The Click Depot Blog

Archive for August, 2008

The big news this weekend seems to be the insider news leak about the possible launch of Google Android on Tmobile handset in September. This source reported a nice story about Google Android.

OK, now, why is that important to you? Here’s why:

1. 3G is just getting to become a huge phenomenon in the US. This is the new generation wireless communication protocol that will make sharing videos and large data files much easier. This has the potential to explode cell phone usage for Internet access. The iPhone already started this trend in a big way earlier this year. Google Android will make it bigger. Other countries in Asia (Japan) and Europe are already into this stuff and US lags behind. But we have the largest volume of consumers and the most amount of online spending and Internet users. If 3G takes off in the US, things can change for marketing firms very quickly.

2. Today, the big change seems to be people moving from using the Yellow Pages to using http://maps.google.com to find businesses. This shift was quite big. People had to learn the use of computers and know the ways of the Internet. Even then, this happened in less than a decade. People already use cell phones and when the same applications such as Google Maps and Google Android will be available on the cell phone, people will transfer much quicker to using cell phones instead of going to their PC’s as much.

3. You can stay ahead of the curve in the following ways.

A. If you have a budget for marketing that you can spend on mobile marketing, then talk to a mobile marketing firm. They can get your ads and brandname on multiple mobile applications.

B. Get yourself listed on Google Maps and other online mapping applications such as Yahoo Maps. MapQuest.com and others. These are getting used on the mobile phone in a big way already.

C. Add a “Send me an SMS” feature on your website. Encourage your website visitors to contact you via sms on your cell phone. http://smseverywhere.com/webmasters.htm. Now, this will have to be done with caution. You might have to keep a separate cell phone line for this purpose alone. I haven’t seen too many people try this but I can see it happening in the near future. Of course, 5-10 years from now, everyone will have cell phones than can handle email very well and sms will slowly become almost extinct or at least slow down in usage. Until then, this might be a good idea to grab the attention of your visitors. Who is more likely to contact you? Someone that just sees a regular contact us form on your website or someone that sees a “conctact me via sms” box and knows that you will receive his message immediately and may even respond to it in the next 30 seconds via sms to his cell phone?

There are many more ways, but I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. In marketing, as in business, staying ahead of the curve is important. Don’t do it after everyone else is doing it. Read the signs and get in early.

If you have a company with more than 20 customers and you don’t have an email list yet, you are missing out on the most powerful marketing strategy in the planet. Earlier, we wrote about 3 steps to establish your online presence and social marketing ideas for your small business. Building an email list comes even higher than anything we talked about in those articles.

Despite using email and knowing about the benefits of this technique, many business users choose to ignore it, perhaps due to the lack of time. But here’s why you need to jump into this NOW.

1. People hate spam. Everyone I know already gets more email than they can handle. And it’s only going to get worse. However, there are several niches where people still don’t get the info they need easily. You can enter their address books now and slowly and steadly, using quality articles and newsletters that you send them, build their confidence and the results (more sales) will pay off. If you wait, chances are that someone else (your competitor) will start sending them emails and then when you send yours later, yours is spam. Got the idea?

2. Building a reliable email list takes time: I know a person who has a list of 30000+ people. Every time he feels like making some money, he simply sends the list an email and talks about a cool product with an affiliate link. and there you go, a few hundred dollars almost instantly. But it took him several years to get there and he spent a lot of money trying to advertise his site via search engine optimization to get there. But it pays off now. If you start today, within a year, your list could have a couple of hundred people (at least, even if you don’t do it aggressively).

The best way to start building your list is to GIVE SOMETHING AWAY for free on your website. People love free stuff. Give away a free product sample, discount on a product on your website, a free cruise, a free informational newsletter (though that is losing its charm due to spam), even a free wallpaper or a video that you created. Trust me, people will take it. Of course, the more useful and relevant the freebie is to your visitors, the higher the signup rate usually. And in exchange, you sign them up with their Name and Email. People often always sign up thinking they will unsubscribe from your list once they have the freebie but research shows that if your freebie was good and the following emails are useful, a majority actually stay and become a loyal member of your email list.

There are some very good email list management software out there. My favorites are Aweber and Mailchimp

Any business owner knows how important marketing is. Most spend tons of money on advertising on print media, yellow pages, online yellow pages, Etc. I am amazed that this trend continues to this day. It is a fact that people that used to use Yellow Pages are rapidly beginning to use the Internet as a way of finding businesses. Unless your target audience is people aged 50+, you are likely placing your bet on the wrong cards.

Online marketing is easy, inexpensive and rapid. None of these can be said about off-line techniques. Here are five ways that you can market your business online yourself without spending a dime. And no, I am not going to tell you things that you already know, such as creating your website and adding a blog to it, and so on. Not even standard local marketing techniques such as the ones we discussed 3 ways to establish your online presence. In facrt, what I am going to tell you does not even require you to have your own website. I am talking about some creative techniques that a lot of people are not looking at right now. In a previous post about The best part, it can actually be fun to engage in these kinds of “social marketing” efforts.

Create a facebook ad page for your busienss: WAKE UP! Social networking is the fastest growing online segment. Even faster than search, faster than Google and MSN put together. Ten year old kids and Seventy-five year old grandmas alike are taking to this. So how can you benefit from it? Simple. Create a profile at http://www.facebook.com/ads. It takes 10 minutes or less and it’s drop dead easy. If you can handle email, you can handle facebook. The process of creating the account includes importing your contacts from your address book on Yahoo, Gmail, AOL or any such email account that you may be using. Once that is done, just add pictures, text, etc. to your account.

Every time you add anything to your account (a new picture, a video, additional profile info, news about your life, etc.), your friends get notified. OK, so that sounds like a great personal networking tool. I know you are thinking - Alright, but how can that benefit my business? Well, business networking starts with friends. You can also invite your customers to join your ‘friends’ list on your business profile. Each time you add something, they get a notification on their facebook account about it. This might all seem useless to you, but when you consider that over 50 million users use Facebook, this starts to make sense. Your customers will have facebook pages soon, if not already. You can appear tech-savvy and cool and at the same time connect with your customers and contacts.

The more time you spend on your facebook ad updating stuff, the more you remind your customers and contacts about your business. You will be surprised the kind of wonders a cool reminder service such as this can work. I know a local restaurant owner that tried this with myspace and his results are phenomenal. I suggested facebook because they are growing faster than myspace, have better features and actually allow businesses to create ad pages.

Don’t just leave this page - go create your ad page NOW - http://www.facebook.com/ads and add their toolbars to your website or blog.