26 Feb

Internet Marketing Powering Small Business

Posted By: admin  //  Category: Marketing Strategy
The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has just published current statistics for internet marketing. The group reports that Search Engine Marketing spending, including paid placement, paid inclusion SEO and purchase of technology platforms, is expected to double by 2011. The aggregate spending total will be $18.6bn.

This will have a dramatic effect on how small business does business on the Internet. More companies are enhancing services to make it easier for small businesses to access consumers.

Google has released its voice service, along with Adobe, to improve web conferencing. Combining this with the stick released recently for VOIP services, has enabled small businesses to expand their markets content wide.

The improvement in technology, and the flexibility, has increased the amount of money spent on search engine advertising.

Organic SEO is still the strongest marketing tool. Three quarters of all advertisers use it. A close second is paid placement 86% of the total advertising dollar, at $8bn.

The market is still driven by companies trying to generate direct sales, however, brand awareness is growing as advertisers learn to use the net to improve PR and customer relations.

No surprise is MSN’s gain on Google. It has now captured 68% of the market, up from 29% in 2005. The surprise came last fall when random reports claimed that myspace had surpassed the number of hits sent to websites.

The increase in use of MSN is no surprised as online shopping increases. MSN still leads the way with ‘decision to buy’ or ‘impulse buy’ visitors, resulting in a lower Cost Per Click (CPC) than the other search engines.

Despite this, Google still dominates the field in 2007, with 95% of all respondents advertising on AdWords, followed by 86% on Yahoo.

One fifth of all respondents claimed they were shifting money from print magazine advertising, while this is a bold move, only time will tell whether it is a smart move. Currently, trade and regional magazines top all other media in dollar value when considering ‘decision to buy.’

Magazines now have a higher retention rate, even than television, on a single view. It is not sure if this will transfer to the web, but if it does, then it will level the playing field for small businesses that lack the marketing budget to advertise in national magazines.

Myspace is showing itself to be a powerful branding tool, so much so that many companies, including Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nike are trying to force Myspace to discontinue profiles and hubs with URLs that use those trademarks.

Many business owners are using the Myspace option in the same way that YouTube is, creating channels that allow business owners to improve Internet Marketing by ‘riding the coat tails’ of the large companies – for a price.

Either way, the release of Web 2.0 this spring, set to coincide with the release of MS Vista, will have hard hitting repercussions which will change the internet forever. Smart webmasters are already taking advantage of Social Networking, by creating Myspace.com, Squidoo.com, Youtube.com and other hubs, as well as optimizing for Web 2.0 to gain the advantage when the web changes.

This foresight is not optimistic thinking, but a learned behavior. Any change in the Internet’s SEO algorithms shatters the SEO marketing objectives of the best sites and brings small business sites to the forefront, at least for a few months. Not bad, when taking into consideration that a few months on the top of Google can equal hundreds of thousands, or even millions, in extra profits.

By: Bruce Chandler -

Bruce Chandler helps businesses understand technology match it to their needs www.voipwolf.com Please stop by and review his FREE guide to web conferencing and technology at www.videoconferencingstar.com

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26 Feb

Internet Marketing Strategy: The 7 Standard Steps

Posted By: admin  //  Category: Marketing Strategy

In every single internet marketing website or blog, these seven strategic steps will always take place. These steps are must-dos for every internet marketers.

1.Obtain A Good Domain Name

A domain name is an address of your website, better known as a URL. It is unique because it distinguishes your website’s name and identity from the other websites. Make your URL something easy to remember and simply typed in by people. It could be your name, the name of your product or a summarised name fit for your website’s purpose. I do not normally recommend numbers in your URL because when you verbally tell other people about your website, because you have to state whether it is a number or a word like 1business.com or onebusiness.com. Also, do not use complex words that people find hard it to spell and type.

A fully qualified domain name includes the host name, which is world wide web or www and the domain registrar which is the part after the dot, as in .com. The .com is the most recommended one to use other than .net or .info because it is easily listed or accepted in search engines and it is good for businesses. Other domain registrars such as .org/.edu/.gov are not good for business, as they stand for orgeanizational, educational and goverment respectively.

2.Find A Webhost

A webhost is a company that allows you to host your website on their servers. A webhost is like a so-called landlord for you to go through before you can live in the house that is on his land, which is your website. Like when you’re looking for a house to rent, you have to take a look at the facilities and services in the house that is provided to you. So, a webhosting account has certain features for you to look at to see which are the services that you need to have your website running as smoothly as posible.

You need a website that provides you with at least 5 Gigabytes of space for you to promote your products and at least 500mb/s of data transfer, which is the speed of which the time your website takes to download at a visitor’s webpage. They might also provide you with a good website builder if you want to design the website yourself. Find out if they also allow you to input email accounts, audio, video, “shopping carts” for your products, and so on. Also, it’d be great if they have the amazing cPanel feature, which is a control panel that provides you with all the practical applications suitable for your website.

3.Website Design

Firstly, choose a website template suitable for your business. Do remember that the human eye focuses mostly on the top, right and center part of the website. So if you want to emphasize on your newsletter/mailing list subscription, product or a promotion, place it at the optimum level of the website.

For design, you can use Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver or your webhost’s website builder. If you do not have any experience whatsoever, try learning or hiring a web designer. The colour of your website should not be glaring to the human eye. A professional white background is good for business.

4.The Content

The content of your website is very important. People love to get free information about a desire or a need they have to satisy. Give them more than what they expect and make them trust you with their money. Just when they’re burning and yearning for more details, simply promote your product. It has to state how the product or service benefits the user, how it has improved other people’s lives by using testimonials and promote the other bonuses you’re adding on, etc. Visuals are important for credibility. If you’re selling physical products, take a picture of them. If you’re selling digital products like softwares or e-books, get an electronic cover or an e-cover for them.

5.An Autoresponder

An autoresponder is an automatic e-mail feature that allows you to keep in contact with your visitors and customers. For example. you may send an automatic e-mail to thank someone for subscribing to your list or to give out automatic newsletters at a weekly basis. Do bear in mind that you also need to provide your visitors and customers with an option to opt out of your list. This is preferably stated at the bottom of your e-mails.

There are many good and well-known autoresponder programs like Aweber and GetResponse that is mainly used by businesses worldwide.

6.Traffic Generation

The fastest way to get traffic is through pay-per-click advertising. This means that for every click your ad gets for your visitors to come to your site, you will have to pay for it. Do read up on pay-per-click strategies and how to use them properly or you might end up paying more than what you can afford. Using pay-per-click advertising, it is easier to make the target market come to your site because of the key words and phrases you use that attracts them to your product or service.

You can optimize your site for search engines like Google and Yahoo! to easily find you using the Search Engine Optimization method or SEO. Basically you have to type in specific HTML tags into your website’s HTML to make the so-called search engine “robots” find you easily and list your website as one of the results generated when a visitor types in the relevant keywords related to your website. This is a tasking job. You might want to ask a web programmer to do it if you don’t understand, or you may find some SEO templates lying around on the internet.

There is also the free traffic method, but I do not normally recommend that because the people that come in to your site will not be your target market, just visitors in general.

7.Your Payment Gateway

Payment gateways such as 1shoppingcart, Clickbank and Paypal are popularly used by businesses. They accept sales processing credit cards and they automate your business transactions. use a good payment gateway that benefits you with their features.

The Internet Marketing Strategy’s 7 Standard Steps is crucial for you to follow. It is how you implement them that can state the golden future of your website. Read up more on these internet marketing strategies to learn and apply them properly.

Copyright (c) 2007 Jo Han Mok

By: Jo Han Mok

Jo Han Mok is a #1 bestselling author and a masterful planner in developing powerful internet marketing strategies. Find out how he can make you discover the internet millionaire within! Visit his website at www.internetmillionairecode.com

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