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By Maureen Rogers
We’re still getting all the renewals updated so I’m still sending the Bu$iness of Herbs to many whose memberships are over. Enjoy it J Current members are getting a weekly Marketing 101 newsletter in addition to The Bu$iness of Herbs. Every week you get a simple (or what I hope is simple) step to take to improve your marketing skills. Occasionally there are some neat videos, this week two on preparing for a talk. When you renew, you’ll get the links to past ones so you won’t miss out. I’m reading everything I can find and we’re covering the dutiful social media as well. If I get an invitation to attend one more webinar on the subject, I’ll scream. So renew at www.herbnet.com/shop and start promoting your business. Cheapest advertising and marketing info you’ll find.
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Far
away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can
look up and see the beauty, believe in them and try to follow where they lead.
BITS & PIECES
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I do believe in homeopathy but this came through one of my lists and I have to laugh. If this seems less than holy, oh well.
http://quantavie.net/2009/07/homeopathic-resuscitation/
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When Business
is Slow and cash is low, what can you do? There are times when a business goes from generating extra cash to generating not enough cash. Any business that has been around for a few years will experience the ebb and flow of our economy…especially in a recession.
One way that comes to mind usually is to run a price promotion. It is easy to do and will often fill the immediate need for short-term capital. It’s especially easy if you have an active, loyal email customer list. Long range, it’s likely to hurt though. I don’t mean to imply that price promotions are all bad. They are often good. Close-outs or special promotions will help both the supplier and the customer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Recent research has given new scientific evidence to the long-held empirical belief that elderberries possess antiviral activities. The research involved a specific, reproducible elderberry extract developed by HerbalScience Group LLC, and succeeded in identifying key chemical components of the extract that inhibited in vitro infection and were shown to bind directly to Human Influenza A (H1N1) virus particles. The binding blocked the ability of the viruses to enter host cells, and thereby effectively preventing H1N1 infection in vitro. An article detailing the study has been published in the peer-review scientific journal Phytochemistry. The article's authors are affiliated with HerbalScience Group, a Naples, Florida, and Singapore-based company dedicated to applying advanced science and technology to the production of botanical drugs and nutraceuticals, and with the Univ. of Miami. The research results are notable not only because they identified and characterized two specific flavonoids (plant nutrients that are beneficial to health) that are the major contributors to the anti-influenza activity of the elderberry extract, but also verified how the flavonoids provide that benefit, via direct binding to H1N1 virus particles and blocking the virus from infecting host cells. "Our studies on the elderberry extract have enabled us to identify the key bioactives that contribute to its antiviral activity, and begin to understand how the mixture of natural chemistries present in elderberry functions," says Randall Alberte, CSO of HerbalScience Group. "Using methods, technologies, and procedures that are standard in the pharmaceutical industry and new technologies developed by us, we're able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the elderberry extract in inhibiting viral entry into target cells and effectively blocking its ability to reproduce." Central to the research was the use of a direct analysis in real time time-of-flight mass spectrometer which is able to detect, identify with high accuracy, and quantify the hundreds or thousands of individual chemicals present in botanical extracts. When this technology is combined with HerbalScience's Platform Technology, this information can be used with other data to rapidly identify the key bioactives present. The elderberry extract used in the study is the result of technology that enables the company to standardize the chemical profile of any selected botanical in order to deliver a compositionally and functionally consistent product that is effective and safe. The patented technology was developed for the company by researchers in botanical and natural products chemistry and plant biology, as well as experts in supercritical CO2 and affinity absorbent extraction technologies, methods used for extracting plant phytochemicals. The company's proprietary and environmentally friendly technology is able to extract a broad diversity of phytochemicals from botanicals and produce a consistent and reliable chemical "fingerprint" for each dose. The scientists also developed a process that enables the beneficial chemical compounds in botanicals to be enhanced while removing any harmful compounds like heavy metals and pesticides. Source: HerbalScience September 11, 2009 _____________________________________________________________________________________________
This is a real pet peeve of
mine and Seth Godin talks about it on his blog
Promiscuous dispersal of
your email address I just went through the hassle of trying to get some B2B firms the details needed to give me an informed quote on a project. I visited eight sites. Six of them hide their email address. They use forms of one sort of another. One firm refused to accept more than 500 characters in the "how can we help you" box, while three of them wanted to know what state I was in, etc. Email
contact is like a first date. If you show up with a clipboard and a
questionnaire, it's not going to go well, I'm afraid. The object is to earn
permission to respond. If you sell something, set up an address like "sales@xyz.com". Put this on your home page, "contact us if you're looking for more information or a price quote." Sure, you'll get a lot of spam, but deleting spam is a lot easier than finding customers. (Hint, ask your IT people to make it a mailto link, with a subject line built in. That way, you can use the subject line to find the good email). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How to Write Content for the Web By Jennifer Kyrnin About.com
Don't just copy the print marketing One of the most common mistakes that a beginning website owner does is to just copy and paste the marketing materials from the pamphlets onto the website. Writing for the Web needs to be different from writing for print. The way the Web works is different from print and the writing needs to reflect that.
Write for USA Today readers, not the New York Times
It's not a reflection of how smart your readers are
- it's a fact that the Web is international, and any page you put up is going to
be viewed by people with all levels of English knowledge. If you write to a
lower level audience you'll be sure to keep people interested because they can
more readily understand.
If you think of your content as a pyramid, the
broadest coverage of the topic should be listed first. Then move on to more and
more specific as you get further into the page. This is useful to your readers,
as they can stop reading and move onto something else once you've gotten as
specific as they need. And the more useful you are to your readers the more they
will want to read your content.
Resist the temptation to write in "marketing-speak".
Even if you're trying to influence your readers to take a specific action, they
are less likely to do it if your page feels like fluff. Provide value in every
page you write so that your readers see a reason to stick with you.
The Web is not a good location to write your novel,
especially as one long page. Even a chapter is too long for most Web readers.
Keep your content to under 10,000 characters per page. If you need to write an
article that's longer than that, find sub-sections and write each sub-section as
a stand-alone page.
SEO is important to get readers. But if your writing
is to obviously geared towards search engines you will quickly lose readers.
When you write for a keyword phrase, you need to use the phrase enough so that
it's recognized as the topic but not so much that your readers notice. If you
have the same phrase repeated in a sentence, that's too much. More than twice in
a paragraph is too much. Use lists and short paragraphs
Keep the content short. The shorter it is, the more
likely your readers will read it. Solicit feedback from your readers
The Web is interactive, and your writing should
reflect that. Asking for feedback (and providing links or forms) is a good way
to show that you recognize that you're writing for the Web. And if you include
that feedback in the article the page stays dynamic and current and your readers
appreciate it. Use images to expand on your text
Images can be tempting to sprinkle through pages.
But unless you're a photographer or artist, having random images spread through
your documents can be distracting and confusing to your readers. Use images to
expand on the text, not just decorate it.
All of these rules can be broken. Know your audience
and know why you're breaking the rule before you do so. Have fun with your Web
writing, and your audience will have fun with you.
Free Press Release Distribution Here's the dirty little
secret of most free press release distribution services. When Journalists Ignore Your Releases This week, seven
Publicity Hounds have tips for Joel Kweskin of Charlotte, NC, who needs advice
on how to get his press releases published. He has sent many releases to
journalists, with little success. There are many ways to drive traffic to your website, but when you’re starting out you’ll want to focus mostly on free traffic. One of my favorite ways to get free traffic is by writing and submitting articles to article directories. I submit most of my articles to EzineArticles.com. (Make sure you include your website’s URL in the blurb or bio that runs with the article.) Another good way to get free traffic is through social media marketing. Search for blogs and forums that are related to your niche and answer questions and post comments. Most forums and blogs will allow you to link back to your website. Just be sure that you are providing good content and that what you have to say is relevant to the forum’s or blog’s subject matter. Keep in mind that most of the people you attract to your website by submitting articles and through social media will not purchase anything from you - at least, they won’t purchase anything on their first visit. But that’s why you have the opt-in form - to capture their contact information so you can keep bringing them back.
Words To Use In Your Marketing Pieces So People Will Buy What You Are Selling !
As I review the pieces, two things happen to me. I get very frustrated trying to figure out what they are selling, and I also get angry that I have to spend my precious time trying to find out.
The people who produce these pieces are probably very smart, are professionals, and supposedly they are trying to help me solve some problem I might have. But not one of them has produced a piece that grabs me by the throat and jumps out at me saying, “Ken, here’s something for you.”
As a result every one of these pieces fail in their attempt to make a sale.
You must grab your prospect’s attention immediately.
Selling really starts from the first word that your prospect sees. So, your first words had better be your strongest words, because if they aren’t, you’ve failed.
Before you put together another marketing document, review the following items:
If
your pieces don’t do this, then you need to follow what I am going to review
now. Remember these four words:
These
words contain the secret to starting marketing pieces that sell.
Opening with an offer… At some point in your life you must have gone into a store and bought something on sale only because it was on sale. If you’ve bought only because of the sale, you bought because of an offer—a special condition that induces you to buy right now. Give
your prospects a special reason for buying now. The “now”, as much as the
product itself, is what gets your prospect to buy. Think of reason for getting
your prospects to buy now. Here are some.
So,
consider starting your pieces with an offer. Always restate the offer over and
over again in the text that follows, including the PS.
Opening with a testimonial… People buy products and services because it’s delivered benefits to them. That’s why you should open with a testimonial. You
don’t want general testimonials. Use testimonials that tell the prospect
specifically what the satisfied buyer has achieved and benefits with it. The
strongest testimonials are not general; they are specific. Make sure your
testimonials emphasize not only benefits but also the offer itself.
Here’s an example. “My profits are up 30% with the (product). That’s great, but
what’s even better is that I got a month’s supply free when I took advantage of
this special offer.” Open
with pain... One
of the two main reasons why people buy anything is because they are in pain.
Hitting them with a strong statement about their pain makes a lot of sense. Which
is a stronger opening? “Here are some facts about our Vitamins” or, “ Of
course, you want people to look at you, but not because you’re fat.” The second one is about the prospect and promises to do something to help the prospect avoid the pain of being fat. The
truth is people in pain know they are in pain and are often desperate for help.
They are only interested in the results your product can give them. The extent
to which you drive home the prospect’s pain is the extent to which you have
gained their attention and begun to persuade them to buy what you are selling. Open
with a benefit... This
last one is the best. A feature is a fact about the product or service, whereas
the benefit is what the buyer derives from the feature. To
make benefits work for you, write down every feature of what you are selling and
force yourself to list the corresponding benefit. Then lead with the strongest
benefit.
Opening with an offer, testimonial, a statement about the pain or with benefits
which the prospect will get will make your marketing piece very strong. I
guarantee it. Don’t hesitate to combine these four to make a stronger opening. Try
an offer + pain + benefit. The extent to which you open your marketing piece in a way that:
is the extent to which your piece will be read and your product or service will be bought.
You already know how powerful links can be when it comes to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. As Search Engine Specialist Alexis Siemon says: “A link is a shortcut to quickly get you from one website to another. If you can harness the power of the link, you can make your website a force to be reckoned with. That means higher search engine rankings, more traffic to your site, and, eventually, more customers and more money in your pocket.” But though more and more online marketers are learning about SEO and how it can help deliver lots of quality traffic to their sites, the powerful little link is still a mystery to many. One question I frequently get is about “link juice.” What is link juice? It is the key to your popularity with the search engines. The more you have, the higher you can rank in the search engines’ results. To understand link juice, you first need to understand another SEO term: Link Popularity. Link Popularity is a metric that most search engines use to gauge the “popularity” of a Web page based on how many other Web pages link to it. You could think of it this way: Each link to a Web page that a search engine finds on the Internet counts as a vote for the page it’s linking to. The more links that are pointing to one of your Web pages, the more “popular” a search engine will consider that page to be. Search engines consider popular pages to be highly relevant. Since they are interested in presenting the most relevant search results to their users, they’ll give popular pages a high ranking. And this will improve your SEO, put your website in front of more search engine users, and ultimately result in more traffic and more potential sales. But that doesn’t mean you should ask all your friends to link to your site. You don’t want a link from just anybody. You want links from sites with lots of link juice. Link juice is a way to describe the “weight” a specific link might carry. A link with more weight is going to be more important to the search engines. Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say you’re trying to get a job. Your potential employer is going to be more impressed by recommendations from your boss at your previous company than she will by recommendations from your mailman or your dentist. You could have 100 letters of recommendation from your college buddies, but one powerful letter from the CEO of a business you used to work for will do a lot more to convince her to hire you. It’s the same with the search engines. Each Web page has a certain amount of clout - or link juice - that it can pass to another page. How much is not really something you can accurately measure, but you can get an idea of how good a link is (how much link juice it has) by looking at a few variables: 1. How many links are pointing to the page? If a page has hundreds or thousands of links pointing to it, chances are the links on that page have good link juice that can be passed on to outside pages (like your page). Let’s say MortgageBroker.com has a ton of link juice. If you are in the mortgage brokerage business and get this site to link to you, it could pass on a lot of link juice. (It’s like getting a job recommendation from the top dog in your industry.) 2. How many outgoing links does that page have? Pages with too many outgoing links (20 or more) usually have less link juice than pages with 10 or fewer outgoing links. That’s because sites with too many links to outside sites aren’t as choosy. Think about it this way: If a food critic rates every restaurant she visits as “5-star,” you might not believe she’s got a very discerning palate. But if she gives her top recommendation only to a few restaurants, you would be more inclined to try them out. After all, they are the only restaurants she likes out of thousands. If a page has lots of links pointing to it and a small number of links pointing out, it’s probably a good page with plenty of link juice. A link on that site pointing to your site would be beneficial to you. 3. Is the page that links to you in a similar niche? It’s important to build up links to your site, but you must make sure those links come from sites that complement yours. In other words, don’t request links from sites that are about mortgages if your business is about sporting goods. 4. How much real content does the page have? Pages that have very little content and are mostly made up of outgoing links have less link juice to offer. The best links are usually from pages that have lots of “real” content and a small number of incoming links. Once you’ve found a site that has a lot of link juice, request a link from it. Remember, the more link juice you can get, the higher you will rank with the search engines.
Contributed by Edwin Huertas
Are Vampire Words Sucking the Life Out of Your Writing?
It’s nothing new. E.B. White recognized the problem in his revision of Strunk’s Elements of Style:
White was writing back in the 1950s, though. With the internet making writers and publishers of us all, those little words aren’t just leeches: they’re full-grown vampires. And they need to be stopped.
As well as White’s “Rather, very, little, pretty”, there’s a few other words you might recognize in your own copy. Here’s a few examples:
These
are all qualifiers: wishy-washy qualifiers at that. They suck the life-force
from a red-blooded sentence. They make readers yawn, or switch off, or lose
confidence. So
stop qualifying. Start being
bold and direct. Sure, you might risk a few
pedantic types taking issue in the comments – but you’ll be keeping the rest of
your readers gripped. When
you edit your copy, hone in on those words that are sucking your sentences dry.
What grabs you? “You may see fairly impressive results” Or
“You’ll see impressive results” Grab
a piece of your copy. Go through it and highlight every qualifying word you can
find: adjectives and adverbs. Here’s an example, from
Ten Timeless Persuasive Writing Tips: Want
to convince your readers to do something or agree with your point of view? OK,
that was a silly question. Of course you do.
Persuasion is generally an exercise in creating a win-win situation. You
present a case that others find beneficial to agree with. You make them
an offer they can’t refuse, but not in the manipulative Godfather
sense. If
you take a word out, would the sentence still make sense?
“Silly” and “Beneficial” are obviously necessary. “Manipulative” isn’t
grammatically essential, but it makes the meaning clearer. When
you’re not sure with a word like “generally”, ask yourself whether it makes the
sentence stronger, or whether it’s draining its life blood.
“Generally” is the one word that could be cut, to make the sentence read
“Persuasion is an exercise in creating a win-win situation”. Clear Those Suckers Outta Your Headlines The worst place for a vampire-word to lodge itself is in a headline. A quick reminder from How to Write Magnetic Headlines: “On
average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will
read the rest.” Want
more people to make it past the headline? Then don’t put a vampire in their way. Don’t
write “Fairly Recent Research May Indicate…” Write
“New Study Shows…” Don’t
write “Some Reasons Why List Posts Usually Work” Write
“7
Reasons Why List Posts Always Work” Don’t
write “Why Your Blog Might Not Be Making Much Money” Write
“Why
You Can’t Make Money Blogging” You
get the idea. What To Do With Your Vampire Words We all know how to deal with vampires.
Cut
those words right out of your copy, and don’t look back. About the Author: In between watching episodes of True Blood, Ali Hale occasionally gets some writing done. She’s a freelancer, a post-grad creative writing student, and a blogger for several sites, including her own Aliventures on “getting more from life”.
Tel. +1.905.640.6677 Fax. +1.905.640.6641
Goodwood, ON L0C 1A0 Canada everything herbal!
10 Surefire Ways to Curb Shopping Cart Abandonment
1. Determine if you really need a "view cart" page. Many companies have "view cart" pages even though they don't really need them. If users are abandoning on your "view cart" page — or the two subsequent pages — definitely test your process. Ask yourself the following questions:
Decide if you need to make a few tweaks or a complete
overhaul. Your decision will depend on your customers, your days to sale,
whether there's purchasing authority involved and so on.
2. Reduce, eliminate or delete as many navigational
elements as you possibly can in the checkout.
Users don’t need distractions — they need to place their orders. Don’t worry,
they don’t need to disappear for long; you can offer them again at the
confirmation page.
3. Use big buttons.
The bigger, the better. Buttons leading to the next step should be bigger than
the ones leading to the previous step. And next-step buttons should be to the
right.
4. Use a picture of a Wilford Brimley-type (read:
old-fashioned Santa Claus) in the right-hand column of your site.
Why Wilford? You need a picture of someone you’d give your money to. (And no,
not for a lap dance. Someone, er, a little more reputable.)
5. Offer alternate ways to contact you, in several
different places. Put your phone number at
the top, bottom and right-hand column of your site. Your email address should be
in those three areas as well. Fax numbers and postal addresses should be in the
right-hand column and along the bottom. You don’t want phone calls? Tough
bananas. Users won’t call you unless they need to — that’s why they’re on the
web in the first place. If they call, something is likely wrong with your site
or they’re in the category that won't place orders online, even with incentives.
For some groups, this can account for more than half of the people.
6. Address privacy and security on every view.
Users need to see this every time they scroll down
to a new page.
7. Show payment method icons.
Tested, these icons work better than just showing the
text links or line-listing drop-downs. Remember: People see things in pictures,
not in text.
8. Collect a secondary email address.
Very few companies do this, but it’s a very effective
way to collect “good” names.
9. Use a temperature bar.
Yes, it's ugly. Deal with it. 10. Review your error handling messages, presentation and choices. For many, this is a huge issue and can result in up to 15 percent of your abandons.
Of course, there are pitfalls
too. A fake business Twitter account can cause severe backlash. "Janet," a fake
Exxon employee Twitterer caused some problems, even if the intentions were good.
Because of its relative anonymity, it's important to monitor your company on
Twitter. Try
TweetBeep - you
can enter keywords and URLs and be alerted every time someone tweets about it,
even if they use a shortened URL.
TweetScan is
another good one. There are some good examples
too.
Whole Foods uses
Twitter to answer customer service questions, post news about the industry and
their products and share recipes. They have 7,940* followers, as of this
writing. But here's the thing - they follow 8,489 other people on Twitter.
They're not just responding to people because they "have" to, they are actively
seeking connections.
Southwest Airlines
is another active Twitter user. One of the ways they use the site is post
special deals and savings. Connecting successfully with consumers on Twitter follows much the same pattern as other forms of social media.
Of course, to be successful,
you need to build a loyal following. Check out
Twellow. You can
search for Twitter users by industry and category. Target users with lots of
followers and high activity rates and start making friends.
TwitScoop shows a
cloud-based view of activity on Twitter and you can also use it to find and
track conversations by keywords - another good way to find active users in your
industry.
Just Tweet It is
another good tool to find like-minded people. Once you start following some
people and have some followers,
Twubble can make
friend suggestions based on those people. And since you likely already have a
blog with some loyal readers, make sure they know about your Twitter account.
WordPress bloggers can install a
Twitter widget. Finally, just because Twitter
is a phenomenon without borders, that doesn't mean it's not useful for local
services and businesses.
TwitterLocal
provides a feed of Tweets when you enter your location and range you want to
search. The TwitterLocal Leader Board identifies the top twittered locations
(Tokyo is first, followed by New York) and top twitterers in those locations - a
good way to find local influencers. * Whole Foods gained another five followers on Twitter by the time I finished writing this article. See what I mean?
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Monopolize Search Engine Results with a Blog and Social Media
The concern seems to be that if they optimize their
blog for the keywords they're targeting, they are in fact competing against
their own Web site, and thus their own self-interest.
However, as long as all your properties are
funneling traffic to your Web site for conversion, or able to handle conversions
themselves, you have nothing to worry about.
It's more like the game of Monopoly: the more
properties you own, the more traffic you're likely to get. (Except in this case
people are happy to be your guest.) In fact, if you add optimized, quality content at YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, and other social media sites, you can really start to monopolize Google's search results for your targeted keyword phrases. And since photos, videos, and localized content are becoming more prevalent at search engines, you don't want to cede that opportunity to your competition.
Not only are you helping out your customer or prospect
in that case, you're creating content that can help drive more prospects to your
blog, Web site, or social media presence. Just remember to create keyword-rich links back to relevant pages on your site so you can continue the conversation.
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5 Ways to Market like a Psychotherapist
Does
that thought make you uncomfortable? Or even seem a little creepy?
American psychiatrist Jerome Frank put it eloquently over forty years ago:
psychotherapy is the art of
Persuasion and Healing. A
good therapist needs to do more than just teach her clients to have more
positive feelings. She
actually needs to sell those feelings, in order to get the results her patients
want. Psychotherapy sells the “good” feelings In
Persuasion and Healing, Frank said: “[S]uccess in therapy depends in large part on its ability to combat the patient’s demoralization and heighten his hopes of relief. All forms of psychotherapy do this implicitly, regardless of their explicit aims. Progress in therapy, in turn, further shifts the balance toward the ‘welfare emotions’ […] such as love, joy, and pride, so that, with luck, the process becomes self-enhancing.” So
psychotherapists promote these positive or “welfare” emotions. Why
would that be marketing?
Because when your dog pees on your carpet or someone cuts in front of you on the
freeway, you need to be sold on why staying cool is more productive than going
berserk. Like
any smart marketer, the psychotherapist needs to determine the right time to
“sell” the patient on feeling good instead of bad. She needs to be mindful of
emotional intelligence literature, which shows that emotional health is dynamic,
and that it’s healthy to fluctuate between non-welfare and welfare emotions. (In
other words, as every good copywriter knows,
negativity isn’t always a bad thing.) Psychotherapy sells ideas and attitudes When
you see your psychotherapist, she has to do a lot of persuasive work to convince
you that you’ll get over that failed relationship. Your grieving heart has a
hard time believing a word of it. She has to work to persuade you that even though all of your life you were trained to be nice, being assertive is actually okay.
Sometimes marketing propels us to buy stuff, and sometimes it persuades
us to adopt ideas and attitudes. The process isn’t actually all that
different. And even when we’re selling products, we often need to do the work of
selling ideas first. How to market like a psychotherapist To market like a psychotherapist, you can start with these five basic steps:
About the Author: Melissa Karnaze writes about the intelligence of emotions on Mindful Construct and Twitter.
R-Herbary.com
Branding Helps Connect With Consumers
The Secret of Brand: It Is a Promise At the heart of Zappos' brand
was a promise to provide excellent customer service. Zappos advertised its
customer service and often told the press about its commitment to providing
exceptional shopping experiences. For example, Zappos representatives often told
members of the media that although the company was based in Las Vegas, Nevada,
it had a shipping operation in Kentucky, which was, said Zappos's personnel, a
stone's throw from FedEx's shipping hub. This meant, according to Zappos, that
it could get your order to the shipper faster than its competition. The company
also publicly announced that it paid trainees to quit because it wanted only
committed employees taking care of its customers. Essentially, Zappos was
successful because they made a brand promise—great customer care—and they did
everything they could to live out that promise. Make Your Own Brand Promise While it may not be realistic for your online store to try and match Zappos' brand success, you can still develop an authentic brand promise and enjoy the success and opportunities that come with a solid reputation.
Try to develop a single
sentence that describes your company's brand promise. Once You Have a Brand Promise, Live Up To It An effective brand promise will
be evident in every aspect of your ecommerce operation, including your website,
your customer care, and your advertising. And if you are really going to gain
some equity from your brand, you need to make the promise a systemic part of
your operation. For example, let's imagine that you sell extra large shoes for guys with extra big feet, and your brand promise is to "provide hundreds of shoe styles in sizes 13 to 20 at competitive prices." This brand promise would inform your actions. You might personally contact hundreds of shoe manufacturers asking them only about their larger sized offerings. You could—if you had big feet—personally test every style that you sell, since finding and trying out shoes would be consistent with your brand promise. Having done this work, you
could send out a press release about how you wear a different pair of shoes each
week and then write your own review of the shoes, posting those reviews to your
own website. In the release, you could mention that if you don't like the shoe
you stop carrying it. Summing Up A brand is really a promise and a relationship that can lead to many happy shopping experiences for your customers and increased profits for your business. It is also a defining mission statement that can and should guide how you do business. In the long run, well-branded companies outperform the no-names.
Insurance.....for most things Don't forget we've found great insurance for ingestibles (that's anything that goes in your mouth) like teas, tinctures etc.....Contact me for the details.
...Till next issue
Maureen
Maureen Rogers The Herb Growing & Marketing Network www.herbworld.com and www.herbnet.com PO Box 245, Silver Spring, PA 17575 717-393-3295 email: herbworld@aol.com
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