Advertising is essential
When you start a home based business, it is essential to gain an edge over other competitors offering same products or services in the market. In order to attract customers to your site you will have to promote your site through advertisements. If you do not advertise, you will end with nothing done. As though you would advertise on an Online video advertising directory.
Even though there are great range of products in the market, new products and service are conceptualized day by day. Even if the quality of the product or service you offer is the best, it will not gain attention from the customers if you do not advertise. Without advertisement, there will be no sales and no revenue.
This is the reason why the companies spend millions of dollars over advertisements. A product, which is not advertised, can easily get lost in the competitive market.
The small-scale business establishments, personal trades and home businesses are often under constraints of advertisement budgets. However, it need not always be so because, nowadays advertisements that are both inexpensive and expensive are available to your choice and needs. The basic idea is to get the attention of the public.
Nowadays there is a definite trend for digitalization. You can create a domain with an attractive dot.com and file your site to free web directories. This can add great value to the products and services you are offering.
One effective method for advertising home based business on the Internet is to try shared advertising. Here you need to find out people who are also in need for product exposure at least expenditure, and merge your advertisement along with their product. This method gives definite benefit as long as you differentiate your product well from the others.
Shared advertising can be less expensive. Here you can be convinced that any surfer to come to visit the other product or service will definitely have a look at the one which you offer.
This method of advertising is very common on the Internet as they appeal to the same target audience. The more advertisers you share with, greater the exposure of your product.
The Internet has become the best choice for people to conduct business. There are many cost-effective methods for advertising through the Internet. Effective advertising methods are essential for promoting a product on the Internet because here the customers cannot virtually see and feel the product.
Using banners with good designs can prove effective. Well-designed banners can attract more attention from the customers and provide credibility to the product. Advertisement through ezines and blogs can also attraction the attention of the customers to a great extent.
Whichever method you follow, it is essential to see that the advertisements are clear and impressive. It should state all the qualities of the product in a clear and crisp manner to attract the attention of the customers.
Email Marketing
In today’s economy of intense competition, a company’s brand is of paramount importance. This is further enhanced by the fact that the Internet makes your nearest competitor just a click away.
The values associated with your brand can make the difference between having lots of repeat customers and constantly losing people after one sale. It can mean the difference between having positive word of mouth advertising working for you and having a diluted conception of who you actually are. These brand values ultimately make a big difference to your bottom line, and they’re something every business owner or brand manager should be looking at closely if they want to secure the longevity of their brand.
Email marketing is a key element of the brand building exercise that often goes overlooked by decision makers. People will spend countless hours, days and weeks analyzing their websites and making sure each page has a consistent feel. But how long are your customers really on your website? While all of us wish we were eBay with a retention time per user in excess of 90 minutes (source: Nielsen//NetRatings), the fact remains we are not. Email marketing lets you impose your brand values on your customers (and prospective customers!) even after they leave your website.
If your customer spends 7 minutes on your website, do you think they have absorbed enough of your brand values? Think of popular brands in today’s marketplace: when someone says McDonalds you instantly think and feel certain things, but those values were built up over a long period of time (…definitely dwarfing the 7 minutes you got to spend interacting with your customer!). But, email marketing can help fill that void. The best email marketing programs will offer email signup boxes for your website, so you can prompt your site visitors to sign up for your newsletters, coupons, promotions, etc.
By sending effective email marketing campaigns to your customers, you can communicate with them even after they’ve left your website. This is not to suggest that your strategy should be to bombard your customers with constant email marketing messages so that they have no choice but to remember your brand. In this case, your email marketing may have effectively gotten your customers to know your name, but the brand values you are communicating is that you are excessively annoying (and you probably don’t want that!).
An effective email marketing strategy for brand building would be a monthly or bi-weekly newsletter. You want to send enough email marketing messages so that your customer gets a feel for your company and keeps you in mind for their future purchases. It’s important that your email marketing campaigns reinforce the brand values you began to setup while the customer was on your website. While your customers may not become brand loyal after just one email marketing message, over time your brand will become ingrained in the ‘purchasing habits’ part of their psyche and that’s exactly what you are striving for.
The nice thing about email marketing in conjunction with brand building is that it is very viral. Once you have brand loyal customers, they essentially become your brand ambassador and that means they can easily forward your message to their friends and colleagues (most email marketing programs should have a ‘forward to friend’ feature). This is a huge benefit because when John gets an email from his friend Mike saying “Hey John, these guys sell the absolute best widgets, check out their flyer below”, you better believe that John will be landing on your website ready and eager to be your customer.
Email marketing, when done correctly, keeps the lines of communication open long after a customer has visited your website, which gives you the time to build your brand and ultimately reap the benefits.
Make sure to check out: online video business directory
Is Youtube on borrowed time?
While not directly in the realm of videogaming, YouTube is a global Internet phenomenon that has penetrated nearly every home with a web browser. Of late, the user-generated video website has been used to promote various aspects of videogames whether it be an officially released promo trailer or an illegally shot shakycam reel of beta footage.
A report today from The Business Insider’s Benjamin Wayne suggests that YouTube is doomed. According to the piece, the company can’t easily monetize the traffic coming in from users watching videos. Despite massive growth, ubiquitous global brand awareness, presidential endorsement, and the world’s greatest repository of illegally-pirated video content, Google’s massive video folly is on life-support, and the prognosis is grave.
Read the whole story here
South Africa - Biometric passports
I found this very interesting article that I had to share.
The South African Department of Home Affairs has begun rolling out security enhanced passports to new applicants from this week.
A facility in Pretoria which prints the new passports was officially opened last week by the minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. Until now South African passports were produced in bulk overseas and personalised locally.
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The new South African passport was due to be introduced in 2007, but was plagued with delays and has cost around R500m (£36m) to implement.
The initiative forms part of a Turnaround Programme aimed at improving customer service and stamping out forgery. The new passports bring South Africa into line with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards for technology and security, which were revamped following the 2001 terror attacks in New York.
The new passports have an embedded RFID chip which stores the owner’s biometric information, including personal details, a high-resolution colour photograph and fingerprint information.
Several security features are designed to make it extremely difficult to forge, according to the government, principally the back page which now consists of seven layers of polycarbonate, each with an individual security feature.
Rather than placing a physical photo on the page covered in laminate, the passport holder’s photo is laser-engraved on one of the polycarbonate layers, as is a copy of their biographical data.
The paper used for the other pages of the passport includes a watermark of Chief Albert Luthuli, and designs depicting the Big Five along with perforations making out the passport number. Other security features include interlocking stitching to prevent pages being removed or tampered with, and micro threads embedded in each page which store a form of uniquely identifiable ‘DNA’.
read more: here
The road to hell
My parents traveled this road once, some time ago, and I remember them telling me that they did not want us to know about it. They eventually showed us the pictures, and we were shocked.
Highway driving can be a relaxing …cruising the open road in a convertible, hair blowing in the wind… these images are often evoked at the mention of the “American Dream.” What this motif takes for granted is that the road beneath the tires is safe; free of potholes, sharp curves, slick spots and vertical drops. While you may hate the monotony of your daily commute, exchanging it for a drive on any of the following highways may be ill-advised. The cliffs, crazy traffic and other assorted dangers may be exciting, but taking a joyride there could quickly turn your Dream into a nightmare. Fortunately, none of these highways to hell are stateside.
The Guoliang Tunnel – China
Carved right out of the Taihang Mountains by a group of 13 unskilled farmers, the road is as picturesque as it is dangerous. Short and tight, the tunnel is less than a mile (1,200 meters) long, 15 feet high and 12 feet wide. The most spectacular aspect is the 30 windows where the enclosure opens up, revealing the cliff and valley below. While the windows were engineered in order to discard debris and let light in, they also function as doorways to doom for distracted motorists.
The Grand Trunk Road – From India to Afghanistan
Built by Sher Shah Suri in the 16th century, the Grand Trunk Road presently stretches over 2,500 km from Sonargaon, Bangladesh to Peshawar, Afghanistan. Serving as the principal trade route between the Eastern and Western regions of Northern India, Grand Trunk has maintained a constant stream of animals, pedestrians and carts for over 400 years. The addition of bicycles, motorcycles, cars and buses in recent years has magnified the congestion and made parts of the road nearly impossible to navigate.
Luxor-al-Hurghada Road – Egypt
The Luxor-al-Hurghada is one of the few roads where leaving your lights off at night actually improves your chances for survival. While head-on collisions are a constant threat, the alternative is decidedly worse. The area is overrun by marauding thieves, and local terrorists who target the highway traffic prefer to attack after sundown. The roadside crime was actually much worse prior to 1997, when the murder of 62 German tourists in Luxor prompted an increased police presence, but to this day many drivers feel safer testing their night vision than making their cars moving targets.
The Russian-Georgian Military Mountain Roads
Built as a passage through the Caucasus Mountains for the Russian military, this series of roads is constantly mired in snow in the winter and mud in the summer. While never intended for civilian vehicles, many locals utilize the 220 km stretch on a regular basis. As if the switchbacks, extreme weather and obstructions aren’t enough, ongoing tensions between Russia and Georgia have made the road increasingly dangerous.
The Road of Death – Bolivia
Formally known as the North Yungas Road, this unsealed (no barriers) trail snakes through Bolivia’s Andes Mountains at heights ranging from 15,500 feet at the top to 3,700 feet at its destination in the jungle town of Coroico. The 64km stretch of highway is restricted by a mountain facade on one side and a cliff on the other, and veering just slightly off course will send a vehicle plummeting nearly 1000 meters into the jungle below. To make matters worse, traffic is a constant and the presence of road dust and fog make limit visibility. On average 26 vehicles and 100 lives are lost here annually, but in 1983, the bloodiest year to date, 320 people plunged over the edge.
Written by Ben Leffler, world traveler and automatic-transmission driver extraordinaire, for Ship Happens.
I found this post here
