sembuilders

After the twitter, facebook or linkedin revolution, many companies and pro’s shoot tons of tips about how to use social sites to promote companies, products or services. Every now and again someone asks us if its worth to open themselves into this new social monsters. Our answer is simple and has to do with the Key factors involving any marketing communication, reach less, reach more, but simply reach. 

I believe there is a tool for any need, there is a right guy for the right job and there is a perfect symmetry in some things,  but when it comes to web, there are some products or services that will mark the difference between having fun promoting your business, and really knock your head to the screen if sells dont arise as expected.  

There is no secret formula when it comes to correctly using social sites to promote and aquire new traffic funnels or empower your online reachness, still, we suggest some tips that might come in handy:

-By opening a public profile in a social website, you are accepting to enter a network of PEOPLE who like to talk and interact with PEOPLE, you are not entering a static post-now-comment-later schematic. Update your profile contents regularly,  and most of all: Say what you are doing to the right people !, watch out for groups that might be interested in what you have to say, don’t forge answers and comebacks. 

-Try to open your profile as an employee in your firm, and state that you are doing just that, don’t lie and try to scam people out, its preferable that people know that you are socialized because the company you work in wants to talk to new people, rather than stating that you are alone in this and that you just work for that company. 

-Try to have your analytics tools ready to measure the amount of traffic this kind of websites are bringing to your company’s website. Compare the data with your website contents, and see if people stayed in your website or just left because of the lack of interests, sometimes determined by the type of people that you targeted in the social website. 

Is there any other way?

Actually there is, and several others, some are quite easy, some are not, and some require the expertise of professional developers, but you might want to check each website developers zone to see if there are any services available that you might benefit from. Major brands develop tons of applications to “include” an opt-in way of putting their brand into each person profile.  More info here

When planning new strategies for your Online Business Optimization, using  behavioural and traffic analysis tools such as google analytics (among many others out there) , can really put you ahead of the competition.  why? simply because it helps you identify key aspects and variables that shape your website improvements and contents.

No matter what kind of business model you have in your web project, Analytic tools can help you outperform most of your process and increase those heavy conversion rates. the real difference between knowing what needs to be done and what you “think”  should be done.  Ok enough with the promo speech…

What are the key factors?  I believe there are tons of metrics in an analytics reporting that you could use at your own sake and benefit. Anybody that has run a decent report knows that crossing several type of metrics is easy, giving a practical sense to those metrics is another thing…

One of the most important aspects of websites is traffic. This is the blood of the website and the most fluid the traffic flow is, the more healthier our website will be. With Analytics there are some metrics that will help us to:

Identify Visitor sources: Here we will find out where our visitors are coming from. Visitors to our website can come through several sources as Search Engines, Direct (People who entered your website URL in browser), Linkage with other websites, banners, widgets or anything that links back to your website.  Other popular traffic sources that appear on analytics are emails sent with email marketing online softwares among others. 

Attention to: Keywords that people typed to find your website in Search Engines. Target your website contents for those keywords or synonims.

Identifying website sections popularity: Knowing what sections are most viewed and visited in your website helps to add your most relevant information, products to communicate,  or sales pitch. Remember: people navigate websites trying to reach desired information in few steps. If they dont find nothing useful for them..bounce rate. 

Content popularity: Your website contents like posts, texts, images, videos or product listings are the items you are trying to propagate to your traffic. Knowing which content.

Attention to: Avg time on site (in particular content page).

In a World governed by economic adjustments both for companies and for individuals, new trends arise in the online business field,  We though it would be interesting to share some of them in our blog. Listed below are five of the most recruited trends in the race for better online marketing, some of them you already know if you’ve been around marketing for a while now,  and some of them might sound new, either way, having some key aspects in view for the present or future of your actions  can add some spice into your Online Business road to success. All trends can be applied for Service oriented websites and also for Product selling ones or ecommerce portals. 

1-Website design: This is not a waste of time, having a really good looking website, and by good looking we not only mean nice, clean and trendy, but structured and targeted to your specific audience. If you sell intangible goods for example, or services , try to create visual imagery or concepts that reinforce your ideas and your added values.  If people don’t find you proposal or your key seller concepts in the first to second page, they will find another way to obtain what they need in your competitors website.

2-Search Engine Optimization: This is one of the most useful strategies out there to create free-of-charge traffic to your website. Remember in this case,  free doesn’t mean  AT NO COST at all, to have your website contents (your products or services, texts, multimedia or offers) indexed by most popular search engines, you will need an optimized website (correct html tags, proper keywords, keyword content inside specific texts, titles in images, among many others) and a good Inbound theme related linkage. Find out more in websites such as seomoz.org, googleblog.blogspot.com or simply contact us. 

3-Social Media & Blogging: What to say about this ? A Lot…but ill try to keep it as accurate to purpose as possible. Social websites are a must,  Probably because facebook.com  has one of the highest  CPC (Cost Per Click) around, real leads and job postings appear in social networks every day, people connect to each other in opt-in ways, develop their online profiles as online cv’s, and increase workable visibility and expansion opportunities as never seen before. Social websites help find niches both for personal and for professional use, you might create your company’s profile at linkedin.com or even find outsourced opportunities at networking.entrepreneur.com, this online spots are good for real cost-effective ways to communicate your business around proper targets. Remember: You will need to feed your network in order to produce results. some of the most popular social websites include: facebook.com, linkedin.com, hi5.com, among many others like twitter.com and blogster.com for bloggers. Blogging is one of the first web 2.0 initiatives or may be considered as the father of what we consider “the social web”, the proper way to blog with your business is to make your company blog communicate with other keyword or theme related blogs and be reviewed or commented by key people around the community. 

4-Analytics & Reporting: Perhaps one of the most useful web tools available is the Analytics and reporting tool, both in free and paid versions. What this tool does, is to gather delicate information about your website visitors behaviour, traffic analysis and website content popularity. Once you have the necessary information about whats going on inside your website, you can prepare new strategies and reach your audience in a more effective way.  By simply adding a code into your website web page you can start gathering information and analysing your next moves with your project. A good head start is google’s analytics service, free of charge and powered with cutting edge professional reporting.Take a look here.

TELNIC, the organization behind the .tel domain extension,  launched the registration of trademark domains first, to end with the complete opening registration of .tel domains both for individuals and for companies. What is the big buzz about this new TLD (Top Level Domain) extension ? Well…explained in simple words, when you look for a website address on the browser, this address points directly to a domains/IP association database called DNS (Domain Name Server). This database only stores information about which domain or email points to that IP. The Technology behind .tel TLD’s is that now this databases will store not only information about the domain A-Records (Address Records)  itself,  but will also store information targeted to be consumed by humans, not by machines. This means that if you type “John Doe.tel” or “imb.tel” you will be able to retrieve contact information about that particular identity, social websites linkage, VoIP addresses, MSN, Skype, etc. If that data was stored by the publisher in first place. Now…if all spammers already used domain registry, registrars WHOIS information data and more chunks to fill endless email databases, what will happen if you add PERSONAL DELICATE information to the world largest and quick-to query world database. Relevant tip: When you add or retrieve information from a website, you are querying a database that is  hosted on a database server inside a web-server located in any place around the globe, the .tel DNS technology is meant to be faster and more protocol friendly than any of its competitors and other domain technologies. And what is more important…everybody is welcome to query it.

The idea and the technology seem to be quite promising, other similar initiatives as openid.org are trying to cut down on the steps we take to communicate with websites and to each other, unfortunately every good action is always harmful in the wrong hands, spammers have found the way to overcome the latest anti-spam techs, and what is worse, wordpress and blogging spam is increasing daily, a world contact information database open to everybody is a dangerous territory if you dont wear the right shield.

the uk credit crunch , combined with the current economical and financial situation, brought within several let-go’s and out-of-business signs. As in almost every historical crisis, people needed to find new ways to cash-in and pay recurrent bills, not to mention the stress of retaining a non-solid job. New businesses arise and the online sector is witnessing a major increase of activities since the beginning of 2008. In an effort to provide means and tools for entrepreneurs and for people interested in the online business optimization liner, we are about to launch our UK Online Business Bundle pack, specially configured for UK offline Businesses, looking to empower their online ventures. webstarting your project with online marketing tools can be a cost-effective way to generate income while watching the return of your investment in real time.

We hope you all a happy new year and a succesful 2009! We have lots of news to tell you, lots of things happened in our company and even more happened in the online business area and the search marketing world. Due to the world crisis and the credit crunch involving thousands of companies of all sizes, it seems that Internet and the web ship itself  has gained more popularity than what it was expected from previous years guessing. We will continue to provide the best consulting around Internet subjetcs, new people has joined the crew of Opts and some lightweight software developments are on their way. Our new offices are fully equipped and our prodigal son “WebUpdate09″ a special update programme thought for web professionals will be launched around march the 10 th.  More news to come…didn’t wanted to takt too much time of YOUR time since probably most of you are on vacation right now…:)

A few days ago Google sent a release note for Ad Manager Administrators about the new and updated features present in the platform. For those of you who are not familiarized with this cool tool, it helps publishers of any size, to manage and build campaigns in a more accurate and ordered way. In other words, it is what lacks out of AdWords publishing tool…Here are some of the most relevant:

Line item delivery page – The new line items tab on the orders page provides a quick way for you to check on your ad operations, including order readiness, delivery status, and inventory revenue performance. View the color coded delivery bars to easily identify line item pacing information and line items at risk

Getting started made easier - Our new getting started page will help new users learn how Ad Manager works, walk through step-by-step tutorials, and explore additional Ad Manager resources. Visit this page by clicking the Getting Started link in the top and footer of your account.

Updated reporting - Your reports have become more accurate and now filter out clicks and impressions from your internal traffic.

Want to know more, feel free to check the beta platform website at: http://www.google.com/support/admanager/publisher/bin/answer.py?answer=90782

Embedded web browsers in mobile phones could actually manage to display AdWords and google related ads in websites, nothing far from that, this time publishers can display their ads targeting only mobile phones such as the iPhone and Google’s G1, carriers such as o2, verizon and others and geographic mobile locations. This new streamline might be a handful of new possibilities when it comes to persona marketing and to analyse the effectiveness of your campaign in mobile users.