A mature database marketing program spends under half of their funding toward image awareness and sales lead programs.

It seems the majority of business to business marketers put over 90% of the budget into image enhancement, market awareness and sales lead generation programs, while under 10% goes into database marketing. This approach is incorrect.

As an alternative, if you’re new to the database marketing game, consider putting about 3/4 or your marketing budget to image enhancement, market awareness and sales lead generation. Then spend the remainder funding other database programs with the intent to develop and nurture hot prospects until they become qualified leads or make a purchase. You may also want to save a bit of this remaining budget to target your existing customers to upsell, retain, upgrade or add-on to the current offerings.

Those businesses which have more developed database programs, particularly those who have demonstrated an ability to measure and increase sales from database marketing programs, usually end up spending less than 50% of their budget on these sales lead, image and awareness-enhancing programs. Why is this so? It’s simple: because they know they aren’t required to spend so much on these objectives when also effectively using a quality database marketing program. These savvy database marketers are able to use the remaining 50% on communications programs directed specifically at their prospects, customers, and leads. These select, coordinated and consistent marketing campaigns are designed to locate and develop sales opportunities.

Although sales lead generation, image, and awareness all play an important role, these programs are most effective along with a well-executed database marketing program. A good balance between both marketing aspects will help you reach top levels of performance in your direct marketing efforts.

A Direct Selling online business, also called Direct Sales, is one of the most profitable ways to start an online business. One of the primary benefits is the freedom to decide what your paycheck will be. You are rewarded financially for how smart you work, not how hard.

There are a many misconceptions between direct selling online and MLM companies. Although they are both related to selling they are not the same. Most MLM affiliates are marketing products that are not high-ticket items, therefore providing smaller commissions. In MLM you are also required to build a very large downline in order to make the type of money people dream about. This can take anywhere from 2-10 years. However, in direct selling online, the compensation plans enable affiliates to beginning earning large commissions immediately. This enables affiliates to begin turning their annual income into their monthly income fairly quickly.

In order to be successful in direct selling online, there are several key components to look for when selecting which company to work with. First and foremost one should find a team that has experience, support and a proven system in place. Although many teams claim to have these components, it’s essential to do your own research.

As a new entrepreneur, you will save yourself time and money by following the leaders on your team. Leaders have already spent their time and money discovering what works and what is not successful. Individuals who take this advice to heart, are able to propel themselves further along in their business, than those who insist on “doing it their own way.”

World famous finance and business experts Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki recently released a book titled, Why We Want You To Be Rich. This book dedicates an entire chapter to direct sales and direct selling online. Both Trump and Kiyosaki state that beginning your entrepreneurial career in direct sales can be one of the best decisions a new entrepreneur can make. An individual can plug into a system and receive all the real-world business training they need to be successful, for a very reasonable cost. Once an individual has established himself or herself in direct selling online, they have the experience required to take their business enterprise to the next level where the sky is the limit!

Article marketing is a well established type of advertising that involves writing short articles related to your business. Article marketing has several benefits, including establishing yourself as an expert, lead generation, increased site traffic and improved search engine rank. When you write an article then give people free use of it, you get some back-links and website traffic if your article is re-published elsewhere. Article marketing is therefore one of the fastest ways to develop back-links to your website often resulting in improved search engine results.

Thus article marketing is one of the most powerful skills you can learn for the promotion of your online business and is the most effective way to drive free, targeted traffic to your website, blog or product. However article marketing works slowly and you shouldn’t expect to get a load of traffic overnight.

So how to you get increased traffic from article marketing?

You write articles relating to the benefits of your products or service and place them in article directories which can get your name before millions of people, help you to establish yourself as an expert on your subject matter, and drive traffic to your websites. The greater majority of authors never make it beyond single figure article counts, with the most prolific writers enjoying significant traffic rewards because they publish many articles.

It doesn’t have to be spectacular, but you can create a steady trickle of incoming traffic from the sites that published them. Without traffic, it’s hard for an internet marketer to be successful. You must be prepared to deliver what the search engines want to get lots of free targeted traffic. Articles that are interesting and informative will act to draw targeted traffic direct to your website in both the short term and the long term. Articles I submitted to one article directory over two years ago still brings regular visitors to my site proving that high quality articles can be “timeless” and provide web site links and targeted traffic to your website for years to come. This is because article marketing caters to the thousands of websites on the internet that are looking for original content.

Articles should be written to target particular keyword niches, and distributed to content publishers that cater to those markets. Greater attention to the content creation process will create greater appeal to your target audience. Simply put, if you have AdSense sites, then you NEED to be using article promotion, otherwise you’re missing out on new income from the advertising which your visitors click on.

However, don’t be fooled into thinking that just writing a few articles and building in some links will push your website to the number one position for your primary keywords. Most major search engines see incoming links as ‘votes of confidence’ and may rank a page higher due to these votes. Your article will serve as a viral marketing tool that will grow in exposure to steadily generate even more permanent direct web site links that result in even more targeted visitors to your web site. If you want to build one way links to your website, learn more about directory submissions.

Article submission sites like EzineArticles.com get the spider bot treatment because of their regularly updated content which in turn speeds indexing of the site. As proof of the popularity of article marketing, article directories have watched their submissions mushroom by 400% over the last two years.

When articles are published to the Internet, the content, based on keywords used in them, attracts the attention of search engine spiders. These articles should be quite different from each other, and the links in the author bio should be directly to the important pages you identified and include the top keyword for those pages in the link text. If we assume that you have focused your website(s) for your most important keyword(s), then article marketing can be used in a very effective way to drive home and support that focus but most experts agree that if you try and get too promotional you may turn off potential publishers.

The great thing about article marketing is that you are rewarded with one-way incoming links from your resource box at the foot of every article, yet you don’t have to reciprocate as you would with link exchanges, which in theory should reward you with better search engine rankings.

So, article marketing and submission is one of the easiest kinds of website promotion, it is a perfect way to focus your website marketing on the full range of your most important search phrases and it is a practice that no webmaster, blogger or Internet marketer should go without doing.

How many people do you know without a cell phone? Within our technologically savvy environment, for most people that number is probably close to zero. Given the changing trends of society, where people are reminded to turn their mobile devices off in a movie theatre, the concept and implementation of mobile marketing becomes more and more relevant everyday. What better way to get a message out to a niche audience than through a device that people carry with them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? Just as cell phones, BlackBerrys, and iPhones keep us connected to people across the globe, they also provide a new avenue for businesses to garner customers and attract a targeted group of consumers. Therefore, businesses should and inevitably will embrace this innovative concept of mobile marketing, realizing that the possibilities are endless as it will certainly play a pivotal role in the future of marketing and advertising.

In today’s media saturated world, businesses are constantly looking for a viable outlet to attract their target consumers. Over the last decade, traditional media forms such as newspapers and magazines have become less popular among the masses, and by extension, a less formidable way to advertise. According to a recent M:Metrics report, the average person sees more advertisements in one day than people of 50 years ago saw in a lifetime, severely desensitizing consumers and destroying the marketing effect. Additionally, the widespread use of DVR devices such as TiVo has weakened the impact of television ads, while pop-up and banner blockers have diluted web ads. So how are businesses supposed to promote their product or service? The simple answer: mobile marketing. Unlike the more traditional forms of advertising, mobile marketing is able to bypass common hold-ups and reach an attentive audience, anywhere at anytime.

Given the current situation, mobile marketing offers a solution to many of the marketing woes mentioned above. According to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA), “three in four mobile phone users text message at least occasionally.” Over 525 million text messages are sent each day. Therefore, mobile marketing opens the door to an extremely large group of consumers that can be targeted by specific demographics. A further advantage mobile marketing presents compared to more traditional forms of advertising is its ability to generate interaction with the consumer, which ultimately increases brand recognition. Instead of simply reading or watching an ad, users can actively participate by playing games, voting via text message, and interacting in a number of other ways. This idea of interaction also makes it possible to measure an ad’s impact more effectively.

Although still a new technology, many are finding that the benefits of mobile marketing far outweigh any risks. Those that adopt mobile marketing solutions can build a vast database of interested consumers that can be contacted instantly. Imagine spending advertising dollars on a campaign that immediately reaches your targeted audience and bypasses the disinterested, saving time, money, and headaches. With mobile marketing, all this is possible. Businesses are not forced to waste valuable money and resources on an audience that will never have any interest in the brand’s product or service. Say a local restaurant was having a slow night and decided to text all those registered in their database with a coupon to come in that evening. Instead of spending valuable time and money to print a coupon amd put the ad in a newspaper (where the majority of people will simply ignore it), that restaurant could immediately have direct access to thousands customers. Mobile marketing with a company such as EnMobile offers direct and instant access to a business’s prime audience.

Overall, mobile marketing represents the new age of marketing and advertising. As people adopt new technologies such as text messaging into their daily routines, businesses should look at how they can capitalize on this current craze, which shows no signs of slowing down. Incorporating a mobile marketing campaign into one’s business strategy has numerous positive benefits that traditional platforms do not offer. If a business is looking to expand to the next level, they should seriously consider a mobile marketing campaign.