SlideShare - The YouTube of PowerPoint

By Melvin Jame

Have you ever heard of SlideShare.net? Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, called it the YouTube of PowerPoint. People would like to view, upload and share views and comment of PowerPoint and PDF, just like they do on YouTube.

PowerPoint is a good way to explain your new ideas, you can visualize the concept easily slides by slides. You can easily share your wisdom worldwide on SlideShare, and you can also find some fabulous stories on SlideShare.net. Many of the most views and hot downloaded slides are innovative.

Sharing your own work to over 25 million monthly visitors

Sharing your masterpiece on SlideShare is just like uploading a clip on YouTube. People would leave a comment, pick your slides as favorite, and you can even embed your slides to the blogs and websites.

How to get started? Just sign up and then you can upload many dozens of supported formats, like PDF, PPT, docs.

No one would be interested in a boring slide, so innovation, creativity and brilliance are important. Many PowerPoint tutorials teach you to make your PowerPoint simple and clear, but not on SlideShare.net. Ideas, Images, background are extremely essential. You can design your slide like a magazine. A colorful or meaningful slide will gain the attention of the visitors.

There are some rules you should know about.

1. Idea - no matter what, idea is the most important factors to a good slide. SlideShare users are highly educated, more that 62% hold a college degree and 19% have a Masters or PhD. And over 50% are managers, directors and other business decision makers. If you idea is not brilliant, it won't be popular.

2. Text - make it big and keep it simple. If you want to public your novel, SlideShare will not be a good place. It is more about visualization of your mind, idea or concept. So sometimes just keywords would be enough. But since not everyone would switch to full screen mode to view your slide. Making the font big is important. Of course, some special and interesting font will make your slide more attractive.

3. Photo - choose the best one to explain your subject. The best is, the visitors can understand what you are talking about at the first glance of your picture. Or the picture is tightly related to your point. Of course, you can find a lot of pictures from the Internet.

4. The first page - the first page of your slides is extremely important. When visitors browse SlideShare.net. The only information they can know about is the thumbnail of your first page and the title of your slide. The first page is the cover, so, remember to decorate your first page and optimize your title.

Follow the rules above, you can also make a popular slideshow. You can also share your slides on LinkedIn with the app. Just log in your account, go to profile, then click 'add application', then you can share your slides with your LinkedIn connections.

Also, you can get many inspirations from others

What can you benefit from SlideShare.net, a huge resource of excellent PowerPoint and PDF files? If you are going to present, maybe to your customers, or your students, or maybe your new plan to your boss, you need to prepare a good PowerPoint. A good PowerPoint is a good way to support a speech.

There are many categories on SlideShare, across finance, health, design, business and many templates. There must be some slides will inspire you and you can use the public resources directly, for example, beautiful template or some data from the excellent files. Many files are saved as PDF, you can easily convert PDF to PowerPoint with AnyBizSoft, then insert into your own presentation. It is very convenient for you to reuse the content or get the template from SlideShare. And if you found some PDF files from famous research institution, just convert them to PowerPoint and quote from them directly, that will make your presentation more convincing.

So, SlideShare.net is not only a platform that you can share your idea, creativity, but also a database of PowerPoint material.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Melvin_Jame

iPhone Apps For Marketing And Sales People

iPhone has been transformed into many versions and has now reached iPhone 4G, the latest version from the creative technologist Steve Jobs from Apple. iPhone applications are been used for the promotion of brand and boost up of brand's image. It's a great way to be cost-effective yet influential, both at a time. Games apps, puzzling apps, informative apps, medical apps, travel apps, summer apps, real estate apps and what's not? Small business owners are having these iPhone apps and getting most out of it. Through iPhone you can minimize the hardships and time-taking steps and can make the life easy and user-friendly. Yes. Life can be friendly with iPhone apps, trust me.

Marketing and sales personals are using marketing iPhone apps. These marketing iPhone marketing apps are best for marketing and sales professionals. They can do market research, keep an eye on website stat, maintain relationships with clients, process credit cards and much more you can't even think of.

Salesforce Mobile

Salesforce mobile is a free marketing iPhone app but requires Salesforce mobile license as in pre-requisite. It comes in the CRM category and known as best for CRM. You can respond to leads and customers queries. It allows you to log sales activities, make calls and set meeting while you are out of the business world. Salesforce will help you accessing updated account records of your subject before you step into any meeting. So it's there to make a deal on win-win situation. You would be able to create, edit and delete things out there.

Stay in Touch

The name of this very marketing iPhone app says it all. It connects you with your folks, business partners, employees and with people you want to be in touch. It will help users to maintain clientele management and prosper the business of small nature and make it bigger by strengthening it. It will help you in follow ups, reminders, and contact details with brief introduction etc. It has variety of reminders i.e. weekly, biweekly, monthly etc. you won't need any setup and simply import your contact list for your ease. It also comes in the category of HRM. But in short, it is there to remind you when you totally forgot you need to call someone.

Analytics Pro

This iPhone app is connected with your Google Analytics account that gives you an easy access to search accounts, make reports analytically and statistics which is crucial for decisions making. Its truly an awesome app for marketers, SEO professionals, social media strategist or anyone who needs analytics. It allows you to view analytics dashboard, visitors over view, content overview, goals conversions, traffic sources, map overlay, site usage, visits, previews etc.

Published at http://www.sooperarticles.com

How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business

by Michael Stelzner

Can Twitter actually help my business or is it a complete waste of my valuable time?

This was the very question I asked myself only a few months back. Perhaps you’ve pondered the same?

When people I respect started singing the praises of Twitter, I decided to give it a go. At first I just didn’t get it. However, after a short while I was shocked at the level of access to high profile individuals I was able to achieve.

This article reveals how bestselling authors and business professionals use Twitter to grow their businesses and reveals ideas you can employ to achieve Twitter success.

In fact, I used Twitter (and LinkedIn) to source much of what you see here!


First, What is Twitter Again?

“Twitter is instant messaging made available to the public,” stated talk show host and author Hugh Hewitt.

I think that’s a fair starting point. I’ve heard others call Twitter a micro-blogging platform.

Here’s what you need to know. According to the State of the Twittersphere report, each day 5 to 10 thousand new people join Twitter. Current estimates of total users top out around 5 million. That’s a lot of opportunity.

Twitter allows you to post updates (called Tweets) as often as you want (and limited to 140 characters). When you follow other people on Twitter, you see their tweets. When they follow you, they see your tweets.

It’s a constant stream of communication. The good news is you can turn it on or off as often as you like. Twitter also keeps a public record of all updates, which can be mined with Twitter Search.


Why High-Profile People Use Twitter

Twitter is not just a fad. When very high profile folks begin evangelizing Twitter, it’s worth closer examination. Here’s what some of those gurus told me:

Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch identified three big advantages of Twitter, “(1) I get great insight when I ask questions, (2) let’s face it, I get traffic and (3) people on Twitter spread my thoughts to new places.”

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com said, “We’ve found that Twitter has been a great way for us to connect on a more personal level with our employees and customers. We use it to help build our brand, not drive direct sales. It’d be like asking how does providing a telephone number for customer service translate into new business when they are mostly non-sales-related calls. In the long term, Twitter helps drive repeat customers and word of mouth, but we’re not looking to it as a way of driving immediate sales.”

Bestselling author David Meerman Scott said, “I have personally connected with hundreds of people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I booked an interview on NPR and a big daily newspaper using Twitter.”

Copyblogger’s own Brian Clark said, “Twitter Search is an amazing way to see what people are saying about your products or services. For example, I’ll do searches for Thesis Theme and people will be asking questions about our WordPress Theme. I’ll use the reply function to answer the question, which has led to direct sales. Plus, my answer creates awareness of Thesis for others that follow me. It’s a form of constructive promotion.”

Be sure to check out this Business Week article that surveyed 18 CEOs and how they’re using Twitter to help their businesses.


Practical Ways Twitter Can Help Your Business

This is where it gets interesting. A lot of people are doing some very innovate things with Twitter. Here’s some of their stories.


The Twitter Plan

Cindy King, an international sales specialist, saw a huge boost in business inquires by implementing a strategic Twitter plan.

“Following the right people on Twitter was key. There are some people very gifted at building relationships on Twitter. As I followed these online community builders, I realized that some of them are also excellent direct response copywriters. They get their Twitter followers to take action,” said King.

“Light bulbs went off, and I spent a weekend putting together a tweet marketing plan and entered in 6 weeks worth of tweets, 5 a day, using TweetLater. I used a mindmap, created categories, varied times on tweets and used BUDurls so I could track results and improve my tweet plan the next time around. That was a month ago,” explained King.

When King finds a spare minute between projects, she logs into Twitter and watches what folks are talking about. When she Tweets, about 90 percent of the time she presents useful information and resources to her followers. The remaining tweets are surveys and questions. Following this strategy, King saw an 800 percent increase in inquiries about her business after she setup her Twitter campaign.


Getting In Front of High Profile People

B2B copywriter Terri Rylander took a much different approach. At first she was very skeptical of Twitter. “I looked at it but couldn’t figure out why people would continually send out messages about the size of a text message, unless they were a teenager. Twitter was for sending updates they said. I don’t have time for updates, and besides, who would care?” said Rylander.

She later came across a peer in her industry that was using Twitter and suggested Rylander follow her on Twitter. “That’s when I discovered Twitter as a business tool. I’ve been in my particular niche for over 10 years and know who the players are (though they don’t know me). When I checked who she was following on Twitter, there they all were! It read like a “Who’s Who” list.”

Rylander joined Twitter and began following and interacting with the people she respected. “Other than a cold call on the phone or e-mail, I would never have the chance to get my name in front of vendors, industry analysts, and industry experts. I’ve had a number of Twitter conversations that have also led to personal conversations.”

To stay top of mind with experts, she offers interesting links, responds to tweets, and posts her thoughts for conversation at least a few times a day.


Getting Traffic and Leads

Pam O’Neil, VP of Marketing at BreakingPoint said, “Twitter has all but replaced our PR agency as a large percentage of our followers are press and analysts. A writer for ZDNet wrote about us and linked to us based on something we tweeted and that resulted in a huge spike in web traffic and at least one deal with a major service provider.”

Mike Damphousse of Green Leads said, “Twitter is new to us. That said, in a few short weeks we’ve had definite increase in all sorts of traffic. Out of the normal inbound leads, the number has increased 15% and two of the inbounds are now active pipeline opportunities. We’ve found one extremely valuable partner relationship. We are also building PR relationships, although finding the contacts is a bit of a chore.”

Are you beginning to see the potential here?


A Few Tools to Help Your Twitter Experience

Twitter has a whole world of available support applications you can employ to gain the most of the service for your business. Here’s a few of my favorites:

TwitterFox: This Firefox web browser plugin allows you to view Tweets within your web browser (in a popup menu). This is very handy and eliminates the need to constantly go to Twitter.com.

TweetLater: This powerful service allows you to schedule tweets (much like you would schedule emails). Another very powerful feature is the ability to receive email digests of keyword activity in the Tweetosphere. This allows you to join a conversation or track topics and trends.

Ping.fm: If you have accounts with many services, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, this amazing site allows you to post updates across ALL of your social media sites in one single step.

Twitter for Facebook: If you are on Facebook, this application forwards your Twitter updates directly to Facebook as status updates.

And just in case you get addicted to Twitter, here’s some advice from one of the leading authorities on Twitter. Chris Brogan says, “Most people who see Twitter the first time either flat-out ‘get it,’ or they say, ‘why bother?’ Here’s what people miss. They believe one should read every single update that rolls across your screen of choice. Don’t. Just let it roll past like a stream.”

So what are you waiting for? Go check out Twitter and report back here with your experience.

Has Twitter already helped your business? If so, tell us your story.

How to set up a Facebook fan page that works

Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

A fan page lets you grow as big as you want, send updates to an unlimited number of people, and keep the focus on the organization without revealing the administrator (unless you want to).

Okay, so once you’ve set up your account as a fan page, then what? Here are some tips:

Upload a logo or photo with a web address at the bottom. It won’t be clickable, but fans can see where to go if they want to visit your website.

Fill out your info page completely. Here you can have a clickable web address, company overview, mission, and products. You can give only what Facebook asks for or get creative and provide other information as well.

For example, in your company overview, you can list links to pages on your website, your newsletter signup form, other social media, or whatever you want.

Use FBML to create a landing page. FBML is Facebook’s version of HTML, which you can use with an application called Static FBML. This lets you render basic HTML in a box or tab on your page. You won’t find it in your default applications, but you can find it with a search in the application directory.

The idea is that instead of sending people to your wall, as most people do, you send them to a landing page with whatever message you want to provide. For example, you can give a short description of your organization and tell people to click the “become a fan” button.

This is one of those “duh” things you may not think about at first, but which can dramatically increase your Facebook growth. A landing page is just good direct marketing.

Use your tabs wisely. If you think of a Facebook page as a secondary website for your business, you’ll realize that the tabs at the top of the page are like site navigation. You can have a tab for your newsletter, a tab for donations, a tab for products, etc. How? With that nifty FBML application.

Don’t forget the sidebar. Anything you can put in your tabs, you can also put in your sidebar. A newsletter signup form fits here nicely. So does a poll (another application you can add), affiliate banner, or set of links.

Post often. The same rules apply to Facebook as any other social media. It’s all about content and interaction. Posting something every few weeks won’t cut it. Post every day or even several times a day to make sure you’re showing up in the news feeds of your fans. This can be links to your blog, product announcements, questions, news items, or anything your fans would be interested in.

Every time someone becomes a fan, comments, clicks the “like” link, or shares your post, it shows up in that fan’s news feed for all their friends to see. So “viral” is built in.

Link to your page from everywhere. If you want fans, you have to let people know you’re on Facebook. Put an icon or link in your newsletter, on your website or blog, in your email footer, everywhere.

Email and blog it. Don’t be shy. Do an email blast driving subscribers to your fan page. Post a blog about what’s happening on your fan page with an invitation to become a fan.

Send updates to your fans. This feature is a little like email. Don’t abuse it, because Facebook fans aren’t expecting (and don’t want) an avalanche of messages from you. But used wisely, this handy feature lets you update fans about your products, sales, and events.

Subscribe to similar fan pages and groups. You can buy ads on Facebook, but the consensus is that response is poor. A cheap way to reach beyond your fans and attract new fans is to subscribe to similar pages and groups and post short messages inviting people to visit your page. Don’t do it too often. And don’t be spammy.

There’s more you can do with Facebook, but this is plenty to get you started.

Is it worth it? Absolutely. I’ve found that Facebook can drive significant traffic to your website as your fan base grows. And it gives you a totally independent way to interact with potential customers or supporters.

Read More: http://www.directcreative.com/blog/facebook-fan-page

Video Marketing - Should My Business Be on YouTube?

By Stefano Grossi

Video marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your potential customers because it offers the best means to present your products and services. Video has great impact on the viewer and brings in the advantage of the classic TV advertising too. Video ads can contain demonstrations of a product's usability and can help prospective customers understand the usability and advantage of your product better.

You can choose to optimize your videos for the search engines too. Use appropriate metatags for the content of the page, where you would feature it. You can create video site maps too, which can be submitted to search engines. Appropriate usage of keywords in the video titles and their descriptions is a great option to optimize your videos for the web too.

Your Business on YouTube

YouTube recorded 38 million visitors by the end of the site's first year in business. Ranked as one of the top websites online, it was bought by Google in 2006 and continues to dominate popularity charts.

If you have videos related to your business, you can easily upload them to YouTube and let YouTube host your video. This can turn out to be a cost-effective option for businesses with storage and bandwidth limitations. How-to videos with experts offering tips, help on various issues is very popular and you can take advantage of this to feature videos of your employees, CEO offering tips related to your business.

YouTube offers businesses an opportunity to showcase their business and value by generating sales by directing users to your website. The only investment from the business owner's end would be time to choose and upload videos.

Learn more about internet marketing and how your business can use video and social media to increase traffic to your website and expose your brand to millions of web surfers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Stefano_Grossi

Google Retargeting

The most important product release for marketers in 2010 has been Google’s ‘retargeting’ across the content network. The ability to serve highly targeted ads to individuals across the Internet provides digital strategists with an unprecedented level of control and develop insights never before accessible. So lets look at how retargeting can be used to close the loop in digital marketing strategy.

How does it work?

Retargeting follows individuals as they surf the Internet, by placing a tracking beacon (known as a cookie) on their Internet browser. To place this cookie, a specific code is placed within a webpage (on a specific or common page) and after users have viewed that page, the tracking beacon is automatically attached to their browser until cookies are cleared.

An example to help explain; a dog food company places a tracking cookie on the checkout page of their website. When the user surfs the net thereafter, every time they access a website that allows Google ads to be served, the tracking beacon recognises the user and allows the specific ads from the dog food company to be served. As we know that only people who were on the dog food checkout page (and code can be programmed to only target those that didn’t complete the process) have been exposed to this specific code, we can serve up text and banners ads that remind the customer to go back and complete their purchase. Thus closing the loop.

Surely if they didn’t buy first time, they won’t buy second time?

Although a logical assumption, the statistics and anecdotal evidence show that the Internet is a convenience store; consumers will leave what they are doing at the drop of a hat for a multitude of reasons, a phone call for example. Google retargeting allows marketers to get a second bite at the cherry for a mere couple dollar investment.

More advanced tactics:

The most important application of retargeting is to keep the brand front of mind. The dog food company for example could have separate tracking cookies on each of the separate pages for each of the dog food brands they sell. Ads specific to each of those brands can then be served up keeping the supplier top of mind. This serves two applications, firstly it reminds them to make an additional purchase, and secondly, it builds the brand through constant exposure to the customer, stimulating conversations and brand advocacy. If a user of the brand (even for very small companies) is constantly hounded by banner ads every time they use the Internet, they can’t help but be aware of the constant onslaught of brand messaging. From a data insights perspective as well, it allows advertisers to build up a clear picture of the Internet browsing habits of their cliental, providing unprecedented levels of consumer insight.

There are plenty more application for retargeting, but without doubt this is the most important product release of 2010, closing the loop in digital marketing strategy.

Read more: http://www.ciims.net/2010/07/google-retargeting-how-to-use-it.html#ixzz10rB1kt3z