New Internet marketing tools

Some new marketing tools

1. Real Link Finder Neil Shearing's "RealLinkFinder" is a handy little link-building tool you can use to increase your link popularity and SE rankings. It lets you find targeted blogs that don't have the "nofollow" attribute tag so your links will count in all the search engines. Great way to build targeted links related to your site's main keywords or keyword phrases. This is one "No Cost" link-building tool you should try: www.reallinkfinder.com
2. Peel Away Ads Simple ads which sit at the corner of any webpage, when a cursor hovers over the pulsating image - the page peels away to reveal your ad or promotion. Might seem a bit gimmicky, but like the pop-up or fade-in, they do work. You do get more sign-ups and sales. www.pealawayads.com
3. Video Marketing Using videos as marketing tools has now become commonplace on the web. If you're not promoting with videos, you are losing a large portion of the online traffic or surfers currently on the web. Even using videos to explain your site or product will increase your conversions and sign-ups. Viral videos embedded with your links or site url can produce results when placed on YouTube or Google Videos. If you need help, one recent commercial product has been from Simon Grabowski (GetResponse) called TalkStream, which lets you put streaming audio and video on your sites. Just google to find it.
4. Social Media Bookmarks/Tags One of the most significant changes in recent years has been the rise in importance and use of social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati... these sites are now commanding huge traffic numbers and should not be ignored in your online marketing. You must connect your content with these sites. This is very simple to do since social media sites use tags, which are more or less simple keywords that help classify content and links. If you're using the popular Wordpress blog software, each category will be considered a tag. You can create a simple tag in technorati by using this code: <*a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname]" rel="tag">[tagname]<*/a> <*a href="http://technorati.com/tag/new+marketing+tools" rel="tag">new marketing tools<*/a> Remove the *asterisks in actual codes.
5. Add this Button One of the easiest ways I have found to tap into the whole social media bandwagon is to put the Addthis button on your webpages and let your visitors bookmark your content for you. This button is free and only takes seconds to set up on your pages. In case you're wondering if this button works, I recently received 70,000 visitors to one of my sites in one day from these social media sites. Granted most of this traffic is transitory and not permanent - the huge traffic numbers will only last as long as your links/bookmarks are on the front pages of these popular sites. But where there is smoke, you can make fire.
6. Blogs RSS Feeds Likewise, you must have a blog and RSS Feed associated with your site or product. It is vital that you take advantage of this technology to get your content broadcasted across the web and around the world. RSS is only simple code that syndicates your content to all interested parties; it originally stood for "Rich Site Summary" and was a way of summarizing your content and broadcasting it. Most people now refer to RSS as Really Simple Syndication. You need a "newsreader" or aggregator such as Newsgator, Google Reader, My Yahoo! or Feed Demon to access all your feeds. One little blog traffic tool I find helpful is John Reese's BlogRush, which helps syndicate your blog posts on other blogs. www.blogrush.com
7. Expert Marketing Another effective way to market online or off is to promote/prove yourself as an expert in your chosen field. Creating articles, ebooks, websites on a subject that interests you will make you an expert. Once you gain credibility as an expert, your marketing will become much easier. Some obvious places to help build this credibility would be Ezinearticles, SelfGrowth, Ideamarketers... I have found these places are excellent for getting your name and your content noticed.
8. Long Tail Niche Marketing One of the most effective ways to market online is to use long tail keywords in your niche market. This simply means instead of targeting very general and very competitive keywords, you target less competitive long tail keywords in a smaller niche market. I have found this tactic especially good for affiliate marketing, and the trick is to find the exact long tail phrase someone is using in the search engines and then construct content/url to match it. I find Brad Callen's Keyword Elite software program extremely helpful in finding those long tail keywords.
9. Guru Fast-track One of the fastest and quickest ways to earn large amounts online is to hook up with big marketing GURUs and use their huge contact lists. If you have a high quality info product, then JVs (joint ventures) with these savvy marketers can be a very viable option for you to try. These marketing gurus or experts are valuable marketing tools you can use to your advantage. Granted, their aggressive marketing methods do turn many people off, but there's no denying their methods do work.
10. Micro-List Marketing Micro-List Building is one of the most effective online marketing tools you can use. Quite frankly, I have found building a large opt-in list is not the real key to online wealth but instead creating small micro lists for each of your promoted products to be much more effective. You can have hundreds, even thousands of these different micro-lists. Use an unlimited autoresponder program like Aweber to handle and manage all these lists. Studies have shown interested customers may not buy on the first visit, that it may take up to six or seven reminders. So keeping in contact with an interested customer, one who is looking and in the right mindset to buy, will definitely increase your sales. Here, rather then the hard-sell, the emphasis should be on collecting contacts in order to give them helpful informative content on the product they're interested in buying. Supplying quality content should be your main goal; let the selling take care of itself. If you get the first part right, the sale will come naturally. In conclusion, you must remember when dealing with such a complex creature as Internet marketing, in most cases there's no one single marketing tool that will do the job. Instead you need a whole orchestra of tools working together in order to make your online marketing the most effective. So why not try some of these tools in your own online marketing and see the results for yourself. You have everything to gain.



by Titus Hoskins

How to launch a new website - design & creation (in view of SEO)

To start with you need to create a well designed, useful, informative and optimised site – this sounds obvious but it’s in this area where most companies fail.

The key is to think about the site's structure and search engine optimisation (SEO) before the designers and programmers get started rather than afterwards.

So many companies build a site and then contact an SEO company for advice – it then tells them to redesign and alter most of the site, which adds time and cost to the project.

If the SEO company is involved from the start, then it can create the site's structure and underlying code and then a designer can make it look amazing.

Areas to consider are content management systems, which can be costly to optimise and customise, and blogs which need to be set up in an extremely user friendly manner.

Lots of corporate blogs lack the easy to use subscription and commenting features that well designed Wordpress installations make use of and they suffer greatly as an example.

Other features such as social media and user generated content should be integrated at the design stage rather than bolted on at a later date.

When you come up with the idea for a new site it is very important to think about how the site will market itself.

A commercial site needs to have user generated content and innovative features built in as well as the ability for users to bookmark content and share items with social networks.

Marketing a site from scratch is very tough these days and without social features and the ability to publish remarkable content in a well presented manner the task is made much harder.

As a general rule every new site should have the following features:

* Blog or news publishing system
* Optimised pages for each product
* A unique feature to help attract publicity
* An in depth marketing strategy

Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in Your Pay Per Click Ads

BY Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

If a Google user is searching on "dirt cheap digital camera" she'll see a number of Google AdSense ads with that same search term in the ad headline. How do they do that? Some Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisers will bid on every possible keyphrase and write a specific ad for each. But many take advantage of Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) tools that are built into the major search engine ad systems. DKI is designed to insert into the ad the exact term a searcher uses. The search term is most commonly inserted into the title, but the tool can be configured to insert the term into the body of the ad as well. If the search term is too long to fit in the space, then a default keyword is inserted instead.

DKI Advantages

DKI can have a real upside, especially for certain kinds of paid search campaigns.

Higher click-through rate
All other things being equal, a searcher is more likely to click on an ad that matches his exact search term, since he will perceive it to be more relevant than the other ads. This only works, of course, if competing ads aren't also using DKI.
Simplified administration
If you're employing a "long tail" strategy of bidding on hundreds of seldom used but relevant keywords, DKI can simplify administering the process and cut your set-up time.
Quality score
doesn't automatically increase, but if through increased relevancy you get a higher click-through rate on your ads, your quality score is likely to improve.

DKI Disadvantages

On the other hand, DKI is not a magic bullet solution to all paid search campaigns.

Click-through rate using DKI may not, in fact, be higher
For higher-traffic keywords it's worth taking the time to test to see if DKI can't be outperformed by another title.
DKI titles won't stand out
if most of your competitors are using them. If that's the case, you'll have to differentiate your ad from other competitors by not using DKI.
For long search terms DKI uses your default text
This isn't a major disadvantage. It just illustrates that DKI doesn't help in all situations.

DKI tends to be most effective:

• When ad groups are primarily organized around products that have many ways to describe them, such as tennis shoes.
• When phrase match, not broad match, is used.
• When one main word varies only by part number, size, color, model, etc.

When you are conducting a conceptual or brand-centric campaign, however, DKI is less successful. For many campaigns with a clearly organized theme, DKI won't be necessary -- or helpful. But when your campaign requires a long tail strategy, then DKI may well save time and get a higher click-through rate on rarely-used keywords.

Unethical SEO - Online Marketing Gaffes to Avoid

In the world of online marketing, every rule is a shade of gray that is constantly going through technical evolution. While many marketing techniques had periods of proper usage that were beneficial to how the Web works, some of the known online marketing styles that have been considered abusive (black hat) by the search engines. As with all marketing, there will always be unscrupulous businesses that cause techniques used today to become frowned upon by the majority. Making sure that your company is aware of certain basic standards and not accidentally infringing on discouraged techniques is essential to making sure your online brand is a flourishing asset that is building value.

Top Online Marketing Techniques to Avoid

• Page cloaking

In broad terms: using various techniques to fool a search engine to deliver different Web pages under different circumstances. Using various technologies, a site attempts to detect whether or not a human or search engine is requesting a page to view. If it detects a search engine, it serves up a visually unappealing page intending to maximize SEO results. Most search engines dislike this technology as it prevents them from grading actual pages that a human visitor would read, and it detracts from the ability to serve relevant results to the end user.

• Spamming of the submission process

Each search engine has a specific period that it will accept submissions for the same site. If a search site has guidelines of every ninety days, it means every ninety days. Many unethical SEO groups know of ways to submit nearly identical content located on different pages. When caught with such duplicate content submissions, sites are typically pulled from being indexed.

• Automatically generated doorway pages

A doorway page is created for the purpose of spamming the index of the search engine by providing multiple pages listed with particular phrases, for the purpose of sending that visitor to another page. They have many other names: portal pages, bridge pages, gateway pages, entry pages, etc. Some doorway pages redirect visitors without their knowledge by using page cloaking, which has taken on the nickname of page hi-jacking.

• Keyword Stuffing

This technique is defined by a Web page that is loaded with a variety of keywords in the tags or main content. Used with caution and skill, this technique is one of the basic building blocks of SEO. However the engines frown upon sites excessively flooding keywords on a page or hiding them in code that is irrelevant to the viewer of the page. The most abusive version of this technique is when words that are completely irrelevant are including on a page solely for the purpose of organic traffic results.

• Irrelevant Keywords

This technique is very straight-forward. You have a site about luxury real estate that lists random luxury car names or the names of premium golf clubs on it without providing actual information about the cars or clubs to the reader. The only reason the terms exist is to have traffic come to the site when they search for “New York Jaguar.”

• Duplicate content on different pages or sites (mirror sites, etc)

This technique is often one of the most common “accidental” black-hat techniques that many unknowing site owners commit. Once information is indexed by a search engine, any other sites that have the identical information indexed are considered “duplicate.” For established sites, this is not a large problem. For new and un-established sites, having large amounts of duplicate content may cause the site to be flagged as a SPAM site and completely removed from the index process.

• Misspelling of common words, or well-known brands/sites

This is very similar to irrelevant keyword and keyword stuffing- where popular brand names such as Google are misspelled for traffic results. Gogle, Goole, Googl, etc. It can also happen with longer names that have 2-5 parts that may or may not be searched for, such as: Trans American Airlines. Such variations as trans-america, America Airlines, or even Trans American Airline (without an s) can produce temporary traffic results for a savvy search marketer who is willing to break rules.

• Data blogs with no unique content (also known as splogs or scraper sites)

With the creation of RSS (really simple syndication) the ability to import data into another site has become increasingly simple. Millions of spam blogs exists that have re-purposed duplicate content from hundreds of other sites, programmatically making changes to the original content to make it look slightly different. Typically these blogs give absolutely no credit to the originating author of the material and are breaking several copyright laws. Well-read online authors have this problem daily, hundreds of my articles have been stolen this way over the past two years. The primary reason for the existence of these sites is monetization through programs like Google Adsense which allows the site to profit off random traffic lured in using the stolen content.

• Code Swapping

Code swapping is when an established page is changed to an entirely different page once a top ranking is achieved. Common instances of this include pages that originally very text heavy or have many comments and eyes looking at them (forum areas, popular articles, etc) and then switching it out with a “buy me now” page that has a call to action for a completely unrelated item. Successful online campaigns can profit during the short period of time the search engine doesn’t recognize the change, but risk having the page disappear entirely when the search system properly analyzes the new information (which is often worthless to the reader)

By Barry Hurd

Transactional Email Marketing

transactional email is a way for a company to get creative with communications by utilizing
a form that should be delivered to a customer.


Benefits of transactional email are:

1. Increased Communication—Increased amount of time right in front of the customer

2. Improved Customer Loyalty—Transaction email allows a company to build loyalty by seeming as though they are able to almost predict the needs of the client

3. Brand Reinforcement—Every communication that is welcomed, such as transactional email, provides the company with an opportunity to reinforce brand recognition, either through name, logo or both

4. Cost Effectiveness—Email on the whole is extremely cost effective, but transactional email kills to birds with one stone, allowing communication of a necessity item (i.e. invoice) and communication of a marketing message

5. Conversion Rates—Research shows that by using transactional email tactics, companies can see as much as a 100% increase in conversion rates

6. Receivers are Customers—With transactional email, the receiver is already a customer, so they are much more likely to be receptive than those receiving blanket SPAM

7. Cross Sell and Up-sell—Provides company with opportunity to promote complimentary items or newer versions of previously-purchased items, increasing sale potential

8. Increase in Revenue—With an increase in conversion rates, prospects will soon become paying customers, while current customers continue to purchase due to increased loyalty and up-sells/cross-sells, thereby increasing revenue