Advertising your Website on Television

Have you noticed that almost every company that advertises on television has a website that they flash up on the screeen at the end of the ad? Have you thought about "Advertising on Television"? Unless your business is getting pretty big, this would be quite a bad idea. You'd have trouble producing and airing an ad even on local cable channels for less than $10,000. Of course, if there's a market for your product and you've got the budget for this, you could take a gamble and make a mint. The home businesses that tend to do best out of TV ads are ones that have a 'unique and useful invention' product with easy-to-demonstrate benefits -- think infomercial. Research shows that you can sell almost anything given a 60-second ad, a free phone number and a price point of $19.95.
In some markets advertising on TV is quite reasonable locally but be sure to mention your website in your ad. It is unbeleivable the number of big business owners that forget to do this. Mention your website on everything you have your company name printed on. Sometimes people are more apt to go to a website before they even call you on the phone because they don't want to have to deal with salespeople or being put on hold.
If you need help with your advertising online please contact me or visit my internet advertising website. - Thanks for reading my blog - Ann Menke

Ways to Advertise Your Website

To continue my discussion about other types of advertising to day I will talk about advertising on the Radio: Wherever you are, the chances are that there's a local radio station. Once your home business grows to a decent size, you might consider buying some time on it.
Really, though, the only kind of home business that can benefit enough from radio ads to justify the cost is one that has anything to do with cars. Since radio is almost entirely limited to use as in-car entertainment now, you know that almost everyone your ad reaches will be a car-owner, and so might be interested in what you're offering. If you offer something that people need cheaply or even for free, you can get a big response.
Unfortunately, that response could be a little too big -- thanks to the time-sensitivity of radio, you'll get mobbed the next day, and then everyone will forget you again. Radio advertising offers the listener no opportunity to keep your ad and refer to it later, or to find it again in the future. You will find that any ads involving a phone number are spectacularly useless. It does help of course to repeat your website address at least 3 times in the ad in the hope they will write it down or remember it.
More to come tommorrow about ways to advertise your website.
If you need more website advertising advice please contact Ann Menke

Advertising Your Website Offline

The media is a powerful thing -- the average person spends an enormous amount of their life consuming it in one form or another, and will spend a significant percentage of that time looking at, listening to or watching advertisements. If you want to use the power of the media, though, you need to know what you're doing otherwise your investment will be a financial disaster. Listed below are the most common forms of media advertising. No doubt you can think of others as well.
Advertising in Newspapers and Magazines:There are two kinds of advertising you can get in newspapers and magazines: classified and display. Classifieds are the small ads towards the back of the publication, while display ads can be almost any size, from a small corner of a page to a massive double-page spread.
I like putting classified ads in local papers with just a website address such as: Used Heavy Equipment at floridaearthmovers.com, Semis, Boats, Motorcycles. It is a very cheap way to advertise and gets enough hits to justify using it from time to time.
Look at your local penneysaver or hometown paper and see if a little local ad can't add some hits to your website.
More about these other forms of advertising tommorrow:
Radio, Television, Billboards, Movies, the list goes on.
Thanks for visiting my website advertising blog -Ann Menke

Writing for the Internet

It`s a well-known fact: Large blocks of copy are intimidating and will often send people running for the hills or at least the Delete button. The solution? Break up paragraphs into two to four sentences. Use several subheadings throughout your emails and newsletters. And use asterisks, dashes, and ellipses (...) to give your copy more rhythm. Bullet points are excellent eye-catchers - use them whenever appropriate.

To convince people to buy your product or service, you must make them believe that your offer is credible and that you (or your product) will deliver as promised.
How do you do that?
Here are three ways you can buildcredibility with the readers of your sales letter:
- Provide testimonials.
- Include endorsement letters from authority figures in yourindustry
- Make your offer and promises sincere and believable.

If you need help writing ad copy or creating a newsletter for your website please email me and I will tell you what I can do to help.
Thankyou for visiting my website advertising blog - Ann Menke

Free Places to Advertise Your Website

There are lots of free places to advertise. Here are a few that I use quite a bit to sell used heavy equipment. When you open a new account you can put two free ads in the http://www.truckpaper.com Be sure to put your website address in the description of your ads.
For used Antique Tractors and Equipment try YTMag.com-they only allow one picture though.
You can post as many ads as you like with lots of pictures at http://used-heavyequipment.com and let's not forget one of the biggest free advertising sites on the internet http://www.craigslist.org.
Of course be sure not to abuse these sites and follow their policies. It's also a good idea only to place ads on craigslist that are close to home if it is a vehicle you are advertising as most people won't travel very far to look at it seems. But I have been wrong about that before as I recently shipped a Kenworth semi truck to Italy so your buyers can come from very far away.
I even shipped a Mack truck and dump truck to Africa last year.
I hope these links come in handy for you - thanks for visiting my internet advertising blog - Ann Menke

Writing Good Ad Copy

Sit down and write every conceivable benefit your product has. Don`t know the difference between features andbenefits? Features describe the product; benefits describe the results of using the product. Features appeal to logic...logic justifies emotion...emotion drives sales. Here`s a rule of thumb for benefits: ask yourself "What can my product or service do for my customer?" Then begin to write your letter telling your reader WHAT`S IN IT FOR THEM.
Tell them how much better life will be for them after they buy from you. Tell them how much better they`ll feel. Tell them how their peers will respect them more.
AN EMOTIONAL APPEAL
When promoting anything to anybody, you must remember that buying decisions are based upon emotion and later backed up by logic. Before you write a single word, determine what emotional hot buttons you need to push to "jumpstart" your prospect. Selling dump trailers? and at a loss for words? Go for the "fear of disaster" button with "Making Hurricane Cleanup Easier." Selling political bumper stickers? Hit the "anger" button with: "Let the President Know What You Think of His Policies." Other buttons include: curiosity, greed, ego, vanity, hope and/or fear of scarcity or security.
Check back tommorrow for how you can make your product appear more credible.
Thanks for visiting my Internet Advertising Blog - Ann Menke

Writing Newsletters that Get People to ReVisit Your Site

Having a webpage alone is not enough - one of two things will happen: the sale is closed or the prospect will leave the page and never return. That is why you need to send out newsletters to people who have visited your site. By placing a simple email box on the front page so they can sign up for your newsletter you are building an email database. Yes it is good to have a contact form but some people don't like filling out long forms. So keep it simple and just ask for an email address on the front page of your site. Then when you send them a newsletter that contains useful information at no cost into their inbox at periods specified by you, you will remind them of the product they thought they might want later, and often this will prompt them to revisit your site or call you. Be sure your newsletters content is directed toward the specific reasons to buy the product, but doesn't come across as "sales pitch". Fact filled uses for a product and ways that the product will make life better and more enjoyable; these are the points on which to focus. Be sure you include a compelling subject line in the email and don't use the word "free" because some of the older spam filters will cause your mail to be dumped into the junk mail box before anyone reads it. Convince the reader who signed up for your free newsletter that they simply can't live without your product! Offer up a few testimonials in it or a link to your happy customers page. Prompt them to revisit your site by giving them an easily clickable link in the text of your newsletter. If you need help creating a monthly newsletter to help get more visitors to your site-A1AWEB Internet Advertising can do that for you. To see an example of a blog newsletter I created for Maxi Dump go to Dump Trailers and Utility Trailers.
Thanks for visiting my blog - Ann Menke

Advertising is an Expense that Increases the Value of your Business

Do you cringe at the thought of spending more and more money to advertise your business, product or service each month? If you can change the way you look at advertising costs and change the way you advertise your business will grow beyond your wildest dreams. As a small business owner, you should always be looking for ways to cut expenses and increase revenue. Expenses are anything that is required for your business to function. This can include web site hosting, copywriting or ghost writer fees, office rent and utilities, payment processing fees and even payroll for your office staff. Anything that is designed to bring in sales or leads (and is measurable) is not an expense. Measurable, trackable advertising costs and sales force commissions and salaries are not expenses. These costs are an investment in your business and your future. Measurable advertising that is designed to produce a certain measurable action is referred to as "direct response marketing". Advertising dollars spent on directing a targeted audience to respond via a web site, email address or a special phone number is always an investment, not an expense.
For a home business or small business, it is not always practical to try and "get your name out" to your target audience (known as "branding") by spending thousands and thousands of dollars. A more effective way to advertise would be to run ads that attract the attention of your target audience and entice them to perform "your most desired action". The desired action may be to visit a product web site, which could result in an immediate sale. A heavy equipment business for example that considers advertising an investment would make sure that the desired action at their web site is to collect lead information above all else. That web site could make some sales, but a mechanism to capture personal contact information of interested visitors will generate many more qualified leads. Through follow up contact, these leads could produce many more sales over time than the initial visit to the web site would. Another desired action in your ad could be for the prospect to call a phone number for more information. They would give the phone person their mailing address (to receive a promotional package) and their phone number (that a sales person would use to contact them).
If you are thinking of investing more in your business and need more help with online advertising please contact Ann Menke

Use Keywords in your Anchor Text

When doing link exchanges make sure you are using keywords in your anchor text. That is the text that shows up right after your URL. It is the title of your link. Rather than using your company name which most people will not know to search for use the most important 2 word phrase that you feel people would type in when doing a search for what it is you are selling. For instance if you are selling dump trailers you would use the words "dump trailers" as the title to your link or which is also called your anchor text. Here is an example of a well written link exchange:
"Dump Trailers - from Maxi Dump come in many different types and sizes and can be pulled by most heavy duty pickup trucks." As you can see I used the word dump trailers as the anchor text. You can also use other 2 -3 word phrases for this type of site such as Trailer Dumps, gooseneck dump trailers, small dump trailers, etc. In case you are wondering how to create a link exchange page for your site you can see an example of a well made link exchange page here.
Thanks for visiting my Search Engine Optimization Blog - Ann Menke

Search Engines are Getting Smarter-Are You?

As search engines gets smarter, tricks get cheaper and we get nearer to coming full circle to an original goal of Internet search: that website content is, indeed, king. It cuts across the grain of some notions we've held in the industry for some time, that there are shortcuts aplenty in the hunt for better search engine rankings. A1AWEB Internet Advertising discourages customers from thinking that they can or should fool Google and Yahoo. Instead, I show you solid methods that work. Above all else, your website needs superior content that anchors your search engine optimization strategy.
Algorithmic innovation, much of it by Google's engineers, has thankfully rendered search engine spamming a fruitless endeavor. This has made the search engine a far greater tool for us to use and, in turn, has sparked the online advertising industry.
Nevertheless, Google and other search engines closely guard their Search secrets. Their constant tweaking compels smart webmasters to not rely on keyword strategy alone. Your site must be prepared to weather the ensuing fallout from any change in web-crawler browsing instigated by their engineers in those far-off, unseen laboratories.
Search engines take link relevancy into account when ranking webpages.
Your white hat optimization plan means shoring up whatever online relationships you can with other sites for link exchange, promoting your site with new ones for more link exchange, and joining web directories. This is not an instantaneous process, it takes time to optimize a site for the search engines- but it is indispensable for your long-term online planning.
The focus is now on content. Content requires actual work, anathema, perhaps, to those seeking quick rewards with no effort, but this work pays off. You need to produce fresh, relevant content that - gulp - someone might even want to read!
I've yet to hear of a web crawling spider that purchases anything online. Until this starts happening, you should start writing (or rewriting) your website's content with an ideal reader in mind: your customer. For instance, if you're marketing dump trailers, describe each trailer individually, Be genuine.
State the aim of your site's business by using clear and direct language early in your text, or "up there" on the page. Indirectness or misleading intros may not only divert the attention of people and cause them to leave, but the same for web crawlers, too. State your business early.
The goal is to win people over right from the get go.
If you need help with creating content for your site please email Ann Menke
Thanks for visiting my blog.

Newsletters Help Your Site to Get More Visitors

If you’ve attracted a user to your site, you want to make sure he comes back. If he didn’t click on other pages during his last visit, he might click next time. And if he did click on other pages during his last visit, then that’s definitely the sort of user you want returning. Satisfying your users with valuable content will help, but even the most satisfied user can still forget to check your site regularly. That’s why a newsletter is such an important tool. You should always be trying to capture your users’ email addresses. You’ll be able to remind them that you’re out there, tell them that you have good information and suggest that they come back to your site.
This is especially good if you have new inventory you want them to see. You can put links to your products directly into the newsletter itself. One way to create a newsletter and use it to generate more visits to your site is to fill it with original content and make sure that your URL is well displayed. If people feel that they’re getting good content from your newsletter, they’ll come to the site to find out more. The other method is even easier. Every time you create a new blog post or write a new article simply take the first paragraph or two and paste it into your newsletter template. When the template is full, mail it off to your list. To read the rest of the article, those old users will have to visit your site. If you’re not sending a newsletter to your users, you’re also missing a valuable way to generate traffic from previous visitors.
If you would like to find out more ways to generate traffic to your site please visit:
How To Improve Your Websites Performance.
Thanks for visiting my blog - Ann Menke

Know Your Customer

Know Your Customer: websites that try to sell everything are going to be a turnoff to the average consumer. Even though the Internet is an anonymous electronic force, consumers want to feel as if the website owner knows about and cares about them as individuals, and a website that tries to be Wal-mart to you is going to get exactly what it deserves - nothing.
At the same time, if you understand the type of person coming to your website and you can deliver to them items that they really want and need, you're going to get a repeat customer. Ideally, your web sales should take place within content on your website, and when your customer reads about the item you're selling, they should instantly want it.
Use Targeted Content: Once you know exactly what you should be selling to your customer, you can target your content to support those sales. Consumers, more than anything else, want information on products they may want to buy. And those who sell products depend on "buzz," people like you talking about the product's advantages and disadvantages, to get those products sold.
Targeted content can be the obvious reviews of books, new products, etc. But it can also be things like descriptions of fishing trips where you drop in links to your products you actually used. For instance, if you caught a huge bass last weekend using a particular lure, you can drop in a photo of the lure, linking the photo and a text reference to your lure sales page where you actually allow the consumer to purchase that lure.
This is a trick that television networks are just catching onto. While recent fashions may have been largely driven by the clothes characters wear in popular TV shows, there was no way to purchase those fashions without searching for something similar throughout stores. Just this season, networks are starting websites where you can purchase the sweater Jennifer Aniston wore, or Tom Welling's jacket, even funky new glasses frames. It's the ultimate targeted-content model, if they sell it right.
You probably don't have a network to sell your products on. But you can develop a dedicated audience that knows your recommended products are good, reliable, and exactly what you say they are.
If you need help developing content for your site to promote your products please visit A1AWEB Thanks for visiting my blog- Ann Menke

Promoting Your New Online Store

OK. So you took the leap and started your online store-perhaps you were selling Dump Trailers. But, oops, there are no customers and your store is lost in the crowd. All is not lost. You just need to be very creative in how you market your site. The key thing to remember as you market your site is "people buy from people, not companies."

To make money online: 1) You must get traffic to your site. 2) You must convert that traffic to paying customers. To begin simply create a T-chart. Label one column "Traffic" and the other "Conversion." Then brainstorm what methods you will use to to make those happen and turn them into an action plan.

Traffic suggestions for you:

* Pay per click
* Offline advertising
* Article marketing
* Newsletter
* Autoresponders
* Word of mouth
* Joint ventures / strategic partnerships
* Talks to groups
* Participation in online forums / discussion groups

Most online stores are extremely competitive (what's not these days?) and they compete on price - one of the worst ways to compete. What you need to do is find a way to take the focus off the money, find your unique value and promote it from there.

So how do you do that? First you have to know who your prospect is so you can speak to them directly. Hint: Your market is not everyone or anyone. Once you know who your prospect is, you can implement tactics that will convert them into customers.

Here are some ideas that will help your conversion rate:

* Bundled products
* Free gift with purchase
* Regular newsletter
* Autoresponder course
* Helpful content on your website
* Companion blog for your website

These should get you thinking about where you need to go. This is not by any means a complete, comprehensive list -- just a start. Begin by putting all of your ideas together in an action plan. Use your action plan to drive what you do every day. Spend at least one hour on these tasks per day. In no time you'll find you've made a lot of progress.

If you need help getting started please visit A1AWEB
Thanks for visiting my blog - Ann Menke

Create One Page for Each Product

Use unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Don't try to lump a bunch of products together to save a bit of money on web hosting. Have a site with individual pages dedicated to each product and to nothing else. I just created a site like that called Maxi Dump. Include affiliate product reviews on the website to spell out exactly what the product will do for the purchaser. Include testimonials from users who have enjoyed the product and are willing to allow you to use their names and photos on your website for that product. Write articles highlighting uses for the product and include them on the website as additional pages. Make the web pages compelling, and include calls to act on the information. Every headline must attract the reader to read more. Bullets and highlights of special points will help the reader who is scanning to learn what the page is about find that they have to know more!
If you need a website built today look at the websites I have already created for many happy customers at: A1AWEB Internet Advertising
Thanks for visiting my blog: Ann Menke

Keep Content Fresh

The Internet is primarily two things. It's a huge reference library with information of varying quality, free to anyone accessing it. And it's the biggest marketing and advertising engine ever invented. You can take advantage of the enormous advertising potential of the Internet by using well-written and optimized content articles. Content articles are the key to:
- Delivering good information to your customers
- Showing that you are the master of your topic
- Placing well on search engines
- Keeping your customers happy enough to come back
Good websites, laid out in a friendly way, with excellent and constantly fresh keyword-optimized content, are the ones that will wind up on top. Always keep content fresh. This may be the second most common mistake made by business owners- putting up a website, then sitting back and ignoring it. Web crawlers seek out fresh content, and sites that are always fresh get ranked higher at the top of the search engine rankings.
I have lots of content articles about all different type of subjects your site may benefit from so if you are looking for content even if it is for something as mundane as Dump Trailers please email me and I will see if I can help.
Thanks for visiting my blog- Ann Menke

Being Prepared for Any Disaster

With all the things in the news about natural disasters that could befall us like mad cow, bird flu, hurricanes and tornadoes it is in my opinion a good idea to prepare for any eventuality. Of course I hope none of these things ever happen but if you live in Florida nowadays you are at least prepared in case of a hurricane. This means stocking up on water, canned goods, flashlight batteries, gasoline and having a generator handy just in case. When you live here these are just the bare minimum of things that you need to keep on hand. But if you are looking at something more long term you might want to think about stocking up more food and supplies than what is just needed for a bad storm. We buy a few extra canned goods each time we shop to help spread out the cost of stocking up and we rotate what we have so the older stuff gets used and the new stuff goes in the back. One thing people don't think about is trash pickup-it's good to have a backup plan in case that gets disrupted. It's hard for them to pickup your trash when the streets are flooded. We bought a dump bed for our pickup from http://www.maxi-dump.com so if we have to we can haul trash to the dump ourselves. I know it came in handy for yard cleanup after the hurricanes last year. Do yourself a big favor and get prepared now-think about it each time you go grocery shopping. Remember how empty the shelves get right before a storm-don't wait till the last minute. Thanks for reading my blog, Ann Menke

Secrets of Getting Your Site Indexed in the Search Engines

I get emails all the time from people whose sites just aren't getting on the search engines. On of them whose site I redid recently was http://www.maxi-dump.com. I usually refer people with questions about how to optimize their website to a page that tells about all the things they need to do to accompish this: http://www.a1aweb.com/improve.htm
The first thing I do is look at their website and view the source code to see if their website developer remembered to put meta tags on each page and then I look to see if these need any improvement. If they don't have meta tags I tell them to have their website developer add them or I can add them for a small fee per page. If you don't have a good meta tags with your title, description especially than the search engines will make up their own title and description for your site based on your content. And this may not be as good as what you would of wanted them to come up with. This is why it is so important to have meta tags, this way you can define exactly what you want the search engines to have come up about your site when someone does a search. The Titles are especially important because keywords in them are looked at very closely by the search engines. So make sure you put your most important keywords first and your company name after that in your title. I would suggest doing the same for your descriptions as well. If you need help with it please visit the page suggested above, read it and then contact me. Thanks, Ann Menke

Others Things You can Do To Get More Hits

I just got off the phone with http://www.redzee.com and would like to recommend them as an addition to or alternative to doing pay-per-click thru Google and Yahoo. Thru them you can buy a keyword that pertains to your business and everyone that uses their browser will end up finding you at the top of their search for that keyword. For instance I can buy the word "dump trailer" for my customer http://www.maxi-dump.com for $500 for 5000 clicks/hits to their website. This is much less than you would pay for that word on google or yahoo for ppc. So they get alot more bang for their buck this way. Of course they are paying a lump sum in advance versus one day at a time like they do for the major search engines but that is why it is less per click. They do have starter packages for less for those who are interested email me at info@a1aweb.com.
Thanks, Ann

Is It Better Not to Give a Phone Number On Your Website

I have found that by leaving my phone number off of my website people are more apt to fill out the contact form. Perhaps it is pure laziness or the inability to type that keeps people from filling out forms but I have been able to cut down on lots of dumb questions by removing my phone number. It seemed that most calls could of been answered with an email if they had taken the time to fill out the contact form. So yes I would recommend leaving your number off your website unless you have someone there to answer it all the time. Also it helps you to collect more email addresses if you force them to fill out a form to contact you versus writing down someone name and number when they call and then possibly losing it on a notepad. When their contact information comes into your email it is easy to drag and drop it into a customers folder.
I use these later to email those in one group perhaps interested in Dump Trucks. I can create one email telling everyone to visit my website http://www.maxi-dump.com or http://www.floridaearthmovers.com to look at new listings for dump trucks or dump trailers. So take your number off your website and save yourself a whole lot of phone interuptions.
Thanks for visiting my blog, Ann Menke at http://www.a1aweb.com

Prepare for a Long Hurricane Season

Well it sure is getting warm here early this year...and seeing that bad weather in Australia and in the Midwest just makes me think that is going to be a bangup hurricane season. So now is the time to think ahead and prepare. We just bought a dump bed from http://www.maxi-dump.com
for everything from yard work to disaster cleanup. And even if we don't need it I know there is always someone around here that would like to rent it...notice I said rent and not borrow. I will also throw in a few teenagers for a small fee. Don't forget to get yer generator primedup and running for those weeks without electric. I have a wireless connection so I can still get online as long as I have a few hours I can plug my laptop into the generator to recharge the batteries. If you haven't got a generator nows the time to get one before you really need one and plenty of gas cans on hand. We live out in the sticks and the electric is not very reliable so that is something that is a given out here. I still haven't forgotten the gas lines caused by Katrina last year so think ahead everyone....Hope you'all have a safe and happy summer,
A.