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MARKETING STRATEGY : 5 Online Marketing Tools for your Small BusinessEntrepreneurs, start-ups and other small businesses often wonder about the online marketing tools that can be used. Online marketing tool #1. Google Website Optimizer About : Website Optimizer is a free tool that helps you test and increase your site’s conversion rates. You can test variations of text, images, and other content. It’s easy to use and provides a very compelling way to test and increase conversions. Why use it? : You can use the Website Optimizer for numerous tests on your site, including the home page, our “how it works page”, and on other pages to test specific elements. If you wonder whether the effort is worth it – it absolutely is. How to it : Develop content for a specific page and run tests to see which content leads to higher conversions. For example, you can test different variations of your “How It Works” page. First, include a short factual statement that helps buyers understand the average level of participation when the award is less than $300, compared to the average level of participation when the award is more than $300 (the amounts in this example are for logo projects). Second, we try to visually help buyers understand whether the amount they’ve entered is LOW, AVERAGE, BEST, etc. To increase conversions, we try to find ways to show buyers why they should offer awards higher than $300 in logo projects. At the moment, we are testing two different approaches. In the first approach, we are using color bars to signal to the buyer whether their award is reasonable. A buyer who enters the minimum amount in their project ($200 for a logo, for example), sees a red color bar with the text “VERY LOW”. A buyer who sets a higher award amount ($1000 for a standard logo project, for example), sees a blue color bar with the text “BEST”. We have color variations and different messages in between those two examples. Online marketing tool #2. Google Analytics About : Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your web traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Why use it? : There are numerous paid analytics tools available – and many are quite good. Google Analytics is free and offers more than enough features that most businesses need. Google has continued to innovate in this area and has recently added new features, including advanced segmentation (allowing you to analyze subsets of your traffic) and custom reports. How to it : We monitor web traffic to every page on our site. We also monitor every marketing campaign that we run to evaluate whether the expenses (both time and effort) are justified. We’ll also occasionally compare our data to those of our competitors. If you’re interested, I recently wrote “10 Tips For Evaluating Your Competitors” – a useful guide that lists additional resources that could supplement your analytics data. Online marketing tool #3. Gmail Apps About : Google Apps is a low-cost online service that provides powerful email, calendar, documents, intranet solutions for small businesses. Why use it? : Google charges $50 per user per year. It would cost us considerably more (in setup, time, and support) to replicate the services offered in Google Apps on our own. We get outstanding email service with world-class email security, spam filtering and archiving, group calendar capability, group document, spreadsheet and presentation capability, and although we don’t use this feature – the opportunity to create an intranet for our company. How to it : Some of us use the online gmail interface while others use the Mail client in OS X. We often generate documents and spreadsheets that we share among our team, and we share online calendars (iMail integrates nicely with Google Apps – some on our team prefer iMail and Calendar in OS X – and those live peacefully with the rest of us who use the Google native online applications). Online marketing tool #4. Google Alerts About : Google alerts are free email updates from Google search results about any topic you’re interested in tracking. Why use it? : We track numerous terms (different people on our team track different terms). For example, I track the names of our competitors, our own name, certain key industry events or terms, and many more terms/topics. Anytime Google adds something to its index that mentions crowdSPRING – I receive an immediate email notification with a link to that item. How to it : Without the ability to learn about new content, we would have difficulty participating in online discussions about us or about issues that are important to us. Moreover, Google Alerts help us to follow new developments in the industry. Online marketing tool #5. Campaign Monitor About : Campaign Monitor is a low-cost service that helps you with email marketing. You can send text and html email campaigns, track the results, and manage your subscribers. Why use it? : We send emails and our newsletters to tens of thousands of users who’ve opted in to receive email from us. It would be very difficult and expensive to do this on our own How to it : Campaign Monitor maintains our subscriber list and allows us to test every html email in multiple email clients before it’s sent. It also monitors numerous statistics about our emails and delivers reports to us showing how many people opened our email, how many (and who) clicked which link, etc. We use this data to improve our emails and newsletters and to better understand what our users like reading about. source: source: http://blog.crowdspring.com/2009/08/31/10-awesome-online-tools-every-small-business-should-be-using/ Strategy for Marketing Your BusinessQ: How can a professional web designer come up with a business marketing strategy? I am a webmaster in Florida. From what I read and what people tell me, the skills I have for designing websites and web development are still in high demand.....Marketing your Internet BusinessSo you've got a fantastic idea for a business, a product that absolutely everyone wants. so now what? It's time for a marketing strategy and plan; the lifeblood of any successful product lies in its ability to reach out amongst the ....Free Sample Marketing PlanA marketing plan for a small business typically includes Small Business Administration Description of competitors, including the level of demand for the product or service and the strengths and weaknesses of competitors....Marketing Plan EssentialsEvery marketing plan has to fit the needs and situation. Even so, there are standard components you just can't do without. 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