Marketing Mars

The social networking sites boasts nearly 200 million profiles, which is more than double the number it had just last year. In addition to gaining access to a vast worldwide audience, a MySpace marketing campaign has the advantage of affordability. According to Luke J. Bodley of Vibrant Promotions, the social networking site sells advertising through banner impressions rather than clicks at a cost of around $5 per 1,000 impressions. (Minimum buys are usually between $5,000 and $10,000.) Banners can be targeted at a remarkably defined audience: You can choose everything from location and school affiliation to weight and sexual orientation.

So what do you need to know before you dive in?

Include a form that collects email addresses. Your sign-up rate will be five times higher if you offer an incentive for entering email addresses. Also, be sure your page includes an obvious link to your Web site.

Remember that MySpace users are Web savvy. They know basic html and like to promote favorite products on their pages. So provide the html code for a pre-made banner ad that links to your company’s site. If you’re lucky, your friends will promote your company for you.

Give visitors a reason to come back. Give visitors fresh content of something entertaining to do or they’ll stop visiting. –Luke J. Bodley

WOM is the act of people providing information and making honest recommendations to other
people about a brand, product or service. Today this is often performed by what we call
“influencers”. Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) happens when marketers launch campaigns to influence and accelerate “organic” WOM. Unlike traditional offline and online marketing,
WOMM is not about how many people you reach, but how many people pass your message to
others. womm is about intense user engagement and primarily relies on finding and empowering “influencers,” opinion leaders who have extensive knowledge in a specific area, to spread
the word about a product or service. Although most WOMM still happens offline, online WOMM
is growing fast. online information includes blogs, online forums, videos and podcasts to
create consumer-generated media (CGM). online or offline, a successful WOMM campaign
involves true and passionate influencers who are willing spread the message.

Who are the influencers?
In general, influencers are typically the 10 percent of individuals who are influencing the
choices of the remaining 90 percent of the population.

Influencers are different from the general population in several ways:

* They are four times more likely to be associated with five or more organizations.
* They are four times more likely to be considered “experts” by others on a variety of
general topics or issues.
* They are well connected, and have about three times more knowledge than the average
person.
* They are twice as likely to recommend a product or service they like; and when they
do, they are four times more likely to tell nine or more people about it.
* They are typically well traveled and are activist-oriented.
* They are willing to inform with feedback, ideas and competitive information on a
consistent and regular basis.
* They do their research and uncover unethical programs and communications. For example,
72 percent double-checked the information they received with an offline source, and 69
percent with an online source (E-fluencials Study, 2001, Burson-Marsteller). n-Marsteller).

who are strong influencers?
individuals who feel strongly about your brand, The most passionate influencers are often
part of the current customer base, and can be located and engaged with the help of your
marketing, sales and customer support departments.

we have to see, who are all our listners, means who are all the favorable and most
influenced customers are. This can be done by monitoring blogs (Blog Pulse, Technorati),
news search alerts, online discussion forums, del.icio.us tag analysis, RSS feed monitoring
(PubSub, Technorati) and other methods.
Finding the right influencers for your WOMM campaign requires insight into their
backgrounds, passions, motivations and aspirations.

Choose the right influencer partnerships. The ideal relationship is mutually beneficial—collaboration always beats paid partners.

PAYPAL is now one the top and leading online payment system with over 100 million account members.
1. calculate the PayPal expenses quickly with P-Calc- Depending on the type of
account and business it may impose a small charge on received funds. Although minimal,
these charges can be a bit hard to calculate. P-Calc is a free service which lets you work
out all those charges. With this, you can better price your products to ensure you reap a
certain net amount.

2. Withdraw funds from ANY country with VMI- The Virtual Money International ATM
card is a popular legal workaround. It registers your details under a US bank which you can
then transfer PayPal funds to. After which you can withdraw the funds from your local ATM
machine.

3. Add an extra level of security with a PayPal Security Key- As a service, PayPal
is pretty secure, but passwords can fall into the wrong hands all too often. Here the
technique is more safer- it uses a PayPal Security Key is a small electronic device that
generates a unique security code for your account about every 30 seconds. You use that code
to access your account, and to help prevent people that you don’t know from doing the same.

It’s like a combination lock for your account, except that the combination always changes.
At present its only used in the US, and is available at a cost of US $5.

4. Allow people to PayPal money to you from your blog- Want to easily place PayPal
donation link in your site? There are a few easy ways to go about this…

* Go to PayPal and set up a standard checkout system - this is painful as the guide for
the ‘easy’ standard checkout is 126 pages long.

* Try out Wordpress widgets by Patrick Chia or Supriyadi which allows you to have an
easy donation widget in your sidebar

* Try out the popular ‘Buy me a beer’ Wordpress plugin which asks for donations, but is
phrased differently.

5. An easier way to ask other pay you back- PayPal for Facebook lets you request
money from others with just a few clicks. it’s one of the more useful Facebook apps to have
around.

There is a FREE 50-page ebook that explains why PayPal freezes so many accounts, how to
avoid it, and what to do if it happens to you.Details and free download from

http://www.sellerbeware.info.

For any business, to keep the product in market as a prevailing stuff, pricing becomes an essential technique and hence it requires a detailed market research. Let’s take pricing as an example to define the market analysis issues elaborately .Companies are striving to keep an optimum price for their products based on their features and capabilities which can be delivered to the customers. The market research tools comprises of quantitative and qualitative techniques.

The dilemma which companies facing in the market today is mainly related to brand positioning which ultimately depends on the overall qualities of the product in terms of its price and also its features. Through market research, the answers for the brand positioning related controversies can be delivered. For example, through positioning research and market segmentation techniques, various aspects like sensitivity of the product related to price and demand analysis can be answered by various stages of price research.

Small and medium enterprise companies are launching various internet marketing campaign packages to tune their websites for enhancing the fundability and for boosting the marketing efforts through market research techniques. These packages are aimed to improve the competitive analysis efforts and other research methods.

The research related to pricing is mainly done by interviews, questionnaires and other survey methods which help in discovering various hidden issues that ultimately helps to tap the opportunities and hence ensure the success in the hunt much faster than other competitors.

The most common used research method is quantitative research method which helps to decide the complicated issues like competitive prices of the product. The steps involved in this process include figuring out a problem, proposing a hypothesis and definition of parameters for the corresponding hypothesis. The final step is to do the statistical analysis and delivering the solution to the problem.

we can read any posts on our mobile phone and any one can do that. Its fairly simple. We can also know how many people are reading our blog posts from their mobile.
Numbers of mobile readers will increase with decrease data plan costs and increased confidence in using the mobile web.

You can get a nice picture of the Google reader through a video demonstration.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1422851591954503386&hl=en

Now the point of having just one blog, or multiple blogs. Here we see many points under
this. Is our blog considering a single topic, or is it more general, like a newspaper? first
of all, we have to spend considerable amount of our precious time in doing research for the
topics, and will it be possible to dedicate more hours to other blogs? well this question is
on the reader, as he may be a dedicated blogger, or who also maintains a blog parallel to
his busy schedule. The blogger if he feels bored of just writing many articles on the same
topic, shall consider in opening another blog, but is it manageable by him? if yes, kindly
proceed. If not i feel it’d be better to do guest blogging.
If our blog talks more in general than any specific topic, then we can deal with any topic under the sun. When there are multiple pages in our blog, its important to see, if all (or most of it) are having good page ranks, if not, we have to manage them in a better way. Its a poor state to have a page rank of just 1-4 for inner pages and have higher rank for the main page. we have to manage all of them effectively. The answer to this, INTERLINKING. By interlinking the pages, each individual post comes directly under the index homepage. All you have to do is make sure that the individual pages are linked directly from the main home page. Therefore, whatever pagerank the homepage achieves is shared among all the individual pages. Although it cannot be guaranteed, there is a higher chance of the individual pages getting a closer page rank to the homepage. A very intelligent way to do is, by linking the highest page rank page with a lower page rank one.

Intelligent way in the path of blogging:

1. Plan well: plan well, and in advance as to what the topic has to be, what contents has to go into it, rather than, thinking that i have to write, so let me think of a topic now, or asking someone to suggest you a topic. spend sufficent time each day, to keep the postings ready to launch, like atleast 1 to 2 hours each day.

2. Prepare: Have an acivity planner or jot down the topics and suitable titles, so that you can work on it at a later time.

3. Read: use the RSS feed to see whats going on. take time in reading competitor’s blog, or those blogs that have similar topics as yours, so as to compare where you stand in the competetion.

4. Market: spare some time to plan for the marketing of the blog, and to market it.

5. Polish: More important to writing blog, is to polish the topics written and also
add our personal view wherever possible and quote better reasons and proofs.

6. Comment: Take some time to comment on other’ blog, or to reply to the comments
made on your blog.

when we are considering a redesigning the blog, we must keep certain things in mind. we
generally don’t touch or do any changes with the traditional blog layout, like the header,
content panel, sidebar… . We must do a makeover the appearance from the traditional blog.
They are: -

1. DECLUTTERING : we must concentrate on the area thats more cluttered area.
Generally it’ll be the sidebar. try decluttering this area, by moving a few things from
this, to any other parts of the blog, that can hold the information well, as well as its
readable. After this, thought the information is scattered, it’d have all the information in
the page, and more appealing and pleasure to read through.

2. Visibility of the most important content : what to do to make the page look more
appealing to the visitor of your blog ? The most important thing is, to keep the main and
important contents in the most noticeable area, and the links in its place.

3.Maximum exposure for ads: Who would not love to earn little more bucks through
their blogs? There are already One of the drawbacks of using premade themes is that you have
to force your ads and affiliate links into a crowded design. But with your own customized
design, you keep the control in your hands.

WHAT THINGS THAT YOU SHOULD NOT DO TOO MUCH TO YOUR BLOG: -

We must not do too many changes that looks like a new blog even to the old
customer or visitor. The changes must be minimally effective. If you go wild with a lots of
assorted ads and affiliate links and your new visitors dismiss your blog as an MFA(made for
AdSence) site. The better you make your site, more people visit. If we, in our enthusiasm
to earn more revenue, and take the flak of readers.

Also, the changes must not be either too frequent or once is a decade. Also that, we have to
test the new template change- look and feel of the new template, and ask some of the close
friends who are regular in reading your blog, to evaluate the change, as more appealing or
the opposite. there are cases that, if you are interested in changing the look, and choose a
wrong one that the readers don’t like, there are chances of loosing many readers, because i
feel that “first appearance is the best appearance”. Also the new design may not pull new
readers, if it doesn’t match their taste. After all, we have to keep in mind that, we are not
blogging just because of us, but for others also.

The title should always go hand-in-hand with the topics chosen n posted. The reader must not
feel the break in the chain with the posting and the blog name.
Its really important to make few changes to the blog, to keep the most important things up
and at the most important place. along with this, the blog must not loose the crux of its
posts.

Google believes it has finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential for online video advertising and at the same time, keeping its audience loyal.

Google will be introducing a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw. According to Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms, to start with Google is selling overlay advertising on a limited number of YouTube videos to a select group of partners at a cost of $20 per 1,000 viewers or $20 CPM. Initial advertisers include BMW, Ford Models, and Warner Music Group.

The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay (a translucent banner of sorts) on the bottom fifth of the screen, unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs or various shopping networks. A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

Google will place the ads only on video clips of its content partners, however we’re not quite sure what content partners they are referring to — more than 1,000 small and large media companies that have licensed their videos to YouTube. By doing so, YouTube will avoid the potential liability of having ads appear on copyrighted clips it is not authorized to display. And it will also prevent ads from playing on clips generated by users whose message may not be to the liking of advertisers.

The revenue from the ads will be split between the media partner and YouTube. Ms. Naughton also said advertisers would be able to take aim at specific channels and genres, as well as demographic profiles, geography and hour of the day. If successful, the video ads could persuade more media companies to license their content to YouTube as a way to make money from it, analysts said.

Google also that it has added video news clips to the U.S. version of Google News, the company’s free Internet news aggregation service. Initially, the clips will come from CBS, Reuters, and several local Hearst TV stations. The company expects to add more video news providers to Google News and to offer the service in other regions in the months ahead.

Already existing video ad networks

Social video ad network VideoEgg’s Troy Young, chief marketing officer said that they invented the video overlay ad about a year ago. Another upcoming video social site is blipd.com

You can take a look here at Video Egg’s overlay ad:

Possible metrics

According to Troy Young, VideoEgg’s chief marketing officer, claims that the CTR is almost 5 to 10 times that of banner ads.

To make an estimate let’s say that banner CTR % varies from 0.02% to 0.05% (based on one of our B2C client’s data). Let’s take banner CTR average as 0.03% and say the overlay ads at 8 times more than banner ads.

Then I would be looking at a CTR of 0.24%

According to Compete.com, YouTube had 150,652,781 visits to its site in April 2007.

Taking this as an average – 150,000,000 visitors x CTR of 0.24% = 360,000 visitors to my site Taking an average CR of 1% (standard across banner campaigns and PPC), I would get 3600 registrations or leads.

Now, the cost bit – if Google plans on charging $20 CPM, then my cost would be $300,000 and I would end up with a CPA of $830!

This is of course assuming that ALL visitors would see my ads and it would be displayed on ALL videos. Once you categorize your ads and display it in proper genres, the visitors would be much lesser.

It’s not surprising that mobile phone is emerging as the next generation device. They have integrated all possible domains from serious gaming to casual web 2.0 marketing. According to the research done by Sasken Communication Technologies Limited, by the year 2010 mobile phones are likely to emerge as the primary digital computing device. The mobile phone penetration will cross 50 per cent with underlining user defined categories like “expression”, “entertainment” and “enterprise”.

As a part of the recent mobile 2.0 trend that yahoo is looking to launch an email to sms feature which would allow users of yahoo to send messages their friend’s phone right from their mail box.

The text-messaging feature will be initially available to Yahoo Mail members in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines. In order to text a friend, users simply enter a mobile phone number, type a text message in Yahoo Mail and hit send.

This feature shows the importance of mobile component for a web player. It also shows that going forward we can only expect more traction in the mobile space with respect to internet players.

Business blogging is undoubted as a tremendous way to build your corporate brand, personal brand, increase traffic on your website and get found in the search engines when people are searching for the products and services that you offer.

However there are some key mistakes you need to avoid if you want to build a credible business blog… By mistakes I am not referring to not posting regularly to your business blog or not engaging in the blogsphere by commenting and linking to other peoples business blog.

Here are three mistakes that business bloggers should avoid:

1. Not branding your business blog

· Ensuring that the name of your business blog connects with your business and the services you offer.

· Making sure that the design of your business blog follows through from your corporate identity. There are many low cost and no cost blogging tools available which one of the reasons why business blogging has become so popular.

· Creating content that meets the needs of your target market and niche – consider your blog as a way to represent your unique expertise in your field.

2. Not connecting your business blog to your corporate website:

· If you have a corporate website make sure that you have a link from your website to your business blog.

· To ensure that you benefit from traffic to your business blog, you can use a blogging platform such as Wordpress.org where you can host your business blog alongside your website.

3. Not adding an about page:

· You might not realise it but your about page on your business blog or website is the second most likely page that people will click through to.

· It is important to have details about you and the teams authoring your business blog as people want to check out who you are – they are genuinely interested in the authors of your business blog and they are also interested in assessing your professional credibility in the areas you are writing about.