Cutting Edge Marketing Tips

A low standard online publishing package can be the ruination of any creative online publication. Actually, picking out a software provider is one of the most important considerations you’ll take when you make an ezine. It’s not about merely picking a nice format for your creation - indeed this is a much more serious choice because it may easily mean success or failure for your entire venture.

Ease of use is the main thing you want from your software. If you can’t make the software work it doesn’t matter how good it is claimed to be… Take the time to dry run different packages before you select a provider for your ezine. The second major piece of preparation you’ll need to do is safeguarding security. The next thing on the list are hackers. Is there something placed to protect your package? Can the content be secured? What security measures have been taken to keep people from just copying and pasting the content? You’ll also want to think about interactive collateral management to promote your digital magazine. No matter what plan you choose you should think about how you will deal with ads. Modern marketing techniques mean considering search engine necessities when editing your content. What about paid content? Think about offering a variety of subscriptions. Will you be commercializing your content in any way or is this venture not-for-profit? How about providing teasers to sell the ebrochure? What’s the accessibility of the magazine? Is it private: then you can look into many hosting possibilities or is it public? If public you will probably be best hosting directly. Have you examined how you will deal with back-issues? Some solutions need to be thought about in advance prior to encountering an emergency. How is their level of tech support? How is their FAQ page? Also check whatever how-to guide they may feature. Do they commit to their response time? Try calling their emergency phone number to test it out. This is definitely a case of last not least consideration. Because you don’t want to find out the hard way that they’re not up to it… Once you’ve resolved on producing a digital publication such as an electronic magazine, making the right choice of digital magazine software host may make or break the profit of the magazine. Think about this choice so you will achieve the best result.

Perhaps the most dramatic change in how business organizations operate nowadays is in PR - or public relations. Whereas previously, a business organisation would rely on printed media like magazines, newspapers, and industry journals, these days there is the internet. And so this too has influenced how organizations carry out PR. Now that blogging has become common, all of a sudden we’re reading informal updates straight from the head chiefs instead of the normal finespun, formal editorials normally located in their corporate brochure. Not only that, but we’re hearing more from corporations too, as websites are constantly updated. With the recent introduction of sites like Twitter, business organizations are also microblogging too.

Not only that, but the net has made communication much less passive and a lot more involved. Now those browsing the web effectively vote for your advertizement by clicking it, or join your e-mailing list, or ask questions directly to you using your online forms. We also understand far more about target demographics due to their “footprint” they leave behind with their actions. Thus it’s critical that an organization can respond to the opinions given by their visitors and form their public-facing messages based on these opinions.

So with these changes, does that mean companies have much more power to command how the general public perceives them? Yes it does! Businesses are now setting aside increasingly more time on public relations, since a lot more new “public meeting places” have opened up with new technologies. With that increased opportunity all the same, there is the increased opportunity of making slips too, and so we are of the opinion that it is better to use a public relations company first. You can learn a great deal from them. For instance, how do they utilise all the new media that is now available? They have gathered experience in knowing what works, and what doesn’t work. They can quickly highlight the areas you need to improve upon and bolster your strengths in terms of your relationship with the public. A great place to start in terms of locating a PR company is a search engine. Just enter a keyphrase like public relations agency and you’ll quickly get a list of public relations companies prepared and willing to assist you.

You maybe already know how important uploading your businesses short format video is. For a firm’s marketing manager, online video is a helpful medium that can help to capture your potential clients’ attention & increase the overall number of visits to your website. Short format professional videos are exceedingly good in getting the target customers’ comparatively short attention. What’s more, if codes are built-in & video sharing is promoted, videos can be a wonderful way to get one-way inbound links & in so doing positively affect your businesses position on the search engines. Vidify are market leaders in short format corporate video production for small businesses.

Indeed, professional videos have become a good source for business or self-promotion. The following are numerous tips to circulating your own online video clips.

Firstly, you can post your short format video commercials on your own web site; but this would involve you to make your own video hosting arrangements. Ask your online hosting solutions merchant if video downloading or video streaming services are supported.

Video downloading is where your business viewers must download your video to their PC’s hard disk. They need to store the online video to their own personal computer before they can play it using their PC’s video player or a downloadable video player software. There are lots of video downloading service providers that cost very little. There is also a progressive downloading mechanism where your viewers can play the Web videos at the same time as downloading them.

Video sharing streaming on the other hand absolutely does away with the demand to download the Web video clips & allows instantaneous playback so it offers the most worth to your web viewers. Of course, getting a video hosting company that supports video streaming can cost you a pretty penny.

And finally, the more fashionable way to distribute Internet videos is posting your sites to video distribution websites that possess their own video hosting infrastructure. These websites cost you nothing to become a member & will sometimes pay you to upload video clips. What’s more, also have a large audience base & reach; for example, YouTube receives in the region of 14 million Web visits each month.

Writing articles for redistribution through free article directories and announcemnet lists is a great way to promote your business. By doing it properly you have a good chance of getting increased search engine traffic. More importantly if you do it right you articles can and will be picked up and published by large ezine publishers. This can mean having your article sent out to literally tens of thousands of people all waiting to read information like you are publishing.

However you need to do it right. Website managers and ezine publishers have a lot at stake when they publish content or send out ezine to their client and subscriber lists. They can’t afford to risk sending out junk that provides little or no value to their clients. They certainly can’t afford to risk sending out incorrect or non-functional advice. So, if you expect to have your articles picked up and published, you need to make sure you do one thing very well.

You need to write articles that directly address the needs of a very specific audience.

That may seem very simple, but getting it right is critical to your success in publishing reprintable articles.

Using this article as a quick example, you will see that there is a very specific audience in mind, with a very specific concern being addressed.

Audience: People looking to promote their business via free reprint article distribution Problem: How to get the best possible distribution - specifically getting published in large ezines and busy websites.

The goal of this article then is to help all of you fine folk understand how to better your chances of getting picked up by major players in your industry.

The first step is getting to know your market. Do this by participating in blog and forum discussions relevant to your market area. Note common questions and problems people are asking about. Browse through online market places like ebay and clickbank to get a sense of what products are available in your market already and see what problems they are claiming to solve.

You also need to get on the mailing lists of your competitors. See what it is that they are promoting and advising. This will give you valuable information about your market and what others feel are active trends.

Of course you should also subscribe to the RSS feeds or email announcement lists of free article directories. You should be able to choose to get updates on only the categories that interest you. This will give you a very clear idea of what is being published and targetted in your market on a daily basis.

http://www.reprint-content.co m for example provides real-time & weekly email announcements of new articles as well as continuously updated RSS feeds for every category in the directory. These are readable in any popular email program or RSS reader.

As you do your ongoing market research keep clear notes about how your business, service, or product can help people deal with their concerns and problems. These notes will be the core of many of your future articles.

Once you have a better understanding of who and what is in play in your market, then you can begin to target your articles to a very specific audience and for a very specific purpose. The actual type of article you write will vary depending on who your audience is and what you are trying to give them. Tip-sheets, how-to guides, explanations, opinions, and advice style articles can all be very effective when targetted properly.

In sum, you must take time to write your articles for a very specific audience. Do simple ongoing market research to find out what are important issues for people in your market. You need to understand who is consuming your information and then write articles that they need and want. Be very sure to provide relevant and useful information and solutions for these people. The better you do this, the more likely ezine publishers and webmasters will pick up the article and use it in their publications.

Several years ago, one of my favorite speculative fiction writers, Orson Scott Card, started creating an online community of readers, a community that continues to thrive to this day. As I recall, during my first exposure to the community Scott was posting chapters of the book he was writing at the time, and giving people the opportunity to comment and make suggestions.

I thought, “What a great idea,” and promptly stored it away for future use. Well, the future is here now as I pull a writing Purpose Project from the backburner to the front burner. I envision the Amberlin Series to be just that — a series of books chronicling the life and times of Amberlin Gentry, a spiritual genius who’s born into an ultra conservative spiritual community known as Golden Acres. There she is raised by her grandmother, Rose, who is the great-granddaughter of the founding father of Golden Acres, and her grandfather, Jonathan, who quietly practices an ‘eclectic spirituality’ while living in the fundamentalist community.

Since I started writing this visionary novel about a year ago, I already have several chapters roughed out which I will be posting over the next several days. My plan is to then continue to post chapters as they are written.

I invite your participation by reading the saga of Amberlin as it’s being written and offering constructive questions and comments. I’ll also post more about what I’m particularly looking for that falls under the heading of “constructive questions and comments.”

Ok, here’s the start of Chapter 1 of The Goddess Returns:

7-year-old Amberlin watched as her favorite ducky drifted towards the spiraling waterspout as the water drained from the mammoth Victorian-style tub. As the clockwise current of water drew the floating toy into its influence, she smiled and waved her index finger in a counterclockwise motion, then giggled lightly as the spout changed direction and the toy duck followed suit soon after. After a few moments, Amberlin stopped her finger, and the water quickly resumed its customary clockwise motion, until once again she impressed her own will upon the water. She continued playing like this for several moments, enchanted by the game without noticing her grandmother, Rose, quietly observing her, until suddenly:

“What in God’s name are you doing? Oh my Lord,” Rose shrieked. “Jon, Jon. Come up here at once,” She yelled to her husband, but even before he arrived, she took matters into her own hands, as she was accustomed to doing. “You stop that right now, you hear. That’s a bad girl.” Rose grabbed Amberlin’s hand and slapped it sharply across the knuckles. “You mustn’t do such things. Dear God. Jon, Jon. Are you coming or not?” Amberlin tried to stifle her cry of alarm and pain, but a whimper escaped despite her best effort. As she tried to pull her hand from danger, a pair of tears escaped, coursing down her ruddy cheeks.

Continue the chapter by going to:

http://lifeonpurpose.typepad.com/life_on_purpose_weblog/2005/11/chapter_1.html

©2005 Brad Swift of Life On Purpose Institute, Inc.
This article can be reprinted freely online, as long as the entire article and this resource box are included.

Dr. Brad Swift founded Life On Purpose Institute in 1996 with the vision of creating a World On Purpose by assisting people like yourself to clarify their life purpose & live true to it. Determine how on or off purpose your life is with the fun & insightful Self Test at:
http://lifeonpurpose.com/_forms/self-test.php?source=ezart.
Inspire yourself with a free subscription to Purposeful Pondering Ezine:
http://lifeonpurpose.com/index.php?dir=_ezines&task=view-ezines.

1. Make your goals achievable.

By achievable, we mean realistic and attainable. You might
unconsciously have set a goal even others will have a hard time
achieving, even if they had the means and the time to do so.

Here’s what you can do: break down your goals into small,
realistic goals set against reasonable time frames. Oftentimes,
you’ll achieve your bigger goals if you work on achieving the
smaller goals leading to those. The important thing is making
your goals as realistic and as achievable as you can.

2. Devise a feasible plan.

You know what you want, but do you know how to get what you
want? Do you need technical or artistic training to achieve your
goals? Or perhaps further studies? Do you have a set plan of
action that will lead to the achievement of your goals? What
things, both tangible and intangible, do you need to aid you in
reaching your goals?

Take a moment to sit down and list the things you need and make
your action plan. This is a good time to break them down into
small, realistic goals and then tackle them one day at a time!

3. Resist spreading yourself too thinly.

Sometimes, it’s better to work on one goal at a time, rather
than doing and shooting for so many all at the same time. Work
on so many goals at one given time and you’ll find out you’re
nowhere near achieving even one goal. You won’t be able to focus
your full energy on one goal.

Prioritize your goals and start with either your top priority or
your most realistic goal. You’ll discover you’re able to do more
and achieve more using this approach.

Copyright © 2004 Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ

Truthfully, I have not read many books, so I can not say they
are my main source of inspiration. But there is one book that
has probably influenced me the most, and that book is The
Hobbit. Many might not understand the importance, or rather
misunderstand. I can not explain this book in the slightest. It
is well worth the read, I assure you that. Most people think
that the beauty of it is that it shows how even the smallest of
mans can be a great hero, but I see it deeper.

To me The Hobbit shows such a deep love of life that shall
never be known. There is creativity in every passage, wonder in
every sentence, and beauty in every word. The imagery, the
feeling, the meanings, and the plot are forever intertwined as
an endless tale of life, death, and mortality.

Fantasy, in my opinion, is more than the power of the
imagination creating endless thoughts, but rather of a mind that
understands life and the world so great that it can spread its
beliefs into new worlds, new creatures, new beliefs. It’s like
the releasing of beauty from one realm to another while not
losing a drop of purity. When an author creates a new world, it
is not only about escaping the world they live in, but rather
spreading that world into new canvases of emptiness and void.
It’s not just a creation of something new, but a rebirth of
something old.

All this inspiration and all that I have learned is poured into
my artwork and writing. It is my channel of release. I want to
paint everything I see, draw everything I know, and write about
everything I feel. I want to live everything I can see, taste,
feel, and hear. I don’t want to watch life, I want to be it. I
want to live in the arts, be painted in shades of truth, drawn
in lines of passion, and sculpted with clay of innocence.

My art is my passion, my expression, and my knowledge. It is
how my feelings, thoughts, and memories are recorded. It is more
than an outlet, an escape; it is a calling, a release, a guide
in life. Whether with words or design, my art is as much as a
part of me as I am a part of my art.

My first passion in art was drawing. When I was little I would
draw anything and everything. Of course it moved on to shading,
and then painting, and now other medias. I really enjoy
photography now. Art isn’t a hobby to me. A hobby is something
you do to kill time. Art, to me, is something I do to make time.
It’s a recording of moments and passages in my life. A few
years back, maybe five or so, I took up poetry. It started off
as just an experiment at first. Simple words rhyming as jokes in
poems. But then I developed a skill of word use, of expression
through imagery, of putting feeling and thought into phrases. It
came from my love of music and lyrics, and developed into my
collection of poetry as in my portfolio. My poetry is different,
though. I don’t think many understand the meaning in my poems. I
cover them up with fancy words, sweet sounds, and flowing
phrases. And even if they do, they can’t feel what I can feel.
They can’t understand its truth. So is the pain of being the
writer, as many of you readers know.

I suppose I could mention love as one of my inspirations,
though quite an odd one indeed. Love is a beautiful, powerful,
and haunting thing. It can seal, heal, and break hearts. It can
lift, lower, and bury spirits. Even so, I do not know well of
it. I know the love of my friends, the love of my family, and
the love of life, but I am still lacking the romantic love. I
have no girlfriend or wife, but maybe someday. I suppose it’s
this wanting to be complete, to feel that I deserve someone and
someone deserves me that makes it an inspiration in my writing
and artwork.

There isn’t much to say about love as an inspiration. You can’t
describe it to someone who doesn’t know it, and to those who
know it they don’t need it described. It isn’t really like
another feeling, like being sad or happy or mad or scared. Love
is a feeling of its own, set away from others. It can’t just
disappear, or be overcome by another feeling. It is just
something you know when you find it.

To me, nature is the most beautiful thing in the world and my
greatest inspiration. It outshines all my other inspirations. It
is also the only thing that a soul can rely on. It is constant
and everlasting, changing and forming, spreading and growing,
touching and reaching across boundaries of life. Not many people
have a love for nature anymore; I do. It’s my life, my greatest
inspiration, my greatest knowledge, my closest friend, my
healing source, and my creator.

There is beauty in every creation of nature. They all possess
such purity of life, such untouched desires and cores. They
aren’t tainted with knowledge, with passion, with thoughts and
feelings. They are simple forming with time. They are complex
still, but they aren’t overflowing with it. They don’t worship
themselves, but rather life. They know not of corruption they
only know life.

Unfortunately, the truth is that nature creates mankind and
mankind destroys it. A sad thought it is indeed. Nature is fuel,
a source of life. It isn’t just for admiring, but it is also for
honoring. We can honor some great God, fellow mortals as actors
and athletes, as lovers and family, as friends and companions,
but we can’t honor Nature? Even sadder if you ask me.

I shake my head and wonder why more marketers aren’t
writing. The internet has made it possible for anyone
to spill their thoughts onto the screen.

It doesn’t take a genius or tons of talent. It just
takes patience and persistence.

When I started writing, I was the worst writer that
ever lived. I still can’t believe I was crazy enough
to send out some of those early articles.

If it wasn’t for the freedom of the net, I would have
been dead in the water. No editor would have ever
published my ghastly ramblings.

Luckily it was my ezine and I could practice and learn.
With only 300 subscribers I had nothing to lose.

Eventually I started becoming readable. Not very good
just readable.

My good friend the internet let me keep plodding along.

Now after tons of practice and learning, I can consider
myself a writer. I can’t even conceive of doing anything
else.

The internet has literally changed my life.

I’ve gone from the 95% trying to make a dollar online,
to working when I feel like it. Truthfully I can’t
even call it work.

I get paid to have fun.

If I can do it so can you. Let your articles be your
training ground.

Over time you’ll start your own viral marketing machine.

Some of the long term benefits to you and your business
are:

* Instant branding

* More online friends than you can shake a stick at

* Tons of sites linking to you

* More joint venture offers than you could ever accept

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The internet is a writer’s paradise and if you’re not
taking advantage of it, shame on you.

Do yourself and your business a favor and start writing.
You’ll not only help yourself, you may just help others
along the way.

About the Author

John Colanzi has been writing for the Internet for 3
years. He has shown hundreds of webmasters how to use
mindset medication to join the ranks of the successful,
prosperous marketers. Subscribe now to his “Street
Smart Marketing Newsletter and put your business on
the fast track. mailto:streetsmart@rapidreply.net

Obtaining the skills for writing good business correpondence is important; a job seeker needs to send customised job application letters. A secretary needs to send out an official invitation letter. A purchasing assistant may need to prepare an invoice. It does not necessarily imply that you must just have a good standard of English. You should remember that correspondence means to communicate a message. It is a two-way effort between the writer and the receiver.

Here are some tips:

The Printing

The quality of your printing reflects the stature of your own company. Ensure that your printer has an adequate ink cartridge and the printing is even. Do not set your printer to “quick draft” as the quality is not up to standard and may not be easy for the receiver to read.

Write To The Point

The structure of the business correspondence should always be to the point and not be opened to various interpretations. Your writing should not be repetitive and a business letter should preferably be a page long. If your receiver does not have any background information, you should include an attachment with the cover letter.

The Title Of Business Correspondence

The title of your business correspondence should preferably be a line long and not have a font that is too big. If the title is not clear, your letter may be put under the KIV tray of your receiver. There are many senior executives who empower their personal assistants to sort out their corporate mail.

Short Sentences Your sentences should not be too long. They should be consistent with the theme of the correspondence and you should avoid jargons or quotations.

Watch Your Punctuation

Punctuation rules should be adhered. With the popularity of office software tools, presentation bullets are used indiscriminately in all business correspondence. Please use this tool appropriately and maintain the official nature of your writing.

The Receiver’s Details

It will reflect very badly on your professionalism if you make an error in the name or designation of your receiver. It implies that you do not take the business correspondence as important.

Your Contact

You should leave your direct contact number or even an email address if you need an urgent reply from the receiver. With the improvement in telecommunications, it is expected that the message be relayed in the quickest manner. It is not a good idea just to leave your corporate number with a voice mail.

Remember To Proofread

It is a good habit to proofread your writing; do not just rely on spell-check or grammar-check to do the job. As an illustration, after careful reading of your business writing, you may discover that your writing is too casual for the situation.

Fax Cover Letter

If your are sending out a fax, you must remember to include a cover letter to accompany the rest of the correspondence. This is to ensure that your receiver obtains all your correspondence.

Your Signature

You must remember to sign your business correspondence, where necessary.

About The Author

Colin Ong TS is the Managing Director of MR=MC Consulting (http://www.mrmc.com.sg). Please email him at colin@mrmc.com.sg if your corporate website requires free content by him.