Social Media (Tool 7)

Cluster of new sort of online media, which shares the following characteristics, is known as social media:

PARTICIPATION: users are encouraged to contribute and share feedback, which hazes the line between the concept of media and audience.

OPENNESS: most of the social media services are set to openness with a freedom of providing your feedback or conveying your message to everyone. Such services also encourage voting, comments and sharing of information too. There are hardly any sort of barriers to accessing and making use of content.

CONVERSATION: social media is a conversational, two-way communication medium, whereas traditional media is about “broadcast”, content transmitted or distributed to an audience.

COMMUNITY: it allows users to form a community for effective communication around common interests such as business opportunities, favorite shows etc.

CONNECTEDNESS: Most kinds of social media flourish on their connectedness, via links and unite different types of media in one place.

Why Social Networking?

It is very entertaining form of networking where you meet people of similar interests, and can be very effective medium for entrepreneurs, small or start up businesses, writers, musicians or artists.

Everyone has some type of hobbies or things in which they are keenly interested such as movies, cars, games, business tips or technology innovations, social media allows all to reach out to each other who share similar interests.

However, Simultaneously You Need To Ask Yourself, “Which Is The Right Social Network For You?”

Questions you must ask yourself in order to pick a right social network for yourself:

1.What do you want out of a social network?

2.Are you choosing social network for business reasons?

If yes, then you must check the presence of your target audience first or else you can choose a general interest sharing social network such as facebook, MySpace, Bebo for an advertising face or business oriented networks such as Linkedin, WeCanDo.Biz for making good business contacts.

It is suggested that you should pick a niche social network with specific theme because it matches your interest, where you will be more likely to get involved in the community after all that what social networking is all about.

Regrettably, there are plenty of social networks that cater different interest, but still there isn't a social network for each and every interest. But, almost all social networks allow users to created groups to share their interest through which usually people are connected to each other.

Online Advertising (Tool 6)

The main purpose behind online advertising is parallel to the regular marketing methods that are to market messages, in such a way that it should attract customers. Similarly, there are different types of online advertising methods depending upon how the advertising is done.

The most common and popular advertising methods followed online are:

Pay Per Click Ads also known as PPC ads in which search engine place your website on their front page and you need to pay a set amount per click-through. The pay rate for advertisements depends upon the competition in the industry and the more you bid the higher your site appears on the first page of the search results.

Usually PPC campaigns helps in bringing a lot of traffic to your website but you need to make sure whether you are getting the targeted traffic, if not then you might be losing money through this campaign.

Banner Ads, it is one of the oldest ways of advertising online. Banners highlight your product/services or other offerings and by clicking on them, the users are redirected to the advertiser’s website, where they can create a suitable landing page to provide further information related to the advertisements. Such spots where banner ads are placed usually is sold by impressions, banner views or even through the click rate, where the advertiser only pays when the user clicks the banner.

Banner ads are usually placed at such blogs, websites, forums or social networks where advertisers can easily find their targeted prospects.

Such advertising is also promoted by exchanging banner where advertisers whose services compliment each other’s exchange their banners or pay a banner network to post the ad on a numerous site of publisher.

Skyscraper Ads are almost similar to the banner ads, the only difference between them is that the banner ads are placed on the top, where as skyscrapers are placed vertically either on left or right sidebar of the site.

Skyscraper ads are comparatively more expensive than banner ads due to two reasons:

• They stay visible to the user even if they scroll down the page,

• The other reason is its large size.

Contextual Ads are commonly used for content-based websites with contextual advertising, where a targeted ad appears based on the pages actual content. In contextual advertising system scan the content of the webpage for keywords and keyword phrases and then return specific targeted ads accordingly.

This way of advertising has become one of the most popular ways of targeting as it is based on the user’s interest.

Takeover Ad appears when the visitors initially enter the website and then continuity of the same message is continued in the form of banners, skyscrapers and buttons. The approach of this ad has been observed to be very successful, as the brand remains visible to the viewers throughout the site and usually, click through rates are high.

Pop-ups and Pop-downs sometimes become very annoying and appears when you first get onto a website. Pop-ups appear as a full screen ad whereas pop down appears at the bottom on the bar of your screen, where you need to open them in order to get rid of them.

This is not a permission-based marketing and according to the different researches conducted, it has been concluded that usually users get intrusive and annoyed by such advertising methods.

Floating Ads appears as a user logons to the web page, ads float usually for couple of seconds while users are on the screen. These ads makes the page murky and even block mouse input, such ads are popular for several reason, which includes:

• Animated

• Grab’s viewers attention & cannot be ignored

• Audio / visual content

• Up to 3% higher rate of click-through comparatively

On the other hand, users get highly irritated due to the ads, as this is also non-permission based marketing which is highly discouraged by the audience.

Interstitial Ads are pages, which appears on the web between the web pages with an option of skipping the page. While user’s requested page loads on the background, this could be an ideal way of delivering ads that contain large graphics, applets or streaming media.

Unicast Ads are basically rich media audio / visual ads, which runs in the browser window. The ads are usually based on 20-30 seconds and have a similar branding power as of TV. But as we know new media offers something, which traditional media does not i.e. the ability to click on the ad for further information. These ads have been proved to have an average click-through rate of 5%.

Search Engine Marketing aka SEM (Tool 5)

In the previous tool of online marketing i.e. Search Engine Optimization, we learned that the process of optimizing a site is based on:

Content:

Image and media, widgets and tool, resource lists, testimonials, translations, comments, RSS feeds, articles, blogs and titles.

Links:

Directory submission, partners / suppliers, reciprocal links, press release, memberships, social media, advertising, comments, contests and news.

Site Architecture:

Hosting, DNS, geo-location, domain, URL structure, web design and standards, usability and analytics.

However, if you are intending to take part in in the online marketing arena, it is important to that you must be aware of how to bring search engine marketing into play too for domino effect. As today, we are living in such a world where we use internet on daily basis to find things of our desire and prefer to do a research online rather than going to a store and having a dialogue with pushy sellers.

If you are a merchant then probably, SEM is one of the best ways for you to target your market online. However, a question arises here, how search engine marketing vary from search engine optimization. The important factors of search engine marketing are:

Creativity in Ads:

Ads are useless if there is no creativity in them no matter whether it is contextual advertising, banner ads or a video ad, in order to generate sales the ad must be creative enough that it grabs the attention of a visitor at a glance and make them click on it.

We use contextual advertising, text links, banners ads, rich media and buzz marketing is search engine marketing, which are keywords optimized and based on seasonality and segmentation.

Placement of Ads:

Placement of an ad is the most important factor in the search engine marketing. Mostly, ads are placed in the Meta search engines, second tier search, search engines, directories, websites, affiliates, and blogs. However, before placing an ad you must carry out a price comparison of the sites.

If you are a small business owner, it is necessary for you to allocate a budget for your online marketing activities through measuring the ROI with the help of analytics but make sure that your customer support infrastructure should be strong enough to serve each customer at the best level of satisfaction.

Keep proper checks on conversion rate of the traffic you are receiving through your search engine marketing campaign because if there is traffic but it is not converting then probably there is some problem that you need to figure out real fast in order to generate good results.

In a word, search engine marketing is a key skill for all online marketers to learn. On the other hand, this is for sure that once you have well-read all the rules of the game, your business will never be the same.