What’s The Most Important Aspect Of Internet Marketing?
When it comes to marketing yourself online, do you know the most important ingredient in a sound Internet marketing plan? Is it SEO? How about a large budget? Driving traffic? Targeted traffic? Analytics?
How about, None Of The Above.
When it comes to Internet marketing, the most important thing is your reputation. Yes, your online reputation. Guard if ferociously.
The reason I say reputation is the most important aspect of Internet marketing is because once you lose trust and credibility with your audience, that’s it. You can win it back, but it’s a long, hard road uphill. And one you don’t want to climb.
People online would rather do business with someone they know and trust than someone with a great product that has no credibility. If you have a solid reputation online then your Internet marketing efforts will go a lot more smoothly. You’ll get more doors to open. And you’ll be a lot more successful. That’s about how it works off line too, isn’t it?
I guess you could say some things transfer very well from the real world to the virtual world. Internet marketing is a lot like traditional marketing. It’s the technology that is different.
Keyword Analysis As Competitive Intelligence
One of the most important aspects of competitive intelligence is keyword analysis. One of the simplest parts of competitive intelligence, it is also one of the most involved. There is more to keyword analysis than simply checking which keywords are the most popular searches in the search engines and which are the most sought after in terms of competitive business. Those are important, yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
One very important piece of the keyword analysis puzzle is the keyword meta tag. It’s relatively easy to scour the competition’s website and extract their keyword meta tags. The danger is that your competition may not have optimized their meta tags well and you’ll just be getting garbage, but if your competition has done a good job at producing optimized web pages, including the meta tags, then you can get their full list of keywords just by visiting their websites.
When using meta tags, you have to visit each page of your competition’s website individually. That’s because they will likely have optimized every page for one, two, or three keywords. The meta tags, if done properly, will show up to 10 important keywords for each page (5 is better) and each page will be optimized for different keywords. So you can see that there should be some overlap from page to page.
At any rate, while the keywords meta tag is not the only place to go for competitive keyword analysis, it is one place you don’t want to overlook.
How Host Selection Affects Your Web Design Needs
When it comes to world-class web design, there is more to building a good web site than looking pretty. The elements are complicated, but how they work together makes all the difference. And there’s not just one right way to do it either.
One of the least often thought about aspects of web design is hosting. Sure, everyone thinks about it, of course. They choose a host and build a website and upload it to their host’s servers. But few webmasters actually sit and think about the hosting needs of their website. But the features of your web host are just as important for web design as they are anything else.
For starters, do you need a dedicated host or will a shared hosting plan suit your needs? To be sure, a dedicated server is more secure. It’s also more costly.
Then there’s the database support. Do you need a Windows server or a Linux server? Do you know the difference?
What about special needs for e-commerce accommodation or huge file storage such as videos and audio files? Are those necessary in your business plan?
It will behoove you to research the web hosting options you have available to you and compare them with your web design needs before you purchase your domain name and select a host. While you can always move to another host and repoint your DNS servers to that new host, you don’t want to do that if you can avoid it. It’s best to start out in your permanent home.
How To Go Viral Without Too Much Effort
Viral marketing gets a lot of airplay, as well it should. Just one successful viral marketing campaign can put your company on the map in hardly no time at all. But how do you do it?
There are any number of ways to make a viral marketing campaign work. But if you want to make one work without much effort then you’ve got to get other people involved in the spreading of the virus – I mean, word. Perhaps the best way to get others involved in helping you spread the word is to give them an incentive. And the best way to do that is to provide them with rewards for their efforts. An affiliate program is the perfect choice.
While there are no guarantees, if you offer a lucrative opportunity for others to profit from your successful efforts then you’ll encourage them to spread the word for you. If you provide a good product or service, great support for your affiliates, and offer unbeatable rewards, they will do the legwork for you and deliver viral results while you sit back and watch.
OK, I wouldn’t encourage you to sit back and watch. But if you have a good army of affiliates working for you then you don’t have to work as hard to see your marketing efforts go viral. Affiliate marketing is where it’s at. Viral marketing is the result of a good product, a good affiliate program, and great rewards.
Social Media Optimization Tip: Headlines Make All The Difference
Optimizing for social media traffic is a bit different than optimizing for search engines. But there are similarities. When you optimize your landing page for search engines, keywords are extremely important. After all, people will find your site by those keywords. But with social media, while keywords are important, they aren’t the most important thing. Social media users look for something different.
First and foremost, they want a unique experience. Keywords are good for ensuring those social media pages achieve better rankings in the search engines, but what happens if someone finds your content in Digg or StumbleUpon and arrives there from a search engine? You still want them to go to your website and that will take a different approach than merely sprinkling your content with keywords.
Your headline is very important. It should attract attention. More than that, it must get the click. Social media users have two things to go on in deciding whether or not to read your content: The headline and the description, or summary. The headline, more than anything, will determine whether or not they read your content.
What should a headline do? Three things:
- Arouse curiosity
- Tell the reader what to expect from the content
- Use your primary keyword
Understand that Nos. 1 and 2 and more important than No. 3 when it comes to social media optimization. Yes, you want your keyword there for the search engines, but human readers care about the content. It must answer their most pressing questions or make them believe that your content will answer those questions. Get them to click. That’s the goal. And if you achieve that then you’ve done your job.
Getting The Most Out Of Search Engine Marketing
You may feel your search engine marketing efforts are paying off and all is going well – they could be too. However, you should always be reviewing your activities to ensure you are get the most out of your campaigns.
Search Engine Journal has a timely post that provides seven tips to increasing your landing page conversions – we could all use an increase in conversions, even at the best of times. Consider reviewing the following in relation to your landing pages:
- Call to Actions Matter – is your call to action clear
- Digestible content – is your content scanable
- Minimize choice – don’t confuse things with too many choices
- Keep It SIMPLE – create simple pages
- Keep form length to a minimum – only collect the data you need
- Avoid marketing speak – use every day language
- Envoke Trust – if I trust your site, I will buy from you
Although very obvious areas to review, over time our pages get out of hand – reign them in and with luck, your conversions will start to climb. The post makes one point that is worth repeating:
Landing pages are becoming overly complicated data dumps where the short attention spanned consumer is left to sort through the pop-ups, multiple focus points, talking heads and flashing pictures. No wonder bounce rates are astronomical on most sights. Let’s stop blaming poor market conditions….
Now go back and look at your landing pages in relation to that description. How does it measure up? Many don’t measure up and by trimming them back you can make them lean, mean conversion machines.
Is It Time To Target Your Search Engine Optimization
For many years the name of the search engine optimization game has been to target Google. The more articles you read the more often you will come across references to Google, Matt Cutts or Webmaster Tools. Every now and then, Yahoo! or Bing creeps into the conversation.
The theory has been that Google gets the majority of traffic so that is the place to rank. It has been a reasonable theory too and most sites find that if they get it right for Google, they are close to getting it right for the others.
Yahoo! recently announced a new search design and at the same time made a little noise about targeting people search. A search for a person will produce results which include profiles Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed. Their aim, to be number one for people search.
It was not so long ago that reports indicated that Bing was doing well in the travel, retail and finance sectors when it came to searches.
If the search engines are going to target certain niches, perhaps the time has come to reassess our search engine optimization strategies. If your site is based on travel, retail or finance, it may be time to focus your search engine optimization strategies on areas that will help you rank well on Bing.
Many will argue that you can optimize for all three search engines, and you can. However, we still bring the focus back to Google – perhaps it is time to change that.
Using The New Adwords Bid Simulator Tool
Have you ever wondered how you could keep you costs down whilst increasing traffic to your site? The new Adwords Bid Simulator tool may be able to answer some of those questions.
It’s not a crystal ball and the information you glean from it is only a rough guide. However, the information it does provide does at least have some statistical basis behind it amd can help to tweak your pay-per-click campaigns.
The tool works by analyzing the last seven days traffic and then calculating revised impressions, clicks and cost in relation to changes in the maximum Cost-Per-Click. In other words, if you were to raise or lower your bid prices, what effect would it have on costs and traffic.
If you would like to test it out, just view all your campaigns in the AdWords interface. From there, select the keywords tab and sort all your keywords by click volume. A blue icon should appear alongside the current CPC for all high-volume keywords; click on the icon and you can play around with the data.
As I said, it’s not a crustal ball but it can provide some interesting data. You can find out more from the the Google Adsense blog here.
Is Your Web Design Costing You Rankings?
Web design, site structure and internal linking can all lead to problems that can ultimately affect your search rankings. A post on Bing’s Webmaster Center highlights the effect of poor design and what steps should be taken to ensure your web sites gains the most from your efforts.
There are times when the general theme coming from some blogs is that search engines are the enemy. In reality, if your site is providing valuable content then the search engines want it – they want to be able to tell the world about it. Rather than being the enemy, they can be a web site owners best friend. It’s simply matter of listening to what they want, how they want it presented and supplying it. As the Bing post stated:
….if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines.
It’s common sense. If the search engine bots cannot read certain pages – they won’t be indexed and if they are not indexed, they won’t appear in the search results.
Simply tasks like using Redirects when pages are moves; adding a Robots file to block out certain areas of your website that don’t need indexing; and providing clear and keyword targeted page and directory titles should be standard practice.
If you can ensure your site is easily spidered by the bots then you should find your pages being indexed. If pages are not being indexed, have a closer look to try and determine why. Find and fix the issue and you will reap the rewards through search traffic.
Spread Your Pay Per Click For Better ROI
Pay per click marketing can be a stressful past time for many web site owners particularly if they are in a competitive niche where costs per click can be high. If your walking a tight line between profitable and unprofitable costs then it may be time to rethink your pay per click strategies and look at some of the lesser known PPC options.
There are quite a few alternate search engines around that offer pay per click advertising, often with lower costs per click than the big boys like Google. The hard part is finding these alternatives. A search of Google will help you find a good handful of alternatives.
Once you have a list of alternative pay per click search engines, sit down and do some research. Sign up and create a few ads, check out their interfaces, and see what sort of costs per click you may be up for. Many of them can provide the same keyword advertising program but at much less costs.
If you have the funds, create a few trial ads and let them run for a few days. This will give you an idea of what costs you are likely to face, what sort of click through rate you are receiving, and most importantly, what sort of conversion rates you are achieving.
You would be surprised at the amount of traffic you can generate through these alternate search engines. You may also find you are achieving better conversion rates – if that’s the case, your ROI will simply get better.
Viral Marketing And The ReTweet Phenomena
ReTweeting has become an important component of the Twitter experience and could perhaps create a Digg like experience for users. One gets the feeling that reTweets are now more important than the original Tweet and if the original Tweet has a marketing angle, the viral marketing angle can be tremendous.
As proof of the popularity of reTweets, Twitter is looking to add a re-Tweet function to the site. There are already plenty of third party re-Tweet options around already, each providing Digg like re-Tweet buttons.
WebProNews provides a list of the benefits of re-Tweets:
- Retweets are viral
- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed
- As opposed to a Facebook “like,” a retweet is shared with everyone
- Retweets typically give credit to sources
- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships
- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content
- Retweets can inspire further conversation
- Retweets can be good for branding
- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.
- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content
The practice of re-Tweeting is growing and as businesses start to see the value in Twitter as a marketing tool – viral marketing will bloom.
The First Step To Competitive Intelligence Is …
If you’ve been thinking about doing some competitive intelligence – and you should – then you’ve got to take the first step. But what is the first step, exactly? Glad you asked.
Before you do any amount of competitive intelligence, the first thing you need to do is identify who your competitors are.
That seems like a no-brainer and it is, but sometimes it isn’t so cut and dry. For instance, who are Twitter’s competitors? There are a dozen or so microblogging services, but none of them are at the scale that Twitter is at. Then there are Twitter Search, Bing, and Google – are they competitors? How about Facebook? Facebook seems to be trying to compete with Twitter on some level.
In some industries, a competitor in one market segment could be a partner in another. High tech companies have operated that way for years. Now, it seems, we’re starting to see some of the same happening in Internet services companies.
What you think is a no-brainer may actually contain a few shades of gray. Be sure to identify your competitors for each of your markets and define them intelligently. Otherwise, your competitive intelligence information may not be helpful.
Web Design Tip: Don’t Overload With Information
You’ve heard that content is king and that is true, but you can go too far. One of the five common mistakes that many businesses make in their web design is providing too much information at once.
There are several ways you can provide too much information on your website:
- Too many irrelevant pages
- Too much information on a single page, making it too long to read
- Providing too much depth when giving an overview would do
- Elaborating on topics that need no elaboration
- Redundancy
- Duplicating content
- Adding irrelevant content to pages, watering down your SEO
Web design is very important. People will leave your site as often for a poor web design as they will anything else. An attractive site is very important to keep people interested. Even then, relevant content is what keeps visitors on your site and if you have too much irrelevant content or provide more than what people are willing to read through then you could be cutting off your own nose.
Before you build your site, learn a few web design basics. Don’t be a bore.
Viral Marketing Tip: Focused Twittering
Viral marketing gets a lot hyper for good reason. There are plenty of ways to go about running a viral marketing campaign and achieving success. Here are some tips to help you in your next Twitter marketing campaign. How to go viral on Twitter:
- Put some thought into your Twitter name. Try to get something that is easily brandable (and it helps if it matches the brand you’ve already created)
- Use Twellow, Twitter Search, and such tools to find followers in the niche that you work in.
- Maintain an active Twitter posture (10-20 tweets a day is ideal – not too many and just enough to keep your name in front of your followers)
- Ensure that all of your tweets provide value related to your niche
- Write a keyword-focused description on your Twitter profile
- Use @replies to respond to your followers and build relationships
- Retweet helpful tweets from others
- Build up a sizable following (there’s power in numbers)
- Stay away from automation whenever possible, but in light doses you can pre-schedule certain tweets that are recurring using services like Tweetlater and HootSuite
- Put a Retweet button on your blog
- Use Twitter Tools to automatically post your blog posts to your Twitter account
The key to going viral on Twitter is to build relationships with people in your niche who are like-minded and to provide value upon value upon value.
Search Engine Optimization Is On The Brink Of A Major Change
Search engine optimization is about to change. Forever.
Google has recently announced a preview of its upcoming change in search algorithm. This is supposed to be one of the biggest and most radical changes ever. They’re calling it Google Caffeine.
Everyone from Aaron Wall to BusinessWeek have taken it for a test drive and written about it. Some of the things that people are saying about Google Caffeine are:
- Lightening Fast (Mashable)
- Newsier by a nose (CNET)
- No real difference (BusinessWeek)
- Too much emphasis on real-time results (Marketing Pilgrim)
- Increased weighting on domain authority (SEOBook)
- Indexing more of the web (Vizion Interactive)
- Smarter at finding fake websites (ComputerWorld)
There are a ton of people talking bout the new Google Caffeine. In fact, search for “Google Caffeine” without the quotes and you’ll find over 5.37 million results at Google and 10.8 million at Bing.
It’s interesting to read what some of the most prominent people in search engine optimization are saying about it, but mostly what I’ve found are a list of disagreements. About the only thing everyone agrees on is that Google Caffeine is faster than the current Google and includes more results in search queries. But I do believe that search engine optimization is on the brink of a major change. Don’t you?
What Will Search Engine Marketing Of The Future Look Like?
Search engine marketing has often been defined as attempting to rank web pages in the search engines through means such as pay per click advertising, paid placements and paid inclusion. But this is a little bit of an antiquated definition.
With Microsoft taking over Yahoo!s search business and incorporating it into Bing, at least two of those strategies are nearly no longer valid. Yahoo! trumpeted paid inclusion years ago, but since search engines have gotten better at crawling and ranking web pages, paid inclusion has not be all that necessary. Any search engine marketer worth his weight in salt ought to be able to get a web page ranked without it.
So what will SEM of the future look like?
My guess is will still involve contextual advertising, or pay per click, but it will also involve some form of social media advertising. As the Web grows more into a social web with search functions, as opposed to a searchable database with social features, the search engines themselves will take on a more social role. Search engine marketing could actually become more social in nature. What do you think?
Online Reputation Management Is A Multi-Faceted Ongoing Project
New Internet marketers may not understand the terms that get used online and reputation management is one that gets confused a lot. To be sure, it’s not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing project when done right and it should be started long before you really need it.
I’ve met far too many website owners – and even some non-website owners – who think of reputation management as a last minute resort, or as a cleanup activity. Once they’ve met with someone online who is trashing their name and trying to ruin their reputation, that’s when they think about protecting it. At that point, it’s too late.
Online reputation management should begin the moment that you start thinking about building an online presence. Reputation management should be a part of your overall strategy for building a business online.
The tools that you’ll use to build and maintain your reputation online are many. Which ones you focus on depends on your personality, your business goals, and your budget, but here are a few ideas to get your mind spinning:
- Online video
- Search engine optimization
- Search engine marketing
- Blogging
- Article marketing
- Podcasting
- Display advertising
- Social media marketing
- Viral marketing
- Reciprocal push marketing
- Newsletter marketing
- E-mail marketing
- Link building
As you can see, the tools in your arsenal are plenty. And you can use them all together. The key is to develop a strategy and stick with it. Your reputation is too important to leave to chance.
Test Your Pay Per Click Strategy Before Full Implementation
For most companies, a well-crafted and managed pay per click campaign can build real significant results into their online marketing plans. This is an area of online business that requires some critical thought. You don’t want to just jump in with both feet and a big budget and nonchalantly start tossing money away. There is a strategy to consider.
When you first start your pay-per-click campaign, do so lightly. Run a test. Initially, you want to test your keywords and landing pages. No sense in throwing thousands of dollars into a marketing campaign for a website that isn’t ready to close sales. So run a moderate test to see what kind of results you can get before you go all out with your marketing campaign.
When you run your initial test, you are looking for three things:
- Is your landing page optimized well enough to receive traffic and close sales?
- Are your keywords the right keywords for reaching your target market?
- Is your ad content written well enough to attract click throughs?
If you can answer yes to those three questions then you are ready to start your pay per click campaign. If your answer to any of these questions after you run your test is “no” then you need to tweak and retest.
An Internet Marketing Illustration
Seth Godin shares an anecdote about a real estate agent who lifts vague signage to advertise her business. It occurred to me that these types of vague claims could happen just as well – and often do – online.
Suppose the real estate agent put up a website and right at the top of the page when you landed on her site was the phrase “#1 in Westchester, Top 10 Nationwide.” Would you be tempted to do business or to leave the site? I think most of us would head off to play Yahoo! Games or something.
Now, I’m not denigrating this real estate broker, but what does it really mean to be No. 1 in your neighborhood and top 10 nationwide? Who’s counting? Does that mean you’ve sold a lot of houses?
I think Seth’s point, and now my point, is you’ve got to be specific with your message. Especially online. Because Internet marketing isn’t getting any easier and people don’t have a lot of time to sift through vague marketing message to try and find that one person who can help them get what they want. They want someone who communicates clearly and succinctly about what they have to offer. If you can do that on your website then you’ll reach the people you want to reach.
What Is Benchmarking?
When it comes to seeing how you stack up against the competition, one good measure of an industry is benchmarking. With benchmarking, you can’t compare yourself to specific competitors like you can with other types of comparison, but what you can measure is just as important. A good benchmarking tool will put your company side by side with industry averages on important statistics like web traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.
This is important information because benchmarking statistics are compiled from individual companies within a niche, but rolled up into an average for the aggregated whole. It allows you to measure you against the playing field.
With benchmarking, you can see whether you are above the average company within your field for each important statistic or below the average. Then you can tweak what you need to tweak to move your company in the right direction. Don’t overlook benchmarking when you conduct your competitive intelligence research.
Is Twitter A Viral Marketing Tool?
If you’re familiar with the popular microblogging service Twitter then you understand how you can pick up followers and direct them to your website. But can it go viral?
Listen to the gurus and you’ll think that Twitter is the breadbasket of the Internet. Build a Twitter stream, get 100,000 followers – or, if your Ashton Kutcher, 1 million will do – and drive that traffic like cattle, Baby! Is it really that easy?
As an old sage once said, nothing worthwhile is easy. And so it is with Twitter. It is worth the effort and it can go viral, but it is work.
The key to succeeding with Twitter is to find people to follow you who are interested in what you have to offer. But how do you do that? There are tools available, such as Twellow and Tweetlater, to help you do that. And you can find people to follow by keywords, by location, or by interest. Or you can just scour the follow lists of your friends.
Twitter is not in and of itself a viral marketing tool, but it can go viral if you are persistent and consistent in your marketing efforts.
How Can You Optimize Your Social Media With DOS Attacks In The Air?
You may have heard that Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media sites were recently struck with a denial of service attack, otherwise known as DOS. And if you’re wondering what that is, it is essentially a strategic cyber attack that induces the use of multiple computers to send hits to a particular web server, or in the case of the recent DOS attack, several servers, for the purpose of overloading them to the point that no one can benefit from the services those servers provide. In other words, the server is struck with too much to handle at one time and shuts down.
Such attacks are more common today than they used to be. It may be because there are more servers to attack or because there are more people to effect. Or it could just be that there are more bad guys who are Web savvy enough to pull it off.
At any rate, for attackers to have shut down Twitter the way they did this past week, they’d have had to have had quite a few resources at their disposal. As a result of the attack, Twitter was inoperable for a day and has been slow for most of the past week. The other social media sites attacked were able to ward off the attack successfully and weren’t affected. So you might be wondering how you can benefit from social media optimization efforts if that kind of thing can happen.
Well, it’s a real concern. But don’t fear. It doesn’t mean you have to shut down your business. Be careful who you associate with online. While Twitter’s server was affected and not your personal hard drive, if you mingle with the wrong crowd you could open yourself to vulnerabilities. Download a copy of the latest spyware or malware software and keep your firewall up and running. Be selective about who you let in on your profile. It’s business, but it isn’t monkey business.
The Most Overlooked SEO Secret Known To Man
Many times, clients ask us if they have to pay for ranking for keywords that they weren’t targeting. The answer is no.
Most importantly, you never pay a cent for showing up for keywords that you aren’t targeting. In fact, long-tail searches that weren’t planned for can bring in a lot of converting traffic as well.
Every website will inevitably rank for certain keywords and phrases that weren’t being targeted. It’s a part of the natural order of the Web. Some of those keywords will actually prove to be beneficial for you.
It’s nearly impossible to predict what people will search for. Google has said that a 20%-25% of its search queries are brand new searches that have never been seen before. That effectively means that you’ll see a certain number of queries in your server log delivering traffic to your site in unexpected ways. That’s the power of the long tail.
If you can target long tail searches over a long course then you can penny and nickel your way into top search rankings one long tail search at a time. Eventually, if you win enough of the long tail phrases, you’ll start to rank for the general search phrases in your niche as well. And you’ll see loads of traffic coming to your site just because you were persistent enough to pursue the long-tail strategy.
Should You Use The Content Network?
The Content Network is Google’s network of advertising websites on which they place ads. You can actually select your websites when running a PPC campaign by narrowing your Content Network focus to keyword-based, placement targeted, or both.
A keyword-targeted campaign on the Content Network is just as its name implies. You select the keywords that you want to target and Google will place your ads on web pages that are optimized for those keywords. There are advantages to doing this, but we don’t recommend this strategy for all customers across the board. Whether or not you wish to target by keyword depends on a number of factors and if you think that your targeted keyword could be used on a number of sites where your targeted visitors won’t traffic then it will just waste your time and money. That’s what you want to avoid.
With placement targeting you can choose the specific sites you want you ads to run on. For instance, if you sell cowboy boots then you’ll want your ads to run on sites that might sell cowboy hats or other western wear, or you may want your ads on sites that attract a large traffic base of country & western music listeners.
The Google Content Network offers many more opportunities for advertisers and can often lead to more conversions and more targeted traffic.
Will Google Wave Make Reputation Management Easier?
Google announced its new social collaboration tool Google Wave at the end of May and since then that’s what everyone has been talking about. Mashable has an entire category of blog posts dedicated to it.
If Google Wave will be able to do everything that they say it can then it could prove to be as good a reputation management tool as anything. But it could also prove to be a reputation management pitfall. It will likely be both.
Think about it. You’ll be able to communicate in real-time with the entire world. Think e-mail, IM, and Twitter combined. Real-time goofs, gaffes, and bouts of genius all rolled into one. Still, pitfalls aside, if it can do all that it’s billed to do, it will be a revolutionary communication tool – even better than Twitter.
But a tool is only as good as the hands that are holding it. Do good with it or use it for bad, but it’s there. Google Wave promises some great reputation management benefits with the following features:
- Wiki
- Applications and extensions
- Embeddable waves
- Open source
- Playback
- Drag and drop file sharing
That’s powerful stuff and if you’re serious about managing your reputation online, you’ll find real usefulness from these applications.
How Not To Exceed Your PPC Budget
The surest way to ensure you do not exceed your budget on your pay-per-click advertising is to set both a monthly and a daily budget. The key is to keep your PPC ads running during peak times without going over your monthly ad spend or using all of your ad spend before the end of the month.
Let’s say your monthly budget is $1,000. If you just set your budget limit at that amount and set your ads to run then you could spend your entire budget before the end of the month. Advertisers have found their budget depleted by the 15th and their ads won’t run any more until the first of the next month. That means your ads won’t run for half the month, leaving you with wasted time and wasted money.
To prevent that from happening, set a daily budget that is lower than or equal to the prorated amount for your monthly budget. In other words, divide $1,000 by 30 days and you get $33.33. You don’t want your daily budget to exceed that amount. Set it slighly lower, say to $30, and day that you hit that amount your ads will stop running. But they’ll pick up again on the next day allowing you to run your advertising throughout the entire month without exceeding your $1,000 monthly budget.
Another way to control your PPC spend is to find out when your ads are clicked on the most and run your ads only during those times. If you find that 75% of your clicks are between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday then you can set your PPC account to display your ads only during those times. That will cut out a portion of the time when clicks are low and save your budget.
Internet Marketing For A Service Business
The unique advantage a service business has over a retail store is no inventory. You have no holding costs. Until the last 15 years, if you owned a service business your options were fairly limited in where you could do business – and how you could do business. But the Internet has changed how service businesses can interact with their customers, and it has changed who their customers are.
There are certain types of service business – like barber shops and auto mechanics – that require a physical location in order for those businesses to thrive. But that doesn’t mean you are limited to your physical location in terms of Internet marketing. You have other options.
Most service business professionals think that Internet marketing consists of setting up a website to advertise their services. Sure, that’s one option (the most obvious one, actually). But it’s far from the only option.
As a service business you can make money on the Internet in other ways. You can’t cut someone’s hair or replace a carburetor online and you can’t do those things for customers 2,000 miles away either. But you can sell information products or lead persons interested in those services to an affiliate product or service and earn money from that. Or you could earn money from advertising of similar products and services that don’t compete.
When it comes to Internet marketing, there are as many ways to accomplish it as there are types of people and businesses. There is no right way or wrong way. There are effective and ineffective ways. We’d like to help you find the best way to market online for you.
What Is Actionable Intelligence?
Is there a difference between competitive intelligence and actionable intelligence? Actually, there is.
Competitive intelligence is any intelligence undergone that leads to a better understanding of the competitive landscape within your niche. Actionable intelligence is any intelligence you can use to improve your marketing position within the marketplace. Sometimes these two kinds of intelligence intersect, but sometimes they don’t. You hope you gather actionable intelligence about your competition and that you are able to act on it in time to be profitable.
But you have to be careful. There are some things that are illegal when spying on the competition.
In general, competitive intelligence simply means surveying what the competition has to offer its customers from the perspective of a customer and then turning that into data that you can use to beat them in the market. But some competitive intelligence doesn’t really mean anything that you can act upon for marketing purposes. For instance, you might find out that employees of Company A within your niche all drive Porsches. It’s nice to know, but does that help you be a better marketer for your company?
On the other hand, if you find out that employee morale is higher at Company A because they have a dress down Friday and catered lunch then you might be able to use that to improve your company’s relationship with your employees. That could in turn lead to better relations with your customers. That’s actionable intelligence.
Other forms of actionable intelligence about the competition includes:
- The price of competitive products
- Benefits of a product that are enjoyed by the company’s customers
- The size of a company’s marketing budget
- Which keywords they use in their AdWords campaigns
- The size of the company’s website
- Which calls to action are effective
- What subdomains the company owns
There are countless other items of competitive intelligence that can be considered actionable as well. And if you take the time to find out what the competition is up to, you’ll likely learn that you can act upon a lot of it.
Is Viral Marketing Contagious?
God, we sure hope so.
Pardon the bad joke, but viral marketing is a misunderstood science. Too many webmasters think if they follow some blueprint then they’ll get boat loads of traffic overnight because they used so-and-so’s winning formula. But viral marketing is not about winning formulas. It’s largely a hit-and-miss proposition and some of the most successful viral marketers have more failed campaigns than successful ones.
The reason you hear so much hype around viral marketing initiatives is because the ones that win big really win big. That’s when people start talking.
But you don’t have to make a million dollars in order for your viral marketing efforts to pay off. You could have something go viral on a small scale and pay off. It just depends on the size of your market.
The main ingredient in any viral marketing campaign is creativity. You want your marketing campaign to target a specific market with something that will get their attention. When it does, they’ll talk about it. And they’ll help you market your business or product without so much as even a request. Often, you can’t even predict what will go viral. It sometimes is something you didn’t even plan on. When it is, you just grin and eat the butter.
What Is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization is a fancy word Internet marketers use to describe the best practices of marketing a business through various social media channels. Some of those channels might include:
- Blogging
- Digg
- Delicious
- StumbleUpon
- BlogCatalog
- YouTube
That’s just to name a few. There are countless other social bookmarking and social networking sites out there to participate in as well.
Social media optimization involves a few principles that, if followed, will help you reach the right target audience for your message and drive traffic to your website. What are the principles? Glad you asked. These are the principles that we recommend for the best social media optimization practices:
- Create unique content
- Engage your audience through a blog
- Provide a way for your readers to bookmark or share your content
- Distribute your content through RSS, aggregation, and various channels of social media
- Participate in other people’s channel marketing initiatives as well (ie interact)
- Be genuine, not fake
- Use SEO
The idea behind social media is to be conversational. You can do that without being pushy or overbearing. You can also do it and still ask for the sale. Before you jump into a social media campaign, take time to study what social media is, who is using it, and how they are doing it.