Social networking websites like Friendster, Myspace, Tagged, etc, and especially Facebook, have significant implications for business owners, marketers, and entrepreneurs. To keep your business current, you should at least be familiar with the latest conversational marketing techniques and viral technologies, including Facebook and its powerful features.

10 reasons to use Facebook for Business:

1.    Meet friends. Now Facebook is not just for school kids. Members are typically older and more mature than on other sites, and there are more professional users.

Internet marketing is a very broad subject. If you understand how broad offline marketing and sales is, it is the same for online or internet marketing. Therefore, in order for your online marketing campaign to be successful, there must be a group of marketers that truly focus on doing it. It is complex and the methods are variety. Fortunately there are few distinguished techniques for you to start. While the others, they can be implemented later accordingly.

1) WEBSITE - Why having a properly designed website is very important to optimize your online marketing?

The purpose of marketing is to create leads.  Once you have leads, then it is up to the sales team to close the deal. Among the leads, there are people whom you can close them right on the spot. For others, there must be some leads nurturing effort before they are convinced to engage on your products or services.

The campaign that you make to get people to visit your website is called marketing. It can be via both ways; online and offline or just one at a time. Once the visitors are at the home page, your website is taking the role of a salesman. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that your products’ website is your online sales men. That factor alone is a very good reason for you to invest for a well designed website.

Now, you’ve understood the function of your website. Let’s get to understand in brief about what are the visitors’ expectations and behaviours about any website:

• People come to web sites to satisfy goals, to do tasks, to get answers to questions.
• They come for information, for the content that they think (or hope) is there
• Answers a question or helps them complete a task
• Information is easy to find and easy to understand
• They expect the content to be accurate, up to date, and credible
• They don’t read much, especially before they get to the page that has the information they want.
• Even on information pages, they skim and scan before they start to read.
• They want to read only enough to meet their needs.

Let’s discuss about the vital points to consider….opps! I’m sorry. I have to catch an appointment now. We’ll continue later, ok?

As we kick off 2009, one thing is crystal clear: We’re entering an entirely new era for marketers. Let’s call this the year for building relationships. Right now, prospects want to make every purchase a safe one. That means they’ll rely on companies or brands they know and trust. Closing sales will require a stronger emphasis on tactics that let you relate to customers one to one. And it’s never been more important to craft a set of effective letters that you can customize for individual prospects.

Writing a great letter takes a bit of time and know-how. Whether you use it to follow up a lead, close a hot prospect or introduce your products and services, a well-crafted letter will be one of your most powerful marketing tools in the new year.

These six rules will help you write letters that motivate your best prospects:

Rule 1. Set a Measurable Goal
Every good letter must be written to make something happen. Focus on that goal before you begin, and decide what your letter must contain to produce the desired result. Make reading your letter worthwhile for your prospect, and it will reward you by advancing the sales process. If you’re sending letters just to provide prospects with more information, you’re wasting your postage and opportunity to move prospects to the next level.

Rule 2. Have a Strong Hook
Your letter has to immediately grab the reader’s interest or it’ll be discarded as junk mail. Depending on the type of business you’re in and what you’re marketing, your hook can be a special offer or a lead communicating a unique benefit. When your letter follows a phone call, highlight the benefits your prospect desires in the first paragraph.

Rule 3. Convey a Unique Message
Have you ever received letters from competing companies with virtually identical offers? Chances are you tossed them because you couldn’t tell one company from the other. Take a look at one of your old letters. If it could have been sent by any of your closest competitors, rethink your approach. The message, pricing and offers contained in your letter must be unique to your business and tie into your branding.

Rule 4. Keep the Reader in Mind
Imagine you were face to face with your prospect, reading your letter aloud. Would you be comfortable, or would the tone be all wrong? Your letter is a one-to-one communication with a real person. Don’t come on too strong or overpromise. Use simple, direct language, not flowery prose or impressive vocabulary. And because you won’t really be face to face with your prospect, the look of your letter alone must convey your professionalism, so double-check for errors.

Rule 5. Write About “You the Customer”
Great letters are –directed outward. That means they stress what “you the customer” will get and not what “we the company” provide. Highlight benefits front and center, and use the body of your letter to describe the features. Then summarize the key benefit once again, and close with a call to action that gives the prospect a reason to move to the next step in your sales process.

Rule 6. Make Responding Easy
No matter what type of marketing letter you’re writing, close by providing a clear and actionable next step. In some cases, the responsibility for that action–such as sending a written proposal or contract–will rest with you. When a special offer has been made, your letter should make it quick and easy for the prospect to take advantage of it via phone, e-mail and postal mail. The fewer hurdles your prospect must jump, the more likely you are to close the sale.

Exactly, how do information systems enhance business processes? Primarily, in two ways:

1. Increasing the efficiency of existing processes.
2. Enabling entirely new processes that are capable of transforming the business.

Information systems automate many steps in business processes that were formerly performed manually such as checking client’s credit, or generating an invoice and shipping order. But today, information technology can do much more. New technology can actually change the flow of information, making it possible for many more people to access and share information replacing sequential steps with tasks that can be performed simultaneously in parallel, and eliminating delays in decision making.

That’s why it’s so important to pay close attention to business processes. By analyzing business processes in your firm, you can achieve a very clear understanding of how your business actually works!

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