Internet Marketing

Smart selling tactics (part 1 of 2)

Hard selling no longer works. Don’t try it and don’t waste your time on it. Ads are everywhere – when you open your newspaper, switch on your computer or TV, when you are walking down the street and in your mail (electronic or otherwise). People are now oblivious to ads and no longer respond to them, unless the ad is extraordinarily creative and provokes interest. Coming up with one of those is nearly impossible for the online businessperson, because they take time and are, frankly, not at all easy.

So what can you do? Switch to smart selling tactics. Attack your customers in different ways; advertise without advertising!

1. Sharing is caring –Share some knowledge and build up a relationship with people. This can be through social media, blogs, forums, your own website etc. Make those things into interesting places which people like to come to for advice or information. Make your products visible on these locations but do not hard sell. Let them be there in “oh by the way I have these things too if you are interested” sort of way. As you build up a loyal set of followers they will notice the products you are selling. If you have built up a decent level of trust, your sales will start coming in.
2. You’re the one that I want! – Who are you selling to and who do you want to sell to? These are very important questions. The first evaluates who your current market is and the second defines who your market should be. Sometimes you may find that your current set of customers isn’t who you think they are. In this case, it may be time to re-evaluate your approach. There is no point selling an Xbox, for example, with sales copy like “a clever little device that will keep your evenings filled with entertainment”.Unless you are trying to sell to grandparents, this is the wrong approach. Tailor your sales copy to interest your target market and avoid the hard sell angle.

Genreal

Three Basic Strategies for Link Building (Part 2 of 2)

Once the Reciprocal link building system fell through, another more ingenious system was put into place by developers. Called the Three Way, this system was essentially reciprocal link building; but it required a little bit more co-ordination. Here is how it works: website “A” links to website “B”, but “B” does not link back to “A”. Instead it links to website “C” which links to “A”. In this manner the line can grow almost infinitely, with the only person at risk being website “A”. That is because the last person in line needs to link back to “A” and if they don’t do that, “A” does not get anything out of this.

Unfortunately for the developers, Google cracked this method as well. Chain linking is fine, as long as it does not curve back on itself and complete the circle. But once again, this is a decent method of drive traffic to you website.

The third method is currently the best and does not involve any trickery. This is, perhaps, what Google wanted from the start, as it is a decent measure of a website’s popularity. This method is called One Way linking.

A one way link is a link that points to your website from another website. You should not have any links going back to that website or else your PR will suffer. This is where your SEO, Social bookmarking, article marketing etc plans start having an effect. Having plenty of sites outside your domain pointing back at you will get Google to place you higher and higher. In fact it is possible to get to the top of a search result page purely on PR alone. This is the method you should be concentrating on from now on.