Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Job Recruiting Moves from the Campus to the Internet

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

As the Internet has become a huge repository of entry-level job advertisements, recruiters have pulled back from on-campus job fairs and recruiting efforts. A recent study by Monster.com found that over 90% of companies utilize online advertising for job recruiting. About 25% are also using social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn to advertise entry-level openings.

Monster.com also found that college students and recent graduates sought out friends and family (78%) and online job boards (67%) the most for job opportunities. Social networking sites were only utilized by 38% of respondents. However, this shows a huge gain over last year’s survey, when social networking sites were utilized only 15% of the time by new graduates.

While social networking sites continue to proliferate in their uses, the line has become increasingly blurred between public and private content. 55% of college job seekers said they have tailored their online profiles to make them more appropriate for viewing by potential employers.

Smartphones continue to lead in mobile advertising

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Millennial Media, a mobile advertising network, found through a recent study that smartphones account for almost one-half of mobile ad impressions in the US. Even though more subscribers have feature phones, these users have less interaction with advanced mobile content, and therefore only account for one-third of mobile ad views.

iPhones continue to dominate ad impressions within the smartphone category, followed by BlackBerrys and Androids. Androids have seen that largest increase in ad requests, rising 72% month over month. March was the first month the Android phone was one of the three top smartphone operating systems. Requests were up 20% from Apple phones and 25% from BlackBerrys.

On other mobile devices, such as iPads, iPod touches and connected video gaming devices, Millennial Media found that those devices took a significant share of impressions. iPad impressions climbed 713% during the first full week the device was available for purchase. Numbers will only climb as the iPad and similar mobile devices continue to proliferate.

While Apple’s tight hold on the smartphone market continues, the Android has gained significant ground because of its high customer satisfaction and loyalty. Indications that Android also represents a robust mobile app platform also point to a greater share of mobile ad impressions in the future.

Start-up Success

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Perhaps the most ambitious campaign of start-ups, Y Combinator is a hybrid venture capital fund and business school that invests in, advises, and literally, feeds 40 or so early-stage businesses a year. Paul Graham, it’s fearless and optimistic leader, supplements his nominally sized investments of under $25,000 with lots of smart advice, technical help, and sense of community. The model has produced 145 companies to date, a few sizable acquisitions, and copycat funds in cities across the country and around the world.

For all the pain of nurturing a start-up, Graham believes that founding a company is the most efficient way to create wealth — for investors, for founders, for society at large. “There’s this classic pattern that has happened over and over again throughout history in which something is made one at a time, very expensively and unreliably by hand, and then someone comes along and figures out how to make large numbers of them cheaply and reliably,” Graham says. “We’re pulling this kind of transformation with venture funding. We’re mass-producing the start-up.”

Graham is something of a folk hero to a generation of ambitious techies, who debate his essays, read his books, and pitch him start-ups by the hundreds. His philosophies are simple: founders should live as cheaply as possible so that they can first become cash-flow positive. Wealth will follow.

Indeed, there’s something exhilarating about Graham’s optimism, especially at a time when so many once-great companies are sitting on the verge of bankruptcy. Graham believes, deeply, that start-ups are the answer to the world’s problems; that they are easy to make if you are determined enough and cheap enough; and that it’s getting a lot easier to start one.

North American Search Market Heats Up!!

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Search engine marketing spending is expected to be up 14% to $16.6 billion in North America in 2010. While growth in this marketing channel, which includes paid search, search engine optimization, and other search engine marketing technologies, slowed in 2008 and 2009, it still proved to relatively recession-resistant. As we progress into 2010, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) projects steady growth to return.

In a recent survey, SEMPO found that a majority of marketers planned to shift marketing budgets away from other channels such as direct mail and spend more on paid search and search optimization. Marketers see search optimization as a valuable means for increasing Website traffic and generating leads. In turn, site traffic metrics could measure the success of campaigns, such as conversation rate.

Respondents, however, are concerned about measuring return on investment, effectively optimizing their sites, and choosing the best keywords. Further, markets were also daunted with the challenge of integrating paid search and search optimization with other online and offline marketing strategies.

Better Rankings in Google Local

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

A recent blog post from the SEOmoz blog, described tips regarding improving your ranking on Google Maps and increasing local search optimization. Rand, the CEO of SEOmoz, walks internet marketers through the research and strategy development internet marketers must take to ensure the best results for a dominant presence in local search results.

He recommends using the following steps to improve your ranking on Google Maps:

Step 1: Do Lots of Searches Related to Your Business & Region

Actively search and understand your competitors within your business and understand what they are doing online, where they are located online within local directories, and how they are getting to the top of Google Maps. You’re seeking results that show competing or closely related businesses in local search results, so get creative and do a thorough search of the local market.

Step 2: Identify a Handful (or a Few Dozen) Businesses that Consistently Get Top Rankings

You could build a formal spreadsheet and perform tracking to identify these top ranking competitors or start with gut feel and expand later on in the process. For less competitive listings, an informal approach may work just fine but what you want to do is get a full understanding of why the top competitors are on the top!

Step 3: In Google Maps, Go to the Local Business Profile for Each of These

Don’t click the name of the listing itself. Instead, follow the links to the “reviews” about each of your competitors’ businesses. You’ll get a page with information about the business, reviews and lists of data that Google has found about them.

Step 4: In the Business Listing, Click on the Links to “More About this Place”

The “more about this place” section of the business listing shows brief snippets, titles and URLs where Google has found relevant information pertaining to the business. This is your potential goldmine for discovering listing sources.

Step 5: After Reviewing Relevant Listing Sources, Go to those Sites & Get Your Business Added/Updated

The domains that are listed are places where Google is pulling information about your business. This is where the Maps algorithm comes into play - it relies on not only the number of listings, but the quality of the sources and the consistency between them. You want every listing to perfectly match one another, right down the the suffix on the reservations phone number and the formatting of your suite number (e.g. 1221 E Pike Street vs. 1221 East Pike Street vs. 1221 E Pike Street Suite 200 vs. 1221 East Pike Street #200 are all DIFFERENT - don’t make that mistake).

In addition to the potential local ranking boost, a majority of these sources offer the potential to earn links! Even if you don’t care much about the local results themselves, this is a pretty terrific way to get some good quality, trusted sites linking to you.

Step 6: Repeat Step 4 & 5 for the “Reviews” and “User Content” Sections

If you’re hungry for even more sources, you can look at where listings come from on other competitors and/or go back to the business listing’s page in Google Maps/Local and choose from the “reviews” and “user content” sections for even more potential spots. Much like manual link building back in the late ’90’s, perseverance and careful attention to detail will take you far.

There are automated services out there to help with this process, but I haven’t yet seen one I feel completely comfortable about. The biggest issue is the dramatic value of and need for consistency in the listings. When automated systems submit, they can mix in a suite number in the wrong place, cut off a phone number because the form doesn’t accept hyphens or confirm a URL that doesn’t match what you’ve submitted elsewhere. For now, I recommend playing it safe and spending the hours (even if that’s a dozen or two) to get those 50-250 listings correct. Google will reward you with local rankings and high quality traffic.

Essentially, you want to research and understand what your competitors are doing to receive high rankings on Google Maps and mimic they ways they are receiving links, gaining customer reviews, and other methods that help them get to the top. Hope this series of steps can help get your business on the map, literally!

Information Provided By: Rand, SEOmoz
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Local Online Ad Buys on the Rise

Monday, March 8th, 2010

The state of the economy in 2009 forced changes to the local ad market. This has caused BIA/Kelsey, a large media strategies group, to lower expectations for local advertising spending, pushing the recovery curve out one year further than previously forecast.

Last year, according to the firm’s “Annual US Local Media Forecast,” US local ad spending reached $130.2 billion, or 55.3% of the total. That was lower than what BIA/Kelsey projected in February 2009 forecasting $141.3 billion and a significant drop from the $156.3 billion spend on local advertising in 2008.

BIA/Kelsey believes that the total local advertising spending will continue to stagnate through 2011, while 2012 will bring more “meaningful recovery” to the ad market.

Some important points to be noted within this study suggest that:
• Buys Online will continue to get a larger share of the local ad spending pie with increases from 12% in 2009 to a projected 14% in 2010.
• By 2014, BIA/Kelsey expects one-quarter of all local advertising spending to be online!
• In January, Barclays Capital also reported 2009 local ad spending down significantly from the year before, by about 22%. Barclays similarly expects a flat local ad market through 2011.

Here are some graphs to show details concerning the ad market in 2010:

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Benefits of Online Streaming for Sports

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Sports fans from all areas of the sports arena have been vocally demanding one thing from their teams they are loyal to… online streaming of their sporting events that can be seen anywhere at anytime.

The spread of paid-streaming content online by U.S. leagues brings huge audiences for sporting events like the Olympics, March Madness, and the U.S. Open. Major League Baseball however, is the leader in capitalizing on this new trend offering its fans streaming live-game content on a paid basis. According to the Sports Business Journal, MLB has built an online streaming package that generated around 40 million dollars in 2009! The NFL, NBA, and NHL are also putting their best efforts forward to get their online streaming capabilities up-to-par for their fans.

Also, with the increase in smartphone use and data plan subscriptions from sports teams, this opens up demand for streaming sports and video content to call phone and mobile device users.

The increase in online and smartphone streaming allows many benefits for all different types of groups:

• Avid sports fans will now be able to watch games they are interested in seeing online, on their phones, or at a later date. This keeps fans interactive with their teams and up-to-date with how their teams are doing during their season.
• Advertisers now have an opportunity to sponsor online and smartphone videos and content allowing them to increase their branding strategies as well as hit some of their target markets
• Sports teams now have the opportunity to profit from an online market by offering these live streams of their team.

Here is a graph of the leading U.S. Sports teams taking advantage of video-streaming:

So, for all you sports internet marketers out there, give your fans what they want and start making some money off of it!

Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Astounding Facebook Stats

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Happy Birthday Facebook! On February 4, 2010 Facebook officially turned 6 years old. Facebook is used world-wide and has become the platform for internet networking with over 400 million users and more than 900 employees.

Quick Facebook facts:

1. The average user spends about 55 minutes a day on Facebook- this is equal to over 8% of their day.

2. Facebook is now able to be viewed in 65 different languages.

3. 30% of Facebook users are from/in Europe.

4. Every day 35 million users update their status and 20 million become fans of pages. (There are 1.6 million fan pages, by the way).

5. Of the 1.6 million fan pages, 700,000 are local businesses.

6. 2.5 billion Photos are uploaded every month by users.

7. Each month 3.5 million events are created.

Did we mention that now users don’t have to wait until they get home to log onto Facebook? The Facebook mobile application is supported by three phones: Blackberry, iPhone, and the new Android. Facebook mobile has 100 million monthly users and is still growing.

Facebook is dominating the networking game on all levels; especially for marketers. People can directly advertise to their target market via Facebook using pay per click. You can use Facebook as a tool that will post your ad on the pages of those people you select to target- a marketers dream come true. No wonder Facebook is a billion dollar company.

WebitMD knows the value and importance of marketing via social networks like Facebook. It is crucial that businesses, especially local businesses, take advantage of getting their name out to members of their community and using Facebook pages to reach people is the fastest way. WebiMD specialized in social media marketing among the other services we offer.

Information provided by: mashable.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

5 Free/Inexpensive SEO Tools For Your Website

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Looking for some free tools to help you improve your website’s SEO? Get familiar with the following 5 tools that can help improve your website’s visibility online and increase your conversions!

1. SEO Analyzer: You submit your website’s URL into this SEO Analyzer and it will provide you some feedback regarding your SEO and conversion strategies. It actually gives your website a rating on a point scale between 1-100 on how you are currently optimizing your website for search engines and optimization. It also gives you a report on every aspect of your website, including inline styles, obsolete HTML, and download time. For being a free tool, it is worth taking a look at!

2. Website Grader: This free tool is one like that of the SEO Analyzer. Instead of giving you a grade on a point scale between 1-100, it actually gives you a letter grade. Website Grader provides a great deal of information in a short amount of time and tells you all you need to know about optimizing your site, making your SEO efforts easier, and in less time. This tool also tells you how many del.ici.ous bookmarks you have, as well as grading both on-site and off-site SEO.

3. AWStats: This tool is also free and is mostly helpful when researching who is visiting your site, what search engines visitors use, and when visitors are actually showing up on your site. This is more of a log analyzer than an analytics tool but still provides free and useful information.

4. Crazy Egg: The basic version of this tool is free, but can also be upgraded if you pay a little extra. Crazy Egg allows you to see what visitors do when they get to your website, as in where there mouse is actually moving and what they are clicking on. It even has a heatmap to show you the exact mouse movements made by your visitors! Very easy to use and great free information!

5. Mint: Mint is a tool that provides great information regarding unique referrers, popular pages, and number of visits. This tool is around $30 dollars, which is not bad when the pay-off will hopefully be increased site traffic.

One should of course use web analytics tools first to receive most of their information like Google Analystics and Google Webmaster Tools. However, yo should be using the free and inexpensive tools that are available out there to find out more information about what your website is doing right, wrong, and to find out more information your analytics tools don’t tell you. In this economy, any beneficial information you can receive on a tight budget can only help your website grow, so get out there and start utilizing these tools!

Information Provided By: Moe Tamani
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Social Media Use at Work is a Liability

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

Have you ever considered the effects of social media use your employees are engaging in during business hours? According to the “Social Networks vs. Management?” report from employment services firm Manpower, they claim that although social network networking sites can be utilized as an effective marketing tool for your business, it is just as big of a liability.

Lower productivity, security problems, and reputation issues are huge threats to the success of any company and these happen to be the end result of increased social media networking performed by employees during and after business hours.

The graph below demonstrates how many companies have a formal policy for employee use of external social networking sites worldwide. Only one-fifth of the companies that were surveyed in Manpower’s report even have a policy that concerns social media use. It seems that the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific business worlds are leading the pack with setting policies about social media use during business hours.

Among the companies that did have one of these policies, around 63% of them claimed that it was pretty effective in fighting off the lost productivity social media use encourages.

The loss of productivity in the workplace is one major concern of the use of social media. However, one must not forget about the effects of social networking and how it could potentially negatively effect the reputation of your company. Currently in the U.S., 8% of the companies surveyed in Manpower’s report confessed that social media did in fact have a negative effect on their overall reputation.

I personally believe that limiting the use of social media in the workplace is a great way to increase productivity of one’s employees. I also would want to encourage my employees to either promote a positive outlook on their company or even become unaffiliated with it altogether in order to keep the overall reputation of a company’s brand free from harm online through these sites.

Information Provided By: eMarketer, Manpower
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders

Is SEO Dying?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

It was bound to happen- some person writing about the death of SEO. There are a few reasons for this speculation, try searching for “is seo dead.”

Reasons why people think SEO is dying are as follows:

First, people do not really know what SEO is. Even among marketers, people continue to believe that SEO is the “process of tricking search engines to rank a site for search queries for which it isn’t one of the better matches. With this viewpoint, it’s easy to see why people would want to conclude that SEO is a dying medium. Google and Microsoft make billions of dollars in revenue from their search engines, and protecting that revenue stream is a critical activity for them.”

If people are not using SEO correctly, they will ruin the search engine system. This is why Google has invested so much in WebSpam. When consumers receive poor search results they become dissatisfied and turn to different search engines.

Second, other people believe that social media will soon replace SEO. “These people argue that inbound links are an elitist system of voting for Web sites (you have to own a Web site to vote), and that social media will provide a much broader array of signals, because anyone with an Internet connection can sign up for a social media service and start making their opinions known. Further, they argue, more people will rely on social media for opinions on things because people love to learn from the experience of others.”

Social media sites have not been adopted broadly across the population, making the data lumpy and inconsistent- and it is easily spammed. In creating an account, no real investment is needed; all you have to do is sign up and begin posting your opinions and thoughts.

Authority is another issue here. We can assume those with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter have some authority on a topic, but the most they can offer is their own opinions. “Someone with a Web site has made a significant investment in building that site, and here the stamp of authority is likewise relatively easy to measure. However, it’s much more meaningful to receive an authoritative link than an authoritative Tweet.”

So is SEO dying?

“Not a chance. Defined properly, but still somewhat narrowly, SEO is the practice of helping publishers bring new traffic and customers to their Web site, by building and promoting high quality Web sites using technology that the search engines can parse. That need isn’t going away anytime soon.”

Make the most out of available opportunities. For example, Microsoft’s Bing. SEO can and will evolve with the changing times. The advent of universal search resulted in some changes, and created new opportunities for SEOs. The rising prominence of local search did as well. Increasing personalization will create yet more opportunities.

“For the SEO professional, staying abreast of the changing market environment is part of the price of being in this business. While change is constant, publishers use SEO as a means for obtaining new customers from search engines. As long as search is around, there will be a need for people who know how to make that happen.”

Information provided by: searchenginewatch.com
Written by: Samantha J Stephan

Mobile App Usage on the Rise in 2010

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.

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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

Does Your Website Make Sense?

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

Top SEO Trends for 2010

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

What is the Google Honeymoon?

Monday, December 21st, 2009

When a new website is initially released on the internet, Google may give it a high rank in the Google search index. Usually this is between 24 and 48 hours after production. On average, the page will rank particularly high, then it will drop back to whatever is normal for the website.

One theory, calling this period the “honeymoon,” suggests that Google initially ranks new pages high, so that it can collect data on how relevant the page is for particular keywords. “If during the honeymoon your pages are clicked often and the visitor hangs around for a while (doesn’t click back and choose another option from the search results) then your drop after the honeymoon isn’t significant. The logic being that your page offers a good answer to the question being asked. If your page doesn’t get many clicks or people don’t stay around then after the honeymoon you can expect your page to drop further in the index.”

It is always exciting to see your website rank well on Google’s search index, but keep in mind that once a few weeks have passed, the site may drop back to its real position.

Information Provided by: Entrepreneurs-journey.com

Written by: Samantha J. Stephan