Small businesses need to make the most of every advertising dollar. Understanding what marketing trends will be most successful in 2010 can help your business soar above the competition, while ignoring those trends could leave you floundering.

Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to head the list of online marketing strategies. New aspects in 2010 include personalization and greater relevance. As you develop your SEO strategy this year, dedicate some of your resources to developing content that targets niche audiences. You’ll also want to keep your web content up to date since search engines will begin factoring publication dates, geo-locations, and social media content into their relevancy algorithms.

Social network marketing will continue to rise in popularity in 2010, but you’ll need to fine tune your strategy in order to use it to best advantage. It will no longer be sufficient to maintain a Facebook or Twitter page. You’ll need to take the next step and use it as a vibrant forum in which to engage current and potential customers in meaningful conversations.

Mobile marketing has exploded and continues to rise in popularity. More people now have access to cell phones than to cable TV or home computers. Small businesses need to take advantage of this burgeoning market by creating mobile apps and by instituting location-based marketing techniques.

Video blogs are the blogging method of choice in 2010. Millions of web users view online videos each day, and while video blogging may not replace the text version, still, companies can expect an increase in the number of viewers who want more than pages of text about their products. Videos are highly shareable, and are more interactive than text; consequently, they have the potential to attract more loyal groups of followers than the more traditional written blogs.

Building your web presence should be a key leg of your online marketing platform in 2010. It’s no longer sufficient to maintain your website, Facebook page, and Twitter page. You’ll want to make your website visible in as many venues as possible including blogs, Youtube, Yelp profiles, and email newsletters. For instance, videos that appear on your website but nowhere else online will fail to reach a large portion of your target audience due to the web user’s tendency to search one centralized site such as Youtube for any videos on a given topic. If your video doesn’t appear on Youtube, then for that viewer it may as well not exist.

Online marketing trends in 2010 will expand on the succession of new marketing outlets that appeared in 2009. Using your advertising dollars effectively means putting them towards the venues that will produce the most return on your investment rather than continuing to invest in trends that may be dying out.

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This post was written over at Noble Samurai and touches on a topic that I am asked regularly. With their permission, I am re-posting this here as it is a very relevant topic in today’s web marketing world.

There is a common misconception that in order to develop a successful online business you need to be targeting hundreds or thousands of keywords.

This perception often causes a great deal of confusion and can lead to ‘Analysis Paralysis’ as people spend months analyzing keywords looking for the perfect opportunity. As a result they never follow through to create a complete and profitable business.

Last week, a group of us were discussing this problem and came to the conclusion that the reason this misconception is still so prevalent is that in the past, focusing on quantity versus quality DID actually work.

In the early days of Internet marketing, if you placed a large number of related keywords on a page or included them in Meta and Alt tags you could often get rankings that led to traffic.

Similarly, in the early days of Google Adwords, it was possible to load your account with thousands of keywords and generate a steady stream of traffic to your site.

However, while this may have been the case in 2003, it is very important to realize that THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

The old approach was a ‘shotgun strategy’ in which you targeted a large number of keywords, took a shot and hoped for the best.

With the continuous improvements in search engine algorithms and the development of quality metrics such as Google’s Quality score, this approach is no longer effective.

The mantra of “The more keywords the better” is a thing of the past.

The alternative to the old shotgun strategy is a new ‘laser like’ approach in which you explore your market carefully and then zero in on a small subset of specific keywords.

To understand why this laser focused approach is so important we need to examine something we call the ‘Iceberg Principle’.

According to the Iceberg Principle, finding a good keyword is just the tip of the Iceberg.

In order to transform a keyword into a genuine asset for your business, you need to undertake a range of tasks that most people unfortunately never get around to.

These tasks include:

On-page optimisation

Off-page optimisation

Obtaining high quality backlinks

Writing articles

Conducting targeted PPC campaigns

Etc.

The truth is that every one of these activities requires time and effort. Clearly, if you are trying to target thousands of keywords, following through on these activities becomes virtually impossible.

So, instead of generating lists containing thousands of semantically related keywords, here is the laser focused strategy that we recommend in today’s SEO environment.

To get started, use Market Samurai to generate a sample of keywords in your niche and then continually refine and filter these keywords until you find 5-10 keywords that have the following characteristics:

(1) They are highly relevant to your niche

(2) They have reasonable levels of traffic eg. 100 visitors per day

(3) They have acceptable levels of competition eg. Less than 30000 competing web pages

(4) They have low strength of competition ie. The top 10 sites in Google are not well optimized

Once you have identified and selected your target keywords, redirect your focus to the on-page and off-page SEO tasks necessary to transform your keywords into genuine traffic-generating assets for your business.

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This day and age, having a website just isn’t enough. You may have heard that all you need to do is fill in your meta descriptions and you’re good to go. Unfortunately for you, search engine optimization, or SEO, is not that simple anymore.

Google is the mother load of all search engines, commanding roughly 70% of the market share. Google tends to be a trend setter that other search engines follow. For the most part, your focus should be on improving your search engine ranking within Google. When that happens, you’ll also find that your sites begin ranking better in the other search engines as well.

There are tons, and I mean tons, of different ways for your site to move to the top. Believe it or not, sometimes you just need proper keyword density and a fairly low competitive search phrase, and you’ll be good to go. Most of the time though, you’re going to need to do more; much more.

I do SEO for a living, so I could literally go one for days regarding all of the things that can be done from. However, for now, I’m just going to stick with the basics. First off, we need to figure out which keywords are going to be best for your website. There are a couple of keyword research tools out there such as SEO Book and Wordtracker. I am actually in the process of developing a similar tool to Wordtracker, but that will be announced at a later time:) Once you find your ideal keyword phrases, we want to make sure this is placed throughout your website. Mainly, you want this placed in between your title tags. Ideally, you’d like to have the keyword phrase placed in header font. Each image on your website allows you to include “alt” tags. Place your search terms in those tags as well! This is your basic overview for your on page optimization. You want to ensure your keywords are weaved into your content as well, but it’s important to remember that you need to speak to your customers first and foremost, not to the search engines.

Lets remember that having relevant and quality content that matches your keywords should be a priority. If you’re able to churn out quality content every day, or at least on a regular basis, you’ll accomplish two things. One, search engines will take notice and your content will be indexed quicker. Secondly, your visitors will keep coming back to see what’s new.

One last thing I want to touch on, is your link building strategy. To begin, I suggest submitting your site to various directories. You want to avoid link farms, and free for all pages. You’ll also want to avoid reciprocal link exchanges at this time. Perhaps down the road, you’ll find link exchange partners where it will work out, but it’s not something I would necessarily do for an affiliate website.

When you begin making money, or if you’d like to cut out the time requirements of link building, you can look to outsource this responsibility. I would suggest you try yourself first though, just so you know what it entails and have a better grasp of the process. This is your basic link building strategy. However, your link building can expand into several other aspects as well. Such as: commenting on blogs, forums, social networks, groups, etc. For your first few affiliate programs though, I would suggest keeping things simple.

This is a basic SEO overview for beginning affiliate marketers. If you’d like assistance or more detail regarding any of these principles, feel free to ask!

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The internet gives you an opportunity to gather an almost endless supply of information on virtually any possible interest. As time goes on, the internet continues to be engrained into our daily lives. It has been said that the internet is growing at more than 1 million pages everyday. That is an alarming rate of information. The popularity of the internet gives an opportunity for businesses and entrepreneur’s a chance at greater financial gains.

As I have mentioned before, affiliate marketing can be a great opportunity to make money online. Here are a few basic principles that will help you to get your affiliate marketing program started.

First, you want to identify a particular niche market that you are intersted in and building a website around it. Finding something you are passionate about is a key element for a number of reasons. For one, you won’t be bored with the subject matter. Another reason is because it will help bring out your best, without much effort. You’ll also leave an impression with potential customers that you are an expert. This helps to gain customer trust. Once you have established your niche market, you want to start searching for good paying merchants with products or services that relate. It helps to have knowledge of the product itself, so for your first attempt I suggest sponsoring something you have purchased yourself.

After you have established your market, built your website, and chosen your affiliate product, you’re ready to promote. Promotion of your affiliate program will be what you spend the most of your time with. This is the most important aspect of your affiliate marketing career, so it pays for you to take the time to understand this portion. This is something I’ll discuss in greater detail later on, but don’t be afraid to read books and articles about the best promotional techniques.

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme. Sure, it’s possible to earn large sums of money by sponsoring high end and expensive products. However, these products are much harder to sell. Affiliate marketing requires persistence and hard work. As I mentioned before, you need to be willing to learn more every day. Through hard work and determination, you can build your affiliate marketing success and earn money even as you sleep.

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Affiliate marketing continues to gain in popularity. It has been proven that affiliate marketing can be an effective way to make money online. Some affiliate marketing gurus are able to generate a full-time income strictly on their affiliation programs. Affiliate programs are truly a win win for both the merchant and the affiliate. Both mutually benefit from the sale. The merchant didn’t have to do the selling, and the affiliate didn’t need to have a product of his own. Yet, both get paid. Affiliate marketing is growing on a daily basis, thus increasing the competition you’ll face. This putting a premium on creativity and utilizing effective methods in which to make your affiliate program succeed.

Affiliate programs are one of the most effective forms of advertising. It’s cost-effective and relatively risk-free. Yet, many people still fair at affiliate marketing. There are numerous reasons for this. Probably the most important aspect of an affiliate program is how it’s being advertised. Many affiliate marketers stumble across the industry when looking for easy ways to make money online. Therefore, they may not be the hardest working. Having a solid work ethic will go a long ways towards your affiliate marketing success. If you want to earn the big bucks, you need to put forth the time. Whenever you aren’t working on your affiliate program, someone out there is.

Not being prepared is another key reason for failure. By you reading this, it just shows that you are in the process of preparing yourself which is a step ahead of most. You need to make sure you’re researching any affiliate program you join. You need to become familiar with the merchant, and cannot just choose every affiliate opportunity you come across. Find closely related products to your website. If you’re website is built around weight loss, it probably doesn’t make sense to pitch your poker related affiliate product.

Your website will be your most important tool for your affiliate program. Proper research should go into your domain name, design, and the content you’re going to display. If you’re website is not up to par, you will surely lose potential customers. Your quality content is what will keep visitors coming back. Having overly hyped product pitches can be a deterent for your visitors. If you aren’t able to keep a visitor interested, you won’t be able to lead them to the merchant’s website. Not getting them to the merchant’s website means no sales.

I mentioned planning your domain name. This is also referred to as your top level domain name. Try and use your ideal search terms within your domain name. This helps visitors know your site is relavent to what they’re looking for. It also helps to gain better search engine ranking.

Affiliate marketing, like anything else, is a constantly changing environment. You must be willing to change and adapt, and be willing to continue to learn more. Many are focused on the end goal of making money quickly, and lose sight of the path to reach that goal. Continue to gain as much knowledge in these areas as possible: advertising, web design and development, search engine optimization, and of course affiliate marketing.

I mentioned in my previous post about persistence, and I’ll bring it up again. Don’t get disappointed if your first attempts don’t work. There’s a learning curve, and you must come to the realization that not everything you promote is going to make you money. Many affiliates quit if they don’t get immediate results and then signup for a new program. Instantly blaming the merchant’s product for their lack of sales.  Instead, try and learn why the program didn’t work. Is it because of the product you’re affiliate yourself with, or is it because you weren’t able to get traffic? You got traffic, but couldn’t convert them to sales? There are a number of reasons things may not work out, but you must try and learn from those things.

Think I left out any reasons why affiliate marketers fail? Feel free to share!

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In a couple of my previous posts I stated that I would be starting a series of Affiliate Marketing posts. This is to be in conjunction with the launching of Novel Concept Studio’s Affiliate Program later this month. I’ll try and write a daily post regarding the topic, as there are a lot of things I want to cover with regards to Affiliate Marketing. I am in the process of a major project, and also have clients that I need to attend to, so I cannot guarantee daily posts, but it will be frequent! So with that said, let us begin on this fascinating topic!

Getting Started
We all have our own interests and hobbies. Some people love sports. Others love books and movies. There are those who love gardening, others who love spending time with their pets and some enjoy traveling.  These are all interests and hobbies that help us to relax and get more out of life. They’re an escape from every day problems and/or troubles. Having said that, not everyone has a hobby that makes money. Unless, of course, you consider your job a hobby and truly enjoy it.

Having a money producing hobby could open a lot of doors for you. It would obviously allow you to spend a little more lavishly. It could also allow you to eventually quit your current job. The ladder is why many of us today go online to start a business; either to supplement their income or to gradually replace their current income from their job. Affiliate marketing is a great way to start earning money online. Thus, making it a hobby you might want to pick up.

What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing, as described by Wikipedia, is an internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. In other words, it is a revenue sharing partnership between a web merchant the affiliate. The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, sales to the merchant. Referring sales is the most often used in affiliate programs. This type of system allows you make money in a business where you don’t have upfront costs of creating your own product. You also do not have to worry about any bookkeeping, e-commerce, or customer support as those are the merchant’s responsibility.

Do You Have What it Takes to be an Affiliate Marketer?
Before you begin your venture into affiliate marketing, you first need to choose which niche market you’re going to be affiliate with. What businesses and products do you know the most? Which products can you do the best job of selling? Once you discover your specialty, you are going to need to come to a realization. The realization is that you are going to need to remember the three P’s.

Three P’s of Affiliate Marketing
Persistence
Patience
Perseverance

These three qualities are one’s you should possess in order to be a successful affiliate marketer. Too many online business owners fail because they become impatient. You have to know what your strengths are, the things in which you are good at and your capabilities. It’s also important that you have a strong desire to succeed in affiliate marketing.

Notice that sales skills are not listed in those qualities. Why are sales skills omitted? Because, it’s the merchant’s job to ultimately make the sale. You can recommend them, you can give your own personal experiences, but you don’t need to be a hard nosed sales person to be a successful affiliate marketer. I am not going to say it does not help, but it’s certainly not required.

It’s not an easy task to become a successful affiliate marketer. You have to learn the techniques of marketing the products you’re sponsoring. You shouldn’t take up every affiliate marketing opportunity that presents itself. I would suggest that you start by promoting a product you know, perhaps even used or purchased yourself. This gives you that first hand knowledge of the product and you can feel more comfortable supporting it.

An important aspect of being an affiliate marketer, is actually being successful at internet marketing. Most affiliate marketers have their own website. It’s important to know how to effectively draw traffic to that website so that you can further enhance your chances of a sale. It’s possible to be an affiliate marketer without having a website. This is done by Pay Per Click ads (something I will discuss in another post). However, having a website and promoting a product or service within that niche will be a better long term solution.

It is also beneficial to have knowledge on how to “upsell” your visitors for the more expensive services. This helps to portray you as an expert in your niche, and will go a long way to improving your sales. There are affiliate marketers that think just having affiliate links on their website will bring them good profits. This can have some truth to it, but the more successful marketers still believe that making use of strong marketing campaigns is still important. Affiliate marketers will find more success when they treat their customers or online visitors as friends, not necessarily as just consumers or customers. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site.

Being creative doesn’t hurt your chances either. Another key to being successful with affiliate marketing is to create a quality content based website and incorporate your affiliate links into your content. You have to provide your prospects with good, quality information to keep them coming back to your site.

Stay tuned, as I’ll be devling into several topics with regards to affiliate marketing. Have other thoughts that you think might be beneficial? Any acronyms you use in relation to affiliate marketing?  Let me know what you think by commenting!

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In this day and age, Internet Marketing can encompass a variety of forms. One effective form that business owners can utilize is that of message boards, or commonly referred to as forums. Forums are a gathering place for people to communicate and share ideas. These ideas are generally focused on a particular niche. If you open an online furniture store, you can find a community based around furniture simply by using a search query for, “furniture forums.” Variations of that term can help you find more possible forums to participate in as well.

The key in capitalizing on this marketing method is finding forums that are in your niche market and becoming a part of the community. When marketing via forums, you want to ensure you read their policies and terms of service beforehand. Failing to abide by some simple forum rules, may cause you to be banned and removed from those forums.

Some forums may prevent you from posting URLS, so this can hurt your linking opportunities. However, it is still possible to attract customers if you’re offering a quality service or product. You can still draw in visitors from these message boards by posting quality and meaningful posts. Often times, you will see people just make a simple post with a link to their website. This is considered spam and should never be apart of your message board marketing process. You need to try and participate in conversation and act professionally at all times. Remember, you are representing your company in every post you make.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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It’s a new month, and Novel Concept Studio has been hard at work. We have a few major announcements!

First and foremost, our website at www.novelconceptstudio.com has been COMPLETELY rebuilt. The new website is powered using the Joomla CMS. This gives the company greater flexibility moving forward and is something the company has been working towards for awhile.

The next major announcement is the fact that Novel Concept Studio will be providing web hosting solutions at great prices. This hosting will be backed by Host Gator, a reputable web hosting firm with many awards under their belts. Because of they will be utilizing Host Gator’s servers, Novel Concept Studio can offer the same premium hosting but at a cheaper rate! Great news for anyone or any business in need of a web hosting solution. Details on the web hosting options are being finalized and an official announcement will be coming shortly.

Lastly, and certainly not least, is the announcement of the Online Digital Mall (www.onlinedigitalmall.com). This Online Digital Mall is owned by Novel Concept Studio. It is a social networking site that will bring buyers and sellers together in a unique social atmosphere. Businesses will also be able to create listings on the web site for a reasonable fee of $60. This ad is placed on the site for 6 months and will be in front of people searching for your type of business/product!

We’re proud of what these options bring to the table. All of them should help to enhance our goal of becoming a premier web site management and marketing firm.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

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Digital Asset Management (DAM), or Digital Asset Optimization (DAO), has been floating around the search engine optimization world for a little while now. It is sometimes even referred to as SEO 2.0. Though it is a term that has been around for awhile, it still seems to be a relatively new concept to the SEO field. In my opinion, it is not a whole new internet marketing system, but instead an extension of SEO.

So you’re probably wondering, “what is it?” Well, Digital Asset Management has to do with optimizing digital media files (images, videos, audio files, etc). The difference between DAM and SEO is, SEO applies itself to text based files. With the uprising of video sharing websites like YouTube, it is as important as ever to ensure your digital media files are optimized for search engines.

How It’s Done
It is important that you properly name your digital media files. You also want to give them proper meta descriptions or image alt text. Often times, digital cameras will assign a generic name such as PA122058.jpg. Well, if you want your information to be found under search results for PA122058, then you have a winner. However, if this image is of a business product, then you want to name this image as your business product. A PDF file is another example of a file that can be optimized using this technique. By properly naming the PDF, and then by embedding the PDF file within an HTML file, you will gain SEO benefits as it will be searchable by search engine spiders. You can then tag the PDF file in the same way that you would tag image files and the like.

Videos are a little trickier to optimize. It is easy to just embed a YouTube video into your page, however that actually helps YouTube’s ranking more than it will help your own ranking. If you have a video to share, the right thing to do would be to host it in multiple locations. Not only on YouTube and other digital directories, but also on your own host servers. Again, you want to make sure you have a valid file name, and then tag the files with title and meta tags. This allows you to somewhat control how the videos get indexed by search engines. Hosting the videos yourself allows for viral marketing to take effect, but you also want to make sure your host can control that type of traffic flow.

Utilizing these techniques can help you attract more visitors in a different way.

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Once you have identified a couple of your selected targeted keyword phrases, it is important that these phrases are placed throughout your website. However, just as important, is not being completely repetitive and have these keyword phrases repeated constantly. This can actually do more harm than good, as search engines will catch on to what you are doing with your website. This is called overstuffing.

They key thing is to have your website flow naturally, as ultimately that is what search engines are looking for. They are consistently reworking their algorithms to enhance their results. An ideal keyword density is around the 3% to 6% range. This means your targeted keyword is placed 3 to 6 times out of 100 words of content. Quite frankly, having much more than, you will most likely lose interest in your potential customer anyways because they will just feel like the website is not edited and therefore not trustworthy.

If you’re not sure how many keywords should be within your content, you can take a look at this keyword density tool. You can go to my site for more help on SEO and web design.

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