10 Commandments For Marketing Failure

Just like there are proven techniques for marketing success, conversely, there are also formulas for marketing failure. Following are the 10 commandments for marketing failure:

1. Thou shall not have a clear vision and goal.

2. Thou shall not have a clean, easy to navigate website.

3. Thou shall not learn and implement basic SEO techniques.

4. Thou shall not advertise and promote thy business consistently.

5. Thou shall not give customers easy and convenient payment options.

6. Thou shall not experiment with different marketing techniques.

7. Thou shall not monitor and track marketing results.

8. Thou shall not adapt to changing marketplace environment and trends.

9. Thou shall not listen to customer complaints, suggestions or feedback.

10. Thou shall not follow-up with customers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By the way, I'll be launching my new website later this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online copywriting, hosting, website design, ISP, printing, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

7 Things I've Learned About Twitter

I've been involved with Twitter for approximately 1 month now, and I've learned a few things that have enabled me to use Twitter very effectively:

1. You need to have a clear and concise vision how you're going to use Twitter. You need to know going in exactly what you want from Twitter. Are you going to use Twitter as a serious business tool, or for casual, social purposes? What is your end game?

2. You can use Twitter anyway you like. You can use it to build a mailing list - to announce specials or discounts - to take surveys - to announce new blog posts. Brick and mortar stores can use it to pre-take orders for pickup, like one coffee shop is doing. Authors can use it to post book excerpts. I'll soon be using it to announce the launch of my new website, Reviews-by-Customers.com. I could go on and on and on. The point is you are limited only by your imagination.

3. Twitter works. In the approximately 4 weeks I've been using Twitter, I've increased my affiliate sales and my traffic. I've made invaluable business contacts and a few friends. That being said, Twitter is not a panacea. It's a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. And it's only as effective as the person using it.

4. It isn't necessary to follow thousands of people to get the most out of Twitter. You can if you want to of course, but in my opinion, following that many people is counter-productive. Besides, it's impossible to follow thousands of people and actually read what each one of them has to say. After awhile, following thousands of people becomes background noise. I was following nearly everyone who followed me - over 600 people. But I've recently cut that total nearly in half. I'm currently following approximately 300 people. I'm only interested in following people who I find interesting, have something of value to say, and who keep the personal chit-chat to a minimum.

5. The people who are the most successful on Twitter give value. Be it business tips, articles, free reports, free software downloads, etc. They spend the majority of their time giving value, and trying to help others. They don't bombard their followers with spam, and they don't spend the majority of their time talking about what they had for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

6. You have to participate. Get involved in conversations. Even if no one responds to you everytime, people do take notice of who participates and who sits on the sidelines. If someone tweets something you like and you think others would like it as well, retweet (RT) it to your followers.

7. Reach out to others. Even though I'm new to Twitter, I've already reached out to people who can help me get to where I want to go. For example, I've reached out to one lady who is a PR expert, and is constantly being interviewed on national television. I've also reached out to a blogger with a national radio show and 100,000 followers. A few people have reached out to me as well. Reach out!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online copywriting, hosting, website design, ISP, printing, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

Business & Success Quotes

I enjoy writing quotes for fun and relaxation. Here are some of my most recent quotes. I'm not suggesting they're instant classics, or anything like that. But I like them, and some of them are thought-provoking.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"You can beat a dead horse all you want...it's still going to be dead."

"Bad luck favors the unprepared."

"If working smart is the key to success, why aren't all geniuses successful?" "

"Don't ever be afraid to reach for success. Your arms may be longer than you think."

"Before you play follow the leader, make sure the leader is worthy of being followed."

"When you break a promise, you're not only breaking your word, you're shattering your reputation."

"Be careful when buying hype. It's usually worthless."

"Failure can be expensive, but its lessons are often priceless."

"Time is on your side, only if you're the one controlling the clock."

"To be the best you can be, you first have to figure out who you are."

"If you think life sucks, try living it as a straw."

"A penny saved goes right to the government."

"A bird in hand is worth a hand full of crap."

"When all is said and done...say and do something else."

"A great movie is like great sex...you remember it forever."

"Every dog has its day, but every cat has three afternoons."

"If you haven't seen anything yet...open your eyes."

"Whoever said there's no tomorrow probably died the day before."

"At the end of the day, it will be evening."

"If you build it, and they don't come, put in a jacuzzi."

"Women rule the world. Men are just here for entertainment."

"If the grass looks greener on the other side, it's probably because they use more fertilizer...and you know what that's made of."

"A wolf in sheep's clothing is probably going to a Halloween party."

"The squeaky wheel may eventually get the oil, but in the meantime, the noise will drive you nuts."

Whoever said, "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game..." probably never won anything.

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies under lock and key."

"Before judging others, take full measure of yourself first."

"Ask not for whom the bell tolls...just find out who keeps ringing the damn thing!"

"It's easy to blame circumstances for your failures in life, but more often than not, you created the circumstances."

"The person you consider an enemy might be a brutally honest friend."

"If someone likes you, they will usually give you the benefit of the doubt. If they don't like you, they will usually think the worst."

"Everything you say or do makes an impression. Whether it's a good impression or bad impression is entirely up to you."

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online copywriting, hosting, website design, ISP, printing, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

"Thrown Under the Bus"

A police officer pulls over a speeding car. The officer says, "I clocked you at 80 miles per hour, sir. "The driver says, "Gee, officer I had it on cruise control at 60, perhaps your radar gun needs calibrating?"

Not looking up from her knitting the wife says: "Now don't be silly, dear, you know that this car doesn't have cruise control." As the officer writes out the ticket, the driver looks over at his wife and growls, "Can't you please be quiet for once?" The wife smiles demurely and says, "You should be thankful your radar detector went off when it did."

As the officer makes out the second ticket for the illegal radar detector, the man glowers at his wife and says through clenched teeth, "Dammit, can't you be quiet for one moment?" The officer frowns and says, "And I notice that you're not wearing your seat belt, sir. That's an automatic $75 fine. "The driver says, "Well, you see officer, I had it on, but took it off when you pulled me over so that I could get my license out of my back pocket."

The wife says, "Now, dear, you know very well that you didn't have your seat belt on. You never wear your seat belt when you're driving." And, as the police officer is writing out the third ticket the driver turns to his wife and barks, "WHY won't you please SHUT UP?"

The officer looks over at the woman and asks, "Does your husband always talk to you this way, Ma'am?" The wife replied, "Only when he's been drinking."

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online copywriting hosting, website design, ISP, printing, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

Ignorant Twitter Bias and First Impressions

Have you ever met someone for the first time, and for whatever reason immediately decided that you didn't like that person? Then after getting to know the person, you discovered that he or she wasn't so bad after all?

Of course you have. We all have. Fair or not, it's human nature to form erroneous judgements and opinions about people we really don't know. And while it may be human nature to do this, it's also ignorant.

I was guilty of this type of ignorance myself recently - but not with a person, with an entity. I formed a negative opinion about Twitter, based on erroneous first impressions. I had heard that Twitter was a silly waste of time, and not really a useful marketing tool.

Because those opinions comported with my own negative opinion of Twitter, I bought into the negativity, and began badmouthing Twitter at every turn, instead of doing my own due diligence.

Finally, wanting to check things out for myself, I visited Twitter's website, and there they were - four words which would confirm my negative opinion about Twitter.

Those four words? "What are you doing?"

What are you doing? "Who cares what I'm doing, I thought to myself. I'm eating breakfast, that's what I'm doing. But who cares?"

Well, apparently millions of Twitter subscribers care about what other Twitter subscribers are doing, because Twitter has an estimated 10 million users worldwide.

And as impressive as those numbers are, it took having lunch with a good friend of mine to finally make me see the truth about Twitter. My friend showed me how Twitter had dramatically improved his financial bottom line. He showed me before and after numbers. He showed me cold, hard proof, and I became a believer.

Bottom line: I was wrong about Twitter, and I don't have a problem admitting that. Twitter is an excellent marketing and networking tool, which can be used to build relationships and promote virtually any type of business - profit or non-profit. You are limited only by your imagination.

As a result, I will be using Twitter myself this summer, when I launch my new website. I already have a million ideas about how to promote my business via Twitter. I can't wait to get started!

In the words of Dick Jones from Robo Cop... "Good business is where you find it!"

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online copywriting, hosting, website design, ISP, printing, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

How to Motivate Your Prospects

There are two basic factors that motivate all prospects, and turn them into customers:

1. Discontentment.

2. A Desire For Change.

And as complicated as some people try to make it, if you simply focus your advertising message around those two psychological points of fact, the better off you'll be.

The most effective advertising focuses on a clear and succinct message that will emotionally arouse the discontentment the prospect may be feeling, and offers a clear solution that will light a spark for the desired change.

As an advertiser, it is your job to create discontentment inside the psyche of your prospects, and make them desire the change that you're offering. For example, people aren't going to sign up for Jenny Craig or NutriSystem diet programs if they are satisfied with the way they look. And people aren't going to go out and buy a shiny brand new car with GPS and all the other bells and whistles if they're content driving their beat-up old jalopy.

Diet commercials work because the target audience sees how much thinner they could look in just a few short weeks, and they desire that change. New car commercials work because they make the target audience see just how crappy their old car really is, and they have a desire to trade up for a shiny new model.

That's what effective advertising does - creates discontentment inside the psyche of your prospects, and make them desire the change that you're offering. And if you're selling something, that's what your advertising is supposed to do.

When you get right down to it, advertising is really simple, as long as you don't make it complicated!

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online copywriting, hosting, website design, ISP, printing, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

How to Energize Your Mailing List

If your mailing list isn't producing the kind of results that you expect, here are are a few tips that may help energize it.

1. Make people opt-in to your list. Research has shown that when people have to opt-in to your list, they are more "qualified" prospects.

2. Provide valuable, interesting information. If the information you send your list is boring or crap, your prospects will either ignore future mailings or opt-out faster than you can say "Hussain Bolt." Neither scenario is good.

3. Don't make every mailing a sales pitch. If you make a sales pitch each time you mail to your list, they won't respect your information.

4. Keep your list motivated. Conduct reader surveys and opinion polls. Let your prospects know their opinions matter.

5. Keep your list clean. If after mailing to your list consistently for two years, drop those prospects who haven't made a purchase. If they haven't purchased anything in two years, they're probably not going to. DEMC cleaned their list recently, and their list shrunk from 135, 000 to 35,000. But here's the amazing part. Even though DEMC's list is 100,000 subscribers smaller, it's just as responsive as its ever been, according to advertisers. Dropping a bunch of deadwood won't hurt your bottom line.

6. Separate your list into two categories - customers and prospects, and mail your customers special offers to reward their patronage. If they purchased from you once, they'll purchase from you again and again. You just have to give them a reason to.

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online hosting, website design, ISP, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

Why You Need a Subscriber List to Grow Your Business

If you're a reader of mine, you've probably heard me say before that a good subscriber list is "guaranteed income." That's because it is. Whenever I mail to my list it always brings back income - ALWAYS! But you don't have to take my word for it. Read top marketing blogs like ProBlogger or OnlineMarketingBlog, and see how much value their readers place in their lists. Or ask any successful online marketer like Rich Sloan of StartupNation or Adam Urbanski of TheMarketingMentors and they will tell you the same thing. "The money is in the list!"

Let me explain why. For the most part, visitors to your website are complete strangers. They don't know you, therefore they don't trust you. They drop by, window shop a bit, and then leave after a few seconds. That's right, seconds. Don't believe me? Check your website logs. How long is the typical visitor spending on your site?

See what you're up against? That's why on average, 99% of visitors to your website leave without purchasing anything. And unless you have a system in place to collect their name and e-mail address, many of those visitors will be lost forever. That's good potential income down the drain.

There's an old saying in marketing. "It takes seven contacts with a prospect to convert them into a customer." That means a prospect has to see your marketing message at least seven times before they're comfortable enough to buy from you.

That's why your subscriber list is so important. Even if they haven't purchased anything yet, these are people who are interested in what you have to say. They are guaranteed future income. Think about it. These people have taken the time and made the effort to subscribe to receive your newsletter, blog updates, whatever. This gives you the ability to have contact with these people over and over again. Eventually, these people will develop enough trust in you to purchase your products and services. And if you treat them right, they'll keep on purchasing from you. Heck, they might even bring their friends and family members with them.

Remember what I said earlier? 99% of visitors to your website will leave without purchasing anything. That means out of every one hundred visitors to your website, if you're lucky, you may get one sale. Conversely, your subscriber list will convert at a much higher rate. My list consistently converts at around 15%. That means for every 100 people who receive my mailing, fifteen of them buy something. And I'm not talking results I get sometimes. I get these kinds of results every time I mail to my list.

Which would you rather have, one sale per hundred visitors or fifteen sales? When you compare the numbers, building a subscriber list is really a no-brainer, isn't it?

And it's easier than its ever been to manage your list. E-mail marketing services like Costant Contact or VerticalResponse will handle everything for you - and at a reasonable cost.

So, what are you waiting for? If you haven't started building your subscriber list, get started today!

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online hosting, website design, ISP, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

Avoiding the New Website Spam Blitz

I just received an interesting e-mail from one of my blog subscribers. Here's what the e-mail said:

"David, I just put my brand new website online, and I'm already being besieged by spammers. How did they find out about my website so quickly?"

Here's what I told my subscriber:

"Professional spammers scour the Internet, looking for new domain registrations. Here's how to counter their activities: After registering a new domain, wait a few weeks before putting your website online.

Is this techique 100% foolproof? No, but I can tell you from personal experience, it will drastically reduce the amount of spam your new website receives.

Sure, the spammers will catch up with you eventually. After all, they're relentless. But at least you'll buy yourself a little time before they do."

By the way, I'll be launching my new website this summer. It's called Reviews-by-Customers.com. It will feature "real" customer reviews of top online hosting, website design, ISP, SEO services and more! Follow me on Twitter @CustomerReviews for further updates.

Real Link Popularity Has Nothing To Do With Search Engines

Although Google uses the phrase "link popularity" as a way to describe how they ranked sites in the early days, and still do in some fashion, link popularity means far more to website promoters than a measure of search engine worthiness.

Link popularity as a marketing tool was around long before Google or any search engines existed. Links are the thread that weaves the web together. Search engines didn't invent this, they capitalized on it just like all sites on the web have since the beginning.

Your link popularity in a real sense is not a contrived "weight and measure" of your site's worthiness to be ranked well in a search engine.

Your link popularity is actually based upon how many traffic-driving, visible links you have pointing to your site from other sites in your niche and even from less "relevant" sites than search engines want you to be linked to.

If you can get targeted traffic to your site from another site, regardless of search engine imposed rules for relevancy, by exchanging links or posting on a forum or sharing an article or press release, by all means do so!

Do not worry about people telling you that you are going to ruin your rankings in the engines if you don't link properly. 90% of the advice out there is from search engine junkies and geeks who rely 100% on search engine traffic.Without search engines, they couldn't market their sites to save their lives. Of course they don't want to do anything to hurt their rankings, their entire livelihood is tied up in that one source of traffic!

Those people are far different from average website owners. We take the search engine rankings we can get PLUS all the other traffic from other sites that we can get. According to our own in-house case studies that's 80%-85% of the traffic of average sites that have a well rounded marketing campaign!

So it is easy to see why we pay less attention to search engines than the geeks do. The engines only contribute at best 15% of the visitors to any of the sites in our network. (And that's for purposefully optimized sites using all the tricks and tactics the geeks told us to!)

Therefore, nowadays we give search engines no more than 15% of our time and go for real link popularity that includes a plethora of promotion options.While people who sit and wait on search engine traffic often find themselves getting bored with little to do, we never run out of promotion that we can do for our sites.

There is always something you can be doing to gain link popularity (link popularity = marketing) every moment you are logged on.

If you find yourself twiddling your thumbs without a clue what you are going to do next to promote your site, there is something wrong with your marketing campaign. It is deficient in Vitamin Link.

You can fix an anemic marketing campaign by spending more time getting content created and syndicated, adopting RSS as a highly valuable traffic generator, and making partnerships out of link partners.

Get (and give) more than simple link exchanges. Exchange articles, other content, and get each others' links in prominent places around your sites.Exchange newsletter sign up pages (squeeze pages) or allow people to additionally opt in to your partners list after they opt in to yours.

There are far more ways to promote your site and gain valuable, REAL link popularity than myopic and short-sighted search engine marketing could ever give you.

Don't get caught up in the search engine marketing myth. There are only ever 10 spots available for your keywords that will get you any significant traffic from any given engine.What surprises most people who get far enough along in their real link popularity campaign is that they get great rankings in the engines after all. Just by marketing to their audience and not to the engines.

Case in point: A lot of search engine traffic is generated to my blog and other sites from people searching for "jack humphrey." But customers and readers KNOW to search for my name from all the other marketing that I do to put my name at their fingertips. It's branding as much as link popularity.

The end result is easy search engine rankings for a name that is not competitive but that, because of all the other marketing efforts in my campaign, puts me in the right places in the engines without any more effort than simply increasing my link popularity by marketing to my niche market.

Marketing to your market, wherever they surf and not just where they occasionally search, is a fail-safe way to market any kind of site on the web. One that lowers the risk of failure (over single-minded search engine obsession) and guarantees longevity and ever-increasing traffic over time.------------------------------

Jack Humphrey is the managing partner for http://www.contentpropulsionlab.com/ where members enjoy very high, real link popularity. He blogs regularly about cutting-edge website promotion and internet marketing tactics at
http://www.jackhumphrey.com/ .

This article was published on WorkOnInternet.com