Image Advertising is Dead!

It was refreshing to watch Andrew Lock’s first episode of Help My Business Sucks earlier today as he talked about the fact that Image Advertising is Dead.

If you don’t know what image advertising is, it’s what Coca Cola, Ford Motor Company and other large organisations do … they take every and any opportunity to get their logo in front of you and, they attach emotion to their logo by advertising their product in the happiest setting such as on the beach or work break time (Coca Cola and Diet Coke for example).

The problem with image advertising is it’s hugely expensive and the truth is, few companies using image advertising make a return on investment but yet, they still pour millions of dollars into advertising in this way.

If you’re a small business owner or entrepreneur, be warned …

Image Advertising is Dangerously Expensive to the Longevity and Growth of Your Business

I know most people are not going to want to hear that because this is what they were taught in Business School.  I was too, so it’s not sour grapes!  My MBA taught me little about “real world” marketing and depite spending in excess of £10,000 ($20,000) to earn it, it cost me much, much more to learn how to marketing my business both online and offline.

But I’m going to reserve my spiel about what it cost me participate in Image Advertising and the BEST way for small businesses and entrepreneurs to approach marketing for my next blog post.  For now, I want you to watch Andrew Locks’s video and take note of his 21st Century methods for marketing your business.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised that you don’t need an MBA to market effectively.

Until next time,

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Build a Website The Easy Way

Don’t run away from building a website because whether you do it yourself, or have a designer do it for you, you need to build one!

It can be daunting to consider venturing into your own online business, having to think about your niche, the marketing of the site and then either do it yourself or hire someone to build a website, but before you start breaking out into a cold sweat, it really isn’t that difficult to build a website in the 21st century.

I admit I was adamant to learn how to build my own website from day 1, mainly because of the price designers were charging four years ago .  But I’ve used almost every software out there, including Dreamweaver, now owned by Adobe, Netobjects by Website Pros as well as various other online website builders before finally listening to my husband and buying, and sticking to Microsoft’s FrontPage 2003 .  I’ll explain why I think this is the best website editor in a moment.

But whatever way you look at it, if you want an oline business, you’re going to have to have a website and this applies even if all you’re doing is marketing other people’s products as an affiliate.

As my mentor, Alan Forrest Smith, would say…,

“don’t talk about building a website, talk about building a business.” 

Why?  Because this forces you to change your mindset about your website and rather than create an expensive online brochure, as I call them, you’ll create an automated business machine that once created and created well, will continue to keep working and making money for you with just some tweaking, maintainence and updating from you.

As I said before, I purchased my copy of Microsoft FrontPage after finally listening to my husband who kept telling me he used it at work and how easy it was.  So after getting frustrated with jumping from one website editor or online site builder to another, I purchased a copy and I’ve never looked back. 

Whilst a web designer will tell you Dreamweaver is the best, I can tell you that hands down, FrontPage is the easiest to use and has everything you need to build a website that not only looks good, but makes you money.  And this is coming from me, the techie. 

FrontPage is also the same software that most of the Internet Marketing guru’s use to make millions of dollars each year.  So unless you’re aleady familiar with Dreamweaver, I would save yourself the headache and use something that’s easy and gets the job done in less time.  Otherwise, you’ll get frustrated and frustrated people often give up!!

And, if you’re used to Microsoft Word, then you really are laughing because of the huge similarities in the interface.

To get the most out of creating a website and adding things like forms, linking my website to my merchant account and capturing email addresses, I invested in Jim Edwards Mini Site Creator home study course and if you want to have a ‘no stones unturned’ video course that takes you from complete newbie to pro in a few short days, then this is the program that will clear all of your headaches on building mini websites.

By mini websites, I’m talking about 1 to 10 page websites that focus on one product or one theme but there is absolutely no reason why this program can’t be used to create a 30 page niche content website.

Jim not only shows you “how” to build the sites, he highlights the various kinds of sites and will explain the mechanics behind why he does what he’s doing. 

He also demonstrates the building of a mini site using FREE software that comes with Mozilla FireFox.  Whilst not as sophisticated as FrontPage, it’s great for the beginner or if you can’t afford to purchase Microsoft FrontPage immediately.  The bonus is that Jim Edwards has created some updated videos where he shows you how to use FrontPage with the FrontPage expert himself, Paul Colligan.

Now, I’m going to be truthful with you… even after I spent a few days building my website, having put into place what I’d learnt from the Mini Site Creator, I hired a web designer to take what I’d done and add his artistic flair to it.  But hear me out before you call me an imposter!!

I had 101 things to do and I decided that now I knew how to do it, it meant that I was also able to project manage it!  So even though I gave it to a designer who did a sterling job, guess who was in charge of the project?  Yes me! 

I gave them permission to use a little flash but forbade them to go overboard because it’s annoying and doesn’t keep people on your page any longer, and I was also able to control the look and feel including the font and font size (not sure why some designers love to give you fonts that no one can read online - they’re small and grey) as well as the overall ease of the navigation.

If I didn’t know what I learnt from Mini Site Creator I may have just accepted anything, including all of the mistakes that newbies make with their websites (not time to go over these here, but I will in the next few days).

If you want to go and see that website, it’s at www.womenofinfluence.com.

Another interesting thing is that I used this same designer for a number of projects, including some of my clients projects, and mine were always hundreds of dollars cheaper because all they had to do was take the template site that I’d put together using the Mini-Site Creator course and add their designer flair to the graphics.  So even with hiring a designer, I have a huge advantage over those who have no idea of how to build a website.

Even if you’re not interested in purchasing the course just yet, or ever, go over to Jim’s website at  www.minisitecreator.com and listen to the interview with Dr Jeanette Cates.  Jim Edwards gives away so much quality information in this interview that it will enable you to put some of the strategies into place immediately.

Hope you feel a little less stressed and worried about either building a website or having it built for you, but whatever you do, don’t hesitate building one unless you have no idea of what you want to market online. 

To your online success,