Money-Making Blog Or Corporate Web Site - Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

Money-Making Blog Or Corporate Web Site – Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

Posted By admin on June 14, 2010

Money-Making Blog Or Corporate Web Site – Marketing Tips For Offline Businesses

One of the most common critical errors small offline businesses make when approaching online marketing is wanting to have a fancy, flashy web site like the big corporate sites they’ve seen online. But what they don’t realize is that the big companies all use advertising agencies, and part of the advertising agencies marketing strategy is to use corporate sites strictly for Internet branding.

Internet branding can do wonders for a corporation’s image – a big beautiful site using the latest technologies really does impact a consumer’s view of the company. But don’t mistake these sites as sales vehicles – there’s no call to action, no sales copy in most cases – and when was the last time you saw a Fortune 400 company come up on the first page of results at Google, Yahoo or Bing?

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These Internet branding sites, often costing a million dollars or more to build and operate, are just one part of advertising agencies marketing mixes – they’re not designed to drive traffic or make sales. That part is left to other areas of the mix, like TV, radio, print ads in newspapers and magazines and even adding the URL to product labels.

As a small business owner, however, you can’t compete on that scale due to budget – but you shouldn’t be trying to copy them online anyway! Think about your goals online:

* To reach a wider market
* To increase your market share in your existing market
* To sell more of your products and services
* To increase your bottom line profits

In order to accomplish those 4 goals while keeping your financial and time investments under control, take a page from the full-time professional Internet marketers. Familiar with all of the new marketing strategies online, in the majority of cases they now opt for business blog marketing over static web sites.

Free blog marketing is easy to set up, costs almost nothing to host and is designed for the best possible search engine optimization with the least fuss. A small business marketing blog can be updated in real time by anyone on your staff – or you yourself – as simply as typing a letter. No waiting for advertising agencies to make each update, and no large bills for their time and efforts, either!

Best of all, using any of the great blog tutorials on marketing using blogs, you can set up your first blog in under an hour – for an offline small business it’s easy to see that blogs and marketing should go hand in hand once you decide on your blog strategy. There really is no doubt that using blogs for marketing is the premiere choice given today’s state of the Internet.

Of all the new marketing strategies emerging from the World Wide Web, it’s easy to see that business blog marketing should be the first technique added to your small business marketing strategy development – after all, what other medium costs so little to develop and has a growing audience for your sales message every day?

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PowerStart Marketing Mentor Doug Champigny

Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny has been teaching companies new marketing strategies since the 1970’s, having owned and operated his own retail advertising agency before transferring to marketing online full-time since 1996. A recognized expert in how to market a product online or offline and master of these new marketing strategies, Doug Champigny is the creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching program at http://www.PowerStart2010.com and the Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program at http://www.affiliate-marketing-powerstart.info and is occasionally available for private 1-on-1 consultations and mentoring as well. Doug is a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

Technorati Tags: business blog marketing, new marketing strategies, small business, blogs, marketing, Internet branding

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3 Comments so far

Earl Netwal
Twitter: EarlNetwal
on June 14th, 2010

Yes, I’ve seen a number of small businesses go the fancy route and end up on the bottom of the search engines not the top. I did a fair amount of work with people in the home staging market and they wanted to show off their creative flair by having fancy web sites. All they really did was shoot themselves in the foot from a marketing perspective.

Earl Netwal´s last blog ..Score Top Quality Comments By Delivering CommentLuv Plugin Do Follow Back Links

Doug Champigny says…

It’s still the number one reason why offline businesses fail in their online advertising and marketing. Back when Teri & I had our advertising agency, we turned down any client request that we knew wouldn’t work – online or offline. Unfortunately there are three groups who, in most cases, will happily build them a site that won’t work: Web designers, who are trained in all the latest bells and whistles but know nothing of marketing; Ad agencies who are more concerned with their own showcase designs than whether it actually works for the client; and Internet marketers who are only interested in making money, so they’ll give the client whatever the client wants, instead of what the marketer already knows what works. Caveat Emptor… unfortunately. -DC.
Joel Osborne
Twitter: JoelOsborne
on June 14th, 2010

Yep you’re right Doug.

You can have a fancy beautiful web site that costs $5,000 to make… but if it doesn’t contain the proper marketing/sales aspects to it, then it’s almost useless for a business.

Doug Champigny says…

Exactly Joel – although they don’t get much for $5,000 – the Association of National Advertisers says their members (all huge corporations) spend between $750,000 and 1.2 MILLION dollars a year to build, maintain and update EACH site – and have an average of 7 websites each. We charged $15- $20k per site back in the 90’s, but that was for smaller clients than the ANA group. How we got the message across to our clients was that building a huge flashy site that couldn’t be optimized for traffic was like creating the world’s best store-window display – but in a window that faced the back alley. -DC.
Andre Arnett on June 15th, 2010

Yeah Doug, I had always wanted one of those big corporate sites thinking that was the way to go. Boy, am I glad I did not have the finances to invest in such a thing. I know it would have been a waste of money and I could spend it in better areas for my business. I think there are people out there that if they aren’t would do well take take heed to this information. Thanks for sharing.

Andre Arnett´s last blog ..Your Time Of Year Again For The Challenge

Doug Champigny says…

Those big sites are a hole on the Internet that you pour money into, Andre. Glad you avoided having one built or building it yourself – people think only of the initial outlay and the look – as well as being crappy for search engine results, the bulk of the cost and time running them is spent on maintenance and updates. Today’s hi-tech flashy gimmicks look very dated 6 months on, and utterly ridiculous 2 years later, so the whole site needs to be revamped regularly too – which takes a lot of time and expense. Teri & I have a couple of very large plain sites from the mid-90’s still operating online, and even without the bells & whistles it’s still impossible to keep every part of them right up to date.

If memory serves, that same report from the ANA said their average member had 33 people maintaining their sites – shame they didn’t know how much easier and more efficient a blog is… Changing a theme is usually a 5-minute process, and changes to every page on the blog, no matter how big, can be made in minutes most times. – DC.

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