Email Marketing: 5 Reasons to Start Today

Do you want to market your business for fractions of a penny per message?

Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to your small business. You can achieve outstanding results with email marketing, while investing only a small amount of time and money. Combine that with the potential to target more precisely than direct mailings, that’s a real win for the small business owner.

In tough economic times, it is crucial to continue marketing your business, and maximize the marketing dollars you’re spending. Email marketing is a perfect way to keep your business in front of your customers’ and prospects eyes!

Sometimes, people unfamiliar with email marketing get nervous about it because the first thing they think about is spam, or they’ve heard that most people don’t open their email, right?

Wrong.

Targeted mailings that pique interest result in high email open rates, and an opportunity to build relationships with your customers and make some sales. As for the spam issue, mailing only to people who have given you permission to do so minimizes the risk of being labeled a “spammer”. Using myself as an example, I have mailed thousands of emails to my clients, and prospective clients, and have not had one spam complaint.

Following is a list of five reasons you must start email marketing now!

1. Email marketing is inexpensive.

Email marketing is an affordable way to stretch a tight marketing budget. Unlike direct mail, there is virtually no production, materials or postage expense. Email marketing can cost as little as fractions of a penny per email.

The expenses involved in email marketing involve having a hosted website with email capacity. You may also want to consider subscribing to a list management service, such as Constant Contact or aWeber, to help manage your email campaigns. The fees for this service range from about $15 to $20 per month, which includes unlimited emails.

2. Email marketing is highly targeted.

You can easily segment your email database into different groups, so that your promotions go to individuals most likely to respond to your offer. For example, you may send one offer to existing clients, and send a different one to prospects who’ve expressed interest in your products or services.

3. Email marketing is proactive.

Email marketing enables you to proactively communicate with your existing customers and prospects, instead of passively waiting for them to return to your website or storefront.

It is a highly effective way to communicate promotional offers, news, seminars, which may result in an increase in sales, drive traffic to your website or store, and develop customer trust and loyalty through relationship building.

Sending out a monthly email campaign will keep your business in front of your customers’ and prospects eyes.

4. Email marketing generates an immediate response.

Promotional emails include a call to action that can result in immediate responses. Initial campaign responses generally occur within 48 hours of the time the email campaign is sent; testing and refining your campaigns is immediate. If you use a list management service, you can gauge the open rates of your email campaigns, which provides useful and immediate information you can use to tweak your campaign messages.

5. Email marketing is easy.

The Web-based email marketing products available to small businesses are easy to use. The services available through Constant Contact and aWeber, as well as others, include professional HTML templates, list segmentation and targeting capabilities, as well as automatic tracking and reporting of your email campaign effectiveness, such as for open rates, bounces, and spam reports.

If you’re not a “techie”, have no fear. You don’t need a Webmaster or technical person on staff to handle the development and distribution of your email campaigns.

Email marketing works because it allows precise targeting of your marketing message, it builds loyalty and trust with your customers, it is inexpensive, and best of all, it drives sales. Include email marketing in your arsenal of marketing tools!

Source: SiteProNews

Microsoft warns of financial crisis scams

Internet fraudsters will try to exploit the global financial crisis by sending fraudulent emails purporting to offer cash-strapped consumers new mortgages, loans or money from failed banks, a Microsoft executive said on Wednesday.

Tim Cranton, an Internet safety expert at Microsoft, said there are early signs that criminals have already begun trying to cash in on the economic turmoil.

"It's especially troubling right now with the financial crisis," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. "There are more and more people who are maybe in a more desperate or vulnerable situation.

"We have seen an increase in some mortgage refinance type of scams. We are anticipating that they'll become more sophisticated.

"We have seen that with Hurricane Katrina, the (2004 Asian) tsunami and other natural disasters where the scammers immediately jump."

Fraudsters may send spam emails to consumers that ask them to pay a fee related to the collapse of a bank or financial institution, he added.

"They will allege it is associated with the refinancing -- so because of this bailout you'll get a much better deal on your mortgage and all you have to do is pay this fee."

Online criminals have long used promises of easy money to try to defraud unsuspecting victims.

Common scams include requests to help move money out of a developing country. People are offered a cut of the fortune if they first pay a release fee.

Or they are told they have won a lottery in a foreign country and will receive a huge jackpot once they pay an administration fee.

A poll for Microsoft on Wednesday found more than a quarter of computer users thought it was likely they would fall victim to an online scam that would cost them money.

Half said the scams made them more wary of shopping online, while more than a third said it led to them being more reluctant to use the Internet at all.

However, the poll suggested that the actual chances of becoming a victim are far lower than the perceived risk.

Of 5,000 people polled across Europe, only 113 had lost money to an Internet fraudster in the last year. That equates to one in 44 of those questioned. Microsoft said it has formed a coalition with Yahoo!, Western Union and the African Development Bank to help spread the message about hoax emails.

"What we'd like to do is raise awareness so that people feel more confident about using the Internet," Cranton said. "We don't want to see a reduction in e-commerce."

Source: Reuters

Google: This Is Your Brain On Advertising

Madison Avenue is increasingly turning to neuroscience to refine the art of crafting successful ad campaigns. The Nielsen Co. jumped into the field earlier this year by investing in Berkeley, Calif.-based research firm NeuroFocus, which applies neuroscience to advertising research.

Now Google is applying "neuromarketing" to video advertising. In a study released Thursday, Google and MediaVest used NeuroFocus findings to show that overlay ads appearing in YouTube videos grab consumers' attention and boost brand awareness.

YouTube-owner Google has championed overlay ads--which appear in the lower third of video screens--as a less intrusive alternative to pre-roll ads. But the format has failed to gain much traction with advertisers, and earlier this month Google announced it would begin running pre-, mid- and post-roll ads with the launch of full-length videos on YouTube.

With revenue from YouTube ads falling short of company expectations at an estimated $200 million this year--mostly from display ads--the pressure grows to find new ways to monetize the Web's largest video site.

Through the overlay study, Google is clearly trying to make the case for the format to brand advertisers that may be skeptical. "Overlay ads are a format used primarily for branding campaigns, so measuring click-through rate is not the most effective way to measure success," said the company in a statement.

To that end, the NeuroFocus research conducted in May looked at the reactions of 40 people to YouTube InVideo overlay and companion banner ads from a cross-section of MediaVest advertising clients.

The firm used biometric measures such as brainwave activity, eye-tracking and skin response to gauge the impact of ads. Based on criteria including attention level, emotional engagement and memory retention, it then comes up with an overall "effectiveness" score for ads.

The study revealed that viewers found overlays "compelling and engaging," generating high attention and emotional engagement levels across different brands and types of video. On a one to 10 scale, the ads scored a 6.6 in effectiveness, which is considered showing "a high effect."

The combination of overlays with companion banners also grabbed users' attention more than banner ads alone, scoring a 6.6 compared to a 6.3 for just banners. The overlay-display combo was also found to improve brand response over banners alone, based on study participants' brainwave activity.

Yaakov Kimelfeld, MediaVest senior vice president for digital research and analytics at MediaVest, said the study "will be instrumental in showing that overlays actually work." While advertisers may still be more comfortable with pre-rolls, which approximate TV commercials, Kimelfeld noted that "the interruption model is going away, even on TV."

The Google/MediaVest study did not compare overlays with pre-roll ads, but he suggested that could be a subject of future research. Kimelfeld added that the overlay ad study was the first time MediaVest has applied neuroscience techniques to advertising research. "It's a new tool for testing new formats," he said.

Source: Media Post

Russian watchdog rejects Google's bid for Begun Ad Agency

Russia's Federal Anti-monopoly Service (FAS) said on Thursday it had refused to let Google acquire 100 percent of the Begun advertising agency.

"Having reviewed the documents and information received relating to this deal, FAS on October 22, 2008, made a decision to refuse to satisfy the appeal," the service said in a statement on its Web site (www.fas.gov.ru).

It gave no reason for the refusal.

In July, Rambler Media, the British-registered owner of Russia's Rambler Internet portal, agreed to sell the agency to Google for $140 million.

Source: Reuters

Link Building and International SEO

It’s that time for another uncommon SEO tip you can employ the next time you are considering building links to develop rankings and website authority.

There is a reason why there is a WWW in front of your domain address, an opportunity to reach, network and share your thoughts and businesses around the world with International SEO. Think local, act global (in context to SEO) can now be taken literally.

Link Building using International SEO

Your country is your home, but opportunity exists everywhere. Despite language barriers, authority sites (since search engines can translate) are everywhere. Such websites when combined in tandem can provide immense inbound link weight for your website, which in turn translates into higher search engine rankings for your website.

What is an authority site? Website authority is a by-product of multiple factors (trust rank, relevance and endorsement from websites who have earned a position of authority from search engines).

In layman’s terms, it is a popular site that people frequent, that gets linked to on the basis of it’s merit, or that others willingly refer to when the topic of that site comes into play.

As a result, if you are looking for a great source for inbound links, you can always tap into search engines to find relevant sites in other countries that you can approach to find viable alternative to your competition on common soil.

One link from an authority site can be equal to 1000 off topic links. Since relevance is one of the key metrics search engines use to determine how much value the link passes, think outside the box, or at least outside the country to find other sites that have attained authority status.

Traffic comes from uncommon sources, for example our blog has readers in over 127 countries who frequent regularly. There isn’t a day that goes by that we are not getting linked to as a reference for something SEO related from Russia, Italy, India, the UK, Canada, Australia, Spain or dozens of other countries.

The key to this strategy is to create link-worthy content (before you embark on an SEO campaign), then look for new ways to emulate local or national SEO strategies abroad (a great plug in for FireFox exists from Red Fly Marketing for this purpose called Google Global). Other countries outside the USA have social bookmarking sites such as those you will find on the attached list, or you can use search operators like these in Google or Google Blog Search, from the international search engine location.

Also, another tactic is to look for link opportunities from the top down, much like going to DMOZ to find sites that have made the grade and passed human inspection, you can also seek out International Search Engines or International Directories with clout to find the sites that have a degree of website authority.

The strategy is not limited to websites, resources or directories, you can also take your RSS feed international as well. Or use similar strategies to jet set without leaving the comfort of your computer when looking for other uncommon International SEO link building opportunities.

Source: SiteProNews

Google Launches Adwords Display Builder

Yesterday Google released the new AdWords display ad builder, which lets you create professional-looking display ads in AdWords without needing to hire a designer or start from scratch. If you've ever wanted to expand beyond your text ad campaigns, or if you've been looking for an easier way to build display ads, this new tool can help.

The Adwords display builder lets you create customized display ads with your own text, images, and logo. You can also change colors and backgrounds. The tool can create ads to fit all possible placements across the Google content network, including video and game placements. The display ad builder is available now to all advertisers in the U.S. and Canada.

Source: Google

MySpace MyAds - Self-service ads

MySpace's latest bid to wring profit from social networking

The Holy Grail for social networks: turning popularity into profits. All have ambitious plans to make money, but few are actually doing so in any meaningful way.

Facebook, for example, has amassed 110 million active users but has not yet hit on a solid strategy to generate the kind of revenue that many expected of the much-hyped Silicon Valley start-up. And some of its advertising efforts have backfired. This year, it's expected to generate $265 million in revenue. Its executives say the big winner in social networking will emerge in the coming years, not coming months.

In fact, founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says his company just isn't laser-focused on making money. In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he said: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

MySpace has a different philosophy, says CEO Chris DeWolfe. It wants friends and advertising dollars. And it's working hard to get them both.

On Monday, the popular social network is officially launching a self-service advertising program called MySpace MyAds that lets small businesses and individuals create ads tailored to the personal information on its users' age, gender, location and interests. The minimum ad buy is $25. Pricing is based on clicks on the advertiser's profile. The ad campaign's performance can be tracked. And small businesses can charge it on a credit card.

DeWolfe said 3,500 advertisers are already using the program, which has been in ...

... private beta for the past three months. He said that average advertising spend has increased year over year and that revenue is up year over year, but he would not be more specific.

"This unlocks a brand new market for us," he said. "The big difference with MySpace is that we have always been focused on building a real business. The other social networks out there are more focused on either selling their companies in some cases or just building new features."

At least one analyst agrees.

"A year ago, people were questioning whether social advertising even made sense. This is another example of how the advertising model absolutely does work," said Richard Greenfield, managing director of Pali Research. "If you put advertising on the page that is relevant to a given consumer, that consumer will not only look, that consumer will click. ... This is a very intriguing additional opportunity for small businesses looking to target consumers in a portion of the Internet that is still growing rapidly."

MySpace is owned by media giant News Corp. In September, News Corp.'s chief operating officer, Peter Chernin, told a Merrill Lynch media conference that the social network's advertising business was operating "above budget, above where we expected it to be."

MySpace has been making progress, DeWolfe said, with the launch of MySpace Music and the MySpace.com redesign that made the home page less cluttered and more hospitable to advertising.

It also commands a majority of all money spent on social networks, DeWolfe pointed out. That said, those dollars have not come easy.

Expectations for MySpace were ramped up in 2006 when the site announced a three-year, $900 million advertising pact with Google. Bearish comments in January from Google on how hard it was proving to wring profits from social networking were taken as a reflection on MySpace. "We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected," George Reyes, then Google's chief financial officer, said at the time. Under the deal with MySpace, Google must pay revenue even if consumers don't click on ads.

More broadly, there is concern that social networking users do not view ads, no matter where you put them or how well you target them.

DeWolfe disagrees. And he defended the partnership with the Internet search giant. "Our feeling is that things are going quite well. I think their comments were more of a generalization," he said.

DeWolfe also says MySpace has not yet felt any impact from the spreading financial crisis despite the expected slowdown in consumer and business spending on advertising dollars.

"We're cautiously optimistic. We haven't seen a slowdown here," he said.

Source: LA Times

New Clickjacking Threat for Web Surfers

Internet and Web browser security experts are sounding the alarm about a new type of malicious attack called "clickjacking," a technique that can be used to dupe Web surfers into revealing confidential information while clicking on seemingly innocuous Web pages. Among other things, a clickjacking attack can be used to take control of a computer's Webcam and microphone without the knowledge of the user.

Clickjacking has been identified as a vulnerability for the Adobe Flash player, as well as for every major browser, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and even the newly released Google Chrome.

"It is a very serious problem," said Giorgio Maone, the author of a widely praised free Firefox extension called NoScript, which blocks potentially malicious scripts from running in the Firefox browser.

"Clickjacking is a very simple attack to build, and now that the details are out, any script kid can try it successfully," Maone warned. "There's no estimate to the number of trap sites, and it's unlikely that we will see any credible report about the number of sites using this technique, because there are literally infinite ways to implement such an attack, therefore no signature-based scanning can detect it automatically."

Unauthorized Access to Information

The growing severity of the clickjacking problem was identified by Robert Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, and Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security. The two were scheduled to speak publicly about their discovery last month at the Open Web Application Security Project NYC AppSec conference in New York, but postponed their talk in order to give Adobe and browser companies a chance to come up with a solution.

Reacting quickly to the announcement, Adobe released a security advisory Tuesday, describing the threat as "critical" and instructing users on how to turn off Flash access to cameras and microphones.

"We have just posted a Security Advisory for Flash Player," wrote David Lenoe, Adobe's security program manager, on the Adobe security blog, "in response to recently published reports of a 'clickjacking' issue in multiple Web browsers that could allow an attacker to lure a Web browser user into unknowingly clicking on a link or dialog. This potential 'clickjacking' browser issue affects Adobe Flash Player's microphone and camera access dialog." Lenoe said a patch for Flash would be ready by the end of October.

Unfortunately, as Hansen and other researchers have pointed out repeatedly, Flash clickjacking is only one of the variants of this problem. In a lengthy blog posting about the issue, Hansen said that "there are multiple variants of clickjacking. Some of it requires cross-domain access, some don't. Some overlay entire pages over a page, some use iframes to get you to click on one spot. Some require JavaScript, some don't. Some variants use CSRF to preload data in forms, some don't. Clickjacking does not cover any one of these use cases, but rather all of them."

A Structural Problem of the Web

Hansen warned that it will be challenging to come up with a comprehensive solution to prevent the clickjack threat because of the nature of the code that underlies the Internet.

Maone agreed. "This problem comes from features which are integral to the modern Web as we know it," he said, "and especially from the ability of Web pages to embed arbitrary content from different sites, or to host little applications (applets) through plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Java or Microsoft Silverlight."

Maone predicted that a general browser fix won't be developed any time soon, since the real solution lies in developing a general consensus about changing existing Web standards in the various Internet standardization groups.

Source: Yahoo News

Back in Time with Google

In honor of Google's 10th aniversery, Google has brought back their oldest available index. Now you can search Google in 2001. The look, results, and result pages clearly show the prograss Google has made in ten years...let alone the last seven years.

Some notable differences are:

1. Search 1,326,920,000 web pages

This may have seemed like a lot on 2001, but if Google was to list the pages today, it would run right off the screen.

2. No sponsored links

That's right...their wasn't a Google AdWords or AdSense...or any ads. The search results without ads seem cleaner in 2001, yet the right side without these ads appears empty to me now that I'm used to seeing Sponsored Links.

3. Web, Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Mail, and more

Well in 2001, there was only the web, nothing else. Now there's Images, Maps, News, Shopping, Mail, Video, Group, Books, Scholar, Finance, Blogs, YouTube, Calendar, Photos, Documents, Reader, Sites...and the list goes on and on! But I'd like to mention one more that I believes sums things up for Google in 2008,...Google Earth. Maybe by 2010 there will be a Google Galaxy.

...And it all started with a search engine.

YouTube Insight: New Hot Spots Feature

YouTube Insight has helped millions of you learn more about your YouTube videos and figure out when, where, and why your videos are popular. But what if you could learn not just which of your videos are hot on the site, but which specific parts of those videos are hotter than others? What if you could know exactly when viewers tend to leave your videos, or which scenes within a video they watch again and again?

This information is now available to all YouTube video uploaders with an innovative new feature for Insight called "Hot Spots." The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine "hot" and "cold" spots by comparing your video's abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards. So what does that mean? Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content's gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely

You can see that many viewers are not impressed with the dance moves of Michael Rucker, Associate Product Marketing Manager at YouTube; they're leaving the video at a faster than average rate almost immediately after the video begins. But the longer the video goes on, the more people tend to stay, generating a hot spot at the end of the video. Better late than never -- kudos, Rucker!

We think you'll find Hot Spots useful in several ways. For example, users can figure out which scenes in their videos are the "hottest" and edit those videos, or include well-timed annotations, to keep their audience more engaged. Partners might similarly create better content -- like more exciting promotional trailers -- for use on and off YouTube, and advertisers and agencies can study the effectiveness of their creative, to make sure they keep viewers' attention throughout an ad. Now that Insight shows what parts of videos viewers are watching and skipping, creators no longer have to play guessing games. YouTube, the world's largest focus group, provides them with answers. You can find this new feature under the "Hot Spots" tab within the Insight Dashboard.

As with all of Insight's features, we learn about the most creative examples from you. We can't wait to see what you come up with next.

Source: Google