Most Internet-based businesses have TONS of testimonials sitting in their databases… and these testimonials have no other purpose but to be featured in their sales letters.
But how many people actually read sales letters? The more sales-y a page is, the odds are against a person actually reading it.
So here’s a simple, but pretty wild idea
Well, it’s official. The partnership which will lead to the blending of the “other search engines” Yahoo and bing, has been given the government seal of approval by both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission.
The integration of the two engines will be started immediately and it will take until 2011 before the
I completed my LPC / Legal Practice Course at College of Law in Bloomsbury in 2009. I have a few friends who are doing the course now and the big exams namely Litigation, Business and Property law are now coming up very soon.
Now as my friends before me passed me their LPC notes, I passed
CP+B Toronto caused quite a stir at lunchtime when it unveiled its stunt for Rethink Breast Cancer. The agency wrote headlines and facts on women's breasts to fuel conversation about the disease. Many of the models were actual breast cancer survivors.
The stunt, which was pulled off in some rather frigid weather, certainly impressed at least one person. Howie Mandel, who was walking by, tweeted it to his thousands of followers -- and took a picture to boot.
The event was to promote Rethink Breast Cancer's annual fundraising event, Boobyball.
From my perspective as a former full time musician I used to be oriented to music by the name of the decade it came from; the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and so on. Here we are coming to a close of the first decade of the new millennium and there has not even been a widely accepted name for it yet. I heard a reference to the decade recently as the “oughts.” We’ll see if that one sticks.
Timothy Noah, on Slate.com, stated at the end of 2004: “The most logical candidate is a term often used to describe the first decade of the 20th century: the "aughts." But despite heavy promotion from journalists and others, it's never caught on.”
Five years on, and still no name for the decade. Oh well.
I’ve made it a habit over the last few years to name what I thought would be the most important Internet marketing strategies for the coming year.
Here’s what I said for the most important strategies for the beginning of 2008:
a. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising b. Article Directories / Content Hubs c. Optimized Press Releases d. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Actions Done to a Web Site e. Email Marketing f. Banner Ads g. Web 2.0
Here’s what I said for the most important strategies for the beginning of 2009:
a. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Advertising b. Blogs c. Online PR d. Social Media e. Video and Audio on Sites and Blogs f. Article Directories / Content Hubs
Interestingly, in an industry that thrives on change, there was not a lot of change from 08 to 09. Certainly banner ads are not a major force anymore. Article directories are less of a force than they were a couple years ago but are still very effective. Blogs and online PR are still very effective. Social media has become a more dominant force in online marketing in 2009.
My Website Marketing Picks for 2010
As we prepare to enter the new decade (which we assume will be called the “Teens”) here is my prediction for the best website marketing strategies for the next year.
a. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC is still a very dominant force and very effective, though its use is pretty much limited to high ticket items because of its cost. I was concerned a couple of years ago because of the multitude of companies that had begun using PPC and the resultant rise in bids and higher cost per click. I suspected that either the competition would have a self-normalling effect, driving some players out of the market and cost per click prices would fall somewhat, or the high costs would make the medium irrelevant eventually. Happily the former has occurred. PPC is an excellent way to drive traffic to your site on an immediate basis, and due to the excellent statistical and monitoring tools, in skilled hands it can be very effective. It’s just not viable for selling books and CDs.
b. Social Media: I have a friend who was bugging me to get into social media a couple years ago when I was reluctant, and he loses no opportunity to remind me of it when the topic comes up. Facebook is the #3 site in November according to Compete.com with 128 million unique visitors. YouTube is #4 with 85 million visitors. Twitter is #43 with 22 million visitors. True enough, social media has become a dominant force in website marketing, as long as you know how to use it. This means developing lots of friends/followers/connections, then sprinkling your marketing message into the conversation in a tasteful, non-offensive way. Shouts of “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff,” “buy my stuff” at every opportunity will not work, because people can easily sever their connection to you and will. For my business I find it works to post several things a day saying what I am doing, such as “I am working on designing a new web site for a veterinarian,” or “I am ghost writing an article for a client.” It’s not obnoxious (at least I hope not) and it regularly reminds people of who I am and what I do. And I get business from Facebook and Twitter.
c. Single Dissemination Points Out to Multiple Sites: I believe that one of the primary essences of marketing is to have one message and to send it out as broadly as possible, without having to initiate the communication over and over again yourself. For this reason I really like sites that allow you to put out one communication one time, and have it go out to multiple places. I use Ping.fm to type in short communications (140 characters which is the Twitter limit) and I have it configured to post the message to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, and several other sites. So every time I post an update it goes out to 11 sites and to all my friends on those sites. I use Posterous.com for posting longer communications to my blogs, and I have it configured so it goes out to my blogs on Typepad, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com and several other blog sites.
d. Keyword Research: I think keyword research is vital to do at the beginning of your website marketing efforts. The reason is because search engines base all their ranking on keywords. You do not just rank well or poorly on a search engine. You rank well or poorly for specific keywords. And it does practically no good to rank well for a keyword that no one searches for. But at the same time, if you think you are going to be able to rank well for general, single word, category keywords like “golf,” “computers,” “furniture,” or “mp3,” I’m afraid that just isn’t going to happen. There is way too much competition for those keywords. So the key is to find keywords that have decent traffic but not a jillion sites competing for them. Then work those golden nugget keywords into your strategy for blogs, online PR, social media, article marketing and so on.
e. Email Marketing: I first got into email marketing when it was a newfangled thing back in 1998-99, and made millions with it for the company I was working for at the time. Unfortunately a few years after that saw “the deluge.” By that I mean the flood of mostly small businesses flooding cyberspace with their sales emails promoting stock picks, male enhancement products, printer toner cartridges, and a host of other products. And most engaged in tactics that were considered unethical then and are against the law now, such as not removing you if you asked, using deceptive subject lines and so on. My observation is this killed the market for rented email lists. But what does still work today and work well, is developing an in-house email list of customers and prospects who inquire about your products and services, and emailing to them regularly. It works great for selling your products. Just comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
f. Blogs: I have written extensively about the effectiveness of blogs (some have kidded me about how much). I still believe that they are one of the best things you can do. Blog on Macduff.
g. Online PR: Optimized press releases, containing your target keywords that you found when you did keyword research and submitted to online PR sites, are very effective in building quality links to your website. These links also rank very well in the search engines.
h. Article Directories: I think article directories have become the ugly stepchild of Internet marketing in the last year, because no one in the SEO community talks about them (they rarely ever did for reasons unknown) and the number of directories have dropped off. But I do this for my own sites and for several clients and it still works like gangbusters in developing quantity links.
That’s it. Best wishes for 2010 and may you have the most prosperous year yet. Remember, if you market yourself properly, you can overcome all this “economic uncertainty” and together we will.
Dr. Dre licensed his name for a line of headphones. I have no idea how much his royalty is, but figure it's $20 a pair.
At some point during the negotiations, perhaps someone said, "wait a minute! What if it's a hit? What if we sell more high-end headphones than anyone has ever sold, ever, and we sell 5,000,000 pairs. That means that he'll get a hundred million dollars. That's absurd! We need to put a limit on this."
We often hesitate to pay a portion of the upside to someone who is taking a risk, because we're worried that perhaps, just perhaps, his risk will pay off and he'll make a fortune
Let’s face it: Click Through Rate (CTR) can either make or break your campaign. Whether you are doing PPC, PPV, or especially with CPM & Media Buys, your CTR is often the determining factor in whether you make money or not. Since this is the case, it never ceases to amaze me how many affiliates (myself included) forget to put hard work and thought into the #1 thing that affects your CTR: your ad copy.
Putting together a campaign usually goes something like this:
Spend several hours doing niche research
Spend a couple of hours finding the best keywords
Spend a few more hours creating your landing page
Ready to launch!
Oh wait, I have to put some ads up here… I’ll just copy & paste what the other guys or doing, or just throw in some text off the top of my head
And then you wonder why nobody is clicking through to see your awesomely designed landing page and your super-targeted offer… Guess what? Ad copy has a massively huge part to play in your campaign’s success. Coming up with consistently killer ad copy and images is probably the most important skill you can have as a marketer. If you can’t do that, then what can you really do? Copy campaigns? Put tracking together? Load keywords into Google? That’s great, but that could all be outsourced to a monkey.
The real value that affiliates bring to the table is in our creative approach to campaigns and ad copy. You think that the company whose service or product you are promoting hasn’t tried direct-linking their website on the major search engines for their primary keywords? They have. They either have that on lock and therefore have those keywords blacklisted from you, or it doesn’t work and they turned to CPA Networks and Affiliates to think outside the box and get them leads from sources that they don’t know about or don’t understand well enough to do themselves.
Take some time to educate yourself on the basics of sales, marketing and advertising. All of the knowledge you can get from studying the fundamentals will go straight to your ad copy, and your CTR. Even if some of the principles were created for print advertising, it still applies online. I don’t care if it seems like homework. If you want this to be a serious business for you then you need to treat it like one. Read some books on marketing & advertising. There are literally thousands of them written. You will not regret the time you put into bettering yourself as a marketer.
Here are a few of my favorites to get you started (not affiliate links):
Do you like hanging out on Twitter or Facebook working endless hours to attract new business prospects?
Do you like “hangin out” and letting people know every intimiate detail of your life?
Do you like making small talk with hundreds of people every day in hope that some of them will filter into your sales funnel somehow?
There
Facebook already has more than 1000 employees, and it said it plans to increase that by at least 50% this year, according to previous reports. That number has been growing fast, from what we’ve gathered. It is now past 1300, according to sources, although Facebook is only confirming that it is above 1200. We heard
Social bookmarking is a great way to get your content seen very quickly by others and pick up in the search engines. Now it is another thing all together to have your content bookmarked by others and ranked higher (Page One of Google) in search results.
You’re going to want to use social bookmarking and news
Optimization is a key factor in success for internet marketing campaigns. There are so many variables needed to be tested until a campaign is fully tested & optimized.
One of these variables is frequency capping or also called as individual user capping.
If you are new to media buying, or CPV Marketing, you have to understand
You are about to learn how an effective linking program via blog posts and back links can be easily integrated into your online book marketing campaign. Back links are links directing blog readers to your website. Even though blog back links are not as highly rated as other web page links (because of abusive link spamming techniques by bad online marketers) Google still indexes them and so they are worth pursuing within your marketing niche. But be aware that many blog links come with a "no follow" follow" tag, which tells the search engine spider not to link back to you. You can still find blogs in your marketing niche that do not use this tag by following these three steps:
Tip #1:Conduct a search at blogsearch.google.com for: "your keyword phrase" + "do follow"
This search will identify the blogs that do not use the "no follow" tag. If the search produces no results, use broader keywords. For example, if your niche is book marketing, and "book branding tips for people in Tampa" did not return any results, try "book branding" and then "book marketing tips."
Tip #2: Use the Firefox browser and the free plug-in that will highlight in red blogs that use the "no follow" tag.
With the installation of a free plug-in, the Firefox browser will highlight all "no follow" blogs in red. And this plug-in will also identify the page rank value of every blog. Start at the top because higher PRs mean higher index value for each back link.
Tip #3: Visit Comment Hunt, a "Do Follow" Blog Directory
Comment Hunt is an incredible book marketing research tool:
Links you to FollowList.com where posting comments by topic is free.
Allows you to search for "do follow" blogs by keyword.
And, you can add your blog to the directory. Courtneytitle.com., a site that provides links to 200 "do follow" blogs where you can post comments.
Gives you the option to purchase comments.
Lists popular and active "do follow" blogs.
How to Select a Blog for Posting
Even if you post to "no follow" blogs, not every blog is equally effective. Every blog that you post to must:
Be current.
Have a page rank higher than "0."
Have an active comments section.
Tips for Posting Comments
Show yourself as the expert you are by adding information of value to the blog post.
Blogs use your name and URL as anchor text, so when it's time to sign the comment, use a keyword phrase (not your name) with your URL. However, do use a long-tail keyword phrase (three-four words) that is relevant to the post and then add a link to a relevant article on your website. For example, end your comment by saying: "I've written more on: . I trust that you'll find it useful." This little-used strategy provides high-ranking back links by providing relevant and current content. Don't forget, though, that your comment links need to use the clickable. Finally, to supercharge your online book marketing, establish yourself as an expert and keep your comments from being deleted by blog moderators, offer highly useful content and back links.
More book marketing tips are available from the award-winning author, V. Michael Santoro ,creator of the AuthorInterns.com online book marketing system, an easy-to-follow program helping authors promote their books by utilizing the services of student interns. More book promotion tips await you in Michael's free book marketing training course.
Using Video to boost your business marketing efforts is becoming more and more important. In a recent article in the New York times it states that online ads are booming when they are associated with video, with alot of the new websites starting to look like television rather then newspapers.
Video is being featured more promptly on the likes of CNN.com and ESPN.com, with video even becoming more prominent with the likes of Wall Street Journal.
Other key matters mentioned in the article include:
People (i.e. your consumers) are using the internet in a different way now.
With broadband penetration becoming ubiquitous and more and more sites having this easy capability, people are expecting video to be there.
The growth in video consumption has spurred investment and interest in video production.
Among Web sites operated by newspapers, The New York Times, Gannett and Tribune each reach more than a million viewers a month with video streams.
Beyond news sites, video is now the fastest-growing segment of the Internet advertising market. Digital video amounted to $477 million in revenue in the first half of 2009, up 38 percent from the same time period in 2008, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
In the five-year outlook it released last month, eMarketer said that video ads would be the “main channel” for major advertisers seeking to increase their online spending. Already, ads for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Unilever pop up often on sites like MSNBC.com.
Web executives say some clients think of online video as an extension of TV, and others think of it as an enhancement — one that allows for interactive messages and instant feedback from viewers.
So don’t get left behind, and be sure to start using (online) video to promote your business!
Customer relationship management (CRM) marketing makes use of tools and techniques for creating new, or fostering existing, relationships between a customer and supplier which ultimately derive mutual`benefit.
Typically the CRM component is a piece of technology, usually software which can be run on a single PC or hosted on a server either internally or remotely from
…It affects your bottom line!
You’ve no doubt visited many websites which bombard you with huge, flashy banner ads and other advertising which is only vaguely related to the content of the particular page. For example, you might click through to a web page with an article on children’s birthday parties. The distracting banner, proclaiming you
I recently sat down with Jeffrey Hayzlett, the ex-CMO of Kodak.
We had met earlier this year at another big social media event, but I finally was able to get him to reveal details of his inner secrets. This included more thoughts on running your own business, leveraging social media and what it takes to “make
Drive down your local street and you see the signs; the economic “recovery” is taking out a lot of your favorite businesses. Maybe even your own business is struggling. Don’t let it fail. Here are 10 things you could do right now to find extra cashflow:
1) Look in the couch for spare
Are you trying to put originality on your used cars for sale in Indiana? We have all of the latest and greatest products that can assist you with this. Not just will you find a great deal of such things as articles and pictures to help you decide you can read reviews and other’s comments.
I promote a lot of other people's products through Clickbank and wanted a way to do it without using an actual WordPress blog theme.. so I done some searching and found a couple products that done exactly that, so I bought both to see which was better.
The first was WordPress
A facebook discussion got me thinking about this question “Is it harder to be ethical during a Recession and does it affect the value that you offer”? – Started by Shel Horowitz.
What do you think? Me? I think the two (value & ethics) are separate questions to some degree.
Ethics is something that’s at the core
One of the biggest lures of Internet Marketing is the promises that are made. When you’re browsing on any mainstream website nowadays, you can find all sorts of claims being made. If we didn’t know any better, we would actually buy into what internet marketing strategy the “article” is utilizing, putting our financial security at
You might not know who Justin Bieber is, or you might be his number fan. Love him or hate him, it doesn’t matter. This article isn’t about him. It’s about you and how you can be the Justin Bieber of your market.
Why would you want that?
Justin Bieber is currently the hottest pop star on the
Thanks for visiting our little site here at SEOtraffic.org. We take great pride in the fact that so many marketers across the globe consider our company as their number one search engine marketing resource they turn to when they need targeted traffic the most.
That’s something we worked very hard to achieve and we have
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Making money online with a home business can be very easy, but it's a well known fact that most people who begin are destined to fail. Why should that be, after all, Internet marketing doesn't require special skills or training, you don't need to be a
There is no shortage of information about Internet marketing. Everyone has information about the best Internet marketing tip, but sometimes these opinions have other intentions, like specific product promotion, which means you aren’t getting comprehensive information and being truly helpful. The easiest, yet somewhat difficult, way to determine the best Internet marketing tip is to
Life in the Grind was the subject of last week’s webinar. Apparently, there are a few mentoring students moaning about the boring work they’re doing. And, I have to admit, I’m one of them. Dull, dull. Endlessly dull.
The good news is I’m keeping at it. I’m plodding on and, for the most part, not being
I first tried my hand at internet marketing back in 2005, when adsense fortunes were being made practically overnight. I was instantly hooked by the ability to create a site and start earning money within 2-3 days. It wasn’t really the money that hooked me in though, although I was unaware of this at the
If you want to grow your fitness business, you must spend some time working ON it along with all the time you spend working IN it.
I’ve shared a few of my time management strategies here, but it’s not only about saving time…
…it’s about making your time more valuable.
The way you make your time more
Garmentology allows online fashion retailers to create personal shop windows for each user, allowing each user to see the clothes that suit them best based on their unique body shape and colouring.
What problems does Garmentology solve?
Garmentology allows retailers to address the key issues of relevance and confidence for buying in fashion online.
Garmentology allows retailers to address relevance by showing the clothes in the order that will suit each user the best, so the most relevant items for each user will appear on the very first page. This is like giving each user a personal shopper who will ‘edit the floor’ for them.
It allows retailers to address confidence by proving a unique personal suitability rating for every garment for each user, so they will know which ones will look as good on them as they do on the page. We don’t judge garments, just how well they suit each individual user.
When and why did you launch it?
Garmentology started in 2008 as a research project driven by the need of users to find out if was possible to automate the matching of garments to people with the same consistency and quality as delivered by professionally qualified image and style consultants.
Once we found that we could, we then set about developing a service that could be integrated into retailers’ web sites, whilst still delivering the needs of the users , which we launched earlier this year.
The motive was driven by a desire to democratise professional style and image advice. As an image professional, I knew the benefits that clients derived from the service I provided, but also that relatively few people were in a position to hire personal shoppers.
By automating the process, it could be made available to all who wanted it on a 24/7 basis at no cost to the end user – a classic case of identifying a need and fulfilling it.
Who is your target audience?
Garmentology has two audiences. Our by-line is ‘inspired by users, designed for retailers’.
In terms of users, our service is currently perfect for two types of women: those who don’t always feel they can judge for themselves which clothes to buy or find returning garments that don’t work for them a chore, and those who know exactly what they want but prefer not to spend time searching through pages of garments to find them.
As for retailers, any stores whose users fall into one of the categories above are good targets for us. Also, retailers who know that personalisation is a key differentiator on-line, or want to bring their on-line experience closer to their High Street experience are good candidates.
What are your immediate goals?
We’re currently working with a number of well-known retailers to integrate our service into their web sites. Our immediate goals are going live and supporting our retailer partners through this exciting but crucial period.
What were the biggest challenges involved in building Garmentology?
We learnt quite early on that we had something unique so one of the biggest challenges was keeping quiet while we tested and proved what we had, and turned an idea into a product. When we had a prestigious reviewer pronounce that ‘it’s clever, it’s fast, and it works!’ we knew we’d done the right thing!
Retailers are building increasingly wonderful websites and we’ve always been attracted by having something that would dovetail into existing sites. This meant designing our whole process around making things simple and fast for retailers.
How will the company make money?
We provide a service to retailers and charge for this service. Retailers can put any number of users through our online consultation process, and can request garment ratings as often as they like, 24/7.
An essential part of our process is how we capture details on each garment a website has for sale.
This part of our process is manual – we capture about twenty different details on each garment – and a key part of our research was to make this process as efficient and accurate as possible, so every garment is ‘double coded’ and checked, but it all happens very quickly and is fully covered by our service fee.
As our user base builds up, we increasingly see great value in the data we collect about body shapes and colouring, which means that personalisation can go well beyond the website and reach right back into the buying process.
This data can be quite personal so we will only release it in aggregated and anonymous form, but doing so won’t detract from its value.
What is your pricing model?
Because retailers are in total control of how they use our suitability ratings (and there are many ways in which they can use them) a monthly service fee based on the retailers’ range and anticipated churn is the most straightforward way to price the service, but we are also open to shared risk arrangements where appropriate.
Who is in the team and what does it look like?
Garmentology was founded by Rob Macdonald and I. My background is in image and style consultancy, but also in corporate sales. Rob has a varied background in IT including (many years ago) a background in the artificial intelligence technology that underpins our service.
Not surprisingly, we have a team of IT people making all the technology work, and a head garmentologist (Kirsty) who looks after the team of coders who run the manual process of capturing garment details. On top of that we have some great people helping us promote the business.
Where would you like to be in one, three and five years time?
There is no simple answer to this. We are committed to delivering a service that customers/users want and this will drive the direction in which we will grow and develop.
There are many amazing applications for our technology, and we probably haven’t even thought of all the ways that it can be used, yet! It is going to be about staying agile and responsive to our customers needs.and we keep learning new ones as we talk to retailers and users.
The road map includes some very exciting projects of developments in personalisation allowing access to our service from many different devices and location, not just in retail but publishing too.
The RAP Bank affiliate network previously required you to purchase a RAP script for getting your product listed in the network.
This requirement changed today when RAP Bank revealed RAP Bank List ‘n’ Earn.
Using RAP Bank List ‘n’ Earn is simply a matter of uploading a small script to your website and adapting your sales page
Web marketing is getting more popular in this age of IT. Research has shown that internet promoting can noticeably increase the traffic to your sites and therefore shoots up your sales. Please remember that though some firms basically hire or … Continue reading →
This article aims to explain the first steps to take if you want your online business to be successful. In fact, this article show how important it is for a business to have a successful online marketing strategy to drive revenue.
The World Wide Forex Market Forex is known as a trading ‘method’ also known as FX or and foreign market exchange. Those involved in the foreign exchange markets are some of the largest companies and banks from all over the world, trading in currencies from various countries to generate a balance as some are going
lenledbetter.com – XanGo announced today that worldwide network marketing icon and recognized business leader Lennon Ledbetter has joined the ranks of XanGo’s more than 1 million independent distributors in 35 countries. Ledbetter, founder of Team Builders Global, is among the highest-earning and most well-known network marketers in the world. “We’re thrilled, in our eighth year, to have a dynamic, incredibly accomplished leader such as Lennon joining XanGo without a signing bonus or guaranteed position,” says XanGo Founder and Chairman Aaron Garrity. “Lennon’s achievements stand at the pinnacle of our industry, due in large part to his unique ability to inspire others and help them realize their potential. In XanGo, he can count on a strong partner with extraordinary executive leadership and a commitment to supporting our distributors in a way that accelerates their growth now and well into the future.” Ledbetter is among the very elite achievers in direct sales, his team having consistently generated many millions in annual revenue as a heralded leader in one of the three largest companies in the industry. Among his accomplishments at his former company, he reached its highest ranks and consistently earned among the top sales growth checks worldwide. A sought-after motivational speaker and trainer, Ledbetter has wowed audiences in dozens of cities domestically and internationally in front of packed stadiums. Remaining humble, he’s also been known to spend considerable …
Five strategies to keep you ahead of the game in 2010 Citywire.co.uk My second theme was to buy stocks that you expects to deliver positive earnings surprises, that is, where consensus expectations are too pessimistic.
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From my perspective as a former full time musician I used to be oriented to music by the name of the decade it came from; the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, and so on. Here we are coming to a close of the first decade of the new millennium and there has not even been a widely accepted name for it yet. I heard a reference to the decade recently as the “oughts.” We’ll see if that one sticks.
