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| ISSUE AT A GLANCE (Issue 2): Psychology of Pricing — Importance of Blogs | |
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Psychology of Pricing
Have you ever wondered why some stores offer products for $1.99 or $1.49, etc. They have conquered the pychological barrier of pricing. They know that $1.99 sells more products than $2.00 sells the same product. This pychological pricing is the same for rental properties. Things look cheaper when they end in an odd number.
A study from the Ohio State University showed that in fact there is a psychological barrier to pricing. They found that there are different types of psychology towards pricing including odd number pricing and prestige pricing.
Odd number pricing refers to setting a price just below the psychological breaks in the dollar, such as a price is set at 49 cents or 99 cents rather than 50 cents or $1. Prices may be set at 19 cents or 49 cents or $19.95. This gives the psychological impression to the customer that the price is not 20 cents or 50 cents or $20, but less. Odd number pricing is often avoided in prestige stores or with higher priced items. An expensive dress could be priced at $150, not $149.95.
Prestige Pricing refers to high markups and/or pricing above the market. Many consumers are willing to pay more for a product or service because it is felt the product or service is of higher quality or possesses brand or manufacturer prestige. Usually above-market pricing can be done only when the product is unique or distinctive, or when the seller or manufacturer has acquired prestige in the field.
Depending on the product or in our case, the home you are trying to rent. It is best to put $995/Month instead of $1,000/Month. You will tend to get more bites with the first one. If however, you are renting out a mansion or anything above $4,000 / month, it is best to take the prestige pricing approach and not end in an odd number. You got to love psychology.
| | | | | | | | | Importance of Blogs
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 | Before I write the benefits of using blogs to increase your business' visibility with search engines and customers, I will first give a brief history and definition of what a blog is. A blog is short for weblogs and started as a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). Although most early weblogs were manually updated, tools to automate the maintenance of such sites made them accessible to a much larger population, and the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Wikipedia.
ComScore reports that the traffic to blogs continues to grow, up 56% over the past year to 58.7 million visitors, and that represents 34% of the total Internet audience.
How can blogging help my business?
There are a variety of reasons why blogging can help your business including increased search engine visibility, instant pushing of information, increase in monetization of pages, and interaction with new and existing customers. Let me go into detail on each of these.
Increased search engine visibility - Search engines crawl blogs very efficiently. In fact, many of the search engines have now developed areas to search for blogs only. Google, IceRocket, Ask, Technorati In addition to blog search, many search engines like when companies write blogs with new content that is updated often.
Instant pushing of information - You can add information to your blog and it can be live for anyone in the world to see within seconds. This is great to notify existing customers and new customers of a new product or service you are offering. Or maybe you want to share information and news with new customers. This is a great way to get them to your site from your blog by providing a link.
Increase in monetization of pages - What will you do with all this extra traffic coming to your blog? Well, the more relevant content as well as often updated content will bring people back to your blog more often. To generate a little extra revenue, you can add adsense to your site which Google will share the profits. To learn more about adsense go here..
Interacting with new and existing customers - Every blog you can enable a function called "comments" where anyone can add comments on the current subject. You can also add polls to your blogs where you ask for your visitors to vote on a subject. Again, this allows visitors to interact with your site which increases the chances of them going to your main site so you can sell them on your products or services.
Visit our blog here.
Getting Started
There are a variety of blog sites where you can start blogging. Some of them are free and others usually are a monthly fee. Please find two below:
Blogger
TypePad
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