Why Invest in a Website?
It’s common to feel that a website isn’t an urgent issue in a business. Sometimes the website is even an afterthought – “Oh, and we ought to have a website, too.”
In today’s business world, however, a having a web presence is a primary consideration for any business of any size, and should be a top priority.
Cost Effective Advertising
By using good search engine optimized copy and a great graphic design, you can attract people to your site, and keep them there. If you have an informative, useful site, other sites will link to it, giving you more free advertising. You can utilize a variety of different online tools such as videos, graphics, interactive games, calculators and photo collections that will help your customers and those who happen upon your site get to know your company and your products.
A Cure Is In Our Reach
This week we launched a new site ACureIsInOurReach.org, for a Non-Profit , The Life Raft Group. It's for a great cause.
Here is a little bit about the project:
"The Life Raft Group (LRG) launched this website, What does a cure mean for you? to find out exactly that…
We want to know what a cure actually means to those people who are dealing with cancer every day. Unfortunately, cancer has touched us all in some way - whether you’re just concerned about it, you or someone you love has cancer, or you have lost someone to cancer.
We also want to show the scientific world that their work REALLY means something. We want to remind them that we are here, we are counting on them and we are real people."
The Pre-Cyber Monday Shakedown: Is Your Ecommerce Strategy Optimized For The Holiday Rush?
Across the globe, retailers are bracing for a challenging holiday shopping season. If you run an ecommerce site, what can you do to be sure to get the most out of “Cyber Monday” (the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States which falls on Dec. 1 this year) and beyond? At Agency.com we have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s strongest online retail brands, all of which are as concerned as mom-and-pop retailers about how they will fare during this holiday shopping season.
In anticipation of Cyber Monday and in preparation for the few weeks of consumer frenzy that follow, here are some of the global brand marketers strategies for making sure that ecommerce environments are ready to make the most out of the smaller opportunities that this season will inevitably afford.
Holiday specials content: launch it now. Although I cringe every time I get hit before Halloween by an ad for holiday shopping, now is the time to be launching your seasonal content. It is important to get your calls to action properly indexed and ranking in search results in anticipation of the interests of potential shoppers. Look back over last year’s analytics to see the seasonal search phrases that were driving high-conversion traffic to the site and build content to target that behavior. Get ready with your “holiday gift ideas” and plan ahead for people seeking “last minute holiday gifts” or looking for “gift ideas for mom.” Get this content featured on your home page so that you can contribute maximum link popularity to these specials as quickly as you can.
Cloud Computing: The Dark and Stormy Side
A number of leading authorities have been urging caution on the adoption of Web-based services as a new wave of vendors unveil cloud initiatives. Cloud computing involves computing resources hosted in an off-premise "cloud" rather than an in-house computer room.
Generating Leads in a Web 2.0 World
Marketing is going through a revolution online, thanks to the continual adoption of the Web 2.0 concepts originally defined by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty.
If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson's blog, Trends in the Living Networks.
A New Conversation
Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them.
Building a Profitable Web 2.0 Web Site
Competition for building a profitable Web site is quite fierce. Yet many of us have dreams of a unique concept that will attract viewers, followed soon thereafter by advertisers. I'm not sure what percentage of aspirants succeed in this quest, but I would venture to guess that it's a very low percentage.
With the evolution of the Web to the Web 2.0, the task becomes even a bit more challenging. For those who aren't familiar with the term Web 2.0, Wikipedia can help out: "Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and Web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the Web ..." The complete definition also mentions video sharing sites.
A Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Pay Per Click or PPC is among the most popular of all web-marketing tools. It is nothing but a small two or three line text advertisement which contains keywords and phrases. These small advertisements are usually found on the right side of search pages on leading search engines. Quite often one or two links are also highlighted on search pages. These links are termed ‘sponsored links’ and can be seen in leading search engines such as Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. These sponsored links are nothing but PPC advertisements.
The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.
