Before I start this article, allow me to greet you Happy New Year this 2012 year of the black water dragon. This year will bring prosperity according to astrologers and specially those who believes in Chinese astrology. And those businesses that relates to water will have a good chance to succeed unlike those connected with fire. Anyway so much for that topic, what I want to emphasize now is the business trends regarding marketing and advertising. Since the internet popularity explodes, with it, online advertising was introduced and in no time it was accepted as one of the means to market and advertise a business. In my observation and also those who were knowledgeable on online advertising know very well that the ads network Google Adwords (when Google also introduced Adsense) revived the online advertising after the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 (March 2000 to October 2002). I’m not sure if I’m 100% correct but that is how I observed it. Google introduced Adsense on June 2003 that enables small publishers to participate and I think it is no coincidence that after launching Adsense the online advertising industry was standing on it’s feet again.
Compared to traditional advertising: print media and television commercials, online advertising was cheaper and more cost effective because you can track your advertising expenditures, ads behavior like banner clicks and impressions and other detailed information. Yes online advertising was a great invention and tool for businesses but since the dawn of the internet, computers was the only device capable of browsing websites. And only a few years ago that mobile phones can now be used to access the internet. Yes of course there is an internet device also invented a few years ago and that is the tablet like the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy and others I didn’t mentioned. So aside from traditional online advertising, are you also paying attention to mobile advertising? According to the survey of emarketer.com, the time spent on mobile increased to 30% from 2010 to 2011. More than the time spent on reading newspapers and magazines combined.
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If you have used twitter not just to socialize but have used it on your business, then this might be a good chance to know if twitter really does any good. Honestly I didn’t really know if twitter is useful to me or if it does drive traffic to my blog. What I see in my web analytics tool I’m using right now is there is no traffic coming from twitter.
Maybe because there is a problem on most analytics software identifying the traffic coming from twitter or maybe there isn’t any visitors coming from twitter. I’ve tried 3 kinds of web analytics tools already, and those are Statcounter, Hitslink and Google Analytics and so far I can’t see any referral from twitter although I have implemented an automatic tweet to my blogs. Automatic tweet is useful so you don’t have to log-in and update twitter on any new post created by your blog.
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Social networking sites was a big hit not only in the U.S. but specially here in the Philippines. Filipinos really love to socialize so even online most of us can’t hide that fact. Just after friendster when we became the second largest number of users, facebook came into scene and now we rank among the top ten users all over the world. In fact even with that large numbers of users, many Filipinos still can’t afford to have an internet access and many homes don’t have internet access. The only way those users can access if they don’t have their own computers is going to internet cafe.
But thanks to mobile internet technology, many who can’t afford computers can surf the internet by using their mobile phones. And mobile phones that can access the internet using Wifi or 3G (not the old GPRS) are not confined to those branded and expensive ones like iPhone and Blackberry. Many cheap mobile phones in the market already have Android operating systems that can match expensive ones. Also, most telecommunication companies endorse social networking sites like facebook, twitter and youtube by offering free access or discount rates. So what does it mean to your business? it means you should include social networking sites in your marketing strategies. And not only the well known facebook or twitter but other social networking sites that Filipinos usually spend their time.
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Have you seen the TV commercial of Lola Techie? well I think this is not a joke anymore seeing senior citizens or middle aged people enjoying social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Linkedin and Youtube. The trend in the U.S. is older people are now flocking to social networking sites and you know that most of the time we Filipinos are followers of the U.S. trend.
Why I said that? it’s because few years ago Friendster is the number one social networking site among Filipinos but when Facebook became popular, many of us specially the youth flocked into facebook.
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There have been a buzz around when Google plus was introduced. And many webmasters placed the Google +1 on their websites. To those who are not familiar to what I’ve said, Google plus is a social networking website, a counterpart of facebook and Google +1 is very similar to facebook like button.
So what advantages will a business have on Google plus or Google +1? if you have a website, then it will help your site to get more traffic and as some articles I’ve read that it will help your ranking in the Google search. [click to continue...]
A guest post by Paul Dumanig of The Mighty Leverage
I happened to meet a Malaysian businessman in a bookstore a week ago. I was looking for a personal development book when he approached me and talked about a plethora of self-help books which he was able to read for a decade already. His business is into leadership training and he is involved in a distribution business.
Nowadays, it is my habit to add new friends in Facebook as my way of storing contacts. When I visited his Facebook profile, what I saw was: a different name as compared to his real name in the business card, a tiny picture of a car as a Profile picture, a few friend connections, and a few personal information – which for me, does not speak of who I thought he is when he introduce himself to me.
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This is a guest post of Nisha Sandhu
Now that you’ve decided to take the plunge and create an ecommerce website, it’s time to find a few customers. Although some newcomers think that all they need is an attractive website with a good product line, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, in the online world, the best products and best prices don’t always equal success. Just like you need to advertise a brick-and-mortar store to persuade customers to walk through your doors, an ecommerce site requires a substantial amount of marketing to draw traffic and make a sale. Here are some of the best ways to make your new online store a success:
Make Your Site Easy to Find
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