You just found a 75% off sale at your favorite clothing store. What do you do now? Hoard all of the clothes, speed home and lock yourself inside your house until the sale is over? No way! Before you know it, you are on the phone with ten of your closest friends and they are on their way over to shop with you. Here are a few different ways to create a word of mouth campaign that will effectively work for your business.

• Give them a reason to talk about your products and services. Make it easier for their conversations to take place and make them want to share their experiences with others.

• Be honest. Let them know what the real purpose of your word of mouth campaign is. They are smart enough to tell anyway, and feel as though they are being lied to otherwise.

• Treat your customers well and commit to providing superior customer experiences in order to improve credibility.

• Honor your word. After all this is a word of mouth campaign and if your word means nothing, neither does your campaign.

• Offer incentives to customers to help spread the word either by a percent off of their next purchase or by a percentage of the sales earned through their networks. People know people and you want everyone to know about your business.

• Get organized. While you may already be doing all or most of these things, a campaign is an organized set of activities designed with a specific purpose and desired outcome in mind.

Businesses know word of mouth advertising is the most cost effective, fastest spreading and best way to advertise on the planet. Think about it; if your friend tells you a movie is good, how often will you actually take their advice and either go see the movie in theaters or at least rent it when it comes out on DVD? Word of mouth advertising worked.

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The term viral marketing may have you wondering just what exactly it means. It’s called “viral” marketing because it is a strategy to promote your marketing to one person and another and another, much like a virus spreads itself. Perhaps a better term to use instead of “viral” would be “word of mouth” because this is simply what viral marketing is in essence.

The best way to create your own viral marketing program is to create an offer relating to your business that will make someone want what you have to sell. A simple way to do this is to offer something for free. Free sells, well not sells, but it will get people to your site for sure and that’s what you want, attention. This will bring hoards of people to your site where they will sign up for your newsletters and presto; you have an instant database of leads.

The next step is transmitting this virus – make it easy for the people who signed up for your “free” item to pass the information along to other people. If they are happy with the product then they will pass your link to someone else and so forth. This is the “virus” being transmitted.

The best way to get your viral marketing plan off and running is to promote and use social media to place links to your special offer. Affiliate programs and social media sites can bring you the exposure you need to stay in the public eye. They also put your message in front of hundreds of potential customers who you can then use to promote yourself even further.

If you want to get some great exposure for your website, create a free product as a “teaser” and get out there and start spreading your viral goodies!

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Traditional marketing plans have you select a target area and distribute flyers, mailers or place an ad in the newspaper telling a potential customer who you are and what you offer. The drawback to these styles of marketing is they can be very expensive for an ad that is seen only once and can be easily forgotten.

Marketing on the Internet; however, is very different. Through ad programs you can target a much wider and geographically larger audience, by using interactive ads, which tend to perform much better than a static picture in a newspaper. Associate programs can be established where other people put the advertisements up for you and you pay them a small sum of money to host the ad on their site.

There are also services that will seed your ad into the website based on the content of the site itself. There is no reason to send an ad for car tires to a video game website and this type of service ensures that doesn’t happen. You can even choose a graphical ad or an even cheaper text only based ad. By using this type of pinpointed advertising, you can get the most targeted traffic for your money.

The possibilities on the Internet for marketing anything are boundless. The only thing stopping you is your own imagination, drive and how serious you are about getting your brand out there. If you are willing to put in the effort, you can be assured your business brand will get noticed by buyers who are looking for your services or products.

Looking into cost effective ways to market, such as social marketing, is the best way to pursue a frugal advertising plan. Social marketing can lead to more customers coming to your website virtually free. The only thing you will need to do is put in the time and the effort.

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There are hundreds, if not thousands, of advertising resources on the web today. Some you can write a post for and forget about until the calls start coming in and others you have to actively work at and promote yourself in order to see the return. Some of the resources you could tap into are listed below.

• Forums – These are usually free to post on if you are a member. They are great resources to meet people and connect with customers who are looking for products similar to yours. Some also allow limited advertisements in the signatures.

• Craigslist – Craigslist has become a standard go-to for almost any individual looking for a product or service. It is also a free resource for people needing to advertise.

• Social Networking Sites – From Facebook to Twitter and many in between, social networking is a growing phenomenon taking over the lines of communication. More people are connecting on social networking sites than almost any other way imaginable. Once connected, it is a free resource for people to advertise their products to other like minded people.

• Email – This is a widely overlooked tool. Email is everywhere. We use it every day and yet almost no one thinks to advertise in the signature box on an email. If you have a new product or service, make sure you include a link to your website or blog. Think of how many people you send email to who don’t get a chance to look at your web page or blog. Well, now they can.

Advertising resources are everywhere. These are only a few suggestions. Any search on free advertising resources will provide numerous results, which are all decent options. The best tip is to read reviews on them and ask people questions to see which ones have given them the most success with the fewest problems. Since they are free, try them out yourself. If they don’t work, you haven’t lost anything, just pack it up and go somewhere else.

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Creating videos couldn’t be easier with this great tool I am going to tell you about. All you will have to do is upload your digital photos, pick the music you want, add your keywords and you are ready to go. It is that simple. Animoto is very user friendly and within a few minutes you will have your first video up and going.

Here are a couple of ways I use this tool:

When I get a new listing, I take the photos and upload them to make a virtual tour. Now I can eliminate the monthly fees for video tours. Your video link can be used for your MLS, your websites and your blogs. Basically you can use the link to your video just like you did with the virtual tour subscription software.

I go around and take photos of the different neighborhoods in my area and create a show for them. This is great for people who are not familiar with the area or are out of town. Showing them the pool, the clubhouse and all the amenities makes it easier for them to determine what neighborhoods they like and the ones they don’t. This alone could save you countless hours driving people around.

Group your neighborhoods together such as golfing communities or waterfront communities and put a show together for them.

Create a Staging Tips video for your seller prospects.
Create a Seller Tips video by putting together a PowerPoint presentation and making it into a video.
Create a Buyer Tips video by following the same process as I did with the Seller Tips.

Put together a show for the home your buyers just bought so they can send the link to their friends. What a great way for them to show off their new home and link you to all their friends.

Those are just a couple of ideas. Oh, don’t worry, they have great tutorials that walk you through exactly how to do all of this.

Animoto has a free version and a paid version. But you know what? The paid version is only around $35.00 per year, that was what I was paying for one month of my virtual tour subscription. That gave me a very quick pay off. So try the free version and if you like it, then upgrade.

Get your free Animoto account here

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Determining your Internet marketing budget really depends on a couple of factors – how much do you want to spend and how well do you want it done? A big portion of the marketing appeal online is in how you present yourself, whether your look is traditionally professional or one following current trends. Either way, you have to know your budget and what this marketing will cost you.

When creating a website you will be spending a decent bit of money. If your website is badly designed, full of broken links and hard to navigate, you will may as well say “Thanks for coming, now go away.” If you want to have a fast, attractive and easy to navigate site, you need the right designers.

A good rule of thumb is you will be spending 2x the amount of money it cost you to create your website on Internet marketing. The first year is the most important. You aren’t going to reach #1 on the Google search list by spending $100 a year on marketing. The Internet is huge and there are more and more people advertising on it daily. Keeping ahead of the crowd can cost some money. However, you can easily determine how much you can reasonably afford in your advertising budget.

In a nutshell, break down your sales projections all the way down to net profit and see what you have left over. In the first few months, this is your budget. After 6 months or so, depending on how well you are doing, you should be able to settle down into having a budget around 8-10% of your net profit.

When you first start up, if you have a website professionally designed, it will eat up most of your advertising budget. Once it is in place, however, you can focus on more budget friendly marketing tools like free classified ads, social media marketing and email promotion. These options will cost little to no money and draw a lot of traffic to your professional website. Once the prospect gets to your site, your design should help you close the sale.

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