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Small Business Taxes Gone Wild In California

I estimate that 99% of Californians do not understand the implications of the new small business tax that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law yesterday. This law would mandates online sellers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to start collecting sales taxes on items shipped to California if they have some sort of relationship with an affiliate. [...]

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You Got the Opt-in, Now What? Here Are Some Top Email Strategies

The first part of email marketing is to get your visitor to opt-in your email list. Once they opt-in, the visitor becomes a prospect. The second part of email marketing is to move the prospect along your marketing funnel towards them becoming a customer. An important element of that is relationship marketing done via trust. [...]

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Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

There was a time when Linkedin was cool. Well, maybe “cool” is too strong of a word for this early social networking site. Let’s just say that Linkedin was *the* place to network as a business professional. You sign up for Linkedin, you make connections with people you work with, you ask for a recommendation, [...]

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A Way to Promote Your Business with Facebook Events

Let’s assume you’ve already set up your own Facebook profile and a separate Facebook Page for your business. Maybe you’ve also created a Facebook Group that relates to a type of product or service that your business provides. What are some ways that you can promote the special events your business sponsors? One way is [...]

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How to Remove Antispyware Soft

Marketing online is fraught with risks. One category is business risk. The other category is technical risk. Business risk is when you try to execute a digital marketing strategy and it fails. Technical risk includes the risk of not implementing your websites and/or scripts correctly. But technical risk also includes the risk from cyber-attacks. One of the most common form is viruses pretending to be a friendly program ... like a trojan horse. This blog is about how to remove Antispyware Soft. … Read More...

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Website Banners for Advertising

August 16, 2009 By Alex Leave a Comment

With the recent string of “Google Slaps” aimed at affiliate marketers using PPC to CPA offers, many online advertisers have had to find alternatives to paid search. For the last few years, it was relatively easy to throw up an advertising campaign and generate almost instant traffic to a website. Since it was so easy, this form of search advertising drew many people online. The best part was that it worked… perhaps too well. So advertisers became lazy. They simply did not add any value to their landing pages.

Here is an example:

If a searcher typed “Banner Maker” into Google.com, a paid search result might read –

Banner Maker Scam?
We Compared 12 Banner Makers
Which Was Best? See Results Now:
BannerMakerReviews.com

The above paid search ad with link directly to the vendor landing page. Cookies set. Commissions paid if the searcher buys.

As the pool of advertisers grew and competition swelled, Google became stricter and stricter with the way that people could advertise. Google introduced quality scores, click-through-rates, landing page requirements, account history, and a host of other hidden factors. But even that didn’t stop the masses from wanting to throw advertising money at Google.

The latest fad in internet marketing is to promote CPA offers with rebills. At times, it was “ridiculously” easy to make $25 to $40 per lead online. Smart advertisers would spend $1 and make $2 to $3 in return. How many times would you want to do that? Of course this led to even more competition, which led to shady affiliate tactics like fake blogs and fake newspaper articles, which led to Google shutting down the whole party.

Now everybody who was advertising CPA offers (especially with rebills) have lost their very lucrative advertising channel — thanks to a few bad apples.

So what’s next for online advertisers? How about advertising via banners?

Advertising banners are not a new of promoting your business online. However, it seems to be one of those methods that seem to linger on and that are used by many websites and companies and even reputable ones. This is because, advertising banners employ the use of one of the most influential ways of advertising, appeal to one’s emotions and look. To outshine their counterparts, many websites thus use highly graphical and animated banners as part of their advertising campaigns.

Nearly all major players on the internet use banners as a form of advertising. Simply open up your Yahoo mail and the first thing that captures your eye is the flash advertising banners that are located at the top. There are different types of banners that are used, the common ones being flash advertising banners. This is because flash banners can employ movement. Movement has a long-lasting impact and as a result, it is more likely to influence a viewer more than a static banner would. Furthermore, over 90 percent of computers around the whole have the flash software installed. From basic static banners to advanced interactive banners, many website developers seem to favor the use of flash advertising banners both in web development and also as an advertising platform.

Click-through rates, conversion rates and cost-per-click have shown that consumer search and purchase behavior are greatly influenced by what they see. Simulations conducted on search engines have shown that advertising banners do result in more sales and targeted traffic as opposed to traditional advertising methods that do not use banners. It can be expected therefore that this trend will continue.

Making banners is however not an easy task. Making advertising banners that sell is even harder. It requires a lot of creativity and originality. You are more likely to employ an advertising firm or an individual with banner development know-how if you are to make a selling banner. Usually, your competitors will give you an idea of what sells and what does not. If you find a banner appealing, it will most likely have the same effect on your target market. Like I mentioned, advertising banners play on one’s emotions. Their message should be short, to be point and have a punch line. Having a punch line allows viewers to associate what they see with your website or the products you have to offer.

If you don’t have Photoshop or a similar tool and you’re on a budget, here is a banner maker site that you can try:

http://bannersketch.com

Good luck in your effort to create website banners for advertising your product or affiliate product.

Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: , , ,

Advertising on the Internet – Scam or Legit?

August 8, 2009 By Alex Leave a Comment

There are really very few places you can go nowadays where you cannot get internet service. Shuttle pilots regularly use it to communicate with people on the ground. We may also remember the researcher in Antarctica that used a web stream so she could operate on herself; and of course there’s you and all the other people like you wandering around with your iPod streaming this that and the other using all those wonderful apps. So whats in it for business?

The major attraction for businesses wanting to advertise on the internet is the cost. Rather the lack of it, per gained customer. Broken down this means that a company can readily reach a target market, if it’s done right, much quicker and at a lower cost than any other media out there. What companies do to achieve this is nothing short of remarkable, with whole industries now in vogue to simply fill the rapacious desire of all for a quick and profitable return on their ads. These ads range from full page, “in your face” pop-up or pop-under ads, you have tear type ads (those with the peeled corner look to them), simple text links, sponsored links, text embedded links, content as advertising, paid reviews as advertising… the list seems endless. Which it probably is, because as soon as a new wrinkle in technology comes about, then a new form of advertising on the internet comes into being to utilize it. How many of you have NOT gotten an unsolicited text message about something or other?

As with everything, there’s good and bad advertising on the internet. First let’s look at good advertising. Most consumers do their research on products and services online. A smart advertiser would use review-type sites to give readers useful feedback on the product being researched on. One tip would be to give “social-proof” type reviews. These are reviews done by actually users of a product or service. Reviews can be the side-by-side comparison or they can be the blog type where a user blogs about their experience with a product.

Now let’s look at bad advertising on the internet. A recent trend is to use fake blogs to entice readers to click on a link. These fake blogs (flogs) owners try to deceive their readers by providing a fictional account of them using a product or service. These flogs typically get compensated by sending the readers to a CPA (cost per action) offer. We see this a lot with “make money at home”, “teeth whitening”, and “acai diet” offers.

Another more recent form of bad advertising are the fake newspapers (phony gazettes). These landing pages are made to look like a legitimate online news site. To the casual reader, these phone gazettes have all the normal elements of a news site: city name, headlines, weather, videos of Barbara Walters… The only problem is that everything is fake. Like flogs, these phone gazettes monetize through CPA offers like “make money at home”, “acai berry diet”, and “colon cleansing”.

Then there is the old classic standby: emails from the UK or Nigeria claiming that there is an unclaimed pot of money that has the email recipient’s name on it. Sure the spam filters most of these emails out of the reader’s inbox. But the filters are not perfect because I still get emails telling me I’ve won the UK lottery (that doesn’t exist, incidentally) even though I’ve never entered such a thing.

When done right, using the right demographics and no Black Hat (this is the term used for using not so legal methods for market gain, audience attraction etc. that’s looked down upon by the majority of web denizens) techniques then advertising on the Internet should be the way for all smart marketers to go, whether for your teen’s dog grooming after school business (think local) or that corporate giant struggling (think Palm). It will work for you and your business. Just test, adjust, and test some more.

Filed Under: Advertising

What is Twittering and Why Should You Care

June 15, 2009 By Alex Leave a Comment



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Why indeed? What is Twittering? … Isn’t it just another social networking site?

I think Twitter is a little more than that. Twittering is a way of networking with other people, that much is true, but you could also call it a phenomenon. Sharing knowledge, advice, updates and much more in just 140 characters is a challenge that thousands of new people are taking up every single day. Twitter has hit the headlines more and more in recent times, and revealing just a few of the stories that have been published should give you an idea of just how important this site can be to you. Tweeters, by the way, call their form of communication, “tweeting.” You send tweets of 140 characters or less.

When the Presidential race was on, both candidates were making good use of Twitter to garner support for their campaigns. Barack Obama is still the most followed person on the whole of Twitter… although he hasn’t been tweeting much since he started running the country. He still has well over 1,417,890 followers at the last count however.

And celebrities are using the site more and more too – to connect with their fans, promote their careers and much more besides. Some of these have been proved to be fake, but there are plenty of real celebrity Tweeters out there too.

The NBA basketball star Shaquille O’Neal or Shaq also has a huge number of followers on Twitter. Shaq has more followers than Obama at 1,259,460 He often responds to messages and takes part in conversations as well. American actress Demi Moore proved that Twitter can be much more than just another social networking site by helping to prevent an apparent suicide bid by another user. She has 1,195,969 followers.

You can see how Twitter has pervaded the lives of many different people. You can make a difference with this site, and you can also use it for many different purposes including marketing. But the main thing to remember at this stage is that you can reach a huge audience. It may not be anywhere near as big as the one the Real Shaq enjoys, but you can still end up with thousands who will read every tweet you write.

Twitter is not just for the rich and famous – although judging by the number of stories along those lines that have been hitting the headlines recently, you may wonder.

But no matter what line of business you are in; whether you are based primarily online or you have offline interests as well, you CAN benefit from having a free account on Twitter.

Watch the video and click on the link below. You will be taken to a system that you can put to work right away to start building your own Twitter following.


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Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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