William Tincup was featured recently in John Sumser’s Top 100 Influencers, which is a running series that Sumser is doing on recruiting and HR professionals who have made an impact in our industry. While Tincup isn’t a recruiting agency guy, he is a self-employed professional services guy, just like many of you. Tincup, along with Bret Starr, co-founded their company Starr Tincup in November... (more...)

The manner in which you open your marketing call remains the most important element of the call because in order to achieve success you need to accomplish a minimum of three things within the first 30 seconds: You must get your prospect’s attention. Nothing else matters if you do not gain their attention. You must eliminate or at least not create a “reflex rejection” — an automatic negative... (more...)

Yesterday’s part 1 of this series detailed the right mix of marketing, PR, and social media for recruiters today. Now we continue with the right ways to build your social media brand. 6 Steps to Build Your Social Media Brand Secure your vanity name on all social media sites. As mentioned earlier, the “Big Three” are LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. For a full list, Google: [Social Media... (more...)

We live in exciting times. Remember the mid ‘90s, when the Internet was growing exponentially? It opened up the world with speed of communication and spread of information. The Internet continues to transform the way people live and how businesses operate, including ours — search and recruiting. Now we manage databases and use new tools to efficiently prospect, manage relationships, and deliver... (more...)

In the world of recruiting, seldom are recruiters good at all aspects. In fact, it is more the exception than the rule, but we continue to think that with the right training, a new recruiter will become an outstanding researcher (thus, an expert in our niche); have the ability to identify and recruit A talent; be adept at marketing; and land wonderful “we need this person now” opportunities. Nothing... (more...)

Recently, many of the calls and emails I have received address the same subject: candidate marketing. For example, here is part of the message I received from a strong regional client with multiple offices and specialties: “In these challenging economic times, should our consultants be spending 50% of their time servicing existing clients and 50% of their time marketing candidates?” As... (more...)

>>2 Salary Scripts for Candidates I recently led a class called, “End Game: the final critical stage in getting your candidates hired.” One of the things I discussed was providing your candidates with exact scripts for their interview process. The topic where this is most relevant is the question of salary. You want to be sure that your candidates memorize their answer to this employer... (more...)

Marketing Software as a Service (SaaS) represents a much better value than installed marketing software. If your company uses or sells marketing software, you might want to consider a hosted software as a service or a hosted environment as a service rather than hosting it yourself.  Users can eliminate the headache of maintaining and upgrading the software, while vendors can establish turn-key hosted environments for their customers without rewriting the software. Moreover, marketing firms can demo and share applications and data in real-time with their clients without changing internal networks.

A single application that runs in your web browser has its benefits. However, a Hosted Marketing Software Environment (Environments as a Service – EaaS) can be more effective.  EaaS can be a full-service, managed, hosted, marketing environment. If you wish, your environment can include customized Windows Desktop environments with Microsoft Office Professional (Outlook, Word, Excel, Publisher, PowerPoint, and Access) and everything your marketing organization needs, including all the software, data, and hardware necessary to work from any machine anywhere.

A good hosting company hosts the software and tools you already use, eliminates your dependency on equipment, maintenance, support, and training, and provides fully managed support, even including an understanding of your marketing software applications and managed web browser requirements. SaaS and Eaas enable marketing businesses to concentrate on marketing .

From the Marketing Software Desk…
“The benefits of Hosted Marketing Software Environments are huge – There is no need to implement software upgrades, pay for maintenance or add more hardware. We are able to host our Internal and External Marketing Applications all in one place. They even negotiated better Marketing volume license pricing for the software we use.”

When comparing SaaS or EaaS to web hosted software, consider the following:

Hosted Marketing Software Environments are:

• Web Browser Independent – browser based applications run in a browser managed by the hosting company
• Bandwidth Independent – reducing your ISP expenses
• Fully Managed – software updates and upgrades are applied with your review and approval.
• Not Dependent on local Equipment – reducing or eliminating client-side maintenance and IT costs.

Browser based Marketing Software Applications are:

• Web Browser Dependent – there may be issues with different browser and web browser versions.
• Bandwidth Dependent – requiring additional ISP cost to your clients and users
• Semi-Managed – You manage your browser, equipment and network when you have issues.
• Dependent on your existing equipment – adding to your existing maintenance and IT costs.

Managed Hosted Software Services

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An affiliate program and a few quality affiliates can generate massive amount of sales for your business.  The aim is to get other website owners, with high traffic, or people with large email subscription lists and newsletters to promote your products and services to their visitors or subscribers.

Sounds easy? Not always. For one, most of these webmasters are already affiliated with other product owners or your competitors. They would be silly not to if they do in fact have good traffic or a large subscriber base.

Do not risk failure.  Don’t  start your affiliate recruitment until you have completed the following steps. 

• A professional looking website including your company information, “about us” page, well written Home page copy, help and FAQ pages, privacy policy, software end-user licensing agreement, contact information (with telephone number if possible) and at least 8-15 500-word content pages related to your niche, offering valuable information.
• Research and monitor your competion.
• A professional affiliate program with a well known network(s)(discussed next)
• Affiliate content such as banners, text, links, e-mails etc to help affiliates easily promote your product.
• A good commission rate, depending on the competitiveness of your market and how high a rate your competition offers.
• QUALITY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

To recruit these super affiliates, as they are called, you need to be able to offer something with comparable or more value then what they are currently promoting. Consider the following strategy:

• First and most important, a good affiliate never promotes sub-standard products or services as they know risking the trust of their visitors and subscriber base is business suicide.  Don’t think about recruiting the top affiliates until you offer products or services of similar or more value then your competitors.
• Second, tempt potential affiliates with high commissions per sale. As high as 75% may be needed to lure a top affiliate. This seems like a lot, but the resultant sales can far outreach your direct sales potential. Furthermore with these customers on your “list”, you can promote other products to them. People that have already bought from you are often 10 times more likely to buy from you again (compared to prospects who have not bought from you before) due to the trust that develops by offering a valuable product in the first purchase.
• Third, the most successful product and service-based businesses online are multi-faceted businesses that offer a low cost product or service initially, at very high commission payouts (to lure the affiliates), which in turn builds their customer list, which then allows them to promote higher priced products or “professional version” services on the back end. This is how companies manage to buy pay-per-click and other traffic at such ridiculously high prices at an initial loss, but still turn a big profit and annihilate their competition in the pay-per-click bidding wars.

As you can see, affiliate marketing involves monitoring and researching your competion. Nobody builds a successful LONG TERM business on the Internet without a good product and a trustworthy “expert individual” or company backing the product. If you can’t offer a product or service that is better then your competition, then you need to position your product uniquely by focusing on its benefits that differentiate your software from your completion. Find your USP!

Begin by signing up with as many affiliate networks appropriate to your product or service to get it out there and seen by thousands of potential affiliate marketers. Simply list it on as many networks as possible with the “hope” that affiliates will see and begin to promote your products.

Don’t miss this step. It’s easy and will contribute to your growth. More importantly, these networks offer payment processing and other services useful to your company, and also offer options to the affiliates you will try recruiting later on. Many of them will have a preference for a particular network, so you want to make sure you are available on their network of choice, to make the process as easy as possible for them. Once you have signed up on these networks, review each carefully and you will find different tools and options they offer that can help you promote your product or service successfully within each network.

Note: Due to most of them offering their own payment processing, it can sometimes be a pain to manage, and will require some effort, but the end result of all this visibility can be very rewarding.

Are you ready to start recruiting your super affiliates? If so, guess what? We are not going to tell you how!

This is because we are firm believers in getting experts to perform tasks that we do not perform. This is especially true with regards to affiliate recruitment since you most likely have only one chance to get those “top 10″ power affiliates, sometimes less in smaller niches. Don’t  risk the possibility of instant success and hundreds of sales a month or day, by trying to do so yourself with minimal or no experience in affiliate recruitment.  Do yourself a favor and speak to some experts in affiliate recruitment and management. Just like the PPC management firms, they are only successful if you are successful. Your time may be better spent training staff on other  types of marketing within your niche.

Here are some options:
http://www.partnercentric.com

Application Marketing and Software Hosting
Website Design – Keyword Research – Competitive Research – Link Strategies – Submissions
Deep Linking – Link Building – Article Marketing – Pay Per Click – Affiliate Marketing

For more detailed information about how our Managed Application Development and Hosting can help your business
Contact Application Solution Providers at 866-764-8324, Send an email, Submit an Information Request

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Pay Per Click advertising works well as long as you know what you are doing. Success also depends on the product or service you have and the competitiveness of the target market. It’s even possible to know within a week of launching your campaign, if it is profitable or not, thereby allowing you to make decisions quickly to minimize any losses you may incur on an unsuccessful campaign.  It allows you to measure your advertising spending versus sales revenue so you can make sure you profit or know when to quit. Pay per click can generate instant traffic and sales, but can also spell disaster if you aren’t careful.

Pay Per Click Advertising refers to services such as Google Adwords, (These are the ads that appear on the right side of Google’s search results, and on websites with Google Adsense) Yahoo Search Marketing, etc.  For this article, we will focus on Google Adwords. Once you are successful here, its easy to duplicate the campaign on other networks.

First, if you already have some sales data, you want to try to determine what your conversion rate is from user visit  to purchase.  With this rate, you can determine what you can afford to pay per click and still be profitable.

Basic Math…

• Lets say your are a software vendor, you get 200 visits a day to your website, 100 downloads a day and 5% of the downloaders purchase your software. That’s about 150 sales a month. Your software costs $67. That’s $10,050/month.
• You then work out how many visits converted into sales. 200 visits a day x 30 days = 6000 visits a month. 150 sales a month x 100 downloads / 6000 visits a month = 2.5% conversion rate of visits into sales.

You want to make a 50% GM on your software and spend only $5025 per month on advertising to make total sales of $10050/month. You need to divide the advertising expenditure you have by the number of visits you currently receive per month, which will show you the cost per click you can pay to reach your target. In this case $5025 / 6000 visits = $0.8375 per click. This may be a reasonable amount in some niches and impossible in other more competitive niches.

If you don’t have this sales data yet, you can use Adwords to send traffic and start tracking your conversion rate to obtain the data you need.

You can sign up free for google adwords. Then proceed to (https://www.google.com/adsense/adsense-resources ). This will allow you to go through the free tutorials and training that Google provides. This is almost enough to start a successful campaign. After all, Google wants you to succeed and continue spending with them. Go ahead and sign up to start familiarizing yourself with the service.

Google wants your ads to be relevant. Since Google’s business is providing quality search results for its users, it does not want irrelevant ads cluttering its search results. They have therefore introduced the “Quality Score”, which scores your ad, keywords you bid on, and the page your ad links to, based on relevance to each other.

Simply put; If you bid on the “Video Conversion Software” keyword phrase, then your ad should include this phrase in its title and description, and the page that it points to should be information about this exact topic (at least 500 words of text).  This will generally get you a good quality score. Sounds simple? You’d be surprised how many people get it wrong!

Your quality score will also be influenced by the click through rate that you get in relation to the number of times your ad appears in a search result for users (called impressions). The assumption is that if nobody is clicking on your ad, then its not relevant to what the user is searching for. Keeping above 2.0% click through rate will generally keep your quality score high.

A good quality score allows your ad to rank higher in the search results while maintaining a low cost per click. It’s possible to rank better than a competitor at a fifth of the cost per click, simply because his ad and landing page text may be less relevant to the chosen keywords than your ad. This can be the difference between profitability and failure.

Below is a link to a free report on how to run a successful pay per click campaign, recommended by many of the top Internet marketing “gurus”.  http://www.creativedigitalmedia.com/dominate/frank/    By the way, these guys run a very successful PPC management company,  so if you are thinking about outsourcing your pay per click marketing, give them a call. They will review the market for your product or service, and won’t take on any projects they don’t think will be successful.

If you are a beginner, you may want to sign up for Hexatrack. A free membership is available that will allow you to track 4 groups of 10 keywords for free, before you need to register. This can be more then enough for a single product or service. If you need to, they offer a paid membership, which allows you unlimited access. Go through all their tutorials to maximize the value you receive from the service.

In summary, pay per click is competitive, but viable, sometimes hugely successful and other times disastrous. Fortunately, in almost any market, there is a path to take to a successful campaign. If you have the budget, I’d recommend leaving it to professionals who have proven track records over the years.

Application Marketing and Software Hosting
Website Design – Keyword Research – Competitive Research – Link Strategies – Submissions
Deep Linking – Link Building – Article Marketing – Pay Per Click – Affiliate Marketing

For more detailed information about how our Managed Application Development and Hosting can help your business
Contact Application Solution Providers at 866-764-8324, Send an email, Submit an Information Request

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