Tag Archives | IM Marketing

The Influence of Video Email in Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the earliest forms of Internet marketing since ordinary consumers got hooked to dial-up Internet. With so many people having e-mail addresses, advertisers that are hoping to make some extra money for themselves with the mindset of helping other people, these advertisers resorted to sending their offers directly to their inbox. Since Internet connections were slow at the time, video email marketing couldn’t be used.

The messages often contained convincing messages that describe the product, service, or offer along with a link that leads to the opportunity or product webpage. Then viewers are supposedly captivated with the offering assuming that the webpage is convincingly designed which can then lead to a sale or referral that benefits the advertiser.

As these e-mails started circulating around inboxes more often, people started treating these items as spam. Some web users ignore the email because the content doesn’t look very convincing and the offering could be a possible scam. With the increased technology of spam filters by many of the online web providers, making e-mail advertisements are increasingly difficult.

Nowadays, however, Internet speeds are much faster and compression technologies are far more advanced to allow multimedia content like video to be streamed quickly with good visuals and sound. Combined with the latest video marketing software, advertisers are creating their own video email marketing campaigns to convince their leads to go on with the purchase of the products being offered or any available opportunities for the visitor to take on.

Video emails are quite similar to standard emails, but they do not contain as much text since all is needed is a link to the site where the video will be. From there, visitors can enjoy the visuals, graphics, and, other effects of the video while understanding more information about the product and service being advertised.

Videos are designed to increase the conversion rates of visitors to actual sales. Existing advertising methods in gaining traffic to the website will still be used while the videos themselves serve as the main spotlight for people to believe what they are actually seeing on the website.

Multiple videos may be made to further convince and guide people if there is any registration process that needs to followed. For instance, a person may need to fill up a web form with a valid e-mail address in order for them to get a special video email that leads to a video demonstrating a more detailed overview of the website.

Video email marketing is highly advantageous in modern Internet marketing because of the many free places videos can be hosted including YouTube and other free hosting sites. They have influenced the way emails are made and how new websites are designed with the video in a good spot where viewers can’t miss or resist playing it. Video marketing is here to stay and marketers are always trying to find new and creative ideas to make their videos better and more convincing than ever.

What Are Bookmark Sites In Social Media?

Bookmark sites also known as social bookmarking sites are a popular device for sharing and storing bookmarks with others. Everyone has a favorite set of sites, and almost everyone has a set of bookmarks for frequently used or enjoyed sites. Bookmark sites enable the average surfer to share their favorites with others along with comments on what they found interesting on the site or what they disliked.

This is just one facet of web 2.0 but social media where regular internet users share their thoughts has become wildly popular and many sites have popped up to serve this function. In the beginning, that is before web 2.0, the average internet user was faceless and mostly voiceless unless it was in a chat room. The internet was a place to find information, read, or sometimes watch videos, but rarely were the surfers allowed to interact in a meaningful way or to influence what was shown on any one site. Social media has changed that and now surfers have a voice and can influence what is seen and share what they felt was funny, sad, awful or informative.

There are a wide variety of social bookmarking sites to choose from but all of them work in a similar manner. You must sign up for an account with the chosen bookmarking site (remember this is social media and the surfer is no longer faceless or voiceless). You will have a screenname on that site and a list of favorite sites can be created. When you find something great on a website you can add it to your list of bookmarks along with comments, and even tags.

Some of the more common and well established social bookmarking sites are; Twitter, where you don’t bookmark you tweet and share your newfound web discovery and your thoughts on it too. Digg, is a very popular social bookmarking site and website owners take great pride in how many “digs” they have had. Stumbleupon allows users to give thumbs up to bookmarks and boasts some 9 million stumblers. Delicious is a venerable social bookmarking site and even offers a toolbar that will let you share a bookmark without leaving the page and going to their site. Facebook has it’s own social bookmarking feature as well and you can post your favorite bookmark to your Facebook page as well as any thoughts you have on it.

Social media and social bookmarking have evolved rapidly from an experiment into the new face of the internet where surfers influence the popularity of a site and finally have a voice. Website owners and especially blog owners recognize the importance of this and many have widgets beneath posts or articles so that surfers can bookmark a post or article with ease.

Along with the very real positive influence that social bookmark sites have had on the internet they are also subject to spammers. Site owners figured out quickly that the more often they were bookmarked by surfers, the more popular they became with Google. This forced the social bookmark site developers to keep developing means to prevent such manipulation.

For surfers sites bookmarked by them are not private but intended to be shared and can’t normally be hidden, but hiding them would negate the reason for putting them on a social site anyway. Most sites encourage bookmarkers to use tags to identify their bookmarks and organize them with others.

RSS feeds are even available for some social bookmark sites and can be followed by tags, comments, keywords or even by username. The addition of social media to the web has changed the face of the internet and though it is subject to some manipulation, web 2.0 has brought more interaction and given the average user a voice, and it’s not going away.

Success Through Branding

Branding yourself or your company requires that you put emphasis on the positives that you or your company can provide to consumers. Branding is essentially setting up an image that will put your business into a customers mind when they are considering necessary services or products.

The companies that have been successful in providing good branding in these tough economical times have found that, even though people are not spending as much money, they are turning to them to meet their needs. Think of the top insurance agencies of the world and what tools they use to create successful branding for their business. It could be a catchy slogan or something as simple as an image that brings good feelings or ideas to people.

Finding the right branding idea for your company could take some time. You have to put something together that people will remember and that will draw people to your business. Changing brands often can sometimes hurt a company more than help so be sure to put a lot of thought into the process and commit to the branding idea. You should give the brand time to catch on and not give up and change as soon as you have tried out an idea.

You want your branding idea to portray the type of business that you are running. You want consumers to feel like they can trust you to give them what they need and that you will be there to assist them in any way that you can. It is a good idea to avoid any racy or inappropriate branding attempts as they will surely limit the number of prospects that they will attract. The goal is to speak to the largest amount of people and to grow your business to new levels.

Once you have found the right brand for your business you will see that the word will spread quickly about the services that you provide. Be sure that you can deliver on any promises that you make because branding also makes it easy to loose a large amount of business. If everyone knows your business name or slogan and you get some bad reviews, your business and your slogan will mean poor service and customers will look elsewhere for their business needs.

The branding for your company should speak to the integrity of your business and the high quality services or products that you can deliver to your customers. Give the public something to remember you by. Give them a reason to call you for their needs. When you have developed a strong customer base that is very familiar with the brand that you have incorporated into your business, word of mouth advertising will surely take place.

Companies with difficult names or that do not have a catchy brand to be remembered by may find it difficult to get the word spread about their business. This is why incorporating a great brand to your company and standing behind the great services or products that you offer are very important to any business.

If your company does advertise using their brand today, think of the possibilities that could be waiting on you and the growth opportunities that you could be passing by on. Branding moves companies ahead in the business world and the benefits can be realized as soon as the great brand gets spread to the consumers.

Getting Started in Video Marketing

There are millions of people that log on to the web and do all sorts of things on a daily basis. This fact has encouraged advertisers and marketers to bring out their products, services, and other offerings to these people to increase their sales. With Internet marketing being easy to learn, the web has become oversaturated with marketers which explain the many ads that are floating about. The competition can make it tough for some people to become successful so new marketing methods need to be developed in hopes of increasing sales.

Video marketing is one of the advanced techniques of marketing since it involves a webcam, digital camcorder, or imaging device that has recording features. Its primary purpose is to further encourage viewers to try or buy a product or service.

It can be a powerful method for getting the word across because the advertiser has full control of the quality of the video. Combine all of the different offline and online editing and production video tools with user creativity and you can get a really nice output.

Popular video tools like Windows Movie Maker for Windows and iMovie for Mac OS X allow people to add some nice effects to their videos to make them stand out more. More experienced users can try out professional tools like Adobe Premier to create clips that can compare to advertisements seen on TV. Even without a video recording device, graphical videos can be made using programs like Adobe After Effects. Then using a video tool, music or audio recording from the microphone can be added so that a convincing message can still be conveyed.

Once the video is ready for public viewing, it must be uploaded to an online video sharing website so it can be viewed at any time without any worries of bandwidth depletion. Lengthy videos on a good resolution can turn out to be large file sizes and most online video sharing websites compress the video without greatly sacrificing the quality.

Popular websites like YouTube and Vimeo are great to try out first since they are visited very often and have a high page ranking. High page ranking of the site is significant because you can still apply search engine optimization techniques to make your video more visible. Think of a good title of your video after uploading using keywords that best describe your content. Add some more keywords on your description and tags to back it up. Don’t forget to add a link to your capture page or product homepage where others can find more information.

Now that the video is fully functional online, you can use the various sharing tools to increase the exposure. Every video on the video sharing site has a unique link and you can market that link the same way you would market ordinary links, so exercise your favorite marketing techniques like e-mail marketing or social network marketing to get more video views. You can even embed the link to a webpage so that people that visit that webpage can see the video as well.

Videos aren’t totally focused on driving traffic to your website, so don’t abandon all of your other advertising techniques. Use videos to increase the conversion rates since they are made to further entice visitors into making a purchase.

The Importance of Having a Good Landing Page

The internet is still expanding at an enormous rate of knots, and many people are now using it as their prime source of income. There are literally millions of websites, and many of them are plying for a portion of the same trade; in other words they are competing with each other for a slice of the same market. In such a fiercely competitive environment, it is vitally important that your own website stands out from the crowd.

There are two main issues to consider. The first is driving traffic to your website, and the second is capturing that traffic when it alights on your site. Much has already been written about how you can drive increasing quantities of visitors your way, but when you stop to think about it, unless you can spark your visitors’ interest the moment that they actually land on your website, you are likely to miss the opportunity of turning that visitor into a paying client.

This is where having a great landing page comes into its own right. But what is a landing page? A landing page is the literally the page of your website that a visitor lands on. It is the first thing that any visitor sees of your site and that is why it is so important to grab your visitor’s immediate attention. Once you have gained their attention, you have immediately increased your chances of making a sale a thousand-fold.

As well as grabbing your visitors’ attention, a well designed landing page will then entice that visitor further into your site. The number one priority is of course to make a sale, but this is not the purpose of the landing page itself. In reality, most people do not make a purchase on their first visit to a website. Yes it does happen, but most sales rely on piquing the visitor’s interest and then drawing that visitor back, time and time again, until they are convinced to make an actual purchase. The average number of visits that it takes to clinch such a sale is seven.

So the key thing is to engage your visitors in a way that will encourage them to return to your website. Good landing pages need good design. Your landing page needs to be aesthetically pleasing. When your potential client regards your website for the first time, you want to make them feel that your site presents a professional image. No one will even dream ofmaking a purchase if your website looks cheap and tacky.

Your potential clients must feel comfortable, and must have a belief in the integrity of your product or service, and they should be made to feel that they will get good value for money. No one likes to waste their hard earned cash, so generating this feeling of confidence and security is all important.
The best Landing pages are designed to entice. They will often lead visitors to another page within the website that is set up with the intention of signing your visitor up to a newsletter, or signing on for some form of free gift. The important thing is to gain your visitor’s contact information so that you can keep in regular touch with them reminding them about the benefits of your product and/or service and keeping them up to date with any offers that you may be making.

Remember the seven visit average to making that all important purchase. Make sure your landing page is well designed to captivate that initial interest, and that you can gain your potential clients details in order that you can keep in touch and gently nudge them from time to time until they decide to buy.

Social Networking Tools and Tips

Two of the most common tasks that are performed during the early days of the Internet include the searching of all kinds of information using search engines and the checking of e-mail. Now with the newly emerged advancements in web, developing social networking sites formed and several of them have reached high rankings in terms of global site visits.

Facebook is currently the leading social networking site with over a 130 million unique visitors. These were statistics back in 2008 so the numbers should be a lot greater. It incorporated the core features found in earlier sites like MySpace and Friendster, including the ability to create profile pages, add people as “Friends”, see what common friends connected people have with each other, and post public messages on other profile pages.

Facebook’s massive success convinced the developers to create a system where networked people can chat with each other in real time without the need of software. Third-party developers built on this concept anyway by implementing “Facebook Chat” support on their multiprotocol instant messaging applications. There are several free applications that you can get like Digsby, Trillian, and Pidgin if you want to enjoy chatting with your contacts in various networks using a single interface.

Twitter is another website that grew quickly, even attracting many celebrities, too. Although the number of unique visits isn’t anywhere close to Facebook, Twitter excels in simplicity where messages of up to 140 characters can be posted for the public to see. This is known as microblogging and the social networking features of the site make sure that these posts are read. People can “follow” other profiles so any updates can be seen on their main page.

It can be tricky to see all of the content in Twitter if you have lots of followers so several applications were developed so people can “Tweet” or see other people’s “Tweets” with ease. Tweetdeck is one popular example of a downloadable client that can be used to do all sorts of things the web interface offers. There are also some services that add extra functionality to twitter like Twitpic.

Facebook is so popular that other social networking sites that previously had the crown including MySpace and Friendster have a hard time keeping up. However, there are some networks like LinkedIn that are still successful because the approach is different. LinkedIn has similar features to Facebook, but only encourage business users to register so that partners among members can be formed.

Some applications integrate multiple social networking services like Flock which is a browser based on Firefox that allows easy access to Facebook, Twitter, and other services from a sidebar. There are also a number of widgets that can be used to retrieve information from a social networking profile so that it displays on the site.

Social networking sites aren’t only used to make new friends and keep in touch with existing ones. These sites offer new and exciting ways to share all kinds of information and multimedia content. Even Internet marketers are riding on these sites to spread their offerings to their target market. Just make sure that the information you put on your profile is accurate so others can find you. If you have privacy concerns, read the site’s privacy policy and adjust any privacy related settings so you can be more secure.

SEO Is More Than Keywords

When people talk about search engine optimization, keywords are usually the subject which comes up the most often. While your choice of keywords and optimizing your site content for relevant keywords is definitely important and should by no means be ignored, there are a lot of other things which you can do to improve your site’s page rank in the major search engines – many of which are off-site SEO techniques which do not necessarily rely on working keywords and phrases into your content. Keep reading for a few things you can do to bring in more traffic and get your site moving up the search engine result rankings:

1) Link building:

Google and other search engines do use keywords to determine what your site is about and its relevance to a given search term, but link popularity matters almost as much and according to some, is even more important than keywords.

Link popularity is the measure of how many inbound links point to your website from other places on the web. It’s not just how many of these links you have that matters, but where they’re from and what kind of links they are.

One way links (links from sites which you do not link to from your own site) which originate from popular websites which are on the same topic as your own site are the most valuable of all. The more inbound links you have, especially from relevant sites, the more popular the search engines perceive your site as being.

2) Article Marketing:

This is a method of improving your search engine page ranking which is both a link building campaign and a type of information marketing. By writing high quality, informative articles on subject matter relevant to your site and distributing them through the online article directories and syndication services, you’ll be able to build more inbound links (and the directories themselves are good sites to have inbound links from).

Many website owners and e-zine publishers use these directories, republishing material they think their readers would enjoy; any time that this happens with one of your articles, you’ll gain more inbound links. If your articles are entertaining and/or informative, then readers may want to learn more by clicking the link to your site which you can include in each article. This is a strategy which is well worth trying. If you don’t feel your own writing skills to be up to par, then you may want to consider hiring a copywriter to produce this content for you. Well written articles lend your site an air of credibility and authority – which is just what you want when trying to increase your audience or your customer base, if your site is a business oriented one.

3) Blogging:

It’s easy to start a blog and there is really no kind of site which is as easy to update. By creating a blog linked to your main site, you’ll be generating inbound links from a site which is frequently updated (assuming you’re willing and able to dedicate some time every few days to a week to add new posts). Search engines love frequently updated sites – and blogs are a very low maintenance method of driving more traffic to your site.

Five Quick Tips For Easy Blogging

Blogging is a phenomenon that has swept across society with the fervor and enthusiasm of things new and life-changing. People are blogging about all kinds of things – from corporate business blogging, news blogging to personal blogs on a plethora of interesting subjects. In order to get the most out of your blog, you need to observe five simple steps to make it a success:

1. Pagerank versus Relationship Building

Most people after they’ve been blogging for a while become cognizant of pagerank and what it can do for traffic and search engine results. Pagerank is a number that is placed on your page by search engines that represents just how important the content of your page ranks when compared to another page. The higher your pagerank, the more important your page – the higher the page shows in the search engine results. This means that if somebody searches for a specific topic, your webpage will show up on page 1 or 2 of the results pages versus page 1,265 or lower. Most people make decision and click on a search result on the first 5 pages or less of the search results, so showing up on those results pages means that you will get more clicks which equals more visitors.

While you may optimize your pages strictly to turn up very high in the search results, you will want to keep in mind that what you write is just as important as the number of keywords you use in order to get good search engine results. The reason this is important is that while search engines are driven by robots who scour the web for relevant content to populate their database of search results, the people who click on those results are actual human beings. So, you will want to present a blog that is both search engine optimized AND human readable. This builds relationships which is just as important.

2. Comments

Comments are those things that people leave on your blog posts that tell you opinions of your readership. A good blog builds like a community, and everything you blog about is comment-able. The more good comments, the more social-friendly your blog becomes and more popular by result. Comments are made by human beings who are reading your content and posting their negative or positive opinions.

3. Trackbacks

Trackbacks, on the other hand, are automated. They automatically notify another blog that have a link to an article on the other blog. You can use trackbacks to initiate a “ping” which is a way to alert the other blog that there is now an incoming link from your blog to theirs. Sending trackbacks usually results in an incoming link to your site, and since you are referencing their post, it is only courteous to let them know. This is also another method of relationship building.

4. Linkbacks

Linkbacks are actual links on your website to another blog. These are considered incoming links, but unlike trackbacks, they are automatic. Link exchanging is one of the highest forms of relationship building, and linking to a specific blog or blog post is what makes the Internet go round. The best type of linkback is an incoming link. So, if you have two blogs that are similar, you can link from one site, and have the other blog owner link to the second site you own. In that way, everyone gets a non-reciprocal linkback which builds search engine love.

5. Ways To Add Content

A good blog has a number of different methods to add content to their site – direct blogging, automatic blogging and guest blogging. These three methods are easy to implement and add variety to your blog site. Direct blogging is just like it sounds – you write up a relevant article or post and put it up on your blog. The second, automatic blogging requires a blog plugin. With it you can set it up to blog on a schedule, either articles you have posted with dates into the future or from an RSS feed that posts on a schedule. Lastly, you can allow other folks to post, or guest blog, on your site. They write the content and you give them a special log in and password. This adds content to your site without you writing it. Usually, all you need to do is approve what they’ve written.

There you have it. We’ve just gone through five quick tips to get you started on running a successful blog. Now that you know more about ways to add content, linkbacks, trackbacks, comments and pagerank, you can get started today with making your blog the best it can be.