Free Tools To Measure Social Media

Below are the 14 free tools to measure social media influence on the World Wide Web. 

SEMRush: What does your site rank for?

Just plunk your blog or website URL into the search field a top of the page and SEMRush will show the keywords it ranks highest for. SEMRush will show you what you rank for, what your competitors rank for, what Google AdWords you might consider buying and the terms you should be focusing on in your blog posts.

Woopra: How are your visitors behaving?

We like what we’ve seen of Woopra, a Web analytics tool that provides real-time data about how users are interacting with your site. While the visitor moves through your site, you can see where she came from, her approximate location, and the actions she performs and where she goes off to next. Woopra has a freemium model: While the free version of Woopra is severely limited, you may soon want to move up to the Bronze ($4.95 per month) or Silver edition ($14.95 per month), which let you segment your visitors (say, referrals from Facebook, Twitter or StumbleUpon), print out customized reports and track trends over time. Like SEMRush, Woopra helps you get your own house in order before moving on to your outposts on the social Web.

Klout: Scoring across three networks

Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as re-tweets, follower counts, list memberships, and unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Facebook Insights: Stats you can use

Facebook beefed up its Insights service this year, to good effect. Now Facebook Insights resembles Google Analytics in many ways. As a Page admin, your dashboard gives you access to a trove of data: daily active users, monthly active users, daily new likes, and daily interactions such as comments, geographic location of your visitors (broken down by country, city and language), external referrals, internal link traffic and more. When you have spikes of user engagement, Insights will show you caused them. It’ll show you what content most interests your readers, and it’ll let you and your team understand and analyze growth trends. One big limitation is that you can’t access a lot of the data older than a week.

Bit.ly: Are your promotions working?

Our favorite URL shortener, bit.ly, provides double duty by offering analytics and click data for every link shortened. Click data lets you see how effective your social media promotions are. Nothing much, just log into account to see click through numbers. A new feature, bundles, lets you group similar links together. Both the free version of bit.ly and Bit.ly Pro handle our metrics needs without the need to upgrade to Enterprise ($995 per month).

TubeMogul: Who’s watching your videos?

If you’re familiar with TubeMogul, you probably think of it simply as a way to upload your videos to multiple sites, saving you the hassle of uploading videos over and over. But TubeMogul has developed a rich set of metrics lately, letting you see stats on how many people have watched your videos across networks. Real-time analytics include views, viewed minutes, audience geography, embeds, referring sites and search terms and more, all via your dashboard. It helps us to cross-compare by category, content delivery network, advertising mix or video player. And it’s free!

YouTube Insight: What parts of your video are ‘hot’?

YouTube Insight is a self-service analytics and reporting tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the audience for the videos that you upload to the site. Use the information to analyze marketing your efforts — both on and off YouTube — and determine how best to optimize your campaigns. Watch the video (natch) and see metrics around views and popularity, how people get to your site, the content clicked on, average pages per visit, which parts of your video are “hot” and “cold,” demographic information and community engagement.

Google Analytics: Powerful & easy to use

Google Analytics has become such an indispensable part of the analytics landscape that it’s not surprising we get a little blasé about it. But let’s not forget the genius of this tool: You get super-rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness — for free. Create better-targeted ads, track sales and conversions, measure your site engagement goals, track Web-enabled phones and mobile apps, integrate business info and develop applications that access Google Analytics data.

Alexa & Compete: How do you stack up?

When was the last time you looked to see how your site or blog was doing over time? Google Analytics will provide traffic data more accurately than analytics services like Compete, Quantcast and Alexa, but these firms also show trends, a different set of demographics guesswork and, most pointedly, how your site measures up against your competitors’. Alexa offers search analytics showing the top queries driving traffic to your site from search engines.

Feedburner: Are your feeds radiating out?

Now owned by Google, Feedburner is the easiest way to roll your own feed — and then sit back and watch the stats roll it. It’ll tell you how many people have subscribed to your blog or site — or even a section of your blog, if you set it up that way. Dig deeper and you’ll find your Feed Stats Dashboard, revealing average subscribers, reach, popular feed items (recently and all time) and other interesting factoids. For instance, we didn’t know Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television was aggregating Socialbrite’s open content via our feeds until we spotted it in Feedburner.

Twitter tools! A wealth of options

There are a ton of third-party Twitter apps to measure your Twitter grandiosity. Here are a few of my favorites:
Twitalyzer works for any Twitter account and gives you information about their impact score (percentile score) and the type of influencer they are.
Grader.com is a suite of tools that helps you measure and analyze your marketing efforts. It shows the bio, location, history and the number of followers of the Twitter user you’re researching, and more.
Twittercounter lets you count registrations and comments on a particular campaign you’re running.
Backtweets shows you how many people you reach on Twitter and helps you understand how people interact with your brand and your content.
Type your Twitter ID into Twitterholic (where you can also see the most popular Twitter users in your city) or Twinfluence or Twittorati to see what kind of impact you’re making.
How far did your tweet travel? tweetreach offers reach metrics, statistics and analysis for marketing and PR professionals. Retweetrank, Tweetmeme, Twitturly and Retweetist also measure how often you get retweeted.
Tweeteffect determines which tweets make you lose or gain followers.
My Tweeple is a basic tool that lets you manage who you’re following and who’s following you.
Twittersheep analyzes your follower profiles to assess their likelihood of engagement.
Plus, a whole lot of other Twitter analytics apps.

PostRank: A modest tracking dashboard

PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, Diggs and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s suited to blogs and websites with a lot of content. Under its free plan, you can Track and compare your sites and your competition — up to five sites in all — to get the full picture of your social engagement. You can also track your static and offsite content (PDFs, YouTube videos, SlideShare content) for up to 10 sites.

Flickr: Are your pictures trending?

Flickr was one of the earliest social networks to provide metrics about how many people are viewing your photos. For instance, you’ll be able to see such statistics as views for your photos, sets and galleries — today, yesterday and all time (3.4 million for me, how about you?) — Your most viewed photos and videos and how many have been geo tagged or have comments. I just wish Flickr would tell you how many people are embedding your photos on their sites.

Soovox: For brand lovers

Soovox has a slightly different take on the Klout model: Discover your Social IQ, share your likes and earn rewards. Your “social influence quotient” measures your online social presence footprint and assigns it a value that gets translated into rewards. The money you make can go to your organization or to your favorite charity. Soovox is more geared to individuals who like to share their opinions about brands and products they love, but it’s worth a look.

Other tools - A worth look

Here are some other metrics tools we like. Not all of them are free:

Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox, aimed at helping web publishers who deal with search engine optimization and Internet promotion of websites. Seoquake allows users to assess important SEO parameters of an Internet project on the fly.

Social Report offers a social network performance tracking, monitoring and reporting tool. It comes with a 30-day trial and prices starting at just $9/month.

Foursquare and Yelp provides business dashboards that have the ability to review check-in data and other metrics.

Technorati and BlogPulse are blog search engines. Look for metrics around bloggers’ influence and authority.

Google Trends provides information on Web search trends around key terms and topics. It shows how often your topics have appeared in Google News stories and in which geographic region people have searched for them the most.

Xinureturns provides a dashboard overview of your site’s standing in social media. Run a report and you’ll receive information on Technorati, Googe PageRank, Diggs and even backlinks to your website.

Tribe Monitor is a social statistics aggregator that helps yo keep track of your fan base on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

Source: www.socialbrite.org

How to Make Money From Blogs 

- Direct Methods

Different models that bloggers are using to make money from blogging into two areas – Direct and Indirect methods.

Direct Income Earning Methods - these methods are where a blogger earns an income directly FROM their blog.

Indirect Income Earning Methods – these methods are where a blogger earns an income BECAUSE of their blog.

Direct Income Earning Methods for Bloggers;

1. Advertising

There are many ways of selling advertising space on a blog (this could almost be a series of its own) but some of the different advertising options that I see bloggers experimenting with include:

Contextual Advertising – Programs like AdSense and YPN (beta) are very popular with bloggers and are probably the most common income stream being used by them today (MSN are developing one too). In short – these programs scan the content of your blog to assertion what its topic is and attempt to put contextually relevant ads (text and image) onto your blog. They are generally simple to use and involve pasting some code into your blog’s templates. 

Payment is on a ‘per click’ basis (referred to as CPC or ‘cost per click’ ads). Contextual ads suit blogs that have a particular niche topic, especially if it has some sort of commercial angle (i.e. it has products and services associated with it). They are not so good with ‘general’ type blogs (i.e., many topics) and/or political/spiritual blogs which argue just one side of a case (this confuses AdSense). I write much more extensively on how to use AdSense on your blog here.

Other CPC Advertising – There are a variety of other ad systems that pay on a per click basis which are not contextual in nature (which is important as systems like AdSense do not allow you to run contextual ads on the same page view as them). These systems include Chitika’s eMiniMalls (aff) which I reviewed here.

Impression Based Ads – Impression based ads pay a small amount for every person who views the advertisement. The amount that they pay varies from program to program (and ad to ad) and is generally a fraction of a cent. There are a variety of ad systems around like this including Fastclick (aff) which I reviewed here and Tribal Fusion. Impression based ads won’t earn you much if you don’t have a lot of traffic but can be great if you do.

Blog Ads – BlogAds have become something of an institution when it comes to advertising on blogs. They traditionally have had a focus upon monetizing political blogs but are expanding their focus lately. The beauty of them is that bloggers set their own rates and can accept or reject advertisers that apply to them to be featured on their blogs. These ads put the control of what ads show and how much they earn into the hands of the blogger. 

The downside is that if you price them too high you could never have any ads showing at all. They can also be difficult to be accepted into as a publisher as these days they only accept people into the system if they have someone who is already in ‘sponsor’ or recommend the new publisher.

Text Ads – Another increasingly popular way to sell ads on your blog is to look into text links. The beauty of these are that they don’t take up much room and that depending upon the system you choose to run them you can have control over which advertisers you accept and reject. AdBrite (aff) is one such system that gives you control in a similar way to BlogAds in that you set your own prices and approve all ads. They are also other formats of ads. Text Link Ads (aff) is another text link seller that more and more bloggers are using. The beauty of both of these systems is that they have a pool of advertisers already so you don’t have to go looking for your own advertisers. 

Their systems are also both very automated and are just a matter of pasting some code onto your blog. I use them both and while they don’t earn anywhere near as much as AdSense or Chitika for me they add up over the year and have done well for me. Bidvertiser and Adzaar are other system that I know are popular with some (we’ve used them quite successfully on b5media although I have little personal experience with them).

RSS Ads – An increasingly popular way for people to read blogs is via RSS. As a result publishers and ad providers have been keen to find ways to place ads in feeds. These attempts have been met with a variety of success levels. I’m yet to hear of too many people making big dollars with RSS ads yet but the ad systems seem to be improving. 

AdSense offers RSS ads to some of its publishers (you have to have a certain number of impressions first) as does YPN. Feedburner is a tool I’ve used to help monetize my own feeds – they give publishers three options (1. AdSense if you’ve been approved by them, 2. Amazon affiliate program and 3. If you have a lot of subscribers (over 500) they have an Ad Network). Pheedo is another system that you might like to try (although I’ve not had much experience with it).

Other Ads Systems – In addition to the above systems are many other advertising options which we’ve not had experience with and so won’t personally recommend. I’m sure they are worth experimenting with however as I see many of them being used by bloggers every day. Here they are in no particular order:

AdGenta, CrispAds, Clicksor, Intelli Txt, Peak Click, Double Click, Industry Brains, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, AVN, Pheedo, Adknowledge, YesAdvertising, RevenuePilotTextAds, SearchFeed, Target Point, OneMonkey, and TextAds. Feel free to add your own and tell us how you’ve gone with them in comments below.

2. Sponsorship

Another form of advertising that a smaller number of bloggers are using is to find their own advertisers. All of the above systems have the advantage of finding you advertisers (or at least assisting in the automation of ads to your blog) but as your blog grows in profile and influence you might find other options for private deals come up.

The big blog networks have people dedicated to the task of finding advertisers (often working through ad agencies) but smaller bloggers might find this worthwhile also. I’ve been selling ads on my Digital Camera Blog for two years now and as it’s grown in traffic and profile and managed to attract larger companies (who are willing to pay more) to buys space. Currently the blog features ads from Adobe who have bought a combination of banner, newsletter and text ads.

The key if you’re going to take this approach is to target advertisers in your niche that have products that closely relate to what you’re writing about. There are a variety of ads that you can offer them including banner ads, buttons, text links, mentions in newsletters and even individual post sponsorships. I would highly recommend that you always make it clear to readers that your post is a sponsored one when you’re writing a sponsored post.

3. Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are where you take a commission for referring a reader who purchases a product or service to a company. Probably the most common of these for bloggers is Amazon which has tens of thousands of products that you can link to (I reviewed it here). Other affiliate programs that represent many different companies and products include Linkshare, Commission Junction and Clickbank.

Affiliate programs take some work if you want to get the most out of them (perhaps more work than advertising) but can be lucrative if you match the right program with the right blog/topic. If you want to explore affiliate programs more you might like to read 10 tips for using affiliate programs on you blog.

4. Selling/Flipping Blogs

The idea of selling (or flipping) your blog is one that many bloggers have in the back of their minds for ‘one day’ but in reality it is not something that is overly common… yet (I think this is changing). Probably the largest sale is that of Weblogs Inc (a network of blogs) which sold to AOL for a reported $25 million. Of course this is the stuff that most of us can only dream of – but there are examples of smaller blogs being sold, either privately or via auctions on sites like eBay and SitePoint. One such auction was that of the Blog Herald which took place here.

Starting a blog with the main goal of selling it down the track is one that I’ve heard of a number of bloggers doing but few have been successful. Rather than starting with this intention I think if you start with the intention of building a quality site that has a large readership and it’s own good income stream you are more likely to find buyers down the track.

5. Donations and Tip Jars

A very small number of blogs have a history of making good money with these (Jason Kottke being one of them). To be successful with asking for money from readers you’ll want to have a large and loyal readership (and a rich one might help too). Most bloggers just don’t have the critical mass or the cult following to make it work.

6. Merchandise

Another method that some blogs use with reasonable effect is to sell T-Shirts, Mugs, Stickers etc with the blog’s name, logo and/or taglines on it. This is another idea that will probably only will work if you either have a brilliantly designed merchandise range and/or you have a cult-like status as a blogger with some fanatical readers who are a little obsessive about your blog. Some blog topics lend themselves to this more than others.

7. Selling Subscriptions

The idea of charging readers for content is one that surfaces from time to time. While there are numerous websites around the web that do this successfully (community membership sites) I’m yet to see many (any) blogs do it well. The problem that most bloggers who have tried it have run into is that most topics that you could think to start a blog about already have free sites available. To make it succeed you would need to have some sort of premium/exclusive content and/or real expertise on a topic.

8. Blog Networks

Another emerging income source for bloggers is blog networks. There are two ways to make money here. Firstly you can start a network and contract bloggers to write for you or secondly you might like to join a blog network as a writer. There are many networks out there and all have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’ll attempt to write a post on what to think about when you’re looking at whether to join a network later in this series.

Source: http://www.problogger.net

Disadvantages of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Like with anything else in internet marketing pay-per-click advertising would have its own set of pros and cons.

Internet marketing is getting more and more competitive each and every day. Because of this reason, why a lot of marketers are finding various types of marketing campaigns for their products and services. Pay-per-click advertising is both easy and quick to put into operation. It also has the potential to be an extremely cost effective means of advertising, but only if approached with the right strategy and knowledge.

As easy as it is there are still many online marketers who seem to give up at the first sign of difficulty without realizing the wonders of pay-per-click advertising. We hear the similar issue all the time from new marketers: “How come my click-through is not converting?”

As good as it seems pay-per-click advertising has its own set of disadvantages and drawbacks. Let us go over some of these things so that at least you have a better picture of pay-per-click advertising.

Easy

You might be thinking that being an easy strategy should not be a disadvantage. There are two sides to this, yes, it is true that pay-per-click advertising is easy to get going, however it does not mean that success is on your side right away.

Before you fall into pay-per-click advertising you have to do careful keywords research to ensure you are not going to be part of an overflowing market. A sorry excuse for a copy will surely affect your ad’s ranking which means you are spending unnecessarily.

Click fraud

To explain this in non-technical language, click fraud happens when your competitors click on your advertisements because eating up your budget. Click fraud in per-pay-click advertising can be done by an actual person or it could be done by a program that is designed to click on ads without detection.

Be sure that you check the conversion rate of your pay-per-click with each search engine that you use. After getting this information drop whatever it is that is not doing well and save some money in the process.

Do not go thinking that since Google is the biggest search engine right now that you should only use that. It sure is big but together with that, there is a lot of competition. You stand a better chance of getting conversions if you use small pay-per-click programs, and not to mention it is less expensive.

Poor keyword research

What are your prospects doing to find products like yours? Do you know what they are typing in that search box? If you are guessing as to what that is then you are costing your business unnecessary expense.

A well-researched keyword phrase will clearly show what the main purpose of the search is. So when you think you have found a keyword, ask yourself, “What problem is this person trying to solve? What are his issues?” If you are not able to answer those then what you have is too general so you have to research again otherwise you are going to lose money.

If you are just starting out you might want to try out Google Adwords because that is for free and it can help by providing you an amazing range of information that will help you zero in on inexpensive, targeted keywords that will bring in people with a problem that your product can solve.

Scatter gun Ads

Every advertisement that you think of should be based on one keyword phrase that is relevant to one specific problem. Using an advertisement that is too general might result to clicks that are not valid. What do I mean? Someone might click it but in reality, these people are actually looking something entirely different.

In writing your advertisements make sure that you do it right, spend some time on it. Write as if you are the one with problems that needs resolution. Use your keyword in the header and try to integrate it to the body of the advertisement. In the body of your advertisement, be sure to mention the product benefits instead of just mentioning the features.

Unrelated landing page

People click on your advertisement because they want to know if you can solve their problems, so if you link unrelated landing pages and prospects see it is a different thing then they will for sure close that window and never click on your advertisement ever again.

If your prospects click, on an advertisement, that sells handbags and then they are taken to a landing page with all sorts of other products, or they have to figure out how to navigate to get to the handbags section then chances are you have lost a sale.

Click-through cost money and conversions keep you in business

So be sure that you make the most out of each click you receive. The conversion of each click is what keeps your business going.

Continuous work

If your advertisement is not working, test other advertisements against it by modifying some elements and running them against each other. Think of your original ad the control ad, change the headline, and see if the new ads yield better results. Keep doing this until you get the results that you want.

Source: internethomebasedbusiness.startup-internetbusiness.com

Benefits of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Companies of all sizes in all industries are taking advantage of pay per click advertising’s immediate and quantifiable results.  Pay-Per-Click (PPC) delivers highly targeted pre-qualified traffic and your company’s message is delivered the very customers already searching for your product or service.  

Another PPC benefit is that it also offers the unique ability to test messaging, enhance both on- and off-line branding, and quickly adjust to shifting market conditions. 

Immediate Search Visibility – 

If your company does not have strong search engine visibility, pay per click marketing is the fastest and easiest way to show up on the search engines. SEO Inc’s Paid Search managers can launch a new campaign in a matter of days and optimize your campaigns to drive pre-qualified visitors to your site.

Reduce Costs – 

From proven keyword expansion and bid management techniques to ad testing and landing page optimization, through the effective keywords advertiser will get his own targeted customer to his brand.  Whenever the user use the keyword to search any on internet the Ad will display on the page.  Also advertiser will only pay for clicks not for any impressions; this will help to advertiser for reducing cost.

Maximize ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – 

Working closely with ad campaigns we will get to know the performance of the Ads and collected leads will maximize the Return on Ad spends to the advertiser.  This enables us to get more clicks for the advertising dollar and to deliver the highest quality traffic.

Increase Depth of Keyword Targeting – 

If you have a smaller website but want to target a large amount of keywords, you will need to use PPC advertising. Organic search will only support keywords that show up on your website while with PPC you can target as many keywords as you want.

Reinforce Branding – 

Supplement already strong search engine rankings with PPC and you control more of the search engine results pages (SERP’s) for searches on your branded keyword phrases. Branded keywords are often inexpensive and provide excellent opportunities for testing and also remarketing.

Re-marketing – 

Every marketer knows that the more a potential customer is exposed to your brand and messaging over time, the more likely they will become a customer. Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who've previously visited your website as they browse the Web. Find out more about Re-marketing.

Testing Capabilities – 

Pay per click marketing offers a tremendous opportunity for marketers to test new ideas whether it is testing a marketing message prior to a new product launch, experimenting with offers or price points, or just improving an existing PPC campaign. 

Increase Organic Click Through Rates – 

Once the adopted keywords are search organic we will get a highest rate of valid click through rates from search engines,  but the only one thing is it will take more time and depends on our update of the websites or landing pages.

Local to Global Exposure – 

One of the best PPC benefits is the ability to choose where your ads are served by geography. If you are large or small and want to grow, PPC allows you to target new geographic or demographic markets. . It doesn’t matter if you have a small local business or if you are major global brand, PPC has benefits for all types of companies of all sizes.

Source: www.seoinc.com

PPC - Pay per click

Pay per click (also called Cost per click) is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.

Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC "display" advertisements are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads. This approach differs from the "pay per impression" methods used in television and newspaper advertising.

In contrast to the generalized portal, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, PPC implements the so-called affiliate model that provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites.

The affiliates provide purchase-point click-through to the merchant. It is a pay-for-performance model: If an affiliate does not generate sales, it represents no cost to the merchant. Variations include banner exchange, pay-per-click, and revenue sharing programs.

Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser's keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site.

Among PPC providers, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model.

The PPC advertising model is open to abuse through click fraud, although Google and others have implemented automated systems to guard against abusive clicks by competitors or corrupt web developers.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Trends in Online Advertising

Following up on the Top 10 Tech Trends Of The Decade and drilling down on trend item five, in this post we’re going to look at the evolution of online advertising and what we might expect to see in the coming decade. At present, the online advertising industry is at $55 billion, and mobile advertising is at $2 billion. With the rise of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, mobile advertising will gain momentum.

Below are the top ten trends;

1. Paid Search Rules:

Google ruled the past decade with paid search advertising. There is still no better, more effective form of advertising on the Internet. Keywords are becoming expensive, but if you know what you are doing, you will still be able to find cost-effective ways of acquiring customers using PPC.

2. Organic Search Gains Momentum:

Increasingly though, marketers are starting to understand the importance of organic search. Almost 90% of the entire Web’s search traffic flows through organic search, yet the search marketing industry are generally obsessed with PPC. This decade, some sanity and rationalization will take the place of this weird dichotomy.

3. Display Advertising and Vertical Ad Networks:

The best trend I have spotted during the past decade is the rise of vertical ad networks like Glam Media, Federated, HotChalk, Travel Ad Network, and others that focus on specific verticals. This is pretty much the only way for advertisers to do brand advertising across the fragmented spectrum of blogs and other online hangouts for audiences, including social media. In the coming decade, vertical ad networks will get better at providing more value to advertisers through advanced technology for audit, measurement, analytics and optimization, as well as richer engagement capabilities like interactive and video ads.

4. Social Media Advertising:

Social networks, especially the big ones like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, have a lot of information about individuals. They have not yet figured out ways to monetize this information and create a safe, non-intrusive, yet personalized framework through which advertisers can do high-precision targeting. This is definitely coming in the next few years.

5. In-Game Advertising:

Consumers are spending excessive amounts of time online playing games. We foresee a significant uptick in in-game advertising this decade.

6. Advertising Apps and Games:

Now that apps have taken over the mobile web, and is even coming on to PCs, advertising apps and games are a natural progression. Marketers will see it is obvious that instead of a 30-second prime-time advertising slot, a branded app or game that can engage users for three minutes is a far better use of ad dollars.

7. Interactive Infomercials:

Television infomercials are an effective way to market products. But the Internet offers significantly more cost-effective and targeted ways to market using the same concept, but delivered through display ad networks, viral videos, and so on.

8. Video Advertising:

Whether they are about political campaigns or consumer brands, YouTube videos have a viral power, and everyone knows it. This decade, we will see a huge amount of creativity deployed on this art form.

9. Mobile Advertising:

The rise of the mobile Web – through mobile apps on smart phones and tablets in the West, and through the avalanche of cell phone adoption in the emerging markets from Brazil to Indonesia – opens the door for mobile advertising as a category to gain tremendous momentum this decade. In particular, location-based advertising, coupons, and special offers at highly targeted and precise moments – all look very promising.

10. Better Analytics, Optimization, and Targeting:

Powering all this and more, we will see a vastly more sophisticated analytics, optimization, and targeting infrastructure that doesn’t quite exist today. There will be innovation in affordable tools to optimize PPC, SEO, mobile advertising, social media advertising, and every other conceivable online customer acquisition method.

Source: www.sramanamitra.com

Types of Internet Marketing:

The various types of Internet marketing are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

In this kind of marketing, the website is made more search engine friendly so that when a specific keyword or search is typed by the user, the site will make it into the top search results. This type of Internet marketing is more appropriate method to attract the potential customers.

Pay-Per-Click: 

Under this category, the advertiser pays the search engine certain amount to get the address of his website featured separately if a keywords relating to his industry of sector is typed in.

Affiliate Marketing: 

It is a kind of marketing wherein a company hires other companies or websites known as affiliates and entrusts them with the responsibility of marketing the product. The affiliates are paid commission. The affiliates can host a website in which it may display the banners or logos of the company. If the visitor clicks on this banner, they are redirected to the sponsor's site. The affiliate is paid a commission.

Online Auctions: 

Online auctions are just as the auctions that take place in the real world. Items are put up for sale and the seller quotes the minimum price. Interested buyers then start quoting their price. And the item is sold to the highest bidder. The buyers in case of online auction can be form any part of the world

Banner advertising: 

Here banners of the advertiser are displayed on the website. The advertisers pay a certain amount of money to get the banner displayed on the website for a certain period of time. The banners are usually visually appealing to attract the potential customers. The respond it will get depends upon the website it has been displayed. Again there is no guarantee that the prospective customers will view it.

Directory Listings: 

It is a service wherein sites are placed in special categories in a directory. Such kind of service can be free or fee based. The listing can be made in yellow pages or directories such as Yahoo.

Internet marketing is thus a new age marketing that provides the sellers with never seen before kind of opportunities. Since it is online, it is much cheaper than traditional methods of marketing and can be done by even a small-scale enterprise.

Ethical E-mail marketing: 

There are many web applications which allow website owners to maintain the subscriber database and allow personalized newsletters to be sent in a jiffy. Usually marketing strategies are impersonal in nature. For e.g. an ad shown on TV is simultaneously watched by many. Email marketing gives an opportunity for personally addressing the recipient. If handled tactfully, email marketing can be used to successfully stroke the emotions of the targeted audience and thus elicit positive response. It can be used to send information about the latest product information, launches, beta products, and updates on service workshops, seminars etc to the subscribers.

Source: www.alzains.com

What is Online Marketing?

Introduction

Online marketing or internet marketing is a relatively new, but rapidly expanding and fundamentally important aspect of strategic implementation. Indeed in many organizations, it may be regarded as a functional aspect of marketing strategy and certainly of the business model.

Final Touch Inc considers online marketing very different from ordinary business marketing and brings six categories of organic benefit: costs are reduced, capability is increased, communications are refined, control is enhanced, customer service is improved and competitive advantage may be achieved depending on the competitor’s reaction.

Analysis

Online marketing processes include not only e-marketing and sales, but supply chain and channel management, manufacturing and inventory control, financial operations and employee’s workflow procedures across an entire organization. Essentially e-business technologies empower customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, vendors, and partners by giving them powerful tools for information management and communications.

Online marketing or e-marketing is always confused with e-commerce. Any business marketing using online media is known as e-marketing, while on the other spectrum, if there is financial transaction involved with the electronic process using internet technologies, it is e-commerce.

Since a web presence is essential for a business to grow in all dimensions, a dynamic website, blog and social media activity, is the best way to develop sell your products and services to prospective local and international clients.

Customer satisfaction is the most important aspect of business development through e-marketing. There are certain online marketing tips that can truly enhance the worth of your business. The website needs to show complete contact information, this will help customers to rely on the company that if something goes wrong, someone will be there to listen to them. Impressive profile of products or services search engines is great idea of marketing business through online sources.

Data warehousing to map customer needs that is FAQ`s, auto replies, built in call back facility and queries recording is also essential in this regard. Customer relationship management CRM needs to be focused separately. E-branding, that is, to make your site attractive through animations and slide shows inclusion.

Conclusion

Driven by competitive pressures, companies are employing online marketing for a variety of purposes. Its main advantage is the increase in revenues through optimal customer and partner management. Online marketing strengthens the operational core of a business by reducing the amount of loss and instability.

In addition to this, it fortifies interactivity that is pull mechanism and push model. Industry structure enhances customer relations and removal of intermediations, agents and distributors. Hence e-marketing has been playing a role of bridge between businesses and end customers in a most effective manner.

Source: www.focus.com