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Saturday, July 9, 2011

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Social media marketing

Social media marketing is a addition to personal, small business, corporate, and non-profit organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a multifaceted, orchestrated marketing and advertising practice organizations follow to connect with their target markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates promotional elements: advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing and sales promotion. Increasingly, viral marketing campaigns are also grouped into integrated marketing communications. In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms and public relations firms.However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organizations communicate. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online.
Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted, third-party source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.
Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and often, improved customer service. Additionally, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns. With emergence of channels like Twitter, the barrier to entry in social media is greatly reduced.

Social Media Outlets

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs

Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising is changing the world of online marketing. It can help a website gain recognition by the search engines, and drive valuable traffic to your site. It’s not fool proof by any means, and because it is a new way of advertising, many people still don’t understand how it works. Educating yourself on how to best run a PPC campaign should be your first step, in order to cut down on the chances of losing your money. However, it’s a proven fact that PPC advertising does work, and there are several reason why you should consider it to promote your online business.

Site Traffic

Search engine optimization techniques are hard to master, but the great thing about PPC is that you don’t necessarily have to know everything about SEO techniques. Essentially, the ad itself will take care of the traffic, and while it does, you can use that time to work on optimizing your site further.

You Decide How Much Money to Spend

You’re in charge of how much money you want to spend on your PPC campaign. You bid on your keywords and nothing forces you to pay more for your keywords than you want too. Also, you can set maximum limits for your campaign. For instance, if you’re only willing to spend $50 on your campaign, you can set a limit, and once you’ve used up your investment, your ad will stop running on the search engine.

You Only Pay for Results

Like the name implies, you only pay per click. This means in essence, that you only pay when you’ve gotten the result that you were looking for. If no one clicks on your ad, you don’t have to pay. Of course, this by no means ensures that whoever clicks on your ad will buy your product or service, but at least they’ve taken a look at your site.

PPC is Cheaper

Television, newspaper and radio ads can all cost a lot of money. They certainly cost more than a PPC ad, and in most cases, they don’t get as good results. If someone hears your ad on the radio, there is no guarantee that they’ll go and have a look at your site. The same goes for the other traditional methods of advertising.

You Can Do It from Home

With PPC, there is no need to run out and make a television commercial. You can sit in your comfortable computer chair, and design your campaign at your leisure. It’s by far the easiest, cheapest method of advertising, which is why it’s becoming so popular with business owners.

As you can see, there are a myriad of reasons why you should consider using PPC advertising to bolster your business. With a little bit of research, and a small investment, you can take your online business to a new level. While PPC isn’t necessarily without its risks, it’s definitely something a business owner should look into.

Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (or SMO or Social SEO) is the methodization of social media activity with the intent of attracting unique visitors to website content. SMO is one of many online methods of website optimization. One of the many other methods is search engine optimization or SEO.

There are two categories of SMO/Social SEO methods:

(a) Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos

(b) Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles

Social Media Optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social Media Optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

Social Media Optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.

Social Media Optimization (SMO), is not limited to marketing and brand building. Increasingly smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy (ie. product/service development, recruiting, employee engagement and turnover, brand building, customer satisfaction and relations, business development and more). Additionally, Social Media Optimization is often at times implemented to foster a community of the associated site, allowing for a healthy business to consumer relationship[

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.[1] While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.[2]



Affiliate Marketing Guide

Most of us being PC users and surfing on Internet World pages are not good at its specific concepts and terms. Let us get acquainted more with affiliate marketing. Basically, affiliate marketing deals with the marketing products or services that are not your own. Affiliate marketing is worked out as a marketing strategy that allows one company to expand their marketing to their affiliate company's efforts. Creating a good campaign and the right affiliate marketing program are a must. It is the key to every marketer's success. A good marketing campaign is informative, as well as entertaining. This will keep your clients coming back for more.

Affiliate marketing is a narrower part of online (or internet) marketing. That is why it is alike with internet marketing in some methods, tools and strategies. However, it is more important to define those features which make affiliate marketing unique and provide that special scheme of affiliate marketing functioning.

Affiliate marketing network includes three-parts cooperation which involves a merchant (or he is often referred as an advertiser, a brand or a seller), an affiliate himself (or a publisher) and a customer. Affiliate marketing works step-by-step. An affiliate partner signs up to advertise the merchant's goods or services in order to direct a customer to the relevant web page which contains the information about advertised goods or services. For every customer an affiliate gets affiliate marketing commission.

In order to identify every affiliate, there is a system of marking him or her. As a result, every customer who is headed from the affiliates' link is to bring some money from every accepted purchase or offer.

An additional benefit of affiliate marketing is embodied in the opportunity to create sub-affiliate network (2-tier affiliate marketing). It means that every affiliate is able to attract more partners to work for him or her and bring additional percentage from every customer's action.

In such a way, the affiliate marketing sites develop a large program that envelops many people all over the world. A significant feature of affiliate marketing is its availability. In other words, it is possible to be involved into affiliate marketing with various conditions:
if you are working at home;
you have major job, but you wish to earn some extra money;
if you do not have much time for second job;
affiliate marketing is easy to learn. That is why affiliate marketing business starting is an issue of some hours.
In spite of its availability, affiliate marketing might require some special attention for the first time before it stars working and brining some income automatically. The best idea is to deal with the affiliate marketing tools. These simple and available options guarantee stable web site work and regular income. To prompt some tools, it is worthy mentioning content and link building, CEO (ppc affiliate marketing as a part of it), e-mails, blogs along with affiliate marketing software. Last attribute allows optimizing your efforts by making the programs to do some routine work for you.

To speak about the most popular affiliate marketing spheres, it is worthy noting gambling, retail, mobile phones, finance and traveling. Meanwhile, statistics foresees enlargement of the affiliate marketing fields in the nearest years.