Paid vs Organic Search

Organic Search vs Paid Search
What are they? What is the difference?
Organic Search is the links that appears in your search engine that has the most relevance to the topic you searched. This is the most used type or search.

 

 Example of Organic Search

As you can see in the example, when digital river is searched, the most relevant links appear below the search box.

  

Whereas, paid search is the word ads. Site owners pay an advertising fee, and these ads are posted on the right hand side and sometimes at the top, it is indicated by a light pink shadow (as seen below)

 

Which is more effective?

Organic search is free and information that is offered is generally credible (checking for author and credibility is important when gathering information). However, it is not easy getting to the first few pages, which realistically is when we all stop looking.

Paid search can be recorded which helps us marketers a lot. It is an expense but can leave a greater impression on people. The ads don`t stay long but can gain more traffic.

How do businesses use these?

Targeting

In terms on targeting, paid ads show up when the keyword is searched. For example if the word dog food is searched, an ad may appear similar to the example above.

In organic search, the person who is conducting the research is the target market, purposely wanting to become aware of the product and what other attributes are offered.

Branding

When a company is in the top search results it can give the impression that the company is important. Therefore, companies strive to secure a better position in organic search than their rivals. When it comes to paid search, awareness occurs in both customer and non-customers, which is what the company`s goal is.

Control

Traffic count is offered to help determine how many people are interested in the product or service.

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Organic and paid search are used to gain awareness and a way of advertising.  Both can be used effectively to get a potential customer.

Thank you for reading, Heather A. Stevens

SPAM - How do you get your email through?

What is spam you ask? Isn't that a canned cooking product? Well, it is, but it is also a huge part of modern day emailing, and even more so in terms of marketing. 

Spam is a message which is sent out electronically to a massive audience, in which the recipient would not usually want to receive. It consists of advertising, for products and services. Spam can also come in get-rich-quick schemes or pretend legal services. It is very inexpensive to send out to a mass audience, it costs the sender very little, and is paid mostly by the recipient or the carriers.  

The most popular type of spam used today is done by email. The main use of spam is commercial content and advertising. Spam has also been called unsolicited bulk email (UBE), unsolicited commercial Email (UCE) or junk mail. Spam has a pretty high stake in all everyday emails, up to 80-85%. 

Now that we know what spam is, how do we avoid it? How do we get our message through to our customers? Email providers, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and even our Mocomotion have built in spam filters. These filters target key words and phrases. They also target certain ways an email is typed. For example, if you type "SAVE NOW ON WINDOW INSTALLATION" In all caps and green writing, these are  warning signs for the filters and they may block your email. A blocked email means that your message will go to the junk/spam folder. That is the last place you want your message to go, because let's be honest, how often do you go sifting through your junk emails?

As well as using a spam filter, Gmail uses something rather neat. They have a community based spam filter. This means, if an email I received should be spam, but got through to my inbox. I am able to mark it as spam. This will go through the network, and it will remove it from others peoples inbox as well. 

Gmail on Spam

Take a look at this video; it was created by the Gmail team. Although lacking in professionalism, the video is very informative and shows the way Gmail is fighting spam. 

Before you send out your email, you'll want to look it over to make sure you have as little properties of spam as possible. You can go to this website here, http://www.americaint.com/spam-filter-messagetest/spam-checker.html. This website will check your email and make sure it will pass through spam filters. It will check your email and give it a score of anything from 0.1 to anything over 13.1 (which is major spam content). Now that we know how to build our marketing emails free of spam and how to check them to make sure they will get through to our target. We are ready to start emailing! Have fun!

Thank you for reading my blog!

Austin Lerke

Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Basically, Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO” is the process of bringing a website higher in the ranks of a search engine.  When trying to optimize a webpage for search engines, what one is essentially doing is trying to make the site more visible and easy to find for people looking for content related to your subject matter.

How do you improve your rank on Google, Bing, and other search engines?

There are many ways in which you can improve your ranks, but it can be very complex.  So complex, in fact, companies now hire people to work full time on improving their business’ rank.

Two great ways that one can improve their search engine ranks are using the right keywords and having relevant, quality content which will lead to having backlinks.  These are basically what SEO is all about, when looked at in the simplest sense.

Keywords involve choosing relevant words and phrases to base your optimization around.  These will be the basis for your URL, tags, and other words which will be places in the coding of the website, but also in the content.  The more specific and niche the keywords are the better chance someone who is looking for your specific content will be able to find it.  If one uses keywords which are too general or generic your content could be lost among the millions of sites on the internet.

There are sites such as http://www.seotipsy.com/ that serve as tools to give companies ideas and advice for improving their SEO rankings.

Some people believe that the most important thing to ranking high on search engines is to generate relevant content.  I agree with this idea, because it leads to the direct traffic, plus it can lead to people linking others to your website.  When others place a link to your website on another website it is called a backlink, and it is a useful way to get your website ranked higher.

Though SEO is a great way to get your website noticed, it is an ever changing game, and you always have to be working on keeping your rank up.  Your website can drop from the first hit on a search engine to several pages deep in a matter of minutes.  Staying number one is not easy, but it is definitely necessary if you wish to have a successful business with a strong internet presence.

Here is a short video about the basics of SEO: 

I hope you enjoyed my blog, thanks for reading.

Victoria Le Page
October 3, 2012

Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an essential part of any company’s presence on the internet and for the company’s growth.

HostPapa is a web hosting company that uses email marketing to relate and contact clients directly; to inform them of prices, improvements, new technology, and information. I was and still am directly involved in the replies from the monthly newsletter queue for HostPapa.

The amounts of replies I receive that are spam filter notices are unreal. The email says something along the lines of:

“I am protecting myself from spam. If you would like to contact me further please go to this website... You will only have to do this once.”

Not something a company wants to see when it comes to their emails not reaching the consumer. Spam is definitely a huge problem on the internet. Consumers do not want to receive daily updates from brands, company’s, or anyone for that matter on an ongoing daily basis. I honestly do not ever look at 99.9% of the emails I receive from retailers or wagJag deals. I either felt obligated to give my email while shopping at a store or gave it out to win something… WHICH I DID NOT WIN OF COURSE, and in turn now receive annoying emails daily.

Companies that do any emailing or send anything online must abide by CAN-SPAM. CAN-SPAM is a set of laws that govern the email marketing world while giving the consumers privacy. The penalties of not abiding by these laws could cost a company up to $16,000.

THAT WOULD BE ENOUGH TO SCARE ME INTO NEVER BREAKING THE LAWS!

These laws include:

1.     Don’t use false or misleading header information.

2.     Don’t use deceptive subject lines.

3.     Identify the message as an ad. 

4.     Tell recipients where you’re located.

5.     Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.

6.     Honor opt-out requests promptly.

7.     Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. 

This information was gathered directly from the CAN-SPAM website. For further information on CAN-SPAM please visit their website. 

Here is a short video that explains each one of these regulations into small detail. 

Number 5 refers to an option they must give you within every email they send that allows you to opt out of their emails going forward.

Here is just one example where there is an opt out option at the end of a MAC Cosmetics email blast:

You are receiving this email because you opted in to receive emails from M·A·C Cosmetics Online regarding products and promotions. Unsubscribe. Please add macnews@e.maccosmetics.com to your address book to ensure you continue to receive emails from M·A·C Cosmetics Online. © M·A·C Make-Up Art Cosmetics, INC. All worldwide rights reserved. Privacy Policy Legal Terms/Conditions M·A·C Cosmetics Online, 130 Prince Street, New York, New York 10012

Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you enjoyed it.

Janelle Brown

September 2, 2012

Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Marketing Best Practices

When running an email marketing campaign, whether the aim is to increase sales, website traffic, brand awareness, or any other marketing related goals, the main obstacle to overcome is getting your target audience to actually open the email.  If an email does not get opened, or worse gets sent to the spam filter, that is one potential lead/sale/customer which you have just lost.

            

            Typically email marketing programs have spam checkers, which will look for patterns which are typically found in spam mail, and let you know if your email will be sent to a spam filter, or delivered to the inbox.  The main concern once the spam filter has been avoided is to actually get the email opened by the viewer.

 Jamie Turner, at Dreamforce believes the best way to increase open rates is by offering an incentive in the subject line, which can increase read rates by up to 50%.  Also, the subject line must be compelling, and between 30 to 50 characters, and create a sense of urgency. 

Once the email is opened you should ensure the call-to-action is above the fold (in the first section of the email, so the reader does not have to scroll down to take action on your offer) and easy to find.  The email should not be too cluttered, and should get the message across to the reader quickly and easily, with as little confusion as possible.

The emails should also be closely linked to your landing pages, in order to provide the reader with a seemingly seamless transition from the email to the landing page, which will make the reader feel comfortable with the landing page as soon as they arrive on it, rather than having to figure out how the page works again.

Marketing campaigns must do all they can to avoid “spamming” customers with too many emails, or else they will quickly lose leads.  Nobody likes spam.

Finally, you definitely want to analyze how your campaigns did, or else you will never know what stage of the process your campaign is succeeding in, or failing.  These analytics come from the email marketing programs which are used to send your email.  You can get lots of valuable information, such as read rates, click through, how much time someone spent reading the email, and much more.

In sum, email marketing campaigns should be quick and easy for the reader to navigate, and they should be able to understand the information you are giving them within moments of viewing the email.

Here is a quick video by a company which has an email marketing program. It explains two quick “gotcha’s,” which are things which should be avoided when on a marketing campaign: