Top Products for Summer Promotions

Summer is just around the corner and is the ultimate season to promote your business. From golf outings to travel promotions to company picnics to simply saying thank you to your most valued customers, summer is a great time to spread the word about your company. When considering promotions and events for the summer, make sure to incorporate a promotional item to maximize the exposure of your brand and extend the life of your promotion.

Finding the perfect item to complement your message, and incorporating that into your overall theme, can be a challenge. Consider some of these product ideas as a starting point to begin the creative process of establishing an effective summer marketing campaign for your brand.

The top five products to put your logo on this summer:

1. Umbrellas – They’re functional, unisex and offer essential protection during the rainy season. And, they are a no brainer for golf outings and picnics. From promotional folding styles to high quality windproof golf options, there is sure to be an umbrella to fit your budget. Whether it showcases one logo or assists in delivering a broader communication, umbrellas provide a large canvas to amplify your marketing message.

2. Chairs – Not always the first product idea to come to mind, chairs are a unique, yet useful gift to give in the summer. Great for beach trips, sporting events and picnics, a promotional chair is an item the recipient is going to use over and over and is likely going to recall the name of the advertiser who gave it to him or her. You can be that advertiser.

3. Towels – Nothing says summer like the beach! Whether you are planning a travel promotion or beach event, or just want to incorporate a beach theme into your campaign, towels provide the maximum amount of advertising space for your money. Great for launching a new product or service, towels allow you to create a walking billboard for your organization or message.

4. Sport Bottles – Reusable and refreshing, sport bottles are a great transportable item for the office frequenter or the weekend warrior. Add your logo and use it as a giveaway for a marathon or walk, outdoor concert, or wellness program. Sport bottles come in many styles and color combinations, you are sure to find one that will complement your brand.

5. Cinches – Who doesn’t have a need for a fun and portable bag to tote their items around in? Cinches have become popular in retail and even more popular in the promotional world. They offer functionality at a great price point, and can be used as packaging for new products, marketing literature, or other promotional items. They are ideal for any youthful market and can be easily incorporated into any marketing program.

Don’t take a vacation from promoting your brand in the summer. Instead, extend the fun of summer by creating a marketing campaign that ties into the relaxed atmosphere summer brings. Be sure to pick products to support your initiative that will be used over and over again by the recipient.

Best Promotions has a great selection of summer promotional products at multiple price points to assist you in your search. http://www.bestpromotions.com/products/browsecategory/293/

Why You Should Launch Your Own Web Directory

One of the easiest types of web sites to launch is a link directory. Just download one of the free or inexpensive PHP software packages, install, configure, add some categories, add some links and you’re off! Having your own directory isn’t a bad idea, despite what some pundits might think, for a number of reasons which I’ll outline.

Directories attract motivated users, who are eager to promote their own web sites. Just today, there were almost 82,000 new domains registered in just six of the top level domains (.com,.net,etc.) Of these, a large number will surely wind-up being used for web sites. Add to that the thousands of new hosted blogs and web pages, and you have many thousands of new web sites being born each day, and therefore thousands of webmasters looking to generate backlinks to get their sites on the Internet map. All of them will surely submit their links to the big league search engines and directories, but a fair percentage will also seek to add them to as many not so popular directories as possible. A portion of this traffic could be directed at your new directory without much effort on your part. I don’t know of any other type of web site that doesn’t contain nudity and that can attract traffic so quickly!

Now that you know that your directory can be a traffic magnet, you can use it to increase backlinks and visits to your other sites. One of the ways you can do this is by requiring or suggesting a “three way” reciprocal link to another of your web sites. Requiring it will lose you some people, but on the other hand some will comply, whereas if you make it optional, the vast majority will decline. If you prefer, you can require a backlink to the directory itself, but one way links are usually preferable not just for you, but also for the one submitting. You can also give your other sites a boost by adding links to them in the directory. Since you’re the boss, you can give them a more prominent placement by making them featured links. You can also add “deep links” to them, that is URLs other than to the main page. Deep links are said to be rated higher as backlinks by major search engines.

Set your directory to accept only opt-in submissions. That is, submitters must include a valid email address and then receive a message with a confirmation link they must follow. By requiring an email, you build a mailing list which you can legitimately send messages to, being careful not to abuse this privilege. Such messages can have links to your other sites, or the directory itself, effectively recycling the submitters rather than letting them disappear forever. One way to keep in touch is to have an e-newsletter which provides directory or seo updates. If it includes interesting and useful content, adding advertising shouldn’t result in protests.

Building email lists comes with a warning label: a fair number of emails you’ll get will be throwaway addresses that the submitter uses only for this sort of thing. In other words, the user won’t be reading your newsletters. You can safely presume any address containing the word “spam” is bogus, but beyond that it’s virtually impossible to filter bogus emails just by using your eyes. Although it would be possible to compile a list of such domains and reject any address whose hostname part matches, your directory software won’t have support for such filtering.

Of course, you have to be careful to not turn your directory into a link spam generator. Start by making it a niche or language-specific directory, specializing in certain kinds of sites. The temptation is to accept all links submitted by making it a general directory in an effort to maximize the number of visits, quickly turning it into a site of dubious merit. Nonetheless, you can have it both ways: create a separate category tree for unrelated sites. Whatever you do, don’t make a clone of Dmoz, or even a portion of it. Create your own original directory structure and populate the categories with your own carefully picked links. Human edited directories are genuine, whereas clones will tend to be sneered at.

You’ll need extreme patience managing your own directory, since you’re guaranteed to receive buckets of “spammy” links. You recognize spam when you see a bunch of submissions with the same IP address, or that deal with the same or similar topic, or with the same description. The proper course of action is to mark these links as spam, a function which your directory software should support. You’ll also waste a lot of time changing the category selected by the submitter, which almost always is wrong. It’s unlikely the big name sites will submit their link to your lowly directory, thus in the interest of maintaining a high quality database, you should first populate it yourself with as many relevant, quality links as you can.

I don’t want to mislead you: any web site needs to be promoted to succeed, and directories aren’t any different. You’ll have to go through the motions and submit your directory’s link to a big bunch of other directories to get things started, and use every other means available to get exposure. Listing your site in “directories of directories” such as Directorycritic, is particularly important, as that’s where a lot of new site owners will be looking for places to submit their link. You could also suggest your directory to a multitude of site submission services and programs, but only do this if you have some use for the email addresses this will generate, since the people who submit to your directory via such services actually won’t visit your site at all (a robot will submit their data for them.) Most submission services stick to the big name search engines and directories, but there are some who submit to several hundred lesser known directories using a specific software, particularly Phplinkdirectory.

Which directory software package should you get? Well, the choices are quite limited if you’re looking for something that’s relatively easy to install and configure, as well as having a lot of features. Almost everybody uses either Phplinkdirectory, eSyndicat, or Indexu, all of which are php-mysql based. eSyndicat sells for 75 USD for a one site license, Phplinkdirectory will set you back 80 dollars per site, while Indexu charges the most at 99 USD per site. However, Phplinkdirectory offers a cheaper version, at 30 dollars per site, but that means you’ll have to display a link back to their site. They also offer a much older version completely free.

Indexu is the only one that’s lets you download and test their full version for free, although the other two do have online demos you can preview. All three products have a variety of free plugins to extend your directory’s functionality, as well as templates. It’s very difficult to say which of these packages you should pick, though I would put Phplinkdirectory in the third spot owing to my personal experience with the product and the company, which I’ll be writing about in an upcoming article. For more webmaster tips, visit http://www.Cgiware.com

7 Steps To Creating An Information Product That Can Make You Money While You Sleep

If you write on a regular basis or even have lists of FAQ’s (frequently asked questions), you have enough content to create an information product to give away or sell. Set aside an afternoon to gather and arrange your content and piece your product (free giveaway/pink spoon, e-report, e-book, e-course) together. Once you have done the groundwork and added your final details the rest of the process can simply be outsourced in order to automate the sale and delivery of your product.Here’s how:
1. Create a spreadsheet with 3 columns using these headings:
*Title – the title of your content or topic of the article
*Summary – a short description of the content
*Category – specific to your content. For example, I categorize my content as Home Office Organization, Marketing, Time Management etc.2. Gather all your content together and fill your spreadsheet with the above information for each piece of content you have. Use your blog posts, articles and FAQ’s.3. Sort your spreadsheet by the ‘Category’ heading. This will group together all the content within the same category giving you a good overall picture of the quantity of content you have for each category.4. Determine how you will package this content. Your options are to:
*create a short e-report as a free giveaway to build your list
*create an e-book to sell (generally priced between $10 – $47)
*create an e-course complete with assignments and set up the information to be delivered over a 4 – 6 week period or even longer (generally priced higher than an e-book)5. Create a new document in a program like Word. Build your product by laying out the content you have chosen to use by copying and pasting it into your document. Play with the order and formatting.6. Proofread your document. Add content to connect pieces where needed or subtract content to ensure your material flows and is easy to follow.7. Congratulations! You now have the foundation of your info product. Finishing touches include the addition of:
-headings
-subheadings
-images
-table of contents
-cover page
-conversion of file to PDF formatNote:* You may also want to add a headshot and your bio written in third person on the last page. This can include a call to action consisting of an invitation to check out one of your related products, programs or services.* After your product has been created it is time to launch. You will need to have a sales page and a plan for ongoing marketing and promotion of your product to encourage sales or sign ups in the case of a free giveaway.* Decide how you want to accept payment. You can use a shopping cart system or PayPal.Tools you will need:
a. A program like Word and/or Excel to organize your content and piece it together into a product.
b. A website to announce your product for sale or invite visitors to sign up for your free offering.
c. A shopping cart program to set up, deliver and sell your product and communicate using autoresponders.Remember, once you have assembled your product you can outsource the technical aspects of the process. A Virtual Assistant can create your sales page and automate the process by adding “buy now” buttons or a sign up form doing all the back-end work on your site and in the shopping cart. This will ensure that sign up, purchase and delivery of your product operate seamlessly.Whether the goal is to grow your list or make more sales or both, product creation is a great way to boost business. It is a one-time creation and set up process that is fully automated. Once you have invested the initial time and effort it will work for you over and over again. It is a very real possibility that while you’re in dreamland at 2:00 am a visitor to your site will make a purchase proving that, yes, you really can make money while you sleep!

Make Money on Internet – Promote the Product Not the Program

Allan Gardyne a well-known affiliate marketers on the Web, gives various pieces of advice in order to earn money online. Promote the product and not the program is one of these ones. However, some people seem to have not listened to this uttermost advice of one of the successful men on the net.For Gardyne there are thousands of ways to promote affiliate products, but the worst way of doing it is promoting the programs, since the important thing to do is to assess your own skills and interests, using your strengths.He explains that he wrote and launched a newsletter. He also contributed to online forums and spent a lot of time answering emails at the beginning. Things that work for him but that have not to work for others.For example, to earn money online he recommends to create ezine ads if you are good on that and then link them to a free report, that you divide into a series of articles in order to promote and place them on an auto responder.But there exist other key points you have to look for before choosing an affiliate program to promote and make money online such as: a site that has a high conversion rate or looks as though it has, an excellent product that will appeal to your niche market, a high commission (40%-50%), programs that pay residual incomes or lifetime commissions.Gardyne suggests also earn money online to try the product before promote it. He likes to study and use the products he is promoting, because if you like the product you will talk about it with more enthusiasm and your writing will show that, increasing your sales.Despite other experts consider that is better to offer your own products by the Web to make money online, you do not need to do that to succeed online, according to Gardyne though it is an excellent idea, if you want to get ahead fast.