Internet Marketing Toronto - Ignite!

The New Frontier for Internet Marketing

Well the future has finally arrived with two new technologies, one from Microsoft and the other from Sony. Over the next 5-10 years as these technologies evolve and become cheaper to produce we’re going to see them everywhere. More importantly they will be internet enabled providing us marketers with a new channel for advertising!

Microsoft “Surface”

Microsoft is cool again, as a result of unveiling it’s “Surface” computer which allows users to interact with a touch screen and device aware surface to view content on devices, interact with web services and software and share information in an interactive personal way. Have a look at the video, and see for yourself. This platform will open an entirely new realm of possible advertising vectors for the future!

See it on YouTube.

Sony’s paper thin OLED TV

Sony has been working on this for sometime and we’re now seeing prototypes of it’s paper thin, very small, OLED full color TV’s. As the cost of this technology comes down over the next few years you can bet we’ll see these everywhere including cereal boxes, golf bags and clothing. Just imagine being able to stream Flash ads to a cereal box on top of someones kitchen table. No more reading the ingredients - they’ll be watching your targeted ads! Scary and exciting all the same.

See it on YouTube

We’re excited about these technologies, however, they are very new and unfortunately very expensive. The Surface computer is currently expected to retail for around $10K so only the affluent will have them in their homes, and of course businesses such as restaurants and clinics. We don’t expect these to become ubiquitous for quite some time. So, we’ll keep our eyes on these technologies, and see where they lead us with new and evolving marketing opportunities.

Chris

Search Engine Optimization Is A Marathon And Not A Sprint!

Despite what many marketers wish for, there is no magic potion to receiving instant results for your search engine optimization. At least, you should be leary of systems that promise instant success. I recently read this press release from Search Engine Trust. Although their service will likely help your rankings, it should be used with caution by coupling with other SEO practices such as writing compelling content, and developing an overall site that people want to link to naturally.

Effective SEO should be considered a marathon vs. a sprint. It takes time, and should be comprehensive!

Chris

Google rolls out new analytic and account snapshot

New Google Analytics Beta 

Google is rolling out their new analytics package that should make it easier for site owners and advertisers so see what is happening on their site. The new package is more intuitive and graphical. It also provides better report exporting capabilities. Another big change is the ability to build a dashboard to display your key performance indicators. These changes along with the price point (free) will make this package very attractive indeed.

New Google Account Snapshot Roll out

Some of you may have seen a new tab in your AdWords account.  Everyone else should see it soon. The tab opens a window to an account summary. There is also a visualization of some of the more important items and a drop-down to select some fixed date ranges. The tool is useful to spot dramatic trends or to see the effect of major changes. It generates mini reports quickly and easily. Is it a response to the Yahoo summary page?

Glen

A Better Way To Get Backlinks

Every website owner at one time or another has received at least one link exchange request if not hundreds of them. Many of the link exchange requests are very poorly written and we discard them immediately. Once in a while though I get a really well written one in my inbox. I received one like this today. I won’t mention who it was from, or what site they were promoting because that’s not the point. I will however use this as an example of how not to develop backlinks.

In this case the link exchange request was well written and to the point. As expected I performed my diligence on the company and the person requesting the exchange. In the process of doing so I ran a few searches in the major search engines on the persons name + the name of the company they were promoting.

I was not surprised when I found plenty of backlinks on blogs from this person about the site they were promoting. So, I clicked through to a few and read the postings. What I found was blog spam. The comments were consistently the same and simply pointed the user to a URL back to the site they were promoting. Time and again I saw the exact same spammy post.

Most of these comments will get removed as spam so these kinds of backlinks are not worth the effort expended to create them.

The right way to do this is to provide meaningful content that a reader of the blog in question will derive value from. In the process make reference to the site your promoting only when it makes sense to do so. In other words if the your site has content relevant to the blog posting your commenting on. This same principle applies to comments in forums. Provide meaningful content and people will be drawn to your site to find out more.

We like your opinions - so please share them with us!

Build Traffic For Your Site With Podcasting

More and more frequently we find ourselves speaking with clients about the value of podcasting as a means to generate traffic for your site, and act as a new source of leads. Many people we speak with are not very familiar with what podcasting is let alone how to do it. So, we pulled together a little bit of information to get people started on the road to discovering what podcasting is and how to do it.

First, everyone should be hosting their audio files with LibSyn. Through LibSyn you pay for storage and not bandwidth - which is the most expensive component of podcasting.

Here are some resources which you can read through to gain a better understanding of what podcasting is, and how you can do it.

• http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/00-podcast-tutorial-four-ps.htm
• http://www.voxmedia.org/wiki/How_to_Podcast
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PODcasting
• http://radio.about.com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a.htm

If you find this information useful and want to get started podcasting, please give us a call and one of our Internet Marketing Consultants will be happy to speak with you and get you started!

In Video Text Ads on Google & ScanScout

Two companies have recently begun testing in video text ads. Google recently began piloting their offering via YouTube, and Scanscout with a recent investment began their pilot.

Both systems scan the content of a video scene, and then display a contextualy based text advertisment over the video. Users can then click through the ad. You can think of it as adsense for video.

We’re going to add this medium to our list of trends to watch.

For more on this story read the TechCrunch posting.

We Have Launched Our New Web Site!

We’ve officially launched our new web site last night. The new site with it’s spectacular graphics and compelling information is something we’re very proud to present to the public and our customers. We invite you to come explore the information there including some in depth profiles of the Spark Internet Marketing team.

Have a look when you get a chance. If you have comments or questions, please feel free to send us an email, or give us a call. We’re information junkies so the more you send us the better. Our goal is to continually improve the site with search engine optimization content and features which will benefit you most.

Our next major release of the site is a customer service portal running on Pligg - the social news platform based on the ever popular Digg.com site. Check back often so you don’t miss the launch!

Desktop Widget for Google Analytics Works with Yahoo! Stores

VivAlytics is a great new desktop widget that pulls in and displays data from Google Analytics. The developers Molitus LLC have even configured it to work properly with Yahoo! stores.

To find out more about bringing Google Analytics to your desktop read the rest of the Google Analytics Blog article.

Two New Possible Looks For Google and Yahoo!

We noticed these two postings the other day. It appears that people have been seeing two new “possible” looks for Google and Yahoo! search results.

See, the search engines will often try new things by offering them to a very limited number of people in the real world. When this happens the news spreads pretty quickly!

Check them out…

New Google Look
New Yahoo! Look

Advertising Widgets - A New Trend In SEM

You may not have heard of these yet because they are relatively new. Advertising widgets are small javascript or Flash snippets that serve ads on a publishers website. There are a number of companies providing the service, and we’ll be watching them closely as we evaluate the services to determine if it’s worthwhile bringing to your attention. If our research results are positive we’ll certainly be recommending it to those customers who we believe can benefit most!

Here are the current providers:

• Google Gadget Ads
• Boobox
• AuctionAds
• ebay “ToGo” Widgets
• Tumri Publisher
• Mpire

To read a little more about this new advertising trend read this TechCrunch Article.

If you are interested in finding out more about this topic, please give us call and one of our IMC’s will be happy to shed some light on the subject for you.