Archive for July, 2009
Why your business needs New Media Marketing Now
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Online marketing has developed way beyond using Google adwords to drive traffic to your website, although still an effective strategy, it by all means is not the only one.
Your business will need to adapt if it is to survive in the glut of online competition, keeping ahead of the curve is not just another marketing strategy, it is an essential strategy.
Once your business is online you need to drive targeted traffic, prospects and ultimately sales for your product or service to survive. New online entities such as video, podcasting and social media give a new and in my opinion welcome, dimension to the basic need for the lifeblood of the web, traffic.
Let’s start with Google, the most popular starting point of your customers. How do you get to the top of Google? Unfortunately if you are in a highly competitive business area this can be a mammoth task on its’ own. Google has traditionally ranked sites based on many different elements such as age, domain age, incoming links, location of web host, structured silos of your website, popularity and many many other factors.
Google has re-structured its’ algorithms to include their ‘other’ databases. The Google search engine consists of many separate databases of content. These are Google Images, Google News, Google Video, Google Local, Google Base, Google Blogs, Google Books and Google Code.
But the vast majority of users simply did not use these databases of information.
Universal search solves this problem by taking the results from these other databases, also known as ‘verticals’ and includes them in the main search results.
By integrating these elements into your overall strategy you stand to get your website visited via the backdoor through video, podcasts, images, blogs, satellite sites and many other pockets of sub-content. Social media also plays an increasingly important part – no it’s not just for teenagers – businesses and entrepreneurs and using it to network with their counterparts and their customers and their customers are starting to expect it!
Satellite content sites such as wetpaint, squidoo and hubpages all provide powerful backdoors to your main sales hub, providing it’s done right, as well as powerful back links in the eyes of Google.
When you have your website online and revving to go the work remember this the work has actually only just begun.
The power of RSS Feeds
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Real Simple Syndication or RSS is the powerful web tool of the so-called ‘Web 2.0’ revolution that all Internet marketers and Webmasters should be using right now. RSS and Blogs are revolutionising the distribution of information to consumers, whether it is HTML, Flash or streaming video. This distribution channel provides a fantastic opportunity for marketers to connect directly and build bridges of trust and loyalty with their audience.
Many attribute the success of blogs to the technologies of RSS and Atom which enables subscribers to receive constantly updating feeds piped to their desktops via RSS readers, websites or applications. This form of distribution has an advantage over newsletters since it is not blocked by spam filters or lost in a sea of junk.
The use of RSS, mostly used today by the web savvy and businesses, is about to hot up with the new update of Internet Explorer 7 and Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista. IE7 will alert readers when RSS feeds are available and automate the subscription process, as Safari and Firefox do now. Microsoft’s endorsement of RSS could make it a mass-market technology within a few years making feed subscriptions as relied on as search engines.
A business effectively using RSS can bring new site visitors, increase search engine positioning, and generate product interest. As consumers become comfortable signing up to feeds from blog and news services, they are more likely to be comfortable with buying from these sources also.
Although RSS has been around for several years, it is still in the nursery phase, so business and commerce concepts, such as advertising inserted in RSS feeds or charging for subscriptions are just now starting to appear. Google and Yahoo are in the testing phase of pushing advertising through RSS that has excited marketing people, but horrified RSS purists, who feel that adverts clogging up these distribution channels are not the way to go.
Wherever the dust settles, consumer expectation will drive businesses that are slow to adopt. It is certain that RSS will become a standard, like email addresses and websites are now a “must” for businesses. RSS feeds will join their ranks.
The big consumer benefit to RSS is that consumers opt-in to content of interest, totally controlling the flow of information they receive. If the quality of the content in the feed declines, users simply remove the feed from their RSS reader and they will not receive any additional updates from that source. The RSS reader acts as an aggregator, allowing users to view and scan multiple content streams in a timely fashion.
