Recent Jackpot Shatters All Doubts

By the time you read this it will be all over the news. Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, creators of www.youtube.com have cashed in their enterprise to Google. The giant search engine company paid a reported 1.65 BILLION dollars.

The next phase of whats to come should tantalize even the hardest cynic. Enter the phase of customized advertising by invitation only.

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Ted Cantu is the creator of Mobile Cast and www.911Copywriters.com he has handled the marketing for such innovative groups like www.WindsorBeauty,com and contributes to several blogs and podcasts such as….. http://911copywriters.podomatic.com. He served as a top rated art director for Interactive Web Marketing groups in Chicago and New York City.

The New Blood: Shaking Up The Remaining 38%

As I write this traditional marketers are shaking. In fact, they are trembling. I should know. I am the one who makes them tremble. Instead of forking over 24 - 40 thousand dollars for getting my marketing message out there I have found a back door.

This back door allows me to do something that no marketing company out there can do. I can tap into the missing 38% of the population who make buying decisions from auditory learning only. IN other words. 38% of the population hates to read. They avoid it. I have tools in place right now as we speak that taps into that buying sector.

Why is that important?

Up until a few months ago, companies were gladly handing over $4,000 a month just to cover Google Ad Sense. But thanks to recent innovations with podcast technology and blogging and now vlogging, (video blogging) the whole marketing gambit as we know it has been flipped over on its ear.

Incidently, SEO and SEM is getting a heck of a lot smarter too – and more precise.

WHY PODCASTING MATTERS
I just checked out my subscription list for a new podcast show I developed and found out we gained an additional 24 new subscribers. What makes this even more interesting is that my podcasts were automatically downloaded to users Ipods while they were sleeping. Just going by the search words alone we were able to get picked up in many new “markets”.

“24 new subscribers? WHAT? Big deal…….”

Well friend, it is a big deal when you consider that number is actually higher than the number of unqualified customers we used to generate out of our weekly radio show. In fact, some weeks we were lucky if we got 10 new callers. I would answer their questions live on the air and then they would call me at my home and drive me up the wall, (often asking the same questions over and over again without purchasing anything).

The beauty of what I do now is that I put this marketing message in orbit and invite people to listen to it. This is actually easier then doing things the traditional way and getting sponsors to support my weekly radio show. The old way was expensive. This new way isn’t costing me nearly as much and I have some loyal listeners. I get fan mail too which is nice.

That number is growing daily. Right now there are only 44,000 podcasts in existence. That means its very early in the game and the time is now if you are going to do anything in this arena.

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Ted Cantu is the creator of Mobile Cast and www.911Copywriters.com he has handled the marketing for such innovative groups like www.WindsorBeauty.com and contributes to several blogs and podcasts such as….. http://911copywriters.podomatic.com. He served as a top rated art director for Interactive Web Marketing groups in Chicago and New York City.

BURGER KING: THE MOTION PICTURE

(Or The Strange, The Fearless and The Brave)

The recent issue of Forbes is a hoot. It just hit the newsstands, its the one with www.Youtube.com on the cover. There is an article in there that you must see to believe. On page 68 you will find a beaming grin of Russ Klein hanging out with the cast of the Burger King stable. The plans he is weaving are…… interesting.

The plans are underway for a Burger King movie centering around a youth who happens to live on top of a Burger King restaurant. The film is an oddball comedy hoping to gain a cult phenomenon like Napoleon Dynamite or an Empire Records.

Whether or not this fan will do a great job of recruiting the “heavy users”, (those who eat at fast food places more than15 times a month) remains to be seen. But they know the niche is out there. That is just the thing a lot of online companies don’t seem to get.

Too many start up companies assume that the market is just going to be there waiting for a new thrill. Burger King and companies like Threadless, (www.threadless.com) understand the power of building cult brands and marketing to them for serious profit.

The customers are groomed and conditioned to buy and to spend more upon each visit.

So is this a wrong thing to do?

That depends on what you want your customer to do. I must admit I find the whole thing somewhat appealing. I tend to alternate my fast food choices when the need arises. But lately Burger King has been edgy with their copywriting, (read the inner notes on the Angus burger wrapper) and check out the smart copy on the soft drink cup.

They also do something smart with their positioning. Dr. Angus is a riot. I like the way he swaggers in front of the screen and takes pot shots at the fat epidemic of America. This is a direct jab at the overly hyped Atkins Diet. Dr. Angus even has his own web sites for the www.angusdiet.com which was still up a few weeks ago.

I have a sense of humor and I do not mind being manipulated as long as there is some humor involved. These guys make me laugh. The food isn’t terrible but there are days when I can surely pass on the fare.

This works better for me than some of the ultra geeky tele-visual offerings from Tim Horton’s. You know the ads where this pencil thin geek goes around haunting every cube within eyeshot and earshot until co-workers give in and go to lunch with him.

Guilt doesn’t work well. Humor sells. I started to go to Quiznos because of the singing dust balls with guitars. Then I found out they had a kick ass pepper sauce that I would have otherwise have overlooked.

Even Dave Thomas from Wendy’s used to lay down a heavy guilt trip. His beef, (no pun intended) was that he laid out all these salads and nobody was coming in to eat them. He had no laughter, no smiles, he was all gruff about it, as if to say, “get in here and buy my stuff”.

That is a tactic that rarely works. Nobody owes you a dime just because you declare yourself a business. Its all about the customer. That goes for any business.

THE CULT OF PERSONALITY
Okay, the phrase fits but it was named after a famous song in the 80’s. You get the drift. So will your customers if you play it right. The customers are the ones who will call the shots in your company. If they start to buy differently than you expected then you need to tailor your delivery and adjust to their buying behavior.

Example: I built www.windsorbeauty.com and we are the S.E. Michigan sellers of the incredible Schwarzkopf hair products. But when the cosmetologists arrived to the site they didn’t use the shopping cart the right way. Instead of getting a password and entering they used the site as sort of an online catalog.

They would call the 800 number to tell the operator what products they wanted. Were they wrong? YES. To me they were 100% wrong but they were still ordering. So we had to make adjustments and accept that this type of ordering was a little quirky. That is alright. We are still making money with this crowd – just not the way we expected.

We also had to admit that the customers for this market DON’T READ. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Its just that most of our customers are audio learners. HELLO PODCASTS. We had to create a hip podcast that this market sector would listen to and benefit from. NO BIG DEAL. That is the beauty of online marketing and interactive communication.

You have to adjust to the needs of your customers. After all, they are the ones who are keeping you in business.

Right now as I write this there is a phenom going on called, THE BIG IDEA REVOLUTION and it’s a weekly podcast. This guys deal is that he wants everyone to start thinking big and change the world. Its fun for about five minutes.

I would rather get the guts of how to change and shift customer buying behavior. Things are changing at a rapid pace. This is no time to get cute. We tried that in the late 90’s with the whole dot com fiasco and look what happened to our venture capital firms – they suddenly got cold feet in the early 2000’s and started funding offshore business ops.

This isn’t the time to THINK BIG.. its time to GET INTELLIGENT.

But back to Burger King, these guys got it right. They are adjusting to their core audience and delivering goods and services that appeal to them and its working. The average franchise now pulls in 1.1 million a year.

What are your customers telling you?

Are you listening?

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Ted Cantu is the creator of Mobile Cast and www.911Copywriters.com he has handled the marketing for such innovative groups like www.WindsorBeauty,com and contributes to several blogs and podcasts such as….. http://911copywriters.podomatic.com. He served as a top rated art director for Interactive Web Marketing groups in Chicago and New York City.

The Age Of Ferocious Online Marketing

THE NEW BUSINESS MODELS

I started reading the Chicago Times every Sunday, not because its my favorite city on the planet, but because of the changing face of business. Not everyone “gets it” and as usual…..The Chicago people are on top of these changes and kicking major butt on the online marketing scene. And that’s good.

No it’s not only good…. It’s AWESOME.

There is no comparison to what is happening in other cities. Over the past few weeks I have had a lot of disheartening conversations about the changing face of the Internet. An overwhelming amount of top people who should be “in the know” are still waving banners for Macromedia Flash and championing web sites which are little more than “online digital love letters” to interactive multimedia. They offer little more than digital fluff.

THREADLESS
This innovative t-shirt company had a great idea. First they would hold a contest to see what the people wanted to wear. They had a t shirt design contest for the best artwork and had a vote. The winners were able to sell their shirts online. When the company needed a market they sold the winning shirts back to the ones who voted for them. This is OPT IN customer marketing done to an absolute T.

The result? 18 million dollars of revenue.

How long can this last? Not sure. But one thing is for certain, this sucker punched the t shirt industry and shook the ground of even the most heavy handed cynic.

The three young men who pulled off this miraculous masterminded stunt are barely in their 20’s. The designs for these shirts are what really struck me as odd. Most of them didn’t really have much of an appeal to me. I’m slightly older and from another generation when BIG was in. I go for loud, bombastic, in your face designs.

The designs from Threadless have more of a worn in feel and there are traces of speckled paint and fading colors. IN short, they look like something you may of pulled out of a used bin at your local Goodwill.

Not to come off hard. These designs are BRILLIANT in their simplicity. They surely connect to their core audience. And this is where a lot of businesses fail to succeed. They let the audience gain control over their purchasing choices.

The core audience are the ones who will be buying and wearing them after all. This is where Threadless gets it right – continuously. This business model is all about customization. This is simply outrageous.

But can this type of daring innovaton be copied and perfected? You bet. But it is going to take some finagling to make it right for your market.

What was the word from Detroit? To quote an offbeat advertising hack I met with from the Winchester Group in Farmington Hills, MI………….

“What the hell is an online art director?” he said glumly.

Exactly.

Once again, Detroit, with its narrow minded thinking will most likely be left out of the game.

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Ted Cantu is the creator of Mobile Cast and www.911Copywriters.com he has handled the marketing for such innovative groups like www.WindsorBeauty.com and contributes to several blogs and podcasts such as….. http://911copywriters.podomatic.com. He served as a top rated art director for Interactive Web Marketing groups in Chicago and New York City.

OUTRAGEOUS RESULTS IN JUST THREE HOURS

Hey folks! I want to just spread a little ray of hope out there for everyone who is serious about getting more customers online. Getting all your ducks in a row online can be hard. Blogging and podcasting can be absolutely grueling if you don’t do things in the right order.

Tonight I have tweaked my web pages and synched them up with my blog and pinged the appropriate search engines. Something wonderful happened. The same pages that I created this morning and uploaded to my server are the same ones that popped up in the Yahoo top ten.

I got THE NUMBER ONE SPOT…… In fact, I occupy the top two positions for beauty products.
This is for a company called Windsor Beauty Supply in Farmington Hills, MI. Check out this link to see our top position -- seeing is believing --- we are at the very top in Yahoo. The beauty of this is that I found a combination that worked.

I was literally shocked to see how effective this was. I want to tell you a little about how I did it. First of all, I used BLOGGER. I used that because it is owned by Yahoo. It made sense to use it so I could be recognized quickly. Go Daddy’s blog system however is pretty good. I like all the tools that it comes with so I set up different blogs using different software to get a feel for what I like. I suggest you do the same.

Picking Out The Keywords
The keywords are important if you want to get your search engine rankings up. You should make sure you put enough of them in your copy. But what is even more important is referencing them when you make your hyperlinks. This is where a lot of people lose steam.

The common mistake is that when people go to link something they will hyperlink the phrase, “Click here for more information”. I admit I was guilty of doing that in the past - at some point - we all have done it.

The problem is that the search engines will not reference your pages properly. Instead of indexing your keywords they will highlight words like, “The, And, For, Go To etc.” This sounds pretty basic but its more common than you think. I was horrified when I reviewed the traffic reports off a site I built recently. Even the companies tech department were oblivious to my recent discoveries.

Create The Perfect Pages To Ping Off Of
There is a certain way you should lay out your keywords in your meta tags. Depending on who you listen to there are two ways you can do it. I learned of a technique where you can stack up four rows of meta tags related to search engines. You can see an example of this if you right click on your mouse and View Source to see what I mean………

Log onto:
http://www.windsorbeauty.com

You will notice that it looks a little different. Now here is the funny thing. According to the software package, Hello Engines, I am actually doing this wrong. This is an Australian product but they could be right. However, the US based search engines like what I do and I have gotten favorable results.

If anyone can commit on this - please do so. I would like to find out the proper coding for keywords. One would assume that I am doing this right by my recent successes.
Know Which Blog Search Engines To Ping
Not all the blog search engines are created equal. Some will add you to their databases by hand. They station a live person to go through the requests. DMOZ does this. They added a blog feature but still have a live person deciding if you will get accepted or not.

This can be very frustrating.

There are only 10 really important blog search engines that you should be send to. The others are a crap shoot and there is no telling if you will be included in 2 weeks or 48 hours. Some directories will automate daily. The other thing is that a lot of these blog search engines don’t even bother sending out email anymore to new sign ups. This is due largely to the recent spam they receive on a daily basis.

Hint: check splogs….etc.
(spam blogs)

Still though….. 3 hours…. Is pretty sensational.
Remember back in the not so distant past you had to wait 7 months to get listed on Google. Now you can get on there in a few hours. Its pretty outrageous.

Now before you run out and try this keep in mind that you want to encourage participation. Setting up your blog with subscription feeds, RSS, and capturing email addresses is a good idea. It would be advisable too to get a hold of the traffic report. I would stay clear of posting these results on your blog -- this is for your own benefit and its no one else’s business to see how popular you are. This is something that you will need to do so you can see what is working.


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Article written by Ted Cantu, freelance correspondent for FASCUBE, The Fashion Culture Beauty Network. Cantu handles online marketing, copywriting, graphics, SEO - SEM, Blogging, Podcasting and can be found on his home site of www.911copywriters.com. Cantu is located in Walled Lake, Michigan.

Marketing Cheat Sheet - Vol. 42

Marketing Cheat Sheet - Vol. 42

In This Issue

· Secret Customer Forms That Work

The Secret Of Getting
OPT IN Customers

In the age of SPAM paranoia, you will want to master
the art of getting OPT IN Customers. OPT IN, simply
means that you have permission to market.

When you want to get customers online you are going to
need forms. In the beginning you are only going to
ask for just two pieces of information.

1. First Name
2. Email Address

That's it.

** DO NOT ask for any more information than that. Your
prospects are going to rarely want to give you any more
information than that on the first contact.

You will want to put that form on the upper right of your screen.
You do not have to be a programmer to get these forms to work,
(and that's a relief for some of us!).

The form is going to capture your prospects information.
But it doesn't stop there……


Get The Whole Article Here....