So many people and businesses have their own websites, but most are wasting their money. It seems that South Africans are so focused on conventional marketing that they are dumping their Internet investment in the water. This is not your typical compare-conventional-marketing-to-Internet-marketing-sales propaganda, because that will be similar to comparing Paris Hilton with Margaret Thatcher. Conventional marketing still works and has worked from the first day people traded items in a market thousands of years ago.

A business needs to do some form of marketing in order to be in business and to grow. Without marketing, a business will fold. How many times have you heard people say, “Ag, the web doesn’t work in South Africa”? Maybe you are one of those people that made that same statement or were thinking it!

It doesn’t work

Well, for all practical purposes, you are right. It doesn’t work. Despite the millions of people on the Internet in SA today. Despite the recent OPA stats indicating that 17% of Internet visitors in SA are earning above R400 000 annually. Despite the fact that Internet marketing has the capacity to cost you less on marketing due to enhanced capabilities offering much more accurate demographics for targeted marketing.

Despite all these facts, how much time and effort did you spent lately on your website’s marketing?

Yes, the Internet is a waste of money! So those idiots that sold you the website in the first place were liars; they promised you that the Internet will work - the joke was on you. pal! It doesn’t work! It is a complete waste of money!

The fact remains; most websites out there are designed like billboards and brochures. They are even treated like secondhand marketing tools - published and forgotten!

But what is the biggest difference between conventional and Internet marketing?

Conventional marketing requires a place where there are known visitors and traffic. Will you advertise on a billboard in the middle of a desert where there are no roads or traffic going past it? Well, there is the difference! When you made your website live it was in the middle of the Namib desert; there were no means for any potential customer to see it. Marketing techniques such as banner advertising, editorial marketing, social media marketing and other techniques create these crucial roads on the Internet.

Thus, conventional marketing requires location, whether it is in a magazine or on a billboard next to a road, as location determine traffic and exposure. Internet marketing requires you to build the roads in order to obtain location for traffic to pass by. It is that simple.

So your website was submitted to search engines? Big deal, so was millions of other websites! Your website’s meta tags were done? So were millions of others. Many businesses are placing all hope on search engine rankings for a few keywords to provide them with traffic. However, search engine optimization (SEO) is much more than ranking for a few keywords; it relies on other acquisition strategies to be successful. Not only that, Internet marketing requires conversion and retention strategies as well, which search engines cannot offer because they are supposed to be integrated on your website.

Most websites in SA were made live with the objective to serve as a marketing tool; yet they add very little value to this intended purpose and are a complete waste of money. The reason? Plain and simple: the lack of online marketing integration. The irony is that it is a simple issue that can be resolved with little time and effort.

There is so many ways to stalk your competitors but my favorite it a little trick with search engines for example with Google. Lets see where your partners site has been noticed from; First go to google.com then in the search bar put in the exact domain ( for example internet-home-based-business.com ) then click search. You will then see if you did it right now as I’m righting this: Results 1 - 10 of about 1,270 for internet-home-based-business.com.

Then a list of sites:

internet-home-based-business.com: Internet Home Based Business

» About internet home based business internet-home-based-business …

Entertainment Jobs, Film & Television Production

Homebased Business

14 Pages Found, 151 Links Found, 13630 Score, http://best-internet-home-based-business.com · Complete Money Making WebSite Setup Free - Work at home and …
emarketingmatrix.com/links/homebasedbusiness.html - 26k - Cached - Similar pages

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The trick is some of the listing might not be the site you are stalking, for example the last listing is referring to best-internet-home-based-business.com

Which is another site but also probably worth stalking. Basically just keep this in mind when doing this search if the site just has your domain name in another domain.

Seems simple but very insightful and what you might not be doing

This Article is written by Charles Yarbrough
charlesyarbrough.com who also runs marketingspot.com

At the most basic part of how to work from home on the internet there is three main paths.

1. Find a affiliate or reseller program or find a skill like data entry and solicit your services.

2.  Find your own product and put a shopping cart on your website. Paypal works great for this.

3. Provide a valuable content for a subscription fee

There is thousands of other way but I want to focus on the top three.

1 .. First find a affiliate or reseller program or find a skill like data entry and solicit your services. This the easiest of all ways to make money on the internet. I recomend finding something that most people use every month and that you use and have a opinion on. For example mps players, you can find a website that specializes in MP3 players and check to see if they have a affiliate program.

If they do then you should start a basic website, even one page is fine. Do not get a free web page or a page from the business that sells the product. This will be much harder to market and get search engine traffic to.

On your website post something eye grabbing like their lowest price MP3 player. Now add test that has to do with this devise on the page in a attractive and professional manner.

Next you should add a blog on the website, I recomend wordpress for this and DWHS for hosting since they have word press that can be added for free easily and they only charge$3 for a basic website.

Make sure and update your blog  3 times a week even if it’s cut and pasting stuff from the website that you are sending customers to. This will eventually make money if website has a good product, make sure and have a friend or you test the website to see if the affiliate program and website itself works well.

2 .. Find your own product and put a shopping cart on your website. Paypal works great for this. This is actually easier then you think. Even if all you sale is candles or toilet paper if the site is clean, professional, and functional you will make at least some sales.

First find a distributer, in this example lets say a local candle maker. At first you will not make much from the candles  because you will not buy them in bulk but this starting process is how almost all business with no start up costs will work.

Next sign up for paypal and use there shopping cart option to add the candles to your website and  allow for people to buy them. You will also want to make friends with your local shipping office so you can eventually get a shipping discount.

Next build a blog on your website and update it once a week with stuff in regards to candles. You will also want to sale these products on Ebay and Craigslist.

3 ..  Provide a valuable content for a subscription fee. This is done in so many ways I couldn’t cover them all but some are EBooks, News, Groups, Content, ECT.. ECT..

For this you don’t need a shopping cart, just a website with some great sales stuff on it and a company like verotel to manage the members and payments

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Other things to consider:

Get good hosting, slow or dead web pages do not get customers. We recomend www.dwhs.net for this

Link to you blog from at least your front but even better is every page.

Make sure and add images to each blog post, it makes it less boring.

Think of these words first when making a website:  clean, professional, and functional

It’s not that bad to have someone else build the website. PageAlive.com does a page for $100 flat

Be patient, search engines take about three months to list and update new sites.

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Written by Charles Yarbrough for www.marketingspot.com
www.charlesyarbrough.com

It’s coming to a age where having a website is necessary for all business owners. But who has time to update all the new products and business changes on a daily basis? The reality is the majority of business owners update their web page every 6-12 months. Usually this consists of something they think will improve the image of the website. The part that’s commonly overlooked is that updating your website pages and text at least once a month has huge benefits far beyond any benefit of a slight image change.

By updating the web page once a month it adds credibility with customers and even more credibility with the internet process (Search engines and other websites). Search engines will always list a website that is active over stale, plain, and low text (content) websites. The differance between adding even a little more text each month is huge for how search engines will consider your website in the SE ranking system.

Of course adding jiberrish will not help much, but adding good text based stories, information, and by building more pages you WILL make a huge differance.  With that said here is the top 5 reasons to update your website atleast once a month:

1. Search Engines - They see changed and content rich web pages as a active website and will always rank this over a stale website.

2. Other Websites - The internet starves for new original information and by adding it to your website regularly you will have a much better chance to get free one way links to your website.

3. Customers - When customers see a website that is updated and has lots of perdinant information they are more likely to save the page to there favorites and come back!

4. Personal  Investment - I’m not big on tricking myself but the more you add to your website and see actual results the more fun it will be to add more content and watch your website grow.

5. Website Quality - Eventually you will notice errors or little ways to clean up and make the website more usable when your actively updating it.

The best way to stay active is to add a blog to your website, www.wordpress.com is a search engine friendly and is super easy for anyone to use. Most web hosts like www.dwhs.net  has it available for free by the push of a button. For example www.ocfocus.com You can see how the main website is the front line for the business and just adding a link on the bottom of each page to your blog you can have a easily updatability website that the search engines and your customers will love.

The other option is to have a non-static website, you can so this with blog software or any CMS (content management system)  www.drupal.com is a good option for this but might require slightly higher hosting fees to run it.

Written by Charles Yarbrough for www.marketingspot.com
www.charlesyarbrough.com

First… sorry about the cheesy image, I couldn’t resist.

Here are 5 business marketing characteristics that might help you be more successful.

1. Do what you can do for free; If your willing to do something substantial for free then you are able to do it well for money.  Find something you like and that you do well as a hobby or passion, then seek means to do it professionally.

2. Stay in the game; Most business’s fail, it’s a cold fact of life. Use this as a lesson and learn from all obstacles. There is a lesson in every situation that sets you back. Usually the lesson is someone else did what your trying to do better.

3. Be in the moment; Try not to spread yourself to thin. Staying on track is hard by nature, our minds want us to find something easier or better. In busines there will always be temptations of easier and better ways to make money but these our found from someone else working hard to find it.  Usually they found it by learning as they get there. Trying to take a short cut to match someone else’s success will usually set you back. It’s more reliable to find your own path and stick to it.

4. Don’t find ways to make yourself more successful; This is more for business and marketing professionals that are established. Instead of you focus on what can make your customer and employees more successful. This will bring success back to you in the end.

5. Open the possibility box, expand all possibilities for the business you target. It’s smart to know what not do as much as what to do. Try new stuff that pertains to your business even if you think it’s not worth it. In the end, even if it doesn’t work you will know more about what you need to NOT focus on.

Written by: Charles Yarbrough
www.charlesyarbrough.com

You know they say it takes money to make money, well you want me to tell you how I started out. I started with zero cents. I got fired from a job from sleeping in cause I was up to late on the internet. My girlfriend even yells at me when I sneak out of the bed in the middle of the night to get onto the computer. My dog wines and cries because I don’t spend time with him, but anyways let me get back to what I was saying there is several ways to promote a website with no money, but I’ll tell you what it takes a lot of determination and dedication and if you don’t have that in you then don’t plan on succeeding. It also takes a lot of innovations, or some type of innovation, or viral markets that will pull leverage in for you.

1. Submit to free directories as cheesy as it sounds yes they do work, plus over time when these links set in these web directories you’ll start to get more credit from them and who knows the directory owner might promote the directory pretty well.
2. Do donations you can find high quality links one way links by searching for links to donate to just go to the search engine and type donate open source, or something similar to that. (this is a secret though so don’t let every one know).
3. Install a blog and starting writing your fucking ass off at least 5-10 post a day of quality posts.
4. Hang out at forums, and join the social part of the web and see what you can do from there on out. You’ll also meet a lot of friends this way, just viral these people into your blog one way or another and get them to subscribe.
5. Get famaliar with websites such as Digg, Reddit, and numerous other social media sites. Just become part of there community.
6. Buy a laptop just encase you go homeless, or don’t have money for rent. I’m being serious about this cause if you don’t have the passive income to support your bills while your building your business then stuff will get really tough. specially if your someone totally new, but you can still succeed just takes a lot of dedication like I said.
7. Make Friends, Make Friends, and let met say it again Make Friends. Join the social parts of the web and no this is not a waste of time don’t depend to make a living hanging out at DP your whole life by any means, but just try to meet people that will market your services for you such as word of mouth and etc be good at something that no one can do. If you do something that others haven’t done show your ass who cares, prove to other people what you have done people will be like neat-o.
8. Think like an entrepreneur don’t let other people destroy your believes you will feel like your in a war zone when your building a company or something you dream of, and don’t ever let go.

Just mainly try to find ways that you can promote your self with out losing. Don’t give in and offer to do stuff for dirt cheat. Its ok to maybe give a few deals here and there, but the idea in business it to always take care of your clients and make sure your moving forward at *all times*. If you believe there is a better way of doing something because you done been there and done it, then you do it your way because the chances are if your getting better results then what ceo joe is producing then do it.

So you have been on the front page of Digg, you have been a Stumble Upon Top Pick and the blogospere buzz machine has blessed you with enough ink to make Gutenberg cry. Still, your neighbors still doesn’t have any idea what it is that you are doing coding in your den all night long. In fact, he’s pretty sure that you’re some kind of terrorist.

Once you decide to expand your business beyond the bounds of early adopters, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. This will be a brief rundown of most of the important ones.

Keep It Simple

Rubik Cube

The best way to get real people to use your product is to tell them about it. Remember that most people do not have the same knowledge of “collobrative, crowdsourcing designed to leverage your social graph” that the average internet entrepreneurs does. More importantly, they don’t care. If you present normal people with a useful concept, even if it has been done a thousand times before on the web, they are a lot more likely to adopt it than if you try to wow them with marketese.

Notice that I said useful “concept”. You need to distill your product down to its functional parts. The thing that will detract adoption amongst main stream users is complexity. Once they have decided to use a product, features are a great way to keep them happy. When they are still giving it a test drive, however, unnecessary “stuff” is bound to come back to bite you in the butt.

Use Your Community

Parliment

No, I am not talking about your social network on Facebook. If your product solves a real problem, there is probably a terrestrial equivalent somewhere. Find the people who use this solution in their daily lives. If everyone at your office has a day planner, they may interested in your new piece of productivity software. If your friends all spend three days a week watching Blockbuster flicks, they may find your new movie recommendation engine helpful.

The point is that you have to understand the problem you are solving and reach out to the members of your community who have those problems. Make a few phone calls, visit your local college, get in front of your Chamber of Commerce for advice. In short, get out there and network.

The Mainstream Web

Facebook

Remember that the web is also filled with “mainstream” Internet users. You can find them wandering the halls of social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Many of these people have never heard of the blogosphere, and are really only online because it’s an easier way to anonymously stalk people.

Make a Facebook Group and MySpace profile for your idea and invite all your friends. Talk to some of the entrepreneurial groups on these services and bounce your ideas off of them. Get your name out there, and make sure that people have an easy time finding out what you are about.

Once again, these are all people who haven’t been necessarily been saturated with Web 2.0 jargon. Forget your hype, explain your idea and try to make it relevant to them.

Mainstream Media

Anchorman

Local newspapers have very tight publishing cycles and often very little to write about. Use this to your advantage and write a press release. Also, don’t be afraid to contact your local media with your idea. A lot of times they will be more than happy to put together a human interest piece if you can prove to them that there is something coverage worthy in your startup.

The best way to convince members of the press that your idea is worth talking about is to avoid the Web 2.0 hype machine and just pitch them your value proposition. If you can also throw in how your product will help the community, or something about fighting against a large, faceless corporation that’s usually worth a few bonus points.

Consider Advertising

Billboard Trick

Remember that, if push comes to shove, you can use advertising to promote your product. Online, you can usually do this for relatively cheap with services like Adwords. Offline, advertising gets more complicated and much more expensive. This should be the last option in your arsenal for another reason as well. Web products are more easily sold…on the web.

The point?

Don’t put too much money into terrestrial advertisement before you saturate the tech crowd.

Web 2.0 Roundup

A better question than where you should go to market offline is whether your startup is even ready to move into the real world. This checklist should help you make the decision. If you answer “no” to any of these you may want to continue building.

* Does your product, like the cell phone and Facebook, translate well to real people?
* Have you already collected a group of early adopters to help you work out the most glaring bugs?
* Does your major “hook” work well?
* Can you explain your product in one sentence?

Good luck and happy innovating.

VIDEO is taking over the internet world. I can’t explain enough how important it is to get on board. We will see more directories with video more websites with optional welcome videos and most importantly if you have a help page on your website make sure to have help videos!

Videos give the customer/visitor a sense of realism and that someone is with them during the process.  Really compared to text and a image it is a much more suyppeir way of getting something acomplished.

So why hasn’t everyone jumped on the band wagon? Well besides having a full plate it’s because the technology is still alittle cloudy. Do you use WMV, Flash, Quicktime, right.. Who knows.

Well I feel strongly that flash video is the best, it seems to roll with web pages better then the others and has more interactivity them the others.

So how do you start with video on the web?

1. Buy a camera, newegg and costco are good for this
2. Buy the video editor ulead
3. Export the finished video in flash
4. Add it to your website

Also green screens are great ways to spice up the video but don’t get cheesy. This is a business video and needs to not waste time and look clean.

The was written by Charles Yarbrough 

Getting your blog listed and see is becoming more dificult simply because more people are blogging. But on the flip side we are seeing more fair listing services like DIGG FARK and many more like it. Why are these lists in existence? SImply because it worked for Google and they want a similar process. Why Google worked is another story.

So with the millions of people you are against how do you get your article listed? Well first like with all business doing anything you need to see the people are doing it right and getting what you want already.

Then out do them or if you can’t out do them the most important factor in your article is to be something original. I can’t tell you how many lame articles got 500 digs I swear just because it was a original thought (idea ect).

I mean think about it, there is millions of people with hundreds of thoughts. It’s actually really hard to come up with something new in the blog world. Now redoing something already done is aoption and can work but you already 50% chance of getting burried just for what you are doing.

So what the solution, talk about your life and when you have something happen that you like build a list around it and find anything related to it so you can add to the list.

What’s so great about lists?

Well “I” love them, but universally they condense a lot of information in a straight forward easy to navigate process. They also sound very impressive during a dinner party. They also keeps most opinions at bay unless it’s about oppinions.

Anyways don’t get discouraged, your blog will always get love from Google it’s their favorite no business type of website.

Written by Charles Yarbrough

Among the best ways to get immediate customer feedback about your products, services, customer service and other issues—as they perceive them—is through focus groups. But, at anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 per session, depending on the firm you use, the location (i.e., at their site or at a hotel) and the depth of your questioning, it can be an expensive process.

That said, if you have a do-it-yourself mentality, you may have more resources available to put together a focus group than you realize. If you look at the basics, you’re assembling a group of 10 or fewer people to discuss topics designed around specific results you’re looking for (e.g., feedback on a new product or service, the shopping experience at your firm or website, whether you offer good follow-up service, etc.). You’ll have a series of scripted questions, with a group led by a moderator.

So where can you save some money? Following are a few ideas:

• Write your own questions and script—Because you know what you want to learn and accomplish, you’re perfectly capable of creating the questions to which you’d like answers. Try to develop questions that help participants open up and answer without being led. For example:

• What do you like best about working with us? Least?
• How would you want to see our business/product/service be improved?
• Are there products or services that we should be offering but that we’re not?
• What have you seen competitors offer that works better than what we do?
• What about our processes or customer service?

• Keep it in-house—Often, the greatest expense comes from working in the field with focus group companies, which provide meals, snacks and even little gratuities (read: desk toys). If you have the space or access to a conference room, bring in a good meal and do the work in your office, or you can even rent a hotel room. If you have to rent a video camera, just make sure someone can operate it. The record you keep of the meeting—so that it can be used later—is critical.
• External or internal moderator—This can be a tough choice. It can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 for an external moderator, but the objectivity they bring to the table can be worth it. If you have a trusted friend who you think can do the job, it may be worth the savings. Under no circumstances should you moderate; you may not like everything you hear and that can kill any objectivity.
• Recruiting—Market research firms can recruit for you and it might cost about $50 a head, plus whatever you pay for in meals, snacks and fees. But you can also speak directly with your customers or send invitations to do your own recruiting. The promise of a meal and even a free service or product (the gift has to have value—no useless trinkets here) is often enough to get people onboard. You may even want to involve former customers—provided you’re close enough—to determine why they left. The key is to assemble a diverse group of customers and get to the right size (six to 10 people). If the group is too small, people will be inhibited and may not talk; too big and someone’s views will likely be missed.

Once you’ve completed the group, watch the playback and read your notes carefully and unemotionally. Chances are, you’ll learn a lot about what works or doesn’t work for your customers—and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. And remember to follow up with those customers that have participated in the focus group, thanking them for their help and time.