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There is a school of thought on the Internet that says if you want to build a community for yourself –go out and find the fringers and give them a place to connect to you and each other through your brand. Find the outcasts and unite them. I say NO! No. It’s simple. The popular kids never give tutorials on how to become popular. And they never go out and sit down at the loser nose pickers lunch table and make them their tribe. If you want to be a prom king brand or product on the internet you need to build your clique from the top down with two distinct types of users.

1. The celebrities/influencers

These are people that everybody already knows and respepcts. These are celebrities’ in their industry. The household names. They have the ability by simply mentioning your product/brand/website once in a blog post or using it to influence a large number of people.

1. The evangelists

These are the people that read you, follow you, watch your videos and respect you that will use your product/brand/service and individually convert others to use your product/brand/service through personal testimonials

In this model, you build your community through careful selection of whom you want to use your product or service and speak to them, communicate with them. At the end of the day you only need a few of these types of people. However, the beauty of the model is these few will work to recruit the rest, even the fringers. This is a top down approach to marketing and building a tribe. It is always easiest to make the brand cool from day 1, by making sure your users are cool. On the flip side, it is a lot harder to make the brand cool if your users are geeks. That stigma is hard to break. You build a prom king brand by attracting Prom Kings first.

Case study: Versace Marketing in a Gap World

Consider the Versace Model. In the 90s, Gianni Versace started giving his clothing away to celebrities to walk the red carpet in. By putting 1 dress on Elizabeth Hurley, Hugh Grant’s then supermodel girlfriend, (known as the safety pin dress), he got his brand seen and sought after by millions. It was a cheap and effective method. He simply put his product on the back of an influencer and next thing you know he was caviar in a cream cheese world. On the flip side, you take Gap, in order to market to the masses through more expensive channels with greater reach like print ads and television, they need to appeal in style and price and sell far more product. And at the end of the day they still never achieve the mystique of Versace. That coveted position at the cool kids table. What would you rather be? Versace or Gap? It’s simple – Versace marketing is a more effective and less expensive branding technique, it’s just a matter of learning how to do it properly.

Now I don’t mena to say that Versace was on a shoe string budget at the time they started clothing celebrities, but they knew they were a high end retailer and they knew that it was more cost effective to put a few threads (and this was Versace, so we literally mean “a few”) on the important people than having their advertisements flashed all over TV. It is simply a more effective brand builder to associate yourself with the influencers than to go directly to the masses. So, find ways to connect directly with celebrities within your industry or within the mainstream online and actually get them to use your product/service- you don’t need them to endorse it- just using it will make it cool. The rest will follow like sheep.

Marketing writing is quite possibly one of the most profitable types of writing. Profitable because a good marketing letter, advertisement or email will bring in prospects, customers, and sales, it it’s done correctly.

Here’s how to deliver great marketing writing.

Step One. Know your audience. This means not only understanding their demographics like their age and geographic location but also their psychographics – who they are as people. Where do they shop? What types of cars do they drive and why? What are their hobbies, habits, and hopes? What are their dreams and more importantly what are their problems?

Step Two. Determine what your audience’s problem is and then solve it. How does your product or service solve their problems, make their lives easier?

Step Three. Talk to your audience as if it were one person. This is important. We buy from people we like and we like people who talk to us as individuals. Think about it, are you more likely to buy from someone who defines you as a group or labels you or someone who sees you as an individual and is there to fill your individual needs.

One common approach is to create a fictional person who represents your audience and then write the marketing copy directly to them. Yes, your fictional person is based on an understanding of your audience as a whole but they don’t know that. The person reading your marketing copy will feel as if you’re speaking just to them.

Step Four. Make sure your writing is easy to understand. This means skipping the jargon and colloquiums that may not be understood by your audience. Speak in simple sentences and don’t be afraid to break a few grammar rules, conversational writing often does.

Step Five. Reach out to your prospects and touch their emotions. These don’t have to be positive emotions either. Quite often we’re frustrated, angry, bored, and a whole host of other negative emotions. If that’s how your prospect is feeling by all means let them know you understand and have what they need to make it better.

Finally, give your prospects something to do – a call to action. They won’t likely take any action unless you ask them to. Whether you want them to forward to a friend, visit a website or buy now it’s important to ask.

Writing marketing copy begins with understanding your audience and appealing to them as an individual. Speak to them about your product or service in terms they understand, relate to and care about. Taking the time to follow these steps will help you create the kind of marketing copy, and profits you desire.

Relationship Marketing, I’m sure many of you have heard of it before, and many of you probably think it’s old school marketing, you’re probably thinking of heading to the local networking events around your area. But, I’m not talking about relationship marketing of the old days, Relationship marketing like many core marketing tactics never gets old, they just become useful again on new marketing platforms of the current day at hand. So let’s talk about the best ways to do relationship marketing in this day and age.

There are many ways to do relationship marketing these days with the power of Web 2.0. With many different social sites of the world like Facebook, Myspace, Linkdin, and the many 1000s of others, relationship marketing has been renewed and has become very easy to do on the web. And you don’t have to limit yourself to just the name brand social sites “to say” like Facebook and Myspace, there are many social sites out there that are based on and cover all types of topics of business industries, like there are stock social sites, entertainment social sites, marketing social sites, automotive social sites, etc, and etc. The main concept is that your niche market can be found at many of these social sites, basically just hanging around waiting for your product of interest to be relationship marketed to them.

The best way to do relationship marketing once you reach these sites is not to just try and pitch to every person you come across. That’s a fast way to just get ignored. The best to approach network marketing on Web 2.0 sites is to give, ‘I Repeat GIVE” complementary information or news about your product in a helpful way, and let the prospects of interest come to you strictly based upon their interest in your informational content. Of course you can add friends and join groups, but provide information and let the prospect’s interest come to you, don’t sales attack people.

Network Marketing ins another form of relationship marketing where you connect with people in person and give out your business card for your particular product and service. A popular network marketing company right now that has great training is in the skincare niche. More information on what, check out my Neora review and read it all the way to the end.