Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/05/supermoon-may-4-2012-peoria-il-usa.html
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DailySeoTip/~3/3cG49tFvB-w/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/adf-ly-review-good-traffic-source-scam/
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JCulture/~3/fEEoiLLtrhI/review-denman-large-paddle-brush.html
Posted by randfish
Take those black and grey hat comment marketing tactics and throw them away once and for all. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering some wonderful white hat techniques that you can start using today. These tactics will help you spread your name to the far reaches of the internet, gain the affection of the web's most powerful influencers, and build up strong relationships that can bring you long-lasting returns.
Thanks for joining us and don't forget to leave your comments below. *hint, hint*
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to tackle the topic of comment marketing. A lot of people in the internet marketing world and the inbound marketing world use comments as a form of marketing, and classically, at least in sort of the SEO world, it's been a little bit of a grey hat/black hat tactic.
Now, there's obviously like the true black hat stuff, which is essentially comment spamming and it's just automated stuff that goes through, leave comments in the hopes that some of them get approved and some of them pass some link value and maybe some of them are not no-followed or maybe the no- follows carry some weight or get scraped or picked up. Xrumer blasts, like all these kinds of things, right, that find open ports on the Web and leave these strings of comments. That would be like the black hat stuff.
Then there's the grey hat, which is essentially, you know, it's a real person commenting, but they're not adding much value and their entire goal is just to get a link and they're not doing a whole lot.
There's the rarely observed but highly valuable form, in fact, most valuable form in my opinion, which is the true white hat kinds of comment marketing, and that's what I want to talk about today.
Comment marketing is this idea that I want to participate in the Web's communities to earn the trust and respect of other people and the awareness. This is a blog post, right? Here's some content. You can add comments down at the bottom. This happens all over the Web. There are literally tens of millions of blogs where this could be valuable, depending on your niche, and contributing here and earning the recognition of readers can earn you all sorts of returns. Let me talk through some of these.
So comments work well because commenters and readers, the people who are here, people in this world, right, this guy here, that guy there, they tend to be influencers. They tend to be the people who have larger Twitter followings, have lots of fans on Facebook, have lots of people reading their RSS, have the ability to link to you, have the ability to spread your message, speak at conferences and events, influence other people. They are valuable connectors, and it's a great reason to be in front of them. It's not just the people here, though. It's also this guy, the person who wrote the post. We're trying to get in front of them. When we earn the attention and awareness of the blogger, we can often build a relationship there, build some trust and likability, build a system whereby we can earn things like, oh, we can earn a guest post. We can earn the community's reciprocity, inspire reciprocity, meaning that if we contribute here, we're likely to get some of these people and maybe this person contributing on our site to our blog to our marketing efforts, those kinds of things. So it does all these great things.
The goals of comment marketing, when it's done right, need to be build awareness, meaning people recognize you when you're commenting, they recognize what organization you're with. You build trust, meaning, "Hey, you know what? I know that Rand guy. He's commented on lots of sites. I've seen him around. I'm familiar with him." Build likability, the goal here being when I see him, I think, oh, I will positively interpret that message because in the past I have had a previous good experience when this person has left comments. Whenever I see their avatar, whenever I see their username commenting, I think positively about them. That's a great thing to build up over time, and it does lead to all of the great things that you need to be doing in an SEO campaign and a social media marketing campaign and a content marketing campaign. It will help all of those channels succeed better.
You are not, not trying to build links. No, not directly anyway. Eventually, over time, one of the goals is hopefully to get some links, maybe to get a blogger to mention you, point over to your stuff, not to build profiles, which, essentially, is just a form of link spam or of reputation management where you're building all these profiles across different sites, and not to comment without adding value. "Great post. Nice work. Thanks for writing this." Okay, well, thank you maybe, maybe 1 out of 10 comments can be that because you just feel like, man, that was a really great post and I want to tell this person. That's genuine and fantastic, fine. But if you're just doing that across hundreds or even dozens of blogs, what are you doing? Why are you there? If you're not participating without adding value, then the opposite of what you want is going to happen. You are going to build awareness, but you are going to screw yourself on trust and likability. This completely defeats the purpose, and you will have to rebuild your persona on the Internet. A terrible, terrible idea.
I do have some pro tips when we're doing this, to help you accomplish all these goals. The first one is, since we're trying to build awareness and recognition, please, for goodness sake, I see this mistake all the time, use the same avatar and username everywhere you go. Seriously. I can't tell you how many people have, "Oh yeah, my Disqus profile looks a little bit different than my Twitter, which looks a little different than my Facebook, which looks different from the one that I use to comment on blogs. If you want, you can do one of the things that I do, which is I have kind of one image that I always use for my personal stuff. So I have a personal Facebook or I have my Foursquare, and that's personal. It's private. I don't share it with everybody. Then I have my public persona, and I use that same avatar all the time.
If you can, if at all possible, use a real human being face, hopefully your actual face or your social media, community manager's face. Get close up. Eyes, smile, those kinds of things create the sort of stuff you're looking for: trust, likability, familiarity, awareness. It creates that branding. Use a background, that is hopefully colorful, that helps the person to stand out, that's a good color match. Professional photography can actually be helpful. I know it looks like it doesn't because the image is this big. Who cares about professional photography at this size? You'd be shocked. You'd be shocked at how much it really actually helps.
Don't be afraid. A lot of people that think that, oh, if I'm doing comment marketing, if I'm trying to engage to build positive things, then the last thing I want to do is disagree with the blogger or disagree with another commenter. Actually, no. I would say that that's a highly valuable tactic. When you disagree or you have critiques or you have additions or you say, you think to yourself, boy, you know, this part of it I really liked and I think it's highly accurate, but this piece I'm not so sure about and here's why. As long as you're doing it respectfully and positively, you're actually going to be earning much more value and creating much more of a conversation and a community and a reason for everyone to be participating on the blog than if you're simply agreeing every time and saying that you like it. Then you just fall away into the noise. But if you bring up salient points, you're going to have a much better time. I even recommend, and I do this myself sometimes, if there's something that you truly disagree with strongly, you can comment about it, go back and forth on the comment thread. If you're still having questions about that, go write a blog post about why you disagree. Make sure to stay positive. Stay highly respectful. But oftentimes, the person will update their blog post or write a new blog post saying, "Hey, I wrote about this last week. This person who's a frequent commenter in our community mentioned it here." Now you've got a link. You've got some of their traffic. You've helped to drag some of their community over to your community and built more awareness and trust and likability. Fantastic. Excellent, excellent work. That's precisely what you're trying to do.
When sharing a URL, so let's say you've got something in the comments and you go, oh man, this person, they wrote about this. Some people are asking about this topic, and I have something that I wrote specifically about that a little while back, or I have a tool or I really want to share this thing. First off, if it's paid, if it's something that you have to pay for, don't share it. Don't mention it. If it's free, however, and anyone can consume it, rather than putting in the URL that makes it a live link, which can look a little spammy, look like you're trying to get that link, what you can do, and I think this is a great tactic is to say, particularly if you're not sure of the rules, "Hey, I'm not sure what the rules are here. I wrote something about this. I think it would be worth sharing and of interest to your community. Here's the URL," and then cut it off, so that essentially instead of http:// whatever, you've just got SEOmoz.org/blog/thepost. The reason you do that is because it will appear as text, and then you can say, "Editor/blogger, if you want to make this a live link, that's great, or feel free to remove it if this is not appropriate." Then, essentially you're caveating the link that you've dropped and saying, "Hey, I'm trying to do this in a very respectful way and I think this is of interest." If you do it in that way, and you do it with something that is high quality and relevant and useful, you'll probably get a lot of nice traffic. You won't be able to see the referring source, because a lot of people will just copy and paste the URL, but you will see that traffic. You will see people referencing it. Then you can follow up in the comment thread underneath where you've left that.
Number four, I should put this as number one. Target the right blogs and communities. So there are blogs where it pays to contribute. So usually in most industries there's somewhere between 5 and 50 blogs that really matter, that are very important, and you should start building profiles there, but you shouldn't ignore sort of the long tail of, oh, they only get a few dozen to a few hundred readers. You should be contributing on those blogs as well. In fact, those people are very likely to be the ones who will start linking to you, start sharing, because they're also more up-and- comers than they are sort of big industry leaders, and for that reason it can often be a lot easier to earn that trust and awareness and likability. If you're the person who comments on three out of five posts on a blog that usually only gets five or six comments, they're going to love you. They're going to appreciate you so much. You are making their day, and that's a great thing. You actually want to be that big fish in the small pond.
Make sure, though, that the communities are targeting the right kinds of people. So what you are not looking for is customers. I am not asking you to go find the people who are going to buy your stuff. What I want you to find is these people over here who are influencers of potential customers. So it's not the person who, oh, well this is male between 25 and 35, and I'm selling boots to outdoorsmen and so this is my customer. But you are thinking, hey, who are the people who write about outdooring? Who are the people that go on travel adventures? Who are the people that are on television or in media or on the Web who are talking about these things? Those are the folks that I really want to reach. So this is not about directly encouraging customers to come to you and buy. This is about influencing the influencers who will then get your message down to customers. This is why comment marketing works, in fact. So get the right blogs and communities. If you're looking for a good tool, I actually do recommend Google's Blog Reader, because if you go to Google Blog Reader, you can do searches for your keywords for your topics and then you can sort things or see things by the number of RSS readers, which is actually probably the best way to gauge the authority or the influence of a particular blog.
Number five. This is obvious. Don't pimp your products, the things you're selling. Pimp your content. Pimp the stuff that you've written on your blog. Get inspired from the stuff that people are writing to write other great things and to put those things together. If someone says, "Oh, I really wish there was a resource for what kind of trails go with what kind of boots," and you think to yourself, I can do that, do it. Go do it, and then email the blogger and say, "Hey, you remember how you said that you wish that there was this? I made that. Would you share it for me? Would you help me get the word out? Do you have any critiques?" Bing.
Number six. This one is kind of sad and sucky because I take a lot of pride in our industry and in what we do, but it's true. If you use the word SEO or Social Media Marketer in your profile, you're not going to be viewed positively. So I might recommend saying, "I'm the Director of Marketing" or "I run a community" or "I'm involved with outreach and building." Outreach maybe is not such a good word. Try and find good language that describes what you do accurately, but doesn't necessarily use buzzwords that are going to piss people off. People on blog comments and in these kinds of communities are very, very sensitive, and they've been burned by so many people who do the grey hat and black hat kinds of comment marketing that it sort of burned these words as untrustworthy in their eyes. So I'd recommend biasing away from those.
All right, everyone, I'm looking forward to some fantastic comments here, maybe even some suggestions, some disagreements, these kinds of things. I will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/05/usability-review-of-microsoft-social.html
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Source: http://www.netchunks.com/steal-these-kindergarten-email-marketing-tips/
Posted by Benjamin Estes
Lately I’ve seen that a tight relationship between SEO and startups has been something of a foregone conclusion within the SEO industry: “Of course startups should be engaged in SEO!” Perhaps, and perhaps not. In fact, some start-up communities have taken up a stance in direct opposition to this, stigmatizing SEO as manipulative. Personally I’m just a humble consultant who has never started a company of his own, so I think it would be presumptuous of me to arbitrarily declare SEO a high priority for any start-up in any field.
If doing SEO isn’t a foregone conclusion, then, it bears further discussion as a marketing strategy. I want to approach this topic from a different angle. In any successful startup there will be someone with good business sense, someone who can look at the evidence in front of them and make their own decision about what is best for their company. So let me put some premises on the table about what SEO offers the start-up and why start-ups are uniquely positioned to leverage their position for SEO.
The end goal of SEO is to increase the number of people arriving at your site through organic search results. There are also other metrics that are intermediate factors helping you accomplish this goal, such as your actual rankings in search results. These are things that you can measure, and report successes in increasing.
In addition, there are two different sets of keywords to look at when assessing the organic search channel—branded and non-branded terms. It's a powerful thing to demonstrate that your branded search traffic is increasing—it suggests that more people are looking for your brand online, which is a Good Thing.
On the other hand, the implications of receiving non-branded search traffic are numerous. Such traffic suggests that a site has increasing visibility for relevant search terms. If the start-up is defining new language, it suggests that users are picking up on that language. If it is increasing its share in an existing space, it suggests that the site may be cutting into the market share of competitors in organic search.
Optimization for SEO has the potential to enhance the effect of your other marketing strategies. If you are anticipating driving a lot of social interaction with your site, having your pages and URLs optimized for SEO will ensure that as people share your site you get the most value from that sharing. If you are link building through outreach and maintaining relationships with people in your industry, all of a sudden you have assets through which you can promote social content or editorial or anything else you might be up to.
Makes sense, right?
A startup—particularly at the outset of operation—has a great deal more flexibility than a more established competitor in the market. The obvious dichotomy here is between the large, established competitor and the start-up underdog. The start-up clearly has more agility than the established competitor, without a doubt. Consider:
But what about the 18-month old company compared to the 2-month old? If you don’t even have a website live, you’re even more flexible than an 18-month old company with a website up and an investment in a particular architecture or format or strategy for content publication. Oracle might be a giant awkward mess to manage from an SEO perspective, but even Dropbox by now has a more rigid infrastructure and user expectations and a great deal of variables which it must consider. Setting a course at the outset, which includes SEO will ensure that you are well positioned to be successful in organic search when you've achieved the same size and user base.
As part of overall SEO efforts all of the elements in the following (non-exhaustive) list might need to be manipulated:
The earlier SEO can be integrated into the business model the better.
A startup is bringing something new to the market, something with novelty (though hopefully it has some staying power as well).
In fact, novelty is what linkbait is all about. It’s something new and fresh and interesting—whether it is something explicitly new or a new take on something familiar. A new product, or a new face on an old product.
I mean, check out Y Combinator start-up Matterport. They’ve got a little Star Trek-style scanning device that makes 3D representations of any object or environment. This is some link-worthy content if ever I've seen some. We talk in SEO all the time about content marketing, which can be an expensive or confusing marketing route for a start-up. The thing is, in the early days, if you’ve got an interesting product that is your content. Ignore this at your own risk.
And again this matches up well with efforts you will be making on other fronts. If you've got a really interesting start-up idea, you'll almost certainly have been getting links on TechCrunch or Mashable. If you're minding your SEO on-site, you'll be getting the full benefit these novelty-based links can drive to your site.
Practicing SEO is a bit like practicing meditation—full enlightenment is an ongoing journey requiring a lifetime of work, but also a little bit will go a long way. It may be impractical for your business to drop $10,000-$20,000 on a link bait campaign or plan a content strategy that reaches six months out. But if you could manage to do a quick technical audit of your site, even doing that will get you one step closer to success. SEO isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. It is fully capable of scaling with your company.
Next Steps
I think it goes without saying that I think the above premises suggest that SEO is really something that start-ups ought to be engaged in. If you have come to a similar conclusion, I suggest reading this longer essay on the merits of SEO for start-ups. If after that you’re feeling game, checking out the following resources:
These reflect a higher-level look at the problem of SEO in the startup context. Then try to take some first steps, such as:
Thanks for reading, and good luck in your entrepreneurial endeavors! Reach me in the comments below or on Twitter.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Qyaci8-Kzp8/is-seo-the-answer-for-startup-marketing
Source: http://www.legalsearchmarketing.com/mobile-advertising/mobile-industry-stats/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/creating-strategic-business-alliances-life/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/rent-or-buy-video-games-online-make-affiliate-cash-at-same-time/
Source: http://www.legalsearchmarketing.com/general-search-engine-news/1044/
Is outing & writing polarizing drivel hate baiting or a service to the community?
It is all a matter of perspective, isn't it?
Some people would like to claim that it is one thing when they do it & something else when somebody else does it.
Unfortunately for those who want to have their cake & eat it too, consistency matters.
Even these guys know that.
If you brand those who fall outside the guidelines or get hit by updates as scammers to be avoided, then when your company gets caught working an angle & "scamming" (based on your own past sermons) your own judgement gets cast against yourself.
Is that fair?
In a word: yes.
Any belief system that is imposed onto others, but unacceptable when imposed upon the person who states it, isn't a belief system at all. It's duplicitous hackery at best - possibly much worse.
If your own company doesn't follow your own advice, then what does that say about your value systems? How many people have had their potential held back by listening to your misinformation & making the unfortunate mistake of trusting you? What does that sort of behavior do to the reputation of the industry? Now everyone else is suspect because you pitched bogus pablum at newbies.
To speak publicly about the pitfalls of doing "blackhat" techniques and then turn around and be caught red-handed for the same just gives credibility to the naysayers claiming our industry is filled with slime balls.
If you want to be a polarizing asshat, then don't be surprised when you eat your own cooking. To expect anything less is an open expression of ignorance of the field of inbound marketing marketing.
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/want-to-earn-online-here-is-how-to-really-make-money-at-home/
I am already getting fake webmaster tool notification messages using the above subject line & the following message:
Hello dear managers of http://www.seobook.com/! My name is Olivia, and the issue I’m gonna to discuss is for sure not new, but really actual and complicated, otherwise your website and therefore business wouldn’t have lost their favourable positions. Yes, I want to talk about Google Panda and Penguin. These virtual beasts become more and more freakish. Don't you think it's time to pacify them? Google intends to clean its search results from poor content websites, low quality links and hype. Are you sure your website has nothing common with this stuff?
Our team has been constantly studying Google search algorithms. We have already faced the latest freaks of Google Panda 3.4 and will be happy to win back your top positions.
We will heal your website from:
- poor on page optimization;
- same content submission;
- low quality links to your website;
- absence of website moderation;
- black hat SEO applied earlier.
We will make Google be proud of you with:
- high quality SEO strategy;
- backlinks from relevant resources;
- quality SMO;
- links diversity;
- unique content for every submission directory;
- constatnt situation analysis and reporting.
Contact us and you will get a reliable website healer, strategy planner and safe guard of your top positions.
Looking forward to your answer!
And Gmail is letting this stuff slide through the spam filters. Along with garbage like this:
Our Web Site [the url] is definitely related to yours and by placing a link from your site to a Web page of ours, you may not only bring further value to your visitors but you may improve your search engine rankings potential as well. By NOT being what Google and other search engines refer to as a "dead-end" site or a site that does not link to other industry related and content sites, your rankings have a good chance of increasing for important keyword searches. We can explain this in further detail following a response from you.
Create FUD & some huckster will sell into your messaging with inbound spamming.
If you ever wonder where the "reputation problem" of the SEO industry comes from, wonder no more.
One company in particular does a great job of riding these trends on through to their logical conclusion, then riding them a bit longer. And that company is Google.
On a positive note, it great to see Demand Media had solid growth & a stellar quarter. They will plow that capital into registering about 100 new domain extensions. Nothing to worry about there. It's not like they were known to redirect expired customer domain names for their link juice.
Good job Googlers!
Posted by Kurtis
Hi, my name's Kurtis and I'm relatively new here at Moz. My official title is "Captain of Special Projects," which means I spend a lot of time browsing strange parts of the web, assembling metrics and inputting data in Google Docs/Excel. If you walk past my desk in the Mozplex, be warned, investigating webspam is on my task list, hence you may come away slightly traumatized by what you see. I ward off the demons by taking care of two cats and fondly remembering my days as a semi-professional scoundrel in Minnesota.
Let's move on to my first public project, which came about after Google deindexed several directories a few weeks ago. This event left us wondering if there was a rhyme to their reason. So we decided to do some intensive data collection of our own and try to figure out what was really going on.
We gathered a total of 2,678 directories from lists like Val Web Design, SEOTIPSY.com, SEOmoz's own directory list (just the web directories were used), and a few others, the search for clues began. Out of the 2,678 directories, only 94 were banned – not too shabby. However, there were 417 additional directories that had avoided being banned, but had been penalized.
We define banned as having no results in Google when a site:domain.com search is performed:
We defined penalized as meaning the directory did not show up when highly obvious queries including its title tag / brand name produced the directory deep in the results (and that this could be repeated for any internal pages on the site as well):
As you can see above, the directory itself is nowhere to be found despite the exact title query, yet it's clearly still indexed (as you can see below by performing a domain name match query):
At first, the data for the banned directories had one common trait – none of them had a visible toolbar Pagerank. For the most part, this initial observation was fairly accurate. As we pressed on, the results became more sporadic. This leads me to believe that it may have been a manual update, rather than an algorithmic one, or at least, that no particular public metrics/patterns are clear from the directories that suffered a penalization/ban.
That is not to say the ones left unharmed are safe from a future algorithmic update. In fact, I suspect this update was intended to serve as a warning; Google will be cracking down on directories. Why? In my own humble opinion, most of the classic, "built-for-SEO-and-links" directories do not provide any benefit to users, falling under the category of non-content spam.
Some directories and link resource lists are likely going to be valuable and useful long term (e.g. CSS Beauty's collection of great designs, the Craft Site Directory or Public Legal's list of legal resources). These are obviously not in the same world as those "SEO directories" and thus probably don't deserve the same classification despite the nomenclature overlap.
In the midst of the panic, a concerned individual brought to my attention that “half of our directories were deindexed” and wanted to know when we would be updating our list. If by half he meant 4 of the 228 we listed were banned and an additional 4 just penalized, then I’d have to agree. ;-) In any case, our list is now updated. Thanks for being patient!
We've set up two spreadsheets that show which directories were banned and/or penalized, plus a bit of data about each one. Please feel free to check them out for yourself.
Directory Maximizer, Val Web Design, & SEOTIPSY Directory List
Given the size and scope of the data available, we're hoping that lots of you can jump in and perform your own analysis on these directories, and possibly find some other interesting correlations. As the process for checking for banning/penalization is very tedious and cumbersome, we likely won't be doing an analysis on this scale again in the very near future. But we may revisit it again in 6-12 months to see if things have changed and Google's cracking down more, letting some of the penalties/bans be lifted or making any other notable moves.
Changes were made to the list on Friday, June 1, 2012.
I look forward to your feedback and suggestions in the comments!
p.s. The Mozscape metrics (PA, DA, mozRank, etc) are from index 51, which rolled out at the start of May. Our new index, which was just released earlier today, will have more updated and possibly more useful/interesting data. If I have the chance, I'll try to update the public spreadsheets using those numbers.
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You can watch Samsung Galaxy SIII India launch event LIVE on May 31 from 1:30pm IST onward.
Read full article here > Watch LIVE: Samsung Galaxy SIII – India launch event written by Tushar Tajane
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techzoom/kzCz/~3/pXz69iYh640/
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WebsudasaBlog/~3/juFypowW2Og/
Source: http://jaysonlinereviews.com/learn-affiliate-internet-marketing-training/
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
A Technophobe’s No-tears Guide to Podcasting
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ProbloggerHelpingBloggersEarnMoney/~3/eAsQmrOitVk/
Source: http://pluperfecter.blogspot.com/2012/05/online-debates-vs-business.html
Today's video blog post is the final in our ten part series, so we are going out with a bang by revealing a proven selling strategy that delivers solid results.
Check out the video for the scoop and if you would like to see more video blogs in the future, let us know by leaving a comment below
Join Online Selling Tactics Now
Want the written transcript of this video? Check it out below:
"Hi guys,
I'm Alice. Welcome to our 10th and final video on online selling tactics that you can use to help boost your online sales.
Today’s video is all about offering free gifts to buyers.
Offering free gifts is a really great way to absolutely exceed your buyer’s expectations and ensure that they continue to purchase from you in the future which is crucial for the long term profitability of your business.
There are a couple of ways that you can use the free gift method in your selling strategy:
1. Offer a free gift in the listing – advertise the fact that if you buy the item, you get a free gift as well
2. Including a free item in the buyer’s package so that when they receive their item, they get a really nice surprise.
3. Offering a free gift when you buyer makes a number of purchases. For example, you send them a little extra when they have bought 4 or 5 items from you.
Free gifts don’t have to be overly expensive; I’ve seen people give buyers hand-written recipes when they sold Crock Pots and other kitchen items.
Another idea is if you sell clothing, you could order 50 or 100 scarves for female buyers and perhaps some cheap cufflinks for male buyers. I know you can get both of these very cheaply from SaleHoo suppliers so take a look around the directory.
Offering free gifts to buyers is pretty simple but there are two important tips that I want to share with you to ensure you always get the most recognition from offering a free gift:
1. Make it really clear when you are offering something for free. You can do this by using a subtitle feature, if you are selling on eBay, or just writing “free scarf” or whatever it is you are giving away in your item title. This way, when buyers are searching for items and deciding which item to click on, they will be much more inclined to click through to yours.
Here’s an example of some eBay listings and as you can see at the top, there is a listing which advertises a free bag with purchase (see video for example).
2. Always include a hand written note with the free gift. I think this gives you a lot of mileage from the free gift because you can say something like “I really appreciate your business and so I’ve included this little gift for you as a token of my appreciation. I give away free items often, so make sure you check out my listings again ”
So I suggest that you try giving this tactic a go and if you have used this tactic before, leave me a comment and let me know your experience.
As I mentioned, this is the last of my series of mini tactics videos, but if you want more in-depth, proven strategies for how to build a strong and profitable business, I highly recommend you check out my video training course, Online Selling Tactics.
Online Selling Tactics is for you if you have or are having trouble knowing what to sell and how to sell it, or:
I spent over 1 year researching and analyzing what makes successful online businesses differ from those that fail and condensed my surprising findings into 7 lessons, all with step by step instructions on how you can copy these business strategies and boost your own online business.
Whether you have a new business, or an existing one that you want to take to the next level, Online Selling Tactics will get you there and we guarantee results.
So click the link below and check out Online Selling Tactics today. Thanks for watching!"
