The Online Producer

Viral Marketing and the human condition

2008-05-29T18:35:00.001-07:00

I found a quote in the writing of david hume (1748) which in discuss the the essence of what it is in human nature that makes viral marketing so apealing to us. He is talking about religious miracles but its equally relivant to marketing, consiracy theory general gossip.

The pleasure of telling a piece of news so interesting, of propagating it, and of being the first reporters of it, spreads the intelligence. And this is so well known, that no man of sense gives attention to these reports, till he find them confirmed by some greater evidence. Do not the same passions, and others still stronger, incline the generality of mankind to believe and report, with the greatest vehemence and assurance, all religious miracles?

http://www.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/Dye/HumeOfMiracles.html

What is RSS and how do you use it

2007-11-28T17:12:00.001-08:00

Search Engine Optimization And Why You Gotta Use It

2007-11-15T21:24:00.000-08:00

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday

2007-11-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company's internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you're not getting the traffic that you're supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, that's an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google's Adwords and Yahoo's Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo's advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company's name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.

How to Make Money Online

2007-11-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

This video goes through the basics of how to make money online.

The flashing lights make it look like he's on the enterprise.

Viral Marketing 101

2007-09-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn't matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don't know that you exist, it doesn't matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one's product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won't block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help
in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie "The Blair Witch Project"?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft's Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it's your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Getting started with videoblogging

2007-09-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

Videoblogging is the next generation of posting ideas and products over the internet. Everybody knows about textblogging. Now they use videos for a better way of expression. This form of communication may entail a lot of resources, but it is all worth it. If pictures say a thousand words, videoblogging exceeds that by far.

A videoblog requires larger disk spaces on websites, a faster server, and a whole new set of programs to support it. Videoblogs can be fed through RSS. This is technology of syndicating your website to other RSS aggregators.

Videoblogging works with people on the internet expressing their selves. Now if you put this on a business prospective, you are up to a lot of benefits. Think of it as a powerful tool in making showing your prospective customers your line of products or your services. It's just like showing a commercial all for free. And if you videoblog through RSS, then most probably you are getting your target market.

People like to see what they are going to buy. Some would like to see proof and be sure that they are getting their money's worth before shelving their dimes on it. All of us know the influence of a thirty second commercial. The effect of videoblogging is similar to that. You show your product, people watch it. If they like it, they buy it. If you present it good enough, they'll buy the product even if they don't need it.

Now on the web, things are pretty much static, unlike in television in which all are moving. If you post something that is mobile, it would most likely catch attention. Now imaging your product parading in all it's royalty through videoblog. You'll get phone call orders in no time.

If your business is just starting up, you can create a videoblog right at your own home. All you need is your web camera, microphone, video software, and lights. For as long as you know how to use your camera, then you can create a videoblog.

Invest in a good web camera. The higher its resolution is the better the output. And you like to present your goods in the optimum way so get the best one possible. Make a short story, or just capture your goods in one go. Just make sure you are getting the best profile for each. Get those creativity juices flowing.

Lights are important in a production. Make sure you illuminate entirely the area you are going to use to create videoblog. The brighter the area, the crispier the images will be. You can also use lighting effects for added appeal to the presentation.

Should you require sounds for your videoblog, you need a microphone. Record you voice as a voice over for promoting the product and its benefit to consumers. Sounds are as important as videos on a videoblog. It is advisable to make your sound effects as enticing as the video.

Your video editing software can be any program. You need this to finalize your work. You can add sounds, delete some bad angles, or insert some still pictures in there too. Some programs are user-friendly and can be used even with zero knowledge on video editing. Even simple video editing programs should do the trick. Select your background carefully too. The light affects the presentation so make sure that the background and the light complements each other.

Videoblogging is a great tool but it also has it downside. It may slow down the computer so other may steer clear of it. Download time may also be time consuming especially if customer is still on a dial- up connection.

But don't let those stop you. Let videoblogging be an alternative for you, though it is best to still keep the text and pictures present in your presentation to accommodate all possible viewers of your site.

Nowadays, the more creative you are in presenting your product to the market, they more you are likely to succeed. Videoblogging offers an interactive way of selling. You involve the customers. You instill in them the advantage of your goods. And at times, those are enough to make a sale.

Help Save the Environment while you Search

2007-08-22T01:36:00.000-07:00

We all use google. I don't know anyone who uses any other search engine. About the only time i even go to another search engine is to check my yahoo mail.

What we all dont realise is that the white space in google is costing us money.

"how?" you ask.

Well "Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen." Roberson et al, 2002

But dont feer there is a solution...

http://blackle.com/

Blackle uses light text on a black background. It may not save the work but it "remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy"

Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks

2007-07-18T18:19:00.001-07:00

Business week recently posted an article on people who blog as a career. The most important message that comes out of it is that you need to write about something you are interested in. Because you are interested, you will probably generate good content without knowing it. The number one thing you need to have a successful blog is great content. Its not just a case of "if
you build it they will come".

Have a read of the article Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks
After reading it, if you haven't been to http://icanhascheezburger.com check it out. Very Hilarious.

Off topic but very cool - mini Remote control Helicopter

2007-07-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

Imagine flying one of these around the office.

Love the theme music.

I know I'll probably only use it for a total of 15 minutes but I NEED TO BUY ONE!!

You can get them here at Think Geek

Newsletters you should be subscribed to...

2007-07-17T01:33:00.001-07:00

The internet is constantly evolving with both new technology and new trends. What’s hot one month can be forgotten the next. It’s important to stay on top of this constantly evolving information and the easiest way to do that is to get updates sent to you. Out of the many newsletters I receive everyday, these are the ones I find most useful. Often they will be rehashing what you already know

Clickz Network
http://www.clickz.com/
Articles from experts on many different topics. Find out current trends, receive tips and how-to’s

Marketingvox
http://www.marketingvox.com/
Find out what’s new, who’s doing what. Its an excellent daily news bulletin.

eMarketer
http://www.emarketer.com/
Provides stats which are especially useful when you want supporting evidence to convince a client that they should be moving into online.

Web Digest for Marketers
http://www.wdfm.com
This newsletter provides useful tips and sites you normally wouldn’t come across.

Marketing Profs
http://www.marketingprofs.com/newsletters/marketing
http://www.marketingprofs.com/small-business/
Again lots of tips and how-to’s.

Please comment if you have any other newsletters that you feel should be added to this list.

Make Money From Blogging

2007-07-15T22:19:00.000-07:00

A definitive resource outlining the steps to make money online is the FREE ebook by John Chow.

http://www.johnchow.com/book/make-money-online.pdf

It contains a number of easy to follow strategies that John has discovered through his long experience in the industry.

Usability Testing on the cheap

2007-07-15T19:54:00.000-07:00

There are 3 tools I've come to use so much that i cant live without but the thought dawned on me the other day that they might be able to be used for usability testing competitor sites, User acceptance testing and HTML Prototype testing. In conjunction they are a powerful set of tools. I've place them in order of price, the cheapest can be used on its own with the next 2 adding functionality.

The ideas here take for granted that you have your test subjects lined up and your test script is already written. For more information on how to do this check out Jacob Nielsen's site http://www.useit.com/

1. Log Me In
http://www.logmein.com/

This is a remote access tool designed to easily access a remote PC via a web browser. It basically gives full control of the host PC's functions. The funny thing is that whilst a PC is being controlled you can see everything that's going on, it looks like its possessed! Its great to install at a friends house then login and start playing loud music at 3 in the morning.

The visibility of the actions on the host PC can be seen from both sides. This makes it perfect for logging into a PC controlled by a test subject whilst their movements are viewed on the remote screen.

Best of all its free for access to 5 pc's per account.

1. Snagit
http://www.snagit.com/

Snagit in essence works as an advanced print screen utility. It has a great functionality to capture scrolling windows which is great for taking screenshots of long webpages. Something that used to take a lot of cutting and pasting individual screenshots. It also has the ability to capture videos of what is happening on the screen.

I've found this tool invaluable in creating user manuals, capturing errors that other users cant seem to see, marking up creative amends,The list goes on. Like they saw a picture tells a thousand words and the same is true with the notes of the usability test. Snagit will enable you to capture an mpeg video of user interaction, either on the PC they are using or remotely via logmein. If you setup a microphone you can ask your test subjects to describe their thought process as the audio track to the video.

3. Axure
http://www.axure.com/

This program made the producers at my company fight over who would create the prototype. Its fun, but its also extremely use full. It allows you to great html prototypes of a site which act as a working model for the site. This is great to demonstrate to clients how site functionality will work as well as usability test before and design or development has begun. It also generates documentation that can be used as a technical specification.

What is a Widget? - The Next Small Thing

2007-07-15T19:11:00.001-07:00

If you have used myspace or facebook then you have probably already interactive with widgets without even knowing it. According to Business week, widgets are the next ~~big~~ small thing in internet marketing.

“Bits of code called widgets open the door to viral marketing across social networks. Silicon Valley sees them as a Web revolution in the making”.

Check out the article at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_30/b4043071.htm

Here is an example of this blogs feed displayed in a widget created by spring widgets. The code supplied by springwidgets can be embedded in any site and most community sites will accept it.

Get this widget!

Checkout this advertising Widget by www.bla.st . Its an interesting way of advertising, especially online.

Viral Green Lasers

2007-07-12T01:13:00.000-07:00

I've logged into My Yahoo dashboard over the past few days and noticed the same video repeatedly appearing in the top 5 most viewed videos, "GREEN LASER PEN VIDEO AWESOME!!!".

Looking at the video you see a demonstration of the laser in a way that would make any teenage boy or middle age geek think "COOL!! where do i get one?" Throughout the video there is a website at the top and at the end there the same address appears with the words "Available at". Not only has the product sold its self but there is an easy to follow call to action.

The amazing thing about this is that at the time of writing this the video has had 632,626 view with 460 comments along the lines of "wow,I'm GREEN with envy, lol". That is 632,626 times this guy has been able to demonstrate his product free of charge with 460 people reinforcing the value of the product. This isn't the first time I've seen this video on youtube in the top 5 either. Last time it was driving people to an ebay user page.

As you can imagine that video wouldn't have cost much at all to make. With a borrowed video camera you could put it together with Windows movie maker. With the myriad of social networking site out there the opportunities for low cost viral advertising are endless. If you have a cool product putting up a video on youtube or creating a group on facebook or myspace may only take you minutes but the potential for lead generation is enormous.

First things First - How webpages are made.

2007-06-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

When your starting out in internet marketing its good to have some background knowledge about how the internet works and how to build webpages. This will aid you in anything you do online and having these skills will save you money that you would otherwise have to pay to contractors to build pretty sites. In this post I've outlined the 3 main things you will need to learn to start building your own websites.

Learn HTML & CSS

To put it simply HTML is the code that marks up the content on the internet and CSS is the code that styles it. HTML is almost a programming language but much easier to learn. It works by adding tags to your webpage content to tell the internet browsers how it should be displayed.

The Book i originally used to teach myself HTML back when it was in it first edition was
HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide). For any design orientated the learning i find the visual quickstart guides really useful.

w3schools has some great online resources which i often use as a reference if i forget how something should be written. Checkout their html lessons and css lessons.

Whilst you can use notepad to write html, if you are going to be doing a lot your best off to get a wysiwyg editor (What You See Is What You Get). There are a number of options to suite any budget. The industry standard used by most professionals is Adobe Dreamweaver. Its an extremely user friendly tool and with the new CS3 release it has some great AJAX additions to produce transitions in your sites and the ability to copy and paste images straight from your image editing program like photoshop.

Nvu is a free html editor with much of the functionality of Dreamweaver although as usable. The company also provides a great tutorial explaining Learn How To Build Your Web Site Using Nvu and upload them to your webserver.

Dreamweaver Creative Suite 3. Design, develop, and maintain standard-based websites. Order Now!

Learn some basic image editing

To make sites look half decent you need to have some image editing skills or at least be able to resize photos. Like html there are a number of free educational resources on the net to learn image editing basics through to advanced techniques. I personally learnt my image editing skills by downloading the trial version of Macromedia Fireworks (now produced by adobe) and going through the tutorials provided.

Your also going to need an image editing application and I'm sorry to say that MS Paint just wont cut it. The industry standard is Adobe Photoshop. Its a great product for editing your images and creating web graphics but it comes with a hefty price tag. If your not going to be doing that much image work there is a cutdown version called Photoshop Elements with much of the functionality of its bigbrother.

The free option here is an open source program called the gimp. It has similar functionality to photoshop however it not nearly as user friendly. Checkout the tutorials on the website which should get you started.

Fireworks Creative Suite 3. Rapidly prototype and design for the web. Order Now!
learn a little about usability

Its vital for any Internet marketer to know a bit about usability. If your customers cant use your site you will loose money. If your site isn't easy to use or self explanatory customers will go elsewhere. Have a read through the articles on http://www.useit.com/ There is so many articles there it is the definitive resource on usability. Its a good idea to sign up to the email updates to keep informed of new articles. Ironically i don't find the the site itself very usable but the information is great.

This should keep you busy for a while and will serve as a good foundation for all developments. In later posts I'll talk about the actual process involved in building your websites and how to plan a successful website.