Oct 16 2009

SEO Advertising Services for the Internet

Category: search engine marketing — admin @ 1:11 pm

Advertising Consulting Services: Advertising is one of the most important expenses a business can have. Businesses large and small, have some form of advertising, be it word of mouth referrals or multi million dollar television campaigns. Business owners of all types will pay good money for the right kind of advertising. That is why advertising consulting services on the Internet is becoming so popular.

There are two key things you need to know when considering starting out as an internet advertising consultant. The first of course is advertising experience. If you have done advertising in the past and enjoy the work, then that is the first step.

Secondly, you need to know about the Internet. Your Internet knowledge needs to be updated constantly to keep abreast of the current trends. While contemporary advertising – television, radio, and print, are still effective means of advertising, the Internet needs to be approached a bit differently.

When watching television or listening to the radio, people don’t generally have a choice about what they see and hear in the line of commercials. Those commercials of course are advertising. Even when reading the newspaper or a sale ad, people only see what is in front of them, not all the options available. If one grocery store buys an ad in the local newspaper and another grocer does not, the consumer is only seeing one ad.

The Internet has changed the face of this kind of advertising. Anytime that someone opens a web page; they are looking for something specific. People who surf five or six web sites are likely to see hundreds of ads without really knowing they are seeing advertising. Banners, affiliate links, tool bars and the like are all types of Internet advertising, revealing products or brands in front of the consumer.

If a consumer is looking for a product online, and does not know where to find it, or there are multiple sources to find it, the savvy Internet user generally goes to a search engine. Searching for the product by typing in the general name or brand that they are looking for, the consumer can then choose from a list of sites that offer that product. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a system of strategic placing of certain words or keyword phrases on a web site that will allow the search engine to select that site if someone types in that word or phrase. The key to SEO – the first sites to pop up are the ones that are hit on the most often.

Knowing these concepts and expanding on them allows internet advertising consultants to guide and direct business owners in the most effective line of advertising for their products. Many people who run successful Internet businesses are people who don’t know much about the differences between Internet and other forms of advertising. You are the link that these business people need to market their products.

Internet Advertising Consulting Services are quickly becoming a specialized field. There are so many aspects of the Internet that business owners, especially those new to the web as a market, will not know and will be grateful to you for showing them. Knowing how to get those companies names and brands out their on the web will give you an edge over advertising companies that are still focusing on contemporary methods of advertising.

The Internet is not a fad or a passing phase. The challenges and changes that are coming with this relatively new market are going to be both exciting and profitable for anyone who embraces it. Open your own advertising consulting services business today and step into the future.

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Oct 15 2009

7 Email Marketing Best Practices

Category: search engine marketing — admin @ 2:07 pm

Email is the most used service on the Internet and, doubtless, most useful. Many people use the Internet only for checking their emails. Email marketing can be useful only if done right. Otherwise, it can get you more harm that benefits. However, there are things you can do in order to ensure that your email marketing campaign is going to be successful. In this article we provide you with 7 email marketing best practices.

Deliverability

Deliverability is probably the most important issue in today’s email marketing business. There are many spam emails and many legitimate emails are flagged as spam so they are not delivered. They are not getting thru ISP spam filters. Good deliverability ratio is the first step in successful email campaign because if your emails aren’t delivered then you don’t even have an email campaign!

In order to ensure that your emails will have good deliverability you have to choose your email marketing vendors wisely. You have to check if they are on “Blacklist” or “Whitelist”. There are different organizations like Spamhaus project and SpamAssasin that have their own lists which are used by ISP. If your email service provider is blacklisted your emails won’t be delivered! Also, you have to ensure that your domain name isn’t blacklisted. In order to maximize your deliverability it is recommended that your email service provider offers Habeas Sender Warranty Email Header.

Using our award-winning Group Mail product, whether it is Personal Edition or Business Edition you can be sure that your emails will be delivered because we have a constant cooperation with ISP.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

Your email newsletter should be CAN-SPAM Compliant. It is recommended that you require double opt-in subscription so that your subscribers have to confirm their request to be part of your email newsletter. Don’t add your subscribers without their permission and you should avoid adding them manually even if you have their permission. It is good that they do it using double opt-in method. Also, avoid using pre-checked subscription boxes. One of the products in the Group Metrics software called Opt-In manager will help you to do this easily.

It is essential that you provide your subscribers with an easy way to unsubscribe from your email newsletter at any time, when they want. It is good that you offer one-click unsubscription process with an unique address. This way there will be much less requests from your subscribers that you remove them.

CAN-SPAM Law also requires from email publishers that they include their physical postal address so you should include it, too. Your have to show your subscribers that you are legitimate company which have a presence in “offline” world, too.

HTML and plain-text versions

It is essential to offer your visitors to choose if they want to receive your email newsletter in HTML or plain-text format. It means that you should regularly send both types. Sending HTML newsletters have more benefits than plain-text email newsletters. You can use email tracking only in HTML newsletter with image embedding, HTML newsletters have better click-thru ratio because they look like the real web sites. You can hide long URLs so that they will look professional.

However, some people prefer plain-text versions and reasons are different. They use email clients that don’t support HTML emails. Another thing is that HTML newsletter types are larger than plain-text newsletters. Also, one of the reasons why some people don’t receive HTML emails is security. In HTML newsletters some people can embed malicious scripts or use them for phishing (when they pretend that they are representatives of one company and when people click on a certain link they are taken to their web site that is designed almost identically like original). It is mostly used in financial fraud attempts.

From and Subject fields

Your From and Subject fields are very important for getting better open ratio and therefore to have successful email campaign. You have to remember several simple rules.

It is important that your From field be consistent. You have to choose one name, whether it will be a company name or personal name and use it constantly. Once you change your From field it is most likely that your open rates will decline.

Speaking about Subject field, it has to be short and catchy, to grab attention of your subscribers. Your email has to stand out in usually overloaded inboxes. It is important that you don’t shout so instead of

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH…

use

Exclusive Interview with…

It is very good that you make your subject field standardized and that the title be something related from the content of that current issue.

For example, if you have a newsletter called Email Articles your subject line can be something like this:

[Email Articles] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue#10, August 29th, 2005

If your email newsletter has a longer title, for example, Email Marketing Articles you can use this:

[EMA] How to Improve Your Open Rates, Issue #10, August 29th, 2005

Personalization & Segmentation

Personalization is connected with Subject fields, too. Some people like to include first names of their subscribers in subject lines in order to have better open ratio. Personalization is also very effective when it is used in editor’s welcome message or in articles.

For example,

Dear !*First_Name*!, welcome to the 10th issue of Email Marketing Articles.

Powerful email marketing software like Group Mail, beside standard personalization also has “if-then” personalization for more advanced users.

Segmentation is the most important part in marketing. “What am I selling and to whom?” It is not the same to sell your software to novice users (newbies) or to seasoned users (knowbies). Also, it is not the same to market your software to small business companies and corporation. It is good that you make a good segmentation of your email newsletter. Best way to do that is to include several additional fields at sign-up process. Of course this doesn’t mean that you have to ask 15 questions from your new subscriber because many people leave when they see that there are many fields to fill. After that, you will make several email newsletters for each membership type.

With Group Mail 5 (Personal and Business Edition) you can make unlimited number of lists with unlimited recipients in each.

Timing is everything

Another very important thing in creating successful email campaign is timing. In almost every email marketing statistics you will find information about when to email your subscribers. So studies show that the best time for sending email campaigns are days from Tuesday to Thursday. However, it doesn’t mean that someone can’t have successful email campaign sent on Sunday. If you send your emails in days that are not “prime time” you can have a chance to avoid competition that will mail their campaign in prime time. Tuesday-Thursday are generally best days for mailing because, as you probably know yourself, too, not many people like Monday (remember that song?). After a good weekend, Monday is usually reserved for some consultation with the management about weekly plans and task. Friday is, on the contrary, favourite day for many people, because they are planning their weekend. People often come home earlier on Friday so your email can be buried in their inbox until Monday. And in Monday, to be deleted with many others (we have already wrote about Monday). On the weekend people usually don’t work but many will still check their emails.

Also, you have to decide how often you want to send your email newsletters. It will depend on your content. If your email newsletter about latest industry news you can send your newsletter once a month, because then it won’t be latest news anymore. If you send a corporate email newsletter with news about company and useful articles from your area of expertise, monthly frequency is usually the best one.

You have to make several email campaigns and see which ones get you best results.

And when we talk about best results the next logical step is tracking.

Tracking

How do you know if your email marketing campaign was successful? You have to know how many people opened your emails, what was your click-thru ratio, your subscribers’ behaviour on your web site after they had clicked and finally – how many subscribers purchased your product.

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Oct 14 2009

Web Advertising for the Small Business

Category: search engine marketing — admin @ 1:17 pm

If you run a small business, advertising costs must be figured in as part of your overall expenses. If you have received quotes for phone directory ads, business association block ads, and mostly any other print media, these costs are quite high. So, what if your budget is small, perhaps negligible? Will you be left outside of the advertising arena or are there other avenues to help you get the word out? The answer in one word is: yes. Let’s explore ways you can “get the word out” through online means…yes, via the internet!

The rise of the internet has spawned an entire industry with it. You may remember in the late 1990s stories of dot.com companies who made a fortune and then went bust. The “irrational exuberance” of that era has, thankfully, passed by and in its place is a much more rational, but very lively market.

Today’s biggest players online are search engine providers led by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Between them, these three search engines dominate the market. Mostly everyone today searches the internet for products sold by small businesses to large corporations and these are the people you want to target. Indeed, while Christmas season sales typically increase around 4% year over year for “brick and mortar” retailers, the internet has been seeing year over year increases of 30% and higher! No small business operator should exclude the internet when crafting a marketing plan.

Speaking of the search engines, both Google and Yahoo! have their own advertising networks. Google has its AdWords program while the Yahoo! Publisher Network is a comparable, though newer program. This is where you, as a small business owner, can do some of your advertising. By selecting the advertising plan that works for you, you can have your ads appear on web sites in your local area or across the world and be charged a small amount per click. In other words, you don’t pay for advertising unless someone clicks on your ad and goes through to your site. To keep clicks from getting out of control you determine the price per click and the amount per day, week, or month you are willing to pay. No busting of your small business budget!

Banner or text ads on select sites can also be helpful for your small business. If there is a web site you like and you suspect that a lot of your customers would frequent that site, contact the webmaster to learn what his advertising charges would be. Perhaps in exchange for submitting a few helpful articles, the webmaster would waive your advertising fee altogether. Or, at the very least, accept any other help you could provide [moderating a forum, answering questions, etc.].

Another way of getting the word out is through your own web site. No, you don’t need a web professional to establish your site, but it does help to have someone who can guide you through the set up process. At the very least a few pages is what you will need, so set up costs shouldn’t be terribly expensive. In addition, figure on paying monthly hosting and domain name fees but these expenses should be no more than $100-$125 per year. Pay a little extra for a web professional who can help you optimize your site [make it search engine friendly] and you’ll get your money back much quicker. Finally, check with your accountant for small business tax deductions.

You can also generate plenty of attention by writing articles, just like the one you are reading now. No, you don’t need to be a professional writer, but if you can clearly convey your thoughts and present a plan of action for your readers [such as: buy my product] you can get what amounts to be free advertising. How so? By submitting what you write to article submission sites for wider dissemination. By including helpful links in the author resource box you can cause search engines to make your web site much more visible as your article gets reprinted on other web sites. Furthermore, readers will perceive that you are an “expert” and will likely inquire to find out just what you are all about. You can call this, “small business advertising on the cheap!”

No, as a small business owner you don’t have to be strapped by high advertising costs — who has the cash to spare? Instead, the internet offers to you several cost effective ways of informing people about who you are, what you do, and where they can find you.

Select the marketing plan that works best for your small business. A mixture of all four points is a great plan of attack for many small business owners…just like you!

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Oct 08 2009

Increasing Sales Through Strategic Internet Marketing

Category: search engine marketing — admin @ 10:47 am
The Internet has now become an important medium for product and service advertisements.  Almost every company that can afford print, radio and TV advertisements have also ventured into placing ads on the Internet.
But with millions of websites out there being visited by millions of computer users, how can you make sure that your ad can be seen by your target customers and that your leads will be followed by these users?  Here are a few tips.
1.  Place an ad on the websites frequented by your target customers.  Before doing this, you need to define who will be your target customers.  Placing an ad on sites that they usually visit will increase the possibility that your ad will gain the attention and will be followed your target customers.
Also, consider the website’s search engine placement, traffic, external linking and the other ads placed on it.  External linking will determine if there are other sites that link to this site.  This will mean that people can get to the site where your ad is placed, even if they are browsing a different site.  Check if many of your competitors have ads on this site.
2.  Placing ads on some sites cost some money.  However, there are also sites that can place a link to your site, product or service in exchange of having their link being displayed on your site.  This is also true about the newsletters sent by site owners to its mailing list members regularly.
Also, having helpful links placed on your site and having sites link to your pages help in boosting search engine ranking.  This is similar to making a statement that your site’s content is important that other sites have links to your web pages.
3.  Pay-per-click (PPC) is also a good method in Internet marketing.  You will only need to pay for the ad if the link is clicked.  If you prefer this method of advertisement, make sure that you are using services that set limits on daily expenses.  There are also services that help you determine effective keywords and monitor the PPC results.
4.  Choose your domain name wisely.  It is still being debated if domain names matter when it comes to search engine placement.  Whether it does or not, having product related domain names help consumers remember your domain, that they can go back to your site even without the links.
5.  Make sure you have useful content on your sites.  While keyword density is important in search engine placement, having useless information or annoying repetition of keywords will not increase your customer’s confidence in your site.  It may even affect your sites traffic and can get your site removed from search engines.  So make sure that keywords are used strategically.
6.  When thinking of keywords, think like your target customers.  What do you think are they going to search so they can get to your site?  Also, use specific keywords or key phrases.  Submitting a single word or a very general phrase to a search engine will not get you to the top of the search results compared to submitting specific keywords that describe your product and services perfectly.
7.  Track your ads.  Always check how much you have spent on placing links on frequently visited sites and on PPC.  There are services that allow you to monitor PPC transactions and how many of these end in sales.  You always need to consider if the ads that you have placed on these websites are getting you to your target consumers and if these ads can lead to revenue.
One final tip on marketing products and services, sell the benefits.  It will help your marketing strategies a lot if you highlight the benefits of choosing your products and services instead of merely discussing the product specifications.  Product specifications may not mean much to customers, unless they know what these stand for (how these specifications affect the quality of the product or service).
Many people say getting to the top of search engine results is difficult since millions of websites exist, which can be using the same keywords.  While this is true, this doesn’t mean that your website has to stacked under your competitors’ websites when presenting search engine results.  Strategic advertising and linking, together with useful content, can also get you to the top of the search results.

The Internet has now become an important medium for product and service advertisements.  Almost every company that can afford print, radio and TV advertisements have also ventured into placing ads on the Internet.

But with millions of websites out there being visited by millions of computer users, how can you make sure that your ad can be seen by your target customers and that your leads will be followed by these users?  Here are a few tips.

1.  Place an ad on the websites frequented by your target customers.  Before doing this, you need to define who will be your target customers.  Placing an ad on sites that they usually visit will increase the possibility that your ad will gain the attention and will be followed your target customers.

Also, consider the website’s search engine placement, traffic, external linking and the other ads placed on it.  External linking will determine if there are other sites that link to this site.  This will mean that people can get to the site where your ad is placed, even if they are browsing a different site.  Check if many of your competitors have ads on this site.

2.  Placing ads on some sites cost some money.  However, there are also sites that can place a link to your site, product or service in exchange of having their link being displayed on your site.  This is also true about the newsletters sent by site owners to its mailing list members regularly.

Also, having helpful links placed on your site and having sites link to your pages help in boosting search engine ranking.  This is similar to making a statement that your site’s content is important that other sites have links to your web pages.

3.  Pay-per-click (PPC) is also a good method in Internet marketing.  You will only need to pay for the ad if the link is clicked.  If you prefer this method of advertisement, make sure that you are using services that set limits on daily expenses.  There are also services that help you determine effective keywords and monitor the PPC results.

4.  Choose your domain name wisely.  It is still being debated if domain names matter when it comes to search engine placement.  Whether it does or not, having product related domain names help consumers remember your domain, that they can go back to your site even without the links.

5.  Make sure you have useful content on your sites.  While keyword density is important in search engine placement, having useless information or annoying repetition of keywords will not increase your customer’s confidence in your site.  It may even affect your sites traffic and can get your site removed from search engines.  So make sure that keywords are used strategically.

6.  When thinking of keywords, think like your target customers.  What do you think are they going to search so they can get to your site?  Also, use specific keywords or key phrases.  Submitting a single word or a very general phrase to a search engine will not get you to the top of the search results compared to submitting specific keywords that describe your product and services perfectly.

7.  Track your ads.  Always check how much you have spent on placing links on frequently visited sites and on PPC.  There are services that allow you to monitor PPC transactions and how many of these end in sales.  You always need to consider if the ads that you have placed on these websites are getting you to your target consumers and if these ads can lead to revenue.

One final tip on marketing products and services, sell the benefits.  It will help your marketing strategies a lot if you highlight the benefits of choosing your products and services instead of merely discussing the product specifications.  Product specifications may not mean much to customers, unless they know what these stand for (how these specifications affect the quality of the product or service).

Many people say getting to the top of search engine results is difficult since millions of websites exist, which can be using the same keywords.  While this is true, this doesn’t mean that your website has to stacked under your competitors’ websites when presenting search engine results.  Strategic advertising and linking, together with useful content, can also get you to the top of the search results.

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Oct 06 2009

All you need to know about RSS

Category: search engine marketing — admin @ 12:42 pm

What does RSS mean?

RSS may mean three different things. The original RSS (RDF Site Summary RSS 0.9) was developed by Dan Libby for Netscape. After a couple of months, they produced a simpler and easier-to-use version called Rich Site Summary or RSS 0.91. But they later lost interest, leaving it without an owner. As more and more users were using RSS, Winer made an adapted version of RSS 0.91 for Userland, claiming it as his own. Later in 2005, Microsoft developed Really Simple Syndication in relation to its Simple Sharing Extensions.

What is RSS?

RSS is a XML file format for syndicating content and news in the web. It is usually used by websites that constantly need to update their content regularly such as news websites (CNN, BBC and Reuters) and weblogs. Since it essentially gives one’s webpage more traffic, it is now more widely used in marketing, web publications and virus reports. Today, large and small websites alike are usually RSS-enabled.

For example, you’re an avid fan of baseball and you want to share something recent about one of the players. Other than content, you can also attach multimedia files, like videos or pictures. By using RSS feeds, other Internet users subscribed to RSS-enabled sites can read your “headline” for free. They can also track for changes and updates using news aggregators, which will be discussed later on.

How does RSS work?

To be able to use RSS, you first have to download a software (content management system), by which XML format can be read. The title and, excerpt of the article, and a link to the full article are shown. Other than just text, you can also insert multimedia files in RSS feeds like pictures, videos, mp3s and others. Broadcatching, picturecasting, photocasting, and podcasting are some features you can incorporate into your feed, but will not be discussed in this article.

For users to access a RSS feed, they need to use an aggregator or a feed reader. An aggregator searches for updates on RSS-enabled webpages then displays it. It can either be a standalone program or a web browser extension, depending on your operating system. Search engines for web content broadcasted over RSS feed are also available such as Plazoo and Feedster.

How can I make an RSS feed?

It is definitely easier to make an RSS feed if you know HTML. If not, you could sign up for a blog (there are hundreds out there), some of which automatically creates RSS. If you’re using a personal webpage building system, you need to understand more about RSS. Making an RSS feed from scratch is relatively easy.

A RSS feed should always contain an “item”, whichever version of RSS you might use. If you wrote about a recent event in your city or a book review, the contents of this article can form an item. An item is essentially composed of three things: a title, its description, and link (where they can find your webpage). In choosing a title and description, use something that will describe the web content best. Although it will be easier for you, it doesn’t follow that the title tag of your webpage and the item title are the same.

An item will look like HTML tags. First, you need to put an opening channel tag that defines it as an XML file. Then, label the tag as an item by putting <item> after the channel tag. After this, you can now insert the three essentials of your item: <title>, <description>, and <link>. Just like HTML, we need to close the tag by writing </channel> and </rss> at the bottom.

An RSS feed that contains multiple tags looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<rss version=”2.0″>

<channel>

<item>
<title>Anne Rice’s Belinda: A Book Review</title>
<description> If you haven’t read any Anne Rice books yet, you will be greeted with shocking romantic relationships forming between unlikely characters… </description>
<link> http://allaboutbookreviews.com/belinda </link>

<item>
<title>Harry Potter IV: Darker with More Deaths</title>
<description> The recently released Harry Potter installation has proved dark for its younger readers…</description>
<link> http://allaboutbookreviews.com/harrypotterandthehalfbloodprince </link>

</channel>

</rss>

Now, if you’re still having a hard time understanding these tags, look for HTML tags tutorial to further grasp the concept. Have fun!

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