marketing for enterpreneurs

Nothing happens in business until a sale is made. Marketing is simply about getting new customers and keeping them. If you’re not doing something everyday to market and promote your business, your competitors are. Here are ten easy-to-implement tips to effectively market and grow your business:

1. Partner with large email database list owners and offer to cross promote each oher. The list owner will advertise your event, product, or service to their email database and you’ll offer to do the same to your list.

2. Create your own blog which is an online journal with frequently updated posts to entertain and excite existing and potential customers. It’s more personal and immediate then a website and keeps people engaged and hopefully coming back for more. You can even create one for free at http://www.blogger.com.

3. If you want to increase word-of-mouth fast, do something beyond normal industry expectations. For example, Mr. Lube offers fast and affordable tune-up service to customers right on the spot, without having to leave the car, while offering coffee, cappuccino, and a fresh newspaper.

4. Always ask happy clients for endorsements or testimonials and put them on your website and other marketing collateral. They’re worth their weight in gold. Try to get some recognizable names in your community for additional cachet.

5. Put a special offer or product advertorial on every invoice and statement you send out. Likewise, you can also negotiate a deal with another company to advertise your product or service on all their invoices for a percentage of revenues from placed orders.

6. Make your business cards stand out and be natural keepers. Offer important information on the back such as emergency phone numbers, a map, or special dates to remember. Have a slogan that offers a powerful benefit statement to your prospective customer.

7. Offer special bonus packages with your product or service offering. Get corporate sponsors to give away products as part of the bonus package in exchange for free exposure.

8. Align your business with a cause or charity. Give back to your community. Customers appreciate doing business with companies that are bettering their communities and the environment and being good corporate citizens.

9. Find an angle that makes your work controversial. The banning of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, reviewed as "trashy and vicious," was a blessing in disguise. Twain made a poster advertising the ban, which significantly increased sales.

10. Post frequently in online message boards/forums relevant to your business or expertise. Include your signature and offer tips and valuable advice. Eventually you will begin gaining word-of-mouth exposure as a leader in your field. Posting messages with your company information also helps to increase your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your site.

Online game and Social Networking

uVme brings together Online Gaming, Social Networking, and Web 2.0 in an exciting new format for network marketing. These three areas have been the fastest growing, most intriguing aspects of how the Internet has evolved in recent years, even as it continues to grow at an astounding rate worldwide with the explosion of Internet cafes. In fact, Internet cafes are said to bring 30 to 40% of their revenues from online gaming. But online gaming, particularly skill games, is only one of three truly revolutionary and dynamic aspects of the new Internet economy.

Social Networking
has become an international phenomenon with MySpace and Facebook attracting literally tens of millions of people. As social networking technology continues to mature and social networks themselves become more and more specialized to appeal to those with particular interests, it makes sense that social networking and online gaming would eventually come together somehow. Social networking relies upon the Web 2.0 model of content creation to really take off and fly.

Web 2.0, as it is called, is simply user-generated content. The best example of Web 2.0 out there today is the video-sharing web site YouTube. Web 2.0 companies produce very little of their own content, allowing the users themselves to create the bulk of their content. In a way, this has allowed the Internet economy to take off like a wild horse! Another benefit of Web 2.0 is affiliate marketing, allowing users to create their own web sites and content to sell products and services created by a third party. This has become a great way for a people all over the world to take advantage of the global reach of the Internet while allowing them to work from home. So how does uVme take advantage of social networking, online gaming, and the Web 2.0 effect? One hint is in the name of the company itself: uVme. It stands for You vs. Me in an online skill game. One user challenges another in a social network setting through the use of instant messaging to compete in an online game.

To truly take advantage of what the new Internet has to offer, though, the third leg of the Web’s tripod must be taken into consideration: affiliate marketing. The co-founders of uVme, Tom Brodie and Len Fitzgerald, are no strangers to affiliate marketing success on the Web. They created the popular VWD network in 2002; it now boasts over 160,000 members. Over the last five years VWD has paid out millions in commissions, and has a sterling reputation for always paying on time. With this background, the co-founders of uVme expect even greater success for themselves as well as those who sign up. A revenue share model allows members to tap into the economies of scale created by a large network, resulting in a constant stream of income. Affiliate marketing is a totally legitimate marketing and sales tool used by the largest online retailers, such as Amazon.com.

uVme is an online skill gaming network that creates an unparalleled social networking situation based on games, and therefore a potentially vast pool of revenues to share.