Archive for the ‘Search’ Category
Monday, June 1st, 2009
Develop an online marketing plan with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as your starting point, comparatively to other lead generation channels, such as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), affiliate marketing, email marketing or media buys.
SEO, for all the newbies out there, is the organic listings that appear on the left-side of Google’s search results. It is free to appear in Google’s organic listings, which is how 75% of online users will find content. Also, 85% of Google Search users tend to click on organic listings compared to paid advertising links that appear at either the top or right-side of Google’s results. Although free to appear, it is not easy to get your website listed on the first page of the organic search, which is primarily where you want to appear, since most people tend not to go past the 1st page of the listings. So, how do you begin to make your site SEO-friendly?
Start with the title of the web pages. Name the title tags with 3-4 keywords that are relevant to the information on the page. Next, make sure that your information on the web pages are specific to the keywords. Lastly, get as many external links that go to your website. The more links you have, the more it will help in the popularity of your site, which will drive your site up in the rankings of the organic search.
Tags: affiliate marketing, email marketing, Google Search, lead generation, media buys, online lead strategy, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO
Posted in SEO, Search, online marketing | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
I can’t stress enough that, if you are running online marketing campaigns, you have to track them for measuring success. There is no excuse for any online marketer to not track their campaigns through either paid or free analytic software. Google Analytics (/www.google.com/analytics) is a free software that enables any marketer to see how well their Search campaign is going, as well as, other online campaigns. What’s great about this software is that you can place a simple tracking code, provided by Google Analytics, on your website to see how specific campaigns are converting at your site, how users are interacting with the site, and if you have an e-commerce site, how well sales are converting. Without knowing how new users and repeat users are interacting with your site, you won’t be able to know how to improve the user experience to increase registrant or sales conversions.
There is a down-side to Google Analytics, it has problems aggregating all of the traffic accurately for unique visitors and visits. For example, if you are running a Facebook advertising campaign, Google statistically will show less traffic to your site, than what Facebook reports, but hey, what do you expect from a free software.
For a more robust analytic software, try WebTrends. WebTrends can be customized to your needs and is very granular about its tracking. Keeping in mind, it is a paid software, but if you can afford it, I would highly recommend it. If you are running a Search campaign, you’ll be able to see, down to the keyword, if new registrants or sales can be accounted to those specific keywords.
Tags: analytic software, facebook ads, facebook advertising tracking, google analytics, internet marketing tracking, online analytics, online marketing, search engine marketing, search marketing, SEM, tracking online campaigns, tracking sales, webtrends, webtrends analytics
Posted in Search, internet marketing, online marketing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Is there a difference between Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online marketing? Absolutely. Don’t let an inexperienced marketer tell you otherwise. B2B marketing tends to focus on providing targeted content, such as white papers, case studies and webinars to their target market, in exchange for the target markets’ contact information. Also, B2B marketers tend to focus more on customer acquisition, rather than customer retention, since attrition is much lower in the business market than in the consumer market. Online marketing channels tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO and related business information websites.
B2C marketing tends to focus equally on customer acquisition and retention marketing programs. Consumers are more price & service sensitive than businesses. Consumers visit more alternative online services, if they believe there is a better value for them testing out varied sites. Many good B2C online marketers will focus on creating customer retention programs that keep consumers coming back to their sites to extend their Life Time Value (LTV) of their online members…i.e. if the average of an online user is 2 months at a casual gaming site, then the marketer seeks to extend the LTV to 3-4 months. By extending the LTV of an online member, potentially increases online usage at the site and will increase overall ROI for revenues.
Online marketing channels for B2C online services tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO, direct marketing, email campaigns, blogs, viral and affiliate marketing.
Tags: affiliate marketing, b2b, b2c, business to business, business to consumer, case studies, customer acquisition, customer retention programs, direct advertising, direct marketing, email marketing, internet marketing, LTV, online market, online marketers, online marketing, SEM, SEO, viral marketing, webinar marketing, white papers
Posted in Media Buying, SEO, Search, internet marketing, online marketing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the top buzz word on every online marketer’s mind right now, but what does it mean for your website and driving traffic to it? SEO in short, is how you optimize your site to have higher rankings in Google’s Organic Search results, which appear to the left of the screen. There are many techniques that you will have to consider to optimize your site, but if you don’t have a lot of money to hire an agency to help you with this process, one simple way that you can help your rankings, is to have as many links as possible from other sites pointed to your site; this is a guaranteed way to help boost your rankings. But how do you get your url placed on other sites? Try going to the top ComScore sites that accept urls from other websites, such as YouTube.
For example, if you are trying to market a product to a consumer audience, consider creating a short video about how to use the product and place that video on MySpace, YouTube, and Veoh. Make sure the video you create is fun and exciting to watch, otherwise, you won’t have anyone watching. Don’t make the mistake that many others do, that assume just because you built it, people will watch it. Make sure to include your url in the video as a tagline at the bottom of the screen, so viewers can go to your site, once they are done watching the video.
By doing simple guerrilla marketing techniques as the video example, will help increase your traffic and boost your rankings in Google’s Search.
Tags: google, Google Organic, guerrilla marketing, MySpace, online marketing, organic results, Search, search engine optimization rankings, SEM, SEO, Veoh, videos, website, website optimization, YouTube
Posted in Ashley Hart, SEO, Search, guerrilla marketing, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Friday, August 1st, 2008
One of the more important tasks that you must incorporate into your online business plan is monitoring your competitor. It’s easy to do and there are many online tools that let you review your competitors keywords through online services.
Check out KeywordSpy.com and SpyFu.com. Both of these services will help you review your competitors organic and paid keywords by simply typing in your competitor’s domain. If that doesn’t work, try typing in search keywords that you think your target market finds your services online. The keywords that you type in should bring up a string of related keywords that you can use to help drive more traffic to your site and to see who else is using similar keywords.
Also, try Alexa.com to see how your competitor ranks against you in traffic.
Keep in mind, that if you can see how your competitor’s traffic is being monitored, they most likely are monitoring you as well.
Tags: alexa.com, internet marketing, keyword search, keyword spy, keywordspy.com, monitoring competitors online, online marketing, online search, online tools, organic keywords, paid keywords, Search, SEO, spyfu.com
Posted in Media Buying, SEO, Search, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
If you are a B2B marketer, you know the rising costs on Google Search is making it tougher on your bottom-line ROI numbers. To reduce your costs and to stay within your marketing budget, check out Google Base. Google Base is currently in beta, but it’s a great product to test out, since it’s free to list your products and services and you can link it to a store easily for processing purchases. Google Base makes it easier for consumers to find products and services from B2B marketers that are more relevant to their searches.
Also, check out HowStuffWorks.com, if you are a marketer with products that need demonstrations. HowStuffWorks.com can create customized pages for marketers that want to brand their products and services in a non-traditional way to their target markets. The How Stuff team will maintain the page for you with their own editorial content, which is relevant to the products and services that you are marketing.
Tags: b-2-b marketers, b-to-b marketing, B2B marketing, b2b marketing secrets, Google Base, Google Search, How Stuff Works, HowStuffWorks.com, internet marketing, listing products and services, Media Buying, online marketing
Posted in Ashley Hart, Media Buying, New marketers, Search, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
Online marketing has been a cheap and effective solution comparatively to traditional media for advertisers with small budgets. The baseline for online marketing choices for advertisers have been search marketing through Google and Yahoo, display advertising through Advertising.com, and affiliate marketing through LinkShare and Commission Junction. Now, these cheap solutions are being affected by the economy, due to advertisers of all sizes looking for economical ways to maximize their ROIs because of softer sales, which causes high biddng wars in Search and increases in CPM and CPA costs for prime display advertising space.
As the U.S. economy worsens, big budget advertisers that have used multi-channels for their marketing strategies will be forced to cut their budgets and limit their marketing channels, which makes online marketing a more attractive solution to traditional outlets. So, what can you do as a Marketer with a limited budget competing with the Big Boys? Try alternative advertising services to the baselines. For example, advertising networks, such as AdOnNetwork represent some of the Top ComScore sites and offer cheap remnant ad spaces for a 1/3 of the price.
Tags: AdOnNetwork, advertisers, advertising, Advertising.com, affects of the economy on online marketing, affiliate marketing, cheap marketing, Commission Junction, display advertising, economy, google, internet marketing, LinkShare, online advertising, online marketing, ROI, Search, yahoo
Posted in Ashley Hart, Media Buying, New marketers, Search, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Now that the Yahoo – Google deal has been done, how does this affect your Search strategy? Is it better or worse? For Yahoo it’s good, for you as the advertiser, it limits your choices on pricing for Search, which is bad.
Now, that Google will be serving their search ads on Yahoo, that limits the amount of advertising choices, which ultimately means that Search pricing for your keywords are going to go up. Also, the advertiser will have to deal with higher online search budgets, since it won’t be offset, by running ads on Yahoo and Google separately. Traditionally Yahoo’s keyword search term pricing has been lower than Google’s, so now that Google will be running the show, there will be no choices to separate the Search campaigns in other platforms for reducing pricing. So, what about MSN?
MSN’s search has been no match for Yahoo or Google in the past, but maybe with this new partnership deal, will step up MSN’s effort to be a real player in Search and as an alternative for online advertisers. We will have to wait and see.
Tags: google, media buys, MSN, online advertising, online marketing, paid search, ppc, search ads, search marketing, yahoo, yahoo google deal
Posted in Media Buying, Search, brand marketing, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Monday, June 16th, 2008
If you are new to marketing your site on the web, then one of the most important tools that you will need is an Analytics program to gauge traffic performance to your site. Without an Analytics program, you won’t be able to know where your traffic comes from, what advertising programs are really converting at your site, or how much much your campaigns are actually costing you.
You can choose from a range of existing products on the market or you can build the analytics internally. If you don’t have the resources or cash to build your Analytics program, a fair and free alternative is Google Analytics -www.google.com/analytics Yes, you read it correctly, it’s a free product from Google, but there are some minor issues that you should be aware of, if you decide to run advertising campaigns to drive traffic from the Advertising Networks. Google does not record every ‘Unique Visitor’ to a site due to its coding language, which will not pick up. Google will under report the amount of users. Make sure to place a pixel from the Advertising Network on your homepage so you can check the Advertising Network’s reports against Google’s Analytics.
Like any other free software tool that you find on the Web, you can’t completely customize Google Analytics the way that you need, if you have a complicated eCommerce site, but for those simple marketing informational sites, it does work well. To get started, all you have to do is place the ‘pixel’ code that is given to you by Google Analytics at the end of the sign-up process into the <head> tags of each page of the site, then you’re ready to go. It’s as simple as that. It takes approximately 24 hours before the reports are populated with data.
If you do have an eCommerce website that requires a lot of analytic customization, consider Web Trends. Web Trends is a great analytics tool, but can be costly.
No matter what you choose for your Analytics program, make sure to test it against your internal logs to make sure that the traffic numbers are true numbers.
Tags: analysis, eCommerce, google, google analytics, marketing, media buying tools, new to online marketing, online entrepreneurs, online marketing, online traffic data, pixel codes, web trends, website performance
Posted in Media Buying, New marketers, Search, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, online marketing | No Comments »
Monday, June 9th, 2008
Email marketing is considered the #1 way to market on the Internet, but what does that mean to you, if you don’t have a database of users yet? How do you build an email list to market your services? Should you buy a list from one of those online services? Don’t even think about it. I know it’s tempting to buy a list and it is the easy way out, especially, if you are just launching a site and don’t have any customers, but don’t build your email list this way. This is a common mistake of Entrepreneurs and less experienced Online Marketers to buy lists and to send bulk email to the list, hoping that users will click on your email or newsletter. This is definitely the way to get ‘black-listed’ on the top mail servers. Think about how much you hate getting email from companies or people that you don’t know. So, how do you build your email list?
The best way to build your email list is to run targeted marketing promotions that require people to offer their emails to you. Also, try running online Search marketing, Cost per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition campaigns or try offline Event Marketing programs. It will take time to build the list, but once you do, you will have a database of users that want to hear from you and will be more receptive to your marketing offers.
The last thing you ever want to do is to market to people who never requested your information, so don’t do it. Take the time, build your list and you will have an effective email marketing campaign.
Tags: bulk email, cost per lead, CPL, email, email lists, email marketing, event marketing, internet entrepreneurs, internet marketing, marketing, newsletters, online marketers, online marketing, online media buying, search marketing
Posted in Media Buying, Search, brand marketing, internet marketing, online marketing | 1 Comment »