Wow – that came out of nowhere.

It brought back all kinds of memories for me. Sally and I were out in San Francisco in1989 when the quake hit there, resulting in a major loss of life, and it destroyed many roads and buildings. The feelings came flooding back. I am still shaking some.

I have calmed down a bit, as I know all are safe and no one was injured.

So what can we learn from this experience?

Two things…

We need a plan for a real emergency.

Our plan at RevBuilders – RUN. That was it. Thank God it was all we needed this time around. But what about next time? I think we need to put together a little better plan, and include things like: How will we contact our loved ones if phones are down, if internet is down? Is our entire client’s information safe and stored off site? If the building were to collapse would I be able to continue with our business? If we were injured do we have first aid kits available? I’m sure there are many other questions we should be asking – do you have any suggestions or questions? Let us know.

Our Marketing Plans need to be this effective in creating buzz.

Talk about a successful marketing plan – imaging having something like this happen in your business on the positive side. Wow! They are still talking about it – hold on my daughter is calling. First thing out of her mouth was “Wow that was exciting!” That is how a 10 year old thinks –but again, dream with me about creating campaigns that could have this kind of impact. What would it do for your business? What would it do for just your attitude alone? You have any ideas? Let us know, and we’ll learn from each other.

I know for a fact that if you not engaged in online marketing you are missing many WOW experiences. It is changing every day and new opportunities are abound. Check out one of the latest for our client Connor’s Pest Protection. We are having a naming contest for a new puppy they are training to find bed bugs. They are going to give away a free pair of Redskin tickets, so click here if you want to give it a try.

So what kind of marketing ideas could rattle your business (in a good way)? Or how did the earthquake affect you? Post a comment and let us know what’s going on in your mind.

Come join us for some good food and drink as we begin a new chapter in RevBuilders Marketing. Meet our new team members and learn about some of the new and exciting business growth solutions we will be offering soon.

Also enter for a chance to win some fantastic prizes – more info on these to come soon – but it will be worth the wait. Check back here for update.

This will be one of the best networking events of the year – we are inviting all the local chambers plus the Local Realtor Associations as we are partnering with Charles Fincher, a Real Estate Attorney, in some exciting ventures you can learn about at the Grand Opening.

Hope to see you there – please register so we have enough food and drink. Thank you.

Great things are happening at RevBuilders Marketing.

Register Now

But first you have to get them to the site. You have to promote your blog. In a sense you have to market your marketing vehicle.

In order to promote your blog and make it a successful marketing tool you have to ensure three things…

1. People will want to view it
2. People will be able to find it
3. people will be able to pass it on.

No one will read your blog for long if it does not offer them something that they find useful or desirable. This means that in order to appeal to your market, your blog has to be interesting, insightful, helpful, and entertaining or, better yet, all of these things.

You cannot forget that your blog is the vehicle for your marketing message. Make it interesting and useful to the reader so that they have a reason to read or view it. People will watch commercials because they are sandwiched between segments of a television show. Use the same concept.

Create a captive audience.
I want to learn what this music producer thinks about a new piracy law and if reading his opinion means also hearing about a new artist he’s promoting then that’s fine, I’ll take in both messages.

Think about it like – they say that when you give you’re dog a pill you should put it in peanut butter or some other treat. They find the treat so desirable that they’ll accept the pill in order to get the peanut butter. Your blog must work the same way: Give people something that they find desirable and they will accept your marketing message as well. But use caution – do not over market.

To make your blog interesting you have to provide your audience with things that are the relevant to them. Pampers will talk about issues related to babies and new parents, Sony will talk about technology developments, what will you talk about to connect with your market?

Now, not only must the blog be interesting, it must also be findable. The greatest information on the entire internet is not worth a thing if the viewers cannot find it. Assuming that your blog will become part of your already existing site, those who visit your web page are going to be introduced to your new addition by a link on the homepage. In this way, the webpage is promoting the blog.

But it can also work the other way as well. Your blog can bring people to your web page if the blog can be found through the search engines.

This means optimizing your blog. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a strategy to get a web page to the top of the search engines list. Its goal is to make your site show up on the first page of Google’s search return.

Your blog should be optimized in the same manner that your site is, using the same strategies and techniques. However, there are additional, blog-specific search engines that will also help people find your blog. There are several of these engines, with Google’s being one of the largest.

You can also help people find your blog by promoting it through other avenues. Talk about it in newsletters, build a buzz on affiliated sites, put the domain directly on your product. Build your blog up until it is the authority in your industry. Until it becomes the place to go when people want up-to-the-minute information.

The final promotional consideration that you have to keep in mind is that those who view your blog should have a way to forward it to others. If you have done an effective job in creating interesting content then people are going to want to share what they have found and you want to promote this.

By enabling viewers to send a copy or a link to their own associates you are enabling them to do your promoting for you. They are sending your advertising message to other members of your target market.

This is one of the greatest benefits of couching your marketing campaign in an informative blog – people not only respond to it in a more favorable manner, they promote it for you.

Recap

For all of this to work, the marketing message has to be there and it has to be integrated into the blog’s information. You can’t just paste an ad in the middle of the article and expect it to be effective.

People’s eyes will skip right over it. You don’t watch a commercial if you have the option of fast forwarding through it and people don’t read ads if they can avoid them. So make sure that you are maximizing your blog’s marketing abilities by integrating the message into the content.

It’s much more effective than advertising on a pregnant woman’s stomach.

Oh did I say make your blog interesting?

Regardless of how you set it up, there has to be a feedback method. Readers and viewers have to have a way to reply to what they have seen. This is part of what makes the page a blog rather than an article. It is interactive and people respond to that.

The ability to interact on a personal level is a big contributor to the trust and connection that blogs can create. So it is important that your company blog doesn’t forgo this component.

Of course you must also have a system for monitoring the feedback and removing any that would actually harm your marketing campaign.

You also have to decide which media form your online journal will take. Or maybe you will tackle all three. I would start with one first.

Any of the three can be effective and you will have to determine which one best suits your audience. Is your target market likely to own an ipod? If not then perhaps podcasts are not the right option for you. You would opt for a blog or vlog instead.

But you aren’t limited to just one.

Finally, remember that the blog will not deliver the message unless people read it, watch it, or listen to it. If no one comes to your blog or is interested, it won’t be able to create the desired connection.

Next: Promoting your Blog

Myrtle Beach woman gets $4050 for advertising space on pregnant belly

Really, where won’t we advertise? As marketers we are always looking for the next big innovative way to reach our client base. It can be advertisements in washrooms, company logos on athlete’s uniforms, slogans across the miracle of life – whatever we can do to expose ourselves to our target market in a creative and innovative way – we want to do it.

When it comes to marketing we know that in order to sell someone a product or service you have to first form a connection with them. The customer has to believe that they need the item and they have to believe that you are provider who will best meet their needs.

That is what successful advertising does. It creates the demand and then markets the solution. And the company that is most successful at doing this, the one that best targets their perspective customer base, is the one who gets the biggest market share.

So we are always looking for the edge that will put our marketing strategy above everyone else’s.

Now I don’t know about advertising on the prenatal, but there are definitely exciting new ways of marketing on the web.

The internet provides the platforms that create marketing advantages and this is because it is still relatively untouched. It hasn’t been completely exploited and overdone yet. There are plenty of advertising opportunities available now that the market will still respond to and there is the promise of many more to come.

Unfortunately this isn’t the case off-line. Television, radio, direct mailings, print ads. None of these work like they used to. There’s too much clutter. They have been over done and used up. People just don’t respond to them in the same way and they do not create the same connections that they once did.

That is why we are purchasing space on people’s stomachs.

Internet marketing is still fresh enough to create the connections. People haven’t been desensitized to it yet because they haven’t been inundated with it since before they were born.

Of course. Like everything, there are still challenges to internet marketing. Nothing comes that easy.

Enter blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. These are tools that can take create the connection and deliver your message because they are an online platform that has the public’s trust.

So what are they? How are they being used? And most importantly how can you use them to promote your business

During these post I will be explaining the concepts behind these tools and we’ll take a look at how others are using them. Then we will discuss the principles and some dangers that marketers need to consider before diving into this realm. And finally, we’ll look at how these tools can be used by you and whether or not they should be.