Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas &
Happy New Year

British eCommerce Success Story

Alan Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia, has an written interesting article on his blog Internet Media Comentary about a British artist who has created a phenomenally successful online business. Entitled Internet Commerce Success Story, this is a brief overview of the business:

For those who will not read the article let me summarize: A British artist named Jacquie Lawson has created an incredibly successful online greeting card company. Some metrics: two employees, no marketing costs, revenues approaching $5 million, tiny inventory of 500 [46 actually] greeting cards, and an $8.00 per annum subscription price!

Real-time Keyword Suggestions from Google Select

According to 4WebResults Google is testing a new tool called "Google Suggest". The tool sounds really  cool as it will throw up keyword suggestions as you type in the words. As Tom says in New Internet Tool Offers Suggestions in Real Time - "Google Suggest": "this is the perfect tool to do exploratory keyword research, especially if you're not sure what people are really typing in to find your business. Or if you're writing an online article (like a blog article) and you want to use keywords that are popular to increase your traffic, then use Google Suggest."

Blogs that feature "Google Suggest"
Google Suggest (Anil Dash)
Top 5 Web Applications of 2004 (Andy Budd, Blogography)

Help Inc.com Build the 2005 Entrepreneurs' List

This year (2004) Inc.com published their 25 Entrepreneurs We Love list. They are now inviting people to submit entries for their 2005 list. All you need do is go to their Entrepreneurs We Love page; check your candidate meets their criteria and submit the details.

Blogging till the Cows Come Home

Rick Bruner has got an interesting post on his blog, Business Blog Consulting, about the blog marketing exploits of organic dairy seller, Stonyfield Farm. Stoneyfield produces quality dairy products, such as yoghurt, which strictly adhere to organic principles - no artificial sweetners, flavourings or additives here. The company decided to reinforce their marketing message by creating 4 blogs. Rick, in a article entitled Business Blog Case Study: Stonyfield Farm, asks the company blogger some interesting questions in an email interview. Here are a few of the questions
1) What kind of traffic are you getting to your blogs (individually and/or collectively)?
2) What was the thinking behind launching the blogs in the first place?
3) What is the business rationale? What are you trying to accomplish from a marketing perspective (or otherwise)?
4) Are you measuring the benefit? If so, how? If not, why not and may you later? When?
5) What kind of feedback do you get from readers?
It just proves that blogs are a great marketing/corporate tool for any organisation.

Pictures from Google's Googleplex

As I mention Google rather a lot on this website, I thought it would be nice to let people view some photos of the Google complex, taken by an Internet Marketing company on a recent visit there. Chris Breikss, Director and Co-Founder of 6S Marketing Inc, was invited to the Google Campus to meet up with the Google Adwords team and whilst there took these interesting shots. My favourite is the picture of the Beach Volleyball Court where Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, often hangs out.

Biggest Internet Growth Comes From People Over 55

A recent survery, by International Demographics, has found that the biggest U.S. growth in the Internet has come not from young people but from the 55's and above. The report is based on the findings of 80 U.S. Metropolitan markets and notes Robert Jordan, president of International Demographics, "Most of the new growth is coming from older age groups, including the aging Baby Boomer demographic. When you consider the huge purchasing power of this group, which continues to buy everything, including the most expensive products, there is a huge opportunity for e-commerce and e-marketing." So, I suppose, it's ignore this market at your peril.

Read the article at Clickz: People Aged 55 and Up Drive U.S. Web Growth

Animated GIF's to appear on Google

Looks like Google are testing out animated GIF ads for use on Google Adwords. The Clickz website reports in their article Google Testing Animated GIF Ads that the company will only use these ads on websites of Adsense Publishers who accept GIF images to be displayed.

Get someone a TypePad account this Christmas

The TypePad tool has enabled me to develop two very successful web logs, Marketing Tom and Mad About Madrid. So I thought that I would do some promotion for them and recommend that you go and take up their 'buy one, get one free' offer. They also have some great subsription rates, too.

This Christmas Buy Local

The supermarket is selling the latest Harry Potter book for cheaper than the local shop can buy it; you're buying water melons in winter; the meat you buy was cut up hundreds of miles away yesterday and to top it all wasteful packaging of products is filling up your local landfills. The list of supermarket misdemeanours is endless.

This Christmas I'm going to shop local. I am going to try and 'give up' supermarkets where possible and support my local community. That means local butchers, local fruit and veg from the market, local fishmongers, local farmers' markets, Christmas gifts from local shops and going for a drink in my local pub. This Christmas, why should I support vast corporations that are hell bent on destroying my community.

Please let me know of other links.

Related Links
Farmers' Markets (UK)
AMS Farmers' Markets (USA)
Big Barn (UK)
Farmer's Market Online (USA)
London Farmers' Markets (UK)
California Federation of Farmers' Markets (USA)

Online Advertising and the User Experience

Jakob Nilesen's Useit.com website has an interesting Alertbox entry entitled The Most Hated Advertising Techniques. In it he discusses the findings of a study by John Boyd from Yahoo! and Christian Rohrer from eBay, which looked at how people perceive online advertising.

If you're planning to place pop-ups in front of the window or if the ad blinks on and off, then you may be interested to know that 95% and 87% of correspondents answered either negatively or very negatively to these.

Users were particularly pleased with ads that clearly:

• indicate what will happen if people click on them,
• relate to what people are doing online,
• identify themselves as advertisements,
• present information about what they are advertising, and
• provide additional information without having to leave the page.

Rent a Blogger on eBay

The other day someone left a comment on one of my articles asking whether I thought it a good idea to hire a blogger to promote the benefits of a company. Apparently, a company called Inkspress has paid Jeremy Wright, a prolific blogger, $3350 to develop a blog for them and to write between 5-10 articles a week (over 3 months). It looks like Mr Wright had auctioned his talents off at eBay: Blogger for Hire - Start or Improve Your Blog. On further inspection I noticed that quite a few people were auctioning their blogging services on eBay.

Here's what Darren Barefoot, another blogger, has to say on his auction, Rent a Blogger - Online Marketing and Technology Expert

What do you get for winning the auction?
● If you don't have a weblog, I'll set one up for you. See below for my qualifications.
● Three months worth of blogging, with a minimum of five posts a week. These posts will typically include company news and events, tips and tricks about products and services, industry news and opinion pieces.
● Consulting services on blogging and, more importantly, monitoring the blogosphere. Learn who's talking about your company, and respond appropriately to what they're saying. I'm able to begin blogging as soon as you're ready. Feel free to email me with questions regarding the offered services or any other aspect of this auction.

In reply to the question, yes, I do think it a good idea to hire someone with expert knowledge of blogging to put the foundations in place for the development of a blog. Developing a blog can take a lot of time and effort and it's a good idea to ask soemone who's been there before how to do it.

However, in both the above examples the people will only be in place for a finite period of time and it will then be down to the company itself to take over the reins. In order for a blog to work it has to be able to produce content that resonates with the target audience and it needs to be updated quite frequently. It will be interesting to see how the bloggers get on outside their field of expertise and, as importantly, to visit the respective blogs once they have 'left the building'.

Consultancy from Marketing Tom

Marketing Tom is a blog which has been specifically designed to give people a broad range of tools that they can use to achieve Internet Marketing success. In addition, it gives visitors an opportunity to learn more about the Internet Marketing issues which may be of interest/effect their business.

Should you decide that you would like assistance with driving more traffic to your site, Marketing Tom can offer you help on all sorts of Internet Marketing, from Search Engine Marketing and Pay per Click Advertising through to Blogging and Link Generation. We will take a look at your company, your marketplace and your competitors to identify the most suitable strategy and tactics to achieve your overall Internet Marketing objectives. We can also identify issues that arise from your current website, in relation to how visitors use and the information that is presented on it.

Simply send us an email and we will contact you to get a better idea of your requirements and to suggest a plan of action. 

If there are any issues that you would like to see discussed on Marketing Tom, please let me know.

Alun John
Marketing Tom

Affiliate Marketing Forum

If you're a UK business and want to place Google Adwords, Amazon, eBuyer or any other such banners on your site, or if you're looking to promote your site through affiliate programs, then you should take a look at the UK Affiliate Marketing Forum. It has many discussions going on about the best programs, pro's and cons, how to's and much more. A couple that caught my eye were:

Affiliates and Adwords
UK Rail - upto 9% for travel agents?
Play.com v Amazon UK