Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Identifying Keywords via Yahoo!

Following a link from Seth Godin's site, Stick with me kid, I came across this interesting article on the Rugles blog regarding how Google can help people come up with appropriate search terms. The author explains how they were given a list of suggested/related words when looking for the word 'shoes'. The resulting suggestions included 'dc shoes', 'running shoes' and 'rockport shoes'; by further clicking on 'running shoes', they were presented with 'nike running shoes', 'brooks running shoes', etc.

The author noted that when they tried it out a second time, the results couldn't be replicated. I have just taken a look at Yahoo! and they do offer a similar option:

This tool could be quite useful in helping companies come up with suggestions on new keywords, for meta tags, page titles and for their site content. I would assume that the related words are generated from queries already carried out on Yahoo!

Related Article
Overture's Suggestion Tool for search keywords

Google On-line Seminar - "Get Google to Love Your Website"

I just picked up an email from Marketing Profs, which is promoting an event called Get Google to Love Your Website. The seminar is designed to show you how you can change or revamp your website to make it "Google-friendly". The cost is $99 and if you can't make the live presentation, you can view it at your earliest convenience. Subjects covered include:

● Check your "Google pulse"
● Estimate missed opportunity costs
● Ensure Google crawls 100% of your site, including dynamic pages
● Design your pages to dominate rankings
● Use paid placement with Google AdWords
● Optimize ad copy – let Google do the work for you
● Track results with ROI reports – analyze your efforts
● Prepare for changes soon to come in the search engine industry

Beware! - Scam from 'Domain Name Registry of America'

I returned home from work yesterday to find a letter from the 'Domain Name Registry of America' advising me that my domain name, Marketingtom.com, was about to expire and that I should renew it for the price of £18 with the Domain them. With a name like the Domain Name Registry of America I thought that they must be some official body for the registration of domain names but no, they are some scam merchant looking for people to TRANSFER domain names away from their existing supplier to them for an inflated price. I pay GoDaddy something like $7 per year (£4) and my domain doesn't even expire until September of 2005. I did a quick search on the Internet last night and found the following articles relating to this company:

Register.com Wins Stay Against Domain Registry of America
Court bars Canadian domain slammer
Boycot Domain Registry of America
Domain Registry of America, again.
Domain Registry of America (at it again??)

Please inform your business colleagues and friends of this scam and feel free to link back in to this article.

Further use of the Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar offers Internet Marketers a number of very useful tools. One of these is the ‘cached snapshot of page’ which can be found under the ‘page info’ button. This displays the page that Google has cached of your site on their database – not necessarily your current page - and it could help to inform you of why you’re not being picked up for certain words. By clicking on ‘backward links’ on the same menu, Google will tell you the number of links in to your Web site – don’t forget it is likely that many of these will be multiple links from the same Web site.

A9 - Amazon's new Search Engine - Awesome!

Amazon has just launched the latest search engine, called A9, which provides users with search engine results and results from Amazon's 'Search Inside the Book™' technology. This technology provides users with results from Amazon itself and in some cases displays results from a given page in a book. The search engine results come from Google, which also provides sponsorhip links and Google Adwords. Much like Google and Yahoo! users can download the A9 toolbar:

The search toolbar features some nifty tools:
1. Search facility (Google and Amazon products)
2. The standard pop-up box blocker
3. Diary - so that you can leave notes on sites you have visited
4. Site history

One of the best tools is the site info button (a possible must-have toy) for Internet Marketers, which gives you information on where people who have visited the site you are viewing have also gone to (it uses Alexa technology) and some basic site stats. On viewing the Seth Godin blog, I was able to pick up the following site information:

At first glance this looks like a wonderful tool - anything that can utilise Google's search technology with enhanced features such as books and 'site info' can't be bad at all.

Message Boards and adverts

In a previous posting I spoke about the importance of using bulletin boards as a means of driving traffic to a Web site - Bulletin boards, newsgroups - a good source for targeted leads.

Tessa Wegert in an article on Clickz, titled On the Cheap: Message Board Ads, writes about how to use bulletin boards effectively for advertising, using the case of a business her brother developed a few years back as an example:

To assess their target market and determine how best to reach it through online advertising (without investing a bundle), the three partners spent hours surfing the Web daily. They spent much of their time on message boards and in online forums. There, automotive enthusiasts discuss their passion and compare notes on parts they'd appraised. The sites helped the group identify the demand for their products.

The great thing about message boards is that they can help you identify the right language to reach your target market, due to the fact that people on a particular forum will be talking about like-minded things. This article also describes how companies with lower budgets or those looking for channels to drive the main advertising push can use forums extremely effectively. She says that of the 20-odd message boards that they advertised on, only 1 failed to generate any sales for them.

Related Article
Forums, bulletin boards, newsgroups - A good source for targteted leads.

Googlemania! - getting the lowdown on Google

Wired magazine this month offers visitors the chance to read articles from the March edition, which ran a special feature on Google, called Googlemania! The feature contains the following:

• Surviving IPO Fever
• It's an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World
• How to Speak Google
• Google's Open Source Idea Lab
• I'm Feeling Lucky
• How to Kill Google
• 4 Scenarios for the Future
• Redesigning the Interface
• The (Evil) Genius of Comment Spammers
• Google vs. Gates

Blogs as PR and Marketing tools

The rapid rise of web logs (blogs) over the past year has not gone unnoticed by companies, and especially by people involved in Marketing and PR. These people are now involved in developing their own blogs to talk up/add value to their own products and services and also using other people's blogs to promote or discuss them. However, not all companies have actually worked out how to use blogs effectively yet. Here are some articles that offer good advice and guidance for would-be business/PR bloggers:

Gadget blogs gain in popularity and corporate PR begins to take notice

In Post(er) Boy, Robert Scoble a blogger who works at Microsoft offers companies some tips on blogging that can help them succeed online.

James Horton has written a good paper - Marketing And Blogs: What Works - which contains this useful tip:

Successful marketing through blogs creates or enters a community of interest where readers are involved in the use and lifestyle of a product or service. Blogging sparks interactive communications using low-cost self-publishing and syndication of content. It is not a way to make money or shill products. Blogwriters who believe they can sell musings by subscription have been disappointed, and companies that have used blogs to sell overtly have so-far failed and generated protest.

Blog Search Engine and RSS Directories

This is a great page to bookmark for all of those people who have a web log (blog) or RSS feeds. Robin Good of MasterNewMedia has compiled a list of over 55 sites where you can submit your blogs or RSS feeds. He says that he has personally tested all of them. This page also offers some good tips to help you drive more traffic to your site.

RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites

Google's Gmail in beta testing

Google's new Gmail e-mail system looks like it has started to raise a few eyebrows and speculation about what the future may hold. The new system is currently being beta tested, though this is what the service is likely to offer:

Gmail is a free, search-based webmail service that includes 1,000 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of storage. The backbone of Gmail is a powerful Google search engine that quickly recalls any message an account owner has ever sent or received. That means there's no need to file messages in order to find them again.

Pamela Parker in her article Google Gets E-Mail in Clickz believes that Microsoft could soon have something else to worry about, apart from search engine rankings. She says:

The move pits Google even more strongly against Yahoo! and Microsoft, both of which offer extremely popular free e-mail services. It also more firmly establishes Google as a portal, rather than simply a search destination.

One issue that Pamela says creates privacy problems for the new service, is the ability to generate AdWords, like the main search engine, which are relevant to each message. In short, Google's technology will be able to read the content of a message and provide an ad based on this.

For another take on Gmail, have a look at Google's big opportunity on Seth Godin's blog. It raises some interesting thoughts, too.