Business Podcast Marketing Case Study Proves Results
By: Rodney Rumford

Business Podcast Marketing Case Study Shows How Podcasting Delivers Dramatic Results for Client. Podcasting has significant business marketing potential. If the business podcast strategy and online visibility plan is properly executed; podcasting has the potential to be a marketing tool that delivers great marketing results.

The professional business marketers over at marketingsherpa.com have just released a new case study titled "How to Use a Podcast to Promote a White Paper That Generates New Business Sales Leads". This case study is about how Bearing Point used podcasting to promote a white paper and saw sign up rates of over 30% versus a traditional 10%. This is a 200% increase over traditional marketing techniques.

Here is a short excerpt: "Dunay wasn't sure if the podcasts would be a hit or not, especially as his key prospects tend to be fairly conservative. So he didn't roll out trumpets and strobe lights for the launch.

Instead, the team posted the podcasts and announcements at several related sites including Podblaze.com, FreshPodcasts.com, and iTunes (all of which currently promote podcasts for free.) They also rolled out a press release and an email announcement to the house list. Their first podcast launched quietly July 29, 2005.

RESULTS
Joy and exultation! Hundreds of executives downloaded the podcasts. Dunay had hoped that 10% of podcast listeners would respond to the white paper download offer. Instead, 30% did..."

This is a great example of how marketing professionals should and could be using podcasting to help their business. This is the future of podcasting, Podcasting is going to become a marketing tool that communicates, educates and drives listeners to action. In this case the action was to download a white paper and effectively generate leads.

I have been trying to inform the business markets of this trend for the past 9 months. I discussed this very scenario in a Podcasting White Paper that was released a few months back. Read the full case study at MarketingSherpa.com

Experienced online marketing professionals that have expertise in the areas of podcast production, strategy, and visibility such as www.LeveragedPromotion.com can help your business achieve these same levels of results. Just creating a podcast in a vacuum of space is the wrong strategy. Make sure that you achieve maximum exposure for your podcasts so that they can deliver measurable marketing results.

Author Bio
Rodney Rumford has over 18 years of experience in the technology field. He has held management positions in Marketing, Business Dev, Enterprise Consulting, Sales and Engineering. He does corporate consulting in the areas of RSS & Podcasting strategy, execution and marketing. He has developed software solutions in the areas of RSS Feeds, Podcasting and PPC Advertising. He is the CEO of The Info Guru LLC., which operates several web properties that include: http://www.podblaze.com

Article Source: http://www.ArticleGeek.com

Relationship Marketing 101: Blogging and Inbound Marketing

Relationship Marketing 101: Blogging and Inbound Marketing

Posted: 24 May 2010 09:08 AM PDT

One of the most effective inbound marketing strategies available for businesses, online and offline, both in terms of cost of implementation and in overall return on investment (ROI), is blogging. Why has business blogging become so important as an inbound marketing strategy? There are a variety of reasons. Blogging is conversation, it’s personable, and it’s informative. Blogging is attractive for both online and offline (i.e., brick and mortar) businesses because consumers (i.e., customers, clients, and patients) feel they are being told a story rather than sold a product or service; and, no one wants to be “sold!”

Significantly, clients and prospective clients become part of the conversation by reading the blog posts and leaving their thoughts and feelings in the form of comments.

Who doesn’t like being asked their opinion?

And, what business owner wouldn’t pay big money to know what his target audience is thinking, as well as what they react to and why?

A blog is a great way to show the world your expertise, thus establishing authority and demonstrating your competence in the marketplace and to your target market. People like to do business with business people they know, like, and trust. Prospective clients are drawn to businesses and business people who are experts in their field. Demonstrating competence enhances your image and makes the prospective client feel confident about their decision to purchase from you…you, as the expert in your field.

When properly constructed and implemented, an effective business blogging strategy is an incredibly valuable asset. Blogging for business is crucial, whether the business is entirely online or a combination of both, as is the case with most brick and mortar businesses today.

When organized and well written, a blog conveys the ultimate Internet image, an image that announces:

“This business is well run, this is a business I can do business with!”

A well thought out, well constructed blog, combined with an effective overall inbound marketing strategy, conveys a message, an image if you will, that this business owner is knowledgeable and cares enough to seek feedback about products and/or services offered from his or her clients and prospective clients.

A wise business owner values feedback, realizing there is always room for improvement, both in sales and service. Why not ask for feedback from the very people who use the product or service day in and day out? A blog can accomplish this for a business, creating a link both valuable and, ultimately, profitable. The feedback a blog offers is an often over-looked advantage; and yet, it is an incredibly powerful resource.

Significantly, the proper blogging strategy will provide a window into the thinking of your client-base and create a vehicle you may then use to improve your products and/or service.

The feedback from your business blog will also provide ideas and strategies for new products and services. Interestingly, you may even be able to gain a competitive advantage by learning what your clients and prospective clients like and dislike about your competitors, their products and services. Perhaps it’s a product or service you don’t provide but should? Perhaps it’s something to do with price? The blog provides the vehicle, the opportunities are there; and, it is up to the individual business owner to take advantage of them. A well constructed inbound marketing strategy, one that has at its center a well-thought-out and appropriately implemented blogging strategy, will put your business on track to accomplish all of the above and more.

One last word about inbound marketing, blogs, and blogging for business: photographs, audio recordings, and short videos are worth their weight in gold. If you aren’t the greatest writer, and don’t have the money in the budget to hire a good copywriter, also worth their weight in gold, a photograph or short video can help you tell your business’ story. With today’s technology, a photograph, audio, and/or video is easy to create and it’s often the first item to catch the attention of a visitor to your blog.

It’s worth taking some time each day to blog. Think of it as going out to talk to the man on the street. Think of it as time well spent. You will find it to be a great investment in time and effort, the ultimate in ROI.

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What is The Ultimate Internet Image? The ultimate online presence entails merging Internet “inbound” marketing with traditional “outbound” marketing. In doing so UII has created a revolutionary approach to marketing. UII is the next-step, establishing your business as a force in your competitive niche, as well as in your community, online or offline. John Zajaros The Ultimate Internet Image

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Relationship Marketing 101: Blogging and Inbound Marketing

Facebook Location Features Will Unlock More Potential for Businesses

Facebook Location Features Will Unlock More Potential for Businesses

By Chris Crum - Mon, 05/10/2010 - 4:12pm.

Facebook Location Features Coming Soon

We've talked about multiple ways Facebook can help your business online, and that is not limited to online businesses, although selling through Facebook is becoming easier and easier thanks to application developers like Payvment.

Facebook is getting ready to start offering location-sharing features. It's not certain exactly when this will happen, but reports have suggested that it will be before the month is over. Code within Facebook's touchscreen interface has been discovered that will place a "Places" tab on Facebook user profiles.

"This will be the biggest thing to happen to local businesses since paid search," says Ian Schafer at AdAge. "The ability to leverage frequent visits to their locations to passively and actively influence others to do the same, deliver special offers, or redirect local foot traffic at a moment's notice can lead to a direct, measurable impact on in-store sales and word-of-mouth."

If you thought Foursquare had some good opportunities for local businesses, consider that at last count (months ago at this point) Facebook had over 400 million users.

Location sharing is an increasingly growing trend, and is influencing how people access information. It's also playing more of a role in search. With or without search, Facebook participating is a game changer.

Foursquare alone just surpassed 40 million check-ins. I could see Facebook surpassing that in a week.

Let's not forget that Facebook is also sending brick and mortar businesses decals to promote their Facebook pages.

Facebook has been a good way for businesses to engage with their customers in the past, and now there are an increasing number of ways to do this. One app will let you add an actual Support tab to your Page.

Dummies Guide To Facebook Marketing

Dummies Guide To Facebook Marketing

Posted: 03 May 2010 10:34 PM PDT

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 4 years, you would know how popular and widely used Facebook is today.

Just a few short years ago, you had to encourage all your family and friends to join this social networking website (just after others convinced you to join). Nowadays, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t got a Facebook account.

At last count, there were over 350 million users on Facebook and this number is continuing to grow. It overtook MySpace as the number 1 social networking website on the planet last year and is just behind Google when it comes to online traffic. You are then able to understand how important Facebook marketing has become for all websites.

It’s Not A Pitch Zone

The most important thing to remember about social media is that it is not a place to blatantly and endlessly pitch your product or service. If you do this, then you will not get any favours from social media users and will get largely ignored and even bad reviews.

What social media is used for is for building relationships with potential clients. There are a number of ways you can do this:

you can post helpful information (links) where you help them solve a problem you can personally chat with them and assist them you can create content addressing the needs of users and posting it The bottom line is that you want to be seen as genuine and helpful. This way, word can get out that you’re the real deal and before you know it, people will become interested in what you have to offer in terms of products and services.

Of course, the things you share on social networking sites such as Facebook shouldn’t be the nitty gritty stuff that you have to offer. You should share helpful information in the form of teasers that will interest people enough to ask and wonder if there’s more. Offering free stuff is great for getting attention too.

How To Market On Facebook

The great thing about Facebook is that from the outset, it has encouraged all users to use the website as a means of sharing information and marketing whatever they please. As a consequences, it has created various ways for users to do this. You are not obliged to use every single one of them but a combination of them can only improve your Facebook marketing.

Pages

This is probably the marketing tool out there on Facebook. On its website Facebook describes Pages as “a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.” It is specifically designed for promoting a business and everything it has to offer. People can then become a Fan of your page and when they do this, they let their friends know that they’ve become a Fan of your page via their News Feed. The potential for your Page to gain a lot of popularity in a small period of time is great.

Of course, it all depends on the content you put out there for people to use. You need to give them a reason to become a Fan of your Page and a reason for them to keep being one.

Events

This allows to create events to be held at a certain date and time. Depending on what type of business you are, you can create one to be held locally or internationally. It can be any one of the following:

seminar – it should be introductory and free but you could promote a paid one too
webinar – an online seminar and where anyone worldwide can join
product/service launch – you may be about to launch a product or service and this is a way to gain attention The best part about creating an event on Facebook is that it can go viral and before you know it people will be attending your event in droves.

Advertising

Finally, about a year ago, Facebook introduced an advertising service where people can put ads promoting their website or their Facebook Page and they pay per click (PPC) or impression (CPM). It works in a similar way to Google Adwords.

The best thing is that you can target your bads based on both geographical locations and social actions. For example, if you were a wedding photographer and wanted to promote your services, your ads can be set up to appear only to females between the ages of 24 and 30 and whose relationship statuses indicate they are engaged.

It must be noted, however, that Facebook Advertising is still in beta mode which only means that it will only improve in the near future.

Embrace Facebook

If you wanted to market your website online, you would be absolutely nuts not to use Facebook marketing as one of your key strategies. Just be careful not to get caught up in it too much because it can become a very time consuming activity.

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Martin Sejas is a leading online marketing consultant based in Sydney who specialises in helping local business use their websites to get more clients. Register for a free consultation today.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Dummies Guide To Facebook Marketing

Advertising Punch from the Industry Leader

A powerful ad submission service is critical to your business and Blastomatic makes getting content found by search engines quick and easy. This website submission service will increase your results with the most powerful system ever created! No other ad submission service can compare and this one is free!

Blastomatic was designed by Veretekk as a free ad submit service that allows you to create and blast your advertisement to over 12 million websites. It is a superb tool which has great attraction for those wanting to blast their ads into cyberspace with the objective of building back links and generating leads.

With Blastomatic you'll be able to download 5000+ leads daily. As a non-paying member the system will only allow you to do this once a month. But if you update your blastomatic system for $14/month, you will have the ability to download leads daily. You will download an average of 150,000 leads per month which is less then $0.0001 per lead.

The quality of these leads are far from ordinary, they aren't over-used, contaminated 'throw in the trash' leads accumulated and collected from other lists. The leads are fresh leads, straight from the server-farm from people seeking answers to their questions - many of whom are seeking knowledge on starting a home based business..

To use Blatomatic, simply select your keywords, configure your ad, sit back, and watch as your ad is submitted live to many well-known major ad sites.

Don't Waste Your Customers' Time with Your Site

Don't Waste Your Customers' Time with Your Site
Chris Crum | Staff Writer April 11, 2010

If you've ever analyzed your website's bounce rate, you may have found problems with people leaving before they get through the buying process. Have you noticed that a lot of people left your site at the point where they have to fill out a form? This may be because you're asking for too much information.

By this, I don't necessarily mean that you're asking for information that people don't want to share for personal reasons. Perhaps you're just asking for too much in general. You're taking up too much of the customer's time.

Time is an incredibly valuable thing these days, when consumers have much more information coming into their lives than ever before, particularly online. People have news feeds, Facebook, email, online video, search, and plenty of other things to take up their online time. Sure, shopping is one of these things, and you may fit into that, but it doesn't change the fact that time is a factor.

Essentially, it should be as quick and painless as possible from the point where a customer reaches your site, finds what they're looking for, and buys it.

"For instance, if you have an email form and you're collecting email addresses to put them on your email newsletter, you may ask their name, their interests, their email address, have some checkboxes - where did you hear about us...thinking that that's just a normal field, but when someone looks at it, they say, 'I don't really want to spend the time to fill that out,'" says Brandon Eley, author of the book Online Marketing Inside Out.

"Reducing the number of form fields that you put on a form dramatically increases the number of people who will actually fill it out," he adds. "So only ask for the information that you really need. The same goes for a check-out process or a registration process. Make it as simple and concise as you can, and you'll really increase those conversions."

In addition, it is a good idea, if you run an e-commerce site, that you have a consistent navigation system in place throughout the site, so customers can always get to what they are looking for without having to look for how to look for it. Have a search box on every page. Don't make it hard on the customer, because they'll just leave and find a more usable site.

Time is increasingly scarce, and that means people have less patience. Why do you think Google is talking about making site speed a ranking factor in search results?

The GodFather Speaks

The GodFather Speaks
The Veretekk V2 release

It is Veretekk's birthday April 01, 2010. Officially launched as an affiliate opportunity in 2004. That would make the opportunity Veretekk 6 years running strong. But Veretekk started a long time before that. It has always been a vision and a mission. Come to the Monday meeting for a brief history and a glimpse into Veretekk's deepest meanings.

I am the CEO of Veretekk. My name is Thomas Prendergast and I welcome you to Veretekk. Veretekk has been my personal mission for over 10 years. That mission is to empower you, the individual to greatness via the Internet. I have been on the Internet before Al Gore invented it.

Yes the Internet can be challenging to many, but with my leadership, Mike Darlings innovations and the many volunteer trainers, no where else will you find greater hope, and a greater promise to achieve our goals than here.

Not only have I built a system that exemplifies all that I know that works to achieve our goals, I have also made it very easy to understand for all of you. You will notice a yellow colored Clapperboard in the top right corner. Click on it. It is a tutorial video explaining everything regarding this system. Throughout each section I have taken meticulous time to explain what that section does. This is the work of love. You will find this Yellow Video Clapperboards everywhere in this system. Watch them. They will guide you to success.

Another area of intense focus on teachings is the Veretraining section. In there you will find the Training Modules. There are two sections. The Masters of Marketing trainings and the campaign tutorials: The Master of Marketing tutorials will guide you to become a true master of Internet marketing. The campaigns will take you step by step teaching you proven methods that get real results. This is also were you will find the calendar were there are hundreds of like teachings being conducted live everyday. A true university of Internet marketing, we call it the University of Veretekk.

This year we embarked upon a brand new Veretekk system built upon the foundation of the Veretekk of the last 14 or so years.

So far we have delivered Phase 1, which incorporates the:

• New Bully Pulpit allowing you to send email everyday instead of once a week.
• Opened the email lead upload in Veremail from 10,000 per day to unlimited per day. That means You can upload as much and as often as you wish.
• We incorporated our Vereconference conference rooms into your Veretekk back office so your Gold account now includes a 5 seat fully functional webinar room.
• We replaced the Hammer in your Veretekk Gold Portal Control Panels with a new advanced system called the Drill. The Drill builds massive legitimate back links for your SEO advantage. It does not publish your Veretekk email address like the Hammer did and the Hammer links were inferior to what the Drill produces.
• We have routed the capture leads (CPTs) into a verification system in your Veremail back office. We have done this because 90% of your CPT emails are toxic spam with toxic spam trap return email addresses.
• We have added the same leads that the Free-ffa system delivers to your Veremail Gold back office. Now it is as simple as pushing a button to send a verification request to the 2000+ leads delivered to your system everyday.
• We have added $10 per month to your compensation for Gold subscribers to the first level of your genealogy. This $10 per month is paid out to you regardless if you are a Gold or Silver subscriber
• To date the value we have added to your Veretekk Gold system exceeds $50.00 per month.
• To cover these costs we have had a small monthly increase and we have eliminated the setup fees..
• Phase one also allows Gold subscribers to give a Gold subscription away for 30 days. So if you are a Silver not only is there even more value than ever in Veretekk Gold, but now you can experience it with no obligation at all. Just contact your sponsor and request the Gold 30 day free offer from them.
• NOTE: If your sponsor does not respond to you, phone id disconnected, email bounces, they don't respond, them we recommend you contact Veretekk support or find a new Veretekk Gold sponsor to sign up under.

We are working on Phase 2, which incorporates the following:

• Adding Spamassasin filter control on your Veretekk POP account. Only Gold subscribers get POP accounts.
• Auto delete for Silver accounts that are not active. If you do not log into your Silver account at least once a week, your account will be deleted. Veretekk will send email out to alert y7ou that your account is about to be deleted for another 5 days before the delete occurs. Full deletion sends all the leads up line to the first Gold account in the up line.
• Major upgrades to the Platinum Control Panel like making groups of Blogger.com accounts and putting those groups into designated Gold Bully Pulpit accounts.
• Auto remote publishing to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
• Auto publishing to designated Veretekk RSS feeds as well as your own feed via the Bully Pulpit.
• A new Forum replacing the support forum,. The new Forum will be all about Social Networking and Internet Marketing. This new forum will be Google savvy and hooked into your account and new V2 front end.
• Hosting included with your Veretekk Gold account. Full blown commercial quality unlimited hosting. Our Warriors are experience this hosting already. There is nothing better than this.

Then comes Phase 3 the front end system:

• I always save the best for last. Delivering this will be easy but we want everything else in place. The front end new design. Wow is all I can say, I am the designer of the front end and I can't wait. It will be so crystal clear and solid. But even more so, it will be a love affair between your V2 system and Google.
• By Phase 3 all of your autoresponders will be redone. Their will be a customized self replicated eBook for everyone of your Traffic Portals and customized specific autoresponders for each of your portals as well.
• Come to tonight's meeting for examples of this.
• The ability to ad video into your V2 page.
• A powerful all inclusive Social Network system's) management system so you can maintain and control all your Social Network systems from one place in your back office and…..

   

• The Clique:
  An exclusive V2 advantage masking a common area within your front V2 site with all the accolades, blogs, forums and social marketing systems all listed with hyper links and keywords not just for visitors but the Google bots as well.
• And every Portal back office will have the ebook embedded into them. And….
• Every single one of your Portals front ends will also become your blogs and have similar customizable content just like your V2 front page system.

Even if you only understand 10% of what we are about to do, I am sure your mind is saying WOW! I know my mine is.

All I can ad from here, is come to our meetings. If you are Silver get your sponsor's attention and get that 30 day free Gold option. If not FIND A NEW SPONSOR!

Thomas Prendergast
CEO
Veretekk.com, Inc.
Free Lead generating Search Engine

You can now have your very own eTracking search engine and there is no cost. Your eTracking site is more than a basic search engine. You can submit your website to eTracking, but you can also get your very own search engine! 

Billed as the world's first self-replicating search engine, this portal is an extremely viral tool that allows you to generate massive leads directly, as well as indirectly by giving away additional eTracking search engines. This tool represents real SEO power and can easily become a massive verified lead generator and a source of mlm leads for free. It is self replicating, comes with live training and runs on over 200 servers. 

Listed in the back office in your eTracking portal is all the people (i.e. leads) who have submitted to your search engine. Their information is available for you to contact them and promote your business. However, be careful to follow the rules when contacting these leads. 

The Chief Executive Officer of Inetekk, Tom Prendergast and the President of Inetekk, Mike Darling, created the Veretekk Marketing System to help anybody promote their business on the Internet and offline. Veretekk has combined chaos theory with viral technology to create this a leading edge traffic portal.. This technology is exclusive to Inetekk, the inventors of Veretekk. 

If you want your own Free Lead generating Search Engine , sign up for free. If you want a portfolio of lead generators like eTracking, then you need to join Veretekk.

More Info