Internet Marketing has come a long way in the last five years and is now an integral part of corporate or business online branding strategies. Over the years, strategies have changed, new benchmarks have been created and internet marketing trends have been followed. Here are the top 5 internet marketing strategy trends:

1. Search Engine Optimization

Here’s the fact: Natural Search Engine Optimization is growing rapidly. There are several companies that have started to invest in upgrading their existing websites and optimizing them using keyword driven content and persuasive architecture. All this is in order to capture 76% of those internet visitors who are able to click on natural search results instead of the paid results.

2. Websites: Usability Testing

According to a research and survey conducted by Jupiter Research, it was found out that corporate America spending will hit and go beyond the $5.6 billion mark as far as search engine marketing (SEM) is concerned in 2010. This just goes on to show that the corporate players have recognized the importance of the top search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo! Etc. Now the corporate sector believes that the internet and especially the search engines can deliver consumers right at their doorstep through the company websites. As a result, the corporate sector is spending more time and money now on usability reviews as well as testing.

3. Press Releases

Press releases were treated as an effective medium for highlighting new launch, new business, services, products etc some 10 years back and it is still considered as important. In fact, according to a survey certain news search engines seem to have a higher readership than BBC or CNN. These news search engines are rated as the best choice for news especially in the larger age group of 18 - 54. A day has come that the loyal newspaper readers have started to make a move towards online news. Hence, the experts feel that optimized press releases can help people find the news in real time.

4. Blogging

There are mainly two types of blogging: one is the personal blogging and one is the business blogging. The business blogging are for those who want to drive traffic to their website in order to generate higher sales and get higher revenue. Business blogging is more like a content driven advertisement as well as a top PR tool. The more optimized the blogs are, the higher the readership!

Bookmark it!

If you are suffering with the problem of high bounce rate, then you surely be having a tough time with your business. There is absolutely no doubt in the fact that making people to come to your site is not as difficult as making them stay at your site to do shopping. However, you must always try to achieve the second task as this will help you to stay in business. But, if bounce rate is your problem, then you must be having some glitches in your website design.

Website design is one of the most important things for online businesses. Gone are the days when websites were there only to provide some contact information along with a little product detail. Today, websites are used to achieve bigger things. Websites are designed after considering the search engine ranking algorithm to get more traffic. However, if you are having a high traffic because of your website design and other marketing strategies, then it surely doesn’t mean that you will be having high sales as well. In recent researches, it has been told that people decide to stay or leave your site in mere 8 seconds. Isn’t it such a small time to create an impact on them? Well, it surely is, but, there are some tricks that can be used to stimulate the interest of people.

First of all, you must make people comfortable as they visit your site. This can only be done by ensuring them that they are at the right site. Here, effective web headlines will help you to a considerable extent. Now, you must be thinking about the way to create an effective headline. Well, this can easily be done by keeping few things in mind.

•    Always make the best use of your main keyword. This will be the keyword that you use to divert people to your website. Using this keyword in a prominent way will inform your visitors that they are on a right site.
•    You must inform your visitors about the benefits that are associated with your products. However, you must stay away from making such claims which may be too hard to believe. Instead of using promotional language, try to use informative wordings. Let them believe that you are not claiming to achieve an impossible thing, but, you can help them to get closer to achieve that.

If you will keep only these two things in mind, you will surely be have to bring down your bounce rate as visitors will be having greater confidence because of abovementioned factors.

Bookmark it!

Online marketing is the need of the hour as there is no other way to tackle the competition. All online companies try to use certain strategies to get more customers. However, you will have to promote your site in the best possible way to get some customers. For increased traffic, you can try different options, but, there is one of the most important factors that should never be neglected. This factor is about the reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links from other websites are placed on your site and your website URL will be placed on the other websites. It is a great example of give and take which can really help you to get increased and targeted audience. Link exchange is one of those strategies which are momentous to make your business profitable as you can get more customers through this exchanging process. So, the basic advantage of link exchange is that you will be getting refined audience which will be having interest in you type of products. Along with this, you will become able to enjoy a greater search engine ranking as search engines love to pick sites containing greater number of links.

Now, it is quite obvious that link exchanging is a good marketing strategy. But, you will have to keep few things in mind before targeting a site for exchange of links.

•    First thing first, the other site should be a quality site. You must keep in mind that links should complement your site. For this, try going with bigger sites with heavy traffic. This will be in the best of your interest.
•    Try going with such site which may not be selling such products which may compliment yours. It means that you must never go for such site which may be selling products exactly like the ones that you may be selling. This will surely help your competitors and you will end up losing prospective customers.

After keeping the above mentioned points in view, you must proceed by contacting the webmaster. You can always contact him by email, but, try to personalize things a bit. Apart from email, you can use phone numbers to get in touch with a webmaster to talk about your intentions. Here, you must tell a webmaster that you want to put a link on your site to his as you think that his site is interesting. By this way, he may return the favor by placing your link on his site. So, it is all about making a nice relation and conversation as well. But, one thing is for sure that link exchange can help you to get lots of new customers.

Bookmark it!

We have discussed the importance of keywords when using the internet as a business marketing tool; however, keywords alone can not do the job.  The words to support the keywords play a role that is just as vital if not more so to your Internet marketing campaign.  If you do not use proper semantics, spelling, grammar, etc. visitors to your site will not look upon your ads too favorably. So bear these things in mind when creating your ads:

Use Catchy Headlines:  The headline is the first part of an ad the customer will see.  If it is a headline that catches his interest, then he will stay to peruse the ad and visit the site, but on the other hand if he doesn’t like it he will go somewhere else just as quickly.  So catchy headlines are essential!

Use Color:  This is an area where you want to stick out, but you do not wish to blind your customer because of using bright flashy colors.  Color is just as much an attention grabber as catchy headlines.  Each entity alone is really something, but when you combine the two, you usually have a good combination. Use color wisely and in moderation.

Use Graphics & Images:  Graphic illustrations and images help the consumer see what the item looks like.  However; like color, this item must also be used in moderation.  Don’t overdo it in this area.

Don’t Be A Copy-Cat:  Don’t use another business’ color scheme or catch phrase in an attempt to catch customers.  Not only will it not work, because a customer will not shop at a shop that has no scruples.  Also it is unethical and in many cases just plain illegal.  Copycatting is just plain bad business.

Test Before You Post:  There is actually software online out there now that will read through an ad and search for discrepancies and other things amiss with it.
It will verify the semantics to let you know if the ad sounds all right. Two of the most commonly known ones are C.T.R. (Click Through Ratio) and C.P.C. (Cost Per Click).  Try these out to see what your ad is like.

These are just a few common sense basic ideas for Writing And Wording Ads Effectively.  If you follow these tips, then most likely you will see an increase in business.  As your business increases so does your profit.

Bookmark it!

We have all seen them on the news, companies that once were big going out of business.  It makes us wonder how it happened, a thriving business going belly up.  Well in many cases it is simply because they were bought by another company, but usually if a company goes under, it’s for lack of money.  The top executives make some poor decisions and they wind up costing the company profits. As this happens everything goes downhill.  Here are some things to avoid so it will not happen to your business:

Avoid Costly Click Ads:
1.    Many customers will come using these ads, but many more will find them to be an annoyance and do everything to get away from them.  Click ads rank with pop-ups when it comes to the Internet.  Fortunately for you they haven’t invented a click-ad blocker.  However, this is also an unfortunately for the consumer. I do believe that would be an item that would sell one hundred percent.

2.    Trying to trap customers by using an ad that let’s you in, but not out is definitely bad business.  The customer will not like being boxed in do everything to get out of the ad.  This will cause customers to definitely NOT want to do business with you.  Customers will change the page, exit their browser, or in extreme cases do a cold restart just to get away from your ad.

3.    You will never have a perfect one hundred percent ratio of people visiting the site this way.  In essence these ads lose you money, not make it.  Those ads are persona non-gratis on everybody’s computer.  So don’t even throw valuable profits away by investing in them.  You are only losing business for yourself and not getting any business at all.

In essence the money you spend on the click ads for Internet marketing could be more wisely used elsewhere.  Websites and links will wind up paying you more than a click ad will.  By getting the word about your website out there, you will get a lot of visitors who will then become customers.  They in turn will recommend you saying ‘this is a good business, they don’t use those click ads’.

Follow the advice above and your business will make money, not lose it.  There have been too many businesses that didn’t heed that advice and look where they are today.  Gives you some things for thinking about, doesn’t it?

Bookmark it!

We have gone from being a nation that goes to the store each week for what we need, to a nation where the store comes to us.  In the 1970’s there was a saying in reference to the telephone book regarding our fingers!  That saying is still applicable today, only now it applies to the keyboard and not the telephone book.

As a consumer, at times it is difficult to find just what you want online. Often times, items are mis-listed because they were placed in the wrong category, just like the phone book.  As an Internet Marketer, a mistake like this can cost your business lots of money.  So where do you go to find the products which will sell?
First you must consider these factors:

1. What would you like to sell?  You need to decide on a goal of what you would like to make money selling.  As you review these other items, it is perfectly acceptable to change your goals.

2. What area will you be selling in?  For example: If you are going to auction the product will you use eBay or some other online auction venue?

3. What demographic will be your focal point?  Will your product be all-inclusive, or will it focus primarily on the young or the mature?

4. How much capital do you have to invest?  Be sure that whatever venture you choose to take on will not fully deplete that capital.  You need to hold a little in reserve in case of emergencies.

5.  Do you think that investors will back your plan?  You cannot go it alone.  You need to be sure to have a plan that investors are going to love and cannot resist the chance to invest in it.

6. Do you have a failsafe plan?  Always have a fallback plan ready.  If the first one doesn’t succeed, then maybe later efforts will.  I wouldn’t recommend using your emergency fund for this, but if you do, please do not use all of it.

If you take all these factors into consideration then finding a product that you like that is profitable as well should be easy for you to do.  There are no sure things in this world today, but you can even the odds up a bit by using the tips, which are posted here.

Bookmark it!

Link building is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization and plays an important role in increasing your visibility. There are several ways of going about link building but here are some of my little secrets about link building that I would like to share with you.

Secret #1:
Not all the links are highly effective and only few links can actually help you in getting high search engine rankings. Most people use Google’s toolbar PageRank for measuring the quality of a particular link. But the truth is that the PageRank that is displayed on the browser is an approximate value and not the real PageRank. And yes! Google PageRank is not considered as important by some of the other top search engines.

Secret#2:
Indexing and crawl rate: Most search engines use in-house link analysis algorithms for measuring the importance of web pages. They also use these algorithms for determining the frequency of indexing. Basically, if you are able to study and understand the indexing as well as crawling rate then you will also be able to get an approximate measurement of its actual value for link building. To determine the crawl rate, you will have to monitor the cache of search engines. The date of the cache will determine the date it crawled on the page.

Secret#3:
To gauge the true value of a link, you need to study three main types of rates and they are the crawl rate, indexing rate, and the rate at which a page is being updated.

Secret#4:
Requesting for links works very well! Either you can live on a prayer and hope that people or your intended audience will find your website or you can create linkable content that will target a specific linker and then send them a mail to catch their attention.

Secret#5:
Find websites over the internet that would be willing to link to you. The right way to search is by using two important aspects: the link phrase and a keyword. For example: if you are looking for a link to a travel website then you should ideally search using: “add travel url”

Oh! Here is some news: reciprocal linking is dead!

Secret#6:
The final secret is submitting content in ezines. What you really need to do is write an article that talks more about what you, your website or business is selling – a product, concept, dream, or a service and add a resource box at the end of the article with a link to your website. Submit the article in as many top ezines as possible.

Bookmark it!

One of the best ways of getting targeted traffic to your website is through affiliate programs. This basically means that you sell third party products using an affiliate program. There are several programs like that available over the internet like Amazon’s affiliate program, Commission Junction, Orbitz, legalzoom.com and many more.

The normal process involves an affiliate link on almost all the pages of your website but this might be a waste of Page Rank for your website. So what is the best option? The best option is dynamic affiliate linking! Dynamic affiliate linking is considered to be a win-win situation for the website owner as well as the company whose products you are marketing. But before we move forward, you need to understand how to track internet traffic.

There are two technical processes involved in this; one is called the cookies and the other is sessions. Sessions is used rarely and the one company that uses it is Amazon. What sessions really do is encode the tracking information within a query string that is visible on any browsers location bar. But the majority of affiliate linking program use cookies, which are small text strings sent by a server to the browsers. The browser on the other hand will save them in the user’s computer. Next time when the user will visit the website, the same cookie will be sent back to the server and this is how tracking is done.

So now that you know how to track visitors on your website, it is time to test the dynamic links. This is important and you should ideally do it before launching your website because you wouldn’t want to have a broken affiliate link, which can be a serious problem later on. Here is an example of a dynamic affiliate link:

a href=”http://wwwqksrv.net/click-1180946-546790″ target=”_blank”
onmouseover=”window.status=’http://00laptops.com’;return true;”
onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”
20% OFF on all Laptop brands at laptops.com

img src=”http://wwwqksrv.net/click-1180946-546790″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″

The first code is the affiliate referral code and the second one is the impression tracking code.

Once you have the dynamic affiliate linking code in place, you need to set the browser so that it can prompt you for accepting any cookies. If you are using IE6 then do the following:

Tools>Internet Options Menu>Privacy Tab> Advanced Button>Check override automatic cookie handling>select prompt for both first party and third party cookies> Click okay

Now whenever the server sends any cookie, the browser will prompt. Once you have completed testing of the links, you can reset the browser preferences.

Bookmark it!

There was a time when websites relied on small visitor counters at the bottom of the page to know the exact number of people visiting their website everyday but things have changed since then. From those web counters has risen a term called web analytics, which analyzes the complete activity on a website in a comprehensive manner and through an organized process. Web analytics involves collection, collation and understanding of the statistics and behaviors of internet visitors to a particular website. The entire process is the same; the only changes include the monitoring of activity on different websites like content intensive websites, ezines, e-commerce websites etc.

In e-commerce website, web analytics is used for measuring the various aspects of a website that work in-sync and towards fulfilling a specific business or organizational objective. Now these objectives could be anything related to the website like visitors buying a product, reading the forum, saving product SKU’s in their shopping cart for later or simple signing up for a monthly newsletter. But the most important aspect of web analytics is collection of relevant data. The data can be collected by a web analytics tool in two different ways:

Through the log files that contain information of all the activity on the website and is normally stored on the server. The log files store different degree and type of information like how many visitors came to the website, how many people returned to the website in a single day or week, which website pages were viewed the most number of times, the time in which there was maximum visitor activity, etc.

The second method is called page tagging and it is a more complex process as compared to the previous one. To enable page tagging, you will need to insert a code in JavaScript on each of the website pages that you intend to track. When you insert the code or script, it will send all the analytics or information or data to the server handling analytics and more often than not place a cookie on the user computer.

Now both these methods can effectively measure web analytics for a particular website although the page tagging method is considered to be more accurate. This is also the starting point to understanding consumer and online visitor behavior, which is a far more complex aspect but one that can make or break an online business!

Bookmark it!

Over the last couple of years, the internet has evolved and opened some new avenues for online businesses ensuring that both large and start-up companies can co-exist. The potential to earn online for new businesses has also increased multi-fold in the recent times. The result is competition and the one factor that will keep you ahead of the completion is internet marketing. Internet marketing consists of several key elements, each of which is responsible for driving targeted traffic, increasing brand visibility, and pushing forward the overall growth of your business.

Now you would probably ask the question: how significant is internet marketing to online business growth? In reality, the significance of internet marketing varies from one business, product or service to another. Let us look at some examples: EasyJet is a European Airline that is popular for their low cost tickets and they have actually seen a 90% sale of tickets online. Even a mega-corporate brand like Cisco has been able to earn 90% of their revenue online.

Most of the industries like IT, Telecom, Web Design, real estate, non-government organizations, pets, pet supplies, event tickets etc can be bought online. This has been made possible due to the higher reach of internet. This is also the reason why you can sit in California and sell your products or services in Tokyo. But again the fact of the matter is that your website and brand needs to be visible enough and should be able to reach out to your target audience. And this is where internet marketing plays a significant role.

Internet marketing comprises of two main segments:

1. Several specialist marketing functions: These functions apply to certain businesses
2. Philosophy or concept: This is applicable to all businesses

Within the above segments lie different strategies and tools with the help of which you will be able to market your brand over the internet and reach out to your target audiences irrespective of the geographical boundaries. There are eight top internet marketing options that you can use as a standalone strategy or in an effective configuration of some or all. These are:

1. Search Engine Optimization
2. Paid Advertising
3. Viral Strategy
4. Linking Strategy
5. Public Relations
6. E-Mail Publishing
7. Traditional Media
8. Networking

We will discuss these and many more fundamentals of Internet marketing as well as understand their pros and cons as we progress… so keep reading!

Bookmark it!