In the offline world, you may have a leading product and command a lot of respect and influence within your industry; however, that doesn’t necessarily mean that respect and following will automatically translate in the online world. Most often then not, you have to gain and build your online reputation and respect the same way you would have to offline, though time and work.

Here are some ways to earn that respect.

Learn the lingo. You may call your products one thing and refer to what they do or how they perform in a specific way. Your audience has no clue about what jargon your company or industry uses. They refer to it in a way that is most comfortable to them. It works by word of mouth from person to person first, then it travels to the Internet.

Understand by listening. There’s a difference between hearing and listening. Listening involves comprehension and understanding what the other person is saying. Listening gets you beyond the surface of “hearing”; you can get to the audience’s pain point and what’s most important to them.

Read the Full Article.

Ask any marketing expert and they’ll tell you “the money’s in the list”. Email is a powerful and easy way to build a list and communicate your marketing messages to leads and customers. Here are the top 10 reasons to use email marketing.

1. Email marketing is virtually free. Email is truly unique in it’s ability to put your marketing message in front of thousands of potential customers at virtually no cost. This means that virtually 100% of revenue generated from email campaigns is pure profit.

2. Email is personal. Everyone’s favorite sound is the sound of his or her own name. Most email marketing solutions allow you to automatically customize email messages with personal data such as the subscriber’s name.

3. Valuable demographic data can be collected. When a lead subscribes to your email list, you can collect valuable data about your potential customers. This data allows you to better target your marketing messages to your list.

Read the Full Article.

If you have a small business, it is important to understand what is needed to get you ready for mobile marketing. Take a look over this guide of what those things are.

Get Educated. The first step to getting involved in mobile marketing is getting educated. You should be actively reading mobile marketing related articles, blogs and other online information to get the latest news on what’s going on.

Mobile Search Engines. Bookmark the mobile versions of the major search engines and start learning how differently they return and display search results. This is an important area as mobile SEO will differ for now from traditional SEO and understanding the differences is a part of the game.

Analytics. One of the first steps is to get a sense of how many people today are visiting and viewing your web sites using a mobile device. There are many things that can be done to address the needs of this audience once you start to learn about them.

Read the Full Article.

Reaching new customers can be challenging for most businesses. While traditional methods such as newspaper advertising remain popular, a new ad medium has also taken the business world by storm. That is online video ads.

If you are looking to take advantage of online video ads, here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to producing your ads:

1. Keep it Simple.  Viewers don’t want to read large volumes of text on their computer screen. To stand out, your ad needs to be short and sweet. It’s that hard balance of giving them just enough information that they don’t know everything and want to find out more.

2. Call out the Benefits. Research shows that people decide if they want to read more about a topic on a Web site in eight seconds or less. Ads that contain specific, immediate benefits, such as a promotion or discount, can be highly effective

Read the Full Article.

Approximately 200 7-Eleven convenience stores are testing a mobile marketing campaign through Dec. 31, 2009, where consumers can send a text message to receive free beverages.

During the test, residents can send a text with the word “FAST” or “RAPIDO” (fast in Spanish) to “72579.” Then they will receive a message for a free beverage offer at 7-Eleven stores. The promotion is limited to one free beverage per day, at participating 7-Eleven stores.

7-Eleven’s mobile marketing test is supported by both general and Histpanic-targeted radio, outdoor and mobile advertising, while participating 7-Eleven stores will promote the test with bilingual point-of-purchase signage.

Read the Full Article.