Posts Tagged ‘google’
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
Being a Digital Marketer is not easy and constantly evolving with the addition of new websites trying to vye for your marketing dollars. Stick with what you know that works for your lead generation target goals and don’t get caught up in the hype, but test the new marketing channels with $1,000-$5,000, so you don’t lose out on any potential new lead gen goldmines. For example, Google +, although many critics are calling it a dud, may help for companies looking to improve their SEO by building a brand page within Google +. The Google + Brand pages are integrated with Google Search and will help company ranking in organic, thus helping to generate new targeted leads.
Tags: digital marketer, google, Google + brand pages helps with organic ranking, lead generation, marketing channels that work, SEO with Google +
Posted in online marketing, Search, SEO | No Comments »
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
According to the NielsenWire’s latest report, baby boomers should be considered early technology adopters, similar to the 18-34 year old demographic age group.
The top 10 ranked sites that are used by baby boomers show similar online surfing habits, as the younger demographic. Top 10 sites for baby boomers are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Microsoft, AOL, YouTube, Wikipedia, Ask, and Amazon. Note how similar these are to the top 10 sites for the 18-34 year old demographic group: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Bing, YouTube, Microsoft, AOL, Fox Interactive, Apple, Wikipedia. Uncanny how similar these groups tastes have become, especially since the previous older demographic trends have shown slower technology adoption. That may have been true of those previous generations, but not of the baby boomers.
If you are a marketer that has normally targeted the 18-34 year old demographic because you thought that was the best demographic, think again, the baby boomers should not be overlooked for targeting your ad spend. Convince your companies that baby boomers should be a considered demographic to market your products/services to. These baby boomers have more cash and are more free to spend their cash, since they don’t have the same economy restrictions that have hit the younger demographic in the U.S.
Tags: 18-34 demographic age, apple, baby boomers, Bing, early technology adopters, Facebook, fox interactive, google, Nielsenwire, online habits, online users, top 10 baby boomer sites, top 10 sites for 18-34 year olds, US demographics, wikipedia, yahoo, YouTube
Posted in online marketing | No Comments »
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, guerrilla marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, Search, SEO | 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, brand marketing, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | 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 brand marketing, internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search | 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 entrepreneurs, internet marketing, Media Buying, New marketers, online marketing, Search | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
I recently had a website owner ask me about advertising on Facebook, whether the campaign that they were running should continue. They had done some minimal testing at Facebook themselves and received a lot of impressions, but very little clicks. They thought that they should continue, since they were exposing their brand name to the members of Facebook, so it was worth it to them to let people know who they were, especially since they weren’t paying for it, since it was a CPC campaign. My simple question to them was, “What is your advertising goal?” They replied, “…to get traffic.” Well, then my answer is, stop advertising with Facebook because it is not going to help you get traffic, if you’re not getting any or low clicks. You would think that marketers would know this, but don’t assume.
Many marketers believe by running ads with no click-through helps with exposing the brand name. Be careful of those marketers because they are not looking out for your best interests. Your goal is to get traffic to your site. Remember that.
People don’t run ads on Google to only expose their brands, they want traffic to their sites, so work on the premise with any high-trafficked site…don’t just run ads on Facebook with the expectations that by exposing your brand that people are paying attention. If people are paying attention, then they will click on your ads, which will help with your brand marketing efforts. Yes, it is true, that you will receive free advertising on Facebook, but is it worth it, if no one is coming to your site? No, so why do it?
Think about your goals. If you are a web owner and want traffic to your site, go to where you will find the best click-through with the best conversions at your site. By running ads with no click-through is a waste of money and time. It does not brand your company to have no one clicking on your ads. Clicks mean that Internet users are interested in what you are offering and by the interest, helps establishes your brand.
Tags: brand marketing, branding, cpc, Facebook, google, marketers, Media Buying, online advertising, online marketing, ppc, Search, social media, social networking
Posted in brand marketing, internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search | No Comments »
Monday, May 5th, 2008
Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google offered an advertising service to all types of advertisers that could advertise cheaply and effectively to reach their target markets. Advertisers could spend less than $100 per day and find quality traffic reaching their sites.
Well, as I mentioned, that was a long time ago. Now, the “Little Advertiser”, the guy that I consider to have advertising budgets that are below $5,000 per month, are having a hard time competing with advertisers with larger advertising budgets, due to Google’s attempts to “bring better quality traffic by raising the minimum cpcs to as high as $1, $5, $15, and $20 per click.” Well, how does that bring better quality traffic you ask?
The idea is, if an advertiser really values a specific keyword, they will pay anything for that keyword and thus drive out advertisers that are not willing or “can afford” that premium keyword, which gives the advertiser who bought the keyword an advantage to getting better traffic and better placement in Sponsored Advertising positions. But, the advertiser that has most likely bought this keyword has to have a larger budget than everyone else, which discourages the Little Advertiser from bidding on the keyword, thus knocking them out of the bid and creating a service that is meant only for advertisers with big budgets.
Google has forgotten that their ‘idea’ does not work for a new advertiser with a low or tight budget, since the new advertiser hasn’t had a chance to test and optimize their keywords to know which works best for them in driving quality traffic. For example, If I only have a starting budget of $500 and the cpc for my keyword is $10, then I will only get 50 clicks to my site and as you will learn, not all clicks reach our homepages and only a small percentage will convert, before being optimized correctly, hopefully. 50 clicks is not enough data to figure out which keywords worked the best. The Little Advertiser will not last long in spending money with Google or not even attempt to spend money at all, due to the high costs and little return. In essence, the Google that had created the fair, “ever good” online ad service for everyone that had created them, no longer exists. Google in its attempts to bring more money to itself, which let’s admit we are Americans so there is nothing wrong about that, but has destroyed what was so great about them…the democratization of buying online ad media.
So, what happened to that not evil Google that we all loved? They joined the dark forces of the high-price spending advertising world in order to get their marketing capitalization up. Let’s face it, the days of cheap advertising on Google is over and the ever good Google has become Darth Vader.
So, is there a Luke Skywalker out there that will save the Little Advertiser? I think so, like everything else in the Internet world, you just have to wait for the next ‘big thing’ and I believe it will be a new advertising network that will be cost-effective and driving quality traffic for an affordable price…and hopefully, without the click fraud. So hey Luke Skywalker, hurry up and launch!
Tags: darth vader, google, luke skywalker, online advertising, online marketing, search marketing, SEO
Posted in Ashley Hart, internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search, SEO | No Comments »
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
So, what is SEO and why should I do it? Simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique on how well you optimize your site to appear in the Natural/Organic search listings on Google, which in case you didn’t know, it’s the listings that appear on the left-side of the page.
It is important to learn how and to optimize your site for SEO for a few reasons:
1. SEO helps to reduce your costs for paying for advertising in Google or in other search engines. If you are coming up for free in the natural search listings for the keywords that best describe your business or service, why would you pay for advertising?
2. SEO helps you to understand how to position your site to your intended audience. You are forced to think about what keywords are significant and to apply it to your business description.
3. If you have a low budget and you are getting positioned well in certain keyword phrases, but not others, then you can concentrate your paid online advertising on the keywords that you are not doing well in for appearing in the organic search.
A simple way to optimize your site, is pay attention to the page title. When Google or other search engines crawl your site to list it, the search engines refer to the page title to help place it in the listings. So make sure, that whatever you think are the most important keyword phrases appears in your page title.
Good luck!
Tags: Ashley Hart, google, internet marketing, marketing help, online marketing, search engine marketing, search tips, SEO
Posted in Ashley Hart, internet marketing, online marketing, Search, SEO | No Comments »