Picture yourself logging into your analytics tracking software to find that you had a huge and unexpected surge in traffic over the past day.

What do you do? Do you celebrate? Hope another surge in traffic comes tomorrow?

Hopefully, you quickly grab a pen and pad of paper and begin scribbling ideas down. Not only do you want to think about why you have attracted this huge amount of traffic, but you want to think about how you will capitalize on this publicity before it goes away.

Your First Taste of Publicity

Your first taste of publicity may equate to only a twinge of visibility, or it could be a huge surge in popularity. Your first experience in the limelight can take many forms and manifest itself in a range of magnitudes.

Websites, blog posts or internet apps might go viral, you might get listed in your local newspaper or you might be featured on a national news channel.

While this surge in visibility is difficult to prepare for, it is much more important to keep yourself in the spotlight. This initial glimpse of popularity isn’t your 15 seconds of fame or the culmination of your success, but an opportunity for you to work hard to remain visible.

Promote Yourself So You Remain Visible

You have gotten your first encounter with publicity, now it is your job to keep it. You can do this by:

• Continuing to aggressively promote yourself
• Hiring a PR firm
• Drastically improving your product or service
• Offering new products or services

You want to make sure you continually work to maintain a positive image while also growing your visibility.

Your first encounter with popularity has allowed you to enter into the conscious minds of your customers and prospects. Now you must fight to stay there and not be forgotten.

Allowing this moment of visibility to slip away without capitalizing on it will make it very difficult for you to get this opportunity again.

Success has compounding effects, so by remaining in the minds of your customers and prospects, your message will continue to spread and will spread more and more quickly every day.

Enjoy the Perks

Enjoy the resulting publicity from your continued hard work. Make certain you deliver exceptional customer service and outstanding products or services to your customers so they will continually return to you.

This ensures your existing customer base will return for repeat buys, and will hopefully recommend you to others.

Take this opportunity to adjust to any growth, so growing does not become too difficult. Make any structural and incentive changes as necessary and issue training to your staff when applicable.

Remain Persistent

You should absolutely enjoy the growth you have earned and take time to make adjustments. However, you should never stop and rest during a time of increased popularity and visibility.

Visibility can die off very quickly, so it is crucial that you are persistent in maintaining good public relations and continuing to work towards greater visibility after EVERY single success you encounter.

This guarantees that your message and brand will spread exponentially, and that your initial spike in traffic will turn into an upward trend.

What are some other techniques to garner publicity? What are some reasons you may have initially attracted this spike in traffic?

There is a special formula to determine the best price for a product. The only problem is, no one has figured it out yet.

In theory, there is no preferred pricing method. Both discount and premium pricing techniques are considered to be viable strategies.

However, many entrepreneurs seem to prefer utilizing the premium pricing approach when pricing their products. Their argument is that you don’t have to compete with the larger, more efficient companies on price, but you can enjoy a higher profit margin.

In order to justify pricing your product higher, you need to offer a good that is very high in quality.

How does one do this? There are many different ways to add caliber to a product since quality has a lot of different attributes. Below are some useful ways to add a tremendous amount of value to your product.

Make it reliable

A great way to create a high quality product or service is to make it extremely reliable.

Reliability is a very powerful way to add quality because customers will pay top dollar for reliable products, since they feel they are getting a lot of value for their money.

A product that is durable, long-lasting or fail-safe is considered to be reliable, while a service that consistently performs in an expected and outstanding way is also said to be reliable.

Customers perceive a lot of value in reliable products or services because they feel they will offer longer-lasting and dependable benefits, where its stability will pay for itself rather quickly.

You can establish a highly valued product by creating an item that is longer-lasting, more durable or more consistent than the rest of your competition.

Make it luxurious

Customers also find quality in a product when it is considered to be a luxury item.

Consumers are willing to pay a premium for luxury goods because they feel there is a sense of indulgence when using this type of product and that it is superior in convenience.

A product that is more accommodating, offers greater comfort or is better tasting is considered luxurious.

If you can develop your product to be perceived as a luxury item by offering greater accommodations or comfort than competing products, consumers will be willing to pay a steep premium for what you offer.

Make it a high performer

Customers will pay a large premium on a product or service that can complete a task far better than any competing product. It may work faster, more efficient, deliver more power or accomplish its promised task in any outstanding way.

For example, Bose is considered to be one of the best speaker systems out there due to its advanced surround sound. Because of its stellar sound quality and theatre-like experience, Bose is a great example of a product that offers top performance.

Think of a way your product can perform as promised far better than competing products. There will always be a set of customers who are willing to pay a lot of money for the product that is considered to be the best.

Give it status

Products frequently serve as a status symbol and consumers will often pay a huge premium to feel like they belong.

Status can be in the form of social class, niches with specific interests, beauty or fashion.

For example, buying a certain brand name or high quality product might suggest that an individual belongs to a “higher” social class. Owning a laptop running Linux might infer that someone has tech-related interests or wearing a certain name-brand clothing may position someone as fashionable or good-looking.

Products often give the consumer status in that they carry the promise that the user will have a certain feeling of affiliation or positive perception in the eyes of others.

Therefore, if you can create a product that suggests a certain social class affiliation, offers greater beauty to the user or is considered more fashionable or trendy, consumers will be flocking to your product and will pay any price for it.

Make it innovative

Some consumers will always pay a high price for cutting-edge products because they will continually want to stay on top of the best that technology has to offer.

These types of customers are called “early adopters”.

Early adopters will pay a steeper price for a product when it first comes out. They realize that the technology is new and experimental, so they expect the pricing to be higher.

Consider the cost of first iteration of the iPhone. Its $600 price tag was targeted to all of the customers eager to be the first to try out this new product. Then, to entice the more casual users and later adopters, the phone slowly came down in price and is now at a drastically lower price of $200.

By creating a product utilizing new and experimental technology that few other competitors offer, certain customers will be lining up, expecting to pay a large amount for it.

Give it more features

Products are often considered to be of high quality when they have a large repertoire of features.

Adobe Photoshop is a perfect example. This product is considered an industry standard in image and photo editing because of the sheer amount of features and tools available to the user for editing images.

Thus by creating an item with a larger amount of features than competing goods, you can charge a greater price and enjoy an even larger margin for your product.

Save the environment

Customers are demanding more and more eco-friendly products because of the positive effects it has on the world around us. Consumers are often willing to pay extra for green products because they want to do their part to help the environment.

Build your brand

Some brands have an overall great reputation associated with it and will command a high premium simply because the product has their hallmark on it.

A brand is frequently considered valuable because it offers products high in other quality factors.

Clothing companies are a perfect example of this. Often the brand name generates value because it is considered to be trendy or fashionable. If a company can consistently produce trendy clothing, the brand itself will become fashionable solely due to the company name.

If your brand can command such a perception, you will have the ability to set the standards bar as high as you want and as a result, charge as much as you want.

Offer better customer service

While the level of customer service might not have a direct effect on pricing, it certainly will create more value in the eyes of the customer. This can create more loyalty and tolerance for higher prices.

Inspiring loyalty in your customers is very powerful, as it will bring repeat buys, more profitable sales and even referrals. This makes customer service a quality attribute that cannot be ignored.

Can you think of any other quality attributes that can justify charging a higher price for your product?

How can you broadly target narrow markets? Is it even possible?

A recent article in Fast Company discussed Seth McFarlane, creator of the TV series, Family Guy and his ability to broadly target narrower markets. He was so successful at this, that he is currently consulting Google on new means of internet marketing.

This led me to wonder just if and how it is possible to accomplish these two seemingly opposing techniques at the same time. Here are some ideas as to how this may work.

Offend some while gaining loyalty with the rest

This was the tactic that McFarlane used, as discussed in the article. Through Family Guy’s dark comedy, some are offended and completely turned off by the show, while others are drawn even more to the series.

Those that enjoy this type of comedy are not necessarily a narrow demographic, but they are loyal to the series as if they were targeted as a niche. Why? My guess is that there is such a stark difference in the public’s perception of the show. Many hate it and many love it. Because of this strong contrast of opinion, those that love the show feel as if they are more personally targeted.

Offending is not a new marketing technique. If you read any blogs on copywriting, or even blog writing you will see a mention of the merits of writing something that is controversial that may turn some people off. The effect from this is almost the same as that of what McFarlane has experienced.

Niche market to multiple niches

You can have a great product with a multitude of benefits. However, not all benefits are relevant to the niche you are targeting.

For example, say you are marketing a facial exfoliator. Facial exfoliators can help to clear acne and also reduce wrinkle development. Clearing acne may be a benefit that would attract teenage girls, but they would most likely not care as much about wrinkle development. However, women in their late 30s and older, would probably have no concern with acne, but would want to reduce wrinkle development.

Including both benefits in all of your ad copy is not the answer. What you could do is either:

• Create different ad copy for each niche
• Create different branding and market these separate brands to each niche

This way, both niches are being marketed too and feel as if they can more personally identify with the benefits of the product.

Pretend to niche

This is just speculation, but perhaps it may be worthwhile to try pretending to niche. Many demographics have similar needs, so identifying these needs in your message may cause multiple niches to feel as if they personally identify with the product or service you are offering.

How would this actually work? Say the problem your message is addressing is: “Short on cash?”. This could simultaneously target new entrepreneurs, those undergoing housing foreclosure amongst many, many others.

Again, this idea is just speculation and the above example isn’t the best one to use, but if implemented correctly, this technique may be worthwhile to try out.

Target a broad market but understand the demographic very well

Niching is targeting a narrow and specific market and identifying their needs precisely. However, if you do this with a broader market with a more flexible product, perhaps you can reach some success this way.

If the broader market feels as if they are understood well enough, they may identify with your message as well, as if their more specific characteristics were targeted.

Do none of the above, but target different niches with different products

Try creating products that are either tweaked or completely different that will each cater to specific niches. This way, you are able to target a variety of different specific demographics while still maintaining that more personal connection with individual niches.

Has anyone tried any of these ideas? Were you successful? Does anyone have any other ideas with how you can mass market and niche down at the same time?

Are you out of good ideas? Are you trying to come up with new cost saving strategies or more effective marketing techniques?

If you haven’t already, you need to try the old tried and true technique: Brainstorming.

Here is how brainstorming works:

• Start a brainstorming session with several people (3-7 is best)
• Identify the problem or topic you want to address
• Allow everyone present to contribute the first idea, and as many ideas that come to mind
• Every idea is to be written down and no idea can be critiqued, edited or evaluated, only built upon as a new and separate idea

This is a very powerful technique and allows for a list of good ideas to build up very quickly. There are numerous benefits to implementing this strategy throughout all levels of the organization. Below are just a few of them.

You can develop new product ideas, businesses and income streams

If you are looking for new income-producing streams, brainstorming is a very powerful tool. Because this technique allows to you come up with a series of un-critiqued ideas very quickly, you will have a wealth of possibilities at your disposal after a brainstorming session.

Some of these may be very creative and outside-the-box, others may require editing or elimination, however all of these items are something that you can work with one way or another.

There is no limit to how many times you can brainstorm, so whenever you are in need of more income-producing ideas, brainstorming is always a technique that is available for you to use. If you are giving your time unlimited value, brainstorming may turn out to be a very frequently used tool in your entrepreneurial tool belt.

You can create new innovative processes and ways of solving problems

Maybe you have some expenses that are ballooning out of control, or certain practices in your business are becoming less and less efficient. Brainstorming can allow you to think of new and creative ways to solve these problems and implement new processes that can make your business both more effective and efficient.

Toyota saves so much money when manufacturing cars through their “Just-in-Time” (JIT) inventory system. This technique is simple: obtain the parts of the car when needed, rather than storing the parts and incurring carrying costs.

While I don’t know of the origin of the JIT system, whose to say that you can’t brainstorm a cost-saving process as effective as this? I am certain there are hundreds of processes like this one that are just waiting to be discovered. Brainstorming can help you think of some new and creative ones.

You can find new visions and perspectives

You may need to begin viewing your business and how it relates to clients though a different angle or critical lens.

Because of this, you may need to periodically adjust certain elements of your business, or how your core beliefs are implemented into the culture of your organization. Brainstorming can help you discover new ways of doing this. Use your new list of creative ideas to ensure your organization’s core beliefs are being followed most effectively.

Brainstorming can help establish a more accepting culture that values new ideas

Brainstorming should be done throughout your organization, not just by you and your direct reports. New ideas and perspectives are very important in every level of your business and allows for your entire enterprise to be more quick, flexible and responsive to change.

Embracing brainstorming at all levels of your organization also gives your staff the message that your business’s culture values new ideas and diversity of thinking. Showing your staff that you are open to new thoughts and ideas will allow everyone to flex their creative muscles, give you their input and keep a steady flow of new and great ideas coming to you.

You can come up with new marketing ideas

Brainstorming is probably mostly used when thinking of new marketing ideas. If you are trying to think of new ways to market your product, especially if your past efforts aren’t working, brainstorming is something you must do.

This can be very effective in helping you come up with a series of marketing ideas very fast, that you can constantly refer to when trying different advertising techniques. Again, being able to come up with new and creative ideas very quickly will allow you to have a nice flow of marketing ideas that you can test, tweak and test again.

Has anyone else had any success with brainstorming? Any suggested best practices when brainstorming? Does anyone have any other benefits that this technique provides?

Dying to get into internet advertising but don’t know where to start? There is a ton of information out there which can be very overwhelming for the beginner.

To give those who are new to internet marketing a basic understanding of some different online advertising avenues, I have compiled a list of some of the most popular and often used forms of internet advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of optimizing your web site structure, content and coding so that your site will appear at the top rankings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for certain desired keywords.

Traditionally, this was achieved via meta tags. However, now Google’s algorithms essentially ignore these tags and base rankings on other factors such as inbound links (links that direct to your site) as well as your content (most specifically title tags, header tags and image descriptions). Google’s algorithms are extremely complex and always changing. Entire careers are dedicated just on learning how Google’s algorithms work and how best to get your site listed with as high rankings as possible.

For those of you who haven’t a clue as to what “tags” or “algorithms” are, it would probably be best for you to hire a web designer and even an SEO specialist instead of learning it yourself. In fact, even if you do know all of this, chances are the professionals can do a better job at this anyway.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)/Google AdWords

If you perform a search in Google, chances are you will see some “sponsored links” at the right-hand side of the page. These are what is known as “Pay-Per-Click” ads (Google’s PPC program is called “AdWords”). They are essentially paid search where you bid a certain price per click in exchange for getting higher rankings on SERPs for certain specified keywords and terms.

The ads that appear here are a maximum of 140 characters long (including spaces) and should be specifically geared to the keywords that the user is searching for. Best practices include designating specific landing pages with ad copy that uniquely correspond to the keywords and ad copy on the Search Engine Results Page. Many companies often link these ads directly to their home page, however multiple sources consider this to be bad practice.

When selecting keywords, choose some that are broad, some deep, some specific and some general. The specific may be cheaper keywords, but will not yield nearly as many hits. This is why it is important to have a fair balance of different kinds of keywords.

I am admittedly a beginner in PPC marketing, however what I have found that has worked best so far is setting intial bids for keywords higher, and as your “quality score” (the relevance grade that Google gives you per keyword) increases, your minimum cost per click will decrease, allowing you to lower your maximum bid.

If you are really interested in PPC marketing, there are a number of sources you can look into. I will firstly recommend AdWords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson (I have already mentioned this book a bunch of times), Marketing Experiments Journal and, for landing pages, Marketing Sherpa and Copyblogger.

Social Networking

This, as many may know is becoming extremely popular and successful for many businesses. For the ill-informed, Social Networking really refers to any way you can connect and interract with other people online.

Some popular social networking sites and services include:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIN
• Twitter
• Digg
• Ning
• Stumble Upon
• Yelp

As the most recent issue of Entrepreneur Magazine points out, some different ways you can utilize social networking is joining sites such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIN and create a profile as well as user groups for your products. This allows you to let your customers and fans know what offers you will be having, and also give your happy customers an avenue to tout your great products.

You can use Twitter, the microblogging platform to further notify customers of upcoming promotions and offers. Digg and Stumble Upon can help get your site some good visibility (mainly if your site has great content) and Yelp is a great forum for you to post your product to get customer reviews.

Blogging

Both businesses and individuals alike use blogging for social networking, editorials, news, information/How-Tos, promotion, etc…Some blog for profit, some blog for hobby. Either way, the “blogosphere” is a rapidly growing venue for all internet users and at least merits any business owner to consider looking into setting up a blog. Setting up a blog for you and your business’ expertise is a very common practice and, if done effectivly, can define you as an authority in your industry.

If you are interested in blogging, check out ProBlogger.

Email

Many underestimate this tool, however it has proven successful for many companies, bloggers and a variety of other internet marketers. Distributing free information in exchange for the user’s email address is common practice. Marketers then use this email to send information regarding upcoming promotions, new products and newsletters to subscribers.

Remeber, if you use this method, always allow your subscribers the option to unsubscribe, and ensure that you communicate with them that you will not be sharing their information with anybody.

Note: services like Aweber handle a lot of the heavy lifting for managing email subscriptions for you.

Affiliates

This is another large area of internet marketing. Affiliate marketing is basically paying other web sites to act as your sales force. You will pay money to an intermediary/broker (such as Clickbank) and they pay other webmasters to advertise your product.

This can be a very powerful and effective tool and can also help with SEO, since other websites will be linking to you.

“Evangelism”

This term was coined by Skellie in her ProBlogger post, The Truth About Creating a High-traffic Blog. Basically these are referrals to your site. If you have a blog and are a thought leader in your area, you may get a lot of traffic just by referrals by those who follow your content regularly.

Similarly, if you sell high quality goods or services, you may have some customers who will be doing some referring of their own. A perfect example of this is Apple. Whether you love Macs or hate them, they have a strong fan following that recommend these computers to EVERYBODY. This is great marketing in that it is free and effective. To get even more referrals, consider incenting your customers with a small gift for each referral.

These are some basic examples of internet marketing and beginner strategy. Does anyone have any tips or best practices when using these mediums? Does anyone have any other successful mediums that they use when promoting their business online?

Which customers are the best customers to target? Which pricing strategies work best for the markets you are looking to reach?

Choosing the right target market is so important that it can affect the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing campaign to such a degree that you might not make any sales if you fail to accurately target a specific demographic.

Consider the following topics and questions when planning out the target market portion of your marketing plan.

Are you targeting the customers that will actually buy your product?

This is a very important topic to consider when designing your marketing plan. You need to make sure you are targeting the market that is in most need of your product. If you are marketing to the wrong demographic, your marketing mix will be inefficient and you will either make no sales or at best, suboptimal sales.

Are your target customers willing to pay the price that you charge for your product?

You may take on one of two main pricing strategies: a) where you will have lower prices than your competition or b) higher prices than your competition and differentiate yourself through product quality.

In either case, you need to make sure that the market you are targeting is willing to pay the price that you charge for your product.

You should be asking yourself questions such as:

• Is this market willing to pay more for higher quality?
• Does this market value this product enough to pay a premium price?
• Will these customers pay a higher amount based on brand?

Finding the answers to these questions will help you locate the most profitable demographic to target.

What is the lifetime value of your target customer?

This is extremely important when deciding on the pricing of your products, especially your flagship products that initially attract your customers (your front-end products).

If you determine that your typical customer is a repeat buyer for many years and has a high lifetime value, you can afford to have a narrower (or negative) profit margin on these front-end products to entice them to buy from you and establish a relationship with you. Their subsequent repeat buys will often be comprised of your non-flagship products that can be priced higher (your back-end products, more on this soon).

Ask yourself the following questions when determining lifetime value:

• Will this target market generally purchase this product again?
• Do they remain loyal to a specific brand?
• Will there be need for additional purchases?
• Will this target market spend the money for additional purchases?

When asking yourself all of these questions, you should consider which market will yield the highest value, will conduct the most repeat buys and have the capacity to remain loyal to a brand.

To determine the lifetime value of an average customer, Michael Masterson, author of Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat advises calling the marketing managers of some of your larger competitors (Masterson suggests identifying yourself as a marketing student, which you really are) and asking what the lifetime revenue (aka “gross sales”) of a customer would be. You should then determine the lifetime cost of goods sold and overhead that you would pay on average for the sale of these products. Subtract these figures from the lifetime revenue. The resulting figure is the lifetime net profit (before taxes) of your average customer.

Are your competitors targeting this same demographic?

If they aren’t, you should wonder why. Figure out why it is that your competitors are targeting different customers than you. If there is a legitimate reason why are you targeting different customers, than this is fine. But generally, your larger competitors are experienced enough in the industry to know which targets spend the most money. Use this as an indicator when choosing your demographic.

Once you have determined your optimal demographic, you might want to start narrowing down this target even more, as described in niche marketing…

What niches are you targeting?

At the early stages of running a business, targeting niche markets are more important than some would think.

Your larger competitors are probably much more efficient at producing their products, so chances are you will have a lot of difficulty beating your competitors in price. Many small businesses end up pricing their product higher than their competition on account of higher product quality. However, while your research has indicated that your target market may be willing to spend more on quality, you want to make this a surer bet.

This is where niche marketing comes in. If a customer’s very narrow and specific demographic is targeted (ie: middle aged, work-at-home mother in the Orlando, FL area), they will feel more identified with your product than your competitors’ product. This will cause them to believe that your product will more effectively solve their problem, thus giving them an even greater incentive to buy.

This is what makes niche marketing so effective. It differentiates your brand from your larger competitors and causes your target niches to identify more with your product. The best part of niche marketing is, you don’t have to target just one niche. You can target as many as you want as long as each individual marketing message specifies only one niche.

Has anyone had any successes with niche marketing? Any dos and don’ts for marketing plans or demographic targeting?

Do you want a more effective marketing campaign? Do you wish your current marketing efforts brought in more sales and repeat buyers?

In order to do this you need to make sure that you have a plan for your marketing campaign that answers some of the most crucial questions for creating a successful marketing mix.

Below are some of these important questions that you should consider when working on your marketing campaign and marketing mix.

Product Placement

Ask yourself:

“What problem is it that my target customer is looking to solve?”

I may be sounding redundant, but the best way to answer this question is to conduct market research and competitive analysis. Doing these two things will most certainly give you greater insight into the the needs and wants of your target market.

Once you determine the answer to this question, it is vital that your product is being marketed and positioned as a solution to this problem. If your marketing doesn’t sufficiently communicate this, there will be a disconnect between your brand and your customer.

Advertising Mediums

There are tons of advertising mediums available to you and coming up with marketing ideas is as easy as brainstorming or reading articles on websites such as entrepreneur.com.

Some popular mediums include:

• Online Advertising
• Sales Letters
• Newspapers
• Magazines
• TV
• Offline Affiliates
• Direct Marketing (both online and offline)

Once you have a list of some good ideas and idea resources, you should be asking yourself:

“Which ideas are most appropriate for my business, brand, message and product?”

Finding out which of these ideas is best at getting your target market to buy (and buy again) is essential to formulating an optimal marketing mix. Conduct the appropriate research and perform some trial and error of your own to determine which methods are most effective, and in which quantities.

Online Advertising

It is pretty much impossible to have any marketing promotion without doing some advertising online. Some businesses only market online while others do only a little. However, the amount of businesses who either don’t do any online marketing or don’t need to is dwindling rapidly.

Given the growing popularity of online advertising, you should ask yourself the following question:

“How many different types of internet marketing strategies should I undertake for my business?”

Here are some of the most common forms of internet advertising:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC)/Google AdWords
• Referrals/Having a product or viewership following
• Affiliates
• Email (newsletters, sales letters, etc…)

It would take many, many textbooks to cover all of the different methods and strategies of online marketing, and the truth is that no one has the correct, cure all solution to internet advertising.

That said, firms rarely practice just one form of online marketing today. Very often, a combination of all of these methods are used when advertising online. I will be posting a more extensive summary of each of these areas early next week.

Target Market

This is such a huge topic that I am going to comment on this in full in my next posting. Stay tuned!

Remember, for each of these different topics, it is vitally important that you research the advertising strategies of your competition. Chances are that they have already likely conducted extensive (and expensive) research on the marketing that works best for the product that you both are selling and for the customers that you are targeting.