

If you answered yes, here goes.

1. Find a product or service that excites you, gets
your adrenaline pumping and makes your blood flow.

2. Make a decision.

The difference between winning and losing can be seen
in how you make decisions.

Those that succeed reach decisions promptly and stick
with them come hello there or high water.

Those who never succeed reach decisions slowly. They
run for the hills the first time they have a set back.

3. Plant your feet and keep plugging until you’ve
reached your goal.

It’s that simple, but simple doesn’t make it easy.

You can succeed at anything.

I know you can.

***
Copyright (c) John Colanzi.

John Colanzi uses the Plug-In Profit Site
to earn multiple streams of income from
home on the Internet. What about you?…
CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS
***

Viral marketing is an integral part of a campaign strategy that is used to achieve objectives. It is not the objective itself. If the main objective of an e-mail campaign is branding, in order to achieve greater branding success exposure you craft your message or offer in a way that it encourages pass-along.

Producing a message with a quality offer or an incentive for pass-along is what viral marketing is all about.

Just suggesting that e-mail recipients forward your message to their friends and relatives is not viral marketing. A message at the bottom of your e-mail that reads “Feel free to forward this message to a friend” is nowhere close to viral marketing at its best.

On the other hand, if something worthy of sharing, such as a valuable discount, vital information, additional entries into a sweepstakes, an added discount or premium service, a joke/cartoon, or a hilarious video, is included in the e-mail, viral marketing happens naturally and quite successfully.

The bottom line is that your message must be perceived as having value. Relevant or timely information, research, or studies are all good examples of content that might be viewed as potential pass-along material.

Interactive content like a quiz or text can inspire forwarding, especially if it is fun. Personality tests, fitness quizzes, or compatibility questionnaires are all things that have been passed on by many people many times. Why? Because they are entertaining and entertainment has value.

A multimedia experience is always going to achieve some pass-along. Someone is always touting the benefits. It is a bit more of a time and money investment but the messages have a great appeal and rich media has the advantage of being new. The tech factor alone is often enough for the message to be perceived as valuable.