Web Strategy

Guidelines for marketing with social media aren't all that new. In 2006 five members of the digital marketing community collaborated on 16 rules for "social media optimization". Fast forward to nearly 2010 and social media has begun to take a more significant role in the marketing mix.

Innovation around Web 2.0 technologies continues to pick up steam as companies look for ways to cut spending and get more from the solutions they choose. Polly Traylor outlines some of the Web-oriented tools and strategies.

In combination with the first article comment it gives an insight into two different viewpoints on certain aspects in this article.

Quirk eMarketing presents this 360 pages guide to online marketing which gives an overview on different fields of online marketing. It is designed to be used as well by learners as by more experienced marketers who like to use it as a quick reference book with lots of examples, check lists, etc.

Chris Andersons book "Free" - some inspirational thoughts on business strategies.

Anderson's book gives you some inspirational thoughts on successful business strategies. In my case I preferred to listen to the audio book. Here it is available for free as ebook and audio book versions.

Earlier today we shared 5 Bing SEO Tips and how Bing is starting to generate a good amount of traffic to our websites. Compete.com says Bing is the #13 trafficked website on the web now so it's a good time to learn how to optimize your website for Bing.

The article provides a quick overview if you want to start optimizing pages for Microsoft's search engine. Especially I never used the Bing webmaster center in combination with Google's tool before.

Do you wonder why your affiliate marketing business has not taken off? The answer is really simple. The days of selling are over and days of teaching are here.

It continues to baffle me why any small business wouldn't use the internet as an essential sales, marketing and customer relations tool. Establishing and maintaining a web presence is incredibly cheap and easy these days. And web advertising is much more powerful than most traditional print or broadcast advertising in that it enables the business owner to engage customers in a two-way conversation and gain valuable feedback on their products and services.

Exact Target also reported that email subscription via text messaging is the fastest growing list-building tactic among marketers. The company predicts that mobile capture - enabling consumers to subscribe to emails via their mobile phones - will increase 500%, more than any other growth tactic in 2009.Marketers also expect the practice of enabling subscribers to share email content with their social networks is expected to increase more than 348% in 2009.

ORM is the process of following online references to a brand, company, person or service while having a plan in place to deal with any negative feedback. You can think of it as a three-step process, although they may not always occur in this order:

In the first part of this series, I provided an overview of Online Reputation Management (ORM) and why it's an important activity to adopt in your business and professional life. This post will outline some of the free tools available for monitoring your online reputation.

How to Embed Video in Email Newsletters

How to funnel website visitors into leads and customers and track the entire process.

You've refined your keywords, optimized your bids, and written AdWords text ads that pull in tons of targeted clicks, but after looking at your Google Analytics reports, you realize that your landing page has a bounce rate of 91%. Which means that 91% of the users coming to your site are quickly glancing around and leaving, deciding immediately that this site isn't for them. One of the easiest, low-tech ways to make users stick around and look at your products or services is to catch their attention with an engaging headline.Recent research suggests that users decide to stay or leave your site in 8 seconds or less -- in that short amount of time, headlines are the one piece of copy that users will actually read. Here are five tips for writing headlines that will draw in user attention.

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme.

SEO success - traditionally measured by target keyword rankings and traffic - should be measured by ROI instead

Great tips and tricks regarding lesser known Google Analytics features!

Last year I did a large post over-viewing most useful Google Analytics tips and today I am presenting them as well as adding a number of more important hacks to compile one mega-post on Google Analytics tips and tricks:

Today at Searchology, Google has launched a search results enhancement called "rich snippets" that uses meta data from web pages (from microformats such as hCard, hCalendar, and RDF) to display additional details (both content and meaning) about pages in the results. This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn). They will be adding more sites and categories over time.

Incorporating video into emails - a simple enough concept that wasn't even possible two years ago - improves click-through rates by 2-3 times, according to a recent Forrester report.