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Digital marketing converts web traffic into clients

Online marketing surpasses traditional marketing practices. The ’search engine optimisation’ and ‘pay per hit’ factors enhance customer building via Internet. Features like social networking helps business gain credibility among the users.

TODAY, ONLINE marketing industry is abuzz with ’search engine optimisation’ (SEO) and ’pay per click’ (PPC) strategies to get more traffic onto business websites. However, is the conversion rate of traffic into a solid customer base for these websites substantial?

Out of the many instruments with digital marketing, social networking is vital for the improvement of web traffic conversion rate. Based on the Web 2.0 platform, social communities and forums have become a huge rage amongst online users. The video, voice-and-text-chat enabled e-communities lead visitors towards becoming repeated visitors and then into community members.

With customisable user rooms, forums and categories, social networking can help businesses gain credibility and acceptance among the users.

Another significant online marketing tool is the business blog. It is highly recommended for promotion of a business and its website.

Some of its key benefits

• Communicates news in time

• Indexed in minimal time by the search engines, receives feedback (comments and reviews) from visitors and potential customers

• Solves user queries

• Publishes product’s or service’s pictures and videos

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Online affiliate marketing set to scale new heights

As online marketing budgets continue to grow, affiliate marketing becomes an indispensable component of Internet marketing strategies. The online marketing channel is constantly reaping benefits for investors worldwide.

GROWING ONLINE budgets as a consequence of online media consumption has helped in placing affiliate marketing much above other modes of online marketing. The cost effectiveness of affiliate marketing is constantly attracting online marketers who are serious about optimising the Return On Investment (ROI) opportunities presented by Internet. This is when ’search’ still holds the first place among all online marketing strategies.

Looking at the present statistics. It’s not difficult to predict with affirmation that this type of marketing is going to feature big on the online sales and marketing billboards in the coming times.

Reports have it that brand budgets on media like newspapers, magazines and TV have decreased more considerably than what was spent on them before. Marketing and finance heads now demand more explanation from key suppliers in advertising, thus place performance marketing and affiliate marketing under the limelight.

Meenakshi Wali, co-founder and business development head of Rupiz Ads stated that advertisers and agencies are constantly attracted towards the online advertising industry and true professionalism amidst the networks and online publishers has made affiliate marketing a highly attractive element to online sales and marketing blend.

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Google to Spread Social Tool Across The Web

Google has picked up the banner of the social Web by launching an initiative to bring features commonly found on social networks to Web sites of all kinds.

Released in a limited preview, Google Friend Connect will enable Web sites to integrate social features such as blogging and feedback forms without having to write the code as well as provide access to applications developed through the OpenSocial initiative.

“Site owners have been saying for a while that they would love to provide this functionality, but, frankly, it’s been too hard to add social features,” Mussie Shore, a product manager at Google, wrote in a company blog post.

Friend Connect will enable visitors to participating sites to view their friends’ activities across other social sites on the Web. Its the latest in a series of announcements from big-name Internet companies aiming to break down the walls that separate Web communities in a movement broadly known as data portability.

Last week, MySpace announced its Data Availability initiative to allow users to share their profiles with sites such as Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY).

Not to be outdone, Facebook announced Facebook Connect the next day, describing it as an extension of its API. It allows members can bring their identities to third-party sites.

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Google offers to imbue all websites with social networking

Google has set out to enable all websites, free of charge, to be imbued with common social networking features as the Internet evolves toward becoming a giant community along the lines of MySpace or Facebook.

Google Friend Connect was previewed at a Campfire One gathering of third-party software developers at the company’s “Googleplex” campus in Mountain View, California on Monday.

The unveiling of the plan comes just days after top social networking websites MySpace and Facebook broke down walls of their online communities to let members share profile information at other websites.

“Social is going mainstream,” Google director of engineering David Glazer said during a conference call with reporters.

“What used to be hard and proprietary is becoming easy and open. It’s the evolution of social networking.”

Glazer described the MySpace and Facebook announcements as “big steps forward in giving users control over their data” and said Friend Connect is intended to further advance the movement.

“We see the web moving toward an end state where people can use any application on any website with any of their friends,” Glazer said.

“Social activity on the web has been bottled up in a handful of sites. As things mature on the web they become more open and more interoperable.”

Friend Connect lets website owner’s add social-networking features such as registration, member galleries, message boards, and fun or useful third-party applications called “widgets” by simply adding snippets of free computer code.

People visiting websites using Friend Connect will be able to interact with contacts they know from online communities such as Facebook, Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo or hi5.

To demonstrate, an iLike application was incorporated into an official website of musician Ingrid Michaelson so that visitors don’t have to leave to connect with friends at their social networking profiles.

All website operators using Friend Connect see are user nicknames and images, if any, posted along with them.

Concerns about protecting people’s profile data prompted Google to decide to work individually with website operators interested in Friend Connect, according to Glazer.

Website owners are invited to put their names in a “white list” queue online at www/google.com/friendconnect.

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Google’s Friend Connect To Spread Social Data

The software is part of an emerging set of technologies like OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, and MySpace.

Google on Monday announced a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a way for Web publishers to add social features to sites without programming.Google Friend Connect, available Monday evening, lets site creators add prebuilt blocks of code that handle user registration, invitations to view content, message posting, and other features, such as third-party applications (widgets) built using the OpenSocial APIs.

In a statement, Google engineering director David Glazer described Friend Connect has part of an emerging set of technologies like “OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace” that aim to standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and data.”What Google is essentially doing is making it easy to tap into new, emerging standards around social features,” explained Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li in a blog post. “These standards specifically deal with identity (OpenID), data access rights (OAuth), and social applications (OpenSocial). These are all standards that have emerged in the past six months and are laying the foundation for open social networks. Friend Connect is Google’s way to make these new standards more accessible to Web site owners who don’t have legions of developers at the ready.”

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Google’s announcement Monday echoes related announcements made recently by MySpace and Facebook.

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Seven Ways to Make E-Marketing Work in a Tough Economy

A troublesome economy frequently brings with it more marketing obstacles; however, marketers should embrace the opportunities the period presents to introduce changes to more efficiently deliver ROI, advises GlobalSpec’s Guy Maser.

In a challenging economy, you must find new ways to make marketing work more effectively, get more out of marketing investments, and measure and account for marketing decisions. In short, you must make changes.

Doing the same things in an uncertain economic environment and expecting the same results is, at worst, a definition of marketing insanity. At best, it is a flawed strategy.

How can your company be one of those success stories that market and grow their business during challenging economic times? The following strategies will help you allocate marketing investments to better performing programs that will carry your company through the economic downturn and beyond.

1. Get Targeted

A fundamental but sometimes overlooked marketing tenet is to “fish where the fish are.” In other words, invest in those specific, targeted media where you know your customers and prospects will be exposed to your message. Research shows that virtually all engineering, technical and industrial professionals now use the Internet throughout their work process.

The same holds true in most business-to-business markets. However, the Internet is vast, and the fish you are looking for may be using specific Web sites where the content is directly related to their information needs. Work with your media partners to identify and target those sites.

2. Measure Performance

While it’s always the right time to purge marketing programs that don’t perform, it may be time to scale back any marketing plans whose results you can’t measure or are unsure about.

In other words, reallocate and “right-size” marketing budgets to measurable programs. Online programs — which are built around delivering visibility, impressions, clicks, leads and customers — are easy to measure.

3. Think Integration

Integrated marketing means your marketing strategy takes advantage of multiple media, resources and customer touch points to create a whole that’s greater and more effective than the sum of its parts.

The more that marketing efforts are integrated and comprehensive, the greater impact you can achieve in gaining visibility in your market, qualified leads and sales.

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E-Bay, Yahoo And Google On The Top 5 Internet Marketing Must Do’s.

I moderated a discussion panel last week at Toronto’s Massive Technology Show, which is a conference and trade show that brings technology companies together with small to medium size business.

The show had some great speakers which included on my panel (Web Marketing 101), Paul Jeszenszky, of E-Bay Canada, Joanne Acril, Yahoo Canada, and Fred Vallaeys of Google.  Our task was to demystify web marketing and discuss how small to medium sized businesses could get started.

There were discussions about the value of paid search marketing (PPC), and some instruction about how to target and measure effectively.  We reviewed search engine optimization (or organic optimization – being found “naturally” in the search engines for your target keywords) tactics and where it fits within an overall online marketing strategy – and of course we discussed social media and what it means to marketers.

As it is not often that you can gather together a group of experts from online giants like Google, Yahoo and E-bay - I cut right to the chase at the end of the discussion and asked the panel what they would consider the top five must do’s in marketing small business online.

So here are the top recommendations for those that have limited budgets and resources, but know that they need to start somewhere in building their business online:

1. The group unanimously agreed that using and understanding Web Analytics is a must.  (Google Analytics is free and a robust tool for analysing everything from geographic breakdown of traffic to keywords that are used to find your site,  to identifying usability issues with site overlay graphs showing click patterns and bounce rate analysis - there are also other tools available free and paid).
2. Website testing – test your website, and have your site independently tested often.  Have your testers try to achieve a goal such as find a phone number or sign up for a newsletter.
3. Make sure to spend dollars and resources on building a professional website.  There is nothing worse for your brand reputation than a poorly designed website.

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Yahoo Adds Safety Alerts To Search

Partners with McAfee for new SearchScan feature

Yahoo opened the beta test of SearchScan in several countries to help safeguard people against potentially dangerous links in their search results.

Searchers may notice something different about the search results in Yahoo. The company partnered with security vendor McAfee, which runs the SiteAdvisor service, to power a new feature called SearchScan.

“While SearchScan will be on by default, users have control over how they use the feature,” said the Yahoo Search blog. “In preferences, users can choose to turn the feature off or choose to filter out all sites with warnings from their search results.”

SearchScan compares links with an index of ones it has checked for possible problems, like browser exploits, unsafe downloads, or just the likelihood the site spams visitors who give it an email address.

McAfee said its site ratings are based on automated safety tests of websites, and include feedback from volunteer reviewers and its analysts.

Yahoo’s Vish Makhijani, SVP & GM for their search engine, noted on the official Yahoo blog how they are the only search site providing this type of advance warning today. People will see these warnings appear in red with the listing SearchScan flags.

SearchScan should be of great benefit to people whose less than perfect spelling leads them to mistype a query, which could return a link or two that direct people to a dangerous website. Some scammers register incorrectly spelled domains in the hopes of bringing in visitors who hit a wrong letter or two.

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Local companies utilize online marketing campaigns

At the early stages of the dot-com bust in 2001, during an uncertain post-Sept. 11 market, a new advertising trend opened up that capitalized on the Internet’s

close connection between consumer and retailer.

Misty Locke was there to catch the online marketing wave, starting Range Online Media in Fort Worth with Cheryle Pingel.

In October 2001, Range was one of a few companies nationally that specialized in paid search optimization or search engine marketing – when companies pay search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or MSN, to list them at the top or side of a search results page when a user looks up specific keywords.

Now, as Internet business transactions are surging despite the gloomy economy — $21 billion net online sales in 2007, with a forecasted $35 billion in 2010, said Locke. As a result, online marketing, along with Range, have beefed up to handle the projected increase in sales.

“We had visions of large offices across the world and being known as the largest agency,” Locke. “In living in reality, I’m astonished with what we’ve accomplished. We’ve come pretty close.”

With offices in New York and Utah, a staff of around 55 and a client base of about 60 brands including Travelocity and Nieman Marcus, Locke said opening Range might be the best career move anyone could have made.

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10 Ways to Make your Website More Popular

Everybody who owns a website wants it to be more popular. From the web design team at the New York Times right down to the small retailer trying to expand into ecommerce, popularity is the key to success. Reading and working with popular websites every day can sometimes feel like living in a bubble where everybody has good search engine rankings and sites are all beautiful so it’s nice sometimes to look at how “normal” websites can improve their popularity.

Invest in a good design – while people like Ling might think design isn’t everything it is one of the key aspects a site can use to build their visitors trust so you need to get it right.

Learn about usabilty – having the best designed website in the world is useless if normal people can’t use it. Sit behind some of your non internet savvy relatives and friends and watch them navigate your site and make purchases from your store. If they struggle with things you need to improve your usabilty.

Create a useful website – I know this might sound simple but having a website isn’t just a way to tell people about your company. If you really want to become popular make sure your website is actually going to be helpful to the people who arrive there. If every visitor who was pleased by your site gave you a link or told one of their friends your traffic would increase to Facebook levels in months.

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