I will give you a big hint as to what many of the most successful small businesses are doing right now to be successful and that is online marketing!

Your customers are online and searching before they pick up the phone or jump into their vehicles to go shopping.

According to searchenginewatch.com the average small business in the US spent $2327.00 on search advertising in the 3rd quarter of 2010.They claim that is an increase of 43 percent over the 3rd quarter of 2009.

Is there any wonder some businesses are getting new customers and others aren’t?

If you aren’t even involved in Search Advertising you are already losing a ton of business to your competitors.

And this report isn’t for small businesses that have any higher margins than others. Many of the businesses surveyed were typical small businesses such as automotive, roofing, and air conditioning companies.

The mantra for a small business has always been Location, Location, Location. And today that location is on the first page of the 3 major search engines,Google, Bing and Yahoo.

If your business is not there consider yourself if not doomed to at least on your way to oblivion in your niche.

You can’t compete.

Online Marketing Tips

Growth strategies facilitate the growth from the organization. Marketing warfare strategies are conjunction of marketing strategies and military strategies. A online marketing strategy or a mixture of them is chosen only after thorough …

Publish Date: 11/04/2010 16:29

http://www.articlebliss.com/Art/519060/53/Online-Marketing-Tips.html

Internet Marketing Solution-Give solution to the growth of your …

Internet Marketing Solution-Give solution to the growth of your business. If you want your internet marketing softwareservice to reach to large people then you should have good online internet marketing solution strategy which can help …

Publish Date: 11/03/2010 2:52

http://www.fashioninus.com/internet-marketing-solution-give-solution-to-the-growth-of-your-business.html

Demand for online marketing services increasing, survey finds …

Commenting on the results for Search Engine Land, Matt McGee noted while pay per click and email marketing has seen the least growth, there were few indications of a decrease in popularity. The timing of the report coincides with a …

Publish Date: 11/03/2010 7:42

http://www.clickthrough-marketing.com/demand-for-online-marketing-services-increasing-survey-finds-800214125/

By luckytom72 at 11/02/2010 13:39

By 4OnlineBusiness at 11/02/2010 3:37

Online Marketing is Growing Fast.mp4

Interactive spend will near 55 billion dollars by 2014, according to Forresters five year forecast. Watch this clip to hear from Vice President of Forrester Research Shar VanBoskirk, as she explains the projected growth and future trends of online ma…

Article by Carlos Gamez

Image by boboroshi

Is there a land of hope and plenty in this virtual financial dust bowl of the economy?

Yes! It is the land of milk and honey called the Internet.

Look at these stats:

Netflix Third-Quarter Profit Rises 26% on New Users*

Quote:
“Netflix Inc, the mail-order and online movie-rental service, reported third-quarter profit rose 26 percent as the pace of new subscriber additions accelerated. The shares surged.

Net income grew to $38 million, or 70 cents a share, from $30.1 million, or 52 cents, a year earlier, Netflix said today in a statement. Sales rose 31 percent to $553.2 million, beating analysts’ projections of $551.7 million. The company signed 1.93 million new users, up from 1.03 million in the second quarter.”

EBay results beat Street view**

Quote:
“(Reuters) – EBay Inc posted higher-than-expected earnings, helped by double-digit growth at PayPal and a modest rise in revenue at the e-commerce company’s main marketplaces unit.

The company said third-quarter net profit was $431.9 million, or 33 cents per share, from $350 million, or 27 cents per share, a year earlier.”

E*Trade Financial Profit Matches Estimates as Loan Loss Provisions Decline***

Quote:
“Third-quarter net income was $8.4 million, or 3 cents a share, compared with a loss of $854.7 million, or $6.74 a share, a year earlier, the New York-based company said today in a statement. That matched the 3-cent average analyst projection, according to a Bloomberg survey. Sales after loan-loss provisions are deducted totaled $337.4 million, beating the average analyst estimate by 7.1 percent, Bloomberg data show.”

The face of business in America is changing from a “let your fingers do the walking” culture to a “surf the Internet” culture.But this isn’t only an American phenomenon. It is happening in the UK as well

In this post Andrew Redfern, states:

Quote: “It has been predicted that in the run up to Christmas 2010, online sales will be up by 16% to £6.4bn on the same period of 2009. This will bring the total online sales for the year 2010 to £57.8bn compared to £49.8bn in 2009, supporting the trend towards the increase in online shopping which will certainly create a challenge to the dominance of the high street.

The prediction follows reports in June 2010 that online shopping had increased by 22% over the past year compared to 2008/2009. In September, online shopping sales had increased by 24% year on year as consumers started their Christmas and winter clothes shopping early. Chris Webster, head of retail consulting and technology at Capgemini noted an interesting observation that consumers are starting to spread the cost of Christmas over several pay checks and we may start to see an early peak in Christmas shopping spends.”
source:http://www.hitsearchlimited.com/news/9992901/

Even the Halloween shoppers are moving online in droves. Halloween shoppers where last minute buying is a monstous business yet more than 33% of Halloween shoppers will be moving onto the internet to find that perfect costume.

(source stella.louise http://www.savings.com/blog/post/Infographic-Halloween-Costumes-and-Other-Spooky-Spending-Trends.html

And for those of you who have been training all year for the biggest shopping battle of the year, Black Friday, you will be glad to know you can return to your Frappuccinos and scones. This year retailers such as Best Buy, ToysrUs, Walmart, Staples and more will be moving online to offer deals without the danger of concussions and lost limbs.

The recession may be causing offline business owners to see red, but online buiness looks Black as can be.

Article by : Carlos Gamez

Image by:James Cridland

*http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-20/netflix-quarterly-profit-rises-26-on-subscriber-additions-shares-advance.html

**http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69J5TO20101020

***http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-20/e-trade-financial-profit-matches-estimates-as-loan-loss-provisions-decline.htm

I actually did transfer one of our account and it is pretty smooth. Here is how it works. First you have the option to transfer to a current MSN account or to create a new one. Then all you have to do is to initiate the transfer by entering your Adcenter login info. The transfer will take less than a minute. Once it’s done, they offer you to download a spreadsheet of elements that were not compatible or to fix them right away with their wizard. Just use the wizard as you all you will mostly have to is reducing the length of a couple ads. And you’re all set!

Also, in case you are wondering, transferring your account doesn’t mean they will delete the data of your Overture Pay-per-click account right away. You will still be able to look at your historical data in your Overture account if you need.

Should you initiate the transition to MSN right away or should you wait until it becomes mandatory? Well, it’s up to you but I would suggest to do it  now as it will allow you to experiment with MSN’s pay per click management and be ahead of  everybody when the transition will be completed.

Not only can potential customers now see your rating but, if they click it, they will get redirected on a Google products page featuring customer reviews. This new feature should increase considerably conversions for websites with good ratings and, if you are already using Adwords pay-per-click but not Google Products yet, this should give you an additional incentive to use this service.

The 2 advertising platforms that are currently on the rise are Facebook and LinkedIn. Since they are pretty new, they are not saturated with advertisers yet, which might give you the first mover advantage, depending on your industry and niche. In addition, since they aren’t very competitive yet, the advertising costs are so far pretty low, thus affordable to everybody.

Which one should you choose? Well, it mostly depends on your target market.

Facebook, as you may already know, is now a leading online presence, with huge traffic, but it is mostly populated with the 20 to 40 year old crowd. One of the big advantage of their platform is that you can target your audience very precisely, whether it’s in terms of demographics, personal tastes, etc …

On the other hand, LinkedIn focuses on professionals, which will allow you to reach a wealthier and more educated audience. This is, as  a result, a great marketplace for higher-end products.

As you can see, Facebook and LinkedIn cater to different markets, allowing to reach a wide spectrum of potential buyers, thus providing a cost-effective alternative to the saturated Adwords and Overture platforms.

The way Adwords works is, you bid on certain keywords related to your website or business.  You say, “I am willing to pay this much money every time someone clicks on my ad”.  That amount varies dramatically based on your market and competition. It can be as little as 1 cent, or as much as 40 dollars or more.  Then, when someone searches for any of the keywords you have bid on, Google does a mini auction, determining who’s ad will show in what position.  The main things they look at when they do this auction is the keyword’s relevance to your website, the quality of your website itself, the quality and performance of your ad, and of course, your bid price.  Once the auction is completed, Google then assigns the different ads to the different positions and displays them.  Here’s the important thing though, you don’t pay what you bid – you pay based on the people below you’s bid.  Because of these other factors, like the quality of your website, past performance and keyword relevance, you can actually be paying much less than the people below you and show up higher than them!

Not all PPC programs work this way, but many of the most popular ones do.  There are many good reasons to not only use Google’s adwords, but use the other programs as well.  You can often get better traffic for less from these other programs.  But as far as sheer quantity, Adwords is the best.

I find myself asking the same AdWords questions to every potential client.  In the hopes of improving everyone’s campaigns, I will list my general questions here, along with the typical answers I receive.

1.  Are you happy with your results?  Is your campaign profitable?

Normal Answer:  “Not really – no.” I haven’t spoken to a person yet that was happy with their results, although I have seen profitable yet wasteful ones. I have seen one client throwing away thousands of dollars a week.  That account had so many things wrong that I just told them to turn their account off.

2.  Who set up your AdWords account?

Normal Answer:  “I/We did.  Why?”

If the client set it up themselves, that tells me that there are most likely penalties or mistakes that need to be fixed.  It also gives me an idea of their skill level and what the rest of the answers to my questionnaire would be.

3.  What is your quality score?

Normal Answer:  “What is ‘quality score’?”

(This is a number from 1 to 10 that measures the “quality” of a given ad)

Most clients don’t know where this information is since Google hides this information from view.

If the quality score is below 7/10,  you are incurring penalties and don’t even realize it (see chart)

4.  Where are you sending people that click on your ads?

Normal Answer:  “Our home page”. The correct answer, of course, is a dedicated landing page for the specific keyword group.

If you sell computer supplies, you may have a keyword group called “keyboards”.  You would then want to send someone to the web page:  http://www.mydomain/keyboard which shows them all your keyboards, NOT to your home which makes them take an additional step to find what they need.

5.  What is your CTR (Click-Through-Rate)?

Normal Answer: “Not good – less than 1%”. By itself, this statistic doesn’t mean much.  Usually, the higher the CTR, or the higher the number of users click your ad vs. just look at it, the better your Quality Score, the cheaper your ad cost, and more profitable your campaign.

6. What is your conversion rate?

Normal Answer: “What is conversion rate?” (This is the ratio that measures the number of people that complete a purchase or signup to a newsletter vs. the amount of people that just click your ad and do nothing.)  Since understanding conversion rate is paramount to having a successful keyword campaign, this is a bad sign.

Once you have enough conversions, you can start to weed out keywords that under-perform, and find more that do.

7.  What are you setting as your “goal” to base your conversion on?

Normal Answer:  “When they buy our product.” This is a legitimate solution, however, we additionally always try to capture the “lead” goal so that we can capture the users identity so that we can email them later if they don’t complete the purchase.

8.  How many ads do you have running for each ad group?

Normal Answer:  “One.” You should always be running at least 3 ads for a given ad group.  At any given time, you can throw out the worst performing one and replace it with one you hope will beat the other two.

9.  What is your budget?

There is no correct answer to this question.  This is just to flesh out whether they are turning their account on or off repeatably (a big no-no), or hitting their maximum limit for the day at 2 AM.

10.  Are you using negative keywords?

Normal Answer: “Huh?”  Negative keywords allow you to NOT bid on certain words that show up in a phrase.  A common problem are song or band names.  You may want to bid on the keyword “cocaine” as in “cocaine abuse”, but you don’t want “cocaine clapton mp3″.

A major part of optimizing a campaign is finding and using negative keywords to limit any wasted funds.