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Archive for the 'Internet marketing' Category

The Explosive Growth of Pinterest

Published on February 14, 2012 in Internet marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

First there was Facebook, but now there’s a new “face” in town. It’s a site that’s attracting a record number of new users eager to jump on board the next big thing. According to Business Insider, traffic to Pinterest has increased by more than 40 times since December of 2011. As of January 2012, Pinterest had 11.7 million unique users, and this social media site with a twist continues to experience explosive growth. Media giants are taking notice. The Wall Street Journal is already using Pinterest to cover fashion week in New York City. This is appropriate since almost six out of ten Pinterest members are female. Not surprisingly, businesses are eagerly searching for ways to use Pinterest to market their goods and services, especially businesses that market to females.

How Pinterest Works

Pinterest is a visually-oriented social media site that draws attention not with words but with pictures. Members create categories and themes for photos that interest them online and pin them onto themed pinboards. Themes might include anything from “delicious desserts” to “sexiest little black dresses.” Members are free to post and share images they find on the web so other members can enjoy and hopefully share them with others. If a member finds a compelling image, they can repin it by adding it to their own pinboard or share it on Facebook or Twitter. Pinterest members can also choose other like-minded pinners to follow, creating their own community of members with similar interests. It’s visual social media at its best.

To add exclusivity, you need an invitation to join Pinterest. Anyone is free to visit the site and fill out a form to join, but non-members must wait for an invitation to arrive through email to become a member. This can take several days. Another member can also extend an invitation to a non-member to join.

Is Pinterest a Marketing Tool?

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Create Your Content Calendar

Published on February 10, 2012 in Internet marketing and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The biggest challenge of Internet marketing isn’t collecting email addresses, and it’s not figuring out what sort of copy is most likely to persuade someone to click. It’s figuring out what to say.
Too often, that’s a last-minute decision. Marketers set aside a time to write their newsletter or push out an email and it’s not until their fingers are above their keyboard that they start wondering what kind of topic they should write about this week.

That’s the wrong way to go about creating an effective email marketing effort. Although routine is an important aspect of keeping a subscriber list engaged and interested, it’s also important to plan out the content in advance — to know exactly what you want to say long before you have to say it.
That doesn’t just make the writing easier — although it will do that. It also lets you build anticipation through a series of related messages, and increase urgency to buy.

Turn One Email into Many

The most important time to plan ahead is when you’re announcing a special offer. You won’t want simply to tell your subscribers that for the next five days they’ll be able to buy your product for 20 percent off. You’ll want to tell them on the first day that they can buy it cheaply, send a follow-up email two days later reminding them that they’re missing out and send a third email on the last day pointing out that if they don’t buy now they’ll have to pay more in the future.

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Drive Traffic to Your Website With Squidoo

Published on February 4, 2012 in Internet marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Do you Squidoo? If not, you’re missing out on a simple way to market your business and build your brand. Squidoo is the brainchild of a savvy entrepreneur named Seth Godin, and it’s now one of the premier Web 2.0 sites on the internet. When you join the growing number of internet marketers who “Squidoo,” you have the freedom to create an unlimited number of Squidoo lenses on the topics of your choice for online promotion.

A Squidoo lens is a page you create using easy-to-use tools that require no technical skills. It’s fast and easy to create a Squidoo lens on the topic of your choice whether it’s a product or service you want to promote or to draw traffic to your website. You can also use it to share information about a topic you’re passionate about. Blatant commercial promotion is discouraged on Squidoo, but it’s okay to include a link to your website in a lens. The beauty of Squidoo is how simple it is to get the word out about your business or anything else that strikes your fancy.

How It Works

Once you sign up with Squidoo, you can use the simple lens-building tools they provide to create your first lens. You build a lens by adding “modules” to your page. Some of the most popular modules are the text module where you can post an article or blog post, photo and video modules, news and feed modules, voting and comment modules and modules that allow you to sell product from stores like Amazon, Ebay and Zazzle while earning a commission. If you already have content you’ve written stored on your computer, you can create a Squidoo lens in as little as ten minutes. When you build a lens, the URL for your new lens is squidoo.com/titleofyour lens. When you choose the right keywords, this helps with search engine optimization. It works best when you use less competitive, long-tail keywords.

The Benefits of Building a Squidoo Lens for Online Promotion

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What Social Media Can Do For Your Email Marketing

Published on January 27, 2012 in Best Practices, Internet marketing and Tips & tricks. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Before the rise of social media, email marketing was the only way to reach people who had shown enough of an interest in a business to visit the website but weren’t yet interested enough to make a purchase. Persuade those people to leave behind an email address and the company could return to them with a special offer or news of a product release and pull them back through the door.
Since social media?
Well, all of those things are still true.

Social media’s strength is that it allows marketers to access prospects all the time. It lets them respond to their comments and posts, entering into the kind of dialogue that email marketing just can’t replicate. Lists (on Twitter and Facebook) and Circles (on Google+) let them target their messages, and social media has a much greater potential to send a brand viral than email marketing.

But those messages are often overlooked. While an email sits in an inbox until it’s opened, a tweet quickly disappears down a stream.
And while a Facebook page can generate lots of likes, the number of fans they collect is often smaller (and harder to convert) than the number of email addresses the company is able to collect.

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When You Don’t Have to Worry About Clickthroughs

Published on January 17, 2012 in Best Practices and Internet marketing. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Folyo is a job service for freelance designers. Sacha Greif, the service’s founder and a designer with more work than he can handle, assesses designers, reviews submissions from companies and tries to bring the two together.
Unlike other freelance jobs sites though, Greif doesn’t post the offers on his website. Freelancers can’t bid or compete to win the projects publicly. Instead, Greif charges companies a $100 fee once their offers have been accepted, waits until the end of the week then sends the list of jobs to his subscriber list by email.

For Greif, the benefits are clear. Because he checks both the jobs and the designers both sides know that they’re receiving quality. Employers know that the freelancers they’re hiring have been hand-selected for their creativity and professionalism. Freelancers can feel confident that the offers have solid budgets and come from companies that know what they’re doing. Handling everything by email ensures that both the offers and the designers remain private.

The service has only been running a few months but it’s already generating more than $600 a month for a freelance designer who was only looking for a way to share his excess workload. And his list consists of little more than 300 subscribers.

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Live Support: A Simple Way to Increase Website Conversions

Published on January 12, 2012 in Internet marketing. 1 Comment Tags: , , .


These days customers want it all, and they want it quickly, especially when they’re shopping online. With so many options, a customer can be gone with a click of the mouse. That’s why it’s important to stay competitive by meeting the needs of customers quickly. One way to do that is by offering live support or live chat. With live chat, you can actively engage customers and address their questions and concerns while they’re sitting at their computer. No phone required. Online businesses that use live support gain an edge in the marketplace. Here’s why.

What is Live Support?

To use live support, you place a support button in a prominent place on your website. When visitors click on the button, they can chat directly with a customer service rep online in real time. With live chat, customers get the answers they want without having to pick up the phone. You can customize the look of the support button to make it consistent with the theme of your website.

What Are the Advantages of Using Live Chat?

The most important reason to use live chat is that it increases website conversion rates. According to an article published in Internet Retailer magazine, online businesses that use live chat have a conversion rate that’s three times higher than email. That should be music to the ears of any retailer who wants to sell more products. Among the top 100 internet retailers, almost a third are using live chat, more than were using it last year.

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