Choosing Internet Marketing Tactics For your Website

When running a website or online business, it’s important to choose the best Internet marketing tactics, which will offer the biggest reward in traffic or income compared to the amount of time or money invested. This is called getting a good ROI (return on investment) from your Internet marketing tactics.

There are many common, and general, forms of Internet marketing, and most can work for a wide variety of websites and online businesses through the different Internet marketing tactics available in each. These are some of the basic types of Internet marketing:

1. Email Marketing – email newsletters, coupons and offers, etc.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – link-building, keyword optimization, etc.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – search engine advertising, etc.
4. Viral Marketing – video / file-sharing, tell-a-friend, etc.
5. Affiliate Marketing – having others sell your products for a percentage
6. Online Advertising – banner ads, text link ads, sponsorships, etc.
7. Online PR – online press releases, blogging, etc.

There are a few steps in choosing the best Internet marketing tactics for a website or online business:

1. Choose a niche or industry.
2. Identify the target market.
3. Determine what most influences that target market.
4. Evaluate the competition’s strengths, weaknesses, and their marketing tactics.
5. Create an Internet marketing plan, including a marketing budget.

As a part of creating an Internet marketing plan, list all possible Internet marketing tactics that fit your budget and have the potential to reach your target market. Once you have a master list of potential Internet marketing tactics, run each through the following checklist to narrow down the best options, and create your final list of Internet marketing tactics for your website or online business:

• Will reach the target market.
• Will be able to influence the target market.
• Has been used in this niche or other niche’s targeting a similar market successfully before (better if it’s been used to target a similar market, but never exactly done in the current niche)
• Will set the website apart from the competition.
• Will fit within the Internet marketing budget for the site.

The new face of Facebook's marketing model

Facebook is a social utility site that allows you to connect with friends. It is feature rich and allows you to upload photos and share notes with your friends. The company has always been innovative and launched new services everytime. Now, the latest one is a marketing initiative from the company. It allows you to connect directly with the brands. You can now become a fan of any brand which may be a musical band such as U2 or a Mc Donalds. Facebook will let your cirle of friends know that you have become a fan of this particular brand and publish targeted ads.

The model is a new concept altogether and catching up fast with the young crowd. However analysts are saying that the brand has to be really cool, then only people will be ready to associate with the brand and send targeted ads. Whether this concept stays or sinks is something that time only will tell but for now we can safely say that Facebook has again come up with a new concept. There are four concepts by which Facebook is planning to sell this to advertisers. The first is advanced targeting by age, gender, location, interests and more. The second one is content integration so that you advertisement get noticed. There is flexible pricing with concepts such as Buy Clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). The last one is trusted referrals. You can attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your advertisements. It is a four step simple process to create a social advertisement. Once, you it done successfully you can find your web business roaring and your turnover increasing manifold. There is also an option of deep analytics and optimization. With so many features, you can be rest assured that every penny that you spend on your advertisement is returned.

Getting real website traffic with social marketig sites

Social networking sites (such as Myspace, FaceBook, and Orkut) allow Internet users to form communities online quickly and easily, from groups of friends to business networking. These groups of networked individuals, often in similar demographic groups, have become a virtual gold mine for Internet marketers, who can place their message in front of members of their target market on social networking sites for little or no cost.

Social networking sites have also become an easily abused Internet marketing tool, forcing social networking sites to crack down on new types of spam (such as message spam and bulletin spam on Myspace). This spam is a result of people artificially inflating “friend” counts (the number of other members in their social network) through mass-adding and bots. The owners of these profiles will then sometimes market their own products, or charge others to have their URLs blasted to the bulletin board of thousands of other members.

Why Social Networking Spam Doesn’t Work

Simply put, social networking spam doesn’t work. That’s not to say there won’t be any conversion for the marketing effort, but rather that it very rarely will offer a decent return on investment in comparison to other marketing tactics. Here’s why:

1. Huge social networking accounts rarely are filled with targeted members. Therefore, those seeing the message won’t likely be members of the target market (unless someone’s marketing something like a Myspace resource site, or a band marketing to legitimate fans, which are two exceptions to the rule)

2. Many of these paid posts (often in “bulletin” form) are only highly visible in limited quantities, based on post time, and only when a member is logged in. Therefore, most members blasted won’t ever even see the message.

3. Even if targeted members of a market do see the message, actually open the message, and actually read it, there’s still the traditionally very low response rate common in most direct marketing methods.

Ways to Use Social Networking Effectively for Internet Marketing

1. Build a highly targeted “friend” list, rather than using bots.

2. Personally welcome any new members of your network, or at least as many as possible.

3. Time bulletins and messages to when members of the target market will likely be online.

4. Offer something of value (like news or exclusive information) in the posts, rather than simply sending links.

5. Contact members regularly to keep the message in front of them, but don’t overdo it, to the point of looking like a spammer.

6. Join groups on social networking sites related to the niche, and promote in them where it doesn’t violate group rules.

Google Phone and Android by Sergey Brin

What’s Google Phone or Gphone? Google Phone speculations are running at full sway all over the internet. Google is on its way to enter the mobile device market. Some assume that Google is offering a phone running on a custom-built Operating System (OS), with software like Google Calendars, Google Maps, Google Earth and Gmail integrated within the Google Phone along with the standard phone functions. Others feel that Google is competing against the Apple’s iPhone. On the other hand there are some negative rumours coming like, Google won’t enter the mobile handset market because of low profit margin, Google has less experience in hardware.

Now let’s leave apart all the gossip and come to the genuine fact.
Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz from the Google Headquarters, California confirm that there is no such thing as Google Phone but instead introduce us to the Android Platform. They endeavour to illustrate the demo applications on the Android platform through their video clip in the You Tube site.

What is Android?
Android is a fully integrated mobile “software stack” that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications.

This new Open Source (OS) Operating System is the Software Platform over which you can build your own powerful applications for Mobile Phones. SDK has been released and is available for Free Download.

The Home Screen displays all the favourite applications where in you can access The Browser, Maps, Contacts, Text messaging (chat), Global Time and 3D Games. One of the amazing things build in the SDK is the ability to interact and integrate applications with one another. For example, while you are looking at the Maps to find the exact location of where your friend stays, you can get text messages from others and reply them.

Web Browser is based on the Open Source (OS) web kit that allows you to see WebPages just as it appears on your desktop. In fact web pages get loaded over the 3G Data Network and this means accessing the net at 3G Speeds, that’s really fast downloading.

Maps Applications enable us to scan around the city we like by using touch screen capabilities. One of the benefits of using the Android Platform is that there are some basic functions built in, like the Map Views. In order to build something on top of Map views we don’t have to reinvent all the functionality in Maps.

Google is waiting anxiously to reward $10 million for the developers who come up with the best applications using Android Platform. They are looking forward for innovative applications that make use of great functionality available on Android. So, developers out there, get ready to join the race that’s surely going to have a giant effect in the cell phone market.

Truth and Hype about Gphone from Google

Is there anything that Google could never do? The answer will obviously be “no”, because Google is one of the most powerful search engines that has created momentum among the internet browsers. Now the search engine has done something great introducing the Gphone technology! This Gphone has thoroughly changed the facade of the wireless industry.

This Gphone has made thunders and wonders baffling all the whole outs which were in iPhone. The brand new operating system captioned Gphone, was explicated with a crank up titled Android in the year 2005. The major objective of this cutting edge technology is to endow a low-cost “smartphones” sporting robust action and carry out. Google subscribed and took over the mobile software company Android, protruded by Danger cofounder and former president Andy Rubin.

Android is an open source mobile phone platform that purely features the Linux operating system. This powerful open source software platform allows several different software developers to use it as a simple and uncomplicated programming interface to the fundamental mobile phone hardware and its features.

Moreover, android is a sort of an anti-iPhone that has the ability to run on any number of phone models. The Google Android team allegedly formulated a Linux-based mobile Operating System with intent to fulfill the user’s expectations.

Just check with the flow-up and get to know the excellent and prominent features of Gphone from Google.

• Gphone is designed with a large color screen with a projecting “Qwerty” keypad and features the users an easy surfing
• A transcribe 3G-capable mock-up will make use of a Qualcomm chipset
• Web search is merely very simple on Gphone and no matters from where you do your search
• It is a very cool and powerful technology where you can bring the world into your pocket

Anti Spam Appliances

Spam is becoming a big problem for internet users and not only is it annoying, but it can also create problems such as slow downs, using up free space and important mails can get lost between all the junk ones. Of course there are ways to defend your mailbox from tons of unwanted emails and for this purpose there are anti spam appliances. These hardware devices were designed and created to keep spam mails from ever even reaching the inbox of your email account.

Anti spam appliances are hardware equipment which has been specially created to block spam emails and instant messages. The appliances are connected at the gateway of the system or the email server and have to be used in connection with installed software. The anti spam appliances come pre-configured and are mostly used for large networks that have many computers connected, such as those found in big companies or universities. Although there is also anti spam software, there are still many who prefer to just purchase something that comes ready to use and this means for them easy to use and time saving. There are also some companies that produce special anti spam filters for smaller or private networks.

An anti spam appliance has another advantage over software. Many software programs only work with the Windows operating system, whereas the hardware will also work with others such as Linux. Some companies may require that Linux be used in their computer systems and a ready to use hardware device solves the problem of not finding suitable anti spam software for this operating system. Some also just prefer an independent working appliance over more software that has to be manually configured before it will even do what it is expected to. This configuring is for some, especially beginners, quite confusing and if not done correctly will not prevent any spam messages or mails from flooding your inbox and will not provide any protection.

A good anti spam appliance should have certain features. An appliance firewall must have the capacity to handle large amounts of emails, and for companies this should be by more than ten million mails each day. Anti spam hardware should also not slow down the email servers or computers and very important is that it filters out viruses sent through emails also. Since spam mails and viruses are getting better and more effective by the day, it is also necessary that the appliance receives regular updates in order to be able to do its job. A high quality appliance will actually recognize on its own when updates are available and it will download the information and update itself automatically. This makes using such an anti spam hardware piece even easier and it requires no maintenance.

There are many good reasons why anti spam appliances are useful and for some preferred over anti spam softwares. These appliances are extremely easy to use and do not even have to be configurated, although an advanced user may do so if they like. Unlike software, and anti spam appliance does not need a lot of hard drive space, updates itself and generally does not slow down the computer or email server.

How to brand your product on the web - Branding basics on the web

Branding, or brand marketing, is a basic concept in marketing. Essentially, branding involves marketing materials and tactics that help to build and maintain an image with a company’s, or website’s, target market. Branding on the Web is about building recognition of a website, and giving visitors or customers a specific feeling or attitude about the site, based on the message the owner wants to convey. Examples of online branding materials include:

1. A website’s official name.

2. A domain name.

3. A logo.

4. A color scheme.

5. Packaging materials on any products being sold.

6. Images on banner ads for the site.

7. A site slogan.

Building brand recognition, even online where branding materials can be in front of a target market regularly, takes time. Here are some keys to effective branding online:

1. Ensure that all online branding elements actually appeal to the target market.

2. Online branding materials should be memorable, and should portray the company’s intended image.

3. A website’s message to its target audience should be consistent throughout all of its branding materials.

Building a brand image for a website or online business isn’t enough. A webmaster or business owner has to constantly reinforce their branding efforts with their target market. Here are some Internet marketing tactics that help to reinforce brand marketing efforts:

1. Online Advertising (Using the company logo, slogan, color scheme, and message in advertisements when possible keeps a brand visually in front of members of a target market.)

2. Email Marketing (Including a logo and slogan on all email correspondence reinforces branding, while regular communication with members of a target market keeps that message fresh in their minds.)

3. Online PR (Announcing regular news related to a website through press releases or blogging can keep a website’s name and message in front of the target audience. It also provides a way to build and maintain trust in a brand by letting webmasters and online business owners display their expertise in the niche through blog posts and press release quotes.)

ABC of Online Advertising

Online advertising offers advertisers, both online and offline, an opportunity to reach very specific niche audiences and target markets that wasn’t previously possible outside of perhaps the niche and trade magazine market. The biggest difference between niche online advertising and niche print advertising is often cost. Online advertising options are often more affordable, and with new niche websites launched every day, online advertising opportunities are almost endless.

There are many different types of online advertising, from blatant advertising to subtle, seemingly natural links. Here are several common types of online advertising currently used:

1. Banner Advertising – Banner ads are image ads with a company’s or website’s logo, slogan, and advertising message (or something similar) included. Banner ads come in many different sizes, which would be determined by the space available on the publisher’s site where the advertising space is being purchased. Some banner ads are animated.

2. Sponsorships – Advertisers regularly gain exposure in online sponsorships, whether that’s sponsoring a site blatantly for a site-wide text link or banner ad, sponsoring online videos (or even limited commercial sponsorships with major TV networks offering videos online), or sponsoring something such as a free Web template, where the sponsorship link stays in tact every time a template is used.

3. Text Link Advertising – Text link ads can work similarly to banner ads, they can be site-wide links in the sidebar, footer, or other area of a publisher’s website, or they can be a text link worked into the content on one particular page on a publisher’s site.

4. Video Advertising – Video advertising can be done similarly to banner advertising using various video screen sizes, or can involve blatant advertising in essentially Web commercials released with some kind of entertainment value to video sharing sites, hoping for a viral effect of the video being shared to increase exposure.

5. Email Advertising – Email advertising is essentially purchasing banner or text link ad space within email newsletters reaching a certain target market.

6. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising / Search Engine Advertising – Pay-per-click advertisements can be purchased in text or image / banner formats, often through search engine advertising (to place in sponsored results for certain keyword phrases) or through ad publisher networks such as Google Adsense, where ads appear on publisher sites relevant to chosen advertiser keywords.

7. Online Classifieds – Online classifieds advertising works much in the same way as offline classifieds, where products, jobs, and more can be advertised to a more general market.

8. Pop-up / Pop-under Advertising – These are online ads that open a new window on a browser’s computer screen when they enter or leave a Web page or click on something. They’re often considered intrusive, and blocked automatically using pop-up blockers by many users.

3 simple steps that can make you SEO and Link-building expert

Everyone wants to build their to get high traffic and high sales through organic searches. Atleast they want their site to appear between 1 to 10 pages of any search engine result. Here comes the concept of SEO. Having some common sense, many webmasters do their own SEO for their sites. Trial and error gives experience to them. However they are so costly that they eat money and most precious time.

Hence here we give some tactics and tips that can help you know better about SEO and Link building.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process by which webmasters and online business owners get their websites to rank highly in SERPs (search engine results pages) for keyword phrases that are both heavily searched for and related to their industry or niche. Two of the biggest types of SEO work are keyword optimization and link-building (increasing the number of incoming links to a website or specific page).

Here are a few SEO tips to keep in mind when thinking about keyword optimization for a new website or online business:

1. Use keyword suggestion tools to research keyword phrases related to the website’s or online business’ industry or niche topic.

2. Don’t focus exclusively on very general (often one-word) keywords or keyword phrases that would be very difficult to earn a high search engine placement for. At the same time, don’t focus on keyword phrases that no one is searching for. It’s sometimes better to be a “big fish in a smaller pond” than a “little fish in big pond” where you can’t likely rise to the top.

3. Include keyword phrases throughout a page, with particular emphasis on titles, highlighted subheadings, and early in any text areas.

Building incoming links to a website or online business is also an important part of SEO and improving search engine rankings. This is because search engines look at incoming links almost like a “vote” where another website is saying the site, or some page within the site, is of high enough quality to recommend to its visitors. Obviously, link-building can be manipulated in many ways that don’t equate to “votes” (such as by purchasing banner ads or text links on another website). For this reason, some incoming links are considered more valuable than others. Here are a few link-building tips to keep in mind, to build higher quality incoming links:

1. Try to achieve incoming links that are one-way, rather than reciprocal (a one-way link looks more like an honest “vote” than a trade does).

2. Build incoming links from relevant websites (of a similar topic or niche), rather than from generic link farms.

3. Get incoming links from “authority websites” (high quality and popular websites) whenever possible.

4. Look for one-page content-based text links if purchasing links, rather than site-wide banner advertisements (makes the link seem more natural).

5. To get a specific article or internal Web page to rank well in SERPs, build links to that page rather than only the site’s homepage.

NOOB introduction for anti virus protection - part 1

Anyone that loves surfing the internet has to have a good anti virus protection, otherwise there is a good chance of ruining the computer with a nasty virus. The viruses are becoming increasingly frequent and destructive and they can also be well hidden in a website. Once in your computer system, they can cause deletion of files or even a complete shutdown and this can all be avoided by making sure that an actual anti virus protection is installed.

Surfing the internet has become cheap nowadays, because of the so-called flat rates. This enables a person to surf all day long and every day of the week for one low price, however many are not willing to give out any money for a good anti virus protection. This is actually quite careless since the results could be fatal for the computer and even precious files, such as personal photos, could be lost if a virus infects the computer system. Some people may want a good protection, but really do not have the money to purchase such a program and in this case there are many free anti virus protection programs available or trial versions of well known software, such as Symantec or McAfee. Even a free anti virus program is better than none. Companies that offer free anti virus protection software include AVG, Avast! and Avira.

Why You Need a Firewall and How ZoneAlarm is Good for You

If a computer is connected to the internet and it is not protected in some way, then it is vulnerable to attacks by external hackers. These attacks can be quite harmful to the PC and can even result in losing valuable data saved on the hard drive. A firewall is what protects your system from outside attacks and intrusions and ZoneAlarm not only protects with different programs and security levels, but it also informs you if any applications try to connect without you knowing about it and you can then limit which programs can be connected with the web in the first place. There are many reasons as to why you need a firewall and how ZoneAlarm is good for you and your computer.

There are many hackers actively trying to access computers for devious purposes. This unwanted traffic and visitor can steal data and also use your computer for their criminal plans, such as sending out junk emails. A firewall regulates this traffic to different zones, such as the internet or internal networks of which each has a different level of trust. The reasons why you need a firewall and how ZoneAlarm is good for you are numerous, but the main one is to just stop uninvited traffic into your system. The internet, for example, is a zone that has absolutely no trust, whereas private network can be configure to allow more trust. ZoneAlarm is a free tool that takes the firewall a step further and even protects your computer when you have not been working on it. It can be programmed to automatically stop intrusions after a certain period of inactivity or when a screen saver starts.

Why you need a firewall and how ZoneAlarm is good for you goes even further. A firewall must be configured before it can actually do anything and there are not too many that actually understand it and make great mistakes. For one, many use the “default allow” option that comes with a firewall program and do not realize that everything is allowed and that you have to manually block any websites that cause trouble. The ZoneAlarm program, when used together with a properly configured firewall, does more than just limit what traffic comes in, but also lets you specify which of your applications is even allowed to have an access to the internet. The best part about both firewalls and ZoneAlarm is that you can choose levels of trust and what

ZoneAlarm also offers a protection against any worms or viruses that come hidden as a visual basic setup within an email. This program is free to download, easy to use and does not even take up much space on your hard drive. If used with a good firewall that has been configured to best meet your needs then your computer will be safe from outside attacks and unwanted visitors. These are some very good and practical reasons as to why you need a firewall and how ZoneAlarm is good for you.