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Handpicked News For Internet Developers - Since 1999 |
Archives For Internet Marketing
Let Your Objective Guide You…
Recently I was talking with a very bright traditional marketer on the value of integrating Internet marketing into a website's marketing mix. Personally, I have witnessed significant website sales or lead increases when traditional marketing strategies like direct mail, radio, television or publicity are performed in conjunction with proven internet marketing strategies.
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An Outsider's Perspective on Your Web Site
Additional landing pages add additional complexity. I'm trying to help the business find as many stumbling blocks within their conversion process as possible - the whole process is actually about finding faults, which might be tough to hear. People want to hear they've done a great job. But I wouldn't be doing an assessment if things were going well. What I'm really after up front is all the low-hanging fruit a business can fix quickly to generate much-needed ROI - and these are fixes that will continue to pay dividends over and over.
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Webisodes Return, Now as Advertising
Remember webisodes? Original minishows for the Internet were all the rage online before the Internet bubble burst in 2001. Now they're back, this time as advertising vehicles, courtesy of a robust online ad market and growing broadband audience.
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What I Learned From Television
Perhaps it's happened to you too. If you've clicked on an interesting image or piece of content only to find that you clicked through an online advertisement, you may be missing the lines between content and advertising. Their dichotomy is not new: television networks have been thinking about the distinction for over 60 years. Can their models reveal anything about the future direction of online advertising? While this issue of Boxes and Arrows provides us with strategies on looking forward, we might also look back for indications of how to proceed.
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Are You Asking The Right Question?
Helping folks "buy better" involves careful attention to usability, information architecture, search engine optimization strategies and other issues that influence the user interface. But at the core, it depends on your ability to marry your sales process with their buying processes. You have to understand who your visitors are, their motivations, their needs, their buying patterns and where they are in the buying decision process so you can connect them to exactly what they need to make the decision to buy from you.
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10 Web Promotion Strategies
Web sites don’t usually come in version numbers like desktop software did. Which is probably why the “Beta” label gets so much focussed on – what a great way to announce your site one more time because you dropped it. What are some other ways to make your site more popular and keep the memes active?
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Yahoo!/FindWhat Patent Dispute Headed for Trial
The patent-infringement suit filed by Yahoo!'s Overture against FindWhat.com is heading for trial later this month, after surviving the latter firm's efforts to have the case dismissed. A decision in the case could settle once and for all the issue of who owns the bid-for-placement technology that has fueled the paid search advertising boom.
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Branding via Search Marketing
The concept of branding via search does not lend itself easily to working with the engines whose goal is to get a user off their site as fast as possible and to the most relevant site. Throughout the short life span of paid advertising companies haven't been able to express themselves fully, with the use superlatives forbidden (e.g. 'the best' or 'the greatest') and in being instructed to make every effort to increase the click through rate (CTR) from one site to another for fear of penalty with disabled terms demonstrating poor click performance. Additionally, companies have never been able to multiply listings on the same term and for those making the most of the ancillary benefit of affiliates bidding on the same term, Google's early 2005 decision to limit the exposure of an AdWords listing to one per domain removed any possibility of taking advantage of doubling up a listing.
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Customers Are Color Blind
In today's e-commerce age, where everyone is forced to type and to remember names with absolutely correct spellings, companies with big branding campaigns only hurt themselves with their old-fashioned, painted, colorful advice. They must all realign their thinking to cope with today's name-driven economy.
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Ads Are Here To Stay: Planning For Ad Placement
What follows is a list of some strategies and guidelines for presenting ads on a page. These approaches will undoubtedly become more sophisticated as the possibilities, and variability, of online advertising grows. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has put together a list of standards and guidelines for presenting advertising on the web, and is dedicated to educating people on how to advertise online. Instead of addressing these standards in this article, we would like to address their information architecture—how they fit into a larger page-level and site-level system.
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Web Analytics Association Founded This Week.
The Web Analytics Association is a non-profit professional organization dedicated to promoting the understanding of web analytics through education, advocacy, standards, research and technology. Founded by web analytics industry leaders, the mission of the association is to unite and foster the interests of practitioners, vendors, consultants and educators who use, sell, install, implement, consult, teach or train in the field of web analytics.
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Conversion and the Complexity of Your Sale
The click, then, is the essence of your persuasive process. Every click represents a question your visitor is asking. It represents your visitor's willingness to try to stay engaged with you (for now). It represents a unique point of conversion. It represents continued persuasive momentum. If your visitors don't click, communication ceases and persuasive momentum evaporates.
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