Author Archive
How to get money from an investor in 2 minutes?
Posted by: | CommentsPierre Chappaz, is a former Netvibes co-CEO and more important he cofounded a company Kelkoo which was acquired by Yahoo for 579 million USD in 2004. announced that he is going to invest in an Internet startup based on the best 2-minute video pitch. We suggest that you find some French guy (or maybe even better French girl 
) for your team. First, to read and undesrtand his announcement and also it doesn’t hurt that the pitch be in French (you know that French can be vulnerable about English language). This is great PR for him.
So, here is the chance for you 5 minutes of fame. Ooops, 2 minutes of fame. Go get ‘em tigers. Good luck!
Ad Swap
Posted by: | CommentsAd swap is one of the best ways to get new subscribers for your email newsletter or web site if you have a limited budget for online advertising. Swapping ads is a great free technique. If you make good ad swap partnerships with email newsletters or web sites that focus on similar target audience like yours you will get quality (targeted) subscribers. Different Internet marketing studies show that most of your visitors will come to your site from links on other sites.
1) How to find swap resources
You will have to spend some time in finding ad swap partners. It can be time-consuming but if you find the right partners it is well worth it. You have to find partners that have similar businesses like yours, but not the same. It is not recommended to advertise your competitors. For example, if you offer web hosting services you can make ad swap partnerships with email hosting companies. You have to add only those ad swap partners in your email newsletter that will provide value-added services for your subscribers.
Several sites and services will make your job of finding swap resources easier.
Ad swap web sites and email newsletters
Also, you can visit different web forums that have similar target group like your email newsletter or web site. Beside that, you can visit some top web sites like Alexa ranking on different topics so you can find quality resources there.
Searching on Google for places with complement content like yours is also important. When you search on Google you should know which words from your area of business people usually use when they search for information. Google has a service called Keyword Tool and also one useful keyword suggestion service can be found on Digital Point.
Services
Coderedstudios.com – Great website and multimedia design firm.
http://www.coderedstudios.com/
2) How to arrange ad swaps
When you contact webmasters for possible ad swap cooperation it is recommended that you personalize your message. So instead of: “Dear Webmaster…” you should write: “Dear Mr. Last Name or First Name…”
After that, you will introduce yourself and your web site or email newsletter and tell them why you are interested in making link exchange with them. It is important to persuade them, to tell them “what is in” for them. It is best if you exchange links with email newsletters with similar number of subscribers. However, quantity is not the most important thing. The most important thing is quality. Both parties have to be sure that their ads will appear on reputable web sites and email newsletters.
If you want to advertise in email newsletters you should send them your ad, preferably max. 5 lines and formatted with 65 characters in each line. You have to ask them to let you know when they will place your ad in their email newsletter and to forward you a copy. You will do the same. If you want that your ad appear in HTML format you can make a special section on your site where you will place your banners in several formats and to place HTML codes so that you will make your ad swap partner’s job easier.
It is also important to discuss about ad placements and how many other ads will be in that issue. It is not the same if your ad will be at the beginning of the issue, in the middle of an article or at the end of email newsletter. Also, it is better that your ad be the only one in that particular issue.
If you want to advertise in email newsletters that have more subscribers than yours, you can give them special deals like “3 for 1” so that you will place 3 times their ad for one placement of your ad.
Swapping ads is time-consuming but can bring very good results. Also, this way you can make some good online friends that can be of help for your business development.
Good blogs for emarketing, ebusiness and online trends
Posted by: | CommentsHere I would like to share with eMarketingBlog readers some of my favorite blogs related to emarketing, ebusiness and online trends.
Micropersuasion – good blog mostly related to PR, online trends and blogosphere by Steve Rubel
Adverblog – blog about advertising
MarketingPilgrim – blog about Internet marketing
The Jason Calacanis Weblog – writes about different Internet related things, mostly about his latest venture Mahalo
PaidContent.org – the only thing you need to read if you are interested in buying/selling content and services, online trends
PaulStamatiou.com – geek blog, gadgets, Internet services
E-Consultancy – gives good tips, focus on European market, too Also, offer paid reports and buyer’s guides
MarketingSherpa & MarketingExperiments – two web sites recently joined forces, offering one of the most useful marketing info and case studies
MarketingVox, MediaBuyerPlanner and MarketingCharts – partner group of marketing and media web sites, offering up-to-date news and charts from the industry
ThinkVitamin – quality articles about web developing, web design, social networks and Internet in general
Ad Age Digital – interesting news from the digital industry
Bokardo – social aspects of the Internet by Joshua Porter
Copyblogger – if you want to improve your copyrighting skills
Pronet Advertising – different useful advertising-related articles
HipMojo.com – covers Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley
RSS in a Nutshell
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the latest trends in e-publishing is that more and more publishers start using RSS in order to enhance deliverability of their email newsletters or readership of their web sites.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (someone will say Rich Site Summary). In plain words it is technology that enables publishers to deliver their content more effectively to their visitors or members of their email newsletters. Even today not many people use RSS to track their favourite places on the Web. RSS is very important in delivering content online and many companies want to have good solutions that they can provide to their users. That’s why recently Google bought Feedburner for around 100 million dollars.
If you want to be informed everytime there is a new article on eMarketingBlog.com you can add this link in your RSS reader: http://feeds.feedburner.com/emarketingblog
Here are some interesting facts about RSS usage.
- Forrester Research announced in September 2005 that six percent of consumers use RSS feeds once a week or more, compared with 2 percent in 2004.
- Only 9% of Americans have a good idea and 65% are not sure what RSS feed is – according to a research made by Pew Internet & American Life Project published in July 2005.
- 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators – according to Pew Internet & American Life Project research announced in January 2005.
More and more email publishers start implementing RSS in their Internet marketing mix because they are aware of the fact that average deliverability and open rates are not as good as several years ago because of spam problems and email overload. Deliverability is very much affected by your email marketing software. However, even with email marketing software that has high deliverability ratio you can be quite sure that your deliverability is never 100%.
Many legitimate publishers are faced with problems that their emails can be blocked by ISP filters and this won’t happen using RSS to deliver your content.
You can use RSS not only if you publish your email newsletter. You can use it if you have a web site, as well. For example, if you have a section with Internet marketing articles you can make a RSS feed so anyone who subscribes to your feed will be automatically notified when you add new articles. This way you will have repeat visits.
There are some debates on email vs. RSS. It can’t be viewed that way. Internet marketers have to use all available tools, technologies and channels to deliver their content. So they should use email, web site and RSS to deliver their content and communicate with their target audience.
Process of RSS content delivery is simple. You have to create a RSS feed. RSS is actually a XML file. You can see its structure if you enter it in your browser. Good thing is that you don’t even have to know to make an RSS feed “by hand” because there are several tools that will do that for you.
As with any other software and services you can choose whether you want to use desktop RSS generation software or hosted online RSS generation software.
If you want a desktop feed service good choice is FeedForAll at http://www.feedforall.com (fee-based, one-time fee) while if you prefer hosted web-based services you can check services like http://www.nooked.com (free and fee-based options), http://www.myrsscreator.com and http://www.press-feed.com (free and company subscription).
Also, you can try free services at http://www.2rss.com and WebReference.com:
http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/makerss.pl
http://www.webreference.com/cgi-bin/perl/rssedit.pl
As we have mentioned above, RSS is usually standard feature of all blog services so you won’t need additional tools for RSS in case you are a blogger. One of the free blog services that have good RSS support is b2 Evolution http://www.b2evolution.net.
If your RSS feed isn’t online you will have to upload to your web server first. If you visit web sites that offer option to subscribe to RSS feed you will probably see RSS feed address that looks similar to http://www.yourdomain.com/rss.xml
After that anyone who wants to get your content via RSS will have to copy this address to their RSS/News reader. The most popular RSS readers are http://www.newsgator.com, http://www.feeddemon.com, http://www.rssreader.com. http://www.attensa.com.
So this way people who want to get your content won’t have to give you their email addresses. RSS is pull-based technology so that means that visitors need to get the content and you can’t send them. That’s why they can’t get unwanted messages, same way when you use double opt-in for email subscriptions with a difference that using email newsletter you *send* your content and using RSS technology your members *retrieve* your content.
When you want to add new content you will upload it on your web site and add a new description to your RSS feed. Usually, publishers include only a brief description in your RSS feed with the appropriate link on their web site. However, you can include complete articles in your RSS feeds. This way you can publish your email newsletter on your web site and place the RSS. This way your subscribers will be automatically notified when you publish a new issue.
If you are email marketer it is recommended that you place a RSS button (orange is standard colour for RSS button) below your subscription form so that your visitors be aware that they can get your email newsletter in RSS format, too. Anyway, if you offer RSS, your orange button has to be highly visible on your web site, to be “above the fold”. You can also include where you will give a brief explanation about RSS and music video auditions.
RSS technology evolves so that now you can measure how many RSS subscribers you have, you can get a click-thru ratio of each RSS feed you have, popularity of each RSS, to personalize your RSS, you can place ads like Google AdSense or Pheedo in your feeds etc.
When you have your own RSS feeds you should promote them. We can recommend you to make a My Yahoo! and My MSN account and to list your feed URL there. When you place Yahoo! and MSN buttons (with links below) on your web site you can expect to be indexed much faster than usual.
To list RSS feed on My Yahoo!, after you have created your account click on “Add Content”. After that you will see large “Find Content” field and on the right an option “Add RSS by URL”. Enter your RSS feed URL and click on “Add To My Yahoo!” button. In order to enable your readers to place your feed in their My Yahoo! you have to place Yahoo! button (you can put that “Add To My Yahoo!” button but in smaller format) and link it to this link
If you want to add MSN button on your web site, place a MSN button with this link
You can also use useful services like Syndic8, Pingomatic, Pingoat, FeedShot to promote your web site and RSS feeds to the most popular blog and RSS search engines. Also, useful site if you publish blogs or RSS feeds is FeedBurner.
Webinar: Advertising and promotion of companies on the Internet
Posted by: | CommentsFor all eMarketingBlog.com blog readers who understand Serbian (Croatian, Bosnian etc) I want to announce that I’m gonna have a webinar about online advertising on Wednesday, August 29th at 16h. Price for webinar is less than 25 Euro, duration is 1.5 hour and you can watch the webinar wherever you live on the planet (as I said, it helps if you understand Serbian ).
You can find more info about this webinar if you click here.