Day-to-Day Business Card Marketing

Whether you're a businessman or a freelance service provider, your business cards are going to play a big role in your success. The world is big out there but if you want to make good in whatever you do, you have to leave a mark. Yet before you can even leave a mark, you have to make yourself known. Make yourself known as an expert in your field or as a merchant who's committed to his clients' needs. Establish your presence. While the Internet has grown into a very important medium for marketing, there is still much to be done offline. And when it comes down to offline marketing, one thing you can count on is your business card.

By all means, never leave home without your business card. Whether you're going on a date or to the wet market to pick up some seafood, you need to bring your business card. You'll never know what you'll be bumping into. Casual meetings can bring you face-to-face with a person who can give you business and if you do not have anything to give this person so he can call you, do not expect him to go looking for you after you say your goodbyes.

Another smart thing you can do is to simply shower your social and business circle with your cards. But you do not want to be annoying so play it down and, as much as possible, do it when no one's watching. Of course, during business meetings, this is perfectly okay. Otherwise, you're going to need just the perfect timing. You need not catch everyone's attention when giving someone your card, but you do need to have that person pay attention to do as you do that. This is to ensure that he actually is aware that he has your card even when you are out of sight. Do not give your card when the person is busy with something - he'll probably forget about it even if the card has been in his wallet for weeks.

Even when you attend personal affairs such as class reunions, be generous with your contact information. The point here is to have as many people know about what you do or what you offer. And as these people move around their own circles, they can easily make referrals to you. Then, you will have more room to widen your market reach and that means more sales potential.

The Easiest Way Grow Your Online Business Opportunity With Article Marketing

Whether your website is selling a product or a service you need constant exposure to get new visitors to your site. The only way you'll move up the search engine ladder is to learn how to grow your online business opportunity with article marketing. It's really an easy way to find new customers and make more money on the internet!

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is essential for moving your site into the top ranked postings on every popular search engine. After all, what's the point of listing keywords and key-phrases associated with your business if you're not going to optimize them?

Your friends are right! Article banks are filled to the brim with back-linked articles that not only get more visitors to the originator's website or blog, but also serve to increase and optimize their site's all important search engine rankings. Aside from providing a greater chance for your business to turn into a viral online success story, marketing through social networks and article data banks just makes good sense.

Article marketing began to gain strength as more business owners began using self produced prose to help promote their business. News editors began frequenting article databases for story leads and the number of hits to the sites grew to enormous proportions.

Article marketing services will write and post informative prose for you all over the web! You won't have to become an internet or SEO-guru to figure everything out. Article marketing services can have the articles written for you and post them to all of the popular article banks.

In fact, simply by providing a keyword or key-phrase, these fee-based services can have a professional writer prepare your articles in as little as twenty-four hours for proofing. Then the article marketing service does the rest of the work.

In fact, there are many services available now that will write your articles and post them for you. All you need to do is supply a small fee and a keyword or key-phrase and Voila! In a day or two your articles are appearing all over the web and your search engine rankings increase accordingly.

You'll get all of the important backlinks needed to get your site noticed for just a few dollars. It's like getting big business level assistance for the price of a few Venti Lattes! What could be better than that?

Article writing and submission services range from $15 per unposted article to as much as $3,500 or more per posted article or prepared press release. There is a service to fit every budget and meet every unique marketing objective.

Whether your enterprise is large or small, you can grow your online business opportunity with article marketing. If you know how to write using keywords and key-phrases properly, the process can cost you nothing more than a little time. But if you would prefer to concentrate on your core business, there are many cost-effective article marketing service approaches that are available.

A Guide to Hiring an SEO Provider

If your business has any online components (such as a website), then SEO is critical to the ongoing success of your business. You may have the most expensive website in your industry, but without web traffic (visitors) to that website, it is essentially useless. It is not just traffic that you need, but targeted traffic. A good quality SEO service can provide relevant, consistent web traffic to your website (s). This guide will allow you, as a non-expert, to distinguish between good and bad SEO providers. There are many of both kinds, this guide should help you to find the good ones.

SEO needs to be implemented in a way that is effective in achieving your SEO goals and providing that all important meaningful presence on the World Wide Web.

Quality SEO is a critical investment when it comes to developing successful expansion and growth strategies.

Ineffective SEO implementation, renders your SEO efforts wholly ineffective and a waste of your money.

6 things you need to know and understand before hiring an SEO provider:

1) Hiring an SEO provider should be seen as an investment in your business. You should not view it as a business expense, but rather a business strategy and an effective way of enhancing your business presence within your business sector. Try not to begin your search with the intent of "buying some SEO". Hiring an SEO provider should have viewed rather as hiring an employee that understands and cares about your business and its online objectives.

2) The first page of Google (or any search engine) is everything. Few people ever go to the second page of the search results anymore. Google is so good at being a search engine that people blindly trust Google's ability to deliver the most relevant results on the first page. Think about how often you click through to the second page. This means that if your business is not on the first page, it's almost as good as now. The top positions on page one get the most clicks, which decrease as you progress downwards on the page.

3) The 'big' keywords are not everything. It is better to be on the first page for a fewer smaller keywords, than try to rank for larger keywords and not be on the first page at all. For example, an accountancy business in Preston may not rank for the highly competitive keyword 'accountant' (unless they have a lot of SEO budget and time to wait for rankings); but the same business could conceivably rank highly for the keyword 'chartered accountant Preston'. A good SEO provider should research the keywords that your business could literally rank on page one for and also keywords that have enough search volume to be worthwhile for your business to try ranking for.

4) SEO is all about beating your competition. There is no guarantee from the search engines to say you will be on the first page of Google if you do certain things. Put simply, SEO works like this:

The search engines have their conventions; websites that conform by giving the search engines what they want, will find them making achieving search engine rankings. The only thing standing between you and the top spots in the search rankings is your competition. Not your actual business competitors, but your online competitors. The websites that currently have the top spots in the search engines for your desired keywords are your online competition, and you need to beat them out of those top spots. Some keywords will be easy to rank for, others will be more difficult. It is only your online competition that dictates which will be the case for each individual keyword. A good SEO provider will research the competition for each of your keywords. Then, after the most effective keywords for your business sector have been identified that they should be implemented in accordance with point number three above.

5) On-page and Off-page SEO.

Search engine optimization is a complex and ever-evolving science, but in order to intelligently interview a prospective SEO provider you need to understand that there are two main types of SEO.

On-page SEO relates to the factors on your website that affect your SEO (keywords, usability, page headings, outbound links, internal links, etc.).

Off-page SEO are the factors that relate directly to matters outside of your website that affect the SEO of the website, such as back links, citations, social sharing, etc.

SEO providers can work on your off-page SEO fairly easily, but if you are not willing to change on-page SEO, according to their recommendations, you can not blame them for lack of results. A good SEO provider will review your website and report back about your on-page SEO, and how it can be improved. You should have your web designer make the adjustments. (Remember he is the expert in this field)

6) An increase in search engine ranking is not necessarily an increase in leads and sales. All your SEO provider can do is get your website, videos, Google Places, articles, blog posts, etc. further up the search engine results. They can not guarantee an increase in sales or leads, because that factor is determined by your own sales funnel. It is not the SEO provider's job to make sure that the extra web traffic you receive will convert to more leads or sales. Your website needs to convert those visitors with good marketing, which is an issue for your marketing consultant to deal with.

The key differences between 'good' and 'bad' SEO providers:

Good SEO Providers
Good SEO providers know and understand the points mentioned above. You can judge this by their answers to the questions provided later in my next article.
Good SEO providers want to build a solid foundation and a proper SEO plan for your business, with an extensive initial keyword and market (competitor) research. They will often insist upon it, even if the prospect client does not see the need. Sometimes a good SEO provider will refuse to work with a client that does not want the important groundwork to be done, because they know that without it they will not be likely to provide the client with the results that they want. A good SEO provider will want to provide their client with results as their first priority. Often a client will say "but I've already done the keyword research myself". Many potential clients sit down for 5 or 10 minutes to write out all the keywords that they think are relevant to their business, and then think that they have now done all the keyword research that is needed. Real keyword research is a lengthy, investigative process.

Good SEO providers use responsible SEO methods, such as paying more attention to on-page SEO, securing quality back links, improving citations, helping social sharing, including a good user experience, etc.

Bad SEO Providers
Bad SEO providers will want to take their clients' money as their first priority. They will not conduct proper keyword and market research, but will say, for example, "what are your three keywords and your URL that you want to rank for". If this happens (as it often does) you can be sure they are simply plugging your website into software to get irrelevant back links all over the internet, using spam blog comments, link farms and other means. In many cases this approach is ineffective because the URL, or domain, may not match the client's desired keywords. This can also damage the reputation and, ironically, the long-term SEO and credibility of the website.
Bad SEO providers use bad quality SEO methods (Sometimes referred to as Black-hat methods), Utilizing these methods can have an extremely detrimental effect on how your website is perceived by search engines. This in turn may result in your website being (Sand boxed). Needless to say this is extremely undesirable, as damage such as this is extremely difficult to reverse.

Ensure you get the specialist SEO who knows how to highlight the attributes of your company and can draw attention to your products and your services in a way that really makes your business stand-out on the worldwide web.

5-Step Checklist to Devise Impressive Mobile Applications

The more mobile technology is advancing, the more the market demands of diverse mobile apps are increasing almost following an exponential graph. Today, both iOS and Android platform has their own huge market and most of the mobile application developers are devoting them to build user-centric, feature-rich and business-driven applications for mobile devices. Here is a 5-step checklist that would help you develop stellar mobile apps smoothly.

# 1 Clearly Define Goals and Requirements

The first step is to set a well-defined and proper goal so that you can chalk out a plan on how to reach that goal. If you do not preset the goal clearly, you might get lost at the halfway! Once you know what you want in your mobile application, what features what benefits the users are going to get using your app, you can go ahead with the development process. Before starting with the development process, another important thing to decide is on which platform you want to build the application.

# 2 UX Aspect

To build a successful mobile application, you need to pay special attention to the UX aspect. This defines or makes sure that the users can have a good app experience. Even if your app is top-notch at its looks, design and graphics, until and without it can offer the app users a satisfactory experience, it can not gain that much success in today's vying market. For the mobiles that have a touchscreen interface, it is advisable for the developers to devise multi-touch gestures so that the app users can smoothly navigate it. Apart from being user-friendly, developers need to make that application aesthetically appealing as well.

# 3 Development Process

This part is mostly about writing the coding part. Creating a proper prototype, obtaining approval from clients in the case of building custom applications - everything is part of this development phase. The developers should have in-depth expertise in using the programming language along with the updated tools. According to your requirements, they can integrate different web services, can link the mobile app to cloud storage of backend along with integrating the social sites, payment gateway etc.

# 4 Thorough Testing

There are several parts of this testing phase - QC Checking, UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and Unit Testing. With the help of a simulator, the developers and the designers can effortlessly test the developed application to check whenever any error or any bug is present or not. Before launching the app in the app store, this thorough testing stage makes sure that quality of the app is as per the market standard and it is free from any kind of technical glitches.

# 5 Deployment

This is the last stage of the development process. In this phase, the newly built app appears live in the app store. This step includes distribution of apps as well.

Well, another crucial thing is to market this newly launched mobile app. Without a well-planned and quality marketing strategy, even a feature-rich and impressive app fails to do satisfactory business that it should have in this competing market. Here, jotting down a smart marketing strategy for the freshly developed application is utterly vital.