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[T739]The Small Business Game

by John Reed, Joh

Gaming has become the pass time of hundreds of millions of individuals the world over. Game enthusiast spend multiple hours of time just focusing on the game almost without blinking. Interrogate the average player about what is associated with a particular game and they recall it. They actually do.

Marketers that have huge marketing budgets have already understood this. Placing an advertisement in a game is not a new concept, just an effective one.

Think Im missing it? Take a little time to look around when you go to a major sporting event. There are ads everywhere. There are ads painted on the field, hanging from the rafters, tacked to the wall, hanging over the stalls in the mens bathroom. I mean they are everywhere. Marketers havent stopped there.

If you play video games you know what I am talking about. While playing video games, in the game you maybe you are walking down the street in the video game and come across an ad for a clothes line tacked to the wall. You may think that these are just decorations but they are not. Programmers of these games create whole cities with people in them interacting with the person playing the game. Do you really think programmers couldnt come up with a fake name for a fake product to put on that poster gamers keep running into? That is an advertisement and you can bet that it isnt free to have it hanging there.

The nice thing about this type of advertising is that the advertisement isnt looked upon as a nuisance. It is accepted because it ads to the realism of the game. Accepted, Read and Remembered. Isnt that the dream of every marketer.

To lower the costs associated with advertising in third party created games, some marketers have elected to create their own games and use them to draw and keep the attention customers. However, this can be expensive as well unless your uncle Rufus develops games for a living and you can get him to create you one for one tenth of the price. Additional problems arise with this approach when one considers the amount of advertising it will take to get their game noticed in a field that is so saturated with other entertaining options.

The best way to enter this marketing field is to find an existing game that that allows you to place your ad for a small fee. This cheaper alternative works great for small budget advertisers due to its, price, flexibility and scalability. This is hard to find in todays disc based games and impossible to find in major sporting event scenarios. However, viable alternatives exist.

Online games are hot and there are several reasons for this. Individuals that enjoy games can play them from wherever they are at the time, they are usually free and allows gamers to compete with others from around the world at a moments notice.

One such online game and advertising website TypoBounty dot com allows advertisers to place their ad in the game of error hunting for a nominal fee. Advertisers pay very low prices for the advertising and gain attentive traffic with all of the ad acceptance benefits of game marketing.

Game player on TypoBounty dot com are hunting for errors for an opportunity to earn money for reporting them. While they look for errors, they are actually reading and comprehending the website, and the websites sales pitch. They spend more time on the website thus giving the owner more opportunity to sell. For seven to twenty dollars, an advertiser gets attentive traffic. That is a lot better than paying 1500 dollars to get visitors that rarely read much of the sites they visit, like found in pay per click advertising campaigns.

Do yourself a favor, get your ad into game advertising situation and increase the quality of your visitors as well as the quantity. It is no longer a matter of quality, it is a matter of quality of visitors.

Just a few short years ago hardly anyone knew what a blog was, but now, because they are so easy to set up and maintain, their popularity has blossomed beyond all expectations. Blogs are not just for ordinary people who wish to expound on their hobby or area of special interest. Blogs are for the smart small businessperson who understands the power of the published word online.

A blog can provide a low cost means of marketing online, a feedback mechanism for establishing your side of the story against someone spreading negative and potentially damaging things about you and your business, and a means of connecting and communicating with existing clients and potential clients. The purpose of this article is to explain these three main positive reasons why your small business needs a blog.

1. A Blog as a Marketing and Promotion Tool for Your Small Business

Small business internet marketing seems easy at first glance, but many have tried it and failed. Others have persevered, perfecting search engine optimization techniques, keyword density and linking strategies, which work for some but not always for others. They have followed the advice of every "guru," only to be more mystified at the end of the process than when they started out. They invariably end up thinking that there has to be a better way, and there is - a blog.

The search engines love blogs. Yes, a little optimization with careful keyword placement and some back links will never go amiss, but even the complete novice knowing nothing whatsoever can enjoy good results simply by regularly maintaining a blog. All it takes is a simple strategy, perhaps focusing on a particular product line and posting just once a day, to get results that will make a difference.

With time and as your understanding of blogging techniques improve, your small business internet marketing efforts will bear significant fruit. And remember, the cost of all this is negligible compared to newspaper advertising, for example. Of course, this is not the only reason why your small business needs a blog. What if someone is "badmouthing" you by blogging all over the Internet, perhaps because they didn't like something about the way you do business? How do you defend yourself and give your side of the story? You need a blog!

2. A Blog as Feedback Channel to Establish a Positive Image for Your Small Business

A real-life example of someone who found themselves dealing with negative blog posts involves a medical doctor who practices on her own in California. She treated two patients whose poor health situation was largely of their own making. She told them that they needed to take some responsibility for their own health. This was not at all what they wanted to hear. Feeling insulted, they started to blog about it online, giving only their side of the story and painting a very damaging picture of the doctor in the process.

If you were to go to Google or any of the major search engines now and do a search for her name, the only information you would find are negative, almost libelous, rants created by these two aggressive individuals who couldn't face up to the truth about their own health situations.

However, had this doctor previously considered the advantages of blogging for local small businesses to complement her business activities, she would have been able to limit at least some of the damage caused. Patient confidentiality rules would have prevented her from posting a positive rebuttal to the negative blog posts -her side of the story in other words. But she could have built up an archived library of positive and factual information about herself and her practice, automatically dealing with negative blog posts at the same time. Anyone then using Google to search for her name would still have found the negativity, but they would also have found the positive balanced view.

This type of situation can happen to anyone running a business, not just doctors. A blog for your business offers you the chance of great flexibility to promote your business, publish a positive image, and to communicate with all your clients, even those who don't know that they have yet to become your clients!

3. A Blog as a Communication and Connection Tool for Your Small Business

People love getting free things on the Internet. We all do, in fact. And one of the most successful things to give away and help build your business at the same time is a free newsletter. Traditionally, this has taken the form of a specially formatted email, but increasingly small business owners are turning to blogs for publishing their newsletters. They still send out an email to the people on their list, but only to send them over to the blog where the newsletter can be read online.

This is a great way to communicate with your existing clients. You can regularly give them useful information, making them realize that your newsletter has real value. And every so often you can pitch an offer - a special bargain offer perhaps, and a percentage will make a purchase that you would not have had otherwise. But it doesn't have to stop there. Your blog can be a tool for getting new customers too.

If you have carefully built up your business blog with regular and useful posts, the search engines will have noticed and in time your blog will be ranked according to whatever the search engines deem appropriate. Hopefully this will be a favorable placement, and if it is, people who search for the kind of product information you provide will find your blog.

When they are on your blog you can ask them to sign up for email alerts to whenever you make a new post, or whenever your latest newsletter is published. Once you have them on a list you can make offers to them and a percentage of them will buy. Blogging for local small businesses can be a wonderfully inexpensive and highly effective method of acquiring new customers with little effort.

There are many more ways to use a blog for any small business. Often it just requires your imagination to come up with new ways to use it. And you don't have to limit yourself to only one blog; you can have several, each one dealing with a particular topic, and all of them linked together. This can be extremely powerful if done properly, and it isn't hard to do either.

The three reasons I have offered you for why your small business needs a blog are indeed important ones. But they are not the only reasons. Don't waste time now trying to think up other reasons. Get a blog in place first, and then the ways to use your blog will become increasingly obvious. You really do owe it to yourself to get your own small business blog in place today!

Article Source : Advantages Of Transit Advertising

About Author

Both John Reed & Caroline Melberg are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

John Reed has sinced written about articles on various topics from Video Games, Credit Cards and Auto Insurance. The author, John Reed, has 15 years business marketing experience and has had the opportunity to use and review multiple advertising strategies. You can