Agile Creator

Online businesses should use Twitter and perhaps also Facebook for their digital marketing needs.

Why Twitter? Twitter is a hype, but hypes are good from a marketing point of view. Hypes attract a lot of people and that is what you need. Those people won’t convert in buyers, but a small number of them will become more interested in your product and be willing to hear what you have to say.

How Online Businesses should tweet

Most online businesses don’t know how to use Twitter, though. They leave the content up to employees who don’t know what they should be talking about in tweets. The result is bad in more than one way.

Not only will the tweets look boring, they will add little relevancy too. In fact, when done wrong, tweeting can do more harm than good. One of the major topics in the Online Class covers Twitter and its usage for digital marketing.

An Online Course to start an online business or to generate an income from an online presence: why should anyone want to take a class like that? The answer simply is because the digital economy is becoming increasingly important and can protect individuals as well as companies against poverty.

The digital economy is to the brick-and-mortar economy what the industrialisation was to craftsmen. They quickly became obsolete due to cheaper, mass-production made products. The craftsmen made products market became a niche market of its own, with small companies often active in the luxury goods industry, making small batches of expensive products.

The digital economy may restore craftsmen back to their position of high quality product providers by enabling them to get in touch with a much better educated huge market of potential customers, but if they are truly craftsmen, their production output will remain low, adding to the exclusivity of their products.

Mass-production brick-and-mortar businesses are facing difficulties because they cannot differentiate fast and well enough to accommodate for online customers’ needs. A digital company that utilises the resources from a mass-production business and combines these with those of craftsmen, creates a unique user experience that appeals to many people.

Yet, such a digital offering often relies on creative thinking to generate the right type of online presence and the ability to combine multiple resources in an intelligent way. Creative thinking is also often not the strong point of large corporations, but of small business owners and individuals.

While the past few years have been good to start an online business, 2009 and 2010 will be known in history as the years of the great opportunities. The reason is that social media and niche web sites where non-business people can share their thoughts and ideas in a multitude of forms –video, audio, slides, etc.– have become omnipresent and quite usable for marketing purposes without costing a penny.

The free character of these sites is also the reason why starting an online presence the right way is something that you shouldn’t postpone for too long a time –once the word gets out, much of the free marketing opportunities will become payable.

As the digital economy still is very much in its infancy, there is now a nice window of opportunity to start a niche business and profit from it without it having to cost you an arm and a leg for advertising and promotion. A digital business may also be a good protection against poverty in that respect. You can connect to a worldwide market with little startup costs and some effort –although not as much as with brick-and-mortar businesses.

And that is why I started with Agile Creator and its Online Course for learning to create revenue and income with an online presence.

Agile Creator offers online classes with the objective of creating an income or increasing business revenue, but it is not to be confused with get rich quickly schemes, nor with the avalanche of sites that offer you to teach how to fool the search engines into propelling your site to top positions. If you came here because you thought the Agile Creator Online Course would teach you that, then you’ll be very disappointed. But do let me explain why not.

Have you ever visited a site that promised you to deliver overnight success by following their method, and if you have, did you notice the invariable structure of their sales pitch?

Always –and I mean always– you’ll see an endless page with marketing babble and so called ‘evidence’ of their income. And invariably, that income runs into five figures numbers per month. Screenshots of AdSense or other low-effort advertising schemes as proof they’re the real thing.

They’re not, of course. They’re just as real as the Nigerian chap who sends you the e-mail message telling you he has picked you to transfer millions of dollars laying about in one of his lame banks to his bank account. He can’t do it himself for various bogus reasons, and all you need to do first is give him all your details and hand him over some small amount of money. He then gets you into a highly illegal scheme by using your first deposit to pay you back double –that’s to hook you up and get you involved so you won’t run off to the police and turn him in.

Although the getting rich sites usually aren’t illegal, they’re just as bogus. What you’ll end up with is an eBook or a downloadable PDF or something else that is utterly useless to get you where you want to be. I know. I have been there. In 1999, I purchased a well known PDF (known by its acronym even) that the author promised to bring me the instant secret for a site that would sell. It turned out the 200 odd pages of the workpiece were full of platitudes and stuff that everybody knew about and knew not to be working at all.

So, that’s not what I do. I’m not going to promise you anything, except that the virtual world is much like the real one: you don’t get a free lunch. What I will teach you in this Online Course are a number of techniques I know about from my 20 years of experience as an editor and marketing content provider for multinational organizations, and my 12 odd years as a web publisher.

You’ll also not going to see my Online Course being sold for 40.00 USD or 90.00 USD even. A sound piece of work takes time and care to put together and that requires a reasonable price setting. The rubbish that’s sold on the web for these ridiculous prices is just what it is: rubbish. You get what you pay for.

I have yet to establish the price of my Course, and will be doing so over the next couple of weeks, when I have a good idea as to how much work went into creating the slides, the text notes, the video casts, and everything else. If you’re interested, keep an eye for news here at Agile Creator.

How important is it that visitors to a site like what they see? That they are “wow”-ed by the site design? It depends on what you mean by being wowed. A site that welcomes its visitors with a Flash animation can wow your audience, but if it doesn’t put your brand forward, you might better leave it out. Brand awareness does not automatically equal eye candy.

Some advice with web page layout:

• Don’t add design elements just because you can. The message is more important than how it looks. You only have a couple of seconds to convince a visitor your message and brand is important, so design around that.
• Flash is OK as a page element, but whole pages in Flash are not. Don’t entrust a designer with your web site, because he/she will approach your online presence from a look-and-feel point-of-view. At least get a non-designer’s opinion, preferably someone who watches over your brand. Remember: the package is less important than what’s inside the box.
• Design must contribute to the message. Your message is part of your brand, your design is part of your brand, your Unique Selling Point is part of your brand, your attitude towards customers, etc. It’s all part of your brand –who you are and what your business stands for– and the design is not the most important element in the list.

Can you do without design? I wouldn’t think so, because eye-candy in part raises brand awareness, but a clean, uncluttered page with lots of carefully laid out text and links to videocasts and audio files will get your message across more easily than a colourful but busy page with lots of elements that don’t have any meaning of their own.

When you’re establishing your online presence or trying to raise brand awareness, less is truly more.

Agile Creator is your only choice if you want to learn –genuinely learn– how to create an income on the Internet from an online presence.

We are not interested in hoaxes, nor in so-called automatic income generators, because they all fail to some extent. We do feel we can teach you how to get an income and spend as little time possible working on your goals…

Read our Course Plan to find out more.