Bits of Knowledge Post Series (less than 100 words)

Post 1: Blog Monetization
There are three main ways to monetize on your blog. Firstly, you can put advertising from a major advertising network (such as Google Adsense, Adbrite, BlogAds, etc.) and earn by clicks or impressions. Secondly, you can sell affiliate products, that is other people products and services and earn a commission. Thirdly you can sell your own products and services.

BusinessBalls

I have discovered a great site that I wanted to share with you. It’s called Business Balls (visit it at: businessballs.com). You will find there a great collection of articles about sales, marketing, management, HR and other business topics. Moreover there are lots of downloadable business tools and resources like PDF documents and MS office documents like word, excel and powerpoint. That collection is really huge and great. You can find a lot of templates, matrices and other cool stuff for business organization, better planning, reporting and feedback. Do pay a visit there and you will be really amazed like I was!

Some thoughts about salesmen

Salesmen should be ethical and moral; they should conduct business with integrity. They need to be communicative, to be good listeners, that is to be truly listening to the customer’s needs and to try to fulfill them; they need to be proactive and real costumer’s advisors. I can go on and keep typing salesmen must have traits and characteristics for ever… However the point that I want to make here is the following: Most of these things, the things that a salesmen must have and that without these one is almost bound to fail are not taught or learned in universities and business schools. These are not knowledge and education but personality characteristics and qualities that one should have or at least try to cultivate. I really don’t know in which degree sales can be taught and universities can train successful salespeople. I think that not everyone can become a salesman since not all people have the necessary personality traits and characteristics that are critical for such a job. One may learn all the sales techniques (from the basic to the most advanced) and still fail, while another one may not even attend a seminar about sales and be a brilliant salesman.

Networking & PR Planning

Public Relations are very important no matter one’s profession. Especially in sales, PR is really crucial. The most successful sale process involves making one stranger as an acquaintance, then transforming him/her into a friend and then into a customer. Sales from people that you have not transformed into friends are not repeated. You need to be remarkably good and in order to achieve that you need a loyal clientele. Another thing you need to bare in mind is the fact that you may not be a salesman but you always sell. If you are a doctor you sell health services, if you are a lawyer you sell legal services if you are a writer you sell books and thoughts, etc. Every job involves selling so every professional needs a customer base. Such a base can be build through networking and a good PR plan. So organize yourself and start: building connections, strengthening your weak relations (people you haven’t spoken for months), reinforcing your current affairs and acquainting new ones.

I have recently come to realize that a good pr planning actually requires having a specific list of contacts that you need to communicate each day. So, I sorted each of my contacts into groups based on a scale of significance and then I set a communication frequency for each group according to that scale. From that point it’s easy to organize whom you are going to call or email or meet each day of the week.

How to use traffic exchange to earn money on the internet

Traffic is the most precious thing on the internet. Traffic can generate impressions, sales, can promote ideas, thoughts, can connect people, teams, etc. Traffic exchange is the mutual surfing of other people webpages. Someone sees the content of other people and in exchange other people see what he/she display on his/her website. One can utilize the traffic generated by traffic exchange and earn money through the internet. In this post I will show you some ways to do that.

Sales through traffic
Provided that you surf a lot you get lots of credits to use. Once a credit is used one people visits your website. More traffic leads to more visits. More visits can potentially lead to more sales. If you have a website where you sell products and services you need traffic in order to build sales. If more people visit your online mall, it is more likely that you find people interested in what you sell. So more traffic means more potential customers.

Impressions through traffic
You can use traffic exchange to share ideas, thoughts, to exhibit your talents and your services. If you are an expert in something, you may utilize increased traffic to “sell” yourself. By doing so you may reap potential future benefits. Suppose for example you are a consultant in a specific business area. You can advertise yourself through the net and gain more visibility and recognition. Visibility and recognition will eventually lead to more demand of your services and whatever you have to offer – give – say – etc.

Earning though advertising
On fine and very popular way to monetize on a website is by selling advertising space. There are many web services providing every website owner the opportunity to host ads of their clients. Traffic Exchange may boost the traffic of such a site. If the visits to a website that hosts ads will increase so will the advertising earnings. One can either earn through the visits of other traffic exchange users or through any clicks to the ads (that are more likely to be clicked when the traffic is increased).

Professional blogging

Blogging for money or fame? There are two types of professional bloggers: Those who blog for money and those who blog to brand their businesses or themselves.

The former earn money mainly from advertising and sales. They advertise through an advertising network such as google Adsense, BlogAds, etc, or they manually arrange advertising deals.
The later blog about products, services and information that they sell through their blog or another linked site. The sales model may be consisted of their own made products or affiliate products.

Welcome to the free world

Welcome to the new world of free products, services and information. This is the concept that governs the web 2.0 and the new media. It has started being implemented in the offline world too. This is the outcome of too much production and offer and a modern sales technique. Actually all those free stuff eventually lead to the generation of more sales. This may sound somehow contradictory but as soon as the reasoning is explained it is obvious. Free stuff works as a lure. All that wealth of information can help a potential customer to decide if a product or service is suitable for him/her. Moreover it can be a dynamic presentation on the salesman toolbox.

Examples
Let’s give two examples to make the above statement more clear and comprehensible; one concerning an online business and one concerning the regular offline business. The online example: suppose you want to market / sell a new piece of software, you can write an ebook or a series of posts, videos, podcasts, etc. about the procedure or the function that the software you sell does. Then you can connect the written procedure or function with your software (via link or reference) and have an effective sales and marketing tool. The offline example (just to show that this technique is exactly as efficient as in the online world) might be the following: you have a marketing firm specialized in public relations, you can provide a sort of free services as a starting series of PR campaigns and in order to start a potential client base and to create a relationship with them.

Future Predictions
The trend of “everything is free” will continue to grow rapidly in terms of customer consumption and marketing technique. Each of those products, services and pieces of information will have a referring part that is the underlying hidden marketing / sales message.

Traditional products’ marketing & a practical advice on how to become more effective in your business (whatever field you are in).

In the weekend I and my girlfriend were on vacation on a small town (very popular as a tourist attraction). One day in a traditional tavern they gave as after lunch a shot of a traditional drink. It was a sweet liqueur which helps one to digest food. Later on that day as we wandered through the main road of the town which is full of little shops that sell traditional products and souvenirs, we found that drink (which is called Tentoura) and we both instantly bought one bottle for our relatives. It was a very impulsive purchase. The same kind of purchases has occurred to us many times in the past and surely has happened to most of the people. The point here is that one “clever” shop owner of traditional products may exploit those impulsive purchases. He/she may make a deal with tavern owners to supply them for free with Tentoura on the condition that they give each client a shot of that drink after lunch or dinner. It’s a win-win situation; both the tavern owner and the shop owner earns from that kind of strategic alliance. I firmly believe that the shop owner will boost up his/her sales. Thing here is that (I believe) it’s hard to imagine such a marketing technique if you weren’t told about (at least it didn’t occur to me).

I mention the above story because it led me to the following (and now very obvious to me) conclusions:
We often say that one should think from the customer’s perspective and get on his/her shoes to figure out more ways to service one and market to him/her. Personally I totally agree with the above statement; however how was it likely to me to think of the above (marketing) technique? I mean, ok, I am going to think from the customer’s point of view…hm …em …let’s put some ads in the town’s stations and populated places…hm… let’s post an article on traditional products in the local newspaper/magazine or website…etc. To think out of the box – off the beaten track is easy to say but sometimes hard to actually do. Just thinking from the customer’s perspective many times is not enough; one should simulate customer’s experiences: he must go on vacation (although he is in his origin), he must live and act as a customer and try the same experiences and actions. Thinking is not enough; one may need to acquire some input (feelings, thoughts, senses, impressions, etc.). How can one implement the above conclusion? Try to find out a solution/opportunity/challenge not only with thorough thoughts but by interacting with people, places, objects; get a lot of input from anything you get in contact with.

Personal touch and human presence for online success...

I read an article about how can the human presence build online sales and increase conversion. You can find the article here: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/9597.asp (in imedia connection; brought by The Marketing Experiments Journal). The article cites that just a few changes in our webpages (so that they bear a more personal touch and have a human presence) can have a major impact in sales. The experiment carried out, showed that the same page had a 40.7 percent increase in sales by just converting the text to first person, adding a photo of the writer and his/her signature. Well, next time you write something, you‘d better keep it personal and be direct...

Further reading about direct and indirect ad copy at a previous post: http://zip3.blogspot.com/2006/04/ad-copy.html