More and business today leverage the means of online marketing in a big way which is evident from the humungous increase in amount of money spent in internet marketing since the year 2000. The internet age has arrived and the web has become one of the most powerful media with more and more new users subscribing to internet every year.

With the increase in number of websites, the need for search engines grew as people needed to find information easily on the web. Such search engines earn their source of revenue through programs like pay per click and paid advertisements on their sites for displaying search results.

SEM or search engine marketing is one of the forms of internet advertising which is used to market websites and successfully taps the ever lasting demand for finding information and the company’s services and products. There are various methods in search engine marketing like SEO or search engine optimization, paid inclusion programs like google Adwords and paid placement. However SEO is still the most common form of SEM with more than 75% of marketers vouching for it.

To start your own SEM marketing campaign there is no need to specially hire a marketing agency all you need is a strategy, you need to have the know how and interest in starting the campaign and willingness to go all the way to making it a success. The google listings have sponsored text advertisements which become visible when users do a search epitomize search marketing campaigns. The rights for relevant ads are bought by marketers and they pre-chose key words and key phrases placed by users when they type in certain search terms.  

Feelings toward investment in SEM have changed over last few years and most of the senior executives consider SEM as a critical component in their marketing strategy. And this spending is expected to increase further driven by rising keyword prices and advertising demands for space, and also the fact that small business are using keyword to run their online marketing campaigns. Success of SEM is attributable to the fact that advertisers have to pay only when users click on an ad.   

However SEM is still a controversial medium with models like pay per click is vulnerable to frauds. Fake clicks not meant for purchasing but for dubious reason increase the advertisement spending for business and not generating revenue from sales. But of late major players have initiated efforts to make the process transparent and prevent such fraudulent activities in this medium which will overtake the traditional means of advertising like television in the very near future.

The revamped search engine from Microsoft is making big efforts to win market share in its competition with google and yahoo in the search engine space. However with a 65 % market share for google, it would be very difficult for Bing to make it big real soon and being only slightly better than yahoo or google would not help. More meaningful and advanced features need to be present in Bing so as to make users stop using google.

With the huge ad campaign in the range of 80 million dollars to 100 million dollars the campaign is certainly intended to be successful and with the early indications things are looking positive. Initial trials are favorable; however it is too early to call Bing a success.

With all major search engines trying to move their search engines into local search, it represents a relatively untapped revenue source. In terms of share in local searches, yahoo and Microsoft had declining shares as compared to google whose share has increased. Microsoft would have to make major strides to make it big in this sphere.

The results page retrieved from Bing look similar to google but some unique features separate it from the rest of the pack. As often referred to as decision engine the layout in profile page on Bing is more navigable in terms of generating purchase decision about a particular business. It also provides more content with each feature like:

Business listing: almost similar to what is there on yahoo and google, it provides information like address, hours of operation, contact number, reviews and web site links for business information and other features.

Map: Bing provides a very convenient feature which gives predetermined or one click directions from the different parts of the city. It can be very convenient for the users who are familiar with the area under search.

Nearby: a very useful feature which lets you know about other services and places of interest in the nearby area. This simple yet added convenience goes a long way in helping people plan an outing.

User Review Scorecard: it provides a kind of summary of the user reviews and categorizes them for quick references. Clicking on show reviews next to categories will provide more insights related to them.

The content provided by Bing through integration of local results is very vital to searchers and help them make informed purchase decisions along with purchase criteria, beyond map and link to web site for merchant.

As per reports from yellow pages Bing has been in top 10 during last 2 weeks. Bing is on the right track as it relates to local search and with results being quite comprehensive it is creating positive vibes. However the results are not good enough to call it a google killer yet.

Looking forward to making a nice living from your home but failing to achieve that financial independence, the most probable reason of your shortcoming is that you do not have a good internet or website marketing strategy. Many marketers have started using internet to make money without knowing what exactly they are trying to achieve online. Successful entrepreneur’s world wide would laugh on such cases which are aimless and without any proper strategy and could never lead to building a great business.

You need to be proactive and think where you are and where you wish to be in the future. Creating a website and submitting to a few directories and then expecting to sit and relax, at the same time earn thousands is not going to work. All you need is to answer two major questions. Who is your customer? By answering that you will know what your customer specifically desires. Try and get into their shoes and understand their problems and desires. Second question is what is your offer? Why should a customer buy your product and what makes you superior to the rest of your competition? You need to provide something so irresistible that the customer begs you to sell it to them.

You need to understand that people these days prefer buying from their workplace, home or any comfortable location. So in effect you have millions of people buying stuff using internet. If you are not exploiting the opportunity it is your loss. However before you start with your ultimate internet marketing strategy you need to do a thorough research. As it happens in other businesses you need to first understand where you are and what you can do.

As a staring point you should do a thorough research of the potential market. Identify your present and future competitors and what they provide online. After the research you need to identify the weakness and strengths of your competitors. Systemize the data gathered so as to do a thorough analysis on it. Identify your main concerns and find out ways to improve your offering. Post this you develop your most important internet strategy.

Once all the ground work is done you can start with your strategy by thinking who you are and what you can offer to the market. PPC, SEO, blogging, video, webinars, banners exchange, viral traffic generation, e-mail are some of the marketing methods that could be used depending on the affordability. Prioritize the tactics and identify the one that helps increase ROI in the shortest time.

Finally the most important thing is to monitor the performance once you have implemented the marketing strategy. Monitor your internet marketing campaigns; identify the most prominently used keywords and the ones that bought maximum money in PPC marketing. Check whether your SEO rankings are good or not? It is important to note that only by monitoring the strategy implemented you can discover what works for you and what does not.

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
 
7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

 Here is the long awaited pics of Taiwan i took with my fiancee. Hope you all like it! I simply love Taiwan and will be definitely sure that we will be going back again!

Taipei

My Flight to Taipei…

Changi Airport Terminal 3

Xi Men Ding

Taipei Main Station Shopping Centre

K Mall

 Taipei 101

Dan Shui

Taipei Democracy Memorial Hall

Taiwan Martyrs’ Shrine

Ye Liu

Jiu Fen

Kao Shiung

Dream Mall

Kao Shiung Arena

Kao Shiung Railway

Farmosa Boulevard Mrt

Night Market

Love River

Qi Jin Island

Wedding Proposal