Advertising
Google Will Start Penalizing Pages with too Many Advertisements on Top
Jan 30th
Have you ever opened up what looked like a legit website, only to be bombarded by irrelevant advertisements on the top banner? Sometimes you scroll past them to see if the site is real, but often you just quickly click away in frustration. Well you’re in luck.
In an effort to eliminate, or at least reduce, the amount of spammy advertising on the internet, Google is penalizing websites that put too many ads on the top of their websites in a new page layout algorithm. (more…)
Internet Marketing is Obsoleting Traditional Media Advertisers
Jan 23rd
Advertising via print and radio has been in steady decline for the past few years and very soon we will see internet marketing surpass television as well, possibly in the next year or two.
What does this mean for traditional media advertisers? Well, it means their job is becoming obsolete. (more…)
Twitter Claiming Title of Best Internet Marketing Tool
Jan 4th
There are many ways for your business to get publicity on the internet and to reach the customers base who would be interested in your product. There are so many, in fact, that it can be difficult to determine which ones are golden and which one are garbage.
Facebook is the current standard for social media internet marketing, with numerous users, a well-developed platform, and a history of longevity. Recently, I have discussed how to utilize YouTube to get viewers back to your website and how Google Plus is taking strides in social networking. But one other social website is becoming the most unlikely of champions: Twitter. (more…)
How YouTube Drives Traffic to Your Website
Dec 28th
Most people think that YouTube is just a place where you can find videos of people getting hurt, singing new renditions of popular songs, and performing other wacky and creative endeavors. But have you ever thought about using these videos to drive traffic to your website? (more…)
The Future of Internet Marketing: Social Commerce
Nov 23rd
Let me look deep into my crystal ball and make some predictions about the future of internet marketing. I see…
Okay, so there is no crystal ball, or other form of hokum to predict the future. But through word of mouth, internet hype, and intriguing rumors, it is possible to guess how the internet marketing landscape could be changed in the coming months and years.
Web MallAs a teenager, one of my favorite hangout spots was the mall. Even if my friends and I didn’t buy anything beyond an Orange Julius or a Wetzel’s Pretzels, we still had fun kickin’ it and looking at all of the new merchandise. When we did have money, following Christmas or a birthday, we would quickly spend it on new shoes, video games, clothing, DVDs or whatever fad item was trending that week.
Today, I can do most of my shopping from home. Although it is impossible to try on shirts to make sure they fit, for the most part this is a more efficient way to purchase stuff.
Except I miss out on the camaraderie.
While I won’t deny that I’m miserable when a trip to the mall with my girlfriend for new socks turns into a five-hour affair More >
Google Plus Brand Pages Could Fix Problems of Facebook and Twitter
Oct 24th
Google recently announced that they were implementing brand pages for corporate advertisers on their social media site, Google Plus. As Facebook is still developing tweaks to their system in order to raise user enjoyment, Google Plus will hopefully begin with a system that does not necessitate any additional changes in the future.
Amongst the issues that Facebook and Twitter deal with is the layout of their pages, which do not allow for much adjustment. Large companies, like Coca Cola or Disney, can only do so much to organize their pages within the strict guidelines of Facebook and Twitter’s programing code.
Facebook, for example, allows for a main picture on the upper left, content scrolling down the center, and that’s about it. No designing backgrounds, no customizations, and no overriding the website’s programing.
In addition, companies cannot choose which advertisements appear on the right side of their own pages. Hypothetically, a Pepsi ad could load onto the Coke’s Facebook page, creating a conflict of interests.
But hopes are high that Google will solve these issues before the launch of their brand pages.
Ad agencies are already starting to develop brand pages for Google Plus that work with its rigid formatting that is somewhat layered, but still More >
Local Search Optimization
Jun 8th
As we all know, more competition means more challenging and so does broader coverage. Therefore local search optimization is not as challenging as broader categories – but it still has its own challenges. Many of the same SEO rules still apply to local search engine optimization, but because of the improvements done on the search engines for the past 3 years with the interaction of social, it has become far simpler than we thought.
Basics of Local Search Optimization
Be Everywhere That Matters: From Google Places to local directories, local links and user citations are the primary influencers of high rankings for geo-specific terms. Local users go deep for information, so even small, low-volume destinations can result in quality links. They may not deliver that much traffic individually, but a few links from relevant blogs can get your business name and website address a long way on the search result pages including local community pages.
Ask for Reviews: If you’re a local business and are not collecting reviews, you should start considering to ask your customers to write reviews for your business since a lot of locals count on reviews and so do search engines especially for local search listings. After all, search engines More >
Social Media Marketing: A Step-Ladder for SEO Services
Oct 1st
One of the latest weapons in the arsenal of online marketers is social media marketing. Many Internet marketing companies will offer social media marketing services, but as a client and business owner, what does that really mean? Most business owners and people in general know social media as just that—an avenue for interacting with friends online—so what’s the benefit for the business?
While there are a few obvious answers (and many that are not so obvious), there is one particularly useful benefit of social media marketing for businesses that have just launched their website: It serves as an excellent step-ladder to your search engine optimization services and can win you instant customers while you’re waiting out their effectiveness.
To illustrate this, let’s first sum up the basic value of a social media presence to a growing or start-up business. Having social media accounts for your business on avenues like Facebook and Twitter basically allows a free method of developing a mailing list of interested customers and also lets you communicate with them.
Plus, your profile page serves as an appealing extra web presence for your business that requires little to no graphic design efforts. It also serves as a large online business card that More >
Marketing Concept: Don’t Rent Your Marketing, OWN IT! (Part 1)
Aug 20th
If you’ve ever bought property or studied the real estate market, you may have concluded that it oftentimes pays more dividends and makes more long-term sense to own property vs. renting it.
Taking that concept and applying it to your marketing and advertising budget can pay off greatly because the same concept holds true: Having ownership of your advertising dollar allows your business to grow over time and you to yield returns throughout your lifetime—even long after you’ve stopped paying for services.
Think of this example: Spending money on temporary ads in media like the yellow pages, billboards or newspapers could easily rack up a several thousand-dollar bill over just a few months of run-time. That money is gone as soon as you spend it and your returns vanish immediately after the ads expire—and who knows if the ads will even yield you any real returns at all?
Consider this kind of advertising “rent marketing.” Just like an apartment’s benefits would cease immediately after you stopped paying rent (because you’d probably get kicked out), so too do your marketing returns end as soon as you stop paying for run time, because your ads essentially get evicted from their media as well.
So what’s an More >
Diversifying Your Marketing Portfolio: An Introduction to Modern Marketing as Compared to the Stock Market
Jul 30th
It’s becoming pretty common knowledge that if you want to have success in the stock market, you have to have a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and mutual funds.
While your formula will vary a bit based on age and your overall investment goals, it’s usually a good idea to have some risky quick-gain stocks offset by long-term and steady growth options.
This same principle can be applied to the marketing portfolio of any sized business. For the past 10 years, Trimark has experienced the full gamut of marketing strategies, some borderline insanely risky while others have been chugging along steadily for the past 10 years constantly making small strides for the better.
As uncertainty of times come and go, marketing campaigns are tested. Those with a great diverse portfolio always seem to weather the storm. At Trimark Marketing Group, each client’s marketing goals are evaluated, and a diverse marketing plan is suggested for continual growth and sustainability. All the pieces of this customized package work different avenues of advertising and brand presence, and should combine to meet the goals of the business owner.
Here are a few examples of marketing strategies at each spectrum of risk taking and the reward associated with each:
Email More >
4.8 million hours were wasted on Pac-Man while it was on Google home page
May 26th
It might not sound like a lot on first glance, but the 36 extra seconds that the average Google.com visitor spent there last Friday playing Pac-Man adds up to a massive 4.8 million of wasted hours.
According to a study by RescueTime, Pac-Man on Google–the playable version of the iconic game that the search giant replaced its home page logo with on Friday–cost the economy a total of 4,819,352 man-hours and a whopping $120,483,800 in lost productivity. As RescueTime put it, you could hire every single Google employee, including co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, and get them for six weeks for that much money.
Still, it’s hard to get too worked up over 36 extra seconds of time someone might have spent on Google. After all, how much time does the average person spend not doing work when other time-sucks come along, like presidential elections, sports championships, “Lost” finales, the death of celebrities like Michael Jackson, and so on. Clearly, that number is an average, and so it masks that fact that some people probably lost most of their day Friday to Google’s remake of the 30-year-old game.
What’s more interesting to me is how much time people lost More >
$3 Million Super Bowl Ads Becoming Overrated
Feb 10th
This year’s Super Bowl ads seemed to disappoint viewers (although that seems to happen every year). After ads being banned and soaring costs (about $3 million for a 30-second spot), we still saw the same tired commercials (wow, look, Go Daddy girl is ripping her shirt off again while Danica Patrick gawks at her for the umpteenth time) and the familiar brands Coke, Budweiser, et al. With the increasing popularity of social media and viral marketing, I am hoping major brands will start moving away from the exorbitant costs and scrutiny that comes with Super Bowl advertising and take their branding and marketing campaigns online. Not to mention they will get better results for $3 million investment.
Pepsi has already made the shift. A few months ago they announced that, for the first time in 20 somthing years, they were not going to advertise during the Super Bowl, electing instead to focus on social media marketing. I think it’s a smart move since $3 million is going to go much farther online than in a one-time 30 second ad, especially when most of us have DVRs and streaming video. With social media marketing, Pepsi can tweak its messaging to cater to different More >