Thursday, March 21, 2013

Tight Budget? Try These Online Marketing Ideas

Small businesses often despair at the spending required to compete for customer attention in the noisy online and social media marketplace. A helpful Entrepreneur magazine article recently cited some online marketing ideas that will fit into even the tightest budget. Those ideas include getting an endorsement from an influential local celebrity; starting your own LinkedIn group to leverage traffic from your professional network; publishing comments on influential niche blogs in your market; creating an interesting call-to-action YouTube video, which you can film with your smartphone and edit using free software; and finally publishing your own lead-generating e-book about a relevant issue (Amazon will do it for free and give you a 33% take on each sale to boot). You may have noticed something about these "free" strategies: They may not cost you in actual dollars, but they do cost in terms of a commitment of time and patience. That said, if you can't afford to buy online leads, you can still work effectively to woo them. For details on these tight-budget online strategies, see the article at http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226146#

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

FTC Updates Online Marketing Guidelines for Mobile

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued new guidelines for online advertisers now that so many consumers are connecting to the Internet through mobile phones and tablet computers. The new guidelines say online ads need to make clear product disclosures even on the smaller screens of smartphones and tablets. Disclosures about product claims should be "as close as possible" to the claim itself even on a small screen, and marketers should also avoid delivering required ad disclosures through pop-up windows and hyperlinks. The FTC announcement amends guidelines dating from 2000, before the surge in mobile device use.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-03-12/ftc-updates-online-marketing-guidelines-for-mobile