Internet Marketing In A Recession, Five Tips For Times Of Economic Slowdown
The dollar is falling, oil is up, credit is more difficult to get and every time you turn on the TV, or go online you hear buzz about a pending recession. Sales and marketing managers are scratching their heads wondering how they will achieve budgeted sales figures.
Before you brush up on Brian Tracy personal selling techniques, look to how you are currently managing your existing resources. How are you currently allocating your marketing budget? What techniques are you using to gather lead generation? The scary question... gulp... when you gather a lead, do you know where it came from? Does your sales team follow up promptly? Do you let your leads go stall?
Before you look to readjust your sales figures, let?s look at readjusting your current business practices and through the use of cost-effective SEM (search engine marketing) examine if a short-term focused pay per click (PPC) campaign can help.
1. What is a Conversion Worth?
Too often companies do not know how much a conversion is worth, or even how to define a conversion. If Internet marketing brings you a new customer and that new customer provide $X of incremental sales revenue, how much is it worth to acquire that sales lead? What percentage of sales leads convert to customers? How does this compare to other methods of lead generation?
Tip: In times of an economic slowdown, accountability is essential. It is important to know how much money a new customer is worth and how much it will cost to get that new customer. If a new customer provides $500 additional profit and it cost $200 to get that customer (cost per lead divided by call to action conversion rate), you would say that was a profitable venture.
2. Understand Web User Behavior.
What web analytics package are you currently using? When was the last time you sat down and reviewed you site?s analytics? Understanding user behavior is critical. This is magnified in a short term sales cycle. What ?call to actions? does your website hope to achieve from a user? How is this measured? For example, if your call to action is filling out a ?contact us? form for example, how many individual users visited that form and what percentage filled out the form and arrived at a ?thank you page??
Tip: If you are not currently using an analytics page, Google offers a free program called Google Analytics. The analytics program is installed by adding a few lines of HTML script on your website?s pages.
3. Where are your leads coming from?
Crazy as this may sound, many companies to this day do not fully grasp where a lead originated from. The most important part of web analytics is tracking and analyzing defined ?call to action? situations. Advances in CRM systems have allowed the integration of defining a lead as coming from a particular Internet source (http://Salesforce.com does a good job of this integration)
4. PPC burst as a short term strategy.
Need a lot of visibility and are strapped for time? Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising should be on your list to things to do. Sites such as MSN, Yahoo!, Google and http://Business.com offer robust PPC packages that will help you target your audience and convert on your call to action requirements.
These campaigns function around bidding for a small text advertisement to display when a user types in a set of keywords. The concept is each time a user inputs a keyword phrase into a search engine he is looking to conduct business around that keyword. If a person is performing a search for the keyword ?tax software,? the implication is he is looking to potentially purchase a tax software solution.
5. Track PPC campaign.
Pay Per Click is one of the best short term strategies a company can use. PPC is something that needs to be monitored regularly by either by an in-house specialist or professional agency. The performance of your ads will help dictate how much you are willing to pay for a click. Tracking via web analytics can help ensure you are allocating enough resources to high performance keywords and not providing too many resources to keywords that are not producing a desirable conversion rate.
How does PPC fit into your overall marketing budget and strategy? It can become expensive long term, but as part of a balanced solution, PPC can provide the immediate results that you might not get through telesales, newsletters and tradeshows. A final consideration for companies looking to engage in a PPC campaign, test the usability of your website. Receiving double the traffic to your website is no different than becoming twice as efficient. In other words, your advertising dollar will go further when you direct users to pages that are easy to use, provide the information they are seeking and provide you with measurable call to action results.
Keith Hanks is an Account Manager at Atlanta search engine optimization agency TwentySix2 Marketing. He has a passion for Atlanta SEO agency services and web design services.
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Internet Affiliate Marketing - How to Increase Your Website Online Profits by 50%
You have no doubt heard all the hype about how easy it is to make a fortune online Maybe you've invested a few dollars,and brought your first website spent a few more dollars on advertising, and you are now waiting for all of that lovely cash to start rolling in to your bank account, but something not quite right because it hasn't happened yet and you want to know why
Why Google Adsense is essential for affiliate marketers with content sites
To know why Adsense is essential for your content sites is to know first how this works.
Google Adsense - Adsense affiliate marketing!
When you start using Word press to build your Adsense websites, youll soon discover what I mean. Stop trying to convince them that you didnt use MFA (Made for Adsense) sites. Google supplies excellent resources on The Dos and The Don'ts of Adsense as well as very comprehensive tutorials on how to set up and use Adsense.
Google Adsense Profits Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has become one of the most effective ways to advertise online. It is also one of the easiest ways for anyone with a website to make a profit online. Affiliate Marketing is an agreement between a merchant and a website owner. The website owner, or the affiliate, allows the use of their site for the promotion of the merchant's products by linking to the merchant's website. In exchange, the merchant pays a commission to the affiliate on all sales generated by the affiliate. Every time someone clicks on the link on the affiliate website and proceeds to make a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission. The merchant will pay the affiliate only when a customer clicks on the product link and makes a purchase.
Google's SEO Advice For Your Website: Content
The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.
Submit Your Websites to Search Engines Like Google and Yahoo
If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.
Google Nemesis Will Change Affiliate Marketing Forever
It's a phrase that sends shivers down the spines of gurus everywhere.
Driving your website through Google Sandbox & eMergent Marketing- Website Conversion, Usability & SEO
What is Google Sandbox?
Using Google Adwords to generate traffic to your affiliate marketing programs
Highly targeted traffic is one of the most important entities in the internet universe. Any website owner or administrator recognizes the importance of driving traffic to a website. The success of any website does not rely entirely on the site itself. You may have a terrific idea for a website, offer an excellent product or service, or have an exceptionally designed site with superb content, but if you do not use the right strategies to advertise, your site would not attract the high traffic you need. Attracting targeted traffic is a task that should be taken seriously for any site to succeed or make a profit. Fortunately, there are internet-marketing tools that help the website marketer to drive traffic to his website. One of the most sign...
Google, Yahoo!, Apple and Microsoft Most Talked about Brands Online
Technology companies dominate in new research into online social media.
Marketing Online With Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo utilizes its large network of websites and portals to provide Yahoo
Combining Google Adsense with affiliate programs to mazimize affiliate marketing revenue
Are you a webmaster who needs funds to keep your website running? Or is your website the only way for you to earn income? Whichever you are, for as long as you are a webmaster or a web publisher and you need cash, affiliate marketing may work well for you. With affiliate marketing, you may get a lot of cash pouring into your bank account easily. And if your website is rich in great contents and you want to earn more profit, why not get into the Google Adsense program as well?
5 methods to increase your Google Adsense affiliate marketing earnings
If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the ?geniuses? of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.
Yahoo Search Marketing: Is an Effective Online Marketing Tool
Yahoo! manages to utilize its huge network of websites and portals to provide Yahoo! Search Marketing services which provides you an opportunity to advertise your business in a number of methods. The methods are sub-divided in the following categories:Sponsored Search: Display your ad prominently in leading search engines such as Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, CNN and InfospaceProduct Submit: Get your product listed in Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Buyers Guide and be found by millions of usersTravel Submit: Get your travel product or service listed in Travel Deals marketplace or Travel Deals listings and allow easy access of information to potential travelersDirectory Submit: Powered by the powerful Yahoo! Search, submit your business information in...
5 Steps To Optimizing Your Website For Google And Yahoo
The mere thought of SEO is enough to send most webmasters into a flutter. A good ranking in the search engines is a sure-fire way to make money from a website, yet it is not an easy task. But while the exact ranking algorithm used by top search engines is one of the world?s best kept secrets there are some basic principals you should always keep in mind:
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