Advertising Information

It doesn’t matter if you’re a copywriter, marketing executive or entrepreneur, there will always be an opportunity where you have to use visuals to market your business and product.

It sounds fairly simple to tie words to pictures; just take a relevant image and slap it above the headline right?

Here’s where the problem lies – most marketers make the common mistake of repeating in words what they’ve already shown in the visuals. How many times have you seen ads that say “2 For the Price of 1” and show a picture of 2 products being offered at a discounted price?

Ads that are created this way are redundant, repetitive and mean nothing to readers! Understand that people these days are better educated and can tell the difference between a good and a dumb ad. Showing them something that is blatantly obvious isn’t going to help you win the hearts and minds (and wallets!) of your readers!

So how do you create an ad that wins you that all-important sale?

Here are 5 proven and effective advertising techniques that will make your readers go from “what in the world?” to “WOW!”

1. Use split-screen images to highlight the benefits of using your product: Do a before-and-after or side-by-side comparison. Use graphs, charts, timelines, statistics and visually impactful images to illustrate the amazing results achieved by ordinary people using your product. If you want to make your ad even more interesting, you could show the negative consequences of not using it as most people are motivated by pain.

2. Give your readers a glimpse of the future: Paint a vivid picture of the lifestyle that your product helps to create. In other words, emphasize the results of using your product. Could it be a more successful future? Or greater recognition? Or more happiness? You may even highlight the pain your readers would feel by not using your product.

3. Demonstrate the product in use: You often see this type of technique in food advertisements where motion is used to make certain meals look more appetizing – butter being spread on bread, cheese oozing out of the sides of a pizza, steam wafting out of a bowl of piping hot noodles. The rule of thumb is this: if there’s motion, show it. The same applies for products that are not food. If you’re selling t-shirts, show them being worn. If you’re promoting a skin moisturizer, show it being applied on the skin.

4. Emphasize a real, everyday person connected to your product: As I’ve always mentioned in my articles, consumers are smarter this days and relate better to ads that are believable and real. To prove this point, take a few seconds to answer this question: Who would you relate better to? An attractive-looking male model who claims he’s found the woman of his dreams. Or an average-looking Joe who has overcome low self-esteem and finally found the confidence to attract a love partner?

Therefore, this person should be a customer who has already experienced your service and product. By using pictures of real, ordinary people using your product, it makes your ad more believable and your readers will naturally respond better to something they can relate to.

5. Take the emphasis away from the product, but not the benefits: Sometimes, to stand out from a sea of clichd ads, you have to move beyond the obvious and do something different. So besides your own product, what other images can be used to highlight its benefits? If you’re selling a hair growth product that stops balding, could you show something else that isn’t the balding scalp of live human being? Could it be the smooth surface of an egg? Or the bristles of a broom?

MLM lead generation is a highly misinterpreted idea in the MLM business arena. The cause for this misunderstanding is the ‘old school’ yet, widely popular method of lead generation taught by MLM sponsors: “The first thing you should do is make a list of everyone you have ever known including all relatives, acquaintances, and people that work with you.” After you’re finished making your ‘warm list’ of so-called ‘leads,’ you are told to call everyone up and drag them to a home gathering or local hotel meeting where the business opportunity is to be ‘hard sold’ to them. While this tactic works for about 0.001%, the rest of the newbie network marketers either try this and fail, or are afraid to ever try at all, for fear of being added to the NFL club (the ‘no friends left club’). In my opinion, it is this twisted, faulty method of recruiting new reps that accounts for the 97% failure rate, and average life span of 93 days for network marketers.

The number one thing you’ve got to be aware of is that MLM is a real business, and has to be conducted like a business in order for you to reach any level of success, or even sponsor your first few distributors. Would you open a boutique on a side street that nobody can see, only tell your two sisters, and expect to actually grow a business and get into profit? I think not! Network marketing is not at all different. To be successful, you’ve got to employ the most essential, but most ignored word in multi-level marketing – marketing.

So what is the proper way of marketing your business? There are lots of ways both online and offline. Offline MLM lead generation tactics include but are not limited to flyers, drop cards, the ‘three foot rule,’ mail outs and cold callling via the telephone. There are a lot of people out there that will tell you that these methods are out-dated and no longer work. And while, I believe that they DO work, they don’t work as well, as fast or as cost-effectively as online methods. Actually, the internet allows you to contact a large group of people from all over the world, much speedier than you ever could being pigeon-holed in your own town trying to talk to each and every person individually. The truly amazing part in reference to online lead generation is the fact that people online are searching for work from home opportunities. The only thing you’ve got to do is become skilled at positioning your business opportunity in front of those who are seeking it out and people will call you up and join, without you having to beg or convince anyone of anything.

There are lots of online marketing techniques that are very efficient in getting you from a part-time home business owner to replacing your income from your full-time J-O-B in less than a year. As a side note, before we start – you should realize I’m saying a ‘year or less.’ That is because I want to make clear, whether you are online or offline, that it doesn’t happen overnight. Any time you’ve heard someone say they had success overnight, consider the fact that you only actually heard part of their story. When people say they were able to sponsor 186 people in less than a week, they aren’t exactly telling it how it is. It may be the truth, however, it’s more like a like by omission. People claiming these things are leaving out the reason why so many people joined them in such a short time. And the reason, is because a large group of people followed them from a previous network marketing company, to a new one. That’s the bottom line.

The following is a list of my personal recommendations generating leads. I’m recommending these marketing techniques based upon what I’ve found to work the best, starting with my favorite.

Content Marketing – Content marketing is basically creating videos and articles and broadcasting them all over the internet. This MLM advertising technique is pretty cool because it is totally free, and will bring residual traffic to your website. What I mean by that, is that you create it once, and people will see it when they’re searching for your keyword phrases for years to come. The only down side is that it’s not fast. In fact, it will likely take more than a month or two to even see any type of results from this method, which will leave some people frustrated and likely to quit before they see results. So if you know you are the type that needs to see leads in your inbox today, paid advertising will be the way you’ll want to go.

PPC – Pay per Click marketing is by far the most effective paid MLM advertising technique, hands down. Pay per click advertising is effective because it is just directed towards people typing in the EXACT thing you are offering. For PPC, you select a keyword phrase, such as ‘network marketing company’ and place a bid that you will pay, each time your ad is clicked on. Then, when people type that particular keyword phrase in Google, your ad will show up on on the right as a sponsored ad. The only time you are charged is when somebody clicks on your particular ad. Having said that, you can lose a lot of money with PPC if you’re not careful and don’t know how to use it properly. I suggest you NOT try any pay per click until you are properly trained. Perry Marshal wrote a good book on PPC, and there’s also some other good training out there on the Internet.

Social Networking – This is quickly becoming one of the leading MLM advertising techniques and the reason for that is because the way that humans interact with one another is changing. More and more people are making use of socal networks such as Facebook to meet new friends and network online. If you take a social approach to marketing and make friends while you’re at it, you could dominate this method and easily generate 20-50 leads per day. Social networking may soon become the most widely used form of online MLM lead generation.

Online advertising within the fashion retail industry is bigger than it has ever been before. With all the different social media networks, blogs, article websites, picture posting and all the other resources out there, figuring out where and how to even start can be quite overwhelming so we will be covering a few basic ideas in order to successfully advertise your products online.

For more reasons than none, advertising a single product line can be much easier and faster than advertising a company with many different types of products. At first thought, you may think it is the other way around and a company with many different types of products is much easier to advertise since you have more products to talk about and you will probably be involved in different sectors, which in time creates a more diverse background creating more opportunities to advertise not only online but anywhere.

In some cases this can be true but for this particular case we are speaking in terms of product optimization, which is much more straightforward and organized than optimizing for an entire company with various types of product. This specific advertising also serves as a starting ground for a larger and more diverse company in the future.

Since we are specifically speaking in terms of fashion apparel and retail companies, let’s say you have just manufactured a pair of premium denim jeans that are similar to some of the most popular premium denim brands out there but you are able to offer them at a fraction of the cost. You could create a website and blog specifically targeting your premium denim jeans in order to get direct traffic from people searching those exact keywords. You could also create social accounts and post articles all targeting premium denim jeans. Make the online world of retail revolve around your product.

It is much easier to target a group of keywords relating to the same topic than it is to target a group of keywords that are scattered throughout a general category. All of this keyword targeting is a large part of how online retailers are successful that didn’t have any type of prior advertising. To make this thought more clear, let’s go back to premium denim jeans. If this same individual or company decided to go a different route and sell t-shirts, shoes, sweaters, shorts and watches on top of their jeans, they wouldn’t get the same results because they would be optimizing for clothing in general. Yes, they could after a considerable amount of time but nothing compared to the time frame of one particular product. Concentrating all your online advertising energy on one specific product creates success.

If you look at specialty brands that are successful it is because they have focused heavily on one particular product, which draws attention to their other products. Sticking with premium denim, look at brands like True Religion Brand Jeans, 7 For All Mankind or even Rock & Republic. They all initially started out with premium denim jeans and now they are known for their other apparel and accessories as well as their overall lifestyle.

This last topic of online advertising within the fashion industry is an article in itself so we are going to keep this short and to the point and save all the details for another day. Say you have already created a website with a blog, created an account with every social media network you can think of and have articles posted, press releases submitted and the whole nine yards but you still want more. Say hello to affiliate programs. There are many out there, some better than others, but pick a solid one like Commission Junction or Google Affiliate Network. This will allow you to submit your product catalog to thousands of people who then post your products on their websites to be sold. Yes, you have to give these people a commission, usually 5-15%, but the potential for spreading the word about your product is endless and could be one of the most effective ways to advertise online within the fashion industry.

Internet marketing is a huge business and it’s growing every single day as more and more people come online to try to make a living. While there are many approaches to marketing online, one of the fastest ways to drive traffic to your website and start to generate revenue is by utilizing pay per click advertising.

As the very term suggests, this is advertising that is paid for every time someone clicks on an ad displaying your link. The amount that you pay for that click is dependent on the amount that you bid to have a paid listing for a certain keyword term or keyword phrase.

Effective pay per click ad campaigns will start with good keyword research. This step is crucial so that you understand what the best keyword terms and phrases will provide the most targeted traffic for your site or affiliate program that you are attempting to promote.

Keyword research is important so that you do not waste money promoting your site under that wrong search term and also so that you can see if there is enough traffic coming from that keyword term to justify using it. The other aspect of keyword research is checking to see how high the bids are for certain search terms that you would be interested in bidding on.

Often, you might find that the keyword you would like to use for your pay per click campaign has a very high bid amount on it and it doesn’t make sense to pay that much for each click, especially when you are starting out.

Through good keyword research, you can probably find a similar keyword term that can still deliver enough traffic so that it is worth your while, but that has a much lower bid amount on it.

The biggest player in the pay per click advertising game is definitely Google. Not only is Google the most used and the top search engine, but they also have a vast network of sites where their ads are also displayed, giving people the widest array of exposure for their advertising.

Of course, other search engines, such as Yahoo, MSN, Miva, also offer pay per click (PPC) advertising programs, but none of them have the kind of reach or the numbers of visitors that can come from a Google campaign.

However, utilizing the PPC programs of these other sites can help you get attention from and visibility to the different search engines, sometimes accelerating the time it takes for them to index your site.

Pay per click is an and effective way to attract the most potential customers to your website. In fact, many online marketing experts are touting PPC as the absolute best way to assure steady profitability from your website, assuming that your website converts well.

In order to maximize your success, it is important to closely manage and analyze the results of your pay per click advertising campaigns. As each month passes, you will see which of the terms you bid on are most profitable, then you can modify your campaigns and increase your profits even more.

What are the Search Engine Optimization not telling you? All is revealed about pay per click advertising at Mike Selvon portal. Don’t forget to leave us a comment at our SEO optimization blog.