For all of you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, here are 21 tips from Rand at SEOmoz to increase traffic to your blog. Listed here are the first 5 tactics:
Digiknow blogged about this article that appeared in Advertising Age regarding Pontiac who will be adopting an Internet-only advertising campaign for their new sporty G5 coupe. Although adopting such a campaign will not generate the same general brand awareness as television, they feel the Internet will let them target their specific audience of young men who are in the market for a car and are likely to find the G5 appealing. This transition to an Internet-only campaign also means a reduction in advertising spend as compared to more traditional mass media because of the net's incredible ability to focus spend and campaigns. Also, it's cheaper. The article also talks about a general movement by carmakers to spend less on campaigns that try to convert owners of competing cars, to retaining current customers longer and keeping them loyal to the brand. This strategy places more emphasis on target marketing and CRM.
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Excellent article that appeared in Business 2.0 on the explosion in blogging and the ad revenue that is being generated by 1-person operations, including Fark.com and Techcrunch.com. Any person who is running a business, has an interest or hobbie they like talking about should pay attention - there is some serious cash being made.
read more | digg story
Keeping in the spirit of user controlled content, Youtube.com will now allow users to vote up or down video ads that appear on its home page. This article appeared on Advertising Age.
How will YouTube retain its new-found fame when the time comes to turn a profit? That question -- one of the most bandied about by marketers today -- was partly answered today when the video-sharing startup unveiled a new ad strategy called participatory video ads.
Here's how it works: YouTube will feature video ads on its home page that members of the community can vote up or down, rate, comment on and list as their favorites. The ads can also be shared and embedded into a user's own video creations. The strategy is marketing jujitsu, as it pulls consumers into messages by giving them complete control over them.
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CodeMonitor™ is a FREE software product that allows you to track your competitors changes to their web site. It lets you collect competitive intelligence data virtually and in the absence of trackable RSS feeds.
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The new movie "Snakes on a Plane" slithered to the top of the box office in North America this weekend, bringing in about 15.3 million dollars after months of Internet buzz and aggressive marketing for the movie about killer snakes on a plane. The approach of focusing first on hyping the movie online rather than traditional tv, radio, print, and billboards will forever change the way movies are marketed.
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A 10-step article that covers some of the most common mistakes when designing and developing a business web site. I like how it touches on the importance of the home page which should be highly functional rather than just a beautiful front cover. I like to use the analogy that a home page should be designed in the same manner as the front page of a newspaper. With a newspaper, readers can quickly glance and find the most relevant stories to them and where they are located in the paper. Similarily, a home page should share the same functionality and let the user get to the information they want fast and easy.
read more | digg story
Search engine optimization or SEO, is a method of optimizing your web site so that it appears higher in Google and other search engines when a user types in a keyword that is relevant to your business. If your listing appears in the top ten under a specific search, you greatly increase the traffic clicking through to your site. There are many firms that offer full-scale SEO services, but there are some things you can do yourself to optimize your site. Here is a helpful article on some SEO essentials you can do.
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A free checklist that reviews how to prepare, launch and measure a pay per click marketing campaign.The beauty of online marketing compared to more traditional forms of marketing is that it is completely measurable. The metrics you get from a PPC strategy allow you to be more strategic in who you target and test the creative and message of your ads to see which generate the most impact.
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Comments on Maketing Today Blog regarding the lack of integration between online and other mediums such as televsion and radio by well-known companies like The Gap.
Click here to read post
Many businesses seem to believe that email marketing is the way to go. It does have a lot of merits with regards to target marketing and ease of use, but it is very important to understand the whole concept of "permission-based" marketing. It's quite simple, if you do not get permission from the email recipient to receive promotional/newsletter emails from you, than it is considered spam and you can be blacklisted. You can get permission from a recipient by allowing them to "subscribe" to your e-newsletter through your web site, or have them checkmark "yes" to receiving promo emails from you when filling out an online form. In face-to-face settings such as tradeshows or conferences, you can have a similar hard copy form. A properly implemented permission-based email marketing program must allow the recipient to "opt-out" at any time. The article below appeared on e-consultancy.com and talks about the damage of abusing the email channel.
The importance of targeting in email marketing
Email marketing has been a revolution. Not only can it be timed and targeted to perfection, it is cheaper than most other forms of direct marketing, making it accessible to many more companies.
However, from regularly speaking to people in the industry, and looking at my own inbox, many companies are not taking the same care with their email direct marketing as they would offline. This is causing problems for the industry and the companies themselves.
A recent report by SoftScan announced that 90% of the emails they scanned in July were spam, the average throughout the year being 85%.
This is a lot of spam. However a survey from Return Path found that more than a third of people labelled emails as junk or spam, even though they had actually signed up for it.
Do companies not realise that if they are wrongly labelled as spammers, they may be blacklisted by ISPs?
Why is it that many companies still seem to think that if they send out millions of untargeted emails - instead of thousands of targeted ones - they will get a better response rate?
This may be true for some industries in the short term, but such an approach can do irreparable damage to a company's brand in the long term, with consumers learning to ignore emails they recognise as irrelevant.
We try to encourage companies to always put their customers first and ensure that what they send is timely and relevant. This may mean that we make less money because we are encouraging them to send lower volume of emails, but not spamming your customers can only be good for your long term relationship with them.
Just because email is cheaper than most other marketing vehicles, it needs to be treated with as much care and attention to detail as you would give to your other methods of direct marketing.
I found this article on Forbes.com. Interesting since online advertising is a billion dollar industry and only growing.
Google's Questionable Clicks
Rachel Rosmarin 08.10.06, 3:30 PM ET
San Jose, Calif. -
After wining, dining, dancing and karaoke-ing at the "Google Dance" inside the search company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters Tuesday night, 2,000 online advertising strategists came face to face with Google's Chief Executive Eric Schmidt Wednesday morning, and he wasn't nearly as much fun.
On stage at the Search Engine Strategies conference, he wouldn't even answer one of their most basic, burning questions: How much click fraud happens within Google's advertising system?
"We don't want to give out the details," Schmidt said. "But we believe we have it under control, and we believe it is getting better. Though, we don't know what we don't know--we only know what we can detect."
Schmidt's wishy-washy claim comes at a time when his company and third-party click fraud detection firms are sparring over the prevalence and method of tracking the bogus clicks, which occur either when competitors automatically or manually click on each others' ads to waste marketing budgets, or click their own ads to get extra cash from search engines.
Although Google shows individual advertisers limited false-click data for each ad campaign, the company refuses to disclose an industry average, or total dollars spent on bad clicks. Third-party auditors often estimate averages and use tracking technology not employed by search engines to measure clicks and where they come from. Advertisers then try to use reports generated by these auditors to get refunds or credits from Google and other search engine ad networks.
On Tuesday, Google's click quality team published a report dismissing the click fraud estimates of three third-party software companies. "Firms [are] stating that their measurements show much higher levels of click fraud than we believe could possibly be realistic (e.g., 14%), which is troubling," according to Google's report.
This month, click-fraud auditing companies have put the range of false clicks at between 8% and 35%. One firm, Outsell, estimated that about 15% of clicks are fraudulent, and that they cost U.S.-based search engines and advertisers about $1.3 billion a year. Google's opinion of Outsell? "It was an opinion survey," according to the Google report.
As recently as Aug. 3, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com committed to work with the Interactive Advertising Bureau to write click-fraud prevention guidelines, as well as to create standards for how to identify click fraud and how to define a "click." That announcement came on the heels of a judge's approval last month of a $90 million settlement of a click fraud lawsuit. Jim Spanfeller, chief executive of Forbes.com, is the chairman of the IAB's executive committee.
But Google's words and actions indicate that public transparency on the click fraud issue is not a top priority, regardless of how committed the company says it is to solving the problem.
"With nearly half a million advertiser accounts, if anyone is in a position to have a statistical guess, you'd think it'd be Google," says Scott Brinker, CTO of Ion Interactive, a firm that measures click fraud by tracking behaviors after a click. But since Google doesn't share its data, it is frighteningly difficult to come up with a number, he says.
"There are going to be patterns of click fraud detected only on their end and only on our end," he says. "The ideal would be for search engines and third parties to cooperate and look at a combination of the data."
Jon Waterman, chief executive of online marketing firm Findology, which on Tuesday launched click-fraud detection software Fraud ID, says he doesn't blame Google for retaliating against third-party auditors in its report.
"There's no need to bash people in this business, but I want an open forum," Waterman says. "Discredit our data, and we'll respond in real time. I'm sure that can only help address this industry's problem."
I found this article on webpronews.com about how sites can benefit from some good fashion sense.
Most sites could benefit from a little nip and tuck, and when that can increase their search engine visibility from nil to above-the-fold in the SERPs, the impact on a site can be dramatic. Staff writer Doug Caverly of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session, Pimp My Site!
Doug also had some observations about the fashion sensibilities of the presenters. Said Doug (edited for clarity and a handful of colorfully creative metaphors):
"Herrera is wearing a fuzzy, bright orange jacket and hat with white tiger-type accents. Also some dollar-sign glasses with the price tag fluttering around. Friesen is wearing a similar outfit, but his is purple instead of orange, and somehow that's less offensive. Lloyd-Martin and Osmeloski are wearing relatively "normal" dresses with the white-and-black tiger-pattern streaks of color. Li and Laycock are dressed sanely. Bless them."
Read full article here
Interesting article regarding marketing to the MySpace generation. I found it on marketingprofs.com
The growth of MySpace has been front and center in the media over the past 12 months, in part because of the continued incredible growth of the venture but also because of social outrage generated by those who view it as an inappropriate and unsafe environment for teenagers. Here, Cliff looks at what has happened with MySpace, what has changed, and what he's learned about the online social networking business model over the past 12 months.
Read full article here
I found this on e-consultancy
Research by the Atlas Institute shows that the conversion rate from Search advertising is 22% better when used in conjunction with Display advertising.
The study demonstrates that there is a quantifiable "synergy" between these two channels and will hopefully encourage advertisers to take a more integrated approach to their online marketing.
The research is welcome because there are still companies out there who are shifting their budgets from display advertising into Search without a full understanding of how this might affect their conversion success or long term prospects.
Read full article here
Interesting article on e-consultancy
So I am now officially a blogger. Indeed, I am an expert blogger. At this point, I’d like to forget that ex- means ‘has been’ and ‘spurt’ is a ‘drip under pressure’. But back to the point, once again my capacity for inaccurate prediction has struck gold.
In my mind, blogging was always for other people – people with nothing better to do than fill the ether with their ramblings. Not for people like me with valuable contributions to make to the digital world. And yet here I am blogging away (on a late train home from work, in fact).
Real full article here
Found out about this web site called SpotBowl.com. You can vote for your favorite commercials during SuperBowl XL and get real-time results during the polling. Neat concept - personally, I look forward to watching the ads just as much as the game!
Site: http://www.spotbowl.com/
