How to crack the 'Holy Grail of Advertising'.

Social media networking, top rankings in Google & smart Ads that can go Viral.
It's all possible if you understand the basic principles.

Making Connections:
Building your business is about making connections. Whether it’s customer relationships, supply chain structures or triggering brand awareness in the mind of a consumer. Making the right connections is as important as breathing.
The medium for personal connections using technology is evolving all the time. In just 10 years it has evolved from Phone to Faxes, Mobiles phones, Email, Websites, Chat rooms, Instant Messages, Forums, SMS TXT’s , Blogs, Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tweets and on it goes.
As everyone is using one or more of these formats in their daily routine now, the following question becomes very important.

Have you ever considered the quality of those connections?
The answer to this question is the key to great relationships rewarding you with amazing results.
A great advert connects with you, a bad adverts makes you change the channel. It’s the same with your connections.
A great customer recommends your products to more customers in his social group.
Meanwhile a high maintenance customer drains you of your life blood drop by drop.
The trick is to recognise the good from the bad and distance yourself from the leeches. That’s right, get rid of them.

Have you heard about the 80/20 Rule?
The 80/20 Rule: It applies to everything! So apply it to your connections and watch the results flow. 20% of your connections are creating 80% of your quality leads. 20% of your customers are providing 80% of your profit. So take the time to recognise who are your ‘A’ grade connections, customers or lead generators. As 20% of your quality referrers will generate 80% of your quality referrals. An A grade customer can be the busy type who rushes in and spends 3 grand in 10 minutes, so you need to be on your toes when they need that extra service they deserve.
Whereas the D grade customer who spends $3000 and remind you how much they spent, what broke and asks for a discount on every single purchase forever is most likely costing you more money than you can imagine. Remember this, the D is for Drop and D them ASAP. Save your energy for time spent gaining more A grade customers.

A great example of how to build “Quality Connections” is online. Sites like Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com and my own site ListedOnline (http://www.listedonline.co.nz) all allow users to build connections between each other. With ListedOnline these connections are coming to you specifically because they are interested in the products you have advertisied.
Now that is a quality connection and you should treat them as such.

Advertise Here! Every media company says the same thing, the reality is only about 20% of your advertising spend works! To which everyone groans “Tell me us which 20%!”
Ok I'll tell you, you won’t find many advertising agency guys brave enough to give you an answer to that question I bet.
Anyway the secret is and has always been ‘Test and Measure’. So it’s the measurable advertising that works, everything else is just speculation & gambling. Many media companies deliberately confuse you with their statics of readership but this is not at all like a real response to your advert.

Cancel all print (magazine) advertising as it does not offer you the ability to ‘Test and Measure’ results. Seriously and here’s why.
Running a tampon advert in a men’s magazine will get you the same amount of readership views of your Ad as it would if it was for a men’s razor, but zero response for obvious reasons. But the publishers of the magazine still proclaim their circulation (and page views) as relevant to advertisers. Now compare that to real organic Google search results, or web Ads like our Smart Ads. Anyone who finds your product or service having searched under a specific title actually has an interest in that topic. These are you’re A grade connections, so grab their details and keep in touch. (Only possible with Web Advertising).

Web adverts come with web statistics, these are a real assets to businesses today. They show you the actions taken by the readers, how many readers, etc.
If you have a web site, make sure you have Google Analytics set up and running too. This is the proof of traffic flows to and from your site.
A web advert can literally deliver the reader to your web site or generate an instant sale. And it is instantly tracked by Google Analytics.

Smart Ads. Tell me how much that potential new customer worth to you. Then tell me how much it would be worth if you could make a really dynamic connection with them and what if they could re publish your content and share it with their 10 friends! Now that is some valuable advertising. That’s what we built into ListedOnline, we call them Smart Ads. It’s really clever advertising.
So does this mean cancelling print media? The short answer is yes. Print media is profoundly dead. It is possible to use print media in a way that is measurable by hooking it into a web site in some way. But lets face it at $10,000 for a full page advertisement in the local paper that is large enough to get noticed you have to have deep pockets, best leave that type of advertising to the corporate sector. Yesterdays News is Old News and Yesterdays Advertising is only good for wrapping Fish and Chips. It never gets republished unless you spend another $10,000, ouch!

How to gain Word of Mouth exposure using Web technology.
The most powerful form of advertising is Word of Mouth. Now your going to say but how do I get that started? Well use your connections. Your friends will tell two friends and they will tell two friends etc (Actually it’s the 80/20 rule again, They will tell 10 friends and 2 of them will tell 10 friends, and 2 of them will tell 10 friends). Now add in the new technology… a Blog or a Facebook page. If two people who have been wowed by your company & endorse it in a Blog or Facebook page it will gain exposure at an increasingly accelerated rate compared to the traditional Word of Mouth. It’s also more accurate as it’s often your exact offer that is republished over and over again. Plus, it links immediately back to YOU and that’s the beauty of Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. The shared article links back to your original content with a single click.
This content can be an advert or even your own web site content.
The best example of this technology is the ‘Tell Your Friends’ button that appears on every page of ListedOnline (http://www.listedonline.co.nz)
Any advert, article or page that a viewer sees can be instantly republished.
Bookmarked
Emailed
IM
Blogged
or Socially Networked.
Now you can’t buy better advertising than advertising that has been personally referred from Connection to connection. The oldies would call it a snow ball effect, the web savvy call it going Viral.

How to Stand Out on the Web & raise your Profile - A Google secret!
Gaining a great Google ranking and have general searches actually bring you quality leads and customers is not all that difficult. Most web designers treat it like the Holy Grail of web secrets and charge businesses by the pound of flesh.
With the ever increasing number of web sites Blogs and Facebook pages it’s difficult to comprehend how people will find your web site and your wonderful company. Well there is a simple way that always works with Google and it is all to do with Content and Connections. If the content in your advert or on your web site is well written and relevant it will be indexed by Google and that’s a fact. But Google looks for more than just content, it takes a note of your Geographical location as that is often very relevant to users searching for something in their area. Google also takes a count of all the Inbound Connections (Website URL Links) to your content.
How do I build inbound Connections and what are they? Inbound Connections are the links on other web sites to your web site or advert. You can’t fake them they are manually entered url links added by real people.
The more Inbound Connections you have the more weight is given to the credibility of your content and the more chance of being found on the front page of a Google search. So every link from a Blog, Facebook page or Bookmark site like Digg or StumbleUpon to your content is helping your Google Search ranking results. Which in turn makes brings more viewers to your content and that increases the likelihood that they will also share your content.

The Australian owned TradeMe is a Goliath of a web site in New Zealand and it doesn’t allow you to link to your web site, Facebook or publish email addresses anywhere in your Ads. These Inbound Connections to your site would drive traffic away from TradeMe and on to yours. And they want all web traffic to stay on their site. It is after all a primarially Consumer to Consumer private selling site and not aimed at benefitting NZ businesses.
By comparison ListedOnline promotes the advertising of all the Inbound and Outbound connections you want. As that is how we see the future in advertising. It works better for you and your business. Plus it raises the profile of your website and business in search engine rankings and thats likely worth more than the cost of the Ad listing itself.

Excel in Customer Service to build Outbound Connections
Your not looking for a 5 star rating on a customer service rating card any more, you are looking for customers so stoked on your customer service and products that they re-advertise your company for you through Social media websites this instantly drives more traffic your way. With one click of a button most web blog articles including this one, or any page on ListedOnline can be re-published by a stoked reader. In an instant their circle of friends is exposed to your views, products and services.

Advertising doesn’t get better than that!
As already mentioned, the oldies (who work in print media) would call it the “Snow Ball Effect”, web savy advertisers refer to it as “Going Viral”. The Holy Grail of Advertising.

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Lee McClelland