Eric's Marketing Webblog

AFFILIATE MARKETING

echen86 — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:53:12 +0000

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is described as “a revenue sharing between a website owner and an online merchant.” The website owner would help sell the products of the merchants either by their own websites or lead customers to the merchants website. The website owner would then receive a payment for their service. There are three types of affiliate marketing strategies: pay per click, pay per sale, and pay per lead. This post will focus only on pay per click. Pay per click involves advertisers placing a budget limit on the amount of clicks customers can click on their ads. Pay per click works with search engines by allowing advertisers to bid on keyword or phrases that is related to their target segment. When a customer types a word that matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or surfs on a webpage containing the relevant content, the advertisements may be displayed. The three main pay per click providers are Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketingand Microsoft adcenter. PPC HERO reviews Google adword as delivering the most traffic, highest visiblity and contains the most user friendly interface. However the disadvantage is the high amount of competition which drives the amount of work needed to gain visibility. For yahoo, the plus side is that there is less competition but the interface is not as strong as google. Businesses who plans to pay per click adverstising must be aware of click fraud. Click fraud occurs when the ads are being clicked without having actual interest in the message of the ad. This type of action can involve certain people sabatoging a firm’s ad campaign by driving that firm’s marketing expense very quickly without receiving enough sales. To prevent click fraud from happening to you, Words in a row suggests a few tips: research on what the provider’s strategy against click fraud is, invest in a fraud prevention tool such as Click Detective and focus on narrowing your target market to those that you mainly want to see your ads. This prevents outsiders who have no relevant to your marketing campaign from seeing your ad.

Direct Response Adverstising

echen86 — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:03:34 +0000

According to Bagwell Marketing, direct response advertising is marketing and advertising techniques that motivates the customers to take some form of action as soon as possible, whether its requesting more information about the product or service or making a purchase. In direct response advertising, marketers can use broadcast media to get the customers to contact them directly. The main objectve for direct response advertising is to make an appealing offer that the customers can’t refuse so that they feel a need to take action. In marketing, the first basic steps before starting anything else involves knowing your target audience, the message your trying to get across and the media channels you choose to reach the target audience. The marketing message should include your selling proposal as well as the benefits; basically to convince your audience why your product or service is better than the competitors. With regards media channels, media channels that can effectively reach your target audience will be the right choice to use to spread the message. There are three essential elements to your marketing message: offer, information, and response. Direct Creative describes an offer as “a combination of various elements, including the product itself, along with the price, unit of sale, trial period, optional features, terms, incentives……” In addition, increasing the urgency of your offer can be an effective way to increase customer responses. Including specifics such as limited time offer is one way to increase the urgency of your offer. Providing enough Information is crucial because it allow the customers to make up their mind about your offer. Without enough information, there will be no responses from the customers. You want to be able to attract them through an inresistable offer, and then tell them exactly how to respond whether is through providing a phone number, website or email address. “The easier it is to respond, the more response you’ll get.”

Geo-Targeting

echen86 — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:07:17 +0000

Geo-targeting is the part of the Pay per click advertising programs that allows customizing an advertisement for a product or service to a specific market based on the geographic location of potential buyers. Every country, province, state, county or city in the world can consist of a niche market for certain products or services at certain times. An example is a car auto shop in Los Angelos would only set its advertisments to show in Los Angelos instead of adverstising it for everyone to see outside of the city. Geo-targeting can help small businesses to compete with national brands and can even ensure that large businesses effectively make use of their advertising resources. Geo-targeting works by either using your logon and/or subscription information or delivering relevant content to your computer by identifying your Ip address. One to One interactive states geo-targeting as an “increasingly valuable tool for national marketers as they look for ways to tailor messages and offerings to customers living in geographically diverse areas” The following three companies all support geo-targeting: Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

comparsion :http://www.pandia.com/sw-2005/27-yahoosm-vs-adwords.html

SEO:Developing Keywords

echen86 — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:54:55 +0000

When running a online business, it is important to to increase to able to increase traffic in your website by knowing how to attract the right customers to visit your site. The most important part of search engine optimization is selecting the right keyword phrases or “keyphrases”. Brainstorming is the first step towards choosing the right keywords. By brainstorming, this allows you to come up with the broadest possible list of keywords for your web site. Marketers have to study and know key terms that people might mostly use online to match their products. Therefore, getting a right keyword is very important to driving traffic to your website and it is the key to being able to sell and upgrade your website to the next level. One question that comes to mind when developing keywords are why are visitors not being able to find your website? Finding the best keyword is very important and you really need to find ways of knowing what other people are looking for when searching. There are some tools on the web cna help people find the right keyword, such as Keyword Elite. Volusion offers some tips for choosing the right keywords to use: finding out on keywords your competitors are using, ask outsiders for help such as friends or family members to generate keyword you might not have think of. By knowing what yourcompetitors are using, it is a good way to list down what keywords are mostly used in the type of business that your in. After identifying the key terms that you choose to associate with the website, these keywords have to be put into the website content. eMarketing101 suggests using your keywords within your website copy, particularly in the title tage, headline tag, and the first paragraph.The next step suggested is to build up the content of your website with important topics containing your keywords.Websites that contain high density of the key terms as well as high density of relevant content will tend to show up first inthe search results compare to those that don’t;especially when using search engines such as Google. However, some website providers can and will pay more money to appear first in the search results.

Blog #5: Net Visibility

echen86 — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:43:22 +0000

“Social media is becoming a more important part of media consumption for Internet users than some traditional media channels, according to a survey released yesterday by M2 Universal.” Therfore, as a result, many marketers are now using social media tools such as RSS, which according to Forrester Analyst, Brian Haven, saw an increase from 10% from the previous year. User can receive website content through a technological tool called ‘Really Simple Syndication’ without expecting them to visit your website. Wise Geek describe RSS as a tool that use “an XML code that constantly scans the content of a website for updates and then broadcasts those updates to all subscribers through a feed. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to collective feeds from many sites into one place. RSS works with all types of digital content such as blogs, audio and video. A good example of Video Rss is Youtube. Youtube made the process easy for people upload their own video clips they made onto the Youtube website for anybody to see and share as well. Youtube also allows users to embed the videos into their websites so viewers can watch the videos without having to visit Youtube’s website. This also allows provides free marketing and advertisements for those that want to reach out to more users without having to spent a lot of time and effort since people can choose to embed your videos onto their websites for free. If it is in successful in gaining new subscribers, they will like to receive more updates or messages their favourite sites through RSS, which will be more convenient and effcient.

Three of the 7 design Elements:Context, Content & Commerce

echen86 — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 21:37:47 +0000

Leaving a good first impression is important, especially when dealing with potential customers becuase at the point, it will determine whether you have gain new customers or not. A well design website which includes its functions can leave people with a impressive impression of the site. Context, content and commerce are the three elements of the 7Cs which will focus on layout, the looks and capabilities of the website. Context focuses on the layout and the design of the site and it consist of two dimesions: function and Aesthetics. The way the website is lay out and its functions such as searching and nagivation are important factors that will either make it a easy of difficult experience for the consumers. Buzzle.com suggests that the website design must go hand in hand with the look and feel of your company’s marketing strategies and objectives. A website’s content includes many types of media such as picture, sound and video. In addition, the content of your website will offer information to customers aoubt what products, services and information its offering and adverstising promotions and deals for customers to make a purchase decision. Developing and creating content for your website can be challenging especially if the website is not initially generating a lot of visits from customers. Mark Jackson, chief editor of Host Review UK, suggest “keeping the content fresh and original”; continue to develop your website and keep it up to date. Getting your website “properly indexed by search engines and directories can take up to 8 months”. In addition, he suggest adding visual highlights such as underline and bold text, which help identify important content and keywords for users. Lastly, commerce deals with the websites’s abilities to support transactions between the customers and the company such as registration, shopping cart and placing orders. Commerce determines the final step whether your company will gain the businesses of new customers or drive them away. Dan Janal gives a bunch of tips on how to build the “right shopping cart to increase productivity and stop your online business from stalling.” Some of them include: making sure the shopping cart has an easy to follow ordering process and ncluding automated functions such as sending receipts and personalized messages. Dan Janal states that by using these tips when buildign a shopping cart for your website can you save you a lot of time, energy and money. By focusing on the areas discussed above, there will be more chances that people will coming back to visit your website in the future.

Blog #3: Planning a Website

echen86 — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:47:49 +0000

Before creating a website,HTML Basic Tutor offers a number of tips including knowing what is the purpose of creating the website and knowing who and what your target audience is. Firstly, knowing the industry your in and the demographics and psychographics of the target audience will be provide a guidance in creating the website. Secondly, in order to know what is the purpose of the creating the website, you need to set measurable and realistic goals.What is the website going to do and accomplish for the customers. After setting goals and gathering all the information you need, planning will be the next step. In the planning stage, the websitep project plan will have to be created which includes the budget, schedules and so on. Creating a website can require a lot of money, therefore it is important that marketers need to know specifically what the website needs in order to be successful. When designing the website, Fencl Web Design suggest using making good use of the graphics with respect to loading time. If it loads too slow, it can results in customers leaving your website. In addition, if the site is loading too slowly, it might be helpful to reduce the amount of graphics in your website. Webevents states successful web design should contain some of the following: A layout that attracts visitors, fast loading times and easy nagivation for customers. A layout thats uses simple colours such as black or dark blue for your text colour might be more effective. Easy nagivation through the website will make it easy, effortless and even fun for customers which can help build strong customer relations with the website. After the designs are done, the actual production of the website will be the next step. “Similar to building a house, your site should have solid framework. The wrong programming could throw off the functionality, corrupting data being collected form visitors and causing other unforeseen problems” Lastly, the final stage would be setting up the website and testing it to make sure there is no errors or problems with the site. Testing the website before going public prevents customers from any negative experiences from visiting the website.

Blog #2:Web Analytics

echen86 — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:27:13 +0000

It is always iimportant for marketers to collect information about their customers because marketers use these information to help them create or change their marketing strategy and plan. With the web being so accessible it is much easier and faster to collect customers’ information online ciompared to the old fashion ways. Web analytics is a tool that can help marketers monitor the customers’ activities on their website. According to O’Reiley Xml.com , “web analytics is the process of collecting data about the activities of people accessing your website (visitors)–how they found you, when they visited, what pages they looked at, what they bought or downloaded, and so on.” This provide advantages for online marketing because information can be obtained more efficiently and accurately. By using the data from web analytics, marketers can know what attracts the customers and what turns off immediately. This allows the marketers to improve its website by focusing on the problem. For exmaple, If people enter that webapge and then leave within a very short time period, that means that webpage needs to be redesigned.

Google offers its own web analytics called Google Analytics. It is free to use and it offers a decent amount of options and features to use. In addition Google has its own official blog Google Analytic Blog where it has helpful hints and tips for people using google analytics as well as news related to Google.

Clicktrack is another web analytic software that people can use. It offers three versions, starting with a basic version called Clicktrack optimizer and up to its highest product called Clicktracks Pro+JDC. Clicktrack is most likely suited for people who is willing to invest more money to obtain information since Clicktrack’s starting price is at $995. Because it is expensive, it offer more features such as Vistor labelling, where it “helps you understand why they do what they do.”

Blog#1

echen86 — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:54:19 +0000

What is permission marketing? The technical term of permission marketing is the ability to obtain customer’s permission to receive information from a particular company (Marketing Terms, 2007). This term was popularized by Seth Goldin who stated “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”(Seth Goldin’s blog). An example of this is where people want to sign up for newsletter or special promotions in advance relating to certain produts or services they are interested in. The hardest part of being able to master this skill is being able to capture your target consumers attention especially with so much advertisements and spam mail being received. Building on top of that, those annoying telemarketers who constantly call you asking either to ask you to fill out a survey or trying to sell you a certain product is not exactly the best way to win over people’s brand loyalty. According to Seth Goldin’s Blog, “in order to get permission, you make a promise” and then by promising to do something for the consumers, hopefully the company can gain permission from the consumers to listen. And on top of that, you dont do anything else. More of Seth’s knowledge on permission marketing can be found by clicking here. There are many ways to reach out to potential clients whether its through direct mail or email. By using email, All Business, has four rules to develop your own opt in strategy and some of them include: letting the customer decide what format they want to receive your promotions and also allowing customers to stop receiving future mails. The rest of them can be found on the website.

Being able to stand out from the rest of the competition takes creativity and knowledge. An example was H&R Block being able to do to gain the attention of more than 50,000 tax paying customers by grabbing attention of their attention through banner ads promoting a sweepstake(Fast Company 2008). The deal was this; you give us your permission to email you more information about our new service and you get a chance to have your taxes paid by H&R. (Fast Company 2008). I think this was a clever idea to get peoples’ attention and time since most people dont like to pay their taxes. If you like more information on what H&R did or more information and tips on permission marketing, you can find it on Fast Company.