Does your Internet Marketing Pull?Written by Paul Short
"Pull Marketing" has always been, and will continue to be most effective internet marketing strategy at your disposal.Allow me to explain. Most marketing efforts can be placed into one of three categories: 1. "Push Marketing" or advertising basically screams at viewer. "Hey Look at ME, Buy My Stuff NOW!" Because we are exposed to this type of marketing thousands of times a day, we've learned to tune it out, hate it and even protest against it. Look at SPAM for instance. People even get arrested for using email to "Push" their offers in front of us! With Push Marketing we have no choice in matter. We get a sales pitch whether we want it or not. And who doesn't want a choice in what they see, read or hear? 2. "Permission Marketing" on other hand aims to seduce us into allowing others to advertise to us. They offer up promises of great useful content, special offers and discounts if we sign up, opt-in or subscribe. It's effective but loosing ground day by day as we see content more and more diluted by ads. Basically, they ask us if they can advertise to us and we have a choice whether content they're offering is valuable enough to us to put up with ads. 3. "Pull Marketing" is when people come to you, with a purpose. If I'm seeking services of a programmer to develop a script for a web site I'm working on, first place I begin my search is either a search engine or a site where I know programmers can be found like Elance.com. I actually visit these sites with a purpose and seek out best person for job. Maybe I read an article or web based tutorial on designing scripts for my purpose. Maybe I searched through HotScripts.com and couldn't find what I was looking for. The Point is, I went looking for them. I took time and energy to find them and I'm ready to buy now. I'm most targeted prospect programmer could ever hope for. Now, key to effective Pull Marketing on internet is visibility. If that programmer was not visible when I went searching he would have lost sale. He used Pull Marketing to his advantage and it was to my advantage as well because I needed his services at time.
| | Following trends to higher earningsWritten by Stan Rosenzweig
Following trends to higher earnings By Stan Rosenzweig copyright 2004, all rights reserved.Here are two ways to spot marketing trends that can lead you to new financial opportunities and three lessons you can apply: Trend spotter #1: Read 10 year and 20 year old books about trends. Learn from history. History repeats itself. Trend spotter #2: Read newspapers. In 1982, in his bestseller Megatrends, John Naisbitt showed himself as a student of history by quoting an even earlier management consultant, Mary Parker Follett, who, in 1904, identified a key concept in determining trends and market directions. She created "the law of situation", a concept used today to reinvent businesses faced with key strengths in an eroding market. Had railroads recognized law of situation and understood that they were really in transportation business, said Naisbitt, they might have survived migration of shipping from rail to trucks, even to air. Naisbitt calls railroads great lesson for business, but there are clearer lessons for information age. Take telephony. I think great lesson for us all comes not from railroads, but from telecommunications; specifically, from Western Union. Most of us know of Alexander G. Bell's historic telephone utterance on March 10, 1876, "Watson! Quick! Get your tail in here." But do you know other important, but less than famous quote? It seems that only one short year later, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, Bell's future father-in-law and financial partner, offered whole shebang to Western Union Telegraph Company? As you know, Western Union was as strong and powerful back then as they come, just like railroads. According to Sidney H. Aronson, contributor to "The Social Impact of The Telephone", MIT Press, 1977 (another oldie, but goodie, history), Hubbard was turned down cold by Western Union's president William Orton with words, "What use could this company make of an electrical toy?" Now that's a quote worth remembering. Don't be too hard on old Orton, though. He wasn't exactly asleep at switch. Western Union was very successful under Orton. They were virtual Microsoft of 19th century. In fact, by time Bell and Hubbard had happened along, Western Union had wired up whole country and already had developed a new technology to carry written facsimiles of messages (fax). This, evidently, was for those who wouldn't learn Morse code and wanted a graphical user Windows-like interface. Undeterred, Bell went on lecture circuit talking up his concept for a great information superhighway of time, that could be used by just about anyone without too much training. Naisbitt was right about railroad and several other things, but he got it wrong a few times, too. He predicted a high-tech backlash, fueled by need for people to be together, a concept he called "high touch". "People will want to be with people", he said and he predicted that home offices, electronic shopping and teleconferencing would not succeed.
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