Tag : Business

  • How to Develop Successful Mobile Apps

    Posted Sep 7th, 2011 By in Mobile With | No Comments

    While there are already hundreds of thousands of mobile apps out there, this new medium is really still
    in its infancy, which means the door is wide open for new ideas. What makes a successful app? Why is
    Angry Birds the all-time highest seller on mobile platforms? There isn’t a perfect formula for creating the
    next smash hit, but there are a few common attributes all the best apps share.

    This is the golden age of the mobile app market. Most customers aren’t clamoring for more advanced
    and futuristic apps (devices yeah, apps no), they just want something useful and/or fun they can use on
    what they’ve got. If your great idea will only work on the iPhone 12, it’s probably not such a great idea.
    So here are some things that make an app successful.

    Make it useful

    The greatest apps to date have been those that do something we think we need, although we may not
    realize we need it until we see it. If your app makes people think to themselves, “Whoa! I can totally
    use that! Why didn’t I think of that!” you’ve probably got a winner. Whether it’s Genius Scan for taking
    better notes in class, or SwiftKey or Dropbox, if it makes life more efficient or allows me to do something
    on the run I previously had to do at a computer (or even worse, by hand), it has a market. (more…)

  • The Best Way to Blog for SEO – A Beginner’s Guide

    Posted Aug 30th, 2011 By in Blogging, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) With | 1 Comment

    Are you clueless on how to blog for SEO? This beginner’s guide will take you through simple steps on how to get your blog posts in tip top shape for when the search bots come crawling.

    Why Blog for SEO?

    There’s two very good reasons you should do this, which lead me to put together this beginner’s guide on how to blog for SEO.

    1. Since you’re already taking the time to write the blog, so you might as well know how to blog for SEO.

    2. It will help drive extra traffic to your blog in the long term – which is why you’re blogging right?

    How to Blog for SEO

    First you should plan out your blog post. It might seem like extra work, but believe me it will make the whole process a lot easier. You can download the plan I used to prepare this blog for SEO here.

    Topic – First you’ll need to decide on the topic you’ll be blogging about. Ideally it should be a trending topic or something you know is popular with your target audience. There’s no point writing about something no one’s interested in.

    Keywords – Probably the most important consideration when tailoring your blog for seo is the keywords you’ll use. Once you’ve decided on your topic, the best way to select keywords is to head on over to the google keyword tool, which will show you a bunch of suggestions for the topic you enter. Ideally try to choose 2 or 3 phrases which have high search traffic and low competition. If you downloaded the plan I used for this post, you’ll see that the phrases I’ve selected are ‘blog for seo’, ‘how to blog’ and ‘beginner’s guide’, which all have low competition and searches in the thousands. (more…)

  • 6 Tips for Creating Compelling White Papers for a B2B Audience

    Posted Aug 4th, 2011 By in Content Marketing With | 2 Comments

    White papers are more commonly used by B2B companies than B2C companies. This is because B2B companies are ready to dedicate their time to find out more about the solution and the product. Every B2B company needs a white paper to help market itself better.

    Some of the points you need to keep in mind while creating white papers are:

    1. Avoid direct selling – When you write a B2B white paper you need to forget about directly selling your services. B2B white papers only work when you sell your services in a subtle manner. You can write it persuasively, but you need to forget about using testimonials, call to actions that pressure readers, etc.

    You might think that this indirect way of selling will not work, but when it comes to white papers subtle selling works really well.

    2. Address it to a single person – Many writers think that when you write it for a business you’re writing for a whole bunch of people together and they need to address them as a group of people. It’s true that many people are going to read it, but they’re going to read it alone. You won’t have a group of people reading it together. This is the reason why you need to address your reader as a single person with a “you”.

    3. Keep it simple – It’s is common for businesses to use hard to read language in their white papers as they think that it reflects on the company. They think that making the white paper hard to read will make their company look sophisticated. But using complicated words could actually work against you.

    Your white paper is normally 6 to 14 pages long. It could take a lot of time for someone to read it and people who normally read white papers are busy decision makers. They are looking for white papers which are simple and quick to read. If they read a white paper that is hard to understand and keeps them visiting the search engines for answers and making it longer to read the white paper, they will just abandon reading it.

    This is the reason why you need to simplify the writing and look up meanings for every word and write it in a detailed manner. This will make it easy to read and more busy decision makers will read it completely, which will give it the opportunity to do its job of generating leads. (more…)

  • Retailers Use Mobile Marketing to Attract More Customers

    Posted Jul 21st, 2011 By in Mobile With | 2 Comments

    As a customer, you’ve probably experienced the benefits of mobile marketing to give you discounts, specials, and freebies from your favorite brand. Right? Well, as a business owner, you can use this same type of hands-on mobile marketing to reach customers more effectively than ever before.

    Even the most popular fast food chains like Subway, Pizza Hut, Burger King, and Wendy’s started marketing to customers with text marketing, iPhone apps, and mobile coupons just a few years ago. Many of these mobile apps will allow a customer to place an order online and pick up their food moments later. Simply brilliant.

    Even large retailers like Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy stay connected with customers via text for holiday specials and discounts and have introduced iPhone apps to give customers more options. Instead of visiting the official website, customers can read reviews, order products, and create a gift list directly through their mobile phone.

    As a business owner, you can take your mobile marketing campaign beyond just the standard text message. You can get creative with the following ideas:

    • Mobile Payments: Starbucks recently introduced Starbucks Card Mobile payments available at more than 1000 Safeway locations via the Android App. Customers can load up their Starbucks card on their mobile phone and use their phone to pay for their coffee at their convenience. This means that Starbucks mobile payment is now available on 90% of all smartphones to make it virtually impossible for a customer not to connect with Starbucks through their mobile device. (more…)

  • Mobile Marketing Trend: Texting Is Mainstream

    Posted Jul 13th, 2011 By in Mobile With | 1 Comment

    If you’re a small business owner who already uses text message marketing, then you’re on the right track. But it’s still important to stay up-to-date with the latest mobile marketing trends to ensure that you too can stay ahead of the pack.

    Currently, there are four times as many mobile phones in the world as opposed to PC users. Roughly 20% of houses in the US are mobile only without a landline.

    When you consider that we send 130 billion text messages each month, mobile marketing can be incredibly lucrative for small and large businesses if it is approached correctly. This is precisely why so many businesses have embraced text message marketing wholeheartedly as the most popular form of mobile marketing. Which is why text messaging is now becoming more mainstream than ever before.

    To best grasp the concept, text messaging should be compared to e-mail marketing and can be used in the same way that you would create an e-mail campaign. Of course, instead of encouraging your customers to give you their e-mail address for a newsletter or a coupon, you’ll be asking for a mobile phone number to send the same type of condensed updates to a mobile phone.

    Yet mobile marketing provides an even greater benefit. You don’t have to go to the trouble of creating a fancy e-mail campaign with images and video because you’ll only be using 160 characters of a text message. Even if a customer doesn’t make a sale the first time, 97% of your customers will still read your text message because it’s so short. You can’t beat those odds!

    Businesses have been using text messages to reach out to customers for several years. A Comscore study has confirmed that 25% of all mobile phone users have signed up for anywhere from 1 to 10 text messaging programs on a monthly basis. This means that customers are ready and willing, and you can reach them with your marketing message at any time away from home.

    And the text marketing trend continues. People of all ages are using texts for communication, meaning that businesses can use text message marketing for all generations. More and more customers are searching for mobile coupons as our economy recovers from the recession and programs like Groupon rise in popularity. As a result, a number of retail stores, grocers, and restaurants have launched mobile coupon marketing programs to reach out to more customers.

    Last but not least, the result that can’t be beat in text marketing is the impressive ROI. A text message will normally get seven times the response rate as an e-mail, meaning that the same message sent out to the same group of customers via text versus e-mail will be much more successful to generate even more sales and revenue.

    Guest Author:  Bethany Ramos is an expert in Internet marketing and social media marketing, and she also co-owns her own e-commerce website, The Coffee Bump.

     

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