The thing which keeps the Internet going (as well as keeping much of it free), is advertising. Banner ads have been a staple of Internet marketing just about since the virtual dinosaur age (back when Times New Roman was your only font option!). We look at how to make sure your banner design keeps ahead of the competition.

Banner advertisements are made up of two major components - the graphics and the text. There are three contexts that you’ll need to be aware of these components in, which are also the different purposes that banner advertising exists for. These purposes are usually either:

* To drive traffic to a website
* To increase awareness of your brand in the marketplace
* To actually sell a product

Your banner design tactics will be different depending on which of these goals you are aiming for. Brand awareness ads should use corporate colors and slogans; ads that aim to drive traffic should include a URL as well as being clickable and should be similar in visual style top the page they are located on. Ads which aim to get people to purchase something should take care to look professional and trustworthy, contain a call to action, and even display accreditation logos on the ad as well as the website.

However, no matter which of the above you are aiming for, there are some general design guidelines you should follow for your banners. Some of these touch on suitability issues that you will have resolved in other areas of creating your banner campaign. For instance, you will need to make sure that your banners are appearing on websites that are related to your target market. Likewise, your design will need to take into account your target market.

Keep in mind guidelines like:

* Ensuring that any images of people in your ads look like your target market. If you want women to look at your ads, use images of women. Different ethnic groups, different age groups, and also different levels of professionalism can also be targeted through your choice of image.
* Using colors that will appeal to your audience. Dark, subtle colors will usually appeal to men, while bright, happy colors appeal to parents, pinks to young girls and blues to young boys.
* In your written content, use terminology and slang that your target audience would use. Stilted teacher-talk is no good if you are trying to get kids to click on your banners!
* Animation and ultra-bright colors can be good, but should be used sparingly. When your ad constantly distracts your viewers from what they are trying to read, it is likely the ill-will towards your ad will carry over to your company - this is not only a waste of advertising spend, but costs you money in the long run.

Banner design is definitely an art - but it also requires sound science behind the inspiration! Why not try an expert Internet marketing banner ad package to start with, and check out the results?

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

While many people include the practice of natural search engine optimization with paid search under the umbrella term ’search engine marketing’, experts divide the two. Search engine marketing, according to well-accepted definitions, is the practice of paying for inclusion in search engine results pages via pay per click advertising, sponsored results, or contextual advertising. What is search engine marketing, and what are the main issues surrounding it?

The best recognized form of search engine marketing (SEM) is pay per click advertisements. These appear in the right hand sidebar of Google, Yahoo and MSN search results pages, and sometimes above the natural results. They are usually differentiated from the ‘natural’ results for the search, and have a heading of ‘Sponsored Results’ or something equivalent.

The process of engaging in SEM is much simpler than SEO. You will determine the keywords that you want to appear in the results for, write advertisements that adhere to each search engine’s character limits, and input a bid for the keyword that will determine how high up you appear in the results. The company that bids the highest amount for a particular keyword or keyphrase will appear at the top, the second highest bidder will appear second, etc. Conventional wisdom states that there is little benefit in appearing outside the top three places.

PPC ads are generally seen as good value by companies, as you only pay for the advertising when someone is interested enough to click through to your ad. Of course, there are initial campaign set up costs involved also, as well as monitoring and testing. PPC does have costs outside of the actual click, so it is still in a company’s best interests to have a well-executed campaign.

PPC ads are not generally seen as being as trustworthy as natural results - and there is some legitimacy to this view. Relatively new players in the PPC game can get to the top of the results simply by spending more money. While Google’s algorithms for natural results favor the sites that offer real value to searchers, their program for paid search favors the businesses spending the most money in the short term. That could be you.

Search engine marketing is like many marketing activities on the net - something that appears simple, but can quickly spiral out of control with regard to time and costs if not managed properly. We recommend outsourcing at least some of your initial campaigns for best results.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Website marketing is a difficult subject to encapsulate within three paragraphs! However, with a little dedication, the business skill to outsource to the right people, and some basic initial work, new websites can see thousand percent increases in traffic in a relatively short time. We look at the six most important aspects of website marketing.

1. Having a good offering - All your website marketing efforts will come to naught if people visit your website, and immediately leave because it looks like a black hat, non-reputable type site. Invest a little money in high quality graphics, a professional design, and a developer that knows how to implement the design, and the payoff will be immense.

2. Incorporate on-site optimization into your pages from the beginning - Ensure that your tags, titles and content are all geared towards getting natural search rankings for specific, niche keywords that are absolutely relevant to your business.

3. Put in place an off-site optimization plan and timeline - Ask your Internet marketing services firm about implementing an article marketing program, a regular press release schedule, a directory listing campaign, and a blog for traffic and rankings. Also set timeline for these activities - regular is best when it comes to off-site optimization.

4. Check out what Google has to offer - Google Local, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics are all invaluable free tools for website owners. Google’s services are reliable, comprehensive, and almost always free.

5. Utilize social media - Open a Facebook group or three, create a MySpace page for your business, start a Twitter account and offer insightful, regular comments, as well as creating more corporate networking profiles on LinkedIn and LinkMe. Create a Digg and Delicious account also, so that you can help spread the word when you have interesting new content.

6. Non-standard link building methods - Link building has been covered in off-site optimization, however these regular methods aren’t the only tricks website marketing services have up their sleeves. Ask about getting links from authority sites, partnering with complementary but non-competing companies, and the other tools of the website marketer.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Buying targeted traffic is certainly an option for startup businesses, but as a long-term solution, creating your own natural targeted traffic using the magic Google formula has great results. Here we give you some general guidelines and individual ideas for increasing targeted traffic to your website.

By its nature, any traffic that Google delivers is ‘targeted; in some way - they have arrived at your site because Google believes you hold relevant information to the keyword that a person searched for. You know that your services are relevant to millions out there - so how do you convince Google of the same thing, to help them deliver you maximum targeted traffic?

* Optimize your website: Expert help is usually mandatory for on-site optimization. You’ll need to determine your core keywords, and incorporate them in a natural way, in specific densities and places throughout your web copy. Editing your meta-information, looking at your site structure and gaining relevant backlinks are the other signposts that Google is looking for.
* Search engine submission: Submit your site both to the major search engines, as soon as it is up and running, and also to vertical search engines and more targeted engines within your business niche.
* PPC advertising: Also known as paid search, users know that results on the right hand side of the screen are selling something. They usually won’t click on these ads unless they are willing to buy … and as the advertising is on a ‘pay per click’ system, this can be an extremely cost-effective way of getting targeted traffic.

However, Google is not the only place on the web people go for information! Online marketing is about much more than Google and Yahoo - here are some individual ideas for delivering natural targeted traffic to your site.

* Give something away for free: Create an eBook that you can give away for free, a discount coupon, or a prize related to your business to help bring traffic to your site.
* Lend your expert advice: Offer the ability to ask a free question and have it answered immediately on your site. People power in marketing is just as strong as Google power!
* Participate in forums: Answer people’s questions, and they may come to your site for more advice.
* Join networking sites: Be of benefit to your network, and it may just start a targeted traffic landslide for you!

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Once you have a solid foundation for your SEO campaign, link building is going to be most of your ongoing work. If you can make more money using your time for something you specialize in, rather than rote work (that would be most of us, then), hiring a link building service makes good financial sense. Here are the main considerations for choosing a good link building service:

1. New Methods - The face of SEO changes as rapidly as Imelda Marcos’. Techniques that worked well several years ago can now get you blacklisted in Google - make sure your company has recent testimonials.

2. Diversity of Strategy - Link building for longevity of results means using different methods - article marketing, press releases, directory submissions, and linkbaiting should be featured in any good link builder’s repertoire.

3. White Hat Techniques - This goes without saying (yes, I know I just said it!). Your link building service should use white hat techniques only.

4. Reputation - Google the company name that you are thinking of using, and look beyond the first two results pages for information on them. Look them up on review sites and forums, the place where people most often air grievances. You want their record to be mostly clean, at least.

5. Response time - Many companies have a poor response time. Even extremely busy companies should have the time to respond quickly to let you know that they’ll answer your query in the near future. If they are slow even on the sales end of the customer continuum, they will be more difficult to deal with.

6. Testimonials - Look for customer testimonials on site, and see that the language contained in them is natural … not marketing speak.

7. Own site backlinks - Try checking the links to a company’s own site through Google or Yahoo, or a link popularity checking SEO tool available now.

8. Flexible pricing - A good link building service will give you several pricing options, rather than a flat hourly rate. Look for those that are paid for results, as well as time spent.

9. Ability to Meet Expectations - If you have any expectations in terms of number of links or quality of links when it comes to your link building service, tell them about them. Those that are not defensive, and are confident about meeting those targets or will tell you exactly why they are unrealistic, are those you should trust with your money.

10. Relationship - Go with a link building service where you get along with your sales rep or personal ‘builder’.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

SEO tools have come a long way since the most advanced thing around was Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool! SEO is a constantly changing landscape - ignore it for six months, and you’ll need to re-learn everything you knew. This list describes a few of the new-school SEO tools that can make your optimization and marketing efforts much easier.

Bad Neighborhood Checker
Google and other search engines are getting ever more savvy about the tactics people use to try to manipulate the algorithms in their favor, without providing any real value to visitors. Sites that use ‘black hat’ tactics, or even those that are a shade of grey, can contaminate every site they link to. You should check whether you are linking to bad neighborhoods.

Google Duel
This seemingly inane Internet time-waster is billed as a popularity contest on the web, with ‘cat’ versus ‘dog’ as the example. However, its usefulness to keyword researchers runs far beyond that! An SEO tool can help you decide what form of a word to focus on in your keyword list (for example, the plural versus singular forms of a word, the verb or its nominalized form, the gerund form with ‘ing’, etc).

Link Popularity Checker
Check in on what your competition is doing in terms of link building, and get some tips for your own link building processes while you are at it. A link popularity-checking tool collects results live from the Internet. It also allows you to see what a great job your SEO service is doing!

Authority Site Finder
There is a tool that allows you to easily find authority sites within your niche, so that your SEO service can look into link exchanges, sending relevant information to do with your site, blog commenting, and other activities geared towards getting you a backlink from them.

GeoTargeting Detector
Most of your keywords should be geographically focused, except for certain narrow categories of business. This SEO tool allows you to assess how well you have geographically targeted your search engine optimization efforts. This will be especially useful if your company determined your keyword list before engaging a search engine optimization service.

Google Ban Checker
If you’ve been engaging in your own SEO, there are some novice mistakes that can actually get you banned on Google, rather than helping your ranking. If you want to check whether you’ve been banned on Google, there is an SEO tool that allows you to do it without going through the 13 million results that Google generates in 0.29 seconds!

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

It is the very first, tiny, baby step towards a number 1 ranking on Google for your main keywords - submitting your site to the search engines. Search engine submission will be one of the first things you, or your Internet marketing company, does for SEO. We look at six basic things you should know about search engine submission.

1. For some search engines, you don’t have to … but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t

Google has ‘bots’ or ’spiders’ that crawl the web, examining and indexing pages as they are added or updated. If your website is linked to by another website already indexed by Google, it will eventually be found by the bots, with no effort on your part. In fact, Google prefers to find content this way - it deems it more ‘natural’. However:

* Only linked pages will be found
* The process may take up to a month
* Google won’t have your site map if it isn’t linked to on the site

2. The story doesn’t end with Google, Yahoo and MSN

There are hundreds of search engine on the web, and many require that you manually submit your site to them before they will index you. It is often niche, advanced users that use these search engines, and they represent an audience that shouldn’t be ignored.

3. There are up to 100 engines worth submitting to

That is what makes the process a little more complicated than having a couple of details ready and typing them in! Up to 95% of the traffic on the web is created by 100 or so search engines. You should be on most of them.

4. Submission is not a once-only task

You should resubmit your site to search engines if you make major changes to structure or content, to ensure that searchers aren’t frustrated by Google telling them something is available on your site, when it no longer is. Other than this, though, there is nothing to be gained by resubmitting your site.

5. A drop in rankings does not mean you need to resubmit your site

A drop in rankings means that your competition is raising the bar when it comes to SEO. You do not need to resubmit your site - you should diversify your SEO strategy.

6. It’s cheaper than you may think

Search engine submissions by a recognized SEO company are not a huge investment, money-wise … but certainly can be a large time investment, when non-experts do them by themselves. Hiring an expert is wise.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Article promotion may be the workhorse of SEO, but that doesn’t mean it should be dry, boring and routine! This is one of the ideas about article promotion that simply doesn’t work. Find out what to do in your articles, by finding out what not to do.

Don’t assume that just any content will do

There are hundreds of thousands of people that can - and do - write page upon page of useless, trivial comments with several keywords thrown in and label them articles. Readers instantly recognize these, and will leave the page within seconds. Your About the Author box has not been read, and your publisher will see these stats and pass your articles over next time they are searching for content.

You need to offer information that is valuable to somebody, even if only to a narrow niche audience. How-to guides often make great articles, as do listed posts, ‘Beginner’s Guide’s, and complete resources.

Don’t keyword stuff

Less is more when it comes to keyword incorporation in your articles. Your keyword density should be around 5%, and should be derived from a mix of different keyphrases. If you pick a topic that is relevant to your business and your website’s current keyphrases, it shouldn’t be difficult to work the right words in.

Additionally, if you publish the articles on your own site and they are obviously keyword-stuffed, Google may penalize your site. Hardly an ideal situation.

Don’t slap the title and summary together at the last minute

Creating the title and the summary for your article should take at least a quarter of the time that it took to create your article. Look at the titles of other articles in the niche, and examine what characteristics make you want to read them, so you can use these in your own articles. Try out several different versions, and choose the one you like best.

Don’t assume that article promotion is an overnight success method

Article promotion has been called the ‘workhorse’ of SEO. If you publish quality articles on a consistent basis, you will almost certainly get results. However, they may take time to build. Be patient with the process, and you will reap the rewards. Abandon it too early, and your efforts will definitely be wasted.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

When it comes to marketing via press releases, writing the document itself is only a small portion of the work! Distributing press releases is a skill in itself, and more is not necessarily better when it comes to the effort you put in. We show you how PR experts work smarter, not harder, when it comes to distributing press releases.

Free distribution sites

There are literally hundreds of free press release distribution sites out there. Some are well-trafficked by journalists and news aggregators, and some are only well-trafficked by publishers. Press release services generally know the difference between the good and the worthless.

Press releases only need to be submitted to a maximum of five free distribution sites. Any more than this is a waste of time, as news aggregators will generally go to at least one of the top five anyway.

The Associated Press

The big name in news publishing, the Associated Press is a worldwide phenomenon. If your release is published by the Associated Press, it means guaranteed real-world coverage and publicity, not just backlinks. This is always worth a try, especially if your release is particularly exciting and newsworthy.

Local Media

Distributing press releases for optimal results means more than just entering details into some websites. Expert services will usually pick and choose local publications that would be most interested in the news, and use slightly different tactics to pitch it to them.

Niche Publications

Trade publications, special interest magazines, free newspapers and hard-copy newsletter creators may be interested in your release. You’ll never know if you don’t try! Submit it only to those within your field, to maximize the effort to benefit ratio.

Bookmark it

An especially valuable tactic for smaller organizations is to Digg, StumbleUpon, and delicious the press releases as you add them to your press release archive. Have a network of accounts within the company that can all add them. This ensures that even if the response from mainstream media is minimal, your release has space to breathe and the opportunity for freedom!

Publish the press release on your own site

One way of making certain your news gets published is distributing press releases to yourself! Add a press room, or at the very least, a press release archive to your website. Although it is not likely that mainstream media will come directly to your website looking for news, if a future release is of interest to the press, they may come looking for information on your corporate history and past activities.

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites

Promoting a blog is not an activity that happens outside of content creation - a 2 hour per month commitment in a regular block. Successful blog promotion requires constant attention to what will bring traffic, and keep it on your blog. We look at the first things you need to understand about methods of promoting blogs in today’s Internet.

There are several things you need to remember when creating your content, about how it can help promote your blog:

* Your posts need to be good quality. By this, I mean niche-focused, should add to the discussion or tell somebody something they don’t already know, be concise and focused on information, not discussion. They should also utilize good grammar and perfect spelling in whatever language you are publishing.

* Your posting schedule should be consistent - from daily to weekly is a good time range with which to set your schedule.

* Gear your content towards getting inbound links to your blog. List posts are the best known way of doing this (22 Ways to Cook Perfect Potatoes, 15 Reasons Why Your Website Isn’t Ranking in the Top Ten, etc). Readers now recognize these titles as a blatant cry for traffic, and are starting to become more sophisticated in looking for interest in a post title. ‘How Do I’, ‘Why You Have To’, and question-titled posts are some examples of the new breed of blog titles.

* Remember to link the heck out of your posts! Link to other posts on the site that are relevant, link to posts on your main website (if you have one), links to other bloggers posts (this is seen more as participating in the community than acknowledging the competition), and link to current news and events. User don’t always go to Google and then a menu to find what they are looking for, and these random links can really build traffic.

* Blog networking is critical for blog promotion also. This means responding when commenters ask a question or make a good point. It also means commenting on related posts elsewhere in the blogosphere, and including a link to your blog either in the comment body or in the ‘website’ section.

* Utilize features such as ‘Linkluv’ and last-post widgets that allow commenters to get Internet marketing value from reading and commenting on your blogs. By changing the nofollow tags in your blog source code to dofollow links, and promoting your blog as such, you will get plenty of readers who comment only for link value. But you also have the opportunity to reach a much wider audience, sometimes of people who will subscribe and visit day after day.

Blog promotion is an activity that is intrinsically linked with blog creation, and requires skill and dedication. However, at the beginning, all you need is skill!

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites