Archive for January, 2010
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Lately, AT&T has faced numerous complaints of poor or slow data bandwidth from its users of the iPhone, specifically the business users and the typical Apple consumer. Metropolitan regions like New York and San Francisco, where iPhone use is exceptionally heavy, make up the bulk of these complaints. AT&T’s main competitor Verizon even uses AT&T’s lack luster network in its marketing to differentiate their services.
With the introduction of Apple’s latest media technology the iPad, AT&T’s network could become even more crowded now that the iPad’s internet capabilities will be provided by AT&T’s 3G network exclusively, like that of the iPhone. To cope with the increase in users in their 3G networks, AT&T is really serious about expanding their network.
The expansion of AT&T’s networks began in 2009, where they added 1,900 new cell sites that expanded 3G coverage to over 360 markets enabling it to now reach an estimated 75 percent of the population.
AT&T is now looking to invest over $2 billion in 2010 to expand and improve the broadband data network even further… Finally! It plans to deploy fiber-optic backhaul, which will increase 3G data speeds even further, as well as focusing on boosting data capacity in troubled areas like New York and San Francisco.
AT&T CFO, Rick Lindner, offered this statement in response to AT&T’s excitement to take on the Internet capabilities for the new iPad:
“We believe, though, the device, based on where we believe it will be used–in homes, in offices, coffee shops, bookstores, airports, so on and so forth–will be used a substantial amount of time in a Wi-Fi environment. And so we’ll just–we’ll have to monitor this usage as the device gets out there. And if it’s substantially different, we’ll adapt to it. But right now, I think the economics will be very positive because it will be a very low-cost device for us–no cost, really, in terms of acquisition.”
Hopefully, AT&T can effectively expand and improve upon their 3G networks all over the world in order to better service its customers. Once they do this, and their Internet services become one without issues, their competitor Verizon will have to find another flaw in AT&T’s system to market against!
Information Provided By: Tony Bradley, PC World
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: 3G Network improvements, AT&T 3G Network, AT&T internet expansion, AT&T internet improvements, AT&T network improvements, AT&T Network iPad, iPad and AT&T, iPad internet capabilties
Posted in Internet Marketing News, Starting Up | No Comments »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
Conventionally the purpose of link building is to give a website a better chance to be noticed by the search engines. Every SEO professional knows the key to high search engine ranking is link building.
However, most importantly we must not forget a website’s true worth according to the search engines, is the content it provides. Does the site present ideas, services, products and educating information to improve our daily lives? Much too often websites are packed with keywords in order to rank for a certain product or service while offering something completely irrelevant.
Sites that appear in the first pages of the search engines are the ones with the most relevant and useful information using honest and appropriate techniques. Some have developed sophisticated yet irrelevant SEO techniques that may be damaging the Internet’s value, however, search engines have responded to such techniques and will penalize websites by removing them from search results. Therefore, stay away from link farms, spamming, duplicate websites and keyword generated link pages.
Some SEO experts are seeing great success in achieving high search engine ranking through substantial effort put into receiving inbound links from high-classified websites. When your site receives links from pages with high page rank, your website is able to maintain or grow in page rank simultaneously.
Written By: Sam Kim
Tags: inbound link relevance, Link Building, link building strategy, link building techniques, san diego internet marketing, San Diego Link Building, seo strategy, webitmd internet marketing
Posted in Starting Up | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 28th, 2010
iPad Specs:
Height: 9.56 inches
Width: 7.47 inches
Depth: 0.5 inch
Weight: 1.5 pounds
Display
* 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
* 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)
* Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
* Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously
Capacity
* 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive
Processor
* 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip
Battery and Power
* Built-in 25Whr rechargeable lithium-polymer battery
* Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music
The release of the iPad has obviously been hyped and swarms of consumers blindly following the newest most talked about trend will flock to the apple stores. Perhaps the question we should ask ourselves before jumping on the consumerism bandwagon is, will the iPad be able to perform all of the functions you need it to consistently and reliably? If the iPad follows the trends of the iPhone, then maybe we should think twice. Lastly, with iPhone prices being dropped down to an inexpensive $99 now, could it be difficult to justify spending $499-$829 on a product that is similar.
Tags: apple ipad release, ipad, ipad introduction, mobile internet, mobile media device
Posted in Starting Up | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
The number of mobile applications is growing daily pretty soon we won’t even need computers! Marketers are quickly jumping on this trend in 2010- the world of applications will soon grow to an all-time high. Although the spending on social apps will stagnate this year, most marketers have already produced them. “Less than one-half of marketers created either a mobile or social app in 2009, but most plan to invest in a mobile app this year. The iPhone is the platform of choice, followed by Android.” And among those marketers with apps in 09, Facebook was the leading platform.
Social apps were perceived as the top goal for achieving engagement, audience targeting, reach, sharing and branding potential. “The top one-third of advertisers and agencies using mobile apps planned to up their investments by 75% or more. Marketers who used apps reported a growing market, client demand and increased standardization in the app world as reasons to spend more in the coming months.”
Mobile applications by marketers and publishers are the next goal for distribution and discover ability.
15% of advertisers and agencies spent more than 60% of their budgets on promotion in 2009, but more than one-third spent less than 5%. Times are changing, and today consumers want easy access to their favorite sites quickly. Mobile apps are the newest trend for 2010 when it comes to reaching your target audience.
Information Provided by: eMarketer.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan
Tags: 2010 trends, internet marketing san diego, mobile applications, mobile applications take over, san diego internet marketing, social applications, webitmd internet marketing, webitmd san diego
Posted in Link Building, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Social Media Networking | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Many companies fear that online consumers will post negative or hurtful comments about them and their products or services. This is worrisome especially on social media where opinions about certain things are shared all over the globe and in real-time.
In their “Social Media and Online PR Report,” Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia explored ways marketers can combat “brand bashing” online.
They reported, when asked how companies most often combat these negative comments, that:
• Nearly one-half suggested having directly engaged with the consumer
• The second-most-common strategy was longer-term in focus: trying to improve products and services.
Many respondents had even tried to get offensive content written about their company removed entirely but that tactic can have many negative effects on a company’s image.
Econsultancy also noted that only 12% of companies tried to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions in search results, and that more could go this route.
When companies were asked about their activities on Twitter specifically, Brand monitoring was the third highest activity behind publicizing new content and marketing using this form of communication channel.
Other findings from Twitter usage found:
• About one-quarter of companies were using the microblogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback.
• Nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies reported responding to tweets, and 34% responded “systematically.”
• More than one-fifth of client-side companies told Econsultancy that fear of reputation issues was a factor preventing more effective social media engagement.
• Almost 30% of agencies said the same of their clients.
In response to the results of these findings, Econsultancy offered this statement to address brand monitoring and how to effectively combat it: “To address this, there needs to be more education around how to deal with negative PR and social media crisis management, as well as best practice on how to engage in the first place,” according to the report. “There is clearly an opportunity here for agencies to better educate their clients.”
Happy Branding!
Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: Brand Monitoring Social Media, Brand Reputation Social Media, San Diego Internet Branding, san diego social media, social media advertising, Social Media Branding, Social Media Utilization WebitMD, WebitMD Branding Social Media
Posted in Social Media Networking | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Due to a rising middle class in the emerging countries, there has been a rising demand of the latest gadgets and online media activities while Internet users in the US and other mature markets are loosing their edge.
According to reports by Accenture, the top consumer electronics owned by US Internet users were computers and mobile phones, with web-enabled mobile phone usage increasing more than 300% in the past 3 years. Mobile phone and web-enabled smartphones taken together become the most important consumer technology to Americans.
Web users surveyed in emerging countries such as China, India, Malaysia and Singapore were ahead of mature markets such as the US, Germany, France and Japan in areas such as:
- “Emerging-market Web users were more than two and one-half times as likely to buy a smartphone during the next year (52%) compared with mature-market respondents (20%), and were also more likely to have bought a smartphone in the past year (67% versus 32%).
- Internet users in emerging markets were twice as likely to have bought a computer in the past year (40% versus 20%).
- Emerging-market respondents tended to spend more money on consumer electronics in 2009 than their mature-market counterparts.”
In addition emerging markets are showing more usage of Web activities than mature markets in areas such as – watching tv shows/movies on the Internet or mobile, working from home, managing photos and videos on the Internet, connecting with people on social networking sites, and blogging.
“One of the reasons for this emerging-country growth is the rapid expansion of the middle class with its substantial disposable income,” says Jean-Laurent Poitou, managing director of Accenture’s Electronics & High Tech industry group.
Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: eMarketer
Tags: emerging markets, international mobile internet rise, mature markets, mobile tech growth san diego, online marketing mobile, san diego internet marketing, san diego tech growth, tech growth, web activity, webitmd internet marketing
Posted in Starting Up | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
According to the new edition of the SheSpeaks “Annual Social Media Study”, social networking profile penetration of women climbed from 58% in 2008 to 86% in 2009.
Along with this increase, there was also an increase in brand-related activities on social media sites of female internet users. The study shows that 80% of female users said that they had become a fan of a product or a brand on one of their social media networking profiles. In additon, 72% of female users had learned about a new product or brand, or joined a group about one.
Twitter has become the least-likely alternative to finding out about products or services via social networking sites compared to the rest, the study also demonstrates.
Also, according to the study:
One half of female internet users had bought a product because of a social media network, adding to the overall growth of purchasing with the influence of social networking sites and blogs over the last year.
Women have also been more receptive to social network advertising, where 2% in 2008 said that they look at the banner ads and click-through them which has increased to 9% in 2009.
Women seem to be responding to social network advertising and brand awareness more-so now than ever, so it is important to target them as best as possible. According to Aliza Freud, the founder and CEO of SheSpeaks, “Last year our members were going online primarily to research purchases, but now they are looking to social media to help them research, guide and facilitate every kind of transaction, from social exchanges to purchases. Women have become more comfortable using social media, and for marketers, the overall growth and habitual use of social media represents opportunities to reach and engage women of all ages, and influence their purchase decisions.”
Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: internet marketing women social media, ladies social media, san diego internet marketing, san diego social media, san diego women social media, social media targeting women, social media women rise, women and social media, women social media branding
Posted in Internet Marketing Fundamentals, Starting Up, Web Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
Android is quickly catching up to iPhone to become a mobile platform to be recognized, according to data from ChangeWave Research.
The majority of growth was seen between September and December 2009. Android-based phone purchases jumped from 6% to 21%, which the much-hyped launch of Motorola’s Droid undoubtedly was a big reason for the surge. Thus, Google’s operating system was able to overtake Blackberry in the handset market.
Although iPhone remains the top choice for handsets at 28% of the market, they did see a 4% drop between September and December 2009.
Meanwhile, overall smartphone usage continues to see a steady rise, with 42% of US consumers by December 2009. Data shows that over the past 3 years, usage of smartphones has increased 27%. Additionally, roughly 13% of respondents in the study were planning to buy smartphone over the next 90 days.
According to ChangeWave, iPhone owners were most satisfied with their handsets followed closely by Android-based phones. Satisfaction rates drop significantly with other smartphones. Another common trait the iPhone and Android users have is that they share similar mobile content habits.
Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: eMarketer
Tags: andoird mobile marketing, android marketing, Mobile Marketing, san diego internet marketing, san diego mobile marketing, SEO San Diego, smartphone, webitmd internet marketing
Posted in Internet Marketing News, Mobile Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, January 18th, 2010
Although Pagerank is not available on the Google Toolbar, Google still ranks websites higher in their index if they have a higher Pagerank. It would benefit your website greatly within the search engines if all of the pages within your site’s directory contained high Pageranks so that each page is ranked higher for the keywords they possess, but this is hard to come by.
Normally, the homepage of your website is usually the page with the highest Pagerank because when online users share and link to your site (link-building), they are linking to your homepage’s url the majority of the time, rather than the subpages’ directory urls of your site. This makes your homepage more visible in search engines leading to higher traffic over the rest of the pages your site contains. Many ask the question: In theory, would it benefit my website’s subpages, and their Pagerank, if they had their own subdomains rather than using their current directory urls?
A change for a subpage’s directory url to a subdomain would look like this:
WebitMD’s current blog directory url is http://www.webitmd.com/blog
If we changed the blog’s directory url to make it a subdomain, some examples would look like this:
http://www.blog.webitmd.com/ or http://www.webitmdblog.com
By changing your subpages’ directory urls to their own subdomains, this would allow those that share and link to your site’s content to drive straight traffic to your subpages thus increasing their Pagerank individually. This is because Google looks at subdomains as individual websites themselves. This in turn, will allow visitors to come across these subpages more often in the organic results of search engines.
Is this strategy worth pursuing on your site? In theory, yes and no.
If we look at the basic rules of SEO, fresh and interesting content is key! If you have a website that has subpages where you often update and provide interesting content for the online audience, this subdomain strategy can help tremendously provided that people are linking to your subpages and the content is rich in SEO text. For those pages that are not updated very often, this would be a waste of time.
It is important to note that if you do pursue this strategy, you may experience an initial drop in Pagerank when you first create the new subdomains from your original homepage at first, but provided you stick by the smart rules of SEO, you may end up with three or four websites with high rankings instead of just one. This is certainly worth the time!
Information Provided By: Entrepreneur’s Journey
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: how to use sub domains, how to use subdomains, san diego internet marketing blog, san diego subdomains, SEO San Diego, subdomain blod posts, subdomain blog posting, subdomain blogs, webitmd internet marketing
Posted in Starting Up | No Comments »
Friday, January 15th, 2010
Jeff Walker is considered one of the best Internet markers and is known for the “Product Launch Formula”. His methods have been used for nearly all big launches in the last year including “StomperNet”, “Pipeline Profits”, and “Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing”.
It seems however, the perfect formula for Internet marketing is being applied to the Internet marketing world, which has already been saturated with launches and therefore a terrible place to apply the strategies. Recent success stories have been emerging from non-internet marketing industries.
When you’re looking to launch a product or a service, Jeff’s Product Launch Formula is the standard however there is some good info that can be obtained for free as well.
“The email list is the key component behind most product launches and it acts as the main communication medium between the expert or company, and the prospects.” Mistakes in this area can be critical.
The 3 following rules, which may seem very basic, are critical:
1. Always send a test email to yourself before publishing
2. Test all links in the test email
3. If any changes are made after your test, repeat the test with your new email
When you ask yourself whether you conduct the 3 steps before you send an Email Newsletter, how frequently does that happen?
A few simple, quick and easy steps can help you avoid adjusting errors after the fact.
Written By: Sam Kim
Information Provided By: www.entreprenuers-journey.com
Tags: email marketing, email newsletter, Internet Marketing, product launch, san diego seo webitmd
Posted in Starting Up | No Comments »
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
It is surprising that even today website owners haven’t discovered how to make their sites user friendly. People like aesthetically pleasing sites that cater to them: the customer.
Here is a short checklist of dos and don’ts for anyone working on the internet to sell their product or service.
- In the space “above the fold,” state what the site is aiming to achieve. The area above the fold is the section that is seen without scrolling down. This space should be used to tell the consumer what you do exactly. Why does your site exist? This should be clear to the audience in one quick glance. “You can’t solve someone’s problem if they can’t even figure out what it is that you do.”
- Use large fonts and plenty of white space. “This is a no brainer. You want your website to be read by as many people as possible so don’t use tiny fonts, don’t use clever fonts, just keep it simple, double spaced and big. You wouldn’t whisper your sales pitch to a potential customer in real life, so don’t do it online.”
- Keep it simple- not too fancy. Text comes first to graphics; the words on the page are primary. “Graphics should only be used to enhance the presentation of text and never hinder or distract the visitor from what they are supposed to do at your website – read it!”
- Use headings, bolds, and lists. Unfortunately, people today are getting lazier and lazier. People don’t want to read your five paragraph essay on your product or service. They want to see bullet points, lists of benefits and get information as quickly and painlessly as possible.
- If you aren’t as technologically advances graphic wise as you’d like to be, just use one nice text-based page. “You can have tremendous success online by using a webpage that is just a simple letter format. Follow the rules above and tell your story using just words. If you can’t do website design yourself or can’t afford it, you can keep things simple and still have a very effective message. It won’t be pretty, but like I said, pretty doesn’t sell – the words do.”
Information provided by: entrepreneurs-journey.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan
Tags: checklist for websites, internet marketing san diego, san diego internet marketing, tips for websites, webitmd internet marketing, webitmd san diego, website tips
Posted in Internet Marketing Fundamentals, Marketing, Starting Up, Web Development | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Out with the old and in with the new! A new year has begun and keeping up with SEO trends should be at the top of your to-do list. So for 2010 here is a list of trends to keep an eye out for:
- Site Speed – Site speed may be used as a new ranking factor in 2010. Make sure your pages load quickly by decreasing load time. “The order of things on your page will affect its load time, so make sure you’re using proper HTML, and cleaning up your CSS and JavaScript so that users aren’t left waiting when they try to access your site.”
- Mobile – Research done by Neilson shows that there are now 56.9 million people looking for information on mobile web sites, which is up 34% from last year. First you should find out how your site performs on small devices. There are paid services which provide feedback for this. Then, once it is functional, take advantage of Google’s new mobile services and free online coupons.
- Online Video - YouTube was made the second largest search engine last year. With larger companies dropping out, more space is available for small to medium sized companies which could use the attention. So make a video and post it soon!
- Reputation Management Meets Real-Time Search – “When Google put real-time search updates into the SERPs they unleashed a potential online reputation problem of epic proportions. They essentially opened the floodgates to give angry customers immediate power in the search results. You no longer have a window to reach out to an angry tweeter to ask them to amend their update or tone down that Blog post. Google is pulling from tweets, from Blogs, from news, from articles and other Web content and throwing it immediately into your search results, often right above your own site. All of this means that you need to be even more vigilant about monitoring the conversation in an attempt to protect your brand. For a small business owner, your best line of defense is to build a listening station that will help keep you abreast of conversations as they happen.”
- Increased Awareness of Local – “If you haven’t tied up all your local listings and profiles, it is beyond time to do that. The search engines, especially Google, are looking at the consistency and completeness of your local listings in order to rank you for relevant queries. That’s a huge ranking factor that is 100 percent in your control. Take advantage of it!”
Information Provided by: Smallbiztrends.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan
Tags: 2010 trends, internet marketing san diego, internet marketing trends, internet marketing trends 2010, san diego internet marketing, seo trends for 2010, top new trends 2010, webitmd internet marketing, webitmd san diego
Posted in Behavioral Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, SEO, Social Media Networking, Starting Up | No Comments »
Monday, January 11th, 2010
There are a lot of different blog content management systems to choose from when looking for one to use on your website and each platform has its advantages and disadvantages over the others. When it comes to searching for the best blog platform, there is one system that stands out from the rest. The system that provides all-around excellence and most ease of use is WordPress and it blows the other systems out of the water for good reasons.
The advantages of WordPress are:
- Yeah, It’s FREE.
- The WordPress interface is easy to learn, use, and to install! You don’t need to be an experienced web designer to integrate and use the software.
- It is entirely Open Source! Open Source is a philosophy of software distribution that allows anyone to read and modify the program’s source code. Because anyone can modify the source code, improvements, implementations of new specific features, and customization occur rapidly and efficiently. You could even use the blog platform as your website’s platform and no one would ever know.
- Integration of plugins and themes are seamless and widely available. WordPress offers more of a variety of plugins and themes than other blog systems. We like options!
- It offers easier organization of your content pages. WordPress does not limit the amount of pages you can have or how to organize them. Rather it is up to you what kind of navigation pages you would like, what categories to fit them in, and where you would like them to be placed on your site. It is entirely up to you and WordPress does not limit your capabilities.
- The back-end GUI is neatly organized and uses large fonts. The back-end graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows the blog’s manager to interact with programs in more ways that typing such as computers, hand-held devices, and many more. Having the GUI as neat as possible and clear to read will save you time and energy.
- It is driven using a SQL Database. The Structured Query Language is a database designed for maintaining and saving data rather than having to re-write the data completely. This language allows you to keep the format of the pages you have already made, and use them over and over again, rather than having to rebuild anything from scratch like you have to with other blog systems.
- SEO is just good on WordPress than it is on other blog platforms. Google spiders crawl WordPress sites like they would any other blog and rank them accordingly.
For these reasons, and probably many more, WordPress is king! Blog integration and use on your website should be seamless, easy to use, and timely and WordPress is the program that offers these the best, at least in our opinion!
Information Provided By: Entrepreneurs-Journey
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
Tags: Blog Content Management Systems, Blog Integration, blog integration on website, Blog Integration San Diego, Blog Integration WebitMD, Blog Setup, Easiest Blog platforms, power of blogs, san diego internet marketing, San Diego WebitMD Blog integration, WebitMD Blog Integration, website blogs, WordPress advantages
Posted in Internet Marketing Fundamentals | No Comments »
