WebiMax Blog

With continued increases in the sales of goods and services through online platforms both here in the US and abroad, there exists several standard musts for companies in order to succeed. These are not necessarily groundbreaking or even new recommendations, but new research out regarding the industry in international markets suggest e-commerce companies are not engaging in these important practices. They are slow to fully embrace the realities of what is needed in order to succeed in the online retail industry. As a result, call them principles, practices, or strategies, but they absolutely need to be implemented to the specifications and needs of each business. Simply put, e-commerce companies must engage in these activities:

Social media should be a part of any successful Internet marketing campaign, but measuring the impact of your efforts previously required additional tools or creating advanced segments in Google Analytics. Now, social media traffic is much more accessible to the more casual GA user.

Again, this title is tongue-in-cheek, as there is certainly no one size fits all plan, as the implementation of one would achieve only mediocre results, miss out on great potential, and potentially damage a brand's image in certain markets. There are strategy points that can be catered to each market, though, and one underlying guiding principle - understand each local context, what is popular, what the trends are, what the web behaviors are, and what characterizes their online activity to name a few elements ,and analyze how your business can operate in that market. With this post, we are continuing the subject and now addressing social media in Europe.

Yesterday I kicked off a series of blog posts dedicated to choosing the best social network based on the needs of a business. For small and medium-sized company owners, there is no certainly no lack of choices to be made when selecting which social sites to operate on. Many SMBs tend to lack the sort of SEO experience and social media awareness to really take advantage of each network's full capabilities. Fortunately, each site can be boiled down to a few key attributes that can make picking the right one an intuitive, and even enjoyable, process.

As social media websites become the focal point of countless internet advertising firms, so too have small business owners come to depend on social networks for their ongoing marketing campaigns. While Facebook is the primary social website for many companies these days, the fact is that there is no shortage of social media sites to pick from when trying to improve a company's conversion rates and traffic. Although social media companies often ignore many sites when campaigning, the options available to businesses advertising on social networks are rather robust.

Yes, that title is tongue-in-cheek, as there is certainly no one size fits all plan. Reading any of my previous writings here, if there is one recurrent theme or underlying message toward international SEO and internet marketing in a new international market, it is that marketers must cater to the new context. They need to do their homework in understanding the local environment and how culture, language, and the societal structure (political, judicial, etc.) will impact the operations of the business - and act accordingly.

Tons of resources are regularly devoted toward evaluating the strength of business sales strategies.  Evaluation and implementation play integral roles in the strength of the strategy and there are methods businesses can use to refine their message.  Analytics potentially provide the most effective evaluation and illustrate measures that other tools simply cannot.  Below are 4 ways website analytics can help businesses refine their sales strategy:

I shake my head each time I read an 'excuse' in regard to disappointing revenue numbers, especially excuses aligned with 'slow seasons' or 'traditional downtimes.'  Does search engine optimization know of such ineffective times?  Depending on the vertical, off to online marketing may be similarly or grossly contrasted; but, can present-day brands use traditional outcomes when it comes to online marketing's nascent years?  Are some brands simply not giving SEO a good enough try?

Over the past several years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become increasingly popular for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Although large scale corporations and well-known retailers may rely primarily on TV and print for most of their advertising efforts, many companies also supplement their marketing campaigns with SEO-based operations online. What used to be a relatively unknown advertising method has now become a common business strategy for countless retailers, restaurateurs and service providers the world over.

In yesterday's post, I opened the discussion of Twitter's varied use by non-marketers and covered two interesting and innovative applications of the technology. The first is that of Francis Kariuki (@Chiefkariuki), the Kenyan administrative chief that uses twitter to get important messages out to his community members. Secondly, we looked at the twitter bot named Where's My Bus (@whensmybus) which offers travelers real-time London bus information.

Twitter is impressive, the technology itself in what it allows you to do but also in how people are actually using it to improve how they interact with the world around them on a daily basis. The platform has seen solid growth and now has over 100 million active users, those that sign in at least once a month. The US slice of Twitter use is expected to rise to 21 million this year (eMarketer) as people continue to see worth in its use, even if to simply track that which they find interesting rather than creating and sharing content themselves.

If you're online and need a question answered, where do you go?  If you're like most Americans and many Europeans leveraging a search, you're using Google.  What would happen if Google didn't answer your question?  That's what happened to the Federal Communications Commission regarding their question of Google's Street View project.

Over the weekend, one of Google's co-founders, Sergey Brin, granted an exclusive interview to The Guardian in which he very openly discussed his thoughts on the future of Internet freedom.  In the interview, he targeted various governments and their attempt at passing legislation to censor the Web and also stated his opinions regarding social networking giant, Facebook and the electronics manufacturer, Apple.  Brin believes that the two companies are "restrictive" and intend to limit the functionality of the Internet.

As I discussed in a previous blog post, many businesses find themselves focusing the majority of their social media efforts through Facebook these days. While I still feel that Google+ is a fantastic alternative to this oversaturated social network, there are still several features on Facebook that make it an attractive platform for marketing purposes. In particular, it's the network's capability for pay per click advertisements that is a huge draw for many business owners. Aside from the site-wide ad initiatives that came about via the Timeline layout update, companies listed on the world's biggest social network will also soon to be able to take advantage of another potential marketing avenue.

Now that Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign and the race is on between President Obama and Mitt Romney, an unprecedented media war has begun. We've seen big media battles before. But in money, in woman- and man-hours, and in technical and strategic sophistication, this will be the biggest ever. Especially in Pennsylvania and other swing states, you'll see television ads from both camps, and from the semianonymous political action committees that have become the coin of the 2012 realm.  Read more

The Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance that began in 2009 is coming to the end of its full roll-out in the UK, Ireland, and France. The Search Alliance started a few years ago with Microsoft's Bing powering Yahoo search and transitioning the advertising activity on each search platform to Microsoft's adCenter. The transition has been smooth, but has taken considerable time to manage all the moving parts of such a transition for large companies and the synchronization of behavior and function for all the current adCenter users.

What can your company offer?  Does it address service needs for consumers?  How do you define a 'consumer?'  Could your business take a few steps in another direction, creating a different vantage point, and target market?  A recent article illustrates the emphasis of offering services rather than producing in factories.

Many business owners who are new to the world of online marketing often consider pay per click as their main channel of advertisement. As what is essentially the internet's oldest form of direct marketing, PPC ads continue to be one of the most prevalent methods of inorganic link building. It certainly doesn't hurt that every search engine website displays its own custom PPC ads on every SERP it shows. Although PPC usage remains constant across the web, the prominence of this popular marketing method is not even across all ad networks.

The US Justice Department interceded in the business affairs of Apple and Amazon lately, ruling on the side of lower-priced e-books.  The Department posed an antitrust suit on Apple and five other large book publishers.  The government felt the group of publishers was strategically attempting to raise the prices on e-books, prices which Amazon has lowered to $9.99 for new and popular books.

Purposeful targeting to drive traffic is the essential point of both organic SEO and paid search. Utilizing tools in each mode of internet marketing allows for the catering of specific messages to different contexts. This assists the ability to split test ads for paid search and bring localized web searchers to your web properties in terms of SEO. Now, new zip-code and location functionality out this week from Google allows for marketers using AdWords to target over 30,000 ZIP codes offering a greater ability to more specifically cater the ad message to a specific location. Similarly, "Location Insertion," another new feature, gives marketers the freedom to establish a single ad and have information placed into that ad depending on the locations of the search queries that initiate it. The two features are considered location extensions in AdWords, and they have important implications for businesses partnering with SEO companies in an effort to increase paid search spend and traffic.

Those business owners who turn to social media sites for customer traffic are known to rely just a little too heavily on Facebook. Sure, the world's biggest social network continues to expand its influence, and it's a given that it will grow towards a projected one billion users by year's end. While there's certainly no lack of potential customers to be found on Facebook, there is the matter of market saturation. For every type of business out there, there are literally thousands of competitors with which to contend. Small business owners who try to maintain a strong presence in social media have to work much harder when rivals are involved.

Twitter, the most popular microblogging site on the internet, offers instantaneous communication and unique engagement opportunities for businesses to connect with members of their audience. Twitter indeed offers two-way communication, but a recent study by Conversocial shows that many big businesses, within retail clothing in this case, do not engage in two-way communication with their customers, and if they do it is limited. On social platforms other than Twitter, customers can message businesses directly, comment, and reach other in other ways.

Just weeks after touting a reorg that would set it on a new and profitable path, Best Buy has jettisoned its CEO of 28 years, Brian Dunn. Best Buy has been in trouble for a while and has not made enough strategic moves to improve its position, said Kenneth C. Wisnefski, founder and CEO of Webimax. "That is a reflection of the CEO and could shed light on the resignation."  Read more