It’s that time again . . . time to get the ball rolling on your new membership recruitment campaign, or your seasonal ad campaign, or your annual meeting promotion. You need an idea, a direction, an inspiration to guide your creative mind to a result that will be executable, will reach and resonate with the intended audience, and come in within budget. Where do you turn? Hopefully, you turn to the potential customer, in the form of primary research.

The more you know about the audience for any marketing effort, the more effective that effort will likely be. You know the challenges they face, you know the mindset they use on a daily basis, you know what they need, and can make your concepts, copy and offers sing to the audience in a way that creates action, but only if you have the information you need. The way to get that information, in a reliable way that you can use to make decisions, is to be in regular contact with the audience. One of the most effective ways to do that is with periodic in-depth phone research.

Get a Reality Check
In-depth phone research, when combined with some written survey work on a periodic basis, can help you get an accurate feel for your members or target audience on an ongoing basis, unfiltered by the “pick the middle choice” phenomenon of printed surveys. Done in a truly blind fashion, where the audience has no idea your organization is behind the questions, customers feel secure enough to answer honestly and directly. Even so, most respondents in a small, highly specific prospect pool, especially in a member-based organization, figure out that the word will filter back to your organization eventually, so they feel that this may be an opportunity to air their gripes and get something done on their behalf without complaining directly to you. You can also gather information on the positive side as well, as compliments are far more rare then complaints from customers or members of the organization.

Customer service benefits aside, true primary research generates not only anecdotal information on your current customers or members, but if you include ex customers or former members in your scheme, there is quantitative data generated that can be projected accurately over the entire audience or prospect pool. And in that data is where the creative inspiration hides.

Draw Comparisons
Inspirational data often comes from the most unexpected numerical comparisons. Most marketing data mirrors the expectations that were built into the questions in the phone survey. In the face of that effect, there is often one set of data that stands out as an unexpected result, either very positive, or extremely negative compared to your own “feel” for that issue.

The other comparison that lends itself to driving a creative “hook” is the comparison between the data from your current constituents and your former constituents. Not only will this comparison show you what facets of your organization are working well and retaining customers, but it will also show some of the reasons why the ex-customers left. Those are the things you can address in your creative strategy to shore up those perceptions that could be discouraging potential customers from doing business with you.

Often an issue you feel is of little consequence turns out to mean an awful lot to the constituent audience. If you find that unexpected “key to their heart”, that should inspire a creative approach that will yield considerable success. Both in the concept and in the copy, hitting that high note repeatedly based on solid research is usually a home run.

Careful reading and interpretation of that collected data is key to going in the correct direction. Sometimes some additional follow-up research with a small but representative audience to drill down on that unexpected issue can generate some additional, more leading data. That clarification can mean the difference between a home run and a wiff.

Occasionally, the opposite scenario plays out, and something you’ve been promoting as a benefit all along turns out to have little importance to the audience. That lack of “resonance” is a disconnect that you now know you can avoid in your copy. That frees up some room to play up the positive aspects you’ve verified with the research data.

Use The Data You Gather
Without the underpinnings of that research, there is little basis for decision-making in the creative process. The data can give you a more sturdy brand profile, it lets you make a persuasive case to senior management, and gives you something to backstop your creative direction. The temptation is often to take the data and twist it to meet the “gut feel” that exists in the collective mind of the organization.

Ignore the data at your own peril. If the study is conducted by professional researchers, and there are no clear flaws in the list of respondents and its reflection of the audience is accurate, then let the data drive your decisions.

The data doesn’t lie. It’s very easy to discount research data when you compare it to your own perceptions, or the preferred perception of the organization, and it doesn’t match. It’s tougher to stick to your guns, believe the data and act upon it. Once you see it work predictably and successfully, you learn to trust the numbers.

Prioritize the Issues
Once you have the data collected, and the analysis done, how do you make the leap to a creative direction? The secret is in the numbers. The basic strategy is that you determine the type of approach based on the read of the top 5 factors in the survey in order of importance. If the top three involve emotional issues, rather than the rational, or intellectual, then the creative approach leans toward a more emotional appeal.

For example, if the survey indicates that your organization is not producing results for customers in a particular area, maybe customer service or responsiveness – those are largely emotional issues, as no one likes to feel ignored or not served adequately, but they are not functional issues or operational issues within the organization’s functional mission. The creative approach in that case might involve imagery and copy that plays upon the warm, service-oriented nature of the organization, a one to one approach that is more welcoming and almost apologetic. Of course, you can also pass the info on to the customer service department and improve there operationally as well.

If you uncover among your top five factors that numerically your satisfaction level among customers is 3 times higher than your ex-customer dissatisfaction ratio, there’s a set of numbers to crow about, and you can take a more rational, numerical approach to the concept and the copy – show you’re keeping customers happy and keeping them longer than ever before. The data still drives the point home, and works to provide you with a creative direction, a springboard toward a winning concept that resonates with the audience.

Use A Metaphor
One of the simplest ways to make the leap from data to concept is to use a metaphor that explains what the data reveals. If you’re trying to illustrate that your company grew its customer base by 200% in the last quarter, or that your customer satisfaction rating improved by 3x over the last year based on some changes you’ve put in place, showing images of outrageous growth – beanstalks, elephants, Cyclops giants, etc.; or show images of size disparity – big bones with little dogs, big sandwiches with little kids, an Oreo cookie so large it won’t go in the glass of milk. The metaphor gives you a way to explain the concept that the data revealed in a way the audience can relate to easily.

Now, on to those meeting ads, or those membership recruitment ads. Let the data be your guide in these cases as well. If your data shows that 80% of your members don’t go to your annual meeting because it’s too expensive, takes too much time away from the office and the same people go every year and it’s turned into a good ole’ boys club, its time to break out the big guns. They are not finding the value in your meetings. Time to fight the perceptions with your own reality and show the members in your ad or brochure that there are benefits to spending the money, taking time away and meeting those good ole’ boys face to face. Imagery in this case should be very rational, practical, businesslike, and copy should be extremely benefit-laden, addressing those concerns head on in a way the audience can relate to.

In many cases, if you get one good lead, one good tip, meet one solid useful connection at a meeting, you’ve made the trip a worthwhile endeavor. Now multiply that by the “possibilities” of the number of typical attendees (some latitude allowed here, no accountants in the wings), and show how the value multiplies with the number of participants – sort of a “you have to show up to win type of approach”.

Destination “X”
Ads focused on the destination are destined to fail for at least a portion of the audience, yet they persist and even proliferate in the member organization landscape. Everyone knows it’s great to go to a meeting in “X” city, if you like that city, and if it has something inherently beneficial or relevant to the meeting’s purpose. If not, you’ll lose the folks who are farthest away and those that are the most cost conscious, almost automatically. No matter what city you pick, those two audiences are lost if the content isn’t up to snuff. You can’t have a meeting good enough to get them to go there. For those who are having trouble finding value in the content, the city is irrelevant. If the content is good and the results beneficial, you can have the meeting in a train station and people will attend.

Use Testimonials
For those organizations hunting for new members, there are many approaches where the data can give you some insights to follow. Testimonial approaches are a very strong framework from which to build value for prospective members. They humanize the organization, provide benefits the audience can relate to easily, and put a face to the issue of keeping members involved and active. Your research data sets showing the biggest challenges members or customers face are the key to crafting solid testimonials that answer these challenges.

You can use the top 3-5 problem areas the data reveals and create a series of ads or brochure pages featuring members explaining how their involvement in the organization helped them solve the problem or meet the challenge. They would be highly credible, they would show the organization at work, and they would outline very relevant benefits that would resonate with the audience to a high degree – all driven by a few questions in your phone research survey.

Use Everything Available
There are many creative approaches buried within your primary research, and there are many sources of data that can be used to augment, support and reinforce your primary data and the subsequent analysis. Member application data, tradeshow or annual meeting attendee data, industry atlases or SIC code studies published by the U.S. Department of Labor, can all shed light on your target population. There are other kinds of research as well that will generate data, including focus groups, written or e-mail surveys, web surveys, live interviews at meetings or tradeshows, and live long-form personal interviews at a research facility equipped with one way mirrors and camera equipment.

All these are viable forms of information gathering, and each has their place in providing you data you can use to form a creative approach to your outreach marketing. The key is to believe the numbers and use them in conjunction with your internal organizational knowledge to drive an effective creative strategy.

David Poulos, Chief Consultant at Granite Partners, has been providing marketing guidance to firms large and small for over 25 years. He can be reached at http://www.granite-part.com, or by phone at 410-472-4570. More articles at www.granite-part.com

If you want to boost sales, increase membership, enhance volunteer participation, increase market share or find new profit niches, the best methods start with knowing your target audience. One of the most effective ways to do that is to listen to them. How you listen, and how you organize and collate the results of that listening is the determining factor in the usefulness of the data, and the accuracy and actionability of your analysis. Clearly, much depends on the goal, but the type of research you select will drive the type of information you receive, and dictate how reliable it is.

For sales-, membership-, and interest-based organizations, a method termed “Right-Brain” research could hold the key to cost effective, actionable information you can use quickly and effectively to increase your knowledge of prospective customers. The human brain consists of two “hemispheres” left and right. Based on Nobel award-winning research by Roger Sperry in the late 1960s, it was determined that each has different functions and characteristics associated with it. Sperry’s research showed that the Left side of the brain is responsible for the more linear functions and thoughts – math, computation, organization, languages (not speech directly), rational analysis, value prioritization and decision making.

The Right side is responsible for the more interpretive and sensory aspects, like art, music, philosophy, creativity, visualization, and imagination. Left is rational, Right is more intuitive and emotional, while neither is exclusively that way. In fact, the aspect of “handedness” is reversed; with the right side controlling motor and other functions on the left side of our bodies and vice versa.

Often in decision-making, especially regarding purchasing behavior, the Left side is informed by the Right. The Left rationalizes the emotional inputs from the Right to drive a purchasing decision. To drive sales, it is fundamental to appeal to that tricky Right side. When divining the needs of the customer or prospect pool you’d like to reach, it is important to gather and record output directly from the Right side.

One way to accomplish that is through verbal communication. A long-form, personal, one-on-one discussion with customers, but on a large, organized scale, will elicit results you can put to use in crafting a strategy to approach the entire pool of prospects. In short, the resulting data from such small group research is projectable.

Right-brain research has been used to test new products in the prototype stage, test new concepts for advertising, movies, even gauge the effectiveness of customer service or test brand attributes for entire companies. It can be very effective, but it requires a high level of organization, some time and patience in listening and interpreting the results, and some resources to create the components and arrange for the interviews.

The components of this method are fairly straightforward:

* A set of goals for the research should be established and communicated to all involved – what do you hope to find out or accomplish when you are done?

* Describe the target audience for this goal. Discover what attributes they have in common, what characteristics can be used to select them from the general population, and how they differ from the rest of the audience.

* A profile of the ideal participant is developed. That profile is used to select a representative sample of respondents to participate in the interviews. This profile can include age, gender, marital status, purchasing behavior, geographic proximity, socioeconomic status, professional standing or experience, education, membership in organizations and many other properties.

* A Discussion Guide or Study Guide is created. This is the blueprint for the interviews, the guide for the interviewer to weave into their questions and discussions with the participants. It starts with the goals from the first step, to be sure that the questions drive responses that allow the researcher to answer the goals. It sounds simple, but if the goals are not realistic or the scope of the study is too broad, it will show up at this stage. This study guide is the key to effective implementation of this type of research. The questions have to be formulated in such a way as to elicit a response that is accurate, honest, direct, and emotionally unguarded. Often questions are asked multiple times in different ways to check for consistency of the answers.

* Create the list of possible participants. In some cases, especially for consumer research of this type, the facility can offer some assistance in this area, as they often have pools of potential respondents and a good database of names and demographic data from which to select a pool of candidates. Selections are made based on how closely they fit the selected set of attributes from the profile.

* Candidates are recruited by phone, either by your staff or by the facility, and the offer is made. Most participants are compensated for their time, either with cash or an incentive gift of some sort that will appeal to the intended audience. Professionals like doctors and attorneys are usually compensated at a higher level as their time already has a given “value” in monetary terms, an hourly rate.

* Respondents are scheduled for their interviews, which are usually 60-90 minutes in length. More than 10 interview sets per day per interviewer are not recommended as fatigue for the interviewers tends to taint the results. More than one interview can be conducted at one time, depending upon the availability of interviewers and the size of the facility. Over book initially on each day to account for no-shows when you confirm the schedule the day before the interviews by phone.

* The interviews are conducted by skilled interviewers, professionals who are personable, knowledgeable, aware of the goals to be achieved, perceptive and skilled in interpreting human emotions and the associated verbal and physical cues that telegraph them. They are terrific listeners, and skillful at guiding the conversation to keep it on track and on time. The facilities can often recommend or have interviewers on staff.

* Each interview is recorded to capture both audio and video, and tapes are labeled and packaged with the release form for each subject for later reference.

Once the interviews are conducted, the tapes are reviewed, and transcripts are made, to remove any “image bias” generated by the subject’s appearance. Those tapes and those transcripts are used to analyze and codify the results, to distill them into some sort of organized format that can be used to make recommendations for action.

How do you make the jump from transcripts to action? Analyzing the results of such research is a skill unto itself, as the interviews generate a huge amount of data, buried deep in the responses. It takes time and patience,(and a very left-brain oriented person) to organize, sift, and distill all those conversations, picking out commonalities and similarities among them, and highlighting stark differences and inconsistencies that can signal false results, or emotionally guarded responses.

Once that glut of data is distilled and interpreted, those interpretations are put together in an organized fashion, ranked, rated and codified, much as you would survey data or focus group data. Those ratings and rankings are put into a report, along with recommendations for action.

Uses for the final analysis vary widely. Some distill the video recordings, editing them down to some representative responses for each major question, some pro and some con, and present them in video form along with the written analysis. Sometimes, just the transcript is enough to get a sense of the trend of the responses, and can show glaring problems or highlight positive areas simply and quickly. Sometimes the two are combined in a multi-media presentation for added impact.

This type of research can highlight any number of aspects of the prospect pool, depending on how the research guide is structured. The more aspects of the prospective audience that are included in the study, the less depth you get in any one area. For a accurate study that is statistically projectable, and has a high degree of confidence, 30-40 interviews will usually suffice. Depending on how small the area of interest or niche you want to study, the toughest part might be finding enough respondents to interview.

How does The Right Brain Approach complement other research methods?
The Right Brain Approach measures emotions, not people. Quantitative data is valuable, but the information it provides can be even more valuable when used in conjunction with Right Brain Research. For example, if you conduct Right Brain Research before a quantitative survey, you will know what the key issues are and will be able to ask the right questions and ask them in the right way based on the actual language that consumers use. Once Right Brain Research results are known, future surveys can target the factors that affect buying decisions with more accuracy.

How can we use what we learn from Right Brain Research in conjunction with the results of our quantitative research?
What you gain in understanding from Right Brain Research will illuminate the information garnered in quantitative assessments. Now you have a chance to know the rest of the story! Actually, the Paul Harvey analogy is an excellent one. He tells you all the facts with no interpretive framework. Your mind goes off in all different directions trying to make sense of what he is saying. Then he hits you with a surprising ending or twist and all the facts make sense in a startling way. This is what Right Brain Research can do for your company/brand/packaging.*

No matter how you approach it, speaking directly with a population closely representative of your target audience is extremely empowering in it ability to accurately inform your creative, sales, membership recruitment or product development activities. You can’t know too much about customers, and this method allows you to gain insights that can’t be accessed any other way quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.
*Excerpted from FAQ section of Kenney & Associates, The Right Brain People’s website.

David Poulos, Chief Consultant at Granite Partners has been offering marketing guidance to firms for over 25 years. Specialties include non-profit marketing and full-scale strategic marketing campaigns. He can be reached at http://www.granite-part.com, or 410-472-4570.

Business plans and marketing plans are inextricably linked. Without the business, there is no marketing, and with out the marketing, there is no business. Creativity is an especially essential element to the home business marketing strategy. Without the sky-high budget and well known CEOs, a small business has an up hill battle in gaining name recognition and customer respect. With a solid marketing plan, however, any business has the potential to flourish.

How to Develop a Marketing Plan
Every business needs a marketing plan if they have aspirations to succeed. While the process for developing such a plan can be easily broken down, carrying it out takes a bit more effort. There are five main steps to developing a marketing plan:

1. Figure out who your customers are going to be. Who is your target market? How many customers do you anticipate having? These questions are among the most vital in creating a successful marketing strategy.

There are a number of different ways to determine your target audience. You likely had some idea of the type of customer you wanted to serve upon the conception of the business. Seek out this population and see what they think of your product. Hold product testing forums, send out surveys, and communicate through any other means necessary to get feedback. Once you have a solid profile of your customer, you’ll know how to speak their language.

2. Pinpoint where you fit into the market. Study your competition and figure out what works for them and what doesn’t. It helps to begin by creating a list of your strengths and weaknesses along with your competition’s strengths and weaknesses. Once these are clearly stated, you can focus on emphasizing the positives and eliminating the negatives.

3. Decide what kind of marketing you want to do and how you are going to do it. This step depends on your target audience. If they are particularly web-oriented, you’ll want to do most of your advertising online. If they are big readers, a newspaper or magazine may be the best place for advertising. In our media driven society, it is hard to imagine you’ll ever run out of places to market your product.

4. Create a budget. This can be one of the most challenging aspects of the marketing plan. It is here that your big dreams of having big time celebrities representing your company on primetime television commercials may die. Lucky for us, the Internet has opened a whole new world of effective marketing opportunities that cost little to nothing.

This includes constructing a business website, blog, participating in online discussions, and getting involved in article marketing. All will help you gain exposure and reach a greater number of people than any home business could do through the mail or over the phone.

5. Develop a strategy for tracking results. Marketing efforts are oftentimes hit or miss. It is important to track successes and failures in order to make modifications for your future marketing plans.

One common way to track your promotions in relation to your sales is to attach identifiable order numbers to the products placed in advertisements. For example, the SKU number for the same product may vary slightly depending on if the customer is ordering it off the website or from a postcard they received in the mail. This allows you to tell if your website or the mass postcard mailing was more effective.

The other method many companies use it to simply ask the customer where they heard about the product upon purchase. A brief survey question at the bottom of an order form will suffice. While neither strategy will be 100% accurate, they’ll at least give you some idea of which marketing pieces are pulling their weight and which ones are dead weight.

You are making a wise investment for your business by following these steps to create a marketing plan. While starting a home business can be an initially stressful endeavor, if you make the right moves, it will prove to be a thrilling ride.

Roger Haumann owns a drywall contracting business by day and makes money online by night. Visit his blog, Get a Rush, to read more about his online business. Roger uses Article Marketer, an online article distribution service, to get the word out about his blog.

http://www.articlemarketer.com

Most people change their website’s pages whenever they get a new idea. They think that each change is going to improve their site and make them more successful.

Of course, there are basic improvements you can make as you are writing the content for your site. And for the first few weeks you may notice some shortcomings that need to be remedied.

But, after a few days or weeks your site becomes stable. You don’t find any more errors in spelling or grammar. The graphics look like they belong on the site. And your order link or opt-in form performs correctly.

You’re now ready for split testing. This is a slow, incremental improvement of your site through ongoing testing.

Split testing involves making an experimental change to one of your pages, measuring the effects of that change, and analyzing the significance of differences in measured results. In other words, a split test attempts to determine how a change to your site affects some measurable response.

There are several decisions you must make to conduct a split test.

First, you need to determine what change you want to make. Typically you will change a headline, a sentence or two in your sales copy, the price of your product, the wording of your guarantee, change an image, or alter some other single feature of your page.

You will use two (or more) nearly identical pages. The difference being that one page has the “original” material while the other “experimental” page has the change applied.

Second, you must decide what “success event” to measure. For many people, it will be sales of a product or clicks of the order link. Some will want to measure the number of opt-ins. Others will measure the clicks to a pay-per-click service like AdSense.

To measure successfully, you must know how to distinguish successful responses from your “original” and “experimental” pages.

For example, many affiliate programs allow you to include a campaign ID in your link. By placing one campaign ID in the order links on the “original” page and another campaign ID on the “experimental” page you can determine the number of clicks and the number of orders coming from your pages.

Other people use a redirect script that keeps statistics on each redirect request. Redirect scripts typically use a keyword to select the URL for redirection. You can use keywords like “original” and “experimental” and have both redirected to your affiliate program’s order page. Then you can use the admin function of the redirect script to look at the number of clicks to the order page from both your “original” and “experimental” pages.

Next, you’ll need a script to randomly deliver your original or experimental pages to your site’s visitors. It would be helpful for this script to place a cookie on the visitor’s computer so the same page is delivered when the visitor returns.

Finally, you’ll need to analyze the results. The Chi Square statistic is often used to determine the significance of experiments similar to this. While differences in results often seem satisfyingly clear, they often are not statistically significant.

For example, consider two pages that are each displayed 500 times. One page resulted in 20 sales while the other page resulted in 30 sales. “WOW”, you say. “One page caused 50% more sales than the other page. That’s got to be meaningful.”

In this case we had a total of 50 sales, all things being equal, we would expect 25 sales from each page. The difference for both of your pages was only 5 sales. One page made 5 more sales than expected while the other made 5 fewer sales than expected. This could easily be the result of random variation rather than being caused by differences in your pages.

To help you understand, consider this story. Two random people are each given 500 pennies and each is placed 30 feet from a small can. They toss their pennies at the can. One person gets 30 pennies in the can while the other gets only 20 in the can. Can you conclude that the person who got 30 pennies in was significantly more skilled at tossing pennies than the other person?

No. In fact, if this penny tossing experiment was repeated 100 times, it is likely that 15 of those results would differ by as much or more than our example. That’s too close to simple random variation to believe that there is a real difference in skill levels between the people tossing the pennies.

For many experiments, a “statistically significant” result means that the differences we seen in our result would occur 5 or fewer times if a similar random experiment was repeated 100 times.

So, we should not conclude that there is a significant difference in the ability of our pages to deliver the “success event.”

There are now two things we can do. One is to conclude that the change we made to our “experimental” page is not statistically significant. In this case we can move on to the next split test experiment.

Or, we can continue this split test and hope that the ratio of sales remains the same. If we carried on the split test longer and found the same ratio of results, the differences could be significant. Consider doubling the number of exposures of your pages. If the ratio held, and we now have 60 sales compared to only 40 sales, that result would be statistically significant.

In 100 truly random experiments, successes having differences similar to 60 and 40 would occur fewer than 5 times. This is a good indication that the observed differences were not caused simply by random chance. Rather, we can conclude that there was a real cause for the observed differences.

The Chi Square statistic can be found on many spreadsheets, including Excel. With this statistic you compare the expected success values with the actual success values. When the statistic has a value of 0.05 or less you can conclude that there was a real reason for the differences.

Don’t expect every split test experiment to yield important results. Perhaps a third of your split test experiments will show the experimental page significantly improved sales. A third of the time there will be no significant difference. And a third of the time, the experimental page will cause a decrease in sales.

But, keep testing because that’s the sure way to improve your sales.

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of besuccessfulnews.com, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business.

When Dan Brown published his book, “The Davinci Code”, Christians were up in arms. After all, Brown had effectively rewritten two thousand years of Christian history with the claim that Jesus Christ had been married.

Whether you choose to believe this or not is really immaterial to this article. Personally, as a Christian, I saw nothing to get all up in arms about.

In fact, Brown’s strategy was brilliant. Who knows if he really believes what he said? The bottom line is the bottom line.

As a marketer, I found it easy to see through Brown’s, ploy. By creating controversy over his book, he sold 46,000,000+ copies, of “The Davinci Code”. Now he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Writing about controversial subjects is nothing new. Using controversy to promote your products and services is also nothing new.

The subject Brown chose to write about had already been done before. A good example is a book by Robert Ludlum.

In 1976, Robert Ludlum published “The Gemini Contenders”. Ludlum offered an alternative gospel, written by one of Jesus’s disciples. If recovered by the Nazis, this alternative gospel could destroy the Allied World and lead the Nazis to victory.

What Ludlum didn’t do though is rewrite history. He used actual events as chronicled in mainstream history books.

Ludlum also didn’t set out to offend anyone. He was telling a story, pure and simple.

So what does this have to do with controversy?

Plenty. It can mean the difference between a blockbuster product, and a super blockbuster product. It can mean thousands, or even millions of dollars difference in sales.

Recently, a lot of products have been released in internet marketing that used controversy as a main selling point. The problem is, many of these products didn’t live up to the hype.

The real secret to controversy is timeliness. You also want to live up to the hype you’ll create when launching your product.

The question is, how do you do this?

First, do your homework. Regardless of what industry you’re in, you can do a little research and find out what the latest trends are.

Search Amazon and find out what books about your subject are hot. Carefully study these books. Read the table of contents, reviews, and any other information you can find.

Next, do a search on a news site at Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Put your search terms in quotes to make your search more effective. Find out what’s being written about your topic.

You can also search news release sites like PR Web. The advantage of searching a PR portal is that you can see what other businesses are saying about themselves. News releases are meant to be informative news pieces about a business, but these news pieces are still written from a particular business perspective.

To create controversy, you need an alternative viewpoint.

Here’s an example:

With Dan Brown’s book, he chose to go against 2,000 years of what had been considered conventional wisdom by Christians. He offered a different historical viewpoint to history, and he chose to base his story on this different viewpoint.

It worked. His sales prove it.

The controversial viewpoint is often not the most popular viewpoint of the times, but this doesn’t mean the viewpoint is wrong, or less than because it’s not the most popular viewpoint.

King Solomon once said “There is nothing new under the sun”. I believe this is true. There are no real secrets, only principles that work.

Creating controversy is a viewpoint that works.

Creating controversy is a timeless principle you can use to sell your products and services. Just make sure your product lives up to the hype you create. You’ll sell more products that way.

Jinger Jarrett is the author of “1001 High Traffic Sites to Market Your Business for Free”. Learn how to market on high traffic sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN News. http://www.jingerjarrett.com. Visit her internet marketing bookstore at http://www.lulu.com/jingerjarrett

The days of targeting everyone with advertising are over. In fact, I don’t know if they ever existed. Mass targeting is an illusion. There is a target audience behind every advertising effort. Targeting your market through niche marketing will help concentrate your efforts and make you more successful.

What is Niche Marketing?

In a nutshell, niche marketing targets one distinct group of people who need what you are offering. Regardless of what you are marketing, there is a specific audience that needs what you offer. Understand all the nuances of your audience, solve their problem and you will soon be on the road to raging profits. But before you can advertise your services and products, you must understand “how” to niche market.

How to Begin Niche Marketing

You’ve got an awesome product or service, you know who your audience is, and you’re almost ready to make money! Niche marketing really is quite simple and effective. It enables you to concentrate your efforts on a specific group. You don’t have to worry about what the masses will think. What will your group of people think? Marketing resources, such as available money, are more concentrated. Would you rather spend your hard earned money targeting all the people on the Internet or perhaps a smaller group of a few hundred thousand? It’s really a no-brainer.

Begin your marketing strategy by first listing the type of niche you are planning to market. If you are unsure about what niche to market to, examine your product or services. Let’s say that you are selling premium dog food. From this point research existing dog niches. No need to create your own niche, it’s costly and time consuming. A quick internet search will easily reveal a dozen niches that will interest you. But a good target audience will be hungry for the product you offer.

Time to Target an Audience

We’ve established that targeting one specific group of people saves you marketing dollars and valuable time. It helps to establish you as an industry leader, which will lead to credibility with consumers. Using our fictitious dog food product, we will break down how to target the specific audience that desperately needs this dog food!

Let’s say that your dog food is all natural and organic. Who would buy such a product? Obviously the dogs are not doing the purchasing! But their owners are. Now don’t be tempted to target all dog owners. Many could care less that your product has no bi-products if it costs an extra $1 a bag. You must research deeper than just dog owners.

When you are short on ideas, ask your family and friends their opinion! Other good sources are magazines, local newspapers and any industry publications. Don’t forget to write down your findings. You think that you’ll remember, but when it comes down to implementing your strategy, it’s impossible to remember everything.

Now that you have your marketing research and have narrowed your audience you are ready to market. It’s recommended to target a few niches in your market rather than depend on just one paying off. For example, a couple of niches for your healthy dog food would be environmentally conscience owners and owners that have dog with existing health problems. You will need to tailor your message to each niche you plan to target. How does your product meet their needs? Anticipate what questions your audience will ask.

Next, you will need to find out everything possible about your audience. What are their likes and dislikes? The goal is not only to communicate to your target audience, but to do so as one of them. Approach your potential consumers as a trusted source and your results will be far greater than expected.

You’ve got your niche, you understand your target audience, now make sure that you get your message to them on their home turf! Don’t make your audience find you. Put your message right in front of them. You can do this through targeted email campaigns, AdWords marketing or advertising on web sites that they already visit. There really is a myriad of options. It comes down to concentrating your efforts on the most interested audience available. Now, if that’s not a recipe for success, I don’t know what is!

Omar Johnson is author of the homestudy course “How to Make Money On the Internet While You are Asleep” go here to find out more

If you are a typist with time on your hands and if you are eager to bring yourself some added cash, then you might want to find internet typing jobs. What are internet typing jobs? These are typing jobs that are posted on the internet.
One way to find a list of the websites that carry such jobs is to go to ask.com. If you do that, then you might soon find yourself visiting the website freewebs.com. That particular website indicates that there is a real demand for typists who will take on the various internet typing jobs. The following paragraphs provide details on some of those jobs.

If you have ever been stopped by someone in the mall or if you have been asked to take a telephone survey then you are familiar with one important internet typing job. You are also familiar with the basic method for market research. Companies depend on market research to learn what the consumer wants. The volume of information obtained from such research needs to be typed into a report. Some internet writing jobs call for a typist who knows how to type up such reports.

Once companies determine what interests their customers, then they want to communicate with their customers. Many companies do that by using newsletters sent to each customer’s e-mail address. The companies seldom ask a company secretary to type up such newsletters. They tend to enter their request for a newsletter typist among the many posted internet writing jobs.

The list of internet typing jobs goes on and on. Some companies need a typist to help with the printing of ads. Some companies desire typists who will supply them with well-typed welcome e-mails. These are sent to those customers who sign up for the company’s newsletter. Other companies seem more interested in finding someone to type up information lists.

Information lists are not the only sort of list that company administrators want to see. Such administrators also want access to mailing lists, i.e. the list of customers who are receiving either the company newsletter or the company catalogue. Sometimes the administrators want a list of ordered items. Typed lists of software orders are a frequent need among company administrators.

Typed lists of any kind supply the company administrators with valuable information. While the customers are studying the company website to obtain information about the company’s products, the company administrators are studying the many typed lists. If the available lists fail to supply the necessary information, then those administrators are apt to seek funds for more internet typing jobs.

Typing, like writing, is vital to the creation of an online presence. Accurate typing insures the delivery of easy to read and adequate information. Good writing adds color and interest to that information.

To Your Success

Obinna Heche. Los Angeles – California

Delivering the best home based business ideas,
opportunities and resources so you can work at home successfully..
http://www.homeincomeportal.com/obhmy365/

Search engines don’t buy products and services. People do.

To sell your products and services online, you need targeted traffic. Search engines will send you targeted traffic, and a lot of it, if you take certain steps.

The first step in your search engine marketing campaign isn’t search engine optimization. Your first step is to understand the internet and how to effectively use it to promote your products and services.

The internet is a content driven medium. Searchers are looking for information. They don’t want to be sold to. They want value. You can provide this value through the content you write for your website, as well as content you write for your promotions.

Therefore, you need to develop a complete, content management strategy. Your content management strategy needs to be customer focused, content driven, and optimized for the search engines.

Your content management strategy should consider on page and off page optimization factors. On page factors include optimizing your page for keywords relevant to your page, titles, and descriptions. Off page factors include link exchanges and backlinks.

Once you’ve chosen the topic for your site, you need to develop your website. Decide what content you will write. Your content should include articles, press releases, and product reviews. You can also create free ebooks, reports, and white papers provided the information you include will be useful to your site visitor.

Before developing your content, you need to do your research. Find out what your readers are searching for. There are plenty of free tools and software on the internet to help you accomplish this task. Simply search for a keyword phrase like “keyword suggestion tools”.

When you’re ready to write your content, choose two to three keywords and/or keyword phrases in the text for your page. Write your content and then optimize your page for these keywords. You can use free software like Web CEO.

Although on page optimization will help you if you don’t have a lot of competition for your keyword phrases, it is not enough if you are targeting high competition words. To raise your rankings, you will need to link to high traffic sites with high page rank. Building backlinks from other websites will also help you raise your rankings.

Do a search in your favorite search engine to find sites you can link to. Study these sites. Check to see what keywords they use to optimize their pages. Find out if they exchange links and request a link exchange.

The key to success in search engine marketing is to do your homework BEFORE you create your website. The bottom line is that no matter how many links you have pointing back to your site, or how well you optimize your page for the search engines, you won’t rank high for keywords that are too competitive.

If you still insist on building a website on a highly competitive topic, then I would recommend you use other techniques to promote your site. Article writing, forum posting, press releases, pay per click ads, and offline classifieds.

The bottom line is you won’t succeed in any business you aren’t passionate about. Choose a topic you like that has a market and then build a content rich search engine friendly market. Get your name out there and keep branding yourself. You will succeed.

Jinger Jarrett will show you how to get more traffic and sales with free marketing. Get her book, “1001 High Traffic Sites Where You Can Market for Free”, at http://www.jingerjarrett.com

Everything that has something to do with online is getting attention nowadays. There is also no exception for online surveys. Similar to the traditional form-filling surveys, you do the same here with a few added advantages. First, you do not need to leave your house to fill up a survey form but instead you can do it online. Second, you are paid to voice out your opinions.

Before a product enters the market, companies spend years on research and development. After that, years are again spent to gather information on how the market is likely to respond to the product. Seeing this tedious pattern, companies decided to utilize the Internet to gather information as fast and as easy as they can through online surveys. Rather than spending dollars and waiting for the information gathering, why not do it the easy way with web based surveying?

Online survey exists and are real. It is not a scheme to get you into signing up and then cheat you. You can really earn an income by doing online surveys. The companies are grateful for your feedback and comments and this is why you are paid. Your comments are precious to them for further improvement. Since you have spent some time filling their survey form, it is just fair to pay you some money for your precious time.

For serious income generators, there is another great option for you to choose. When people are willing to pay some fee in order to have fast access to online survey sites, why not set up another site of your own? Even you pay other sites to access paid survey listings. Of course, other people out there are willing to pay you to reduce the burden of searching the sites. By doing this, you can continue to fill up online forms and at the same time, provide the online survey database. Now, you can earn money from the number of users that sign up with you to access online forms database. You can multiple your income and all this are done according to your own pace.

Web hosting is not expensive. Getting your own domain name is easy enough if you are keen to become a double generator. Look at it as an investment to expand your career.

You see now that online surveys are not a fraud. You can earn money through it and even make it as a business. Although there might be some risks in being cheated, there are ways to avoid this from happening.

Most survey databases only charge you about 100 dollars. Amounts larger than that might seem suspicious so, you might want to avoid them. Another good way to check either the online survey site is not a swindle; you can always visit forums that feature posts from individuals who have been cheated. It might look tiring but you had better be safe than sorry.

As a conclusion, you do not have to hesitate when considering online surveys as an option to make money. All you have to do is make sure that you take ample precaution so you might not end up in frustration.

Terence Young – For more information on online paid surveys visit: http://greatestpaidsurveys.com/

Did you know that every year companies world wide spend an excessive amount of $250 billion dollars trying to sell their products and services. Almost a billion of this money spent goes straight into market research. And this is why online paid surveys pay so much.

If you spent a couple of million dollars developing a new product you’d want to make sure people like it and you’d also want to know all things that people don’t like about it. Paid surveys are a perfect place to test new products and services before companies launch them publicly.

There are currently an estimate of 7,500,000 million companies throughout the world that pay for surveys offline and online. However due to the popularity of the internet surveys are recently been very popular and a good source of income for some people. If you did enough high paying surveys you can actually turn it into a side job or even a full time job. It’s a perfect home based businesses for moms, students or anyone who’s looking to work their own hours.

How Does Online Paid Surveys Work?

When a company decides to trial their new product or services they contact market research companies who have a list of database of consumers. Companies then have the advantage of testing their product or services on particular groups of people. Survey participants are then paid after each survey is complete by cash or cheque. However surveys are also conducted over the phone or in person and usually pay a high rate since it is not as convenient as an online survey.

Before you participate in a survey the market research companies usually profile you by giving you simple questions. Once they are able to place you in a profile you’ll be called upon according to your profile to test various products and services. Some surveys may include: