Marketing in all its various forms is something that has been an integral part of any business venture ever since the earliest days of trade and commerce. No serious business today can hope to stay afloat without any form of marketing.

At its most basic, all types of marketing have two main objectives: 1) to inform your potential clientele about the existence of your product or service, and 2) to convince them of its relative merits. A number of techniques and methods have been established over the years in the pursuit of these goals, and many of the fundamentals remain in use today, albeit in modified and sometimes radically altered forms. This is only to be expected; after all, business as a whole has gone through numerous changes and it is only natural that new and more effective marketing techniques are implemented to keep up with the changing times. This is more crucial now that more and more businesses are being established on the Internet or have had some form of Internet presence for a number of years now.

At the heart of it all though, a few things remain constant: the need to attract your market and to get your message across to them.

One of the marketing techniques that remain in wide use today is the use of a mascot or a unique character for your product or service. This remains one of the most effective ways to enhance brand recall for your business. Think about all the mascots that have become a part of the public consciousness over the years: the Pilsbury doughboy, Ronald McDonald…the list goes on. Remarkably effective tools for both reaching out to your audience and keeping you fresh in their minds, mascots and special characters can also be tremendously useful for your website.

When first deciding on a mascot or avatar for your website, you will want something that is simple, eye catching, endearing, possibly colorful and most of all effective. A mascot that conforms to all the above criteria will serve to embed your website into the minds of your market and from there the potential to increase traffic to your website considerably is endless. Once you have captured your market, they will be far more likely to visit your website repeatedly, host link to your site, and even pass on word about your site to friends and business contacts. It is a time proven technique that amazingly still works today and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future

It’s all about branding your business. For example, if you own a blog on baby beds, you can develop a unique character of a baby explaining your products and adding a colorful and vibrant touch to your blog.

You must have heard about www.johncow.com. This blog is raking in thousands of dollars every single month. Johncow has a unique milkman character displayed on the header of the blog. That milkman is so famous that it has become viral. People often refer Johncow as milkman. The difference is that mascot or character that embellishes the blog and entertains people in a unique way.
It’s certainly not expensive to hire a designer to draw a unique mascot for your website or blog. sosfactory.com charges $250 for the design and they have done that milkman character for johncow.com. Iwebcontent charges $249 and they have done the viral king character for www.viralking.com.

This unique marketing method can explode your sales literally. Try it out and see for yourself. You will be amazed to see the repeated traffic coming back to you each and everyday.

A final word on developing a mascot for your website: while you may be tempted to cut costs and have your mascot designed by a friend or acquaintance or possibly a “talented” child of someone you know (this happens a lot more often than you would think!), it would probably be best to leave that job to a suitably qualified person or company. It is your website that the mascot will be representing after all, and you wouldn’t want to settle for less than the best that you can buy, wouldn’t you?

Many bloggers make a full-time income from playing with their websites in the comfort of home. The internet income is not a hype, its a reality; those who are sincere in doing it, acquired the knowledge necessary, and went smiling themselves to bed.For those who would like to join the fray, here are some basic tips:

0. Deciding your product

If you do not have products to sell, try Affiliate Marketing. For example, go to www.clickbank.com

Also, many deals are handled with Paypal and other internet banking services. Get familiarised with them, before you go on to the website.

1. Content is king

Educate your audience about your products. A seller who does not give infomation freely to customers is a rude one, so don’t fall into this pit. People come back for good content, and if they really like your content, trust is slowly built, and money will then flow.

2. Drive traffic to your website.

When you open your shop, you would need people to know about it. Traffic driving are available in all forms.If you would like to learn more, just drop us a message and we’re be glad to share.

3. Allow comments

People like to see others’ opinions on a product before buying. This very smart moves prevent unnecessary “buyer’s remorse”. A website will comments attract more people. Say, don’t you also read comments on Youtube?

4. Be patient

Just like wine, a website gets better with time. The older your website, the more people will come to visit, the better your page rank on search engines, and the more trusted your website is. You can choose to build it slowly and strongly.

5. Pictures

More often than not, “have”  is better than “dont have”. Try to have pictures on every post you have. This is treated as a very basic fundamental in having a blog shop. (Did the above picture charm you into reading this post? If so, pictures do work.)

The above is all I have for you at the moment. If you master the above, you could keep a satisfactory part time income from your blog shop, while keeping your full-time job or studies. I’ll share more next time on the continuation of this post. Til next time!

PR Log (Press Release) – Mar 18, 2010 , www.prlog.org

Now, it’s a way of communicating, a language just like any other, spoken by millions.  It is the language of Twitter, one of the most popular social media sites.  And if you learn to become fluent in it, you can even launch your business into the stratosphere by way of Twitter.

As with most things in life, to be successful at this you’ll have to make friends with the right people.  In this case, those people are the people at web promotions company uSocial.net.  They have a collection of hugely popular social media marketing products that have successfully helped many businesses promote their businesses online via sites like Facebook and Twitter.  The latest member of their lineup is a service dedicated to helping people with their Twitter marketing endeavours.  What’s so special about this service is quite simple:  It’s the first of its kind to allow customers to purchase the Twitter followers they need just by buying them.

Leon Hill, the company’s CEO, explains:

“For some time we’ve know the power of Twitter, though it wasn’t until around a month ago that we ourselves decided to get onboard,” explains CEO of uSocial.net Leon Hill. “Within around three weeks we were up to around 20,000 followers on our company accounts so we knew we had cracked the secret to huge numbers and fast.”

This new service is the fourth in the company’s lineup of products, following in the footsteps of services like their paid social-bookmarking service.