It’s been 2 years in the making and it’s now done! I just received my final grade in my Capstone class for my MBA in Marketing from Regis University!

It was 12 classes and I took the Marketing concentration and I’m very happy to announce that I received 11 A’s and 1 B….the B was in Financial Decision Making which was the most boring and difficult class I could imagine because it was all financial spreadsheets and how to interpret them!

But at the age of 41 to pull off a 3.8 GPA is awesome considering a full-time job and Wife and 4 kiddos!

So now I am taking one last class as an Independent Study in Internet Marketing so that I have 18 hours in Marketing at the Graduate level. This is because many Universities require their Adjunct Professors to have this to be able to teach Marketing at the College level. My goal is to teach online at a few Universities in Business and Marketing as I thoroughly enjoyed the online learning environment and see this is the most reliable way for a College to grow in the future.

If there’s any Marketing Related issues or questions that I can ever help you with I’ll be happy to help!

Tweet This Post

When you hear the term “internet marketing”, what do you think of?

For many, that term conjures thoughts of websites or spamming or search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. For others, it’s all about graphical design, writing fancy code or even affiliate programs. All of those answers correct, but the essence of internet marketing is much simpler.

At its core, internet marketing is about these things:

* Understanding the target market to which the product/service/cause you’re marketing will appeal
* Determining exactly how your target market interacts with the internet
* Positioning your content on the internet to attract the attention of your target market
* Collecting information about your target market (also known as “leads”) for follow-up and conversion into sales
* Design of offers or incentives to induce the desired actions from your leads

Since there is insufficient space in this article to give all of these topics adequate attention, let’s focus on just one specific topic with the realm of internet marketing: Email Marketing.

My best payoff has always come by focusing on permission-based email marketing. Permission-based email marketing refers to the practice of collecting information (including email addresses) from website visitors and communicating with them via e-mail with their direct consent. The “permission” aspect of permission-based email marketing is what separates legitimate email marketers from the spammers that everyone despises.

My love of email marketing is strong for one reason: It works very well. Email marketing has been much like a never-ending goldmine: It enables us to produce income on demand simply by sending a good offer to our list. When you have thousands of loyal subscribers – as we do – and you put a strong and compatible offer in front of them, income becomes nearly automatic.

However, the key to successful email marketing is the development of a legitimate trust relationship with your subscribers. If you opt to send your subscribers a request for purchases every single day, they will likely tire of your badgering and cease reading your emails altogether.

Alternatively, if you take the time to provide good content to your readers on a regular and frequent basis, you’ll discover that your readers take all of your emails far more seriously, and as a result your emails will be opened, read and acted upon with greater frequency. Essentially, email marketing is really an exercise in trust.

While there are many more aspects to internet marketing than just permission-based email marketing, email has definitely been the cornerstone on which our business is built. Here is the bottom line: Always, Always, Always….give massive value to your readers! Help to educate them with issues they have and sometimes (NOT in every email) provide your services as the solution.

Tweet This Post

Outsourcing has always had the good and the bad associated to it, but the success of outsourcing all over the developed world has proven beyond doubt, that the volume of the pros associated with outsourcing overpower the cons to a great extent. Latest in the field of outsourcing is the concept of “virtual marketing departments”.
Wondering what these are? Well, just like any other outsourcing job, virtual marketing departments take care of all your marketing needs and strive to make your startup/established business a success in the online world. Right from branding to developing market strategies and getting leads and tackling the media etc., these departments know all the tricks of the trade and the best part is that they help you save a lot of time that you otherwise would have wasted on doing each of these things on your own.
You might put a question to me at this juncture- why outsource when I can hire people and see them formulate plans in front of my eyes? Well, I understand your apprehensions about outsourcing your marketing job to a third party virtual department, but in doing so, you are entitling yourself to a hoard of benefits. First up, you don’t pay these virtual departments on an on-going basis. Rather, you pay them only for the work they do. On the other hand, if you had a dedicated marketing system set up for your company, you would have had to pay them a fixed salary and compensation packages, irrespective of the kind of work they are doing. In outsourcing, therefore, you tend to save at least two quarters worth of money that you would have paid your local marketing department.
Besides, you would also have incurred the cost of setting up the office, telephone connections, travel alternatives etc. for your dedicated marketing department, while this is not the case with virtual marketing departments. Virtual departments have their own infrastructure set up and all you have to do is pay them and put your idea across, without worrying about anything else. So, what are you waiting for? Just outsource your work to a virtual marketing department and give yourself complete peace of mind. Contact us today to get this started for your business!

Tweet This Post

Having access to powerful internet marketing tools is elementary if you want to succeed in your online ventures. Latest in the range of internet marketing tools are automated marketing tools, installing which, you can get your message flashing in front of your prospect until they finally decide to buy the product in perspective.
In essence, the idea behind employing such marketing tools is to bolster your marketing work improve the sales without spending additional effort on re-doing things that you would already have done. Having access to a good marketing center is also helpful as these marketing centers are your gateways to effective and powerful automated marketing tools.
The whole idea of minting money in the autopilot mode has caught up with a lot of seasoned and new internet marketers alike, and is likely to stay for the days to come. Some automated marketing tools are more effective under some circumstances than others, and it is you who has to decide which tools to opt for, depending upon the kind of work you want them to perform. Whatever you do, be rest assured that after installing them and making the initial settings, they will work on their own, without conflict!
Now, to show you the power of automated marketing tools, we pick up one internet marketing vertical and explore some tools that have personally worked wonders for me. Let’s talk about link building, basically this is what it means: Google looks at a website, and when it sees a blue link going somewhere they count it as a “vote”.  For example, let’s say one of your vendors has a section of their website that has “Recommended Resources” and list your company there with a link to your website….this is a vote and Google will rank you higher in the search engines based on the amount of these links you have!
First and foremost, article marketing is one of the easiest ways to go about link building on autopilot. You can outsource your writing jobs to professional writers and submit those articles at various internet marketing directories. These articles stay there forever and the link to your site is also shown in your signature box. This means, that if your articles are good, then you have chances of people building links with you, virtually for the rest of your life. Once written, you can use a single article and submit it to hundreds of directories and get traffic for life, on autopilot. Apart from article marketing, one way link builders, reciprocal link builders, diggs and blogs are some other ways of generating leads for the rest of your life. These were just some of the marketing tools that you can use, research more to figure out more ways of milking the cash cows- on autopilot.

Tweet This Post

Being referred by some as the “newest marketing revolution”, video marketing is definitely gaining a lot of popular audience. So what is it that sets video marketing apart from other marketing paradigms? What are the main benefits of using video marketing over other conventional and well known ways of marketing? In this write up, we try and explore the answers to these commonly asked questions and try to evaluate and analyze the essence of video marketing in general.
First and foremost, video marketing is one of the most interactive ways of interfacing with your prospect. The whole feeling of watching someone live and talking gives the clients a more reassuring effect and thus, it bolsters your brand image in the minds of the client. As the common phrase goes, people these days tend to believe what they see and video marketing therefore, happens to be one of the best mediums to stamp your point across to your prospects with authority. The simplest way to picture this concept is by putting yourself in their shoes. Imagine you are reading about a product, lets assume that product is a used car. Now, if the same car is being listed by another dealer, who is willing to send you a video of the vehicle, it is eminent that you would favor buying the vehicle from the dealer who is willing to share some videos, photographs and other media with you. This is as simple as saying, you just don’t trust anyone owning a blog and claiming to sell a product, claiming to be effective, until and unless you see the product and its claims right in front of your eyes.
Another reason as to why video marketing has gained considerable popularity amongst marketers is because it gives the marketers more space to test their creative juices. What I mean by saying that is, that it is not possible for all marketers to pen their thoughts down and some campaigns do require video marketing. Therefore, those marketers who find it difficult to jot their ideas across on a text pad and paste it on their websites, find it easier and better to use video marketing to put their points across to their prospects in a cleaner, more interactive and youthful way.
Besides, thinking from a prospects point of view, which medium would you like   to be detailed through? Interactive, moving pictures depicting a story, or boring mundane lumps of text written in stereotypical language, describing a product that is not actually present there for you to review? Think about it, I am sure you would be prompted to move onto video marketing to strike that special chord with your clients.

Tweet This Post