Expert Internet Marketer

Directories are Dead. Not really but it seems to be in vogue to announce the demise of something or other. They’re not dead, it’s just something has come along that is more effective, more vibrant and more fun.

Social Media sites like Digg, Reddit, Netscape allows to get the entries noticed. Basically they are huge directory sites. Their category pages get crawled by Google, the archives are around to continue the traffic.

Read full story @ CornwallSEO.com

There are two primary complaints about the long-term viability of social media sites. The first is how to monetize them. The second is how to keep your best content producers from heading off to another site. After all, as goes the content, so go the users. It seems that YouTube has decided to address this issue by not only monetizing popular content with ads, but also by finally putting a revenue share option in place to help keep popular video producers at the site.

“I have no doubt that we are uniquely positioned to redefine and own the interactive agency space.” – Gaston Legorburu, Chief creative officer, Sapient.

AdAge — a leading industry “bible” and influential trade publication — has ranked Sapient as the second largest interactive agency in the world for the second year in row!

In addition, Sapient had won a Sofie award for the work with Citibank. Specifically, the award “Most Effective Customer Acquisition Campaign 2007″ for the Citibank Direct e-Savings online campaign and many number of other creative awards received by Sapient’s west coast teams had reiterated the credibility and creative force in the industry space.

Visit Sapient.com

Before we begin, lets understand what is a Podcast. Podcast is a technology to publish audio files on the internet, preferably as a feed, letting users to subscribe and listen to it – either online or other mediums such as iPod, etc.

Running a podcast program could provide as a challenge in terms of costs and efforts. But on the long run, you will gain a loyal user-base who shares common interests.

Define Objective

Ok, lets ask ourselves why would I want to do a podcast. Perhaps I have an expertise on what I do and would like to share with others. Or I have something very important and interesting piece of information that has high demand. Whatever your reasons are, define an objective of what you would like to achieve – fame, subscription and money.

Since a script can make or break your goal. It’s advisable to put all efforts and time in creating a well-defined script.

Spread the Message

Now that you have created an interesting podcast program, its time to spread the message and make it famous. Create a descriptive feed and add it to the podcast directories, include it in blogs, keep the file available for download, add a link to social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, reddit.com, etc.

Integrate Analytics

Integrate the website analytics on the site and enable tracking code for each podcast program and monitor visitor behavior, usage of bandwith, number of downloads, etc. Find out the number of leads your podcast generating for your company. We can use this data to convince the finance and marketing departments for more budget.

To Hire or Not

Podcasting is a very vibrant and creative medium and an experienced person can add a lot of color and efficiency in the production. If hiring a full-time experience guy seems to be expensive, consider freelance podcast consultants.

Networking

Having a collaboration and understanding with other podcasters could push the podcast promotion to the targeted audience. Send your podcast information to other podcasters, create a technology to make your podcast to be embedded in other’s blogs, etc.

Sell sponsorships

Podcast could prove to be a powerful medium for online adverising. Use the analytics data and visitor behavior to convince the advertisers and sell sponsorships successfully.

The Website Optimizer allows you to experiment multivariate ad testing to determine the most effective ways in getting conversions. You have the flexibility to choose the particular part of a page to test — headline, image, promo text. Website Optimizer provides you the reliable reports and a suggested course of action in order to optimize your site for maximum business results.

• Choose your test page. Choose a page that you drive traffic to using AdWords, or a page that you like to increase the conversion rate.

• Identify your conversion page. Typically, a page that lets user do desired action – makes a purchase, fills out an interest form, or downloads a white paper.

• Determine which page sections you’d like to experiment with on your test page. Use page sections such as a headline, image, or promotional text.

Start with a single purpose
Start with a single and specific goal in mind and then expand to the broader message.

Create Landing page for the specific campaign
It’s crucial that your landing page carries the same message and promise as to your ad copy. Research shows that users tend to click more when both the ad copy and the landing page are complimentary to one another. Besides, it also makes it easier for tracking.

Show what you want your prospects to do – avoid everything else
Resist the temptation to promote other services or include other links such as about us, privacy, etc in your landing page. Keep your landing page simple, short and convincing.

Mercury QuickTest Professionalâ„¢, the next-generation automated testing solution, provides the industry’s best solution for functional test and regression test automation – addressing every major software application and environment.

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Though there’s an exponential growth in using Web analytics but the recent research at MarketingSherpa shows that almost 80% of the marketers are not using the Web analytics to the full advantage.

A case study of Jamestown Distributors’ Web site shows how their business prospered after integrating real-time analytics into their merchandising strategies and product relevancy rankings.

“When people came in through SEO or Google AdWords, they could have been anybody. It might have been a commercial builder or some guy looking to buy some paint so he can fix up his kayak. We needed to make the site better for acquiring customers from our [pool] of visitors.” says Marketing VP Michael Mills.

Tactic #1. Automate the merchandising process
Tactic #2. Rank products internally by importance
Tactic #3. Upgrade back-end support
Tactic #4. Empower call center reps
Tactic #5. Marketing and IT hand-in-hand

The results of the integration showed tremendous increase in conversion rates and average order size to be 23.5%.

Read the full research at MarketingSherpa

“Persuasion Architecture is a thought provoking concept to model and understand your customers, what they want, and figure out how to persuade them to buy what you are selling. It’s made more challenging by the fact that your prospective customers are not all at the same stage in the process. Some of them are ready to make an immediate decision, others are still doing research, and others may be at various in-between stages. In a Persuasion Architecture you strive to be successful in addressing the needs of all of these kinds of prospects.

Persuade the customer to buy, by serving them. Doing this truly well requires a lot of insight and ongoing optimization to get to optimal results. Yet the upside is tremendous.”

Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, is very well known in the web analytics world, and is the chairman of the Web Analytics Association. He is also the co-author of Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing.

Yahoo appears to have removed the display of “Category” links which is obtained from Yahoo Directory in their search results. Barry Schwartz reported the news at Search Engine Roundtable, and it was later confirmed by a Yahoo spokesperson as “part of our ongoing effort to lessen the clutter on the SRP and improve the user experience.”