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%.

Article Marketing (Tool 2)

I regret upon a delay as I've been very busy last few weeks but here is the tool 2 for online marketing.

Online your potential success solely depends on traffic, if there is no traffic neither you can generate sales nor you can earn revenue through advertisements. Keep in mind people are always hungry for the information and here article marketing comes in, which helps you a lot in attracting visitors, the more popular the articles are, the more visitors there will be.

Creating and distributing valuable content attracts the attention of visitors who are searching information related to particular field. Through article marketing you can target the audience who are readers of e-news, brief leavers, blogs, e-books and magazines etc.

Provide valuable information in your article related to your products or services and explain briefly about its benefits to your targeted industry such as “The Importance of Logo Design for Small Business”. The article explains the importance of logo design in terms of creating brand awareness and its benefits for small businesses for marketing of their products or services.

Once you are done with creating a good article publish it on your own site and create re-write versions of the content in order to submit it to the article directories, which will benefit your site in terms of search engine rankings.

Try to search and insert long tail keywords within the body of the content, which are mostly searched by your targeted audience through Google keywords search tool. It will help you in optimizing your site on the keywords, entered by your target audience as well search engines also loves to see keyword optimized articles on the site, which helps them to identify and index the site accordingly.

Almost all article directories allow you to create a hyperlink on a keyword, through which you can have an anchor text link on your targeted keywords. Using long tail keywords in the content published on your site  and anchor text links through the article directories can let your site rank higher on those keywords, which means more leads to your site.

Remember if your articles are well written and informative they will gain popularity and helps you in creating fans for your content, who links back to your site; even few of them provide a small review about your content too on their blogs or suggest further reading to their readers for the related content written by them.

Though article marketing is comparatively cheap then other advertising and marketing methods, hence it is much more powerful tool as compared to the other tools used for marketing your business online. It has been proved that article marketing helps in bringing a huge number of traffic at very minimal expense if compared to sponsored ads or pay per click advertisements.

I’ve found an interesting document on article marketing written by Mr. Matt Callen, "The Article Marketing  Blueprint". Read more

I’ve gathered and created a list of 238 Article Directories for my readers. Click here

Stay tuned for the tool # 3

Top 10 Online Marketing Tools: Blog Marketing (Tool 1)

Online Marketing is one of the farthest reaching, yet least expensive method of promoting your business. In fact, on few channels you don’t even have to pay a cent for your marketing and is effective because the opportunity for success is unlimited.

Based on my learning and experience, I will be providing a series of articles based on tips, suggestions and examples for marketing your business online. The posts will be up in ten parts and first we start with:

Blog Marketing

Blogging, in a conservational manner, could make your industry interesting to people, which gives them a glimpse into a world they don’t know.

It becomes easy to gather and develop a community from all over the globe, sharing similar interests through blogs, and it has also been proved that the blogs act as good PR vehicle for their companies. But it doesn’t mean that you can sell products or services through blogs.

Mostly bloggers who believe that they can sell through musings subscriptions, there is a bad news for them. Blogs should not be used for selling; rather they can be used for promotional and advertising activities.

Now-a-days, most of the companies are using new media marketing tactics along with the traditional media for the PR purpose. Such as the PR department of General Motors loaned the new model of Corvette for one day to Guy Kawasaki, that resulted in a form of post with few nice pictures of the car on his blog How to Change the World to showcase the new model of Corvette 2009 to his readers.

Similarly, Jeremy Schoemaker the author of Shoemoney.com wears a t-shirt every Friday received by different organizations with their logo on it, along with few more complimentary things. Jeremy gives a snap shot of him while wearing the t-shirt and provides a small brief about the business and its products or services.

If you look at the scenario, both Guy and Jeremy have more than 50 thousand subscribers, and when they click “publish”, their posts go to every single subscriber in a nick of time. Now you can see how blog can serve as a powerful tool for marketers in terms of advertising and building public relations.

Stay tuned for the Tool # 2

Why Business should be Marketed using New Media Tools?

The term media refer to the channels through which companies reach to the customers in terms of advertising the products or services. Let’s have a quick look at the traditional media marketing, which was based on radio, television and print advertising, outdoor or media known as billboards and direct mailing.

In actual fact the aim of traditional media is to make consumer recall the brand at the time of purchase through developing brand awareness and loyalty.

New media has replaced old media with internet driven technology which generally refers to website, online advertising, blogs, podcasts, e-mail and social networking sites to market products and services.

The traditional media has an advantage of reaching all types of audiences regardless of the term media or tech savvy but cons of traditional media are observed that the consumers were spending more time online due to the better interaction opportunities by New Media. Although it has been proven that the businesses are gaining success by integrating new media with traditional media a good example here could be billboards or posters where the audience can SMS for more details. Although it is a con for small business in terms of expense, traditional media particularly television advertising isn’t cheap.

Whereas if we talk about the pros and cons of new media the pros includes cheaper cost of targeting customers, higher engagement and interactivity, capturing customer in buying mode, faster ways of delivering the information required for buying and the ability to track leads on ROI though measuring clicks on PPC banners (online advertising).

The cons of new media includes non internet and media savvy audience, not well tested methods of marketing, difficulty of controlling the message such as blogs, could be ineffective without a website.

So, Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses should keep in mind:

What are their objectives?

Whom they are targeting?

Where they can find their customers?

How the message could be delivered to them? 

Small businesses can get high ROI through considering free online media such as blogs, networking sites and listings. Remember! Having a good website is an essential part of successful marketing strategy particularly in New Media, it should be simple clear and relevant to your audience not necessarily biggest or expensive one.

A Brief Guide to Personal Branding using Social Media

Becoming a thought leader in an industry requires expert level knowledge and vision, accompanied with the ability to communicate and align with relevant people. Social media provides that platform and power to reach out to people online and create a powerful and long lasting personal brand. Personal branding is no different than product branding, but this time it’s you who needs to be differentiated.

Developing a brand over social media is a step-by-step non-linier process, and it will take some time before you start seeing the results. Remember, creating a personal brand is directly proportional to creating value for other people.

Here we will discuss how you can use social media to make yourself a brand over the internet.

The power of blogging:

Let’s first start with blogging. Blogging do it consistently and add value. Blogging provides tangible evidence of your expertise and achievements. Before starting a blog, setup all the on-page stuff. Firstly, buy user-friendly, easy-to remember, and content appropriate domain name, and then create a blog theme according to your area of expertise and target audience. Meanwhile, set everything else like “About us” page with your personal and professional information, easy to use comments box, RSS subscription etc.

After on page setup it is important to analyze your blog with website like Website.grader.com, to make sure that your blog is well-build for search engines. If you find anything missing, add it before moving further.

Don’t forget to update your blog with quality and relevant content regularly to make your readers keep coming back. A strong, well written content can be the headstone of a great online identity, which in turn is a key element of a great personal brand.

Increase your online presence:

Now, it’s time to increase your online presence. Therefore, first submit your blog to top blog and web directories. When you submit your blog to any blog or web directory, your blog get listed in a category relevant to your area of expertise. Since many internet users have the same interest as yours, they would often search for that through the search engines, and these search engines would crawl over different blog directories every day. Therefore your blog can have a possibility to show up and read by thousands of readers online. This can generate your blog a great deal of traffic.

Claim your blog with Technorati.com. Claiming blog allows you to add keywords and description about your blog to make people find you easily through searches. Learn how to claim blog on Technorati (Read more).

Get listed with Google Blog Search. It is a specialized Google’s search engine that indexes blogs only. Thousands of people search blogs of their interest daily with Google Blog Search, and if your blog is listed with Google Blog search, they can find you easily. (Read more)

Check regularly who is linking back to you through Yahoo! Site Explorer. Backlinks tell you how much your blog or website is popular over the internet. The more the backlinks, the more you are popular, but depending on the quality of links. (Read more)

Commenting on other blogs within your area of expertise would certainly help you to build awareness and to build connections with experts. The more valuable your comments, the more it will reflect your ability. (Read more)

Brand extension with social media:

Besides blogging, to further extend you personal brand, creating accounts on other social networks and media platforms help a lot. (Read more)

Twitter.com allows you to share your latest projects and promotional ideas, and also helps you to interact with fellow tweets and social media practitioners. (Read more)

Facebook and MySpace could be used for outpost and to stay in touch with old friends, and find new ones. You can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. Both are the great platform for having some different experience. Profiles on them give you an opportunity to show yourself in your own way. (Read more)

LinkedIn is a professional network that helps you to explore business opportunities and to get advices from experts no matter where you are. (Read more)

Flickr is more than just photo sharing. It can be used to spread the words about yourself. (Read more) 

Digg and StumbleUpon are more of a digital media democracy that emphasis more on technology and science articles. When an article is submitted to them, other people read the submission and vote what they like the best. Once the article receives enough votes, it appears on the front page of the website. (Read more)

Moreover, get Upcoming.yahoo.com account for promoting events, and Gmail account for docs, readers and more. Creating accounts on all these social media websites would certainly give you jump recognition on social media.

In addition, creating groups on social networking platforms give you an easy mechanism for communicating with lot of people in one go.

Time to build connections:

After all the efforts, it’s time to start networking and build connections. Interact with people, allow them to reach you easily, thank community often for their time and attention, ask questions for expert advices, share knowledge based articles with your contacts and if you have mistakenly done something wrong, apologize immediately. Doing all these community building efforts grow you out as a natural extension. (Read more)

Conclusion:

The concept of personal branding is closely associated to that of leadership and at the heart of its passion. There is much more you can do to standout and become a brand. Remember, Online personal branding using social media is depended on creating quality relationships. Try to look for ways to help those who are best placed to help you, they'll be more inclined to help you, and if you need to call on them they'll remember who you are.

Introduction to Vodcasting / Video Blogging

“The combination of video files posted to the internet with a method of updating the content quickly and combining the usability of blogs with video files is known as Video blog or Vodcasts” Zen (2005). Video blogs are not just the videos, which could be found widely on internet, but video blogs carry some of these features along, Meng (2005):

• Video blogs are downloadable files,
• A regular updated blog format,
• A RSS Feed with enclosure.

The video blogs are downloadable files, if it is not downloadable; it usually does not count as it is a video blog because the concept behind it is that the user can download the file and can access it even without the internet anywhere and anytime. Most of the video blogs use standard blog format, which give an ease of updating it so that it can come on ranking of search engines and the viewers can find it, and with RSS enabled on it, people can subscribe to the feed and can download videos wherever it is convenient for them. RSS reader is check feeds on schedule automatically, every time any new video blog is added it would be sent automatically to the subscribers.

Creating a vodcast is as easy as 1-2-3,

Source: Meng (2005), “Podcasting and Vodcasting – A white paper”

The videos or pictures uploaded from the cell phones having camera and access to the internet are known as Moblog.

How to Become a Podcaster a.k.a Audio Blogger

Podcasts are also known as audio blogging. Meng (2005) defined pod casting as “the process of capturing an audio event, song, speech, or mix of sounds and then posting that digital sound object to a Web site or “blog” in a data structure called an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) envelope (or feed)”.

Many of the marketers, trainers and consultants are now a days using podcasts for providing tutorials to their subscribers clients and students. There are four good reasons why companies should podcasts:

• To gain first mover advantage,
• To develop customer loyalty,
• To give the company a more human voice,
• To exploit the PR value of a new technology.

These audio files automatically gets downloaded onto the users’ computers, who are subscribed with the feeds of the service provider, which directly goes into the management programs onto the users’ computer such as Music Match, iTunes or Windows Media Player. These programs further transfer these audio files to the subscribers audio devices as they are synchronized with the computers and could be listened anywhere anytime as desired.

After uploading the content, it requires to be tagged via XML in a format known as RSS 2.0 so that it could be delivered to the people subscribed to editor’s RSS newsreader. As the content is delivered to the subscribed people it automatically, download to their portable audio devices as they synchronize it and will be able to listen it anywhere any time they intend to.

Curious about creating a Podcast of yours, just follow the steps given in the image below:


If you are having any difficulties in viewing the image try clicking on it.

What's New Media?

New media is an abstract concept with a general meaning. According to Martin Lister (2003), new media is defined as media established with a sense of interactive communication, whereas the conventional media refers to established institutions and organizations such as the press, broadcasting, publishing, and so forth. In late 1980s when the media and communications looked quiet, different the idea of new media has been emerged. New media refers to the techno-culture, which is entailed of technological, cultural and social change. It is called new media as the term “new” in it carries the ideological implication of “the most recent” or “the cutting edge,” derived from a modernist belief in social progress arising through technology. New media is classified as websites, blogs, vod-casts, social networking, rich multimedia, virtual reality such as virtual shopping malls, video conferencing, mobile TV, podcast, and so on (Lister, Dovery, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2003, p. 9-13).

The characteristic of new media employs technology based on interactivity, hyper-textuality, digitalism, dispersal and virtuality. New media makes the communication interactive and the information more accessible in the digital age. The traditional media tools use to be only one-way communication, which includes TV, radio, and newspapers. Traditional media walls have been broken down by the new technology; it provides the interactive communication tools. The convergence of new and old media is an emerging phenomenon in the whole world, with an accelerated movement toward the use of new media among businesses.

Lister, Martin, Dovery, Jon, Giddings, Seth, Grant, Iain, & Kelly, Kieran. (2003).
New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.