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Twitter Improves Privacy Options, Now Supports ‘Do Not Track’

Like most social sites, Twitter tracks your every move around the web. Now, however, the company has joined a growing number of websites that support the "Do Not Track" standard, offering users a way to opt out of the tracking. MarketingProfs Daily

Three Tips for Getting Your Product on a Major Retailer's Shelves

You have a solid brand, a great product, and you'd like to see your stuff on the shelves of major retailers. But how do you achieve this goal? Typical strategies include hiring a sales representative, attending trade shows, and encouraging friends to request it at their favorite stores. Vanessa Ting ... Read the full article at MarketingProfs

How to Get More Out of Your Online Marketing Dollars

Online advertising should be an essential component of any company's marketing strategy, given that 3 million Americans use the internet on a daily basis. In fact, marketing online can help to build a strong customer relationship, reduce costs, provide access to global markets, and increase efficiency. Most importantly, however, is that online marketing can be quantified, meaning that website traffic can be tracked through web analytics. With this information, a website can be optimized so that it may appear at the top of a search engine's results. Other benefits of online marketing compared to traditional marketing include:

• Businesses can make changes instantly to their marketing campaigns in order to maximize effectiveness. Unlike newspaper ads or television commercials, online advertisements can be tracked and monitored to gauge their success.
• Online marketing also allows companies to target a specific demographic, including a certain age, location, gender, or income level. With traditional advertising, this is very difficult to do.
• Online analytics track a marketing campaign's results in-depth in order to see how effective it is. With traditional marketing, this typically cannot be done.
• Marketing online also allows for diverse advertisements, including the usage of email, social media, blogs, newsletters, videos, and more. In this respect, traditional marketing can be limiting.

Although internet marketing can become pricey when interactive agencies, web developers, and web designers become involved, many businesses can launch their own internet marketing campaigns using economical methods.

10 Ways To Advertise Online Economically And Efficiently

Due to the expansiveness of the internet, most businesses can find cost effective ways of advertising their services or products for little or no money. Below contains a list of ways to advertise cheaply.

1. Social Media Websites

Social media websites, such as FaceBook, Twitter, Tumblr and MySpace, offer businesses opportunities to promote their services all for free. To get started, businesses are required to create a profile and/or page. Once that is created, they can then start sending out profile invites to friends, family and customers. With Twitter, businesses can send out updates daily to their "tweet lists," which helps to generate website traffic as well as promote brand recognition.

2. Blogging

Blogging is another great way to advertise a business' services for free. Blogging consists of writing up short web logs that pertain to a business and its related services. Blogging helps to generate web traffic and also helps to build brand recognition. Businesses should create accounts on popular blogging websites like Blogger.com or Blogspot.com.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a handy free resource tool that allows businesses to gauge how successful their online marketing strategies are. Specifically, businesses are able to see how many visitors they receive, what pages they are viewing the most, and most importantly what keywords they are typing into the search engines to find your site.

4. Newsletters

Newsletters are an efficient, and free, way to communicate with a specific target audience. As long as businesses ask for their existing customers' permission beforehand, sending out newsletters can help to recruit new customers by getting old customers excited about new offers and products.

5. Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization allows businesses to show up at the top of a search engine's results. This means that internet users will be more likely to visit those websites that are within the first few pages of results. Search engine optimization can be achieved through the optimization of a website's structural elements, getting other relevant sites to link the site, and great content.

6. Profile Building

Creating company profiles is another way to promote a business' website. Most company profile websites offer low cost or free profile creation, where a company simply has to upload their logo along with a hyperlink to their website and a brief description of the website.

7. Article Marketing

Article marketing consists of businesses writing articles on topics related to their products or particular industry, and having them published on syndicated article websites. These articles are then spread online through re-publication, which in-turn promotes website traffic and back links.

8. Online Press Release

Businesses should consider issuing a press release when a new product or service is launched. Once a press release is issued, it is sent to newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations and more. By doing this, website traffic could increase significantly and also generate links to the site.

9. YouTube.com

Many companies are now using YouTube.com as a way to advertise their products or services, YouTube.com is a website that allows its members to upload homemade video clips. By advertising on this website, businesses' videos can help to generate brand recognition and website traffic, especially if the videos are unique and attention-grabbing.

10. Podcasting

Podcasting, much like YouTube, is another cost efficient way for businesses to advertise their goods and services using an audiovisual medium. Podcasting, a form of online audio broadcasting, allows web surfers to listen, and even subscribe, to a business' audio broadcast on their ipods or other media players. Best of all, most websites allow businesses to create podcasts for little or no money.

The Different Online Marketing Approaches

While taking into account the above ways to advertise economically, businesses should also be aware of other online marketing strategies. Below contains the three main marketing strategies that are most used by businesses online. Keep in mind that their costs can range from few cents to hundreds of dollars depending on the industry.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves paying website owners to advertise a business' services in exchange for a percentage of profits. Affiliates, or websites that advertise on the behalf of a business, are paid either by pay-per-click, pay-per-sale, or pay-per-lead.

• Pay-per-click: Each time a website visitor clicks on a business' link, and leaves the affiliate's website, the affiliate receives a certain amount of money.
• Pay-per-sale: Each time a sale is made as a result of affiliate advertising, the affiliate receives a commission.
• Pay-per-lead: Each time a visitor registers with a business' website as a result of affiliate advertising, the affiliate receives a predetermined amount of money.

Many businesses find this to be a great way of advertising because they are not required to actively promote their products. However, businesses are required to pay affiliates as well as manage the affiliate to ensure they are not breaking the company's terms of service.

Search Marketing

Search marketing uses search engine results as a means of advertising an online business. Cost-per-click advertising, a component of search marketing, is when a host, such as Google, places a business' advertisement on their search results page. Each time a visitor clicks on the advertisement, the search engine receives a predetermined amount of money. The amount of money they receive is based off of a bidding model and depends on what other competitors are bidding for a particular keyword.

Content advertising, a passive form of search marketing, is where a business' advertisement appears on online magazines, newspapers and individual websites. Although this advertising method is cheaper, it also has a lower click through conversion rate. However, content advertising helps to create brand recognition, which is vital for a business' long term success.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN are the most popular companies that offers this type of service. In fact, businesses are allowed to choose their own advertising budgets, and the company only receives money when their advertisements are clicked on.

Display Marketing

Display marketing involves placing graphics-based advertisements, similar to those found in magazines, on websites for a fee. The most common form of display marketing is online banners. Although their click through rates are low, online banners can be relatively inexpensive, and are a good way to increase brand recognition. Banner advertisement success is generally measured in four different ways:

• Page views: The number of times a specific website has been requested from the server, which measures the number of web visitors that could have potentially seen the banner advertisement. Many hosts charge their clients "per thousand impressions," or per each thousand visitors.
• Cost-per-sale: This measures how much advertisement money is allocated to one sale, which can be determined through internet cookies.
• Click-throughs: This determines the number of visitors who click on the banner advertisement, and oftentimes hosts will charge businesses per banner click.
• Click-through rate: This is the ratio of page views to clicks, and is expressed as a percentage of total visitors that actually end up clicking on the banner advertisement.

For businesses that don't have the funds to pay for banner advertising, they may be able to exchange banner advertisements with other online companies.

All Things Considered

With the World Wide Web continually expanding, online advertising offers businesses a unique, direct and quantifiable way to market their products or services to a specific market niche. Unlike traditional advertising, businesses have the opportunity to change their online advertising campaigns to keep up with consumer demand as well as different online trends. And online marketing doesn't have to come with a hefty price, either. Most businesses can launch their own marketing campaigns with little or no money and be able to determine its profitability in near real time.