Blog Archives

Stock trading, buy your options now!

Are you involved in any way with the stock market?

Maybe you’ve got some stocks. Maybe you manage your own portfolio. Maybe you have an account with an online brokerage. Maybe you even trade stocks and options regularly.

Regardless of your level of involvement, the bottom line is that you are NOT a professional trader on Wall Street.

Therefore, you are trading with a huge handicap! Yes, you are at a major disadvantage…

UNLESS… you’re using ‘The Simple Trade System’.

There has never been a course like this.

This is the way real professionals trade, and if you’re not using this information you’re simply not doing as well as you could be doing. You see…

The market offers unlimited opportunities to players who understand what is going to happen next in the market.

It does not apologize for taking your money when you’re wrong. It doesn’t feel bad when you’re caught off-guard by a surprise move.

In fact, the market doesn’t have any feelings at all!

The market is not a person and it doesn’t care one little bit about the money you’ve gained or lost.

It fluctuates in a way that frustrates the majority of players, and rewards only the 5% of traders who understand that it’s NOT news, technical analysis, or earnings that make the market move.

The top 5% of professionals who make consistent profits in the market look at the market differently than ordinary traders (aka “retail traders”) .

screenshots

How would you like to see those kind of profits in your account?

I can’t guarantee that you’ll achieve any specific results, but what I do 100% guarantee is that I’ll be giving you the EXACT SAME system and strategies used to make a consistent income like the screenshots above.  Read More

7 Hot Social Media Marketing Positions

Whether you’re unemployed, underemployed or looking for something more challenging, the Mashable Job Board is full of listings that will help take your career to the next level.

Since 2005, Mashable has been committed to bringing the top digital, social and tech news and resources to our readers. Over time, we’ve built a readership of 20 million people who are well versed in digital trends, social media and all the hottest technologies. So when the world’s best companies are looking to fill open positions, they post them on the Mashable Job Board. New jobs are added every day, and many positions are exclusive — employers know that if they’re going to find the right person for the job, they’re going to find them reading Mashable.  Read More

Secrets Of Successful Marketing Analytics Adoption

When Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business released its latest edition of The CMO Survey recently, it revealed a curious paradox. Some 500 U.S. chief marketing officers surveyed said they expect to increase – and in fact dramatically increase – their spending on marketing analytics over the next three years.  Currently, marketing organizations spend an average of about 6% of marketing budgets on analytics, which is expected to hit 10% within three years. That’s to make sure the other 90% is optimally invested and the right customers are being offered the right things.

But here’s the paradox:  Even as marketers allocate more money to analytics, efforts to apply analytical learnings to organizational decision-making are lagging well behind. In other words, there’s still a big gap in extracting the real value in big data. That gap, I would wager, results from what I call “institutional lethargy” – the tendency toward status quo that keeps organizations from making the changes they need to make.  Read More

Robert Downey Jr. reportedly signs with HTC for $12 million marketing blitz

robert downey jr iron man (Featureflash / Shutterstock.com)

HTC is preparing an extensive two-year marketing campaign featuring Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr, according to two sources who spoke to Bloomberg. The deal is said to be worth $12 million and will span television, print, and billboard advertising around the globe, with Downey maintaining a level of creative control.

HTC has struggled to keep the pace with rival Samsung’s marketing muscle, despitepositive reviews of products such as the flagship One smartphone, and was also recently hit with a series of high-profile departures. The company said last month it had soldaround five million One phones since its March launch, compared to Samsung’s 10 million shipments of the Galaxy S4 in its first month.

“We haven’t been loud enough,” said chief marketing officer Ben Ho in his first meeting with the press this March. Ho added that the company would be retiring its long-serving “Quietly Brilliant” tagline in favor of a campaign based around the themes of “bold,” “authentic,” and “playful.”  Read More

6 Key Marketing Do’s and Don’ts For Your Startup

Marketing is everything these days. You can have the best technology, but if customers don’t know you exist, or they don’t know how your technology solves a real problem for them, your startup will fail. Yet I see many entrepreneurs that focus on the basics of marketing too little and too late.

They skimp on the design of their website, procrastinate on the rollout to make sure the product is perfect, and get so excited about technology features that they forget about creating value for customers. In fact, this article was driven by a startup press release I just saw today, highlighting a startup’s “geo-fencing technology” as a new basis for discount coupons. How many customers will have any idea what this means to them?

On the marketing side of the equation, there are so many “marketing gurus” and “marketing resources” out there, the real challenge for most of us is to sort out the basic do’s and the don’ts that apply to startups. I found some help from marketing coach David Newman’s new book “Do It! Marketing,” which provides some pragmatic marketing advice for all small businesses as follows:

  1. Don’t tell customers how great you are. Parroting a generic message that you have great service, great value, and a great selection says you have nothing unique. You need to clearly convey what makes your startup the only choice for your customers. Give yourself the “So-what?” test and check for a compelling value-based answer.
  2. Don’t fall into the marketing-speak trap. Don’t fall for the temptation to make big claims, empty promises, and mind-boggling jargon. Learn to speak a new customer-specific dialect based on current research and homework. Go directly to the source – your real live customers, and get their priorities, issues, pressures, and challenges.
  3. Don’t waste your time networking with strangers. Start networking smarter and smaller. Invite key people for coffee or lunch one-on-one, and get to know them and their business. Aim first and foremost to make them a friend, and the connections to others will come naturally. Working the circuit of big groups of strangers is minimally productive.
  4. Don’t waste your time following up. If you are focused exclusively on prospects who are actively seeking to solve the problem you are positioned to solve, you won’t need five or seven attempts to get their attention. Craft a no-follow-up sales letter, after you have positioned yourself as the right expert, with powerful testimonials. They will call you back.
  5. Don’t dumb it down for social media. Many entrepreneurs fear giving away their very best insights, strategies, or tools via social media – it might diminish the demand and the profit. In fact, when customers perceive real value in what you give away, they begin to imagine how much more they might get as a real customer.
  6. Don’t put all your faith in passion. Passion is necessary, but not sufficient to grow your startup. Be passionate about what you do, but develop a really strong plan, and a strong plan B too. The more you think ahead of failure, and think beyond failure, the better your chances for success are.

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3 Marketing Myths That Are Costing You Sales

BARCELONA, SPAIN - JANUARY 07:  A display wind...Is your company approaching marketing and sales the right way?

Misunderstanding In-Person Sales. Everyone knows a personal connection matters in sales– but few companies have grasped how technology has altered the dynamic. It used to be that salespeople were “the only repository of the information customers needed,” Baer told me. “Nothing was available via self-service, so it was almost a forced relationship.” But just as stockbrokers and travel agents found themselves supplanted by the Internet, salespeople are far less necessary early in the process: customers want to investigate for themselves online. “Salespeople don’t have the keys to knowledge unilaterally the way they used to have,” says Baer, who is also the co-author (with Amber Naslund) of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social. They’re still important (customers want to know and trust the people they’re buying from), but their role in the sales funnel has shifted. “People call once every other question has been answered,” says Baer, so a rudimentary understanding of your product or industry just won’t suffice. Today’s salespeople need to be experts at building relationships, inspiring trust, and keenly understanding customer needs.  Read More

For Social Media Viewing, Twitter Is Live TV; Facebook Is DVR

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When you follow someone on Twitter, you see everything they post. When you follow someone on Facebook, it decides what you see. Which is right? I’d say both, and it comes down to the live TV versus DVR personalities of each service.

Should Facebook Show Everything?

The issue of Facebook deciding what to show people in their Facebook news feed came up this week when Nick Bilton of the New York Times wrote about how over the past year, the engagement on his posts had dropped, despite his having gained a huge increase in Facebook followers.

That echoed concerns from Star Trek alum and social media extraordinaire George Takei, who last year was alarmed that his Facebook engagement was down. He wondered, as Bilton did, if this was perhaps something Facebook was doing to get him and others to pay for better visibility. Billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, also got in on the criticisms last year.

I used to be in the “Facebook should show everything” camp. For example, when the Subscribe feature (now called Follow) launched in 2011, I wished it was available for Facebook Pages, not just for people, so that the visibility of content from those pages didn’t feel so out-of-control for the publisher.

As I wrote:

If someone wants to follow a publication or website on Facebook, they shouldn’t have to hope that they’re not going to miss content they may want to see, because Facebook decided something wasn’t important enough to show.

Since then, I’ve come to realize that I don’t want Facebook to show me everything in the same way that Twitter does. Moreover, even though Twitter shows me everything, I don’t actually see everything. Time to unpack the TV metaphors.

The “Live TV” Of Twitter

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When you follow accounts on Twitter, everything they post flows into your Twitter timeline. You’re going to see it all. Twitter’s not sitting behind the scenes trying to decide what non-paid tweets it thinks are more important and should be shown nor what should be held back. In short, Twitter’s not trying to separate out the signal from the noise.

That’s not to say that “noise” is bad. Twitter, to me, is like having a TV on in the background while I work. I glance to it from time to time, and if something big or important happens, I look up and pay attention.  Read More

In Upgrade, Google Adds to Model for Mobile Marketing

GOOGLE executives, declaring themselves pleased with the results of an unusual advertising initiative last year, are bringing out a Version 2.0, again teaming with agencies and marketers to try demonstrating that technology is not incompatible with traditional Madison Avenue sales strategies like emotional storytelling.

Google and Volkswagen developed Smileage, an app and Web service for drivers.

The 2013 version of the initiative is to be announced on Thursday as a gaggle of Googlers gets ready for the annual South by SouthwestInteractive Conference and Festival in Austin, Tex.

The initiative last year, known as Project Re:Brief, was meant to help change minds outside Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley about the role that technology in general, and Google products in particular, could play in mainstream brand marketing.

The focus of Project Re:Brief — as in rethinking a creative brief — was to reimagine for contemporary consumers four classic commercials and campaigns from the “Mad Men” era, for Alka-Seltzer, Avis, Coca-Cola and Volvo.

This time, the brands taking part are Adidas, Burberry andVolkswagen, with Volkswagen of America and its creative agency, Deutsch L.A., going first.

Another change for 2013 is a renaming of the initiative: Art, Copy and Code, riffing on the ad industry phrase “art and copy,” evoking the two components of most ads; the organization known as the One Club for Art and Copy; and a movie, “Art and Copy,” produced by the organization.

Perhaps the biggest change for Version 2.0 is to shift the time frame. The work developed last year for Project Re:Brief was based on ads from the 1960s and 1970s. The work being developed for Adidas, Burberry and Volkswagen will be based on current ads.

“We had a great experience last year when we went back to the iconic campaigns, people saying, ‘Wow, you can build brands online; digital isn’t just for click-here, direct-response ads,’ ” said Jim Lecinski, vice president for United States sales and service at Google.

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Social Media ROI and the Impact of Press Releases

A recent post from BtoB Magazine highlights the impact of social media marketing as an overall strategy for public relations. In an article on March 4, Christopher Hosford mentions that social media is part of an overall plan for most companies, but is still being limited to 6 percent of the average marketing budget. Press releases are being integrated into this strategy with social media.

Kirsten Bjork-Jones points out that press releases are part of the marketing plans at her company. She mentions, “We distribute catalogs, PR releases, videos, email, ads and so forth, and it’s hard to tell which leads come from which channel.” This is a common issue for companies that focus on multiple venues to market their products or ideas because tracking ROI has its limitations. An infographic from PR Newswire highlights how press releases get shared across multiple social networks, so the combined impact of other social media efforts can be difficult to trace.

It is clear that social media ROI and press releases are being mixed together as companies encourage more shares of the releases through Facebook, Twitter and other networks. PR Newswire found that Twitter was able to “drive significantly more traffic” compared to the other social networks; however, Facebook and LinkedIn were still important for overall shares. This may explain why press release websites are still flourishing despite the multiple options available to companies. Business Wire continues to make global partnerships to increase its press release distribution with the addition of multimedia content. TransWorldNews has also focused on press release services with videos and picture galleries along with offering tweet services for more distribution. PR Newswire has focused on creating social channels with search optimization.  Read More

 

 

 

 

3 Shocking Social Media Stats That Will Amp Up Your Marketing

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We recently uncovered some seriously shocking social media statistics – take this one for instance – it’s said that more than 600 million people who own a mobile phone don’t own a toothbrush. Crazy, right? Beyond ‘shock-value,’ these stats lead to targeted, insightful lessons that marketers can apply to their own business strategy. At their core, these statistics speak to the potential that social marketing holds. We’ll share 3 stats below and their implications for marketers. For even more stats and marketing implications, pick up our newest whitepaper, 6 Mind-Blowing Social Media Stats (And What They Mean for Marketers).

Keys to social media

1. Nielsen estimates that social media and blogs reach 80% of all active US Internet users (of which there are 245 million).

 If you’re not there, you’re missing out on plenty of potential opportunities to increase brand awareness, identify prospects and strengthen relationships with existing customers. The vastness of that statistic indicates that if you aren’t on social media or actively blogging, your competitors probably are, forging relationships that could be yours.

Leverage the Stat:

1. Locate your prospects: Perform a social audit to find out where your customers and prospects spend their time online.

2. Secure channels: If you haven’t already done so, secure your place on social media channels and start a blog. Fill out each profile completely to answer the basic questions your audience may have: who are you, what are you about and how can they contact you.

3. Develop a content strategy and content: What themes will you own? What non-promotional content will you share with your audience? Develop engaging, relevant content themes that support your brand.  Read More