Online marketing is one of the least expensive forms of marketing, which makes it very popular in recessions. It is a popular choice because of the large and varied results for the price. Online marketing is your web site helping prospects move forward. It is an opportunity to business if you don’t have the capital and the connections. This type of marketing is usually very affordable because there are so many places to advertise you need to learn how to best utilize your online advertising budget.

Marketing on the web is extremely targeted and measurable, making it the most cost effective form of advertising available anywhere. Marketing is simple, but it isn’t always easy. Marketing professionals need to deploy online programs such as email campaigns track and measure results immediately,and report ROI yesterday.

Online Marketing is a constant work in progress. It is finding a very important place in the budgets of all types of businesses, across the globe. Online marketing is defined from Wikipedia as the selling of products on the Internet. It is your web site optimized for search engines. This platform has become so popular for a very good reason. The platform is one of the most versatile programs which allows you to target prospects looking for your products.

Internet marketing is really the wave of the future. Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales. Internet advertising offers an unprecedented vista of touch points with a customer. It starts with a professional, effective website.

Websites do not have to be overly elaborate to be effective, but they should be well planned, attractive, easy to navigate and include a clear call to action. Websites can also help firms gain ground on their larger rivals. Web usability does take time, money and attention. Sites that just list random keywords without an article, or articles that make little or no sense will be thrown out of search results lists by the new searching systems.

Search engine optimization helps to improve your site’s ranking in popular search engines online. Search engines often can’t read and find all the information. Search engine marketing means there are no wasted marketing dollars, because each visitor is pre qualified. Searchable on line directories, product catalogs, and even advertisements placed on search engines give current and potential customers easy, quick access.

Companies that haven’t already done so are finding themselves scrambling to create a presence so they can continue to achieve success and grow or at a minimum maintain market share. Common areas of interest within the field of online marketing include affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing, a business recruits associates to promote the companies products or services. Companies that understand the online marketing cost their business needs to make are the companies that use the Internet to grow. Companies that incur an online marketing cost are the companies that see their dollars returning to them as they continue to expand their profits.

SEO and link building require a lot more creative effort, but can have more sustainable results. SEO marketing, PPC marketing, and SMO marketing are the most popular online marketing methods. SEO is a very important component of Internet marketing efforts. SEO in 2009 has become one of the number one ways to market a business or product. SEO services gives your website high ranking for the search on your specific keyword.

Marketers often get confused when faced with the dilemma of making a choice between organic search engine optimization or pay per click advertisement strategy, to promote their business online. Marketers are moving from informing to engaging their customers via the internet.

Social Networking via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and an SMS campaign are some of the many tools being utilized by many international companies as part of their online marketing strategy, thus creating ever increasing online visibility and in turn the all important increased branded website traffic views. Social media combines business and personal objectives, which makes it difficult to tell why you’re spending time on it. Social media is addictive and can become unproductive very quickly. Social marketers can make or break any site.

Customers start by typing keywords into a search engine. Customers and contacts in a recession market need to know that their business contacts keep track of them and enjoy their time. Customers are hungry for the information only you can provide.

Start a blog if you are committed to posting regularly. A blog can be a great way to build relationships with your customers and leads. Start out with a question and then start talking about your business or freelancing career. Start marketing your business online today and watch the money come rolling in tomorrow.

Successful online marketers are persons who are not trapped in the old and traditional models of doing business. Successful online businesses have secured an online presence through effective marketing strategies, which have an initial online marketing cost. This type of marketing is a fairly new arena, with self made pundits spouting new strategies on daily basis on how to be successful online. Success in the online world is a result of accurate planning, knowing what works and passion for helping others.

Viral ads are online marketing campaigns that are intended to spread like a virus. Viral marketing is not easy as every one think it is. Viral Marketing is not just send my video into You Tube. This makes the idea so jumpy that our users would like to share it with others. Viral marketing is a technique in which companies encourage customers to pass along information about their products or services.

Online marketing is a specialized form of advertising and is constantly evolving. Online marketing is becoming an increasingly important aspect of a marketing mix. Online marketing is marketing that utilizes the power of the internet to promote products and services to the widest number of people in the most targeted and effective way possible. Online marketing is relatively inexpensive in comparison to traditional marketing methods. Online marketing is aimed toward maximizing website visibility and obtaining higher search engine rankings to produce higher conversion rates.

Mobile marketing is a huge potential source of traffic, customers and profit for your business, but as yet fairly untapped. Yet, over the next three years, it is predicted that more than half current internet users will be accessing the web via mobiles and other handheld devices.

Mobile marketing offers a very personal kind of interactivity for relationship building with your prospects. It’s not just about bombarding folk with text SMS marketing messages. Mobile friendly web sites and mobile applications mean marketers can reach a much greater target audience.

The statistics are pretty convincing and competition in the mobile direct marketing arena is still comparatively low.

Growth in mobile customers

World wide there are 4 billion people with mobile phones. In fact, there are almost five times more cell phone owners than laptops and computer owners, especially home internet ready.

Gartner, the IT research company, predicts that over the next three years over half current internet users will be accessing the web via mobiles and other handheld devices.

“There are clear opportunities for mobile transactions to grow as users, in this and previous surveys, indicate that they want to be able to use their mobiles to buy more goods, such as books, music, travel services, household utilities and electronic appliances,” says BuzzCity CEO, KF Lai.

It’s a very global trend. BuzzCity’s recent survey questioned 1,798 mobile users across the Americas, Asia, Africa, Western Europe and the Middle East and showed that 90% had directly purchased products or services via their mobile.

The trend towards mobile marketing

It’s no surprise really that the fastest growing marketing technologies and emerging channels are mobile, rich media and social media. You only have to do a search on some of the popular keywords for the internet marketing and online home business industry to see how these methods are all being adopted with enthusiasm by marketers.

Unica just released its “The State of Marketing 2010″ results from the latest Global Survey of Marketers and there are some astounding findings.

The survey reported that “Nearly half of marketers surveyed have already embraced social media marketing, and adoption is healthy across most social media outlets, such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. However, marketers need to think more about integrating social media with other marketing tactics.”

Despite the rapid increases in the potential audience, “mobile marketing” is a relatively new practice. The term describes marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a cell phone using WAP or text messaging to communicate between the business and the customer.

Mobile marketing is increasing in significance with over 30% of marketers surveyed already using some form or other of mobile marketing and many sources of information (magazines, and services available to support them.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has grown over the past 1-2 years (almost 100% in the UK), despite the economic recession. The total is pretty small compared to advertising on the internet, which last year was higher than that spent on TV.

However, the Mobile Marketing Association suggests the growth in mobile marketing is likely to accelerate as handsets equipped with new technology, including mobile broadband, become ubiquitous and consumer behaviour changes.

The response from marketing vendors isn’t far behind. For instance, 84444.com recently launched its Do-it-Yourself mobile marketing campaigns that can be run from the convenience of a desktop computer. YouTube is making huge changes to its mobile web presence and has now begun incorporating adverts throughout its mobile site.

How to tap into the mobile market

Anyone in business should always be looking for new ways to reach out and touch their customers and build attention from new prospects. And mobile marketing may just be the golden ticket.

Your mobile user is permanently switched-on, impulsive and ready to interact at the drop of a hat. Who wouldn’t want to tap into mobile marketing? It’s the ultimate direct response tool.

Mobile marketing, you could argue, is perhaps a rather more captive audience. When someone has their phone in their hand and downloads a page, they are much engaged than on a desktop based website. It’s a much more powerful direct response tool than the internet.

Conversions from mobiles compared to web or email marketing are five times higher. And, obviously competition is much lower because nobody really knows about this yet.

So what changes do you need to make in your business to attract mobile clients?

Well, first you should make sure your website is mobile friendly, especially if you are sending text SMS messages with active web links to your mobile contacts. There’s a tonne of reasons why this is important, but mostly because mobile is an instant and impulsive kind of medium, so you want the recipient to be able to follow the link and get to a useful page and quickly.

Consider that subscriber on your email list may well be reading their messages on their phone. So you want to keep your main message and link ‘above the fold’ to use a newspaper term. To clarify: when you’re accessing emails from a mobile, sometimes the longer ones will get truncated so put your link early on and remember the rules of compelling headlines.

But also, as with the SMS, your mobile user should be able to click your call to action link in the email and bring up the page right there and then from their phone’s web browser. The chances they will visit your website when they get back to their PC are far lower.

Google is actively hunting for decent mobile enabled sites to feature in its search results, since this is a huge source of revenue for them if their users are happy. There’s not enough mobile sites out there. So learn how to create a Google-friendly mobile version of your site and you could rank higher than for your regular desktop site.

There’s a whole spectrum of solutions for making your webpage mobile friendly. These range from the simple and cheap like adding a bit of code you add to your WordPress blog to a more complex and expensive decision to create a complete and total mobile website.

Getting your site indexed by Google on the mobile search engine?

Google have mobile site maps distinct from the usual site maps. Check out their webmaster tools for help on that. And get yourself listed in the Google local business listings. Google has a way you can build a mobile landing page within that tool. It works best for brick and mortar businesses, but it’s all good web presence.

Google knows that people search differently on their mobiles than they do on their desktop. They actually have a specific mobile keyword research tool. Not a bad idea, then, to clue up the whole different algorithms search engines are using for mobile searching.

Another thing to remember to keep your mobile text ads short, mirroring the style of social networking conversations. Opera (one of the mobile browsers) statistics show that 41% of people accessing the mobile web are going to social network sites, so MySpace, Facebook, twitter. These are intertwined and meshed together as a tool, so these ads need to work together.

Automating the SMS text marketing process

You want to add a mobile phone field to your web page capture form if you currently capture your visitors’ names and email addresses. With a list of numbers, you can unleash your mobile direct marketing power by sending automated, scheduled SMS or text messages to your subscribers.

Internet marketers have known for years the money is in the relationship with your email list. As mobile marketing gets unleashed, it’s likely your phone list will become the gold standard.

SMS has an astounding 97% open rate – and usually within the first 5 minutes of receiving the message. That’s powerful to marketers! If the “autotexter” replaces the autoresponder, do you have a business strategy for that dramatic change?

Early adopters ALWAYS make the most money. So go check out mobile marketing and see what a difference it can make in your business.

Jay Allyson
Pro Marketing Consultant

Jay Allyson is Home Business Owner, Internet Marketing Coach. She Teaches People To Make $250k in 12 Months. Family Strategy. Helping Others Achieve Time Freedom & Dream Lifestyle.

Have you ever visited a website and seen a place where an image should be but you see a big red X instead or an icon with a broken link or something like that?

Well, in some cases it is something as simple as the file wasn’t uploaded or uploaded to the wrong location, or is being hosted on a third party site and that site is inaccessible at the time. But, in many cases, it’s just a problem with a bad link structure. In some web page software the image gets linked to the web page
designer’s hard drive and not the path to the image on the server.

This, of course, will cause a problem when the page is uploaded, BUT to the designer the page will look fine because the browser on his computer will be able to find the image because it’s pointing to a location on his or her own hard drive. In most cases this happens because the image is added to the page before the web page is saved. We’ve seen this in testing many web design applications.

So a good rule of thumb to keep this from happening is when working with a new page from scratch, be sure to save the page after you open it. That “should” keep this from happening. Let’s talk about what an incorrect link looks like and then what the correct link should be. Obviously, the incorrect link will vary as will the correct link, but if you understand what you’re looking for that will help correct this issue or keep it from happening in the first place.

In most cases the incorrect link will look like.

You may see something with file= in the URL but it will be similar to the above. Two things to notice are that it is pointing to a local drive letter c: or d: or whichever drive letter the image was on. Also notice the
direction of the slash “” if it is local it will use a back slash “” if it is a web or net work URL it is a forward slash “/”.

A correct link will use what is called an absolute or relative URL. Without getting too technical let’s explain the two terms and then move forward. An absolute URL is one that is not dependent on any other information. An absolute URL uses the exact location on the website where the image is hosted.

Here’s an example. If linking to the logo on my blog you would give the exact path to the image that
was uploaded to the images folder. This would be: http://yourwebsite.com/images/image.png.

You could put that URL into any browser and without a doubt it would display that image in the browser window. That is an absolute URL. So if you were looking in your HTML source code the above image
would appear as http://yourwebsite.com/images/image.png. A relative URL can get a little tricky because you’re linking to the image as it is related to the root of the web directory. (Sounds confusing already, huh?)

First, lets look at the relative URL for the same image above. The relative URL would appear as:../images/image.png or if you were to look at the HTML source code:

The URL is shorter but you will need to be aware of how the image relates to the root folder. The “..” tells the server to go up one level from root to the find the images folder.

Using relative URLs can get a little more confusing if you’re using subfolders or sub domains. You just need to be fully aware where the image is located.

Obviously, either method will work as long as you use them correctly. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages but you can easily see how some images can be incorrectly linked from time to time.

To receive your free copy of the Frank Deardurff and Bret Ridgway’s special report “The 7 Biggest Website Mistakes Online Business Owners Make”

When did hypertext links become the enemy? Google’s PageRank began a burgeoning
search engine optimization link building industry that now seems to be out of
control. What’s the deal with text link ads? Isn’t a link just a link? Not
really, at least according to recent blog and forum posts.

In the Beginning There Were Links

A simple concept, hyperlinks connected the websites within the world wide web.
Linking is what the world wide web is about. This certainly didn’t start with
search engines, but rather with hyperlinks created with HTML code. The rules for
producing viable websites joining the world wide web sprang from this language.
So why is there so much power allotted to search engines and their rules about
linking? Sad to say but the past linking between sites voting for quality have
gotten muddled in the link building frenzy. Search engines have created their
own linking monster.

What Is This rel=” nofollow” Tag Anyway?

Much of the search engine forum discussion started with Google representative
Matt Cutts suggesting that O’Reilly Media use the rel=”nofollow” tag to keep off
topic links O’Reilly Media sold to essentially “not count” when search engine
robots came across the links for indexing purposes. The idea is that this tag
can be used to negate the power of the link vote for link popularity when the
webmaster is linking to what is often called a “bad neighborhood”. This may be
seen as a suggestion by Google, or it could be Google’s way of popularizing the
nofollow tag so it is used by webmasters for their own paid text link ads on
webmaster websites. Only time will tell.

Matt Cutts Comments On Reputable Sites & Link Selling

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=7651

The recent flurry of posts regarding O’Reilly Media’s text link ads has produced
some interesting comments from Search Engine Watch Forums members and
Threadwatch members:

O’Reilly In Off-Topic Link Selling Debate

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=7496

Google Admit Problems with Text Link Ads

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/3706

Danny Sullivan offers an explanation of this new tag in his Search Engine Watch Blog:

Google, Yahoo, MSN Unite On Support For Nofollow Attribute For Links

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

Definition Of The rel=”nofollow” Tag:

http://microformats.org/wiki/relnofollow

“By adding rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination
of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by
user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages (e.g. search engines).
Typical use cases include links created by 3rd party commenters on blogs, or
links the author wishes to point to, but avoid endorsing.”

The original idea behind this tag was focused on decreasing link and comment
spam, particularly for blog sites. When you purchase text link ads webmasters
should be aware that the rel=”nofollow” tag may be present in the link page
source code, thus the link may end up being worthless in terms of ranking.

The Real Problem

How do the search engine algorithms differentiate between a simple text link and
a paid text link ad? The real problem may lie in the probability that Google and
other search engines are unable to differentiate between regular links and paid
links, such as text link ads, within their current algorithms.

This creates a great deal of work on the search engines part to track and
understand the true motivation for a link on a page. Certainly the issue may be
raised that webmasters who sell text link ads may cut into the business model of
the search engines text ad programs.

The Real Solution

The linking problem was created by the emphasis on the need for link voting to
improve link popularity and search engine ranking. This originated primarily
through the creation of Google’s PageRank. If the search engines created the
situation, shouldn’t the search engines then also provide the solution? Instead
of suggesting webmasters add the rel=”nofollow” tag to their pages to make the
search engines job easier, wouldn’t it make sense to create better search engine
algorithms? Maybe it is time to get rid of the toolbars and change the way
search engines value linking. From every comment I’ve seen on this subject it
certainly seems to be the right choice to make.

# # #

Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Optimization company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Promotion since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.

1. Night time is for sleeping.
You wouldn’t call her home phone in the middle of the night and neither should you text. Given that most text message alerts are loud enough to wake a person, respect her lifestyle. A text on random Tuesday morning at 2 am is not cool. The late night SMS will make you look desperate and needy.

2. Don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say in person.
Similar to emails, the intonation and emotion in a text can be read incorrectly. Be careful using capitals and symbols- they can easily be keyed in the the wrong way and misunderstood. A smile and frown are only one button away from each other but the response will be hugely different.

3. Alcohol and SMS are not friends.
Most of us have probably realised that drunken messaging is a cocktail for disaster. Most of the time the text refers to a booty call of some description. Commonly problems arise when your message backfires and you look like a sleeze or you accidentally text the wrong number and your mother (or boss) is left to decline your sexual advances in the small hours of the morning.

4. Abbreviate appropriately.
Unless you are dating a 14 year old, text speak is best left to a minimum. There is nothing worse than having to painstakingly decipher the coded message of a hyper-abbreviated SMS.

5. Keep messages brief.
Avoid the urge to bombard her with a long string of questions and a message that reads more like a novel. Similarly, realise when to end the text exchange. We are all busy people and your fanatic text barrage will make you look obsessive and possessive.

6. SMS is not for serious issues.
Text messaging provides us with a shield to protect our vulnerability but also offers a weapon for guerilla warfare. We can use SMS to shyly ask someone on a date but when it comes to serious issues nothing can replace face to face conversation or a phone call. We all know someone who’s been dumped by phone or email but being dumped by SMS is the worst. Never break up with a girl via SMS, it makes you look weak and irresponsible. Arguments are sorted faster with a quick call rather than a volley of scathing remarks which often are misinterpreted and simply escalate tensions.

In short, text messaging is fast and fun way to transfer a message when used correctly but be careful, it also has it pitfalls.

Happy dating!

Alexa Hartstone is a dating and relationships expert. She lives in Sydney, Australia, and is co-founder of DatingDragons.com a site devoted to men’s dating advice.

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