I have never done “offline marketing” because I have always been working online. The problems mentioned have therefore never been an issue for me. I could tell in a second which adsense campaigns bring most of my clients, and which partner sites contribute most to my access statistics.

Every single one of my clients has the necessary tools to see whether the campaigns I planned for them produce results or not, which practically does away with one of the greatest doubts clients use to have towards marketing measures.

Low budget

What’s also great online is that you don’t have to spend 500 euros to reach a few thousand people of your town among whom maybe 50 are interested in your product. As long as your target group frequently uses online search, you could get much more visibility and target interested users directly while spending only 5-10 euros.

Having in mind the low budget necessary for online campaigns, imagine how much your marketing potential explodes if you just spend a small part of your marketing budget in online campaigns!

Very fast

Another advantage of online marketing is the time it takes to launch a campaign. Since the necessary interfaces are already there, once the campaign’s concept is done it shouldn’t take too long to start the first campaigns. Compare this with the time it takes for professional designers to create “offline ads”

Targeting

I’m sure you have seen on blogs or web portals ads that very often contain content related to the article you are reading. This is due to aplications like AdSense, who analyze the text on a website and come up with related ads, so that users see ads they are likely to be interested in.

Great flexibility

Everybody makes mistakes. What’s good online is that mistakes will never cost you a fortune, since you will see right away whether a campaign does bring results or not. In case it doesn’t, it can be either optimized in terms of text, images, or location, or cancelled and substituted by another one on another site.

Ready, steady, go!

If you’re interested now, don’t hesitate and get in touch with an online marketing professional or a web consultant to get specific information on the online potential for your product or service.

My friend’s business activity is usually on a rather personal level, which is why I recommended to start building up a personal reputation on the web. Until the day we talked she hadn’t made any efforts to get the word out there online, so I suggested it was high time to start off.

Get started

My idea was to start using her knowledge about natural cosmetics in order to create a blog as a basis of operations. On this blog she could present herself and frequently publish posts on natural cosmetics.This blog should be available under a personal domain name or even include the term cosmética and her name in order to do something for seo (search engine optimization) right from the beginning.

Get known

After having published quite a few informative and interesting posts on her blog I advised her to start searching for forums and blogs in her fields of interest, like forums on natural cosmetics, natural products, etc. and start to participate actively in discussions and making valueable contributions.

What’s great about this is that you can always leave a link or even a short text promoting your work or your blog in a footer below your message.

Get social

In order to further develop her reputation I recommended her to graduallz start using social media tools like xing, facebook and - if she had some time left - twitter. Already creating a profile on these sites can get you followers or “friends”.

Since natural cosmetics is something that might interest a lot of people, I thought trying to also promote her work with these tools could be a worthwile task.

Get in touch

After spending a few weeks on the tasks mentioned above, my friend would automatically get in touch with people interested in natural cosmetics. Once some online contacts have been established, further measures should be taken to intensify these contacts and try to gradually use them for business. Writing e-mails, chatting via skype or msn, or even meet for a coffee in case they didn’t live too far away could be an option.

Everything else I preferred to leave up to her - I’m not a salesperson.

What do you think of this strategy?

While we were having coffee I was trying to explain that in the last 6 years many things have changed on the web. Just the fact that a one-time inversion of a few years ago didn’t result in a huge success doesn’t mean that small stores can’t have success online today.

Since this topic seems to be an issue that needs clarifying, I will focus on explaining the web’s potential for local businesses in today’s post.

Let me ask you three questions in order to help you understand how you can appreciate the web’s true potential for your local businesses:

1. Are your clients online?

First and foremost you have to know how many of your clients are online frequently. There still might be a certain niche business that only sells to grandmothers, but you can be quite sure that most of your clients do have direct access to the Internet, or at least know someone who can find information for them online within seconds.

I remember my family asking me to search for handymen near my home town, or Italian restaurants in Graz (Austria) at a time when they hadn’t already been familiar with the Internet. Luckily, now it’s no problem for anybody of them to find their stuff on their own

It’s important to see the fact that most of your potential clients have direct or indirect access to the Internet, and most of them will know how to search something in Google - your business, for example.

2. What’s your business’ Community Potential?

“Online Communities” or “Social media” are probably two of the emerging trends coming up in the last years. I like to think of an online community as a group of people interested in the same subject, that use certain tools to get in touch with each other, interchange photos, videos, links and messages. 

From a business related point of view, the idea of communities is to gather potential customers around your business and your main fields of competence. Just think of tuning shops trying to form a community with car freaks, or model aircraft pilots getting together on a model plane retailer’s website.

There are certain businesses that are more likely to be successful with building up an informal, community-based relationship with their potential clients than others. While a dentist should definitely have a website to be found on the web, I guess it’s quite unlikely that patients or “potential patients” are keen on getting in touch with each other talking about their inlays.

3. Are you ready to give it a true chance?

Tons of people thought like my client some years ago. They thought that having a website with two photos and publishing the company’s address and opening times would be enough to get people coming in - well, it definitely was, 10 or 15 years ago.

Today, things don’t work like this any longer. Nowadays, in order to have success on the web one must be willing to spend a certain time and budget on their online marketing strategies. The more complex the Internet gets, the higher the demand for professional help with your Internet related stuff.

When I started doing business online, almost everybody knew a teenager who could create a website with some free software. Now, having a presentable website still is of high importance, but the website has become just one single part of a fast-growing complex network of online marketing tools.

While locally operating companies very often spend huge amounts of money on flyers and newspaper ads, very few of them consider the Internet as a real option to get the word out there. That’s a shame, because after doing an online marketing campaign for you, I could tell you exactly what was the outcome. With your latest flyer campaign, in contrast, you will hardly have a chance to know anything about its results.

Let’s have some Pizza!

I’ve written this post because I would like more local businesses to use the Internet’s true potential. On most Google websites after searching for “pizza” you will get an input box asking you for your zip code. Why? Because Google knows that if you’re looking for pizza, you most probably want to find an Italian restaurant near the place where you live. 

Today, users even sometimes use the Internet to see if their neighbours have got a hidden swimming pool behind the fence in their garden - using the web to find local restaurants, clubs, car studios or hairdressers is something nearly everybody knows how to do, and almost everybody does.

Your neighbours are online, and this is why your business needs to be there as well.

What do you think about the web’s potential on local markets?

So what is twitter?

Basically …

… I’d say twitter is just another tool to communicate with other people. You can “follow” other people and this way the messages they write will show up on your home page and their profile will be added to your list of “tweeters”. By using @ in your messages you can direct messages to another tweeter. For example, writing @gertmellak hi gert would send the message “hi gert” to my twitter account @gertmellak. Every message sent this way will show up on your twitter home page. In case you want to contact a tweeter who is following you directly, you can send them direct messages.

In order to start using twitter, you should at least be familiar with the usage of the following commands:

• DM - to send a direct message to a tweeter
• @<username> responds to a user (e. g. @gertmellak hi gert)
• RT - retweet (forward a tweet of another tweeter)

Technically …

… twitter is a microblogging platform and consists of a text field where twitter users (tweeters) can write their messages (tweets), a “follow” button (you will see the messages of people you’re following on your home page on twitter), and the home page where your messages and the messages of people you’re following will show up.

Theoretically …

… when writing tweets you are answering the question “What are you doing?” - maybe therefore there are people really tweeting about when they’re going for coffee or walking the dog. It’s like opening your window at home and screaming “I’m going to have coffee now”, so that your neighbours know about it.

Practically …

… twitter is what you make of it. I’ve seen fellows like @chrisbrogan live-tweeting at press conferences using twitter as some sort of “twournalist” (twitter journalist), others use it as a notebook to have links they find interesting available on the web.There is even a group of people using twitter to lose weight tweeting everything they eat and this way manage to eat less things that are unhealthy.

It’s all about the community

I believe that the main purpose of twitter is to allow you to find people interested in the same things you are - almost instantly, following them and getting in touch. You would like to get in touch with people interested in football? Search for “football” on search.twitter.com and you will find lots of tweeters who frequently talk about it. Follow them and you will be able to start growing your community almost instantly.

Update:

Just in case you’re getting interested and want to know more about twitter now, have a look at the Twitter Dummy Guide written by @duoblogger.

Before starting to test various different platforms this afternoon , I created the following list of my 10 basic requirements I expect to have covered by any professional newsletter platform:

1. Whitelisting / Positive listing

There are numerous newsletter systems available on the web. In order to do a first preselection, I usually look for information on whether the system has active whitelisting or positive listing. This means that the sending server’s ip is recognized as a trusted server, which makes it less likely that your newsletter might end up as spam.

2. Write newsletters in html and text version

While until a few years ago text-only newsletters were completely acceptable, nowadays newsletters must be sent as html. However, many client applications, especially web mail clients, do not show the html version of your newsletter right away and the user must do one or two clicks in order to view it properly.

Since very often users aren’t used to that, many newsletters will never be read. Adding a plain-text version of your newsletter can be very helpful since it allows you to also send the basic information along with the links as plain text, so that mail clients not capable of showing the html version can first show the text only version.

3. Intuitive user interface

Let’s face it: sending a newsletter is an additional task that - if done properly - already requires a lot of time and effort. There is no need to any further complicate the task by providing hundreds of different options - I’m in favour of straight simple user interfaces able to lead the user through the necessary tasks step by step. It’s great to have an additional admin mode for advanced settings, but for the average user I need a simple interface.

4. Planning newsletters

When using newsletters professionally, they’re usually not written right before sending them - especially for holidays or special events you might plan several e-mail campaigns a long time ahead. A professional newsletter system therefore should let you plan the date and time when you want to have your newsletters sent.

5. Import and Export contact lists

Although you might have found your favourite newsletter solution, keep in mind that tomorrow another one might come up that suits you even more. Importing and exporting contact lists (also for backup purposes) should therefore be one of the standard features of every mailing application (and it is, in fact, even available in free (open source) applications)

6. Planning follow-up e-mails

One of the reasons why I really love AWeber is the possibility of planning follow-up e-mails. This means that if you register for my newsletter today, I can plan ahead that 2 days after your initial subscription you will receive e-mail X, 15 days after subscribing you’ll be sent e-mail Y, and 2 months later e-mail Z, and so on.

This not only guarantees that your subscribers are reminded regularly of your website automatically with a one-time-effort of writing the follow-up e-mails, but also means that your follow-up e-mails you write today will still get you visits month and in theory years ahead.

Just make sure these follow-up e-mails contain what I like to call “sustainable information” - tips and advice that will still come in handy in two years.

7. Click rates

It’s not realistic to expect that the first newsletter you send will already create perfect results. Like with every application, it takes some time until you know which type of links, link texts, images, etc. really attract your newsletter’s target audience.

In order to evaluate, for example, which links in your e-mail get most of the clicks, professional solutions offer click-tracking where the url of your link is redirected and so clicks can be counted and later checked in the statistics. This way you might find out that the text “Buy now“  next to a product gets much more clicks than “Visit our web store to buy this product“.

8. Target groups

Users are different - even users belonging to the same target group. For this reason, although you might have one general mailing list for general broadcasts, it’s convenient to also use more specialized lists and let people opt for the lists they’re interested in.

This way, you could send out product offers on cars to the “average” subscriber, but information on trucks only to those users subscribed to the “trucks” list.

9. High deliverability

If your e-mails aren’t delivered, people won’t get them - sounds logical, but many companies offering newsletter services are still not concentrating their efforts on deliverability. AWeber is one of the companies that really focuses on this issue and therefore has a very high deliverability rate.

10. Newsletter Web Analytics

I don’t like the thought of spending time regularly on things I cannot evaluate afterwards, which is why I would never use a newsletter system that doesn’t tell me how many of my newsletter recipients actually open the newsletters.

You should always be aware of the fact that opening rates only include html newsletters, since at the moment there is no other technical solution than integrating an image tag which, at loading the transparent image, handles the tracking.

But apart from opening statistics there are other important figures, for example, related to the signup forms you’re using, or your recipients’ geographic location. You should also get detailed statistics about how many new subscribes you have each day and how many decide to unsubscribe, and much more. The statistics tool is the most decisive tool when it comes to evaluating whether your efforts pay off or not.

After having spend an entire afternoon testing and comparing different newsletter systems, at least for English newsletters I’ll stick to AWeber.

If you would like to see AWeber in action, sign up for my personal newsletter.

On numerous websites you can now see YouTube videos directly embedded using the provided HTML code you can copy and paste directly from the YouTube website.

However, there are a few things that make your website look crappy and even may lead your audience to a competitor’s website, like:

• the top search box to find other videos
• the list of related videos after yours has stopped
• the player’s style that’s always the same on different websites
• the videos don’t start automatically, your users have to click on the play button

In this post I’m going to show you some tricks in order to have your YouTube video look like coming from a professional streaming server (just the YouTube logo has to stay there, sorry ;-)):

1. The Code

Usually, a video code from youtube looks like this:

<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8yut_7gxX8A"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8yut_7gxX8A"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
allowscriptaccess="always"
allowfullscreen="true"
width="425" height="344">
</embed>
</object>

2. autoplay

Many people don’t like it when they always have to click on the play button to see a video. If you would like a video to start right away when viewing the page, just add autoplay=1 to the video’s address (in the code above you would add it to the second line, so the address would be

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8yut_7gxX8A&autoplay=1

3. Start video at 00:15

I don’t want my users to have to watch the whole introduction to get the video’s message, so I add &start=15 to the URL to have the YouTube video start at second 15.

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8yut_7gxX8A&start=15

4. Turn off the related movies + search box

One really big disadvantage of using YouTube as a source for videos is that at the end YouTube usually shows related to videos that might have your users switch to another site. Thanks to a special parameter, you can switch this off and the video will stop with the last frame and a “replay” button. Just add &rel=0 to the address like here:

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8yut_7gxX8A&rel=0

Have you seen the search box YouTube integrated into videos? When moving your mouse cursor over some videos, a search box appears. Just imagine you’re using YouTube videos on your company’s site and people use the videos you publish to search for your competitor’s products!

Luckily, the &rel parameter also switches off the search box!

5. Set borders around your videos

Sometimes you might want to have your videos within borders. This can be achieved using the parameters &border, &color1 and &color2:

<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8yut_7gxX8A&border=1&color1=0xffffff&color2=0x000000

Make sure you’re putting the color codes as hexadecimal codes, in the format 0xffffff for white, for example.

6. Putting it all together

Last but not least, you can use all these parameters together to integrate a video in decent way, with a suitable border, having the video start at a certain second and avoid distracting users with related videos at the end - check out this interview with Darren Rowse:

Do you know any other ways to tune embedded YouTube videos?

Apart from the faster installation there might be less differences to Windows Vista as many people still using XP and waiting for 7 expect.

Yesterday I came across a great article on ProBlogger about how to grow your blog although you only have 1-2 hours a day to work on it.

The main idea is to set yourself a time limit each day, let’s say an hour or two, but at least half an hour. Then you assure you’re using this time as efficient as possible for the work on your blog, but also for establishing relations with other bloggers by commenting on their blog or working on your reputation in the social media field.

According to Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, these are the essential when it comes to blogging efficiency:

1. Writing outstanding articles

2. Linking, and link-bait

3. Guest posts

4. Commenting

5. Email and networking

And these are likely time killers that should be reduced to a minimum:

1. Blog stats and earnings

2. Ad networks

3. Blog design

4. Blog memes

5. Reading lots of other blogs

6. Plugins and widgets

7. Social media

Just in case you’re looking for a cool time logging application, check out mite!

How efficient is your blogging?

1. How to Write a WordPress Plugin - Introduction
2. Seven Reasons to Write a WordPress Plugin
3. How to Get Ideas for Wordpress Plugins
4. Structure of a Wordpress Plugin
5. WordPress Plugin Actions
6. WordPress Plugin Filters
7. Constructing a Wordpress Plugin Admin Panel
8. Constructing a WordPress Plugin User’s Panel 
9. WordPress Plugins and Database Interaction 
10. Using JavaScript and CSS with your WordPress Plugin
11. Using AJAX with your WordPress Plugin 
12. Releasing and Promoting Your WordPress Plugin