EXPO 2020: Can Dubai Fill The Skills Gap?
Always keep in mind these four rules:
1. You are a resource for the media.
2. It’s never personal.
3. The media can change the rules, but you can’t.
4. All that the media think about is what you can do for them and their audience.
Once you’ve established a media contact, stay in touch with that person, email being the preferred method of contact these days. Play by the media rules. They have the upper hand. They have the power. It’s very important that you stay on their radar screen. Remember this and you’ll become a public relations superstar!.
Websites and List Building
If you’ve decided to market online, the first rule of which you should be aware is the rule of ‘thirds’. You should determine the budget you’ll have for online marketing, then invest one-third in developing your site, one-third in promoting your site and one-third in maintaining your site. Most ill-advised online marketers invest three-thirds in developing their site, then wonder why they aren’t earning landmark profits.
I could write a whole book on Internet marketing but, in a nutshell, here is the three-step process on Internet marketing.
1. Begin with a wonderful product or service.
2. Create a motivational website.
3. Promote or send emails (to your list) with hyperlinks to your website.
This brings me on to the topic of list building which is a process of defining your market, setting your objectives and then figuring how to establish warm and trusting relationships with the people on your list.
Firstly, make sure you get permission from people to be on your mailing list. The term for this process is called ‘opt in’. Let your prospects decide whether they want to be on your list. If they opt out, that’s cool because you won’t have to waste time, money or hopes on them. If they opt in, they want to hear from you and they’ll anticipate each contact from you. People who opt in will never consider your email to be spam.
Secondly, you can get some of those names by offering a free newsletter, free report or free e-book on your site. The idea is to offer valuable free information—especially unique data that is not available elsewhere—and keep a list of people who sign up or order your freebie.
Contests, sweepstakes, free e-zines and joint ventures are more obvious ways to add names to your list. You’ll attract many more with your blog and your participation in forums and groups, especially on social media sites. You’ll begin with a few names at first. Keep it up and you’ll get 5,000, 10,000, 50,000. People aren’t changing that fast. They still love valuable free information.
Social Media
Let’s just look at some latest statistics: There are over 1 billion users on Facebook, 750 tweets a second are delivered through Twitter, LinkedIn has over 200 million members and 1 million groups and the Google +1 button is used over 5 billion times a day. So this must tell you that you need to not only be up-to-speed on how to use these platforms but also be using them on a regular basis.
Social media has made it easy for anyone without a marketing budget to get results similar to those of corporate companies spending millions. One of the best ways to use this platform is to follow the 3 rules of successful social media marketing.
1.
2.
3.
All that remains now is to pick one or more of these Guerrilla Marketing strategies and start applying them to your training or consulting business! Let us know how you get on!
Sohail Khan is the World's Top Joint Venture Business Expert and Head of Business Development for Training Magazine Middle East.
He is also author of 'Guerrilla Marketing and Joint Ventures' with the late Jay Levinson.
http://www.MillionDollarPartneringBook.com
Marketing That Works! - Feature