Internet Marketing and advertising ideas

With more than 77% of all American adults now online, and more than 175 million Americans using the Internet regularly, the argument that a website is an essential business tool is resolved before the debate begins. If your company isn’t taking steps and making a continuing effort to maximize its website it is leaving customers and revenue behind (for competitors to pick up).

Some of the hesitancy in developing and maintaining a good website is derived from misunderstandings of what it takes to make a website productive. This article shares 8 things you can do with relative ease to enable your website to deliver better results. They are:

1. Make Sure Your Website is User Friendly
Whether in an offline or online environment, your target market can’t be expected to buy your product if you do not make it easy to find and purchase. Your website can enhance the ease with which information and specs about your products/services can be found, thereby making the decision to buy them easier. Your website needs to (a) open quickly, (b) be easy to navigate and find information, and (c) provide a painless checkout process. If you can meet these three criteria, visitors will enjoy being on your site, and your sales through the site will increase.

2. Give in to Speed

According to some sources, you have about 30 seconds to convince a visitor to your website to stay there and look for what they came to purchase. If your website takes these same 30 seconds to upload, or you have a 30 second flash that is well prepared but devoid of any message (loved by the graphic design folks and marketing people for its creativity and hated by visitors because it takes time and says nothing), then you will lose visitors even before you have a chance to present your benefits and offer. The key to speed is a well designed site hosted on servers that deliver high speed.

3. Know Who Your Site is Targeting

The better you understand your target market the better your website will perform. Keeping in mind that the website is a marketing tool, and that knowing your market is a fundamental of good marketing, it makes sense that your website should be developed with your market in mind. You need to understand how you market behaves not only in terms of buying habits and spending patterns, but also, in the case of effective web development, online. The online behavior of your market will help you construct the site to meet their expectations, needs and preferences. In most cases the market will demand (a) that your site be updates and provide the latest relevant information, (b) that the site enable their inquiries through the latest online technologies, and (c) that the website be convenient to navigate. sponsored by paid research survey

4. Know Your Goals

Just as with offline business, “getting more sales” is not a useful goal in that it is vague, overly apparent, and devoid of any market based elements. You need to approach your website with goals and objectives in mind, not only so that the site can be constructed consistent with them, but also so that the maintenance of the site can be executed to support them. For example, the goals of your website could be “present products in an attractive manner that allows prospective buyers to visual their use and benefits”. Another legitimate objective could be “to present information on products and the company so as to educate consumers and broaden our customer base”. In both instances, the goals are clearly defined, and the websites constructed around them will be designed in architecture and appearance to maximize the success of the stated objectives. sponsored by paid research survey

5. Develop a Smart Web Architecture

When it comes to the architecture of your website – where the information is placed and the paths visitors take to get to it – the most critical tool you can deploy is common sense. Most people will look for information in the place where it is most logical for it to be. If you get creative, or want to make a point with your navigation (or the names you give to the information links you have) you will find that most people will leave your site rather than try to unravel the brilliance you are showing through your very clever structure. In other words, people are on your site to get to something, the easier you make it for them to get there, the better your website is. Period.

6. Operate According to a Plan

Like any marketing tool, your website needs to be tied into your overall marketing strategy and needs to be reflective of your company, its products, and the message and image it seeks to communicate to the market. Your website needs to have a plan of operation that detail, through a process and in accordance with steps, timelines, and accountability elements, the milestones for measuring performance and success. The plan needs to include (a) processes and timetables for updates and announcements, (b) your web marketing campaign, and (c) how your site will compete against similar sites.

7. Market Your Website

Like every other aspect of your business, if you do not market what you are doing nobody will know about it or why what you are selling is something they should buy. There are many ways to market a website and, as with Tudog’s approach to traditional marketing, we recommend a basket of tactics. These include (a) organic embedding of metatags and other keywords into the content of your website so as to secure a higher natural listing on the search engines, (b) the purchase of select keywords to ensure high search results when these words are punched in, (c) affiliate sites and appearances on other sites, and (d) targeted web ads. These marketing tactics will assist you in driving traffic to your site, as well as serve to raise general awareness for your company.

8. Monitor Your Activities

The Internet offers excellent opportunities to monitor and analyze your activities so that you can be certain that what you are doing is not only working, but maximizing your potential. The web can help you determine how many people are coming to your site, where they are going inside the site, where they came from into your site, and whether or not they made a purchase. You can use this information to determine the efficacy of your navigation, architecture, content, graphics, message and marketing.

Your website, like all other aspects of your marketing, is a window into your company and a reflection of not only how much respect you have in what you do, but also how much respect and commitment you have toward your customers. A professional website demonstrates a professional attitude. Anything less is…well, less.
sponsored by paid research survey

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The state of jobs in Ohio has led many full-time job seekers to become loyal survey participants. What was once considered spam mail or a “spam-offer” 2 years ago has now become a welcomed form of a “now hiring offer whenever it appears in your email in-box.

As many downsized Ohioans sit at home accumulating massive hours of boredom, frustration and impatience waiting for the phone to ring with an offer of employment, many have reconsidered the more feasible alternative of completing online surveys for cash. There are good jobs in Ohio but the flexibility of adding an additional income stream, of working at home, and at an individual pace has offered many the refuge of time relevancy. What is time relevancy you might ask? It is the feeling that that you are accomplishing something, even a menial task during your empty schedule. The loneliness that accompanies unemployment for many can be dehumanizing, and the best remedy to pass the hours is to sit in front of the computer and blog in order to connect with other unemployed people, or accept one of the various offers for online employment with survey companies desperate for opinionated form fillers from across all age demographics.

This situation is the perfect marriage between idle time and desperate corporate clients that need to fine tune their marketing campaign for an upcoming product launch. American businesses spend billions of dollars every year on advertising but only a tiny amount of that money is spent on consumer research. It may seem like the greatest paradox; Fortune 500 companies spending only a fractional amount to learn what their consumers think of their product and services –a few million dollars here and a few million dollars there. All things considered, the market research companies hired by these Fortune 500 companies have developed analytical methods to derive behavioral conclusions just from survey responses taken from cross-sections of American population demographics.

However, participants like you and I who partake in these modern efforts which may include telephone surveys or more often of late-online surveys for pay—can receive anywhere from 5$ to $50 dollars per survey. If you participate in online or participate in phone surveys with multi-conferencing to focus groups you could receive as high as $150 by average pay-out estimates. The internet as a platform for orchestrating a survey campaign that 15 years ago would have been executed via telemarketers is the most effective platform to reach exactly the demographic population that may or is currently buying a particular product or service. Of course consumer data has been collected on all of us since the dawn of the internet, and if you have been a long time subscriber to any internet based service they have already sold their million name list of subscriber data to marketing firms more than twice—your data included.

What does this have to do with the ongoing survey revolution? The market researches who have been hiredby Fortune 500 companies and companies of all sizes, are buying this data which contains information about your: income, marital status, car you drive, soda you prefer, how many children you have, your religion, race, sex and any other arcane details necessary. You the consumer are no longer hidden behind the telephone or annoying bulk mailer packet. You can be easily and quickly accessed again and again and even placed into a subscriber based survey pool and virtually obtain employment with dozens of market research companies that have now sprouted dot-com divisions of their main business practices. Since the onset of the economic crisis market research companies have been busy redesigning their survey queries to reflect the new economic reality of late; that consumers have less disposable income and are less willing to splurge on non-essential items unless their were strong incentives. Market researches that began subscription services for individuals like you and I, also began to increase the pay out commission on completed surveys.

This means the profit margin between what the Fortune 500 company paid the market research company to design and execute the survey and the commission they pay you for completing the survey became smaller. Of course, all of these market research firms make tens of millions of dollars every year, just a few million less because of the recession. Where do you fit into this equation. Well, if you are underemployed, unemployed or strapped with debt, earning extra income by joining a survey service is a pragmatic solution. You have no boss, no concrete work schedule and you can choose your assignments. The most important aspect of this extra income is that you can work from the comfort of your own home—and this is the crux of the survey revolution. The working at home business model is not just for market researches contracting with consumers globally, but also for Fortune 500 companies that need to contract for specialists , and temporary services without the financial responsibility of hiring full-time employee.

Take into consideration that a full-time employee will be enrolled into a company sponsored group health plan, company matching 401k and retirement plan, paid training and other expenditures that companies large and small would rather do away with and preserve their operating costs. Thus outsourcing corporate roles such as: accountant, pay-roll accountant, sales support, customer support, technical support, claims representative, enrollment manager, paralegal, research support and data entry clerk are also all portable roles that are expanding online in the same magnitude as the internet. Don’t be misled into thinking that the global economic crisis of late has been the catalyst for “work at home” programs such as surveys. In actuality, the global economic crisis simply accelerated the eventual transformation of ideally portable corporate jobs to the back office to the home office.

Scaling-down rather than downsizing is what I define this new business model that has financially benefited millions of people worldwide who otherwise would have been unemployed indefinitely. Online surveys are here to stay because many large and small companies have completely transformed their traditional brick and mortar physical business location for a virtual location on the internet. The birth of online shopping stores and mega-shopping sites such as Overstock.com where you can buy virtually everything from A to Z has solidified the need to collect consumer data over the internet and identify new shopping trends via surveys.

The downside of this business model is that as surveys become more popular the commission structure payouts for survey subscribers will begin to decrease. Thus now more than ever is the time to take advantage of online surveys while they offer a profitable financial solution for replacement income.

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