Week 5 EOC - Midterm Evaluating My Experience.

In evaluating my experience over the last 5 weeks I must say I have learned a lot. I have learned the areas where I still need work such as; I need to work on my headings and copy, making them more interesting in catching my audiences attention, this is extremely . I need to be able to get a better understanding of my target market, which would also help me with headings and the overall design of my sites.

Even though there are some things that I have to work I do like my Movie Obsession Website. I have tried to incorporate interactivity from the first page on, there is opportunity for the user to interact with the site. I had tried to use the headline to reach out and talk to the user’s emotional condition.

"Marketing is the ability to effectively reach out to a customer and offer them your product, your service, your personality, your information" (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg 3)

"The number one reason people go online is to get information." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars pg 23)

I put a lot of information on my site about inspirational movies, offering the older, newer and movies that are not out yet. I put reviews, editorials and a blog so people can see what others might have thought. There is detailed information about each movie; the actors that played in the movies, producers, ratings and movie trailers.
I tried to create my site by following the eight rules for creating an effective Web site pg 25 of Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars.

1. Planning-By knowing that I wanted to present inspirational movies that touched people's lives that created a want in them; wanting to be different; wanting to change; wanting to help change the world around them.

2. Great Content-by presenting movies they had already seen and can relate to and presenting others that they had not seen that others thought were good can arouse their interest in exploring further. I tried to make sure my content was specific, relevant, and focused on their current concerns. I tried to use "Killer content...information that gets people to respond emotionally." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg 24) By offering movies and articles on their greatest problems and struggles and then offering a place where they can respond and see what others are going through and how others are facing these same challenges by giving them the opportunity to write about the movies they had seen and how it affected them and by giving them a place to blog.

3. Design- I tried to design my site to be user friendly and easy to look at. The choice of where they wanted to go is presented in uncluttered easy links that are available on each page so that the user can go forward and back without getting lost on the site. The navigation is clear and allows the reader to easily reach the most essential content. The colors are consistent and easy on the eyes. I used headlines to grab their attention, and sub-headlines that told the main story so they could choose whether they wanted to browse or really read.

4. Involvement- I made my site interactive. Instead of just offering the information lay out on a page of text, the user has to click images and links to get to where they want to be. I tried to make it so they would want to explore. They have opportunity to sign in, sign up and share, and win tickets and dinner.

5. Production- The website is online.
In my MySpace project I started to build my online brand. "Customer loyalty is really built on branding and on building a relationship and those two go together.
You have to build this bond with your customers and prospects. You have to build a relationship with them, but at the same time, part of building that relationship is maintaining a consistent theme, identity and message. That's really what branding is about.
Branding is about communicating a message." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg 32)

My theme is seen across my MySpace, Blog and Twitter in using the same colors, background and styles. The background I used has words such as create, community, serve, inspire, mentor, make a commitment, support, have vision, impact, invest, education, see potential, have compassion, make change, share knowledge, nurture, believe, etc.

Helping people to help people succeed; this is my message; this is how I want to be identified.
When people see these sites, the logo, the colors, the words, they will think of me. "Psychologists call it contiguous association, and that's really what you're trying to build in branding." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg 33)

"In short, customers can immediately associate my products, myself, and my identity. Consistency is so important...the average consumer gets 3,000 commercial messages per day--from TV, billboards, telephone, Internet, and other sources. That's an enormous amount of noise and clutter. How do you cut through that enormous amount of noise and clutter? You must have a consistent message. You must have something that you focus in on and hone in on so people identify it with you. If you don't have a laser-focused message, then there's no chance of cutting through the noise in the marketplace. " (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg 35)

I have tried to keep the look, the feel, and the message consistent throughout. I tried to keep the content uncluttered and easy to navigate.

I am also trying to keep a sustainable uniqueness. "A sustainable uniqueness means that you're able to sustain it over a period of time because there's a barrier to entry. In other words there's some reason that your competitors cannot easily match the unique value, the unique benefit, the unique benefit, the unique proposition you're offering to your customers." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg37)

"By finding out what people want to buy, allowing them to buy it from you, and being able to deliver a benefit to them, you are able to sustain over a period of time." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg38)

By allowing people to see you, what you do, your humanness, where you've been, sharing your life with them and allowing them to share with you, opens up a door of communication that builds relationship and hopefully loyalty. It's not about money, it's about people.

I learned how to sign up for a YouTube account, post a video and tag and promote my video to get hits. My YouTube Project is an animation I created in Flash. I did not start out with any particular meaning but I think it now speaks out to what do you believe, do things just happen accidentally, with a big bang, or is there rhyme and reason to what happens. Is it just coincidence or is there a plan. Faith or unbelief?

My Name for the Movie Insider Project is "The Las Vegas Box Office".
My plan is to learn to implement involvement devices and to have a clean design that is easy to navigate. I will be using "Involvement devices which are devices used to get people "involved" with your sales copy. They magnetize people to read every word of your copy...When you use involvement devices, you effectively "own your audience." That is, you hold your audience captive." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg60)

"It's the involvement device that allowed them to articulate their problems in their own words, and type them into that little box. It got a lot of people "involved" in the sales copy, and made them admit they had problems that needed solving." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg61)

I plan on having quizzes and boxes where the user can react with the website. Having involvement devices that gives choices and places for people to write things down helps them to get involved and create a relationship that gives them reason to return to the Website.
"According to master of persuasion, Robert Cialdini, "Writing is believing." When you ask your readers to write down (or in this case, type out) the things they desire, they admit the need for your product or service, and a written commitment is more lasting then a mental commitment. One who writes out a commitment has a higher likelihood of following through on what they have written." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg68-69)

I will also implement the recovery principle. "Here's how the "recovery" involvement device works in a nutshell: If you fail to sell your Web visitors on your primary product at the full price, but succeed in selling them the same product (or maybe even a different product) at a lower unit of sale, you recover the effort and cost of getting them to your Web site, and plug them into your income stream. That's why it's called a recover device." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg69)

A recovery device I plan to use is to offer something in return for the users involvement, such as tickets to a preview, in exchange for an e-mail address. "Seducing the online surfer is both an art and a science that requires the knowledge of consumer psychology as well as an intimacy with the mindset of the Internet population. Involvement devices are simply the catalyst that gets your prospects to respond so that you can start a dialogue and create rapport with them." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg71)

I believe that my Midterm grade should remain an A. I do have to improve on some things but I have, thus far, learned about many tools of marketing and I have tried to implement what I learned into every project that we have done to this date. "Learning marketing that is the ability to effectively reach out to a customer and offer them your product, your service, your personality, your information." (Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, pg3)

The some of the tools that I have used are; writing web copy, headlines, sub-headlines to capture the users attention, build interest show benefits, to create seduction, interactivity to get the user physically involved with my Website, branding to build relationships, and implementing involvement and recovery devices to name a few.