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Updates from Bianca Gubalke RSS

  • 12:42:34 pm on August 28, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    Relevant Online Marketing Seminars

    Relevant Online Marketing Seminars like those offered by Ycademy since 2004 are in high demand by people who want to build a successful business online or bring their offline business to the Internet.

    Following my article on How to do Online Marketing on Friday, here is some feedback with my personal conclusions from the first day of this astonishingly clear, quite complex yet efficient and hands-on Ycademy Workshop that provided each Seminar participant with a relevant Email Marketing setup on their WordPress based Author Blog on Semiomantics XO.

    Relevant Online Marketing by Bianca Gubalke

     

    The above photo was taken at the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa – a traditional Marketing eldorado of its kind!

    Relevant Online Marketing Seminars

    What emerged as a key element from the first day of this relevant Online Marketing Seminar by Ycademy was that today online marketing has to be “relevant” and “contextual”. These two words have to be remembered, specifically when focusing on Email Marketing and the integration of Emailing with Newsletters and/or Autoresponders into one’s CMS, eg. Author Blog.

    With our high performing Semiomantics websites and blogs this is no easy task to start with.

    It needs careful thought and weighing of what is needed versus what’s not needed and a close look at what serves our purpose best: free or paid solutions? On the surface, it looks like concessions will have to be made between the mailer and our website optimization… however, that’s obviously not what we at Ycademy will settle with!

    Relevant Emailing

    Relevant Emailing in a smart and contextual form is what the Ycademy Brainwave came up with despite some rather frustrating research into various unsatisfactory avenues. Relevant Email Marketing in a way that’s modern, permission-based, contextual and far beyond the batch and blast approach of the old days.

    With all of us thoroughly fed up with the clutter still reaching our mail boxes despite spam filters, we need to know that this is only around 20% of the spam that actually goes out – and this still seems to serve a certain market… an indicator that even that still works.

    However, for the marketing professional in today’s economic climate everything turns around customer retention – and emailing is a powerful way of keeping in touch, communicating and ensuring growth through customer retention. We all learned that it is more cost-efficient to work on retaining an existing customer than winning over a new one.

    Bearing this in mind, we move away from large broadcast campaigns to more targeted engagements. However, delivering that relevance requires more sophistication and here the challenge is to invest in the analysis of response and behavior data in order to assist us in directing our marketing strategies in the most beneficial ways – beneficial for us on one hand to avoid losing our time and efforts and risking spam complaints and optouts – as well as for the customer who may well be interested in receiving hot information on the red sunlasses we offer but not the green bikinis we sell in a different chapter. This needs to be realized and attended to accordingly. This is what relevance and context in terms of reaching out to our readers and customers is all about. That we give them what they want without throwing anything else at them. Graceful Service with the right Attitude in my eyes. Just as an example.

    Looking at our website publications – eg. Author Blogs – it appears that the Email channel is a natural extension to distribute and monetize content – however, it needs a customized approach and it needs a soft approach to ensure that our mails get delivered and… opened… and maybe even passed on.

    Therefore, our goal as publishers must always be to deliver a relevant, contextual and personalized quality experience that our readers and customers enjoy!

    How do we achieve this?

     

    Ycademy Seminar on Online Marketing

    While day 1 of the Ycademy Seminar on Online Marketing provided the conceptual understanding, the basic setup and the tools, day 2 (today) will complete this important chapter in order to not only serve our own purpose in terms of promoting our own products and services, however, for those of us who focus on customer satisfaction when it comes to Web Design and Customer Follow-up, to offer our customers a maximum of value and safety in firstly reaching out and staying in close contact with their customers with their highly search engine optimized WP based Semiomantics CMS.

    I am looking forward to a highly informative Workshop at the Ycademy Seminar today.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • 07:49:56 pm on August 26, 2011 | 0 | # |
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    How to do Online Marketing

    How to do Online Marketing – or Internet Marketing – is and remains at the center of anything happening on the Internet, and while the principles remain the same if compared with traditional offline marketing – as we see here on the picture taken at the V & A Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa – different skills need to be mastered and different tools and equipments are being used: attract, convert, monetize.

    Online Marketing by Bianca Gubalke

     

    Affiliate Marketing at Ycademy Seminar

    Affiliate Marketing is an excellent concept within Online Marketing and remains a good source of income to this day. Basically, people do Affiliate Marketing all day long by recommending products they like to people they know and receiving a commission on each sale. So it’s pretty easy to understand as a concept.

    At the upcoming Ycademy Seminar August 2011 we will go back to Online Marketing and pursue the vast topic over the next months. Our objective will be to work in a way that we minimize our efforts, focusing on one link. That’s always the main issue… one cannot promote two links. This one link could theoretically be one’s Author Blog. It’s a personal decision to be taken, however, one could promote everything from or out of the Author Blog. All other websites are satellites in support of my main CMS.

    Online Marketing

    There are a few things that we need for doing Online Marketing. If we sell our own product, we need our own Product website. Alternatively, if we sell someone else’s products,  then we have affiliate links, possibly feed streams etc, however, the principle remains the same: Lead Generation, Follow-up, Conversion. As always, Lead generation depends on Traffic – and Traffic comes from Google, Facebook or people we talk to.

    It has been the same since ever!

    What we need is people looking at our offers, then figuring out what percentage will buy and then see what effort we need to put out to get enough people that result in enough conversion that we make a profit, ideally a living online.

    Lead Generation

    Lead generation is based on Traffic. To generate a so-called ‘lead’, we collect people we can talk to. From there the money is in the follow-up… as taught over years at my Ycademy Workshops on “Online Communication”.

    You can go to Social Networks, eg. Facebook and find people there who might be interested in your offer. More efficiently would be to have them on a Mailing List.

    Mailing List means Newsletter, means Email promotion, means Email Marketing.

    Email Marketing

    Email Marketing has always worked pretty well; otherwise there wouldn’t be that much spam in our mail boxes every day – unfortunately one ahs to say!

    Autoresponders work very well as well… but what definitely works is Newsletters.

    Newsletters

    If you have people signing up with your Newsletter – giving your basically permission to send them your weekly or monthly summary of your articles on your Author Blog wrapped up as a Newsletter (obviously of the items they are interested in and nothing else), or that you have a Newsletter concept where you publish a particular Newsletter on a particular date, maybe even both online and offline, you need to have the Knowhow and the Equipment to do so.

    Mailing your Newsletter is the most difficult thing to host, resulting in the fact that there is a stiff price tag attached to it. However, if you work in a smart way and try not to exaggerate, then you can with some relatively interesting means have a nice, sound lead generation follow-up system connected to your CMS.

    The risk with Mailing Lists and Newsletters is: most people don’t know (or care) about spam etc… they get all excited and within two or three months they are blacklisted with their email account, meaning their IP address – and this means they get off the horizon of Google. This is the eternal problem one faces… Besides, what worked years ago is no longer possible today.

    Looking at hosting costs on Webber means real money and one better knows what we do.

    Ideally, we get interested people on our own mailing list and coordinate the mailing and newsletter with our Blog. It means trying to get a maximum of output with a minimum of input; it means that we have to streamline our business in such a way that whatever we do is extremely efficient.

    If you post on the Author Blog in a specific category… from where it goes through the publishing network, it has to be thought-through. Having yet a different website does not make sense as we need our traffic on our own site, not the merchant’s site.

    Lead generation means that we need Landing pages and Lead capture pages. As demonstrated with our Photo Blogs we have seen that we can setup any page we want on a WordPress based Semiomantics XO. Say just a header and a footer and nothing inbetween: there ‘inbetween’ where there is ‘nothing’ we can type in any html code and put in any lead capture content we want. Therefore we can create as many lead capture pages as we want even outside the WordPress content and the WordPress loop.

    Then we will add software to the blog that allows us to do Mailings, where we can setup Mailing Lists per category to address individual interests of our readers and customers. Someone opting in for photography is not interested in any home business stuff – as an example – and vice versa. The focus must always be on respecting our readers’ and customers’ interests.

    We can send people on our Mailing List a weekly summary of what is new on our blog, or a monthly one… or even a daily one. That depends on each individual. But the idea is always about getting people to give us double-optins to receive our news, free give-aways or whatever we wish to promote to them – and with their permission. It’s back to the real form of Marketing with Advertising pages or Lead capture pages – and all on WordPress.

    This we will setup at the Ycademy Seminar August 2011. Don’t miss it!

     

     
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