Copyright ( C ) 2008 Dr. Kumuda Gururao. All Rights Reserved
Copyright ( c ) 2008 Dr. Kumuda Gururao. All rights reserved
Although all precautions have been taken in the preparation of this ebook, the author assumes no liability for damages that result from using the ebook and information contained herein. For information, please contact Dr. Kumuda Gururao at www.advisor2u.com
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Acknowledgements
It is quite some after I have published my first book, where I had explored concepts of Nobel Prize in Physics through Concept Mapping. My experience as Asso. Prof. and Web Technologist at i2IT, India kindled my curiosity to explore Internet Marketing as it seemed natural to promote what you have created, i.e. your website.
Thus born my interest in iMarketing, During the journey of my acquiring knowledge related to iMarketing I explored various possibilities of gaining knowledge such as practically implementing them on trial sites, gathering from various virtual iMarketing guru’s through their ebooks and subscribing to various newsletters related to this topic.
On the way, I gathered useful information and thought why not I publish a book, so that entire web community could benefit from this knowledge, Thus born my third baby, as I have contributed as co-author in another book related to ‘Mobile Learning’ published by IADIS, Malta.
I should acknowledge my sincere thanks to Mr.Vishal Sharma, EDS & Former VP Tech, Neted Inc for his valuable suggestions and encouragement given to me in publishing this ebook in spite of his busy schedule. His encouraging words, which usually bring the best out of me, gave me the confidence to publish this ebook on my own.
Next, a special mention should be made about the Founders of Jamuse.com Rob Wilson and David Fritsche and C.O.O Bruce Lazarus for letting me present jamuse in detail.
I thought it my duty to introduce jamuse as it is a Web 2.0 Marketing Operating System useful to both Creative Professionals and Ad Makers. It enables you to market your product and interact with your clients at one go. Hence all references related to jamuse belong to
A special mention has to me made about Ms.Geetha, an Educationist for Special Children for proof reading my entire document as she has always done for my books.
Finally my thanks to my mother, other relatives, cousins and friends who had put up with my work, as most of the time I was so busy attending only very important calls as I had to keep abreast of my interest in other fields such as ELearning, ABAP apart from writing this ebook, as I wear few other hats too. They understood my pressure and continue to love me as they had always done.
I sincerely hope, the information you find in this book, when implemented would definitely promote your business.
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Guide 2 iMarketing 4 Ur Business (Introducing jamuse an offspring of Web 2.0)
Unit 1 – Introduction 5
Chapter 1 - Nitty-Gritty of iMarketing 6
1.1 Introduction to iMarketing 7 1.2 Principles of iMarketing 14 1.3 Essentials of iMarketing 19 1.4 Mobile Web Marketing 24
Unit 2 - Various Ways of Promoting Your Website through iMarketing 29
Chapter 2 - Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 30
2.1 What is SEO? 31 2.2 Onsite Optimization 35 2.3 Offsite Optimization 44 2.4 Promotional Methods that Compliment SEO 53
Chapter 3 - Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 60
3.1 Introduction to Search Engine Marketing 61 3.2 Pay Per Click (PPC) 67 3.3 Analyzing SEM 73 3.4 Promoting Website through Web 2.0 Gadgets n Widgets 80
5.1 Roles of Audio & Video in iMarketing 131 5.2 Role of Animations in iMarketing 137 5.3 Role of Podcasting in iMarketing 146 5.4 Role of Vodcasting in iMarketing 153
Chapter 6 - Business Networks n Viral Marketing n Affiliate Marketing 160
6.1 Business Networks & their Role in Promoting Business 161 6.2 Viral Marketing to Promoting Business 169 6.3 Affiliate Marketing to Promoting Your Business 176 6.4 Confluence of Blogs, Forums and Work Space (to Share files ) in Promoting Your Business 181
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Unit 3 – Conclusion 194
Chapter 7 –Future of iMarketing 195
7.1 Latent Semantic Indexing 196 7.2 Vertical Searching 202 7.3 Future Trends in Online Marketing 209 7.4 Future Trends in Mobile Web Marketing 214
Author’s Other Published Works, Awards & Honors 219
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UNIT 1 : INTRODUCTION
------
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns." John Maurice Clarke
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Chapter 1- Nitty-Gritty of iMarketing
------“This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back “
John Ilhan
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1. 1 Introduction to iMarketing
Goal and Objectives
To know the basics of iMarketing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Define the goal of iMarketing and how to achieve it to promote your business. Suggest various iMarketing strategies that can be tried for promoting business. Highlight the interactive nature of iMarketing with examples. List the advantages and limitations of iMarketing. Implement the activities suggested at the end of this chapter.
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Goal of iMarketing
Internet marketing, that is also referred as online marketing or E-marketing (Electronic Marketing) is marketing of your products or services over the internet.
The goal of iMarketing is to generate leads and the essential thing to achieve it is to have an Optimized website. Leads are like prospects to your business. So, How would you identify prospects for your business? Normally you identify them through survey or by employing a focus group and then ask them to complete a questionnaire that enables you to recognize attitude, aptitude, economic status and geographical location etc of your prospects.
Similarly you have to identify and get the prospects for your business through iMarketing. iMarketing is a sub set of general marketing. But the advantage is, you can reach the global audience, round the clock.
In this book I shall explain the various types of iMarketing and how you should implement them to generate leads.
Interactive Nature
Internet Marketing also known as Online Marketing is, marketing that uses World Wide Web to promote your business. From here onwards I shall refer Internet Marketing as iMarketing. It has brought lots of benefits to business community, the main advantage being, the ability to distribute information to global audience.
Moreover, it offers interactivity in its various modes of implementation so that it provides an opportunity for your prospects/clients to express their queries / responses directly to you. Business Networks, email marketing, blogs etc enable them to interact with you. Since the future is going to be a participation age, where interaction plays an important role in promoting business, iMarketing certainly has an edge over others.
Because of this intrinsic nature of iMarketing, you can inform your prospective clients about
The nature of products you are going to introduce or update, How it is different from similar existing products, What services you would offer to retain your clients, How frequently you intend to update your products (if necessary) How you would offer them to your clients How you plan to outsmart your competitors in healthy way maintaining business ethics etc.
In short iMarketing enables you to talk to your customers, provides you an opportunity to convince them about your products and services and win them for you to promote your business.
Business Models
There are various types of business models, the main ones being B2C, B2B.
In the former case you can convince your customer and in the latter case, you can strike a deal with your business client and reach a win-win situation that benefits both of you.
ECommerce has not restricted itself to Retail Giants like Wal-Mart, Spencer etc. It has spread its wings to Airlines, Banking and Hotel Industries where transaction can be done through secured site. These are industries that are capable of holding the customers for lifelong, Hence winning
10 the customers for these industries would be an added advantage. iMarkeitng through its highly distributive nature is capable of winning lot of customers and play a vital role in boosting your business.
After the introduction of Apple ipod, millions of MP3 files have been downloaded and in the case of banking sector, both its performance, and its customer base have improved through internet / mobile banking.
Book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Nobel are standing examples of success for iMarketing as they are internet oriented business houses.
Even in non ecommerce business sectors a website optimized to search engines, backed by IMarketing, will bring prospects to your website, enable them to know your products better and then direct them to you for finalization of the sale / deal.
Role of iMarketing in Promoting Business
Hence in future, where broadband connection will reach even to remotest part of the world the role of IMarketing is no doubt going to be big.
A stage will come, where it will be inevitable to live without technology, where broadband connection for internet access will be similar to having cable for TV and a point will be reached where almost every Tom, Dick and Harry will use internet without phobia for simple things from buying groceries to booking air tickets.
So when internet reaches to remotest part of the world, iMarketing follows it too to every nook and corner and hence, there is no doubt that it is going to play a major role in future. iMarketing will help you acquire quality prospects with little cost. But it is not enough if you merely make the prospects visit your site but you should make them stay there too. The website must be so designed it should be unique and stay fresh in your visitor’s memories. The message you want to convey should be simple, direct and truthful. The message must be conveyed in such a manner you should make them stay there and view them.
If you have achieved the task of not merely making them visit your webpage and view what is available there but grasp what you want to really say, then you have achieved your task of making them listen to your exact message, that is, promoting your business be it a product / service.
There are various ways of implementing iMarketing to promote your business and they are given below.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Search Engine Maximization Webvertising and iMedia Participation through Business Networks and Viral Marketing
Depending on the nature of your business and the time and dollar you can spare, you should choose the right strategies and implement them effectively, so that, it will make prospects knock your website and listen to your message.
The future chapters will explain in detail about the various iMarketing strategies and how you should implement them.
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Advantages of iMarketing iMarketing has an edge over general marketing as it enables you to address global audience 24 by 7 for 365 days of the year. The cost of spreading the message is next to nothing as EMailing your subscription base is much more economical than sending letters through the mail.
Companies that use Internet marketing can also save money because of a reduced need for extensive sales force.
Overall, Internet marketing can help in promoting your business from a local market to both national and international market places.
With most of the youth having capability to access the internet, not implementing it might lead to your competitor’s advantage.
It enables you to measure the impact of iMarketing on your ROI.
Performance of PPC can be measured using Google Analytics.
Compared to traditional "offline" marketing, Internet marketing can offer a greater sense of accountability for advertisers as it is easier to track the efficiency of it using web analytics.
The constant stream of feedback enables you to improve your performance.
Informing your prospects / customers about updating of your product can be done easily through auto responders (getresponse.com)
Hence if you propose any offers, your customers can immediately reap the harvest as soon as they finished reading the email, since just by accessing the URL, they can enjoy the benefits proposed by you.
The lack of direct response to customers by iMarketing that may be daunting to some extent can be overcome by allowing the customers to interact or express their opinion about the product as is done in amazon.com. In Amazon, they allow the readers to review the book or share the images of the product they might purchase and they also offer the provision to allow the visitors to inform their friends, thus enabling them to play an active part that in turn might help in improving the product for future updates.
Thus iMarketing is highly interactive in nature. With the advent of Web 2.0 technology, all the tools based on this technology and email marketing etc allow your prospects to interact with you. The feed back offered by your customers help you improve your product / service to a great extent.
Limitations
Since it requires the knowledge of technology to access it, I am not sure that everyone will be covered by it. iMarketing or online marketing is not free. The cost of software, hardware, web site design, maintenance of your site, online distribution costs along with time, has to be taken into account while determining the cost of implementing iMarketing to promote your products.
If bulky multimedia files are used for advertisement, then it will be difficult to download the information using dial up services or mobile devices.
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Internet marketing does not allow shoppers to have direct contact with the items before finalizing on them. Liberal return policies and in store pick up services to reassure customers, may to some extent offset the drawback mentioned above.
If websites have poor navigation, then customers will find it difficult to select the items they want to buy and make an online purchase. Thus navigation has to be taken into account as most of the websites are designed from marketer’s point of view rather than from customer’s angle.
Not updating sites will prove to be a costly error.
But in spite of these limitations that can be overcome easily, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, as it offers the most significant aspect of marketing strategy that is, interactivity, since it involves the visitors to express their opinion.
Cool Tip
Make your landing page attractive and contain essential information with title, side heading, descriptions all containing relevant keywords.
Check Points
Make sure you add interactivity to your website by providing your email address, telephone No. or interactivity section in your newsletter. Analyze your results Modify your methods of implementing if they are not satisfactory. Still if the results are not satisfactory, consult an expert as to how you should improve your performance.
Activities
Mention the goal of iMarketing Identify what distinguishes iMarketing from General Marketing List various methods of implementing iMarketing Identify the industries that have benefited by iMarketing Mention a company (not given in book) and describe in detail how it has improved its performance through iMarketing using the following format
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Name of Company : ------Product / service it offers : ------iMarketing strategy (ies) used : ------No. of prospects increased : ------
Express the variation of prospects with reference to time graphically. ------How the performance improved : ---Hint : Mention improvement in customer relationship, product, efficiency etc------Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. The leads you generate from iMarketing are similar to your prospects
2. Podcasting does not belong to online marketing.
3. SEO offers interactive marketing.
4. iMarketing enables you to measure the ROI accurately.
5. Amazon.com offers high interactivity to visitors.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. False 3. False 4. True 5. True
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1.2 Principles of iMarketing
Goal and Objectives
To know the principles of Marketing and fine tune them for iMarketing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Identify the four 4Ps of marketing Determine them based on general marketing Fine tune them according to iMarketing Explain 5Ws and IH related to your product or service through iMarketing Consider your website or take any other website and explain 5Ws and IH with reference to the product or service.
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4Ps of Marketing
The principles of marketing i.e. the 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and what you do to convince your customers to buy your product / service hold good for iMarketing too.
Only thing is you must fine tune them according to iMarketing.
Product remains the essence of any business, since it is what that is ultimately sold to customers. Hence you should make it valuable to customers. Or in other words, it must be worth paying for.
Price : Setting a price depends on how innovative and how valuable it is to the customers. While fixing the price for your product or service you can consider the following factors into account. Introductory offer Festival discounts Geographic locations Discount for more than one purchase
Place : It deals with distribution of products and how you intend to achieve it.
Promotion ; What you do to convert your prospects to customers.
Fine Tuning the 4Ps of Marketing to suit the principles of iMarketing
Now we shall see how you fine tune the 4Ps according to the needs of internet marketing.
Since iMarketing requires a website to promote your business, it is not enough if you merely have a good website. Apart from having good website optimized for search engines it should cater to customers’ needs.
You should provide value to your prospects who visit your website. That means you provide truthful information and make sure your product or service accomplishes exactly what you advertise about them. Since the possibility of the prospect revisiting the site is high the information should be authentic.
You must fill your web pages with quality content. It is not enough if you optimize them with appropriate keywords but should also provide relevant information related to your product or service.
5Ws and 1H (What, who, where, when, why and How of your product or service)
You should provide answers to all 5 Ws and How. Or in other words, you should provide information to all the questions that may be raised in the prospects’ mind, like
What are the essential features of your product or service Who is offering them Where is it being produced, does it require shipping charges? If so how much? Or is it an information product that can be downloaded? Any guarantee that it is free from virus etc When will it be available? If the product deserves frequent updates how will they be notified? Why should your prospects choose your product or service? What is so special about them?
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In order to provide answers to these questions, you should mention the benefits the prospects will get out of buying your product rather than mention the basic features of it.
For example if you are offering an information product, you can inform about the additional bonus you provide to them, how closely they are related to the product you are offering and how accessible you are to them if they have any doubts. You can inform the genuineness of your product through true testimonials given by your customers. You can impress them with the true success rate achieved by your other customers.
You have now provided answers to 5 Ws of your product / service. Next you should explain ‘How’ of it.
If the product you offer is a non information product but related to food or health, then you should clearly mention the ingredients you have used to prepare with exact percentages and how they should use the product. Otherwise too, you should mention about the guarantee you offer and the service you provide to your customers.
If it is an information product, you should provide clear instructions as to
How they should download and install the product How it is free from virus, malware etc What system requirements they should have to install your product? Any plug-ins they require. In what format it is available? Is it in zipped format and if so any file opening softwares are required etc
Or in other words, you should clearly explain how your visitors download, open and use your product.
If it is related to service you should clearly mention how you differ from your competitors. You can inform whether you provide
Direct support Interactive support through email or live programs like chat, conference call, phone etc Support 24 by 7 for.365 days of the year or for certain specific time periods of the day Regional or National or Global support.
These things play a long role in helping the customer decide whether to go in for your product /service or not. We shall see in next chapter how you can promote your business through online or internet marketing. As I had mentioned earlier, I shall use the term iMarketing to refer to internet marketing.
Cool Tip
Inform your prospects what they would gain by buying you product rather than mentioning its features
.
Check Points
Make sure you have implemented 5Ws and 1H of your product or service. Make sure you offer bonus to your visitors that is closely related to your product. Make sure you provide clear instructions to your visitors for accessing your product.
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Ensure yourself that you have fine tuned the 4Ps of marketing.
Activities
Identify the four 4Ps of marketing Determine them based on general marketing for your business (If you don’t have one, consider any business and do for it) Fine tune them according to iMarketing Explain 5Ws and IH through iMarketing Consider your website or take any other website and explain 5Ws and IH with reference to the product or service.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. The 4 Ps of marketing are represented by Product, Persuance, Placement and Promotion.
2. You should optimize the web page with 2.5 - 3 percentages of keywords.
3. Testimonials by your customers increases the credibility of your product / service on your website.
4. Information about how many have downloaded your product will compliment your offer of information product.
5 By providing answers to 5 Ws and 1H you can fine tune your promotional efforts through iMarketing?
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. False 3. True 4. False (Information about system requirements, installing and downloading the product will compliment your offer of information product) 5. True
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1.3 Essentials of iMarketing
Goal and Objectives
Identifying the essentials of iMarketing to promote your business
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Develop an online marketing /imarketing plan (using concept map or anything ) to promote your business. Specify your goal and identify small steps to achieve them. Implement them in the iMarketing techniques you would be choosing to promote your business.
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Developing an Online Marketing / iMarketing plan
The first step in iMarketing is to create an online marketing /iMarketing plan. You can create it in the form of flowchart or concept map or you can even simply write the headings with related actions in bullet forms. Since I am proficient in developing Concept Maps, I have expressed the Online Marketing / iMarketing plan using Concept Map.
You can also develop your plan using Concept Map as it is not very difficult to create one.
Figure 1: iMarketing Plan
Specifying Your Goal
Let us say your main goals are
Increasing the traffic Retaining the customers
How will you achieve your first goal?
It involves increasing the visitors to your website. This can be achieved by implementing any one of the iMarketing Techniques I have suggested in section 1.1.
But whatever it may be, you should implement the following suggestions to realize your goal.
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You should definitely implement SEO to rank high in search engines for organic keywords To get higher ROI, this should be followed by Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques such as PPC etc To achieve SE Maximization the above effects should be complimented by either any one or all the efforts suggested under SE Maximization in the Concept Map. You can explore the marketing avenues available in internet by creating podcasting or vodcasting and then submitting them to directories. You can acquire membership in certain business networks like Ryze, LinkedIn and get yourself associated with others in the community.
The steps suggested so far will definitely help improve your traffic. But how will you make them buy your product / service?
For that you should provide information to prospects in a manner that captures their attention. When they absorb your message, they may become your customers.
Next, let us consider the second objective that is, retaining your existing customers for future.
For this you should do
Thorough analysis of 4Ps (Product, Price, Package and Promotion) to retain your customer Study your competitor and find out the techniques adopted by him to keep ahead of the race. Things better than your competitor in a positive manner.
Implementing the above steps in iMarketing Techniques to promote your business.
While implementing the first step, concentrate on the content of your web pages, taking care to include your keywords that customers might use while searching for your product / service. While implementing PPC, again make sure that you include the right keywords in your ad. Compliment your efforts by articles, press release, blogs and email marketing etc Create a 4 to 5 minute short videos to promote your business While acquiring memberships in various business networks follow the rules specified by them, as the rules may vary for different networks.
The detailed study of implementing each of the iMarketing Techniques is given in the next unit.
Cool Tip
Think of innovative way to advertise your product and devise a marketing plan by incorporating that into account
. Checklist
Make sure you have identified your goals. Make sure you have identified ways of implementing it.
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Prepare a budget for it. Execute the plan.
Activities
Define your goals for implementing iMarketing to promote your business.
Imagine yourself promoting a software product. Create a marketing plan, exactly specifying what techniques you would use and how much fund you would allocate for each of the iMarketing techniques. Explain why you have adopted the techniques you have chosen.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. SEM is implemented to rank high in search engines for organic keywords
2. To get higher R.O.I, Search Engine Optimization should be followed by SEM techniques such as PPC.
3. Through iMarketing you should not only win and make them stay but see that your prospects get your message.
4. The 2Cs of iMarketing are Client and Consumer (end user).
5. The first step in iMarketing is identifying your marketing strategies
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. True 3. True 4. False (2Cs are consumer and competitor) 5. False
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1.4 Mobile Web Marketing
Goal and Objectives
Identifying the essentials of mobile Web Marketing to promote your business
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand what is meant by ‘Mobile Web Marketing’ Implement the essentials to opt for ‘Mobile Web Marketing’ List the ways through which you can promote your products through Mobile Web Marketing’. Implement Mobile Web Marketing to promote your business through mobile devices. Perform the activities suggested at the end of this chapter.
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Mobile Web Marketing
The World Wide Web has now extended its wings to mobile devices. That means you can access your email even when you are mobile or when you are waiting for your doctor in your doctor’s clinic. You don’t have to reach home or office to access your computer and if it is an urgent matter then you can send a reply then and there.
According to wikipedia, “The Mobile Web refers to the World Wide Web as accessed from mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and other portable gadgets connected to a public network. Access does not require a desktop computer.”
Thus Mobile Web ensures that one can bring real internet experiences to mobile users.
Just like you have created websites for desktops you can create websites for mobile devices. On these mobile websites one can deliver mobile ads and build landing pages, offer mobile video & audio downloads & streams leading to the concept of Mobile Web Marketing.
Essentials to opt for Mobile Web Marketing
With the establishment of mobile web sites, it is made possible for anyone with a mobile device, access all the information contained on the Internet.
To view mobile web sites, you have to first subscribe to mobile service provider that has access to mobile web sites.
Next thing is, if you have a website, you have to make it a mobile website by buying a mobi domain name so that it matches with your original website name. For example if your site id is Mybook.com, then you can opt for Mybook.mobi
Next you can refer to ‘Mobile Web Initiative’ to look for standards to create mobile web sites.
Implement the essentials to opt for ‘Mobile Web Marketing’
User’s goals
You have to keep in your mind, the users preferences while surfing the net. Mobile users may have different interests compared to users of fixed or desktop devices. Their interests may often be to find out specific pieces of information that are relevant to their context. For example they may be interested in knowing about the schedules for a particular flight they may be undertaking rather than entire fleet of aircrafts and their various schedules.
Next, mobile users may not be interested in lengthy content as the ergonomics of the device is unsuitable for such things.
Data Transfer
Data transfer in mobile devices often costs money. This has to be taken into account before incorporating any bulky videos in mobile sites.
Device Restrictions
The restrictions imposed by the keyboard and the screen demands a totally different approach to page design than for desktop devices.
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Mobile browsers often do not support plug-ins thereby restricting the range of content that they can support.
Hence while designing your advertisents for mobisites, you have to remember these points to avoid improper display on them.
Listing the ways through which you can promote your products through online mobile devices.
Insert proper codes for titles etc Implement SEO for Mobile websites. Implement Mobile Ads
Implementing Mobile Web Marketing to promote your business through mobile devices.
Optimizing your mobile website
The following practices are advised to be included to achieve optimization of mobile website.
Mobile site should link out 100% valid XHTML code must be used Mobile Web best practices must be practiced Optimize the site with keywords, insert appropriate tags for titles and use keyword rich anchor text for internal links. Design a simple site structure with clear labels minus videos for easy navigation. Finally don’t forget to submit your mobile site map to Google
Some of the URLs given below enable you to create mobile web sites freely. You can explore them to create your mobile website.
Be brief and to the point while describing your product or service as as the ergonomics of the device is unsuitable for lengthy description.
Check List
Write a title for your mobile web page with key words inserted. Use keywords in anchor text Have user friendly navigation system. Create engaging landing page.
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Activities
Define Mobile Web Marketing List the essentials that are to be considered before implementing Mobile Web Marketing List the ways through which you can implement Mobile Web Marketing Create your own mobile website and then implement mobile web marketing for it. State your results in the following format.
1. Mobile Website URL : 2. SEO : List the things you have performed to achieve Mobile SEO 3. Mobile Ad : Show the ad you have written for your mobile website.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Mobile users have the same preference as the desktop users. 2. Unless you create a .mobi website you cannot develop a mobile website. 3. Data transfer in mobile devices are highly economical. 4. The range of content for mobile sites are limited as mobile browsers do not support plug- ins. 5. Valid xhtml codes have to be inserted.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. False 3. False 4. True 5. True
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UNIT 2 : Various Ways of Promoting Your Website through iMarketing
------“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Jeff Bezos
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Chapter 2 - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
------“The winner is the chef who takes the same ingredients as everyone else and produces the best results.” Edward de Bono
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2.1 What is SEO?
Goal and Objectives
Knowing the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to promote your business.
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand what is meant by SEO Understand what is meant by ‘organic search engine optimization’ Identify two important ways of achieving SEO Identify 7 qualities an SEO specialist should have. Mention the important results SEO should obtain for your website.
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What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as a process of implementing various techniques that seek to improve the ranking of a website in search engine results. When I say improve the ranking in Search Engines, I mean improving it for organic search results.
Organic SEO is the use of search engine to draw traffic by means of on page optimization using keywords and off page optimization by adding appropriate links to website apart from having good navigation, design of website etc.
With Organic Search Engine Optimization, the website’s rank is maintained because of its pertinence and not on its advertising budget. With the upward swing of internet advertising costs, companies will realize that relying merely on PPC (Pay Per Click) will soon deplete their budget as the traffic improvement cost will definitely go up.
Websites should be optimized for keywords that are frequently searched upon by potential customers. Optimization includes incorporation of these keywords into content, page titles, link text, and various other elements of the website.
The optimization of website using keywords is known as Onsite Optimization.
It should also be optimized with relevant links and this is known as Off-page Optimization.
An SEO specialist should have the following 7 qualities to optimize the website effectively.
An SEO specialist should optimize the website for organic search results and can then compliment the results using PPC (Pay Per Click) or other methods.
He should suggest a proper navigation structure based on keywords and products priority.
He should be able to define meta tags for website and should clearly mention title tag, description and other important tags.
He must be an expert with all techniques like directory submissions, forum postings, link building techniques and rules for link exchange etc
He should explain the client’s doubts in simple terms and must try to complete the task in time without incorporating any black hat techniques.
He should thoroughly analyze the competitor’s websites, keywords they have used, strategies they have employed etc to effectively optimize your site.
Finally he should keep track of the techniques he has employed, results he has achieved and the progress he has shown from the time he has taken over your optimizing work. Periodically he should check the website’s rank by using Google Tool Bar or any other Rank Suggesting Tool Bar and inform the same to the client.
Thus a good SEO should assure you of the following results.
Top rankings in search engines,
Higher targeted traffic for website or generation of more leads for website
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More visibility in the market and create an edge over your competitors.
Hence an enhanced indication of these services also include brand recognition, increase in prospects resulting in more customers, more enquiries resulting in more customers, increased sale of product / service and access to immediate feedback that would result in decrease in promotional costs for a website.
Cool Tip
Avoid duplicate content in your website
.
Check Points
Add relevant title and description to your web site filled with your chosen keywords Make sure the keyword density of your web page is between 3 to 3.5% of your total words on the web page. Analyze your competitor’s site and see how they have implemented keywords in their website.
Activities
Define SEO for organic search results List the qualities an SEO Expert should possess. List the results you should expect after implementing SEO. Take your website or create one using Google’s Page Creator. Then perform the following activities for your website or web page. 1. Keyword research analysis Create the title and description for your website Create the content for your web page with relevant keywords Make sure the keyword density is between 3-3.5% of total content on web page After implementing all the things provide link for your web page.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. SEO is mainly to do with optimizing website with keywords.
2. Onsite optimization is mainly to do with optimizing the website with links.
3. Off page optimization is mainly to do with optimizing the website with keywords.
4. SEO is associated with improving your rank for organic search results.
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5. The keyword density of your web page should lie between 3 to 3.5% of your total words on the web page. Answer to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. False 3. False 4. True 5. True
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2.2 Onsite Optimization
Goal and Objectives
Implementing Onsite Optimization for Your Website
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Identify the keywords for your web page using any one of the keyword suggestion tools Write the ‘Title’ and ‘Description’ for your webpage using the keywords selected from step 1 Check the meta tags using the meta tag generator suggested in this chapter or any other tool. Develop content for your web page and test the key word density so that it lies between 3 to 3.5% of words used on that particular web page.
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Give visitors the information they are seeking for
We have already seen that On Page Optimization is related to optimizing the content of WebPages with relevant keywords. Hence you have to provide high-quality content on your web pages, especially on your homepage. This is the single most important thing one should do while developing the web pages. If your web pages contain useful information, then the content will retain the visitors and make them look for what you are offering to them.
Hence create, information-rich site, with pages that undoubtedly and truthfully describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include them on your site.
These words that users would type in Google or any other search engines to find your web pages or product/service are generally termed as keywords.
Hence to select proper keyword for your product/service, I suggest, that you should visit few websites that would help you identify the right keywords for your website.
One of them is http://www.goodkeywords.com/.
They have a very good keyword tool, and greatest of all it's free! Hence you can download this software, enter the most common keyword for your website into the software.
Figure 2 : About ‘Good Keywords’ 1
In the following example, the keyword used is "computer games".
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Figure 3- Keyword Analysis for ‘Computer Games’
The above figure illustrates the analysis for keyword ‘computer games’. You can see that overture US shows 83,397 counts/month. The above result is followed by other keywords and the corresponding counts/month for them.
The above result is shown for Overture and when it is multiplied by 8 roughly gives the result for Google.
From the above analysis, we can see that the word ‘computer games’ is searched by 83,397 times in overture and if you directly go about optimizing your website around this keyword, then you may face a very stiff competition. Hence you can try a word, quite close to the one suggested above but one that has not so many counts/month. You can try for ‘kid computer game’ or ‘video computer game’ etc
Next you must develop the content using the ‘key words’ you have decided in such a way, that it occupies 3 to 3.5% of total words used for that particular web page.
Next you should make sure that your title is expressed in bold format with your chosen keyword using
header tag.
You should then verify, whether your images are expressed using ‘alt image tags’ with possible usage of chosen keywords.
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The following URLs suggest other websites that help you look for keywords and search for ‘niche phrases’.
These tools thus help you decide the right keywords for your product/service.
Thus on page optimization includes relevant usage of keywords in
Page Title Header tags alt tags meta tags
and proper formatting of your page title, side heading etc apart from creating a keyword rich content for web pages.
After implementing the above suggestions to your web pages, you can visit the following webpage http://www.prsite.eu/ and determine the rank of your webpage.
Figure 4 : Determining Rank of Webpage of prsite.eu
The above figure shows the web page of prsite.eu
In the text box shown in above figure, type the complete URL and click ‘check page rank’.
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The following figure shows the page rank for Google, that is 10/10.
Figure 5 : Page Rank for Google
They also suggest codes for inserting ‘Page Rank View Button’ that will enable your visitors to know the rank of your web page. This will help you in the long run as Web Masters will express willingness to share links with you if you have a good page rank.
The following figure shows the codes offered for displaying page rank in your web page. You have to just copy and paste them in your web page.
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Figure 6 : Codes for inserting ‘Page Rank View Button’
Case Study
Inspiring Success Story from Goods Pharmacy based on Interactive Nature of Online Marketing
Shane McGlaun after his long struggle convinced his boss in Goods Pharmacy near Tyler, Texas to let him try promoting the business through online marketing.
Hence he decided to take the 68 year old pharmacy nationwide online and launched HealthyLifePharmacy.com in January 2004.
30 days later, in spite of his best efforts in SEO and Paid Search Efforts, Shane had to report miserable failure as only one sale was made inspite of receiving thousands of visitors to website. Though he had an attractive site, visitors didn’t stay for long.
So Shane completely revamped the site with the expert help from Steve Jackson at ConversionChronicles.com. After two months of hard work an entirely new site was born.
Now the conversion rate from visitor to sale has been increased to 0.8% and he intended to increase the rate to still further by about 2% by the end of that year.
Now we shall see what prompted the success rate in conversion from visitor to buyer.
It is the phone number that facilitated interactive nature, prompted the visitors to buy the product. They were not merely satisfied with the descriptions, hence most of them tried
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over the phone, got their doubts cleared and were convinced by the answers offered to them, hence made purchases. Key words were highlighted and more white space was added. Descriptions were rewritten in such a way it high lighted the benefits it offers to visitors rather than the manufacturer’s feature focused description. To his news letter sign up form he added a question box, asking ‘what is their top concern?’ He was flooded with interesting responses that resulted in his releasing a newsletter that readers find truly compelling.
Cool Tips
Domain name : It is the most important thing in SEO. If you have not already selected your domain name, then choose one with your main keyword being used. File name : This again is very important. Here again choose the file names with relevant keywords used mostly in that webpage.
Checklist for On page Optimization
Title Tag : It should contain 5 to 8 words with main keyword being used. Meta tags : It should contain description of your website in about 25 words and title tag with sparing usage of appropriate keywords in them.
The following URL generates meta tags and emails them to you if you provide the URL and other details required.
The above website also helps you to determine ‘keyword density’ for your webpage and also analyses your competitor’s website with reference to your website and provides you the details. Most of all, the usage of above services is free! So, why not make use of them?
Use appropriate heading tag for page title etc Content – use keywords in such a way they occupy 3 to 3.5% of your total words utilized for that particular webpage and format them in bold. Try to use alt tags for images and try to use relevant keyword if applicable to that image. Check for broken links and correct HTML. Keep the links on a given web page to a reasonable number (less than 100).
Activities
Identify the keywords for your web page using any one of the keyword suggestion tools. Write the ‘Title’ and ‘Description’ for your webpage using the keywords selected from step 1.
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Check the meta tags using the meta tag generator suggested in this chapter or any other tool. Develop content for your web page and test the key word density so that it lies between 3 to 3.5% of words used on that particular web page. If you do not get it first time then revise the content till you succeed and achieve the above result.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Providing alt tags for images with appropriate keywords helps you achieve SEO for your site. 2. Stuffing your website with keywords helps you achieve SEO for your site easily. 3. Choosing a domain name has nothing to do with SEO 4. The approximate number of words used to describe your website should be greater than 25. 5. The links on a given webpage should be more than 300.
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Answer to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. False 3. False 4. False 5. False
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2.3 Offsite Optimization
Goal and Objectives
To implement offsite optimization for your web page.
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Mention the importance of anchor text Type the keyword that could be used for getting your wep page / product / service in Google and 1. Check if your website comes in first page of Google for your search result. (If it comes, then you have implemented SEO). 2. Check if off page optimization has been implemented for it. Mention three ways of obtaining links Write an email to web master of company related to your product asking them to exchange link with you. Submit your website to directories and search engines to achieve one way link and mention the names of directories. Check whether your web site has implemented easy navigations for visitors.
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What is Offsite Optimization?
Offsite optimization is defined as improving the performance of website for search engines through link building strategies.
Now I will explain the importance of ‘Anchor text’ and how it helps in improving your position for Search Engines. Links to your website can come externally and internally. The links pointing to your website should contain your main keywords in anchor text so that when the visitors type the keywords in Search Engines all these links with the keywords will point your web page.
Now imagine how nice it will be if the external websites as well as internal websites point to your webpage. You can improve your ranking by making one of your main navigations and drop down menu’s point to your web page.
Thus offpage optimization ultimately deals with web sites that point to your web page, what is their rank and how their site is related to your product /service etc.
The following figure shows the result from Google for the search word ‘download’
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Figure 7 : Result from Google for search word ‘download’
The website with the URL ‘ www.download.com ’ comes first among 871,000,000 web pages.
Now let us see if it has incorporated some of the suggestions I have said earlier.
The following figure shows the web page of download.com.
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Figure 8 : Web page of download.com 1
The above web page shows that
The domain name has the keyword ‘download’ The word ‘download’ is used many times in the web page as one can see the hyperlinks ‘Download Now’ and ‘The Daily Download’ etc It has got links such as ‘Digby’ and ‘Windows Software’ etc that have huge links pointing to them.
The above site is a good example for proper implementation of onsite as well as offsite optimization.
Now to build external links for your webpage, there are various ways of implementing them:
They are
Reciprocal link exchange One way link program Buying links from high page rank websites
Reciprocal link exchange : In order to implement this technique, you have to identify the websites that belong to your domain. For example if you launch a software product, then all other software products belong to the domain name ‘software products’
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Hence you should identify other websites belonging to your domain and request the web masters to exchange links with you. Of course you must write a nice email, convincing them of the advantage they would get by exchanging links with you. Or in other words, you should convince them about the ‘rich content’ you have on your webpage and how visiting your webpage would benefit their link such as enhanced position in search engines as you have implied only ‘white hat techniques’ to promote your website.
One way of achieving reciprocal link is by registering yourself in www.linkmetro.com They offer numerous categories and you can choose the categories from which you would like to receive links. They have both free and paid options and unless you want to go for automatic exchange of links, you can opt for free version itself which offers good exchanges and within a matter of few weeks you can realize the improvement of your website in Search Engines.
One way link program: Submission of your website to Search Engines and Web Directories is one of the most powerful ways of improving your position in Search Engines.
There are two types of web directories – Human edited and Spider operated. Open Directory Project and World Wide Web Virtual Library come under the former category
Some of the important human edited directories are given below.
Uncover the Net Wow Directory BOTW Search and Go Skaffe
The following URL http://www.web-directories.ws/ provides access to various types of Web Directories :
Free Web Directory Paid Web Directory Best Web Directories Niche directory (lists11) Regional Listing Internet Press (includes blog and article directories and RSS feed sites) Non-English Language Directories
The regional listing plays an important role for submission of your website to local search engines, which in turn enhances the probability of increasing the generation of leads or prospects for your product / service.
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Hence you can choose whatever type is feasible to you and then submit your website to directories belonging to that category.
Buying links from High Page Rank Websites : The list of High Page Rank directories are given by http://www.web-directories.ws/ You can choose few of them for quick inclusion in their list of websites.
The following URL gives Directory List, a Web Directory of Directories. http://www.directorylist.org/ They have numerous categories and they are arranged in alphabetical order. It also offers a search facility so that you can select the type of directories you want and then can submit your website to them.
The following URL provides the list of search engines and directories from A to Z. http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm
Finally you can check the popularity of your website with respect to search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN using Link Popularity
Additional Information
What I have suggested so far is standard onsite optimization and offsite optimization efforts that would help you in acquiring increased traffic for your website. In order to further improve the performance of your website you have to convert your traffic i.e. prospects to customers. This can be easily achieved by extending what I have suggested so far.
I had already mentioned about easy navigation of websites for visitors of your webpage. Here you have to provide good secondary options of buying products/ services for your prospects, For example, if your product is about a book then provide buttons for purchasing hard copy as well as ebook and also for getting some free stuff. These things will make your visitors stay for some time in your webpage and provide them an opportunity to listen/ view to what you want to say.
SEO should be preceded by good marketing research, where thorough analysis of 2Cs namely Competitor and Customer are done.
1. Competitor analysis reveals information about their keyword targets and how they are positioned in three big Search Engines Google, Yahoo and MSN. By looking at their sites you can create a list of keywords that have demonstrated achievement in the search engines for them. Creation of the list helps you develop a good content for your website that would be loved by Search Engines.
2. Link Analysis will help you determine where the links are coming from, what are their ranks and whether they are paid links or from link farm etc. A thorough analysis of your competitor’s sites will also reveal the links reaching them and will help you in building links for your site. You can use Backlink Watch to get an idea about the links emanating from your competitor’s site.
3. The first two points throw some light on effective building of website based on Competitor Analysis. Now let me highlight the importance of site from Customer’s point of view. In order to make the visitor come again and capture their attention during their stay in your webpage, you have to present your marketing campaign effectively either through interesting video or animation.
4. If you want to capture their email while offering a newsletter then make your navigations simple and straight forward, so that they don’t spend much time understanding the webpage.
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Case Study
Success Story of Uniform/Career Apparel Supply Company through SEO
Overview:
For more than 105 years Klug Uniforms has been supplying and customizing uniforms and career apparel for companies all across the United States. Klug Uniforms wanted to extend its traditional marketing success to the Internet and was interested in long term strategy of implementing Search Engine Optimization. Hence it approached NetSuccessUSA to achieve its ambition of reaching global market through internet.
Strategy :
Therefore, NetSuccessUSA formulated an Internet Marketing plan for Klug Uniforms that emphasized Search Engine Optimization. They selected keywords within 48 hours and implemented onsite optimization followed by XML sitemap submission to Google. They also wrote specially-designed keyword rich SEO content for the site.
A relevant linking program was also started and approximately 300 links were added each month.
The Result:
Ranking results for Klug Uniform website rapidly increased. As a result of increase in rankings came a considerable, higher-than-expected increase in Internet sales and resulting improved revenues.
Cool Tips
Write the anchor text with relevant keywords so that when users search the spiders with those keywords, then all your links with those keywords will point to your webpage.
Check List
Check the page rank of the websites that link to you (higher the rank of the sites that link to you, the better it will be for optimization)
Exchange the links with sites that are relevant to your product or service.
Have more content for better SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings
Activities
Mention the importance of anchor text Type the keyword that could be used for looking your web page / product / service in Google. 1. Check if your website comes in first page of Google for your
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search result. (If it comes, then you have implemented SEO). 2. Otherwise, take the site that occupies one of first three positions in Google in first page and check if offpage optimization has been done for it. (Check if huge links point to them) Mention three ways of obtaining links Write an email to web master of company related to your product asking them to exchange link with you. Submit your website to directories and search engines to achieve one way link and mention the names of directories to which you have submitted your site. Check whether your web site has implemented easy navigations for visitors.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Submission of your website to directories and search engines is an example for implementing reciprocal link exchange.
2. Inclusion of keywords in anchor text helps you achieve improved offpage optimization.
3. The 2Cs of iMarketing are Customer and Communication.
4. Yahoo Directory is an example of human edited directory.
5. World Wide Web Virtual Library is an example of spider operated directory.
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Answer to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. True 3. False 4. True 5. False
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2.4 Promotional Methods that Compliment SEO
Goal and Objectives
Implementing Promotional Methods to Complement SEO.
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Submit your website to directories using submission software. Explain what is meant by deep linking strategy. Implement deep linking strategy for your website. Mention the benefits of using RSS. Find out index rank of your website using ‘SoloSEO’. Use an RSS Mixer to create relevant feeds for your website.
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SEO through Softwares
So far I have suggested optimizing website manually. Now I will suggest ways of achieving the same result using softwares which will definitely save lot of your time.
The following URL provides the details of SEOptimization softwares. http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/directory/search-engine-optimization-software.html
Most of them offer a free trial, hence no harm in trying them, and if you are convinced you can go for purchasing any one of them. Some of them are really good and would save lot of your time.
My advise is if you are going to implement these things with less manpower then go for these softwares, but if you are rich in human resources then you can opt for implementing them manually.
Deep Linking Strategy
I had earlier explained about the major role played by links during offpage optimization. Now I will explain about the importance of another strategy known as deep linking strategy.
Let us see what is meant by deep linking strategy?
It is a strategy where you will be asking the web masters of certain sites to link to a specific page of content, which has more relevance to the product/service offered by the websites whose webmaster you are approaching.
It has certain advantages.
The first one is, the webmasters are sure that their links are placed on a page that has more relevance to their product/service rather than merely placing it on a page that contains links from all other sites.
The second advantage is they feel happy to know that you have studied their product/ service thoroughly and then asking for an exchange.
You increase the value of your web page as you are not merely filling it with links from any Tom, Dick and Harry but filling it with links from sites that have more relevance to your content.
Hence go for deep linking and reap the harvest of SEO success.
The following URL suggests various ‘Web Site Promotion Tools’ http://www.promotionworld.com/tools/
The site suggests tools under various categories namely
Web Building Tools Web Promotion Tools Web Profit Tools
I would like you to explore the various tools available to achieve best results in Search Engine ranking.
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RSS to boost your SEO efforts
What is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering web content that changes regularly. Many news-related sites, blogs and other online publishers syndicate their content via RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
The sites offering RSS feeds can be accessed from this website : http://www.syndic8.com/feedcat.php
Benefits of using RSS
It allows you to update yourselves by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save lot of time by not required to visit each site individually. You can also retain your privacy by not having to join everysite’s newsletter. But the main advantage is that it increases the index rank of your web page (a measure of checking how far the web pages are dynamic).
Index Rank
Index Rank is nothing but a new SEO Metric of Indexing Rate. It is found that if the rate of change of content is high, even it be small, your site has a good chance of getting a high rank. But if the rate of change of content is low then the rank will be lower.
You can find the Index Rank of your site by visiting this hyperlink Solo SEO. In that webpage type the domain of your site, whose index you want to find in the first box. In the other boxes type the domain names of the competitors. Then click the search button.
The following figure shows the index rank of Newsday with reference to other newspapers in US.
Hint : You can find the domain names of your competitors by typing the relevant keywords in Google and then selecting the websites from the first page of your search results.
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Figure 9 : Index Rank of different Newspapers in US
The best way to achieve high index rank is by embedding a blog to your website and frequently posting new contents to your blog apart from subscribing to regular feeds related to the content of your website.
Feed Reader or News Aggregator is a software that enables you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.
The following URL provides the details off RSS Feed Reader available for different platforms. http://blogspace.com/rss/readers
Role of RSS to Enhance your SEO Efforts
RSS feeds provide items with short descriptions of web content along with a link to the full version of the content.
Hence you can add RSS feeds to your web page that match the keywords you have chosen for that particular webpage. This way you get continuous updates from relevant sites that make your web page a dynamic content provider rather than a static one. http://www.advancedrssmixer.com/
The above URL suggests an advanced RSS mixer, where you can mix various feeds relevant to the keywords of your web page and blast them with latest news.
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The following figure illustrates the various options offered by the RSS mixer (free and payment)
Fig 10 : Various Options Offered by RSS Mixer
SiteMap Submission
Incorporate a SiteMap page. This will help spiders crawl all the important pages on your site, and help understand your website’s hierarchy. This will also inform the spiders when your web pages will get updated as you may have to mention how frequently you update your webpages. You can easily create a SiteMap using the hyperlink SiteMap Generator
You can also create a SiteMap for your website using the ‘XML SiteMap Creation Tool’ using the hyperlink given below.
The following hyperlink Recommended SEO Tools offers the details for
Keyword Research Tools Website Analytics Tools Competitive Research Tools Ranking Reporting Tools SEO Friendly URL Solutions XML Sitemap Creation Tools
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This hyperlink too, Important SEO tools offers various SEO Tools.
Explore them and implement SEO successfully to rank high in Search Engines.
Include Testimonials
Nothing is more important than a true testimonial by your customer. They will speak volumes for the quality of your product or service, hence include them in your website.
Cool Tip
Don’t forget to add the RSS button so that your visitors can subscribe for it.
Checklist
Make sure you create a web page for deep linking strategy Make your web page dynamic by adding relevant RSS feeds to it Ensure that the index rank of your web page is high.
Activities
Submit your website to any 3 directories using submission software. Mention the directories you have chosen. What is meant by deep linking strategy? Implement deep linking strategy for your website. Mention the benefits of using RSS. Find out index rank of your website using ‘SoloSEO’. Use an RSS Mixer to create relevant feeds for your website.
Self Assessment Exercises
Choose the best answer from the options given.
1. The strategy where you will be asking the web masters of certain sites to link to a specific page of content, which has more relevance to the product/service offered by the websites whose link you would like to include is known as two way link strategy.
2. Index Rank of a website will be high, if the web page is dynamic.
3. RSS Feed Mixer is a software that enables you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.
4. By adding RSS feeds to your web page, the index rank of your web page will increase
5, Site Map submission is done using XHTML.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False
2. True
3. False
4. True
5. False
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Chapter 3 - Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
------“In business, one of the challenges is making sure that your product is the easiest to experience and complete a sale.” Mark Cuban
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3.1 Introduction to Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Goal and Objectives
To obtain high ranking search results for keywords through Organic Search as well as through SEM
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand What Search Engine Marketing Is. Distinguish between SEO and SEM List the Advantages of SEM Identify the sites that occupy the first few positions for organic and paid search results for any keywords.
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Introduction
Let us say you want to buy organic products from online shopping malls. How would you go about it? You would type the relevant keyword for the product you are looking for in Google, Yahoo or MSN or for that matter any other Search Engine and look for the results you get out of it.
Let me say I typed the word ‘Avacado Oil’ in Google. The result I got from Google is shown below.
Figure 11 : Search Results for Avacado Oil
The first page consists of 10 websites showing ‘Avocado Oil’ out of 157,000 web pages. Making the website occupy the first few positions in Search Engines for natural search results is known as Organic SEO. This has to be achieved for your website and if it can be done, then it speaks for the quality of the website as it is not a joke to achieve it overnight.
But you have to complement your efforts with other means like Pay Per Click (PPC) Adwords program offered by Google or other similar programs to get better ROI (Return of Income). In the above figure, look at the ad given on the R.H.S. of the webpage (given below)
Avocado oil Packings of 28, 55, 200, 920 KG Quality : Crude or refined www.sictia.com
This can be achieved irrespective of your website’s position for organic search results. But you have to spend few dollars and frame the ad for the keywords that visitors might use to access your product / service.
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That is you are marketing your products through Search Engines. Thus Search Engine Marketing shortly known as SEM comprises all activities to be implemented through Search Engines to promote your products/services. Thus SEM includes PPC and other methods like widgets etc. that are used to promote your business.
The differences between SEO and SEM are given in the following table.
SEO SEM It deals with optimizing your website for natural It includes SEO but also other paid options like listing in Search Engines and Directories PPC The search results appear on L.H.S of your The search results appear on R.H.S of your result Google search page It is subset of SEM It is main set Concentrates mainly on improving your ranking Apart from PPC includes Banner Ads, in Search Engines. Text Link Building, Optimized Press Releases, Contextual Ads, Blogs etc that can be used to promote your product/service through Search Engines Results are shown in about six months, Based on how much you spend, the thereafter it becomes significant. results are shown immediately. The cost incurred is high in the first year as Continuous investment for advertisement site’s quality and ranking has to be increased. is required. If you stop paying for Once established, without much additional advertisements, then they will stop. cost, you can retain your position. You get increased credibility and establish You reach there because of the amount yourself as leader in your industry because of you spend, hence may not get the your ranking in Search Engines. additional benefits suggested for SEO
Since we have already explored SEO in detail we shall see how to implement PPC (Pay Per Click) to promote your website in the following section.
Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of making your site designed in conformity with the existing ranking algorithm standards of search engines to rank high. Hence SEO that is a part of SEM includes only organic or free ways to increase ranking in search engines whereas SEM involves free as well as paid ways to do the same work.
Case Study
I came across a very interesting case study at web hosting geeks and thought I’ll share it with you. It solves the dilemma one faces whether to go for SEO or PPC or both. Here the author has provided a comparative study for the cost involved for both PPC and Natural Search.
Natural Search vs PPC Advertising - A Case Study for Cost Comparison
The magnetism of Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising is irrefutable. Since, you only pay for the clicks you get, you can easily set your daily budget and control how much you can spend for the ad. Most importantly, your website appears instantly to reap the harvest.
On the other hand, obtaining a high ranking in the natural search results seems unattainable. You have to compete with thousands of other business men and that might look like Mount Everest to climb. It’s also true that it takes few months to achieve the result. Hence no wonder one has to think twice before deciding which one to opt for, i.e. PPC or SEO for natural search results.
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The following case study illustrates what should one do to get not only noticed by search engines but also get high rankings.
SEO vs PPC Advertising
Glenn Murray, the director of PublishHub and also of copywriting studio Divine Write had been working hard for the past one year to get high ranking on the natural search results for his copywriting business, Divine Write. For his primary keyword, he is now on page 1 of Google.com (out of approximately 900,000 search results).
He has done this simply by writing helpful articles and submitting them for publication on the Internet. Fortunately for him, since he is an SEO copywriter, writing articles is not a big daunting task. But had he paid an SEO copywriter to write articles for him, he would have spent approximately USD$5,000.
Over the same period, he spent approximately USD$3,000 on Google AdWords (his ads appeared towards the top of the paid listings).
His natural search campaign definitely cost more in the first year than his AdWords campaign.
But since he had reached the top of Google.com, he had paused all his AdWords’ ads, so he doesn’t pay anything towards it. This he was able to achieve since he had established his position through SEO, as otherwise he would’ve continued paying for AdWords, nearly USD$3,000 next year and another USD$3,000 the year after that, and so on.
Of course, he had to retain his high ranking. So if he had engaged someone to write his articles that would have involved an investment of approximately USD$1,000 per year (a saving of 67% each year).
So the money spent breaks down like this:
For Google AdWords investment: 2 yrs = $6,000, 3 yrs = $9,000, 4 yrs = $12,000, 5 yrs = $15,000
Also, these figures are based on Glenn submitting articles to various article banks on the Internet himself. Had he engaged somebody else, then he would have had to shed some more dollars for that too.
Conclusion
To get immediate visibility go for paid ones like PPC and to sustain in the long run do implement SEO for natural search results.
Cool Tip
To get quick results implement PPC but to sustain business in the long run implement SEO too and dabble the Ad and content with keywords.
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Check Points
Before implementing PPC make thorough analysis of keyword research. Decide a daily budget and restrict your spending within your budget. Implement PPC for days it is rewarding than on all 7 days of the week Restrict your Ad to regions where your prospects are likely to be than all over the world.
Activities
Define SEM Distinguish between SEO and SEM
Consider any word and find out the search results for it using Google. From the search results 1. Mention the sites that have occupied first three positions in Search Engines for organic search. 2. Identify the sites that have achieved similar positions through PPC
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. To get high rankings through SEM one should have implemented SEO 2. SEO is subset of SEM 3. One can achieve quick results through SEO 4. It is wise to implement both SEO and SEM 5. After establishing your position in search engines through SEO, it doesn’t require much investment to retain that position.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. True 3. False 4. True 5. True
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3.2. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Goal and Objectives
To obtain high ranking in search results for keywords through SEM (PPC)
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand what ‘PPC’ is all about! List the advantages of PPC. Choose ideal key words for your website Write an effective ad for your website to promote your product / service Monitor your PPC
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What is Pay Per Click or PPC?
We shall first see what exactly we mean by Pay Per Click. It is an advertising method where you pay only when the visitors click your ad. It is a superb method deployed mainly by Google that enables you to get very high R.O.I (Return of Income) when implemented properly. That means you only pay for clicks by people who are interested in your product. That is, you pay for clicks by your prospects who might easily turn out to be your customers.
Advantages of PPC
It offers an effective way of advertising your product on internet irrespective of whether you have a website or not. Since it merely demands a landing page where you present the content with appropriate keywords your visitors might use to look for your product, any body can start implementing it without waiting to achieve results using SEO. But you should remember that your keywords don’t exceed 3 to 3.5 % of total words used on the web page.
It helps you build brand awareness and compliment your online and offline promotional schemes.
It improves your customer base as your ad is exposed to millions of people searching for keywords thus enabling you to get qualified leads.
It enables you to target your customers in local region and at the same time extend your base to national and international level too.
It enables you to target your customers on days where it will be most effective to advertise and not on days where it will be least effective. Hence promoters of product usually target on week days, especially between Tuesday and Thursday to get maximum benefit for their ad campaign.
The possibility of implementing one of 7Ps of marketing, i.e. persuasion is accomplished effectively as the time gap between knowing your prospects and making them visit your website is less since just a click of your ad will take them to your landing page.
Concentration to promote micro sites is enough rather than optimizing the whole macro website.
During any normal business it is difficult to find out the conversion of clients to sales. But in PPC through Google Analytics, you can easily find out the conversion rate and how sales have progressed through particular time.
Let us consider the importance of website’s link ranking and traffic ranking. Many Search Engines, including Google consider them as important.
The website’s link ranking relates to number of sites that link to your website, how relevant they are to your website and how popular they are etc. On the other hand, traffic ranking refers to total number of visitors who are visiting your site every month. Even though quality of visitors ultimately matters but drastic difference in traffic between websites can influence the deciding factor in the long run. Therefore increase in traffic by any means helps your site get noticed by search engines.
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Since the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, one should plan PPC carefully to get high ROI. The main thing is how much return you get for the time and money and resources you are using for this.
For example you can use low cost PPC campaign that uses unusual key phrases for your web page but still turn out low targeted traffic that might engage in few sales deals taking your profit to higher level and yielding high ROI.
On the other hand you can go for high cost PPC for your main keywords and to outsmart your competitors may have to shed more dollars per click and if few of them make a huge purchase, you still stand to gain a lot.
Thus in order to get high ROI, you must set a realistic target and analyze the result thoroughly and do a bit of tweaking to get good result. But still it is worth doing, since it doesn’t expect you to complete your optimization for organic searching and you pay only when your prospects knock the door of your website.
Target Customers by language and location
For targeting international audience it is better you frame the ads in English. But if you are targeting your ad for local regions in their native language then Google offers you the range of choices for you to choose according to the region of people you are targeting. It also offers the choice of exhibiting your ad in cities/regions you choose or allows you to customize it in such a way that you can display them in places that are at certain distances from your business.
Choose proper keywords
You should frame the ad using proper keywords, otherwise you will be driving improper crowd to your website thus wasting your time, money and resources.
How to write a good ad
Your PPC is a window through which your customers get an idea of your product/service. Hence it is essential that you write a good ad to promote your business.
Make sure to include in ad what your webpage offers. Give a unique headline which speaks about your product or service using main keywords Avoid abbreviations and be simple and straight forward in your approach Include a call to deed, like buy now, click here, get your bonus etc
There are some PPC tools available, which play a major role in boosting your business. They are
Speed PPC at http://www.speedppc.com/cmd.php?af=674454 Overture keyword suggestion and Bid Amounts Tool by Pixelfast at http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/ ROI Calculator - CPC and ROI Calculator - CPM - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/index.html PPC BidMax- http://www.apexpacific.com/index.html Clickable in beta version : http://www.clickable.com/?gclid=CP7StNHVqY8CFQ0_agod3SZrSA
You can try whichever appeals to you.
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Monitoring Your PPC
It is not enough if you merely implement PPC. You have to monitor your results and find out whether the traffic has increased and if so, it has resulted in increase in sales etc. You can monitor your results using Google Analytics.
It will help you check your ROI for different keywords and writing the ad in different ways for same keywords. It might take some time to scale the height of success; it doesn’t matter, but you have to make sure that the performance from PPC makes an upward swing so that with proper tweaking you can get your ROI. Otherwise garnering mere traffic through PPC but with poor ROI will prove to be a very costly affair.
Case study
The following case study shows how effective implementation of PPC combined with good designing and keyword optimization increased their leads from 0. 62% to 5.34% and still further.
Compass Security’s Website Success
Compass Security Services, Inc., a NY State licensed watch, guard & patrol agency, wanted to improve their business. Since their website was highly outdated, they didn’t have any search engine rankings. Moreover their site had few call-to-action statements and as a result, they received only a small amount of leads.
Since their existing website did not present a professional appearance, nor capture leads, a professional approach was required to optimize the site.
Hence Prime Visibility was consulted and they implemented the following things for Compass Guard.
They built a new website for Compass Guard. They designed a new professional looking logo for the company and thus implemented the process of branding the company. They developed 1 2 pages of content each containing strong call-to-action message. After the site was ready, they implemented a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. Several weeks later, they commenced the second stage of copywriting that contained 15 more pages of optimized content. They then integrated the additional pages into the website.
The website was designed and was analyzed for 6 full months till august 2005 for the purpose of study.
The findings were excellent. Visits to the site in August of 2005 were significantly higher than the initial results and Page Views were 79.4% higher overall. Also, the “call to action” text improved the traffic with 278 visitors clicking on the “Contact Us” page throughout the month of August.
The Google AdWords PPC campaign also yielded positive results. The keywords that had performed best were the ones that had “NY” or “New York” as their target area. Hence the ads were effective in transforming the searchers into client leads.
As a result the conversion rate for the Google PPC campaign increased from .62% to 5.34%, and once again up to 9.47% in August.
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Redesigning, optimizing the site with SEO rich content and implementing effective PPC campaign made Compass Guard realize its business goals.
They realized dozens of leads per week from scratch. The leads included both job seekers and agencies looking to contact compass guard for private security.
Thus Compass Guard’s seeking Prime Visibility to better their performance turned out to be a very victorious endeavor.
Cool Tip
Make sure your landing page is designed with visitors in mind so that it offers easy navigations to whatever you want to promote.
Check List
Include your keywords in your Ad Give a unique headline Mention whatever you want to promote Include a call for action
Activities
Explain what ‘PPC’ is all about! List the advantages of PPC. Choose ideal key words for your website (even if you don’t have
one, Google Adwords lets you create one freely) Write an effective Google Ad for your website to promote your product / service Monitor your PPC and present your results.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. It is easier to implement one of the 7Ps of marketing, namely ‘Persuasion’. 2. PPC enables you to achieve your results irrespective of whether you have implemented SEO or not. 3. One is always assured of high ROI through PPC. 4. It is wise to use abbreviations and be simple and direct in your approach. 5. Visit the URL, www.xyz.com is an example for ‘Call for action’
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. True 3. False 4. False 5. False
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3.3 Analyzing SEM
Goal and Objectives
To Perform Analysis of PPC Adwords
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand what ‘Google Analytics’ is meant for Insert the code of ‘Google Analytics’ to analyze the results of your web pages Understand what is meant by ‘goal’ and ‘funnel’ Insert the path for ‘funnel’ and study its effectiveness Understand what is meant by ‘contextual advertising’
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Google Analytics
Google Analytics is helpful in finding where your visitors are coming from and how they interact with your website.
The first step in using Google Analytics is to create a Google Account by visiting the following webpage http://www.google.com/analytics.
Google Analytics can import and track cost data from Google AdWords if your AdWords and Analytics accounts are linked. Hence follow the instructions on the Analytics tab to link your Google Adwords account.
After configuring your profile you can
Instruct the Google Analytics to ignore dynamic sessions and not count them as unique pages. Enable it (Google Analytics) to provide ecommerce analysis report
Make sure you add the code to each and every page of your website, as Google Analytics will perform the analysis on pages where the code is inserted.
The code will appear as shown below
Only thing is, you have to replace xxxx with your account number.The code has to be inserted on immediately before the
tag of each page you are planning to track.
Once you've finished this step, Google Analytics will begin collecting traffic data on all your web pages where the code is inserted. You'll be able to get the data in your reports within 24 hours.
Creating goals and funnels
If your website is designed to drive prospects to a particular page, such as a purchase or email newsletter signup page, you can track the number of successful conversions using the concepts of goals and funnels in Google Analytics.
A goal is a website page a visitor reaches once she or he has made a transaction or completed another desired action, such as a registration or download. A funnel represents the path that you expect visitors to take in order to reach the goal. Defining these pages allows you to see how frequently visitors visit or abandon goals (and where they go instead) and the value of it.
Each profile can have up to 4 goals, with a defined funnel for each.
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To set up goals and funnels:
To set up Goal by following steps:
1. From the Analytics Settings page, select the profile for which you will be creating goals and click Edit. 2. Select one of the 4 goal slots available for that profile and click Edit. 3. Enter the Goal URL 4. Add a Goal name as it should appear in your Google Analytics account. 5. Turn the goal On if you want it to be active
To set up Funnel by following these steps:
1. Enter the URL of the first page of your funnel path. This page must be common to all users working their way towards your Goal. 2. Enter a Name for this step. 3. If this step is a Required step in the conversion process, select the checkbox to the right of the step otherwise leave it unchecked. 4. Continue entering funnel path until your funnel has been completely defined. You may enter up to 10 steps, or as few as 2 or 3 steps or even single step.
Completion of these steps enables you to study the analysis performed by Google.
Hints to remember
Do not go for main keywords if there are too heavy competition Use the relevant words that visitors might use to search for your product / service and make sure that you use them in your web pages. If you have more than one product to offer, then create separate ads for them and separate micro sites rather than sending all visitors to your main website page with complicated navigations that might make the visitors leave your website. In micro sites, where visitors land, convey whatever information you want to convey directly without beating around the bush as nobody has more time to spare to do things that can be done in few minutes.
Contextual Advertising
As Google’s Adwords Advertiser, you can choose sites from Google’s Content Network, or let Google pick up the relevant sites for you and place your ad on their webpages.
Site targeting is an AdWords feature that lets you select explicit sites in the content network to display your ads. With site targeting, you can:
Select sites based on your keywords, audience demographics, or precise URLs. Decide to show your ads on an entire web site, a section of the site, or just on few pages.
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The Google content network covers over 75% of unique internet users in more than 20 languages and over 100 countries. Hence, if you advertise on both the Google search network and the Google content network, you have the potential to reach 75% of internet users on Earth
Implement AIDS (Attention, Interest, Desire, Sale)
Attention : You can use text, image, flash or video to promote your product.
Interest : Your ad appears on sites which are highly relevant to your keywords that are used to promote your site. Hence visitors will be interested in visiting your site as they are already interested in the keywords you have used in ad to promote your product/service. Therefore, arouse their interest by mentioning the unique nature of your product.
Desire : Highlight the benefits they get out of your product / service. This way, you can easily convert the visitors to customers.
Sale : Include action calls like ‘Get Your Bonus Now’ or ‘Click Here’ etc as they will entice the visitor’s to close the deal.
Price of Adwords
With Google Adwords you can always control the price you pay for them. For contextually – targeted ads and for site-targeted ads you can choose the options of CPC (cost -per click) or CPM (cost-per thousand impression) in any order you like. You can spell out the highest amount you'd like to spend per day for each campaign. It is entirely up to you. After initial tweaking of Adwords, you can increase the bid and can ensure your success in promoting your business.
I have briefly introduced the concept and explained how to go about it. But this is not be all and end all of Adwords. It is a science, and one has to workout carefully so that you don’t burn your fingers but succeed in promoting your business.
Case Study
The following case study illustrates how Google Analytics helped improve the performance of BuildDirect in getting targeted traffic to its website
Increased Sales of BuildDirect using Google Analytics.
Introduction
BuildDirect was Founded in 1999, and based in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. It purchases products directly from manufacturers and sells them to buyers anywhere in the world. It had become the world's leading online merchant wholesaler and specialty retailer of building products.
It does business in 40 countries on in six continents with a portfolio of products ranging from roofing to countertops. In 2004, it was ranked as the second fastest growing company in Canada by Profit magazine. BuildDirect being a virtual organization credits much of its success to savoir-faire use of online marketing and advertising.
Challenge
Though the company was doing well, the management wanted to improve the efficiency of online spending since the marketing budget was nearly $1 million per quarter in the first years of operation.
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BuildDirect adopted the following marketing mix that consisted of combination of
The challenge was to identify which tactics yielded better results and which did not through better tracking.
Hence in 2004, they went in for Google Analytics to replace an existing analytics package. Within few months, they identified the following results.
Email marketing was not yielding expected results Money spent on third-tier search engines was not worth investing since conversion of traffic to clicks was poor.
Since BuildDirect identified customer demographics using Google Analytics, they were able to design specific creative ads tailored to their buyers.
Results
BuildDirect by focusing advertising spending on the top search engines realized increase in conversions by 37% even while reducing its overall search engine marketing budget by 33 percent.
From then onwards the company has started increasing its search ad spend on high-converting sources, and continues to maintain very strong conversion rates.
Better results from search advertising
Finally based on Google Analytics report data, BuildDirect was able to optimize its website design. BuildDirect found that they were almost losing half their customers on the three-stage process between cart and payment confirmation. Hence they reduced the process to one step. Thus by simplifying payment process to a single step, they witnessed an increase in sample orders by 100 percent and expected that to contribute a noteworthy revenue increase within few months.
Thus Google Analytics has had a huge positive impact on BuildDirect’s business
Cool Tip
Spend on Marketing and not on Analytics as Google Analytics enables you to track all your campaigns freely.
Check Points
Paste the analytics code in all pages you want to be tracked. Compare all your ads to find out the most effective one. Implement Funnel Visualization to identify which pages result in lost conversions.
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Activities
What is meant by ‘Google Analytics’ Insert the code of ‘Google Analytics’ to analyze the results of your web pages
Explain what is meant by ‘goal’ and ‘funnel’ For your website, Insert the path for ‘funnel’ and study its effectiveness Explain what is meant by ‘contextual advertising’
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. While implementing Google Analytics, you cannot ignore dynamic sessions and hence have to count them as unique pages. 2. It is better to create separate ads for different products and separate micro sites for them rather than sending all visitors to main website page. 3. AIDS in SEM stand for (Attention, Income, Desire, Sale) 4. Micro sites are different from your landing pages. 5. The Google content network covers over 75% of unique internet users in more than 20 languages and over 100 countries.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. True 3. False 4. False 5. True
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3.4 Promoting Website through Web 2.0 Gadgets and Widgets
Goal and Objectives
Promoting your website through Web 2.0 Gadgets and Widgets
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Identify the characteristics of Web 2.0 List the platforms that offer these characteristics List their role in Search Engine Optimization Increase your visibility through these tools Mention what ‘widget’ is List various widgets available for websites Identify the one suitable for promoting your business Create a widget for your website Include it in the website to promote your business
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Identifying characteristics of Web 2.0
To understand the characteristics of Web 2.0, one has to recollect the existence of Web 1.0 which contained content with text and images with the absence of video and the concept of RSS (Rich Site Summary). The difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 mainly comes from the usage of net. The concept of Web 2.0 leads to social phenomenon where participation from team/people plays an important role.
The concept that the output from more participation is always greater than from a single individual is made use of in Web 2.0. Hence this principle leads to participation age where people tend to share their knowledge that would result in better research work more useful to humanity. Thus the main principle of Web 2.0 leads to more interaction among participants through interfaces that integrate humans and machines.
This principle of collective intelligence has resulted in multifold increase in the usage of web from across the continents confirming the concept of Global Village.
Characteristics of Web 2.0
Thus Web 2.0 offers an easy to use, involvement encouraging interface that is completely accessible from browsers. AJAX plays a major role in Web 2.0 as it allows the developers to develop rich internet applications that can be updated swiftly without requiring the reloading of entire web page. It also encourages sharing of web content through RSS, an XML formatting.
RSS known as ‘Live Web’ allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time when that page changes. Hence if you enable your visitors to include RSS button of your website then any changes or updates you create can easily be notified.
You can also introduce Digg and Technorati RSS buttons so that the visitors can send your information to these feeds which in turn are picked by millions of people.
Web 2.0 that encourages collective participation has extended its wings to marketing too. Since the principle of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence, the information one places there i.e. on web should be authentic, informative and useful to people.
In Web 1.0 world, Internet marketing was treated like other marketing channels. One could execute a marketing plan targeting audience, by choosing appropriate channels to get the message out: Print ads, radio and TV spots, banners, posters, newsletters, direct mail. Internet banner ads, 2D, 3D text ads, and online press kits were treated as additional channels.
With Web 2.0, one has to consider not only the new means of reaching our online audience but also explore the new nature of the social Web. Many people have started Weblogs and others are dabbling with social bookmarking, social media tools such as wikis, podcasting, videocasting, photo sharing sites and so on.
In traditional marketing, the pyramid structure would be followed when the entire marketing message is delivered by a PR person. With Web 2.0 the whole scenario gets inverted with participation from peers, prospects etc.
Web Marketing will continue to follow the trend of Web 2.0, thereby increasing the participation from visitors. Therefore it will be lot easier for your visitors if you provide RSS buttons on your website, so that they can easily subscribe and spread the message.
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Some executives are creating profiles in MySpace and Facebook, and are appearing in virtual worlds like Second Life which attracts huge crowd these days.
Marketing via Web 2.0
There are quite a few types to promote your business using Web 2.0. Let us see how each one of them can be exploited to promote your business.
Social Book Marking
Social Book Marking is like maintaining an online personal reference work that you are willing to share with others. It is designed around the perception that the browsing practice can be heightened when web users can share tags and favorites effortlessly through the Web.
Flickr, Wikipedia, Ning and del.icio.us are some examples for social book marking through tagging that enable you to index the content.
The following URL provides the list of social bookmark services for which you can create bookmarks. http://www.toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks/
Hence if you provide the buttons of certain book marking sites like del.icio.us, Flickr etc, on your webpage then you definitely increase the chance of your visibility as your content will be indexed and tagged and will appear for search when these tagged items are searched for.
Wikipedia is one of finest examples of applications of Web 2.0 which stresses the importance of participation from visitors. It serves as a standing example of web 2.0 as it is written collaboratively by volunteers all over the world.
Let us see what role it plays in SEM. Wikipedia is daily visited by millions of viewers and invariably comes in first page for most of the keywords you type in Search Engines. Hence an inclusion about your site in Wikipedia will go a long way in creating awareness about your product /service.
Of course Wikipedia is edited by volunteers and they follow a general rule that you should not advertise your product. Or in other words, whatever you say can be informative and truthful but should not sound like using it for advertising your product/service.
You can visit the following web page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM) to see how IBM has presented the facts about their organization.
Similarly you can visit the following websites to get an idea about how to include your website in Wikipedia with the sole purpose of providing information to viewers.
Thus as web 2.0 plays an important role spreading information, it helps you create an awareness of your product / service.
Search Engine Wiki
At the time of writing this book there is an exclusive Wiki known as Search Engine Wiki in beta stage dedicated to search engines and search engine marketing.
It offers a collaborative online library of search engine marketing resources that is constantly updated and evolving. It is owned by Jordan Consulting Group and is managed by Search Engine College staff and community volunteer editors.
Hence, with the advent of Web 2.0, social searching has become the latest innovation in the search engine industry. With the emergence of concepts like social book marking, users are equipped to interact with the Search Engines and promote what they feel are the relevant results for particular category. This is a user based method as opposed to the traditional webmaster based technique.
Social Q&A Sites:
The following are some social Q and A sites. If you feel you are an expert or authority in some field, then feel free to offer answers in these sites with a link to your webpage. This will improve your credibility among online community.
Yahoo Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com/) Google Answers (http://answers.google.com/answers/ ) http://www.answerbag.com http://www.wondir.com
What is a Widget?
Let me start with explaining what a ‘widget’ actually does?
According to wikipedia, “a widget is a small application that runs on your desktop or in a web page. Widgets enrich your desktop or web pages with functionality, useful information and a lot of fun!”
Let us see, how widgets are going to help you in your promotional efforts through iMarketing! Actually there are 2 major types of widgets : desktop widgets and the web widgets.
The desktop widgets are small applications that run on your desktop and generarlly demand that you download and install an engine in order to run them. The web widgets are sections of code that can be inserted in any Web page or pages that play a major role in promoting your business.
For example, there is this ‘book marking widget’ (shown below) that enables your visitor to bookmark your website and works with various book marking services.
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Fig 12 : Bookmarking Widget
The following hyperlink widgetbox enables you to add any widget you like to add to your website or blog to promote your business.
Let me show, how to add this Web 2.0 Blog widget on your web page.
The following figure, shows the Web 2.0 with the theme pink selected for Headlines only. You can choose any color you want and any option, such as headlines alone or with articles. You can check the checkbox if you want images to be shown. The ‘preview’ shows how the widget appears on your webpage.
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Fig 13 : Web 2.0 (Widget) 1
Now click the button, ‘Get Widget’ and the ‘popup’ comes with various alternatives.
Get (Selecting) ‘widget Code’ will enable you to get the widget for your webpage. For other options you have to simply follow the instructions to install them on your respective blog.
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Fig 14 : Various options shown to install the widget
So far I have explained how to install a widget that already has been developed. But if you want to go one step ahead and develop a widget, then do ahead and follow the instructions given below to develop one on your own.
In the following URL, click, ‘Submit A Widget’ and follow the instructions given there to develop a widget of your own. http://www.widgetbox.com/
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Fig 15 : Developing a new widget
Role of widget in promoting your business
These widgets whether it is book marking type or any other thing, will enable your visitors to bookmark your web page or blog under specific tags so that when others look for those terms, your visibility automatically gets enhanced.
Case Study
The following case study clearly explains how the presence of widget on website increases and retains targeted traffic thus increasing the chance of converting the prospects to customers.
Role of Widgets (CLIQ) in SEO
CLIQ is a widget designed to help in cross-merchandising content between blogs. That is, a group of blog owners can join together and agree to participate in a CLIQ. To get best results, participating blogs should be focused on similar topics such as online marketing, online education etc
The originating blog post in blogs are then presented by CLIQ with related posts from members participating in it. In order to perform this, CLIQ analyzes content in each post to match it with related, contextually-relevant blog posts.
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The content author can also exercise control to decide what posts are to be featured or not.
Driving Relevant Traffic
Since more exposure for content means more readers for the publishers, the possibility of getting targeted audience increases.
It is a well known fact that new blog often gets more traffic while the older one goes to archive. Hence it is not likely that someone will go way back to see what was written long back then.
CLIQ plays an important role in offering fresh exposure to relevant posts from the previous months. This keeps the entire catalog of good posts open and available to others and hence might bring in additional traffic to your posts.
For blog publishers, this provides great content from other bloggers on their sites thus offering a blog roll. Even though it might make the visitor go to another site, if your site has a value then the visitor will definitely come back to your site.
Participating Blogs
In this case, 3 blogs participated. They are
The Site is Dead, Optimize & Prophesize, and gr.otto.
All three blogs focused on the behavioral aspects of Internet marketing strategy.
Increased Page Views, Traffic, Engagement
During the test period overall page views across the entire CLIQ were increased by 14 percent. The blog that gained the least traffic witnessed a 9 percent increase in traffic, while the blog that gained most got an additional 17 percent in traffic. Most importantly, all participants got increase in page views.
The following results were observed from their study.
It was observed that blog visitors from CLIQ spent more than 150 percent more time on site compared to other visitors to the blog. It was also observed that CLIQ-referred visitors had a 55 percent lower drop-off rate compared to other visitors to the blogs.
Summary
Thus CLIQ succeeded in its goals of offering increased traffic and value to the participants, the authors, and visitors to each of the blogs.
Cool Tip
Include Digg or Delicious button to enable your visitors to bookmark your website in social media.
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Check List
Make sure you have included the RSS button so that your visitors can subscribe to it Make sure that you include some feeds relevant to your keywords for that web page so that your web page becomes dynamic. Make sure that you include an interactive widget so that the visitors feel they are playing an active role in promoting your business.
Activities
Identify the characteristics of Web 2.0 List the platforms that offer these characteristics
List their role in Search Engine Marketing Increase your visibility through these tools Mention what ‘widget’ is List various widgets available for websites Identify the one suitable for promoting your business Create a widget for your website Include it in the website to promote your business
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. RSS stand for Rich Site Summary 2. Ning is an example for social book marking site 3. Widget is a small application that runs only in a web page enhancing it with functionality, useful information and a lot of fun!” 4. RSS is known as ‘live web’ 5. Marketing through Web 2.0 follows a Pyramid Model
------“The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success.” Irving Berlin
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4.1 Article Writing
Goal and objectives
Promoting Your Business through Article Writing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
List the dos and don’ts of writing an effective article. List the advantages of writing an effective article. Write an article to promote your business. Submit your article to Article Directories. Show proof of success.
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Introduction
Everyone knows content is king and search engines love good quality content. Hence why not write a good article to promote your business? Yes, that’s what I am going to teach you now. I am now going to mention the rules you have to follow while promoting your website through articles. Since content is king, flooding Search Engines with good quality articles will go a long way in promoting your business. When you write an article make sure it is written with probable keywords, your visitors might use to search for your product or service in Search Engines. But at the same time ensure that your keyword density doesn’t exceed 3 to 3.5 % of your total words on the web page. When you submit your article to article directories, make sure that you submit them under right category and also ensure that you don’t submit your article to more than one category. Again search their database to confirm that there are no articles already written for that particular category with the same concept chosen by you. Adhere to the length of article or number of words suggested by the article directories. Too small or too lengthy an article will neither be appreciated nor accepted in their directories. Finally write an original article or get it done from professional writers and avoid plagiarizing as that will be condemned by all article directories and you will face the wrath of person whose writing you have plagiarized. At the end of the article, provide a link to your website where you promote your product/service.
Listing the advantages of Promoting Your Website through Article Writing
Some of the article directories give exposure to thousands of online and offline publishers and some of them might request you to republish your article. When you agree to let them do it, your name and link to your site will also be published. This results in increased link popularity to your site. It helps you stay in contact with your customers and helps you promote your existing business. These article directories are visited by millions of people every month, hence is spidered by Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. That means your article and the links are spidered too and this will go a long way in improving your position in Search Engines. When you provide useful, good, truthful information about your product, the visitors will have faith in you and start trusting you and might try your product / service. If your product or service really speaks of what you advertise about them, then you have gained a customer. Finally article marketing sends quality visitors to your website as they are already interested in what you have written and know about you. Thus you get a targeted audience who already have faith in you or have been inspired by you.
Writing an article to promote your business Now that you know the dos and don’ts of article writing, you can now go ahead and start writing the article.
First do a thorough research about what you want to write. Whatever you want to write be it related to promoting your business or any other article, express clearly how it would be useful to viewers,
Next use appropriate keywords and make it search engine friendly. You can use any keyword suggestion tool and get relevant keywords for the main theme of your article.
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Then use these keywords in your article in appropriate places and make it highly informative and search engine friendly. Provide hyperlinks to those keywords pointing them to your webpage that promotes your product / service.
Next visit some of the article directories like EzineArticles.com, Article Web Directory or any other directory and find out the length of the article they expect you to submit and then restrict the length of your article to be the same as the one suggested by them.
If you are short of time and do not know how to go about it then you can go to the following websites like www.guru.com http://www.writing4web.com/ www.elance.com/writing and after registering yourself in the websites, you can seek the help of professional writers to write the articles for you. They can write good effective articles for few dollars and then you can use them for promoting your business.
Promoting your website through article How will you promote your website through article? At the end of the article in the resource section, please provide the brief details of your website with a link to your website. That’s all; you have finished writing an effective article by yourself or got it written by a professional writer. Next thing you have to do is submitting it to article directories.
Submitting the Article to Article Directories
I came across Martin’s Personal Article Directory List, when Googled the search term ‘Article Directory List’. He has made a very good collection of over 450 article directories and you can access them from the following URL. http://www.article99.com/ezine-article-directories/
He has classified them according to alphabetical order and also according to whether registration is required or not. You can pick up the directories by any way as you like and then submit your articles to them. You can submit your articles either manually or by using article directory submission softwares. Some of the article directory submission softwares are given below.
Thus you can submit your article to various directories either manually or by using submission softwares so that when it is picked by other sites, your link also gets picked and visited by potential customers as they visit your page after being satisfied / influenced / convinced by your article.
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Case Study
The following case study illustrates how through article writing helped SMC Data Systems achieve the status of the “Distribution Industry Expert,”
Technology Expert Acquiring “Distribution Industry Expert” Status through Article Promotion
SMC Data Systems was founded by Dan Kaplan in 1980 and since they had been providing excellent customer service, did not have to worry about acquiring new clients. But after the Y2K issues were resolved and the emergence of outsourcing low cost software and services to Far East, the situation drastically changed.
The outsourcing trend provided warning bells to computer industry after the gainful 90s and forced SMC Data Systems to look for greener pastures.
Since most of Kaplan’s contacts in the corporate world were forced into early retirement, his source of referrals had dried up.
Kaplan was forced to change his business model to improve his business. Hence he started promoting his business through article writing and began to work with various PR firms that promised great things but delivered little. Though Kaplan got better results by publishing articles in small publications, he could not realize his target.
Hence he engaged PR LEADS Article Marketing Experts
As a result of the PR LEADS Article Marketing Experts’ attempts, Kaplan’s articles were made available in online publications and major websites, for instance:
About.com, (one of the top 50 sites on the Net today) American Venture Magazine CEO Online EMarketing Association Sideroad.com Workz.com Hundreds of other websites and ezines
This publicity had offered him a surge of new business opportunities making 2006 the best year in his 26 years in business.
After his success through article writing, Kaplan emailed the publishing links to his business contacts and IBM representatives. This helped him become one of the top IBM resellers in the country and he achieved the status of the “Distribution Industry Expert,” who could be counted as the “trusted advisor.”
Cool Tip
Write an article that is relevant to your business.
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Check Points
Fill your article with keywords Write the article keeping the audience in mind, so that it is really informative. At the end of article, mention about your company with a hyperlink to it.
Activities
List the do’s and don’ts of writing an effective article List the advantages of promoting your website through article writing
Write an article to promote your website and submit them to various article directories either manually or using directory submission softwares. Present your results in the format given below.
Title of your article : ------
Main keywords used in your article : ------URL of
your webpage where the article is published : ------
------
List the directories, where you have submitted your article
1.
2.
3
------
------
If you have submitted your article using submission software, then mention the
Software used to submit the article : ------
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. When you submit your article to article directories you can submit it to more than one category. 2. You get targeted audience through article marketing. 3. Including a hyperlink in article must be avoided as some of the directories do not accept hyperlinks within the article. 4. It is better to avoid java script as some of the submission directories accept basic html but not java script.
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5. It is better to avoid affiliate links in the article as some of the directories do not permit you to publish them.
Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. True 3. True 4. True 5. True
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4.2 Press Release
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Goal and Objectives
To promote your business through Press Release (PR)
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
List the essentials of PR List the advantages of PR Write an effective PR List the websites that will help you publish PR Obtain additional benefits of implementing PR distribution
When to release PR?
First, you should know when it is appropriate to issue a news release. A press release can be given when you start a new enterprise, open a new branch; win an award; launch a new product or service; update an existing one, sponsor an event for social cause; or any other such
101 happening. So in such cases you can go for issuing a press release as it has the following advantages. You may get noticed by media. Since the possibility of getting noticed by media is there, it really is worth a try. If you get noticed by media, the number of audience who would see your information will be in millions and hence even if a fraction of them visits your web page it really is worth trying. You get targeted audience from PR. Most of the press releases are available in feeds. When these feeds are picked by news services they create greater exposure to your PR. Since people who are already aware of your product or service will be visiting your site, you get targeted prospects. You promote your brand awareness as your company’s name gets embossed in people’s memory. You get automatic website updating as PR link informs latest happenings in your company You get Improved page rank as Keywords Optimized PR helps in getting your site picked by many feeds You get targeted leads to your website that would result in increased downloads or sales You save lot of money needed to purchase an advertising spot on press pages.
Writing an Effective PR We have already seen how note worthy it is to issue a press release. Hence you should make it catchy so that it attracts the attention of media. You should use 8 1/2": x 11 ": paper with wide margin, double spaced. Use logo if you have Give an effective title, one that should make people take notice of your PR Give the essence of your message in the first sentence. Mention when you would be launching your company or new product or releasing any updates etc In the body of PR, provide additional details related to lead message and be precise, be truthful and don’t use any superlatives. Avoid excessive use of adjectives and fancy language. Optimize your content with essential keywords Provide answers to 5 Ws and How of basic theme of your PR. Highlight the benefits rather than the features of your product / service to the customers. Finally conclude with three # symbols, centered directly underneath the last line of the release as they indicate the end of a press release.
You can visit the following URLs to get glimpse of sample PRs. http://www.lunareclipse.net/cspressr.htm http://www.publicityinsider.com/release.asp http://www.press-release-writing.com/sample-press-release.htm
Listing the websites that will help you publish PR
Electronic News Distribution Services:
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The 2 most popular distribution services for electronic press releases are PRWeb and
PRLeap.
The following list provides the Press Release Distribution Sites
Idea Marketers have recently added a Press Release service that is available at http://www.ideamarketers.com/pr.cfm
To top what all I have said so far, PRWeb is offering the following Web 2.0 visibility tools.
URL Shortening Services - It doesn’t merely shorten the URL but offers permanent redirection. PRWebPhotowire.com - Allows users to upload high resolution photos and images and offers gainful (free) option to expensive wire services and news organizations that charge exorbitant fees to link hi-resolution images to news stories. RSSPad.com - Allows users to create RSS feeds without a blog PRWebPodcast.com - Features recorded interviews about press releases submitted by PRWeb users.
Case Study
Role of PRWeb in Boosting Search Rankings of ResortQuest
Problem to be addressed:
ResortQuest, is one of the leading vacation rental management and resort real estate companies, that offers a one stop resource for North America’s premier resort destinations.
Soon ResortQuest realized that only very few people are aware of its vacation rental program professionally managed by it and realized that it is due to poor visibility in search engines where many of their prospects look for vacations.
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Resort Quest’s Online Marketing Manager, realized the importance of link building and hence started to use PRWeb on a small scale initially. After few press releases with emphasis in specific key words they witnessed an increase in traffic to their site.
Hence ResortQuest tried few more press releases with other specific keywords and observed an increase in search rankings for those keywords.
The search engines recognized the links in the press releases instantaneously as the landing pages were highly relevant to specific keywords that users would try to look for vacations.
As a result, these pages surged forward to the top of the search results for the prospective customers when they began their search for a vacation.
ResortQuest has its wings spread to 20 different locations from Destin, Florida to Whistler, British Columbia. After seeing huge success with their initial press releases, ResortQuest began issuing a minimum of two press releases per month for each of their location.
The Results:
The following table shows the dramatic improvements ResortQuest.com achieved from October 2006 against March, 2007:
Google Yahoo! KEYWORDS Now Ranked From Now Ranked From breckenridge vacation rentals 3 Not Ranked 2 11 charleston vacation rentals 6 Not Ranked 3 Not Ranked destin beach vacation rentals 7 Not Ranked 6 Not Ranked fort walton beach vacation rentals 8 Not Ranked 5 Not Ranked isle of palms vacation rentals 6 Not Ranked 2 Not Ranked keystone vacation rentals 5 11 2 8 kiawah vacation rentals 9 Not Ranked 2 Not Ranked lido key vacation rentals 7 Not Ranked 4 Not Ranked outer banks vacation rentals 8 12 11 Not Ranked seabrook island vacation rentals 5 Not Ranked 8 Not Ranked st simons island vacation rentals 5 Not Ranked 4 Not Ranked sun valley vacation rentals 2 2 1 9
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telluride vacation rentals 9 Not Ranked 10 Not Ranked wild dunes vacation rentals 6 Not Ranked 10 Not Ranked
This table shows where the location-specific page at ResortQuest.com is ranked with its respective keywords in March 2007 compared to its ranking in October, 2006 Source :. http://www.prweb.com/success_resortquest.php?skin=default
Thus in less than 6 months, ResortQuest tremendously improved its rankings for its web pages in search engines and says it owes it to PR Web as it has played an important role in improving its visibility in search engines.
The press releases were not written directly to promote ResortQuest, but rather they were about news and events related to specific destinations. The following examples illustrate the point mentioned above.
“Spring Beer Festival in Breckenridge, Colorado,” “Family Circle Cup Tennis in Charleston,” and “Hilton Head’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.”
Thus ResortQuest acknowledged its position of the top 5 rankings with 100s of quality keywords to its relationship with PRWeb.
Cool Tip
Compliment your PR with other online marketing strategies suggested by
them.
Checklist
Make sure you have included the following things in your Press Release
Company Logo, Name, Address, Phone Number, Web Address PRESS RELEASE in all caps Press Release date TITLE in BOLD/CAPS BODY- containing Date/City of launch of your company or product informing 5Ws and H about it Summary at the end in few lines Contact Person's Name and his email id.
Finally send positive feedback such as how your event got promoted, etc to the editor who published your PR
Activities
Implement the following activities. List the essentials of launching a PR List the advantages of PR Write an effective PR List the websites that will help you publish PR
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Launch your PR Give the details of launching your PR (title, main theme of PR, where it is submitted etc)
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. You should start strong with your headlines and first paragraph giving the main message.
2. PR need not be illustrative.
3. It is better to write PR in active voice than in passive voice.
4. You can launch a PR when something excites you
5. Using strong verbs ensures that your PR is widely read
Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True
2. False
3. True
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4. False (You can launch only when it is newsworthy)
5. True
4.3 Blogs
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Goal and Objectives
Promoting your website through Blogs
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand what is meant by a blog Write the essentials in blog to promote your business List the web pages that enable you to create blogs Tag and Ping the blogs Submit your blogs to blog directories Create Micro-Blogs Implement Citizen Journalism through Blogs
Understanding what is meant by a blog
Blog is an online diary where you share your experiences using text, images. You can also share music leading to MP3 blog and can broadcast your audio and video leading to podcasting and vodcasting about which we shall see later on.
According to wikipedia as of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking nearly more than 106 million blogs
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Writing the essentials in blog to promote your business
As I have already said, it is an online diary and hence you can create a blog to air your personal views or express your opinions on professional matters related to your career.
You can really express your views on matters on which you seem to have expertise and if it is really good, people will definitely give their feedback by posting their views in guest book.
Thus blogging has promoted independent journalism as it enables you to publish your views and share it with others.
But here your aim should be to promote your business and hence you can blog on subjects related to your product or service and provide a hyperlink to your blog from your website and promote your product / service through it. The following are useful tips one should remember while blogging for business purposes. Do a thorough research about other blogs in your field and make a list of what you like and what you don’t.
Then develop content for your blog based on above analysis. Do not make it very short or too lengthy.
Create RSS feeds for newsreader syndication
Get the URL address and site name in such a way that it is related to your product / service. For example if you are an Elearning Consultant, then get a blog URL as http://www.elearningconsultant.blogspot.com (for blogger) and give the title as ELearning Consultant or something similar.
Don't mix-up your blog with a lot of ads and other diversions -- people mostly want to know what they come to look for and hence provide an interface that is easy for navigation
Make it really informative to audience by providing information that is really true and useful to them.
If you have to make a comparative analysis of other products related to yours, then make an objective, professional analysis and don’t use this as a platform to air your subjective opinions.
Listing the web pages that enable you to create blogs
Now that I have told you, what a blog is about and what you can write to promote your business I’ll tell you what are the various services that enable you to write one. The easiest way to start blogging is to register yourself in www.blogger.com and as they say you can start blogging in 3 steps. Others in the list are
Drupal
Livejournal movable type msn spaces
Typepad
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Vox
Wordpress
Xanga
Another important concept that has emerged recently and has become very powerful is group blogging, where many people post their opinions.
Some of the more popular and successful group blogs are:
Blogcritics
BoingBoing
Corante
itvidya
Lockergnome
The Command Post
The Volokh Conspiracy
Weblogs Inc.
Worldchanging
Now after having successfully created the blog, give its title with keywords your visitors might use to look for your product or service if possible, and tag them as I have suggested below, before submitting them to blog directories and blog Search Engines.
Tagging and Pinging
Tagging
Let me show how to add tags to your blogs. It will definitely increase your visibility as it improves the chance of your blog getting picked by Technorati and other blog Search Engines.
The following figure explains the screenshot of one of my blogs titled ‘FOSS for HE- Patent issue w.r.t LMS’ in HTML mode.
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Fig 16 : Dashboard of blog in html mode
The last 4 lines in the blog indicate the codes for adding tags namely FOSS, Higher
Now, How to add the tags for your keywords in your blog? It is very simple.
Just consider the code
XXXXXXX And in above code replace XXXXXXX in both the places with your tag . That’s all! Click Preview and click Publish Post.
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Your blog gets published with relevant tags that increases the possibility of being viewed by more visitors, as when the visitors type these tags, your blog has more chance of getting picked and published.
The following figure illustrates the above blog as web page with above tags being added as shown in the figure.
Figure 17 : Blog with Tags 1
Now, Let me show how to ping your blog.
Pinging is just informing other blog directories and blog SEs that you have added something new to your blog or you have updated your blog. Or in other words you are informing the weblog tracking sites that you have added some new information to your blog and they can pick them up. The blog search engines then pick up the news and as a result you can see your blog witnessing increased traffic.
Ping your blog to following URLs to witness a definite increase in your traffic.
Autopinger
Blog Flux
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Blog Ping
Exefind
Google Blog Ping
Pingoat
ping.in
PingKong
Ping-o-Matic
PingMyBlog.com
Technorati
Vobbo.com Video Blog: ping
RSS for your blog can be written as follows.
For older version in blogger, you can follow the one given below
If your blog URL is www.xxxxx.blogspot.com then RSS is www.xxxxx.blogspot.com/arom.xml
For new version
The URL of beta / new blog's feed is : http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Substitute your actual blog name in place of yourblogname
Most of the other blog services automatically provide RSS feeds for your blog. You can note down that along with Blog URL.
Next step is you have to submit your blog RSS to RSS directories. Before doing that, you have to Keep your blog’s Curriculum Vitae (CV) handy.
Your blogs CV should include the following
Username
Password
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Blog name
Blog URL
Blog RSS
Blog Description
Keywords
Your email address
This will be helpful when you start submitting your blog to blog directories and Search Engines.
Submission of blogs to blog directories
The following list suggests the places where you can submit your RSS. But the main Blog Search Engines are: blogdigger, Feedster, and Technorati
Others are given below
2RSS
5 Star Blogs
About
All Headline News
Blizg
Blogazoo
Blog Advance
Blog BiB
Blog Bunch
Blog Category
Blog Clicker
BlogCritics
Blogdex
Blog Digger
BlogDir
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Blog Directory Summit
Blog Explosion
BlogFlux
BloggerFind
Bloggeries
Bloggernity
Blogion
Blog Fuse
Bloggoriffic
Bloghop
Blog Hub
Bloglines
Blog Matcher
Blog-O-Rama
BlogPulse
Blog Rankings
Blog Scholar
Blog Search Engine
Blogs by Women
Blogs Small Business
Blog Soldiers
BlogStreet
Blog Sweet
Blogtastic
Blog Top Sites
BlogTrack
BlogTree
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Blog Universe
Blogwise
Blogz
Bloogz
Blurt It!
BoingBoing
Bulkfeeds
Bulletize
Complete RSS
Choredata
Columbia Newsblaster
Contents Matter
Crayon
DayPop
Desk Feeds
Diarist
EasyRSS
EatonWeb
Every Feed
Explore Blogs
FastBuzz
Feed24
FeedBomb
Feed-Directory
Feeds 4 All
Feeds2Read
Feeds Farm
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Feed Cat
Feedmap
Feedminer
Feed Nation
Feed Park
FeedPub
Feedshot
Feedster
Finding Blog
Findory
FindRSS
Fyber Search
Geek Philospher
Genecast
GetBlogs
Globe of Blogs
Google BlogSearch
Guardian Weblog Guide
Headline Spot
Industry Blogs
Jordo Media
Kiosken
Klog News
Kmax
IceRocket
Library Weblogs
LS Blogs
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Memigo
More Over
MyMSN
My Wire Service
NewsAlert.com
News Feed Directories
News Interceptor
New Is Free
News Fire
News Knowledge
News Mob
News Net Plus
News Trawler
News Trove
NGOID
Nooked
Open Weblog Directory
Ping-O-Matic
Plazoo
Popdex
Postami
PubSub
Rate It All
RDF Ticker
Read A Blog
Red Tram
RocketInfo
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Rojo
RSSFeeds.com
RSS Feeds Directory
RSSFeed.org
RSS Knip
RSS Locator
RSS Mad
RSS Network
RSS Reader
Science Port
Scripting.com
Search 4 RSS
SHAS3
Stephen’s Web
Spurl
Step Newz
Swoogle
Syndic8
Technorati
Terrar
The Blog Resource
The Feed Directory
The House of Blogs
The Open Directory (DMOZ.org)
The Truth Laid Bear
The Vital
The Weblog Review
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Topix
We Blog A Lot
Wil’s Domain
XS News
Yahoo! or Yahoo! News
YENRA
Your Weblog Here
You can submit your blog either manually or by using RSS submission softwares. Some of the RSS submission softwares are given below.
Automatic RSS Submission Tools: RSS Submit And FeedSubmitter
Blog and RSS Directory Submitter
RSS Planter 1.0.121
Whichever way you submit, you keep your Blog CV ready and submit your blog to few directories daily and make note of, to what directories you have submitted.
The following hyperlink enables you to create RSS buttons or Chiclets for your blog which in turn will provide an opportunity for your blog visitors to add your link to their RSS preferred reader which would lead to more visitors to your blog as a sort of chain reaction.
Video Blogs
Latest trend in blogging is video blogging and one of the best sites to visit is http://videos.webpronews.com/
Micro-blogging
Micro-blogging is a fusion of social networking, text messaging and blogging.
According to wikipedia, Micro-blogging is a form of blogging where users write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group that can be chosen by the user.
These brief updates can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.
The most popular service is Twitter, and according to EDS's Next Big Thing Blog, Twitter defines itself as "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?" You can answer this question at any time using text messaging on your phone or with instant messaging (IM) or even on the Web (including your Web phone).”
How to start Micro-blogging
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Let us say you’ve read an interesting book, ‘Critical’ by Robin Cook. No doubt it is an interesting book and you want to share your views with your friends and would even want them to read. In that case, you can microblog your views through twitter and be happy of informing your friends in one go.
To start with, you can go to any one of the following URLs. https://twitter.com/signup or http://www.jaiku.com/join and register yourself freely. Depending on your cellular phone service, you may be charged for each text message you receive or send via Twitter
You can invite few of your friends once you start micro-blogging and can even add them so that they can share their views.
In times of emergencies it serves bothways as it enables the sufferer to inform others about the grieviences so that whoever wants to help can interact and decide how they can help or rescue someone suffering from natural or artificial disaster.
Though a phone with a text messaging service is not necessary to do micro-blogging, would be more useful if you have one.
What I have said so far is for general purpose. You can now indulge in microblogging to announce any new features if you have added to your product or if you want to do any marketing survey etc as you can easily inform your circle of friends through it.
Case Study
Modern Capri Promoting its business through Blog
The Mercury Capri convertible of 1991 to 1994 was reminiscent of the classic British open sports cars of the 1970's. Mercury Capri convertible seated four and was assembled and built by Ford of Australia and then imported into the United States.
The sporty Capri convertible has a following of owners and drivers who find and restore these vintage convertibles. But finding parts to restore cars like the Capri is not an easy thing to do and can be a struggle, if you don’t get all in one go. Modern Capri Parts of Pennsylvania sells the parts of Mercury Capri and thus helps the owners of car by keeping it running. In order to Improve their ranking in search engines for specific keywords and also to improve traffic for their website to promote their business, Modern Capri Parts started a blog.
Thus Modern Capri, developed the blog informing the visitors about the design, specifications and history of the Mercury Capri convertible and in less than 2 months wirnessed an increase in business deals and traffic. Even Nike and other big and small companies have tried using blogs to promote their business.
A business blog when embedded to website will defiitely go a long way in link building, increase in traffic, inform launch of new product and ultimately to build credibility with customers. Thus the Modern Capri Parts blog by offering useful information to Capri Owners helps build links to its auto parts web site.
Inform your readers about effective usage of your product and how they can use it to avoid visiting service center often.
Check Points
Don’t forget to add tags to your blog After adding tag. Ping your blog to blog search engines Add RSS buttons so that your viewers can subscribe your blog. Embed your blog to your website to increase its index page rank
While micro-blogging remember the following things.
Remember the interest of your audience, post things that are of great interest to your group Encourage participation from your group and viewers. Respond to their queries if any immediately Turn off your phone alerts for feeds that don’t feed you.
Activities
Write the essentials of creating blog to promote your business List the web pages that enable you to create blogs Create a blog to promote your business Tag and Ping your blog
Submit your blogs to blog directories Create Micro-Blogs Provide details of your blog (Title, URL, Directories to which you have submitted, tags created etc)
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Commenting on other’s blogs improves visibility and interaction for your blog.
2. Tagging and Pinging play an important role in making your blog noticed by search
engines.
3. Twitter plays a major role in promoting your blog.
4. Use of perma links do not help you promote your blogs.
5. Without a cell phone you cannot create nor view micro-blogs
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
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1. True
2. True
3. False
4. False
5. False
4.4 Email Marketing (voice mail, video mail)
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Goal and Objectives
Promoting your website through Email Marketing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
List the Essentials of Email Marketing Implement the essentials of Email Marketing List the softwares required to implement Email Marketing Realize the importance of the role of Auto Responders List the advantages of Email Marketing Realize the importance of the role of Email Marketing using Video
Listing Essentials of Email Marketing
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The following list suggests the essentials of EMail Marketing.
Define your objectives of Email Marketing Identify your target audience Understand the concepts of sending, tracking and measuring the results of email marketing. Avoid spamming
Before implementing Email Marketing to promote your business, you have to decide for what purpose you are going to use Email Marketing. That is, whether you are going to promote a new product to existing customers or you are going to promote a new product to prospects who might become your customers or you are going to announce updates for your existing product to your existing clients or you are going to announce updates for your existing product to your prospects who might become your customers or you are going to generate new leads to promote your business
Whatever it may be you should have identified your targets. You must have a list of double-opt-in members who have agreed to receive information from you. You can obtain the list of these members by asking them to agree to receive marketing schemes from you when they try to agree to receive newsletters from you. By using this list of members, you are sure to avoid spamming and have an added advantage that you are appealing to people who are interested in your products.
Next thing is you should track and measure the success of your Email Marketing. Most of the Email Softwares will let you know the No. of Emails sent, the No. of Emails opened by people in your list and the No. of clicks performed. These results will enable you to get a fair picture for you in promoting your products.
Open-rates and Click-through rates are the two most widely used metrics to determine the success of email campaign. Open-rates will let you know the No. of people who have opened your emails and Click-through rates will let you know the No. of people who have clicked and reached your landing page, where you provide the information you want your readers to know. Whatever metrics you use, you must use it to improve your EMail Campaigns and whenever you get a feedback, you should make it a point to respond immediately as this will go a long way in turning your prospects to your customers. Next you should avoid spamming by not sending unsolicited emails to people who have not opted to receive information from you not sending irrelevant information to people who have opted to receive information from you. Because spamming is strictly prohibited in US law, when some one raises this issue you might even get the possibility of your site getting banned.
Implementing essentials of Email Marketing
Whatever business you are doing you must define the objectives of your EMail Marketing and identify the target audience for your promotion. This can be achieved either by using opt-in-list you have collected from your visitors or you can buy opt-in list from various reliable vendors. The vendors offer various categories and depending upon your Email Marketing campaign you can choose the category and buy the double opt-in lists to implement your Email Marketing in a safe mode as you totally avoid spamming.
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Writing your EMail Campaign
The ‘ From line’ should clearly indicate the brand of your company and should mention from whom it is sent.
Subject : The subject line is very important as many people will proceed only if the subject is relevant to them. Hence give an apt heading.
The first two lines of your body is very important. Just like in PR even in Email Marketing, the first two lines are very important, hence make it apt, relevant and to the point. Then proceed to inform your targets, whatever you wanted to say.
Leave your contact information, i.e provide your email id and/ or telephone No. so that they will be able to contact you if required. This would pave way for interactive Email Marketing which is the order of the day. Finally give them an option to opt out of your list if they wish.
List of softwares to implement Email Marketing
There are two ways by which you can implement the Email Marketing. They are Acquiring an EMail Marketing software Asking a hosting company to implement it for you from their server.
Of the two options, the first one is generally adopted as you can easily make sure that your list includes even your latest additions.
Affordable Email marketing systems and software by Dave Chaffey provides a detailed study for EMail Broadcast Software for EMarketing.
Role of Auto Responders
If you plan to make series of announcements then auto responders will be very useful as they let you send your emails automatically and let you broadcast your announcements too easily. With the help of Email Autoresponders you can be in the minds of your prospects often at the intervals you specify without any hassles. For example if you want to send emails at an interval of one month, then you can load the responder with n number of emails specifying when they should be sent and to whom. Any announcements you want to make, you can broadcast it to your opt-in-list through the autorespondes. Thus once you have planned your Email Marketing strategy, then you can relax and concentrate on your core business or other marketing activities as autorepsonders take care of you 24 by 7 on 365 days of the year. Most of the auto responders help you build your lists, import your lists and track your Email campaigns thus playing a major role in promoting your business through them.
Some of the most widely used autoresponders are
365SalesBot Autoresponder
AWeber Autoresponder
Email marketing Assistant
Gammadyne Mailer GetResponse
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Listing the advantages of Email Marketing
You can reach global audience at minimum cost. Compared to other forms of advertising the cost incurred for Email Marketing is quite small and the ROI is quite high. It makes communication interactive With the use of Email Autoresponders you can track your progress and can reach your customers 24 by 7 even when you are out of office. It is easy to implement and offers you to execute it with minimum resources. You target prospects who are interested in your services/products.
Email Marketing using Video
The influence of video in iMarketing is very high and its impact on SE Maximization can easily be realized by the presence of You Tube and the No. of visitors that hit the site. Similarly it has made its impact on Email Marketing too.
With Email Marketing, you have the following advantages. Personalization is achieved as one can view you. A text may take some time to be read, but when the same thing is presented by you through video, it makes understanding easier. Hence audio and video mail will definitely play an important role in the long run.
Case Study
The following case study illustrates how AAA Translation improved its business through Email Marketing by Constant Contact
AAA Translation;s Success Story through Email Marketing
AAA Translation based at St.Louis offers translation and interpretation services for organizations based anywhere in globe. It was founded by German-born Susanne Evens in 1992 and offers clients the expertise of more than 100 freelance linguists with local fluency in everything from Arabic to Zulu.
Tracking Email Opens, Clickings and Forwards
Till two years ago, Susanne kept in touch with her clients through an email newsletter sent through her personal email account. It worked, but she could not determine who was opening or reading the emails or clicking the web pages in them or whether people were forwarding them to others. Hence when Susanne found Constant Contact, she decided to take advantage of their free 60-day trial offer.
Analyzing Email Marketing
Susanne says after using Constant Contact she is able to find out which subscribers consistently open her monthly email newsletter, so that she could design her marketing campaigns specifically to those readers.
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Susanne says, she loves the way you can upload photos and create your own professional looking design so easily and finds it highly economical and effective to do business with.
Susanne sends emails on diverse topics as diverse as her clients.
She being a committed networker, uses her personal contacts too to build her business. She asks whomever she meets at networking events as well as anyone who seeks an inquiry if they would like to subscribe to the AAA email newsletter.
Result
Susanne says Constant Contact helps her strengthen AAA Translation's brand with every email she sends by offering prospects and clients with the information they need to make educated decisions about international business.
For AAA Translation, the effort has been paid off. To start with AAA Translation had 86 people on its original list and Today it has a list of over 500.
Write an effective Email Marketing related to your business to grow your list and also increase open and click-through rates. You can include a photo of you and your core team to make it more personal.
Check Points
Make sure you use a double-opt-in list for your email campaign. Like PR give an effective title and apt information in first few lines. Avoid Spam-like words that are given below Free, guarantee, credit card, sex, lottery etc Avoid all capital letters and over punctuation Say thank you with a small gift your audience will value. Be attentive to unsubscribe requests coming to your "reply to:" address and permanently remove those email addresses immediately.
Activities
1. List the Essentials of Email Marketing 2. List the softwares required to implement Email Marketing 3. List the Auto Responders 4. List the advantages of Email Marketing
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5. Implement the essentials of Email Marketing to promote your business either through email softwares or through autoresponders.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. To avoid spamming you should use double-opt-in lists
2. Email marketing is not interactive.
3. Autoresponders do not let you improve your prospects base.
4. Autoresponders enable you to send unlimited number of follow up messages at predetermined interval of time.
5. Like autoresponders, email marketing softwares do not let you track the email marketing you have implemented.
Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True
2. False
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3. False
4. True
5. False
Chapter 5 - Webvertising and iMedia
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------“If you're attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn't, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income.” Jay Abraham 5.1 Roles of Audio & Video in iMarketing
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Goal and Objectives
Promoting your product or service using audio and video
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Identify the essentials required for promoting through audio and video. Implement the essentials to promote your business through audio and video. List the advantages of Webvertising and iMarketing. Measure the effectiveness of advertisement you have implemented.
What is webvertising?
Webvertising is nothing but advertising on internet. It has some advantages. It is a fact in advertising industry that a visitor visiting a webpage will retain 10% of what he reads and 50 % of what he views on the web page. Not only that, a visitor at the most stays for only few minutes or
133 less. You have to capture his attention within that time and tell what you want to say. An audio or video presentation would be a more ideal choice than a text based ad, as the audio or video takes less time to present the same amount of data than mere text.
Here you are advertising to retain your audience, therefore, video would be a good choice to present your product or service. There is no doubt, video is going to play an important role in future, as one can realize it from the fact that Google has purchased ‘You Tube’ at a whopping $1.65 billion dollars
We have already seen how to create an effective text advertisement through Google. Since Google offers separate video searches, we shall see how to create an effective video ad on internet to promote your business.
Now we shall see what are the essentials to create an audio or video ad for promoting your business through internet. You can
Use top of ad space for ad.
Offer mini infomercial ad of short duration, lasting from 3 to 5 minutes.
The concept of promoting your business through video may require you to have a close look at the following things.
. Zeroing in on the type of online videos you require to succeed. . Production of your internet videos. . Shooting the videos in the state-of-the-art in-house video production facility, or at your office premise. . Professionally editing your online videos for a high-quality finished product.
Creating a video is not a difficult task as you imagine, but it requires a video recording device. Camcorders really serve the purpose but even your webcam can be tried to start with. The following URL http://www.fathomseo.com/webvideomarketingtips/ offers the ‘Internet Video Guide’ which you can download and view to get a better idea of developing a professional video for promoting your business.
For individuals interested in shooting your own video to promote your business the following hyperlink Making Videos, Moves and Internet Video comes as a great resource as it enables you to get a clear picture of what exactly you require to make a good video. It helps you to know about equipments you require to shoot and edit. resources for creating movies. editing and making your movie. sharing your movie.
You can also visit http://www.trafficgeyser.com to explore the possibility of wider distribution services offered by it. Listing the advantages of Webvertising in iMarketing
Webvertising
Makes communication interactive.
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Can reach global audience 24 by 7 for 365 days of the year. With broadband extension, can reach to remote corners of the world. Results in increased frequency of visitors when they revisit the site. Offers control in viewing the video ad as one can pause rewind, fast forward etc. Enables you to track the effectiveness of ad.
Submitting your video(s) to various sites
TubeMogul.com is an ideal place to upload your video file to be picked by other video sharing sites like YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo!, Revver, Metacafe, AOL Uncut Video, DailyMotion, Crackle, Imeem, StupidVideos, and Veoh. Since TubeMohul is exploring the possibility of including other video sharing sites, the list will definitely grow longer in future.
Figure 18 : Interface of tubemogul.com 1
You can sign up, it is free and if you click the button ‘Take A Tour’, you can realize how it helps in analyzing your marketing efforts through video.
Case Study
Video Clips to Produce Clickthroughs and Subscriptions
This experiment was done by ‘Marketing Experiments’ an Online Laboratory with a simple mission to discover what really works. They created a total of 28 videos varying in time from 15 seconds to 8 minutes. They introduced a 3-5 second promotion at the end of each video , pointing to a URL indicating that there exists a web page that may be interesting or significant to the viewer.
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They placed the videos on YouTube and Google Video and wherever possible provided a link on the same page as video, so that it drove traffic back to main website.
Each of the videos was in one of the following categories and was amateurish in nature:
Personal Blog (global issues, spirituality, current events)
Comedy (spoofs, skits, celebrity parody)
They purchased off-the-shelf video-editing software for a PC, started filming, and edited all of the videos themselves. The total estimated investment for this project that included 29 videos turned out to be $9,600.
To give you a sense of what they did, the links for two of the videos are given below.
The MEC Certification Video
The Ben Harper Parody Video
Both the videos were humorous, none of them included any promotional messages.
They ran the videos during August and September of that year (2006) and tracked clickthroughs to the sites and subscription sign-ups and the number of times each video was viewed.
Their results, using combined figures from all 28 videos are presented in the following table.
Using Video Clips to drive traffic and acquire subscribers August Sept 60 Day Total Views of videos 88,589 235,601 324,190 Clicks through to site 732 3,430 4,162 Clickthrough rate 0.88% 1.46% 1.28% Conversion to subscribers - - 1.49%
Inspite of the video clips not having any promotional message or content, 1.49% of viewers went on to become newsletter subscribers. In Just 60 Days, their videos were viewed 324,000 times at no cost to them.
The example I have just explained which forms part of Marketing Experiments’ experiment confirms the power of video in promoting your business.
Create an online video and place it prominently on website.
Checklist for Promoting Your Business using Video
Make sure it is short Make sure it plays well for different browsers. Make sure you have submitted your video to video search engines
Activities
Identify the essentials required for promoting through audio and video List the advantages of Webvertising and iMarketing
Implement the essentials to promote your business through audio and video Measure the effectiveness of ad
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Building dynamic lead forms directly into video or embedding on your home page is a wise move in promoting your business. 2. Videos of long duration help you capture audience for a long time 3. The average duration of video stream was 2.5 minutes. 4. Online Video offers interactive communication to visitors 5. Crackle is a video sharing site
Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
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1. True 2. False 3. True 4. True 5. True
5.2 Role of Animations in iMarketing
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Goal and Objectives
To Promote your business using Animations
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Identify various formats for creating animations. List sites that help you create animations. List video Search Engines. Promote your business by submitting your animations to relevant search engines.
Introductions
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It ia well known fact, that a visual captures your attention more than a text. Now with the advent of Google video search facility offering separate choices for animations, music videos, sports etc the importance of using animations to promote your business will be definitely high.
Some of the sites allow you to access the animations through exchange offer that increases your chance of achieving SE Maximization.
The general specifications for designing different formats for webvertising are given below. You can keep that in mind when you develop ads for your website.
The following URL, provides the list of softwares that help you to create animations easily. http://www.programurl.com/list.php?categ=501000&page=1&criteria=rating At the time of writing this book, they had suggested more than 100 softwares running into 9 pages with each page suggesting more than 10 softwares. Depending on your comfort level, you can try any of them and can create professional looking animations.
The following list provides the address of websites offering free and paid options for creating animations. I have tried some of them and they yield amazing results. You can explore them to promote your business through animations.
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Animation Free
Animation Factory This website has Collection of 3D animated GIFs that can work in email, web pages, and presentations.
Animation - Wikipedia It offers overview of the process, with sections about history, studios, styles, and more.
Animation Library -Thousands of FREE Animations Over 14,000 Free Animations plus articles, reviews, tutorials, postcard, and everything else related to animated graphics. ...
Animation Online
A site that offers software for designing animated banners, buttons and Flash animation components.
Webpromotion: Leader in web design, logo design, search engine marketing and multimedia. They offer royalty-free Flash and GIF animation that is featured on thousands of web sites throughout the world .
Free Animation | Free Animated Graphics The site offers best of animations, graphics on the net
GIFAnimations.com The website offers free GIF animations, clipart images, buttons, icons, textures and also royalty free images for purchase.
Gifs Animations Clipart Software Hosting Offers almost everything you need to enhance your site. http://www.fg-a.com/
Submitting to Directories and Search Engines
You must submit your video animation ad to You Tube and Google and apart from them submit your animations to other video directories and search engines given below.
In the case of You Tube, you go to their web page www.youtube.com and click upload which is indicated in top R.H.C corner of web page as shown below.
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Fig 19: Web Page of You Tube
Clicking Upload will lead to following interface, where you have to register yourselves and sign up. That’s all. You’ll get a confirmation through email, and the rest is simple. You can go ahead and submit your animations.
Figure 20 : Creating Your Account in You Tube
Similarly go to http://video.google.com and upload your files that again are indicated in top R.H.S corner of the webpage as indicated by the arrow.
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Figure 21: Video Submission Page in Google
If you already have a Google Account, then you will be taken to the following interface, otherwise you will be asked to sign up for Google A/c and after their conformation email, you can upload your files.
Figure 22 : Interface for Video Uploadin
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Use your keywords while naming your video file and also in title and description. Choose appropriate category for submitting your video file and select ‘public’ for including your video in Search Engine and select ‘I agree to the Upload Terms and Conditions.’ and Upload your Video.
That’s all! By doing video submission you have increased your chance of getting visitors to your website by multifold.
By the way, there is a site called OnlineVideoSkins that enables you to transform standard looking videos into attention-grabbers that make your visitors take a second look at it.
There are some video sharing sites like Metacafe and Revver
Other video search engines for your submission are given below. http://www.altavista.com/video/default http://en.fooooo.com/ http://www.truveo.com/
The following list presents the top ten video search engines.
You can submit your ad to as many video search engines as possible to improve your chance of promoting your business.
Case Study
The following case studies illustrate how animations play a vital role in internet marketing to boost your business.
Akcatel’s bagging of $650 million dollar contract using Animation Ad
Alcatel, a multinational technology firm, presented a series of 3D animations demonstrating how its systems would operate presenting how each piece of gear operates at the right moment in a well coordinated manner performing the sequence of actions.
Executives from London Underground Subway Lines swiftly understood the core of technology and awarded a massive $650 million dollar contract to Alcatel. The contract was related to re- signaling their subway tracks.
Since the animations were self explanatory and executed in a superb manner Alcatel won the massive contract.
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InstaClean’s Success using 3D Animations
Insta-Clean developed a new sponge and used 3D animation to magnify and exhibit its micro - pore structure. The effect turned out by 3D animation was more significant than what a normal photography through a microscope could have done. It clearly depicted how their product was different from ordinary sponge.
Animation thus made the customers understand the significance of the product and realize its value.
3D Animations boosted Mediflow’s Novel Product
MediFlow developed an innovative water filled medical pillows and used 3D animations to exhibit the features inside their product. This resulted in MediFlow acquiring sales lead in North America for this product category.
After 2 years their success was so good they used their cash flow to acquire a company belonging to their competitor. This again proves to be another example, where computer animation helps customers realize the value of your product compared to your competitor’s.
Chalmers Truck Suspensions’ success through 3D Animation Sales Video
Chalmers Truck Suspensions, wanted to make a change in the traditional trucking industry. To overcome the resistance they created a difficult marketing progam with 3D animation. Since their premier suspension system was innovative and exceptional, they produced a sales video with 3D animations to show how all the moving parts of their system worked together and became one of the most admired of all suspensions with truckers and fleets across North America.
Cool Tip
To promote your business create simple animations that expresses what you want to say and actually imparts it in a reasonable amount of time!
Check Points
Provide a text equivalent for important non-text elements Make certain that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes Use the simplest language appropriate for the site's content Provide title to each frame to identify frame identification and navigation For any time-based multimedia presentation, synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., text or audio descriptions of the animations) with the presentation
Activities
Identify various formats for creating animations List sites that help you create animations List video Search Engines Promote your business by submitting your animations to
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relevant search engines.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Promo Big is a special banner used in animation 2. OnlineVideoSkins enables you to transform standard looking videos into attention-grabbers 3. using keywords in animation titles will not be useful from marketing point of view 4. exalead is a video search engine 5. IMU belongs to Over-the –page display of ad
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. True 3. False 4. True 5. False
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5.3 Role of Podcasting in iMarketing
Goal and Objectives
Promoting Your Business Using Podcasting
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand what is meant by podcasting. Create podcasting. Promote business through podcasting. List the advantages of promoting business through podcasting.
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Understand what is meant by podcasting
“ Podcasting is one of the new ways of distributing audio broadcasts using the Internet. Using this method, people can subscribe to a variety of content in a certain file format (usually as MP3s) that can be downloaded to a PC or a portable media player and can then be listened to at any convenient time. “
Podcasting emerges from the combination of “iPod” and “broadcasting” . ‘
Creating podcasting
You can try podcasting too to promote your business. All you require for podcasting is podcasting software that saves your files in MP3 format and creates RSS feeds. Since one of the best ways to promote your business is through iTunes, you should make sure that it creates valid feeds for iTunes.
Podcastblaster.com supplies podcasting software and offers information related to podcasting including tips on creating podcasts.
Hence you can use podcasting to provide regular updates of your product/service.
Promote business through podcasting
The 4Ps of marketing namely Product, Price, Promotion and Place related to your product / service can be explained through podcasting.
You can even explain, how your product is better than your competitors’ and can explain how you intend to offer good service. Since podcasting includes audio, video, text and images you can visually show how your product / service is superior to others or why should a customer try your product/service.
When your podcasting is followed by regular updates, visitors will have an option to view them as and when they like since podcasting allows the visitors to download the files at any time.
The following list provides the web pages where you can submit your podcasting depending on the category to which your business belongs.
AllPodcasts AOL Podcast Beta AudioFeeds audio.weblogs Australian Podcasts Blast Podcasts Blinkx Blog Universe Blubrry Podcasts Canadian Podcasts
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Church Podcasts Digg Podcasts DigitalPodcast Educational Podcasts Every Podcast Family Friendly Podcasts Feedshark Fetching Podcasts FireAnt Fluctu8 GetAPodcast GODcasts1000 Government Podcasts HardPodCafe Hwy777 iBiz Radio idiotvox iPassages iTunes Loomia Medical Feeds Mirpod MLPodcasts My Podcast Center Open Media Network Pluggd Pocketcasting PodBlaze Podcast411 Podcast Alley Podcast Blaster Podcast Bunker Podcast Charts Podcast Directory Podcast Directory AU Podcast Empire Podcaster World PodcastHost Podsites.com PodcastLikeThat Podcast.net Podcast Pickle Pod-Planet Podcast Pup Podcast Reviews Podcast Shownotes Podcast Shuffle Podcast Videos PodCasts Yahoo Podcasting News Podcasting Station Pod Farm PodFeed PodFeeder Pod Lounge PodMopolis
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PodNova Pod Spider PodTower Plazoo Political Podcasts Realty Feeds Recap Religious Podcasts RSS Network Singing Fish Speecha Sports Podcasts Syndic8 Podcast Tech Podcasts Vital Podcasts Women in Podcasting YakkYakk YouLoud
Foreign Language Podcasts
01Podcasts
01Vlog
ElPodio
Lusocast
Videocasts meFeedia
Podcast Salad
Search for Video
Videocasting Station
VlogDir
VodCast
VodStock
Before proceeding for submitting your podcasts, you must have the URL of your RSS Podcast feed.
The web page of podcasting station looks as shown below. You provide the URL of your RSS feed and choose the right category and sub-category properly. Click the submit button and that’s all is required from you.
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Figure 23 : Web Page of Podcasting Station
Follow the procedure for others and your news will be heard by those who are interested as your podcast will be available for downloading.
There are certain advantages in using podcasting for iMarketing.
In the case of emails, there is the possibility of your emails not reaching the recipient as they may be stopped by spam filters. To read an article, your visitors have to allot separate time for it. But they can listen to podcasts while being occupied in other tasks and hence the possibility of not listening to it is eliminated to maximum extent. If the podcasts are interesting to visitors, then there is every possibility they might listen to your future podcasts too thus making it an effective tool for promoting your business.
Case Study
Podcast Marketing Proves Results for Business
This success story illustrates how podcasting turns out to be an effective tool in delivering desired results.
MarketingSherpa is a research firm that specializes in tracking what works in all aspects of marketing. The professionals from MarketingSherpa have released a new case study titled “"How to Use a Podcast to Promote a White Paper That Generates New Business Sales Leads".
The case study was about how podcasting was used to increase sign up rates for Bearing Point that wanted to promote a white paper.
Paul Dunay, Director of Global Financial Services Marketing for Bearing Point, was not sure that podcasting would deliver the desired results. So his team posted the podcast and announcements about the white paper to various sites including http://www.Podblaze.com, http://www.FreshPodcasts.com, and iTunes (all of which promote podcasts for free.)
To compliment their effect, they also issued a press release and an email announcement to the house list. Their first podcast was released on 29th July 2005.
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The result
The podcasting had such a positive effect on the prospects that resulted in increase in sign up rates by over 30% verses a traditional 10%. It shows a 200% increase over traditional marketing techniques used by them.
This is a classic example of how podcasting can be used to drive your listeners to call of action. In this case the listeners were asked to download a white paper and successfully generate leads.
Cool Tip
Fill tour title and audio with relevant keywords
Check Points
Ensure you provide high quality audio to your audience Make sure you set up a feed so that it can be downloaded conveniently and listened. Submit your podcast to as many sites as possible
Activities
List the advantages of podcasting List the items that are essential for creating a podcast Write the script for podcasting Create actual podcast Submit them to podcast directories
Give your submission report in the following format
Podcast software used by you : ------
Podcast feed : ------
No of podcast directories to which you have submitted : ------
List of podcast directories to which you have submitted : ------
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Podcasting refers to only audio broadcasting through internet. It doesn’t include other forms like text, image and video 2. The general format used to save podcasting is MP4 3. License is required to podcast your programs 4. Podcasting is limited to iPods 5. Podcasting must be presented through RSS feeds
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. False 3. False 4. False 5. True
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5.4 Role of Vodcasting in iMarketing
Goal and Objectives
To promote business through Vodcasting
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Distinguish between podcasting and vodcasting. Identify the tools required to create vodcasting. Develop vodcasting to promote your business. Promote business through vodcasting.
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To distinguish between Podcasting and Vodcasting
In VODcasting (also called as “vlogging”) - the “VOD” stands for “video-on-demand” –and is almost identical to podcasting.
The main difference between the two is that the content is video versus audio, and the content is more likely to be played on a laptop than a PMA (personal media assistant). Though some people use the term Podcasting for both audio and video broadcasting through internet still the term VODcasting is in vogue referring to video broadcasting through internet.
The important steps involved in Podcasting and VODcasting are given below.
Create or capture and edit the content using relevant softwares
Publish content to a web site or blog and create an RSS feed.
Promote your business using VODcasting
Identifying the tools required to create vodcasting
A digital camcorder is required to capture the video. A good resolution camcorder of high quality might be required for better performance. Video editing tools are next required to edit the video. Movie Maker from Microsoft and IMovie from Apple are excellent choices for producing good quality VODcasts. Transfer your file to a website or blog using traditional file transfer methods like ftp, server upload etc Create an RSS feed Submit them to Web pages that accept VODcasts.
Developing vodcasting to promote your business
Produce your video and edit using Movie Maker or iMovie. Save the file in H.264 format. Select the server that is connected to internet. If you are using Mac you can go for iDisk (your own hard disc online) too and host your vodcast file from it. Create an RSS feed using Feed Editor RSS Creator o r F e e d Mi x . Creating an RSS through any of the above ones is quite simple as they don’t require you to know XML coding. Submit the feed to VODcast directories.
Promote business through podcasting
Now that you know that creating a vodcast is not so difficult, you can as I have explained in Podcasting, develop your own content to promote your business and create a feed for it.
Once you have finished creating feed for VODcasting you should submit them to vodcasting Directories that publish your feeds. The following hyperlinks represent two of the important VODcasting directories.
Vodcasts.tv vodstock
Some of the other VODcasting directories are given below for you to submit.
Click either Add Your Show to Mefeedia (on LHS) or Add a feed (in top RHS) as shown by arrow marks. The resultant web page is given below.
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Figure 25 : Adding a vodcast feed
Enter the URL of your RSS feed and click ‘Add the RSS feed’ button.
Repeat the procedure for other directories. Your VODcast is now ready to be viewed through iTuner or RSS Reader.
So far I have explained about podcasting and vodcasting which utilizes iPods to access the broadcasting of your audio and video. But in both podcasting and vodcasting you can access the programs through laptops and desktop computers and cannot access by hand held devices as it does not support streaming capabilities.
This problem can be overcome in ‘My Casting’ where by using ‘orb’, you can my cast your business promotions and can access them through any internet connected device like mobile phone, PDA, laptop or other PC since it allows streaming capabilities.
Hence any updates or announcements you want to make, you can create a short video and ‘Mycast’ them using ‘orb’ and inform your existing clients so that they can access them from anywhere on planet if they have a device with internet access. Best of all, its free!
Case Study
Ford using Vodcasting to Promote its Business
When Ford unveiled its Edge crossover, it decided to kick off a year-long monthly vodcasts that would include music videos and content promoting the new Edge.
The vodcasts were made free and were called “The Edge Music Videocast.” They can be downloaded on to portable media players and can be viewed and reviewed whenever the viewer felt like.
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The ad content lasting 15 seconds would be placed at the beginning of the vodcast and also between songs. Informative factoids were included between the ads and the video.
They complemented their vodcast effort by placing banners at music blogs and adding links to vodcast sites that contain the Ford’s promotional campaign at fordvehicles.com/edge.
Sponsored vodcasting has become popular in US and the market is still growing. iTunes.com gives away vodcasts of popular artists at 99 cents while some of them can be easily downloaded for at some blogs and other music sites. Ford in this case is giving away content for bands that most of them are paying for.
Rock River Music, a San Francisco-based outfit that specializes branded music created the vodcasting for Ford to promote Edge Crossover.
Since Vodcasting now serves as a distribution platform for music and content with subtle ad attached, no wonder Ford tried to encash it to promote Edge.
Cool Tips
Since your video will be viewed mostly at low resolution you should try to retain as much clarity as possible while developing vodcasts. You can take a niche topic appealing to audience and then introduce link to your product for few seconds at the beginning, end or in between the vodcasting program.
Check Lists
Make sure the ad that displays your site contains your main keywords that users would use to search for your product or service. Make sure that the ad is short and sweet Complement vodcasting through email broadcasts or your newsletters
Activities
Distinguish between Podcasting and Vodcasting Identify the tools that are required to create vodcasting Create vodcast to promote your business Submit them to vodcasting directories
Give your submission report in the following format
Vodcast software used by you : ------
Vodcast feed : ------
No of vodcast directories to which you have submitted : ------
: ------
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Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Vodcasting is generally played on laptop than on PMAs (Personal Media Assistants) 2. Movie Maker and iMovie are excellent choices for producing vodcasts 3. RSS is done in HTML coding 4. Vodcasting is viewed only through iTuner 5. ‘Orb’ helps you to promote vodcasting
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. True 3. False 4. False 5. False
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Chapter 6 - Business Networks, Viral Marketing and Affiliate Marketing
------“The point to remember about selling things is that, as well as creating atmosphere and excitement around your products, you've got to know what you're selling.” Stuart Wilde
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6.1 Business Networks & their Role in Promoting Business
Goal and Objectives
To Promote Your Business through Social Networks
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Understand the concept of business networks. List the advantages of business networks. List the important business networks. Promote your business through business networks.
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Introduction
With the onset of Web 2.0 was born the participation era where sharing of information and promoting business concepts through networks and forums came to reality. This concept of promoting business, required the software platform to be enhanced with Web 2.0 capabilities, that insist, ‘collective contribution is always better than single concept’ and enable greater participation from group members.
Since the principle of Web 2.0 is to encourage creativity, collaboration and sharing, the concept of business networks leads to births of new innovations that may arise due to discussions in various forums and incubation of various business promotions.
The casual exposure to Angel Investors, Venture Capitalists and Senior Management of various MNCs and other Entrepreneurs through forums and networks often lead to emergence of innovative concepts resulting in successful completion of projects / deals beneficial to individuals and society.
The business networks have the following advantages
They
Enable the fusion of minds of experts hailing from different regions.
Act as a learning center and enable people to learn, share their knowledge and update themselves.
Provide an opportunity for members to promote their business to different regions across the globe by interacting with members from different regions of the world.
Improve traffic to your website as you participate in various discussion forums and in certain networks like Ryze, they let you sign with your promotional link that draws visitors from forums, networks etc to your webpage.
Help in drawing specific target to your home page when you add testimonials and advertisements in classifieds.
List of Business Networks
The important business networks that are widely used are
LinkedIn
Ryze
Xing
There are other networks that play an important role in promoting one’s business and they are listed below.
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Academy
Affinity Circles
BNI-Europe
Business Partneships
ContactNetworks
Doostang
Eliyon
Entremate
ExtremeNetworking
Friendly Favors
Konnects
Matcheroo
Mediabistro
NetworkingForProfessionals
OnlineBusinessNetworking
PeopleThatClic
RealContacts
RefererNet
Selectminds
Spoke
Viadeo
VisiblePath
Women's Business Network
Promoting your business through business networks
I would say becoming a member in at least any one of the first three networks I have mentioned is essential to promote your business.
The following figure represents the web page of Ryze.
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Figure 26: web page of Ryze
Click the hyperlink, ‘Ryze is FREE -- Click Here to Sign up Now’ and follow the guidelines to become a member. If you are already a member, just login. For the first time user, there is a video tutorial available at the bottom of the page as shown by the arrow mark. Watch the video, explore Ryze, become a member in few networks related to your business interest and participate in the discussions.
Things to follow in Business Networks
Complete your profile. Spicy it with your laurels, interests and what you want from Ryze. When you join any network, follow the rules of the network before posting any new topic. Start a new topic relevant to the network you have joined and encourage replies from others. Introduce yourself when you join any network for the first time and most of the networks suggest your name with a link to your home page. When people visit your home page and leave their comments on guest book, do respond to them immediately. Invite your friends to join the network. You will be informed of your friends’ birthdays, hence send a warm greeting on their birthday. For already existing discussions, if you happen to know the topic well, then do participate and offer your opinion or suggestions whatever the case may be.
Or in other words you make yourself visible among like minded professionals who will play an important role in promoting your business.
I have explained the rules to be followed for Ryze, you can join other business networks I have suggested and follow the instructions given there to promote your business.
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One classic example of how a business network would enable you to learn and promote yourself as an authority among your professionals is given below.
As a member of Ryze, I joined few networks and one of them is ‘E Learning Network.’ There I participated and completed an International Project (Dec 2006-Jan 2007) ‘Learn by Doing’ organized by John Veitch, NZ .
I actually learnt and completed a project on MOODLE suggested by one of our Project Members Ivan Bayross, India, and I also presented to my team members a Unit consisting of 6 modules titled ‘CBCM Software to explain Concepts’
The project consisted of 10 members from different countries and John had arranged the following web spaces for interacting with each other Basecamp E-Learning Wiki Yahoo ELpeers
They all require registration. Why I am mentioning is the participation in the International Project boosted my career and I am sure it could happen to you too.
Apart from promoting your business through networks you can also introduce the concepts like review by visitors and feedback from customers like amazon.com in your web page.
Figure 27 : Webpage to show Customer Interaction
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By clicking the button ‘Create Your own review’, you will be either asked to sign in or register if you are a newcomer. You can do that and you can post your review. This offers an interactive approach where the visitors feel that they are playing an important role in your business. Similarly, you can let your visitors voice their opinion about your product or service.
Case Study
Role of Network (Ryze) in Scott Stratten’s success story
Scott Stratten had improved his business by founding a network called Un-Marketing Network on Ryze. This he started a year ago and saw it growing into one of the largest and most successful networks on Ryze.
Scott signed up on Ryze in April 2003 but started using it to the maximum extent by June/July of that year.
Initially Scott did not realize the full potential of Ryze. Then one fine day he realized that if you have to succeed online then you’ve got to make an effort like you do for promoting your business off-line. He also realized that one has to follow the basic principles of building relationship, i.e. offer your expertise, help people if possible then business will come automatically.
Hence he started a network called “Un-Marketing Network”.
His goal was simple. Offer quality information to people, create an environment where people could exchange useful information with each other and build a list of friends who could help professionally.
He suggests having a ‘pull and stay’ something like newsletter or elearning course sign up on your Ryze page. He also suggests interacting with online members live whenever possible.
Implementation of these suggestions made him succeed online.
Within a year Scott achieved the following things through Ryze.
He made revenues over $20,000 through people he has met through Ryze. The revenue came from consulting, product, and speaking’ He got 1,000+ newsletter subscribers from Ryze He got members of nearly 2,500+ people for his Un-Marketing network He got associated with The Ryze Toronto family, who are some of the best people in the world New friends/business owners Most importantly Publicity in USA Today and Fast Company
He says he simply spent a total of $120 on gold member fees on Ryze… and says it is well worth it.
You can view the free podcasting available on "The Connections Show" where Stan Relihan interviews Kathie Thomas who was recently nominated for Australian of the Year.
Kathie uses a range of Internet tools like Blogs & Social Networks to run a successful network of over 200 Virtual Assistants.
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The podcsting available here, http://connections.thepodcastnetwork.com/2008/02/19/connections-022-running-a-network-of- virtual-assistants/ is a very good example of obtaining commercial value through Web 2.0 tools and applications.
Cool Tip
Before posting any new topic in the forum follow the rules of the forum or network and then post your topic to avoid being called as spam.
Check Points
Make sure you respond whenever someone signs your guestbook/ Contribute to the forums if you happen to know something relevant to the topic of discussion/ Whenever possible leave a link or telephone No. to contact you/ If you benefit from the information available on networks then do acknowledge them/ Welcome newcomers with a warm note.
Activities
Mention the advantages of business networks List some of the business networks Become a member in any one of the business networks and participate in few networks relevant to your business. Provide the details.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Business networks are not applications of Web 2.0 2. linkedin, Ryze and XYZ are examples of business networks 3. The basic idea of business networks is collective mind is better than single mind. 4. Mere participation in all forums increases your credibility 5. Initiatives like signing in others’ guest book, networking with people etc help you build your network.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. False 3. True 4. False 5. True
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6.2 Viral Marketing to Promote Your Business
Goal and Objectives
Promoting Your Business through Viral Marketing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Define what is meant by Viral Marketing List various ways of implementing Viral Marketing Implement Viral Marketing to promote your business
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Introduction
Viral Marketing is defined as any tactic that encourages people to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for tremendous growth for exposure of message. The number of people involved in the Viral Marketing gets doubled each time the message gets duplicated. Thus within a short span of time the message spreads to huge numbers and the purpose of creating awareness about your site is achieved effortlessly.
Viral Marketing can even be by word of mouth. The main purpose of viral marketing is to create awareness about your product/service through strategies that get repeated itself during the course of implementation. So, how will you make people take a look at your site and even make them spread your message?
You could present the information through banner, animation or even create a small video in a manner that captures visitor’s attention. You could even offer some funny animations with catchy slogans so that visitors can even get them for their website.
The classic example of viral marketing is hotmail.com which offered one of the first free Web- based e-mail services. The strategy they adopted is as follows.
1. Give away free e-mail ids and services, 2. Include a small message at the bottom of every free email sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and, 3. Just relax while people e-mail to their own circle of friends and associates, 4. The circle of friends and associates who view the message sign up for it, and then impel the message still wider to their own growing circles of friends and associates.
We shall now see the basic principles of Viral Marketing
Offer part of your service or a simple version of your product freely.
If you are a computer service engineer, then announce that part of your service will be free if they approach you before certain deadline. Similarly, if you are selling a product, let’s say a software product, then you suggest the simple version of the software is free and after they are satisfied, they can go for other versions which offer more features. This way you tend to attract the customers to try your product.
Impart your message effortlessly
The marketing message you want to provide should be such that it is easier to transfer to others. If it is a webpage that advertises about your offer, then you can create a feed for it in the form of a button, so that the visitor can easily subscribe for the feed and get the information and their visitors to you.
‘viral textbased Ad.’
Phptextads.com offers free service and say they can get the targeted traffic for your website that you have been looking for in a matter of hours.
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Viral Video clips
You can also create short video clips and provide a link to your actual webpage that promotes your product / service. Then you can submit them to YouTube and Google under appropriate categories and just watch. . Value Viral Marketing
There is another type of viral marketing known as ‘Value Viral Marketing.’ According to this type the message spreads because of the true value of the product or service you offer.
For example, consider skype (www.skype.com) that enables you to chat with or phone anyone on the planet either freely or by paying a nominal amount. It is a program that uses VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) to provide inexpensive calls to telephone users, and free international calls between skype users.
People who would be spreading the software would be doing value viral marketing.
The general advantages of Viral Marketing are it is economical, has an extensive reach and is continuous in nature. The downfalls of viral marketing may be brand dilution and spam issues when not implemented properly.
Implementing Viral Marketing to promote your business
I shall now suggest a simple way of creating a Viral Marketing Tool to promote your business.
Let us say your aim is to collect opt-in-lists for your newsletter you are sending every fortnight.
Let us also consider you have an information product in the form of ebook. Then what you can do is, at the beginning of every chapter, at the bottom of the page, you can introduce a link to your webpage informing about the newsletter.
You can introduce this in the form of a simple ad. For example if your ebook is related to iMarketing and your newsletter too is related to that, then you can give the ad as
Know the latest SEO to rank well in SEs http://www.xxxx.com
When people click the above link, they’ll land on your webpage where you offer information about your newsletter and also collect their details (email. Name etc) in your database. Since you are inserting the ad at the beginning of every chapter, the readers are bound to click at least once before completing the book.
Be sure to include a disclaimer for your ebook saying your readers can give away your ebook to their website visitors or to their own opt-in list.
You can expect to see quality subscribers to your newsletter after few weeks of downloads.
The ones I have already mentioned about like business networking, image, video sharing sites, social book marking sites etc act as important tools in viral marketing.
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According to latest advertisement model announced by Facebook, the ad enables entrepreneur to have a webpage for their brand and allows them to spread their message virally throughout its more than million odd members via trusted consumer referral.
Through the Facebook newsfeed your product gets promoted.
Viral Marketing Tool
I have explained in earlier paragraghs how to create simple viral marketing tools to promote your product. Now I shall list some of the Viral Marketing Tools available in market.
Forward to a Friend
Refer-a-Friend
ViralLinkTracker
ViralMarketingGiveaway
You can include some of them in your web page to get maximum benefit out of it.
Case Study
Boosting Email Subscriptions through Viral Marketing Software
This success story illustrates how PublicityAdvisor.com improved the email subscriptions of Intel through Viral Marketing Software.
The blue chip company needed a campaign to increase the subscriber base for their free ‘channel’ newsletter. Their target prospects are ‘Value Added Resellers’ who are computer consultants and merchants.
Intel through this campaign wanted to gain 700 new subscribers from companies in the VAR target market.
Viral marketing strategy
In order to influence computer resellers and VARs to subscribe to the newsletter, a free software program ‘Addup’ was created and was and called the "Margin Calculator."
Margin Calculator-The free Software Program
The free Margin Calculator enabled companies to compute their revenue, direct cost, overhead cost and estimated net margins for individual transactions and computer system proposals. The file size was quite small, only 300K. Hence it could be downloaded easily and passed along. It also enabled one to build brand as it was all the time available on the user's computer desktop.
Viral Marketing Campaign
To acquire new subscribers, the free software was announced via opt-in e-mail advertisements.
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The following services were used to increase the subscriber base.
Article writing Media lists Pitch letter writing Press releases and news release writing Viral marketing
Results:
The following results were achieved that looks quite impressive:
E-mails were sent to 49,000 people Out of them, 4,500 clicked through the offer Downloads and new subscriptions acquired were 1,737
The campaign objective exceeded by 248%.
Much to the satisfaction of Intel the campaign result exceeded their expectation. In addition to that people are passing the Margin Calculator to their friends and many websites were linked to the Margin Calculator web page. The process still goes on like chain reaction and Intel continues to get new subscribers and leads from their target market.
Cool Tips
Allow your viewers to share, download and embed your information product in their web page. Don’t restrict your visitors from accessing the (information about your) product
Check Points
Create a simple version of your main product and give away freely. Enable your visitors to give them too Insert web link to your product or service in your giveaway product
Activities
Define what is meant by Viral Marketing List various ways of implementing Viral Marketing Implement Viral Marketing to promote your business and
provide the details.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. The number of people involved in the Viral Marketing gets tripled each time the message gets duplicated 2. ‘ Refer-a-Friend ’ is a simple viral marketing tool
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3. Spreading message about ‘Skype‘ is an example for value viral marketing. 4. ‘Forward to a Friend’ is not a viral marketing tool. 5. Viral marketing can only be done through internet.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. True 3. True 4. False 5. False
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6.3 Affiliate Marketing to Promote Your Business
Goal and Objectives
To promote your business through affiliate marketing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Define or explain what is meant by Affiliate Marketing List various ways of implementing Affiliate Marketing Implement Affiliate Marketing to promote your business
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What is meant by Affiliate Marketing?
Basically Affiliate Marketing is one that lets you earn income from other’s business by referring your customers or prospects to them and vice versa. I will not go into details, as my aim in this book is to suggest techniques that promote your business through affiliate Marketing.
Hence I will suggest only those affiliate programs that promote your business through this technique. That is I will suggest the ones that accept exchange programs to promote each other’s products.
Affiliate marketing basically involves website owners, known as affiliates, posting advertisements for your website on their own website. These advertisements encourage visitors to click on the link and visit your website.
The advertisements are specially coded to enable you to determine how many visitors enter your website through this advertisement and the affiliate is paid when the advertisement yields a desired result.
Various ways of implementing affiliate programs.
Affiliate advertisement can work on any of the following methods, namely
pay per impression, pay per click, pay per lead or pay per sale basis.
Pay per impression means the affiliate earns a profit each time advertisement is served on affiliate’s site. This means every time the visitor views the advertisement the affiliate is given a predetermined amount of money. This amount will depend on a number of factors and will be decided by the business owner and the affiliate before the advertisements begin appearing on the affiliate’s website.
Pay per click programs reward the affiliate each time a visitor clicks the advertisement.
Pay per lead programs reward the affiliate when a visitor not only clicks on the advertisement but also performs a desired action such as filling out a survey or registering for newsletter etc.
Pay per sale programs reward the affiliate whenever the visitor apart from clicking the advertisement also makes a purchase through it.
The compensation plans associated with affiliate programs are so desirable because the business owner can have a number of affiliates and they only have to pay these affiliates if the advertising on the affiliate’s website is effective.
How to select an Affiliate Partner?
An excellent choice to look for an affiliate partner is some one doing business related to your product but not exactly a competitor For example if you are selling an ‘ebook’ then it would be ideal to look for an affiliate who sells ebook reader for PDAs and laptop and desktop devices so that when they buy any of these devices, additional purchase like ebook would only make their purchase more meaningful.
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Similarly if you are selling an information product like some software that speeds up SEO, then you can look for SEO consultants as affiliates as they have a greater chance of promoting your product than any other person.
Thus you should choose your affiliate in such a way they compliment your business and not compete against it.
Case Study
Business Promotion through Affiliate Marketing
I have listed various small case studies to indicate how affilitate marketing helps your business by improving the
leads sales brand
The following case study illustrates how Edmunds.com generated leads for AutoByTel.
Affiliate Lead Generating Model for AutoByTel by Edmunds.com
While choosing affiliates, we should choose sites that can generate high traffic and some of the niche sites that have loyal following. A Web site with an online newsletter mailing list or considerable traffic would be a huge asset as they can generate huge leads.
Example: Edmunds.com is a Web site with detailed information on automobiles. It generated leads for AutoByTel through an affiliate lead-generating model.
The shopper who goes to Edmund’s information site to find out about the car was asked to fill out a form at the site which is nothing but a sales application. This was then forwarded to Auto ByTel and then to a local automobile dealer who would then start the sales process.
Thus, Edmunds used its traffic to generate leads for AutoByTel and charged it per enquiry. Since the leads were targeted, a higher price was charged than a simple click through on any other site. Since AutoByTel deals with selling cars, it realized the importance of leads coming from Edmunds.com and engaged it to generate leads for it.
Thus, Edmunds apart from generating leads, acted as primary source of AutoByTel’s business.
Improved Sales through Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate networks should increase the value of advertising space on the web pages. You will keep an affiliate only if he or she generates sales for you.
The following example illustrates how Brian Clark of ReveNews, an affiliate information site receives almost $37 CPM for selling the software through an affiliate program
A good affiliate partner will increase your sales for your product and at the same time he is also benefited.
Branding through Affiliate Marketing
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The following example illustrates how Amazon.com improved its brand through affiliate networks.
Since Brand identity demands mass exposure, many affiliates who can generate high traffic are chosen.
Amazon.com apparently benefits from its huge network of affiliates. Since it is beneficial to website owner who offers this renowned bookstore’s offerings, Amazon.com has signed up with thousands of affiliates. Thus amazon.com almost developed a whole brand through this strategy.
Cool Tip
Choose affiliates who sell products that compliment yours so that you get targeted customers for your product.
Check Points
Check if your affiliates have good traffic for their website. Include third party honest broker to handle all aspects of registration, linking, transaction processing, and check issue, for both the merchant and the affiliate. Some of them are Commission Junction, ClickBank, and ClickTrade. Develop potential to generate a conversion rate in the same gauge as Amazon Send the goods by shipping at a faster rate Offer reasonable commission to your affiliates For new affiliates create an excellent welcome new email.
Activities
Define or explain what is meant by Affiliate Marketing List various ways of implementing Affiliate Marketing Implement Affiliate Marketing to promote your business and
present your results.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Affiliate marketing generates brand identity for your product. 2. Commission Junction can be considered as a third party broker 3. Pay per lead programs reward the affiliate each time a visitor clicks the advertisement 4. Pay per click programs reward the affiliate when a visitor not only clicks on the advertisement but also performs a desired action such as filling out a survey or registering for newsletter etc 5. For a website selling ebook choosing ‘kindle’ owner as affiliate would enhance his business.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. True 3. False 4. False 5. True
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6.4 Confluence of Blogs, Forums and Work Space ( to Share files ) in Promoting Your Business
Goal and Objectives
Promoting your business through Collaborative Software that offers all the three (blogs, forums and workspace) in one go
By the end of this chapter you will be able to understand
What is Web 2.0? Emergence of collaborative Softwares Advantages of Collaborative Softwares Listing Collaborative Softwares Promoting your Business through Collaborative Software - Jamuse
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Understanding What is Web 2.0
We have already seen how Web 2.0 encourages participative work. Now let us see how this principle extends to offer a collaborative environment. Blogs, Forums and collaborative softwares like Google Docs are the results of Web 2.0, but they are all existing separately.
Imagine a situation where the confluence of all the three are present. A situation where you can create a portfolio for yourself exhibiting your exceptional works promoting your business. We have been longing for such a situation where from one site you can execute all these functions.
Now it has become a reality. Jamuse has brought the fusion of blogs, network, collaborative interface.
The interface of jamuse is given below.
Figure 28: Interface of ‘ jamuse’ 1
Click either join free or login depending upon whether you are a new user or an existing one.
Now you get the following interface.
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Fig 29 : Interface of jamuse after login
Let me now show you, how you can create your portfolio exhibiting your best of works.
Click ‘My Profile’ and you will get the following interface, in this case it shows my portfolio.
As Member of Advisory Board of Jamuse.com, I had the privilege to examine the site, A special mention of thanks should go to Management and Founders of jamuse for letting me mention and present their interfaces to my readers as it is a boon to creative workers. It enables them to create a portfolio, and promote it through blogs, forums and share their work as .jam file which is in Web 2.0 PDF format.
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Figure 30: Profile of jamuse.com 1
The menu for portfolio is given below.
Fig 31 : Menu for portfolio
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The portfolio wizard enables you to set up your portfolio. Create ‘My Blog’ will let you create a blog for main category and other child blogs for other related categories. Both (main and child blogs) can be expressed as RSS feeds.
The screenshot for blogs and child blogs are shown below.
Figure 32: Interface of Jamuse Blog 1
The syndication option for main blog and child blogs are shown below.
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Figure 33: Interface of Jamuse Child Blog
The creation of child blogs are really a boon to creative workers as it might pave way for ‘Microblogs’.
When you click community, you get various options that are given below separately.
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Fig 34 : Menu for Community 1
When you click ‘Discussion’ it leads to various forums throwing you an opportunity to voice your opinion and serves as a place for exchange of knowledge. Clicking ‘Discussion’, takes you to a web page where lots of forums with various topics available are shown below.
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Figure 35 : Discussion Forums of Jamuse
Finally I will show the master piece of interfaces, i.e. Museworx, that enables you to upload, offer description and share your files with clients in various formats including .jam file. (.jam is a Web 2.0 PDF format)
Click Museworx, you get the following interface.
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Figure 36 : Interface of Museworx
The various options and their associated functions are listed below.
Digital Asset Manager enables you to add, share your files, open slide show, view, refresh files and get file details. Instant Share lets you share your files with your clients in an interactive way. Profile Editor, lets you edit your profile. Admin would let you manage your account and choose an interface for Museworx. Jamuse Portfolio Manager would let you add files to, remove files from portfolio manager and open a slide show to present your exhiblits. Jamuse Analytics finally lets you analyse the reports. It lets you find out how many of your files are viewed by whom based on countries, region and cities and the domain through which they accessed your file along with exact dates and timings. In short it helps you plan your marketing strategy effectively to get full benefit out of your Jamuse membership.
The following figure illustrates the results shown by analytics.
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Figure 37: Jamuse Analytics
Apart from above mentioned advantages Museworx offers additional facilities such as
Inclusion of search facilities from MuseWorx, Google and Yahoo. Quick report of files shared or comments offered by viewers in last 7, 14 or 30 days. An opportunity to get latest information from various feeds such as Online Media News and Yahoo.
Thus jamuse offers a platform, where you can create your portfolio with desired files in ‘My Assets’ and then share with your clients offering them an opportunity to express their comments and at the same time enabling you to implement SEO as you can create your blog with relevant keywords and syndicate them. Participation in forums enriches your knowledge and at the same time help you promote your business.
Thus jamuse an offspring of Web 2.0 offers the following two things.
It acts as the premier online location to search and find creative talent from around the world.
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And second (and equally important), MuseWorx offers creative professionals to share, collaborate, and communicate their projects with clients.
What I have shown is just a fraction of what jamuse could do for creative professionals. Its entire capabilities have to be explored by you. You can access jamuse at www.jamuse.com
Jamuse not only offers the confluence of Forums, blogs and work space but also offers the potential of incorporating Viral Marketing. Since it offers a platform where creative professionals meet, praise of work through words of forum or blog will definitely go a long way in promoting your product or service.
I have just informed what Jamuse is capable of doing it. Its complete advantage can only be experienced by you, when you explore various possibilities offered by it as it offers a platform to
Share your files Showcase your talent Collaborate with your clients Manage your assets
The .jam files produced by jamuse are Web 2.0 PDF. Hence irrespective of the software you have used to develop your product your client can access, edit and offer their suggestions.
The testimonial page informs you about how the Web2.0 platform is viewed by creative professionals.
Cool Tips
Include the best of your works in your portfolio. Use keywords your clients will use when they look for your product in the description of your profile.
Check List
Make sure you create a link to your website Make sure you participate in forums and make yourself visible Check whether your blog articles are rich with your keywords Check whether your file descriptions are written with relevant keywords your client might use to search for your product or service
Activities
Become a member (membership is free) and create a portfolio for you. Create a blog to promote your product.
Provide a link to your website from your portfolio. Participate in forums and post relevant views. Give a detailed account of what you have done with links to your portfolio, blog etc.
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Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. jamuse is an example of Web 2.0 technology 2. Child blog in jamuse is an example of microblog 3. .jam is a Web 2.0 PDF file 4. Optimizing your blog with keywords helps you get noticed by search engines 5. jamuse is not dynamic as it doesn’t let you share let your views instantly
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. False 3. True 4. True 5. False
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UNIT 3 : CONCLUSION
------“We can believe that we know where the world should go. But unless we're in touch with our customers, our model of the world can diverge from reality. There's no substitute for innovation, of course, but innovation is no substitute for being in touch, either.” Steve Ballmer
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Chapter 7- Future of iMarketing
------“One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.” Arnold H. Glasow
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7.1 Latent Semantic Indexing
Goal and Objectives
To know the basics of latent semantic indexing
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Explain what is latent semantic indexing? Distinguish between Lexical Matching Method and LSI Appreciate the role of LSI in online marketing. Implement LSI in Online Marketing. List the advantages and disadvantages of online marketing.
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What is latent semantic indexing?
So far I have presented various strategies of online marketing that are developed based on lexical matching methods. But this technique is not very accurate way of yielding results, since there are various ways of expressing a given concept (synonymy), and multiple meanings (polysemy) for the same word.
Due to synonymy the actual words in user’s query may not match against those of a relevant document. Due to polysemy user’s query may match against terms in irrelevant documents.
Hence a better approach is required to solve the problem arising out of the situations I mentioned. This approach should retrieve information on the basis of a conceptual topic or meaning of a document.
Latent Semantic Index (LSI), does exactly that, that is retrieving information based on lexical matching by using statistically derived conceptual indices rather than using individual words for retrieval.
First I shall explain what is meant by LSI and then mention how it helps the webmasters in optimizing your web pages for getting better search results from search engines.
LSI
LSI assumes that there is some latent structure in word usage and hence uses a truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) to estimate that structure in word usage across documents.
Retrieval of information obtained using the database of singular values and vectors from the truncated SVD shows that these statistically derived vectors are more fit indicators of meaning than individual terms.
Hence depending on the context of your text, search engines use LSI to determine the meaning of your web pages without depending on the exact words on the pages.
Let me now explain the two types of information retrieval by examples.
Lexical Matching Method
The following figure illustrates the search result obtained for ‘newspaper’ using the above method. The search term ‘newspaper’ is highlighted in the results shown.
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Figure 38: Search Result for ‘newspaper’ using Lexical Matching Method
Let me now show the results obtained for words related to newspaper. Since Google uses the Tilda symbaol ~ to search for synonyms, I use ~newspapers to get the web pages that are related to ‘newspaper’, The result for above search is given as shown below
Figure 39: Search Result for ‘~newspaper’
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Google, now shows the results of various newspapers such as Tribune, Times of India etc
If you now want Google to show web pages that are related to newspapers, but don't have the word newspapers in the page then you can use this search phrase
~newspaper –newspapers, since Google uses minus sign to exclude the word from the search.
Figure 40: Search Results for words related to ‘newspaper’ but excluding it.
Role of LSI in online marketing
Now we shall see how does LSI affect search engine optimization.
It will be highly beneficial if the SEO Experts incorporate not only the exact keywords, but also those closely related terms in their web pages to improve the results based on LSI. Probabaly you already may be doing the above mentioned thing.
All the same, it would be worth including these related terms to get better results out of the search technique LSI, used by Google.
Implementing LSI in Online Marketing
Hence it would be better if web masters create web pages not merely with keywords but also with keyword alternatives. They can create mixed anchor text including keywords and its alternatives that relate to the general theme of the page.
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Hence it would be better if you write the web page naturally rather than consciously remembering to stuff with keywords. This way the web page will contain words related to your keywords.
Advantages
It overcomes synonyms and Noise. Improved SERPs as LSI focuses on bunch of keywords and not on a single keyword. Junk mails can be prevented effectively by adapting and adjusting a latent semantic algorithm on your mailbox and feeding the details of identified spam messages into it. Better ranking to sites that offer content with multiple related keywords and terms.
Cool Tip
Write the content for web page naturally so that it is not only stuffed with main keywords but also with related keywords.
Check List
Check if title and headings are written with related keywords Check if your anchor text is written with keywords and its alternatives. Check if you have implemented LSI for onsite optimization
Activities
Explain what is meant by latent semantic indexing. Distinguish between Lexical Matching Method and LSI.
Mention the role of LSI in online marketing. Implement LSI in Online Marketing. List the advantages and disadvantages of online marketing.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Due to polysemy user’s query may match against terms in irrelevant documents. 2. Search results for words related to ‘publishing’ but excluding ‘publishing’ is given by ~publishing 3. Search results for words related to ‘Automobiles’ is given by ~Automobiles – Automobiles 4. LSI overcomes synonyms and Noise 5. Those who write anchor text with single keyword will get good SERPs.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. False 3. False 4. True 5. False
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7.2 Vertical Searching
Goal and Objectives
To know the basics of Vertical Searching
By the end of this chapter you will be able to
Explain what is meant by vertical search? Mention why should you add vertical search to your online marketing? Suggest how to advertise on a vertical search engine? List the advantages and disadvantages of vertical searching .
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What is vertical search?
Unlike general search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN that crawl the entire web for content, vertical search engines crawl within specific categories. For example, KnowledgeStorm a vertical search engine specifies the categories like EAS (Enterprise Accounting Solutions), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) etc on which it will offer search results in an easy fast manner.
Why should you add vertical search to your online marketing?
Get Noticed Easily
Though general search engines offer more information, vertical search engines yield better SERPs as they narrow their search to restricted categories and hence improves your chance of getting noticed by targeted traffic. The people who look for results in VSEs (Vertical Search Engines) are people who have come there to specifically look for results in certain categories. Hence if your web pages are seen and visited by them, that certainly improves your chance of selling your product or service to them. Hence it is better to submit your web pages to VSEs along with general search engines.
More Leads for Less Cost
VSEs increase the probability of getting more leads for less cost. Since VSEs concentrate on specific categories they can offer ads for competitively priced rates. Since people searching vertically are nearer to purchase, the money you spend on ad are worth investing as you are targeting the customer who is ready to purchase.
Exposure in Newsletters
Some of the VSEs provide an opportunity to advertise on their newsletters that have wide readership. Getting your banner ad on these newsletters will definitely offer a better exposure to your webpage and certainly will improve your chance of getting noticed by targeted traffic.
How do you advertise on a vertical search engine?
Before giving your ad on any VSE do a small research about outlet. Find out about the size of their indices as the user number invariably is proportional to index size. Make sure that a particular VSE you are interested in is easy to navigate as otherwise your users will find it difficult too.
After you have done your research, you can decide on your ad program and choose the one that is most suitable to your budget as most of them offer varied programs. Since the people who go to VSEs for search are people who know what they want, your job is simply to expose your web page that speaks about your product or service so that it gets noticed by them.
The following list represents the VSEs for different specific categories. www.agwebsearch.com www.chemindustry.com www.dodge.construction.com/reports www.ebuild.com
Leading Provider of Search and Advertising Technologies to Publishers www.planetdiscover.com
The following URL provides the list of popular vertical search engines. http://www.softwareabstractions.com/vse_resources.htm
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Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages
You can effectively reduce the number of irrelevant results on your search page.
Advertisers can easily aim for targeted traffic
You can experience the advantage of partnerships with related players in the vertical area (data feeds, relevant links, tools, co-marketing, co-branding)
Disadvantages
But with most of the search engines implementing LSI, the possibility of getting irrelevant search results for search terms are considerably reduced even for general search engines.
You may miss certain good websites if they were not in the indices of VSEs.
Future Implications of VSEs
VSEs concentrate on 3 main areas namely Local, Topical and Vertical or B2B Industry. I shall now explain how these areas influence online marketing.
Local : As demonstrated by Google Local, this segment is all about geographic or regional-based relevance. Hence local online newspapers, regional magazines and entrepreneurs with a product or service based on local needs exploit this feature to make their presence known in web.
Topical : This is all about consumer niches like health care products, weight loss products, golf, hobbies and other enthusiast segments. Businessmen from these industries through online media can reach relevant audience.
Vertical or B2B Industry : Business people will use web as one of their research tools to seek more relevant information to further improve their business. Similarly to make their presence known to others they will exploit online media to advertise about their presence in web.
Cool Tip
Submit your website to VSEs belonging to category same as that of your product or service
Check List
Get your site indexed by VSEs of relevant category Make sure yout title, web page etc are written with relevant keywords Make sure your participation in forums provide a link to your website
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Activities
Explain what is meant by vertical search. Mention why should you add vertical search to your online marketing? Suggest How to advertise on a vertical search engine? List the Advantages and Disadvantages of vertical searching.
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. you get targeted leads from the search results of VSEs 2. User number of VSEs are invariably proportional to index size 3. www.certmag.com is not an example of VSE 4. Consumer niches like health care products, weight loss products, golf etc fall under B2B Industry 5. VSEs concentrate mainly on 2 main areas namely Local, Topical.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. True 3. False 4. False 5. False
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7.3 Future Trends in Online Marketing
Goal and Objectives
To get an idea of future trends in online marketing
By the end of the chapter you will be able to identify latest trends in following fields.
As against the static contextual advertisements, the future online ad campaigns will be dynamically created and hosted for search engine listings. This will provide quick answer to users' search queries. It will extend your business's reach and increase website traffic by featuring your ads on publisher sites and in collaterals. Content matching by this way will take your ads beyond search results to help you attract more customers to your site
The challenge is to make sure that the searched keyword delivers a convincing, creative and points to the right page that provides an answer to the user’s query. Many media firms and advertisers are developing tools to automatically generate keywords, write and publish the ad the moment content on the site updates. The reasoning is an immediate connection to the search keyword that will drive quality audience to a website.
Immersive Marketing
The general trend in business will shift from sales-centric to consumer-centric. Hence we will be moving towards a situation where consumer would be saying, “I require this product. can you offer this to me?” from a merchant saying, “I have to sell this product. Will you buy?” As a result of the above shift, one can expect online marketing to undergo some change in its marketing strategies, which are given below.
In future, Online advertisers will offer highly customized and immersive marketing experiences to their customers so that they stay with you through downloadable ring tones for your mobile phone, downloadable content in the form of wall paper, icons, screen saver for your desktop, or an MP3 file for your iPod
Online Media
1. ‘Vertical Local’ will play a vital role in suggesting relevant information to a person interested in knowing news related to local doctors, lawyers, reataurants etc Hence banner ads on local magazines or magazines will play an important role in future. 2. As there will be gradual shift from TV to online, industry will embrace the emotional selling techniques, as emotional values will become important in the buying process. Hence sports persons, leading celebreties might join the race to promote brands. 3. Online Marketing will see more of ‘Intelligent Agents’ being used in their advertisements that might allow users to structure and share the fortune of their online experiences. 4. Virtual Worlds will play an important role in future as marketers try to create whole new worlds around products, or to customize environments inside exciting virtual environments.
Trends in Email Marketing
Email Marketing will continue to play an important role with new strategies being introduced as explained below.
When a visitor abandons a shopping cart with shopping items, an automatic e-mail will be instigated offering incentives such as discounts and coupons etc to persuade the user to come back and complete the transaction. Marketers would be sending out e-mails with suggestions for search terms used by the visitors and alternate results when a visitor leaves the site after disappointment with search results. These strategies appear to show click through rates as high as 40%.
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Newsletters through auto responders will become popular as periodic announcements and broadcasting campaigns can be easily managed through it.
Viral Marketing
Professionally produced video viral marketing campaigns will replace traditional ones in the form of ‘Overlay Advertising’ instead of ‘pre-roll’. Overlays will be launched in videos in the form of semi-transparent horizontal bar over the lower section of selected videos. When users click the overlay ad, it pauses the user's video and launches a new video ad. Since the viewers have consciously chosen to view the ad, they will be more interested in the product, thus confirming the increase of targeted customers. But if the user does not click on the overlay ad that appears on selected videos, it disappears after about ten seconds.
Cool Tip
Keep in touch with the latest techniques and implement whatever is feasible.
Check List
When you give online ad, make sure it is written with keywords that might be used for searching your product Ensure your ads in virtual world provide interactivity to viewers. Demonstrate your products and services in a highly interactive fashion.
Activities
Write short notes on the following with reference to future of online marketing
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. Many media firms and advertisers do not automatically generate keywords, write and publish the ad the moment content on the site updates.
2. The general trend in business will shift from consumer-centric to.sales-centric.
3. Immersive marketing experiences offer a strategy so that the memories of product or service stay with the customer.
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4. Auto responders will play an important role in sending out newsletters in future.
5. Professionally produced video viral marketing campaigns will replace traditional ones with Pre-roll.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. False 2. False 3. True 4. True 5. False
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7.4 FutureTrends in Mobile Web Marketing
Goal and Objectives
To promote your business through Mobile Web Marketing
By the end of the chapter you will be able to
Identify latest trends in Mobile Web 2.0 Identify various types of ads for Mobile Web Offer Advertisement on Mobile Web
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Creating Mobile Ads
Mobile ads are short text-based Ad Words ads that appear on mobile websites or for search terms when users access Google from a mobile device. When users click on the mobile ad, they can be sent to mobile webpage or offered business phone to reach you. This will play an important role as many service providers offer internet services through mobile devices at affordable rates.
You are familiar with creating Ads using Google Adwords. Now implement the following instruction to create ads for your mobile web pages. These instructions will help you create a new mobile ad in one of your existing ad groups.
1. First Sign in to your Google AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com. 2. Next, Click the campaign that contains the ad group in which you will create your mobile text ad. 3. Click the proper ad group. 4. Choose the Ad Variations tab. 5. Click the Mobile text ad link at the top of your ad table. 6. Fill out the fields, as required. 7. Click Save Ad.
That’s all. Your mobile ad is ready to be viewed by millions of people who search mobile sites with keywords that describe your product or service.
Mobile Web 2.0
We know Web 2.0 harnesses collective intelligence, and Mobile Web 2.0 harnesses collective intelligence to restricted devices. You can build mobile community sites and distribute and sell content or software via mobile phones.
A simple example of Web 2.0 technology used on the mobile web is the blog, resulting in the term moblog. MoBlog is a mobile blogging tool for PalmOS devices that enables you to post messages to most blogging servers and thus create blogs that include images.
Advertising on Mobile Web
A recent study by online publishers association reveals an increasing trend in traffic to mobile websites. Hence in future, advertisers will increasingly use mobile websites to announce their products or services.
Since the mobile environment is uncluttered and only one advertisement per page is allowed on most sites, ads displayed targeting specific users, will invariably fetch a good return. Apart from displaying banner ad on mobile websites, marketers can offer interactive mechanisms to drive traffic to
your website. landing page offering specific information about product or service. capture Email and to create opt-in lists.
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Downloadable Application Ads
Mobile downloadables are pieces of softwares that reside on your mobile devices either in whole or in part. They are mostly used for interactive experiences like games etc. Hence ads displayed on certain prominent pages of downloadables will definitely play an important role in promoting your business as it leads to viral campaign.
MMS
Multi Media Services that include text, video and audio can be used to send visitors to WAP site by making them click on a WAP link.
With mobile search facility available on mobile websites, users’ preference to access website through portable devices may grow far beyond desktop access in the years to come. With the ability to provide location-based search (Video) using GPS enhanced phones, search engines will provide local search results based on user's location.
With Voice search on a phone now a reality, with Goog-411 and Live Search 411, suggesting a product or service based on its location will not be a distant dream. Hence, it is advisable to have mobile web presence to be notified by the above mentioned services, that will enable the audience to immediately access your product.
Mobile ads on FaceBook
We have already seen how social networks help in promoting your business. The following example illustrates how FaceBook helps you promote your business
Mobile ads can be placed on FaceBook mobile platform allowing the developers to integrate mobile ads with their facebook mobile applications. The advertisers can thus reach their target audience with relevant and contextual ads to increase their brand awareness and revenues.
It would be wise to refer MMA Consumer Best Practices for more information and guidelines.
Conclusion
In future along with regular websites, mobile websites and social networks will also join the race in sending targeted traffic to websites.
Cool Tip
Use the Mobile Web 2.0 companion site to save bookmarks of your favorite sites and place it on your mobile website so that your prospects can bookmark your site.
Checklist
Review your seasonal product offerings and apply holiday modifiers like Valentine’s Gift to your friend. Provide an engaging landing page for your ad. Register your site with yell.com so that you can be reached easily.
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Activities
Identify latest trends in Mobile Web 2.0. Identify various types of ads for Mobile Web. Create Advertisement for Mobile Web to promote your
business. Suggest the ways you would implement to promote your mobile ad
Self Assessment Exercises
Identify whether the following statements are True or False
1. A technology that harnesses collective intelligence to restricted devices is known as Mobile Web 2.0. 2. Goog-411 and Live Search 411 are location based video search engines 3. It is difficult to offer interactive mechanisms on mobile websites. 4. Various protocols used in mobile web services are WAP, iMode. 5. Example of Mobile Web book mark is Mobile Web 2.0 companion site.
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Answers to Self Assessment Exercises
1. True 2. False 3. False 4. True 5. True
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Author’s Other Published Works
I have also published a book titled “ Superconductors & Related Achievements- Concepts of Nobel Prize in Physics through Concept Mapping ” through the publisher Writers Club Press, an imprint of iUniverse, Inc. www.iuniverse.com in Aug 2002. (ISBN : 0-595-24119-0 printed in the United States of America.) Visit : http://mybook.150m.com
My contribution to International Conference Mobile Learning 2005 at Malta (Europe) has been published in a book titled IADIS International Conference Mobile Learning 2005. ISBN : 972-8939-02-7 ( printed in Malta, Europe)
Awards & Honors Received by the Author
First Prize Winner of the BOLT (Broad Outlook Learner Teacher) Award for Chennai, India organized by Air India. The award consisted of Trophy, Certificate & a trip to Singapore.
I Rank Holder of University of Madras in M.Phil (Education). Hence recipient of 1. The Madras University Students Club Endowment Prize, 1990 2. The Dr.Miss E.G.Vedanayagam Endowment (Gold) Medal, 1990
The author can be reached at http://www.advisor2u.com
