Category Archives: Web 2.0

6 Steps of Internet Marketing to Grow Your Business

https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR12KKLMipewYlTSHw_702izG-pL3nhr8ciJXGMmySQYZbtnSfnugToday, most businesses want to use their websites to sell products and services, yet they do not know how to do it effectively or what kind of expectations one should have about what the Internet can do for getting new sales/revenues. If you are a business owner, you must have an online marketing plan. Following are 6 steps for Internet Marketing to increase your Business.

1. Communicate with your current customers with the internet. Think about it: if you are using the internet for all kinds of things, so are your customers. The internet is a great way for you to build a lasting relationship with the people who have already bought your products. You can do this by offering them a mailing list with coupons inside, or by starting a blog that takes questions from consumers. Continue reading

Search Engine Marketing update: Google Instant

Hello Folks, you may have started seeing the latest update in Google search engine. Its called Google Instant.

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

EBay Plans IPO for Skype in 2010

Great News. Okay, so how much for 400+ million loyal Skype users worldwide? And for the the market leadership position in VOIP? Lots of value for sure. Will it be more than the $2bn they paid for Skype? That’s we can’t say yet. But we can say this: its probably a good time to buy EBay stock, because they will surely earn back a good amount on Skype.

Here are the details. Continue reading

Yahoo Business Results and Comparison With Google

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45177000/jpg/_45177445_45032921.jpgYahoo has reported a loss in the final three months of 2008 as the economic downturn hit sales of online ads.

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