Part on Online Marketing (and offline as well) is not only convincing your web site visitors that your product or service is exactly what they need, but also that it is in the same price range they are looking for. It is easy to overlook how customer expectations can influence the outcome of a sale.

During the last 2 years we have seen a dramatic increase in the price of gas, especially during the first half of 2008. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of various reports on how this has affected various industries. People are not buying.

They don’t buy trucks & SUV’s like they used to.
They don’t drive as much as they used to.
They don’t fly as much as they used to.

 
Gas chart by http://www.massachusettsgasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx

Now that prices are starting to drop, people are more eager to buy gas for those long, and even shorter, weekend trips. Those same trips that many people put on hold due to the high gas prices earlier this year.

 

As a result there are now these ridiculously long lines at the pump. All the people, that just a couple of months earlier were not so eager to guy/use gas unless they absolutely had to are now filling up. I filled up my tank a few days ago at around 1 PM, thinking that in the middle of the day the line would not be too bad. In the end I had to wait about 10 minutes in line just to fill up the tank of my little Focus.

What does the price of gas have to do with the sales on my website?
When customers come to your site and they see the price they were expecting, or better yet lower ones, they are more likely to open up their wallets & pocketbooks. If you sell a high end product or service, make sure that the online marketing effort that got them to your site and the user experience on your website reflects that high end value want to sell to them.

When you go to a fast food place for lunch you don’t expect the same price and feel of a 5-star restaurant. Imagine going to a McDonalds or Burger King, and paying $50 per person. You would likely take your business elsewhere. Is your website doing the same thing to your potential customers?

A few years ago I started using various anti-spam “solutions”. Outlook junk filter was the big one at the time. As happened to many, I got a few false positives. I originally thought to myself  “OK, I can just check that junk folder a couple of times a day”. That few minutes twice per day quickly turned into a once a week ritual of hell that took more then an hour to wade through all of the junk in that folder. All this just to see if I got any false positives.

I subsequently turned that off and have had all my emails delivered into my inbox since then. That stopped all the false positives and I have not heard of any missed emails since. The problem being that I was spending quite a bit of time deleting junk from my Inbox.

Then I started using Postini anti-spam filtering for my emails. The big difference of how it works, and why I love it, is that once per day Postini sends me a digest with a list of all emails that it blocked. That list contains the time, date, sender and subject of every blocked email.  I can then quickly go through that list and click on any email in that list to either view it in my browser or have it delivered.

What a difference!

I just installed the Twitter Tools Plugin for WordPress. It has some slick features that you can use to semi-automate your Online Marketing. Basically it allows you to synchronize your blog posts and your Twitter Tweets seamlessly. You can set it to:

1. Create a Tweet each time you write a new blog post
2. Create a new blog post for each new Tweet
3. Create a daily digest of your Tweets on your Blog.

It also has some additonal sidebar options that I have not looked into yet.

As an example, I set it here to create a new Tweet every time I write a new post. Now people who follow my Twitter profile (Alon’s Twitter Profile) will be notified when I write a new post, even if they are not subscribed to my RSS feed.

Before going in to how to optimize your site for the various search engines it is important to understand the history of both the internet and the search engines themselves. After all it is easier to both understand and remember the basic rules of S.E.O. and S.E.M. (Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing) if you understand the various theories and background that went in to their creations.

The internet, as we know it today, did not start off as such. It started at the end of the 1950′s and through the 1960′s as ARPANET, Advanced Research Projects Agencey Network, by the U.S. government. The reason that it was started was to “combat” the growing technical advanves made by the Soviet Union after the launch of their Sputnik in 1957. One of the main ideas behind ARPANET was that if one computer went off line the other in the network should be able to continue to function. I.E.: If one city was bombed, thus taking the computer in that city off line (if not totally distroying it), the rest of the network would still work. Think about the main frame computers that were so popular back then (besides the fact that only large corporations could afford them), if the main compute was damaged and turned off then none of the terminals would work at all. In the present, if the server in your office was shut down you can still do most of the necessary functions on your computer (at least those that do not need “help” from the server). Another example of the is the numerous websites out there: Let’s say that for some reason the servers that host the Google search engine all went off line at the same time. You could still visit all other web sites that are on other servers.

Another reason that the U.S. government took it upon themselves to start this network is that they could not rely on the computer industry to develop this network. Why? This is due to the fact that the coputer industry, similar to just about any other industry, works on profit, or expected profit. They simply did not see the dollar value in this network. A classic example of this came from the movie “Silicon Valley Heist”, based upon the life of Bill Gates. At the beginning of Microsoft they created the DOS system form IBM. In a metting between IBM and Microsoft, Mr. Gates asked that he lease the DOS system for a certain time period to IBM instead of selling it. At the time the IBM executives did not see the potential value of software, instead it was believed that the majority of profits would be made by selling hardware and not software.

Looks like we got off track a bit…Back to ARPANET

At the end of the 1960′s the first “network” was ready to be tested. It was decided that the network would be hosted by UCLA and UCSB. This is a critical fact in understanding the general background of the internet. Both of the hosts are universities and not commercial companies that sell products. If you think about it for a minute you can see why the internet is geared more towards open information and not just profits (although, as stated in the previous article, a large ammount of money can be made through the internet and SEO).

At aproximatlety the same time notes from the networking group meetings were saved in a format called RFC (Request for Comments). These notes were ment to gather responses from members and at the same time notify them of other members opinions and findings. It was hoped that keeping unoffical notes would better encourage people to publish their thoughts as they come, and not polish them for publication with the delays involved in rewriting and edition papers. This is very similarto the way newsgroups & forums now work, where people can openly ask questions and make comments as think of them.

Preface
After talking with a number of my clients and colleagues I started to notice a trend with regard to Internet Marketing in general, specifically related to Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing. It was therefore decided that I would publish, here on my web site, a series of articles on these topics. I have been in the field of Marketing & Internet Marketing since 1997 so I have acquired a vast amount of experience in these fields. In this period I have seen both great success stories along side with huge failures due to unethical marketers and contractors.

Instead of waiting to finish the entire series and then publish it, I decided to publish the individual articles as they are completed. So please be patient as they come and do not forget to check back every few days for new articles and advice.

It is my hope that beyond general enlightenment, they will be usefull for you, a kind of reference manual. Obviously, if you wish to retain my services that would be more than welcome. However, as I stated earlier, the main purpose of this series is to teach you how to successfully market your web site and to avoid falling victim to fraudulent or unethical SEO companies.

Introduction
If you have your own web site, or are planning on starting one, chances are you want as many people as possible to know about it. Most websites are there for a profit, they can sell you something directly or they can just be a kind of online brochure. Just having a web site without marketing it is similar to opening a store in your back yard…with the exception of your family and friends no one will know it is there.

So, how can you market your web site? You start off by making sure that the URL (website address) is on every single piece of paper that leaves your office.

That in itself is not enough, so most people think that the next stage is buying advertising for your site. This can be something small for example an ad in a local newspaper, or it can be a huge investment in a television commercial during the Superbowl. Another way to go is to buy ad space in different web sites and their newsletters. While all of these can work they all have the same basic flaw:

When the time period is up, you have to pay again to be included in the next available slot. If we go back to the newspaper you would have to pay every week or every month to constantly be there.

Most people think that this, having to re-pay again and again, is the only way to advertise….WRONG!!! Among the most cost effective ways to advertise your website is thru the various search engines. Think about it for a minute, most of the search engines do not charge anything to be included in their search results. That is free advertising for you, if you know what you are doing. I personally know of a owner of a web site, who I will not name online, who makes a huge amount of money just thru search engine traffic. This person started his site in April 2002, and by the end of August he was making more than $20,000.00 per month. All while working from his home. How did he do it? He studied the way that search engines work and built his site accordingly.

“Where is the catch?”, you ask. The catch is that you have to optimize your web site and web pages, hence the term Search Engine Optimization a.k.a. S.E.O., so that the search engines can “read” them and include them in their results. While the placement itself, in the search engines, usually does not cost you anything, you have to put the time and effort to make sure that the search engines can index your pages. Search engines can not read the text inside of images and most of the do not read any of the texts in flash files.

O.K., so how do I optimize my site for the search engines? We will start off by going over the history of the internet and the search engines and how they work. This will help you understand later on why some practices work while others do not work. Some practices can get your web site penalized or even banned from the search engines, so you have to be very carefull.

I have said it before and will probably do so again, it is my belief that the only way to truly succeed in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is to understand their history. Once you understand how they started out, other bits and pieces will soon fall in place.

Now when I say “truly succeed”, I mean that once your site is up and running, and you have optimized it for the Search Engines, you should be getting literally thousands of hits per day. One of the pitfalls that some website owners fall into is to making doorway pages with redirects. These doorway pages may work at first, but once your redirects are noticed by the search engines then chances are you will be penalized or banned. On the other hand if you truly optimize your site then chances are that no matter what changes the Search Engines make to their algorithms you will still be receiving large amounts of traffic.

Let us take a look at part of the Search Engine History and then we will get back to “discussion”:

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In the year 1990 a University of McGill student creates the first search tool (called Archie), using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers to archive Internet Files.

In 1991 Mark McCahill from the University of Minnesota launches Gopher. This was intended as an alternative to the 1990 Archie.

Now starts the fun…in 1992 Veronica was created by the University of Nevada. This is a search tool that scans Gopher servers for text file.

In 1993 Jughead was created, meant to be an enhancement to the Gopher system by adding both Boolean and Keyword searches.

MIT student Matthew Gray creates the World Wide Web Wanderer in 1993. This is the earliest acclaimed Web Robot.

Galaxy, the first Web Directory, was launched in 1994.

Think that Yahoo was their from the beginning? Guess again, although others started in the early 1990′s Yahoo was started in 1994 by two Stanford University Electrical Engineering candidates to keep track of their personal Internet interests.

WebCrawler was created in 1994 University of Washington student.

Now comes the Lycos Search Engine, started in 1994 a Carnegie Melon student. It originally had 54,000 documents in it’s directory. Webmasters and Website owners started to submit their sites for inclusion in Lycos.

February 1995 Infoseek was released to the public. In December of that same year it received a huge break by becoming the default Search Engine for Netscape.

Starting to notice a pattern yet…?

Excite was launched in October of 1995 by six entrepreneurs out of California in order to manage information on the Internet.

AltsVista was introduced to the public in December of 1995 and gain popularity rapidly due to unique features it had.

SearchSavvy, what is believed to be the first Meta Search Engine, was introduced in 1995 by Colorado State University’s Daniel Dreilinger.

They say that laziness is the mother & father of all inventions. Well, in 1995 automatic Search Engine Submission software was released. For those of you who have not been there yet, this allows you to submit a site to a number of Search Engines all at once with a “click of a button”. Many website owners and marketers quickly utilized this software to submit 1000′s of web pages each day to the Search Engines, in an attempt to gain better positions for their sites. Various Search Engines quickly caught on to this and began to penalize and/or sites that were abusing the software.

During 1995-1996 Web Site owners, Webmasters, and Web Marketers discover that the use of Meta Tags in their HTML code can increase their rankings in the Search Engines.

In February of 1996 a grant was given to Eric Brewer and Paul Gauthier in order to study how the use of clustered and inexpensive workstation computers can create the same computing capabilities as supercomputers. This was the start of Inktomi.

In October of 1996 a categorized directory of Website listings, named LookSmart, is introduced.

In 1996 Search Engine Optimizers begin a game of cat and mouse with the Search Engines. As the Search Engine Optimizers find techniques to achieve better positions for their sites, Search Engines begin to change their algorithms in an effort to respond to this.

AskJeeves is launched in April of 1997 with the intent of emphasizing ease of use and the ability to learn.

Bill Gross Launches GoTo in 1997, the new twist here is that they were auctioning off search results. This is the first Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine.

In 1997 a new software is introduced to the industry. This software would automatically check Web Site ranking in the major Search Engines.

In 1998 the Open Directory Project was launched. It’s goal was becoming the world’s most comprehensive directory.

Wondering where and when the Google Search Engine started?

Well in 1998 two Stanford Computer Science graduate students introduce Google, aiming for it to take a unique approach to search results and relevancy.

In September of 1998 Microsoft launched MSN Search. It was originally developed for users of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the Microsoft Network.

Another big step that the Search Engines took with their algorithms was in 1998 when they started to consider off page considerations for their results. One of the most widely know of these is Link Popularity which is still used both by the Search Engines and subsequently by the Search Engine Optimizers.

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This list is not complete, but it can give you an idea as to how and why they started. There are two important themes to consider when Optimizing your site of the Search Engines. The first is that most of the Search Engines started off as University (research) projects, and thus their algorithms are meant to work for the users and not site owners or marketers. The second is that once the various Search Engine noticed that Web Site Owners / Marketers “cracked” their algorithms, the Search Engines updated them accordingly to continue returning relevant search results.

When you start to think about ways to market your web site one of the ways that come to mind is Affiliate Marketing. What is Affiliate Marketing? In short it is paying other advertisers a percent of the sales they generate. Usually the Affiliates will put a link on their web site to your website, and you then pay them a percent for the sales generated from their visitors.

If you own the site that is receiving these visitors this can be vary advantageous due to the fact that you are only paying for actual sales. However you have to be very very careful to make sure that all of the traffic generated by your Affiliates is accurately tracked and credited. If word gets around that you did not credit an Affiliate of yours correctly for a sale, you may find that no Affiliate will be willing to work for you. Keep in mind that your are in essence getting almost free traffic sent to your web site and paying only when YOU close the sale.

In short Affiliate Marketing can bring in literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars in sales to your website and company with little or no upfront costs. You just have to make sure that you are ready to track and administer the Affiliate program properly. If you think that Affiliate Marketing can help supplement your Marketing efforts, but are not sure how to start, or are not able to administer the day to day operation needed to run a successful Affiliate Program feel free to contact us. We have the ability and the experience to help you get setup or to run your Affiliate Program for you.

If you are the Affiliate, then your end of the Affiliate Marketing is just the opposite. You have, or are planning to soon have, your web site, which generates a certain amount of traffic. By joining an Affiliate Program you are now able to concentrate on generating new visitors without having to worry about customer support, shipping, payment gateways, insurance, warehousing etc…When trying to decide which Affiliate Program to join there are quite a few things to consider, among them minimum payments, commission level, the items being sold and much more. The best thing to do is to find one of the many online forums and see what others say about the area you are looking into and to the specific Affiliate Program.

Originally posted by Helen Dayman dayman@ion.com.au at www.alon-cohen.com

Your on-line business is growing, traffic to your website is increasing and orders are coming in fast. Too fast. Prospective customers are going elsewhere as your site is becoming congested. Your web pages are taking too long to load and error messages are greeting their requests.

Time to find a solution to this common problem for rapidly growing on-line businesses. Dedicated Server Hosting is the answer.

What is the difference you ask? Currently your website is sharing a server with many other websites. Each of these websites generates traffic through the server. Imagine for a moment, hundreds of busy websites generating traffic flow through this server.

Hosting of your website on this shared server might be limited by the amount of space available to you, say 20gb. Maybe your provider limits uploading and downloading of data to your site with excess traffic flow charged. These restrictions can impair the growth of a rapidly growing on-line business.

There is a solution to this ever-increasing problem. Your on-line business can be hosted on a single computer linked into a network. This dedicated server is reserved to service the needs of a single customer, you. Without the encumbrance of the server dividing the access between many hosted sites, it is able to provide faster access to data.

The server can be customised to meet the exact needs of your on-line business. Maybe you, the business owner, have a number of businesses. A dedicated server can also host a large number of virtual domains enabling your other on-line businesses to be hosted and accessed separately by your customers. A dedicated server will decrease your monthly hosting fees by eliminating multiple hosting accounts and replacing with a single monthly fee.

It would be great to be able to exercise 100% control over your web presence. With a dedicated server you can specify and modify the entire operating system and install the supporting software that meet up with your website’s requirements. Increase faster access to data, scalability and site analysis. If you have the experience, you can configure the CPU speed and partition the server to your specifications.

The dedicated server does not share bandwidth or storage space, you have the entire server to yourself. As no other user has access to the server, you can modify the settings. You can optimise the server for certain web applications such as e-commerce and multimedia.

One of the greatest advantages of a dedicated server is that you are basically renting it. If it breaks down it is the responsibility of the provider to fix it. They will maintain equipment and the connectivity of the server. Any repairs or replacement of hardware components is the responsibility of the provider.

You as the user usually have two service options, managed or unmanaged. The unmanaged service option is more for the user who has experience with programming, installing applications and configuring the server. This service is more economical for advanced users.

Those users who are less confident in their technical expertise can opt for the managed service. The managed service is ideal as it allows the user to customise the server without having the technical expertise.

Once you have made the decision to host your on-line business on a dedicated server, sit back and watch your business grow.

“For $1,000.00 a year I will guarantee that your site will be in one of the top 30 spots in the search engines(…)for the word or phrase of your choice”. This is part of a marketing phone call I received from a Search Engine Optimization consultant, not named here per his request, based near Boston, during the first half of January 2003. At first it sounds almost too good to be true, until you start to think about it. In which search engine will I be? How many people actually look for that particular word or phrase? How many targeted visitors will it bring me? This is just one of the many examples of why the Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) industry has been given “a black eye through their (…) attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results” as stated by Google. There are quite a few very good and reputable S.E.O. consultants and companies. However, there are also a number of “unethical SEOs” (Google) that have hurt the general reputation of the industry. In this article we will introduce you to some of the things that you should consider when choosing a Search Engine Optimization consultant or company.

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Please Note: This article only touches the surface on some of the things that you should check. Should you require a consultation on choosing a Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) or Search Engine Marketing (S.E.M.) company/consultant feel free to contact us.

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Before going go out to get 50 different price quotes from different S.E.O.s decide what exactly are your needs. Will you just need key word research and reports? Will you require the consultant to update your web site? Will you need the consultant or company to submit your site to the search engines? Will you need the consultant or company to create the new text copy for your pages? Different companies offer different services, so you are better off having one company that does everything that you will not be doing yourself.

Now that you know your needs, you have do decide on a list of key words and phrases that you want to target. This can be either a small or large list. The list can contain only words that you think are worth targeting, or it can also contain current key word referrals to your site from the search engines.

Now that you have done your homework you have to start shopping around for the right consultant or company that will fit your needs. According to the number of sites reviewed by www.seoconsultants.com there are over 500 S.E.O. consultants and companies, so do not worry if you start declining some of the proposals you receive, there are certainly enough around in order to allow you to find the right one. While shopping for the right S.E.O. there are a few basic questions that you can ask to help determine if they are a reputable company. The following is a basic list of questions you can ask, as suggested in the seoconsultants.com web site:

• If ethics are important to you can start off by asking “What types of websites will you not promote?”.

• In addition you can ask: “Do you participate (…) ” in “any of the S.E.O. / S.E.M. – Search Engine Marketing Forums? (…)If so, what is your username and can you provide links to your most recent or notable discussions?

• Can you describe and/or produce recent successful campaign results?

• If so, can I use those clients for references?”

You may also ask them if they advise you to use any kind of cloaking, door-way pages or redirects to help with the optimization of your web site; these tactics are also known as search engine spamming. If they do advise you to use any of these tactics you are probably better off crossing them off of your list.

What is search engine spamming and why is it a bad thing? Let us start off by understanding that it is the search engine’s job to find the most relevant results of a search word or phrase. If the results were not relevant then no one would be using them. Search engine spamming is a term that has been used for a while to define unethical practices, done by site owners and search engine optimizers, such as key word stuffing, doorway or gateway pages, and redirects in an effort to overcome the natural results of the search engine algorithm and increase the web site’s position in the results. The different algorithms are there in order to get the end user the most relevant results. In the past, one form of spamming was to put multiple words with a white font on a white background, in effect hiding them. Most search engines know how to recognize this and penalize the web site by not showing it in the results at all. Every now and then a new form of search engine spamming will come up that the search engines have not caught. They usually catch this quickly. As tempting as it may be, what is the use of being in a high position in the search engines only to be completely banned by them a few weeks later?

Another crucial factor to check with them is if they will research the value of your chosen words and phrases and if they will suggest alternatives, either instead of your current words and phrases, or in addition to them. The logic behind this last question is that some consultants will not check the value of the words they receive from the client. Instead they will use them as is. What usually happens is that the client is very pleased at first, as they are getting to the top positions of their chosen words. This is usually followed by great disappointment, and sometimes anger, some time down the road when they realize that there is no value to the words or phrases that they chose. How many people actually type in “purple cheese with non plastic wrapper” in the search engines? Although the company that makes this purple cheese will be happy to be in the top spots in the search engines for this phrase it will not bring them too much traffic.

In the end you really have to ask around and do your homework before deciding which company to go with, it is your money and you want to make sure that you get a good return on your investment. Check with their references, forums and news groups, among other things, to see what information you can find about them. It is my personal opinion that most of these “unethical SEOs” (Google) have come up due to the dot com boom at the end of the 90′s. At the time all you had to do was go to an investor with an idea and use the words “internet” and “computer” a few times during your presentation to get a hefty check to start with. Although this is an exaggeration, it was the general mood, so the gold diggers were quick to follow.

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References
Google.com, (n.d.). Google Information for Webmasters: Search Engine Optimizers.
Retrieved on February 17, 2003, from http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

Search Engine Optimization Consultant not named here per his request. Phone call. First half of January 2003.

SEO Consultants, (n.d.). Choosing a Search Engine Optimization Company. Retrieved on
February 17, 2003, from http://www.seoconsultants.com,

http://www.seoconsultants.com/which-seo-to-choose.htm

Originally posted by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg mcintirj@lincolnu.edu at www.alon-cohen.com

Internet marketing is an umbrella term for the wide variety of marketing and promotional techniques that take advantage of the online medium. Anytime a company builds a web site, creates an email list, publishes an electronic newsletter, or buys ad space from an online publication, it is engaged in Internet marketing. While countless techniques are available to the marketing professional, there are several main elements of Internet marketing that almost any company can use to its advantage.

The Web Site

Any company looking to promote its products or services online should make a professional web site the cornerstone of its Internet marketing plan. Think of a web site as your company’s online equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store. In order to do business successfully, you must establish a location where your customers can come to buy your products or services. The same applies to Internet marketing: the online shopper or browser needs to find information quickly and reliably, and a company web site can provide all of the details that a potential customer may need to make an informed decision.

Web sites are different from “real-world” locations, though, in that they do not need to serve as a virtual space for actually conducting business. You may decide that the your kind of business is not suited to online transactions. In that case, a web site can serve as a valuable source of information, such as how to contact you, what kinds of products you sell or services your perform or what kinds of experience your company has in its field.

Of course, many businesses do sell online, and if you decide that direct selling is the best use for your site, make sure that it takes advantage of the latest technology available for listing products and processing orders. Nothing will hurt your Internet marketing efforts more than a site that cannot perform the tasks you need from it.

Getting the Word Out

Once you’ve established your Internet presence, you’ll want to spread the word. Like Internet marketing, website promotion covers a wide variety of tools and techniques you can harness to promote yourself online. Depending on the markets you plan to target, you may want to make use of email lists, an electronic newsletter, an onsite bulletin board or chat room, or a collection of information geared towards potential customers. For the basics of promoting your site, see my article “Website Promotion.”

You will also want to consider whether you want to attract potential customers from one or more of the many search engines available online. If you do, you’ll want to make sure that your site is optimized for search engine placement. See my article “Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.)” for the basics of preparing your site for searching.

Directories provide yet another means of promoting your site, and many allow listings for free or low cost. Check into local directories as well as those focused on your type of business.

Internet Advertising

While the bursting of the dot-com bubble a few years ago drove many companies back to more traditional media for their advertising, many web sites and Internet-based publications offer attractive and effective advertising packages. Just as you would with print publications, television or radio, get the facts before investing. Make sure that a site serves your target market, and that associating your company name with that site will enhance your brand image with that market. Also investigate the technology associated with the site’s advertising. If a site primarily uses pop-up or pop-under ads, which most web surfers find annoying, you may not see much return on your investment. Make sure you understand the terms of online advertising: there’s a big difference between banner ads and interstitials. Sites such as Internet.com and Clickz.com can provide you with up-to-date information on marketing and technology, allowing you to make the most of your Internet marketing budget.

Interactivity and Immediacy

While there are many benefits associated with Internet marketing, among the most important are interactivity and immediacy. The online medium allows you to not only share information with your customers, but to interact with them easily. This can enhance your firm’s reputation for personal service; it can also add to the workload of your customer service employees. As you plan you Internet marketing campaign, make sure that your company can handle the additional communication demands that arise. Interactivity and immediacy provide numerous benefits for your marketing efforts, but you must always remember that they also create expectations that differ markedly from older media.

The More Things Change…

Despite technological enhancements, Internet marketing still relies on creativity, clarity and focus. Knowing your market and its needs and desires provides the foundation for any promotional effort, whether in print or in Flash. If you’d like assistance in developing your own Internet marketing plan or discovering the latest in online promotional tools and techniques, please contact us.