Are Retargeting Ads the Future of Online Advertising.

Twitter made headlines in recent months after announcing that it’s going to support retargeting ads. Following Facebook’s lead, Twitter will experiment with using people’s behavior to tailor ads on their network. If the two biggest social networks are doing it, then retargeting ads must be the future of online advertising, right? They have been embraced by the marketing industry and many e-commerce websites, so retargeting ads seem to have a place in the future of online advertising. Here’s what you need to know about retargeting ads, and why you should consider them for your next campaign:
What are Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads are banner ads on other sites, specifically shown to people who visited your site previously but didn’t buy. Only 2% of web visitors are ready to buy when they visit your site, so the idea is to remain fresh with the other 98% by tracking their behavior and presenting ads when they surf other websites so they’ll come back to your site when they are ready to make a purchase. Some companies have had great success with this strategy. Consumer-package goods company Kimberly-Clark reports that its retargeting ads have a conversion rate between 50-60 percent.
Unlike regular banner ads, retargeting ads are measured in two ways: click-through conversions and view-through conversions. Below are the definitions of both measurements, according to Moz.

• Click-through conversions are any conversions that happen as a direct result of someone clicking a retargeting ad they were served.
• View-through conversions are like assists. They are conversions that are attributed to another channel, like Google AdWords, but these people were at one point served a retargeting ad before that. Another example of this would be someone who saw the retargeting ad, but went back to the website on their own and made a purchase.

How Retargeting Ads Can Help Your Business
Retargeting ads are different from banner ads, and can be helpful to your business because of the better conversion rates. Although Kimberly-Clark is seeing 50-60 percent conversion rates on its retargeting ads, the average for them is .7%. It doesn’t seem like much, but the average conversion rate for a normal banner ad is just .07%, so retargeting ads have 10 times the conversion rate of a normal banner ad!
One reason why retargeting ads have a better conversion rate is because they can be tailored to the visitor, and even more specifically than just showing ads to people who have been on your site before.. For example, visitors can be segmented by what they were browsing. If you ran an online clothing store, people who looked at shirts could be shown different ads from those that looked at pants, so that the retargeting ads are much more relevant to the individual. This segmentation can also include a time factor, where someone searching for travel or concert tickets needs to be retargeted immediately, while someone looking for a new suit can be retargeted later.
Another reason why retargeting ads work better than display ads is because they are reaching people who have already had an experience with your brand, whether that experience is passive interest in your product, a strong intention to purchase a product in your category, or somewhere in between. In this case, retargeting ads can be used to move your visitors through the buying process and to get them closer to making the purchasing decision. Each stage would use a different message or piece of content in the retargeting ad. The person with a passive interest doesn’t want a coupon or a demo, while the person that already knows about your company and is strongly considering hiring you as a provider doesn’t need an ad explaining who you are and what you offer.
Don’t Rely on Retargeting Ads, However
The numbers show that retargeting ads work well for businesses, but they also shows that the idea of retargeting ads doesn’t sit well with consumers. Unless the consumer understands the marketing aspect of it, the process feels invasive as a brand suddenly follows them all over the Internet, showing them ads for the exact same items they browsed through on the company’s website. And it’s the brand that will pay the price for being persistent and pesky, not the third-party ad companies who serve the ads in the first place. The ads can be even more bothersome if the consumer didn’t even put anything in a shopping cart and just was window-shopping online. “Ad fatigue,” as this phenomenon is called, can sometimes be solved by limiting the number of ad impressions a visitor sees per day, but simply reducing their exposure might not be enough for some of the most sensitive consumers.
Overall, retargeting ads are a way to take your banner advertising to the next level of segmentation and specificity. They can reach people in a way that regular banner advertising can’t. When used appropriately, they can lead to a substantial increase in sales. They aren’t necessarily the future of online marketing for everyone, but for the right companies they could be an effective new addition to your marketing strategy.

http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/retargeting-ads-future-online-advertising-0683163#BCsu8XJbLpEKOgOp.99

Google Study Reveals Internet is Top Choice Among Shoppers this Holiday Season

The internet will be a top resource for many shoppers this holiday season,  smartphones will be the device of choice, online marketing will influence holiday shopping, and cross-screen shopping will be a big deal, according to a recent study conducted by Google.
This holiday season,  89% of shoppers plan to use the internet for holiday shopping.  Seventy-nine percent of  shoppers consider the internet the most useful resource for holiday shopping.
Three in four of shoppers say online research will help them decide which gifts and brands they’ll buy this holidays season. Online research will influence brands bought (76%),  retailers shopped (76%)  and type of gift (77%).
According to Google 2013 Holiday Shopping Intentions study,  online ads will influence holiday shoppers more than television.  Display ads, email offers and search ads as a whole influence more than television.  Six in 10 shoppers will pay attention to search ads and one in three will pay attention to video ads.
What are shoppers using this holiday season to help them shop online?  The study revealed more shoppers will use  a smartphone to help with their online shopping.  In fact, 41% of all adult shoppers will use a smartphone for their holiday shopping which is seeing a 17% increase from last year.
Seventy-six percent of smartphone owners will use their smartphones for holiday shopping, according to the study.  One in four smartphone owners plan to make a holiday purchase on their smartphone, which is up 21% from last year.
Google expects mobile shopping to increase on traditional in-store shopping days – weekends,  especially the one between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The study shows that 53% of smartphone shoppers will use their device to help with ecommerce shopping,  an increase from 46% last year and 53% of shoppers will use their smartphone while in the store.
This holiday shopping the Google study revealed that cross-screen shopping will be huge.  Eighty percent of shoppers will use more than one device at once while holiday shopping and 84% will start gift shopping on one device and finish on another.
This year mobile holiday shopping is being driven by millennials, according to the study.  Eighty-eight percent of millennial smartphone owners will use their devices for holiday shopping, a jump from 67% last year.  Thirty-one percent of millennial smartphone owners plan to make a holiday purchase on their smartphone, a jump from 17% of adults last year.
Shopping for the holiday season has begun early this year, according to the study.  Shopping for the holiday season, the study revealed began before Halloween.  Half of shoppers will research before Thanksgiving weekend and 60% will purchase that weekend.
It’s all about the bargains this year , 81% of shoppers will rely on discounts and 76% will take advantage of free shipping and 60% of shoppers will act on purchase incentives.

http://multichannelmerchant.com/marketing/google-study-reveals-internet-is-top-choice-among-shoppers-this-holiday-season-05112013/

HANDY TOWNSHIP, MICH. — Matt Blauer and Mandy Tefft are making the world a hotter place one bottle at a time.
The husband-and-wife team have been making and selling Papa Turts hot sauce since early 2011.
The seeds of the business were planted with their love of spicy foods and an abundance of peppers in the garden at their rural home near Fowlerville in Handy Township.
“We had all this land, so we planted a big garden and put in a bunch of chili peppers,” Blauer told the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus. “We got a lot more than we bargained for.”
The solution was for Blauer to turn the peppers into hot sauce.
“I messed around with it for a while. Everybody liked it and said I should try and market it,” Blauer said. “It took a long period of trial and error to get the recipe where I wanted it.”
Papa Turts — the name is a play off Blauer’s high school nickname, Turtle, and his becoming a father — makes two varieties of sauce: So Hot It Hurts and Smoked Peppa. The sauce is available in nearly 30 stores and restaurants, and it can be ordered online.
Tefft says the hot sauce is popular at Olden Days Cafe in Fowlerville, where diners often drizzle it over breakfast items such as eggs and potatoes.
“We put it on everything,” she said. “The So Hot It Hurts is hot, but not so hot that you can’t taste anything else. It adds to your food instead of overpowering your food. We put it on pizza. We use it in deviled eggs and Bloody Marys.
“I like the (Smoked Peppa) on lasagna and spaghetti,” she added.
Tefft says her husband is an “awesome cook,” and he often posts recipes that incorporate the sauce on Papa Turts’ Facebook page.
“We recently did a spicy tuna melt recipe online that is amazing,” Tefft said.
Creating a commercial kitchen to make the sauce in the basement of their home required a financial investment of a couple of thousand dollars and approval from the Michigan Department of Agriculture.
“We had to tear up the carpet, put in a triple sink and a hand-washing sink, and put up a curtain and epoxy the floor. We put a vent in, too,” Tefft said.
While the idea for the sauce originally grew from their own garden, the couple rely on other sources for their produce. They get most of their habanero peppers from Wilczewski Greenhouses in Oceola Township.
“It’s two local businesses helping each other,” Tefft said.
Blauer said each batch of So Hot It Hurts sauce — about 120 5-ounce bottles — requires 16 pounds of habanero peppers and nearly 2 pounds of dried arbol chiles, as well as some roasted carrots. The peppers need to cook down for about 90 minutes. Blauer later uses a wooden stick to skim off the skins and seeds.
“It’s a real hands-on process,” he said.
For the Smoked Peppa sauce, Blauer uses chipotle peppers as well as tomato paste.
After the sauce is made, it’s bottled, sealed and labeled by hand.
“We learned pretty quick that places don’t want to sell it if it doesn’t have a bar code on it,” Tefft said. “So we went to Buyabarcode.com and purchased bar codes. Some stuff we’ve just had to wing it and learn as we go along.”
Fans of the sauce can even have custom labels made for the bottles. Hometown Bicycles in Brighton created its own label and sells the hot sauce in its store. Papa Turts has also had personalized labels designed and printed for special events such as weddings and bachelor parties.
Blauer, 40, and Tefft, 37, have two children, ages 11 and 4. Tefft, a 1994 Fowlerville High School graduate, keeps busy as a stay-at-home mom while working to grow the sauce business. Blauer, who grew up in the Detroit suburb of Huntington Woods, is a FedEx driver who owns his own route.
While attending college in Kalamazoo, they met at Bell’s Brewery. The brewery recently began selling Papa Turts sauces, which Tefft called “very exciting.”
Blauer works 10- to 12-hour days, leaving only the weekends for making his namesake sauce.
“When I first started, I’d make a batch every couple of months. Now, I’m working at it one full day every weekend,” he said.
The couple think about the day when Papa Turts can become their full-time occupations and Blauer can sell his FedEx route.
“We’re not quite ready to do that just yet,” Blauer said. “Slowly, over time, I may do less FedEx and more hot sauce until one day I’ll be doing hot sauce full time.”
Tefft said they “broke a little more than even” on the sauce business in 2012, and she’s sure they will do even better this year. When her youngest child starts preschool in the fall, she hopes to have more time to dedicate to Papa Turts. She also plans to revamp the Papa Turts website, where sales currently require a PayPal account.
“We don’t take credit cards, and I think some people just don’t like PayPal,” Tefft said. “When our website gets better and we show up in more searches, we can get the credit card thing going.”
Still, they count people from as far away as California and Texas among their loyal customers.
“It’s been fun; it’s a really cool thing for Matt and I to do together,” Tefft said. “It’s something that we really like that we believe is a quality product.”

http://www.freep.com/article/20130902/NEWS06/309020080/hot-sauce-business-peppers-handy-township

The web’s biggest scam artists are coining it: here’s how

We have all seen the scummy and scammy internet marketing scams that aim to defraud pretty much anyone who is unlucky enough to fall for their link bait; but who are these fraudulent masterminds and how much money do they actually make?
Well first let’s look at why it works. There are a few basic emotions that these scam artists play on.
Laziness
Inherently, people are lazy. People take shortcuts and would rather (in general) find the quickest easiest way of achieving a goal than to actually do the hard yards and earn it! These online scammers pray on that human trait and expose it.
Pride
Their methods make it sound as if this is the best, most well-kept secret on the history of the planet and that you are actually smarter than everyone else for finding this gem of an opportunity.
Community
We like to feel like we belong. Scammers play on this emotion and feed off of it like it’s candy. They lure you in and make you feel like you are part of an exclusive club with smoking jackets, wood panels and butlers who call you “sir”.
So essentially the rationale behind this post is to talk a little about those who are giving real internet marketing types a bad name. The traditional sense of the phrase refers to those guys who are practicing SEO; SEM; social marketing and content marketing (i.e — the good guys). But there are also con artists doing their level best to take your money away from you.
In short, they are the “gurus” who are trying to sell you a cure-for-all; make money while you sleep solution that is going to radically change your life. There is no such thing — at least not in any legitimate form.
There is an internet marketing circle in the United States where these guys have literally made millions upon millions of dollars.

To flesh out this picture; the “internet marketers” who form the “syndicate” are the major players; the guys who get rich. These are the guys who come up with the scams and lay the foundations to get it into motion. The “boiler rooms” are, for all intents and purposes, the call centres that are filled with “pressure salesmen” who will hard sell you into the ground; playing on your emotions and make you feel like you are doing them a favour by buying their product. The “companies” are the fronts who these people say they work for. This is so that if you search their company name online, you find something real, something that reassures you that this is a legitimate business. Within these companies you then have some specialist salesmen who again complete the circle and are the face of the companies.
The syndicate all work together; this is to create the illusion that this incredible offer that they have for you is truly legitimate and that; because more that one company is trying to sell it to you; it cannot possibly be a scam!
Once they have you hooked; they take everything that they can and give you nothing but an empty bank account in return. Their methods are incredulous and their morals are severely lacking; often guised as a hedonistic view of philanthropic entrepreneurialism.
The general rules still and always will apply:

• Never give them your credit card or banking details.
• They are not your friends (they are the trench coat wearing sycophants luring you with lollipops into their windowless van, lined with tear-stained mattresses).
• Get rich quick schemes don’t exist — if you think it is too good to be true — then it probably is.

While I have never been caught (thankfully) in any of these schemes; I do implore you to share your stories with anyone and everyone who will listen to make sure that the syndicates are exposed and that more and more people are made aware of how unscrupulous the villains of internet marketing can really be.

http://memeburn.com/2013/06/get-rich-click-schemes-the-webs-biggest-scam-artists-are-coining-it/
 

Why Offline Businesses Need Online Marketing

Your Customers Are Here, Are You?


You have a local based brick and mortar business, so no reason to invest in online marketing, right? Location based businesses couldn’t be more wrong. Do not miss out on sales and customers by ignoring or avoiding online marketing.  One of the key principles of business is to be where your target audience is looking for you. A growing number of consumers are searching online before making a purchase decision, so your business needs to be there in order for them to find you and include your company in their decision making process.
According to the BIA/Kelsey  report, 97% of consumers use online media before making local purchases.  Google Research  showed that 9 out of 10 internet searches resulted in a follow up action, such as calling or visiting the business. Mobile searches triggered an additional action or conversion 73% of the time; and 28% of mobile searches resulted in a store visit or purchase. Since mobile searches are on the rise, this behavior is only going to continue to increase. How do consumers search for businesses?

1. 90% use a search engine
2. 48% use the online Yellow Pages
3. 42% use comparison shopping websites

Embracing and online marketing can help you get the edge on your competition; especially when you take into consideration that a recent study  shows that 50% of small businesses’ online listings are incorrect and 70% of small business owners state they do not have time to keep their online listings updated. Therefore, something as simple as updating and optimizing your online listings, including the Yellow Pages, will give your business the edge over the competition.
Four takeaways for brick and mortar businesses looking to take advantage of online marketing:

1. With so much of your competition having an incorrect listing or nonexistent presence online, taking just a few minutes to fill in the data about your business in your online listing will make your business more visible to consumers searching for the products or services you sell, even if you do not sell anything online.
2. Websites for your local business should include a responsive design so that it can be easily read via mobile devices. Especially considering that tablets will outsell PCs this year, and more than half of all cell phones are smartphones. What is responsive design? The Wikipedia definition of responsive design  “is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)”. Mashable named 2013 The Year of Responsive Design and rightfully so with the growth of mobile search that results in visits to local businesses.
3. Including online sign up for appointments or reservations on your website will increase conversions and also provide an added convenience of allowing them to make appointments online 24/7. Of the consumers surveyed, 19% made appointments with a local business through the business’ website, that doesn’t include restaurant reservations; Cornell University research shows that over half of those surveyed made restaurant reservations online. If you do not have an online reservation system you have the potential to double your seatings.
4. Embracing social media will allow you to keep connected with these new customers that are tech savvy; making customer retention easier. Get social with the community, build a following host events, and engage with local consumers in an effort to stay top of mind.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-offline-businesses-need-online-marketing/62406/

Multivariate Testing for User Experience for Online Marketing College Majors

The window to grab the visitors attention on a website is approximately 7 seconds. Everything from the design of your site, to the call to actions and navigation must work harmoniously to grab the visitor’s attention and get them further down the conversion funnel. Internet marketers have become privy to this growing demand to appeal to an audience’s interests, and are employing multivariate testing on their websites in an effort to enhance the user experience. These tests are conducted to understand what the user likes, which in turn can be used to update the website in making sound business decisions.

How the Process Begins
To thrive in the ever-changing web landscape, a business owner must always be open to change and improvement in regards to their online marketing efforts. New trends and strategies for reaching your audience are always evolving, making the task of keeping up to date a necessity. Since your audience may or may not respond favorably to these changes, webmasters often do the testing on sites so the risk of an adverse reaction is limited. The two most common type of tests are a/b and multivariate, which are similar in concept but each have their advantages and disadvantages.

Why Choose Multivariate Testing?
Both forms of testing will give you great results, however, multivariate testing is quicker and generally more efficient for large scale website. Since more changes can be implemented after each test, it accelerates the optimization process and reduces the total time needed to come up with a better version of the website. If you have a large, enterprise website, this method is recommended. In fact, eBay and Amazon use it regularly to test what visitors are responding favorably to.

Guidelines for Running Multivariate Tests
As you’ll find, conducting multivariate tests is pretty straightforward. Below you’ll find a step-by-step guide to getting started.

Site Evaluation: Review your site in determining what needs to be improved. Consult with colleagues and friends to get a second opinion – they might have spotted something you missed. Surveys are another outlet to consider in receiving anonymous opinions that are most of the time truthful.
Test Design: Group the elements that you have from the previous step into batches. Choose one of them to run your first test on, then work on designing the variations that you will be using for it.

Test Implementation: Gather up the versions of you site and start running the tests. You can do so easily with the use of software and tools, like Google’s Website Optimizer, which is available for free online. You can also employ the services of testing companies to run the tests for you.
Results and Analysis: Once you’ve completed the tests, gather the results and interpret the best solutions for implementation on your site. Based on your evaluation criteria, implement the design that satisfied requirements, such as an increase in clicks.
Site Deployment: Once you’ve determined which variation is the better version, it’s time to roll out the changes on your actual website and proceed to conducting your next multivariate test.
As you can see, multivariate testing is a simple way to ensure the design decisions you’ve chosen for your site are making a positive impression on your audience. Through these easy steps, you’ll begin to see where the design can be improved, allowing you to focus on a more enhanced user experience that ultimately leads to a much bigger bottom line for your business

http://www.collegenews.com/article/multivariate_testing_for_user_experience_for_online_marketing_college_major

Are You Really Ready to Build a New Website or Blog?

If I had a $1,000 for every time I heard one of the below statements, I’d be retired and sitting on a warm beach right now!

I had a website built by some guy. It’s never worked.
We have a website, we just need you to help us get more sales.
My current website is fine. However, it doesn’t show up on Google and nobody knows we exist.
Our website is fine, it really is. I just need more customers.
We don’t have budget to invest in market research, business planning, strategy development, internal training or planning right now. We just need a website and Facebook page with lots of likes.
Can we meet to talk about a strategy to generate revenue for my business? I don’t have any money because I already spent it on the last agency that built my website, Facebook pages, printed collateral and new business cards.
Will you consider revenue share? We know our website is going to kick butt but we just don’t have any money right now. You can be a millionaire with us if you just help us for free right now!
This post is not for the social faint at heart. I am going to tell you what others want to tell you but don’t have the guts. It may not be what you want to hear. Yet it is likely what many of you NEED to hear.
The others in your social business and digital marketing ecosystem may have not told you what I am about to tell you because they wanted to sell you the website, coaching, training, Facebook pages, logo, video, Google Adwords setup or who knows what. Or maybe they haven’t told you because they don’t know how to fix it.
Your current social media efforts are not working because you started at the wrong place.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Change your thinking. Think digital social fabric, not website or Facebook page.

You need to quit thinking you “need a website.” The truth is you don’t. If you don’t know your audience, and don’t have a plan, the last thing you need to do right now is build a website that will be nothing more than a band-aid to a much bigger problem you may not know you have.
You can download our POST Audience Analysis Worksheet here. It will get you off to a good start in prioritizing and analyzing your audience.
Don’t even think about building a website if you can’t answer the majority of these questions:

• Who are you?
• What are you to your target audience?
• Who is your target audience?
• What are their demographics? Psychographics?
• What are their goals? What keeps them up at night?
• Why do you need a website?
• What do you want to achieve with it?
• What are your goals, objectives? What does success look like in 3 months, 6 months, 1 year?
• What will you do to inspire, connect and engage your audience when they land on your website? What will you do to inspire them to stick around for longer than 30 seconds?
• What do you offer that the other 100 websites or businesses just like yours don’t already offer?
• Why should anyone care that your business exists? Why should they care your website exists?
• How will you nurture relationships?
• How will you communicate with them? What tone do they speak in?
• What social platforms are they hanging out on?
• Who do they hang out with?
• Why do they hang out on those platforms?
• When do they hang out on what social platform?
• How will you earn their trust, build credibility?

I could list 100 questions here but won’t. I think you get the point. We help our clients from entrepreneurs to Fortune 50, answer these questions every day with our social media and social business audits, social business and social media strategy development, consulting and execution services. I’m speaking from experience, not theory.
We often work more on the inside of organizations than we do on the digital outside because that is where most businesses need help. It’s important you start from the inside out. As Sandy Carter of IBM states, “culture eats strategy for lunch.” I agree with her statement 100% even though I am a lover and strong believer of strategy.

You are the Thread of the Social Fabric

What is the social web today? It is not a singular website, Facebook page, Twitter profile or Google + account.
It is not one singular blog post, tweet, status update, or pin. It is not one single experience but a series of experiences.
A series of conversations that weave a beautiful, relevant, vibrant, dynamic, breathing fabric that connects consumers, influencers, business leaders, moms, dads, entrepreneurs, teens, teachers, plumbers, gamers, programmers, geeks, fashion models, comedians, sailors, photographers, entrepreneurs and even grandma.
It connects them via threads of conversations, posts, pictures, pins, quotes, content, education, inspiration, laughs, prayers and even tears.
If you are not a positive contributing part of this intricately weaved social fabric the chances of you seeing any real return on your investment in your website or other digital assets are few and far between.

You need an integrated social business platform.

You need to develop an integrated business platform that will inspire, connect, entertain and attract your target customers to you. It must inspire, educate and engage them in a way that builds trust, nurtures relationships and makes them know you are relevant to their business and / or life.
I know it may not be what you want to hear from me when you fill out a web form on our website. We’ve had many business leaders asking for help making their current, broken platform work.
The truth is if your website is built on old technology, doesn’t have a user experience designed for your target audience it is often more cost efficient for us to start over than to clean up what you have. The reason is that your current digital platform is a mess. It was probably done by someone that didn’t understand or work under the constraints of what I describe in this post. They instead sold you on a random act of marketing, random act of social media or random act of website. It’s simply not how it works folks.

Avoid Random Acts of Marketing!

Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs) will eat any morsel of a chance of ROI for lunch before you have time to open the fridge to see what your options are.
One of the biggest misconception is that you can just “do social media” and have overnight success. Many preach this and tout that you can just jump on Twitter or Facebook and you can be an overnight millionaire. While this may have happened for a few, it doesn’t happen for the majority. What these folks are really selling is quick fixes, band-aids and random acts of social media and marketing. I am not stating you shouldn’t hop on Twitter or Facebook. I am stating you should not expect overnight results.
If you do the double click on the folks preaching overnight success you will find many of them learned the hard way, though they may not tell you such. Many took years if not decades to finally make money online. Few of them have real business experience outside of their own internet marketing startup. Yes, they may be able to help you get where you need to go eventually based on tactics and a random set of deliverables. However, you need to know where you are going, first. This post is dedicated to those who of you who don’t know where you’re going and why you are going there in the first place.
If this post resonates with you, take a deep breath. It’s time you slow down to speed up. You may need to take a step back to take two steps forward. Quit listening to every self proclaimed “social media guru” selling you every Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + class and instead do what you know needs done.
It’s time you plan yer’ work and work yer’ plan as Granny would say! It’s time you get in the head of your target audience. It’s time to truly understand what it means to humanize your brand, story telling and your conversations.

The Language Is Changing

The social fabric is speaking a different language today than that of the days of corporate websites, collateral and traditional advertising. If you don’t learn the language you are going to be left behind in a big way. It IS the reason why your website is not working. So quit blaming it on the web developer you hired. He or she probably did what you told them to do. Stand up, take responsibility for your business and do what needs to be done, period!
If your current methods aren’t working, then fix them. We are happy to help you but we can’t help you unless you want to help yourself. Help me help you. Change your mindset and delete the notion of overnight success from your thinking.
Achieving real results is going to take commitment, research, analysis, late nights, and hard work. Quit cryin’ and do something about it. If you want help, call us. No, we can’t meet with you for free to help you plan your strategy and put a proposal the size of Texas together that you’ll try to go implement yourself. We can spot these “free lunch” seekers from a mile away ;)
For the brave and the strong we promise to work in the trenches with you. We will help you answer all of the above questions and more. We’ll help you develop and execute a strategy, plan, and integrated digital platform that will simply kick butt! If you don’t call us, call somebody. Your excuses are done. You can and will do this!

http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/are-you-really-ready-to-build-a-new-website-or-blog-0464177

Crossing the Borders—Some Tips for International Online Marketing

Points Farther Beyond
You start your business. People get to know it locally. It does well. You get a little bigger regionally, again with more success. Then you stretch out to clients across your country. Now you are really cooking, doing your job well, and bringing in the financial rewards. That’s it. There’s nowhere left to go. Right?
Well, not exactly.
If you reach this point in your online business career, you’ve done well. There’s often no reason to go beyond this point and you can continue running your business at that optimum level, on that desired scale. But if you want to go a bit bigger, if you want more exposure, you might start thinking about international online business marketing.
With the Internet being what it is today, there aren’t a lot of borders that can’t be crossed by a well-experienced online business pro. In fact, it’s quite a lucrative opportunity to take your products and services to clients across borders and overseas—you are creating a bigger name for yourself by doing so. But crossing borders of international business means that you will need some preparation to be ready for the international online business game.
Passport to Success
Research and homework are what you need to be doing in your role as an international business marketer, and you have to be prepared to do a lot of it. Which countries you want to target, what products or services do the citizens of that country crave, what sort of regulations there are for web site marketing: all of these matters need to be addressed if you are going to take to the high seas of international online marketing. Paying close attention to what regulations you have to follow and what certifications you may need before your venture begins are key here. For example, you might be able to market in Scotland a bit easier than, say, Myanmar.
Factored into all of this are costs. You are likely going to have to develop an international product line with new languages in order for the locals to understand, and you’ll likely have to develop this all under slightly different sales circumstances. This costs money, so be sure you check exchanges and learn how to charge, collect fees, invoice, etc. With your online marketing material, things like search engine optimization (SEO) costs and advertising fees, plus any taxes are all things you need to consider when it comes to costs.
New strategies of marketing are worth looking into as well. Other countries might respond better to a particular format of marketing than the ones you typically use. Your work in video search engine marketing (SEM) might have faltered at the local level, but producing a video under new international video SEO standards could reap new benefits due to those clients responding better to visual media than the local clients do, for example.
Guided Help and Assistance
You can’t predict a lot about the world these days, except the ironic fact that it’s unpredictable. The world changes all the time—politically, economically, and socially. The biggest problem you face with doing your online business internationally is trying to predict the future and then continually adapting your business to suit your predictions. Some independent business pros working on the Internet have a better natural skill for this than others. They can see new trends, often very early on, and are able to intuitively fix their business to match what’s in demand.
Don’t sweat it if you don’t have this sixth-sense-like ability. You’re only human. However, it never hurts to hire someone who does. Hiring out an SEM service that specializes in doing business online over multiple borders, even if only on a short-term contract, can help make your business formidable on international terrain. Like a traveler who’s new to foreign land, getting some outside, expert advice on digital international business trends can be an excellent guide to help your business last longer in new lands, with new people.
To get more help on all your SEO, web site design, and web traffic needs, e-mail Numero Uno Web Solutions Inc. at info@numerounoweb.com.

http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/crossing-the-borders-some-tips-for-international-online-marketing-0462359