HOW TO MARKET YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS AND DRIVE MASSIVE TRAFFIC

My first day in a marketing class the lecturer asked me what the relationship between the product and the market place. Those days I was newbie in marketing and all I knew about marketing was the word sales. Therefore I had no clue what marketing was. To me marketing was sales.

The lecturer went to tell me that the role of marketing in an organization is to chart the way forward on:

1. What products to produce.
2. Whom to distribute the products to.
3. What channels to use and
4. How to communicate about the product.

The lecturer concluded that the above is what marketers refer to as the marketing mix and is the core of any marketing activity.

For the first time in my life a person talked about marketing without mentioning the word sales, promotion, advertisement etc.

The role of marketing in your business is to enable your business attract and keep customers. These customers must be willing and are able to pay for your products. Your fist role as a marketer is to locate your and identify your customers in terms of where they live, work, pray and play.

After locating them, you need to understand and know their needs, wants, desing values, lifestyle, and demographics, once it’s accomplished; you need to create products that will satisfy their needs and wants.

After all this is done you will need to take your products to where they can access it and communicate that information to your customers. And that is marketing.

Marketing plays a critical role in meeting the customer’s needs, by producing products that create utility. Utility is the ability of your product to satisfy both functional and emotional needs of your customers.

Always remember satisfaction of your customers is the goal for your business. For a product to offer satisfaction its consumers, it must have benefits that are inherent to it, such that it will always satisfy that customer every time he/she uses that product. That is commonly referred to as a product at performance.

A satisfied customer will tell others and this will lead to more customers and a good product is supposed to do exactly that. In marketing this is referred to as having a customer for life that leaping maximum benefits from the entire life of a customer.

When you have a customer for life, buying x units every day, continuously for 30 years, this is called customer value.

X customers multiplied by y customer values multiplied by z years is what is called brand equity. High brand equity is a dream of every marketer worth his/her salt.

Always remember that marketing is a process. Your online business makes money by satisfying your target customers’ needs. This is based on their lifestyles, values, needs demographics and any other underlying attributes of your target customer segments.

Catch up with my other articles on marketing online business at my blog's archives.

Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for market segmentation across many products, new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name, this includes t http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ .

How to drive massive sales by using market segmentation: By Francis K. Kamau.

Mass market is dead, people are no longer part of the one big family, but are members of small “tribes”. These “tribes” share a lot in common and it’s due to this that marketing has evolved from mass marketing to segment marketing.

Each of this “tribe” share similar psychographics and demographics. The global market which is what we serve online opened up geographical borders, making it hard for anyone who uses geographical segments to succeed. Thus the marketer is left with other demographics, psychographics, needs, and other segmentation criteria to succeed online.

With the customer having many options to get his /her needs satisfied and with a lot of product information allover the internet, you as the marketer must understand which “tribe” your customers come from and who they are. This process is what marketers call market segmentation.

Market segmentation is making of markets segments. A market segment is a group of people or organizations sharing some common attributes. These attributes could be demographics, i.e. similar race, come from the same geographical location, same age groups, and same social economics attributes. A market segment could be psychographics oriented i.e. similar lifestyles, values etc. A market segment could be based on needs, i.e. patients in a private hospital, passengers in a train, and football fans in a stadium.

In marketing segmentation you as a marketer must make sure that a market segment is homogeneous. This is within the segment and in their shared attribute (s).
But a market segment must be heterogeneous across different segments i.e. the football fans segment is different from the patient is a mental hospital, even if both segments could be shouting at the same time. This is because their motivation to shout is different between the football fans segment and the mental hospital patients segment.

Market segmentation therefore is a classification of your market into distinct segments having similar demographics, or psychographics or needs, or lifestyles, or purchasing patterns.

Market segmentation presents you with the “tribes” that your product fits best. These “tribes” are what marketers call market segments. A market segment consists of a group of customers who share a similar set of needs. As a marketer you must identify the most suitable segment for your products and services.

Unlike the mass market product, the market segment product is fine tuned to fit the profile of the intended segment. The marketing mix which includes the price, product, promotion, people and place must fit with the target market.

This way you will be able have niches that requires their own marketing strategies, marketing mix and a certain way of selling to them. This way, you will achieve your marketing efficacy that will improve you sales tremendously. This way your profit and overall customer satisfaction will improve for the better.
Get more tips on marketing online at http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ . and you can also visit the following blogs for other tips on online marketing: http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ Plus you can also catch my other articles here at: http://onlinemarketing-articles.blogspot.com/ .
About the Author
Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for market segmentation across many products, new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name.

BECOME SCIENTIFIC IN YOUR ARTICLE MARKETING SKILLS

The aim of this site is to enable and to give tips to the online marketers who will use article marketing as a way of driving traffic to their sites. Your site is your online store. I would like to share my insights on things that have worked for me in my article writing. Ask yourself, whom I’m I writing for. Research is important, writing is both and art and a science. If you are writing about Health, read magazines, journals, to get the most recent information. First the title, it is very important that the title be a summary of what the body of the article is all about. Don’t forget to use relevant keywords on your title. I hope by now in your internet marketing you have a list of directories that publish articles. This is important because for your article to get noticed, Submission into as many article directories as possible is important. People always ask me what the right number of words in an article. There is no right number of words; however an article of less than 400 words is not an article. To be on the safe side let your article is between 400 words and 1000 words. If you have more information and you pass the 1000 mark, I would advice you to cut the article into two, and have part one and two, you are not writing a journal. Do not put so many links in your articles; otherwise it will look like it’s a billboard to the reader. Articles that describe a way of doing things i.e. how to; are better that the essay type, you are not teaching the readers you are giving them a solution. People in the internet business are always looking for better ways of doing something. Giving a summary at the end is a good writing skill. Lastly, always use the resource box to your advantage; it’s your brand, exploit everything. Remembers you are branding and marketing yourself with your article. Use your article as an ad. Submission to as many directories, magazines and papers as possible is equally important. If you do it right you will see results after about 10 online articles, your business will start to grow.

Make more money with your blog by Francis K. Kamau

This article is for those of us who at least have a blog, if you do not have a blog already, please visit http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com/ and get tips of how you can start your own blog. It will take you 15 minutes to set one up. If you don't have anything to sell in your blog, these two sites http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ will help you in that too

In the world of internet business, getting traffic is an uphill task. Keeping them coming back is even harder. There is a lot of information on how to get traffic to your blog, starting from pay per click to traffic exchange programs but very little information on how to retain them. We are always trying to get more traffic but never trying to keep them coming back for more.

Your blog need to get traffic as well as make them come for more, over and over again. You need what marketers call repeat customers. In marketing is said that repeat customers constitute a big percentage of your sales and advert clicks. With repeat customers you reduce your cost of advertising because your visitors already know your blog and you benefit from the best and free advertising mode in the world, commonly known as word of mouth.

For your blog to accomplish its core objective of driving sales for your products, affiliate programs and Adsense money, you will you need to have a clear purpose or mission. Before designing or adding a new post to your blog, always ask yourself the following question. What is my business, who is my customer, what do my customers value?

Always remember: All successful companies have a mission statement. They stand for something. A mission is like a guardian angel, invisible hand that is always guiding you. Your mission can be written or unwritten; it doesn't matter, but you need to know it by heart.

Your mission written or unwritten should be a) Market oriented: This means that it is for the target market that you want to tap. It should be reassuring the visitors of your commitment to delivering value and meeting their expectations. b) Customer focused: This means that each customer will feel the mission every time they visit the blog. It should appeal to the heart. c) Achievable: A mission is a commitment, it is not some statements to make you feel good but a commitment to something, thus unachievable mission is nothing but a set of words.

The above will make your mission TRUE.

With a TRUE mission on your blog, your viewers will always come back for more and you will get the right traffic for your products. If this doesn't work, then you will surprise all of us.

About the Author

Francis K. Kamau has been in market research for the last 12 years. He has managed market research project for new product development, customer satisfaction, advertisement research among other research projects. He has 5 blogs to his name.

BRANDING YOUR BLOG: THE TEN SUCCESS TIPS by Francis K. Kamau

As a blogger the need for branding is huge. You cannot achieve the desired marketing growth if your lack proper marketing communication. A blog will do just that, it will communicate and help your online marketing. But how do you brand? The following are ten tips on successful branding of your blog.

1. Segment the market: This way you will be able to identify your primary target and develop benefits that will appeal to them. With a segment for your product or your blog, you will be able to specifically target your offering; you will be having a clear picture of who your intended customers are.

2. Know your target: understanding why they are buying from you is a big move that will help you in tailoring your products and designing your blog. Understand what sort of people they are, know their nitty gritty. This can be achieved by using subscription to be able to talk to them as often as you could make it personal

3. Have your unique selling proposition: This will make your offer unique. You will be different from your competition. Differentiate the way you sell your products, how you treat your customers. Have consistency in messages fonts, color schemes. Get professional advice if you must but do it.

4. Know your competition: Your competitors will crush you if they get the chance, know them, and understand their plans, their customers, and their offer. Track, monitor their every move, anticipate their moves, it's a chess game, don't let the check mate you.

5. Turn your brand inside out: Look at what is working and retain, throw away what is not working, innovate, turn your brand younger by the years, extend your brand, give your customers new experiences and change the rules of the game. It's the only way out.

6. Create loyalty: People by nature want to be part of something larger than them. People need a hero. They hero worship anything bigger than them. Niche marketing is your best shot. It creates niches which eventually turn into small tribes. Tribal brands are worshiped by clique of people and guarded secretly.

7. Be a good brand: A good brand is consistent, gives clear messages to its customer. Provides details of its benefits. Its benefits include both the extrinsic and intrinsic of the brand. It caters for its customers both functionally and emotionally. A good brand keeps its promise

8. Give consistency in quality: Consistence should be all round. The product quality should be the same. A bottle of coke is the same whether in a store in Atlanta or hawker cart in Tajikistan. Quality of a brand is in the color scheme, the way the name is written. Consistency is part of the promise. Part of the offer. It reassures your customer of lifetime relationship.

9. Be distinct, relevant and memorable: Since you know your customers very well, then you know what they want, why they want it, and you will always be able to remain relevant. While your competitors are stuck in old ways, you become distinct, standing out. Have easy tags, lines that even kids can recall. Live memorably to live longer

10. Offer more than your competitors: This is the golden rule in marketing. Yes, with all the above then you will be offering more than your competitors.

By adhering to these ten tips in your branding, you will leap benefits by getting traffic and your marketing online efforts will start paying off.

Get more tips on blogging for profit at http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com/ and you can also visit the following blogs for other tips on online marketing: http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ and http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ .

About the Author

Francis K Kamau has been in marketing for the last 12 years. He has experience ranging from advertisement research to New Product Development. He currently owns five blogs.

MARKETING ONLINE: GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG FOREVER by Francis K. Kamau

As a business blogger you must be having the desire to have many people like and come more times to your blog. You need to drive and maintain traffic. Traffic drives you. You also need to enjoy high search engine optimization. For you to achieve this, you must make your blog a brand. A brand so strong, that it will stand out against your competitors.

But how do you make your blog a brand? Many times people use the word brand without actually understanding what a brand mean. The marketers define a brand as:- * A name or a term * A sigh, symbol Thus a brand is a combination of a name, sign. A symbol well designed to enable identification and differentiation by the customers. Without a clear brand, your blog is a generic; your competition can attack you in ease. For your blog to get to the brand league, it must have what the marketers would call, the blog quality. This will bring your blogging ability out and make you succeed both in blogging and marketing online.

The blog quality is the ability of your blog to perform its function which includes retaining the visitors, reliability among other varied attributes. As a blogger, you need create a blog that will stand out as a brand. For your blog to become a brand it has to be maintained and protected, always remember a brand identifies you and so should be your blog.

Being a business blogger, you need a tool for the buyer as well as the sellers. For the buyers, your blog will help them in identification and elicits the perceived benefits. A brand is a promise to the buyers and your blog must be a promise to its visitors. It's a mark of quality and your blog must be a mark of quality.

To succeed in branding your blog must offer consistency, bundled benefits and it must never fail. Giving your blog a name and good colors is a good thing, but that does not make it a brand. For it to become a brand the blog must be more than just the name or symbol; it must capture the customer's preference/loyalty. Your blog must represent customer's perceptions, feelings, expectation and benefits of the product you are selling.

A branding expert suggests a brand reside in the mind of consumers and over time a brand develops good brand equity and so will be your blog.

As a brand your blog must develop a master plan based on its understanding of its primary customers, their needs and what drives them to buy from you. You as a blogger must understand what makes your customer tickle?

Your blog must deliver strength by:- * Relevance to its core customers * Uniqueness * Differentiation from its competitors and other bloggers

In summary, for your blog to become a brand, you must do the following: * Your blog must offer unique selling proposition and be different in solving your customers need. * Your blog must offer bundle of benefits to its core customers * Your blog must build its equality over time or it will lose relevancy and die. In short your blog must live, survive and conquer. Based on that, how is your blog doing to remain become or remain a brand? Always remember branding is about the customer's perception your offer. This perception is based on how satisfied the customer is.

Make it happen and enjoy repeat traffic to your blog. Get more tips on blogging for profit at http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com/ and you can also visit the following blogs for other tips on online marketing: http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com/ and http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com/ .

About the Author

Francis Kamau has been in marketing for over 12 years, his experience in marketing spans over 30 countries in Africa and his specialization includes advertisement, market research, new product development among other areas. Currently he owns 5 blogs.

4 Genuine Methods For Starting A Home Business by Richard Larcombe

Starting a home business is becoming ever more popular. The reason? We can all do with some extra cash and the fast growing Internet is the place to provide you with a home business opportunity. With a little research you will be amazed at what you will find and the resources available.

One work at home opportunity is Affiliate marketing, for which there are thousands of products to promote. Individuals or companies are quite willing to pay handsome commissions for other people to promote products and services over the Internet. To make the most of this home business idea, you will need to carry out some research. The best way to start is to find a hungry market, then find a product to feed that market.

To ensure your home business idea is a success, follow these 4 genuine ways to promote your chosen product.

#1:Writing articles about the subject and submitting them to directories. You can write them yourself or pay someone to write your articles for you.

#2: Using a Squidoo lens to promote the product. This is like a single web page and is free to set up.

#3: Creating an Adwords campaign to promote the product. This is paid advertising, and if done correctly can be very lucrative.

#4: Creating a blog for example at Wordpress or Blogger and adding regular posts about the subject of your home business idea.

When starting a home business you have to build credibility, so that people who start to read your blogs or articles will begin to trust you if you have good content. Eventually they will buy from you. You don’t have to be an expert writer, as material for written information can be found on the Internet.

The good thing with articles and blogs are that the content is out there for a long time, so you can earn an income for months or even a year or two down the line. This can be a useful income stream for your home business idea.

Now to begin with you may think that this is beyond you, but with a bit of application and a will to succeed you might surpass yourself. Any home business opportunity does not require you to be a computer expert; so long as you have pc basic skills you can apply yourself and learn how to run a real home business.

Starting a home business is an ambition of many people, but not all are prepared to take action. If you need that of bit extra cash, then look for a home business idea online. Once you get started you can then start to build it into a home based business to give yourself a secure future.


About the Author

Get a free report and some great courses for starting a home business Also visit http://www.squidoo.com/pureprofits

LEARN HOW TO CREATE ADVERTS THAT WILL DRIVES TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG. PART 2 by Francis K. Kamau

I hope the first part of this article has been helpful. Now you can be able to ascertain whether your product is at introduction stage or not. For this part, I am going to write on the remaining three product’s life cycle, which is the growth stage, the mature stage and the decline stage. The Growth Stage: By this stage the market knows about your product and people have tried it and liked it. The stores are keeping your product enhancing your distribution. This stage is characterized by rapid market expansion. By now more and more customers are recruited. Customers make repeat purchase. At this stage, your product reaps massive benefits. The advertisement expenditure reduces and actually you start to realize the much desired results or profits. This continues until the mature stage sets in. This stage the advertisement should be geared towards, brand building, customer satisfaction and adverts that recognize the role your customers have played in growing your product. The Mature stage: At the mature stage everybody wants to get on board and reap the benefits. Your competition is coming up with substitutes. Other alternative solutions to the customers are competing with your product. Competition becomes horribly stiff. The number of your customers reduces. This is the point that what matters most is not the product but brand and how well you have been treating your customers. If they are unsatisfied they can punish you by taking the substitutes being offered by the competitors. This is the time for a new product. If you feel that your product has converted itself to a brand then it is time to extend. To survive you need what is called brand extension or innovate to new product. Extending your brand is rejuvenating and restarting the cycle. If a product in this stage is not rejuvenated at the mature stage, the products gets to homeward, decline sales decline and RIP. The advertisement in this stage should be about new ways of using the product and if you have an extension of the brand, you will need to talk about it.

For each advertisement that you come up with, one must understand the status on your product’s life cycle. This will give you the advertisement strategy. Your question of what you want the advertisement to do for you will be answered by the following answers: a) Inform/create awareness b) Building your brand c) Satisfying your target customers d) Introducing extension of the brand

If you understand your product life cycle then your advertisement campaigns will reap benefits for you business because they always be relevant to the product life cycle. Get product to sell at: http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com, register for PTC at http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com or get blogging tips at http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com.

About the Author

Francis Kamau has been in marketing for over 12 years, his experience in marketing spans over 30 countries in Africa and his specialization includes advertisement, market research, new product development among other areas. Currently he owns 5 blogs.

LEARN HOW TO CREATE ADVERTS THAT WILL DRIVES TRAFFIC TO YOUR BLOG. PART 1 by Francis K. Kamau

Today one can have a blog without any hassle. Getting a blog is as easy as 123. If you want to get tips on how to get a blog of your own right now, visit: http://makeblogforprofit.blogspot.com. But that is not the end, one need traffic to get value from the blog. For one to drive traffic to their blog one must advertise. This cost money and in the long run if one does not get the amount of traffic expected then that is a loss and it mean more money.

The role of advertising is getting people to know about the existence of our products. Some of you could also be trying to refer; the point is we never rest. We try Google Adwords, and many other pay per click services. But after all is said and done, you need to understand what you want your advertisement to do.

Critical success factor in advertisement is to understand why you are advertising. So every time you are about to launch a new advert campaign and you are about to start checking the economic benefits of the keywords that you want to use, ask yourself this question, why are you advertising? This will tell you whether you want to inform about your new product, or you want to reinforce and already existing product or you want to rejuvenate a dwindling product.

Introduction to the Product Life Cycle Let’s first understand some basic factors about product and what the marketers call the product cycle. A product life cycle is like a human life cycle. We are conceived, born, we become teenagers.mature, get old and eventually die. Each one of us must go through this cycle. A product goes through a cycle too. Understanding your product’s life cycle will save you a lot of time and money as it will answer the question of why you are advertising.

The following is a product life cycle stages: 1. Introduction stage 2. Growth stage 3. Mature stage 4. Decline stage Introduction Stage: This is when a product has just been introduced to the market. Nobody knows about it and you as the marketer, the affiliate, the producer must educate the customers. The customer need to know the new product existence, this is called awareness creation. The customer need to be educated on the product uses, the benefits, why should they buy it, the pricing issues and where found, who is selling it.

The marketer needs to come up with a pull strategy this is to get people to try the new product this is by advertising the right message. The following is just a hypothetical introduction advert. The product initial message: “Introducing a revolutionary product that changes your hair from white to black by just adding it to you drinking water once daily. The products benefits are: “Now you do not have take that drive to the hairdresser and wait for eternity, just do it at home and if you don’t like the result change�. The price and the availability: “The new product has the right price for all of us, its cost is US$ 30 for a 30 days pack and it’s available in all supermarkets or you can order online at…�

But you will need to have had push strategy: this is about encouraging distributors and dealers to stock display and promotes the new product.

This stage of introduction calls for expensive advertisement budget and it does not benefit your product alone but the entire market for that product benefits, this means including your competitors. But eventfully the sales will start to grow. In the product cycle we will now be in the growth stage. This is the end of part one of this article, we continue with the other stages in part 2 of this article. You can visit the following sites and get free product to sell and free affiliate programs to register: http://cashmoneylink.blogspot.com and http://ptrptctips.blogspot.com .

About the Author

Francis Kamau has been in marketing for over 12 years, his experience in marketing spans over 30 countries in Africa and his specialization includes advertisement, market research, new product development among other areas. Currently he owns 5 blogs.