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It’s All About Value


When times are hard, your business will have to put in that extra effort to attract the loyal customer. You may have the best quality product but your competitor may offer the best value – and that is why the customers are going there.

Value is not merely about ‘quality’, especially if that quality has too high a price tag. In fact value is a balanced combination of a number of things: price, features, how well-made is the product and the benefits to the purchaser. In summary value answers the questions: what is it worth to the customer and how well does it meet their needs?

For example, if the customer primarily wants transport for shopping at the local supermarket, they probably do not want a Rolls Royce.

So, while you may have the best-made product with the most features, do your customers think that they can afford it in a weak economy? It all depends on your marketing approach and how you represent ‘best’ and price.

Value is perceived

There are no fundamental values in your marketplace that cannot be influenced by good marketing. You need to understand your customers and provide a solution to their problems. If you do, you will be providing value to them.

If your solution provides much more than they expect, then that perceived value may increase, subject to cost. If you can provide products of exceptional quality but at a reduced cost, then you have a high-value offering. But quality relates to the ability to meet the customer’s needs and is subjective. In many instances this perception can be influenced to create greater demand.

A possible place to start

Information products can provide the basis for low-cost, high-quality offers that result in the perception of high value. These products can be developed with little time and money. Using the Internet they can be duplicated and delivered ad infinitum. Since the manufacturing costs are reasonably low, you can create bundles of these products as high-value packages without additional cost. Then instant delivery, via the Internet, will result in instant customer satisfaction.

Marketing over the Internet

You can market most things over the Internet. However, some market niches are more suited to this medium than others. To those providing high quality, low cost and quick delivery, the Internet can be a blessing in difficult economic times. You need to concentrate on products and services where you can influence the perception of value. This will help keep demand constant or even increase it during hard times. For the next few years at least, value will be the key factor in both online and offline marketing strategy.

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Network Waves is now live!


Network Waves has finally gone live!  The past few days have been very exciting as the response I have received from the site has been amazing.

For those of you who want to know more about Network Waves, I’ll fill you in now!

Network Waves is the simplest, most convenient, time-saving way to upload video content from one single accessible place to multiple online platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and many more.

The site lets you publish video content online in an easy, fast, fun and user-friendly way.

Video marketing represents one of the most effective platforms for powerful SEO opportunities currently available.

Distributing video content across different platforms can increase – with the right keywords – Google rankings with rapid results. This is one of the reasons we love video marketing – and you will, too.

Whilst the current site is giving exceptional value as a free offer, in the Autumn of 2010 we will be unveiling a full suite of further Member services and benefits.

Network Waves offers Members unlimited and unrivalled facilities for uploading, sharing and distributing visual content across the Web.

Our purpose is to make your online networking more effective and save you time. Try our video distribution service for free.

You’ll be sharing visual content effortlessly across multiple platforms in minutes – thanks to the unique Network Waves distribution system.

Please enjoy the Network Waves experience – and pass it on!

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How to Use Twitter for Business


With the popularity soaring with Twitter everyone has come onto the band wagon and created 100’s of different applications to help you get the most out of Twitter. Below are my favourite ones which I use and best of all they are all free!
The biggest problem with the standard Twitter web application is that you have to keep an eagle eye on your replies and Direct Messages as you only see the main Tweetstream on the screen. It is also limited in that it only displays about the last 20 tweets, so if you want to see older ones, you have to keep going back pages. So how can you make it more user friendly?

I recommend you download Tweetdeck (which I use and is a godsend, especially if you have a large following!).

Tweetdeck is brilliant in that it displays the Tweetstream, your replies and your direct messages all on the one screen. The message columns allow for 500 tweets as a default, so scrolling down allows you to go back a fair way or search for tweets you may want to refer back to. You can also automatically send your tweets on Facebook and Myspace if choose too.

The screen has a continuous right hand scroll, so you can set up different groups and their tweets will appear in that column. You might have a group called best friends and another for gardeners for instance. That way you don’t miss important tweets from people who are more important to you than others. At the time of writing, Tweetdeck is probably the most widely used application for Twitter and I would highly recommend it to you.

Twellow is another great way of finding people to interact with. People here are categorized into all different areas and you can search for those with similar interests to your own.

The main page shows you all the categories, which then have sub categories as well. You just click on a category and the list of people in that area are displayed. You don’t have to be registered with Twellow to be displayed, but at the time of writing there were nearly two million people showing on the site, so you will have plenty to choose from. By all means though, register yourself and set up a profile so others can find you.

When you click on a category, Twellow displays a list of people in that category and they are ordered by the number of followers they have. If you are already logged into Twitter via the web, (not Tweetdeck) you will be able to follow people directly from the screens where the profiles are displayed.

I would also recommend taking the time to set up your Twitter background so that it doesn’t just look like the default Twitter page. You need to distinguish yourself from the crowd and that attracts more followers, or at the very least impresses people with your professionalism.

If you’re a bit of a Photoshop whiz, then you can do your own background, full of bells and whistles and load it up to your Twitter profile. But if you’re not, or you just want to save time, then there are some sites out there that will do them for you automatically. My personal favourite is Twitbacs where you can get some great backgrounds.

However, that said, if you want to do your own fiddling in Photoshop, you can get some great layouts in PSD format from Twitterbacks.

I hope the above tips help you, Twitter really is a great application that should be used as part of your marketing strategy and best of all, it’s FREE!

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How to Create a Newsletter that People actually Read


The most important thing you can remember when writing a newsletter is that most people aren’t going to read it. There are some things you can do to increase the number of actual readers out of subscribers, but always keep in mind that maybe one out of five subscribers will actually read your newsletter. In this article, we’ll go over some things you can do to increase the number of readers for your newsletter, not just the number of subscribers.

Something that people often forget and the thing that absolutely should be done first, is to make sure your subscribers know exactly what they’re getting. Clearly state your newsletter’s contents and theme and clearly title it and summarize its contents in a short paragraph so that readers don’t have to figure out what it’s about by actually reading it. You won’t do yourself any favours by getting subscribers for something they don’t know about, and most people will cancel once they realize that your newsletter doesn’t have anything that interests them.

A good way to break up the research for yourself is to figure out a variety of topics to write about. Finding three or four major topics and then breaking those up into sub-sections and then those sub-sections into articles and newsletters.

Breaking up topics like this will allow you to generate fairly detailed material on a number of different subjects, while still being original and useful with your newsletter. If you’re having a hard time writing about a given topic, go a little broader, which will help you use more information in a single newsletter to provide more material.

In the end, even if you follow all of these steps, even if you’ve got the best newsletter available, very few of the subscribers will read every one. Don’t be afraid to promote your newsletter on related blogs, websites and even through other newsletters on similar subjects. All you want to do is make sure that your content is relevant, readable, and accessible. If you can write content that is actually useful for readers, easy for them to understand, and interesting enough that they want to read it in the first place, then your reader base will be that much more likely to read what you send them. The more people that actually read your newsletter, of course, the more people will continue to read and subscribe to what you write.

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Are you using Social Networking for your Business


Social networking is all the latest rage in marketing today. And for a good reason, too. It’s an extremely effective tool which, if you use it well, can really help your business. If you aren’t familiar with the term “social networking,” it refers to online communities and groups such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy, MySpace and so on. It’s a place where people share business and social news, incite discussions, increase their contacts and raise their online presence.

By virtue of being online you are able to make thousands of connections in a fraction of the time it would take to meet that many people in person. You are more likely to make contacts across the country and around the world that you could without an online presence. This gives you an even larger network, which means more people are forwarding your details to people who could use your services, etc. This also means that you have a wealth of information at your fingertips for other business services that you could utilise for your company (or your life!).

Another brilliant aspect of social networking is the multiplication of your information. So for example, if I post information about my online business services on Twitter, I have just over 30,000 people following me who will see it. And if even 1% of those people ReTweet me (re-post that information), then I have another 3000 postings about my business for the one I put up. And those 3000 postings are going out to all the people following the person who ReTweeted me. This means that one little post about my business is now reaching 100,000-200,000+ people. This is the power and the magic of social networking. And to answer your suspicions, yes I have gotten not only great contacts but also new business from sites like Twitter and Facebook.

A final and hugely important element of social networking is that it builds your online presence. This is very important to any business as the world today is online. People are more likely to go to the Internet before to look for businesses than they are to go out driving around. Since social networking includes various posts, blogs and listings, it vastly increases your SEO margin and makes you more likely to get noticed out of the sea of businesses. Also, each site can be used to point contacts back to your website to promote your business.

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