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!

The New Yahoo and Online Success

Today an article in the Business section talked about the new Yahoo. In order to close the gap between Yahoo search and Google, Yahoo has been seeking a parnership with Microsoft. Essentially, Microsoft will handle the hardware and software for Yahoo while Yahoo focuses on the "front end" experience.

What is going to be so different about Yahoo's new front end experience? Well over the next 15 months Yahoo is launching a global branding campaign that will highlight the best elements. However, if you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know we can give you some insights into it before the traditional media catches up.

Yahoo is known for its search, email, instant messanging, and other popular applications. What thay are doing is comes from a multidisciplined appraoch to keep surfers and searchers on thier network as long as possible. In other words, they want to increase stickiness.

What they've done is hire a team of social scientists of different fields to work with their computer scientists to improve their search features. So soon you will see the top ten results as would now but with some changes. You will see content networks like CNN, Discovery Channel, etc. displayed on the left side of your search results that have links to content related to your query.

This is huge for online success. Recently, we have been seeing greater ROI on campaigns that do both paid search and display advertising. In the next 15 months Yahoo is going to be promoting content display networks even more heavily. Thus, this proven combination is taking over the world of Internet Marketing.

What can you do to take advantage of this? You need to start advertising now to beat your competition to the top positions. As we know the longer you've been advetising online, the better positioning you earn as a reward for your loyalty with the Search Engines. Also, as this starts to roll out prices are going to be lower for display. But in a short time competition will drive the prices up making it harder to get started.

As the world leader in Online Marketing we at WSI recommend you to not procrastinate on this opportunity. We advise a proactive approach in integrating this strategy into your current marketing efforts so that you get in on the ground floor. Contact us today and let us show you how this is the best time to to take on this great opportunity.

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.