[This discussion is the continuation of previous post: The Number One Rule of Marketing - Find Out What People Want And Satisfy That Desire ]

The Previous Question:

People like to follow trends and own the newest stuff on the market if they think that many other people do those new things or own that new stuff. They want to be part of a crowd, doing the “in” thing, having the “in” stuff. Is this then an example that need is created by products?

The Answer:

The reality is that people have an underlying need to be like others, not to stand out from the crowd. This need is not directly related to the product itself. It’s because they are afraid being isolated from people. They’re afraid that they won’t be part of “in” crowd if they don’t own certain things or follow certain trends. And that is the reason they want things most other people want. They want to ride the trend.

This is one of the fundamental needs - Love/Belonging - that comes after a person’s physiological and safety needs are met, as outlined in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs model.

So again, this explains how the product and the related marketing promotional activities cannot create a need in people. You must first uncover the underlying need in people and then satisfy that need with your product.

The Number One Rule of Marketing - Find Out What People Want And Satisfy That Desire.

Best online Marketing,

Damen
Related Topics: Love and Belonging, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Technorati Tags: ride the trend, physiological and safety needs, Love and Belonging, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

When I took an MBA class ten years ago, one of my most respected marketing professors asked a very controversial question, “Is marketing able to create a need for a product?”

My first answer was: Of course, it can. We’ve all had the experience where we see something advertised on TV or our attention is captured by an attractive billboard for a new product, and we decide that we’ve just got to have that product - right now! But before we saw the ad, we didn’t even know that product existed! We didn’t have the desire to buy that thing. All of a sudden, we want it!

But at the end of the marketing course, I changed my mind. The reality is: “You cannot create the need for a product for a person. What you can do is to find out what the customer needs and satisfy that need.”

Why? There was an interesting debate in the classroom that night. Read on and you’ll understand.

To demonstrate his belief, the professor presented a case. The Tamagotchi. Ever hear of it? It is a small electronic game device that was very popular about ten years ago. In this game, there is a small electronic duck or chicken that you need to feed and play with. It “grows” if you take care of it carefully or “dies” if you neglect its needs, like eating or taking exercise regularly. Is it an interesting game? Yes. But what surprised people then was that this small gadget became so popular in countries like Japan and Hong Kong (my home country). Many of us really were curious about the successful factors behind that game.

We debated about the reasons for its success. Some students felt it was because people tend to use and try popular stuff, especially when it’s new to the market. These are the people that are the “trend setters”, who want to be the “first on their block” to try something new. It was trendy to have such a device. Others said it was because people wanted to be part of the “crowd”, part of the “popular” crowd and that’s what created their desire to own one.

And finally our professor raised a point that most of us thought was the ultimate reason that the game had become so popular.

In a crowded city, like New York, London, Hong Kong or Tokyo, many people don’t have time and space to raise little animals. However, we still have strong desire to have one, to have someone or something to care for. This gadget satisfied our strong need for having someone to love and take care (whether it is a baby or a small animal). And city dwellers usually have less resources to have a real one ourselves, so we turn to this little device for an artificial one that does not actually exist. But somehow that satisfies our underlying desire of loving someone or something.

Our professor commented that modern people are lonely. We live in crowded cities without any spiritual life. We dare not love people. We dare not raise our own children. We don’t have the resources to raise small animals. And this device can fill the gap in this empty area.

Bingo! We cannot deny people have this desire. And this gadget, in its own way, can really help satisfy this need.

Marketing is after all the act of finding out what’s missing in our customers’ lives and filling that need. To be a successful marketer, you have to find out what your customers’ needs are before you can satisfy them.

This principle applies to all areas of marketing, whether you are doing it on- or off-line.

Some argue that people like to follow trendy stuff if they know many people have this gadget. They want one for themselves, as well. Is it not a counter-example that need is created by the product itself?

The answer is “No”!

Watch out my next posting for follow up discussion.

Related Topics: Tamagotchi, Number One Marketing Principle, Satisfy Your Customers’ Need, Power of Marketing, Customer Demand, CUHK MBA, Professor Chan Chi-fai
P.S. Interested to know my professor? Here you can find his profile: Professor Andrew Chan Chi-fai

The MBA programme I took is ranked one of the best in the world. Check out the profile of it here

Technorati Tags: MBA, Marketing, Tamagotchi, Number One Marketing Principle, Satisfy Your Customers’ Need, Power of Marketing, Customer Demand, CUHK MBA, Professor Chan Chi-fai

Submit your website’s updated information to Google using Google Sitemap Tool

Google unveil a very innovative tool to allow webmaster submit their site’s changes (new links, new content, etc) to Google’s search database using their Google Sitemap service

This service allows a webmaster to manage and submit all the sites he/she operates under a single Google account.

I am not a big fan of search engine submission. However, Google seems to have put in a lot of valuable statistic and management features into this new service - Google Webmaster Tools. And Google Sitemap is among one of them.

So it is worth to take a look.

Particularly, you can use a XML formatted Google Sitemap File to notify and update Google any changes of your site’s content.

If you are using Wordpress like this Blog, you can use the plugin here to generate the Sitemap file:

If you are using Joomla (my favorite Content Management Script), you can use Joomap as a new component to aid the auto-generation of the sitemap xml file.

If you use OSCommerce, you cannot miss this one

http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,3226

There are quite a lot of available third party solutions of sitemap generation available at this link
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

I have just started to test and verify the effectiveness of this service. I’ll be using Joomap and Wordpress Sitemap generator for the trials. Stay tuned with me for my update on this service.

Technorati Tags: Google Sitemap, Google account, search engine submission, Google Webmaster Tools, XML, Wordpress, Joomla, OSCommerce, Joomap

The common mantra that most other Internet Marketers follow is “The money is in the list“

Without the list, you miss an important tool to carry out “push marketing” strategy. The strategy you use to actively promote your product/services.

One of the way to build your opt-in email list is by setting up the Squeeze Page in your website. There are two types of Squeeze page:

The Gift Page

On this page you are going to offer your prospect a gift to join your mailing list/newsletter. You will give them a free ecourse, ebook, software, service or script in order to capture their name & email address. They have to provide it to be able to download your gift to them. It is a trade off. They get your gift, & you get their email address. Once you get their email address, then it is up to you to provide them with useful information & get them to remain a member of your list. You will have those who sign up & immediately unsubscribe after they receive your gift. But you will wind up with a higher percentage who stay subscribed for an issue or two, just to see what you have to offer. That is when the ball is in your court. You got them, now it is up to you to keep them.

The Benefits Page

On this type of page you will sell the benefits of being a subscriber to your newsletter. This is where it is up to you to tell them exactly what they will receive by being a member of your list. This is also where you will have to sell yourself. Here is what you are going to have to tell your prospect:

• What can you provide to your reader?
• Why should they listen to you?

On this type of page you are going to really have to sell. And I mean really sell yourself & your benefits. This is the hardest type of page to produce. BUT, at the same time, they produce the best kind of prospects for you.

The best of all is to mix these two strategies together in your Squeeze Page.

Best eMail Marketing,

Damen

Technorati Tags: The money is in the list, push marketing, opt-in email list, Squeeze Page, Gift Page, unsubscribe, Benefits Page, eMail Marketing

Autoresponder should be used in your day-to-day online marketing activities. It helps to convert a stranger who comes to your website for information into your loyal customers. How and Why?

Autoresponders works in the underlying theory that trust could be built between two strangers if they start to communicate. The trust tends to be accumulated every time you approach your potential customers and give them more information about yourself, your product, your services or your opinion on something you two have shared interest.

Once there is trust, you can start your process of converting them into your paying customers. And this is a demonstration of the simple theory of converting a stranger in Internet into your revenue-generating customer.

So theoretically you can send them several self-written messages yourself once you have acquired a customer contact (by opt-in marketing techniques in mailing list management. Refer to another post Use Squeeze Page to get subscribers). You can do this manually by sending them email messages day by day after they have opt-in your email list.

But this process could be tremendously tedious if you have many new customers everyday. (Imagine if you have several lists that capture hundreds of customers everyday, can you send each of them a personal message the first day and days after?). This is the reason we need autoresponder.
It works by automatically sending a daily message (or in whatever interval you decide) to each of your new customer by a pre-written series of messages. In this way, your new customers experience an illusion that you personally send each of them a follow up message every day. And hence the process of conversion can be done automatically without you lifting your own finger.

To understand this service, try this experiment. Subscribe to my autoresponder experiment here

(No worry, I am not going to sell you anything nor would I keep your email address after this experiment). Go ahead and you can stop the sequential messages I am sending anytime you want by clicking the unsubscribe link at the end of each message.

And tell me your feeling right after this experiment by posting your comment here at this blog post.

There are free services available in Internet for autoresponder. Here are just two examples:

http://www.freeautobot.com/
http://www.sendfree.com/

Best Conversion in Your Internet Marketing,

Damen

Technorati Tags: Autoresponder, convert a stranger, loyal customers, opt-in marketing, mailing list management, unsubscribe link, www.freeautobot.com, www.sendfree.com

Over Optimization - SEO guys - Be Careful!

Webmasters who have been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should know about the importance of inbound links to their websites. People come to build inbound links by participating in link exchange programme or buying inbound links from websites of high page rank.

It helps boosting your page rank if you plan and carry out diligently the tedious tasks of link building for your website. But one thing you have to be careful not to ruin your good work. It is: you have to be careful about choosing the anchor text (or called link text) that the sites have put in to describe the link to your site.

Why? It is because search engines start to analyze those link texts and decide if those links are naturally built or artificially built.

How? Naturally build link text should vary in its description for every link that points to your site. Artificially built link text is not. A web master could easily negotiate and work with a dozen web masters requesting them to place a link to his/her website with exactly the same description in their link text.

Search Engine works in picking up this clue now. If it notices that there are exact wordings or descriptions in most of the links to your website, it could trigger its link discount algorithm to reduce the metric of page rank contribution of those links. The worst of all, if it concludes you are undergoing some search engine spamming tactics, your site could be de-listed from its listing forever.

So be careful when you setup your website link exchange page. When you invite other webmasters to exchange link with your site, you’d better advise each of them to use different link text in the links that point to your site.

Actually the mutually two-way link exchange tactic is losing its value as more and more webmasters are doing the similar thing. Search Engines are discounting the values of those mutually linked websites’ inbound links. Think about other tactics like buying inbound links and article submission with resource box of your websites.

Try this service to learn about the inbound links’ anchor text to your website.

Technorati Tags: Over Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, inbound links, link exchange, page rank, anchor text, link text, search engines, Naturally build link text, Artificially built link text, search engine spamming tactics, article submission

PageRank Toolbar from Google:
It returns page ranking rated by Google when you visit a particular website’s page
http://toolbar.google.com

Alexa Toolbar from Alexa.com
It returns the traffic ranking of a particular website you visit
http://download.alexa.com/index.cgi

Alex does not offer toolbar compatible with Firefox. If you use Firefox, please refer to their information page to install 3rd party Alexa toolbarfor Firefox:
http://www.alexa.com/site/help/?index=127

Get used to using them in your web browsing. You’ll soon get yourself the power to distinguish good sites from bad ones.

Technorati Tags: PageRank Toolbar, Google, Alexa Toolbar, traffic ranking, Firefox, Alexa toolbarfor Firefox

A study held by Stanford University and Poynter Institute confirmed that text is the preferred “entry point” of a webpage for web surfers.

Is it surprising? It may be as many people regard graphic should be more visually appealing than text to normal web surfers.

I’m not surprised, however. Why? There is a much larger experiment on earth that confirms the finding in this research. It is the Google Adwords program.

When Google first launched its Google Adwords program, there was an intense internal debate whether it should go for the format of banner-based advertisement or text-based advertisement. Though with much uncertainty, it decided to go for the text-based one.

And the rest is history. Google becomes the number one online advertising company. Web users are attracted to click on the text-based advertisement showing at the right hand side of the search result page that helps boosting Google’s online revenue. As a frequent web surfer and Google’s search user, I click on those advertisements many times where I’ve found interesting or useful and I guess you have done similar thing as me.

So it confirms that “text” is more important than graphics in your webpage.

Would that conclude Banner Advertisement “dead” in the present finding? Unlikely if you read carefully the research results of the Stanford’s study: Here is the link:
http://www.poynterextra.org/et/i.htm

Technorati Tags: Stanford University and Poynter Institute, Google Adwords, banner-based advertisement, text-based advertisement

Every web master is searching for good content to be put on their websites. Why? It is because content is the life blood of websites. Without good content, web surfers turn away from you to other competing websites. Hence, you lose in the uphill battle with other webmasters competing in the same niche markets you are in.

Small players are playing the hard game to keep this up. But there are no exception to big players.

Google has been putting much effort doing this for the past few years. It has been indexing and digitalizing a lot of scholastic material and books that belong to public domains. Last week, it moved one more step ahead by signing University of California to digitalize and put all its libraries’ books spanning over 10 campuses online.

I’m a bit doubtful whether University of California has the rights to the books hosted in its libraries to be shared with Google. Though Google has spent a lot of effort to gain publishers’ consent to the books they want to get the content listed in Google. (Refer to the news http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3527296)

The lesson learned here is even big player in the Internet is struggling for content. Google truly understands this. It has to put in continuous effort to wider its scope of content to feed the hungry web surfers who are looking for content when they put up the search on Google’s websites.

So the number one principle in getting ranked higher in your everyday search engine tactic is: Build Content.
If you don’t know what public domain is. Refer to the post here:

Get 15 public domain books free of charge

Best Content Building,

Damen

Related news:

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3625571

Technorati Tags: good content, Google, University of California, search engine tactic, Build Content., public domain

Today I reviewed what has been published two years ago about how to select and implement the keywords strategies in using Google Adwords program.

I think this guide is still worth to take a look. It is available at

The Maximum Effect, written by Google Team members of Adwords

Best Pay-Per-Click Selling

Damen

Related Topics: The Maximum Effect

Technorati Tags: Google Adwords, Pay-Per-Click, The Maximum Effect