Networking Your Marketing Strategies
A network is a group of points or locations interlinked with specific paths. A network can be computers, people, web sites, or anything that is linked together to form a group.
Remember the old adage, "There is power in number?" You can utilize this power by developing a network of locations all promoting your products or services.
Web Sites
Networking your web sites in one of the best marketing strategies you can use. The concept is simple. Develop several web sites promoting similar products, and link them all together.
Let's say for example you have a web site that focuses on dogs and offers the following products:
Dog grooming course
Dog grooming supplies
Dog obedience training
Dog breeds guide
Dog show supplies
Rather than using one general site to market all these products, develop five separate targeted sites and create a network.
Your first step will be to register five separate domains, each targeting your products. Your domains might look something like this:
doggroomingcourse.com
doggroomingsupplies.com
dogobediencetraining.com
dogbreedsguide.com
dogshowsupplies.com
Selecting the right domain names is an essential part of developing your network. Your domain names should include your primary keyword phrase.
A keyword phrase is two or more words that best describe your web page. However, selecting the right keyword phrases can be a bit difficult.
Goodkeywords.com offers a free little software program that will assist you. Simply type in a keyword and the program will provide you with a list of additional keyword phrases. http://www.goodkeywords.com
Each site within your network should be strategically optimized for the Search Engines and solely focus on your primary keyword phrase.
For example, the dog grooming course site might provide visitors with free dog grooming tips, articles and advice. The dog grooming supplies site might provide visitors with tips on selecting a good grooming table, or tips on how to properly use clippers and scissors.
All of the content within each network site must be completely targeted to each site. This in-turn will drive highly targeted traffic to each site.
In addition, each site should also link to all the other sites. This can be accomplished by setting up a special link section within each site. Your link descriptions should be your primary keyword phrases:
Dog Grooming Course
Dog Grooming Supplies
Dog Obedience Training
Dog Breeds Guide
Dog Show Supplies
To get the most out of your network, consider publishing a generalized ezine that targets your main keyword. In this example, dogs. You can then set up a subscription form on each site and collect new subscribers from each.
Can you see how powerful a network can be? You're targeting several different keyword phrases, driving highly targeted traffic to each site, sharing the traffic with your other sites, and collecting email addresses from each.
Networking is not exclusive to web sites. You can use this same technique to network all of the following:
Products
When marketing similar products, develop a network by promoting all of the products within each individual product. For example, within each of the above dog products, we would promote all of the other products.
Free Ebooks
Free ebooks offer a great way to promote your products. For example, each of the dog sites above could offer a different free ebook that provides tips, articles and advice that targets their specific audience. In addition, each of these ebooks should promote the sites and the other ebooks to create a network.
Autoresponder Courses
Autoresponder courses not only provide your visitors with great free content, but they also provide you with a great opportunity to promote your web sites and products. For example, the dog sites can each offer a different autoresponder course. Each of these courses should also promote the sites and the other courses.
Affiliate Sites
Just as you can network your own products and web sites, you can also network affiliate products that target your market. This technique involves registering a domain name for a handful of targeted affiliate programs, developing customized affiliate pages, and setting up your sites just as you would for your own products.
Although this article provides some basic networking techniques, it's far from complete. Networking is one of the most powerful marketing strategies used on the Internet. Use your imagination and develop a networking plan for your business. It will be well worth your time and effort.
Seven Steps For Creating Successful Marketing
1. Find the inherent drama within your offering.
After all, you plan to make money by selling a product or a service or both. The reasons people will want to buy from you should give you a clue as to the inherent drama in your product or service. Something about your offering must be inherently interesting or you wouldn't be putting it up for sale. In Mother Nature breakfast cereal, it is the high concentration of vitamins and minerals.
2. Translate that inherent drama into a meaningful benefit.
Always remember that people buy benefits, not features. People do not buy shampoo; people buy great-looking or clean or manageable hair. People do not buy cars; people buy speed, status, style, economy, performance, and power. Mothers of young kids do not buy cereal; they buy nutrition, though many buy anything at all they can get their kids to eat -- anything. So find the major benefit of your offering and write it down. It should come directly from the inherently dramatic feature. And even though you have four or five benefits, stick with one or two-three at most.
3. State your benefits as believably as possible.
There is a world of difference between honesty and believability. You can be 100 percent honest (as you should be) and people still may not believe you. You must go beyond honesty, beyond the barrier that advertising has erected by its tendency toward exaggeration, and state your benefit in such a way that it will be accepted beyond doubt. The company producing Mother Nature breakfast cereal might say, "A bowl of Mother Nature breakfast cereal provides your child with almost as many vitamins as a multi-vitamin pill." This statement begins with the inherent drama, turns it into a benefit, and is worded believably. The word almost lends believability.
4. Get people's attention.
People do not pay attention to advertising. They pay attention only to things that interest them. And sometimes they find those things in advertising. So you've just got to interest them. And while you're at it, be sure you interest them in your product or service, not just your advertising. I'm sure you're familiar with advertising that you remember for a product you do not remember. Many advertisers are guilty of creating advertising that's more interesting than whatever it is they are advertising. But you can prevent yourself from falling into that trap by memorizing this line: Forget the ad, is the product or service interesting? The Mother Nature company might put their point across by showing a picture of two hands breaking open a multivitamin capsule from which pour flakes that fall into an appetizing-looking bowl of cereal.
5. Motivate your audience to do something.
Tell them to visit the store, as the Mother Nature company might do. Tell them to make a phone call, fill in a coupon, write for more information, ask for your product by name, take a test drive, or come in for a free demonstration. Don't stop short. To make guerrilla marketing work, you must tell people exactly what you want them to do.
6. Be sure you are communicating clearly.
You may know what you're talking about, but do your readers or listeners? Recognize that people aren't really thinking about your business and that they'll only give about half their attention to your ad- even when they are paying attention. Knock yourself out to make sure you are putting your message across. The Mother Nature company might show its ad to ten people and ask them what the main point is. If one person misunderstands, that means 10 percent of the audience will misunderstand. And if the ad goes out to 500,000 people, 50,000 will miss the main point. That's unacceptable. One hundred percent of the audience should get the main point. The company might accomplish this by stating in a headline or subhead, "Giving your kids Mother Nature breakfast cereal is like giving your kids vitamins-only tastier." Zero ambiguity is your goal.
7. Measure your finished advertisement, commercial, letter, or brochure against your creative strategy.
The strategy is your blueprint. If your ad fails to fulfill the strategy, it's a lousy ad, no matter how much you love it. Scrap it and start again. All along, you should be using your creative strategy to guide you, to give you hints as to the content of your ad. If you don't, you may end up being creative in a vacuum. And that's not being creative at all. If your ad is in line with your strategy, you may then judge its other elements.
How Do You Score on the Internet Marketing EQ Test, i.e.,
Are You Marketing APPROPRIATELY to Who's REALLY On the Internet?
Are you marketing to who's really in the Internet? Remember that email rounding the Internet recently: "If we could shrink the Earth's population to a village of 100 people, this is what it would look like: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 North and South Americans, and 8 Africans. Seventy people would be non- white; 30 white. Seventy would be non-Christian; 30 Christian ...."
NOW SHRINK THE US INTERNET WORLD
Okay, now lets shrink the Internet world and take a look:
- If 100 people were using the Internet, 52 of them would be women, and 48 of them would be men
- If 100 women were doing business, 61 of them would be doing it on the Internet and 39 would not be
- If 100 men were doing business, 55 would be doing it on the Internet and 45 would not be
- If 100 women were spending over US$100 in a 3-month period online, 63 of them would not have children, while only 52 of them would
TAKE NOTICE:
- There are more women now on the Internet than men
- More women do business online than men
- More women do business online than do not
- Women in American make up to 80% of purchasing decisions for the family
- Women between the ages of 35 and 44 are a dominant e-retail force. (PC Date-Online's research)
- Women without children are heavier users of the Internet than women with children (Jupiter Media Metrix) and they spend more online
And -- according to Nielsen NetRatings, the number of at- home female Internet users in the US is increasing more rapidly than the number of male users.
PLUS -- according to the latest NielsenNetRatings, individuals with household incomes ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 are the fastest growing income group online.
PLUS -- 44% of US adults over 18 are single, and the American Association for Single People projects by 2010, 47.2% will be unmarried. The Census Bureau says between the ages of 15 and 85, the average American will be unmarried more years than they're married.
SO WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
Interpeting these data is like "if all the wookies are mejums, and half the mejums are kondites, how many wookies are kondites?"
GET POSITIONED
- Whatever you're selling, are you pitching it to women?
- Whatever you're selling, have you included products for women?
This doesn't mean you need be clueless or artificial - slapping a "feminine" graphic next to your power tool, but it does mean if you're pitching your power tool with a bikini-clad babe, or showing a pert young thing for your "live chat", or alienating the huge singles' and Islamic markets in your Christmas marketing, D+ for you on your marketing emotional intelligence test.
Consider putting the face of a virile young man on your chat graphic.
And consider that nearly half your consumers are single -- the Carnival cruise line is the only one I know of that offers a true singles-rate (not a single rate based on double occupancy), and the Costa also gets kudos from me (a single woman) for providing Gentleman Dance Hosts. Combining both might win my cruise business and I cruise often.
- THE BOTTOM LINE: Put your dip stick in your gender-bias and see how it comes out.
"US" INTERNET?
Notice I specified "US" here, because the statistics were about US users. However, I'm getting more and more hits on my site from folks outside the US (and glad to have them), and other webmasters are reporting the same.
This month so far, I've had visitors to my website from: UK, Canada and Australia, Netherlands, Singapore, Argentina, New Zealand, Japan, Luxembourg, Brazil, Belgium, Slovak Republic, South Africa, Germany, France, Namibia, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
BUT -- when we talk about "US" Internet users, there are 80 million multicultural Americans in the US now, with over 1 million new immigrants yearly.
TRENDS
In coaching, web visits and ezine subscribers precede personal emails precede Internet course learners, clients and licensors for my EQ products. Look at the trends:
- Last year I started getting more emails from Canada, the UK and Australia. Now 1/4th of my practice is from those countries.
- This year I'm getting several emails a day from people whose first language is not English. This month alone I've heard from Nigeria, Malaysia, India and the Philippines, and increasingly am getting clients from the UK, Australia and Canada.
- So I'm expecting more clients from non-Western nations to follow, wishing I knew more than English, Spanish and French.
I have ezine subscribers from more countries than I can name. In fact I didn't know some of them were countries and it's been a wake-up call. I'm doing my homework, are you?
And most surprisingly, a whopping 20% of the learners taking my Internet courses are from non-US countries including France, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Russia and Indonesia.
I'm also being approached for strategic alliances from coaches in the UK and Malaysia. Can Singapore be far behind?
TamingTheBeast says users from India are coming on strong. "Up until now," they say, "the Internet has been very focused on the US ... [but] by 2003, the Asia Pacific region will catch up and overtake in regards to Internet usage." By sheer force of number -- see email above.
TIPS
- Consider putting ni hao, guten tag, konichiwa, or buna ziua on our websites. Go here: http://www.ipl.org/div/kidspace/hello for ways to say "hello" in one of the 2,796 languages on this planet.
- Start submitting your website to the Asia-Pacific search engines and indices. Here's one: http://www.asiaco.com .
- Brush up on multi-cultural selling - pick up a copy of Michael Lee's Opening Doors . It's about selling, not just real estate.
- Prepare to start hearing "neesh" instead of "nitch" for that niche you're trying to claim.
- Get a currency converter on your website. There's a FREE one here: http://www.xe.com , and be ready to discount your professional services for Canadian clients.
- Put the name of a professional translator in your Outlook Express. In Spanish you don't say "I love my clients" by using the "love" verb, that's erotic; you say "my clients please me."
- Stop looking for "Article Archives" and start looking for "Free Ideas." It's all the go. But no advertorials, please.
- If you're going after the asiadragons dot commers, be prepared to call your password your "Secret Word" and you don't have to enter your password twice!
- And prepare for daily conversations that begin, "We don't want war over here, do you? Why aren't you doing something [in the US] to stop it?
And, let's see, perhaps having an international Internet dating service for un-childed women over 35 might be the gold mine of the century?
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