Product placement is not just for movies and TV shows anymore. Product placement has come to online social networks. According to the article On MySpace, Millions of Users Make ‘Friends’ With Ads article in WSJ, movie characters now have MySpace pages. They also have lots of friends.

Which movie charcters have MySpace pages? According to the article, Ricky Bobby, from the new movie “Talladega Nights” has a page:

“Ricky Bobby has 47,000 “friends,” MySpace lingo for users linked to the page. The 1,500 comments range from admiration (“You kicked butt in the race the other day. Loved when you signed my baby’s head”) to exultation (“Ricky Bobby is the Man!!”).”

Other characters with pages include:

“John Tucker, the womanizing teenager of “John Tucker Must Die,” and each of his four girlfriends have MySpace pages. (You can check John’s basketball schedule or read about Carrie’s plans for college.) So do seven of the characters from “Accepted,” a film about college students debuting this week. (Bartleby Gaines, the fictional star, lists “Fake I.D.’s” and “Monica” as his interests.) Even the creepily-quiet mascot king from the Burger King commercials has a site. (“If you’d like to be the King’s friend, he’s totally down with that,” his page introduction says.)”

While it might seem that it is easier to promote a new product (all the cool, new product buzz), there lots of different ways to promote an older product, as long as it is relevant to your target market.

When you have just created a page about the new product online, the page is brand new. This means that search engines don’t know about it, there are no incoming links to it, etc. As the web page matures, while you are (hopefully) marketing the product online, search engines index it, there are more and more incoming links to it, more people are recommending it, after buying it themselves, etc. The buzz is building on top of buzz, and more and more people are learning about your product.

But how do you start creating buzz? Which techniques should you use? Here is an article I wrote on Online Marketing Techniques To Drive Traffic You Your Web Site.

Can humor ads create buzz, and, more importantly, SELL? The Alltel ads are definitely generating buzz, both in the online and offline worlds. According to the WSJ article, Alltel Spoofs Itself in Online Ads, But Not Everyone Gets the Joke,

“In advertisements on hundreds of blogs, visitors are being encouraged to join a lawsuit against Alltel Corp. over a new discount-calling plan from the regional cellphone company. The plan, called My Circle, allows Alltel customers to designate up to 10 phone numbers that can be called for free, regardless of the cellphone carrier they’re affiliated with. ”

The article says that the ads are so good, that not everyone realizes that it is a spoof, and not an actual thing.

At the end, though, the abdurdity of the web site itself gives the joke away:
“While most of the ads play it relatively straight, the sites they link to are full of absurd details that give away the joke. Many of the ads feature Edward Maxwell Von Houten, a fictional attorney for the People Against My Circle Foundation, or PAMCF. The attorney’s earlier courtroom wins supposedly include lobbying for greater dress-sock elasticity and suing his mother’s obstetrician for giving him an “innie” belly button (“One day I calculated that over the course of my lifetime so far, I’d spent nearly 18 weeks cleaning lint out of my navel,” he writes on PAMCF’s Web site). He rails against My Circle, accusing Alltel of encouraging long, rambling calls among friends.”

Alltel ads seem to be generating blog posts and lots of Internet buzz for them. Can you come up with a humorous campaign to generate buzz for YOUR business?

I was recently asked about multiple streams of income for coaches. Creating multiple streams of income is a passion of mine, and something that I teach to my clients. I think that different income streams is the best way to leverage your time and earn more money. Many streams are about packaging your knowledge into different Here are a few diffent income streams that I recommend to my clients:

– Ebooks and Special Reports. Many professionals package their knowledge into an ebook, and/or create shorter special reports on smaller topics.

– Group coaching – lower fees per person, and better profits for you.

– Teleseminars. A great way to teach your target market in groups, and get them familiar with what you have to offer.

– In person workshops.

– Subscription web sites.

– CDs.

– Audio recordings.

– Ecourses.

– Selling other people’s products.

There are many different ways to re-package what you already know, and create products from it. I teach members of MarketingSalad.com how to take their knowledge and turn it into products and passive income streams.

Did you ever want to know who comes to your blog, how often, what they read, and how long they stay? Some of these questions can very easily be answered with your web site statistics.

Just like you can track web site visitors on your web site, you can track your blog visitors and readers through the web site statistics on the blog’s web site. These web site statistics should give you information about the visitors who come to your blogging web site.

Web site statistics contain wealth of extremely useful information about your online customers and web site visitors. However, very few business owners actually use the statistics to find information to further their business. You can learn more about using your web site statistics in the Understanding Web Site Statistics Report.

With blogs in particular, some people who read blogs prefer to use RSS readers (I use Sage to read RSS feeds, there are many other RSS readers on the market as well). With RSS readers, you don’t need to visit every blog yourself, to see if they have been updated or not. Instead, the reader checks each blog automatically, and tells you if the blog has been updated since the last time you read it. These readers make RSS requests, that are also seen in your web site statistics. This means that if you have web site statistics for your blog, you will see how many RSS Reader requests your blog receives.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who helps coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs use their blogs and web site statistics to market better online. Learn more about her marketing training program at https://www.MarketingSalad.com

After I posted a message on Multiple Streams of Income, with one the examples in the message being a person who got their start at MySpace, I found this message on Andy Wibbles’ Blog, titled Slashdot Geeks Skeptical About MySpace Traffic Claims. Also, take a look at the SlashDot’s Summary of Users Comments on MySpace

Yes, some people doubt the traffic numbers. Yes, MySpace might not have the best design on the Internet. But the proof is in the pudding – the web site WORKS, it attracts its target market, and lots of it. And it is getting heaps of FREE publicity while doing that.

Many of my clients ask me how to make money online. Everyone is looking for fun, original ideas to implement and make money. Moguls of New Media article in Wall Street Journal talks about just that – how different people leverage the Internet to make money.

Amond them is a popular member of an online community MySpace, podcasters, bloggers and creators of online videos. Many people are looking for entertainment online, so if you can create a video that becomes popular, it will be watched by thousands and thousands of people.

What I like about all the people mentioned in the article is that are diversifying their income streams. They have created different income streams – they make in-person appearances, take advertising for their content, sell subscriptions, sell content, speak, and much more. They realize that one venture, however popular, is not enough for continued success. Therefore, they diversify and create multiple streams of income, while doing what they love to do.

And, even though they make plenty of money now, they still continue to diversify. So if people who command thousands of video views and have very popular podcasts, are still interested in diversifying further, what does that tell all the online business owners and solopreneurs?

It tells us that creating multiple streams of income is what all the successful business owners do. In order to succeed, we need to be diversifying and have different ways to produce revenue. For example, a business owner should have revenue streams coming from one-on-one work, as well as group work, speaking engagements, subscription sales, books sales, ebooks and reports sales, audio and video content sales and more. Only when you have different products to offer to your clients, will you be able to create the revenue that you are looking for.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who helps coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs create multiple streams of income at https://www.MarketingSalad.com

I had lots of fun teaching Article Marketing for Profits Teleclass last week. One of the things we discussed was the importance of linking directly to your product, newsletter, special bonus, from the resource box of the article.

Why should you link directly to the product, instead of the main page of your web site? As you know, I always recommend to make your marketing as targeted as possible. You can do that very easily with article marketing – when you write an article on a particular topic, and offer a gift or a product in the resource box, related to the article’s theme, you are doing targeted article marketing. Since your article reader is interested in the article’s topic, offering a gift or a product related to the article increases the possibility that the reader will actually click on the link in the resource box, and learn more about your product.

Let’s say your wrote an article about time management. The best bet for your resource box is to offer a link to a free or a for-fee product of yours about time management. If your article is on time management, and you offer a link to a product on networking, you will not get as many takers.

You can get lots more article marketing tips and tricks in my Article Marketing Audio Guide.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who can help coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs get more clients through article marketing. Get marketing advice directly from Biana at https://www.MarketingSalad.com

In his article in Wall Street Journal, It May Be a Long Time Before the Long Tail Is Wagging the Web, Lee Gomes is discussing Chris Anderson’s new book, “The Long Tail.” Lee says that”

“The book argues that while traditional companies are limited by shelf space to offering only a relatively small number of “hits,” on the Web, they can carry a vastly bigger number of slower-selling items. These “misses,” which make up the “tail” of the title, can, he says, add up to a big number — maybe even bigger than sales of the hits.”

So far, so good, right? Does this mean that anyone can publishing an e-book or a report on pretty much anything, and make money selling it? Can we all write a song each, submit it to iTunes and profit?

But Lee says that:

“By Mr. Anderson’s calculation, 25% of Amazon’s sales are from its tail, as they involve books you can’t find at a traditional retailer. But using another analysis of those numbers — an analysis that Mr. Anderson argues isn’t meaningful — you can show that 2.7% of Amazon’s titles produce a whopping 75% of its revenues. Not quite as impressive.”

So, what does this tell you? I think noone would argue with me when I saw that knowing what your clients want, and catering to these wants will produce the “hits”, the best-selling products everyone is looking for.

But how about “misses”? How can a small business owner profit from misses? Small business owners typically don’t have the same amount of traffic as Amazon does. They would be able to sell a few of their “misses”, but selling just a few of a product will not be profitable in the long run.

My recommendations? Strive to create as many “hits” as possible – those will be profitable for your business.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who can help you make money with your custom products online. Get marketing advice directly from Biana at https://www.MarketingSalad.com

If you make custom, one of a kind pieces, such as paintings, jewelry, home decor, or any other, you may want to sell them. So how do you do that? And, more importantly, how do you do it online?

Custom work could sell if it is promoted to the right target market. Custom work usually takes a lot of time to complete, and as a result, has a high price. This means that a good target market for such custom work is probably and upscale target market. Pricing your products correctly is very important when you want to earn money and appeal to your target market at the same time.

Here are the steps to take to promote your custom products online:

– Define a good target market for the custom products
– Create a web site with the look and feel to appeal to the chosen target market
– Promote the web site heavily using search engine optimization, blogging and other online marketing techniques

Biana Babinsky
Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who can help you make money with your custom products online. Get marketing advice directly from Biana at https://www.MarketingSalad.com