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(And kill it at the same time…)

1. Use a services like PayPerPost or sponsored reviews and pay someone to blog positively about your product but don’t worry if the blog is completely off topic to your market.
2. Sign up a bunch of fake alias in multiple forums, answer a few questions, and then start flogging your product to yourself.
3. Create a few splogs loaded with scrapped content and loaded with relevant keywords and then blog about your own product.
4. Spam all of your friends and ask them to Digg and stumble your blog posts daily until you have no friends.
5. Create a FaceBook fan club for your product and invite everyone you know and do weekly updates to everyone even if they didn’t join the group.
6. Offer your product for ‘free’ to prominent bloggers only if they write something nice about you
7. Buy a whole bunch of fake traffic and then put your site up for sale on SitePoint telling everyone how much major traffic you have, then cancel the auction and tell everyone, that you site is way too valuable to sell.

Got any more fun ones?   Add them in the comment field.

The trade show floor is full of different types of people with different agendas. Some people have specific goals for attending the show; others do not. As an exhibitor your observation and questioning skills will be your key to determining who may be a viable sales prospect. Familiarize yourself with the various visitor types likely to frequent the tradeshow floor.

1. Definites. If you have done a thorough job of preshow marketing, definite prospects and customers will visit your booth.

2. Demonstration Junkies. Watch out for passers-by who are attracted to your booth by a demonstration or other activity. These could be valuable prospects or time wasters. Ask a few short, open-ended questions to find out.

3. Curiosity Cats. These types could be curious about anything - what exactly your company does, a graphic, who designed your booth, and so on. Do not spend too much time with someone who is just interested in the design and construction of your booth or intricate details about your graphics.

4. Paper Lovers. Some people love to collect literature or just take any piece of paper no matter what it is. Are they attending the show to research the market for a boss? If so, they may be an influencer worth pursuing.

5. Eyeballers. These types are usually extremely friendly; they smile and their whole body language says, “please talk to me.” Questioning will determine whether or not they are prospects worth pursuing.

6. Jeopardy Gigolos. Winning contests is their passion. They are always ready, willing and able to drop a business card into a fishbowl for any kind of drawing. Contests that require more than just a business card to enter will help deter these types from finding their way onto your follow-up lists.

7. Keepsakers. Any kind of giveaway attracts these types. They may even want more than one for family, friends and colleagues. Keen questioning will ascertain if this visitor has potential.

8. The Disinterested. Some people in the crowd will simply not be interested in what your organization has to offer. They often let you know in no uncertain terms through their body language; for example, walking by purposely avoiding eye contact or chatting with a colleague. Waylaying these types will only upset them.

9. Hawks. These people attend shows for the sole purpose of selling you their products or services. Publication advertising representatives are a prime example. They are unlikely to be prospects, but you never know. If floor traffic is slow, it may be worth asking a few questions, if only to find out who they could refer you to.

10. Job Seekers. Trade shows are an excellent place to network and look for organizations who may have present or future job openings. As with Hawks, you may want to spend time with them during slow, unproductive periods.

11. Nonentities. These types could be underlings in their organization sent to do some specific research. Never underestimate them. They may be extremely strong influencers. In addition, they probably know whom in their organization you need to contact. Time spent with them could be invaluable.

12. Snoops. Beware of the competition! These types often give themselves away by knowing too much or asking precise questions. Make sure that you do more questioning than talking so that you lessen the chances of giving away valuable information.

Written by Susan A. Friedmann,CSP, The Tradeshow Coach, Lake Placid, NY, author: “Meeting & Event Planning for Dummies,” working with companies to improve their meeting and event success through coaching, consulting and training. Go to http://www.thetradeshowcoach.com to sign up for a free copy of ExhibitSmart Tips of the Week.

Finding innovative and unique ways to distribute your information about your product or service is key to success on the Internet. Here are five ways to help you increase your success.

1. Directory Linking

Create separate directories for each topic on your web site. No more than 25 — the major search engines will bounce you out, or black list you, if more than 25 on any one page. A few years back the search engines didn’t make this distinction, however, now they do.

Always request that your web site be listed on other people’s web site. All they can do is say no. However, they might say yes. Design an template e-mail for this request. You can do so in a “signature” as well in Outlook.

Have a few different sizes of directly linking paragraphs available for quick submits.

2. Bonus Advertising or Exchange

Do you have a product or service that doesn’t sell well?

Let others add it to their offers as a bonus. Offer it as a freebie for someone else’s product or service.

Create a template e-mail that others can use to cut and paste into their e-mail or broadcast system to send out to their subscribers. Goal — make it as easy as possible on the receiver to propel the information to their lists.

3. Trade Autoresponder Space With Other Businesses

Find others who send out information with autoresponders. Exchange ad space. You will want to keep the product or service exchange to noncompetitive or complimentary to your product.

You can agree to exchange top or bottom or middle space.

Let’s say you send out articles via autoresponders. Add their ad in between the article.

If you are an affiliate, add a sales pitch and link into the various articles. Keep the number down to one or two ads per article. That is if you want people to keep requesting more articles.

4. Voice Mail Tip Line (This is my favorite!)

Start a free quick tip line. Offer a daily, weekly, or monthly tip on your services or products through your telephone voice mail system.

Some people change their message daily as to their availability. If daily, create enough for five days a week for three months. That is a total of 60 quick tips. After the three months, start the segment all over again.

Add an ad for an upcoming event or the next place you are speaking.

Quick tips are best though. People will leave more messages and you will not feel guilty about letting the phone call go to voice mail.

5. Content Swap

Exchange articles or other content with other web sites. Who are your gatekeepers for your business? Find their web sites, exchange articles.

You could trade articles, top ten lists, etc. Both parties could include a resource box at the end of the content.

If you know of their service or product personally, write a two-liner testimonial.

Catherine Franz, a Certified Professional Coach, specializes in infoproduct development. Newsletters and additional articles available: http://www.abundancecenter.com blog: http://abundance.blogs.com/inthelight

If you are reading this article online, you may belong to the group of people who are fanatically enthusiastic about online activities. You shop online as much as possible, purchase digital products, email friends and family rather than pick up the phone, and consider requests to meet with you in person unnecessary and peculiar.

Understand, however, that you belong to a minority. The vast majority of people, even those you encounter online, keep Internet contacts in perspective. They prefer to personally select the vegetables they buy, they read paperback books and they attend face-to-face seminars.

I’ve been thinking about this because nearly a year ago, I launched an online mentorship program designed to deliver support, guidance and resources in technologically advanced ways like a password-protected discussion board, member-only teleclasses and searchable online articles. I designed it for the convenience of busy people who won’t need to travel, I thought.

Almost as an afterthought, I announced an in-person seminar with the same focus as the online mentorship program. To my surprise, the total number of participants in this seminar (repeated every couple of months with a different group of participants since then) is running slightly ahead of the number of members in my online program.

Why do people like seminars? Here’s what I’ve learned so that you won’t overlook these powerful wants and needs.

1)Concentrated learning. Some people like to experience education in a focused, intensive time frame rather than interspersed with all their other activities. This can be especially powerful for those who are reevaluating something they’ve been doing for a long time, searching for fresh perspectives or facing challenges that they cannot get a handle on.

2)Social interaction. Seminars are fun because they enable people to get to know a bunch of others in a setting that makes it easy to get to know one another. Sometimes people living in separate regions of the country sign up for the same seminar to see each other and learn at the same time. Often people make friends and find clients amidst the socializing at a seminar. Very often the career-changing suggestion or insight comes not from an official leader or presenter at the program but from another participant.

3)Getting away. For women with children, going out of town to a seminar and letting the spouse take care of the home front is a delicious treat. For others, a seminar in an appealing location offers the prospect of tax-deductible travel and relaxation.

4)Learning preferences. Some people know that they get breakthroughs and galvanizing perspectives not from books or the Internet or recordings, but from real, live people in a face-to-face setting. An online program has little or no appeal for them.

5)Synergy. In a well-run, well-selected seminar, all of the above factors work together to produce surprising experiences, valuable insights and worthwhile new relationships. Somehow the whole proves more beneficial than the component parts.

So if you believe that face-to-face seminars are old-fashioned, impractical and rather useless for today’s Internet Age, think again!

Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books. She runs an online mentorship site, MarketingforMore.com, which supportsbusiness owners who are growing their businesses. Download her free report, “Charge More & Get It,” at http://www.marketingformore.com/survey.htm. Or find out about her upcoming Marketing for More seminars at http://www.marketingformore.com/seminars.htm.

Whether you’re a former retail store owner known for your creativity, a championship bridge player, or a psychotherapist with a long current waiting list for openings, if you possess expertise that makes colleagues and aficionados want your pearls of wisdom, you can create a new income stream with an online mentorship program.

Such a program charges a fee for people to sit at your feet and learn from you. The program would have a special focus (not for everyone) and offer information, resources, advice, insider tips and problem solving. While a mentorship program could take place in the “real world,” it is especially easy to set it up, promote and run it online.

Before I created my online mentorship program, MarketingforMore.com, in the fall of 2003, I did extensive research on fees and features of other programs. I looked most closely at seven examples whose fees ranged from $30 a month to just less than $600 a month.

At the lower end of this spectrum, $30 a month didn’t give members very much personal access to the expert around whom the program revolved, while at nearly $600 a month, a member received just about unlimited private access to the expert. Likewise, the program with the lowest fee accepted anyone who applied, while the higher fees required application, with no guarantee of acceptance.

Features in the online mentorship programs I looked at included some or all of these: * Topical teleclasses or conference calls * Member newsletter * Member-only articles * Feedback and advice from the designated expert * Discounts on products and services * Free books, tapes or reports * Free in-person meetings * Group discussion board

You should do this research yourself to see who has a program similar to yours, what they charge and what they offer. Join a couple of mentorship programs and learn from what you like and don’t like in what they do.

When you decide to go ahead, you can either buy a readymade software program for running such an online program or create your own web site. Membergate (www.membergate.com) is the best and most reliable such tool, with a one-time licensing fee of $3,500 and up. Since my husband is a programmer, we built our own site with a password-protected area and an online application for prospective members to fill out.

However much or little you decide to charge, it’s essential for members to feel they’re getting their money’s worth, and that means that you must offer quite a lot of member-only content, with fresh material added often. I not only quit one mentorship site but also asked for my money back because it didn’t live up to the promise of listings that were updated daily and the site owner appeared to be nowhere in evidence.

Be flexible in what you’re willing to offer members. I started off thinking that a member-only discussion board was the best way for members to get feedback and advice from me, but I learned that while some members loved that, others preferred the exchange of ideas in a live conference call. So I added those to my program.

Because I thoroughly researched and planned before launching my online mentorship program and have remained determined to have members think they’re getting an unbelievable deal, MarketingforMore.com got off to a successful start and has continued to grow. Good luck cashing in on your expertise!

Marcia Yudkin marcia@yudkin.com is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books. She runs an online mentorship site, MarketingforMore.com, which supports business owners who are growing their businesses. Download her free report, “Charge More & Get It,” at http://www.marketingformore.com/survey.htm. Or find out about her upcoming Marketing for More seminars at http://www.marketingformore.com/seminars.htm .

Did you know only 20% of the information on the internet is accessible through Google?

That’s right, the majority of the info you need to plan a great account entry strategy is on the “hidden web” housed on secure servers.

But in sales today, it’s imperative to know as much as you can about your prospects, their business and their industry prior to meeting with them. Armed with in-depth information, you can craft enticing phone messages and develop a compelling account entry campaign that is literally irresistible to prospective buyers.

And you’re busy too! You can’t afford to spend 1-2 hours every day searching through a bunch of irrelevant sites filled with worthless drivel.

Fortunately there are shortcuts to finding those invaluable nuggets of information.

Last week I interviewed Sam Richter, President of the James J. Hill Reference Library - one of the best online business libraries in the entire world. He took me into the “hidden web”, telling me about a multitude of sites I’d never heard of before.

After talking with him, I raced home to my computer eager to find out the scoop on some of my hot prospects. Without spending too much time online, I found some great information that I can’t wait to use.

If you’re pursuing business with a big company, looking for more data on an industry or need to find good prospects, check out these sites:

• Corporate Information http://www.corporateinformation.com This site is full of detailed information on public companies. Registration is free, but required. After typing in my prospect’s name, I had immediate access to 27 highly relevant articles supplied by various analysts. A goldmine!

• Edgar Scan http://www.edgarscan.pwcglobal.com Incredible information on public companies. You can do benchmarking against competitors on it too. I loved the graphical display of the financials and trends.

• News Link http://www.newslink.org It’s often hard to get good info on companies headquartered far from where you live. At this site, you can find and search the local press which generally carries more information, more often.

• Thomas Register http://www.thomasregister.com Full of info on manufacturers; great for identifying other companies similar to your best customers. For fun, I entered in “printed circuit board makers” and found 183 of them - five in my own state.

• Biz Stats http://www.bizstats.com More good benchmarking info. Lots of financial ratios and statistics. Small businesses can see how they compare to others in their industry too.

• Archive http://www.archive.org When Sam told me about the WayBack Machine, I didn’t believe him. Take a look at how your prospect’s website looked all the way back to 1996. Great for researching companies involved in mergers/acquisitions. Interesting to see the historical perspective.

• Biz Journals http://www.bizjournals.com With press coverage in over 60 US markets, you’ll find in-depth information coverage of your prospects. Also sign up to be notified when any articles are published about your prospects anywhere on the network.

• American Association of Association Directors http://www.asaenet.org/find/ If you need to know more about an industry, check out this site. Find and contact the relevant associations to learn about industry trends and key players.

• Glossarist http://www.glossarist.com/glossaries/business Need help understanding business terms and acronyms? From “abandonment options” to “zero sum game” you’ll find all the definitions you need on this site.

These sites should get you started, but there still are sites you can’t access. If you want more information, check your local library. They often subscribe to these “hidden” databases.

And I can’t say enough good things about the James J. Hill Reference Library. (Check it out at http://www.hillsearch.org ). For a small annual fee, you have online access to an incredible trade journal database, the best of business website, D&B, a special issues index and much more. You can do your research at home or in your office. Best of all, you get live help (online & phone) from a specialized business researcher who can shave hours off your searches.

On a final note, a recent survey of 23,000 purchasers of business-to-business products found that 76% of the buyers were sick and tired of sellers who didn’t understand their business.

Knowledge is power in sales. Be prepared - learn about your prospects, business and industry. Figure out how to align your offering with their strategic initiatives and critical business issues. Come up with ideas to solve their problems or achieve their objectives.

Alignment and ideas - that’s what it takes today to get your foot in the door of big companies.

Jill Konrath helps salespeople get their foot in the door and win big contracts in the corporate market. Sign up for her free e-newsletter by sending an email to jill@sellingtobigcompanies.com . You get a free “Sales Call Planning Guide” ($19.95 value) when you subscribe.

Most paid-for internet advertising is a complete waste of money!

I’ve tried them all! OK, I got some results from some methods. But it was very rare to make a good PROFIT - often the cost of the advertising was higher than the income generated.

I used to marvel at high traffic websites, wondering just how they managed to generate so much traffic while my own sites dried up. So I researched and came up with a perfect traffic building system that works 24/7/365.

I learnt how you can get traffic from virtually any website you want with the site owner’s consent! This system is built around three crucial aspects of Online Marketing:

1. How to easily, professionally and effectively advertise to your website visitors 2. How to convert idle “browsers” into paying customers or opt-in subscribers 3. How to keep new visitors coming into your websites at no cost

Current internet marketing trends

If you visit almost any high volume website, you’ll probably get a “pop-up” or “pop-under” page advertising something or other. Pop-ups open a new page right on top of the page you are viewing. Pop-unders appear after you close a page you have finished with. These can work well under certain conditions: a) They must offer a product targeted at the people visiting the site and b) They must actually be looked at by potential customers.

The targeting is just down to common sense - you don’t try to sell vacations for people over 60 on a site whose customers are interested in fashion for the under 25’s!

Getting potential customers to see your message in a pop-up or pop-under is harder. Both types have spawned a whole industry of software writers who have written programs which eliminate them before they are read by anyone. Even major ISPs have now built pop-up killers into their email systems. So a very high proportion of pop-ups and pop-unders are never seen by anyone. How many times have you heard someone say “I hate advertising!”? And yet much of what we buy is a direct result of advertising. What people really mean is “I don’t want to see advertising unless its for some product or service I’m interested in.” So these pop-up killing programs actually prevent legitimate buyers and sellers from knowing about each other just because not every buyer needs every seller!

The answer

There is now a new technology which delivers all the advertising power of pop-ups and yet is non-intrusive and cannot be stopped by the pop-up stoppers! It’s the PopThroughT. It has all the advantages of a popup, pop over, pop under BUT has more features unlike its predecessors. Here are just some of the amazing features that are built into a PopThroughT.

* They are easy to create. Simply point and click and your PopThroughT is ready to go! * Professional looking - gives your website a professional look that your visitors will simply love. * Increases your website conversion rates by as much as 114% right off the bat. * Defeats virtually ALL current popup blockers and stoppers! Your PopThroughs simply Pop right Through the popup blockers and stoppers - hence the name PopThrough! This makes them unstoppable. * Non Intrusive - PopThroughs blend into your website’s design, theme and overall concept of your site and are user-friendly. * Cool animations for entrance and exits are easily incorporated that will totally win over your website visitors. The animations are so amazing that we guarantee that you’ve never seen anything like them before. And your website visitors will simply love them too.

As I said earlier, I’ve tried just about all advertising methods currently available on the net. The PopThrough idea is the very best I’ve found and I’ll be delighted to help anyone who wants to try it.

Paul Denham is a successful online marketer in the UK who knows the secret of how to generate a lifetime of traffic to his website from ANY website he desires and advertise to their email subscribers for free! Visit his website at:http://www.excitingbiz.co.uk/popthru.htm