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.

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.

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.

In my last post, I talked about how magazine headline writers are the best. There are many valuable lessons an online marketer can learn simply by reading the millions of magazine headlines in existence. Don’t think that you have to read them all. Read as much as you can and see if you can spot the following patterns.

Numbers Count. Many people hate math. Their minds grow numb at the sight of adding numbers longer than 3 digits. But for some psychological reason, people seem to trust information that is presented to them more when there are numbers attached. For example, the first ad said, “617 pieces that will change your life.” Notice that the ad didn’t just say, “Pieces that will change your life.” The ad was very specific. People also trust numbers that aren’t neat like 600. Rather, 617 implies that someone actually took the time to count the pieces so the information presented must be trustworthy.

Sentence Length Matters. The longest “sentence” out of the 8 ads that I showed you last time from the magazine’s front cover was 21 characters long. It read, “(and we should know!).” There is a reason for this. People scan for sound bites when they read. You have to create short sound bites that grabs your prospect’s attention as they are bombarded by information coming from the hundred other magazines on the rack.

Notice that Google took a page out of magazine advertising strategies when they created their online advertising platform, Adwords. Each Adwords ad is limited to 3 lines of text and 1 line for the display URL. In the 3 lines of text, you are limited to 25 characters for the first line which serves as your headline. You have 35 characters for the 2nd line and 35 characters for the third line. The reason behind this is simple…sound bites. As with magazine advertising, you are bombarded with information when you get the results back from doing a Google search. People will make a decision on what to click within seconds.

Bolding and CAPS. The ads that I showed from the magazine utilized three style elements: one is bolding, two is capitalization, and three is color. The goal of using bolding and caps is to avoid monotony for your reader. It’s also to point out an important element like a number, for example. For search engine PPC advertising, you will only have one style element to work with – CAPS. But this is not a hindrance because a lot can be done with CAPS. We’ll cover this in another article.

Instant and Easy. The truth is most people are lazy. We’ve been program to want instant and want it now. Nobody wants to exercise and eat less to lose weight. They want a weight loss pill. Nobody wants to buy the giant 65″ plasma TV three years from now when they’ve saved up enough money. They want to take the TV home today with the easy payment plan. And nobody wants to build up their look, they want, “Instant Glamour: The Only Makeup Item You’ll Need.” Only one makeup item? That’s hard to believe… I’ll take two.

These four advertising headline tricks should get you on your way to creating your own swipe file of the best magazine ads out there. After reading through a few of these ads, you will undoubtedly begin to see the patterns that are repeated over and over again. You’ll see the same patterns in sports magazines, kid magazines, women magazines, car magazines, and so on. The reason for this is they work. Plain, simple, and easy.

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Yes it is true that magazine ad sales are down. According to recent figures, magazine ad pages, a measure of magazine ad sales, is down around 12% year over year. So where are companies spending their advertising dollars? While the recession has taken a big bite out of ad spending, many companies have also shifted their advertising dollars to online media. There is direct evidence of this in the rise of Google Pay Per Click rates over the last few years.

Even though offline channels like newspaper advertising, and now magazine advertising, have gone down, their advertising methods have not. As business owners and online marketers, we can still learn a lot from these offline channels. Let’s take a look at magazine advertising, for example. Before a magazine can sell advertising, it must first sell itself to customers perusing the magazine aisle in supermarkets or in bookstores like Borders.

The way that magazine writers do this is to create compelling mini-headlines. Cosmo magazine is the master at doing this. Here are some examples of the type of eye-catching headlines that you would see on a cover. There are a total of 8 mini-headlines that try to convince customers to pick up a copy. This is very much like what online advertisers do with PPC on Google.com.

The mini-headlines on the cover of might read:

617
pieces that
will change
your life

SPEEDY
TIPS FOR
PERFECT
HAIR

WE’RE GIVING
AWAY MORE THAN
$475,000
worth of
free gifts!
PAGE 236

How just
5 pieces
can get you
through
the week
PAGE 212

Update
your look
in one
simple step

NEW SECTION:
THE BEST
ONLINE SHOPPING
(and we should know!)

INSTANT
GLAMOUR:
THE ONLY
MAKEUP ITEM
YOU’LL NEED

Jenny Lauren
The strong
and sexy type

I tried to preserve the colors, caps, and bolding schemes that Lucky used to capture people’s attention. Study these mini-headlines and sub-headlines. This is the kind of wording that magazine advertisers have to try and capture and hold a passerby’s attention. Usually, you only have 3 seconds or less before people choose.

Study these examples. They represent excellent copy writing. In the next blog post, we’ll study these headlines in more detail.

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Magazine ad sales were down an average 12% last year. The BusinessInsider has the full story and a spreadsheet that shows the breakdown for each magazine. This news is not surprising given that newspaper ad spend has been steadily declining over the last few years.

The down economy has affected almost all corners of business including advertising. However, there is more to the dramatic decline in traditional media ad spend than the poor economy. Newspapers, magazines, and radio are no longer the medium of choice when people want to find out about something. These days, the first place to look is online. If you want to know something, just “Google it.” If you want to find someone, go onto Facebook. If you want to watch a TV episode that you missed, fire-up YouTube. If you want to hear a particular song, download it from iTunes. With the Internet, information has become democratic and a lot more immediate.

So what is a business to do if they want to reach their target customer? Simple … go to where the target customer hang-out. 21st century business must use 21st century advertising techniques in order to remain effective. Advertise on Google, Facebook, YouTube, Ask.com, Myspace, and all the Web 2.0 properties that allow it. The new lingo for online media include words like — Pay per click, Contextual ads, Interstitial ads, Banner ads, Sponsored links, Pop-ups, Pop-unders, Pay per view, Text message ads, Thank-you page ads, Co-registration, and Downloadable software. I know it may sound daunting for the uninitiated, but the principles of advertising remain the same, regardless of the medium. It’s just that online, the effects are almost immediate. It’s certainly a lot more measurable compared to offline ads.

Over the next few blog posts, I’ll cover the strategies that you can employ to increase your marketing ROI during this time of transition and change.

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