Last month an incident happened that made me realize how dependent I am to Google. It all started when I did my daily check of my largest ClickBank account. It appeared that I had made only 2 sales the prior day, something that rarely (if ever) happens.
Tag: Marketing
Something that freaks me out more than anything online is seeing some of my websites or pages disappearing from Google’s index from time to time. There is generally a good reason for that to happen and troubleshooting the issue quickly and thoroughly can help you save tons of “leaking traffic”. I had a similar problem over the weekend. Let me tell you what happened and how I fixed it.
We all have a vague idea of how Google Adwords works. You give them a list of keywords, create your ad and and set a maximum bid. But do you really know how the ad auction work? It’s all based on 3 simple criteria: your max bid, other advertisers max bid, and ad quality (CTR, relevance, landing page). Taking all these criteria into account, Google will then give you an ad rank, which will eventually determine your actual CPC. Sounds confusing? Then read on…
I was inspired to write this post by my friend Debi and the brand new Twitter account she created. Debi is the Director of Marketing at CrownAir Aviation, an aircraft maintenance company out of California and when she learned about Twitter, she thought it would be a great new social networking tool for her company so she started using the @crownair username.
Why buy a book on Amazon when you can get virtually the same information from a free ebook? While doing my daily readings of Tech and Marketing news, I stumbled upon this post by Chris Brogan. Topics go from viral marketing to blogging and Twitter. Enjoy!
- The New Rules of Viral Marketing – David Meerman Scott
- Marketing Apple – MarketingApple.com
- Masters of Marketing – Startup Internet Marketing
- Podcast Marketing eBook – Christopher S. Penn
- Google Adwords Secrets – SEOBook
- Get Viral Get Visitors – Stacie Mahoe
- Marketing With Case Studies – Dynamic Copywriting
- How to Write a Marketing Plan – Geisheker Group
- SEO for WordPress blogs – Blizzard Internet
- Social Web Analytics – Social Web Analytics
- Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter – Geekpreneur
- The Zen of Blogging – Hunter Nutall
- What is Social Media – iCrossing
- A Primer in Social Media – SmashLab
- Effective Internet Presence – Effective Internet Presence
- Introduction to Good Usability – Peter Pixel
- Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program – CRM Transformation
- We Have a Website. Now What? – Craig Rentmeester
- Blogs & Social Media – PRSA
- The Podcast Customer Revealed – Edison Media Research
Categories
What subliminal marketing can do to you
Studies have shown that everyday, each of us is subject to about 10,000 marketing messages, brands, logos and product offers. 10,000? Yes, that’s a huge number but when you think about it, it’s probably close to reality. Let’s see for a minute.
You wake up and turn off your SONY alarm clock, go to the bathroom and brush your teeth with your BRAUN electric toothbrush and use some COLGATE toothpaste. While you’re brushing, you look unconsciously look around you and see your HUGO BOSS cologne, your NIVEA lotion. You turn on your LG TV or your PIONEER radio and hear a commercial for Mossy NISSAN, another commercial for PAPA JOHN’S, and another commercial for BANK OF AMERICA. You get a SMS on your APPLE iPhone; it’s actually a special offer from MCDONALD’S because you agreed to receive SMS alerts from them. You make some STARBUCK’S coffee in your BODUM French press. It’s time to go to work. You grab your keys and walk through the parking lot. You walk by a FORD, a TOYOTA, a BUICK, a KIA, an AUDI (that’s mine;-). You get in, turn on the radio and hear 5 commercials for BUDWEISER, GEICO, BEST BUY, TARGET, and T-MOBILE. You drive off the parking lot and that’s when the marketing hammering really starts. You drive by hundreds of different cars (different brands), some of them with stickers for various brand names, you pass hundreds of billboards. OK, let’s stop here. I think you get it.
How much do you think you saw of all this? None? Guess again. Reality is you saw most of it, even if you’re not aware of it. Scary, huh!? But that’s what marketing is all about. It’s not because you didn’t read the billboard that your brain didn’t register the information. When you drive by this billboard, your eyes just lay on it without reading it, but your brain is smarter than you (haha) and takes a picture of the billboard, processes it in the background and register all the information without letting you know. Then you go to the store and without thinking about it, you grab some Gatorade. Why Gatorade? Maybe because it’s your favorite drink? Or maybe because you heard 21 commercials about it within the last week, saw 15 football teams with the Gatorade logos on their bottles, or maybe you just really like it… No! You don’t just really like it. You’ve been somewhat brainwashed by marketing genius to think you really like it.
I am writing all this because I read my friend’s blog post about subliminal marketing and there was this amazing, yet scary video about subliminal marketing. When marketers get caught at their own games, you know it’s solid!
These are some of the basics of marketing. I remember my first class of marketing in Business School. The teacher asked: “what is the goal of marketing?”. Most answers were: “advertising a product”, or “selling products”. The right answer is that the goal of marketing is to create a need! Do you really an iPhone? I mean, your old BlackBerry Pearl pretty much does it all. Well, marketing creates this need for the iPhone. And they’re so good at it they even make you wait for hours in line to get it…
Patricia Hursh wrote a good blog entry at SearchEngineLand.com about online registrations and downloadable asssets. Online efforts are designed to generate leads and a good way to generate those leads is to give an incentive to people to enter their contact information. Most of the time, the incentive will be a downloadable eBook, or white paper, or report; call it whatever you want.
Patricia presents 3 proven method to increase registrations:
- bundle information – you may want to mix what you’re offering. It can be a white paper plus the recording of a webinar. Or a report with a podcast. By doing so, you create a much higher perceived value.
- offer multiple media formats – you want to leave people the choice to either read, watch, or listen. Various formats can be, video clip, podcast, webcast, product demo or a simple text document.
- test names and descriptions – you can improve response rate by testing names and descriptions. By doing so, you might find out that “product demo” generates much more registrations than “virtual tour”
Categories
List of do follow blogs
Support the do follow movement. Here is a list of blogs that follow links for SEO love.
A funny video I wouldn’t have come across if it wasn’t for this site. First uploaded Monday, the video has clocked a staggering 1.4 million views this week, garnering it YouTube’s coveted “most viewed” spot. Levi’s says no special trickery was used during shooting. I believe them but I wouldn’t risk my balls at it….
Yesterday, Google officially announced the availability of AdSense for Search for use in combination with the powerful Google Custom Search service, something not possible until now and potentially very welcome to both small and large professional web publishers looking for further ways to optimize their content monetization opportunities while helping their readers find more easily the information they are looking for.
Overview of AdSense for Search Integration With Custom Search:
- Create a custom, personalized search engine in no time at all
- Customize the appearance of search results and ads
- Tune results and ads to your site’s content and audience
- Get more comprehensive site search results with improved indexing
- Earn revenue while helping your users find what they’re looking for
Here is a short video that tell you all about it…