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Contests can be seen as a stunt. In my opinion - a stunt is something new and out of the ordinary that catches peoples attention, and when it comes to marketing, if done correctly a stunt can generate a lot of positive attention.
Contests can be used to attract people to your website, to build [...]
Continue Reading: Using Contests As A Marketing Tool
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Every month an estimated 200 million people play casual games, and the casual gaming industry is seeing a 20% increase in both audience and profits year after year.
The Casual gaming market it expected to surpass $2 billion in 2008.
Casual gaming gained popularity with games like Solitaire, Tetris and Bejeweled played on the PC and Nintendo video game system.
The internet has now become the main source of distribution for casual games and social networks like Facebook are playing a major role in their rise in popularity and profitability. Casual games share a few basic characteristics; they offer simple gameplay and simple graphics that can be enjoyed in short burst like during coffee breaks or while on public transportation.
Continue Reading: The Rise of Casual Gaming
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People like to consume their media in many different ways. When it comes to getting our daily dose of news, some people like to read their morning paper over breakfast, other people listen to the news on the drive to work, and many of us check the headlines online as soon as we get to work.
MSNBC.com shows that they are aware of our diverse media habits, and they are offering us even more ways to experience the news via www.NewsWare.msnbc.com. MSNBC.com has added Spectra, Newsblaster and Newscroller to their existing collection of podcasts, RSS feeds and mobile applications.
Continue Reading: A New Way To Experience The News
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Have you ever wondered how hard it will be to rank for certain keywords or keyword phrases? Try out SEO Chat’s Keyword Difficulty Check Tool. This tool gives you a percentage score that reflects how difficult it will be to get first page ranking for your keywords.
The recently launched www.publicitywheel.com is a new concept for [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: SEO Checklist
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If you are looking for a great example of online video I recommend you check out the Fiskars Cinema Series. This series of three documentary style videos tells the story about a 360 year-old artisan enclave and “company town” called Fiskars Village.
These videos are telling a story, it is obvious that these are promotional videos, but they exude passion and craft and do not feel like commercials. These videos remind me a lot of the TV version of “This American Life” and some of Hillman Curtis’ artist series videos.
These videos are presented on a flash heavy site with very little text. I would recommend that along with all this great video they include some text. This would improve their organic search results and give people who liked the videos, more information about the village.
Continue Reading: Fiskars Cinema Series
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Everyone’s favorite ex Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, along with Will Mayall and Kathryn Henkens have launched alltop.com. The site is an aggregate of stories from “all the top” sites on the web. I recommend checking out the Social Media, Design and SEO pages.
Paul McEnany of hee-hawmarketing wrote an insightful article on brand building on the [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Watch The Masters Online
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f you want to reach a large audience with your online videos, it is always a good idea to post your video to several video sharing sites.
Posting you video to youTube is a no brainer, but with over 300 other video sharing sites to choose from, where do you begin? I recommend posting your videos regularly to 5-10 different sites, and before you decide on which sites best suit your brand of video you may want to start posting on 20-30 sites and narrow them down to the top 10 after a couple months of testing.
If you are serious about online video, and plan on producing a lot of video and building an audience. You should also factor in your ability to monetize your videos on each site.
One video sharing site I recommend you consider is…
Continue Reading: Monetize Your Online Video With Viddler
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Steve Bradley over at Small Business Newz uses two seemingly low budget online videos as examples of how you can use video to effectively market yourself online.
Speaking of low budget videos, here are a couple of google related viral videos from Germany. One old and one new.
In 2006, Aram Bartholl built a life size [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Google Come To Life
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When we think of successful social networks we (North Americans) immediately think of MySpace and Facebook. But have you ever heard of Tencent.com or their social network brand QQ.com? In 2007 they made 523 million USD in revenues, nearly 4x what Facebook made during that same period.
Tencent’s user base has grown to 300 million active IM users, and 741 million users in total. Tencent is more than just a social networking platform. Since developing an IM application 9 years ago, they have developed various online outlets including a web portal, online game, blog and wireless portal.
As Tencent and QQ’s user base keeps expanding, they are quickly becoming an everyday tool for the Chinese. Many Chinese companies are even using QQ to communicate with their clients.
Another reason for Tencent’s and QQs success is…
Continue Reading: Ever Heard of QQ.com?
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Wordpot recently updated its free online keyword research tool. The update includes a monthly keyword trend chart (I love how it animates), synonyms, related and associated words and the new keyword basket. The two best things about Wordpot, is that it’s free and its fast.
Today youTube announced the 12 winners of the 2007 youTube Video [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: 1/4 of all Web Users Cannot Perform a Simple Google Search
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If you’re like me and you read a lot of blogs and listen to a lot of podcasts then you have probably noticed that there has been a lot of discussions going on about Twitter.
Twitter is quickly establishing itself as an alternative communication medium that may soon become as common as email, instant messaging and blogging. Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium that makes it easy get short text messages out to friends and fans. All you have to do is type a short message, and anyone who is watching your Twitter feed will immediately get the message.
If you want to have a quick peek at what Twitter is all about I recommend trying out Tweetscan. Tweetscan is a search tool, that gives you real time access to public Twitter streams…
Continue Reading: Real Time Twitter Search With Tweetscan
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I’ve read many times that one trick to getting traffic from Yahoo is by participating in Yahoo Answers, answering questions that are relevant to your niche, then linking back to your site. Duncan Carver of Internet Marketing Today has developed a new piece of software called Answer Sniper that will alert you in near real [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Finding Your 1000 True Fans
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Todays post is not necessarily about endorsing one companies line of products, but more importantly how internet marketers can use a variety of products and mediums to enhance their internet marketing.
Using design, photography, and video can significantly increase the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign. And now that Google and the other major search engines are embracing universal search, both images and video will begin to have a greater impact on search engine optimization.
Adobe was already a leader in design and photography applications, but when they bought Macromedia in 2005, and acquired Flash, Dreamweaver, Director and Fireworks, they instantly became the leading provider of website creation applications as well. Becoming familiar with the different tools that are available can be useful to online marketers, even if you never plan to be hands on with them yourself.
Continue Reading: Internet Marketing With Adobe Products
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Marketing Lens has a great case study on how Matt Griffin of the Boston Celtics used email marketing to sell 3,500 tickets in 30 days.
Today Youpark has launched a new Facebook application that allows users to download software and games onto their mobile phones, and it also allows users to send these free mobile games [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Scrabulous Facebook
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Over the last two months I have read dozens of lists predicting the top internet related marketing trends for 2008.
Most comment on a rise in social networking, an increase in internet cell phone use as well as an increased focus in all things local, including local search and local search engine optimization.
Here are 5 of [...]
Continue Reading: 5 Internet Marketing Trends To Watch For
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Avenue A Razorfish released their 2008 Digital Outlook Report yesterday. The report on consumer behavior explores social marketing, media spending, mobile web usage, search, and behavior targeting.
Patrick Gavin, founder of Text Link Ads has just started a blog. His first two posts History of TLA and How To Grow Your Online Business 4X [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Look But Don’t Buy
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Yesterday, Yahoo launched its social news site Yahoo! Buzz. It has immediately been labeled a Digg clone, but the one major difference is that all the stories will not be user submitted, but instead, they will be selected from a set of pre-approved publishers. The list of publishers will include both large news sources and niche blogs.
The buzz rating of a particular story will then be determined by a combination of users clicking on the “buzz up” button next to the story, as well as search patterns and trends. This may not generate the same variety of stories that are found on sites like Digg, but it will probably help weed out stories that are obviously spam.
Each day a few of the top Yahoo! Buzz stories will make it to the Yahoo’s main page. This would mean huge traffic boosts. While testing, Yahoo reported that a wired.com story it had promoted to its homepage, generated over 2 million unique hits in 2 hours…
Continue Reading: Yahoo! Buzz (Beta)
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Kevin Nalts over at Will Video for Food, wrote a great 8 step road map for marketers interested in trying out viral video called The Marketeter’s Cheat Sheet to Viral Video.
Copyblogger has released a 5 part guide to Keyword Research for Bloggers. The guides include information on how keyword research can help you choose a [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: For Wine Lovers
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Even though podcasting is still a relatively new and unknown medium eMarketer forecasts that spending on podcast advertising will grow nearly tenfold in the next five years.
To start things out, let me state that I am a huge fan of podcasts. I definitely spend more time listening to podcasts than I do with any other [...]
Continue Reading: Adding Podcast Advertising To Your Media Mix
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Jason Lee Miller over at web Pro News wrote a simple yet effective list of the Top 10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google. These 10 points could be used as an SEO checklist at the beginning of any web development project.
Maki over at Dosh Dosh has written a great post on How to [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Google Online Marketing Challenge
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Tax season is fast approaching, and I was impressed to see both TurboTax and H&R Block using internet marketing as a way of promoting their products and services, in two very different ways.
TurboTax has partnered with YouTube and BrickFish to create “Tax Laugh” a unique online video contest.
There are two parts to this contest. The first is to submit a funny tax related video for chance to win $10,000 and open for comedian Joy Moh.
The second part of the contest is the “Taxlaugh Promoter” campaign, where TurboTax has created incentives for internet promoters to take an active role in driving Word-of-Mouth about the contest.
Continue Reading: Internet Marketing During Tax Season
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Julie Ruvolo over at iMedia Connection wrote a great post called 5 tips for stellar branded video. It includes some great examples from Toyota, American Express, Delta, Gmail, and Hugo Boss.
Copyblogger shares his 5-Step POWER Copywriting Method that he came up with while teaching a copywriting class for a special program at Ohio State University. [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: 8 Seconds of Awesome
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I’ve always been a fan of Japanese ads. There is something about these short quirky and colorful ads that quickly capture your attention and keep your eyes glued to screen right until the end.
And regardless of the language barrier they all seem to deliver their message clearly.
Here is a great Mentos ad that [...]
Continue Reading: Funny Video Friday: Mentos Mouth Art
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HoneyShed.com is the furthest thing from traditional online advertising I have seen.
When you arrive at the site a large video stream will begin playing, starring a bunch of 20 something guys and girls who look like they’ve just been pulled out of a 1980’s fashion magazine.
At first it might seem that they are just hanging out and goofing off, but you will soon realize, they are trying very hard to sell you products.
If you like the product they are promoting, there is a link off to the right side of the screen showing the price, and giving you the option to buy it or stash it for later…
Continue Reading: HoneyShed.com: Old School MTV Meets the Shopping Network
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Is there a formula on how to create a unique brand experience with social networks like MySpace and Facebook? Mark Drosos, the account management VP of Powered Inc says it’s as easy as 3+3.
ProBlogger Darren Rowse wrote a series of posts on using Twitter as a way of improving your blog: 9 Benefits of Twitter [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Humans Are Mathematically Incompetent
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Here is a funny and somewhat disturbing reminder for us all to step away from our computers this weekend and get some exercise.
This commercial uses humor to be memorable while at the same time capturing the feeling of self consciousness and embarrassment that is often associated with being overweight.
Having an innocent baby act as [...]
Continue Reading: Funny Video Friday: Man Breast-Feeding
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IKEA agreed to let comedian and filmmaker Mark Malkoff live in their store for a week while his New York city apartment was being fumigated.
Mark has flipped the typical scenario of a brand using a celebrity or sports star to endorse their products, and instead, he is using a brand to promote himself.
Mark set up the website www.MarkLivesInIkea.com, and has posted nearly two dozen videos on it so far. He is also inviting people to become his friend on MySpace and Facebook…
Continue Reading: Mark Lives In IKEA
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Dev Basu at www.searchenginepeople.com/blog shares his methodology on how he goes about planning and executing his SEO goals.
Planning on doing some link building this weekend. You may want to check out “The 4 Different Types of Authority Links (and 11 Ways to Get Them)” over at wiep.net.
Lee Odden wrote a great article for Target [...]
Continue Reading: The Wekender: Competitive On a Budget
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Buffalo Wild Wings have come up with a clever way to promote their “Boneless Thursdays”.
The new Wild Messages website allows users to select from three vocal characters (a sexy teacher, a referee, or a drill sergeant) to created a personalized message, inviting their friends to meet them at Buffalo Wile Wings for “Boneless Thursdays.”
The humorous message can be sent to their mobile phone or their email address…
Continue Reading: Buffalo Wild Wings New Mobile and Email Campaign
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Seth Godin’s new book Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? is now available at Amazon, and your local book store. Godin’s latest book is about 14 marketing trends that are changing our world. This is the next book on my reading list.
David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, [...]
Continue Reading: The Weekender: Meatball Sundaes
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On Jaunuary 7th Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia has launched his latest open source project called Wikia Search.
Wikia Search is currently in Apha and can be found at alpha.search.wikia.com. So far the reviews have been overwhelmingly negative.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls it “a complete let down” and Stan Schroeder of Mashable calls it “miles behind the competition”, I say give it a year or two and see what the open source community can do with search. They have surprised the world with the success of Linux and Wikipedia, so succeeding at search may still be possible…
Continue Reading: Will Wikia Search Ever Compete With Google?
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We will be taking a break from posting over the holiday season, so check back with us in January ‘08 for some fresh new content. Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to our RSS feed.
WebVideoReport.com did a great survey on the cost of online video advertising. The prices range from $90 CPM for a 15 sec preroll ad at WSJ.com to $15 - $35 CPM for an overlay, pre roll or in video bug at Break.com.
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