Internet Marketing Articles

The suite of search marketing product offerings, powered by OrangeSoda, will enable small and medium-sized business to affordably reach an online local audience, tracking all of their online advertising campaign metrics on a single web-based platform. We are excited to bring this service to our advertisers and help them jumpstart their online marketing efforts and represent yet another step in our overarching strategic initiative to significantly enhance the products and services offered online by all Freedom properties nationwide. Freedom Communications, headquartered in Irvine, Calif. The privately held company is based in Orem, Utah. Watch the latest videos on YouTube. The views expressed in the articles are not necessarily those of earthtimes. read more

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Promotion, promotion, promotion is the main thing you have to keep in mind as you attempt to make yourself and your songs known to the world. Simply having a Myspace and playing at a few local scenes is not going to make you famous. Sure, you’ve sold a handful of CDs, you have a moderate amount of friends on Myspace, and your mom loves what you do, but the goal is to get more attention especially important attention from music executives. To achieve this attention takes promotion of your site.

Myspace is the premier social networking site on the web but using it alone will not draw the required attention to your page. If you notice that you are not receiving the amount of plays for your songs that you were hoping and that your page is quickly going the way of the dinosaurs, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Be proactive and tenacious.

Promotional campaigns are important for your goal of being a recognized and possibly famous musician. Myspace is a way of promoting your music for free and this is why so many struggling musicians choose this method, the same is true for Facebook and Youtube. You are able to reach a large number of people, who may become fans, for free everyday. However, without additional help how are people going to know that you even have anything to promote? This is where word of mouth and viral marketing comes into play.

Word of mouth marketing has been around since our ancestors had items to barter. This is a time tested and trusted method used by large companies, corporations, and professional musicians. Take a moment and think about how you heard about some of your favorite musicians? Was it through the radio, TV, the internet, or was it from a friend who told you about them?

Word of mouth is a frequently the way news spreads about musicians and bands. You may have heard a bands name, but usually it wont be until a friend vouches for the band that you will give them a listen. This is how word of mouth works and how it can be used to work in your favor.

Some view this method as old fashioned with the introduction of the internet and advertising methods used there; however word of mouth will never fall into disuse as long as people continue to recommend, and talk about items, musicians, and other subjects of interest.

On the internet word of mouth is referred to as viral marketing and basically works the same way. Blogs, social networking sites, and other places such as forums all work to spread recommendations and news about a variety of items.

Both word of mouth and viral marketing work on the concept that if one person tells another person and that person tells two more people and so on then soon enough people will know about that object of subject to make an impact. This can work in your favor when it comes to your music.

You should ask your friends to mention your band and music to their friends, and tell as many people as you can that you have a new song out and where it can be found and how great it is. Post about it on blogs, forums, and use other sites like Youtube and Facebook to help spread the word and you will be very pleased with the results.

A great way to help entice people to come to your site is by mentioning how many plays you have for your songs. This will convince people that your songs are worth the time and all the buzz surrounding them is dead on. The dilemma is that if you do not have a solid fan base yet, or if your songs play counts are not as impressive as you would like, then you will not be able to use those figures to entice anyone.

Promotional tools are a great way of boosting play counts which will help gain fans, attention, and make heads turn. Back up claims of popular songs by actually having solid and impressive figures.

More plays and views adds an edge to your word of mouth and viral marketing efforts.

Once you are receiving a sufficient amount of traffic to your site, you will have to keep people coming back for more by updating your page, uploading new songs, and keeping up with the current information and be sure to never stop promoting.

TuneBoom Pro is now available beyond the major labels and artists and to the independent artist for the first time. Market your music like TODAYS MOST POPULAR ARTISTS! Everything needed to succeed is here. Use EXACTLY the same strategies used by Todays Mega Superstars at:
http://TuneBoomPro.com

Do you Squidoo? Do you create free traffic using Squidoo lenses?

Seth Godin started the Original Squid almost ten years ago. He created Yoyodyne, and for the first time introduces the idea if permission marketing online.
Yoyodine was acquired by Yahoo, Seth served as VP Direct Marketing for Yahoo for an year and since 2000 Seth Godin dedicated himself as a public speaker, an author and a blogger.

Among others, he wrote an eBook about traffic in which he introduce a term I like, deserved traffic, which is coming from content. Yes, content is the king.
With the technology and software packages we have today is easy to build web pages, but we really need web pages which attract traffic. The eternal question: how do I get more traffic?

Seth Godin’s advice is we need the 3 Us: useful, updated, unique.
Whatever you create, a lens, a blog, a website, you are responsible for the 3 Us and this is the long term solution for getting traffic which is the same as having quality content.
Search engines have sophisticated algorithms, they change frequently without any notice to the public at large. Some people invest a lot of time, work, and energy trying to trick the search engines, it is possible to do so, but it isn’t a long term solution.

What happened in July 2006 when Google decided to change the landing page algorithm to rank web sites was a lesson for all of us. It was painful for a lot of people who lost a good Google ranking over the night.
But Google is on a mission to build a better web, and that action was a huge step in the right direction, a loud cry for quality pages! That was the Google way to clean up the web, to make invisible pages which aren’t useful, nobody update them and have information which aren’t unique in nature. With other words pages without content.

Prior to July 2006 I used PPC (pay per click) to drive traffic, since that day of infamy I begin to explore Social Bookmark which can produce free traffic for me.
My prefferate technique is to create Squidoo lenses in which I have links to my web sites, my eBay auctions, RSS modules, Amazon modules and a lot of interaction with the pubic interested in my topics via plexo modules.
Squidoo is a platform that lets anyone build a web page (called lens) about any topic which interest you, free, and in just a few minutes,
It is confusing for the beginning, but you can define a lens as your viewpoint on a topic. Lenses focus attention, drive clicks and even earn royalties.
The secret is your lens must be noticed by the public and if you have good content they will. Why, because:
1) they are useful
2) frequently updated and
3) contains your unique expertize, point of view.

The successful lenses are the ones which follow Seth Godin’s 3 Us rules.
I heard a lot of comments about how much you have to work on your lenses to continue improve and update them. The answer is yes and no! I hope you don’t expect to improve the visibility of your work doing nothing!

If you use proper techniques you can create lenses with dynamic allocation. Example, you can use:
1) RSS module which change content at 6 hours
2) Create a gallery of pictures with Flickr, all the time when you add a new picture in Flickr the change will be propagated in your lens which use that Flickr
3) Amazon modules
4) Voting using plexo modules
5) eBay modules which change when an item is ended or you add a new item.

All of those will refresh your content daily and in top of that when you have something new to say, yes, you will update your lens content.

I am very comfortable with Squidoo lenses and the traffic I generate for my personals links I put on them: my web sites, blogs etc. I really love Squidoo lenses, I have a lot of fun doing them, but I am an open mind and I use other sources to drive traffic like Social Bookmark techniques.

I use:
1) StumbleUpon
2) YouTube
3) del.icio.us
4) Digg
5) Onlywise and so on.

In a nut shell, it is possible to create traffic without spending money with PPC:
1) the content of your web sites, blogs, lenses, is the most important driving force for traffic,
2) social bookmark is the second important technique you can use to generate free traffic, and always follow the rule of 3 Us: useful, updated, unique.

Michaela Cernescu is an Education Specialist trained by eBay, Internet Marketer, Digital Products Writer and Affiliate. Visit:
http://www.Squidoo.com/MCeBayResources/

There are so many things that you need to do in order to maintain a successful blog site and increase its popularity in the online community. It is somewhat difficult to sustain profitable growth, but this can be achieved if you make good content on your blog. Anyone in any type of business has to worry about the quality of information that it displays to visitors and clients.

Online blogs and businesses have to deal with the same issues when maintaining and regulating their own financial affairs. They must create effective content that will attract as many visitors as they can to their own web pages. As more people actually visit a blog site, the more financial profit and income that the blog will be able to obtain.

A blog’s level of popularity will largely determine the amount of money that the owner will be able to make. If a blog business earns the dedication of many customers, then other large companies will want to advertise their own products and services on this particular web site. The amount of visitors to a specific blog site holds a direct correlation to the business’ success and opportunities for growth and profitability.

The main goal of any online web site business then is to determine exactly how to increase the amount of visitor traffic to the web site. One of the best ways of increasing traffic flow is through the effective use of search engines, which publish and advertise the most popular web sites on the Internet. In order to get a search engine to put your particular web site at the top of a visitor’s search, you must make good content on your blog.

The main thing for web site designers to remember is the importance of the web page’s content and what is published on it. The quality and effectiveness of a web site’s content will determine if the online business is recognized by large search engines and therefore increase its amount of traffic flow. There are a few techniques that you can use to enhance the quality of your blog’s content.

Good content and articles on your blog should be very intriguing to online visitors and should increase their desire to learn more about the topic even if they have read the entire article. Publishing interesting articles is a major way for you to make good content for your blog without spending a lot of money. You need to also make sure that the content is written with high quality writing skills.

The content on your blog should also be very relative and important to the needs of your targeted Internet audience. If you do not publish relevant information, then you will not be able to make good content and establish a very successful blog.

You should also try to make your blog’s content as entertaining and fun as it can be. This will attract more new visitors to your blog and will ultimately increase its traffic flow.

Court is an expert on starting a blog and also provides internet marketing services.

The Google Conversion Optimizer has been generating a considerable amount of buzz amongst AdWords advertisers. Google continues to lead the other search engines by providing their customers with tools designed to improve the performance of PPC campaigns. This new tool from Google is another step in the right direction; however, it is not for everybody. If you are unaware of exactly how the tool works and for whom it is best suited for, you could find that the Conversion Optimizer is really a Profit Killer.

By reviewing the tool, reading the FAQ, and drilling into the answers that Google provides, you can really gain some insight into how the tool works. In addition, if you read the Success Stories, you will get a better understanding of whom the tool is best suited for. I have taken the liberty of dissecting the tool, the FAQ and the Success Stories so that you don’t have to.

The Tool:

The name of the tool is a bit misleading. A true “Conversion Optimizer” would be an algorithm that determines the ideal bid price and ad position for your ads to produce the maximum amount of conversions for your given ad budget. Google’s Conversion Optimizer works to get conversions at a desired cost-per-acquisition (CPA). These are two entirely different things.

Google’s Conversion Optimizer focuses on achieving a CPA that you set yourself. In order to do that, Google looks at each keyword’s historic conversion rate and then at your desired CPA to set the appropriate bid price. For example, if you have a keyword that historically converts at 1% and you set a desired CPA of $10, Google would take your desired CPA of $10 and divide that by the number of people needed to historically convert (100) in order to set the appropriate bid ($.10).

One of the problems with this method is that it ignores the position that your ad will receive. A bid price of $.10 may not be high enough to get your ad to appear on the first page of Google. Since 80% of internet users never go beyond the first page, your ad may not be seen often enough to convert as much as you would like.

The basic limitation of the new tool is that the Conversion Optimizer focuses on achieving one metric (CPA) in spite of others that are far more important, such as profit, sales, and other conversion types. At the end of the day, the most important metric to any business is profit. If you are managing your online advertising or using a “conversion optimizer” that focuses on any metric but profit, you may be doing more harm than good.

I worked with a client that had an ad agency that was focused on lowering his CPA. Week over week they showed this client how their CPA was dropping. The client thought this was great. Then, one day he dug into what was occurring. He looked at what his revenue was from his advertising in terms of total revenue, revenue per order, and profit per order. He realized that as his CPA got lower so did total revenue, revenue per order, and profit per order. He then realized that the goal of achieving a lower CPA did not achieve the goal of an increase in profit.

The Conversion Optimizer, along with most other tools, calculates the CPA in an illogical manner. The Conversion Optimizer credits a keyword with a sale when it is the last keyword clicked on prior to a purchase. This allocation model completely ignores the keywords that might have been clicked on prior to the last keyword. Marketers all agree that it generally takes more than one keyword to generate a sale. Given that is the case, why do the tools only give credit to the very last keyword that was clicked? If more than one keyword was clicked prior to a purchase, shouldn’t all of the keywords involved get some form of credit? This is what I call the Purchase Path.

The Purchase Path looks at all of the keywords that led up to a sale and gives each keyword some form of credit. Therefore, each keyword gets some form of a CPA vs. just the very last keyword. This method gives a much more accurate picture of how your advertising is working and ensures that you are not turning off keywords that happen earlier in the buying cycle. If you do turn off keywords that typically occur at the beginning of the buying cycle, the keywords that typically occur at the end of the buying cycle will suffer. They will suffer because they will get fewer opportunities to close since the keywords that used to assist in their sales are no longer present.

FAQ:

Below you will find language taken directly from the FAQ Google posted on the Conversion Optimizer. I added several comments about each entry which show the limitation of the tool.

Which AdWords features don’t work with the Conversion Optimizer?

- Position preference
- Budget optimizer
- Placement targeting
- Advanced ad scheduling
- Preferred cost bidding
- Separate content bids
- Multiple conversion types
- Cannot use AdWords Editor
- Cannot use AdWords API

Basically what Google is saying is that any feature that is used by a somewhat sophisticated advertiser cannot be used in conjunction with the Conversion Optimizer.

How should I structure my campaign?

Be sure your campaign contains ads for related products and services, and limit the number of ad groups in your campaign. Having fewer ad groups, each of which contains related ads, helps the Conversion Optimizer predict your conversion rate more accurately.

Also, be aware that the Conversion Optimizer requires conversion history in order to predict an accurate conversion rate. For this reason, it’s best to modify existing campaigns rather than creating a new campaign.
Reading between the lines here again shows that this is not for sophisticated advertisers. Google recommends using this for small campaigns with only a few adgroups and a few keywords. It also cautions against creating new campaigns because the optimizer will not be able to optimize because there is no conversion data.

How do I get more conversions in my account?

To boost the conversions for one campaign, follow these tips. If you’re interested in improving the overall conversion rate of your account, you may consider one or more of the following:

- Opt in to the Google content network.
- Add more keywords to your ad groups.
- Increase your maximum CPA bid.
- Change your ads or landing page to try to increase your CTR or conversion rate.

My experience to date is that the content network reaches buyers earlier in the buying cycle. Content network ads do not do a great job of getting conversions immediately after they are clicked upon. Adding more keywords could improve conversions as long as they are better-targeted.

It is true that if you raise your CPA or accept a lower conversion rate that you could achieve more conversions, but you must also make sure that the increased CPA still produces profit. Rewriting your ads to increase your CTR does not ensure more conversions, it ensures more clicks. The best recommendation that they give is to rework your landing page, which we have found to be effective for our clients.

Case Studies:

Just as I did with the FAQ, I pulled some quotes directly from the case study section of Google’s site related to the Conversion Optimizer. As you will see, the quotes give great insight for whom the tool is best suited for. I added a few comments after each quote.

“With the Conversion Optimizer, we managed to get 600-plus conversions per day, instead of the usual 200. Also, I thought it wasn’t possible to get below $0.60 CPA, but Conversion Optimizer managed to cut our costs down to $0.25 per conversion.” - Moritz Daan, CEO Webgamic

First of all, Webgamic is not an eTailer. When I visit their site, I cannot tell what constitutes a conversion. It seems as if a “conversion” is just a visitor. Lastly, Google had to go all the way to the Netherlands to find this case study?!?!

“I have cut down my involvement with the content network from a very stressful mandatory daily session to a leisurely weekly session which I can skip if I want to. [Conversion Optimizer] algorithms take care of finding the [content network] gems and discarding the trash without my intervention. I really can’t stress how powerful this is for a time-pressed small businessman.” - Patrick McKenzie, CEO Bingo Card Creator

The key line in this quote is “I really can’t stress how powerful this is for a time-pressed small businessman.” If you are too time-pressed to pay enough attention to your AdWords campaigns, then this tool might do a better job than you can do for yourself. If you are not a small business, then this is not the tool for you.

“The main advantage of the Conversion Optimizer is that you don’t have to bid keyword by keyword.”- Paolo Mardegan, Business Director for Neo Network

Again, the big advantage that is pointed out here is the time savings, which clearly indicates whom this tool is for; small businesses that are pressed for time.

In closing, the Conversion Optimizer is not for serious advertisers. It is best suited for the small business that does not have the knowledge and/or time to dedicate to achieving the optimal performance. Lastly, an increase in conversions does not necessarily mean an increase in profit. Every business I have every worked with is driven by profit, not by conversions.

Adam is the Chief Revenue Office at ClearSaleing. He is a seasoned sales manager starting insides sales teams at Google and Actuate Software. Adam holds a B.S.B.A. in Marketing from The Ohio State University. Learn more about ClearSaleing Online Marketing Solutions.

You have probably experienced the frustrations and impatience of receiving hundreds of spam emails every single day on the Internet, and have setup certain restrictions that help to eliminate them from your online atmosphere. Most of this spam is a bunch of junk that does not offer anything reputable or realistic to the recipients and only benefits from people clicking on the links that it provides. Some web site owners have begun to use spam programs to increase the number of online visitors that click on link icons that lead to their site.

In many cases, spam emails do not have a great positive effect on neither the recipient nor the sender because it is junk and contains no value. Sending out spam emails is a very unethical approach to increasing your site’s traffic flow and does not even have a very effective outcome on your site’s success. There are so many other effective methods that you can use to increase a page’s popularity and traffic flow.

Spam contains many negative aspects that destroy the online world. This article will name a few of them so that people will know that you do not need to use spam emails to get good search rankings.

Lost Money-
There are some web site owners that spend quite a bit of money on programs that send out spam emails to hundreds of people. They are simply throwing away this money because most of those spam emails are immediately deleted by people from their mailbox and are even blocked by email programs such as AOL and Google. Buying spam email programs is a great waste of money and can be very harmful to the financial success of your web site.

Spam Overload-
The programs that are designed to send out spam emails to hundreds of people usually create millions of messages that completely clog up the Internet and damage the online world. Millions of spam emails are sent out every day and prove to be very detrimental to everyone who uses the Internet for information and business. If fewer web site owners used spam programs in attempts to improve their site’s reputation, then there would be more room for them to expand their online business and become more profitable.

Not Legal
Some spam emails are not even legal to create and send in the United States and might cause you to experience some legal problems in the future. It is very difficult to regulate the types of spam emails that your specific program sends out, and you therefore take the risk of doing something illegal without you even knowing about it until it is too late. Spam can be illegal in many different forms and should be avoided to protect your rights and Internet business.

You simply do not have to spam in order to get good search rankings. You can build up link icons, work with other site owners, or even use other advertising methods to increase your reputation with search engines.

Court is an internet marketing consultant and helps people to learn about internet marketing.