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Who called? From Where? Why?

There is no question that business and website owners are spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars every month in website marketing. When you add that to the money that has to be spent in developing the website and getting the website to perform to the technical standards that Internet users expect nowadays, there is no doubt that the investment becomes a crucial part of the overall company budget.

As a website owner, do you really know whether your website is performing the way it should, and whether the Return on Investment or ROI has made all your efforts worthwhile?

According to a JupiterResearch study, 43% of marketers do not or cannot accurately measure ROI from SEO. This is extremely important to you because you need objective, tangible proof that your website is performing the way your Internet marketer promised you it would perform.

SD Internet Marketing has set itself completely apart form that 43% in that it has several ways that it measures the online marketing efforts it conducts on your behalf, and you are provided with detailed reports so that you can have tangible, accurate, real time evidence of your website’s overall performance.

Most of the time, marketing efforts are measured through tracking whether visitors to your website complete whatever task they are meant to accomplish. However, what can be done about things such as offline conversions, or conversions that are accomplished over the phone?

Many website owners often wonder why people call instead of going to the website, or they may wonder how people are finding them since they do not have a strong website presence. There are people who will go to a website, get the phone number, and call the company directly from a cell phone or landline, and website owners are sometimes left wondering where the call came from.

It is for the aforementioned reasons and others that are too numerous to mention that Call Tracking became necessary. SD Internet Marketing applies this tool so that website owners can be provided with an additional measurement of their website’s success.

Moreover, many website visitors do not convert the first time they visit a website, but they may do so at some point down the line. People visit websites for various reasons, and they may go to other websites to shop around, and consider one service or product against another.

Call tracking software will associate a phone call with the source that got a visitor to a website in the first place, and this method know as Conversion Attribution is accurate marketing measurement at its most forward-thinking.

If there is no call tracking solution for your website, any data relating to the call is lost, as is that particular measurement of your website’s overall performance. Therefore, it is essential for anyone who is conducting an Internet marketing campaign to have a call tracking solution in place, and the Call Tracking solution provided by SD Internet Marketing allows website owners to have both local phone numbers and toll-free numbers for a local, national and international presence.

As a business and website owner, you really need to stay on top of everything that is going on in the social media market.  Millions upon millions of people make daily use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, among others, and you are missing out on a great opportunity to promote your brand, service or product if you are not present and active in the social media market.

It is not enough to create an account in the most popular social media websites and leave it at that.  You have to know how to use the tools made available so that people can become aware of what you are doing, how you do it, and where to find you.

You also need to be well-aware of the latest trends in the social media market so that you can continuously have an active presence where the most people congregate.  Toward that end, SD Internet Marketing employs strategies that have proven themselves over time to help our clients increase their brand, service and/or product awareness. 

We stay on top of the game so that you do not have to spend the countless hours that it takes to do the research and learn what it is that you need to do in order to have a social media marketing strategy that works.  We do the research, apply different techniques, and we find out what works and what does not work in a fluid and dynamic market such as social media.

SD Internet Marketing has qualified professionals who stay current on the latest advances, technology and strategies so that you can stay current.  You have to know which media are the ones you need to use to be the most effective, and you also have to know who the new players are, and whether it will be worthwhile to develop your Internet marketing in any of the countless social media websites that offer their services.

One of the newest, and one with great potential for business and website owners is Google Buzz.  On February 9, 2010, Google announced that it had launched Google Buzz in order to get into the social media market, which is now firmly in the hands of Twitter and Facebook.  When the announcement was made, Google’s vice president of product management, Bradley Horowitz, made it a point to mention that people have a proclivity for sharing experiences, and that they want to do their sharing in real time.

However, on February 16, Google admitted to BBC news that Buzz testing was insufficient, and the company has had to make several changes to the service, especially after users began complaining there were too many intrusions into their privacy.

The fact is that Google bypasses its more usual external tests, which it has used for many of its other services, and it only implemented internal tests.  Once the company began to receive user complaints, it said that it was working extremely hard to fix the problems that users were experiencing. 

When the company was asked whether its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or any of the executive team would issue a public apology since user trust had been breached, the response from the Google spokesperson was that Google has apologized…”We’re very sorry for the concern we caused.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google Buzz Launch

As a business or website owner, you would not have to worry about staying on top of news, events, developments, etc., in the social media world because SD Internet Marketing and its team of experts take care of that for you.  Being aware of everything that is going on in this market and implementing strategies to deal with issues such as the problems with Google Buzz so our clients do not have to do it; that is just one of the many services provided by our Internet marketing company.

All business and website owners should be asking themselves how much they really know about their Internet website and their business.

For example, do you know the percentage of your revenue that is generated by your online presence? Are there many people searching for your type business product or service online? How many of those people are arriving at your website? How would your bottom line be affected if you increased your online presence by (X) percentage?

SD Internet Marketing Can Get You There

The data tells the story, and it makes a compelling case for knowing the answers to those questions.  There are over 1.7 billion Internet users worldwide, which is a penetration of over 25%, according to statistics provided by Nielsen Online.  Nielsen Online further reports that over 875 million consumers have shopped online.

As far as searches are concerned, in May of 2009, 9.4 billion searches were made, with Google! getting the lion’s share at 63.2%.  What is your presence like on Google?  Is your website being marketed properly so that your piece of the pie is as big as it could be?

If you are concentrating on traditional advertising for your business, then you are pouring money into something that will have steadily diminishing effectiveness.  Yes, it is true that radio, TV, billboard, magazine and other forms of traditional advertising are not yet buried, but they are noticing consumer trends and shifts.

Newspapers have gone online as a way to cope with reader loss, and to try to keep up with changing times.  How many people are actually listening to traditional radio now that there is satellite radio, iPods, CDs, MP3s, MP4s, and so on?

It is a fact that more and more people are working and shopping on their computers; the numbers tell the story.  There are people who only pay for Internet now, rather than the traditional cable/Internet mix because you can get your favorite TV shows right from the Internet.  There are people who spend hours on YouTube watching videos, rather than watching cable TV, and you can watch movies, get up-to-the-minute news and communicate right from your computer or mobile device. 

If you have not yet maximized your online exposure, then it is time to do so because more than 25% of the world’s population is online. 

The first month of 2010 is almost over, and successful companies have taken a proactive approach to the Internet in order to maximize their overall marketing and sales goals. You either follow suit, or you miss out on your piece of the pie as other companies capitalize on the power of the Internet, its fluidity and mobility.

You must increase traffic to your website as you try to keep up, and that traffic must then be converted into leads and sales.  If you are imaginative, inventive and creative, you can capture the imagination of some part of those 1.7 billion Internet users.  You are going to want to have that piece of the pie because you can bet that your competitors are going to try to get it too.

But perhaps you do not really know what Internet marketing really involves.  You may be asking yourself:  Is it as simple as just having a website or doing a PPC campaign? How do I maximize the use of Social Media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Digg and/or YouTube? Should I restrict myself to just one website, and what is the best plan for my website? Will I be just another one of a hundred companies offering the same service?  How will I set myself apart from all the others so that I can increase visits to my website?  Am I restricted to just my website? Or is it one of the dozens of other services out there?

For an Internet marketing company to be of any value, it will incorporate every tool that is available on the Internet so that you will get the most visits possible to your website

The list of tools that are available is extensive, and you must hire the right Internet marketing company to do the job.  SD Internet Marketing is a company with years of experience on the Internet, and we know how to exploit Internet tools in order to get the most out of them.

Do not wait too long to make up your mind and start because your competitors may be building their web presence as you read this blog.  Contact SD Internet Marketing whether you are in the San Diego area, California, or anywhere else for that matter.  SD Internet Marketing will ensure your presence on the Internet.

It is no secret that social websites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others have been growing by leaps and bounds.  If you are like most business owners, it is also no secret that you want to be able to tap this valuable resource.  Most people think that they can just go to these websites with millions of users, tell the users about their product and/or service, and that people will flock to their business and website.  Sales will go through the roof and everything will be great.

Social Networks are Essential

That is how most people initially view social media marketing, and they end up disappointed when they do not see the results.  That usually happens because most people in general, and business owners in particular, just do not understand the methods that need to be used in social websites for a successful social media marketing campaign.

It is absolutely necessary in today’s business world to go to these websites, talk about yourself, your service, your product, your website, and what makes your business different from the rest.  However, if you only concentrate on you, then you are committing a fatal error in social media marketing.

Step one or making your brand or service known to social website users is necessary, but it is only a first step.  There are other steps that business owners need to take in order for their social media marketing campaign t be successful.  At SD Internet Marketing, we have gained invaluable experience in social media marketing.  We know the steps we need to take in order for you Internet marketing campaign to be successful.

At SD Internet Marketing, we have a proven approach to social media marketing, and we know what is relevant.  We know what attracts people, and what will keep them coming back.  We know how to get people to your website, and then how to turn these visitors into customers.  Give us a call at 1-800-340-SDIM (7346) or 619-261-4348 and let our experts guide you, not only in your social media marketing campaign, but also in your overall Internet marketing campaign.

It is no secret that online advertising has been playing second fiddle to TV advertising for a long time.  However, if you are still following this line of thinking, then perhaps it is time to reconsider your position.  A study conducted in September 2009 revealed that marketers are spending more on online advertising than on TV marketing for the first time.

The study was conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.  It showed that online marketing increased by 4.6% during the first half of the year.  During the same time, TV advertising fell by a whopping 16.1%.

Online Marketing Continues Upward Trend

The above statistic should be an eye opener for business owners who have not yet begun to take advantage of the Internet.  According to Nielsen Online, the International Communications Union and other reliable sources, there were more than 1.733 billion Internet users worldwide.  This is a penetration of approximately 25.6% of the population, and it showed a growth of 380% from 2000-2009.

In light of these numbers, you are missing out on consumers not only in your area, but all over the world.  These are people who could potentially be looking for your product or service.   Just in the United States, Google accounted for 64.6% of all Internet searches during August 2009, with Yahoo a distant second at 16%.

Why are those figures important to you as a business and/or website owner?  If you are on the first page of search results for your keyword on Google and Yahoo, you are reaching over 80% of all people searching for your particular keyword or keyword phrase.

With Internet users at almost 2 billion and Google and Yahoo controlling most of the searches, it stands to reason that you would want to concentrate your marketing on those search engines.  How do you know which keywords are effective for your particular product or service?  How do you get on the first page of web results?  How do you generate more traffic to your website and more sales?  How do you get exposure for your product, brand or service?  What can you use to get exposure for your product, brand or service?

At SD Internet Marketing, we have trained professionals who know exactly what needs to be done.  If you were to invest the time it takes to optimize your website for search engines (SEO), you would have to spend hundreds of hours familiarizing yourself with the unique way search engines operate.  You would have to figure out what works best by trial and error.  Then you would have to apply what you learned to your website and see whether it shows positive results.

Meanwhile, your competitor will simply invest in company such as SD Internet Marketing, a company that has a proven track record.  Through our company, business people and website owners have gotten the brand exposure and recognition they are looking for, and they have seen their website move in the search results.  They have also seen the accompanying traffic that comes along with better search results.  In addition, they have seen an increase in sales, with a resulting excellent return on investment.

You need to begin online marketing because it has become a must in today’s world.  At SD Internet Marketing, we will help you exploit the Internet market, whether locally, nationally or globally.

Give us a call at 1-800-340-SDIM (7346) or 619-261-4348.  One of our Marketing experts will take your call and help you figure out what approach is best for your product or service.  Years of training and expertise allow us to help your business sell more.

As a business owner, you should be planning for your sales to take off instead of hoping for the best, and continuing with things as they are.  The time to start your sales growth is now and not sometime next year.  You can bet that your Internet savvy competitors are not sitting idly by.  They are probably well into their 2010 Internet marketing campaign, getting brand recognition, and increasing sales.

Get Brand and Service Recognition

What you need to do right now is start a planned and organized marketing campaign through a variety of Internet venues.  However, if you are like most business owners, you simply do not have the time to both manage your business, and then take care of the marketing.  It is difficult enough to coordinate everything that you need to take care of, and to generate Internet traffic and sales.

Since time is at a premium for you, then you should allow SD Internet Marketing take care of everything for you.  This will give you the time you need to actually manage your business.  The professionals at SD Internet Marketing are trained in the latest techniques to get traffic to your website and increase your sales.

Do you know who the ideal customer for your business is?

Where does your ideal customer work and how does he/she access the Internet?

How much does your ideal customer earn and how much of that does he/she spend online?

Is your ideal customer a manager, worker, business owner, parent who stays at home and so on?

Do you know how much time your ideal customer spends on the Internet and the websites he/she likes to visit?

How do you get your ideal customer to look for products and/or services?

How do you get your ideal customer to go to your website rather than to your competition’s website?

At SD Internet Marketing, we will determine the answers to those questions.  You will not have to spend your valuable time and energy trying to get answers to these questions.  Our professionals specialize in getting those answers for you.  We will then direct your Internet marketing campaign to your ideal customer.  Your website visitors will increase and your sales will grow accordingly.

Advertising on the Internet is not a simple matter, but our experience has allowed SD Internet Marketing to develop techniques that work.  Do not hesitate to contact us so that we can start your 2010 campaign immediately.  Every hour and day that you wait is an hour or day that your competition will be ahead of you, and staying ahead of the competition is what will give you the best return for your investment.

The recession that the United States is slowly coming out of hit the marketing budget for most companies really hard.  During a recession, it is the marketing budget that gets slashed to make way for other expenses which are deemed more relevant and important.  However, studies and our vast experience have shown that marketing is not one of the budgets that should be cut.

If you are a business owner who has cut, or who is thinking about cutting your marketing and advertising budget, you need to be familiar with the ABP/Meldrum and Fewsmith joint study, which was conducted during the 1970 recession.  It showed that “sales and profits can be maintained and increased in recession years, and in the years immediately following, by those who are willing to maintain an aggressive marketing posture…”  You also need to be familiar the follow up study that determined:  ”Companies that did not cut advertising expenditures during the 1974-75 recession experienced higher sales and net income…”  The studies they conducted were against companies that cut their marketing budget and cut back on promotional efforts.

Increase Advertising = Increase in Sales

There was also a study conducted after the 1981-1982 recession by McGraw-Hill’s Research Laboratory of Advertising Performance.  The report from the study revealed that B2B firms “that maintained or increased their advertising expenditures during the 1981-82 recession averaged significantly higher sales growth, both during the recession and for the three years thereafter, than those that eliminated or decreased advertising.”

Therefore, if you have decided to cut advertising, you are going against what studies and our experience have shown.  You may still be feeling the crunch from the latest contraction, but you need to find the money to put into marketing and perhaps cut elsewhere.  If you followed the trend and slashed marketing and advertising, you have given your competitors a leg up.  Aggressive and savvy business owners will have been increasing revenue and profits while you decide it is time to once again increase your budget.  They have been marketing and advertising their brand.  They have been in the public’s eye and they are the ones who will be remembered when there is more available spending cash.

Here are some more numbers if you still need to be convinced that you need to market and advertize.  There were 101 household name-brands compared during the 1989-1991 recession.  Among them were names that everyone is familiar with such as Jell-O, Crisco, Green Giant and Doritos.  These companies experienced a sales decrease of 26 to 64%.  However, Procter & Gamble, which then owned the company, increase Jif peanut butter’s  ad support and sales skyrocketed by as much as 57%.  Something similar happened to Kraft salad dressing, whose additional ad support saw sales go up by 70%.

It is common for small businesses to instinctively react and cut marketing and advertising so that profits will not suffer.  However, in a recession or downturn in the economy, it is the aggressive marketer and advertiser that profits.  You need to increase spending rather than slash the budget, market to your customers, start sponsoring, command premium prices by explaining the value message of your brand, introduce new products and, above all, draw on an Internet audience that is millions strong and growing.

That’s where SDInternetMarketing comes in to help you conduct your Internet marketing campaign.  SD Internet Marketing has the experience and knows the methods that will get your website noticed, increase your visitors and help your sales grow.  We stay current and up to date with the most recent market trends and studies.  As a business owner, you will have the time to take care of your sales, knowing that SDInternetMarketing.com will be taking care of everything else.

The topic of online video marketing is not something new, but it is still something that is underused.  Business owners should take advantage of the opportunities that online video offers.  Online video popularity continues to grow at an unbelievably rapid pace.  Business owners should tap into this growth and create new marketing opportunities.  If you have not visited one of the video content websites, then perhaps it is time to begin doing so.  A quick visit may even generate some great marketing ideas.

A well place video that’s interesting, quick hitting, makes a point and attracts attention can do wonders for your website.  You have to be creative, original and thought provoking to capture your audience.  Think of ads that you see on television that really grab your attention.  You should be looking to produce online videos along a similar vein.  Perhaps you can find new twists on formulas that have been over worked.  Maybe you can explore new ideas and concepts.

We Know Where and

How to Advertise

However you decide to do it, you will soon find what works and what you need to stay away from.  You have to fit your ad to your brand.  You have to make the viewer connect with your advertisement.  The advantage is that there are online video viewers in the millions waiting for something that will catch their attention.  They will then do marketing for you because they will pass on your video.

Another advantage is that you do not have to spend millions of dollars for your video to draw attention.  All it takes is creativeness and understanding your target audience.  Once you do, then you will have good website or content promotion.  You can even offer testimonials about your website, service or product and SDInternetMarketing can help.

Of course, the key is to convert your video viewers to website visitors.  More website visitors mean more potential customers and sales, and this formula has been proven time and again.  If you have marketing videos that are creative, attention grabbing and quick hitting, you will also form a return customer base.  People will come back to your website or video channel to see what you have been up to lately.

If you do not have the time to produce your own videos, then perhaps you should let the professionals at SDInternetMarketing.com conduct your video marketing campaign.  Our seasoned professionals can help you with ideas, themes, production, placement and every other aspect of your video marketing campaign.  If you are looking for San Diego Internet marketing or marketing in general, our company can help you every step of the way.

Thankfully there are tons of ways available for you to attract, convert and keep viewers.  We will discuss some of these different means in later posts.

If you are a webmaster, you may want to start supplying geographical region information when doing Google submissions.  In case you have not paid close attention, some search results in Google have begun to include this particular information.

The Best SEO Techniques

Geographical information can be invaluable because it allows you to quickly determine where a website or company is located.  Top level domains, .com, .net, .info and .org, do not allow you to determine location at a glance.  However, country code top level domains or ccTLDS such as .ca (Canada) or .com.ar (Argentina) provide the information at a glance.

This has been taken a step further in that you no longer have to click on the results or refine the search to see the actual page for which you are looking, according to Google software engineer Piyush Prahladka.   He added that the hope is that region tags will help searchers identify which results are most relevant to their queries.

Anyone who has had to spend any time at all doing searches knows that it is essential to cut down the time spent clicking on links that do not lead you to relevant queries.  The seconds that you might save by not having to click on an irrelevant query you might now be able to spend finding the right results.  This is especially important to regional marketers who want to concentrate on a particular area.  If you can see regional results, you can the concentrate on actual Internet marketing rather than fruitless search queries.

As a webmaster or website owner, you can include this information in Google by logging in to Google Webmaster tools and then going to Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. You can then associate your country or region with your website or family of websites.

Be advised that Google is only including the information for certain domains (.com and .net).  If you have a site that is location specific (ccTLD – .com.ar, .ca, .br, etc.), then the region tags will not be available.  In addition, if you are doing searches from San Diego, no results are going to say US.  The region that you are searching in has to be different than the region you are in when you do your search.

However, webmasters and business owners, you should not be upset with this peculiarity in the system.  All you have to do is find a proxy in another country, do your search and you will see US results turning up.  You can also use Google.co.uk or any other ccTLD for Google to search from and you will see results from other regions.

You have heard of Macy’s, Bank of America, Gucci, and a number of other names. The name is what equates to a brand. We can look at Washington Mutual and realize, at one point in time, they had a highly respected name in banking. Their brand in recent months has dwindled to the point that few people look at them with the respect they once had. Take a look at J.C. Penney. This store, originally created as a dry goods store, has been around since 1912. It has stayed alive because it has maintained its brand through the years.

The point is this – your name, the name of your business – are what people remember about you, and your company. Of course you want to keep your star shining as brightly as possible. To do this there are some things you will want to do, and that may include redesigning your website.

Get Your Website Redesigned

First, we all need to understand that a brand does not just happen. It is something we need to build and grow. We want to establish a name people will remember and then target the name so it is not just a remembered name but so it becomes the preferred choice of the consumer.

If you are on vacation and traveling through an unknown town where you decide to spend the night – would you spend your money to stay at Rock-a-bye Motel, or, for the same amount of money would you choose the Best Western. Most likely you would choose the latter because the name has been branded in your mind. You know you will stay in a clean, comfortable, safe hotel for the night because you not only recognize the name but you also know the value it has to offer.

Another item to remember when selecting your name is that it needs to be unique yet say what you are all about. For example, if you need some plumbing supplies do you want to visit Joe’s or do you want to go to Home Depot. Most likely you will go to Home Depot because you are pretty certain they will have what you need. Joe’s, well, we are not even certain they have plumbing supplies. For all we know they could be a bar, a restaurant, or a number of other businesses.

A key ingredient to your successful branding is your customer service. If you operate a nursery and a customer visits you and wants to buy a specific cherry tree, your sales associates need to know their products as well as detailed information. How will the customer react if the sales person does not know which of the trees are cherry let alone a specific type. Say good-bye to that customer as they head down the street to their old nursery. Although they heard your products might be cheaper the customer has learned their lesson that s/he needs to go to their tried and true place of business where they are now and forever a loyal customer.

You need to establish your name. Once your name is established, in a positive manner, you must start building a reputation whereby your brand will be the first name a customer thinks of when s/he needs a specific item. You must separate yourself from your competitors; build a business brand that creates trust as well as loyalty. One you have positive branding you will grow your business to where you want to take it.