Never Ending Thoughts…

One of the very effective ways of generating leads on the Internet is either writing a viral blog or contributing to the ones that already exist. Viral blogging is an art that very few have mastered. It not only requires you to be innovative and really come up with a material that is not only fresh but also something that people would be interested to read about; In addition you need to put lot of effort to “kick start” the blog right. For example, spend lot of effort quickly spreading it across various news channels, social forums, blog directories and so forth. The idea is to reach out to as many people as possible.

Once that “hard part” of making a blog really “viral” is done, now comes the part of really reaping benefits off of it. If not done, then it just remains nothing but a blog with hundreds of comments not leading to anywhere. Here are some of the things you can do to your blog that has gone viral or with the blogs that are already going viral.

1. Moderate comments and take the discussion to a common conclusion, not conflicting ideas

When a blog goes viral, people throw in all sorts of comments. It’s hard to believe sometimes people take the theme of the blog to a totally tangential ground. Try to moderate as much as possible. Never contradict; be polite; and drive the discussions so that the blog doesn’t get cluttered with conflicting ideas. Keep in mind that the comments on your blog are as important as the blog itself! Many people read the comments first even before diving deep in to the blog (especially if it’s a long blog).

2. Reply, Reply and don’t forget to Reply!

Do not forget to honor people who post a comment. Reply back with a “thank you” at the least. Try to drive the conversation further. It’s about acknowledging that you respect that someone spent some time reading your blog. That creates a very good vibe about the author in general and more people will tend to comment more.

3. Make sure to keep the conversations “live”

Try to keep the conversations and comments going on. Make sure when you comment, you bounce back the user in way that makes them to think and discuss about your blog more with other people. Don’t ask direct questions, but inculcate curiosity in them. This will keep the conversations live even outside your blog! If successfully done, this can bring lot of traffic to your blog!

4. Spawn next steps and actions

Try to take the conversations to the next level. Perhaps send a note to all the readers about setting up a webinar and taking the discussion further. Consolidate the comments and write summaries once in a while (say after every 25 comments). Collate the information and ask for more information from the users. You will be surprised how many people are ready to help; you just have to ask! The idea behind spawning next steps and actions is to take the conversations and your relationships with the readers to the next level where in you can have a direct one on one conversation with them (for lead generation).

If done correctly, these four simple steps can bring tremendous traffic to your blog and eventually highly qualified leads. Viral Blogs not only serve the purpose of Internet Marketing and spreading word about your product or idea, they can be a great source of lead generation!

Have you successfully generated leads via viral blogs? Share your idea here! We’d love to hear!

Advertising on the Internet can be one of the most costly ventures no matter if you know all the ins-n-outs of the system or not. Yes the more you know the better decisions you’d be able to take and get good bang for the buck from your Advertising expenditure. But one fact would remain the same; i.e. your advertising expenses would be one of the major things on the balance sheet that you’d be talking about almost all the time whenever talking about marketing.

Now, all that is fine and I’m not saying that it’s wrong or right, but let’s think about entrepreneurs who are running with extremely low cash to start with. Every penny counts for every company and business, big or small; and that’s how it should be anyways. But it counts even more for a small business that’s just in its infancy and is starting up and fighting against the big giants that have seemingly unlimited resources.

So what can you do as a small business owner to bring down your Internet Marketing expenses to a Big Zero? Here are some cool techniques:

1. Write blogs with lots of back links and trackbacks

Writing blogs is one of the best ways to advertise your products and services. However writing blogs in solace is not going to be very fruitful. Some things that you must follow without any doubt are a) writing fresh material – how do you write one? well, don’t read much; just write what comes to your mind. You will see that after a few blogs you will become good at it; b) Use as many trackback links as possible. Trackbacks allow to automatically share backlinks and that will help you build good page ranking.

2. Participate in forums

No matter what Industry you are focusing at, there will be free forums and groups talking about what’s going on in that Industry. Try to find the top five and participate in them. Share your opinion. Being shy is one of the worst things you will be doing when starting up a new business. You have to be open and participate and share your opinions. Many people find this hard to do; but believe me, these forums are filled with people who are exactly in the same boat as you are and 99% of the time they are helpful. It’s an excellent place to find new contacts and leads too!

3. Share and Trade Advertisements

Instead of going with costly ppc advertising contact other bloggers who might be interested in advertising your products. Similarly find other similar products and technologies that complement yours and ask them to advertise on your network. That way you’ll pay for your advertisements by sharing advertisements! ellipsis AdNet is one of the best ways to initiate such things.

4. Spend more on Lead Generation and Lead Management

While PPC Advertising is good, it can turn out to be way too expensive if you are short on budget. An alternate solution is to work more on lead generation and lead management. Get in touch with some lead generation companies in your area and get some good lead management product. For example, you could try ellipsis dive! for your lead generation needs and may be use zoho for lead management.

5. Do as many things as you can by yourself!

Take for example blogging. Typically bloggers charge anywhere between 15 bucks to above 100 bucks for a blog. This cost could add up into hundreds and thousands of dollars over time. However, if you manage time properly, you can do most of it yourself! After all it’s your product and you must be motivated enough to brag about it or to write some good stuff about the Industry you are focusing. This will not only give you a lot more understanding about your own Industry, it will also turn out to be a good way to save lot of money. All you have to do is plan it out well. For example, instead of driving to work, try to take public transit and use that time to write a quick blog. Of course it might not work in all scenarios, but try to spend time judiciously and try to do as much work as you can yourself from development to sales and support.

So here you have it. Some simple and quick ways to save money and keep your small business running in the toughest times is near to impossible – note – “near” but not “totally”. Give it a shot!

Yes, this is true. There are numerous other methods of advertising and marketing a a brand. For example, you could easily create articles that can market your business alone. Don’t know how to do this?

One great form of marketing is the creation and submission of press releases. Press releases do not usually advertise a brand directly, but they create an effect all around the online environment. Using press releases your company can post news about its business, such as the launching of new products and services that may be available to clients too. You will only need to post your message to press release directories. You will be amazed of how many people search the internet and especially these websites where there are posted news about the companies. Surely, in the first weeks, your news will not be so read, but if you keep on going with adding new features to your business, you will eventually gain some degree of respect.

Press releases are not the only way to get people interested in your business. The creation of sales pages, and also sales letters represent great formulas for any kind of marketer. There are numerous solutions for your business, the only thing to do is to experiment a lot.

One of the most interesting fact is that today there are more blogs than ever expected. Blogging is a form of expressing your feelings, thoughts and other related emotions. However, blogging can also be a great form of advertising and brand marketing too. Look at this blog for instance. It offers a good glimpse of what a business-corporate would need to look like. Business blogs that are usually attached to a business would need to delicately market the business and the brand name. This can be done only by publishing interesting content.

You need to understand the fact that Internet marketing is all about targeting all the interested people and determining them to buy some kind of a product or service that your business offers. Our blog for example targets people who are interested in Internet Market, Lead Generation ,Social Media and many other kinds of management and marketing that are related to the online environment. So, things are simple enough to understand. If you have a business that operates online, a website of your company, you will also need to have a business blog too. Please tell us your experiences regarding this subject. What are you thoughts on this topic?

In this blog we will discuss some of the reasons why people tweet their blogs and one cool way to do it with Java.

Why tweet your blogs?

The reasons are many. To count a few:

1. It helps spread the word about your blog to a wide set of audience.

2. Tweets have an inherent tendency to spread easily and so they are a perfect tool to spread some viral news.

3. Short texts can be written to create curiosity amongst the reader and make him not only click a link and read the blog but get involved. That’s why SMS’s are so popular!

4. Good tweets can always help you build a good group of members for your blog!

5. And, last but not the least: tweeting is free! Who doesn’t like any free way of promoting anything?

So how it’s done?

Unfortunately many people don’t know that twitter APIs are very well maintained and if you spend a day understanding them and writing your own twitter bot you can save 100s of dollars that would otherwise go in the pocket of companies that sell so called “twitter bots” for ridiculous price.

Prerequisites

Although twitter APIs come in almost any programming language, in this tutorial we will focus on Java. All you’ll need is basic understanding of Java and any editor of your choice. We are not going to discuss how you are going to install and configure JDK or install the editor or the whole App end to end. We are assuming you have gone through the good old “HelloWorld” sample of writing a web application or anything of that sort for that matter. Now that if you know all that stuff and really want to know how to automate twitter from your blog, you may proceed to read further; otherwise, take a step back and first go learn Java!

What all you’ll need?

All you’ll need is RSS Utils (rssutils.jar) and a good twitter API for Java. We will focus on twitter4j. It’s the first one mentioned in twitter’s own documentation, is well documented and is even available in maven repository!

Pulling feed from your blog – using RSS Utils:

You can read how to use RSS Utils here: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javaserverpages/rss_utilities/

RSS Utils allows you to easily read your blog’s RSS feed. If you are using wordpress or any other famous blogging engine, most probably your rss feed url will be http://your-blog-url/?feed=rss

Then you can create a Java Rss object like so:

RssParser parser = RssParserFactory.createDefault();

Rss rss = parser.parse(new URL”<rss feed url of your blog>”);

And read all the items in its Channel object. Every item will give you your blog’s title, description and url. Using this you can create a string; truncate it to fit in the 140 characters because anything beyond that will freak out twitter.

Once you have the string to be tweeted, now comes the tweeting part.

Tweeting a message to twitter:

For this we will use twitter4j. You can read all about twitter4j here: http://twitter4j.org/en/index.html

Keep in mind that twitter doesn’t support Basic Authentication any more. So most of the documentation related to basic auth in twitter4j and most of the APIs related to that are now useless. They all are deprecated (or will be deprecated). If you still use them, twitter will throw an error telling you about the same. So directly move on and learn about the OAuth (point 7 on this page: http://twitter4j.org/en/code-examples.html). This example shows you how to register an application using your twitter account and how to use the secure token to publish a message.

If you get stuck anywhere, don’t hesitate to ask here! We will be more than happy to help!

cheers! and happy twitting/blogging!

In the case of websites and blogs especially, content can be considered as being king. This is why you need a lot of content. However, the content that you might want to post on your website must be quality one and it needs to be interesting for your audience.

Newsletters must be developed in HTML format. In this way the reader will be interested to read the content that you have supplied. The content needs to be perfectly integrated into the design of the newsletter. Certainly, you need to be creative. This is why you need to understand the importance of your newsletters. The reason why webmasters send newsletters is somehow linked to the fact that they want to advertise and direct people to certain webpages where the webmasters will be able to obtain the details of their visitors and transform the visitors into customers.

The main tip will be to think and write creatively. Think about all the subjects that went into the last newsletter. Also, as a webmaster you will need to speak more about the reasons why the client would choose to visit your website or even buy something from there. You need to predict what are the needs of your customers and how can these be satisfied in a way or another. Newsletters represent a great method of marketing. Nevertheless, it is easier to build trust in time than self-advertising. This is why it would be better to send the messages with a disclaimer, and also be creative all the time. If you send the same newsletter twice to any customer, this will most certainly mean that you are spamming the user. Avoid spamming by all means.

Every time people launch websites, they need to find new ways to promote their “web creations”. Each webmaster needs to get a lot of traffic to its websites mostly because traffic is money, whatever other internet marketing specialists might say. Webmasters need to have a strong SEO strategy. This might take a lot of time, more than a SEO strategy.

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization is pretty much the same thing as developing a long term strategy. It takes time to get all the needed backlinks that you as a webmaster might need. It is recommended not to do yourself the SEO. Any webmaster needs to apply all the newest methods and techniques that are available to use on the Internet. However, use only the “legal” SEO techniques and limit yourself to them. Also, do not send spam to people and businesses. This will only aggravate your situation.

Here is a good method of attracting traffic: run blog and twitter contests. Set prizes and other details that a contestant might need to know in order to participate to your contest.

It is essential to start and build your website from scratch. Why? It is simply better this way. When using pre-made platforms for your internet, especially open-source ones, your newly set up website will look pretty nice, but will have some internal flaws that will eventually cause you a lot of problems. The good thing with open source platforms is the fact that most of them where built and develop using powerful online communities. You will always find your needed updates and other plug-ins that you may want. Always try to buy your website platform or create it from scratch.

It is not an easy job to promote a corporate website. Numerous methods of self-promotion via forum and blog comments are often eliminated and considered as SPAM if it is not done using great care and attention to details, such as posting only quality comments and replies, instead of standard messages. In addition, there are a lot of important and respectable websites that do not like to link with your website, due to the fact that your website is a corporate one used for promoting and selling products and services.

As a successful entrepreneur as you are, you will need to get those links to your website. However, some techniques of link building are not as good as you may think. One of the most reliable methods developing a proper link building campaign for your corporate website is represented by the creation of a corporate blog. Beside your corporate website you will definitely need a blog. This corporate blog can be part of your website or it can be hosted on another, second domain and IP addresses.

In order for your blog to be efficient, you will need to write on your blogs frequently. You will need to post news about the company, service and products that you provide and sell. You will need to write content for 3rd party websites, such as HubPages.com or EzineArticles.com, while adding link to your website, products and services. Social networking is also a good method of promoting your website, blog and whatever you want to advertise. Do not feel discouraged if you do not see the results in no time as any of us would expect.

Blogs have been around since the early 1990s. However they really started picking up some ground only after around 1997. Currently around 28 million Internet users in USA have a blog that they update at least once a month and they represent roughly 14% of the Internet population. According to emarketer.com, by 2013 more than 37 million users will update their blogs at least once a month. More than that, as per emarketer.com, by 2013 more than 128 million people will be reading a blog at least once a month.

In this article we will discuss how blogs have become an integral part of any marketing drive and what’s in store for blogging and bloggers in the coming years.

Some of the areas in which blogs have become really successful are:

1. Bringing ideas to the public – Blogs have become a standard way to spread information or ideas. They are simple, open and free. Many marketers agree that it takes a lot more time to write a traditional white paper or publish a news release while blogs are more lax, informal, can be put much quickly and at the same time create a bigger impact.
2. Creating a two-way communication – Blogs are a perfect platform to initiate a two-way communication. People can leave their comments and reply to each other and take the discussion further and many times even extend the original concept to new levels. This makes blogging a very healthy way to discuss and share ideas.
3. Helping create exposure – Blogs are generally open and mostly can be read by anyone. Some blogs even allow anonymous replies. This level of openness makes blogs easily index-able by search engines and hence helps getting lot of exposure in the Internet World.

Surprisingly very few Fortune 500 companies have leveraged this platform and these companies are now starting to recognize the value blogs bring to marketing. This means that the role of blogging and bloggers will increase in the coming months and years by unimaginable proportions. Social Media is already playing a very big part in catalyzing this by letting users “micro-blog” (such as via twitter, etc.). Companies like Coca Cola and Wal-Mart are already experimenting with blogging platforms and harnessing their power in different ways. For example, Wal-Mart has a checkout blog geared to the consumer and discussing the latest in gadgets, green, gaming, etc. while Coca-Cola’s conversations has a single author blogging about the history of the company. Bloggers have become more sophisticated and are utilizing affiliate marketing and innovative display & search tools to bring themselves into the forefront of blogging markets.

In a nut-shell, though blogging has been there since the very first starting years of the Internet boom, it still hasn’t been leveraged to its fullest and the coming years are going to see a lot more involvement of bloggers and blogging platforms in marketing across various Industry verticals. The bottom line is that if you or your company doesn’t have a blog, you should have one right now!