Online branding through interactive advertising provides high-value brand engagements.  As such, interactive advertising provides far more measurement possibilities than just clicks and conversions.  These new metrics have more immediacy than traditional brand measurement methods.  Here is a list of the top ten high-value interactions that can be measured and reported.  It is particularly useful to share these metrics with your clients, who are undoubtedly anxious to see the ROI and value of their interactive advertising investments.

•1.       Newsletter and email opt-in

Although this metric is often overlooked, it is extremely valuable.  Any online marketer will tell you that their email list is a gift that keeps on giving.  A big email list can become one of the most valuable online marketing tools.

•2.       Downloads of materials

Share materials like white papers, flyers, coupons, or anything else you want your prospects to see.  Typically, websites will require visitors to fill out a form in order to access free materials.  However, you can get rid of the form and let visitors download the materials freely and then measure the results.

•3.       Video views

Promoting your business online with multimedia is highly effective.  Make ads, short sales presentations, branded short films, educational content, and much more using video.  Measure the number of views your videos get.

•4.       Phone calls

Although phone calls are not necessarily conversions, you can more than double your ROI by tracking the sources of your incoming calls.  Marketers typically do not measure phone calls.  They tend to focus on metrics that take place online.  However, you can publish phone numbers on your website and landing pages by source and apply incoming calls to the ROI of your online campaign.

•5.       Social and viral sharing

Make your ads and content social media-friendly by adding chiclets to encourage viewers to share your content with others.  By using social and viral sharing to your advantage, you can turn one click into several impressions and a lot of traffic for your site.  If even just a fraction of the traffic you get at your site engages in social and viral sharing, you will receive huge rewards for your efforts.

•6.       Social connections

Social connections on websites like Twitter and Facebook can contribute greatly to your online success.  In fact, some metrics have even put the value of one Facebook friend or Twitter follower from $2 to $10.  Encourage people to become your friends and followers on social media and then measure the benefits they bring you.

•7.       Return visits

Measuring return visits is important because return visits tend to be more valuable than first-time visits.  Although any visits to your website are considered a good thing, return visits are better because they show that the visitor has a high level of interest in your site.  Furthermore, conversions typically happen long after the first visit.  Measure return visits to determine what percentage of your website visitors come back.

•8.       Page views per visit

Create engaging landing pages that take your visitors through a messaging sequence.  The goal of having prospects go through your sequence is to build your brand and increase sales conversions.  Optimize the pages that lead visitors through the sequence and measure the results of your campaign.  Measure the number of times that your high value product pages are viewed.

•9.       Comments, opinions, and testimonials

Comments, opinions, and testimonials from your customers are not only high value brand engagements, they also serve as valuable content that you can use on your site to speed your search engine optimization efforts.  For example, you can run a poll to ask your customers about their opinions and tastes or actively seek testimonials.  You can also ask your customers for a story, a picture of them with your product, or a product review that you can display on your marketing materials, on or offline.  Ask your customers to add the content to your site and measure the results.  You will be surprised at how many customers are willing to answer your call to action and participate.  User generated content can be a very powerful tool in your interactive advertising campaign.

•10.   Clicks to bricks

Measure the factors that drive your customers into your clients’, resellers’, and reps’ stores.  Actions like searching for a store location and doing a search for reps is a clear indicator that the customer is likely to make a purchase in the near future.  Measure these actions to determine the level of direct sales escalation.

There are many more indicators of success that could be measured in your interactive advertising campaign.  This is just the tip of the iceberg.  Measuring these factors will get you off to a good start, however, so you can tweak your methods and build a more successful interactive advertising campaign.

About the Author

Ron Knight is a US based Internet Solutions Consultant with many years of experience helping people and businesses out in establishing a stronger presence on the web. Many interactive advertising companies have benefited immensely from his advice.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

1. Sharing Links to Items of Interest

As soon as you read something online that you think is interesting, it is easy to share it on Twitter with all of your followers.  Twitter is highly effective in this manner because it is such a quick way to be able to reach a large group of people.  You can also get a lot of great ideas for blog posts from Twitter since many new ideas and stories are floating around that haven’t even made it to the blogosphere and definitely not to mainstream media.

2. Building Your Network

Using Twitter is a great way to build your network because it allows you to find and follow people with similar interests.  You can use Steeple to find people who live in your geographical area.   You can also use other tools that help you find new people to follow based upon who your Twitter friends follow.

3. Build Relationships within Your Current Network

People in different networks often use Twitter to connect with their contacts instantly rather than using instant messaging for that purpose.  Furthermore, many people use Twitter to connect with their network during events like conferences.

4. Re-Distributing Content from Your Blog or Website

Twitter can be used to redistribute content from your blog or website.   However, you should take care to do this thoughtfully since many of your Twitter followers may already read your blog.   For that reason, you may want to avoid using a blog plug-in that automatically Tweets your posts.  Your best bet is to Tweet your content manually and customize each Tweet so it doesn’t get old.

5. Get Involved in Live Tweeting Events

Twitter launched at SXSW last year, catapulting microblogging conferences to fame.  Live Tweeting events are great because they  are a form of citizen journalism that allow you to connect with several new  people in your niche while making active and valuable contributions to current  discussions in your community.

6. Pitching Stories to Journalists on Twitter

You can send a direct message to a journalist who is following you on Twitter to pitch a story idea.

7. Communicating with Your Team

You can use Twitter as a company intranet that connects all of your employees.   Twitter can be particularly useful in this regard if you have a virtual business with employees in different geographical locations.  You can set your updates to private for security reasons.  Anytime you are working on group projects, you can stay in touch with your team members using Twitter.

8. Brand Monitoring

Stay up to date with any mentions of your business on Twitter.  If there is anything negative, you will be able to counter it quickly.  You can also use Twitter as a way to receive feedback from your customers and improve your business.  Just ask your followers to give their opinion on something.  For example, if you designed a new website, ask your followers what they think about it and get their constructive criticisms so you can make your site design even better.

9. Acquire More Votes on Social Media Websites

If you have submitted a story to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or any other social voting website, tweet a link to that submission to try to score more votes from your followers.  If your followers like what they see, they are sure to vote for your content.

10. Hiring People

Looking for a programmer, designer, or writer?  Whatever type of professional you seek, try finding them on Twitter.  Simply send your followers a tweet telling them you are looking for someone for a job.   They can either recommend someone to you or offer themselves for the job.  Using Twitter in this way is ideal for finding qualified freelancers.  It is much more convenient than putting out a classified ad.

11. Build Your Personal Brand

When you use Twitter to talk about things as mundane as what you ate for breakfast or how you are going to sleep early tonight, you make your followers feel like you are casual and approachable.  Even those with running a company that has a cold, corporate brand image could create more appeal and build a unique personal brand using Twitter.

12. Streamline Electronic Communications

When you use Twitter, you’re likely to find yourself using IM, email, and other electronic communication methods less.  Twitter not only provides public chatting through Tweets, it also allows you to send direct messages.  Twitter will help you streamline your electronic communications, allowing you to scale back online.

About the Author

Ron Knight is a US based Internet Solutions consultant with many years of experience helping people and businesses out in establishing a stronger presence on the web. Many Internet Marketing Services India companies have benefited immensely from his advice.

Article Source: Content for Reprint

So what’s the significance? If you should do a quick search with, say, the term “Internet Marketing” you’ll find both sets of results in google.de and google.es are different. The similarity is each contains some numbers of sites based on their native country-specific domain extensions and languages. This is Google’s attempt at presenting the best possible results based on localization and as you can see, it also becomes possible for you as the business owner to take note of the combination of factors that enables your localized site-if you should design one-to rank high in the “localized Google”.

Possibly the most influential factor is, as mentioned, the country-specific domains. Invest in website.co.in when there is a compelling reason to target the India market. You can still take on the lesser recommendation of sticking to just one domain. Some corporate websites I’ve seen have subdomains created to represent their various country offices e.g. india.website.com or website.com/india.

The IP address of the web hosting server with which you run your website also contributes some weightage to the localization effect.

From the SEO point of view, it is more effective to publish content in the local language since localized Googles run on the same language. Though there are many free and paid translation tools, you cannot afford grammar and vocabulary mistakes and miss out on subtle nuances of language when you’re in business. It pays to get a professional human translator to edit the content.

The benefits of inbound backlinking to increase PageRank still applies.

So far all that’s being said refers to on-page optimization to influence free traffic. In Google AdWords there’s also some work to do for geotargeting ads. However, AdWords have always been well known for ease of use so you can clear this hurdle in minutes simply by clicking on “Edit Campaign Settings” in your campaign and modify under “Target Audience” section.

Here’s the interesting part. Consider 2 phenomena in searches:

1) The unwritten rule of thumb for conducting a localized search is to input “(keyword) (location)” e.g. “plumbing london”.

2) Let’s say you live in the UK. Have you noticed whenever you access Google you are redirected to google.co.uk instead of the presumed ‘default’ google.com? That has to do with your web browser’s IP address, which becomes part of a range of addresses that is assigned to a region or continent, and the Google search engine has been programmed to act accordingly.

When you geotarget AdWords ads, it’s not necessary to put in location to the ad’s title, but consider carefully whether your business should accommodate travelers. Travelers would have done their homework before they make their travels, so you cannot restrict your ads from appearing depending on where these would-be travelers conduct their searches.

Example: your business may be renting out vacation homes in Florida, but surely it’s not only the Florida natives who rent vacation homes. What about the Brits?

Unless you’re highly aware of where your overseas sources of customers are likely to come from (Google Analytics will be helpful for tracking), you can switch off geotargeting option and put in title “Rent Vacations Home In Florida”. You may also put in negative keywords for locations where you know you won’t convert.

Alternatively, create and geotarget a separate ad appealing to British travelers for Florida vacation homes.

Let me end off by saying this post does not end conclusively and I’m sure there’s more to geotargeting strategies than meets the eye. I’m writing as a creative response to a query by a client of mine about targeting specific crowd and demographics, and I hope this article contains enough information to get you on a good start.

About the Author

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

Article Source: Content for Reprint

Methods of Targeted Marketing Campaign

Under normal economic scenario, businesses usually establish three different strategies directed at getting leads. Although the strategies would vary depending on the specific business models, goals and objectives, they would remain more or less similar for many businesses. While the goal for some business, for instance, is to drive maximum traffic to their website, it may be higher conversion rates or more leads for some other businesses. Higher leads may not always mean higher conversion rate, but they potentially open up many opportunities for your business in the long run.

Sources of Leads Generation via Targeted Marketing Campaign

Irrespective of the kind of business you do via your website, it is possible to generate highly qualified sales leads with the help of the potential lead sources. The efforts, expenses and the results of each kind of campaign may vary depending on the kind of business you have and the action that you want your visitors to do on your website. But the sources of marketing your product and services can significantly boost your leads.

Search Engine Optimization Campaign

The organic way of driving traffic to your website and generating leads is SEO campaign. The online buyers use the search engines as the major source of information. Moreover, they don’t go beyond the third page of the SERPs to find their required information. Therefore, your website needs to rank higher to get noticed by the visitors and get maximum number of leads.

A successful SEO campaign takes unique and appealing content, proper keyword research and, strategic and effective SEO techniques. In fact, the number of visitors that you get for your website is determined by how effectively you are applying these techniques. You can get more targeted visitors to your website and widen your opportunities to make sales with search engine optimization techniques.

Paid Marketing

One of safest business strategies and the fastest way of getting online visibility is the paid marketing campaign or Pay-Per-Click (PPC). PPC is a kind of search engine marketing method that allows the advertisers to get visibility for the searches in a particular industry. It helps your website come directly in front of the customers looking for the services that you are offering.  However, you will have to pay the search engines for the performance of your website.

Although paid marketing is a faster way of generating leads, you must be careful about the technicalities involved with it such as biddings and selection of keywords. If you can successfully target your potential customers through this targeted marketing campaign, you can enhance the number of leads on your website.

Referral Marketing System

Almost every business needs referrals to expand. And often, the secrets of successful online business lie in the referral marketing system. However, a handful of business owners know about the true power of referrals and can make proper use of it. Online businesses are largely dependent on the credibility of the websites. The referrals add credibility to your business which is crucial to generate leads.

You will get more referrals if you have more number of satisfied clients. For maximum number of referrals, it is important that you must make them understand how you can benefit others through your services. The smart way to increase your referrals is to stay in touch with your existing as well as past clients.  Develop a strategy of creating referrals for they are the integral part of a successful business.

E-mail Marketing

Marketing experts have found that email marketing allows more advantages to a company in a cost-effective way than any other form of marketing. As the campaign aims at targeting the niche audience, chances are higher of getting visitors to your website and also generating leads. Of course, the challenge involved with this kind of targeted marketing campaign is to find out who are the prospective customers for a particular product.

Make proper research to find out the most popular links to generate more number of leads. It will help you prepare a list of prospective customers to follow-up. You must keep track of the individuals clicking on each links. You can also use your new leads and follow-up them to find a new interest group.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a kind of paid marketing where you allow another website to advertise your products or services with a link back to your site. You pay the website for each conversion on your site that has become possible via the advertisement. Placing the advertisement of your products on reputed sites such as Amazon can build your reputation and attract more visitors who may eventually turn into buyers.

To generate more leads from your targeted marketing campaign like affiliate marketing, you need to make sure that the advertisement is placed in a highly relevant and reputed website. It will add credibility to your business.  However, you must strategize your payment for the advertisement according to the number of leads on your website.

The above sources of lead generations are effective for any venturing as well as established online business. You must do research to find out the most useful one for your website and develop your strategies to generate leads. Alternatively, you can also choose Internet marketing professionals having significant expertise in helping your business generate potential leads.

About the Author

Todd Paton is an online marketing strategist who strives to provide unique and effective target advertising solutions for the clients who concentrate on generating niche traffic to their website to maximize sales.
Todd Paton with his enviable experience in the filed of targeted marketing campaigns, can help your business get more out of your promotional expenditure. Log on to www.patonmarketing.com or contact todd@patonmarketing.com now to get professional marketing consultations!

Article Source: Content for Reprint

The only guaranteed method to repair your credit is to pay off the old bills and get your derogatory balances to $0. “Well that isn’t very helpful” is probably what you are saying. Since none of us just have cash laying around to do that there are other things you can do that are guaranteed to increase your FICO score practically overnight and start rebuilding your credit.

It’s actually very simple. Sign up for Millennium Secured Credit Card and send them $300. Buy $90 worth of groceries on it and make the payments. Keep the balance under $90. Then sign up for www.alliedtrustdiamond.com and get a $10,000 unsecured credit card, buy something and make the payments. Do a google search for USA Shopping Club and sign up with them for $12,500 unsecured credit card buy something and make the payments, Eclub USA and get your $3,500 credit card and finally Horizon Gold and get your $500 credit card.

Once all of these companies report to the credit bureaus you are going to see an immediate increase in your FICO score. Guaranteed. Then you can work on getting the bad marks paid off and removed. It’s much easier to get them permanently deleted if you don’t owe them any more money.

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There are literally hundreds of credit repair websites and a lot of them try to guarantee success but the reality is most of them are just a waste of money. They use methods of repairing your credit you can do yourself if you simply google credit repair templates. Their process is very lengthy and requires months and even years to get a lot of things removed and sometimes the bad marks can come back as some companies are very persistent, especially if you still owe them money.

The only guaranteed method to repair your credit is to pay off the old bills and get your derogatory balances to $0. “Well that isn’t very helpful” is probably what you are saying. Since none of us just have cash laying around to do that there are other things you can do that are guaranteed to increase your FICO score practically overnight and start rebuilding your credit.

It’s actually very simple. Sign up for Millennium Secured Credit Card and send them $300. Buy $90 worth of groceries on it and make the payments. Keep the balance under $90. Then sign up for www.alliedtrustdiamond.com and get a $10,000 unsecured credit card, buy something and make the payments. Do a google search for USA Shopping Club and sign up with them for $12,500 unsecured credit card buy something and make the payments, Eclub USA and get your $3,500 credit card and finally Horizon Gold and get your $500 credit card.

Once all of these companies report to the credit bureaus you are going to see an immediate increase in your FICO score. Guaranteed. Then you can work on getting the bad marks paid off and removed. It’s much easier to get them permanently deleted if you don’t owe them any more money.

About the Author

http://www.alliedtrustdiamond.com

Article Source: Content for Reprint

The advent of social media, communities, and networking sites, has been useful to many companies. They have positively affected the majority of businesses by allowing them to directly communicate with consumers about products and services they offer. However social media has also opened doors to malicious behavior of the minority, which has proven to be damaging to individual and corporate reputations. Individuals and the small business to the fortune 500 companies have been harmed by malicious online postings. Part of this pain is self inflicted and some is the handiwork of unhappy customers, disgruntled former employees or chronic complainers. There are several rules to remember while posting online, which assist with online reputation management:

- The positioning of a company or individual within social media, communities, and network profiles and comments, is indexed by search engines. Indexed pages can be cashed in search engine files infinitely. Any text associated to your name can be found now and for years to come.

- The content and images posted become public domain. On many websites, including Facebook, when signing up, you grant the social community site the right to use your photographs. The following text is listed in Facebook Terms of Use: “By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sub license) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sub licenses of the foregoing.”

- Never post photographs or content that you would not want the world to see. Remember the world includes current and future employers, parents, and current or future spouses. It is not as easy to delete this information as you would like to believe. This is also from the Terms of Use on Facebook: “You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.”

After interviewing prospective employees, it has become a standard practice to go online and Google the applicant. It is also the practice of individuals interviewing to research the employer. Negative information associated to an individual name or corporate entity could cause a prospective employer or employee harm. In a 2007 survey conducted by Execunet, an online community of C-level executives, 83% of recruiters used search engines to learn more about candidates. Of those, 43% were eliminated based on information found online. “For better or worse, the Internet provides recruiters and employers with a wealth of unfiltered information that’s used to help evaluate candidates,” says Dave Opton, CEO and Founder of ExecuNet. “From a candidate’s perspective, there’s no question that managing your reputation online is as important as it is offline.”

Due to the number of people who use search engines as a research tool, online reputation management is becoming a big industry. Ruthless competitors and angry clients now have open access to blogs and web sites. They can define a person or company’s online identity. Their words have far reaching effects- whether they are true or not.

This is why ORM is necessary. Because it is difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate traces of thoughtless actions or malicious attacks on the web, online reputation firms disseminate positive information on their clients. The goal in online reputation management is to bring public attention to positive blogs, articles and other online media written on behalf of the company. The positive online publicity takes the higher search engine result rankings, thus minimizing the damage of any attack.

About the Author

Julie Ross is Principal of Rostin Reagor Smith, ORM Experts in Public Relations Online. With 20 years in public relations, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith has refined the SMO Expert Formula. Social Media Optimization is used for higher search engine ranking in Online Reputation Management for public relations online.

Article Source: Content for Reprint