Before we get into the blog post for today, I recorded a video to accompany it since the topic seemed to beg for it.

How are you using video for your business?

You’ve heard that using video to market your business can bring incredible results. But do the benefits outweigh the effort it takes to put your video online? In a word, Yes! Shooting a video, editing and formatting it, uploading it to the internet with the right title and description takes a bit of time. But the payoff for video marketing can be tremendous. Here are seven real benefits of marketing with video:

1. Personal Connection – Especially for internet based businesses, the personal connection with your potential market is a huge selling factor. With video, your audience can truly get to know you, eye-to-eye. They get to see that you are indeed a real, live person. They start building a deeper relationship with you and feel as if they actually have met you.

2. Social proof – There’s an old proverb: “Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” On the internet it’s so easy to be a fake and a fraud. People are skeptical about claims they read online, and rightfully so. But video puts a face to your words and makes you more believable and trustworthy.

3. Traffic – People are watching 2 BILLION videos per day on YouTube alone! That’s a whole lot of traffic you’re missing if you’re not marketing yourself with video. It’s free and easy to add your video to a large number of the video sites available online.

4. Emotional Influence – The classic horror movie is a great example of how the audio has an emotional effect on us. The creepy music comes in, immediately cluing you in that something bad is about to happen. Now, imagine combining that audio with powerful video cues to influence the emotions of the listener and create a much more compelling message than with just text alone.

5. Portability – Maybe even more so then articles and ebooks, video is portable. iPhones, Smartphones, iPads and all kinds of other devices allow video to be seen on the go. You can also allow people to download video easily so they can view it over and over again.

6. Demonstrations – Reviews, case studies and examples are great ways to sell products and services. It’s the reason why infomercials make millions of dollars. Now there’s no need for you to be as annoying as the Sham-Wow guy to make money with video, you just need to create videos that show and tell your potential customers why your product will be helpful for them.

7. Engagement – There are many reports available online to show that video boosts response and conversion rates. When someone is watching a video, you have their full attention – eyes and ears. Unlike with the written word, they’re not likely skip ahead or gloss over important information. Most people will watch a video from beginning to end, allowing you to clearly create a message and call to action that engages your audience.

Overall, video is an effective marketing strategy that is only growing in popularity. Since video is here to stay, it’s time to check out the options and see how quick and easy video marketing can be.

Successful press releases can really benefit your business. That’s a known fact. However, a lot of business owners don’t think about the long-term impact they can have.

If you get an instant influx of customers, many of them will remain customers for life. So press releases are not just about the immediate business they can give you. Instead, their main benefit is what they can do long term.

Unfortunately, not all press releases are created equal. A bad press release may not even get published.

Here are five ways to write a good release:

Make it interesting

It’s often been said that the worst thing you can be in business is to be boring. The same goes true for press releases. Make sure the subject of your press release is interesting. It has to have something that differentiates it from the rest of the press releases out there.

Editors get a lot of press releases. So if there is nothing about yours that makes it stand out, your chances of getting it accepted are zero.

Have an exciting headline

If you have a bad headline, the editors won’t give it the time of day. Make sure the most compelling part of your story is listed in the headline.

You want to start with your best foot forward. If your headline doesn’t grab the reader’s attention, the rest of your release won’t get read no matter how good it is.

Keep it short

Ideally, the release should be five hundred words or less. In other words, it should not be more than one page. Editors have a lot of stories to get though, and anything that is too long is likely to get thrown in the trash.

Keep your sentences brief as well. This breaks up the text and makes it more readable.

Avoid advertising

Remember, the editors don’t care about your business. They want a story that their readers are going to find interesting. If you just write a long ad for your business, your release isn’t going to get read.

Write about newsworthy events

You obviously can’t write about just anything. For instance, having a sale on paintbrushes might be important to your company, but it’s not going to be interesting enough to get readers.

Instead, write about things you know customers would care about. For instance, if you just took a poll of your clients on something, write about that.

Also, consider doing some sort of fundraising community event. It doesn’t even have to raise money. Anything that gets the community involved will be interesting to the press.

The bottom line is, press releases are one of the most underutilized strategies by businesses for getting customers. When you do them the right way, you will reap the benefits for a long time.

Promotion is one of the four parts of the “marketing mix” along with product, price and distribution. It is the communication between buyer and seller. You may think first of advertisement when you think of promotion, but promotion really is so much more than just running an ad. Try thinking of promotion as the “fun” part of marketing as it allows you to use your creativity. You will also want to polish your communication skills for any promotional activity.

The purpose of promotion is to stimulate potential purchasers towards the buying decision. The specific purpose of any promotional activity or campaign may be to influence, to build awareness, to provide information, to increase demand for a product, to reinforce the brand or to differentiate a product in the marketplace. Make sure you know your purpose before you make your promotion plans.

In general, thinking about promotion for your business should get you looking into each of these five categories: personal selling, advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion, and publicity or public relations. Personal selling means being very comfortable in a sales conversation about your business. Advertising these days can be very inexpensive or as costly as you are willing to spend and should not be ignored. Direct marketing now can be anything from a postcard campaign to personal Facebook messages. The area of sales promotion often opens up creative channels such as coupons, contests, free samples, exhibitions and many more. Publicity or public relations is getting others to help spread your message whether this is done for free or for a fee. A great marketing plan for your business will have addressed each of these promotional areas in some way.

If you’re trying to build an opt-in list, and of course most internet marketing experts recommend that you do, then you’ll want to create a squeeze page. These single web pages are designed to work as landing pages whose sole task is to collect opt-in list subscribers. Squeeze pages are landing pages created to solicit opt-in email addresses from prospective subscribers. Let’s take a look at how to build one:

Step #1 Get your website ducks in a row. Do you have a domain name, hosting company and a method for creating a web page? A squeeze page is a web page so your first step is to find or open whatever programming software or system you’re using. If you already have a website then you’ll just add a page to that site. If you’re starting from scratch then your hosting company will likely have templates you can use or you can hire someone to create a web page for you. You can also create a web page with software like DreamWeaver or a WordPress template.

Step #2 Lay out your page. Your squeeze page will not want to have a multitude of graphics or flashy features. Everything on this page should be focused on getting your visitor to subscribe to your list, that’s it. You will have some formatting in the form of a headline, bullets, a call to action and a form. You may also want a color scheme, logo or image that helps brand your page to your business. However, before you publish this page, make sure everything on the page supports the task of motivating opt-ins.

Step #3 Write your headline. Your headline, like a book title, has to capture the attention of your visitor in a matter of seconds and motivate them to read further. Make a promise, offer them something valuable, always make sure you’re keeping your visitor’s needs in mind when creating your headline.

Step #4 List the benefits subscribing or signing up for your email list offers. Bullet points are the easiest to read and you can highlight keywords in bold print to draw the reader’s eye through the copy. Remember, benefits are not features. Benefits are about what signing up for your email list will do for your prospect. How will it benefit them?

Step #5 Write your call to action. Your call to action is essentially a statement that tells your visitors what you want them to do – sign up now!

Step #6 Create your subscription form. You can use a number of services to create this form, or if you know how to write code, you can do it yourself. You need to collect an email address and a name if you want to address future communications to this person directly. “Dear Amy” sounds much better and more personal than “Dear Reader.” Paste the code onto your squeeze page and you’re ready to publish.

Step #7 Follow-up. You may want to follow up with a confirmation to make sure the person intended to subscribe and a thank you for subscribing.

Once your squeeze page is up and running you have two remaining tasks: test and track it for success. You may find that a little change in the wording of your call to action for example may motivate more opt ins, or maybe your headline could use a little tweaking.

You’ll also want to market your squeeze page through various marketing methods like listservs, forums, general online marketing, PPC advertising and finally you’ll want to provide your subscribers with all of the wonderful content you promised them. Once you have the ball rolling and have built a notable opt-in list, you can then focus on using that list to boost profits.

There’s a general cycle to internet business, a series of phases. The first phase is generally to drive traffic, increase awareness and build your subscriber or opt-in list. The second phase is to motivate subscribers to become customers. This is generally accomplished by offering entry level products like low cost reports and ebooks. However, once you have customers, how do you continue to increase sales and motivate purchases? What’s the next step?

Motivating customers into action involves a few different strategies working cohesively together. The first is to continue to offer quality information. You want to continue to give them a reason to come back to your website. And you want them to think of you often, particularly when they have a need for your information, products or services. This is accomplished by continuing to reach them through your autoresponder, social networking, blog posts and other marketing strategies.

Continue building your community. The more people feel like they belong and they can relate to your brand and personality, the more they are likely to become repeat customers. And they’re more likely to recommend you to others. Social networking, blogging and social networking badges and buttons on your website are excellent ways to accomplish this.

Reward your customers for their loyalty. Loyalty programs help accomplish a few things. They make customers feel appreciated. They motivate purchases because loyalty programs and rewards often come with privileged promotions, special pricing and exclusive information. And they help build your community.

Build a marketing funnel. It makes sense to have a tiered level of products or services in your catalog. If your first entry point cost $5 you don’t want your next product to cost $500. There has to be a mid range too. And like wise, some people may be ready, after buying your first entry level product, to buy the whole cow as they say. So make sure you have larger priced items available too. Provide choices and a tiered level of products or services.

Tap into those all important buying triggers. Your customers will respond to:

* Emotion
* Scarcity
* Urgency
* Authority
* Credibility
* Liking

Embrace these buying triggers and use them in your communications and promotions.

Finally, make sure it’s easy to buy. Sometimes we don’t realize that there are artificial blocks to making a purchase. Maybe we ask for too much information during the checkout process, maybe the call to action isn’t clear. Eliminate any obstacles to making a purchase and make it extremely easy to buy from you.

Turning customers into repeat customers and motivating sales is an ongoing process. However, once you create good systems and procedures here, it can essentially be an automatic and repeatable process.

I can’t wait for August because August means NAMS in Atlanta. If you have never attended the Niche Affiliate Marketing System Conference, then you need to! I’ll be there and I want to meet you. NAMS provides the best training I have ever seen for marketing your business online.

NAMS was sold out, but there have been a few cancellations, so their loss is your gain! There are only 20 slots open, so head on over right now and use coupon code “LASTCHANCE” (without the quotes) and you will receive $300 off of your conference registration.

bit.ly//avG1DT

Again, the coupon code is “LASTCHANCE” (without the quotes) and as of this writing there are only 20 seats left, so act now!

I look forward to seeing you there!

You know the importance of marketing your business. You may even have written a marketing plan and are now implementing it. But is simply marketing your business going to bring you the results you need? Do you have a way to measure the success of your marketing? If your marketing isn’t successful, do you know how to find out where you went wrong?

These questions are some of the important reasons why you need a properly set-up marketing strategy plan. A marketing strategy plan will help you gain maximum benefit from your marketing. It goes a step beyond a marketing plan.

A marketing plan describes the activities you are going to do to promote your product or service. A marketing strategy plan establishes the basis for your marketing and provides the goals for all your marketing activities. It gives you a tool you can use to define your market, position yourself, and increase your sales.

Here are some of the things a well thought-out marketing strategy will tell you. This information will help you gain maximum results from all of your marketing efforts.

Describe your business and your objectives. This is where you will write down what your business does and what product or service it provides. You will also consider what the goal of your business is. When you have established your goals, you will be able to choose marketing activities to help you reach those objectives.

Describe your products or services. This describes what you do and how you provide your product or service. It is important to understand exactly what service your business provides so you can tell others about it effectively. This may seem obvious, but many business owners can’t describe exactly what it is they do. Including this in your marketing strategy plan will ensure that you understand what you do and why it’s important, and can relay that information to others.

Profile your target market. Who are you providing your product or service for? This will tell you who you should be marketing to. Research your market to find out what appeals to them about your product. This will help you market it to them effectively. Learn everything you can about your market so you can speak their language and make sure your marketing is appropriate.

Know your business’s role in relation to your competition. This will help you understand your unique position in the marketplace. Find out how you’re different than your competitors, whether it be stronger or weaker. You can use this in your marketing to make yourself stand out from the competition.

Your marketing strategy plan will provide the goals for all your marketing activities and help you reach them. It will also simplify your marketing because you have done your research ahead of time. For these reasons, a marketing strategy plan helps ensure that you gain maximum benefit from your marketing.

The world of a blogger is often lonely.  For a solopreneur with a blog, it can be a frustrating process.  You pull from the depths of your creativity for ideas for posts, you spend hours crafting them and honing the words to be just right, you post and you sit with the silence that often follows.  Sometimes you have comments or even better, dialogue, in response to your posts.  Usually, you just hope that your blog subscribers are checking, reading and enjoying.  The truth is that it’s almost impossible to know who is reading what you have written.  This is no excuse not to write nor is it a reason to slack off in your quantity or quality.  Because people are reading and you never know who they may be.

This idea came home to us this week when we discovered that this blog had been quoted by a writer for Forbes.com.  Here’s the link to read the article about time management and distractions for solopreneurs, a topic we cover periodically.  The writer, Linda C. Smith, has an impressive list of writing credentials.  She is experienced herself in the entrepreneurial world as she is a writer, a mosaic artist and a distributor of a nutritional product.  I also went and explored one of Linda’s blogs and recommend it as another spot for you to generate ideas and even participate in conversation about your needs as a small business owner.

Please share your comments here about our quote on Forbes.com, Linda’s blog or your own ideas about what it’s like to be an entrepreneurial blogger.

Internet marketing seminars are created to benefit business owners, both virtual and brick and mortar. Making the choice to attend an internet marketing seminar stands to benefit both the owner and the business. Seminars are created to help direct business owners in the right direction and teach business owners how to effectively market their company and themselves.

My personal favorite internet marketing seminar by far is NAMS (Niche Affiliate Marketing System) which will be held in August this year. I would love to meet you at NAMS so register now and enter the coupon code, NAMS4FF, for $300 off your registration. You need to act quickly. As of this writing there are only 27 seats left.

When attending a seminar, the best piece of advice is to be prepared. In order to take away the most information out of a seminar, it is important to actively participate as well as contribute.

Here are some tips designed to help you succeed at your first internet marketing seminar:

Take notes! Unless you have a photographic memory, chances are you will not remember a lot of the information that was discussed during the seminar. The solution to this is to take notes, and lots of them. What may not seem important during the seminar may turn out to be a vital piece of information or advice that will lead your marketing in the right direction.

If you decide to go to NAMS be sure to take your laptop and cord to plug in. The note taking from this conference is endless…in a very good way!

Ask questions. Many seminars reserve a slot of time for questions and answers. Make the most of this time by asking questions about either information you did not understand or even broaching a new subject that was not discussed during the seminar. Do not worry about appearing unintelligent – after all, the only stupid question is the one not asked.

Discuss the information with your peers at the seminar. Most internet seminars have a chat room where users can talk with each other. By chatting with your peers, you may come upon even more information or advice. Different people also have different insights into marketing; some of your peers may share their insights which may benefit you as well. Most of your peers may also be willing to spread the word about your business on your behalf, especially if they like the person they are talking to!

Befriend the host of the seminar. Internet seminars are hosted by a plethora of different people, each with their own take on business and marketing. By forming an acquaintanceship with the host, they may allow you to contact them in the future with any questions you may have. Most hosts will also do consulting outside of the seminar, this may be useful to you as well.

There are several ways to take away a world of knowledge when attending an internet marketing seminar. By being prepared, taking notes and discussing the information with your peers, you are opening the doors to forming a successful marketing bid. Because most businesses do not survive without an effective marketing plan, be sure to make the most of your internet marketing seminar.

Taking risks is part of life, and it’s hard to succeed without ever taking any form of risk. It’s been said that “many a false step was made by standing still.” The biggest risk of all may be not doing anything and settling for a comfortable and boring existence.

You grow when you take risks. Think of the last time you felt the most alive. What were you doing? It was most likely when you were learning a new skill or doing something that challenged your limits.

Most people are willing to accept their lot in life. Even though there is a very small upside to doing the same things, they are too afraid to try something new. However, if you want to achieve extraordinary results, you need to take risks.

That doesn’t mean you should jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Your goal in business and life is to minimize risk while maximizing the upside.

Let’s use a scale of 1-10, with one being the worst possible scenario and ten being the best. If a certain marketing endeavour has an upside of 10 but a downside of 0, it might not be worth taking. For instance, what if you have $1000 marketing budget for the quarter and you decided to invest 100% of that into a new advertising campaign?

The upside is easily 10 if it works. However, the downside is a big fat 0 because economic hardship is a real possibility. This may be a risk you shouldn’t take.

However, if there is an upside of 4 but a downside of 4 with something you are considering, that doesn’t mean it’s worth it either. There just may not be enough potential in this endeavor. The goal is finding the solution with the highest potential while minimizing the risk (although it can never be eliminated entirely).

Remember that there is a 100% chance of failure for not trying. Getting rid of risk is impossible. In any decision you make there is an inherent danger. When you drive, you risk a life-threatening crash, so getting rid of risks shouldn’t be the goal. Your goal should be managing the risk. Everything you do needs to have a high upside and a relatively low downside.

The key to success in business is to manage both the risk as well as the reward. There is a point where the risk outweighs the reward, so you need to carefully evaluate it and then make the best decision possible.

However, don’t get the old “paralysis by analysis.” It’s impossible to have all the information before acting. The key is to plan out to the best of your ability the risks and rewards of possible action and then make the best decision possible. Chances are that when you really think about the worst-case scenario for most things you fear, it’s probably not as bad as you think. Get going and take those rational risks!