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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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Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

November 5, 2010 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

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, you’re golden. One thing for sure, you made yourself search friendly to headhunters.

But that was yesterday. Today, the cool place to network socially and professionally is arguable Facebook. With an active member community of 500 million and growing compared to 50 million and shrinking at Linkedin, Facebook is the place to link up and link in.

So does Linkedin provide any value in a world dominated by Facebook? I think so.

Whereas Facebook is the Goliath, Linkedin is a niche site. They cater to white-collar professionals who are individual contributors or first level supervisors. These are the “actives” in the workforce. In other words, these are the people who do the actual work in a company. As such, they are prized for their technical skills. So Linkedin is the perfect place to advertise their skills.

Which leads me to how companies use social media to advertise nowadays. Advertising works best when it comes with social proof. By this, I mean testimonials and feedback from actual users of the advertised product or service. Yelp built an entire business model on social proof. Facebook is doing the same with their Business Page where you can “Like” it.

Now Linkedin Company Page allows you to do the same by showcasing “recommendations” from Linkedin members. The demographics of the Linkedin community would be the actual users of a product or service.

It’s not a new concept. Review sites have been around for years. Linkedin is playing catch up here. But it works, so more power to them.

Here is an example of HP’s Linkedin Company Page:

Linkedin company page

Example of Linkedin Company Page

Filed Under: Advertising

Online Trends in Advertising and Marketing for 2009 and Beyond

September 13, 2009 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

2009 is definitely a challenging year for many businesses as many of them try to stay afloat despite the global economic slowdown. I am going to review some online trends that are already being used by businesses as they struggle to grow and maintain their presence online. Some of these advertising internet marketing online strategies are ahead of their time and may likely be adopted by many businesses in upcoming years.

One of these trends is the continued rise of “keyword cost-per-click inflation.” As the marketplace moves toward digital, it can be expected that the internet will become increasingly crowded. This ensuing demand will result in paid search costs going up, especially in first tier search engines like Google. Cost-per-click inflation will likely continue to go up. As a result of this, the advertising internet marketing online community will concentrate on improving conversion rates if it is to offset the keyword inflation. This move towards improving return on investment by offering end-to-end optimization will best be achieved by controlled testing. Such things as click-tracking and eye-tracking projects will become defaults and a necessity within any website improvement program.

As the recession bites, online behavior will be shaped by consumer thrift. Most consumers continue to shop online for deals and bargains and will likely continue to do so. So auction sites and ad listings will see their traffic rocket despite the downturn. Since retention of marketshare is considered crucial during a downturn, advertising internet marketing online businesses will need to be aggressive by offering incentives and shaping consumer perceptions to keep them coming. To achieve this, great creativity will be required. Landing pages will need to be user-friendly, disruptive advertising strategies will need to be employed and websites will need to be trustworthy.

Advertising internet marketing online players will also need to use qualitative date in analytics and decision making to understand not only what website users are doing, but also why they are doing what they are doing. Such things as user surveys, internal search analysis, email questionnaires, FAQ feedback, user complaints, customer service forms, A/B and Multivariate testing, eye tracking and click-density analysis are going to be essential tools in optimizing return on investment. The information gathered from these analyses will be used in making decisions on optimization with a much greater certainty. Localized services will also see remarkable growth since they result in more relevant search results, more accurate targeted advertising can be done and search advertising internet marketing online search networks will get massive additional inventory to sell at a more local level. Undoubtedly, these marketing trends will shape future online behavior.

Filed Under: Advertising Tagged With: ,

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: , , ,
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