Internet Marketing Overview

Forget about electricity, automobiles and airplanes.  The Internet is now considered American’s greatest gift to the world.  What began in the late sixties as an alternative communication channel for the military has quickly developed into a fullfedged business and economic system.

“Believe the hype. The Internet and the World Wide Web have become the most important new communication media since television, and ones that are fundamentally reshaping contemporary understanding of sales and marketing.” Jim Sterne.

During the late nineties, the Internet explosion saw all sorts of new companies rapidly developing products and services that capitalized on the Web’s potential. However, the push to market often resulted in poor planning and business models that neglected to include realistic business goals. Unfortunately, as the year 2000 ended so did many of the dot-com firms.

Companies now realize that web-based techniques and strategies must be approached as they would with any traditional marketing activity.  The same fundamental questions must still be answered:

Who are our customers?
What is the competition doing?
Which marketing mix strategies are most effective?
Are our business models realistic?
How and when we will make a return on investment? 

But there are many non-traditional things to learn about this new medium:

Search Engine Optimization — The best and most cost-effective way to get people visiting your website starts with getting your website listed on top search engines and directories.  But how is that best accomplished?  Do you concentrate on offsite or onsite optimization?  How do you find your keyword phrases?  And a host of other important questions about SEO.

Pay Per Click Advertising — Is the easiest and quickest way to create instant online presence. Campaigns can be created and launched in less then 2 weeks. Costs are determined by keyword search volume and keyword market value. But how do you ensure you get the most return on your investment?

Email Marketing — A custom newsletter design combined with a powerful email management system will make sending engaging emails, newsletters, or promotions that will stand out above the rest easier than you think!  But what is an autoresponder?  What is a drip campaign?

Advanced Web Statistics — Web statistics provides a lot more data than how many hits your site receives (what is a "hit" anyway?). Statistics allows you to easily measure vital information such as where your visitors are coming from, how long they stay, what pages are the most popular and on which pages visitors most commonly exit. The accuracy and configuration of these tools are critical in diagnosing problem areas on a website or determining the results of a campaign. 

This site will explore products and services to help you get the most from your Internet Marketing.

Marketing In and Around Your City

citiesInternet marketing has provided us with a great opportunity. We can now easily advertise our businesses to people all over the world. However, this means that a lot of businesses are neglecting to advertise specifically in their own cities. This is a mistake. Even if your business sells a lot of products online, you still want to develop a local base of consumers. For example, if you have a business in Tampa, you don’t only want to do Tampa internet marketing but also should look at marketing locally in and around the Tampa area.

There are two main reasons that it is important to advertise your business in your city. Both reasons relate to the importance of having a local consumer base. The first reason is that your local community is likely to be where you can get true support. Online shoppers may come back to your store again and again but it is unlikely that they feel any loyalty to you. Local shoppers who actually get to know you in person will feel a stronger sense of loyalty.

The other reason relates to this. It is important to customers that they feel that the businesses that they shop with are community-oriented. If you can show that you have ties to your community, you help to promote your business even outside of the community. That’s why it is important to make sure that you market in your home area even if you are doing a lot of your business on the Internet.

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Advantages of Mailing Lists

One of the options that you have for advertising your business is to buy mailing lists. These are lists of people to whom you can send advertisements about your business. This method of advertising is favored by many people over other advertising options.

Some of the advantages of mailing lists include:

  • Affordability. Many types of advertisements are expensive. In comparison, it’s fairly cheap to send advertisements out to a group of people on a mailing list.
  • Targeted advertising. Mailing lists are designed to group together people with similar interests. You purchase the lists that are most likely to have customers that would be interested in your business. This type of targeted advertising increases the likelihood that the ads will result in sales.
  • Measurability. You can create advertisements that must be submitted or mentioned in order to get a deal with your company. This lets you track the response rate (and therefore the success) of your advertising. Other forms of advertising are not as easy to track.

These are just some of the reasons that people choose to use direct mailing lists instead of advertising through other methods (such as television, radio or print magazines). They’re all good reasons to take into consideration if you have some advertising to do.

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A River Fountain Effect In the Forest a Good Idea?

I live out in Larkspur, Colorado, and our property has an awful lot of pine trees on it.  That’s beautiful, but now that we’re used to it, we’d now like to improve our backyard somewhat from just the native look.  The main reason is that when we bought the house the yard was completely overgrown with noxious weeks and scrub oak-even the dogs couldn’t get through it.  We had that all ground down, but four years later those weeds keep poking through, and native grass still has not taken over the big area smack dab right outside our living room window and deck.

We were thinking of having sort of a riverbed look put there with well placed xeriscape plants and a garden wall fountain.  Now, in that area, we don’t seem to get a big collection of pine needles as we do the rest of the yard.  But maybe that’s because the area is so barren that they all blow away.  What I want to know is this:  once we put in a water effect and rocks and especially one of those garden wall fountains, would that area now become so prone to collecting needles that I would spend the same number of hours picking out pine needles that I do now killing and pulling weeds?

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Technology Can Reduce Required Tasks

techOne of the best things about good technology is that we can use it to be more efficient. In many cases, a single piece of technology can do multiple tasks that previously had to be done by different machines or methods.

An example of this that comes to mind is the use of networked scanning systems which allow people to send and share scanned information throughout an entire computer network. This technology is capable of replacing multiple tasks including:

  • Faxing. There’s no need to have a fax machine anymore if you can scan and send documents from the same machine.
  • Mailing. Likewise, you don’t need to mail hard copies of most documents anymore since digital copies sent through a network’s scanner are typically sufficient.
  • Copying. You no longer have to make copies of information for everyone on a team since you can just hit send to all of the people who are supposed to receive it.
  • Filing. These scanners have a built-in digital filing system which can be adapted to a company’s needs. As a former receptionist, I appreciate the fact that there are fewer papers to physically file in offices these days!

This is just one example out of many where technology has been created to replace multiple devices with a single device to make things more efficient for all of us.

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Keeping Our Home Owners Association on Track

Home After moving into our condominium just five years ago, I realized that there were some problems.  Our association meetings were very quiet (since no one showed up) and nothing was really being done to take care of our homes.  The committee was run by just a couple of people and we were getting nowhere.

But just two years ago, I made the effort to bring some of my fellow tenants in our building and we were able to get it so I was voted in as president.  This meant that I had the opportunity to make some changes and really have the ability to make our home a better place.

Some of the things that I thought were priorities were that we needed better people in the homeowners association management positions.  With a little nudging and sweet talking, I was able to get some of the tenants that had been coming to the meetings to volunteer for some of the management positions.

We also started using some HOA software to help keep in touch with the tenants and since that time, we have an attendance rate of over 90% at every one of our meetings.  It has also helped to keep the meetings short and to the point as everyone knows the agenda for the meeting before they come to it.

Needless to say, the life in our condominium has been much better than when we moved here.  I just hope that it will continue after I step down at the end of this year.  But I guess we will have to wait and see what happens.

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