What Does Google’s Disappointing Financial Year End Results Mean to Search Marketers
My first degree was actually a BSc in Economics but I shied away from this fascinating discipline to join the army of marketers…online marketers to be precise! This is not to say that headlines related to Finance & Economics do not grab my attention – they absolutely do! Whilst prowling through my G+ stream yesterday, I came across this post from Google’s Larry Page:
And then this post from Avinash Kaushik:
It led me to their Q4 2011 financial summary and Year end report and YouTube webcast.
Here are some take-aways I think every search marketer should take note of from their year end report:
7 Effective Online Marketing Habits That Will Boost Your Business in 2012
“We are all creatures of habit.”
It may be a well-known saying, but do we really understand how true it is? Every part of our lives is influenced by routine, repetition and familiarity in some way, right from choosing what we have for breakfast to making important decisions that will affect our businesses. Of course, some habits are better than others, and forming new habits (or addressing ones we’d rather give up) requires training. It is essential to perform our desired actions, use discipline to repeat them and consistency to keep it up. The more we do this, the more natural it becomes – and a habit is born. Online marketing habits are no different. To make your business presence felt in the digital world, you must be ready and willing to identify positive actions, create a schedule for their execution, dedicate yourself to adhering to the routine and continue to carry it on into the future.
Here’s a guide to the most essential online marketing habits to push yourself into the limelight:
Monitoring Conversations: 10 Ways to Monitor Your Brand Online
All brand managers need to stay vigilant by setting alert systems that pick up on all brand mentions – negative and positive. Negative mentions should be proactively curtailed and positive mentions further promoted online.
So how would you proactively go about monitoring your business’ brand or your personal brand online? Below are free and premium brand monitoring solutions to help you: Read More
5 Ways to Stop the Waste in Your AdWords Campaigns
Paid search is increasingly becoming the preferred option for businesses that aim to generate sales and leads online. Amazon is currently AdWords’ #1 advertiser with a spend of $51 million in a single quarter! So my guess it that, although you probably don’t have as much as Amazon to spend on your AdWords campaign, you still have a relatively substantial paid search budget you expect a return on your investment from. You also probably want a more stable source of traffic from Google because organic & local search appear to be highly volatile and dependent on Google’s ever changing algorithm and its result pages.
With this in mind, effectively spending and putting every single penny to good use in your AdWords campaign is ever so important! Several businesses choose to manage their Paid Search Campaigns in-house; although this is not usually the best option for medium to large sized organisations. Proactive monitoring of campaigns are absolutely critical elements to successful campaigns. If you insist on managing your business’s AdWords account on your own and do not want to thrown money away, then follow these five tips to help you get the best out of your campaign spend and time (these tips are not only limited to AdWords but also Microsoft AdCenter – which now covers Yahoo and Bing and accounts for 20-30% of search engine traffic). Read More
7 Premium SEO Tools Worth Paying For
SEO is a lot more complex than most people give it credit for. Many regard it as something akin to voodoo or alchemy. But SEO can be incredibly powerful and lucrative if you have the right tools for the job. That doesn’t mean you have to splurge on every piece of software you come across. Having prowled through the interwebs, trial and premium tested a number of tools out there, I have come up with this selection of MUST HAVE Paid SEO tools you should grab your wallets to purchase when the need arises.
Coming Soon….Twitter Button on Your TV Remote Control
What has been exciting me lately has been the convergence of social media (twitter & facebook to be specific) and old media (television & radio). I am not of the school of thought that one medium a.k.a new media would completely take over old media. Rather, I think that new media has matured enough to take a substantial share of media consumption in general and is available to support old media and vice versa. This is largely due to the added advantage of real time interactivity new media affords.
What fascinates me the most is how TV has become 3 dimensional. We now watch live TV shows and can openly discuss our thoughts about TV & radio shows to a wider audience of viewers & listeners on Twitter or Facebook. We get real time feedback on what others think and what we may have missed out. We throw thought provoking opinion open to discuss not only in our living room but to a network of living rooms. 43% of us watch TV shows and discuss on Facebook & Twitters at the same time. Twitter is by far the most popular social media channel for live TV commenting. The #hashtag feature of twitter morphs it to a highly topical discussion forum of sorts and almost eliminates the need for old style discussion forums. Facebook pages on the otherhand, give TV shows an insight into their audience and a medium to converse and mine opinion. They are a both massive research channels producers can tap into for assessing what works and what doesn’t. I believe producers can actually change the course of the popularity of their shows if they create efficient processes that get real time feedback from viewers of their shows.
Bring On Internet Connected TVs
Internet enabled TVs are going to be a game changer and seem to be overshadowing 3D TV. At the moment people use their mobiles, tablets & laptop computers to catch up on the discuss on social media sites about live TV shows. Well, imagine if you could simply change over to X-factor on a Saturday night and then hit the twitter button on your remote control? The TV picks up the TV show name and immediately figures out the hashtags. This enables your TV stream live comments from twitter about X Factor to your TV, either as a bottom scrolling banner or a side scrolling banner. You can then either join the conversation directly via your TV or via your tablet, laptop or mobile.
Patent Already Filled
It looks as if IBM has jumped the gun on Twitter & Facebook enabled TVs, they apparently filed for a patent back in 2009 that enables Facebook & Twitter to be accessible from a TV. I have so far not seen any ground breaking demos that take advantage of creating a hybrid experience of converging live TV and social media. It would be interesting to see how things pan out, now that major TV manufacturers like Samsung are beginning to take internet connected TVs very seriously. YouTube on internet enabled TV’s is a given and something I would be discussing in a later blog post.
AdWords Update: Get 60 Characters in Your Text Ad Headline!
Google AdWords have just introduced a major change to the way ads are display in the top positions on Google search (this applies to only top ranking ads, above the organic results and not on the side).
Description line 1 is now displayed along side the headline text in the headline for top ranking ads. This means a total of 60 characters would now be displayed for the top 3 sponsored results i.e. the allowed 25 characters in ad headlines + 35 characters allowed in description line one.
For your ad headlines to display 60 characters, two criteria must be met: Read More
First Google Toolbar PageRank Update in 2011 Taking Place Now….
