With more and more email marketing providers coming online every day, it’s always hard to know which one to choose. There’s an interesting thread below from Linkedin which provides an email marketing review of a number of providers alongside user recommendations.
You should find plenty of useful stuff in there. If you have any other recommendations – why not post a comment below.
There’s a fascinating blog post by a company called Think Eye Tracking which compares eye tracking studies between users of Google between 2005 and 2008.
It raises the question over keyword popularity – and do you really need to be at number 1 in Google to clicked on by the majority of users. Certainly user habits have changed over the last three years, according to this study. I suspect this is because we have all become more familiar with the interface and with the way it displays results.
You can read it in full here.
It won’t be a surprise to hear that Internet video advertising is more effective in terms of clickthroughs than the plain old banner ad.
According to research reviewed by ReelSEO.com, video ads are receiving between 4 and 7 times click through ratios than that of image banner ads.
Whilst clearly the creative and execution are important – viewers want to be engaged, even if it is just an advert, it is also just as important to get the functionality right. Play, pause and stop buttons are all essential. If you make the browsing experience disruptive, natural tendencies are to stop the video playing. If users choose to click play, then they are likely to watch up to 2/3 of the video.
Relevency also shouldn’t be forgotten here. Carefully placed, subject matter targeted video ads are still more likely to be clicked than random placement.
You can read the whole post here.
Clearly there’s no one simple answer to this complex beast of a question around website promotion tips but I spotted the question raised on Linkedin and it’s raised some interesting answers…
Always want to stay ahead of the curve within your business or one you’re thinking of setting up? There’s a handful of really cool new tools starting to come of age you should definitely take a look at which will help you figure out who’s searching for what – search trends:
1) Google Trends has been around for a while (although still in beta of course)! and will give you a rough indication of one keyphrase’s search term popularity vs another as well as showing you today’s hot tends.
2) Edopter is a ‘social trendcasting’ website which provides you with a whole host of the latest up and coming themes across many different segments.
The really cool thing about it is that you can actually start a trend yourself… How about Being Smarter?
3) Alexa is the definitive web resource on the top search trends around the planet. It’s fascinating to look at the movers and shakers too – the link’s buried away a bit – but you’ll find it here.
Some fascinating facts and figures from the Google blog on something dear to my heart – the future of online video
It may sound old fashioned – but do you include your contact details on every piece of documentation which leaves your building? Make it easy to be contacted.
SEO has received a bad press recently because of the number of companies that have guaranteed rankings to their customers when it clearly is an almost impossible thing to guarantee.
Many gullible small business owners and would-be Web entrepreneurs have been sucked in by these false claims and it hurts all of us. Because of that, many reputable SEO companies stay away from “guarantees” because they don’t want to be lumped in with those bad guys.
Rand Fishkin, has published an interesting post in which he shares some of the claims that some SEO companies have made:
Our search engine optimization software comes with the latest link popularity and web site optimization tools for helping you achieve guaranteed ranking.
The phrase guaranteed ranking is quite astounding really when there are so many variables which make up search engine marketing. The one certaintly is change and that there are no guarantees.
Ranking in itself can be open to interpretation in a big way. Nail down your provider to clarify such statements if they offer such a service. Page 1 ranking could mean many things too – I have my preferences set to 100 on page 1 of Google! That’s less hard to achieve. Top 10 listings is harder.
People are guaranteeing to optimise sites for 100 different phrases. That’s quite a niche… how to confuse a web crawler instantly. Remember, the search engines are looking for relevance – you can’t make a page relevant with 100 keyphrases on it!
Google themselves say that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, yet still people claim to be able to do this.
The other point I wanted to pick up on that Rand makes is that even if you are #1 on Google, that in itself doesn’t guarantee you anything. If traffic for that keyphrase is minimal, you will receive little traffic, if your page doesn’t convert well – you will recieve no sales!
Read and enjoy.
We make your content work harder and generate incremental revenue by widening your audience. Subject matter experts, check out our partner video…
