STOP! Advertising will kill your business.

Written by Michael Scadden


STOP! Advertising will kill your business.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Ok, I will make one clarifying statement. If you’ve had exposure or experience in using direct response advertising methods and you know something about copywriting, then by all means forge ahead.

If not, proceed at your own risk.

I will tell you a story to illustrate my point. When I first got into business, my marketing degree gave merepparttar erroneous idea that I had a clue about promoting my business.

After losing about $100,000 inrepparttar 119775 first year on expenses, bad decisions, and bad expensive advertising ($10,000 on one mailing alone with zero response, ouch!) I realized I didn’t know what I was doing.

Funny how a dwindling bank account and mounting debt snaps you back into reality.

So, I decided to dive head first in learning proper promotion skills, I went to seminars, read books (expensive books), joined marketing associations, took classes, experimented with ad copy for myself and others.

In all, I probably invested another 100k in my marketing education. My copywriting skills improved and I realized writing for business promotion was not nearly as hard as I envisioned, but you need to know what you are doing or else it gets expensive….Believe me!

At one critical point inrepparttar 119776 business, we needed cash to come in byrepparttar 119777 end ofrepparttar 119778 month….a lot of it….fast! We had about a week. The clock was ticking.

I put together a quick direct response letter and sent it to our customer base. Roughly $8,000 came inrepparttar 119779 next day fromrepparttar 119780 letter. It wasn’t a tremendous amount, but we were able to pay payroll and meetrepparttar 119781 basic expenses.

It was a cyclical business, so luckily things were a little betterrepparttar 119782 next month and we were able to squeak by and weatherrepparttar 119783 storm.

Looking back, that little direct mail piece probably saved a business that still exists today. In fact, it’s thriving generating over a million dollars a year in revenue forrepparttar 119784 owner. No, I don’t own it any longer (I sold it in 1998).

The point is, learning direct response marketing skills is kinda like printing your own money when you need it. No, it doesn’t always work, but it beatsrepparttar 119785 alternative which is putting your faith and hard earned money copying worn out marketing methods that never worked inrepparttar 119786 first place.

Some of you might have had similar experiences. If so, let me know. I’d like to hearrepparttar 119787 story.

I am very much interested in helping small business owners develop their overall programs, butrepparttar 119788 biggest problem I see is in marketing communications.

For those of you who are reading this and saying to yourself, “Yeah, I have a few marketing challenges of my own.” I’d like to hear about them.

Simply contact me with your number one marketing issue and I will try to shed some light on solving it. If you have already created a marketing piece or campaign and you want a critique on it, please email or fax it to me I would be happy to take a look at it.

Best to all of us in our business endeavors.

Before Launching Your SEO Campaign

Written by Kalena Jordan


One ofrepparttar most important aspects of a search engine optimization campaign is also one ofrepparttar 119774 most overlooked – preparation!

As I’m always explaining to my SEO101 students, there are some important steps to take in advance of launching your campaign that will make sure it has a better chance at succeeding.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it’s for your own site or that belonging to a client, you need to answerrepparttar 119775 following important questions:

1) What isrepparttar 119776 overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? (e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffic, more publicity etc.)

2) What is my/their time-frame for this project?

3) What is my/their budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questions will help you to build a framework for your campaign and establish limitations forrepparttar 119777 size and scope ofrepparttar 119778 campaign.

Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establishrepparttar 119779 project requirements, so you can tailorrepparttar 119780 SEO campaign to you or your client’s exact needs.

You need to know things like:

1) What technology was used to buildrepparttar 119781 site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScript, Flat HTML etc)

2) What arerepparttar 119782 file extensions ofrepparttar 119783 pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Doesrepparttar 119784 site contain database driven content? If so, willrepparttar 119785 URLs contain query strings? e.g. www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing “?” symbols), or doesrepparttar 119786 site use parameter workarounds to removerepparttar 119787 query strings? (the latter is search engine friendly).

4) Are there at least 250 words of text onrepparttar 119788 home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How doesrepparttar 119789 navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScript drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages doesrepparttar 119790 site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) What isrepparttar 119791 current link popularity ofrepparttar 119792 site?

8) What isrepparttar 119793 approximate Google PageRank ofrepparttar 119794 site? Would it benefit from link building?

9) Do I haverepparttar 119795 ability to editrepparttar 119796 source code directly? Or will I need to hand-overrepparttar 119797 optimized code to a site admin for integration?

10) Do I have permission to alterrepparttar 119798 visible content ofrepparttar 119799 site?

11) What arerepparttar 119800 products/services thatrepparttar 119801 site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

12) What arerepparttar 119802 site’s geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

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