Posts Tagged ‘affiliate marketing’

Choose SEO First When Starting Your Online Lead Strategy

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.

Is there a difference between B2B and B2C Online Marketing?

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.

How the Economy affects your Online Marketing Stategy

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.