Good Web Site Design increasingly More Important

It's imperative for a company to have a quality web site today - but many firms are still throwing up web sites that are just poorly designed or overly complex. Poor navigation (menus and overall site structure) when coupled with low quality graphics is really problematical (!) - online visitors think less of your company as a result which will hurt revenue in long run. Many think just doing a minimal job is sufficient but they aren't factoring in how close your competition is! On web any potential customer is only one click away from seeing a high quality web site that is well designed and conveys a quality image

A good rule of thumb when budgeting for a web site is to assume you will pay approximately $250-300. USD per page - this should include your graphics design, content development, setting up registration forms, etc. This may sound too expensive for many companies but for better or worse perception is reality in online world! So, don't short change yourself, put some resources into your web site and be prepared to continue to do so - it's now a vital component of any company's ongoing marketing processes that needs constant upgrading like traditional marcom (PR, print, etc.) materials.

Opt-in E-Mail Trending Down but still Viable

Opt-in or permission based e-mail (meaning people give you "permission" to market to them) response rates for Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer are dropping below where they were a year ago by 30-50% on average. What's happening? The ever-increasing deluge of Spam is negating throughput (response rates, purchases, etc.) of quality opt-in e-mail.

Opt-in e-mail is still a viable and excellent way to market your company but expect less results, lower costs/fees (more vendors equals more competition which is good) and need to repeat your campaigns if you want to see tangible results. And don't get dazzled by a design firm or your in house marketing staff that wants to design a fancy HTML e-mail message for you - 65-75% of market today still doesn't want fancy graphics, they want a short message, delivered concisely with short paragraphs in a text format. Less is more!

Performance Based Marketing on Upswing

You see, recently I decided to copy cocktail weiner strategy and give something away for free. I had read tons of articles about magic of "free" but for a long time was skeptical about whether it would work for me... I mean, what on earth can a writer give away free? And hasn't impact of that over-used four letter word worn off by now?

Apparently not.

Internet marketing kahuna Jim Daniels gives away copies of his e-book precisely because free works. He says, "Offering a free manual gives me an opportunity to show off my expertise and possibly gain a few more potential prospects and customers... If you can give it away for free, people will remember you."

Well, I don't have an e-book to give away. But this is what I did and what you can do, too.

My primary means of promoting my writing services is through distributing business- and writing-related articles like this one (a freebie in itself). At end of each one is a short author's tag which acts as a plug for my services. This is ONLY advertising I do. Until I had my cocktail wiener epiphany, that tag read like this: