What Is Internet Marketing Anyway?

Internet marketing uses a combination of methods to sell items in the global marketplace through the power of the World Wide Web. While the most common method is through an attractive website that ranks high on the first page of results from popular search engines, internet marketing strategies have expanded into other areas in the cyber world including social media sites and smart phone applications. Because the global marketplace continues to grow at a rapid pace, the modern business model can't ignore the advantages of internet marketing.

Search Engines
Most internet users rely on powerful search engines to retrieve relevant information from the internet. Usually, they will make a choice from the first few selections on the initial page of the search results and look no further. If an internet marketing plan can ensure that a website is listed on the first page of Google, it is almost guaranteed to sell a product. Many people use a technique called Search Engine Optimization in an attempt to rank high with the search engines. This free, internet marketing method uses keywords that internet surfers frequently search on for prominent placement on a result page. Another way to rank high is to pay a fee to a specific search engine to become a preferred site for a list of keywords. This can ensure that you are near the top of the page on relevant searches.

Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing involves compensating others to provide internet marketing services for a product. In return for promoting the product, the affiliate marketer receives a commission if a purchase is made from their site. They will use a variety of search engine optimization techniques, blogging, emails, social networking, forum campaigns, and anything else that they can think of to sell an item or a service. These motivated individuals usually know all of the most effective, cutting-edge internet marketing strategies. To start an affiliate marketing program, a company can contract with a third party or start their own program from their main website.

Social Networking Sites
This is one of the most effective ways to use internet marketing to date. Many internet users are virtually addicted to MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and large corporations are taking full advantage of this fact. On almost every corporate website, icons for all three of the major social networking sites are displayed in a prominent location. While social networking members are busy meeting people from around the world, they are also exposed to advertisements and offers from the ever-growing global marketplace. One of the fastest growing online occupations is the social networking marketer. Companies hire these experts to leverage the power of social networking sites in addition to creating specialized blogs with frequent updates.

Recent News from Google

Google wants to publish out-of-print books online. Readers that I’ve talked to are encouraging the move by the search engine giant. Although, the courts see it differently, they want to make sure Google isn’t stepping on any anti-trust laws.

The authors and publishers have given their consent to Google to release their material. Should the case go in favor of Google, the out-of-print authors could reach out to an audience when they could not before. Readers will be able to read the author’s works online, on their phone, iPod Touch, or on the new electronic readers that have recently come onto the market.

The public will be able to read this material for free, but Google has to pay for the rights and set-up of the service. How will they do it? Well, the same way they have always done it: advertising revenues. This is just speculation on my part, but I foresee them placing ads on the margins of e-books that they publish.

Businesses wish to reach a captive audience might want to watch as this story develops. Imagine a group of potential customers reading books that your business sponsors! Your ad would be displayed on every page giving you repetition, retention, increased brand awareness nudging potential customers page by page toward consideration. It would be like having your product displayed in every scene of a movie.

Knowledge is the key to on-line success. Internet Marketing success is based on how much information we can collect, interpret, and leverage towards our goals. Follow this story and others like it here on on-line.blogspot.com or by consulting with an agent from WSI Magic Web. Contact us today.

The New MSN.com or Bing.com

Yahoo isn't the only one looking to rebrand themselves. MSN.com has turned into Bing.com. Claiming that the nation suffers from search overload, Bing.com is the first ever decision engine. I'm sure you've seen their really annoying commercials, but is it so different from standard search?

From what I've seen there isn't much of a difference at all. The results display the same except for a tab with more info that appears when you mouse over the right side of a listing. I was going to take a screenshot of an example of it for you, but it disappears when I'm using my capture tool.

So the search is the same, but there are some features on Bing.com to help you waste your time.

The video page mimics Hulu.com with all the popular television shows. Below the shows, it displays current music videos.

The Image search displays the images related to the image of the day. Once you enter a keyword and search for an image it works the same as Google.

Shopping on Bing.com is relatively the same except for their Cashback program. When you buy items that have a cashback symbol next to it you can get up to a 20% discount. Bing.com will email you each time you earn cashback. You can retrieve your cashback cash 60 days after your purchases. You must have earned at least five dollars. They may have convinced me to do my online shopping on Bing.com.

Bing.com does have a neat feature on their travel search called Farecast. It forecasts your fare so you can plan the cheapest fare. The drawback is that your summer vacation might be in winter, because that's when the cheapest fare is. Likewise, if you must travel on a certain date for business or a wedding or something like that, the Farecaster is not going to help you.

Visual Search is another fun feature to use although it is nothing new. Don't stray outside the predefined categories or you will get normal search results not visual ones.

One last feature I will talk about before I send you to explore on your own is xRank. XRank shows what the popular search terms for the day are. You can look up past days as well. You can also check the popularity of your search terms (Hint to business owners).

I look forward to leveraging the MSN or Bing.com. I believe, although the search is the same, the new shopping features will bring online success to businesses that use MSN as channel to reach customers. WSI Internet Consultants know just how to get your company started, contact us today.

Yahoo Begins Its Campaign

In the previous blog we talked about Yahoo revamping their service. I mentioned in late September their new national ad campaign. In case you missed TV for the past few weeks, here's the first ad of the 15 month series. This commercial just introduces the new Yahoo to consumers in vivid color and movement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULjCSK0oOlI

As Yahoo starts to re-brand themselves you should be as well. Yahoo is positioned to be the Content Portal for the entire web. Content advertising is nothing new. Your business has done it before in local newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Now that people are shifting in a major way to absorbing content online, don't you think it's time to re-brand your company online?

It used to be that only nationwide brands could market themselves on CNN.com, WallStreetJournal.com, ESPN.com and other online news sources. That has all changed thanks to the partnerships WSI has forged with Yahoo, Google, MSN and other major portals. You can now advertise locally on these nationally known networks.

The average consumer is not aware of this fact. Therefore, your local brand can look like a national brand for a fraction of the cost! The advantage of this perception by your local customers is astounding. You will gain copious amounts of creditability which leads to more sales and faster growth of your business.

We at WSI are excited about the new Yahoo and what it will help us do for you. Your online success will grow by leaps and bounds when you use WSI's proven Internet Marketing strategies. Contact us to find out how to get your business on the fast track today!

Setting Yourself Apart

From our earlier posts we've seen how the Internet has changed the way we do business, how we promote them, and the changes the Internet itself has gone through. Bottom line, it has become a more crowded and competitive space. Local businesses are competing in their local arenas and sometimes nationally or globally. With all this competition how does one set their company apart from similar businesses?

So far we've been talking about the design and promotion of your website to set you apart. Conversion-based architecture helps to ensure ease of use no matter what customer type you serve. Aggressive Internet marketing makes sure that your website is easily found, talked about, visited, and generates conversions of traffic into customers. But, what are some little extra things that will set you apart?

In Internet marketing, we call these little extras conversion tools. They improve the customer experience, keep customers on your website longer (aka create stickiness), and generate word of mouth. Below are just a few ideas, but contact us to see more and discuss their advantages.

Placing a video along with regular text gives the customer an option to choose how they consume the information provided about your company. Now you are catering to their needs. Thus, improving their experience.

Along with video we use an ROI calculator. It's a gadget that our clients can use to get a rough idea of what they can expect their returns to be for our Pay-per-click campaigns. They can play around with it for a while which give them a chance to think about their goals, so they will ready to talk budget when they contact us. Just by them spending a little extra time on our site, we capture more of their attention. The more attention then the more likely they become a client. To see the ROI calculator, click here and scroll down to the middle of the page.

The third I want to introduce is the Click-to-call element. This conversion tool allows customers to call you without them having to dial your number. It allows you, the business owner, to measure and record calls made to your business from your website. Not all click-to-call tools are the same. The one we offer has many advanced features such as the find-me-follow-me function and virtual receptionist. Both these features give the appearance of a larger company to your customers. They make sure customers find the person they are looking for and that a call never goes unanswered. Our click-to-call solution is the best one we've found, and we've looked a lot.

All in all, these tools are about the customer. What are their needs? What will hold their attention longer? What will impress them, so they tell their friends? These tools range from free to moderate price, from cheesy to impressive. Pick our brains about the ones that we've seen success with and for creative ideas for your business today. Let us help you stand apart from the crowd.

Main Street Marketing 2.0 (Part 3)

Main Street businesses are certainly familiar with traditional forms of advertising. Newspapers, magazines, billboards, bus benches, radio, and television ads are traditional forms of push marketing. Push marketing allows businesses to inform potential customers and create awareness about their company and any sales or services offered, announcements can be temporary or long standing.

Yellowpages, business directories, and tourist information centers are traditional forms of pull marketing. Pull marketing takes advantage of the awareness created. Once a customer identifies his needs or wants, he seeks out ways to contact or visit companies that offer exactly what the customer is looking for.

All of these have a direct mirror in Internet Marketing. The difference between online and traditional marketing is that businesses are:

• able to reach to a wider audience at less cost
• able to easily track the results
• able to respond quicker to customer demand

Let's look at a table where we can see the mirrors of each strategy and where they fit into the buying cycle of customer behavior.

Although they did not fit on the table, we can assume that all the traditional push strategies fit only into the purchase stage of the funnel. But to be fair we'll stick with push media for now. Pull marketing is worthy of it's own lengthy blog.

Once again the Internet has an advantage over traditional media, because it can do remarketing. Remarketing is where, because online activities are being traced, we have a second opportunity to capture purchase makers even if they did not click on our push ad. Another more detailed blog about that later.

Back to the matter at hand Display ads and banner ads are to newspaper, magazine and billboard ads as television and radio are to viral video marketing and social media marketing.

Display ads appear among the content of news and other informational sites to potential customers that are a captured audience on those sites just like newspaper and magazine ads have a captured audience. With Internet marketing the number of impressions can be accurately measured. Not so with newspaper and other print and good luck measuring how many people see your roadside billboard.

Like TV and radio ads Social media and viral videos are subject to the whims of the viewer or listener. Once ads come on they can change the station unless the ads peak their interest. With TV and radio you cannot count how many times your ad was seen or heard. Viral videos and social media can be exact to how many times your ad was watched, and unique to the Internet, reviewed by the public!

By now you should be able to the ongoing trend here. Traditional marketing while effective most of the time does not provide accurate measurement and therefore presents an iffy portrayal of your Return on Investment. Internet marketing is just as effective if not more and portrays an exact measure for your Return on Investment. For those businesses that need to watch their bottom line more closely the Internet is their best option although a healthy mix of both would be ideal. Call your WSI Internet Consultant to learn more about the best strategy for your business today!

Main Street 2.0: Local internet Marketing (Part 2)

In part 2, we are going to discuss some more similarities between how a business markets themselves on and offline. Main Street businesses spend lots of money to generate word of mouth. Let's examine the most expensive part of those activities especially for a new business: their storefront.

Main Street is popular because of all the unique storefronts that decorate the sidewalks with entertaining window displays, inviting scents wafting from restaurants, and the colorful characters that make shopping downtown memorable. Companies spend a lot of initial investment creating the right look and feel for their storefront. Every element of their design is meant to attract customers and create word of mouth. It is most effective when foot traffic or window shoppers with no set shopping agenda say,"Ooh that place looks neat. Let's check it out!" And you know, when they get home they tell their friends about this really cool store they found.

Internet Marketing has a similar expense when building online storefront. Although a website is much cheaper than designing a physical store it still needs the same care and attention. Like a window diplay your website needs to be attractive and compelling. Like having good employees your website needs to be able to inform customers to turn traffic into purchases. We call these conversions. Conversion based architecture needs to be included in your website design to make your investment effective.

Businesses want to be located on Main Street because it brings them the most foot traffic. Local internet marketing does the same thing for online traffic. Companies need to invest in IM strategies to have the best location among their competitors. Thus, they will gain the most traffic and the most customers for their type of business. Like Main Street the Internet used to be small and simple to market your business. When malls and big box stores started to compete with Main Steet, it had to up its game. Nowadays the Internet is flooded with comeptition and local businesses once again need to up their game. The best strategy for them is to leverage proven Internet Marketing techniques.

Webdesign is the starting point but you can't stop there. You need to promote it and measure the results. Traditonal media can be hard to measure. The Internet makes it easy with web analytics. Like your accountant can tell you how much ROI you are getting per sqaure foot of store space, your Internet Marketing consultant can tell you your ROI for all the ways you promote your online store. Ask a WSI Internet Consultant to show you how.

Main Street 2.0: Local Internet Marketing (Part 1)

Main Street2: Local Internet Marketing (Part 1)

More and more activities from our daily lives have gone online. It seems as if Main Street America is being replaced by the Internet. The outlook looks bleak. Why go to the bar when there’s Match.com? I can order groceries or a delivery pizza online, so I don’t need to go out. I can watch movies or local bands on YouTube or MySpace. The Internet is so convenient for all our activities why do we need to leave home?

It’s the same reason why jail is bad. Humans need to go outside and actually interact with other people. We need to get out and stretch our legs. When we can, we reward ourselves for our hard work be it dinner, drinks, clothes, or entertainment. The Internet is not going to replace our local businesses and destroy our humanity like some hard lesson learned story by Ray Bradbury. The world isn’t going to end, but the paradigm has shifted because of our other human need, information.

The Information Age is enhancing our communities by opening up communication. Local business listings on Google Maps and Yelp and other “review sites” opened up Word-of-Mouth marketing to business owners everywhere. Social Media, or Social Networking sites offers us a chance in our busy lives to build relationships in our community. Good relationships are the backbone of a local business. Internet marketing bridges the gap that used to separate companies and customers.

The opportunities to connect the span are not hard to see, but information overload can blind us to them. It’s wise to consult with an Internet marketing professional at this point (wink, wink). We are told about pay-per-click, social media, page rank, Google, Facebook, shopping carts and how great they are, but they’re not new concepts. Internet Marketing works because it’s based on traditional methods of building business-customer relations. In truth, the basic elements of T.V., Radio, Print, Yellow Pages and Word-of-Mouth have an online counterpart. The difference between traditional marketing strategies and Internet marketing is the heightened ability to track results, measure Return on Investment, adjust and adapt to market conditions and interact with customers.

The second part of this series will look at the behaviors of customers downtown and online. What makes a company competitive on Main Street and Online? Then, in part three, we’ll look at Traditional and Internet marketing side by side. How are they applied to customer behavior?

A Word About Word-of-Mouth

Talk to most business owners and they will tell you that word-of-mouth is their best, if not only, source for attracting new customers. And why not? It's free (almost).

There are some costs to achieving positive word-of-mouth. You must have spent money training a knowledgeable and friendly staff to ensure the best customer service possible. You've no doubt given discounts, refunds, and give-aways to satisfy unhappy customers. You probably spent time and money trying to measure your customer's experience with customer comment cards and surveys. Even after all these efforts your business can't be there when word-of-mouth takes place, or can it?

Your customers are talking about you online. Search around on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Myspace, and other Social networking sites to see exactly what I mean. If you don't see anybody talking about you, then try refining your search locally. If you still don't see chatter about you, then you have an even bigger problem, and also a great opportunity. (Funny how crisis and opportunity appear at the same time.)

First, let's talk about what to do if you see people talking about your company, products, or services. You simply need to join the conversation where the word-of-mouth is happening. You may ask," How do I find out all the places where my customers are talking about me?" Your WSI Internet Consultant has tools and reports to find out for you. We can simplify the process of gaining a presence in the Social Media sphere of influence. Now let's look at the second scenario.

So, you can't find any word-of-mouth about you online. What does that mean? It does not mean that your customers don't go online. Unfortunately, it does mean that your business is not creating strong word-of-mouth, which is as good as no word-of-mouth at all. Fortunately, like having no credit you have a great opportunity to build good standing. With the slate blank you can start the conversation then invite your customers to join you. In turn, you improve customer relations and build a community around your business.

Community organizing and involvement are buzz-words today that cannot be ignored. Look at how much success it brought to the Obama campaign in 2008. It has a powerful impact in your market share. Banks have to be involved in the community by law. Most successful small to medium businesses support local Little League programs or charities. There are communities built around these important organizations on Social Networking sites. Your business could support them online as well as off. People like businesses that act beyond their bottom line. Thus, word-of-mouth grows from community involvement.

Want to know more? WSI Internet Consulting and Education is a great place to start. Visit our website to learn more about marketing your business or non-profit on the Internet.

What Is Online Success?

Simply, just with any business venture, it is a measure of desired results against your investment. How seriously you take your investment has a direct impact on your success.

I have seen how expensive and ineffective websites done by amatures can hurt a small business. Because of our economic times and emerging technologies a new and expanding marketplace has developed on the Internet. The online marketplace is more sophisticated allowing consumers to learn more about the products and services to fullfill their needs.

What does that mean for your business? It means that the investment in your website or virtual storefront needs to be taken as seriously as your physical storefront. Whether you provide goods or services you have invested time and money in a prominent location, training a friendly and engaging staff, and (hopefully) effecient marketing.

Guess what, your website needs to perform as your brick and mortor location. It needs to be in a prominent location i.e. at the top of the search results for keywords related to your business. It needs to be engaging, professional, and informative like your best employees. Lastly, it needs effective marketing such as

• Pay-Per-Click: Stand out from your competitors
• Social Media Optimization: Join in the conversation with your customers and manage your brand
• Display Advertising: Build brand awareness where customers are consuming media

The great thing about succeeding online is that it is easily measurable. You and your professional Internet Marketing supplier should be using analytic tools to measure your return on investment. With them, you can see where traffic is coming from, what they are doing on your website, how they are converting into customers, and at what rate? (more on analytics in a future post or contact me)

Businesses should keep these tips in mind as they build their Internet presence.

1. Always work with a professional Internet Marketing company.
2. Always keep your website updated and engaging.
3. Never stop driving traffic to your website.

Make sure your Internet Marketing company does all of the above. WSI is a world leader in Internet Marketing with 1500 professional Internet Consultants to help your local small-medium sized business. Learn more at http://www.wsimagicweb.com/.