Archive for November, 2008
Getting in the Search Engines
Friday, November 28th, 2008 | search engine optimization | 1 Comment
After we figured out what SEO is and what it’s not in the last blog post, today we will learn the next piece of the SEO puzzle.
Since it is the ultimate goal of website owners to drive targeted traffic from search engines to their respective web sites, it is important to understand how search engines work.
Getting Indexed in the Search Engines
To get included in the SERP’s (search engine ranking pages) you do not need to pay any shady company that promises you will be included in 3,000 search engines for $250.00. I also found that using the “submit your site” function in the various engines does not get you the quick results you wish to achieve. So, to sum it up, don’t do it because its just a waste of your precious time and money.
To get included in search engines you need links. Google, MSN, Yahoo and the like use a piece of software called a “spider”, “crawler” or “bot”. All this software does is read web pages and following links from these web pages to other web pages. If the “spider” finds a URL (e.g. www.yoursite.com) which is not known to the search engine, it will report it back and the search engine will add it to its “index”. So, if your web site does get linked to from other web sites, Google and friends find you and get your web site indexed much faster.
What Sites to use to get Incoming Links
In order to get indexed quickly you want to find other sites that get “crawled” frequently by search engines. Crawling refers to the “spiders” coming and reading a web sites content. Ideally, you want to find web sites that get crawled daily or even multiple times a day, and have many other web sites linked to them. If a link to your web site from this kind of site exists, you will be indexed very soon.
Here are a few example sites:
- the Yahoo Directory is certainly one of the most important and effective places to be in, however Yahoo charges $299 per year for inclusion. Despite the stiff price tag, we still recommend using it.
- www.articlesbase.com
- www.ezinearticles.com
- Any popular blog
Published by:
Director
Lasse Kubiack
49Above Marketing Inc.
lasse (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lassekubiack
CPA is King in this Economy
Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | affiliate marketing | 2 Comments
For many years the affiliate CPA model was widely embraced by the online gambling industry due to the legal restrictions to market their services in traditional online channels in many jurisdictions, as well as by some traditional merchants.
However, the battleground has changed and more and more traditional online merchants and service providers turn their heads to affiliate marketing and its Cost-per-Action commission model. Why is that? Since the battle for customers in a challenging economy got fiercer and advertising dollars lesser it is simply a matter of efficiency. The merchant incurs an expense only in case a transaction occurrs and redundant spend, like in Pay-Per-Click, is eliminated.
Lasse Kubiack, Director at 49Above Marketing Inc. noticed a shift in services requested by clients asking for more security in advertising spend. “Affiliate Marketing is now shifting to industries which never have utilized this kind of marketing channel before“, Kubiack says. A prime example is an Adoption Agency which now utilizes affiliate marketing to find families for orphaned children or children whose parents are not able to provide for them.
“With affiliate marketing you get what you pay for” explains Director Kubiack, and this is true in every sense. To make your affiliate program stand out and generate the sales volume that your company needs, you need to have an affiliate manager, who knows the ins and outs of this industry and who has the connections to the high performing affiliates who are able to drive traffic and results to your organization. “Many clients come to us, because they tried to run the affiliate program through their marketing department, however never got the results they hoped for” reports Mr. Kubiack.
North America has a few very capable affiliate managers and 49Above Marketing is one of them. The company however is not restricted to North America, because its Affiliate Managers are multi lingual and serve German, Spanish, French and of course all other english speaking markets outside the US as well.
Published by:
49Above Marketing Inc.
sales (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
What SEO is and what it’s NOT
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 | search engine optimization | 1 Comment
SEO or Search Engine Optimization often sounds like the magic word to online merchants and service providers, however when talking to clients there seems to be a misconception about what it really is.
In order to bring some clarification on this subject we will publish a number of articles about SEO, what it is, how it is done and what the benefits of proper SEO are.
What SEO is not:
- a quick fix solution sending unlimited free traffic
- a tool or program that sends traffic to your website
- paid advertising
- a scrupolous method to trick Search Engine algorithms to obtain a certain ranking
Although some SEO specialists utilize “scrupolous methods” to trick algorithms of Search Engines we strongly recommend to not use these tactics as they are only effective for a limited time and might get your site banned from search engines altogether in the end. This kind of method are called Black Hat SEO and we consider them search engine spam. None of these tactics will be explained in this blog as 49above Marketing strictly adheres to ethical SEO practices.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a process designed to aid your search engine ranking and ultimately targeted traffic flow to your web site.
The first step in the process is to identify who you want to target. What kind of visitor you want to visit your web site and what action you want them to take. For example purchase goods, fill out forms, download something or read about your products.
The second step is to find out how many competitors you have in your niche, what they do to be successful and what you need to do in order to be better than them.
The third step is to achieve the highest possible search engine ranking for keywords, most likly to be used by your target audience. In order to make this happen you will need to do OFF and ON site optimization, which will be explained in later posts on our blog.
The fourth step is to ONGOINGLY monitor and adjust your SEO tactics, because search engines frequently change. Therefore, so does what needs to be done to keep your SEO effective!
Ongoing SEO changes
Because SEO requirements frequently change, you might find outdated information. However, we will do our best to keep the information provided on this blog up to date and relevant.
Published by:
Director
Lasse Kubiack
49Above Marketing Inc.
lasse (at) 49above.com
office: 1.778.785.0080
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lassekubiack
Online Marketing in an Ailing Economy
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 | 49above Updates, World Events | No Comments
Daily news reports about falling stock prices, companies close to bankruptcy and recession talk are normal these days. In fact over the last months more and more economies steered towards a recession and so far there are no signs of an end to this trend. The International Monetary Fund revised its international economic growth projections twice in only 3 months and the year 2008 has every potential to turn out even worse than any predictions made.
The Challenge with Traditional Advertising
Large budget cuts are usually the first reaction of decision makers. However, no marketing certainly results in no sales and no sales drive any company into even deeper financial problems. The challenge with traditional advertising is that it is does not produce quantifiable results because it is impossible to establish any kind of accurate tracking data about the success of any given offline campaign or advertising medium used. For example, no one can know how many people have seen a billboard advertisement and subsequently turned into buyers for the advertised product or if the billboard had any affect since buyers might have come from another marketing channel.
Every Crisis Bears Opportunity
Online marketing is different. In the online world, marketing spend can be traced and evaluated for results since there is quantifiable data that shows, for example, how many people have been exposed to an ad, how many people clicked an ad, or how many people purchased after clicking an ad. This kind of data is available in the pay-per-click world of Google, MSN, Yahoo and other providers. However, even with the best tracking and campaign performance improvements in place, there is still the element of redundancy for clicks not resulting in sales. No PPC campaign can deliver a 100% conversion rate!
The market demands more efficient solutions as companies cannot and want not afford redundant ad spend. The solution is affiliate marketing. What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing leverages the highly targeted traffic from 3rd party website owners who wish to sell a product or service for any given company. Traffic sent to a merchant is tracked through a third party network and the affiliate usually is compensated on a cost-per-action basis, as opposed by a Pay-per-click compensation. This means, the merchant only has an expense in the form of commission if the traffic that came from an affiliate turned into a sale. No sale-no cost, however free branding for the merchant on the affiliates web site!
Often this relatively new online marketing channel is underestimated in its effectiveness. However, the truth is that companies across almost all industries experience monthly sales revenues from this channel in millions of dollars.
Vancouver based 49Above Marketing Inc. (http://www.49above.com) is one of North Americas leading online marketing companies, which offer this kind of marketing besides PPC and media buying services. 49Above Marketing’s Director and Co-founder Lasse Kubiack noticed an even higher number of clients who turned to online marketing over the last months as in the months preceding the financial crisis. “We see an even higher ad spend in the affiliate marketing industries as companies receive 100% of the desired return on ad spend with CPA models” explains Kubiack. Online Marketing is cost effective, quantifiable, flexible and highly targeted.
According to Mr. Kubiack, in these difficult economic times more and more consumers are looking to shop online in hopes to find a bargain, use a coupon code and to save a car ride with gas expenses to the overpriced local shopping mall. While brick and mortar stores have seen a dramatic decline in retail sales, their online competitors experience normal to elevated sales at the same time.