September 10, 2009 at 2:16 pm
· Filed under online marketing, social networking ·Tagged b2b marketing, b2b social networking, how to get new business leads, LinkedIn, online marketing
Need to market your site to business prospects or looking in general for new business leads? Check out LinkedIn.com LinkedIn is a great business social networking site and currently has no restrictions on making contact with anyone that is listed in their directory. LinkedIn is the largest of the business social networking sites and the oldest, which means it contains the largest U.S. business database.
LinkedIn is free to use and can be used to hire new talent, connect with businesses or to market your business services. Recently, LinkedIn launched a new advertising component to their network that now allows businesses to market by targeting ads by titles, regions, and companies. Use LinkedIn now, before they start charging premiums for using the site.
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September 3, 2008 at 1:34 pm
· Filed under advice, brand marketing, marketing, online marketing, social networking ·Tagged advertising networks, advice channels, advice in politics, advice in religion, advice site, angstz.com, banner advertisements, brand marketing, branding, business advice, college student advice, facebook, fitness advice, job advice, MySpace, online advertising, online marketing, relationship advice, social networking, travel advice
Angstz.com is a new social networking advice site for ages 18 and up. What makes Angstz.com unique in the social networking space is its ability to target its membership with brand advertising. Angstz.com allows advertisers to run advertising targeted by Member Profile interests. The interests are divided by Advice Channels, which include Travel, Fitness, Gaming, Relationships, Business, Colleges, Jobs, Politics, Religion, and many others.
Angstz.com has found a way to target its users that Facebook.com, and MySpace.com have not been able to do with their own membership base, target based on interests.
Advertisers have a choice of either traditional banner advertisements or branding the entire Advice channels at AngstZ. Angstz.com is currently in public beta and advertisers can get reduce pricing, while the site is in beta.
Go to http://angstz.com.
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August 19, 2008 at 1:44 pm
· Filed under marketing, online marketing ·Tagged AshleyHartMarketing.com, b2c marketing, ComScore, Google, higher traffic rankings, MySpace, online marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search tips, SEO, Veoh, videos, YouTube
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the top buzz word on every online marketer’s mind right now, but what does it mean for your website and driving traffic to it? SEO in short, is how you optimize your site to have higher rankings in Google’s Organic Search results, which appear to the left of the screen. There are many techniques that you will have to consider to optimize your site, but if you don’t have a lot of money to hire an agency to help you with this process, one simple way that you can help your rankings, is to have as many links as possible from other sites pointed to your site; this is a guaranteed way to help boost your rankings. But how do you get your url placed on other sites? Try going to the top ComScore sites that accept urls from other websites, such as YouTube.
For example, if you are trying to market a product to a consumer audience, consider creating a short video about how to use the product and place that video on MySpace, YouTube, and Veoh. Make sure the video you create is fun and exciting to watch, otherwise, you won’t have anyone watching. Don’t make the mistake that many others do, that assume just because you built it, people will watch it. Make sure to include your url in the video as a tagline at the bottom of the screen, so viewers can go to your site, once they are done watching the video.
By doing simple guerrilla marketing techniques as the video example, will help increase your traffic and boost your rankings in Google’s Search.
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August 14, 2008 at 8:18 pm
· Filed under marketing, online marketing ·Tagged b2b marketers, b2b marketing, Google, Google Base, HowStuffWorks.com, online marketing, online media buying, PPC, SEM
If you are a B2B marketer, you know the rising costs on Google Search is making it tougher on your bottom-line ROI numbers. To reduce your costs and to stay within your marketing budget, check out Google Base. Google Base is currently in beta, but it’s a great product to test out, since it’s free to list your products and services and you can link it to a store easily for processing purchases. Google Base makes it easier for consumers to find products and services from B2B marketers that are more relevant to their searches.
Also, check out HowStuffWorks.com, if you are a marketer with products that need demonstrations. HowStuffWorks.com can create customized pages for marketers that want to brand their products and services in a non-traditional way to their target markets. The How Stuff team will maintain the page for you with their own editorial content, which is relevant to the products and services that you are marketing.
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April 16, 2008 at 1:56 pm
· Filed under brand marketing, entrepreneurs, marketing, online marketing, start ups ·Tagged Ashley Hart, AshleyHartMarketing.com, brand names, Internet marketing, online marketing, urls
Google, Twitter, Veoh, Facebook….do any of these names really describe what their online services are? Nope, so why not have fun with creating an off the wall name. Differentiate your name by making it fun, but make sure that the name is not too complicated that people can’t spell it. The key to creating a good name is simplicity. What all these hot online companies have are names that are simple and easy to spell in the url.
If you are creating a name for your new online service, just make sure that the name is simple, the service is good and the brand will create itself.
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April 11, 2008 at 9:55 pm
· Filed under entrepreneurs, marketing, online marketing, start ups ·Tagged advertisers, advertising, advertising networks, Darth Vader, Google, Luke Skywalker, online marketing, search, search engine marketing
Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google offered an advertising service to all types of advertisers that could advertise cheaply and effectively to reach their target markets. Advertisers could spend less than $100 per day and find quality traffic reaching their sites.
Well, as I mentioned, that was a long time ago. Now, the “Little Advertiser”, the guy that I consider to have advertising budgets that are below $5,000 per month, are having a hard time competing with advertisers with larger advertising budgets, due to Google’s attempts to “bring better quality traffic by raising the minimum cpcs to as high as $1, $5, $15, and $20 per click.” Well, how does that bring better quality traffic you ask?
The idea is, if an advertiser really values a specific keyword, they will pay anything for that keyword and thus drive out advertisers that are not willing or “can afford” that premium keyword, which gives the advertiser who bought the keyword an advantage to getting better traffic and better placement in Sponsored Advertising positions. But, the advertiser that has most likely bought this keyword has to have a larger budget than everyone else, which discourages the Little Advertiser from bidding on the keyword, thus knocking them out of the bid and creating a service that is meant only for advertisers with big budgets.
Google has forgotten that their ‘idea’ does not work for a new advertiser with a low or tight budget, since the new advertiser hasn’t had a chance to test and optimize their keywords to know which works best for them in driving quality traffic. For example, If I only have a starting budget of $500 and the cpc for my keyword is $10, then I will only get 50 clicks to my site and as you will learn, not all clicks reach our homepages and only a small percentage will convert, before being optimized correctly, hopefully. 50 clicks is not enough data to figure out which keywords worked the best. The Little Advertiser will not last long in spending money with Google or not even attempt to spend money at all, due to the high costs and little return. In essence, the Google that had created the fair, “ever good” online ad service for everyone that had created them, no longer exists. Google in its attempts to bring more money to itself, which let’s admit we are Americans so there is nothing wrong about that, but has destroyed what was so great about them…the democratization of buying online ad media.
So, what happened to that not evil Google that we all loved? They joined the dark forces of the high-price spending advertising world in order to get their marketing capitalization up. Let’s face it, the days of cheap advertising on Google is over and the ever good Google has become Darth Vader.
So, is there a Luke Skywalker out there that will save the Little Advertiser? I think so, like everything else in the Internet world, you just have to wait for the next ‘big thing’ and I believe it will be a new advertising network that will be cost-effective and driving quality traffic for an affordable price…and hopefully, without the click fraud. So hey Luke Skywalker, hurry up and launch!
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April 11, 2008 at 1:29 pm
· Filed under entrepreneurs, marketing, online marketing, start ups ·Tagged online marketing, search engine marketing, search tips, SEO
So, what is SEO and why should I do it? Simply, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique on how well you optimize your site to appear in the Natural/Organic search listings on Google, which in case you didn’t know, it’s the listings that appear on the left-side of the page.
It is important to learn how and to optimize your site for SEO for a few reasons:
1. SEO helps to reduce your costs for paying for advertising in Google or in other search engines. If you are coming up for free in the natural search listings for the keywords that best describe your business or service, why would you pay for advertising?
2. SEO helps you to understand how to position your site to your intended audience. You are forced to think about what keywords are significant and to apply it to your business description.
3. If you have a low budget and you are getting positioned well in certain keyword phrases, but not others, then you can concentrate your paid online advertising on the keywords that you are not doing well in for appearing in the organic search.
A simple way to optimize your site, is pay attention to the page title. When Google or other search engines crawl your site to list it, the search engines refer to the page title to help place it in the listings. So make sure, that whatever you think are the most important keyword phrases appears in your page title.
Good luck!
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April 1, 2008 at 4:28 pm
· Filed under brand marketing, entrepreneurs, marketing, online marketing, start ups ·Tagged entrepreneurs, online marketing
I went to an interesting meeting last night that was held for entrepreneurs for women in NYC. The group is sponsored by former students of Columbia University’s Business school and is held each month. It was my first time there and I must say it was interesting to be surrounded by other women, all of which were very intelligent and each being fortunate to have started successful entrepreneurial ventures. What I most found interesting was the range of businesses and the lack of knowledge of understanding online marketing, even today.
The theme for the meeting was ‘Marketing’ and the group invited a few people to speak about their different marketing paths. The majority of the questions that were posed by the group to the panel, was on understanding the buzz words of online marketing, such as Search, Paid, SEO, Natural and so on. By the end of the meeting, it was clear to me that these smart, knowledgeable women cannot be alone in understanding online marketing. If a group of such successful entrepreneurs couldn’t understand the basics of online marketing, have we taken it for granted as online marketers, that not everyone understands what it is or how to utilize it?
Not everyone understands how television commercials are made or where to find the best placements for their print ads, but everyone does know what these medias are and how it can serve them. I think as marketers, if we want to have real online marketing penetration, we have to stop taking it for granted that not everyone understands what is online marketing? I mean how could we, do we actually understand how Google ranks us in Organic Search?
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