States have been trying for years to find ways to collect taxes from online sales, which continue to grow at a rate of about 10 percent a year. States are now losing out on $20 billion annually in taxes they would be collecting if all online sales were happening in physical stores. The Illinois Department of Revenue estimates that they could collect $153 million per year with an online sales tax as proposed in Senate Bill 3353. In 1992, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not force retailers to collect sales taxes unless they had “nexus” — a physical presence in a given state. That doesn’t apply to operations such as Amazon that don’t run physical stores and do all their business online. What does this mean? There are approximately 8,940 affiliates in Illinois representing 4.47% of all US affiliates. In 2008 Illinois affiliate marketers earned $78.6MM and paid $2.35MM in state income taxes. As an active member of the affiliate – Read the full article
Online advertising has evolved – and continues to evolve – so rapidly that secrets, tips, advice are coming from all corners. Just Google “PPC tips” and you’ll see what we mean. Businesses and marketers are keen on increasing their pay-per-click conversion rates and ROI, and they wouldn’t hesitate to try out this new piece of software, that new eBook, this new complex paid-for PPC management tool that should serve as current Shiny Object in the world of Internet marketing. We’re talking, in other words, about a lot of effort, time, and money. Sometimes, though, you can get the job done with something as simple as a Shiny Button. What are we talking about? Well, we’ve written in the past about “call to action” being one of the tips for a successful PPC campaign. Call to action: encouraging your visitors to make a decision about your product, your service, your brand. Writing persuasive ad copy that makes it hard for your – Read the full article
A PPC – pay-per-click – campaign is not for everyone, but when it works for you, then you’ll find out how it can stretch your advertising dollars and realize your sales potential. We wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s hugely underrated, but PPC can work in a way that helps your local business – hugely. In achieving local SEO and PPC success, however, you do have to keep some of these things in mind. Go for balance. Getting the right keyword or set of keywords is important. Choose too popular a keyword, and you may take years or never before you can reach the first page of the search engines results page. Choose keywords that are too uncompetitive, and you risk generating no traffic and lower conversion to ROI. Do all the necessary research. There are four main factors that come into why prospects will buy from you – or why they will not buy from you. These – Read the full article
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry continues to evolve. More and more experts are finding out ways and thinking up new strategies to make their websites – and their content – friendlier to the search engines. Nowadays, it’s no longer such a mystery to figure out how to rank higher, find faster, and optimize better. For the most part, SEO covers just text and image content. That’s because search engine robots understand only text. But times are changing, and we’re seeing new innovations in video SEO that bring us closer to being able to rank published video content more systematically in search. Why is this important? Well, it’s important for the simple fact that people are publishing videos on the Web more than ever. On YouTube, the well-established leader in this industry, users upload 20 hours of video every minute – and 10.5 million hours, or 120 decades, every year. More videos are uploaded using other platforms, which include Vimeo, – Read the full article
Millions of people watch the NFL Super Bowl every year because they love American football. That’s why it’s consistently one of the highest-rated programs every year. Millions more watch it even though they don’t like football. Those of the second kind watch primarily because of the ads. And why not? So many commercial campaigns have made the Super Bowl their ultimate showcase: from Apple’s 1984 commercial to the Budweiser “Bud Bowl” campaign, to the dot-com ads in 1999 and 2000, Super Bowl tradition has proved that the game is where high concept ads and extravagant, expensive commercials are often placed and broadcast. It’s not just the people in advertising watching and talking about the Super Bowl ads. There’s a whole nation of armchair critics out there, eager to compare opinions with other armchair critics. That’s why Boston ad firm Mullen has partnered with social media monitoring company Radian6 in bringing the ultimate Twitter / Super Bowl experience, the Brand Bowl – Read the full article
When you search for your favorite celebrity’s name, or the profile of the novelist behind the book you’d read and raved about, chances are that the results will include a Wikipedia entry. On Page One. You’d almost be shocked if you find it on Page Two. The web encyclopedia seems to have outraced everyone to the top, and everything seems to be pointing to any one of its many, many pages. But do you see “Adam Lambert”, or “Jonathan Franzen” on Wikipedia’s home page? Probably not. You wonder how you can optimize your own website that way, without having to barrage your preferred landing page with a hundred links. The example of Wikipedia demonstrates how SEO can be used to target not just keywords – but entire target markets. This strategy was recently discussed in SEO Design Solutions as a way to out-optimize your competitors, if you will, and have your website rank from the top 1000 to the top – Read the full article
At the recent PubCon in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts from Google delivered a presentation on what to expect in the year 2010. One of the bullet points discussed how, over at Google, there has been strong lobbying to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm: site speed. Soon, Cutt said, site or page speed may be a factor in the organic ranking algorithm. It can happen as early as next year, although we believe Google has been testing this as part of the algorithm for some time. This is a new insight to how Google determines page rankings. How fast a page loads is already a factor in the AdWords quality score; making it matter in the organic ranking algorithm should reward sites with fast load times, and which use fast servers. Right now there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm, each of them weighted differently. And while adding page loading speed to the mix won’t dramatically – Read the full article
Hard-pressed for time and money? That doesn’t excuse you from doing SEO. Now that small and medium businesses all over the world are learning the nuances of search engine optimization and paying greater attention to search marketing, you can’t let yourself fall behind. You’ve got to work hard – and work smart. Don’t make these common SEO mistakes that usually cost a lot of time and money. Image via SEO Tips Targeting Too Many Keywords in One Page SEO is not about stuffing; it’s about sharpening your focus. When creating new pages or publishing new content, remember that – while targeting a lot of keywords is a noble intention – targeting a lot of keywords and trying to hit them all with a single dart is not necessary. Create unique content-rich pages, and make each of them target unique keywords. That way, you consolidate the focus of your SEO efforts. And you build the foundation of an optimized site whose – Read the full article
