Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen
This book is by Dave Kerpen, who is the founder and CEO of the award-winning social media marketing firm Likeable Media. So, needless to say, he has some experience in the field. This book covers an array of topics concerning social media marketing, such as the importance of responding to comments, defining your target audience and creating a presence for your company on the social network. This is one of the most highly rated books on the subject on all of Amazon, and it was just released earlier this year. This is a great start, then, for anyone looking to quickly improve their brand’s social media profile(s).

The Internet Marketing Bible by Zeke Camusio
This was a book specifically written for business owners and marketers, meaning it doesn’t contain much (if any) technical jargon that could confuse unfamiliar readers. Camusio designed the book to be to-the-point, removing all of the unnecessary elements that will often clutter other books on Internet marketing and getting right into the action, providing a step-by-step tutorial on how to become successful online. It covers a range of topics, everything from SEO to Pay-Per-Click to website design, and provides the necessary tools and strategies that will help you get a better grasp on the basics of the Internet marketing world. This is a great book for marketers who are just starting out, but also an excellent resource for seasoned marketers as well.

SEO Made Simple (Second Edition): Strategies for Dominating the World’s Largest Search Engine by Michael H. Fleischner
The second edition of the highly praised and very popular SEO Made Simple is an excellent revision of an already great book. The focus of this book, as the subtitle tells us, is not just how to improve your SEO, but how to conquer Google. Fleischner has been working in online marketing for over fourteen years and is considered an expert in the fields of SEO and Internet marketing. Included in this title are tips and tricks for social media SEO, using Google Places, meta tags and even a step-by-step link building guide. This new edition adds over 20 new pages of various techniques to optimize your brand or website’s search results. This may be the most comprehensive book on the subject of SEO, and with the additions included in the second edition, the best keeps getting better.

Content is Cash: Leveraging Great Content and the Web for Increased Traffic, Sales, Leads and Buzz by Wendy Montes de Oca 
Content may be the most overlooked aspect of Internet marketing, and this book aims to fix that. This books shows you how you can integrate and syncronize some of the best Web marketing techniques available today to, as the title states, drive traffic, sales, leads and buzz for your brand based on your preexisting content. Among the subjects covered in the book are how to use undiscovered content that is both helpful and actionable, make your content easier to find and use content to create more visibility and awareness for your brand or site. Montes de Oca has over twenty years of professional experience and is currently a marketing blogger and writer, as well as owner of the Precision Marketing and Media consulting firm.

Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day by Evgenii Prussakov
This is the affiliate marketing release by the hugely popular An Hour a Day series of Internet marketing books. This guide is meant to provide a detailed, real-world, task-based approach to developing and managing an affiliate marketing program. It covers various aspects of the affiliate business, such as market research, payment models, recruiting and more. This book is full of helpful hints, tips and techniques that can help any aspiring affiliate really get off the ground and should be considered essential reading for anyone looking to launch their own network. Plus, it’s co-authored by Evgenii Prussakov, aka Geno, the founder of AM Navigator and one of the most successful and famous affiliate marketers in the world. If you’re going to trust anybody, he’s not a bad choice.

Brand Media Strategy: Integrated Communications Planning in the Digital Era by Antony Young
Unlike Likeable Social Media, this book, by Optimedia International U.S. CEO Antony Young, is about promoting your brand all over the Web, instead of just on social media sites. Of course, social media is heavily featured in Brand Media Strategy, but so are YouTube, the iPhone and other areas of the Web where your brand needs to make itself known. Young covers the future of advertising in traditional media and how it will interact and compete with digital media, as well as how to get maximum impact out of digital media portals like search, social and mobile. This book offers a look at the Internet from a media-based perspective and will help you stretch the Web to raise awareness for your brand as far as you can.

For its report the CMO Council – which is made up of 6,000 chief marketers who are responsible for over $200 billion in spending across 110 countries, queried over 750 of its members with 64% of the respondents indicating they reported directly to the CEO, President or COO.

The report highlighted three key areas marketers need to focus on.

The following is taken from a summary of the report provided by the council itself. Tell me if you see a common theme here…

1. Drive top-line growth and market share while better defining the brand and value proposition. Through new automated campaign and lead management tools, marketers can engage in highly interactive (and highly relevant) dialogues across multiple channels, reaching across social, digital, and traditional media channels. Connecting the measurements of these multiple channels is one of the key challenges marketers will seek to address in 2011.
2. Redefine the customer experience, developing web experiences that are highly engaging, personalized and differentiated. This new “experience mix” must include social platforms, but must also integrate the messaging and engagements through traditional channels.
3. Use insights to grow the brand and increase loyalty. As we continue to engage with customers in instant, online social channels, gathering data from every impression, every search, every transaction, status update, or tweet can develop a more complete profile of the customer and must be integrated with off line data sources.

The common theme is Social Media and Integration.

Marketers need to create engaging campaigns that seamlessly integrate the digital/social and traditional worlds, while delivering the same message across all media channels with a constant eye on tracking, monitoring and results to continually define the demographics of each individual customer.

As for those of us on the agency side, it’s our job to provide marketers with all the support and tools they need to achieve their goals while delivering the highest ROI on marketing dollars invested.

Will your company be investing in Social Media in the next 2 to 4 qtrs?

Encouraging to Other Internet Companies?

Wall Street analysts, venture capitalists, and private technology companies were all carefully watching LinkedIn’s debut into the world of public ownership. Over the last few years, there have been few high-profile technology filings and a good deal of uncertainly existed about how such an IPO would be received by investors. Several other social media firms, notably Facebook and Groupon, are considering IPOs and LinkedIn’s strong showing should encourage them.

LinkedIn is the business counterpart of the more raucous and popular Facebook — over 500 million users — and the now fading MySpace. You will not be bumping into Fans of Justin Bieber or Kim Kardashian on LinkedIn. It focuses on business professionals who wish to find business contacts, potential clients or employees, or job leads. The company considers its exclusive focus on professionals a key competitive advantage, eliminating the distractions of sites that cater to teenagers as well as adults. LinkedIn accommodates both personal and corporate profiles.

LinkedIn’s History

Established in 2003, California-based LinkedIn was the idea of Reid Hoffman, the founder of SocialNet.com, a now defunct online dating site, and a former PayPal executive. He became LinkedIn’s first CEO and was joined by several other executives from PayPal and SocialNet.com. At the start, Hoffman personally bankrolled the company. All of the original founders have left LinkedIn, although Hoffman remains executive chairman. The current CEO is Jeff Weiner, who once ran Yahoo’s Network division.

The company did not turn a profit until 2010 when net revenue was $243.1 million. That compares with $29.3 billion for Google. Facebook reportedly took in about $2 billion in revenues in 2010, with $1.86 billion coming from advertising sales, according to eMarketer, the research and publishing firm. MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had advertising revenues of $288 million in 2010, an estimate also provided by eMarketer.

How LinkedIn Makes Money

LinkedIn’s revenues come from three sources: user subscriptions, fees for display and text ads, and hiring solutions. The largest share comes from hiring solutions. While a basic membership is free, LinkedIn offers a variety of premium services to users such as enhanced search and more direct communications capabilities. In its IPO prospectus — available from the Securities and Exchange Commission — LinkedIn reported that as of March 31, 2011, nearly 4,800 companies used its hiring solutions, including 73 of the Fortune 100. Called “LinkedIn Corporate Solutions,” the hiring solutions allow companies to identify job candidates based on industry, job function, geography, experience, and education. The prospectus states, “Our proprietary platform is designed to leverage viral actions, social media, trusted recommendations and our rich user-generated data to efficiently connect members, enterprises and professional organizations to relevant products and services.”

LinkedIn employs a field sales force to sell its hiring and marketing solutions. Largely as a result of the cost of maintaining this global sales force, LinkedIn’s profit margin is 7.8 percent compared with 26.8 percent for Google.

The company reports more than 100 million registered users in more than 200 countries. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The company reported that — as of January 2011 — over 50 percent of its members resided outside of the United States. The member base includes executives from all the companies in the 2010 Fortune 500. Currently, one million new members join LinkedIn each week.

Competitors with similar business models include Xing, a German-based company founded in 2003 with almost 11 million users in over 200 countries including the United States. Viadeo, headquartered in France, was founded in 2004 and has over 35 million registered users. It has an English language site but is not well known in the United States. Fast Pitch is an American company that focuses on small business owners and sales professionals.

Benefits for Smaller Businesses

While large companies find LinkedIn useful, it may be of even greater value to smaller businesses that can use the platform as follows.

• Locate employees. LinkedIn can be used as a low cost global employee-recruiting platform.
• Competitive intelligence. It can be a source of free competitive intelligence depending on how much information competitors post.
• Professional advice. Companies can solicit free professional advice from peers and experts from pertinent LinkedIn Groups.
• Professional presentations. Members have access to presentations colleagues have made at industry conferences and workshops.
• Marketing. Small company executives can position themselves as experts in their field by responding to information requests, posting articles they have written, or presentations they have made.

Challenges

The future holds risks for LinkedIn. Fortune 500 firms, especially those that sell to consumers, are embracing Facebook for brand-building and marketing purposes, and Twitter for communication and advertising. To stay competitive, LinkedIn must continue to increase its membership and provide new features and services. It has the advantage of possessing an affluent and well-educated membership base. Both LinkedIn and Facebook collect huge amounts of data from users and how they handle the privacy issues surrounding the data will affect their futures. Also, Wall Street might have been a bit too exuberant. By June 21, the stock was trading at a bit less than $68, losing more than 25 percent of its first day value.

Does your company use LinkedIn? If so, share your comments on the benefits of doing so below:

You’ve spent time crafting content that you’re confident will send record-breaking numbers of visitors to your site and generate a near-endless supply of high quality links.

All that’s left is to submit it to your social networks and let it spread, right? Well, yes… kind of. Social media mavens across the Web don’t just stop with Facebook and Twitter (even though those are two of the best destinations to get the viral marketing party started). Most of the link building gurus have long lists of sites to submit to – and we’re going to give you a glimpse into where.

What you’ll find in the following list are community sites, social news destinations and premium content, community and bookmarking sites which make for great locales to promote your link-worthy content. While there is no guarantee it will work in every case, you might just be surprised at the value (in direct links and high-value profile rankings) participation provides.

Fark: If you’re familiar with Fark at all, you might already be questioning the value of this list. The truth of the matter is however that a clever headline goes a long way with this community. If you’re promoting some edgy, perhaps alarmist material, Fark is nearly perfect and can send immense amounts of traffic. If you like Fark, there are others in the same general category to check out including DavesDaily.com and Cracked.com.

Kaboodle: Merchants often have the hardest time building links but thanks to the rise in popularity of social shopping, Kaboodle has generated the attention of pro link builders thanks to the product lists it makes public – which yields high profile rankings as well. If you’re a merchant, Kaboodle is where you should start promoting link-worthy (creative and innovative) products. If you’re into Kaboodle, check out wists.com, thisnext.com, and wishpot.com.

Scribd: The first stop for any content marketer has got to be Scribd. What it lacks for in organization, it more than makes up for in its ability to aid in the distribution of content. Pretty much any content type can work on Scribd (PDFs, PowerPoints, Photos), you just need to share! If you’re down with Scribd, then add edocr.com, calameo.com, and slideshare.net.

Newsvine: While it may have fallen out of favor with the masses, NewsVine remains one of the top destinations to promote link-worthy content. If you have not returned in a while, now would be the time. While heavily administered, Newsvine does have the ability to sent high quality traffic and does result in strong rankings for those content items that become popular. If Newsvine strikes your fancy, check out nowpublic.com, topix.net, megite.com, propeller.com and gabbr.com.

HackerNews: You’ve heard of Digg and Reddit for sure, but how abuot HackerNews? Several weeks ago one of our posts made its way onto the site and the site has since made its way in turn onto our must submit to list. While it’s difficult to secure a first page ranking on the site, the value is most definitely present.

Shoutwire: More shouting than your average network here, a cluttered, ad-heavy design actually masks a rather competitive destination to promote link-worthy content. While you might be prone to disregard this site as one more digg-clone, shoutwire.com continues to drive a modestly high stream of traffic to active users. Couple that with strong-profile rankings and you’ve got one more to add to your list.

More Bookmarking Madness: Shoutwire is fine and dandy, but let’s not forget the seemingly endless list of social bookmarking sites to which you can submit your link-worthy content. Some of our personal favorites include jumptags.com, mister-wong.com, blinklist.com, spurl.net, Faves.com, Simpy.com, and netvouz.com. For the literary set, bibsonomy.org is definitely one to check out as well as a destination to promote niche-content.

OK – so is there value in submitting across all or any of these channels? If you have the bandwidth then I might agree but if your short on staff and can only focus on one or two – which social bookmarking sites do you recommend?

1. Clean up your page titles. Throughout your site, the titles of your pages should say a lot about the content that page contains. Make sure your titles are clear, contain keywords for your page, and also emphasize the content of that page. Also, remember that search engines use the title you enter as the link when your site comes up in search results. Make sure your title is catchy enough and targeted enough to encourage people to click.

2. Use heading tags the way they were meant to be used. In the HTML markup of your pages, you have the option to set several levels of heading such as H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, etc. These tags have a sort of hierarchy to them. H1 is more important than H2 which is more important than H3 etc etc. Use this principal in setting up your page layout. Use H1 for your most important text, such as the heading for your page. Use H2 for the next most popular, and so on. Don’t overdo it either, use the heading tags sparingly on only your heading worth content (most likely containing the keywords for your page as well).

3. Take advantage of alt and title tags in your URLs and images. When creating an image or link within your HTML, you have the option of including a TITLE attribute in URLs and an ALT attribute to1 images. Use these fields to add additional text about the link/image. This text is picked up by search engine spiders and can add to the keyword content of your pages.

4. Make sure your navigation is available at the top and bottom of all your pages. If you want search engines and your readers to find their way through your site, you have to make it easy for them. In addition to putting standard navigation at the top of the page, consider also placing it at the bottom in your footer. The more ways Google can find their way through your site, the better chance you have of getting all your pages showing up in their index.

5. Use mod_rewrite to clean up your nasty web addresses. Using a tool known as mod_rewrite, you can make a substantial improvement to the URLs of the pages within your site. Instead of a URL that looks like: http://www.mysite.com/goto.php?page=12345 you can change it to http://www.mysite.com/page/how-to-do-somthing.html. This is much easier for search engines to follow and also can contain keywords that can guide them to a better analysis of the content your site contains.

6. Use keywords in the addresses of your pages. Closely complimenting point 5 above, adding keywords to the addresses of your pages can make a big difference. When setting up your site structure, keep that in mind. For example, if you have a site about apples, rather than having a URL like: http://www.mysite.com/page/page1.html change it to something like http://www.mysite.com/granny-smith/granny-smith-orchards-in-california.html where the content of the page is somewhat represented by the address of the page.

7. Make sure you take advantage of meta tags like keywords and descriptions. Many sites often overlook meta tags. There are a large number of these tags you can add to your html pages to help give search engines a better idea of what’s in your site. Two tags in particular, the description and keywords tags, allow you to write a description of each page and also list relevant keywords contained within your site. Use these on every page of your entire site.

8. Create and maintain a sitemap. If you want Google or Yahoo to index your entire site, one of the best ways to do that is to tell them what pages are in your site. Sitemaps are a really simple listing of every single page within your site. For more information, check out the sitemap entry in Wikipedia. If you create and maintain a sitemap for your site, the search engines will easily find all your content.

9. Block duplicate content with robots.txt. Duplicate content on a site can be really bad when it comes to ranking well within search engines. If the structure of your site results in a lot of duplicated content (for example, having summaries on one page of a blog and full articles on another) you can actually be penalized by Google for it. Using the robots.txt file, you can tell Google and other search spiders what content you want read, and what content you want ignored.

10. Make sure your pages contain the keywords you want to rank highly with. While it may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many people overlook this point. If you have a page about granny smith apples, and you want it to rank highly for the phrase granny smith apples, you have to actually use those words often within the content of your site/page. Don’t overdo it, but make sure it’s obvious to a computer algorithm reading your site (such as Google’s content spider) that the main context of a particular page is granny smith apples.

These are just a few simple ideas on how to optimize your website for search engines.

Any others that you want to share?

Google remarketing is a technology that allows an advertiser to show an ad to a user who previously visited the advertiser’s website. The goal of Google remarketing is to two-fold, branding and increasing conversions. The latter is accomplished by being able to “retarget” visitors who, for example:

• Abandoned a shopping cart
• Didn’t convert
• Converted
• Signed up for a trial
• Subscribed to a newsletter

The audience in a remarketing campaign is more valuable than other audiences because retargeted audiences are more likely to convert into a sale or lead due to their known prior interest (they were on your website or a specific web page).
Google remarketing is a perfect solution for staying in front of your target audience, especially those who need to visit your site more than once to make a decision. In this white paper you’ll learn:

1. The basic set up of a Google remarketing campaign
2. Remarketing best practices

Setting up a Google Remarketing Campaign

Google remarketing campaigns are set up and managed within Google Adwords. The basic steps of setting up a remarketing campaign are as follows:

1. Define your audience
2. Retrieve code script and install it on corresponding web page(s)
3. Create an ad group with your defined audience that you wish to remarket

Define Your Audience

With regard to a Google remarketing campaign, defining your audience means determining to whom you want to show online ads, e.g. you want to show online ads to visitors who abandoned your shopping cart. Other types of common audiences are:

• converted users
• Non-converted visitors
• Current subscribers
• By shopping category
• By product

Install Code Script

To receive the code script, click on the tag for the audience that you’ve created. Once you click on the tag it will display a box with the code you need to install on your web page. Copy and paste the code in between the body tags on your web page. Once the code is installed visitors will be included in the Adwords audience that you specified. You can also specify the duration of retargeting. For instance, if you specify a 30 days your ad will show to that user for 30 days.

Create an Ad Group and Add Your Audience

The final step of building your remarketing campaign is to create your ad group and add your defined audience to that ad group. Make sure that the display network is turned on in your campaign settings; otherwise the remarketing will not work. If you are just starting out it is best to let Adwords automatically manage your placements. Once you get used to the campaigns and see which sites are performing you can start managing your placements manually.
Start out simple with one audience per ad group until you get the hang of it. Bidding and management gets very complex with all these elements added to an ad group. So start out small until you get your bearings. Ad groups should correspond to the audience you are adding. For example: If you are trying to retarget shopping cart abandoners your ad group should be labeled “shopping cart abandoners.” Identify the keywords used by your “abandoners” and add them to this ad group. Once again, keep things simple.

Remarketing Best Practices

Both building and managing a remarketing campaign can be complex. In this section you’ll learn some tips on how to successfully build and manage your remarketing campaigns.

1. Plan and organize your campaigns in an excel spreadsheet.

2. Use image/video ads as much as possible. Also have text ads created in every ad group for the websites that doesn’t support image/video ads.

3. Create various remarketing ad groups to show different ads to different audience lists.

4. Customize ad groups around the ad creative that will be displayed.

5. Rank ad groups in terms of qualification, this is the qualification level. For example: Non-engaged users are less qualified than shopping cart abandoners. Therefore, do not invest too much into the non-engaged user’s ad group.

6. The retargeting duration is directly influenced by qualification level of the ad group, i.e. the higher the qualification level, the longer you want to remarket to that ad group.

7. Google retargeting organizes visitors who match an audience definition into lists. An audience will not become active until that list reaches 500 unique visitors. In other words, until a certain audience consists of 500 visitors, your ad group won’t serve ads. All that said, don’t define your audiences too strictly or your audience will never become active.

Remarketing helps advertisers stay in front of their users. There are as many applications of this technology as there are types of convertible web pages. Remarketing can help increase the number of times per month those pages convert.

Care to comment?

Is there a real need for Google to run a commercial when Google has become synonymous for “search”?

If you haven’t seen the Superbowl commercial take a look:

Ok – so it’s a clever, heartfelt even, spot… but was it necessary?

Want to create memorability?  Try these ideas (click on the images to go to the website):

1. Go Big:

Over sized logos and headers have replaced splash pages as a statement.  Some of these designs can, in fact, take up the entire initial screen from which site visitors scroll down.  The rationale behind this?  Studies are finding that users tend to have an initial aversion to clicking, because of too many experiences with bad navigation.  The header and scroll, gives people time to settle into your site.

Some examples:

2. Sketch it out:

While drawing and illustration has been a staple of print design, it’s new – and eye catching – on the web.  Get those illustrators on your staffs to dust off their pens/pencils and apply their talents to your web pages.  Why it’s worth considering?  It adds dimension to your site, separates the pros from the amateurs and catches attention.  Good examples include:

3. Break the type mold:

Bold expressions using typography, like the use of slab typefaces, go hand in hand with the trend to bigger design. Designers continue to push the frontiers on font use as design on the Web.  And our browsing experience is the richer for it.  The true trend setters have abandoned their fears of usability issues and taken to exploring, twisting, and molding fonts to fit their purposes. With the correct placement, a website that utilizes typography as its main design element will be more interesting to a reader than overloading the same site with tons of photos.

Scale doesn’t only apply to type and headers.  It can be applied in terms of your overall site design as well.

4. Get down to the bare essentials and make it personal:

one page layouts force you to focus on the essential elements of your story.  One pagers are great ways to introduce your organization and tell your story in other areas of the web where your audiences find you – blogs, social media pages, directories.  One pagers should be more personal – providing users with insights into who you are and what makes your organization tick.

5. Show the big picture:

Like big logos and headers, a huge and stunning image does the same thing.  It will create an impression site visitors are likely to remember.  It’s a great opportunity to tell your brand story with those thousand words embedded in the image rather than typed out on the page!

6. Be a minimalist:

Think minimalism in terms of design, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you sacrifice richness.  Instead it means you get directly to the point.

Finally, capitalize on what we know works.

7. Don’t just show, let your visitor do:

Interactivity keeps reaching new highs in terms of functionality and usability.  The days of the all-Flash, bandwidth hog websites should be disappearing.  And while these over-the-top uses of flash created kind of a mini-backlash against Flash, that should be over too.  Today’s Flash integrates itself into sites much more seamlessly.  Add to that, new tools like jQuery that can mimic a lot of the motion that Flash brings, and interactive design is primed to move to a whole new level.

8. Go Modal:

Modal boxes are a great way to bring depth and dimension to your website without over-cluttering the design and muddying the visitor experience/  They can allow you to get more personal with your site visitors by giving the a deeper glimpse into your brand experience.  They’re also a great way to say hello.  Modals take pop ups to the next level – unlike their intrusive predecessors, modal boxes are better looking, operate more smoothly, and user controlled.

9. Repurpose the best of what’s old and make it something new:

Retro design is a perennial favorite of designers.  Doing retro right takes some skill.  In the hands of a great designer, however, infusing some retro elements into your site could hit the right note for your brand.  The trick is to pay appropriate homage to the vintage art, tap into some of the playfulness inherent in retro design and avoid its sentimentality.

10.  The graphic, well organized format of the print magazine finds a new home online:

In the online magazine layout, information is carefully organized on a single home page, giving the visitor an opportunity to explore as interested. The familiar layout will appeal to appeal to anyone who’s ever read a magazine or newspaper.  This isn’t about taking a print publication and putting it online, it’s taking the best of the print magazine format and migrating it to a digital environment.  Blogs, in particular, will adopt this format.  And with the growing popularity of e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, there will be increasing opportunities to create digital formats of institutional publications like alumni and research magazines, even recruitment publications.

You would think that marketing trends would be closely aligned with consumer trends, since effective marketing depends on getting your messages to appear where the highest concentration of qualified eyeballs are focused. That isn’t always the case, however, because trend-focused marketers tend to place an inflated value on revolutionary technology and early adoption.

Thankfully, the majority of consumers permanently relocate their attention with much less frequency than marketing bandwagon drivers. Still, missing a trend or sticking with a has-been spells opportunity lost at best and negative returns or loss of market share at worst.

Since your trend-marketing returns are only as good as your ability to make educated guesses, here’s some advice to help you avoid turning educated guesses into marketing messes. The following list features the top 10 internet marketing trends for 2010, in no particular order, and tells you whether to invest, test or let it rest.

Trend #1: Search Engine Optimization

Advice: Test
Sites with relevant content and credible links will continue to rule the search rankings in the coming year, but 2010 has the potential to reveal a few new standards. As the volume of web content continues to grow, consumers will demand even more relevant and personalized search results. That means search engines will be looking for more relevant and personalized content from publishers and brands. In fact, the search engine algorithms are already beginning to pay more attention to date of publication, geo-location, mobile device browsers, past behavior and social media content.

Don’t abandon your current SEO strategy in search of personalization, but make sure you allocate a portion of your budget to testing content, keywords and links that are targeted toward niche audiences. Test keyword and link placement in social media, local content and mobile websites, and make an effort to more frequently refresh some of the content you devote to search engine rankings. Once the search engines have tested these new search targets and revealed some concrete standards, you should be prepared to invest accordingly.

Trend #2: Paid Search

Advice: Invest
Paid search hasn’t seen a revolutionary trend since the idea of the long tail was applied to keyword bidding. That’s OK, because consumers will still use search engines in 2010 as a primary means of finding products and services to fulfill their needs, and they will still be clicking on relevant ads. Search advertising prices will remain reasonable, and average returns will remain comparably high as larger companies with decreased search marketing budgets continue to allocate resources to lower-cost SEO tactics in hopes of attracting visitors at lower prices. 2010 has the potential for even more downward pressure on price-per-click if Bing can gain enough loyal searchers to attract business away from Google.

You won’t exactly feel like you’re in the driver’s seat when your search marketing placement choices are limited to Google, Microsoft or both, but that doesn’t mean you should shy away from investing in the highly qualified leads that paid search is capable of producing for your small business.

Trend #3: E-mail Marketing

Advice: Invest
It isn’t hard to justify an investment in e-mail marketing when the cost of sending e-mails is so low. The low cost isn’t the only reason to send e-mail, however. Most consumers still consider e-mail to be their primary form of communication, even though there are several alternative ways for consumers to subscribe to periodic content from small businesses.

E-mail marketing will remain highly predictable in 2010 and may even become more powerful as e-mail service providers improve social media integration, search engine access to archived e-mails, auto-responders and new integrated applications. If you don’t already use an e-mail service provider, invest in one in 2010. If you already use an e-mail service, invest in your e-mail list and in producing valuable content to nurture leads and attract repeat customers.

The cost of building a permission-based list is likely to stay the same in 2010 as it was in 2009, but more than one-third of consumers changed at least one of their e-mail addresses in 2009–due to job changes or other economic factors. Spend more time and money in 2010 focused on keeping your e-mail list current when those consumers return to work and change e-mail addresses again.

Trend #4: Social Network Marketing

Advice: Test
Social media has one redeeming quality for marketers–lots and lots of eyeballs. That’s attractive if you’re a major brand, but profitable interaction will continue to be the exception for small businesses in 2010 rather than the rule. A good test of your social network marketing potential is to survey your current customers to see how many of them consider social networking to be a primary form of communication. You should probably experiment with a Facebook fan page and a Twitter page if you find that a meaningful percentage of your current customers indicate an interest in following your business.

Make 2010 your year to test content that attracts repeat and referral business. Your current customers are more likely than total strangers to respond to offers posted on social networks because they already know you and trust you based on their prior purchases.

Trend #5: Blogging

Advice: Let it rest
If you’re writing a blog to help with search engine rankings or to inform existing customers, you should continue to test or invest. If you’re blogging in an attempt to attract new prospects and convert them to customers, however, 2010 will be a year that exposes the blogosphere’s vulnerability to the law of averages. Converting prospects into customers depends on driving visitors to content that maximizes conversions, and that means your conversion rate is only as good as the content on your landing page. If that landing page is your blog and your blog changes frequently, your conversion rate is only as good as your latest blog post.

Instead of blogging to convert your website visitors into customers in 2010, work hard to test and develop great landing page content. When you find something that works, don’t change it.

Trend #6: Web Presence

Advice: Invest
If you want people to see the content on your website, it might make sense to advertise the location of your website content by placing ads on other high-traffic websites. Driving visitor traffic to your website isn’t the way to go for 2010, however. Instead, you need to spend 2010 driving your website content to the visitor traffic.

The difference stems from the fact that content aggregation websites like YouTube are boosting consumer demand for instant gratification and what I like to call “content nesting.” Content nesting allows consumers to browse through content fed to them through a single web page, or nest, so that they don’t have to click on links to individual websites all over the World Wide Web, which takes more time–not to mention that the results can be anywhere from unpredictable to shockingly irrelevant.

To take advantage of content nesting in 2010, your website content needs to be nested in as many content aggregation sites as possible. For example, a lot of people search for videos on YouTube. If you have a video on your website and it’s not also on YouTube, people on YouTube won’t bother searching for your website. To them, YouTube represents the total number of videos available to them on their topic of interest.

Trend #7: Mobile Marketing

Advice: Test
In case you haven’t heard, mobile marketing is all about marketing to people through their mobile phones and smart-phone devices. Small businesses haven’t had much of an opportunity to engage consumers on mobile devices, but 2010 has the potential to change that.

Demand is increasing dramatically for mobile applications and mobile web-browsing due to wider adoption of devices like the iPhone and the Google Android phone. As more people adopt these phones and features in 2010, look for small-business marketing services to start providing lower-cost mobile marketing solutions like text messaging, mobile e-mail marketing, mobile websites, mobile application development and location-based marketing.

Make 2010 your year to collect mobile preferences from your prospects and customers, and use tools like Google Analytics to see how many people are visiting your website on mobile web browsers. If you find interest in mobile interaction among your customers, begin testing simple mobile marketing campaigns such as sending a few mobile coupons via text or building a mobile micro-site for one of your products.

Trend #8: Podcasting and Online Radio

Advice: Let it rest
Online radio is actually on a bit of a growth trend, but that’s just because so-called terrestrial radio is suffering so much that radio advertisers are switching their investments to digital formats. 2010 will be a year of exploration for online broadcasters as they struggle to find and attract loyal audiences. iTunes has long been the leader in podcasting, but there are still no clear leaders in internet radio.
Even if leaders emerge in 2010, internet broadcasters will need to make their media more sharable, more engaging, more trackable and more mobile to attract money from advertisers. If you’re looking to attract an audience by broadcasting or advertising on broadcast media, go with online video in 2010 and wait for radio to finish reinventing itself.

Trend #9: Online Video

Advice: Invest
If a picture paints a thousand words, how many words does a 30-second online video paint? Countless buying emotions and memorable brand moments are possible with video. Until recently, spreading your message with video was limited to the television screen. In 2010, watch for video to become more accessible to small businesses through online outlets. Online video is interactive, memorable, widely accessible, cheap to create and highly shareable. There’s also a lot of investment happening around video, which is sure to create even more low-cost opportunities for small businesses to participate in video promotions in 2010.

Video presents a great opportunity for small-business marketing, but don’t think of video as a replacement for text. As powerful as video can be, it can be more cumbersome than text because you can’t scan a video as quickly as you can scan a page of headlines, links and text to quickly find the exact information you need. Use your investments to find the right balance for your customers.

Trend #10: Coupons, Discounts and Savings

Advice: Test
OK, this one isn’t entirely an internet marketing trend, but it’s important enough to mention because of the economy. 2009 was another tough year for retailers, and consumers are so accustomed to shopping for deals that they might begin to expect the plethora of deep discounts currently available to continue forever. If you’re engaged in heavy discounting to attract sales and survive the economic downturn, you’ll need to spend 2010 slowly weaning your customers off your lower prices, assuming that the economy recovers. Resetting expectations won’t be easy, so try swapping discounts for special privileges like loyalty discounts, free upgrades and other offers that won’t lock you in to price comparisons.

Internet marketing trends develop quickly, so expect many new and exciting trends to emerge in 2010. Don’t be too quick to jump on new bandwagons because consumers move more slowly than marketers and technology. Stay focused on attracting repeat business, deepening your customer relationships and solving problems for people. Those are the trends that never fail small businesses.

♣ John Arnold’s no-nonsense marketing advice is featured in his well-known marketing books, including Web Marketing All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies, E-Mail Marketing for Dummies and the forthcoming Mobile Marketing for Dummies. Arnold is also a leading marketing speaker, trainer and consultant who specializes in do-it-yourself marketing advice for small businesses, franchises and associations.

A study from a couple of NYU Stern professors has found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. Basically, if this research is any indication, if your business has both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time, you have a better chance of your paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared.

Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang have highlighted the following findings:

- On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.

- The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.

- Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.

- The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.

- The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.

- Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

The professors used “a unique panel dataset of consumer responses to keyword ads on Google” to conduct their research. The complete findings from the study are evidently available in a paper entitled “Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?” It’s 52 pages long.

“These findings have important implications for the incentives of search engines to strategically modify the rankings of their organic search listings in order to boost their revenues from paid search advertisements,” says Professor Ghose.

Ghose’s point is an interesting one. Nobody’s making any accusations here, but would search engines tweak organic results specifically with the goal of increasing the performance of paid results, and bringing in more revenue?

Some think the idea is absurd. For example, a recent “blog-entary” commented:

No additional CPC is incurred when an organic listing is present, and the CPC certainly does not change depending on the organic listing’s position. The PPC auctioning process has nothing to do with the organic SERPs.

Lastly, manipulating the organic SERPs in order to charge more for PPC clicks is cutting your own throat, from an SE perspective. In effect, telling advertisers: “You got a better organic position, therefore you will be charged more for your PPC clicks.” Under which business model does this make sense? Exactly none.

Even if a search engine did engage in such a practice, it is highly unlikely that anybody would know about it. I think the larger point is still just that it pays to optimize your site for organic listings, even if you are paying for listings. This may seem like common sense, but it is easy to dismiss the time and effort that go into an optimized site if you think you can just buy your way to clicks.

What are your thoughts on the subject?