Social Media Are Not Just For Giddy Teenagers!

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You may have heard about Myspace, the News Corp.-owned social networking powerhouse. Or Facebook, the rapidly growing network which is presently independent but might one day be owned by Google, Yahoo!, NBC, Tribune Co., or any other media company which recognizes the site’s massive potential for consumer leverage.

In a sense, marketing on the internet uses high technology to advance a very low-tech agenda. Like any offline marketing campaign from years ago, generating business demand online still boils down to an objective understanding of your product or service’s utility. You still need an informed and unbiased view of your target market. Effective and efficient use of the marketing mix (price, product, placement, promotion) is as important today as it was decades ago. None of this has changed.

But the dawn of the internet introduced a new variable: a breadth of consumer touch points previously unfathomable to most marketers. Social media are among the most promising channels; according to Nielsen/NetRatings, the top ten social networking sites grew 47% in 2006.

Now a company has a variety of ways to appear in front of its audience. Take Jalima Coffee as an example. This manufacturer of organic Mexican coffee differentiates itself from competitors with a strong prosocial mission, and hired Clicksharp Marketing to inject this brand image into new channels. One of the co-owners used LinkedIn to introduce the business community to her background in non-profit and international development. The company posted a video on YouTube documenting the manufacturing process and sharing a unique slice of culture with its viewers. Jalima’s Myspace profile is linked to over 500 friends: mainly coffee lovers and advocates of sustainable agriculture. Whenever the company’s marketing department chooses, they have an immediate channel with which to communicate news and events, product introductions, or just to say hello.

Moral of the story – forget what you may have heard about the typical user of any of these sites. Their convergence is taking place rapidly and ubiquitously. The sooner you join the network, the sooner you can forge meaningful connections with the stakeholders that are key to your business!

For more, I highly recommend reading Michelle MacPhearson’s Social Media Marketing Guide.

Affiliate Course – Marketing Education 101

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It is rather mystifying why so many new marketers assume being educated isn’t important.

You wouldn’t be able to safely drive your car around town if you didn’t take driver’s training. No one would ever try to fly an airplane without going to pilot school. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, over 90% of new affiliate marketers get the crazy notion that they can cash in big without any knowledge at all. Those are the ones who complain all the time. They could be busy making money if they had only seen the importance of enrolling in an affiliate course. Marketing online is the road to making millions.

There is a right way to perform the work of an affiliate marketer.

Those are the steps and strategies that can make a millionaire out of the garbage man. There are a lot of wrong ways to be an affiliate marketer too. Like taking shortcuts and not doing the initial research needed to open up the revenue stream. One of the worst things you could do is waste tons of time hanging around in the affiliate forums. Yes, you can learn some great stuff from the big dogs do drop into a forum from time to time. The most frequent forum dwellers are losers at actual marketing. If they put that effort into learning what they need to know in affiliate course, marketing would be their focus instead of complaining.

What can you learn from an affiliate course? Marketing strategies like these:

o How to work smart and not just work hard.
o The easiest way to make your landing page convert fast.
o Why over 90% of affiliate marketers fail to make money.
o How to take total advantage of free marketing tools online.
o How to get people to pay for information.
o Why the free way is not the right way.
o How to cash in through social marketing.
o How to locate and drive the right target market.
o How to get on the fast track to making big bucks.

You owe it to yourself to do whatever it takes to learn everything you need to know to succeed.

Marketing does work. There are affiliates raking in over a million bucks a year. That isn’t a scam, it is the indisputable truth. When you have enough of working hard, you’ll either see the light or throw in the towel. It is worth some sacrifice to get past the learning curve as a marketer. I ate peanut butter bread, Ramen noodles and frozen French fries for a week to be able to enroll in the affiliate course. Marketing with the right knowledge made it all up to me really fast. I’ll never have to eat Ramen noodles again! What about you? If you are ready to make some serious cash, get started on a solid marketing education today.