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Too many times, marketers focus on the medium being used to transmit their message, instead of concentrating on the message itself. An effective marketing message will be effective no matter what medium is used to transmit it.

The trick is to know how to construct an effective marketing message. Luckily, this doesn’t involve deals with the devil, mystic VooDoo rituals or ancient Chinese secrets. (Unless you want to base your chances of business success on Satan, a dead chicken and a fortune cookie, in which case have at it.) There’s one simple method that is present in all effective marketing:

An emotional connection.

Let’s play a game. Look at the following group of letters and tell me what they mean:

Now, let’s look at those same letters, in the same order, but presented in a different way:

I’m going to bet the second group is easier to comprehend, easier to remember, and has more of an impression than the first group. Why? The same “message” is contained in both, but in the second case the message was constructed to play upon your preconceived mental images and emotional connections.

I don’t mean that proper marketing uses acronyms (although they don’t hurt at all)…in the second case, you don’t have to explain what “FBI” stands for, or “CIA”, “NASA”, etc. Your readers will automatically have a mental image pop into mind when they see them.

No one has to be told what the IRS is, but AIRS could be anything.

Let’s look at this from a completely different angle; Hollywood movie pitches. Pretend for a moment that you’re a movie studio executive, accepting one-sentence pitches for new movies. You’ve got $50 million dollars to invest in a movie…all you’re looking for is a sure-fire idea. (After all, you had to mow a lot of lawns to build that $50 million up!) Here’s the first pitch:

“A balding guy runs around in American cellars and caves, find treasure and solving mysteries.”

Okay…not too bad. It might even have potential. Now, let’s hear the next one:

“It’s ‘The DaVinci Code’ meets ‘Indiana Jones’!”

Which movie do you have a clearer picture of in your mind? They both describe the “National Treasure” movie franchise, but which one makes it easier to envision how great it could be?

Now, are you trying to sell balding guys in cellars and caves, or two blockbusters added together?

To bring it closer to home, I want to point out David over at Marketing Integrity, who explains what his company offers with the acronym “Mi4″. Read this from his site:

So what on earth does Mi4 stand for? Well, it certainly does not have anything to do with “Mission Impossible“…because with Marketing Integrity, your marketing will not be Mission Impossible!

Seriously, though…there are 4 M’s and 4 i’s that serve as the foundation principles of this business:

The 4 M’s represent the areas in which we serve you:

Marketing – Management – Media – Ministry

The 4 i’s represent our guarantee to you:

Integrity – Innovation – Inspiration – Illumination

Finally, the Mi also stands for the obvious: Marketing Integrity.

Notice how he made sure that potential customers make the emotional connection between his business and the “Mission Impossible” movie franchise by pointing out that it has nothing to do with the movies. (Sorry if I gave the farm away, David!)

Don’t focus on standing out…focus on being memorable. And the best way to do that is to form an emotional connection with your customers, and one of the most effective ways to do that is to help your customers make an association between your business and something they already have an emotional connection with.

While not right for everyone, there’s one method of marketing on the internet that is overlooked by many…affiliate marketing.

One of the more prolific ( and most successful) affiliate marketing systems available today is the one from Amazon.com. In your travels around the web, I’m sure you’ve seen something like the bar to the right more than a few times.

This has turned into a very successful marketing tool for Amazon, because the legions of people spending time, money and effort promoting and marketing their products only get paid when a sale is made.

“Sure, Dave,” I hear you saying, “I already know all of this. What does that have to do with me?”

If you’re not using affiliate marketing with your online business, you should. And if you don’t think your online business is compatible with affiliate marketing, you haven’t spent enough time “outside the box” while thinking it over.

If you sell a product (as Amazon does), then affiliate marketing seems obvious, but if you sell a service you can still take advantage of the power of affiliate marketing, because what you’re really selling is your expertise.

So why not write an ebook in your area of expertise?

This isn’t the frightening prospect you think it is. True, you may want to hire a professional writer to put your knowledge into the proper form, but it will take less time than you think, and accomplish several things:

1. It will increase your standing as an “authority” in your field.
2. It will lead people to your website that might not otherwise find it.
3. It will lead to an additional revenue stream!

When it comes time to start up your affiliate program, there are services available that take care of the process for you, with Clickbank being one of the largest. After that, you can also let your present customers know through your regular email newsletter that an affiliate program is now available, giving them the opportunity to make money while promoting your product.

This can lead to an increase in sales, because the best salesperson you can have is a satisfied customer.

Here’s my question for you…have you used affiliate marketing, and what were your results?

If you had the opportunity to either tell ten people about your business or tell one million, which would you do?

I’m really hoping you said “ten thousand”.

Marketing is nothing more than telling people about your business while prompting them to take action. And while it’s true that marketing to ten pre-qualified targeted people will always give a higher percentage of conversions, they don’t let you pay your light bill with conversions. Sometimes, you have to put the marketing blowgun away and bring out the shotgun. Why?

Simple…if 80% of those ten people make a purchase from you at $10 each, you’ll have $80 in your pocket. But if only one percent of the larger group acted on your marketing message and spent that same $10 each, you would see a revenue of $10,000. And guess what? According to Jupiter Research, the average conversion rate for untargeted marketing email is 1.1%.

If you segment your list and mail to a targeted group, the conversion rate jumps to almost 4%.

There is a very good reason why companies are willing to pay millions of dollars to have one thirty second television commercial run during the Super Bowl…it’s the numbers game. Of course, to make the most out of getting your message in front of a ton of people, you’ve got to track your results. I’ll talk about that (and what should be in your email marketing message to improve your conversion rate) next week.

Your best potential customers are the ones you already have.

Everyone knows that repeat business can be a big key to success, but there’s another aspect of your customers you need to keep in mind…the best marketing you can receive is a current customer recommending you to their friends, family and co-workers.

I’m not talking about multi-level marketing…while many make a nice profit with that business model, talking your Great Aunt Mildred into buying her laundry detergent from you (no matter how much her clothes may smell) isn’t the point. What I am talking about is your customers selling your business for you to others that trust them.

Seth Godin wrote a very interesting book on marketing called “Unleashing The Ideavirus” (which you can download as an ebook for free from Seth here; I heartily recommend reading it), where he refers to people that effectively spread your message “sneezers”, which leads to a very valid point:

Make it easy (or even profitable) for people to “sneeze” for you. 

This can range from a discount coupon your current customers can pass along to others, a discount on referrals, an affiliate program that pays for every sale someone makes for you, or even free products for those that refer paying customers.

What you provide may be the best thing to come along since squirt cheese in a can, but you’re not going to see your product’s full sales potential until you motivate your customers to join your sales force, and make it easy for them to do so.

Don’t forget to appeal to the “what’s in it for me?” instinct that your customers have, and you’ll see what’s in it for you…and possibly even your Great Aunt Edna.

Here’s the question of the day…do you not only make it easy for your customers or subscribers to market you, but give them an incentive to do so? If so, what results have you seen?

Believe it or not, this isn’t a guide to the best print shops to have posters done to hang up at the bus stop. I mean a completely different kind of posters…forum posters.

There are many ways to utilize internet forums to further your marketing goals, and many reasons why you should.

The first (and easiest) method is to become a member of a forum that concerns your niché, and then become an active poster there. When doing so, make sure you link to your website or blog in your forum signature. In most cases, this is allowed by a forum’s TOS, and your signature can even contain a short slogan or marketing message. (Keep in mind that writing posts promoting your business is a good way to get banned from most forums…keep the promotional efforts in your signature!)

Now that I have you asking why this would be worth the trouble, let’s look at the benefits:

1. If you become a frequent poster on a forum related to your business or blog, you can increase your standing as an “expert” in your field.
2. Every post you make will contain your link, which means that every forum thread you post in is a free ad for you!
3. The link in your signature will also count as a backlink in the eyes of Google (in most cases), helping to increase your pagerank.

All good reasons to do this, right? Well, let’s look at the potential negatives before you get too excited:

1. If you become a frequent poster on a forum related to your business or blog, and write posts that show you don’t know what you’re talking about, it can harm your standing as an “expert” in your field. (Yes, even on forums, it all comes back to “quality content”.)
2. Forums can become addictive, sucking up your productive time.
3. If you’re a brand-new member of a forum, it will take time before you’re viewed as anything but an “outsider” on a fairly large percentage of forums…especially if it seems you’re there to promote yourself.

Luckily, there are ways to get around all three of these problems if you like…rent forum signatures (although, ironically enough, the best option to purchase forum signatures is often to check out various forums). There are forum signature marketplaces that do just that…broker the sale of links in the signatures of active forum members to business owners that would like to reap the marketing benefits of forums without spending the time posting.

How much will you have to pay for this? Believe it or not, $1USD for every 100 posts your link appears in (or $10USD per 1000 posts) is not an unusual rate. And also keep in mind, the link you provide can be anything that doesn’t violate the TOS of the forum in which it will appear.

Link to your home page, your blog, or a specific landing page designed to convert forum traffic into an email opt-in signup, newsletter subscription or membership purchase; one penny per link is an inexpensive enough rate to experiment and try different approaches.

Here’s my question to you…have you ever purchased forums signature links for marketing, and if so, what results did you see?

At some point, I’m sure you’ve heard of Google Pagerank (or PR). What you may not understand is why it matters to your website.

Google is, of course, the leading search engine on the internet. As a result, once your website or blog is indexed, it will more than likely become the largest source of “natural” traffic. At least, if you play the game correctly.

Pagerank is Google’s “grade” of your website, ranging from zero to ten. The higher the number, the better your PR. Google’s algorithms compute this score using a variety of measures, but general consensus is that backlinks are the most important part. The more sites that link to you, the higher your PR, and sites that have a higher PR than you pass along more “link juice”, boosting your PR more than a link on a site with lower (or no) PR.

Believe it or not, that’s the simplified version.

Pagerank isn’t updated in real-time; Google performs an update every few months, with no set schedule. (The last PR update was at the start of January 2008, so the next one will probably not happen before March or April 2008)

The question most people ask when discovering PR is “Does it matter to me?” Opinions vary on that question, but here’s my answer: For the most part, no. (I would like to take this opportunity to ask Google to please not destroy me.)
PR can be a good indicator of the success of your marketing efforts, since the higher your pagerank is, the more relevant and well-known Google considers your site to be on its subject.

However, I disagree with those that feel that PR is a measure of your website’s worth. For example, let’s compare two hypothetical sites:

• Site A has regular traffic and generates an average of $1000 per month in revenue, but only has a PR of 3.

• Site B is a blog, has quite a bit of traffic, a PR of 6, but has generated a grand total of $100 in revenue since it launched a year ago.

Which one is more valuable?

If you go strictly by PR, the blog is twice as valuable as Site A. However, if your goal is revenue, then it’s a fairly obvious choice. However, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to grow your pagerank, and here’s why:

The steps you should take to increase your Google PR are the steps you should already be taking to grow your website. 

• Fill your site with original quality content
• Network your site with other websites
• Market your website
• Make sure your site is SEO optimized, to give you better placement in search engine results

If you do these things, your online business will succeed, and your PR will go up as well…even if you never know it.

Obviously, there was no such thing as “online marketing” in the 17th century (probably due to incredibly low bandwidth), but you can still learn something from marketing methods in that time period…specifically the town crier.

When someone takes their business online, and especially if they have an online-only business, the impulse is to promote it online. That’s an effective idea, but there’s something you may be forgetting about your customers.

They’re not “traffic”, “hits” or “vistors”…they’re people. Your goal isn’t to get more “traffic” to your website, it’s to get more people to your website. And that’s who you need to market to…people, wherever they are.

Here’s a question…how many ways have you tried to drive traffic to your website that don’t involve the internet in the last six months? If you answered “Ummmmm….none?”, then you’re literally selling yourself short.

There’s a reason eBay spends millions of dollars on print and broadcast ads…they want to reach everyone. I’m not saying you should go ahead and place you bid for a slot in next year’s Superbowl broadcast, but there are some simple methods you can use to promote your online business offline, which brings us back to the town crier.

Town criers were, for a long time, the best way to get a message out to everyone in a community…they were one of the first “broadcast advertising” methods. And today, word-of-mouth is still an incredibly effective way to advertise.

Use it!

Tell your friends, your relatives, your acquaintances…heck, tell the guy you’re standing in line with at the theater. Have business cards on hand to help direct people to your website, and scatter them around like confetti. Hang fliers in high-traffic areas. Heck, hire a skywriter. It doesn’t matter what method you use, it only matters that you do it.

Don’t get caught up in thinking only in terms of online marketing for your online business. There are potential customers around you every day…who knows how many of them might never find you unless you tell them in person?

I’d love to hear what offline methods you use to market your online business…share them below!