As the Internet continues to expand, video is taking hold and is responsible for the newest explosion of online traffic. Whether it’s an online news website like MSN, an online sports website like ESPN or simply an email from your friends, video is a likely candidate for viewing content online. It’s almost not considered fun anymore unless there is some type of video involved in your online experience. (more…)

The definition of a landing page is simply “the first page that visitors hit on your site,” so it is not strictly a certain page but any page that a user “lands” on. All
websites have landing pages, whether they like it or not, even if it was not specifically designed as such.

Landing pages can have a substantial impact on your e-commerce website. A poorly-developed one can hasten its breakdown just as an effective landing page can drive traffic to your site, respond to calls to action and make your business website a success. (more…)

Want to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket AND free up time to do the important things for your business? All business owners can save time and money if they properly leverage the Web through Web services. What I am referring to is replacing recurring tasks that take employee time to accomplish with web-based services that do it automatically.

If you are a small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day tasks that take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is better spent doing the things you’re in business for than regularly completing every little business administration chore. A common complaint I hear among small business owners is that they spend too much of their time on “business” issues like accounting or mailings instead of the “fun stuff” that their expertise is in. (more…)

Free press is one of the best ways to spread the word about your website, your product, and your brand. However, most people don’t know where to start. Fortunately, it’s really not as hard as you might think.

There are thousands of articles being published every single day on blogs, newspapers, and magazines. Bloggers, writers, and journalists have pages to fill and all of them are actively looking for interesting topics to write about.

Many people forget that PR is about public relations. It’s not just about writing a press release. It’s about getting to know the journalists. Find out what kind of stories they’re working on and see what you can do to help them. PR is really about listening and engaging key influencer’s.

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If websites have one overarching goal it is to create confidence in whatever the website is promoting and who’s promoting it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a product, a service, a sales campaign, or an idea, if the presentation is not minimally credible or optimally motivational, then it fails as a means of marketing communication.

Communicate to the Subconscious Mind

Branding is often thought of as a marketing strategy reserved for major consumer product companies, but the fact is all businesses are brands that are either cultivated so they blossom, or let go-to-seed like a garden full of weeds.

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Web design and development involves three levels:

• Web management
• interaction design (navigation support, homepage layout, templates, search, etc.)
• content design (the actual writing on the pages, as well as the design of any other media types used to communicate content as opposed to site interaction)

Just as in a hamburger, the middle layer is the tastiest and attracts the most attention, including much of our own work on Web usability. We have come to realize that the outer two layers are more important in many ways: users only care about content (in other words, no, the medium is not the message; the message is the message) and the usability of a website is more a function of how it is managed than of how good its designers are.

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For months (or is it years now?) we have been reading articles on how businesses should develop a presence on Twitter and build a Facebook Page as part of their SEM objectives. Now, with social media firmly established in the armory of our online marketing efforts, how can we best take advantage of these two social media giants?

As if to demonstrate their power in the market these days, both Twitter and Facebook (to a lesser extent) have been targeted and dealt painful denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and, as a result, many hours of downtime.

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As you probably know, a good source of backlinks is using Directory Submission, Press Releases, Articles, Forums. Still, this method fails in providing quick PageRank boost due to the fact that Google takes into account only one inbound link from a certain root domain.

Basically you’ll get the PR benefit from a submission platform just through the first link pointing back to your website; the future ones are only useful for generating traffic.

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This is part two of the article Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix

Leveraging Your Assets

Search engine optimization is not something that should be done in a vacuum if you wish to achieve optimal results, nor is it a discipline in which it is necessary to start from scratch. Many of the pieces necessary for a successful SEO campaign are already in place – it is simply a matter of identifying them and using them (and your search engine optimization company) to their full potential.

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