Major Developments Major Developments by Calendar Year

February 17, 2014

All you Need to Know about E-Mail Marketing for Small Businesses

Filed under: 2014 — Tags: — Ralph C Dreher @ 5:18 AM

E-mail marketing is considered as an effective Internet marketing strategy for small businesses. It acts as a tool to deliver commercial messages to your potential customers on your products/services. The purpose of e-mail marketing is to build brand awareness and customer loyalty. Small businesses can make the most out of e-mail marketing, by knowing the its benefits.

Benefits of e-mail marketing for small businesses:

  • Reduces Cost, Time and Effort: E-mail marketing takes less time, effort and money when compared to offline direct marketing. In offline marketing the procedure is time consuming as you need to create the design, get it printed and then send it to your customer in an envelope. Whereas in e-mail marketing by using available e-mail templates you can send e-mails to a number of your customers in a matter of seconds.
  • Real Time Results: In e-mail marketing you get to know who opened your e-mail, has the receiver clicked on the link or your e-mail was forwarded to someone else. It gives you real time results and lets you know the behavioral data of your customers.
  • Easy to Track: Another benefit of e-mail marketing is it helps you figure out where you are going wrong. You can track on how many people have opened your e-mail, how many clicked on the link in the e-mail, did your e-mail bounce, etc. By keeping a track on these things you can identify customer engagement and the response you are getting through your e-mails.
  • Global Reach: Through e-mail marketing, you can reach thousands of global customers by a single click. You can send e-mails to a larger group of audiences who are located at different places and locations at the same time. The news related to your business, your products and your services reaches to global audiences within no time.
  • Easy to Create: E-mail marketing does not require much effort and resources to carry out the campaign. You don’t require many employees to do the work. With the use of fancy templates, images, videos and logos you can create a successful e-mail campaign.
  • Test Marketing Messages: You can use e-mail marketing as a medium for test marketing messages. By this, you will be able to understand, to what your customers will respond and accordingly you can plan and execute it in an effective way.

It’s time for small businesses to take e-mail marketing platform more seriously and start the campaign to stay connected with their potential customers. A good email marketing strategy will help your small business grow and succeed.
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September 19, 2013

A SWOT Analysis of Digital Marketing

Filed under: 2012 — Tags: , — Ralph C Dreher @ 9:47 AM

SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is one of the structured planning tools used to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to a business. As digital marketing is getting more popular when it comes promoting businesses, it is worthwhile to consider a SWOT analysis. The analysis helps businesses make informed decisions and simplifies decision making. This article deals with SWOT analysis of digital marketing.

  • Strengths
  • Cost effective: Digital marketing is cost effective when compared to other means of advertising.
  • Fast and easy to reach: Advertising businesses happens on the Internet in a short period of time. Your products, services and special offers reach local and global quickly.
  • 24/7 operation: Services on the Internet are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This helps the customers purchase products/services at their convenient time whether it is day or night.
  • Customer relationship: Digital marketing helps businesses in building relationship with the clients, prospects and new customers by giving auto-response to their queries related to products/services.
  • Brand development: Digital marketing enables businesses to spread awareness of their product/service widely to target audience, and in the long run helps build brand image by performing consistently.
  • Real time results: You will get to see real time results of transactions by knowing the number of customers visited your website, how many of them have purchased from your site, and what the peak trading times are. It will help you know customers purchasing behavior and you could plan your business accordingly.
  • Weaknesses
  • Absence of physical presence: Some customers are hesitant to buy products online because they don’t get to check the product physically.
  • No direct seller-customer interaction: As transactions in digital marketing happen online without personal interaction between seller and customer, there is no direct interaction.
  • Vulnerable to fraudulent transactions: It will be difficult to evaluate the legitimacy of a transaction. Unauthorized people might access credit card, and other information to do online transaction. Of course, it has become foolproof today.
  • Opportunities
  • Strong online presence: In this digital age, Internet users are rapidly increasing day by day. Users are more comfortable in purchasing products online as it saves their time. They also get good deals when compared to offline purchases.
  • Global reach: You can promote your company’s products/services to audiences across the globe without any geographical barriers or constraints.
  • Level playing field: Digital marketing opens doors to all businesses irrespective of the size and the type of business.
  • Threats
  • Entry of competitors: In this competitive world, everyone wants to give their best and apply various Internet marketing strategies to promote their products/services to reach wide audiences. Competition is more intense in digital marketing.

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November 21, 2010

How to Get High Rankings on Search Engine Results Page

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , — Winson @ 9:30 AM

The main objective of every website is to rank top on the search engines. This is possible when the people search for your website with the related keywords. Basically you should know the factors, which influences the search engine ranking, so that you can focus your efforts on them.

There are two main factors that influence your website in search engine rankings. They are on-page factors and off-page factors. The on-page factor influences directly on your website and are hosted on server such as, content, Meta tags and header tags. While the off-page factors encompasses things that affects outside the website and influences your rankings such as, link popularity.

Things you can do to improve search engines rankings
Good content, Page titles and Meta tags are the three major factors to increase your website ranking on search engine results pages. Beside these 3 things there are few other things that can improve your rankings. They are:

  • Use Target Keywords in the Content: Find the keywords that users frequently type in the search engines to find their sites. Get these target keywords in the content of your pages, in titles, in tag descriptions and at all the places where they make sense in real sentences.
  • Get High Value Links: The efficient way to determine High Value Links is to install Google Toolbar and use the Google’s Page Rank to determine link value. This is because if there is more High Value Links it can lead to better search engine popularity. It is better to have few high quality linking than the than many irrelevant links.
  • Relevant Value Added Content: Append the appropriate value added content for your website. This includes articles, blogs, news, and relevant tools to your business or industry. If your site has 100 pages of good quality content then there is a possibility of ranking top, than the site that has only 10 pages.
  • Create A Site Map: The major search engines like, Google, Yahoo have their standards for website rankings. It enables your visitors and search engines to navigate your website.
  • Use More Text Than Images: To display all the essential names, content, or links use more text than images. Search Engines do not recognize text contained in images or flash content. If there is a need to use images, then always use the Alt tag to describe the link.
  • Revisit Keywords On Regular Basis: There are several ways to search for the similar text and the search patterns vary frequently. You have to use the keywords according to those changes.
  • Submit Site To Directories: These directories include Yahoo and DMOZ. DMOZ is the Open Directory Project and is used to power thousands of sites and directories. If your site is included in this directory it gets you links to 1000’s of other sites.

This information suggests the ways to improve the rankings of your websites at search engine results page. Besides these, you may also require some other suggestions, depending on your need.

Source: Marvist.com

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November 19, 2010

Role of Internet Marketing In Automotive Industry

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , , — Winson @ 7:37 AM

In recent times, many retail businesses are considering Internet marketing as their preferred marketing solution to reach consumers. Many businesses consider taking their business online an issue with Internet Marketing. However, it’s about understanding, and utilizing current marketing trends effectively to enhance a business’s web presence. With Internet marketing, automotive businesses can take their services to higher levels.

Role of Internet marketing in automotive industry
When it comes to the automotive industry, Internet marketing plays a huge roll.

  • 24/7 services: Internet marketing brings 24/7 services to your business. As soon as you implement Internet marketing, your services are on air 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your services are made available to everyone through various Internet marketing methods like SEO, PPC, and Local search marketing etc.
  • Cost effective and flexible: Marketing for any automotive company through traditional media is expensive and the length of time your ad is visible to your consumer is limited. It is different when it comes to Internet marketing. Internet Marketing is cost effective and stays visible for longer periods of time and also appeals to a wider audience. This helps your automobile business reach both your existing and potential customers more effectively.
  • Improve credibility: Your website is an online representation of your business and it is your mouthpiece. All information about the company, and its products, are available on the website. Internet marketing provides your customers a place to read information about your business & services
  • High returns on investments: Costs of Internet marketing for your business are significantly lower when compared to the costs traditional offline marketing methods; such as TV, radio, and print. Internet marketing can represent your automobile business in a better way too. You can laser-target your audience very specifically based on multiple categories such as zip code & city. This means, ROI for Internet marketing is far better when compared to offline marketing, which works on mass marketing basis.
  • Two way communicative marketing: Anyone who searches for an automobile online should find your website in no time through online marketing. Search Engines provide an insight on how your potential customers are searching for services and their response to the various marketing methods you apply. There is two-way communication between you and your customers through Internet marketing unlike traditional marketing.
  • Add value and satisfaction: Internet marketing adds value to your automobile business with its tailor made solutions that are suitable for you. There is great satisfaction knowing the result of each penny you spend on Internet marketing.

Your automobile business can achieve measurable and immediate results by implementing Internet marketing. Internet marketing can help make your website easy-to-find, user-friendly, and convert leads.

Source: Search Optics

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November 16, 2010

Google PageRank vs Alexa Traffic Rank

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , — Winson @ 7:35 AM

PageRank (PR for short) is the method by which Google evaluates the importance of any given site. Pagerank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on a logarithmic scale (like Richter scale), meaning that the gaps between the integers increase logarithmically the closer you get to 10. So, for example, the gap between the 2 and 3 is quite small, whereas the gap between 7 and 8 is huge in comparison. As such, boosting your PageRank from a 2 to 3 would be quite easy, and going from a 7 to 8 would be quite hard.

Does pagerank only matters for getting a high ranking?
No. pagerank is not the only thing that matters, things like keyword density, and the anchor text used to link to the site will also have varying degrees of effect on Google.

But somehow pagerank matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

At one point, PageRank (PR) was a major factor in rankings. Today it is one of hundreds of factors in the algorithm that determines a page’s rankings.
Google updates its algorithm regularly to keep its results relevant. So, the formula used to determine pagerank and Google rankings is not constant.

Alexa Traffic Rank:
This is a ranking system set by alexa.com (a subsidiary of amazon.com). Alexa traffic rank gives rough indication of the traffic your website is getting. The traffic rank provides historical traffic data. The traffic rank number gives the three months aggregated data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users. And it is a combined measure of page views and users.

The lower your rating on Alexa the better. If you have a ranking under 100,000 then your website should be getting good traffic. 3,000,000 to 4,000,000 ratings are for new sites mostly, or sites with no traffic basically. While a rating of 1 will be for the website with the most traffic.

Alexa’s objective is to show the actual traffic of a particular website, the number that it shows serves as only a random sample of the actual traffic of that website. This is because only a small percentage of internet users are using Alexa toolbar, where Alexa Traffic Ranking algorithm solely base its computation and ranking. In addition to this, Alexa Toolbar works only with the Internet Explorer browser and on Windows operating systems.

Thus, Alexa Traffic Rank has a considerable percentage of error and doesn’t really reflect the exact and actual traffic of a website. But since the traffic was base on a random sample and assuming that the sampling is close to uniform, it could still be a good bases for giving idea of the amount of traffic and traffic ranking, just always remember that it has some percentage of error.

Google Pagerank and Alexa Traffic Rank though both attempted to rank the websites. On the other hand, they are entirely different in their objective, (Google rank web pages according to its popularity and importance based on inbound links while Alexa rank the websites according to its traffic, which is randomly sampled). That is why it is more often that they show a different and contradicting statistics, specially, for a relatively small and new websites.

Source: Marvist.com

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