Tweeter button
Facebook button
Technorati button
Reddit button
Myspace button
Linkedin button
Webonews button
Delicious button
Digg button
Flickr button
Stumbleupon button
Newsvine button
Youtube button

May 19, 2012

Posts Comments

Internet marketing trends in 2011: What to expect

September 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The past year was really a thrilling one for internet activities. In 2010, it appeared as though
Facebook was a big threat to the mighty search engine – Google. In the same year, there was
steady and continuous growth of social networking. Also, mobile web has became more
popular than conventional browsing using PCs – the iPad and iPhone played a major role in
increased mobile browsing rates.

2011 Internet Marketing Trends

Social Networking is here to Stay
Social networking will increasingly grow in leaps and bounds. Facebook and Twitter will continually
take a leap forward in taking share of Google’s huge market share and a lot of businesses are likely to
divert their attention from the ‘conventional’ to a social presence.

Obviously, the social network is here to stay, everyone is clamoring about it and lots of businesses are
benefiting massively from having a social presence. It is the best way to reach out to vast demographics
and place your business offerings before them. Your job is to learn the tips for getting followers in
these social networks.

There May be a New Face to Search Engine this Year
2011 may usher in a little change in search engine optimization; however, it will not stop being the major
marketing strategy for several online businesses. Just as it has been in the past years, focus will shift to
“long tail” niche markets – as competition for broad search terms become dense with big names
(renowned brands). Sensitive marketers would research long tail keywords in their niche, so that
they can crack up low traffic with ease.

Increase Rise in the Use of Mobile Devices to Access the Internet
Also, the use of mobile devices to surf the web will rise greatly in 2011. Businesses are increasingly taking
advantage of apps as they begin to realize how powerful these tools are for marketing. It is envisaged that
more people are likely to access the internet using mobile devices. than they would do with personal
computers. So, it’s time to join the mobile browsing bandwagon. Also, ensure that your website features
mobile-friendly tools.

The Use of Blogging as a Marketing Tool will Increase Greatly
More than ever before, a good number of mainstream businesses will join the bandwagon of those who are
already using blogging as an online business marketing tool. Don’t focus much on traditional news sections
feature on websites – more people are getting increasingly aware of the need for fresh information. So
web 2.0 will increasingly rise as Search engines are making concerted efforts to bring fresh and highly
relevant information to those surfing the web through them. Therefore, businesses that would embark on
regular update of their contents will be rewarded significantly. Also, Augmented Reality is likely to break
through into the mainstream market this year.

2011 is really loaded with changes in online marketing! Don’t be left out.

 

Filed Under: Featured Articles, Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Top tips on how to get more online finds for your website

August 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A good number of people face this challenge with their online business marketing.
Getting established online, appears really hard with the surging rate of competing
websites. The value and essence of a website gets defeated when it cannot help you
get customers. You need to establish your online presence and drive traffic
(prospective customers) to your website.

However, you don’t need to worry about this challenge; Google’s webmaster channel
is very valuable when it comes to making your website successful.

Quick tips on making your website more visible:

  • Ensure that your topic will enhance your ranking on Google search results or other search engines’ result pages.
  • Also, you can have your website listed as a resource in relevant as well as authority sites. This is one of the great ways to generate quality traffic. This can even be more effective than search engines sometimes, depending on the quality of websites you get listed on.

Also, the nature and structure of the following will help in determining whether or not your website would be found online:

  • The title featured in each page’s header
  • The texts in each web page
  • How you use descriptive words in your Meta Tags at your webpages’ header sections.
  • The text featured in the initial paragraph of your page
  • The relevance of the featured texts in relation to the keywords contained in your meta tags.
  • Links that include keywords
  • The quality of the external links to your site

The design of your website plays a massive role on your online visibility. By design, we are not referring to the graphics and other decorative features, but the features outlined above, among other factors.

 

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: ,

Top 7 tips for effective link building

August 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

A lot of people have the misconception that link generation is an uphill task. In fact the majority of the people also think that they need sophisticated looking website to attract backlinks.

Here are simple but effective tips for generating backlinks to a website.

  1. Your membership to Industry association could be helpful
    If your company has received an award before, or if you are in membership with any related industry association, you can find out whether these sites link to your site, you may possibly stumble on related businesses that you can extend invitation to link to your site.
  2. Make your website linkable
    Do you have features on your site that can attract other websites to link to you? Create a page that reflects the uniqueness of your business, your success stories, attractions such as freebies and other specialties that people can find hard to resist. This can greatly increase your chances of generating more backlinks.
  3. Create testimonials
    The testimonial is for another company that you love their product or service. Simply construct a great testimonial to such a company. They are most likely to list the testimonial on their website, together with a link to your company’s website.
  4. Keep a track of the places that your target audience go online
    You are likely to generate links from the social networking platforms, forums or websites where your target audience congregate.
  5. Assess the existing backlinks
    Going through your existing links would reveal the most linked content on your site, so that you would work out how you can use the same content or a modified version to generate more backlinks.
  6. What social activities or sponsorships can you benefit from?
    If your company sponsors any local activity or relief groups, you can gain from such activities in return by asking the sponsored organizations to link to your site. It would be sensible as well, to write a linkable content that would reflect your sponsorship activities. You would place the content on your site.

You can also take advantage of the link manager to find related sites, forums and blogs. The tool would also go through the new backlinks pointing to your website. You can also employ some commonly available link managers to verify if there is nofollow attribute featured in the sites that linked to you.

The importance of generous backlinks cannot be overemphasized; it is one of the criteria for ranking high on Google’s search result page.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Link Building, Link Popularity Tagged With: , ,

5 Top rules that guide affiliate marketing

July 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you do not want to bug yourself with the hassles involved in putting up a website, but would love to make some money online, affiliate marketing would be a great option for you.

Contrary to what a lot of people think, creating affiliate marketing is not an uphill task. What matters most with affiliate marketing is to select the right product that you can go into partnership with, then start promoting the product. This form of affiliate marketing implies that you are referring sales and customers to the company that owns the product, and you will earn remuneration in return known as commission. This type of online money making source is quite convenient for those who do not have time or resources to run their own businesses.

Here are top rules that work to help you generate excellent result with affiliate marketing.

  1. What is the earmarked commission percentage?
    You need to determine what the percentage for the affiliate commission is, so as to know if it appeals to you or not. There are affiliate marketing programs for digital products and those of physical products – the former usually offer commission percentage as high as 50%. On the other hand, e-commerce store and physical products would usually pay lower percentage of the entire price, as low as 10%. However, there are times you may earn much money promoting physical products, it all depends on what you are promoting.
  2. It pays better to promote a product per time
    Your success in business is usually measured by how consistent you will be in focusing and concentrating on those activities or tasks that grow your business and thus raise your revenue/profit.  Therefore, once you start dividing your focus and concentration between two or more products, you will lose focus of all and could eventually come crashing down. So, it is better to stay with one product at a time and help grow it until you realize enviable results.
  3. Settle for an ideal price point
    Check the price differences between the products or companies you’ve researched and settle for the one that offers the best price – your price choice should be influenced by supply and demand in the marketing you are targeting. How valuable is the product when it comes to providing timely solution to problems? This is another important point to consider.
  4. Is the product something you would want to buy?
    This is a true test of whether or not people are going to demand for the product. You may even purchase the product and test its effectiveness, so that you can decide whether to go ahead or not, and to also have the right words to describe the product, how to use it and the results to expect based on your own personal experience with the product.
  5. Is the product starting from the scratch or does it have an established market?
    It is better to settle for a product that people are already searching for or demanding; the product must not necessarily be from a big company – what matters is whether there is a take off and substantial awareness about the product already. It would be easier to sell a product that has a base already.

Apply these valuable tips to your affiliate marketing and you would see how successful things would become eventually.

Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Top 10 blunders to avoid when promoting your website

June 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The common blunders I’m about to reveal here are obstacles to search engine rankings. Have a look at them and do avoid these blunders:

  1. Using frames
    Search engine spiders tend to get confused when frames are involved. Therefore, if you have a frame site, your site may be likely ignored often by the search engine spider. There is nothing wrong with writing script or fine-tuning the content to function within frames; but, is it not better to divert that time to something more beneficial to your website in terms of higher ranking?
  2. Over-doing it with title tags
    A better strategy for effective website promotion is when you stay within 70 characters for the titles, and also for punctuation (comma in particular) inserted between phrases in each title tag. The webpages that feature limited content should use fewer characters.
  3. Using Flash
    No doubts, flash appears appealing – however, it affects the ranking of your site. Also, flash slows user experience. Most web surfers are not willing to wait a moment longer. Readability of the keywords by search engines could be improved by flash in the future, but this may also be meaningless if the webpages do not feature visible as well as readable text.
  4. Using design to mask text
    Design has a way of concealing text. Ensure that your visible text is strategically placed high on the page.
  5. Using effective search phrases
    Do this always; incorporate effective search phrases that are true representations of the content featured within your title tags.
  6. Using the wrong words
    Most websites owners prefer to use single-word search phrases since it appears such keywords generate more traffic. However, the reality is that only very few web surfers who use such broad terms may be interested in your offering. It is more effective to incorporate search phrases that contain 2 – 4 words, this is the best way to target a wider range of people who may actually be interested in what you have to offer.
  7. Not taking link building seriously
    Embark on massive link building, and concentrate on the websites that have categories and content relevant to your offerings. For instance, if you are offering computer software services, it would make no sense to link to websites that are marketing clothes.
  8. Using long URLs
    For those taking advantage of a database to maintain their websites, this may ultimately result in the use of long URLs with multiple session IDs, as well as parameters that give rise to multiple equality signs and question marks. The summary is that long URLs may be obstacles to proper indexing of webpages by search engines. You can consult your website developer to shorten the lengthy URLs, or even get rid of them completely. Your ultimate goal is to be visible to those who are looking for your offerings, anything that would constitute an obstacle should be reconsidered.

Finally, do not overstuff your webpages with keywords; avoid using same keyword sequentially up to ten times. Just spread your major search term throughout the page as many times as possible.

Filed Under: Website Promotion Tagged With: ,

Affiliate marketing – tips for selling more

May 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When it comes to affiliate marketing and how you can sell more via the internet, here are basic questions you need to ask yourself.

  • Do you have the ability to achieve more sales online – if yes, what techniques would you use?
  • To what extent do your ads excite your prospects and make they want to click more?
  • How firm are your sales letter; are they capable of converting more prospects to actual customers?
  • How effective are your articles; are they effective enough to attract visitors to your website?

If all you are getting is the traffic and little or no conversions, then there is need to restructure your strategy in order to start achieving conversions.

Here are effective strategies to take advantage of:

First Strategy: Perhaps you’ve detailed all the benefits and features of your product or service in your blog or site, yet people appear not to be attracted. You must have also researched extensively for the keywords you used and had also employed solo ads, banners, email list and classified ads to promote your offering, yet all you get is massive visitors but no conversion.  Selling is a simple but tactful process – what exactly did you do to satisfy their want? Most times people are emotional buyers, so you need to look for a way to fuel that emotion. Some marketers would place candy and magazines in their checkout lanes as a technique to arouse people’s emotion.

What You Should Do: The initial thing to do is to define the benefit of your product or service – let your customers understand what they stand to gain from your offering. You have to be practical by pointing out ways the product has helped someone you know, or even yourself, which is the reason you are not letting go until others also benefit from it. Don’t forget that, a product’s feature explains what it does, and its advantage would say how the product performs better compared to a similar product, while its benefit spells out clearly what it would do for the customer.

This is the strategy you need to solve your dilemma of not achieving conversion; go back and implement this strategy and see the difference it would make.

Second Strategy

Also, if you are not able to convert traffic with your marketing strategy, you may need to revisit the copy in your ads, articles, as well as email responses. Keywords are not all there to making a visitor find your site – in fact, if you use them indiscreetly, they would hurt instead.

What You Should Do

You should focus mainly on imparting valuable knowledge, practical tips and effective ideas that would be beneficial and usable by your visitors. Don’t waste your time creating valueless ad copy, articles or content that is keyword-stuffed – which in its own is anti to effective and successful campaign.

You also need to lay emphasis on the benefit factor outlined in the First Strategy – this is where your selling power also is. You should use keywords strategically and not stuff the content with them.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Top 5 mistakes online network marketers make when starting out new

April 27, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you have been intending on venturing out into the online MLM business, there are mistakes, pitfalls and snares you must be aware of and hence avoid – in order to be successful in this business niche.

  1. Concentrating on Multiple Internet Marketing Techniques Simultaneously and Having No Definite Direction
    No doubts, there are several strategies that can help you market your business online, all of which have the potential to provide you with the desired outcome. However, it is better to pick one strategy at a time, sharpen your skills on that strategy until you master how it works and start generating result from it. Then, follow up that strategy for some time (especially if you are getting good results from it) before taking up another marketing strategy. In all, ensure that you continue with the strategy that is providing you excellent result.
  2. Ignoring the Need for a Mentor or Mastermind Group
    Having a mentor or mastermind group is very crucial in your learning curve as an MLM marketer. You will save yourself time, money and a lot of frustration by having a mentor to look up to. Having someone that would give you direction on what works and what does not is a great way to move forward in online network marketing. Someone who is established in the niche and is achieving result should be chosen as a mentor. But, bear in mind that you are the one who takes responsibility of your success or failure – not your sponsor, mentor, upline or team.
  3. Being Subscribed to the List of Too Many People
    When you do this, it becomes very difficult to concentrate on laying hold of a particular project or strategy; this is because you are being overloaded with the latest, internet secrets (as they are so called). Perhaps you go through this up to five times a day since you are signed up with several lists. It will be difficult to maintain concentration and pursue a given pattern or technique if you get yourself hooked in several people’s lists. Choosing just about 3 highly successful people to network with, is a more sensible thing to do.
  4. Getting Carried Away by the Earning and Losing Focus on What to Do at the Moment
    It is quite easy to become a victim of this snare. When you do this, frustration sets in before you know it, and you may eventually quit too soon! Therefore, take it one step at a time, concentrate on the little things you need to do at the moment, on a daily or weekly basis. Don’t be carried away by the imagination of making big money, and lose focus of the little things that would gradually take you to that height.
  5. Trying to Pose As a ‘Guru’
    Don’t pretend to be what you are not yet. The little but consistent things you do will gradually walk you to the top, then you can speak on it with boldness. People will naturally respect and seek for your guidance if you earn the ‘Guru’ status, and not when you fake it.

When you avoid these pitfalls, you will walk yourself quickly to the top of MLM business marketing.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: ,

Internet marketing trends for 2011

April 22, 2011 By 1 Comment

The year 2010 was a huge one for the entire internet world. This was the year that the internet big super power (Google) was challenged by the emergence and super-activities of Facebook. The growth of social networking continued to soar, and mobile internet surfing experienced a massive leap in taking the place of conventional PC in relation to surfing the internet – the iPad and iPhone made it possible.

Internet marketing trend for 2011- what will be the search subject?

Social networking has come to stay and will continue to grow more than it is now! Facebook and Twitter will continue to compete closely with Google in terms of the market share. This is particularly true if Facebook search engine rumor eventually comes true. More businesses will keep on breaking lose from the traditional online marketing techniques and shift massive attention to social presence. At the moment, social network is the topic everywhere. In essence, you are able to get across to a larger range of demographics in the course of promoting your business. Acquire skills on how to accomplish people following on Twitter.

2011 is likely to witness a little change with regards to search engine optimization; however, it will never cease to be the main aspect of online marketing strategy for most businesses. There would be concentration on ‘long tail’ niche markets, just the same way it has existed for some years, since the big brands are causing oversaturation on the broad keywords (the competition for these keywords is fierce). Marketers that are smart will search out long tail keywords in their business niche and embark on a quick and easy snap up on low competition keywords as well as low traffics. This gives them an edge over their competitors in their niche market.

Also, in 2011, we will continue to witness a massive increase in the use of mobile devices to surf the web. A lot of businesses are awakening to the reality that apps can be valuable tools for marketing. Estimation has it that more people are likely to access the internet with mobile browsers than they would with the conventional PC. So, begin to think mobile, and ensure that you have mobile-friendly websites.

A good number of mainstream businesses will lunch deep into blogging in 2011 than they have ever done. Don’t get carried away by the conventional news sections on the websites of a good number of people; as more people begin to place value on fresh info, web 2.0 will continue to soar. Search engines work tirelessly to ensure that they bring the most relevant information to their users, the information ofcourse is the most updated. Thus, businesses that can take time to do regular update on their info will experience massive turnaround in their rankings.

Also, it is possible that in this year of 2011, we are likely to see Augmented Reality gain eventual entrance into the mainstream market.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Top tips for growing and keeping your Online Business alive

April 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

No doubts, if you have an online business, you want to see it successful. The same rules for conventional business work; you must know what to do to make your online business succeed – don’t just jump in like that, else you will jump out soon!

Here are some very useful tips to guide you.

  • Link Your Site to Your Blog
    This is the best way to make updates on your content accessible to visitors easily. They must not be the ones to hunt for your content updates.
  • Establish social bookmarking
    You must have a means of enabling people to share your content. WordPress offers tons of social bookmarking plugins. If your site is the regular type, tools like ‘ShareThis’ would be sufficient.
  • Build social networks
    When you set up social networks, ensure that they are easy to see and follow. The buttons should be visible. Your blog as well as contact page are excellent pages to place your buttons.
  • Make provision for profound articles or white papers on your website
    Engage your main website as one of your article submission areas if article marketing is your promotional tool. Use creative names for it – e.g. “White Papers” or “In-depth Articles Home”.  This is a great way to convert a section of your site to your own article directory.
  • A site map is necessary
    Garnish your site map adequately, so that it would be conducive for visitors to explore. You may also keep it plain. The most important thing is that you should remember to build your sitemap and link it, since it facilitates the crawling of your site by search engines.
  • Track your usage with your keyword analysis
    A spreadsheet such as excel is excellent for this purpose – you can also use word document as well. Record the terms used, meta description as well as your title for each main site page. If you make changes, put such changes in record as well. This is an excellent way to have a stable record of changes, and you can easily monitor the changes that influenced the traffic and ranking of your site.
  • Content audits are important
    Do periodical content audit – it could be six-month interval. This is an excellent way to ‘fish out’ your webpages that are not performing optimally, spot the topics that captured the attention of your readers and mark the pages that are not necessary (so that you can take them off).
  • Come up with a strategy for your content
    This is a more result-oriented approach than doing ‘trial and error’. The strategy would comprise of the following; the type of content you would send out (is it in the form of videos, images, blogs or white papers?), the destination for your content (is it your blog, main site, YouTube, guest post), technique for tracking your progress, major and sub goals of your content strategy.

These top valuable techniques will help you grow your online business successfully. However, there are other things you need to know in addition.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing Tagged With: , ,

Best Ways To Generate Revenue from Email Marketing

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Email marketing has the immense capability to generate revenue in leaps and bounds; the excellent thing is that email marketing can be integrated into any form of internet marketing. Just like any good internet marketing, email marketing comes with these in-built features:

  • It is possible to track everything
  • You can define the ROI
  • With better implementation, any other medium would be kicked out of service.

For email marketing, the fact that ROI kicks the butt of other online marketing medium is better news.

Looking to grow ROI and revenue from your email campaigns? Have a look at these highly effective steps you need to follow:

  1. Get your landing page optimized. Don’t be satisfied until you attain 30% conversion rate for your landing page.
  2. Also, your click-through rate as well as calls to action for conversions should be optimized. You should endeavor to ascertain the conversions percentage generated by featuring an an image-link in your email campaigns for every call to action. Subsequently, place them in the topmost click-through rate locations and get familiar with the phrase as well as layout that generate the real thing.
  3. Take steps to grow the email database leads. An excellent way is to generate leads from every touch point that you have with potential clients and existing clients. Also, engage in vigorous search engine optimization, online PR, pay-per-click as well as social media campaigns; the whole essence is to ensure that you generate revenue on every lead; in addition, you will get future marketing email addresses.
  4. Meet your subscribers’ need in all possible ways – use mobile email messaging. Your email messages should feature particular capabilities to offer a mobile email message to a recipient, including a mobile landing page. However, it all depends on whether they are using desktop application or mobile device.
  5. Incorporate social media. In a situation where a very loyal product following accompanies your products, the exceptionality of your product will be sufficient for your mobile messages to spread across social networks such as Facebook. Otherwise, ensure that the content of your message is remarkable so that it can benefit your audience. Alternatively, you can make the message very entertaining, so that people would be quick and excited to share the message. As soon as you are done, go ahead and make “Share” and “Like” calls to action as part of your email. Subsequently, you ought to get revenue from social networks as well.
  6. Incorporate SMS. The read rate of SMS is almost 100 percent. The good part is that the spam part of SMS is just 5 percent. So, send only valuable info occasionally, this way, you will achieve huge reach and substantial response from the recipient of your message.

If you adhere to these steps, you will have a rapidly growing substantial revenue from email marketing.

Filed Under: Email Marketing Solutions, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »