Most internet users will have seen some form of viral marketing in recent years, whether it’s a funny video that’s been emailed around groups of friends or a link on a social networking site. All something needs to be considered viral is the ability to spread easily by word of mouth. This is where many businesses can take advantage of viral marketing techniques, with the use of a simple ‘refer a friend’ box.

This is basically a small form somewhere on a website that will ask a user for an email address (or more usually multiple email addresses) of people they feel will be interested in a particular product or service. The script then emails those people and informs them their friend has recommended they view said product / service.

The script itself is fairly simple and there are many different scripts available for free that will achieve the desired effect. However, it’s not good enough simply adding the form anywhere on your site – the placement is particularly important in making full use of the feature. Adding it in the middle of your checkout process is unlikely to generate much use – nor is placing it next to a sign up form.

The most effective placement would be on a thankyou page, or similar completed goal. This way the user will have completed their sign up or bought their product meaning they will be in a much better position to decide if they want to recommend the product or service to a friend.

Rik
Head Of Web Development

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The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) conducted a study into Internet marketing spend in the UK, including SEO and PPC spend, and found that Internet marketing in the UK was worth a total of £2,812,600,000 in 2007, which was up 38% on the previous year. Online advertising was worth 15.3% of all advertising spend in the UK that year, a rise from 11.4% in 2006.

Furthermore, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted spend for Internet marketing going on to 2011 in a report entitled the ‘Global Media Outlook Report’.

2008 £3.6 billion
2009 £4.3 billion
2010 £4.9 billion
2011 £5.4 billion

The figures produced by PwC and IAB have been forecast to underestimate Internet marketing spend in the UK.

Internet market research firm E-consultancy has estimated that of the £3.6 billion that will be spent in 2008 on Internet marketing, £2.75 billion of that will be on SEO and PPC budgets. This represents a growth of 24% on the previous year.

Of that spend; E-consultancy believes that £2.42 billion will be spent on paid search (such as Google Adwords) this year – a rise of 23% on last year. Search engine optimisation (SEO) will account for £330 million worth of marketing budgets in 2008 – a massive increase of 32% on 2007.

According to Chris Lake, the editor in chief at E-consultancy:

Search spending is continuing to increase at a healthy pace, although the growth rate will not match the increases seen over the last few years.

There are various reasons for the lower growth rate. Economic concerns will affect the overall ad industry, and search isn’t entirely immune from a dip in budgets. Marketers and agencies are savvier than ever, so scope for growth in ROI is limited. And growth in consumer internet usage is flattening out. But the sector is certainly more robust than other media channels that have a less measurable return on investment, and should continue to grow for years to come.

Budgets look set to increase into 2009 as well, with 63% of companies surveyed by E-consultancy saying that they planned to increase their PPC budgets next year, while 61% were looking to increase their SEO spend.

The prominence of Internet marketing has been magnified by the drops seen in conventional advertising, with TV and radio advertising falling this year. Indeed, without the increase seen in Internet marketing spend, taking its share of marketing spend to 18.7%, the total spent on advertising in the UK would have dropped by 4.6% in the first part of the year.

As it stands however, Internet marketing spend stands just 0.6% behind press advertising and just 3% behind TV advertising.

The reasons for the success are quite apparent, with a total of 31.6 million using the Internet in the UK this year (Source: BMRB Q2 2008) the market for online advertising has grown year-on-year. Also, the demographic split of Internet users in the UK is an accurate reflection of the UK as a whole, with a 52%/48% split between male and female users. 21% of Internet users are between 25 and 34 and the UK is seeing increasing Internet usage from the over 50s, who account for 30% of the total time the country spends online.

The IAB’s chief executive office, Guy Phillipson, stated:

Online is not immune from the economic downturn, but while other sectors see falls in expenditure, the internet is still experiencing an incredible increase and is propping up the entire advertising market.

The growth in internet advertising spend is beating all expectations as advertisers look to maximise their budgets, and take advantage of new display advertising formats such as video. They are also increasing their investment in paid-for search marketing because it delivers measurable returns on investment.

With TV, press and radio advertising on the decline, Internet marketing, including PPC and SEO, looks set to become the biggest advertising sector in the UK in the next two years.

Darren Jamieson
Senior Creative Developer

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Here are a few tips for using CTAs effectively, to push visitors through your site and on to specified landing pages:

1. The action to be taken.
Keep it simple. Clearly display what to do and what to expect for doing it. Remember not to overload visitors with too much information. Also avoid ambiguous CTAs. Studies show a call to action should consist of a clear and concise descriptive action.

2. The presentation and execution of the CTA.
Like any every other type of advertising, it is first impressions that make the biggest impact. Use the following techniques to advertise effectively.

• Utilise eye-catching image CTAs by using attractive and colourful buttons to execute the call to action.
• Utilise formatting in anchor text CTAs by using bolder or larger fonts to emphasise the call to action.
• Utilise advertising space and position CTAs by generously sprinkling CTA links in the header, footer and body of the page as an alternative path to the same landing page as readers scan and jump around the page when they read.

3. Ensure the conversion process is easily completed within a few clicks.
Make it simple, this way readers know exactly where to click to initialise the conversion process and are less likely to navigate away, effectively losing a conversation.

Conclusions
Adding more CTAs and using CTAs that are more clear and obvious will be more effective in driving conversions. Make it easy for the reader to understand, not just where but why to click through and what they can expect on the other side. Address your readers’ interests to see your CTR increase.

Vipul
SEO Programmer

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The news won’t be too much of a surprise to many in the internet marketing community – Yahoo and MSN have both only just announced the same for their paid advertising services, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter respectively, so it was unlikely Google would let its competitors take all the revenue for such a profitable market.

Companies and individuals in the gambling industry are picking up on this now and a quick search for any gambling-related keywords will show a whole array of sponsored listings on the results page.

These first few weeks may prove not to be the best time to compete in the sponsored listings, as the inevitable rush as the news filters out will likely inflate the advertising costs for many of the sought after keywords.

Having said that, with gambling being such a lucrative industry the organic rankings are near impossible to compete in for the smaller companies. Therefore the sponsored listings may be the only way many gambling sites see to gain high quality traffic, and the high prices in advertising will not be much of a deterrent when forecasting the possible returns on investment.

Rik
Head Of Web Development

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An online newsletter has many advantages over print media. One of the main advantages is that sending a newsletter via email is cost effective e.g. you can reach a very broad audience instantly with very little cost.

Some other advantages of having a newsletter system are:

• Newsletters help you to promote your business. Basically a newsletter motivates customers to buy from you.
• A general newsletter contains articles and an appropriate vision and mission of the business. This information helps customers to understand your business.
• Newsletters are an effective communication tool. Creative newsletters can be appreciated by the clients and hence increase the communication between businesses and clients.
• As mentioned above, a newsletter is a cost effective tool, but it can be used as a source of income by putting advertisements in it.

Along with the advantages, the following are two major disadvantages of the newsletter.

• To receive a newsletter client must provide their email address, which in some cases people reluctant to do so fearing that their email address could be passed to other organisations, resulting hundreds of junk emails.
• In some cases a newsletter may not be received by the recipient. Reasons for this could be the spam filters used by many people. So a newsletter might not get through to those who have subscribed because is rejected as spam.

Nadeem Hussain

NSEO Programmer

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When we talk about website branding we should make sure that our logo appears on every page, our domain name and one line description contained in every email and our theme should be consistent through our website.

Below are some quick ways you can start branding your website.

1) Logo is the basic element in branding a website. Your logo should be included on all web pages. And it should be positioned at top left of each page. It should be meaningful to what you do and memorable.
2) Repetition is very important factor in branding your website. As I mentioned above your theme or your design elements should be same from page to page. Remember that your website must have its own distinct feel.
3) Your domain name should be your brand. So it should appear on all your stationary e.g. letter heads, business cards, post cards etc.
4) About us section should include all relevant information about you and your business including your contact information.
5) A copyright statement should be included at the bottom of each page.

Nadeem Hussain
SEO Programmer

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Enable Benchmarking and opt in to share your Google Analytics data, then compare by changing the category industry vertical to compare your site against.

Currently the beta version of the benchmarking feature enables you to compare your site’s Visits, page views, pages/visits, bounce rates, avg time on site and new visits, against other/similar industry verticals and direct industry competitors, the list of category verticals and the quality of the data will improve as more customers enable the Benchmarking feature.

In conclusion the reports published by the benchmarking data can provide information to better understand the broader context of your website in relation to direct competitors, helping to identify additional opportunities to improve your website’s metrics, as more and more data becomes available, you will be in a position to forecast and stay above industry trends.

Vipul
SEO Programmer

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Entrecard is basically a business card swapping website for Blogs. You sign up to Entrecard for free, create your site profile, or card, and then ‘drop’ it on other people’s websites. By placing the Entrecard code onto your website you’re allowing the display of other people’s adverts, and for them to drop their cards on you.

You earn credits by having cards dropped on your site, by you dropping cards on other sites and by people ‘purchasing’ ads on your site… although no money changes hands. It’s all free. You’re simply using the power of your blog to buy adverts on other blogs.

In this manner you can have your website advertised on some of the biggest and best blogs out there, such as Johnchow.com, but only for 24 hours. Each advertising slot is for 1 day only.

It all sounds very simple, yet there are a few pros and cons:

Cons

• The majority of the traffic you receive from Entrecard is only visiting your blog to drop their card and earn credits
• The queuing system makes it very hard to advertise on the bigger websites, even if you have the credits to do so
• The ads placed are only for 24 hours and the links go through a redirect so are no use for SEO

Pros

• You’re exposing your blog to other likeminded webmasters who would otherwise perhaps not have found your website
• The traffic you get tends to be intelligent webmasters who understand the SEO game and as such often leave comments
• You can advertise on websites that would otherwise cost a lot of money

So will Entrecard succeed? One of their proposed monetisation strategies involves selling off 5% of all ad impressions which would definitely make them a stack of money, but would that also frighten off the bigger blogs who would be promoting Entrecard for little or no reward? The size of the Entrecard badge is such that someone like John Chow could easily make a few hundred dollars from the same space on his website. Why let Entrecard have that money?

For this to work I think they’ll need to come up with some new features, which I know they are working on right now, and I suspect for it to be truly successful rather than simply selling off 5% of impressions they’ll instead offer a revenue share. This would ensure that blogs will continue to promote the Entrecard service as everyone will benefit.

Darren
Content Editor

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The solution is social media: StumbleUpon, Digg, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, del.icio.us and other related websites enable us to manage our online presence.

First off, if you haven’t done it already you should create profiles on relevant social networking sites. It’s easier to breakdown your online reputation strategy according to the type of social networking site.

There are, in my opinion, three main social media sites categories which are described below (there are many other good sites but it would be impossible to mention them all in this post):

• Network sites like LinkedIn, Myspace and Facebook are good to expand your network, it is also extremely easy to target very specific demographics in these sites.
• Content sites like YouTube, Flickr and Squidoo enable you to build ’satellite content’ outside your domains or expose your content to a wide audience.
• Bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and Digg should be used like a directory of quality content related to your industry, even content from your competitors if applicable, don’t worry quality links build trust and establish yourself as a trusted, impartial resource. And consequently makes your profiles more trustable.

Now it’s time to build your network and promote your profiles, makes perfect sense to start with your friends and existing peers by emailing them directly, in your newsletter, email signature, and through your website or blog. You should also cross reference and bookmark your profile pages across each other social websites. For example when you upload your latest corporate video to YouTube you can also bookmark the correspondent page in del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

You should not spam the services or attempt to cheat the system because the social networking websites may ban your profile for life, wasting all your efforts. Making use of these techniques can have great impact to your brand name, as your profile pages get stronger they will achieve good search engine rankings.

Tino
SEO Programmer

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When they were first released they were only available to US publishers – something that many outside the US were frustrated about (unfortunately it seems to be Google’s policy with many upgrades to their applications). However, their frustrations are to be relieved through the roll out of this new feature.

For those of you not yet familiar with the Adsense video units, they are basically customisable embedded video players that will play a selection of Youtube videos, with relevant adverts displayed alongside the videos. Publishers can choose their preferred videos to display or have videos automatically targeted to their website.

Early feedback from the US seems to suggest the new ad format is a success. Now it’s just a case of seeing if they have the same effect across the rest of the world…

Rik
SEO Programmer

This SEO news has been brought to you by Just Search; Experts in internet marketing and PPC