Many clients ask me if they should place advertising on their site to monetize it, and because it is so easy to add Google Adsense, many people think they should go ahead and just do it.

I would strongly discourage the addition of advertising to any corporate site. While you may need to monetize a magazine or community service type website, I believe that you should never place ads on a corporate site for two reasons.

1. You lose your viewers to your direct competitors. Imagine, going to a sales meeting and handing out your competitor’s business card at the end of the meeting. You would never do that in real life, do not do it on your website. If you understand how Google works, you’ll understand that they are good at what they do and if you write a page about a niche subject that your business provides, Google will place ads on that page with competitors that match your keywords.

2. You do not make enough money to justify the loss of customers. Google Ads can make you money, but not as much as you think. I make about $5.00 per 1000 page views on some of our websites, so it is fairly meager. I would guess that our average corporate client may get 2500 to 5000 page views a month, so you would make about $15 to $30. Would you sell your leads and customers to your competitor for that much?

Philosophies differ on what to do to build business if we are in a down economy. Some say this is precisely when ad budgets should go up, but historically when business is bad, media companies are the first to see a drop as ad budgets can be cut so easily.

The top 100 companies spent less in 2007 overall but increased their advertising over 40% online! It is very clear that online ad revenue will continue in a tough market, but where is overall advertising?

According to eMarketer and Universal McCann data, Total US media advertising spending was flat in 2007 but will increase 3.3% this year and 1.9% in 2009.

The “Microsite” is becoming recognized as a part of a website dedicated to a specific subject. It is a separate section or a separate website, sometimes with its own domain name.  Microsites are set apart in that they have a rich media component like video, flash, or audio.

A new concept developing over the last year or two, it is now the subject of more research. One such study among marketers finds that the Mircosite is being used as much as video in specialized pitches, product demos and other short term information. This is somewhat surprising as online video has been well excepted among both marketers and buyers.

RedFusion Media builds Microsites generally for specialized media and subject. Examples include online personalities that guide the user through filling a form, or making an online sales pitch. This is particularly effective as the video can be both the demonstrator and closer. Additional questions can be referred to a FAQ section, technical specifications section or any possible objection to the close.

Our experience shows increased completion of forms and signups for service. Microsites, while not really very different from the Website, may become another hot trend, in that it is a way to work on a specific subject in an intense way without effecting the general Website. Microsites can also be built by outside vendors for larger corporate Websites without engaging the webmaster for creative, a task that most marketers find compelling to get the product they envision.

See http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006226 for the full article.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that nearly ALL teens in the US are online. . . and active in texting. (Writing for those of us over 22.)

Overall 94% are online, and if the income category under $30,000 in household income is eliminated, it is over 97%!

Responding teens were heavy users of electronic communications overall: 71% had a mobile phone, 59% had a notebook or desktop PC, 58% had a social network profile and 27% had a blog, according to information reported by Emarketer Newsletter.

While these facts are no real surprise to the market researcher or technophile, it deserves a hard look for those catering to teenage or young adult customers, because one possible result may be irrelevance of some businesses that don’t get it. Those that text, (they do not like to call it writing) may expect those that sell to them to text as well. Girls spend much more time texting and high-tech communicating than boys do. 44% of girls text every day, compared with only half as much for boys.

Don’t let your conclusion be that this group is great at writing though. In a recent seminar that I attended, Email expert Michelle Howe explained that in her college level business school writing class, most students completely clutch when asked to write a two paragraph email announcing a fictional policy change! See more on this subject in upcoming posts.

What is Social Media?

Social media is the new marketing idea to tie social groups together. The major driving force behind social media is the “user created content”. Users or members of the groups are the ones that create and push the direction of the website, not the owners of the site. The content is driven mostly by blogging or by message boards, where users can create and publish there strings of content. Users also get there own personal homepages, can add photos and plug-ins to their pages, and can link their pages to there friends. The major examples of sites that would be social community sites are; MySpace.com, FaceBook.com, Meetup.com, and YouTube.

Can small and medium businesses use Social Media as a tool?

Sure, the most basic way to create a social community is to add a Blog to your existing website. Blogs are really a two way communication tool with the major advantage that Blogs have a powerful distributions system in the form of an RSS feed built in.

“Permission based” email is when a customer has asked for updates, product information and other direct contact from your company. This is a valuable tool which still has lots of power. First it is like direct mail except, of course, online. Second, these are interested parties and existing customers.

According to a new report by EMarker, Promotional emails perform well against other online forms of contact. They rank right under your website for importance as most influence to buy online.

Online marketing increasingly is more than the website. It is the most important, but in many ways it needs the other media to maximize its prospecting effect.

Read Online Marketing Effectiveness for more information about customer permission to sell.

With an astounding 42% revenue increase, Google stock surged over 17% in a single day following the announcement of huge 30% profit increases. The stock was down due to current market pressures and reports that the “click” rate was flat by ComSearch and other research firms.

Google reported that in fact clicks on its ads increased 20% in the first quarter from a year earlier and 30% in the forth quarter in a Wall Street Journal front page article today.

RedFusion Media has see the cost per click increase over the last several months, supporting the notion that demand for ads continues to increase. This was confirmed by Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in an interview with the Journal stating that on average advertisers are paying more for each click.
RedFusion Media buys online advertising for dozens of its clients and still sees lots of room for smaller businesses to take of advantage of small market niches in local areas. Even with prices rising, the effectiveness is still greater than most other options available to smaller companies and non-profits. Using our Local Target Marketing program, clients can see exactly what they spend and how many phone calls and emails are received as a result of the ad spend. If the cost goes too high it becomes apparent immediately, a measurement that other media simply can not do.

Having your website be found in search engines is extremely important and often it is very cost effective. New studies show that Internet surfers are relying more and more from results on the first page of keyword searches. This study done by eMarketer.com, shows that the percentage of search engine users that select their choice from the 1st page of results has increased from 32% in 2002 to 41% in 2008. Searchers moving to the second page of results have declined from 23% in 2002 to 17% in 2008.

“Online search has become so efficient that most Internet users are now impatient with anything less than great results.” (eMarketer.com, Searching for SEO April 17, 2008) The trend that people are using the first page of results more often shows the importance of building a solid SEO plan to move your site’s pages to the top, because that is where the searchers are looking for your products and services.

If you don’t already have an account with Google, first go to the Google home page here: http://www.google.com/

Next click the “Sign In” button at the top, right of the page.

On the next page, click “Create an account now” on the left side of the page.

On the “Create an Account” page, enter the required fields and click the “I accept. Create my account.” button.

You will be sent an email to verify and activate your Google account.

Forms on websites have always been a problem whether it is coding, execution, or the fact that it was a wall to spiders. I would say that in my 10 years of coding, html forms have been the biggest problem in web site design. From the start forms were created using odd execution triggers; you could use CGI, Java, and the always dangerous Microsoft Front Page extensions. Today we use a number of other functions, php, asp, and flash to improve the delivery of the information. Internet data is now mission critical, so the old form techniques are out - mostly due to security and mail delivery problems.

For Google search, or any spiders for that matter, forms were the end of the road, spiders could not follow. Spiders could not follow the destinations of the forms. Many times forms just go to a “Thank You page”, but sometime they unlock whole sections of content that would not be indexed in the search engines. Other navigation solutions used “jump menus” which are usually coded as forms, so none of your jump menu content was found by the engines.

Google has announced that is now experimenting with the ability to search, from “Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Crawling through HTML forms”

“In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form” - Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, Crawling and Indexing Team.

RedFusion Media has always placed high value on “Google-able” search pages, and if you would like to learn more about how Google works, and how search engine optimization works.