How satisfied are you with the business value your company has achieved by using each of the following marketing channels? This was the question asked by Forrester Research, where social media advertising had measured up to be the least effective advertising medium when it comes to the opinion of ROI (return on investment) for online marketers when judging “business value” achieved among all online mediums used. The report, titled “Q3 2013 North American and U.K. … [Read more...]
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Will Fundamentally Change the News Business
“The Key to success is a willingness to forgo short-term profits while building a business into a powerful position within a market.” Such was said by Donald Graham, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of The Washington Post Company, as he discussed his buyer and the sale of the newspaper for $250 million to digital innovator, Jeff Bezos, Founder and Chief Executive of Amazon.com. It is no secret that the news publishing business has changed greatly over the years. … [Read more...]
IAB: $9.6B In Internet Advertising Revenues for 1st Quarter of 2013
Consumers worldwide are in a constant process of being bombarded left and right by advertising; be it print, television, or signage, people are rarely able to escape the grasp of both corporate giants and local businesses as they go about their daily routine. In fact, it’s getting to the point that many people simply tune out the bombardment of passive advertising confronted with each day, ignoring billboards driven past in cars and quickly thumbing through full-page ads … [Read more...]
Over 200 Advertising Slogan and Tag Line Examples: Ideas for Building Your Brand
Advertising slogans are short, often memorable phrases used in advertising campaigns. They are claimed to be the most effective means of drawing attention to one or more aspects of a product. They also greatly help build your brand. According to "Creative Advertising" by Charles Whittier: "A slogan should be a statement of such merit about a product or service that is worthy of continuous repetitive advertising; is worthwhile for the public to remember; and is phrased in … [Read more...]
Internet Marketing Related Events for 2013
I wanted to add a post which I can update from time to time with some of the most interesting and beneficial events which will take place this year in 2013. These events are all happening in the United States and will offer an opportunity to learn, network and grow your online business. I will try to add to this list over time or as I find out about additional events or any date changes. PubCon Austin Regional, February 21 … [Read more...]
Doing SEO to Your Site? Inquiring Minds at Google Want to Know
Out of all the posts and discussions on “SEO Profiling” through the years and with all sorts of opinions as well as speculation on what Google possibly wants or doesn’t want to know about someone’s SEO efforts, I believe there are finally some answers available for the taking as GOOG’s latest patent is sure to clear the air on some or all of these theories and misconceptions from both sides of the fence. A new Patent Application dated August 14, 2012 called “Ranking … [Read more...]
Cybersecurity Legislation Fails: Persistence is Key; Ignorance is Bliss
Most people are familiar with the news that surrounded the major FBI raid on file-sharing site Megaupload. This was probably one of the biggest take-down stories of the year as the site had over one hundred and eighty million (180,000,000) registered members that visited over fifty million (50,000,000) times per day before it was shut down on January 19 2012. The sites founder, dubbed a file-sharing kingpin, Kim Dotcom, was indicted and charged with criminal copyright … [Read more...]
Two Different Google Penguin “Death Messages” from Webmaster Tools
Who knew a Penguin could be so deadly? Losing your traffic and search positioning on Google is bad, real bad. Showing up on Bing or Yahoo near the top of search is just sort of cool, but it doesn't really make much difference to your business. Sure it might make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside seeing you up at the top there, but even competitive terms, year over year, don’t seem to yield much traffic. Google, on the other hand, makes or breaks your business, … [Read more...]
Search Market Share: Rivals Struggle as Google’s Shadow Grows Bigger
Newly released figures from comScore, an Internet analytics firm, show Google's dominant position to be a granite boulder against which weaker competitors can only grind futilely. Despite vigorous attempts by Microsoft, Yahoo and others to whittle away at the commanding share of Web visitors held by Google, the search king expanded its slice of the pie to 66.8 percent in June 2012, a significant rise from 65.5 percent in June of the previous year. Yahoo's share slid to 13 … [Read more...]
Google Webmaster Tools Now Offers Email Alerts for Crawl Errors
Google Webmaster Tools has been fairly popular for some time but it’s popularity is beginning to grow even more quickly. Much of this new found fame is due to the messages being received by a wide range of webmasters (over 700,000 recently), primarily from, or what seems to be from, the changes rolled out in Google’s Penguin update. Equally significant is the significant buzz and publicity surrounding the fact that receiving these messages is generally bad news for your site … [Read more...]
‘Social Discovery’ Apps Report Hidden Patterns; Predict Human Behavior
Social discovery apps are starting to pick up where social networking software leaves off. New apps hitting the market allow users to search for other individuals based on their age, name, gender, location and interests. They also allow the storage and research on troves and troves of user generated data which can then be analyzed by groups of scientists in order to uncover hidden patterns of our lives, thoughts or political views. Sites like Pintrest.com already fit this … [Read more...]
Rich Snippets: The Absence of Star Ratings & Reviews In Google Search
Most Internet news agencies originally praised Google's decision to replace its local search business rating system with Zagat ratings. After all, the acquisition of Zagat data was a major business decision by the search engine giant who paid a hefty price for those scores, $125 million as originally reported by the Wall Street Journal (more recently reported by AP to be $151 million). However, it seems that business owners and local webmasters who run sites previously … [Read more...]
Bing Update Pleases Developers: Webmasters Can Disavow Links
Microsoft's Bing search engine is now offering web developers a tool to disavow malicious links. Bing Webmaster Tools features a small gadget that allows people to submit domains that apparently link to a legitimate page from poor quality sites. Individual pages and directories can also be submitted in the disavow links page. Web developers with SEO on their agenda often wish they could disavow links. Unnatural links and other black hat spam policies can hurt both a site's … [Read more...]
Knowledge Graph Misses Company Philosophy: Fast Better Than Slow
Google's new "Knowledge Graph" has been one of the most discussed topics out of many new releases from Google as of recent . It may also be the reason, or at least, a contributing factor, to Bing entering into a closer relationship with Encyclopedia Britannica. Ever since Google announced Knowledge Graph, the new feature has been present on countless search pages and is often based around information taken from Wikipedia. Wikipedia appears on the front of Google pages quite … [Read more...]
“Jelly Bean” and “Google Now” To Make Ordinary Search Less Interesting
Google I/O saw a number of new features go down in the book. Several of these were directly related to search. Jellybean is the latest version of Android (available next month), and the operating system comes with improved Knowledge Graph visualization technology. Out of all the features, however, the search features of Google Now might very well be the most significant change to user navigation. Google Now is designed to serve users information that they require based … [Read more...]