Marketing to Generation facebook
April 30, 2008
A new article posted yesterday by Fortune Small Business has some good points for businesses that are still struggling with the question ‘do I build a website?.’
The stats:
- 158,209,426 active websites according to a netcraft.com survey
- 102,678,031 active domains.
- 809,000 active SLL certificates used in shopping carts data source
Three quarter of all businesses in the USA are sole proprietorships. However, sole proprietor businesses, with no payroll account for only 3.4% of all receipts. The total number of businesses in the USA is approximately 26 million. Suffice to say, most businesses are still not on the Internet, according to small business census numbers.
Behavioral Targeting: Web 3.0
April 29, 2008
The conversation has shifted away from the hackneyed Web 2.0 term, to what will most likely be the next overused meeting phrase, Web 3.0. In this next iteration - users will be able to create a platform of widgets on their computer that will control the content they view. It will (in a perfect world) let users stay with their favorites sites and eliminate the clutter. Read more
3 Ways to Improve An Internet Marketing Campaign
April 23, 2008
No matter how successful a marketing campaign is, there is always room for improvement. The following tips will help small business owners improve their web marketing efforts.
SEO Networking
SEO networking is different from traditional SEO marketing. In SEO networking the webmaster builds a spider web within the Internet with each strand leading Internet Users toward the main website. This type of marketing includes lenses such as myspace, bebo.com, facebook.com, yahoo groups, and other social networking lenses. Social networking lenses can be anywhere from three to ten levels from the main site. Read more
Social Spark Now Released
April 18, 2008
IZEA released Social Spark Today. I was one of the first to hit their site and see if it promises to live up to all the hype. The one thing I did notice off the bat that the control is now in the business owner’s hands.
I was a little disgruntled that they offer a video tutorial. Click the link. No tutorial. That said, I love a challenge. I created a dummy account and went on a mining expedition. Within minutes I saw something that no other advertising site offered. I could pick posts one at a time. No minimum campaign. No minimum number of posts. No down payment. There were even more than 30 ‘free’ opportunities.
I clicked through to a blog and took my first look at the controversial pop up. It wasn’t as bad as I expected. We’d been made to believe this popup resembled the Devil’s own attempt at viral marketing. Instead I saw a neat, clean lined box with a YouTube music video on one side, and an invitation to join Social Spark on the other.
Should You Buy Traffic?
April 16, 2008
Small businesses are faced with a mountain of Internet marketing tools. Most are expensive and do not generate revenue. Others are free, but the advertising cycle often exceeds two years. The Internet is an ever evolving community. Successful businesses need to hook web-surfers within 10 seconds or lose them permanently.
Buying traffic looks like a black hat scam destined to leave a website banned. Most business owners are surprised to learn that buying traffic is often the cheapest and most successful method of Internet Marketing.
Spot Runner vs Google
April 16, 2008
The advertising world is about to evolve again. It has been a year in the making, a lion and lamb battle with the lamb confident they will win. The prize, television advertising dollars.
After a year of rumors, Google started testing AdWord type ads on television with their Google TV Ads Beta. The test group included 50 top advertisers who are willing to pay a paltry $10 000 a month for the television exposure. Eventually this program will go public using a Pay Per Impression schematic.
“Over the past months, our partnerships with DISH network and Astound Cable have scaled and we are pleased to expand our Google TV Ads program to more U.S. advertisers,” the company said in a statement.
Soon, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to buy a TV spot — on any one of 94 networks, including A&E Network, Bravo, CNBC, CNN, Discovery, ESPN, Fox News Channel and MTV — delivered to any of Dish Network customers’ 14 million set-top boxes, according to Multichannel News.
The lamb in this scenario is Spot Runner, an internet-based television ad agency who recently acquired Weblistic, a local online advertising company. “The acquisition of Weblistic will enable Spot Runner to correlate TV and online advertising with phone- and Web-based responses to provide tracking, analysis and results.” Spot Runner doesn’t appear to be worried about Google. And maybe they don’t need to be.
Their program differs from Google’s in many ways, namely in price and deliverable. Spot Runner places voice over and text on stock video footage. The price for ad creation is $500, with exact CPS depending on the region, demographic and air time but only a $1000 a week minimum buy, versus google’s $10,000 a month fee.
The question is, ‘Should small business trust their money to Spot Runner or Google?” The answer is subtle but found in news headlines already popping up on the net, ‘Google to Buy Spot Runner.’
Google is great at analytics, Spot Runner seems to be great at facilitating the buy, with that, you have to wonder, when google will just swallow up a company like Spot Runner?
As Henry Blodget put it on his blog a full year ago, “If Google’s M&A team is not already driving down to LA with truckloads of money to buy the company, they should. And if they don’t, Microsoft or Yahoo should.”.
What has Spot Runner done? They reduced production cost from $500,000 to $500. Reduced the time needed to create online exposure from 12 months to 24 hours. They take local businesses out of the Yellow pages and onto television, for roughly the same costs.
“With tons of advertisers suddenly having the option to advertise on TV, we’ll see a lot more unprofessional ads, and some inevitable blunders by confused first-time advertisers,” Pinny Cohen, an Internet marketing consultant, wrote on his blog last month, that it will also “dilute the special status of TV as being an ‘all-professional zone,’ which made it harder for people to miss watching it.”
Despite having a 98% reach, TV still feels the sharp competition from iTunes, Tivo and the like. Inevitably, TV media will be seen as just another commodity, if it isn’t already. I guess its a question of who is poised to carry it to that end?
Virtual business
April 15, 2008
Brent Arslaner, VP of marketing at Unisfair, explains how virtual environments can
increase productivity in marketing, sales and human resources departments within a company.
SEMthing For All Small Businesses
April 15, 2008
While there isn’t much we can be certain of these days, one thing still remains hard to argue, the internet has created a level playing field upon which small business can effectively compete with large companies. No where is this more apparent than when it comes to one of our best tools, Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Last month I attended the SES conference here in New York, an event that continues to grow every year with small business owners. The clinics and discussions were filled with bed and breakfast owners, blog writers, and restauranteurs trying to crack the code to search engine serendipity.
I don’t think its an overstatement that search engine marketing is the single biggest opportunity when it comes to marketing your brand online. We all know this from experience as online consumers, we start our search at the search engines.
In future posts I’ll talk in more detail about the opportunities in SEM and SEO, particularly how they pertain to google, because, lets be honest, it is the 190 billion dollar gorilla.
