Marketers Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

TOP 10 Digital Marketers of 2018

SETH GODIN

Seth Godin is a bestselling author and entrepreneur. He is author of ten books that have been best sellers around the globe, and he is also a prominent speaker. Recently he was chosen as one of 21 Speakers.

Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry’s leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998. He was called “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” by Business Week.

NEIL PATEL

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Hello Bar.He created his first website at the age of 13 and paid a few marketing firms to help him out, but unfortunately they provided no results and took all of his money.

His writing mainly includes topics such as SEO, marketing, and branding. Additionally, you will be surprised to know that Neil Patel has built two multimillion online businesses when he was just 30 years old.

GUY KAWASAKI

Guy Takeo Kawasaki is an American digital marketer specialist and author. Previously, he was an Apple employee who was responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line in 1984. He brought the word evangelist into vogue in marketing the Macintosh and the concepts related to evangelism marketing and technology evangelism.

Larry Kim

Larry Kim is a well known PPC expert and the founder of WordStream. He is also a writer of four award-winning books and regular contributor to Search Engine Land and Forbes. As a founder of wordstream, he has start up an organization from nothing to a successful software company. He does a huge amount of content marketing and PR stuff. His content has produced a vast figure of press pickups in the recent years.

Joost De Valk

Mr. Joost De Valk is the Founder and CEO of yoast.com and WordPress. He is also SEO, a Blogger and a successful web developer with more than 1.5 million monthly readers on his blog.

In 1994, he launched his first website. Later on, SEO turned to be his profession. For mean time, he started working in digital marketing and gathered information for companies like eBay. Later, he developed the plugin, Yoast SEO, which is considered as the simplest and the best WordPress plugin.

Douglas Kar

Douglas Karr is the CEO of DK New Media and founder of Marketing Technology Blog. Beside all, he is also a famous writer and digital marketers who helped businesses like Mindjet, GoDaddy and many more with his skill in online media, PRs, SEO, blogging and pay-per-click

As digital marketing continued to rise, he conveyed his ideas with experience in marketing technology to help others grow their business.

Qadir AK

With passion in digital marketing, Qadir Ak is best known to his innovative strategies while running th online branding company Ultimez Technology. He has been in IT industry since 10+ years. Mr.Qadir from India walks with trends in technology and applies it to every project his company undertakes. Beside India, he is now expanding his Digital marketing & online branding services across wider market of Dubai, UAE.

Dorie Clark

Dorie Clark is an well known digital marketer, speaker, and a regular writer to TIME,Harvard Business Review and the World Economic Forum blog. She is expert in branding and also writer of many famous books like Reinventing You and many more.

Jitendra Vaswani

Jitendra is a Digital Marketing SEO Consultant from India and the founder of

Digi Exe, a Digital Marketing Agency. He is an Blogger and author of WordPress Plugin-SchemaNinja. With 5 years of experience in digital marketing field, he has a strong knowledge of Internet Marketing terms like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Blogging, Social Media Optimization (SMO), Mobile, Ecommerce and WordPress.

Lessons for Marketers From Chanakya, an Indian Teacher From the 4th Century BC

[Chanakya] Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make it all yourselves!

[Marketing Perspective – Research] Time is short and is the most critical element. You need not make the mistake and then change your strategy. While sometimes you will make mistake but that should be accidental. You need to do a thorough homework/research prior to developing any plans. Analyse what competition closely – from a marketers perspective. This entails learning from competitor research – Research about their positioning, segmenting, marketing case studies and marketing strategies. Once you have researched, you will know how to develop your marketing/communication plans more efficiently.

[Chanakya] A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and Honest people are screwed first

[Marketing Perspective – How to represent the message?] There is a way to communicate to your audience – revealing all of the properties/attribute has not helped many brands/companies. Several times, it has to be mended as per the current situation and understanding of the audience. This does in no imply that you need to fake stuff but you need to mend it in the right way.

[Chanakya] Even if a snake is not poisonous, it should pretend to be venomous

[Marketing Perspective – Confidence in your Plans/Strategies/Approach/Presentation] Try to be confident in the market. Unless it is a monopoly, brands/companies face huge competition and is subjected to several challenges to grab a piece of the market share. There are big fishes always trying to discourage you and trying to throw you out from the marketplace, hence you should be confident enough of your plans and strategies. Face the competition with utmost confidence, display it through your marketing/sales/business efforts, to your prospects, customers, investors, employees, analysts and other stakeholders. You know what they don’t know and things spoken with confidence, backed by facts/logic always works out.

[Chanakya] Never share your secrets with anybody. It will destroy you!

[Marketing Perspective – Trade secrets] Perhaps the company deals with information that can make or break the company. Trademarks, copyrights, Intellectual property rights, data protection and security are all directed to this maxim stated by Chanakya.

[Chanakya] As soon as the fear approaches near, attack it and destroy it.

[Marketing Perspective: Change your idea/strategy/campaign] Juggling with a known problem is never a solution. It will cause you to be defeated at one point or the other. When you have identified an issue with a campaign, rectify it immediately or if a campaign does not workout, change your strategy and switch to your other option rather than keeping your ego and still juggling to make it work while wasting time, energy and resources on it. A marketer should remember that it is not a personal defeat if the campaign/idea does not work, rather it is for the benefit of the business that he is working for and hence should make possible efforts to attain the stated marketing and business objectives.

[Chanakya] Even from poison extract nectar, wash and take back gold if it has fallen in filth, receive highest knowledge from a low born person.

[Marketing Perspective – Innovation/Learning/Incorporating ideas] Unexplored market segments – take ideas from each one – a small idea/innovation can make a huge difference – receive feedback from your stakeholders – open communication

[Chanakya] Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing It, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.

[Marketing Perspective] It is indeed true that planning is an important ingredient to the success of any campaign. A well thought and researched, clear objective based campaign has performed well in several cases.

[Chanakya] The world’s biggest power is youth and the beauty of a woman.

[Marketing Perspective – The right segments] These are the two segments that are really powerful. Brands/products/services launched in this category and that have been marketed well, have performed extremely well. Catching the pulse of these two target segments and doing targeted marketing will yield results.

Strategic Action Plan – How to Put Yourself in the Top 5% of Marketers on the Internet

Let’s spend a few minutes focusing on perhaps the most important principle in creating a successful online business- your strategic marketing plan. A lot of people are intimidated by internet marketing because there is so much competition in many large niches such as network marketing, coaching, consulting, and information marketing. As an online marketing coach, I can’t tell you how many times I have heard statements like:

I just don’t feel like there’s any room for me.
Who would want to hear what I have to say?
I can think big, but I have no idea how to take appropriate action
I have a website, but only have 20 people on my list
I have a website; isn’t that enough?

What I am about to share with you will give you an incredible competitive advantage and will serve as the ultimate answer to every single one of these statements, so that you never feel lost in the online world again.

Yes, the internet is absolutely packed with business owners competing for valuable online real estate. Many industries are indeed saturated with websites and blogs trying to compete for their fair share of traffic, leads, and customers.

But here is the thing you really need to understand: Less than 5% of the entrepreneurs marketing online have a strategic marketing plan that they consistently take action on.

As internet and network marketing guru David Wood says, ‘The internet is full of people with huge dreams and little work ethic.’

Because this is true, you really have very little competition, besides the one taking place within yourself. Your only true competition is the excuse you may be making to yourself as to why you can’t/won’t consistently take action to generate massive online exposure. That, my friend, is what you want to expose first. Don’t worry about your external competition in the online marketplace. The only real issue is how willing you truly are to keep taking action until you get the results you desire.

This is why your mindset is such a critical factor that underlies your marketing plan. Sure, you can map out a marketing strategy that looks good in theory. But the flat out truth is very few entrepreneurs stick with their action plan. Why is this so, especially when marketing is by far the #1 activity that leads to more money in their pockets? Here are the big 3 that I have seen:

lack of immediate results– I can relate to this one, as many online marketers can. We all want to see immediate payoff for our efforts. In my experience, one of the highest virtues of successful entrepreneurship is the ability to keep putting in the effort without seeing the immediate return on our time and energy investment. Call this faith, emotional maturity, or discipline-the point is that many of us weren’t taught this virtue and instead, we seek immediate gratification. This is a killer when it comes to online marketing, as it typically does take time to see tangible results.
impulsive and reactive tendencies– This is often a result of not seeing immediate results. One of the hardest things in internet marketing is that you have a lot of incredibly savvy marketers out there basically preying on your hunger for results. They lure you to their offers and solutions, which keeps you constantly grasping for the latest and greatest product or program that will quell your frustration and feed your hope. What ultimately results is a lack of any real consistency or rhythm, making it impossible to build any momentum in your marketing efforts. You keep jumping from marketing strategy to new program to new idea to new guru. This becomes a sort of addiction for many people trying to make money online-and there are many smart marketers absolutely capitalizing on this weakness.
lack of inspiration/laziness/disconnection from real purpose in life-– This one can take a lot of different forms, but the essence is that you lack the real drive and desire to take effective action because you aren’t clear on what you really want out of your marketing, your business, and often your life in general. Many people turn to the internet because (I hate to say it) they have no idea what else to do with their lives.

Before you create a strategic marketing plan, you want to honestly assess if you have a tendency to be vulnerable to any of these 3 obstacles (99% of us do). Seeing your obstacles clearly is always the first step to becoming an empowered and successful entrepreneur. When you see your blocks as they are without judging them, a door is opened where you see that you have a choice to change anything that is holding you back.

Once you have done some of this inner work, then you will likely be able to create an external action plan that is accessible, effective, and even fun to implement.

When it comes to online marketing, what you want to do is create a marketing process that you can literally commit to just about every single day, especially in the initial phases (the first few months) of launching your product, service, or company.

Your marketing plan is determined by 3 factors:

Your budget
Your knowledge and skill set
Your motivation

If you have a good marketing budget, then you’ll want to spend some money on online advertising, as this is the fastest way to start generating leads for your business. Google AdWords is really the best way to start. Depending on your business, you can also invest in classified and ezine ads, or in banner ads on other websites. Google AdWords is a big learning process, so be sure to get the right training before you go and spend thousands of dollars (this will often turn out to be a generous donation to Google). I recommend getting Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords as a starting point.

If you’re on a tight budget or you don’t want to learn AdWords, you’ll want to do some free marketing strategies. Let me share with you my daily marketing process. This should really help you see how this is done. Keep in mind that I am very strong in factors 2 and 3 above-I have a lot of knowledge in online marketing because I have been doing it for a few years and I have a high level of motivation. If your knowledge and/or motivation isn’t quite that high, you’ll want to just take a fraction of what my process and implement it consistently. Bite off only as much as you can chew and be honest with yourself.

Here is my daily marketing strategy:

1. Write a blog post (you’re reading today’s efforts)

2. Make a video of that blog post and distribute it through a video distribution software that sends it to all of the video sharing and podcasting sites – this is an incredible online marketing tool that any serious online marketers should be using.

3. Distribute the post to 27 social bookmarking sites.

4. Distribute the post to 250 article directories using an article submission software.

5. Post my blog content on ping.fm so it goes to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.

6. If I’m really wanting to compete for a specific keyword (like for instance if I really want to get ranked for the keyword I am targeting in this post, strategic marketing plan), I will create a squidoo lens and/or a hub page.

7. If I am so inclined, I will send an email blast to my list to let them know about the post.

I do this as often as possible because it is seriously an incredibly effective FREE way to get my content all over the internet. Of course, this strategy is premised upon offering real value to the online community, not crap or spam. I only send out content like I’m sharing with you here. You only want to distribute your best stuff; don’t be like so many lame marketers and just promote your business and spam people. Give people stuff that really makes an impact and you’ll see a big difference in your online marketing results.

The essence of a strategic marketing plan is that it is implemented consistently over the long-term. Your goal should be to be just as methodical, inspired, passionate, and consistent about your marketing one year from now as you are in the start-up phase where it’s easy to get fired up. It’s just like trying to lose weight and get in shape. The first week you’re hitting the gym every day and you’re totally on fire about your commitment. Then, for whatever reason, your enthusiasm starts to wane and other priorities take over. Eventually, you forget all about that commitment and your mind has taken you to a new focus entirely.

In order to succeed in online marketing, you have to have that vision for what you want firmly in mind all the time and never let go. Do you really want freedom, passive income, a huge downline, or thousands of people on your list? Then you need to tap into the virtue of entrepreneurial tenacity. You keep your eyes on that prize and you let nothing distract you, especially your own mind (this is the biggest danger-that you’ll convince yourself that it’s not possible or that you value something else even more).

When you implement your marketing plan consistently over the long-term, there is no competition because very few business owners actually do this. I know it doesn’t sound all romantic and hype-based like so many of the promises you hear online, but I will tell you this: If you just stay consistent… if you remain tenacious… if you keep a clear focus on what you really want… and you take action on that every day at least a little bit… you can have it.

Online marketing can take you to that place of incredible freedom and success. Just be willing to do what so few others are: Let go of the hype, let go of the need for immediate gratification, and treat this as if it’s your child- daily nourishment and care. Keep feeding your business through strategic marketing and you will-sooner or later-realize your financial goals and have a lifestyle that most can only dream of.

Should You Let Affiliate Marketers Sell Your Products?

If you have created great products that you are looking to sell online, you may have thought about using affiliate marketers to sell your products. Using this marketing method certainly has its appeal. You don’t have to write tomes of content to market your products. You don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on pay per click marketing. You don’t have to figure out how to drive traffic to your sales pages.

Before you commit to making your products available through affiliate marketers, though, there are a few things that you should think about. This article will help you determine if selling your products through affiliate marketers is right for you and your business.

First, you should realize that you will be giving up a significant portion of your profits to the affiliate marketers that are driving traffic to your sales pages. The percentage of revenues that you will need to pay to affiliate marketers differs depending upon the types of products you are selling, and the caliber of affiliate marketers you want to attract.

If you are selling tangible products, such as books, cookware, yoga mats, or ceremonial swords, you will usually need to pay a commission of 10 to 20% of sales to your affiliates. These commissions can represent a significant portion of your total revenues, especially when you consider that you still have to pay for manufacturing, shipping, and product returns.

If you are selling electronic products, such as software, ebooks, or website subscriptions, you won’t have to worry about paying for manufacturing or shipping, because there are virtually no shipping costs, and no production costs beyond the initial development of the products.

However, affiliate marketers are accustomed to receiving commissions of 40%, 50%, or even 75% for promoting and selling these products. So if you are selling a $40 ebook, you may only realize a profit of $10 after your affiliate commissions have been paid, not counting the minimal costs associated with maintaining your sales website.

Second, you should think about how widely you want to spread your advertising. Once you make your product available to affiliate marketers, you have very limited control over where and how your products are marketed. Some larger companies have means of checking up on affiliate marketers to find out how there products are being marketed, but even the most sophisticated methods are only moderately effective.

If you have a high end product that creates a sense of luxury for your buyers, affiliate marketing may not be the best way of promoting your products. You don’t want your product to be advertised on just any website – certainly, there are certain types of websites that would not cast your products in a favorable light. Even on the internet, you have to maintain your business’s image, and this is more easily done if you keep your advertising in house.

On the other hand, if you have inexpensive products that you would like to make readily available to a wide base of internet consumers, affiliate marketing can work quite well for generating a high volume of sales.

Third, you should evaluate how much time and money you want to spend tracking affiliate sales and writing out commission checks. If you only plan on accepting a handful of affiliate marketers to promote your products, this may not be a big deal. A simple software program can help you keep affiliate IDs straight, so you can determine which affiliate marketer should be credited for each sale. If you plan on using hundreds of affiliates to sell your products, though, this can quickly become a very burdensome task.

If you do want to accept a high number of affiliate marketers, you might want to use a site such as Clickbank to handle tracking and payment functions for you. Clickbank charges you a flat free per product, but in the long run, it can be well worth this fee to have someone else handling these tasks.

Finally, you should consider how much time you have to spend evaluating and accepting affiliate marketers to promote your products. Essentially, you have two options when recruiting affiliate marketers. You can either accept every affiliate marketer that applies for your program, or you can conduct a thorough review of every applicant to make sure that they are a good fit for your program.

If you accept every marketer that applies for your program, you won’t have to spend much (if any) time reviewing your affiliate marketers’ websites and selling history. However, you will likely find that only 2 or 3 percent of the people who apply to your program have the motivation and skills necessary to effectively market your products. Most people that apply for your program will never get around to setting up dedicated websites, writing pay per click ads, or crafting the content necessary to generate interest for your products and drive traffic to your sales pages.

If you conduct a thorough review of every applicant, you will spend significantly more time on your affiliate marketing efforts, but you will likely find more qualified marketers to sell your products. This is especially true if you make this known to potential internet marketers up front. If you ask affiliate marketers for website addresses, verifiable sales figures, and professional references on your affiliate application page, you will immediately weed out those people who are not really serious about marketing your products. Of course, you’ll want to make sure you have the time to review websites and verify sales numbers, or you will quickly generate a backlog of work while your own sales figures suffer.

So before you start signing up affiliate marketers to promote your products, take the time to evaluate whether an affiliate model is truly right for you and your business.

B2B Marketers Get Customers to Tune in and Connect Through Online Social Networking

A recent survey of online marketers conducted by research firm Forrester and marketing resource MarketingProfs found that in a recession, the first marketing channel in which online marketers said that they would increase investment would be social networking. The beauty of using social networking sites for marketing is that it is cost-effective and if done well, can establish and strengthen your company brand and generate the sales you desire.

Connection and engagement are the heart and soul of online social networking. Two ways to successfully achieve connection and engagement are through video sites like YouTube and through Open Identity Programs like Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID and Facebook Connect.

When business-to-business (B2B) buyers are looking for resources to help guide their purchases, chances are good that they are visiting sites like YouTube. Home to an increasing amount of B2B content, YouTube welcomes marketers trying to reach these potential customers.

According to eMarketer, which conducts market research and trend analysis on Internet, e-business, online marketing, media and emerging technologies, more than one-half of the U.S. population now watches online video, and eMarketer predicts there will be 190 million online video viewers in the US in 2012.

At that point nearly nine out of 10 Internet users will be watching online video!

Why all this growth? Videos capture users’ attention and make your message stick. In fact, research firm MarketingSherpa reported over 98% of business technology decision makers found viral videos more memorable than other forms of marketing.

If you aren’t utilizing YouTube for online marketing yet, a good place to start is with a YouTube channel. You can customize your channel so that visitors can access your videos, post comments, and engage with your brand and company. Recorded webinars, product demonstrations, video case studies, industry events and advertisements are just some of the ways you can use videos to engage potential customers.

Another way to engage and connect is through Open Identity Programs like Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID and Facebook Connect. For marketers, these Open Identity Programs are a significant advancement in social advertising because of the cumulative power of pushing information out through connected sites.

For example, Facebook Connect is a new application of the Facebook Platform that allows users to integrate their Facebook data into their own site. Users can connect their Facebook profile with any partner Web site, including Amiando, CBS.com, CitySearch, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing!, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni. By applying a small piece of code, Facebook Connect enables seamless integration with the Facebook platform. A visitor logs in to a “connected” blog with their Facebook ID, which enables their profile to appear on the blog and link commenting back into their Facebook activity feed.

This gives your Web site a new level of dynamic social context because you are able to link your Facebook friends and publish information back into the News Feeds on Facebook.

In today’s business environment, it is important to take advantage of every opportunity to not only get in front of your potential customers, but to connect and engage them. Marketing through social networking sites are an excellent way to accomplish this.

Study Finds Strong Majority of Content Marketers Use Social Media Sharing

A research study conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, and sponsored by Skyword titled “Content Marketing Gets Social: 2013 Survey on Content Marketing Trends” found that a strong majority of content marketers are using social media outlets to share their information.

The report states that nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of content marketers publish their content to their websites and then promote it on their social networks. Surprisingly, close to one-quarter (21 percent) did not utilize the powerful tool of social media; while a mere eight percent were unsure.

What social media outlets are being utilized? Well, it’s the usual networks that dominate the headlines: Facebook (84 percent), Twitter (79 percent) and LinkedIn (64 percent). In addition, the largest amount of reader activity came from those social media venues: Facebook pegged 55 percent, Twitter posted 45 percent and LinkedIn had 39 percent.

A large majority of content marketers say their primary objectives are to engage both clients and prospects, enhance brand awareness and acquire leads – improving search rankings and increasing web traffic were the least likely goals.

However, these are not their biggest hurdles. Exactly two-thirds say the biggest challenge is creating content that is relevant and targeted to various Internet audiences. Incidentally, content marketers are producing their own content as 87 percent said they write their own.

Is the practice working? It’s still unknown as only 46 percent of respondents said yes and 37 percent noted that the content is currently under development or being planned. Meanwhile, 15 percent gave a definitive no and two percent didn’t know.
“There is a high expectation regarding social media but a very low understanding around measures to determine ROI versus activity,” said one survey participant, while a separate participant noted: “We don’t do as good a job at tracking the value of our efforts as we should be.”

The online study was conducted in August with 217 respondents from the reader base of Information Today’s CRM and EContent magazines.

Indeed, the business of social media marketing is astronomical. The Business Insider published an in-depth report recently that analyzed just how immense the industry is. For instance, to an outsider, it might appear that brands are wasting their money on advertising on social media websites considering how crowded it is. However, since Americans spend an estimated 12 to 20 hours per month on social media – most likely higher – companies can gauge a higher audience for their content.

Looking ahead, social media advertising, though in its infancy period, is forecasted to be an $11 billion industry as brands either allocate or increase their marketing budgets to include this form of advertising. Also, this could be a lot higher because of mobile device usage; half of Facebook and Twitter’s traffic already comes from smartphones and tablets.

It has been suggested by industry insiders that the primary trends to observe for the remainder of this year and into next year are increased budgets, gamification, community content, brand new corporate roles (I.E. social business manager, content strategist) and staff blogging.