Stop Driving Traffic, Start Capturing Leads

If your Web strategy focuses on driving traffic, you end up with anonymous clicks and page after page of site traffic reports with limited value.

Rather than driving traffic, focus on getting motivated prospects and valuable customers to visit your sites and convert them into qualified sales leads. By re-framing your objectives, you may end up reallocating some of your online marketing investments.

Take keyword ads on general search engines. While these are important parts of an online marketing strategy, your ads may not be reaching the audience you are interested in targeting. You can end up paying for a glut of unqualified traffic — even if you have the right keywords.

Business-to-business advertisers can avoid attracting unqualified traffic from the vast ocean of consumers visiting mass market search engines. One way is being more focused with your keywords. Instead of using "pumps," consider using "turbine pumps," a keyword geared toward a specific audience. Using long tail SEO keyword practices will attract people with the same specific and targeted interests.

Another strategy delivering motivated prospects – not just clicks – is displaying ads only to targeted audiences. You can't always do this on general search engines. But you can with some B-to-B oriented destination sites – vertical search engines – where your filtered, targeted audiences are aggregated for you.

Other strategies helping drive qualified prospects and not just traffic to your site include having a presence in relevant online directories, advertising in appropriate e-newsletters and showcasing your capabilities with banner ads on targeted sites.

A robust, visible presence — not just a link to your Web site — in online directories provides branding and messaging capabilities to motivate qualified prospects to visit you. Look for directories that are geared exclusively toward your B-to-B audience. They offer multiple options for showcasing your company and products.

Purchasing ads in e-newsletters can also change the focus from traffic to qualified leads. When determining an e-newsletter ad strategy, consider both the size of the audience and the mix of readers. Ask the publisher for both the number of subscribers and a subscriber profile, preferably by industry and job function. Review the subscriber profile and you'll know if you're targeting the right audience.

Finally, don't forget online banner ads that appear on targeted Web sites. Seek out a partner that offers a banner ad network allowing you to reach targeted audiences across multiple sites with a single buy, helping to save media research, program management and tracking time.

These strategies drive prospects to your site, usually to a specific landing page deep within your site containing relevant content. Now the other half of the equation comes into play: You need to convert these visitors into qualified leads.

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How internet marketing helps promote city’s music

City-based digital marketing consultancy, Fireloop Creative has help to launch a new website for the 24th Birmingham International Jazz Festival.

The ten-day event - which features world jazz artists from the US, Spain, France, Hungary, Australia, Sweden and Holland – wanted to use its site to engage with new audiences with the use of online social networking and by encouraging community participation.

It is the second year that Fireloop has worked on the festival’s marketing.

Festival director Jim Simpson said: “Fireloop’s combination of considered branding and online technology has helped rejuvenate the festival and ensure its longevity.

“The Internet has changed the music industry and we need to embrace the technologies of tomorrow to encourage more visitors to events like the Birmingham Jazz Festival.

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Google, @ 10 years, is looking for more

Ten years ago this coming September, two Stanford University doctoral students -- one of them a Michigan native -- launched a business that would revolutionize how millions of people use the Internet.

Yes, Google is getting older, at least in tech years.

But don't expect the world's dominant search engine company to remain content with the enormous success it has achieved so far.

Google is rolling out innovative features that will allow users to search the Web more efficiently. It is also looking to expand its advertising reach, focusing on the folks who do their queries via mobile phones and car-based systems. Google has been increasing its spending on research and development, which totaled $2.1 billion last year alone.

The company has come a long way since Sergey Brin and Michigan native Larry Page started Google in a garage in Menlo Park, Calif. One of the most feared and respected technology giants in the world, Google earned $4.2 billion in profits last year and employs nearly 17,000 workers, including more than 262 at ad sales and support offices in Ann Arbor and Birmingham.

With more than half of its user traffic coming from outside the United States, Google has evolved into a global company. It operates 60 offices in 20 countries.

It's no surprise that the company is extremely secretive about its product plans. To get some hints about what may be in store for users of Google's search engine and its AdWords advertising program, the Free Press recently talked to two top Google executives.

Google search engine

"We're constantly looking at the user experience -- what they want, what they need," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience.

Google regularly makes improvements to its search engine, which now contains billions of Web pages compared with only 30 million in 1998.

However, it took a major leap last year by introducing what it calls "universal search." This is a more comprehensive search engine that includes video, images, maps, news and other data. Previously, you had to visit several Google search products to get different types of information.

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Google to Offer a Tool To Measure Web Hits

As soon as Tuesday, Google plans to unveil a new service that measures Internet use, according to advertising executives who have been briefed on it. The tool is intended to help advertisers identify the best places to buy online ads by telling them which Web sites their target audiences visit.

Google s approach, aimed at bolstering its ad-sales business, could pose a major threat to the Web measurement services that are available now, ad executives say. The two main players in the business comScore and Nielsen Online -- gather data on Internet use largely by tracking what panels of people do online or by conducting surveys, and their results can be inconsistent and incomplete. Google's new offering will be based mostly on data from Web servers, allowing for a deeper and broader view of Internet use. And unlike the services from comScore and Nielsen, Google's will be offered to marketers free, according to ad executives.

But with Google already controlling a growing swath of advertising real estate both online and off, some ad executives are leery about placing even more power in the company's hands. "For an advertiser, the last thing you want to do is to have your adviser be the same person you are spending your money with," says Sarah Fay, chief executive of Aegis North America, the media-buying giant owned by Aegis Group of the U.K.

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Part I: The Business of Social Networks Can social-networking sites make money?

KickApps is an 80-person social-networking startup with its head office in a loftlike space just off Fifth Avenue in New York. In less than two years it has created the underlying structure for more than 20,000 social-networking sites--"mini-Facebooks" with an aggregate of 300 million page views per month. You've probably never heard of it.

KickApps gets a fraction of the press coverage of a giant like Facebook, but its growth has been sufficiently impressive that venture firms like Spark Capital and Prism VentureWorks have backed it with $18 million in startup financing, hoping for the payoff of a monster IPO. Its software allows companies to quickly roll out social networks with many of the features of Facebook or MySpace. Its clients--which include local radio stations and newspapers, national networks like NPR and ABC, and brands like AutoByTel, Harley-Davidson, and Kraft--want to offer fans a place to gather and share their love of a team, a product, or anything else.

KickApps' CEO is Alex Blum, formerly of JumpTV, an online television service specializing in sports. "We have 35 programmers working in this office," says Blum, leading a reporter through a sea of desks and flat-screen monitors, "and we only have two marketing people. We don't really have to sell our product."

Like most of the social-networking sites enjoying huge growth, KickApps is giving its product away, expecting that the communities built around it will generate ad revenues. It's a model that stirs memories of the first Internet bubble: build the user base and hope the money comes--from an IPO, a buyout, or ads. At this point, KickApps does not reveal revenue figures, or even what kind of a cut it is taking from the ads. That, too, brings back memories: staying mum about revenue was always a sign that there wasn't much to talk about.

Many Users, Few Dollars
Social networking is the fastest-growing activity on Web 2.0--the shorthand term for the new user-centered Internet, where everyone publicly modifies everyone else's work, whether it's an encyclopedia entry or a photo album. The growth of social networking is astonishing, and it has spread to sites of all sizes, which are increasingly intertwined as platforms open (see "Who Owns Your Friends?"). Even small players are soaring.

Ning, for example, is similar to KickApps but caters to individuals. Founded in 2004 by Netscape's Marc Andreessen and former Goldman Sachs analyst Gina Bianchini, it has been backed with $104 million in venture capital by a variety of firms, including Legg Mason. "We've got 267,787 sites," boasted Bianchini in May. "And we're adding 1,500 to 2,000 a day." ComScore, a firm that measures Internet usage, reports that the Ning domain, on which all the sites reside, sees three million unique visitors a month.

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Tips on internal linking strategy

Internal linking is an important and often overlooked element of SEO and, unlike external links, the site owner has complete control over this, so it's crucial to make the most of it.

Link within your content

Scott advises webmasters to go through their site's content and work out where it would make sense to link to other pages which you want to rank better.

Make sure that the anchor text matches the keywords and phrases that you want the pages to rank well for. Scott also advises that these target keywords should appear on the destination page, as this will make the linking more effective.

Link from stronger pages

Some webpages may be more popular in the search rankings and receive more links than the rest of your website. You can strengthen these weaker pages by including some contextual links to them from the stronger pages.

Some additional tips from E-consultancy's SEO Guide...

Links from footers

This approach can also help with usability, as it is effectively a mini site map on every page. It also allows you to include some lengthy to be included.

For example, E-consultancy ranks well in Google for keyphrases such as 'web project management' and 'online surveys & research', both of which are included in the footer.

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PayPal Unveils Developer Portal

Additions to the Developer Central Portal include advice on responding to requests for proposals, marketing tips, redesigned APIs, and online payment training materials.

PayPal on Monday introduced a redesign of its portal for helping developers integrate the company's online payment services into Web sites.

PayPal, owned by auction site eBay, unveiled the latest version of the Developer Central Portal at the eBay Developers Conference in Chicago. The redesigned site, scheduled to launch in July, will offer business and technical kits to help developers market their services, identify customer leads, and complete integration projects faster. In addition, the portal will include forums for developers to share knowledge.

New additions to the site include a marketing library with prepackaged sales presentations and case studies to help developers sell PayPal integration projects. In addition, there's best-practice advice on responding to requests for proposals and tips on marketing. On the technical side, there's a new library with sample code and training and education materials about online payments.

The portal offers 25 application programming interfaces that enable online retailers to send and receive money online, refund transactions, manage subscriptions, and check transaction histories. New APIs in the redesigned portal offer more options for subscription billing and for conducting transactions with repeat customers. In addition, the site offers a directory of PayPal-certified developers.

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MAKING A SPLASH ON THE WEB

Close encounters with one of the world's deadliest predators led to a drastic career change for David Edwards.

A trip to South Africa to work with fearsome great white sharks inspired the Cheddleton-based web designer to set up his own company.

The 23-year-old, pictured, formed Creative Resolve after working for a firm specialising in cage diving expeditions for intrepid tourists.

When he returned from his trip last year, Mr Edwards decided to strike out on his own after leaving online fancy dress retailer Sureshots.

Now he is preparing to return to South Africa to build a website for an organisation dedicated to the conservation of the great white.

And Mr Edwards's experiences mean Creative Resolve will be targeting small businesses and not-for profit organisations, such as wildlife preservation charities and schools rather than the more lucrative corporate sector.

Mr Edwards said: "My job last year was to be on the boat and help the guests out. I absolutely loved it and that was what inspired me to set up my own business.

"I've approached a lot of small companies, particularly start-ups, because I feel they need the service the most.

"But what I want to focus on long-term is education establishments and non-profit organisations, particularly those involved in wildlife preservation.

"When you go on websites for big companies like Virgin, for example, they've got fantastic-looking sites, but the guys doing more morally profound work don't have the same amount of money to spend, so their websites don't necessarily get the time and attention they deserve.

"They've got some really important information but the problem is getting it across to people and making it accessible.

"I don't like it when you go on a website and it's got this amazing corporate design, but it's very clinical and sterile. I'm interested in doing things with more character and personality."

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'Email effective marketing tool'

Email is a "highly effective, targeted marketing channel" for small and medium enterprises, according to an online marketing agency.

Tink Taylor, business development director at dotMailer, and member of the Internet Advertising Bureau's e-communications council, said that email is a key component of an integrated marketing strategy.

He continued: "To make the most of this highly effective, targeted marketing channel, brands need to get to grips with the basics."

"Getting a specialist who understands how to properly code an email that renders correctly in every client is vital."

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Mobile Advertising More Effective Than Online Advertising

Today at the New York Mobile Marketing Forum, JumpTap - the leading mobile search and advertising solutions provider - announced results from a new study commissioned from Research and Analysis of Media (RAM), on the effectiveness of mobile advertising.

The research conclusively revealed the increased effectiveness of mobile advertising with regards to brand recognition, recall and purchase rates. The findings are especially valuable to advertisers looking for confirmation that mobile devices are becoming the dominant marketer-consumer touch point. JumpTap is offering new customers this unique service for ongoing brand research insight when they sign up for mobile advertising campaigns.

RAM conducted its research with a sample group of 300 Swedish Telia SurfPort users to measure advertiser recall, purchase intent and ad quality on mobile. Respondents were shown ads from EMI, Eurobate, Plutolife (Mobilove) and Discovery Channel Sweden. Although approximately one third of respondents had no familiarity with the advertisers beforehand, the campaigns yielded compelling results:

• JumpTap ads had on average a 20% greater recall rate than other compared ads
• Users are much more likely to seek further information after seeing a JumpTap advertisement, with between 10% of 16-24 year-olds and 28% of 45-79 year-olds stating they would seek out information. This compared to 0% of the 16-24 age group and only 13% of the 45-79 age group who would look for more information after seeing other advertisements.
• Users are more likely to purchase from JumpTap ads than from others—especially women, who were twice as likely (at 15%) to make a purchase. Again, the impact on the 16-24 age groups was significant with 9% responding that they would likely make a purchase versus 0% others.

“RAM’s research supports the effect mobile ads can have on consumers due to the personal and interactive relationship they have with their mobile devices,” said Paran Johar, CMO of JumpTap. “With mobile advertising slated to reach $2.7B in 2008¹ and $19B by 2012², now is the opportune time for advertisers to integrate mobile in their media buying mix.”

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Google maps out strategy for outdoor advertising

Search giant markets map product using the one medium it has never sold

By Abbey Klaassen

Google has built the most powerful brand in the world with nary a bit of brand advertising. But as ads for Google Maps crop up on buses in San Francisco and trains in Chicago, it's clear the company is willing to shell out ad dollars to grow a product that's key to both local and mobile search.

The branding push promotes the service's transit features and comes at a time when Google is courting brand advertisers to buy online display ads, TV and radio. Incidentally, its own campaign focuses on the one medium Google hasn't dabbled in selling: outdoor.

A quick search on Flickr (sorry, Google Image Search) reveals about a half dozen Google ads uncovered around the country in the past six months, including bus ads and train wraps in the Bay Area, a wrapped El train in the Windy City and street teams in both cities that demonstrate the product for passersby. There was also an ad in San Francisco's AT&T Park.

Federated Media's John Battelle spotted that last one and posted it to his blog. “You might call it a non-[cost-per-click] banner display ad in the middle of the Web site that is AT&T Park,” he said, noting that only a year ago, Google VP-Marketing David Lawee told BusinessWeek that Google does a lot of direct marketing but “not brand marketing.”

But Battelle said brand marketing is inevitable for Google (even if you have the best product in the world, you have to tell people about it), and he's not alone in that line of thinking.

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'SEO importance cannot be overestimated'

Webmasters should not underestimate the power of search engine optimisation (SEO) to make the public aware of their sites.

This is according to the Guardian, which states that as most consumers make use of search engines and are likely to only look at the first results page every time they perform a query, publishers should ensure they know how to keep their site near the top by incorporating SEO into their online strategy.

One key way in which website owners can improve SEO is through producing content that contains important keywords and ensuring that the website gets indexed by the major search engines, the newspaper states.

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Is Google Analytics Cheating You? Use Alternatives!

Do you use Google Analytics? Well, a recent study shows that you’re not alone, roughly one third of the Alexa top 500 websites traffic wise use it. That surprised me a little. Anyways, I use Google Analytics myself and noticed before that some numbers are inaccurate or downright wrong. In May I discovered how wrong, completely wrong.

The numbers of search engine referers, more specifically, are wrong. I’ve noticed that before but wasn’t panicking as no statistic tool is perfectly accurate, you always should use at least 2 of them and compare the numbers. Now this time I checked my stats over at SEO 2.0 I was unable to ignore it anymore.

SEO 2.0 is mostly about social media and blogging SEO and it relies on traffic from other sources than Google. I only get insignificant numbers of visitors from Google on my blog, mostly due to very specific “long tail” queries. The only really important keyphrase is “SEO 2.0″ itself. Now looking at my May stats I was very surprised that one of better performing keywords was “site seo vs blog seo” without quotes.

I looked deeper into that just to discover that all 60 visitors looking for this keyword is one person from Bucharest, Romania. Google Analytics counted her or him several times a day for more than 2 weeks.

Now I sometimes create returning visits just by launching my FireFox with my saved tabs but how can a person search for the same query every day several times and then click the search result each time? This one riddles me. I’ve seen that kind of behaviour with Google Analytics in the past but always thought it was due to myself or several developers from my client working on the same site.

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Web designers urged to separate SEO content from images

Firms that fail to separate text within images could be missing out on some "extremely useful" search engine optimisation (SEO) material, one expert has claimed.

According to Loren Baker, editor of the Search Engine Journal, text hidden within images is likely to be missed by the search engines and will therefore not be as beneficial to SEO as it could.

He also suggested that it was important to ensure keywords are targeted in the web design of the homepage as much as in the other content pages to maximise SEO.

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13 Prophecies of Internet Marketing

When people realized the potential of email marketing, they thought that this is the future of internet marketing. Then came in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) with more liberal approach. As the social media evolved with Web 2.0, we are steadily seeing the shift of visitors from popular internet services like search engines and free email services to the newborn Online Social Media. We are seeing that the present of Internet Marketing is changing rapidly. So, why not the future?

The changes in the internet marketing will evolve around the technology. And marketers have to go where all the people are heading. To give a bit of hint, I’ve compiled some of my prophecies that are based on future of internet marketing.

Prophecy #1: Onsite Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be History

Sorry for starting it this way. As an internet marketer, I am happy to promote the keyword Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as most of the people somehow got used to this term. But it’s a wrong word anyway. We the marketers don’t optimize search engines. Rather engineers in Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft does the exact thing.

As the search engines acquire more revenue, their pool of professionals is also drained with best brains. And it will just take some time to identify ways to evaluate each site irrespective of web development language used. But, they will eventually get rid of the need to optimize your site for the Search Engines.

Search Engines might also go for Visual Algorithm Update that will use snapshot image of the page to manipulate information like visible text, animation, and visible keyword density. With artificial intelligence using OCR technology to extract the texts, can eliminate a lot of tasks that are currently done for optimizing a site for search engines.

Prophecy #2: Searching will become more User-friendly

As the speed of internet rises, search engines will show more visible results. I would be happy to see Mouseover Zoom-up search results, for quick peek of the site I wish to open. It’s much like the Snapshot pop-in that Wordpress is using. That will make people go beyond the first Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Moreover, the Search-As-You-Type will also be introduced with search suggestions. The search suggestion will also affect multilingual users, as they will be suggested English keywords for the same multilingual phrase. Well, that might be good for businesses for English speaking countries.

It may happen that searching will not be required at all in case of purchase. You just provide the query to Google, Yahoo, Live or any Search Engines; have a cup of coffee and you’ll have custom reports with prices on products you are seeking with background research highlighting positive and negative comments about the product.

Prophecy #3: More Personalized & Localized Results will Influence SEM

We are already experiencing localized search. However, the personal search has not yet been that very personal. Personalized search will provide more reputation for websites which can influence search engine performance based on more quality visits with low bounce rate. Websites will figure out new offline ways to create more personal affiliation with the site to influence personalized search.

Localized search will provide marketers with the ability to influence people on the move to purchase. That way, the localized search may also change if a consumer changes location.

Prophecy #4: Natural Language Reputation Algorithm will be a Great Factor

Misspelled keyword marketing has already started to vanish. Moreover, to fight duplicate content, spammers will use twisted garbage texts of the same content that have no meaning but with correct spelling. Search Engines will embed several artificial intelligence to identify natural language.

Sites with less grammatical errors and misspellings will get more Natural Language Reputation Rank. This in turn can add as another task for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Prophecy #5: Copying Themes will be punished by Near Duplicate Content Filter

Google has recently updated Duplicate Content Filter that punishes the use of duplicate contents in the internet. But, Search Engines will try it’s best to struggle with the remedies taken by webmasters or web marketers through their Near Duplicate Content Filter.

Varied contents with same theme will also be identified and punished by hidden results which you can see only by clicking “See more pages like this” beside the original theme. The explanation from search engine is, if two pages are saying the same thing, then why keep them all over the SERPs.

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