Knowing that your advertising efforts are paying off doesn’t just come from getting an immediate sales boost. It can take time to see the difference in your profits. But, here are some signs you’re doing things right:

• You’re getting more phone calls
• You’re getting more foot traffic.
• More repeat clients
• You’re developing an online following or getting more website traffic.

Phone Calls

It takes time for your advertising efforts to pay you off financially but if you’re getting an influx of phone calls, maybe an ad you recently placed or that new sign on your building has started something good. Consider tracking the number of phone calls or email inquiries you’re getting so you can measure it against various advertising techniques.

Foot Traffic

People often browse for something a few times before buying. More people than ever do a bit of comparison shopping, particularly for bigger ticket purchases. Try tracking your store’s foot traffic after a recent advertising campaign so you can try to measure whether or not you’re seeing a positive difference or not.

Repeat Customers

Advertising doesn’t have to be aimed at new customers only.  A new ad technique could bring older customers back as well. If possible, track how things are going with existing customers so you can ascertain what sort of ratio of business and business inquiries are a new customer versus a repeat customer.

The Internet

Offline advertising efforts can bring about online results. The reverse is also true. Ads online can bring in foot traffic. Local or in-store advertising about your website could bring traffic to your site or a social media profile. If you’re doing local advertising and you can direct people to your website, this is a great way of measuring results. There are many tools that can help you track how visitors arrived so you can try to map that back to various advertising efforts.  If you’re getting visitors to your site and an increasing number of people following you on Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites, this is a good sign and can lead to further success as well.

Regardless of what sort of advertising methods you’ve tried lately, analysing results is the key to continually evolving to meet the needs of past and future clients.  Advertising and marketing don’t necessarily pay off immediately but an ongoing focus on them will help you increase your customer base and market share continually.

Freelance blogger Sharon Hurley Hall writes today for Sherwood Signs, UK sign makers with a great reputation for creating quality signs and banners.

Regardless of your marketing avenue, or the product or service in your shopping cart, there are good and bad ways to market. And most have more to do with the implementation than anything else. Here are six marketing pitfalls to avoid in hopes that your next project is a huge success!

1. Broadcasting
In a time when you can choose to freely tweet and update your consumers (followers and fans), too many people and companies choose to broadcast their message as opposed to engaging their audience. Word-of-mouth marketing is both free and priceless! Post informative and moving pieces that at least earn you “likes” but preferably lots of comments and shares. A connection to your consumers goes two ways and it is stronger and more powerful than the one-way broadcast.

2. Hiding
Transparency is one of the best policies and practices you can adopt in marketing. When you start avoiding the tough questions, dis-allowing certain customer comments or reviews, and other diverting tactics, people start to wonder what you have to hide? If there is something you need to fix, then fix it! Something you need to make right, set it straight! You’ll find that your consumers will be far more forgiving of any short-comings when you are honest and open about them.

3. Being Boring, Predictable or Less than Authentic
Spice it up! Just because something has always been done one certain way, doesn’t mean it isn’t utterly stupid, or at least deserving of a fresh approach. Come at your marketing strategy from different angles, include input from various mindsets. If everyone at the table thinks just alike, then you’ll walk away with one uniform decision, but it may not speak to every person on the market. And while you won’t be all thing to all people, you don’t need to completely box yourself in either. Just make sure you also don’t go to the other extreme and try to seek an entire committee’s approval for every marketing decision.

4. Failure to research
Do your homework, and do it first. Determining how you want to market something is best approached once you know everything you can about what you are marketing, to whom you are marketing and exactly what message you want to send and why. Set clear goals, otherwise how do you know what you’ve achieved? And move beyond just a monetary end goal. For example, raising your customer satisfaction is an excellent goal; now how do you want to get there?

5. Logic over emotion
And when all your research is in a row, don’t forget that your consumer will still make emotional decisions that defy all logic and research. You can promote in a convincing, matter-of-fact approach, that proves rationally that you’re the better choice…. but in the end you have to connect with your consumer. Without a connection, there is no loyalty or engagement – two things that you will find imperative for growth.

6. Following the Leader
This can be following your competitions’ marketing strategies, or even the product or services offered. Being a “me too” is never good. Even being one better is not as effective as being one different, one all original and all your own. If you find yourself standing about halfway back in line behind the leaders, take a step to the side and form your own line.

Savvy Marketer Terry Ford has learned some of these lessons the hard way. One tool she always uses to make her work clean and professional is the web’s best grammar checker. Another tip she shares is for small business owners to be as active as they can be in entrepreneur organizations.

Have you noticed the explosion of coffee shops on our high streets lately? It seems whenever a shop goes out of business or some premises in a central location become available, a coffee shop isn’t far from opening.

Of course it isn’t just coffee they serve, as you’ll be able to find a range of speciality teas and sweet treats too. How has this culture come about and where is it going?

It’s all been in the last 10 years

This coffee craze is relatively new, and it’s only been around for the last 10 years or so. Before this coffee was extremely unfashionable and rarely drunk by a younger crowd. This all changed as the coffee market changed and innovated with a number of new and exciting products based around coffee. Before this we had bars and pubs but it is hard thinking back to a time before technology and coffee shops!

A well-deserved break

One of the main benefits to visiting a coffee shop is that you get to relax and take some time out of your busy schedule. City centres are becoming increasingly populated and sometimes you just need to take a break and gather back your energy. This is where coffee shops have gained momentum and if they were to go away there would be nowhere for us to sit! This would be a fateful day but luckily the popularity of these stores has anything but declined.

Mocha-chocca-what?!

It was these new-fangled drink creations that really saved the day and brought the coffee shop back. It isn’t just a black or white coffee now, as there are literally thousands of combinations to make your perfect drink. Firstly the sizes range from large to extra extra large and you can specify a number of small combinations regarding your tastes:

• Ask for dry if you want extra foam, wet if you want it without;
• Ask for double shot if you want extra espresso to make it stronger;
• Ask for it skinny if you want low fat milk;
• Ask for an extra syrup to add flavour and sweetness;
• Ask for soya if you want a dairy-free option;
• Ask for decaff if you wish to have a caffeine free drink.

Laptops and wifi

The coffee shop revolution has created a whole new market of tech savvy web users who clutch their trendy laptops in public view. It seems that surfing the web and catching up with your friends on Facebook and Twitter has become synonymous with drinking a cup of java.

Sitting on your laptop is just another way to pass the time and make the most of your cup of coffee, after all you’re paying to sit in there and have a premium drink, so make the experience last!

Steve loves coffee and can’t live without laptops for the ultimate coffee shop and web surfing experience.

Face it, a lot of people use the internet because they are bored.  There is plenty of scope for getting traffic out of providing funny content people can read or look at instead of working, and this can be a great way to build up a following for yourself as a writer, or for your blog (where you can then slyly sell them stuff, if you’re kind of cynical like I am).  Whether the purpose of your site is comedy, or you just want to write some funny articles to liven up your affiliate site and make it more appealing, it is important to keep SEO in mind and find a balance between appealing to the search engines without ruining your jokes.

Topical Humour

An easy way to do this is to write some topical humour.  Whether this is the whole theme of your article, or just a joke slipped in to a piece on whatever subject you usually blog about, look for things happening in the news, entertainment, sport and of course, the world of celebrity for inspiration.  You can then use a keyword that is temporarily trending, like the name of whichever celebrity just went out with no underwear on or got a DUI, to drive traffic to your site (which may be more about selling fitness equipment than celebrity gossip, but everybody knows that a lot of people who like celebrity gossip are fat, so you’re still hitting a ripe audience).

Sliding some jokes about current topics of interest, especially if they are a bit controversial, not only entertains your readers and lets you pick up passing traffic from searches that wouldn’t normally relate to what you do, but also tells the reader that your content is up to date.

Tags

If you can’t easily fit keywords into what you are producing, either because it ruins the flow of your comedy, or because you are using image based or video comedy like cartoon strips, memes, or YouTube videos, then you can use tags to help search engines identify what your content relates to.  Treat tags as you would any other SEO, and make sure they really are relevant and describe the kind of content you have.

Social Media

More than any other kind of content, comedy is really easy to promote through social media.  People share and re-post the things that make them laugh more than anything else, so if you have some funny content, using Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Google+ to get it in front of everyone you know can hopefully start a cycle where it will get forwarded on, shared, linked to, and found in Twitter searches as well as Google ones.  This not only brings you in more traffic from people who see the posts, but also helps your search engine rankings as it creates backlinks, and shows Google that your page is being talked about as well as looked at.

Outsourcing

If you’re not someone who is good at coming up with humorous content, you can still get yourself in front of the  almost endless audience of procrastinators out there by hiring someone who is to write for you.  Think of the blogs you find funny – in some cases you can hire those writers to work for you, but alternatively, you at least have a model for what you are trying to achieve to help you explain what you want to any potential freelancers you are talking to.

Comedy is one of the hardest forms of content to write so if you are having trouble you might want to look for a company that offers copywriting services.  Apple Copywriting is a great company to turn to in your hour of need.

Know what you want.

When trying to come up with a new marketing strategy, you need to be specific with the goals that you want to achieve. For instance, how many new patients do you expect to have after you launch this campaign and what kind of services do you wish for them to avail of? Setting your expectations right is crucial because this will allow you to calibrate your campaign accordingly.

Make your patients your prime priority.

This does not have to be mentioned, but sadly it is often overlooked. There are a lot of reasons why dentists fall short when it comes to taking care of their patients. The recent recession may make them more focused on improving their productivity rather than helping out the patients which they have left. But there are two kinds of marketing – external and internal. You do not just market your practice with the help of ads and billboards but also by satisfying your current patients. Your patients will talk and this can help boost your practice’s productivity through word of mouth marketing.

Help rather than sell.

People do not like it when you aggressively sell them something. This is why patients and prospects are often repelled by old car salesman-like speeches. On the other hand, people respond positively when you mean to help them rather than sell to and earn profits out of them. This is why when you’re trying to offer a solution to your patients’ and prospects’ dental woes, help them by presenting a genuinely helpful solution rather than focusing on making a deal. This way, your patients and prospects will learn to trust you.

Make your patients your partners.

Don’t be ashamed to ask help from your patients especially the ones who have been loyal to you through the years. Word of mouth marketing is still here to stay, and there are no other people you can rely on to spread the word about your practice other than your patients. So when you feel that they were extremely happy with your service, ask them to refer you to their family members and friends so that you can also help them out just like you’ve done so with them.

I hope you find my guest post informative. I write about Websites for Dentists and Dental Marketing Solutions. Your interest appreciated, Elliot Pearson dentist websites

1. Schedule snack time. Rather than snacking throughout the day, limit yourself to only having snacks at certain times, like you’d do with a kid.
2. Learn to cook. It’s much healthier than ordering food or eating pre-packaged meals. Even if you think you’re terrible in the kitchen, there are lots of awesome easy cooking blogs out there you can follow to learn!
3. Keep the junk out of the house in the first place. That way, when you’re tempted to snack throughout the day, your only options will be healthy.
4. Portion your snacks ahead of time as you’re making lunches in the morning. That way you have a baggie of crackers waiting for you at 3 PM rather than eating two or three portions out of the box.
5. Join some healthy eating forums or Facebook groups. When you’re tempted during the day, visit them for moral support.
6. Find a virtual accountability buddy, preferably one who is also a work-at-home blogger and has similar struggles. Report in with one another on a daily basis and hold one another accountable when you cheat.
7. Blog or tweet about your struggles with weight loss. Lots of people can identify with that, and it’s great to have support from your readers. If dieting doesn’t really fit into your niche, you can still references it on Twitter or write a tie-in post (for example, if you blog about books, review a healthy diet book).
8. Get the entire family on board with healthy eating. It’s easier to eat healthy when you’re all doing it.
9. Use social media to find diet tips. If you ask your network, you can find healthy recipes, diet opinions and reviews, exercise tips, and more.
10. Track your weight loss with pictures. When you upload before/after pictures every month, you’ll get lots of support from your entire community.

If you’re self-employed as a blogger, it’s also important to find a health insurance plan, since you won’t get one through an employer like most people. As you lose weight, update your plan – you might be able to save money on your mothly premium if you lose a signifcant amount, since it puts you at a lower risk for major health problems.

Allison writes for HealthInsuranceQuotes.org, where you can find that perfect plan for your needs.

Phishers most commonly use e-mails designed to look authentic and ask you for your information. These e-mails generally use the templates of legitimate e-mails. World of Warcraft, a bank’s correspondence, your Facebook profile or Google’s homepage are all common targets. They will have legitimate unsubscribe links, valid links to the appropriate pages on the actual site, but they will ask you to click a link to reset your name and password.

The site that link takes you to will look legitimate, but when you put in your name and password, it won’t go to the actual site. Instead, it will be recorded and given to the phisher. This is how your identity is stolen, your passwords recorded and your internet security compromised.

Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are all primary targets for phishing scams, and they’re tired of dealing with it. It creates hassles for the companies, for the affected users and for other users. Together they’ve decided to take a stand against phishing attacks and try to do something about them. They’re working with a number of banks and security vendors to form a group to fight phishing. They’re calling it the Domain-based Authentication, Reporting and Conformance group, or DMARC.

DMARC’s goal is to create a system where e-mails can be authenticated on both ends, sender and receiver. This way the sender can make sure that they’re sending correspondence to the right person, and the receiver can make sure the e-mails they receive come from who they claim to come from. Phishing attempts and other similar scams can be weeded out and blocked automatically.

The group is working to create a standardized set of policies and a platform that will allow service providers to add security to their e-mail correspondence. This platform would have the added benefit of providing reports to the service provider, to show them what phishing attempts are being used and to learn from them.

Along with Google, Microsoft, and Facebook several other companies are getting in on the game. AOL, Paypal and Yahoo are participating alongside financial firms such as Bank of America and Fidelity. All of these companies lose millions every year to phishing schemes, both directly and indirectly. The loss of consumer confidence and the resulting loss of revenue is astounding.

As phishing schemes grow more and more sophisticated, so too must the security measures put into place to prevent them. The DMARC partnership hopes to provide just such a sophisticated platform to ensure that e-mail correspondence can have the trust it deserves. While currently in a basic draft, the DMARC platform should go a long way towards minimizing identity theft through e-mail and social networks.

White Chalk Road SEO Perth are online marketing professionals dedicated to helping your business succeed online. For online market research, organic search, paid search or social media, contact White Chalk Road.

Google plus has made a head start in the social networking arena. It’s been only eight months and Google plus has already touched the 100 million mark in February 2012. With further estimates that Google may reach 400 million users by the end of 2012, it is all set to give tough fight to the present social networking leader- Facebook. Let us now analyze some reasons how Google plus fares over Facebook?

Clean And Simple Design

Google plus has a clean, simplistic yet productive design which has become one of the main reason why most of the people prefer Google plus over Facebook. Also unlike Facebook, Google plus pages are free from those annoying advertisements!

Circles

In facebook, you are either friends with someone or not. Google plus on the other hand understands that there are lots of other relations in the real world other than friends and provides you the option to add people based on these relations. (Family, acquaintance, co-workers, crushes or whatever you want to add)

Google Plus In Mobile Devices

Nowadays people are using mobile devices like Smart phones and tablet PCs more than before and more so for social networking. Although Facebook provides its own Facebook mobile application; however, it is no match against the huddle application provided with Google plus. It is fast and integrates well with mobile OS especially if it is an android device. Also it provides chat function to communicate with people on G+.

Hangout

Google plus provides the hangout option where you can make video calls, which is pretty much similar to facebook with the new Skype integration. However there is one major difference- unlike facebook, one can chat with up to ten people in the Google plus hangout at a given time. This can be helpful in video conferencing.

Game Updates And Requests

Facebook walls are filled with irritating messages like- ‘so and so has reached level 3 in so and so ville’, ‘so and so sent you a request to send them a gift’ etc. which sometimes can get quite annoying. Google stream on the other hand strictly means business.

Integration With Email, Documents And Other Services

The best thing about any Google plus product is that it is integrated with others so well that you can easily seamlessly change from one to another, so you can easily change your status while you are sending email.

Divya Rawat likes to blog on various topics like social media and search engine optimization. She works in an SEO Company in Content Wriying field and love to explore on tech topics.

Internet has taken several businesses and their outlooks to a whole new level because of the fact that there are so many benefits and advantages involved and associated with it. So taking assistance from social networks for business is a brilliant opportunity because it has multiple ways through which one could encounter getting exposure to their profits. You can get several of the investors to boost up your sales and not just that, the page ranking and search engine optimization are also ruled out with the help of these social networks and their interlinking and communication forms. Websites like Facebook and Twitter these days are probably the best means and examples of social networks for business without a doubt. In this article we will be having a look on how you can use Facebook to market your business.

Facebook these days have created hype among people to be attracted towards the things they want to have or for the things they want to look up online for a very long time. It gives them an ease and comfort to think of things in an easier manner and that too with the interaction of their friends and family at the same time.

Video Sharing

Turning Facebook into a profitable marketing tool is a good idea because there are various forms of marketing forms you can do. Video sharing is one of the things you could do for it and also the written forms of content and information. For the new singers, comedians and several other artists that are probably the best place to be looking out for chances and things which could get done within a short time span. For professional companies they usually get their graphs and several other pictorials to arrange within a suitable parameter of the video and accommodate it with the content they have put up on their websites.

Facebook marketing is really popular as well in terms of social media marketing as well. Being concerned with the email marketing and several other forms of internet marketing you can have anything and everything done in a conventional method.

Facebook Page

Through Facebook applications you can have a page made for your followers, fans and subscribers for everyone to have a look and get to know about your affiliation some more. Targeted ads and products are made for several individuals to notice and take interest in for multiple benefits. Feedbacks and impacts are also included in the things that Facebook could bring to your website.

Kenny is a contributor for www.autosellingsolutions.com where you can get some useful resources on how to sell my car.

Amazon is doing particularly well at the moment. It started life as a small, American online bookstore, and went on to become a multi-national concern. Today, the site has branches all over the world, and it doesn’t just sell books. You can buy games, toys, and even groceries via Amazon today, and they even have their own electronic device – the Kindle – an e-reader that will presumably secure Amazon’s future even if books go out of style.

Why is Amazon So Successful?

Part of Amazon’s success can be attributed to the fact that they got in ahead of the rush.  Amazon was founded in 1995, during the height of the dot com boom. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, started small, and while many of his competitors shot for rapid growth and mega-bucks, he was happy with slow but sustainable growth. Amazon survived when the dot-com bubble burst, and by then it was firmly entrenched in the minds of the public as the go-to place for hard to find books.

Amazon Make Things Easy

The challenge for any online retailer is persuading people to click for their products, rather than walk into the store. This is one thing that Amazon does really well. Once you’ve bought something from Amazon, buying again is easy thanks to their one-click purchasing tool. You pick the product you want, select the speed of delivery you prefer, and then sit back and relax.

Postage and Packing

Amazon has shipping down to a fine art. Where consumers may be nervous about buying from other online retailers that squeeze books into Jiffy bags that are the wrong size, Amazon has carefully designed cardboard sleeves which will protect most books, and uses cardboard boxes that are lovingly packed for larger orders.

Digital Download

While there will always be a demand for some form of physical product – whether that’s clothes, toys, or food, there’s a growing demand for digital distribution too. Amazon identified this, and has already got a strong digital distribution system for subscribing to premium blogs, downloading MP3s, and downloading ebooks. This ensures that even if we do end up in a future where cardboard boxes and jiffy bags are looked upon as being as quaint as the LP and analogue radio, Amazon will still be relevant.

It’s this forward thinking attitude that has made the company so strong, and so popular. Other retailers sell just one thing, and don’t even do that well. When you see cardboard boxes with the Amazon logo on them, the chances are good that they’ll contain a book – but that’s not the only thing they sell. That box could contain a DVD, a video game, or something completely different.

To the consumer, it doesn’t matter – all that matters is that they paid an acceptable price, and that the product got their safely on time. That is what Amazon does well, and that’s what makes them the future of shopping.

This post was written by Crispin Jones on behalf of UK Packaging who can supply Jiffy bags and a great range of cardboard boxes to suit all needs. Crispin writes on business and retail.