1. Set goals. Goals are absolutely necessary when you do internet marketing. That is because without goals, you are much more likely to waste money and time doing things that do not get you any closer to what you want, which is to have a better business. By setting goals, you illuminate pathways to those goals, which saves you both time and money.

2. Think about the content on your website. You have to make sure that it interests the reader, above all. If you are trying to optimize your site for the search engines, or SEO, you can use some keywords, but do not stuff your entire site full of unnatural keyword phrases. The entire reason to optimize your site for search engines is that you want people to visit your site, and if the content isn’t interesting and relevant they won’t stay. You also have to make sure that your content is frequently updated, so that visitors have fresh information to take a look at.

3. Monitor your site performance. Use Google Analytics or the analytics software provided by your webhost and use feedback from your visitors. Find out what is working and what should work better, and look for ways to further improve your visitor experience. Your website should never be fully “finished” and monitoring site performance is a great way to make sure that you never let down your guard and that you are always looking for ways to make your site all that it can be. You never when or from where your next big customer(s) will come and what they see and read on your website will make the email or call you. Your website is most faithful sales agent working for your 24×7. Keep investing and updating in this faithful internet sales agent of your company.

4. Write articles and spread them with business directories and article directories. If you write articles that can be shared with others and have a link to your site in the author section, you can get a lot of site visitors that can ultimately turn into buyers. Your articles can establish you as a resource or an expert on your chosen subject, and if your article is impressive people will visit your site. Your articles can also provide splendid SEO for you, as the links will attract the search engines to your site as well.

5. Use a blog to keep a good relationship with your customers, as well as to showcase your knowledge about your products and subject areas. Use WordPress to create your blog — its the best software for a blog and has many useful plugins available free. Respond to comments as professionally as possible, and please consider doing video blogs, as video can often be more exciting than text. You can host your video on Youtube and embed them on your blog. Youtube and WordPress have made it very easy to embed videos in your blog posts.

As a small business, you have to take active role in your online marketing, and  the time and effort on internet marketing can start showing positive results within 6-8 weeks in most cases, and it is not difficult to do if you use the Internet Marketing Strategies described above. If you need any specific help, you can contact us, and we can help you with our affordable internet marketing services.

Since many companies and professionals have used MyOrbit services for their online business, I wanted to share this with you. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/sep/09/google-instant-effect-on-seo

What is clear is that Google wants to offer long-tail keywords to users as early as possible in the search process.

For example, along with the keyword: “Hair Transplant Surgery Cost”, people will also see options like: “how much does hair transplant surgery cost”, and the latter phrase will now receive many clicks too, even though its hardly a keyword in today’s internet marketing book.

Earlier such a longer sentence or question would have received very few direct clicks because people won’t type long text, but people can surely select longer text if its offered as a drop-down like it is being done now, thereby generating more exposure/visits to web content built on long tail keywords than today.

In addition, Google has been working hard to improve “personalization”, which means they want to show you things relevant to your search profile based on past searches, geography, etc.

What does it mean for website owners and SEO? I believe websites that cover their topic thoroughly using all possible keywords and their natural expressions will ultimately come out winners.

We will study this further to see how Google Instant can be used for our work, and will share the learning with you. Meanwhile all basic SEO work should continue because that is essential to get started in the search engine indexing game.

Best Wishes,
Shankar

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The above ad is from the AIDS prevention campaign being run in Uganda. It was shared by Perry Marshall over the weekend. It stands out from the usual ads, and has an immediate on the reader because of its ability to directly address the target audience — middle aged men with the income and propensity for procuring teenage sex.

What makes this ad stand out? Some reasons I can think of are:

1. It is dealing with morals/values, where its possible to act differently in private from what we  accept in public.

2. It uses just a few words and that too as questions, which you will tend to answer within yourself.

3. The few words are supported by a carefully chosen image, which really delivers the full impact of the ad.

4. It puts you on the defensive; very few ads can achieve that. It makes you respond internally. So you are likely to remember it for some time.

These days we see hundreds of ads every day on the Internet and in print media. Our mind has been slowly getting trained to separate the signal (content) from the noise (ads). In the early days of the web, 1997 to 2000, there were not that many ads, and the technology behind them had no capability to geo-target the audience.

The above ad is a great example of a powerful ad.
See how you can use its structure for your own business.
- Shankar

In the above interview, Philp Kotler expresses his opinion on marketing lessons from Barack Obama’s 2008 US election campaign. Barack Obama made perfect preparation with discipline and right choice of bright people.The key marketing lessons that can be taken from Barack Obama’s marketing campaign were ‘high tech’ and ‘‘high touch’. High touch means there is an emotional component selling hope and high tech is using the Internet to its best. They created database for sending relevant messages to right people the right time.

On key learning for businesses Philip Kotler says: “I think the climate you establish makes a big difference”. So the high hope concept will make a difference if people will keep going on with passion and purpose and not fear. So basically a company and its people got to be positive realistically.

And Barack Obama’s campaign also used the latest Internet short-messaging platform “Twitter” extensively to share updates every day as he moved from place to place. This adoption of new technology helped him reach out to a far wider group of people in real time very effectively.

Here’s the offer page  and here are the Terms and Conditions for their Money Back Guarantee.

We feel the offer page should have mentioned/clarified a couple of essential terms before asking a prospect to spend time in filling the form.  For example:

#4 of Terms: …Your refund request must be accompanied by a CPA-approved record of revenue for the prior 18 months, showing that you have not doubled your gross sales revenue for any comparable month from the prior year.

[Which means, the doubling of sales will not be assessed over the year or quarter (which is the accepted business growth comparison timeframe),  but any month of the year. This is not evident at all from the way the advertising is presented, and could face difficulty

#6 of Terms:  Only the set up and consulting fees previously paid by you to Infusionsoft are eligible for refund under this program. Your monthly subscription charges to the Infusionsoft service are not refundable.

[What the above term says is that that the various services you need to buy to qualify for money back guarantee are not part of the money back the guarantee! Not sure if this clause has been reviewed by their lawyers because it can't stand in a court of law]

Therefore, always read the terms of a money back guarantee because its very rare in any services business, irrespective of how the offer is being shown. But if you do find a business partner who is willing to give a written money back guarantee on services, then that’s a thing, and worth going for. Hope you found this useful.

Offering free food was one of the ways of beating recession in the 1980s, and restaurant owners are hoping it will work this time too. Hundreds of restaurants have closed in the recent months.

The offer of free food is premised on the belief that customers would be too embarrassed not to leave behind money after dinner. Restaurants owners believe that except students, most customers would not leave without leaving money behind.

For example, the menu card at The Little Bay in Farringdon, London (featured in the photo) does not mention prices for dishes. Customers pay only for the drinks. Restaurant owner Peter Ilic said, “You can leave 50 pounds or nothing; it doesn’t matter, I will treat you the same,” he said.

Btw, if you are in London, you can visit the Little Bay restaurant at:
171 Farringdon Road
Clerkenwell, London EC1R 3AL
Tel: 020 7278 1234

And now the Lesson for those of us in other businesses, including the online business.

Its called the 5% rule, ie. before you ask for anything, offer your customer at least 5% worth of sample or value or product or service or whatever that you sell. We have seen this working in both B2B and B2C businesses.

In fact, a money back guarantee or performance guarantee of some sort also achieves the same result as above.

They make it difficult for the customer to refuse the offer, by removing all possible barriers.

In our experience, too many companies don’t want to try any of the above because sometimes things will fail, and majority of managers are risk-averse. So if you say your company can’t do it, that’s fine too. We are sure someone else will do it and go on to win the sale. Nobody is forced to give us a sale, we have to win it. This recession will test the best. So give it a serious thought.

It reported a loss of $303 million compared to a profit of $205 million last year.

The results come as Carol Bartz takes over from Jerry Yang as the firm’s new chief executive.

Some analysts feel Yahoo has weathered the downturn better than expected, with the loss mainly due to one-off costs.

We don’t think so. The downturn is far from over, and Yahoo will see a very aggressive Google in the coming months, because Google is also facing pressure on their revenues.

Yahoo has a similar global people reach as Google, of about 450 million people, or 30% of global Internet user base, but the lack of revenue producing assets makes the difference. Yahoo has no strong answer to Google Adwords even today after 3 years.

Yahoo does have a few strong assets:

1. Yahoo Answers has been growing in popularity at an amazing rate, and how they monetize that traffic and user loyalty is to be seen. This is a big winner from Yahoo, where they have beaten Google.
2. Yahoo Personals also has potential because online dating is a high growth business. Their pricing model needs tweaking because there are free sites like Plenty of Fish, that are equally good in quality of members.
3. Yahoo Egroups and Flickr are also very popular destinations, and even if they can increase revenue by 1 dollar per user, it could a 100-200 million in new revenues.

But on the advertising side, Yahoo has difficult times ahead as Google continues to eat into its user base worldwide — both English and non-English. Their ad network doesn’t work anywhere near Google’s quality, and that explains the lower revenues.

Yahoo has to make some hard decisions on revenue generation and partnerships.

Related Articles:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7854887.stm

We have helped a few local businesses to use Google in this way, and its a very simple process. So if you have a physical business, you must take this step asap.

GSIBM: Graham School of Investing & Business Management

http://GSIBM.com

It could be considered as an online b-school that’s very practical in its approach, and aims to build business leaders. The program is based on successful business teachings by Ben Graham (and followed by Warren Buffet to produce financial results we all know).

The program has been carefully designed after extensive market research on the business knowledge needs of working professionals at various levels, and it will address a large unmet need.

The program will help working professionals in their career growth with the wide coverage planned: from Finance & Investing, to Sales & Marketing, and Legal Contracts, etc.

You are the among first to get this news, and it will be great if you can share it with others who may be interested, and also bookmark the website: http://GSIBM.com
Best Wishes,
Shankar AVSB for MyOrbit Team

However, a small number of print newspapers like the Wall Street Journal have not only survived the online storm; they have done extraordinarily well despite the competition. The newspaper still boasts two million readers a day. Even more impressive, however, is the fact that the paper has transitioned quite well into the online medium. Its online subscriber numbers are staggering as the paper has close to one million members. These are truly amazing numbers and it leads many people to wonder the secret of the Wall Street Journal’s success.

Part of the reason is that although the newspaper is named after a particular street in New York City, the subject matter of the paper is international in scope. There are financial markets all over the world. People involved in these markets require an influx of news on the subject of banking, finance, and the economy.

Whether it is the financial district of modern London or the black Wall Street of 1920′s Oklahoma, people all over the world have required financial news. The Wall Street Journal provided for that need. As a result, it has been reaping the rewards since its inception in an earlier century.

Of course, the ability for the Journal to stay relevant ties in with the foresight to create an online presence. This is no minor feat. Had it not effectively developed a credible online subscription service it would have lost ground to more visionary start ups. Yes, the Journal could have gotten into the game at a later date but this would have been seen as a “follow the leader” tactic and not one of innovation. The New York Times learned this lesson when its late start into online news subscription services never caught on.

How ahead of the game was the newspaper in this regard? Well, the website debuted in 1996. (URL: WallStreetJoural.com) The internet was making its first expansion into people’s homes during this time period. They were well ahead of the curve since it immediately jumped into the fray. Yes, several newspapers had websites but they were sparse and did not truly embody the look and feel of a new media dynamo. The Wall Street Journal Online did and it set the foundation for the future growth that it would soon experience.

Part of the reason for this is that they understood the trends media communications were being directed. Since the Wall Street Journal lived in a realm of dollars and cents, it understood that the future of news would be found in online subscriptions. Traditional newspapers were simply too mired in tradition to grasp this concept. As such, they fell behind while the Wall Street Journal embraced change and rode it to significant new media success.

This is an article written by one of our Wall Street experts of the Wall Street Gemzies page. This Gemzies page is an Online Wall Street Community where fellow experts can share, rate and find websites, videos photos, books and the latest news. We have got some great content on the Wall Street Bull, Black Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal. We invite you to join our Wall Street Gemzies. Article by Marcel_Van_Brienen.

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A few thoughts by MyOrbit: 

The  Wall Street Journal has maintained a prime position in the free market economy, and whether you agree with their views or differ, it is a fact that their view reaches a few million business/financial professionals, and hence has the ability to make tremendous positive or negative influence on any topic they touch.

That said, the online medium, including blogs and websites like ours, are playing an increasingly important role in providing the raw material/ stories that ultimately appear on the pages of Wall Street Journal. The advances in online media have made it possible to get noticed rapidly. For example, Many reporters regularly pick stories from the top social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble-Upon.

These are interesting times, and Wall Street Journal surely has made itself comfortable in the online space, which in way, ensures its survival and leadership position in the coming years.