DigiFutures by John Daus

DigiFutures Tip of the Month Going Mobile In 2012

2011-10-21T10:45:00.002-04:00

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia.

With the Holiday season fast approach hopefully all of your online marketing campaigns are ready to roll. This month we have been preparing for the shift next year to mobile marketing and have compiled a few slides which go explain the overall trends and why you should consider shifting some ad dollars to mobile marketing campaigns.

One interesting fact we learned this week is that Domino’s gets 30 percent of their orders from the web and a recently launched mobile ordering app has driven almost 2 percent of their ordering volume in just a few weeks. In addition we are seeing over 10 percent of the traffic to The Maids International corporate site is coming from mobile users. So the mobile usage shift is happening and I think 2012 will finally be the year of mobile marketing. To see the slides for Going Mobile in 2012 click on the blog link on www.DigiFutures.com/blog.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Month from John Daus at DigiFutures.

2011-08-25T17:55:00.002-04:00

Finally get back to blogging after taking a summer break. Been testing a variety of new social networking tools and listing services to increase link juice. See our lastest listing of local seo service listings at Thumbtack.com.

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DigiFutures Tip of The Week February 14 Trasnscript

2011-02-14T11:25:00.002-05:00

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia.

It has been a busy new year with several new clients and leveraging social media is all the buzz. The tip this month is how to leverage Twitter for Business. So how do you make the social texting platform work for your business? Well Since I am a marketing guy I still rely on using it as a platform to push messages and industry news, but it should really be used to have a dialog with a prospective client base. An example would be to use Tweets to push video updates like we do with the Tip of the Week program across social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, and FourSquare. Then participate in the ongoing dialog.

You can also use their platform to promote tweets, trends or accounts depending on what level engagement you want to drive with your followers. Check out the details

Business.Twitter.com

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week."

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DigiFutures Tip of the Week Transcript

2010-11-19T15:38:00.000-05:00

"Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia.

The big news this week was Facebook new email system. Now do we really need another email address. It actually the new Facebook email is more of an integrated messaging system combining SMS, Instant Messaging and good ole fashion email. I idea of combining all the messages into a single interface may prove to be useful and take less overhead when you want to communicate with someone in the fashion the most prefer. For example my kids prefer texting while my old Microsoft buddies still live in an email centric world. Besides offering a history of conversation thread the other unqiue capability is the Social Inbox where you can organize friend conversations into folders.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

DigiFutures Tip July 2010

2010-07-30T16:37:00.001-04:00

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. This tip of the week is about my learning from a study of social media adoption in the federal government. Market Connections just completed such a study and presented it this week. About 60% of government agencies are using some form of social media of outreach to their constituencies. According to Bev Godwin at GSA their plans are to go from just communicating to more participation in the conversations and then evolving to a co-creation phase. The soon to be launched challenge.gov is modeled after Xprize.org competitions. It will be an example of the co-reation phase. There is nothing like a little competition to inspire creativity. A video of the whole presentation can be found on the Market Connection site and we have included a link off of the DigiFutures blog. That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

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DigiFutures Tip of the Week #6 June 2010

2010-06-22T17:10:00.002-04:00

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. This tip of the week is about some best practices I learned from a BtoBOnline Virtual Tradeshow. The vendors pitched state of the art lead nurturing processes and their products to managing the online marketing campaigns. My biggest take away is where your audience is online? Second is where they are in their purchase process? Most organizations go thru a 3 or 4 step purchase process from needs recognition, to developing an evaluation criteria, researching solutions and selection of product. With that in mind you should have content which matches their needs for information at each phase of the purchase process. Online marketing is really about providing the content to educate your prospects and not the traditional interrupt marketing of the mass media generation. That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

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DigiFutures Internet Marketing Tip of the Week #5 May 10, 2010 Transcript

2010-05-10T15:10:00.001-04:00

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. This tip of the weeks is for those of you who saw the news about the iPad last month yet missed the footnote about iAds. Apple launched iAD its mobile ad network to compete with the all mighty Google. The Apple’s goal is to create an even better advertising experience with “the emotion of TV and the interactivity of the web”. There is a refresh to the Apple Developer’s Kit so we can learn how to integrate Ad into Apple Apps. Also, there is a good article on the impending battle titled Apple vs Google Faceoff by Julie Batten posted on Clickz.com a week ago. Ads in Apps are coming and we will be ready for them.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

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DigiFutures Tip of the Week #4 April 9, 2010 Transcript

2010-04-09T09:48:00.001-04:00

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. I recently attended a Pew Research Center presentation on Future of Internet by 2020. As you all know technology and bandwidth are doubling basically every two years. So what does that mean in terms of new devices or services for consumers? Well we will see a shift in our need to be data retrieval experts to higher level cognitive processes like analysis and creativity. All the world’s information will be at our finger tips or should I say implanted in our brains within 10 years. Maybe we will even have devices to assist us with the higher level cognitive processes. I am looking forward to a little cognitive help in the digital future. There is a link to the full Pew Research Center report off our Digifutures blog .

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Future-of-the-Internet-IV.aspx

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

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DigiFutures Tip of the Week # March 30 2010 Transcript

2010-03-30T12:01:00.001-04:00

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. This week’s tip is about using negative keywords in your Adwords campaigns. One may ask why use negative keywords in a PPC campaign. Well there are two basic reasons if you find that a term in not profitable with respect to conversions in your campaign so you don’t want to bid on those terms. The second reason would be that you get a letter from a competitors attorney requesting you cease and desist because your are infringing on a trade mark. Even thought it is legal to bid on competitive company names the trade mark rules are there so as not to create confusion for the customer. So it is best to not use competitor’s trade mark in your Adwords text ads to avoid any problems.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #22010 Transcript

2010-03-08T17:19:00.001-05:00

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures a local SEO agency. We help businesses in VA, MD, DC & Greater Mid-Atlantic region with their Google strategy and this is my tip of the week.

This week I read a great white paper discussing why Local Search matters. It was published by Primero Systems. It really gives credence to my search saturation strategy of leveraging multiple websites and online campaigns to drive more than your fair share of leads from the web. An interesting statistic they quoted from comScore’s latest study is that 82% of local online searches follow-up offline. It is really hard for a single monolithic site to optimize for local content. You really need local references, customer feedback and promotions to capture local leads. Of course it is self serving, but that is the advantage WebTreePro offers. The link to the WebTreePro white paper is on my DigiFutures blog.

http://www.webtreepro.com/Files/Cache/file_9559.pdf?time=634036508322346757

That’s our Local Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures.
Have a great week.

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #12010 Transcript

2010-02-24T10:24:00.002-05:00

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures a local SEO agency. We help businesses in VA, MD, DC & Greater Mid-Atlantic region with their Google strategy and this is my tip of the week.

I would like to share my key learning’s from the Borrell Conference on Local Internet Marketing in NYC earlier this month. Some amazing growth statistics were shared about our industry. Over half of small and medium businesses still don’t have websites and yet there are 400 million registered users on Facebook. But the biggest lesson learned was from Yodels’ CEO who said 4 word search phrases are driving double digit conversions for the PPC campaigns they manage. So my take away is to start optimizing for 4 word phrases.

That’s our Local Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures.
Have a great week.

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #12 Transcript

2009-12-08T12:07:00.000-05:00

"Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures a local SEO agency. We help businesses in VA, MD & DC with their Google strategy and this is my tip of the week.

After spending a day reviewing Google Analytics my tip this week focuses on the value you can derive by comparing analytics across from multiple accounts. Besides seeing how many visitors to your site, the real value is in comparing conversion rates of different campaigns and seeing which drive the most leads. Another factor to evaluate is which keywords are more effective at driving the organic verse paid leads. If these aren’t matching our priorities of the client we still have work to do before selecting the next terms we want to target.

That’s our Local Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures.
Have a great week."

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #11

2009-11-20T10:43:00.002-05:00

"Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures a local SEO agency in Virginia.

In this week’s tip I would like to talk about the recommendations I heard at the Potomac Techwire Breakfast yesterday. The meeting was for about 200 attendees of my peers interested in Internet Adverting Outlook for 2010. The panel was a good cross section of industry players most notable was Mark Walsh of Genius Rocket, and attorney Mike Zaneis for the Internet Advertising Bureau . The panel was moderated by Paul Sherman founder of Potomac Techwire and he posed so though provoking questions like where would spend $5M if launching an online campaign for a jacket to be sold by the Gap. Most of the answers were to split it evenly across Paid, Display, Social, & Wireless media, but Mark’s idea was to leverage celebrity power and give the jacket to top coolest folks at clubs and pay them to promote it. Now that would create some buzz. Bottom line recommendations for 2010 was the best place to invest your online ad dollar is in video and social campaigns.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week."

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #10 Transcript

2009-11-11T14:12:00.002-05:00

"Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures a local SEO agency in Virginia.

In this week’s tip I would like to reference an article by Harry Gold
in Clickz where he explains
how to use predictive model to test the break-even point of a online
display advertising campaign. It is a problem I have been thinking
about since we already saturate search results with PPC, and SEO
efforts so our next frontier is to master the online display marketing
landscape. In a nut shell you need to calculate what the average
profit is on an average sale then work backwards with standard click
thru rates and conversion rates to see at what point does your cost
per click (CPC) or cost per thousand (CPM) ads exceed you profit on an
average sale. There is a sample table and link on our DigiFutures
blog. Check it out.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures.
Have a great week. "

Sample table format for developing the breakeven point for an online display ad campaign:

BudgetCPMImpressionsClickRateClicksCPCConvrtRateSalesCost/Sale

If you would like we can include this analysis in a free DigiFutures Internet Competitive Evaluation (DICE) for your industry. Just complete the DICE request form.

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #9 Transcript

2009-11-06T16:43:00.002-05:00

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia.

This week I have been using a great new tool just launched from SpyFu.com. They have always had the ability to look at competitor’s ad history for specific keyword terms. But now you can look at all the domains bidding on a specific keyword term and look at the text ads they are displaying relative to those keywords. It is a great way to find out how your competition has evolved there Google Paid Per Click ads over the last several months and see what is working for them. No need to reinvent the week if you can borrow some ideas from your top competitors. A link to spyfu.com is on our site. Check it out.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.

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DigiFutures Tip of The Week #8 Transcript

2009-10-26T18:01:00.002-04:00

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia.

This week I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Alexandria VA. I just wanted to share some learning’s from the workshops I attended. The most usually breakout season was titled Every Click is a Lead. Some conversion tips from a few large telecom providers included keeping each landing page or step in the online process very brief. You need to nurture leads one step at a time so depending on where the prospect is in their buying process make it as simple as possible for them to get the information they need. Always be crafting a message toward what’s in it for them ie not just features but benefits. Sell the Sizzle not the Steak.

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.

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DigiFutures Tip of The Week #7

2009-10-05T10:55:00.002-04:00

DigiFutures Tip of the Week #7 October 5th, 2009 Transcript

“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. Over the weekend I read a review of Real Time Search Engines in October issue of Wired magazine. It is the future of search since Google just looks at historical content and has been able to keep up with rate social media content is published. Their size is starting to slow them down. Out of the 5 new startup referenced i looked at amount of traffic they are getting and how many had indexed "DigiFutures."

Tweetmeme has an incredible growth rate 0 to 15 M users in 6 months
But only showed one result for Digifutures. Believe me I have more than 1 Tweet that says DigiFutures. The others lag way behind on traffic with just a with just a few hundred thousand users at this point. The most notable of the bunch because they actually showed about 14 results for “DigiFutures” was Topsy. They had the most indexed results with listing of YouTube videos, Blogs and Tweets.

I have included links to the “Live in the Moment” article by Clive Thompson on the Digifutures Blog: www.digifutures.net/Blog

That’s our Internet Marketing Tip of Week from John Daus at DigiFutures. Have a great week.”

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DigiFutures Tip Of The Week #6

2009-09-22T16:55:00.003-04:00

I was out of pocket for a little fund raising mountain climbing project.Check out Crossing Way Foundation site.

Below is transcript for weekly DigiFutures video Tip of The Week.

"Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. This week I would like to discussion how we can forecast the success of an online marketing campaign. By using Google Insights you can get a projection of search traffic for key phrases and it will show you any seasonal adjustment. Depending on the amount of history for a specific term you can get up to a 12 month forecast. The forecast is normalized so to get specific numbers for your calculations.

You can use the Google Adwords Estimator tool. Using the numbers you obtain with these two tools will give you a higher confidence that your ROI projections are on target.

I have included links to both tools Google Insights and Adwords Estimator tool on the Digifutures Blog: www.digifutures.net/blog

That’s our internet marketing tip of week from John Daus at DigiFutures.

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Digifutures Tip of the Week #5

2009-08-24T11:04:00.003-04:00

The following is a transcript of our video DigiFutures Internet Marketing Tip Of The Week:

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. We would like to continue the discussion about measuring internet marketing tactics and calculating an ROI for your online marketing campaigns. Last week we talked about how to track the traffic and measure conversions on your website so the next step is to calculate how many of those leads turn into sales. A simple formula for calculating ROI is to multiple the leads times the close ratio and sales value which will give you the revenue generated from your web site. Take this number and multiple by your gross profit margin then divide by your investment in internet marketing.

The following slide shows you the basic equation. It is posted on the Digifutures Blog: www.digifutures.net/Blog

That’s our internet marketing tip of week from John Daus at DigiFutures.

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Digifutures Tip of The Week #4

2009-08-13T11:38:00.006-04:00

The following is a transcript of our video DigiFutures Internet Marketing Tip Of The Week:

Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. We have been talking about internet marketing tactics to boost organic search rankings and ultimately more sales leads. Today we would like to share with you another tip of the week to help you be successful with your internet marketing campaigns. Before we get to far along with more tactics we should talk about how to measure the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign. Besides looking at your organic rankings and how much traffic you get to your site the bottom line is how many online estimate request or phone calls you get from your efforts. There is an excellent new service from MongooseMetrics which allows you to setup a tracking phone number. These tracking numbers can differentiate between prospect callings from organic or PPC campaigns. Check out the link to MongooseMetrics on www.digifutures.net/Blog That’s our internet marketing tip of week from John Daus at DigiFutures.

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DigiFutures Tip of The Week #3

2009-07-28T14:22:00.003-04:00

DigiFutures founder John Daus Tip of the Week #3 Transcript Linking:
"Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia. Today we would like to sharewith you another tip ofthe week to help you be successful with your internet marketing campaigns. Last week we coveredsome basic content tips. This week we will start covering linking. Remember internet marketing is al about content and community. The links are really the validation of who you say you are by the community. The community can be your industry partners, geographic neighbors like chamber of commerce members or just other companies with whom you choose to swap links. When establishing a reciproal link swap you want to make sure the company you are partnering with has your keyword phrase in the link text. To organize our linking partners we have a resource directory on our site. Check it out on www. digifutures.net the resources link. That's our tip of the week from John Daus at DigiFutures. See you next week.

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DigiFutures Tip of the Week

2009-07-13T10:16:00.002-04:00

The following is the transcript from the DigiFutures Tip of the Week on July 9, 2009.
“Hi I am John Daus with DigiFutures an Internet Marketing agency in Virginia.
Today we would like to share with you some of our secrets for internet marketing success. We are planning a series of Internet Marketing Tip of the Week videos.
So let’s get started with Internet Marketing basics. Internet Marketing is about two things: Content & Community. Today we will talk about a content tip Remember GOOGLE is just a big index of all the word on the World Wide Web. It only cares about how many times a word appears on a page. So when you create your content keep in mind how many times you reference the keyword phrase you are trying to optimize on the page. Ideally the keyword phrase should appear 5-10 times on a page. Depending on the word count for the page your target should be 3-5% word density. That is if you have a 187 word paragraph like this video and I mention Internet Marketing phrase 7 times that is 3.7% word density. For more details check out our blog www.digifutures.net/blog That’s our Internet Marketing tip of the week. Thanks for listening. See you next week.”

Additional Tip
For additional ways to increase you keyword density you can make sure the navigation links on your site have your keywords integrated in the navigation links. Remember each time you are able to increase references to you keywords get you higher rankings with the search engines.

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Time is Short so Tiny your URL

2009-06-09T12:12:00.003-04:00

We have been busy with several new projects and active on Twitter which is all the rage now so been slacking on the blogging front. Also, I have finished the Nations marathon and done a 100 mile MS charity ride in my spare time, but it is time to get back to business of Internet Marketing. My scope has expanded from just taking on Internet marketing clients in VA to a few surrounding states including PA, MD, & MO. We will post client project updates on the website soon.

In the mean time there is the need for speed so using short urls is also a great way to track internet results of both on and offline campaigns. A good article last month by Gary Stein on Clickz the benefits of using tinyurl.com and bit.ly for conducting A/B test and making it easier to track response rates from your social media efforts. I really think as mobile marketing starts to go main stream on the new smart phones or netbook type devices these sites will be invaluable especially for those of us who hate to thumb type on a phone.

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Revenue Forecasting with Predictive Models

2009-03-25T16:56:00.004-04:00

More and more clients are saying show me the money. Well the DigiFutures team is working on a model to see if we can forecast the return based on media spend. That may sound like a lot of hocus pocus, but it has been done a a large scale. A story just published in AdvertisingAge online about one of the top Interactive Agency in the country, Organic, came up with just an approach for Chrysler in which they predicted sales within a 1% of actual numbers based on media spend. See the story on their predict model If we can create a similar predictive econometric model for smaller scale purchases we would have an approach to help show companies how it makes sense to spend more online then not. Stayed tuned for more to come on revenue forecasting from click thru data.

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Social Media for Business

2009-02-13T14:12:00.003-05:00

If 2008 was the year of social media hype then 2009 is the reality check. With internet marketing budgets under presssure to perform and the shift to more performance based marketing we really need to show proof. I stumbled across a great article, "Social Media for Business - Who's Doing it Well & How" by Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell which was published back in the fall, but is even more applicable today with the current state of the economy. Even though our internet marketing firm is doing well in Virginia there seems to be slow down in advertising in other regions. I don't think we have cracked the code of business to business leverage for social media, but that is our goal. Once we do I will be writing a book about how our little internet marketing firm in virginia did it.
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