Is it Really Relavant – Following Bing’s Market Share?
People can’t stop breathlessly following Bing’s core search share in the US and across the world. Every fraction of a percentage point that Bing gains over Google and Yahoo is noted, analyzed and digested like it was a sports statistic. For instance, Bing is reported to be growing at a faster pace each month than the month before. In December, Bing took an additional half percentage point to bob close to an 11% market share. Following the search engine share battle very closely is serious business; why then should these statistics close the club to Google, Yahoo and Bing? Why ignore the elephant in the living room, namely,China’s Baidu?Google has been in the news (and when hasn’t it) this past week for holding its ground in taking the moral high road in not submitting to China’s demands in censorship. Google’s announced pullout from China has earned it quite a shine for its reputation. It’s dignified walkout in China has done more for its business than just earn it a good name though. China’s Baidu search engine is no longer just a Google copycat making do with scraps in the dark. Baidu happens to be bigger even than Bing, and will easily soon overtake Yahoo to be number two after Google. Baidu now has 20% of the search market worldwide, not just in China.
If you really want to tabulate search market shares, how can you do it when you ignore the soon-to-be number-two player? With China’s search market losing Google, the market share that is now up for grabs iss already being carved up by other local Chinese players in search. China’s Internet businesses seem set to become great competition to Google for everything on the Internet, valuable Internet company acquisitions included. The other American search companies hardly seem primed for aggressive market positioning anyway. The fear now is that,China could end up owning valuable Internet properties in the US, and that that would be a blow to Internet freedom.
Text-link Advertising – Sneaky, and Possibly even Illegal SEO
Have you heard of InLinks, the new SEO product from the advertising company MediaWhiz? This is how it works. Businesses or anyone who wants Google to think of their website when anyone types in certain keywords into the search box, start by buying advertising from MediaWhiz. The advertising company will use the advertising to pay blogs around the Internet to look up those keywords in their stories ,and and turn them into proper links (not ghost links that can tip off Google) to the advertiser’s website. With lots of links pointing inward, Google will think the advertiser’s site is pretty important and rank it high.
There is just a little problem with this scheme though: it is against the law in many countries, to manipulate search results with payments made. It is considered an unfair trade practice. Google certainly seems to have no real way of identifying when websites do this. But one wonders, what could happen if Google does find a way. Those advertisers could suddenly find their websites blacklisted. One way they could find out right now, is to compare an old cached copy of the website to a new version with many new links suddenly pointing inward. What if it puts them in the sandbox? This kind of maneuver is known as Text-Link advertising and Google is already asking Internet users to report these websites.
What kind of blogs are they that sell links to the highest bidder? Well, Engadget and Gizmodo do, charging just a few dollars a month per link. And Google would be able to see there was something funny going on to suddenly have a bunch of keyword links appear on an old article. Keywords are usually there was an article goes online the first time.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
With the rising dominance of Social Media in the lives of consumers marketers are jumping on to the bandwagon and coming up with countless new ideas and strategies to target the supposedly transformed consumer behavior. However, social commerce strategies to drive sales and increase customer loyalty, once implemented have rarely performed as expected or produced measurable results. Unlimited targetability was the premise of both B2B and B2C social media marketing, but consumers turned out to be too unpredictable for such strategies to succeed.
Apparently, consumer behavior can only be best understood and acted upon in scale by grouping similar consumers together. Human behavior is fairly simple and simple models of behavior almost always outperform complex models. One-on-one marketing is good in theory but almost impossible to implement.This is the golden age of data. Nearly any media metric can be measured and data mining produces quantities of data, however, without substantive data knowledge and proper modeling the data is mostly worthless. As, Eric T. Bradlow, co-director of UPenn’s Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, says, “Many social commerce problems have been addressed previously, and massive amounts of data will not change the continuing need for the understanding of basic and primitive customer behavior which provides the correct lens to view social media data.”
Mass marketing has lost favor in the face of social media marketing and viral marketing. However, mass marketing is still the most effective technique available though it is important, considering the proliferation of media channels, to ensure that the right media channels are selected. Social media marketing requires that very huge numbers of social media users share product recommendations for any significant impact and the same goes for viral marketing. These techniques may be effective for B2B marketers who have concentrated markets but rarely have much impact on B2C marketing. Rarely does the buzz created by such strategies translate in to product purchases.
Content is important but it has impact only if it reaches consumers. Traffic driving strategies such as referral programs must be the cornerstone of marketing policy. Many people try using the “Long Tail” (items which individually sell only in small quantities) niche driven marketing as one way to boost sales but such investment should be made only if justified by volumes.
Role of Video Marketing in online business
Can video marketing make a huge change in online business? A question asked by most business people when they start promoting their business online. Video marketing is an upcoming technology that helps you win the heart of user by sharing information quickly.
In the fast moving world, users’ intention is to get exact information in limited time span. A well designed video can serve this purpose. People are bored of reading text, they prefer to watch and hear to the information than reading.
A study on online video reveals that the number of people who watch online video will top 1 billion in the next five years. It is obvious that interest of people is switching to videos. It is fact that more than 75% of message is grasped through video.
One more reason for the popularity of video marketing on business field is due to the fact that videos are getting accessed by search engines frequently. It is true videos rank very high in popular search engines, hence the chances of getting exposure to public is high in the video marketing.
The cost of video production and publication is less compared to other advertising costs. You don’t require very expensive cameras, microphones and toned presentations. Just a camera connected to a PC is enough to video any product or service you are offering. A webcam recorder in your hand makes your job easy.
Publishing videos online can be done at zero cost. All you need is an account in YouTube, you can start uploading videos under corresponding category and drive hordes of viewers to your site. Even video testimonials and product/service videos can be placed on your site, just an FLV player on your site is enough to play videos successfully.
On the whole, video marketing is a cost-effective and ingenious way to promote business online. Millions of net surfers are passionate on online videos, and entrepreneurs are starting to cash in on that fascination.
Social Media marketing – a tool for your business strategy
Social media marketing has been one of the growing branches of marketing. Even though it has not proven to be as effective as direct marketing, social media marketing is a concept that does not produce instant results and if planned well with a strategy will show long term results.It is very important to understand the basic idea behind social media marketing so that you can incorporate it in your business plan. This process revolves around utilizing four major online social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and Facebook and of course, lots more, to increase your company’s visibility. With time, the concept of marketing company products, establishing the brand and the quality through social networking sites developed into social media marketing.
Now how does one start the process? Through surveys and polls it has been established that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook are the four largest competitors in the industry and using them to establish your business is the ideal technique. So start Tweeting using twitter. But all this should be kept aligned to the business plan. For instance evaluate what you can offer to your followers. Whether its updating them with information they are looking for or sending them special reports or giving them early notice about a sale will all be effective planned and delivered well.
Once your company has established itself fairly well in one networking site, that’s when you move to the others. Slowly you can spread yourself to all the networking sites and with time link all your connections from all of them along with your blogs and you will find an integrated social media marketing plan. You can even spread out to micro blogging sites, and all other form of networking integrating them all together. So all in all the important fact is to ensure you have a good business plan in place so you can use the platform that social media marketing offers to deliver it.
Use testimonials as a powerful tool to promote your business
Today many webmasters are using similar marketing strategies like online ads, blogging, email marketing, PPC etc to promote their business. Do you want to be different from those entrepreneurs? Then you need to use an exclusive strategy to stay ahead of your competitors. Ideally your customers’ testimonials themselves can be used as one of the most powerful tactics to promote your business successfully.
Testimonials are reviews written by people who have purchased your products or are satisfied by your services. Why are testimonials so effective? When you help your customers grow, you become an indispensable part of their success. They would like to describe what your product has done for them and praise your services through testimonials. It helps you build credibility and offer a sense of security to new customers.
There are bunch of testimonials you might have received from your customers but placing all those pieces will not attract your site users. For instance, a comment like, “This product is great!” sounds nice, but it doesn’t tell visitors what your products can actually do for them. You can place the good testimonials like “This product doubled my profit in a month”or “This product helped me to save $$$” and turn visitors into customers.
You can encourage your satisfied customers to go online and write reviews and feedbacks about your products and services on different script directory sites whenever possible. It will increase the quantity of your customers and enable an increment in your profits.
It is a good idea to include your customer’s photo in the testimonials to make your credibility strong among site users. You can take your business to the next level by including audio or video testimonials for maximum effect. Keep in mind that you need to ask your customers if you can use their comments on your website to recommend your products to others.You can also setup a whole page dedicated just to testimonials. We cannot predict which part of the website the users will click on, so it is better to place your testimonials in the landing page. You can place them in front and in the center of your home page to make your valuable testimonials visible for all the users.
How can you make money online by starting a Social bookmarking site?
Whenever people come across interesting or informative websites they like to refer them back, they will bookmark them in their system so as to access them on requirement. The disadvantages of bookmarking are the bookmarked site list can’t be taken to other system and shared with others. Social Bookmarking comes into the picture to help people in this regard.
Through social bookmarking sites, people can save their favorite sites and share them with the world, friends or keep them private. One can also follow the bookmarks of other members or a specific tag to gather more information on a specific subject.
Webmasters have started crowding around social bookmarking sites to foster their site. You may wonder how social bookmarking sites will help them in the site promotion. By submitting a web site to social bookmarking sites, the site visibility and backlinks are raised which are must for obtaining natural links. Natural links play a major role in raising site ranks.
Webmasters are looking for more social bookmarking sites relevant to their site. It is the right time to start a social bookmarking site in any popular niche.
Make use of social bookmarking scripts available in the market to launch your site in any niche. Markit is the perfect social bookmarking script that enables you to build an effective social bookmarking site in any niche or broad market, for users with bookmark sharing and private options.
You could add useful and interesting items related to that niche and attract more users. Once users start utilizing your site, they will keep coming back to the site for accessing their favorite sites and find more sites bookmarked by like-minded people.
Webmasters are keen on finding social bookmarking sites related to their niche, so webmasters belonging to your niche will definitely post their sites. The site will be always updated with any content during addition of favorite sites or submission of websites, hence your site will gain a steady train of traffic leaving a tremendous asset for you.
Starting your own social bookmarking now is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to make money through the Internet.
Give a unique look to your automobile website
Automobiles are the most important means of transportation for millions of people around the globe. They depend on their cars, trucks, trains etc to travel from home to work place, to visit friends and family, and for any other sort of travel. Automobile production has been rapidly increasing and the industry is constantly expanding.
As today’s youth are becoming net worms, you need an online presence to expose your automobile business to your most potential customers. A recent study shows that 75 percent of new-vehicle buyers in 2009 used the Internet during their shopping process, compared with 70 percent in 2008.
When visitors search for a vehicle online, they can get thousands of websites to find reviews. The chance of raising the visitor conversion rate is very small if your site doesn’t expose your product effectively.
One of the foremost things that comes to every buyer’s mind is to look for images of their favorite cars before buying them. By placing images of your latest cars with good visuals on your site, the possibilities of coverting queries into sales get higher.
Each year, motor vehicle accidents kill an estimated 300,000 people throughout the world. Automobiles equipped with various safety devices will save people’s life from the violent impact when an accident happens. Automobile owners can capture photos of safety devices from their virtual show room and place them on site.
Use some photo editing techniques like clear, filter, distort, frame and scene to add special effects to your automobile photos. It helps you attract more visitors on site and increase the sales rate.
Video marketing – a key to upturn your business during financial downturn
The current fiscal year has made it tough for any kind of business to function. Many industries have started balancing this situation by downsizing or cutting salaries. Instead of reducing their expenses through job cuts and other means, they can increase their sales to meet financial needs.Marketing is the heart of any business; only through effective marketing you can raise your financial position. It is the commercial process involved in promoting, selling and distributing products or services. Hoardings, banners, newspaper, television and pamphlets are the popular techniques used by marketing people to reach the public.
If you go for newspaper, banner or TV, then you could reach people only in a specific zone. But when you choose the Internet which is spread across the world like air, as the medium for advertising, the scope of reaching a broader spectrum of the public is more. Banner ads, text links, slide shows and podcast are some of the marketing styles followed on the Internet. These kinds of ads are placed in appropriate web pages to reach the targeted audience.
Sales can be improved only through proper promotion. In order to accomplish this, change with the trendy world and implement the effective marketing technique of Video. Video marketing will get you close to the current and future customers. You can say a lot more with videos than words. Customers will also appreciate this format compared to text and image, as they can get more information in a shorter period.
Record a video as if you’re talking to a visitor directly and explaining him how your product works or how your service will help make their life easier. For this you do not require any experts. Just use your webcam recorder tool to record it. Before you start recording, prepare a script for your video. Analyze requirements of expected visitors and write your script accordingly. Plan how you are going to deliver the products and/or service details.
Now start recording the video as per your script using a webcam recorder tool. Replay the recorded video and edit it if necessary. Attach appropriate music with it. Upload the recorded videos on popular video sharing sites like YouTube, Spike, Google, Blogger and WordPress. The video title plays a major role, so use an attractive title related to the video content. ‘How to’ title will attract more visitors.
You can also offer videos of a new product launch or any other events in your company; this will create brand awareness among people. Sit down and think of all the ways to attract more visitors and convert them into customers.Sell your products and services through videos, and foster your business well even during the financial crisis.
We offer world class web site services, site scripts, FLV players and webcam recorder. Using Quickcam, a webcam recorder, from Agriya you can record a video and place it live on your site without any hassle. For further details, click here.
Do you want to take a break from writing an eBook?
Are you fed up of writing pages of eBooks? Then go for creating a high quality audio product. It is the easiest way to turn your expertise into cash and make a great impression on prospects or customers. In this article let’s take a look at 5 ways to come up with quality audio products to make money.
It is important to choose a topic that you know very well, and at the same time it should have high demand. There are millions of people who are looking for solutions to address their problems. For example, people want to stop smoking, lose weight, or learn how to solve errors in a software program. Choosing a topic that solves peoples’ problems easily is what it’s going to take.
Add value to your audio products by filling them with quality information. You can get more relevant data for your chosen topic by performing an extensive research using online and offline resources. These include looking at competitors’ websites, discussion forums, or even going to the local library. It also provides an excellent idea on writing a complete and informative article for listeners.
When you start recording your audio clip, make sure that you avoid capturing unnecessary background noises. If you are ready to spend extra money, you can rent a recording studio to ensure that your products sound clear and crisp. Use a headset microphone for recording. It gives you the freedom to move your head around without worrying the microphone.
Pay attention to your diction, speed and volume. Keep your products short by eliminating fillers and lengthy introductions. Lastly, make your creations interesting to listen to by using conversational tone throughout your recording.
Once you have completed the recording, listen to it and edit it using audio editing software to ensure that your content flows smoothly.
After making sure that your audio products are of high quality, you have to advertise them online by using marketing tools like pay per click, banner ads, search engine marketing, article marketing, paid listing and link building.
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