Very new ideas for the old internet

The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

When planning a marketing strategy for you business it is important to consider the growing online market. The internet is so commonplace now that it is only natural to market your company on it. Online marketing is now a necessity to grow and thrive as a business. One such form of online marketing is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is a system where an affiliate is rewarded for every customer/visitor they bring to the buyer of seller. So an example of this would be a potential customer browsing another website and seeing and clicking a link that would bring them to your business’s website. As a result you more potential customers and the website that is linking the customers to you gets a payment by you in return.

The three most common forms of affiliate marketing are cost per action, contextual advertising, and revenue sharing. Cost per action is a system where the affiliates are paid depending on the specific actions of the customer. For example, a company may pay the affiliates for customers that buy something from their site.

Contextual advertising is a system where the ads seen by consumers on an affiliate’s website are chosen by an automated system to cater towards the consumer. This way the ads are more relevant to what the consumer is looking for and as a result has a higher chance of being clicked. The final system is revenue sharing which is the sharing of a certain amount of profits with your affiliate company.

The general advantage of affiliate marketing is that it is very low risk. Because it is a pay for performance system, you will not be stuck paying for advertising that has not done anything. You will only pay an affiliate if you are receiving traffic from their website. So it is safe to have several affiliates at once because you are still only paying for the amount of customers they bring in. the websites that bring in little to no traffic will in turn receive little to no pay from you.

The potential downside of affiliate marketing is that your company may be mistaken as a spam website. Because of companies that have abused online advertising through email spamming, pop-ups, and ad-ware company links on sights carry a bit of a negative connotation. Also there have been issues with scaling when it comes to affiliate advertising.

These are small issues considering the amount of good affiliate marketing can bring a company. It is a smart and effective way to get your companies name out into the world.

Tags: affiliate, Benefits, marketing

Increase your website Traffic

Anyone who owns a website wants it to be extremely popular with high amounts of traffic that converts to new business. This is the always the case whether its a local service like Andrew Hill Salon, a big company like WH Smith or a national charity such as the PCRF (Prostate Cancer Research Foundation). By developing websites everyday, we have a vast understanding of not only design, accessibility and usability for a website but more importantly, search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is a very competitive area with every web site wanting to come on the first page for particular key phrases. Companies want the number 1 spot in Google as well as Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista – the major players in the search engine world.

Animation Technologies focus their web site optimisation both on-site and off-site optimisation on the search engine Google, the reason being, 72.8% of online users use Google as their primary search engine. It is also the case that if you get website optimisation right in Google – gaining a high page rank – it is often the case that the other search engines will follow, even though each one has its own unique algorithm for ranking web sites.

To increase your website traffic takes not only excellent search engine optimisation but also a number of other factors which make up your website on the whole.

Learn about usability – Having a great looking website is useless if users cannot use the website and view the content.

Invest in a good design – Design is not the be all and end all of a website, it is one key aspect that will make a first impression on the user, so quality is important gaining the visitors trust.

Keep it up to date – Your website needs to look fresh, new and great. If the website has outdated news, broken links or hideous graphic animations, this will all deter users.

Topical News – A news feed/blog is a great way of not only keeping new and returning customers up to date about your industry/service, company information and popular news stories.

Create a useful website – Relevant content is king when it comes to increasing your traffic. Your website will not only be telling users about your company but tips that actually help users, thus users referring others to the website.

Manage your reputation – Responding to your readers comments is key to establishing your company as one that cares about what people say about you.

Make Accessible – Many web design companys focus purely on design, in partiuclar flash websites which may jump around the page or make all sorts of noises however, blind and deaf people still need to be able to use it. If they cannot use your website then you will not get their custom – thats potential business your ignoring.

Tags: Advertising, marketing, search engine optimisation, Website Promotion

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic and profits. That being said, you need to understand the inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.

Conflicting SEO Expectations

SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are two competing factors in the effort, time and volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having unreasonable expectations.

The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations deal with keywords.  Obviously, an optimization program is designed to get you high in the rankings on various keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a keyword produces, the higher the number of sites competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this translates to a longer period of time required to get top rankings.

Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap. Even if they go into the number one position across the top three search engines, they have limited the amount of traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as revenues are effectively capped.

A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home page and other centralized pages should be devoted to keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To counterbalance this, additional pages should be built focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.

The exact time periods on this approach are entirely dependent on the subject matter of the site and the keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to six months and Google in six to nine months. For an established site, the figures will be shorter but it is dependent upon the results of the keyword research in the specific field.

Understanding optimization is the key to having reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term goals is the best method of attack in nearly every situation.

Tags: google, Internet Marketing, marketing, MSN, rankings, seo, serps, Yahoo