Internet Marketing Helps Your Home Based Business through the Tough Times

As a home based business owner, you already know that customers are the source of your success and the basis of your business. When times get tough, it's important to maintain Internet marketing efforts and strengthen relationships with existing customers.
Email marketing campaigns are a great and inexpensive way to do this; it's an ideal time to encourage your customers to keep doing business with you, and remind prospects that still haven't bought from you that there is an existing relationship with your home based business.
It's not necessary to hire an entire staff to undertake your Internet marketing plan - especially in today's economy, when everyone is trying to save a buck. The simplest marketing plans can be performed by even the least Internet-savvy individuals, saving your home based business significant funds in overhead expenses.
When writing your email marketing campaign to send to your existing contacts and customers, think about what type of position they are likely in right now. What type of promotional offer is likely to make them 'jump?' Designing these offers is one of the most important steps - there's no sense in spending time and energy on an email marketing campaign that doesn't produce some results.
You may want to offer discounts, free access to seminars, or package purchase discounts. Also remember that your email marketing messages should include more than simply what you want the customer to buy.
Write a special report about recent trends in your home based business's industry that is both informational and educational. You may also consider something like a how-to guide, FAQs, or parts of a recent white paper that will interest your customers.
The only way to determine the value of an email marketing program is to track any sales or activity that is a result of it. If the campaign produces nothing, then it isn't worth the time and energy as it's written; it might be a good idea to hire a professional sales writer at that time.
You can track your results of each Internet marketing campaign employed, and should make this an automatic behavior as soon as sending email marketing messages out to your list of contacts.
If you take the time and effort to compose and send a quality email marketing campaign, this is a great and inexpensive way to produce real income from existing contacts, without ever spending a dime on names' lists. This one activity could help to keep your home based business afloat during even the toughest times when everyone's hoarding their cash and refusing to spend it. (by.Donnie Benda)

HOW STRATEGY IN INTERNET MARKETING

Everything starts with a brand and a marketing strategy. If you already have a brand and strategy, we'll build on them to create a Web site that reflects your vision.
If you are just starting out, Virtual Consulting can help you with branding strategy, finding your target audience on the web and positioning your service or product in the online marketplace.
We will work with you to define the following

We will work with you to define the following :
1. Your Objective

What is the objective of your Web site? Is it strictly sales or are you launching a new image? Are you trying to retain your current customer base or do you see a new market opportunity?

2.Your Target Audience

Who is your target audience? Attracting your audience through the Internet is substantially different to appealing to the same group offline.
3.Your Online Competition

Who are your competitors? Will you compete with large, established companies or small niche companies?
4. Your Unique Advantages

What differentiates you from your business competitors?

Virtual Consulting will also provide suggestions for promoting your site through integration with offline marketing efforts We understand that clients sometimes need assistance in understanding the methods of online advertising and marketing available to them and which routes are likely to best achieve their objectives.
Virtual Consulting provides strategic online marketing advice services; pulling together your goals into a single online strategy. The strategy will encompass requirements, implementation, reporting and success measures.
The strategy will consider all methods of online advertising and marketing, from search engine marketing to email campaigns and affiliate programs.
Once the strategy has been approved, we will assist you in implementing that strategy and measuring its success.(www.virtual.co.id)

ONLINE MARKETING

Online Marketing is a marketing communication activities using the Internet media. Initially, the pages static HTML format that can be accessed by Internet users. That was the beginning of the website that became a kind of 'online brochure' and even 'kantorkedua' for companies to display the teak itself to the world. On the growth of online marketing is not only the media websites, but also email and other applications that run on top of Internet protocol. As part of marketing activities using the Internet media, online advertising (advertising on the Internet) to study the interesting especially for marketers and business generally. What is advertising on the Internet? Initially, Internet advertising in the media is the material that has been running ads in the conventional media (television, magazines, newspapers) to the website. However, in its development, the characteristics of Internet media is able to maximize the results obtained through advertising activities on the Internet. This makes the media the Internet is now used as part of the mixture pamasaran (marketing mix) with a different approach, according to the characteristics of the media and the target audience who want to achieve. Activity commonly used in Internet advertising in the media is to install a banner (banner ad). However, a claim that the marketing communication is not complex enough just the way like that. It takes strategy, creativity and accuracy of measurement and the possibility that there mengkonvergensikan. For example, using the strategy through viral email marketing, developing product-specific site separate from the corporate site, webtorial design pages, create advert-gaming, synergize with mobile marketing, online surveys / polls, and other strategies. In addition to the above activities, advertising, advertising techniques also have a cheaper and efficient, that is to use search engines (Search Engine Otimization). With SEO, the website will be easily found in search engines and the higher the possibility to visit at this time because 80% internet users search for data by using a search engine as the basis for initial searches. There are still many other possibilities in the development of advertising on the Internet. Together Jojashop.com online marketing consultant, you will be ready to realize the achievement markerting online campaign, you approach with an effective and efficient (http://www.jogjashop.com/)

e-commerce - by krish purnawarman

One of the first question from my experience in dealing with businesses that want to start an online shopping store is to define the real business were actually in. I started a an online cigarette store and an online jewelry store and actually found out things I wouldnt have possibly found out if I didnt actually experienced it. Anyways, if you want to start an ecommerce business consider these factors;
Do you have a brick and mortar business already that will go along with the online form of the business? If you have then you may want to start making some (like possibly 20 to 50) of your products online and then keep changing it until you understand the online trend - this ofcourse after you've done marketing on it, cause without marketing, you will never get any traffic to your site. Online marketing your site would be the most sensible way of getting traffic to your site and I can suggest something thats fast and easy traffic generator and that is the SEM (Search engine marketing) via add placements through bidding positions in Googles and Yahoo pay per click section (Adwords and Overture Yahoo search marketing)
Are your products tangible or intangible ? This is important cause intangible (non physical products) distribution online is different to tangible physical products - consider packaging, shipping, weighing hassles. Moreover, If youre in Indonesia, its almost impossible to connect a third party payment processor to your site when selling intangible products. The only way is to make an internet merchant account outside of Indonesia and possibly linking it through verisign and thawte for authentication and encryption technology. If youre selling tangle products consider your self more lucky since you could always integrate your CC payment online through payment processors (2checkout, paysystems) and not having to worry about scripting the connectors and having the hassle of needing to make an internet merchant account. The discount fee is also affordable in payment processors, for example, 2checkout offers a 5% discount and less than 1% charge for every sale that you make online.
Size,Texture and other elements.. If you have tangible products, you may also want to consider how many unique products including variations in size, texture, and other features that you want to offer. Ofcourse you should always weigh each products and measure its dimensions (both packaged and unpackaged) so that you will have data for shipping purposes later on and for customer reference.
Different pricing, Dynamic or HTML static website ..Then I think you will need to determine if different groups of customers will see different pricing on the same items. This is related to whether youre going to offer special promotional pricing, seasonal sales or other forms of temporary pricing or volume discounts maybe?,, rebates? pricing variations. All these confidential pricing variations would almost always means you need to create a dynamic website as oppose to html static site.
Channel distribution .Remeber also that if you already own an offline channel distribution for your product, your product shown on the internet (if you have a high search engine positioning placements on some critical traffic keywords) you may just create an unwanted conflict for your business. I reckon you should make sure you address your pricing strategies to make sure you dont go cutting your distribution channel with an online venture.
Navigation ? I forgot to mention about the website and its navigation. This is one of the most important elements that your customers will remember. Whether or not they can easily navigate through the website to find what theyre looking for will also be a determinant of your online business success. I truely think that the more fun you can make this process the more often your customer is likely to return.
Customer Dialogue to reduce chargebacks and cancellations. When youre business is online, remember the 24/7 component of the business. This means you will be open for business for 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. The part where you have to answer questions from customers and assiting customers not to mention if there is a complaint will never stop. You must determine how you will respond to all sorts of customer questions regardless of the medium. Who will answer emails, accept phone calls, faxes snail mails etc. The way to go about solving this to make written policies and procedures for handling customer complaints, or integrate a e-CRM (for instance salesforce.com, Talisma.com, Rightnow.com) or/and a CIM(Liverperson.com, Rightnow.com) system on your site. if you don't care about this part, I gurantee you will get alot of chargebacks, cancellations and returns. More about this later...
Cart.. ?Another important element is order processing. This has to do with the website having a shopping cart and all. (if not a shopping cart then it should be be basket or something in that form)
Shipping expenses and terms and conditions..?, I am sure you will agree with me that none of your customer or anybody shopping online will put up with calculating their shipping cost. So It is important to offer a customer a full itemized list of the cost involved in each sale, with a clear listing of teh currency involved, terms of delivery or performance, and terms and conditions, cancellations.
Credit card payment - think about ways of accepting payments. I mentioned this above on the payment processor part. This is always possible and easy to do.
Fraud checking and Validation, I dont know if you realize this... or you will only be able to realise this if youve actually experienced being a merchant of an online store. What ever happens a merchant is always in the lossing side of a bad transactions. There was a case from my client, where a customer who had actually received a product told the bank to cancel the transaction and the customer didnt ever need to resend back the product thus my client who happens to be the merchant at that time, lost it all on that transaction. This is just one case, there are alot more...Anyways, the merchant looses in any case unless you prevent these kind of things to happen. So implement a really good fraud prevention and checking, both manually and automatically.
Product Availability, when you launch your site I strongly suggest that you offer only those products that are in your immediate inventory.
Back orders preparations. You will also realise that at times there will be times when your products or items that had just been purchased online will be out of stock. So what happens? you will have to notify the customer that this item can be back ordered, or you may have to offer a substitution. Read on other sites or search on 30 days e-commerce, there are rules you will have to follow when doing this, cause if you don't and youre using a payment processor, you may loose your internet merchant account from the payment processor. That is why, did I tell you why I chose cigarettes as a product to sell?.. the reason was at that time, it was all availble everywhere...I had one shop located in front of my house where I use to buy before shipping them.

EMAIL MARKETING - by Krish Purnawarman

Email marketing is the most immediate and cost-effective way to generate revenue, build brands and strengthen customer relationships. In fact, with the right email marketing tools, all we need is a web browser and a few minutes to deliver graphically rich, professional-looking campaigns or just even a text campaign will do
There are 2 MAIN types of email marketing, permission based email marketing and the spider or automatic generated email marketing. The permission based email addresses are usually build up by professional email marketing company who takes many years to prepare leads email addresses to accept email campaigns but it can also be generated by the website it self once the visitors register them selves to accept email news letters, this is what we will do later for the CRM part. The spidered email marketing, where the email address database comes from a spidered captured email
The left hand side present database of emails generated by spiders that must be filtered to become real leads once a reply is produced from email sent. The permission based email is already claimed to be leads and will not be filtered.
An email management console is used (provided by Yahoo.com) to track hits,USD 250 per month to send outs 50,000 email addresses
The email addresses is purchased from trusted vendors like infoUSA and Canada joined with Yahoo in 2003 as the premier provider of business and consumer mailing lists, sales leads & databases. In the articles it says that infoUSA,. is the only company that compiles business and consumer data under one roof and infoUSA makes over 20 million phone calls per year verifying the accuracy of their business data.
220 Million Consumers Available by Age, Estimated Income, Estimated Home Value and Other Selects.
5.2 Million New Homeowners New homeowners spend 200% more within the first year of buying their home.
15.6 Million New Movers These new movers need your services and have money to spend.
Prices typically range from $.50 per name.Another email address database provider is from email marketing company that can provide 47,000 email leads for USD 200 per one website