Sources Of Marketing Information by: Custom Toll Free, March 14, 2011 Whether you are launching a new venture or already have an established and successful business it is essential to constantly be in touch with sources of marketing information to stay on top of trends and maximize your marketing ROI. There are endless Internet marketing companies providing marketing information on their websites today. However you have to be able to see through the pitches on many of these websites that only promote one or two advertising methods and will tell you anything to get you to acquire their products or services. So where else should you be looking for quality marketing information? Organizations like the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) who compile data and reports and act as unbiased third parties are a great source of marketing information where you can get the real facts on what is working for others both in and out of your industry. Seminars, conventions and conferences like SXSW that is running this month in Austin, Texas are also great sources of marketing information where you can hear from live speakers, mingle with other business owners and see where marketing is headed in the future. Business coaches are actually one of the best sources of up to the minute marketing information. While they may also be promoting themselves, they have the advantage of intimate inside knowledge of which marketing channels and methods are truly working and producing the maximum results for others and do not promote any one type of advertising, but rather are motivated to make sure that you really excel. Finally you should also subscribe to a few cutting edge blogs to get a regular feed of brand new marketing information. This will give you constant inspiration and alert you to new trends as they emerge. Nothing stays the same forever and if you want to continue to grow your business you must constantly be embracing new technology and marketing tools. Read More
How to Start Your Own Money Making Website by: Custom Toll Free, You've probably heard countless stories about how some people were able to successfully make a living on the Internet. Well, it's your turn now. But first, you need to know how to create a powerful money making website. Basically, it is not difficult to create an aesthetically-pleasing site and write content for it. Most people struggle with the promotional aspect. In this guide though, we’ll just give you the basics on how to start your own money making website: Develop a concept and get a domain name – nowadays, the Internet is already crowded. You will get elbowed out if you are just one of the thousands out there. So focus on a niche, corner it, and make sure that your visitors are getting value by visiting. The domain name should ideally relate to your concept as well. Web hosting – go with a reliable web hosting company. They may tend to charge more than startups but consider it as an investment for your website’s future. Keyword research – to create a money making website, it is important to integrate the right keywords into it. There are a lot of keyword research tools that enable you to identify the right terms to use for your industry. Lastly, conduct more search engine optimization strategies. Keyword research is just one aspect of optimization. You also need to conduct link building, tagging, and submit to directories in order to stay relevant. Read More
Thinking of Becoming a Clickbank Affiliate? by: blog-editor2, March 11, 2011 If you’re thinking about entering the affiliate marketing business, chances are, you’ve heard about Clickbank already. Clickbank is one of the largest marketplaces that allow merchants and affiliates to connect. The company has already generated several billion dollars in sales. Indeed, from this figure alone, it is easy to imagine that it has made more than a few people rich. So if you’re interested in becoming a Clickbank affiliate, where do you start? Having a website is obviously important. In this regard, it is important to choose a domain name wisely and create interesting/useful content that benefits readers. At the end of the day, profitability all comes down to having sufficient traffic. Aside from the quantity of visitors you receive, the quality of your traffic also matters. It is better to have 1,000 readers a day with a conversion rate of 10 percent than 5,000 readers a day with a 1 percent conversion rate. You will receive a commission for every referral sale that is generated from your website. Basically, Clickbank controls the amount of commission that is paid. So select products that provide a decent commission. Becoming a Clickbank affiliate will pay off in the long-term. If you are interested, you should sign up now. Read More
Are Independent RespOrgs Really Better? by: blog-editor2, March 10, 2011 Are Independent RespOrgs really a better choice for handling your toll free number management? Well, Independent RespOrgs are really only a better choice if you want better protection for your business phone lines, you want to ensure business continuity, you desire the fastest possible service, and you want finally to have a phone company that will treat you as a valued customer and that you are confident has your best interests in mind. Of course, if none of those things are important to you, then doing business with an Independent RespOrg really may not matter. However, if you want to win in your business and ensure continued success, then you could say it is essential to select an Independent RespOrg to handle your toll free number management. Compared to Independent RespOrgs, phone-carrier affiliated RespOrgs have long been notorious for their poor customer service and the many conflicts of interest that often lead to their substandard management and delays in requests. Believe it or not, there really are phone companies out there that want to help you succeed and that will work hard to help you get the most out of your toll free numbers while actually making you feel like a valued customer for a change. Try out an Independent RespOrg and you will see the difference immediately. Speed is everything in business today. Changes are happening at an unbelievably rapid rate, and unless your phone lines can keep up and your organization is nimble enough to maximize new opportunities as they arise, you will soon be left behind. Once you switch to an Independent RespOrg, however, you will be amazed by how your change requests are fulfilled in just hours instead of weeks, allowing you to make business decisions on the fly with confidence your business phone lines will be able to keep up. Then, of course, Independent RespOrgs also offer the advantage of multi-carrier arrangements that provide protection in case of technical or service issues with a single carrier and will ensure your business phone lines are always running. The choice is up to you, but in choosing between a carrier-affiliated RespOrg and an Independent RespOrg, it's pretty apparent the choice shouldn't be too difficult. Read More
Six Things You Should Be Demanding From Your Toll Free Service Provider by: blog-editor2, March 9, 2011 1. Shared Usage You should only have to put out money for exactly what you need. If you want the best premium toll free vanity phone numbers, but you don’t need them for the whole country, you should be able to get them just for the areas where you provide service. Shared usage with another provider, so you can use that toll free number just for your area, will enable you to get a better number, increase advertising effectiveness, and reduce expenses. 2. Toll Free Fax Included You should be demanding free fax service from your toll free service provider. Free fax service makes it easier for your customers, saves them money, and makes them more likely to do business with you. It also saves you money by not needing an extra line, and provides an easily traceable record for the future. 3. Access to Call Details Online You shouldn’t have to wait for your phone bill to know what is going on with your toll free numbers. Online access enables you instantly to track marketing campaigns and make adjustments on the fly to maximize your marketing ROI as well as identify problems immediately. Of course, it also makes it easier to measure employ performance daily and weekly and keep up production. 4. Voicemail to Email Voicemail to email and call notification by email services instantly alert you to business opportunities as well as enable staffing on demand, which can dramatically reduce overhead and rocket your profit margins. 5. Call Blocking Call blocking ability is essential for businesses today. It not only saves you big on your phone bill, but it will also save your staff an incredible amount of time, making sure they are maximizing production at all times. The best toll free providers should also enable you to block calls by area code and prefix. 6. Non-Blockable Caller ID Non-blockable caller ID means you will always know who is calling your business phone lines, enabling you effectively to block problem callers as well as capturing a prospect's number 100 percent of the time so no business opportunities are ever missed even if the original call is. Read More
Using Business Phone Lines To Grab Market Share From Your Competitors by: blog-editor2, March 8, 2011 Whether you are launching a new start-up or are expanding your already successful business, the name of the game is grabbing up as much market share from your competition as possible. The more market share you own, the less expensively you can market and operate fueling further expansion and growth. Using toll free numbers for your business phone lines can enable you easily and inexpensively to swipe chunks of the market from your competitors and take your business to the next level. How? Become the #1 Brand In many industries, there is still plenty of room to get your hands on a dominating vanity number for your business phone lines to position your company as the number one choice. Think 1-800-FLOWERS and 1-800-CONTACTS. Holding this title in your industry will make you stand out as the first and best choice to do business with, and it will make marketing and closing deals easy. Mirror the Competition In some industries, you may find the most generic versions of vanity numbers for your business phone lines are already being used, but that shouldn’t stop you from pulling in plenty of new customers. If this situation is the case in your business, you have two options. The first is to grab up toll free numbers that are very similar to your competition or are common incorrect dials by those trying to reach your competition. Doing so will also help you to piggy back off of their success and marketing budgets and gain new clients. The second option is to take advantage of shared usage for your business phone lines. Shared usage allows you to get control of a premium vanity number for your industry specifically for certain geographic areas, even if others are using it somewhere else. It is extremely affordable and the positioning benefits are obvious. Take Out One Niche at a Time The wisest and most affordable way to take over your industry is to avoid going head to head for the pole position right away, and instead, use your business phone lines to take out and control one niche at a time. This niche could be a certain demographic group in your business or you could excel at one area like being faster or easier to deal with. This goal is easily accomplished by using targeted vanity numbers and forwarding them to your business phone lines. Read More
855 Numbers – The Most Cost-Effective Form Of Business Continuity Insurance? by: blog-editor2, March 7, 2011 With the increase of natural disasters and terrorist threats over the last ten years, business continuity has increasingly become a bigger concern for companies of all types. So are 855 numbers an effective form of business continuity insurance? Most brick and mortar businesses have business insurance already. However if they read their policies or have been through a disaster already, they know they will be left uncompensated in most cases despite having forked out large sums of money in premiums. A few emerging companies provide information on protecting your business continuity and can create elaborate plans for all types of contingencies; however, such extensive planning isn’t always needed or the best use of capital for many organizations. So how can 855 numbers provide a superior level of business continuity that is far more affordable? Business continuity planning's purpose is to ensure that despite a natural or man-made disaster, whether hurricane, earthquake, or bombing, your business can continue to operate. Even when the economy was at its most buoyant for most companies, just missing a few days of business could be ruinous. What plans and safeguards do you have in place right now? Imagine what would happen if all of your business phone lines were down for a week, your month’s marketing budget was completely wasted, and you lost 25 percent of your current clients because they couldn’t get ahold of you? Your organization may be able to survive, though it would certainly mean a massive loss of market share and leave you struggling to catch up for at least a year while your competition fed off of your demise. 855 numbers can enable your business to set up emergency forwarding plans in advance so, should your main place of business or any branches be affected by a disaster, incoming calls can be immediately routed to preset alternative numbers so you never have to miss a beat. 855 toll free numbers, together with outsourcing and cloud-computing, document-sharing tools, can help you seemlessly to keep your operations running and revenues coming in. Read More
Six Easy Steps For A Profitable Online Marketing Strategy by: blog-editor2, March 4, 2011 1. Research Any marketing strategy not founded on research probably has no more chance of success than the roulette table. That doesn’t mean it has to be incredibly expensive, but some market research built on real facts and figures is crucial for a winning marketing strategy. 2. Branding Before launching any new marketing strategy, you must have developed your brand image in order to ensure maximum results in both the short- and long-term. This development should at a minimum include a unified brand incorporating your business name, web domain name, a toll free vanity number, and a logo. Unified branding will result in the biggest yields in terms of direct responses as well as repeat and future business. 3. Testing Testing is absolutely critical for maximizing marketing ROI and survival in every industry these days. Once you have done your research and branding, get your online assets up and running quickly because without action, there can be no returns. However, instead of throwing your whole marketing budget on one channel or ad set, start slow, see how you can improve conversions, and constantly be improving your marketing strategy. 4. Grow Traffic Before you can make a real impact in your industry and see high volume results from your marketing strategy, you are going to need to be able to get your message in front of a lot of prospects. It is true that paid Internet advertising is still an essential and effective part of any marketing strategy. Yet, growing your fan base, followers, subscribers, and website traffic will ensure you get the highest possible return on all of your future marketing efforts. Try building your opt-in email list with free reports, and run competition and promotions to bolster your social media fan base. 5. Create Your Funnel While the main focus of your marketing strategy right now may be to generate immediate deals and revenues, do not overlook the future value of your contacts. Build out your product funnel so you can automate follow up and make the most out of every lead. 6. Monetize Once you have your online marketing flow working smoothly and have cultivated a large following or at least a large amount of regular web traffic, it is time to monetize it and start really turning on the profits. Your main product line may be performing, and you may be converting others down the road through your funnel, but by joining leading affiliate marketing programs and working them, you can dramatically increase the value of every visitor to your site and really put the icing on your marketing strategy. Image Credit: © Dmccale | Dreamstime.com Read More
Choosing a Business Phone Service System by: blog-editor2, March 3, 2011 Several years ago, even small businesses had to spend $6,000, $15,000, or even more on a business phone system in order to handle communications and conduct business with clients effectively. However, with advances in VOIP and cloud computing software, both new and existing companies can eliminate most if not all of this expense while maintaining a professional presence with premium toll free numbers. Even better, toll free numbers can also help reduce the overall start up investment and monthly overhead. Toll free forwarding combined with Internet phone service can enable your organization to work on higher profit margins and even deliver a higher quality of customer service at the same time while eliminating the need for expensive business phone systems. Call centers and even large companies who need a more robust and elaborate business phone system can find hosted virtual business phone systems that offer more affordable options and flexibility. In most cases, this new breed of business phone system solutions also offers faster changes when needed and less expensive maintenance. These new business phone solutions mean saying goodbye to the days of messing around with tech support for days on end or even having to deal constantly with replacing or adding new phones which can run hundreds of dollars each. It also makes moving and relocating easy, making your organization as a whole more flexible and able to take advantage of the best opportunities as they arise. Taking advantage of the best toll free routing and forwarding features for your business phone lines can also give your organization the edge over your competitors who are still trying to do business the old way. And not only will it streamline your business processes but help in maximizing your marketing ROI. So before you go shopping for an expensive new business phone system or put out more money to expand or relocate an existing one, check out your other options; you may be surprised by just how much you can save in terms of money and gain in terms of efficiency. Read More
800 Number Lookup and B2B Sales by: blog-editor2, March 2, 2011 800 number lookup tools have many invaluable benefits for those in B2B businesses. Not only do 800 number lookup tools provide a mammoth database for harvesting leads, but they can help your staff to understand your prospects better and to hone pitches as well as offering insight into what other products and services you may be able to bundle together to make your offering more attractive. 800 number lookup services can provide easy targeting of specific businesses in niche industries by performing reverse lookups using keywords and phrases in vanity numbers. The best 800 number lookup services will also provide a variety of other details about a number's owner so you can better focus your pitches and sound more educated about your prospects’ needs. These details often include the business' name, web domain name, other contact information, the history of the toll free number in question, as well as other toll free numbers that may be useful for them. Armed with this information from your 800 number lookup, you may in fact find it profitable to join a toll free affiliate marketing program so you can also offer prospects additional toll free numbers and add to your revenue stream. At the same time, you may even be able to profit from including additional Internet domain names to keep the customer's branding unified, even further increasing your profit margins and the value of your offerings. In the past, 800 number lookups have been difficult and have required expensive subscriptions to websites that often did not even have the information you wanted. By contrast, today’s leading toll free providers offer free reverse 800 number lookups with a large range of search options that deliver instant results. So if you have been looking for a new source of B2B leads or a way to improve your closing ratios, you may just be a click away…. Image Credit: © Beata Suchenek | Dreamstime.com Read More