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These 3 marketing myths can cause you to lose sales if you base your marketing decisions on them. We’ve given you some marketing tips to blast each myth and boost your sales.

Myth 1: People buy a product at the cheapest price they can find.

That is not true – if it was then companies like Rolex and would not exist – Timex would have put them out of business a long time ago. Despite the ease of research that the internet affords – buyers are generally lazy and don’t undertake full research. Even on eBay where it is far easier to check the relative prices of a product – people often buy a product at a higher price than they could. So what causes people to buy? These are called buying triggers – the most common are:

• Confidence in the seller
• A high perceived value
• Recommendations
• Ease of purchase

Blasting Myth 1:
Establish your credentials – for example we have over 20 years of business consultancy experience – so we know what works and what does not work in a business.

Find ways of enhancing the perceived value of your product or service by adding extras or clearly demonstrating the value of it’s purchase.

Ensure that you include some actual recommendations within your sales letter.
Make it easy to purchase and receive your product by not introducing any barriers to purchase such as extra forms, obscure or complex payment methods.

Myth 2: Offering your customers numerous different options will boost your sales

When confronted with several options, most customers have difficulty making a decision. They often react by procrastinating – and going to a seller who offers a clearer product. Now by this we don’t say add extras or up sells, just clearly state what is included in the product and don’t offer options that not only confuse but making your selling and processing more difficult.

The human mind works better when offered the two options “buy”, “don’t buy”.

Blasting Myth 2:
Only offer one product – or product package per page. You can have a clear (and short) menu on each page to encourage multiple purchases.
If you have more than one option for a product or service – then give them different names and present them each separately. For example you can call them “silver service”, “gold service”, “opal service” etc. This is what we did with our various marketing services and it works quite well.

You should always aim at a small, easily understood product or service range. You should be able to explain each of your products in one or two sentences. If you can’t do this – how do you expect your potential buyers to understand what they are buying?

Myth 3: Everybody Needs My Product or Service

Unfortunately, most people don’t believe that they do need a particular service of product. Obviously with items such as Ipods – your teenager will try and tell you they really, really, really need one, but this is peer pressure that has been built up with millions of dollars. Much of this was spent on research into what there market wanted – and they got it right!

If you believe this myth then you also believe that you can succeed without doing much marketing or selling. Unfortunately, despite what some marketers tell you – it does not happen that way. Undoubtedly there some very successful marketers around, but they will all admit that a great deal of market research, testing and reviewing of their offerings – happened before they became successful.

Building a successful business is hard work – most of it devoted to finding potential customers and then matching them with your products and services. Even if most people can use your product or service, you still need a marketing strategy to reach them and a persuasive sales message to close sales – because you can bet your last dollar – that where there a lots of potential customers – there are just as many sellers.

Blasting Myth 3:
• Do your homework – find out where your potential customers are, what particular needs and desires they have and what they are seeking to solve these.
• Look for a narrowly defined niche market where your product or service will solve a unique need of the customers.
• Design your product or service to meet these needs.
• Test, Change, Test, Refine, Test and obtain customer feedback.

Unless you are one of the millionaire marketers around – you will find many myths that you follow and potentially lose money on. Hopefully the ones above have helped you.

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© Copyright 2006 Biz Guru LLC
Lee Lister, writes as The Biz Guru, for a number of web sites including her own www.BizGuru.us and www.clikks.com where she sells her informational products. With over 20 year’s management and business consultancy experience with businesses large and small as well as being a serial entrepreneur, she now helps others set up, develop and market their businesses.

You might like to join our: Clikks Ezine: – aimed at the small businesses – click or brick with a web site presence. We provide business strategy and internet marketing assistance and products. clikks_ezine@aweber.com

This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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Internet marketing is exciting, challenging, and confusing. It can make or break your internet business career and yet many people who depend on internet marketing don’t have a full grasp of the essentials involved in internet marketing.

In fact, many internet entrepreneurs waste a great deal of time, energy, and momentum because they do not fully understand internet marketing. Don’t let this lack of understanding undermine your income potential.

In order for you to better understand internet marketing and its impact on your internet business you must know the answers to these three key questions:

1. What Is Internet Marketing?
2. What Is The Cost Of Internet Marketing?
3. What Is The Benefit of Internet Marketing?

What Is Internet Marketing?

Marketing is actually rather simple. Marketing is communication about an idea, product, service, or organization. Marketing therefore encompasses advertising, promotion and sales as well as the various techniques and forms of communication used to advertise, promote and sell.

Marketing is broader than simple advertising or promotion in that it includes researching the market to learn what consumers want and then setting out to meet their needs with the appropriate product, price, and distribution method. Marketing includes market research, deciding on products and prices, advertising promoting distributing and selling.

Marketing also covers all the activities involved in moving products and services from the source to the end user including making customers aware of products and services, attracting new customers to a product or service, keeping existing customers interested in a product or service, and building and maintaining a customer base for a product or service.

Internet marketing includes these same activities but also pulls in various internet tools including web sites, email, ezines, banner advertising, blogging, RSS, text links, search engine optimization, affiliates, autoresponders, and other ecommerce applications.

What Is The Cost Of Internet Marketing?

The range of expenses for internet marketing is huge. There are a number of promotional and marketing ventures that can cost you nothing or only pennies a day while other advertising efforts can cost you thousands a day.

It is important to consider your goals — both long-term and short-term — as well as how much each prospective customer is worth to you. This will help you determine a workable budget for your internet marketing campaign.

Many internet promotions are free, you can set up a web site and/or blog for $250 a year, and you can buy text links for $10 a month. You could easily spend $25-50 a day for advertising but there are many cheaper ad options available.

The best program is to start small and cheap and slowly build as you test and learn what is successful for your market and product. There is no perfect acvertising solution that works wonders for everyone. Each marketer and each product has a different formula.

What Is The Benefit of Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing offers more benefits than many traditional marketing mediums. The very nature of web sites and blogs is that they continue working to promote and market your product long after your initial marketing effort is over. Similarly many advertising efforts, such as ezines, newsletters, banners, and text links also continue to increase in power over time.

Email marketing can be a tremendous surge in contacts and sales and offers the ability to personalize your message as well as reach a targeted audience so your chance for sales goes up exponentially.

The other tremendous benefit of internet marketing is that it offers convenience and immediate satisfaction. Your potential customer sees your marketing message when it is convenient for them — and often when they are seeking information about your specific topic. Then you offer them the ability to act on that interest right then. They can locate your product and buy in the time it would take to watch a commercial on television or turn a page in the newspaper. That is the power of internet marketing.

Now that you have the answers to these three key questions, you are ready to begin your own internet marketing campaign — and succeed with your internet venture.

We’ve discussed blacklisting, I wanted to spend some time looking at where the rubber hits the road for email delivery: the ISP inbox.

Let’s be very clear about this for consumer facing campaigns there are 4 major ISP’s that manage the majority of consumer inboxes.

• MSN/Hotmail

• Yahoo Mail

• AIM Mail

• Gmail

What Does this Mean?
Basically unless each of these mail platforms relays your message to the primary folder, your email campaign is far from optimized.

What Causes mail to be delivered to a bulk/spam Folder?
All of these ISP’s allow their users to report spam with a “report spam” button. The ISP uses this feedback to create a profile for your mail. If users are reporting your mail as spam you will run into problems.

What Can I do to make sure I do not create ISP Spam complaints?
AOL recommends keeping spam complaints below 1-3 percent of traffic, depending on volume. This figure is unique to AOL’s user base; it’s too generous when applied as a general standard. Be at or below the range of one complaint per 6,000 to 8,000 messages, or 0.013 percent.

Minimize Complaints

Minimizing complaints always starts with practices used to collect e-mail addresses. It should be obvious by now sending unsolicited e-mail only gets you in trouble. Mailing lists with the lowest complaint rates are either confirmed opt-in or properly managed single opt-in. If you have a solid permission-based list but still find incoming complaints are higher than the optimal rate or are rising, consider the following:

• Brand your subject lines. Mail systems with spam complaint buttons offer it at the inbox level. A recipient need only to scan subject lines and decide which messages not to delete immediately. A subject line such as “Exciting offers for you, Bob!” will surely be marked as spam. Consider using your company or newsletter name in brackets at the beginning of your subject lines.

• Consider including unsubscribe instructions at the top of your e-mail, in addition to the footer. Some users use the “report spam” button as an unsubscribe method and won’t scroll through an entire message to find that link.

• Include instructions for users to whitelist your domain. This prevents a user-based filter from mistaking your message for spam and either diverting it to the spam folder or prefixing “[SPAM]” to the subject of the message.

• Provide a preference update page. Disclose how your organization will use a subscriber’s e-mail addresses, and how often. Allow subscribers to select preferences on the opt-in form, and link from e-mail to a preference or profile update page.

• Avoid spammy looking content. Try not to use garish, bold fonts; large, red letters, and the like. Avoid images with poor compression quality. A clean, readable design isn’t as likely to be mistaken for spam.

• Don’t over e-mail. If recipients expect to receive a few informational e-mail messages each month from your company, don’t suddenly start sending two or three each week.

• Don’t send unexpected e-mail. If subscribers opted in to receive your “Trends & Tips” newsletter, don’t send them your hard-sell e-commerce messages, unless they clearly requested them.

• Include opt-in information. If possible, add to your e-mail admin area information, such as the subscriber’s e-mail address, date of opt-in, and how she potentially subscribed (product registration, white paper download form, sweepstakes entry, etc). With many subscribers receiving dozens of commercial e-mail messages daily, it’s easy to forget signing up for your newsletter — and then to file a complaint.

What Can I do to test my ISP deliverability?
We recommend you use a service like EmailReach. Their trial is free and let’s you know where you stand in about 5 minutes.

http://www.emailreach.com/default.aspx

Following these guidelines should help you to avoid being bulk foldered by the main ISP’s.