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What is in the Future for Marketing?
Marketing is moving away from a type of interruption marketing to more of a true personalized engagement. What do I mean? Just 
throwing an ad in someone’s face, spamming their inbox with emails, posting the same message over and over again in social media on a continuous basis, is on the way out the door. A more direct approach, with more of an individualized interaction between the consumer and the brand is taking over, on multiple channels.
throwing an ad in someone’s face, spamming their inbox with emails, posting the same message over and over again in social media on a continuous basis, is on the way out the door. A more direct approach, with more of an individualized interaction between the consumer and the brand is taking over, on multiple channels.This type of individualized interaction brings a brighter future for businesses. According to Forrester Research, their experts are predicting that digital marketing expenditure is to grow at a rapid rate in 2011. More businesses will be increasing their marketing budget for 2011 and beyond. This is an indicator that we will see a growth in the economy this year.
Furthermore; Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business along with the American Marketing Association found from their research that spending was up by 9.2 % over 2009. They also found that budgets for projects will double over the next year — pointing to continual economic improvement across the industry. Continue reading
Have You Been I-Framed?
When we started our website development business back in 1999 there were only a handful of web developers in the area. By mid 2008, the growth of website developers increased tremendously. The prices for designing and developing a website ranged anywhere from $99.00 to over $10,000.00.
Competition was at its highest. It also brought in some very questionable practices by some of the website designers and developers. Ever since the vast growth we have had numerous businesses come to us and ask us “what is wrong with our website?” or “my webmaster will not return my calls”. The next most common statement we hear over and over again… “We paid them so much money to build our website and now we don’t have the monies to fix it — can you help us?”
The majority of business owners don’t know where to start or what is involved in having a website. This lack of knowledge opens the door for unscrupulous practices which usually leads to unpleasant results. It is VITAL that every business owner knows what is involved in building any type of website whether it’s a small 1 page calling card website to large websites with several hundred pages.
I have a business friend that just launched a beautiful new website. She used the company that developed her original site… this company literally framed her website. They built the website on a different hosting company then where the website was being hosted, then used i-frames (inline frame – an HTML document being inserted into another HTML page) to publish the website with their hosting company. The problem with this technique is, search engines will not be able to see the content of the website. The result of this practice is the website will not place very high within the search engines.
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Commit to Submit…
If you’ve been around the internet long enough, I’m sure you have probably seen someone say something along these lines “We will submit your website to Google and other Search Engines and make you #1!”
We have found that a lot of people think that this signifies that company works for or is a partner with the search engines like Google. They have the “in” with the search engines…and if they submit your website to the search engines that you will definitely be found in a search.
Let me just say, none of us has any special “in or pull” with the search engines. The search engines’ algorithm to position websites is their trade secret. Over time companies that specialize in website placement have learned what it takes to have a website positioned high in the search engines.
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Test Your Internet Knowledge
Let’s have some fun today!
How smart are you? Test your knowledge about the internet by posting your answers in the comments section below. I will post the answers in tomorrow’s post.
- What search engine was born when six Stanford students sat around Rosita’s Taqueria looking for an exciting way to stay together after graduation?
- Google.com
- Excite.com
- Dogpile.com Continue reading
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
When it comes to setting up SEO for your website there are several techniques, some are good and some are not so good. Google, Bing and Yahoo have all laid out guidelines for the SEO companies to follow. The companies that adhere to the search engine guidelines are called White Hats, where as the companies that try to manipulate the guidelines and apply questionable techniques are called Black Hats Continue reading
Links: To Buy or Not To Buy…
Having links that point back to your website will increase your PageRanking and influence the position of your website in Google’s search results. Continue reading
Social Media…Are You Missing the Point?
Social Media is a great tool available to all business for marketing themselves. It allows you to interact with people locally, as well as globally. But, did you know that there can be a down side to Social Media? 
Citigroup did a recent study this year (2010) and found that 37% of small businesses have not used a website to promote their products or services. When it comes to e-commerce they found that 84% of businesses do not have a shopping cart to sell their products or service online. Additionally, there is 62% that don’t have a means to market their business through email marketing.
Is Your Email Address Transparent?
One of my biggest pet peeves since we have been in the business of developing websites has been people using a different email address other than their company email address. Continue reading
When Change is Good!
Over the last 10 1/2 years I have had a few clients that as of today nothing has changed on their websites. I continually talk to them about making changes but I get the same answers over and over again. “It looks fine”; “I like my website”; or “I don’t want to spend the money”; and even, “ I don’t like changes”. After all that, they then ask me—“I don’t have very much traffic coming to my website – what’s wrong with it?”, “Why isn’t anyone buying anything?”, or “Why can’t I find myself in a Google search?”. Continue reading
I Know I Need To Do It….where do I begin?
Do you need a website? Have you been told by your business associates and your friends, the only way you can increase your business is to build a website. Great!
Now you say to yourself, this should be fairly easy to do, right? I just call around, get a few prices and find the cheapest price – because I will only have a few pages and it will never change. All I’ll need to do is put in what I do, how to contact me and presto! I have a website. That was easy. If this is what you are thinking of as far as what a website is – that is utter “Hog Wash”.
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