New blog, new address, upcoming podcast

The tools of online marketing can be so powerful, allowing you to get your message to a large but targeted audience. For this reason, they can be dangerous and damaging for your brand if you stuff them up. Like many things, they are value neutral, neither good nor bad, just tools to be used.

For this reason I'm starting a new podcast, with real life examples of good, bad and really ugly online marketing tactics - For Your Own Safety.

I have just finished moving the blog over to the new address which can be found at www.4yourownsafety.com

So watch out for new podcast episodes coming soon...

"The thing about free"

Seth Godin did an interesting post (nothing unusual about that) called "the thing about free". It discusses the value of using 'free' in marketing. A summary could be that giving something away for free will win you the attention of your audience briefly, but that we value those things that we pay for, even though the fee may be nominal.

This is extremely relevant to the field of online marketing as almost every decent website you see is offering something for free, whether its information on a blog (such as this one), or free newsletters, free evaluations, reports, the list goes on. This is a standard tactic, one which I use myself and encourage clients to utilise.

I've often heard people from various walks of life discuss the value of free things. The conclusion usually ends up placing the same value on that which is not paid for, as advice unasked for. It is about respect, if something costs you nothing, then you most probably won't value it, "easy come, easy go" style.

The difficulty that I find in the current marketplace is that everyone else is giving something away for free, and clients and customers expect it.

This is certainly not some kind of absolute truth, but marketers and sales people always need to take care in their generosity. I like to be generous, and give of myself and my time, but I know that I need to keep in mind that if there isn't some kind of cost to my time, advice or services, then they are probably going to be wasted on the recipient anyway through inaction.

Brand ownership, domain ownership

How much is Melbourne worth? Someone in America thinks its worth about $200,000, melbourne.com that is, reports the smh.com.au technology section recently, in an article about the loosening of rules surrounding the ownership and trading of .au domain names.

Domain name ownership is a basic insurance level of retaining control of your brand online. Why bother buy mybusiness.net.au when you already have mybusiness.com.au? Although extension like .net are less used by searchers and consumers, registering these domains is a great way to protect your corporate identity online.

Emarketing Mistakes

Emarketing can be such a powerful tool but so easily abused. The gains you receive may quickly be reverse by its overuse or misuse.

Last week my wife receive a message from her tertiary institution informing her (and every single other student) about how they were going to pass on her email address to a third party company so that they could send marketing information.

The email introduced the company and highlighted some products and benefits, which were in themselves valid. However, people had to opt out rather than opt in to receive this communication.

Personally, I think that on an ethical level, this is dubious. The school obviously stands to profit by selling their list to the third party. But the point is that people had to opt out, and it gave them 2 days to do so, some people would not have even got the message by the time their details had been sold onwards.

When people give you their contact information, they are placing trust into your hands. Don't abuse it by handing it on to someone else for a quick buck.

The problem is, that the list becomes one of such a lower quality. People who receive this message that has been passed on without consent will have a lower propensity to purchase the products of that company than they otherwise would have. They may infact even be annoyed to receive these messages.

What they could have done was to write a message saying "this organisation supports the school, they have some great products and a special offer for people who respond to this message, you can opt in to receive useful updates on ... topics and frequent special offers." The people who were already predisposed to purchase those products would have loved it. The other would have ignored it, but not been annoyed when they encountered this brand in the future.

So, engage in emarketing with caution, and what ever you do, make sure you send useful information that the people you are communicating to are interested in.

Our firm has a specific solution that is integrated with your website and client database. Click here for more information

Brand New Site for TMC

This week our brand new company site went live. We are offering great website design, flexible content management and ecommerce options, graphic design and marketing services. We operate out of Chifley Tower, right in the centre of the Sydney cbd.

Focussed online communications is what we provide to clients, assisting them to navigate the myriad of possibilities in internet marketing to produce real and effective results.

We have free articles providing useful information on improving your the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts, available only to our members. Plus, by joining our site you will receive our monthly newsletter and access to discounts on marketing services. So check it out at http://www.thompsonmarketing.com.au/

A new record - our changing world

A new record was set in Australia with an artist single topping the charts just on digital 
downloads. Rihanna has taken the number one spot with Don't stop the music before a single
physical disc has been sold. News.com.au reports that some music stores have stopped stocking physical singles altogether.

This is the trend, you can download movies and tv programs straight to your media player, chooses the content you want, no ad breaks to sit through.

What does this mean for your business? Consumers are searching for products and services online, and more and more they are purchasing there. The current era has been called the information age, but consumers are no longer just using the internet to find information about products, services or companies, but to purchase. They expect choice, they expect to be able to get it now.

Is your business placed to take advantage of this trend. I hope so!

Simple website management

I love using the content management system (CMS) of my website. If you are creating your web pages, page by page, then you are still living in a technological dark age. Within hours I have created more than 10 categories, 30 pages, uploaded pictures and articles. Its simple, its awesome. Go to www.websitegurus.com.au/ to find out more or check out our offers at http://www.thompsonmarketing.com.au/

New media, social media, web 2.0, digital media - whats it all mean and why should you care?

Several new words and phrases have entered our vocabularly in recent times. Over the past decade a stream of innovation has occured in the digital realm forcing an
innovation in the language to describe it. Arguments surrounding the definitions of terms like
'new media', 'social media', 'digital media', abound, which can lead to quite a bit of confusion.

Digital media basically refers to electronic media, as opposed to analog media, i.e. CDs, MP3s etc.
Generally speaking, 'new media' is a reference in opposition to 'old media' - newspapers, radio, tv etc. The new media includes things like podcasts, blogs, websites, although many old media giants are utilising all these new mediums to much profit and advantage. For example, consider the fairfax group, who also publish their newspapers online, some for a subscription, and sell a great deal of advertising, and have integrated with a number of other sites to create a one-stop shop. Yahoo!, mircrsoft and many others also engage in such partnerships.

Social media and web 2.0 (almost used interchangeably), are again difficult terms to define, and are those forms of new media that involve social interation between the participants, user-generated content, and little control by those who facilitate them. Examples include myspace, facebook, wikipedia and youtube.

So, these are all big corporates. What does all of this mean for your business or organisation? People are no longer satisfied with looking at online brochures, which is what many websites are. Customers and consumers want to interact, want to choose what information they receive, want to be able to talk back, and have a conversation about things. The organisations that allow customers to do this, engage with them in meaningful ways and provide useful and interesting content, are the ones who will win market share in the new media scene.

There's only 3 search engines you need to worry about... not thousands!

There are literally MILLIONS of search engines out on the web and it would be impossible to get decent ranking on any number of them. Thankfully however, you don't need to worry about the majority. The search market is dominated by three main players, google, yahoo!, and live (formerly MSN). These sites make up the majority of search traffic globally (with google as the biggest player), so much so, thats its not worth devoting time to any of the others.




A further reason is that many of the other search engines are outsourcing their search to these three big players, i.e. alta vista, the big name in search when I first started using the internet, runs off the yahoo! engine. And apparently, AOL uses google.




In a more personal example, an associate of mine operates a regional information/business directory site. The search function on that site uses google's search technology. This is the case with many sites, and the big players are making it easier and easier to integrate their technology into other sites.




So, if you get an email from a company, or come across a site that offers to submit your site to hundreds or thousands of search engines for $X, you need not be impressed. You can manually submit to each of these major players within a few minutes and it is absolutely free.

To add your URL to google, go to

http://www.google.com/addurl/

To add your URL to Yahoo!, go to

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

To add your URL to Live, go to

http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

I made a (SEO) mistake...

When it comes to your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) efforts it is REALLY important to keep your site updated with new and relevant information. This is one of the pillars of SEO or SEM - Search Engine Marketing.

And I made a mistake... I went overseas for more than a month for my wedding, visiting family, and having a holiday, and I didn't employ any contingency plan for updating the blog or business site. I had limited internet access during this time, but google's spiders are unforgiving. Luckily my ranking didn't suffer too much for some categories and keyword searches, but everyday that you are not improving your SEO, your competitors are. They are creeping up in the rankings, and before you know it, you have lost that first page rank, to be banished to the oblivion beyond page 1. And if you are not on page one, then you might as well be on page one thousand.

“3 Reasons why pay-per-click ads (PPC) are a waste of time and money”

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has become a huge market within the internet advertising scene. It is estimated that over 8 billion searches are conducted globally each month. Further, 85% of people find pages they are looking for online via search engines.
Hundreds of thousands of businesses are using PPC to advertise on the internet, and there are also thousands of businesses selling their services for something that you can easily do for yourself.
On the surface, it may seem to be a cost effective form of advertising; you choose your keywords, set your budget, and only put as much credit as you can afford. Different keywords will cost different amounts depending on their popularity. However, there are 3 problems with PPC that mean that it is a waste of your time and money:

Pay-per-click Problem number 1 – Competitors
Here’s the most costly problem; your competitors can use up all of your credits without you getting any real leads from all the traffic being generated and directed to your site. Click fraud has two sides to it. Some service providers of PPC advertising will deliberate click on your ads to use up your credit to make more money. Or more maliciously, your competitors, who are bidding on the very same keywords can click away, again and again, and use up all of your budget. Whist they cannot run up a bill for you, your losses will only be limited to your predetermined credit limit. That is, if you are using Google Adwords or a similar service. Some commission based sites not work out so cheap. So, it wastes your time in setting it up, and money for no return.
Companies are working on ways to reduce click fraud, logging IP addresses and so on, however in such a large, expanding and virtually unregulated market, it is impossible to control these things at this stage.

Pay-per-click Problem number 2 – Browsers
Some browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, have for some time enabled searchers to use software plug-ins to screen out paid advertising on searches, as well as to block banner ads. A searcher using a program with this feature enabled can conduct searches on Google without ever seeing your paid advertisement.
This goes for those thinking of paying for banner ads too. They can be very effective at getting exposure, but a certain segment of your market will never see you ad thanks to plug-ins like ‘adblock’. With innovation occurring at break-neck speed, this sort of software ad-on is sure to become more popular and widely available.

Pay-per-click Problem number 3 – Smart/Biased Searchers
Some savvy internet users will deliberately avoid those links which they identify as sponsored or paid ads. I have had discussions with clients who will not click on those paid ads, and here is why.
The purpose of search engines is to search the internet and rank and categorise the website and information that they find according to relevance to the search term. That is, when you punch your keywords into a search engine, the point is to give you the most relevant result, the most useful information. For those who know this, paid ads are just cheating. They know that the most useful information is more likely to be in those non-sponsored links. Also, the information is more likely to be unbiased.

It is true that a paid search campaign can be useful in some circumstances, if you don’t get all of your credit used up by a malicious competitor. This may work, for example, in the situation of a very specific and non-competitive search term that you may have come across. Also, a certain segment of searchers will not mind that you have paid for your advertising, or that use a simpler web browser. However the most effective long term option is to have relevant, up-to-date content on your site. When people find your site useful, they will link to it, which in for your search engine optimization is like building your reputation. This kind of SEO is the best strategy for promoting your business through search engines.

You can find more articles to assist in your online marketing efforts, or for further information about an integrated web strategy contact us at info@thompsonmarketing.com.au