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Blitz Ezine # 203 February 24, 2003

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100 ways to promote your site.
The Blitz-Promotions News Letter.
Issue no. 203, Feb. 24, 2003

************ In This Issue **************
Comments
Food for thought
Articles
The Classifieds
Next Issues
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Blitz Comments
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Definitely a crazy weekend here. Started on Saturday morning with more rain, making a total of about six inches in a week. Had just gotten started on my first cup of joe and scanned my first batch of emails when the power went off.... turned out the rain had caused a slip down the road and four power poles were now laying in the ditch. Guess I really needed to take the day off.

Was a beautiful day though, temps in the 70's, no rain most of the day. In the evening it started storming and did it storm. Then woke us Sunday morning about 6 am to a blizzard and temps in the 30's. So when does spring start? I'm ready for it.

Coming Next Issue

Promoting with video, blogs, and more.

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Food for thought
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Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.
~Doug Larson

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100 ways to promote your site continues #84
Start a Live Radio Show
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I know what you're thinking... why would I want to do a radio show, what would I have to talk about on a radio show. First your show doesn't have to run all of the time, second you are an expert on your products and / or services. A good example would have been a gift idea one prior to Valentine's day. Another good idea for a holiday that is coming up would be "How to give your Mom something she'll Never forget..." for Mother's day. So let your imagination free for a bit and you'll come up with something. Then set up the show and announce it on your site and to all of your current customers. Some details and ideas on setting up a show can be found at the links below.

http://www.live365.com/index.live

http://www.webcast2000.com/how.html

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100 ways to promote your site continues #85
Creating an MP3
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How could creating an MP3 promote your business. Just use your imagination and think about it for a moment. Say that you sell toys. You decide to create a MP3 targeted to grandparents and talks for 5 minutes about the 'cool' toys that kids between 8 and 10 are buying and wanting. The MP3 then tells them about a special section on your site dedicated to the subject and offers them a coupon for ordering within the next week. They find it useful and talk to their friends about it - send the MP3 to them and slowly it spreads. .. so you would be surprised how you could use one.

So how do you create an MP3, the link below has enough information to keep you busy for a while.

http://www.techtv.com/audiofile/mp3/story/0,23008,3318811,00.html

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100 ways to promote your site continues #86 - 87
Creating a Windows Background / Icons
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So why would someone let you advertise on their desk top. If it was beautiful, useful, funny or all the above, then they might. That would mean that your ad would get seen at least once a day. So how do you create a desktop image.

1. Create a picture using your favorite paint program.
2. Make sure to have different sizes of the art - also make sure that it won't clash too much with folders and icons folks will have on their desktop.
3. Put the images / links on your site.
4. Folks can then go to the pictures and right click over the image and choose set as background.

The same principal applies to creating custom Icons - they could be cute and reflect your site. Details on creating those can be found here -

http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/howto/story/0,24330,3332137,00.html

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100 ways to promote your site continues #88
Tracking your stats
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Intra-day Tracking of Online Business Performance
By Tony Novak, OnlineAdviser at Freedom Benefits Association
http://www.freedombenefits.org/

The volume of qualified visitors to my Web sites directly controls the success of my online business. Certainly the logic and the math behind this statement are simple enough. My financial plan and past performance data clearly showed that if I could increase my daily Website visitors from 150 per day to 250 per day, then my income would rise by the same ratio to meet my income goal for the year. But I was not confident about my ability to immediately increase by traffic by 67%. While I have clearly defined Long-term goals and track performance daily on a spreadsheet, I was concerned that I did not have the time or ability to track performance over the course of the working day. My tracking and management was “after-the-fact”, lacking the ability to enable me to immediately make changes that would ensure that I meet my daily activity goals in real time. In other words, the only thing I could do was say I met my goal of 250 visitors yesterday” or “I did not meet my goal and I will try to do better today”. The lack of real time interaction in this management function was disturbing to me.

I knew that if I was aware by 1PM, for example, that traffic was unusually slow for a certain line of business, that I might be able to react by spending 30 minutes and a few dollars drawing more visitors so that by 6PM on the same day the performance numbers could be back on track. This seemed to be the best way for me to actually achieve the goals I had set for my business. But without this urgent input, I was unlikely to modify my daily work plan to focus exclusively on meeting this performance goal. But in order to be effective, this tracking system would need to be completely automated and run by itself with no input from me. It would also need to be inexpensive and be easily available in the brief moments each day when my attention is not completely controlled by another project.

To accomplish this monitoring, I took two simple steps. First, I opened an account at Sitemeter.com and created a link to the entry page for each of my major product lines. Sitemeter provides a private coded user page that includes the option to display a graph of Website traffic that is updated each hour throughout the day. Then I set my Web browser home page to the sitemeter graph page. Now whenever I launch my Web browser, I automatically see a flash of the intra-day performance graph before I move on to the next Web page that I have requested. In effect, this gives me a visual queue of my current performance several dozen times over the course of a typical working day.

In addition, I set up e-mail notification of email transactions at MedSave.com and Freedombenefits.org. It is easy to use an email program like Outlook to sort and direct specific emails into a pre-programmed course of action. In this case, I simply wanted to hear a distinctive audio tone from my PC whenever a prospective customer requested a benefit plan proposal. A lack of tones over the course of a day simply means that something is wrong in my online sales process. Both systems are extremely simple, but they work for me. Since adding these monitoring systems, I meet my 250 visitor goal more than 50% of business days, as opposed to less than 10% prior to the monitoring systems. In addition to meeting my activity goals, I am impressed that this system has enabled me to achieve this sharp increase in performance by spending less than $30 per day in extra marketing costs. I attribute this directly to the fact that I am immediately “on top of” any marketing small problem and tackle it before it becomes a bigger problem.

Tony Novak
http://www.freedombenefits.org/
http://www.medsave.com/

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From the Archives - Blitz 90
Dec 2000
Customer Service how the little guys can win.
Meet and Beat their expectations
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You just got a new order for your product or service. Kaching! Their first impression of you will determine if this was a one time deal or if they are going to become your lifetime customer. Listed below are some things you can try.

·Give them something extra (unannounced) with the first order. (Free shipping, a bonus gift, something extra).

·Send them a Thank-you note via snail mail. Include a copy of your latest catalog, business card. The more personalized this is the better it works.

·Include with the note a discount coupon for any of your current products and services.

·Offer them an opportunity to refer folks to you for a discount or something free (viral marketing works).

·If they ordered a product, send them a follow-up note in a month. Ask them did they like the product and how you can improve it.

·Give them an opportunity to join your opt-in newsletter. This will allow you to remind them about sales, new products, close-outs, etc.

Make your first impressions count and you will find that you haven’t just gotten a new customer but one that sticks around for the long run.