One of the most exciting milestones that can be achieved by any business owner or retailer is a product or service launch. It marks the fruit of all the hard work that had been done. A launch, however, can also be one of the most terrifying, stressful, and expensive projects that you, as a business owner, will ever have to take on. So why not do it via social media? Traditionally, product launches feature a mix of advertising and PR efforts, pushed by a huge corporate event, media banquet, or some kind of conference. Yes, these still work. But what if you ran a business that was Internet-based? What if a great deal of Internet usage is critical in your day-to-day operations? What if you want to test the waters of Web 2.0 and use social media as your platform for launching a product or service? Don’t think it’s not possible. While many perceive social media as something that only – Read the full article
A viral marketing campaign is one of today’s best (and most cost-effective) ways to let people know about your business. It can take on many forms, like videos, pictures, interactive Flash games, e-books, and even text messages. If done properly and executed creatively, your viral marketing campaign can excite immediate word-of-mouth enthusiasm from people. It can be viewed, read, “liked”, and bookmarked countless times, spark memes, remixes, and spoofs, generate tons of links, and shared on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, etc. With viral marketing, your campaigns will suddenly get a life of its own – and you won’t have to spend so much money for advertising placements. But how do you do it properly? Is there a formula to achieving a million hits on YouTube? How do you make sure your viral content gets passed around by friends and strangers on Facebook? Because of the wide variety of viral campaigns found on the Internet these days, – Read the full article
Thanks to our good friends over at the social media networks, individuals can create personal brands better than ever. Though you may not know it, your actions on social media accounts give the public a certain image of you. This is probably most true for those who are very fluent in social media—continually connecting and commenting with others on the web who enjoy similar websites and articles. However, a personal brand works just like anything else in life: having one can be very beneficial; not having one can be damaging, and vice versa. A good way to think about a personal brand is like a resume. In a sense, a resume is a document that explains why you are one way and not another—you’re good at math because you studied it in college; you’re a loyal employee because you stay at your jobs for over one year, etc. In other words, creating a personal brand through social media is becoming – Read the full article
So, you’ve got a valued product or service, a clean, professional website with a strong domain name, and you’re ready to launch an online marketing campaign. Well, get in line because every day millions of business owners are doing the same. Thanks to the Internet, the old analogy of the little fish in the big pond no longer holds water. Today it’s more about a tiny grain of sand on a very large beach. But don’t get discouraged because when it comes to online marketing, most business owners are doing it badly. And being that all great business owners learn from the mistakes of others, here are 5 surefire ways to kill an online marketing campaign which should be avoided at all costs. 1. Start with a muddled marketing message: You know who you are and what you do. That’s why you started your business, because you recognized needs and realized that you could effectively meet them. The challenge is – Read the full article
So you’ve e-Commerce’d your site up. (Hopefully with Magento, our favorite.) And you’re ready to roll. The homepage is ready. The product shots have been Photoshopped to perfection. The design and the color schemes look very cool (ahem, an aesthetic term) and you’ve set up your checkout process with a secure third-party payment gateway. That’s it, right? Well – not if you haven’t dedicated as much effort as you already have to your product pages. Here’s a list of awesome tips for turning your product pages into awesome sales magnets: Optimize it. This, really, is a given, since you want the search engines to find you as easily and as often as the human visitors do. Great ways to make your product page SEO-friendly include: avoiding duplicate content and duplicate URLs; writing up unique and compelling text descriptions for each product (don’t just copy the manufacturers’ descriptions); and editing this content in a way that makes it relevant to your – Read the full article
If you’re the type of person who can’t wait to open your E-mail and see the newly arrived daily deals in your inbox, well – you’re not alone. More than half of all Internet users in the U.S. find value in these E-mails, too – enough to make them subscribe to at least two daily or weekly shopping E-mails or newsletters. According to a report published recently by market research firm eMarketer, a surprising 56 percent of adult Internet users in America subscribe to at least two “daily deal” E-mails or online newsletters. 61 percent of these subscribers, moreover, said that they find enough value in these E-mails to open and read all the messages. And they don’t keep the E-mailed online deals, discounts, sales, and freebies for themselves, either. According to the report – which cited research from Yahoo! Mail and Ipsos MediaCT – 45 percent forwarded daily deal E-mails to friends and family at least once a week; – Read the full article
Launching your website into an international arena is not as simple as you might think. Even just buying the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) names, if you choose to go down that route, can be tricky if you don’t actually have a base in that country. And while the basic principle behind SEO may remain pretty similar from country to country, you’re going to have to put a lot of thought into turning your website international. If you’re looking into multilingual SEO, the first thing you need to decide is how you’re going to deal with translation and keyword research. You cannot simply run your site through a translation tool and assume it will get everything spot-on for you. And while you might think you’ve got the right keywords in the right place, once your international traffic arrives on your site they’re going to be able to tell straight away if it’s been poorly translated – in which case you’ve instantly – Read the full article
The times they are a-changin’. And so are newspapers. In a move that might soon herald the next era in journalism and news publishing, and in what could propel Apple iPad as a true game-changing tablet device, Apple and News Corporation are set to launch a highly-anticipated tablet-exclusive digital newspaper called The Daily. According to reports by Yahoo! News’ “The Cutline”, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs and News Corporation’s will introduce The Daily in an event expected to take place on January 19 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reports that Murdoch was investing in a tablet publication had first spread summer of last year. It has since continued to take shape at News Corp.’s New York headquarters, with the company reportedly having hired as much as 100 journalists – from media firms such as the New Yorker, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, Forbes, AOL, and Politico – and committed $30 million for the first year – Read the full article
