My Natural

Last year a local gentleman opened a Mexican restaurant in our area. The unique aspect of the restaurant is that not only is the Mexican food authentic, but the employees are Hispanic as well. When you walk through the doors, you feel as though you’ve stepped into another culture.

Six months later, this same gentleman opened up another restaurant on the other side of town. What was the secret to his immediate and amazing success? …he found a natural market. No one can simulate a natural market. Outsiders go to get the cultural flavor as well as the good food, insiders go to enjoy the “homey” experience.

What Defines a Natural Market?

The most obvious natural markets are cultural, but include a host of other characteristics that you may be familiar with as well. What about homeschooling parents? Who could communicate more clearly, or provide more relevant products than another homeschool parent?

A natural market is simply the part of a market that you have something in common with. It will automatically make you connect with your customers on a personal level, making your marketing strategies more effective.

Why Explore Natural Markets?

You can make immediate and lasting connections with your potential natural market. Let’s face it, we’re more comfortable and more confident doing business with someone we have a lot in common with. It can’t be helped… it’s just in our nature. Take advantage of natural markets on the Web where a more personal business is rare and will hold strong appeal to consumers.

How Do You Get In On The Action?

First think about your interests, hobbies, and life experiences. List your occupations, hobbies, club memberships, nationality, language, and background. Wow, there’s a lot of potential for natural markets at your fingertips.

Once you’ve got a nice list, start critiqueing it for the potential market that will make the most impact. The rule of thumb for deciding on the depth of impact is: the more unique the characteristic… the more impact it will have.

Natural markets add a brand new layer to your existing business, or you can create a new niche business from the natural market idea. Whichever you decide…pull out the stops… blitz the market with advertisments… and get ready to add up the profits!

Who is Allyn Cutts, and why should you care?

Allyn has spent over 24 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales to current customers. Allyn is a marketing and sales fanatic, providing measurable marketing solutions that drive huge results for small-to mid-size business clients. Allyn works personally with clients to design and deliver off-line and on-line direct marketing strategies that focus on metrics and measurable results. You can learn more about Allyn Cutts at http://www.AllynCutts.com and you can call 610.437.4106 between 10 AM and 4 PM Eastern Time Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea.

I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Google’s Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 sign-up fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency?

Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be.

I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need to target and which products are the most popular.

Once that testing period is over, however, it’s time to look into Search Engine Optimization. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Once you know what keywords to target, it’s time to put together a plan on how you are going to optimize your website.
The drawbacks to search engine optimization is that it requires a lengthy amount of time to get your site to rank high with your keywords. That is why I suggest using this method after the testing period is over, when you already know your business will be profitable.

Search Engine Optimization is definately a slow way to get your website traffic if you plan on not using PPC traffic. It could be a long, expensive road before you even begin selling your product. Search engines can take months, even years to start pulling up high with the search engines. But, natural search engine traffic is definately the best long term way to get the majority of your traffic.

When getting your site to start pulling up in SE natural listings there are 2 main things that need to be done:

1. Add Content

2. Add Backlinks

Search engine traffic requires you to submit your site to many different search engines and wait, maybe even months for them to spider your website.

I have had much better luck with another route. You can pay a fee to have your website listed in a very high ranking directory like www.dmoz.com (free), www.yahoo.com’s directory ($299), sbd.bcentral.com (only $50), or another website where your link is on a page that has a page ranking of 4,5,6 or higher. The sites I mentioned above have rankings of 8 or 9. When you have your link on a site with that high of a ranking, the search engines are spidering those sites constantly and will find your website and spider it very quickly. Not only will they find it quickly but because you are linked to a high ranking site, you will also rank higher with the SE.

When looking for backlinks, focus on sites with content related to yours and high page rankings of 4 or higher.

As for content on your site, try to include about 200-500 words of content or text on most of the pages of your site. Text makes your site bulkier. Make sure to integrate all of the keywords you want to target within the content of your site. Don’t worry about cramming the same keywords in over and over. Search engines may possibly even blacklist your site for keyword stuffing, if you try to do that.

There is a lot to know about Search Engine Optimization but, those are the 2 main factors when getting started.

In summary, when starting out, I suggest using PPC advertising for testing products and keywords. Spend time optimizing your site for search engine traffic after you have tested your products and keywords.

Carrie Reeder
is the owner of The Level Collection, an accessories store, offering: leather
wristbands and leather cuffs for men & women.

Her email address is: carrie@thelevelcollection.com

Carrie has 3 years of experience in web marketing. She is the owner of various websites marketing products from software to clothing accessories.

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Nominated for four Academy Awards, The Natural is one of Robert Redford’s best pictures. The breathtaking cinematography, coupled with the bold original score by Randy Newman, makes The Natural one of the most memorable films of its time. A classic baseball film, based on the best-selling novel, the movie has managed to insert itself into the pop culture. Certainly no little league player, nor major league player for that matter, can escape the sounds of Roy Hobbs and his mystical abilities when stepping into the batter’s box with the game on the line The Natural is quite simply one of the best baseball films around - up there with Field Of Dreams, Eight Men Out, and Major League

Written more like a fairy tale than a modern drama, The Natural follows the life and times of Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford), a man trained from his earliest days to love the game of baseball by his father. When the boy’s father dies of a heart attack on the family farm, Roy uses the wood from the lightning-felled tree under which his father died to fashion a homemade baseball bat. In love with the girl next door, Iris Gaines (Glenn Close), Roy leaves the farm after promising to come back to her in order to pursue a tryout as a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. But Roy never makes it back

Mysteriously shot by a woman he meets in a hotel room, Roy’s career is nearly ended by internal injuries. When Roy reappears twenty years later as a forty-year-old rookie for a last place team, he faces opposition from the team coach Pop Fisher (Wilford Brimley) who believes his business partner, The Judge (Robert Prosky), is intentionally sabotaging the team in an effort to cheat Pop Fisher out of his ownership shares. But when Pop Fisher finds out that Hobbs can not only play, but is the best player to ever set foot on a baseball diamond, the team’s losing ways are put to an end - at least until Hobbs decides to complicate his life further

Involving himself with Pop’s niece, Memo Paris (Kim Basinger), Roy finds the level of his game dropping off. Despite Pop’s warnings, Roy develops a relationship with the girl who is in partnership with the Judge to keep the team stuck in its losing ways. However, when Iris reenters Roy’s life (along with her teenage son), Roy’s play begins to pick up. But the championship is in jeopardy when a familiar reporter, Max Mercy (Robert Duvall), comes dangerously close to uncovering Roy Hobbs’s mysterious past and internal bleeding threatens the life and career of the game’s greatest slugger

Sporting a different (Hollywood-ized) ending from the novel which spawned its release, The Natural is nonetheless one of the most inspiring, feel good movies of all time. The 1930’s setting, and the seemingly one-dimensional characters, create an innocence of times past that make this movie seem like a flashback to the Frank Capra era. The musical score will create a literal tingling in your bones, and the hero-wins screenplay is one to be appreciated in this era of cynic realism. All these aspects of the film work together to make The Natural one of the most entertaining films around as well as earn it the designation of a must-see film Pop this one into the DVD player and go live the magic!

About the Author

Britt Gillette is author of The DVD Report, a blog where you can find more reviews like this one of The Natural (DVD).

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