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How to Select a Social Media Monitoring Service

By William J. Comcowich in Featured

The focus is on social media monitoring in this final articlein the series on Selecting a Media Monitoring Service.

In earlier articles, Determining Your Media Monitoring Needs, Print News Monitoring vs. Online News Monitoring, and Broadcast Monitoring for TV and Radio News, I describe the various approaches to news monitoring.

Definition: Social Media Monitoring

The social web is a fast-growing and fast-changing “platform” for consumers to discuss companies and products.

Social media monitoring is the process of listening to online consumer reviews and conversations about your company, its brands and services.

The overarching goal of social media monitoring is to learn from listening – better understand consumer concerns about your organization, and then employ that knowledge to enhance your products and services.

Social Media Monitoring Services

Your social media listening strategy should encompass all forms of word of mouth media and consumer discussion including but not limited to blogs, “complaint” sites, message boards, forums, Usenet news groups, and video sharing sites such as YouTube. You should also monitor
social community sites like Facebook, MySpace and Linked-In, along with Twitter, the microblog.

Social media monitoring services monitor all forms of social media – but not all services monitor all media. The services use specialized software to aggregate social media postings from multiple sources, index all the content on a near-continuous basis, query the index using the client’s key words and identify consumer posts of interest, and then deliver the relevant posts to the client.

Since it’s impossible to predict where or when important market intelligence will “pop up” on the Web; or where it will be repeated or “go viral”, it’s best to monitor the widest possible range of social media.

Market Intelligence vs. Worthless Chatter

Social media overflows with inane chatter. If the Chipotle restaurant chain monitors social media, the overwhelming majority of mentions will be about “going to” the restaurant or “meeting (name)” at the restaurant – not very useful for market intelligence purposes.

Well-constructed search queries help minimize extraneous chatter. As an example, McDonald’s could focus social media monitoring on specific product names (brands) instead of the corporate name. Or it could use an “and not” operator in the Boolean query on common phrases like “going to” or “meet”. That type of clip avoidance strategy will likely delete a bit of worthwhile conversation, but will certainly minimize useless chatter to be reviewed.

In using social media monitoring as a customer service tool, it’s important to review all mentions of company and brand names to identify and act on complaints (and compliments).

What should you be listening for?

As a starting point, monitor for your corporate name, your brands, the services you offer, and the names of key executives.

Initially, just start looking for complaints, compliments and questions about your company. Look for any serious issues that need to be corrected. Look for patterns or trends that are emerging – positive or negative. Initially, measurement of social media is not necessary, especially for small and mid-size companies. Later, you may want to expand your listening to encompass competitors and industry-specific issues – and also do some formal measurement of social media conversation.

Who in the organization should coordinate the listening?

The answer to “who should listen?will emerge from the reasons your organization wants to monitor social media. Is it to find service complaints and rectify them? Then “customer service” should listen and react – often called “engagement” in social media circles.

Is the reason to identify issues with product performance? Then marketing or product development should be listening.

Is it to monitor corporate reputation? Then the public relations department should be listening.

In large corporations, multiple departments should be involved in the listening process.

How to listen?

Using free social media search engines can provide quite a good cross-section of word-of-mouth commentary by consumers on the Web. For blogs, try Technorati, Google Blogs and Ice Rocket. Searching multiple services causes a problem of duplicate content that you’ll need to filter out – something that commercial media monitoring services do automatically.

For message boards and forums (which may be even more important to monitor than blogs), try BoardReader which covers about 50,000 different online consumer discussion sites. The best way to start monitoring Facebook and Linked-In is to simply sign up as a member and enter search queries into each service’s search engine.

The downside of free search services is the time required to conduct the searches. It may not be the most productive use of in-house staff. Staff time is better used for analyzing, not searching. If there are a limited number of new posts each day, it may be acceptable to monitor less frequently. But at least occasional monitoring of social media is crucial to gain a better understanding of consumer issues and to protect your corporate reputation.

Bottom Line: free social media search engines may well meet your needs if you have just a few search terms, typically receive only a few new postings each day, are willing to invest the time to conduct searches on a regular schedule using multiple free services, and have no need for advanced services to measure the quantity, reach, and tone of the social media postings. Using free media monitoring tools, though not perfect, may be “good enough”. “Free”, however, is not truly free. The staff time investment must have an adequate return.

Commercial Social Media Monitoring Services

The paid subscription services for social media monitoring provide more comprehensive coverage, save staff time, and provide many bells & whistles including online clip archives to manage the social media posts, and automated quantitative and qualitative measurement of the posts.

Prominent social media monitoring services include Radian6, Alterian M2, Trackur, and Scout Labs. Presently, more than 50 companies compete in the social media monitoring and measurement space. There is a “wiki” of social media monitoring solutions at wiki.kenburbary.com that continually updates the growing number of social media monitoring services. The Yahoo! Directory also contains a comprehensive list of social media monitoring services.

Many of the well-established news monitoring services provide integrated social media monitoring. CyberAlert, for instance, in addition to its online news monitoring service, provides comprehensive daily coverage of 50+ million blogs; 100,000+ message boards, forums, complaint sites, and Usenet news groups; 200+ video sharing sites like YouTube; and all Twitter postings for the previous 24 hours.

Social media monitoring services vary considerably in their mission and in their deliverables. In screening the companies, it’s vital to match their market niche with your need. Doing your homework in advance to narrow down your vendor list is absolutely essential.

Assessing Social Media Monitoring Services

Questions to ask in assessing social media monitoring services:

What is the core goal of your service?

Who are your key customers? What internal department is the primary client contact point for your service?

What’s your service best at doing? Exactly what social media do you cover? How do you aggregate content? May I add social media of special interest to our company to those your company already monitors?

Do you cover “complaint” sites? Which ones? Do you monitor Twitter?

Do you cover and exactly what content do you harvest from Facebook, MySpace, and Linked-In? Is your search engine capable of performing Boolean queries? What Boolean operators does your search engine use? Is it capable of using regular expressions? How many keywords may I use in my queries?

Does your service include a searchable archive of social media posts? What are its features? Ask for a demo of the archive.

How do you differ from (another service you are evaluating)?

Who is your best competitor? Why is your service superior to theirs?

What enhancements do you plan to your service in the next 60 days? Six months? One year?

Many of the services offer a comprehensive demo or, even better, a “test drive” of the service. That’s unquestionably the best way to sort through the features and benefits of the various vendors.

Summary: Social Media Monitoring

As a new and rapidly evolving media, online consumer discussion and social communities form the “wild west” of monitoring. No solution is perfect. But some social media monitoring is essential for most every company. The temptation is to leap into social media at full speed. But,
the “full service” solution of listening, measuring and engagement may not be the best solution to meet your needs. Determining your needs before contacting or meeting with vendors is the most effective way to start the process. With a better idea of what you need, you’re far more able to assess and evaluate media monitoring services – and not buy more than you need.

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William J. (Bill) Comcowich is President & CEO of CyberAlert, Inc., a worldwide media monitoring company for both news and social media. CyberAlert monitors 50,000+ online news sources in 75+ languages in 189 countries. It also monitors TV news and most all social media. CyberAlert offers a 14-day no-risk free media monitoring trial of all its services at secure.cyberalert.com/ftorder_sya.html.

Google Instant Search for Marketing

By admin in Featured

Google recently introduced their “Instant Search” feature which starts to populate search results the instant you start typing into the search box. At the same time, Google suggests alternate search terms as you type to help narrow your search without forcing you to enter entire search phrases.

The main idea behind this new feature is to save users a few seconds on each search and cut down on misspellings for search terms, business names or product names. Users may not notice much difference in their overall experience, however, for small businesses and online entrepreneurs, this new search method carries a few interesting ramifications.

Since Google clearly ranks as the “900 lb. Gorilla” of the online marketing world, acting as de facto gateway to the Web for millions, any change to their system makes businesses nervous. Many have expressed concern that this latest change will force users of Google’s AdWords program, the search giant’s lucrative pay-per-click marketing arm, to pay for more expensive keywords.

They reason that since the most popular search terms appear in the search box first, and that most people will opt to accept Google suggestions, those most popular searches will carry the highest click prices. In other words, businesses that depend on Google to show their ads fear that Google will force them to pay more money by recommending more expensive keyword searches.

I disagree.

The suggested search term feature actually appeared on Google quite a while ago, and all that’s really changed is Google starts to display the actual search results AS you type. With the old 2-step process, Google made suggestions as you typed and then you clicked the search button to see the search results.

Instant Search just creates a FAST way to see the results for different search variations without forcing you to click the button each time to see those results. This process makes it simple to see the results, change your mind, and not wait for the results each time you change the phrase.

My experience shows that most people always start with a broad search and then narrow it by including more descriptive terms (often called “long-tail” keywords) to better find what they want. This new process won’t change that.

In fact, it will give people more chances to refine their searches on-the-fly by providing Google more details of what they want. Instead of posing a threat, I believe this new Instant Search feature creates an opportunity for any business to perform high-speed market research to look for possible opportunities and trouble spots.

The following four steps will help any small business use Google’s new feature for instant results.

1. Go to Google and search for your business as if you were a consumer.

2. Make a note of the keyword suggestions Google offers as you type.

3. See if those suggestions give you any ideas for your own marketing (since they should represent the most popular phrases).

4. Note which competitors show up and where you appear in relation to them.

These 4 simple steps make a great barometer for taking a read on your local market, fast.

Who appears consistently?

Who shows up hit-and-miss or every once in a while?

Who shows up in Google Maps?

If your competitors show up and you don’t, you’ve got some work to do!

Bottom line: as a small business, use Google’s new Instant Search to quickly get the big picture when it comes to your business, industry, and local competition.

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“Small Business Marketing Weekly” helps small business owners understand HOW to use the web to make more sales, increase revenue, and get more customers. Visit SmallBusinessMarketingWeekly.com for more articles today!

Occam’s Razor Solves Marketing Misinformation

By Jerry Bader in Featured

Many years ago I had a professor whose favorite saying was, “It’s the simple things that elude people.” It’s not a new idea of course, but it is an important one, often associated with 14th century English logician William of Ockham. Occam’s razor as it is commonly referred to states that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” which in pop culture terms has been interpreted as meaning ‘the simplest solution is most often the best.’ It is also pretty clear that old Ockham would have been a big believer in what we now call the ‘Paradox of Choice’ as coined by Barry Schwartz in his book by the same name. The Paradox of Choice basically describes how customers intent on buying from you, don’t, because they are confused with too many options; to paraphrase Ockham, features or options must not be multiplied beyond what it takes to get an order.’ In fact, it is pretty well understood by those of us who actually study how to communicate a marketing message that a focus on an emotional benefit is what works, not another new feature.

The implications of this seemingly simple insight into decision-making are quite significant for marketing executives: features are out; emotional and psychological benefits are in. Ah, but what emotional benefit, there’s the rub. I will assume that if you are reading this you are interested in improving your business and that you are open to new ways of doing things, and that starts with new ways of thinking about things.

Finding Your Emotional Benefit

Finding your emotional benefit is really not that hard if you know where to look. The extended version of Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is the place to start. Every product or service needs to fit into at least one level of the psychological hierarchy from basic survival, to ‘be all you can be’ self-actualization. Every successful brand has its place on the hierarchy.

How to Build a Google Sitemap

By Geoff Bloy in Featured

Google has implemented a cutting edge method of crawling web sites for its search engine index. This unprecedented method of indexing web pages is known as Google Sitemaps, and it is quickly growing in popularity among webmasters and SEO agents and managers due to its ability to get an entire web site indexed quickly and to pick up errors in the links coming into and out of a web site.

Google Sitemaps consists of placing the URLs of your pages along with important information regarding how Google should index them into an XML document. This information is then read by the Google Spider and the pages are normally indexed quite quickly, assuming that they are coherent to Google’s standards for indexing pages (and also assuming that the sitemaps conform to Google’s Sitemap Criteria which will be explained a little later).

There are two primary types of Google Sitemaps. The first is a list of pages in a website and the second is a list of sitemaps in the website. Google has limited the number of URLs in its sitemaps to fifty thousand URLs. This may sound like a lot, but for some of the more intricate web sites, fifty thousand URLs may not even make a dent in what they want indexed.

This led to the advent of the Google Sitemap index file which can index up to one thousand sitemaps. If you do the math, this means that you could have one thousand sitemaps with up to fifty thousand URLs in each sitemap which allows for fifty million URLs to be placed in your Google Sitemap scheme. But wait, there’s more. Who ever said that you can’t have an index of indexes? You could actually make an index of a thousand index files which are all indexes of a thousand index files. Basically, there is no limit to the number of URLs that you can hold in your Google sitemaps.

Is There a Brand in Your Stand?

By George Torok in Featured

Watch out for the branding gurus. Beware of the branding police who focus only on images of brand. Fire the branding consultants who feel qualified to tell you what your brand should be. Ignore the branding zealots who proclaim “brand or die.”

Good, now that we have frightened off the undesirables let’s address some fundamental questions about branding and offer you some probing questions to consider. That first paragraph demonstrates the three rules of creative positioning as explained below.

Should you have a brand?

Maybe. It depends on the goals of your business. You need to ask yourself some questions. Will the brand give you the return on your investment? Will you invest the resources to claim and sustain the brand?

What is a brand?

A brand is the emotional bond that your clients have with you. Ask your best clients how they would describe you to others. Look for the common message in what they say – especially the emotion. That might be your brand.

Brand is the feeling others experience when they think about you and your product. Brand can help them think of you first – or better yet – only you. Brand can justify higher prices – or even better – make price a non-issue.

Not Branding

Branding is not about creative logos, pretty fonts and pantone colors. Fire anyone who attempts to sell you that pabulum. Those things are only images. Have you noticed that the successful brands change these images every few years?

Branding is a marketing strategy. It is only one of many marketing strategies from which you might choose.

Is branding an accident or on purpose?

Because branding is about creating emotional messages you are always branding. However, are you aware of your messages, are you consistent and are you effectively branding yourself?

You could create or claim your brand. Domino’s Pizza created their brand – “Pizza in 30 minutes or its free.” They own that brand. It’s simple, memorable and unique. Some companies look for an opening and build their business to create that brand. Some companies discover their brand by accident. Feedback from clients, remarks from the media or a competitor’s comment reveals the brand that was hidden in plain sight. In that case it is up to you to claim the brand and run with it.

Avis claimed their brand by turning a disadvantage into their brand when they launched their marketing campaign with “Avis is only Number 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.” And with cheekiness they leverage further on their “disadvantage” by adding, “The lines at our counters are shorter.” That brand has been successful for over 40 years.

How do you create your brand?

There are two ways. Like Coke, Nike and McDonald you could throw gazillions of dollars at it. Or you could use creative positioning. Look for the holes in the marketplace. Go to where your competition is not and claim that position. Take a stand like Harley Davidson, Buckley’s Cough Mixture and Nova Scotian Crystal.

Each of these companies claimed positions in the market the competition was unwilling to take. Folks either love or hate Harley Davidson. Buckley’s proudly claimed that “it tastes awful but it works” along with a money back guarantee. Nova Scotian Crystal is proudly the only Canadian crystal manufacturer and they offer an incredible one year breakage warranty. Drop your whiskey glass and they will replace it; no questions asked.

You can read the interview with Rod McCulloch, President and CEO of Nova Scotian Crystal on my “Business in Motion” blog.

Each of these companies was willing to take a position that would drive some folks away while attracting a loyal crowd of fans.

The three principles of creative positioning are best explained by UK entrepreneur BJ Cunningham, who as CEO of The Enlightened Tobacco Company sold a cigarette called “Death Cigarettes”. It was presented in a black package emblazoned with a white skull-and-crossbones logo. Just imagine how this might appeal to the rebels. Everyone except the tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoking was bad for your health. BJ did what none of the other tobacco companies were willing to do. He took a stand.

Cunningham’s three principles of creative positioning:
1. Take a polarized position.
2. Make enemies.
3. Create tension.

Branding starts with market review and self-examination. Standing alone can be scary, exhilarating and hugely profitable. It you are going to claim a powerful brand take a position away from the crowd. Stand where no one else is standing.

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George Torok is co-author of the national bestseller, “Secrets of Power Marketing: Promote Brand You!” He helps entrepreneurs gain an unfair advantage over the competition. Get your free copy of “50 Power Marketing Ideas” at www.PowerMarketing.ca. To arrange for a keynote speech or executive briefing visit www.Torok.com. To arrange a media interview call 905-335-1997.

7 Reasons To Love HootSuite

By Elmar Sandyck in Featured

Heard about HootSuite? It’s a hoot to use!

Twittering has progressed from a social “message burst” to a full-fledged social media tool, and more applications are being developed around its unique appeal. There’s a new player in this scenario, and it’s a hoot to use! The newest in social media, HootSuite, is pegged as a “social media dashboard”, offering a lot of valuable Twitter resources for those of us that like to Tweet a lot or have multiple accounts.

Below are the reasons why we love this great new tool:

#1 Multi-tasking is a breeze.

Got two or multiple Twitter accounts? It’s much convenient to maintain these accounts without having to crack your head open. The Multi-Editing feature allows you to access and maintain your tweets in each account with easiness, and still maintain privacy of your own Twitter password. Switch back and forth or post to all of your tweets using the HootSuite dashboard and you no longer need to log in and out again!

#2 Ease in running a business.

Social networking has turned in to an income-generating channel, and HootSuite has taken that into a new direction with Multiple editors. You can have a “business” Twitter account with Multiple Editors, and have someone else Tweet information as needed, perhaps have one person tweeting about sales and marketing promos, while another respond to direct messages you may receive! You can even embed your Google Adsense code to your account, and generate additional revenue!

#3 No sweat tweet scheduling.

Scheduling an event, and decide on sending out tweets at various times informing people that the event is coming up? This tool makes it pretty easy to schedule using its date and time feature and send it out later. That way, you don’t have to spend all of your time tied up to the screen and tweeting every so now and then.

#4 Link shortening for optimum impact.

HootSuite shortens links within the system. This amazing tool also allows you to monitor your mentions, even your RTs (tweets re-tweeted by others). Apparently, it’s like a miniature Google Analytics program for your tweets, where your tweets have metric value!

#5 Light and not hard on your computer’s memory.

HootSuite won’t affect the performance and speed of the computer since it’s online based. A very much similar applications like TweetDeck eats up a huge deal of processing time on the hard drive.

#6 Saved keywords.

This great tool allows you to save some of those keyword searches and recover them at the click of a button. No more searching or deciding on the keywords to join in a trend or continue one, as you can have them accessed with ease.

#7 Fantastic navigation.

The HootSuite dashboard is set up with ease in mind similar to the Twitter homepage and easily tabbed. Tabs like “Home”, “@Replies”, “DM’s”, and the like make it a no brainer to use. The display lets you look at information appropriate for a certain account, including keyword monitoring, direct messages, and Groups.

Certainly, HootSuite can change the way your business engages online with its great features! It’s a great tool to use, and I give it two thumbs up!

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Elmar Sandyck Highly Recommends To Check Out HootSuite Twitter Tool In Establishing Successful Online Marketing Strategies. For More Tips Visit www.InternetMastermindStrategy.com

Google Instant Means The End Of SEO

By Louise G in Featured

Initially, Google’s new Instant Search system could mean a major change in how web surfers look for information online. Instead of typing a search query into Google and then hitting return, and waiting for a list of results, Googlers now see a dynamic list of results as they type. Google considers this a positive step forward in the development of searching. Google claims this new style of response will save between two and five seconds per search query. That potentially means 11 hours are saved every second. but does anyone other than Google really care?

The internet marketing community, however, will never be very enthusiastic about Google Instant. SEO consultants, who try to get sites listed at the top of Google’s organic search rankings, and SEMs, who battle for their clients’ sites to be placed near the top of Google’s Adwords Sponsored Listings, have been blogging and tweeting as if Armageddon is here.

The SEO community is paranoid at the very best of times, and perhaps with good cause as: a small change in the Google algorithm can determine the future of many websites. In this instance, however, the reaction is not necessary, essentially the results are the same, the sole change is you can see potential results of each word as you type it in, so if you are typing in ‘Italian restaurant’ you will observe everything Italian prior to getting to the restaurant results and then you will have to include your location unless you are very flexible about your travel arrangements, so in fact long tail key phrases are far from dead.

And this time round the latest Google scare is ‘much a do about nothing’ or will it be? There isn’t any denying that Google’s original innovation in search transformed how the Internet worked and made the business of finding stuff considerably quicker and easier. It also created an enormous market – one Google still dominates – that allowed companies to market us things depending on whatever we had entered in that box and all was well, for a while.

But something happened. Social networking, social media, whatever you want to refer to it as… suddenly, content was coming right at us, without us even looking for it. We couldn’t escape it. Several hyperactive egotists in each community began curating content and spewing it out to their friends. People were sharing photos, stories and links so we found that we were spending less and less time foraging around for things and increasingly more time sitting back and allowing it to wash over us.

Fast forward to 2010, and we’re being assaulted by more stuff than we could possibly consume. Facebook, Twitter, and email are shoveling pictures and video down our throats more and more quickly. Feedback loops enabled by sharing and retweeting functions imply that each of us has now changed into an over-sharer as well as an over-consumer. If you are not confused and over loaded with information, you soon will be.

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The author is an expert in the field of Internet and extensive knowledge to help those seeking careers in Internets. Areas of expertise in fact include any qualified route to finding Internet jobs. To search and apply for thousands of Internet jobs go to internetservicesjobs1.co.uk.

Maximize Your Sales Online With These Ten Tips

By Stephen Monday in Featured

These ten steps will help you to make more sales online. Use some or all of them, depending on the type of Web business you operate.

1. Increase your page rank in Google (SEO) Search Engine Optimization

To do this, it is important to know how to write clear, concise articles and page content that will draw fresh visitors. Write interesting, informative articles, and post them in the article submission sites. Include in the article a link back to your site. Hyperlinks are best, for when they click these, they will create incoming links. This will create back links. They will serve to help increase your sites visibility to search engines, and help improve your sites overall optimization.

2. Link Exchange

Find sites, which are related to your product/service, and get them to exchange links with you. (Sites that are getting good traffic are best.) When people click your direct link, it will help to build even more incoming links to your site. The more incoming links you have, the better your site will rank in the search engine results.

3. Search Engine Submission

We have all seen the ads (submit you site’s URL to 80,000 search engines here). While it is wise to submit your sites URL to the major search engines, some of the smaller engines are quite obscure. Get your URL listed in all of the most popular search engines. Do a search on “search engines,” and find the ones which will best serve your interests.

4. Optimize you Keywords

Use tools like Google analytics, and find keywords that are used most often in search queries. It is important to have the right number of keywords in your site. Avoid “keyword stuffing,” for to do this proves to be harmful to you sites page rank. It can even cause penalty, or “blacklisting. Some sites have even lost their domain over such issue.

5. Avoid duplicate content

While there may be many other sites having content relevant to your sites objectives, it is not wise to copy and paste this information. Search engines will find such, and flag them as spam. There are many software applications that search and find such pages. Many try changing the words around, or adding words here and there, but this still, will not result in having new or fresh content. Google and other search engines will find and flag such. To avoid these pitfalls, use only fresh new content for your Website.

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become a boom to many who understand how to create pages that get good rank in search results. You promote other peoples products through your web site and earn up to 60 to 75% commission per sale. Click-bank and Amazon, earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year, in e-book sales alone. You can get your share of this pie by creating great page content, then promoting their latest best seller. Many affiliates create multiple pages, optimize them, and then sell the hottest products selling on-line.

7. Adsense Earnings

When you have a page that gets a good rank in the search engines, you can earn cash per clicks by having Adsense ads of various types placed on a page, which is relevant to the ads. You get paid every time someone clicks through the ad. This is where having lots of targeted, high-quality traffic comes in. The more traffic, the more clicks, the more money.

8. Pay-per-click

I would not advise one who is just beginning to start with a huge budget with pay-per-click. This is where you use Google Adwords to send traffic directly to your site. Because you are paying a good price for every click, it is important to send them to a sales page that is converting well. To use Google pay-per-click advertising, you in effect pay them so much per click (70 cents to $10 per click) depending on the market value of the word, and they give you a sponsored link that shows up when someone chooses keywords you have bought.

This listing displays in Google search, on the right side (or on top) of the generic search results. Since you only earn when someone buys the product/service – it is vital to know exactly what you are doing, in this, or you could lose your shirt.

9. Adsense Marketing ‘with Affiliate Marketing’

One can really earn while they sleep, once they figure out how to incorporate Adsense along with affiliate marketing. This is having a huge site, getting tons of clicks. This type of high profile Web site earns money two different ways. The Adsense placement ads earn cash every time someone clicks them (whether a sale is made or not) and the affiliate links within the site, make money every time someone clicks through the ads and makes a purchase. Having a Web site like this takes research and testing on a regular basis, but it has the potential to earn big bucks for the owner.

10. Super Affiliates

Super Affiliates have an established Web presence, when you click keywords they have bought, their name comes up in Google search results listing as page one – number one results. It takes some money as well as time, to reach this status. Several examples of Super Affiliates are names which are easily recognized such as: Amazon, Click bank, or Google. They have incorporated so many keyword phrases into their paid searches, they have top placement in all of the search engines. To get near the top, where they are, takes total optimization, and hundreds of thousands of back and incoming links.

Be sure that the content on your Website is class “A” Web copy. Have rich, clear, concise information, which your visitors will be glad they found. Have every page optimized for targeted keywords, and get sales copy that will pay you!

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Stephen E. Monday is a Professional Web Copywriter, Creative Writer, and Web Content Manager. Get your FREE Sales Page evaluation. Go to my Copy writing Web site: www.AAAWebcopyservices.com.

Video Email – The Future Of Communication

By John Gaydon in Featured

I know the concept of video email is quite new. Imagine receiving a birthday video email, information on a property you were seeking, or advanced notice of a new car model with a video of it in the email. Certainly providing links to videos on emails is becoming common, and many marketers do that. So why not take the next step?

What You Can and Cannot Do

First, right now, embedding a video in an email is not possible. One day it might happen, but right now email servers don’t have the necessary software for this. This means text links or graphics.

Research suggests that using a graphical representation of your video and then providing a direct link to the video email is the best way to achieve video emailing right now.

The Case For Video Emails

In an article by Mark Brownlow, “Video email: current practices”, he discusses the research on video emailing. There are some interesting statistics.

Looking at this statistic, it is obvious that video is now acceptable to most Internet viewers. “According to comScore, US Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January, with YouTube alone scoring over 100 million unique viewers in that same period.” Finally video has come of age, and we are all conditioned to use it.

Comparing emails with or without a video link – “When not linking to video his click through rate is between 20-27%…when linking to online video it’s consistently between 51-65%” says Anna Yeaman. We know that a video link receives a much better open rate than a simple text message.

The Importance of Marketing Data

By Fallon J Rechnitz in Featured

Depending upon the size of your business and at what stage of development you are in, the types of marketing data you collect will vary. For a business that has just started recently or will be starting up shortly in the future, you’ll want to do a tremendous amount of market research regarding target markets, advertising and marketing options, customer buying habits, local demographics, transportation and shipping costs, salary ranges, and anything else that may be relevant to your particular business.

If your business has already been established, you’ll hopefully have already collected much of this marketing data. But you should also now be collecting more comprehensive marketing data about your current customers. This includes information as to the regional area that contains the majority of your customers, payment methods, and average spending amounts. You should also be aware of your most popular products or services, your least popular products, and factors that may affect sales seasonally.

Together, all this information can help you better market your products or services. Additionally, it will be beneficial to know what your customers think of your products and services, and your business overall. This can help you gauge customer loyalty, and determine whether you may be in danger of losing customer to the competition. The more you understand about your customer base, the more empowered you are to provide them with expert service and beneficial products.

Obviously, you should also be collecting contact information if feasible, so that you can communicate easily with you customers about upcoming sales events or promotions, or other information regarding your business that they may be interested in receiving. Being aware of what publications your customers read, and what social networking sites they frequent will also enable you to market to them more effectively.

In regards to marketing specific products or services, your most profitable and best-selling products will likely be those that provide the greatest benefits to your customers. Knowing this information can help you to improve existing products as well as develop new ones.

Collecting marketing data on customer’s previous purchases can also help you determine where to focus your marketing efforts, and how better to segment your target markets so that you can even personalize your marketing to a specific customer base.

Collecting marketing data typically occurs in two stages. The first stage, in which primary data is collected, is when you collect marketing data for the first time. Collecting secondary data is the second stage: this type of data is usually data that already exists and is purchased from another source.

Primary data can consist of simple customer contact information, or more comprehensive data culled from customer surveys and questionnaires. Your customer’s purchase habits also fall into this category, as well as the fluctuation of sales data on daily, weekly, or monthly schedules.

Secondary data should never be discounted as meaningless: it can often give you great insight into specific areas and target markets. Additionally, thanks to the availability of vast resources on the Internet, much of this type of marketing data can be obtained for free, provided you have time to do the research and know where to look.

It is beneficial to have a good networking system in place to record and house all the marketing data you collect, as well as data backup and protection tools in place so that you do not accidentally lose your data. You’ll also need to ensure that you comply with the Data Protection Act, which serves to protect the privacy rights of your customers and the data you’ve collected about them.

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For more information on how Bridge Capital can provide accelerated cash flow solutions for your business in the Suffolk and Nassau area of Long Island, NY; For more helpful information and tips, please visit us at www.bridgecapitalsolutionscorp.com.

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