‘Online Marketing’

Google AdSense is means of advertising for other businesses on your website while you receive commission for click through actions. Instead of the business paying you directly, Google does the payment. The ads are already made and you will only have to copy the code and paste into your page. In turn Google receives money from the advertiser for the click through actions. Google doesn’t place each ad. It is on an automated system based on the content of your site. In this way the advertiser is ensured of relevant traffic when users click on the ad, and you as the website owner gets more online commission because more users click on the ads which are related to the topic of your website.

Why Put Google AdSense On Your Website?

People argue that with Google AdSense on their site, they will lose valuable online income as the user will be directed away from their site and that the ads are in direct competition with their site content. Although the above can be true, one can also ensure that the user returns to your site and don’t click on directly competing ads by making use of the ads management option. This will allow you to block certain ads from being displayed ensuring that relevant, yet non-competitive ads are displayed at the site.

Now to answer the question of why place Google AdSense at your site. The bottom line is money. You can make money online from ads on your site which can be enough to pay for your hosting, maintenance of the site, and also general management of the site. It can even be more. Businesses often place Google AdSense on their site for the extra earnings while some simply have websites to place ads and earn big. Make no mistake, although it is an excellent passive income earner, it is not all that passive and requires a bit of work at the beginning to ensure that the ads are placed at the right places and in the best possible combinations. Once the secret is understood, the income stream starts.

How Does One Get Paid?

Depending on where you live, your payment can be in the form of a cheque or it can be by means of withdrawal to your US bank account. For South Africans the earnings come by means of a Google AdSense cheque which is payable at the Citibank of Johannesburg. The cheque is issued when your earnings are over R1000 if in South Africa, and $100 if in the USA.

AdSense Reporting

Every AdSense member at Google has access to an online report feature where one can view daily, weekly, and monthly earnings, payment history and specific page clicks. The AdSense reporting feature is quite comprehensive ensuring that the website owner can identify exactly which pages provide the best income and identify the ideal combinations of ad placements. One can also request that payments are kept back until the cheque is big enough to justify withdrawal. The AdSense reports contain a wealth of information ensuring that the website owner can customise pages to ensure more traffic and more AdSense clicks.

What About AdSense Fraud?

Yes, it exists and there have been occasions where other sites steal the earnings from a website owner, but with the ability to specify which sites may display ads for a specific account, the website owner can also prevent other less ethical sites from stealing clicks, earnings and standing with Google. It should be noted that Google is rather strict about the clicking on ads. The account holder may not click on any of the online ads displayed at their website. One may argue that a person can then simply get a friend to click on the ads, but Google has that covered as well. Any repeat clicks from an IP raise alarm bells at Google and it won’t be long before the website owner gets a notice from Google about their observation. Should it continue, the account is then suspended. Anyone earning online from Google AdSense will agree that it is not a good idea to attempt AdSense fraud and risk losing the income stream. Google, does however, also provide an opportunity to restore the account status if the reason for the clicks was not by purpose. One does have to explain in detail and make sure that such an action doesn’t happen again.

Google Wants You To Make Money

Google is not out to cheat anyone. In fact, Google even provides optimization information and tools to help website owners get the most from their online AdSense income. There are full demonstrations on how to insert and manage the Google AdSense.

Is It Profitable Enough To Run As A Main Business?

Website owners differ on the topic, but with everything in life taking a bit of effort and time, it is possible to make a considerable income from AdSense earnings. Some have earned millions while others struggle to get a cheque every month. The secret is to get experts in online marketing to help drive enough traffic to the site and to ensure also that the ads are managed properly. In conclusion then it certainly is worth the while to use Google AdSense as an online income stream.

What Is The Next Step?

Setup an account with Google AdSense which is free. You first need to register and provide your bank details. Google will also request confirmation of tax details before payment will be issued if you stay in the USA. Once your registration is approved you will be able to login into your Google AdSense account, select the type or types of online ads that you want to display, and block ads you don’t want displayed. Verify the websites to display the online ads, which in the simplest form, involves uploading of the Google verification code in a blank page. Google will visit the page, confirm that it is correct and you are ready to earn income. Customize the display of the ads to fit your website theme and background and grab the codes which you place in the HTML of your pages. Upload the pages and wait a bit. Don’t click on any of the ads. It does take some time before the ads appear. Once the ads are active you can log into your account daily to monitor earnings and identify any problems. Once the threshold is reached, Google will issue a cheque for your online earnings.

iLeadOnline for one, has proven that it is possible to provide top notch information, excellent service, and earn considerably from the display of Google AdSense. So if you need a little help running a Google AdSense account, why not ask us for advice?

Social media marketing is the new buzz phrase in online marketing and for good reason. Web 2.0 although still relatively new, is here to stay and has increased interactivity in online world. Social media marketing thus also entails online promotion by means of conversations. Markets have turned into conversation boards. If you don’t engage with clients, competitors and users, you fail to realise the full potential of social media marketing as an online marketing tool.

The age-old “by word of mouth” is the most trusted tool in social media marketing. People read reviews and trust them, even more so when given by a friend or colleague. More often than not users will not buy a product online or even offline without first discussing such with a friend or colleague. If a close friend recommends a product, one is more likely to try it, especially when you trust the opinion of the friend. Here is another keyword in social media marketing regarding online marketing: opinion given in conversation.

Companies must tap into the conversation power. The idea is to create a buzz about a product or brand. Once there is a buzz, the next phase in social media marketing can take place. Online marketing allows one to get an overview as well as an in-depth understanding of what the consumer wants, desires, dislikes, prefers and is willing to pay without having to spend millions in the process.

It is estimated that almost 80% of businesses with an online presence use social media marketing in some form of online promotion. If you haven’t done so yet, the time is now. Issuing information in the hope that it will reach consumers by means of magazines, newspapers or the television is a hit and run method. Maybe you get a few hits, but if you are serious about online marketing today, you need to create conversations and then tap into the conversations to help you develop even more presence in the online world.

Social media marketing is about conversations. The conversations if used correctly can help create new positive perceptions about a product or brand. The opposite is also true and you thus need to keep close tabs on any conversations to ensure that any negative comments can be turned into something positive. Do it right and you have a powerful online marketing tool. Alternatively, you can call upon the experts to use their extensive knowledge and experience to your advantage within the online sphere.

Without contest Facebook is the ruling giant in the land of social media. In fact, comScore Inc. recently did some research in the US to see exactly how Americans spent their time online with astonishing results. According to comScore Inc. the average US Web surfer spends more time socializing on Facebook then searching on Google!

Now for those of us working in the online world this study holds great importance because it completely affects the purpose and position of online marketing. As business owner you can no longer ignore social media as part of your action plan to drive more traffic to your website in order to build a brand name for your company, gain consumer loyalty and essentially ensure ROI growth. Apart from these factors, social media is also a low-cost promotional method that will give you direct and easy access large number of online visitors, i.e. potential clients.

In December 2009 Google launched their “real-time search” which allowed the indexing of information as they were happening on the web. This included their collaboration with Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, Blog posts, Google News feeds, Yahoo! Answers and last but not least, MySpace feeds, thus allowing Google users to get the latest results on various “Hot Topics”. The main reason why this change was introduced was for the obvious reason that social media is a rich source of information. More than that is how it allows businesses to tap into the opinions and insights of online users, thus giving you an edge when it comes to online marketing. But first, let’s look at the leading social media websites and networks out there:

Facebook

As stated before Facebook has rapidly grown into the leading social networking site the world has ever seen and causing many ripple effects along the way. While MySpace holds onto a meagre 5.0% of the market share, Facebook controls approximately 24%, which is more than double the amount of its closest competitor in the form of emails (11.1%), thus making it the main place users go to to share content. The key factor though is how easy Facebook makes it for you to promote your company whilst connecting with users in a personal and trustworthy manner.

When you eventually come to the realisation that no online business strategy is complete without a Facebook fan page, then consider your options of how you should go about doing so. You can either do it yourself (which requires a keen knowledge of HTML) OR you can call in the professionals to create a killer fan page for you to include such things as a fabulous design to suit your branding, and Blog feeding into your fan page. Of course the simplest thing to do is give us a call and we can help you with the whole package that includes both search engine (SEO) and social media optimization.

Then there are the demographics. Facebook allows you to advertise to a very specific market. This means that you are able to choose whether your ad should be shown to male or female, old or young, single or married Facebook users. But you can be even more particular than this. Looking for users who, for example, show some interest in pets? No problem. Facebook will be able to pin down and advertise to users that used or referenced specific details, like a love of their beloved dog Rover, allowing you to directly get in touch with your target market.

Twitter

This free social networking and microblogging website is, aside from Facebook, a hot favourite amongst internet users. In 2009 Nielsen reported that this social media platform attracted 21million unique visitors giving it a near 2000% increase year-over-year. With an average of up to 370,000 new users signing up daily, Twitter made it public that they plan to redesign the website so that their millions of users may find it easier to search and navigate.

A lot of Twitter followers access their account by way of text messages, mobile phone- and desktop applications. In hindsight this means that the number of Twitter users is actually higher. For business owners it provides the chance to build and sustain relationships with their existing clientele as well as reach new potentials.

The drawing attraction of Twitter is that things are kept short and sweet, thus allowing users to quickly and frequently update their own messages, or tweets which are restricted to 140 characters, as well as respond to those they follow. As business owner it gives you the unique opportunity to interact and share information with your followers, thus allowing your company or brand to maintain top of mind awareness as well as establish it as a leader of opinions. Moreover, the Google spiders pick up on tweets which in turn help to drive more traffic to your website.

A Few Other Social Media Applications

Apart from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, companies can also use YouTube to their advantage. This video sharing application draws much attention and have proven to give unknowns the time of day they wouldn’t have had otherwise; case in point Die Antwoord. This South African band was an unknown until their music video “Enter the ninja” spread like wildfire amongst online viewers and eventually got them a record deal with an American record company. You can easily integrate it as part of your online marketing strategy by uploading optimized videos about your product or service, thus allowing your consumers to have a quick and easy video access whilst using the SEO factor to your advantage.

Bookmarking has never been as pleasing since del.icio.us made its appearance. While links from sites such as del.icio.us aren’t really worth much from a search engine perspective – you can’t optimize like one would normally as their robots use “noarchive, nofollow, noindex” Meta tags – they do however still drive quite a bit of traffic to websites when used correctly. You can achieve this by means of tagging pages with the relevant keywords. Let’s use the example of pets again. When submitting your blog post about training your dog, be sure to post it to your del.icio.us account and tag keywords like “dog training”, “obedience training”, and “dog training tips”. Automatically these pages will have their own RSS feed which readers, such as bloggers, will tap into, as well as individuals interested in the particular topic. This not only heightens your chance for more online exposure, but also better your click-through rates, and if your content is good, the possibility that the reader will link their website with your own.

Finally, to bring our post to its conclusion, it becomes evident that social media applications hold many benefits in that they not only can, but will assure you a great online presence. Yes they will require a little more attention and effort, but if done correctly you, your brand and company will most definitely be able to reap the benefits – especially with the help of a professional online company such as iLeadOnline. So the question you should be asking yourself is not whether or not you should include social media as part of your online marketing campaign, but rather why haven’t you already?

A recession is generally seen as a bad time. Jobs are lost, banks loan less, and, as the consumer tightens his or her belt, businesses start to suffer. Generally businesses try to counteract the negative consequences of a recession in one of 3 ways:

• By retrenching and laying off workers
• By closing loss making and marginal divisions
• By cutting budgets across the board

Although these steps are often painful, they are necessary to ensure the survival of the company during tough economic times. But lately more and more companies are hesitant to cut their marketing budget to save on expenditure. In fact, Kellogg’s actually increased their marketing budget during the Great Depression and as such their sales increased. Today, more than 80 years later, Kellogg’s is the only breakfast brand of that era that is still in existence and their case study proves the short as well as long term benefit of advertising during an economic slump.

During the recent economic recession (some have even called it a depression) the majority of companies took a hit. In fact,  even those who were considered to be doing well also felt the pinch.

Interestingly enough advertising agencies in South Africa experienced the recession more severely than other industries and many had to retrench employees in order to stay afloat. This was because businesses cut on their offline advertising (radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and billboards) – choosing to spend their advertising budgets on online advertising instead.

Online advertising has allowed companies to spend less on advertising but still build on their equity and solidify their client base; not to mention gain new clients and taking on their competition. Indeed, many progressive companies are finding that when weighing op the two advertising methods, that internet driven advertising has multiple benefits.

Costs

From a purely financial consideration online advertising is far more cost effective than offline advertising. Purchasing airtime for a TV commercial is very costly, especially for the prime time spots when most of the targeted consumers are tuned in, and the risk is always there that the channel might be changed during ad breaks. Online advertising on the other hand works with a fixed cost per click (CPC) budget and website advert. Moreover, an online advertising campaign is far more cost effective (with savings of over 80% for the same results found in offline advertising) and controllable in the short- and long term.

Target Audience

People tend to think that you simply need to design and create a website in order for it to be seen, but business owners need to remember that there are literally thousands of websites in any specific vertical and market. Don’t let this scare you however, because while consumers may read the newspaper or watch television on a daily basis, they are not particularly looking for a product or service. With online searches on Google on the other hand, they are specifically looking for the product or service that you offer, and are therefore much more likely to take the time to read your advertisement.

In this case your advertisement would be your website. With online advertising you can be very particular who your target audience is. Moreover, if your website is set up correctly, you will be able to track your statistics. This will give you the particulars of your viewers, such as their age, location, how they came upon your website, what keywords were used to search for your website, and so forth, thus giving you an edge on your marketing strategy.

Reach

With offline advertisements you can never be sure that your particular target audience paid much attention. Yes you can definitely say that a certain amount of viewers were tuned in, but were they actually noticing your ad and were they the right demographic?  With print ads there is of course the chance that the reader will simply page over. The fact is that online readers look at this form of advertising differently. They typed in specific keywords into the search engine looking for the product or service that your website offers. This is why online marketing plays such a significant role.

When your website is properly optimized, you will be sure that your website will be one of the top search results that the reader finds, and by tracking the readers actions, you will be able to see exactly what pages they went on to on your website, how much time they spent on a page, and even if they left your website directly or clicked through to another page. In the online world this is referred to as the click-through rate (CTR) which is used to measure the success of an online campaign.

Speed of Campaign

Another reason why companies choose internet marketing (online advertising) over offline advertising is the speed at which campaigns run. While most offline ad campaigns can take quite some time before the reader/viewer even sees the ad, advertising online is much quicker. From the moment you publish a new page, story or pay per click (PPC) ad it will be live on the internet and have the potential to be viewed by your targeted audience instantaneously. This means that you have to be much more particular with your timing of running an ad campaign offline, and often you are limited by outside influences, while internet advertising allows you to take that new story or ad live whenever it suits you.

While offline advertising still has its place in the world, the fact of the matter is that online advertising is growing rapidly because of several reasons – speed, cost effective, target specific and reach. Does this mean that you should let go of your offline campaign and go fully online? Not necessarily. But you definitely should include online advertising as part of your marketing strategy. Not only is it much faster, cheaper and targeted, but online advertising is also more flexible and offer you as business owner options to get your message across. At the end of the day you can be certain that even during tough times, you will see a positive ROI.

In our online world one thing is certain – content is king.  It is for this very reason why we place such emphasis on the importance of creating informative and genuine content pages specifically aimed at search engines, particularly Google.

Writing copy for websites is no easy task though.  While many people think that there is no difference between offline copywriting and web copywriting, nothing could be further from the truth.  To begin with there are more than 15 SEO factors that the copywriter needs to keep in mind while optimizing content.  Then there’s the daunting idea that failing to do so with any one of these factors might lead to an overall rank drop for the site, which is why we insist on using the services of professionally trained and experienced SEO Copywriters.

Another reason why web copywriting differs so much from offline copywriting is the fact that people interact differently to content on the web.  Google estimated that the average reader takes approximately 30 seconds to decide whether or not they find a particular page relevant and interesting. So instead of reading content like you would a book or magazine, the reader is scanning through it to find highlighted thoughts and links, following links from page to page. From this we can take it that the importance of optimized content is to draw your potential client in in order for them to get to know your product or services better after which they can make the ultimate decision to engage with your company.

In our last blog post on The Importance of Website Speed we briefly touched on the subject of content relevancy. Without a doubt this factor carries the most weight in Google’s search ranking algorithms, the “calculation” by which Google determines what website pages to give as result to your search. Whenever you do a search for a particular product, brand or subject Google’s spiders are sent out into the world wide web of websites and within mere seconds provide you with pages most relevant and of the highest quality in terms of your search. This is where keywords definitely plays a major role and why it is absolutely imperative your website is well optimized, making use of meta tags, link building, and so forth.

At the end of the day optimized copy serves not only as relevant and useful information to your visitors but also affects the overall ranking of the website by attracting the search engine spiders that will ensure that your website does well in general. This will enable you to set up goals to achieve, like getting a reader to fill in an online query, purchase a product or download content.  Whatever your goal/s may be though, you need to take the time, money and effort to invest in informative, relevant and well optimized content as an essential part of your marketing strategy.