Internet Marketing Blog by Winnipeg's leading web agency

Yell.com, the leading online business directory, has just inked a deal with Videojug. The arrangement is for providing tens of thousands of ‘how to’ guide videos. It is in the process of setting up a vast network of over 100 blogs with an idea of turning the ubiquitous Yellow Pages service into a multimedia content venture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Breaking the news of star singer Michael Jackson’s sudden death resulted in a huge surge in traffic to TMZ.com. The number of people visiting the celebrity gossip site went up by almost a quarter.

TMZ.com was the first site that broke the heartbreaking news. Late last month it was the first to report that the King of Pop has suffered heart attack and reported his death. The BREAKING NEWS saw a 24 percent increase to 11.7 million unique users.

The figures, released by comScore Media Metrix, mark a record for the popular Hollywood gossip site. It also witnessed an impressive 10% month-on-month rise in page views to 279m.

The news report read: “We have just learned that Michael Jackson has died. He suffered a cardiac arrest at his Holmby Hills home earlier this afternoon. Paramedics were unable to revive him. We are told Jackson had no pulse when paramedics arrived and they never got a pulse back.

“A source informs us that he was dead when they arrived. The hospital staff tried to resuscitate him. But he was completely unresponsive. A hospital source told us there was ‘absolute chaos.’ ‘You’ve got to save him! You’ve got to save him!” people with the singer were screaming.”

TMZ.com is a joint venture between Telepictures Productions and AOL. The website has been founded by the managing, editor Harvey Levin. TMZ regularly comes up with exclusive stories in the world of entertainment like DUI arrest of celebrity Mel Gibson and the subsequent encounter he had with law enforcement.

Its mobile site as well as iPhone application also registered new record traffic numbers with well over 11m page views by users on the day of Michael Jackson’s death, as his shocked fans frantically searched for updates on unfolding events.

Though Internet will garner larger chunk of the advertising budgets in the coming years, the scenario remains challenging. The fact remains that some high-flying Internet business ventures such as MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., have been affected to a great extent by the global recession.

With overall advertising spend in decline, and showing no signs of early revival, the leading social networking service has recently announced a 30 percent staff cut. Many other top Web 2.0 businesses, like the Google owned, YouTube, are also trying to work out how to ‘monetize’ the huge traffic that they generate.

Digital marketing campaigns tend be far more labor-intensive to develop (if not to visualize) than ads placed in traditional media, experts suggest. What this means is obviously higher fees.

Innovative advertisers or at least those who can still manage to spend – have also seen some benefits in the confluence of the current cyclical economic downturn. They have tackled it with a subtle structural shift toward free advertising avenues on the Internet.

New technology will only bolster the advertising abilities of traditional media such as TV, backers say. However, none of these things are expected to exist in isolation in the future. Advertising executives have indeed been referring to ‘integration’ of their campaigns for last few years, albeit with mixed results. Now the challenging economic conditions are forcing them to do so.

The Publicis Worldwide’s chief operating officer, Richard Pinder, said in an in interview. “We are going back to the original meaning of the term advertising. It’s spreading brand awareness and making people interested to know more about it.”

Newspaper ads and television commercials, as it has been established, are now a shrinking and less prominent area of the overall marketing strategy. What takes place elsewhere, to be specific mostly on the Web, is what matters more to advertisers.

It is not that advertisers have suddenly woken up to the potential of the Internet. They have been gradually shifting increasing portions of their tight budgets online for last few years. The growing popularity of social networking and other innovative Web 2.0 phenomena has only hastened the process of transition.

Their increasing dominance is actually helping the advertisers use the reach and power of tech-savvy users to spread the word. Smart customers are inadvertently doing the job for them, and at a much lower cost. This is allowing them to bring down the attention and thrust on paid advertising.

While more movie studios publishers and music companies, among others, are clearly trying to figure out the various ways to get potential consumers to pay for their content hosted online, advertising is apparently shifting in the other direction. It is not surprising at all that forecasts from PriceWaterhouse- Coopers are not exactly encouraging for newspapers and television media.

The research firm expects that both the print and TV media will suffer from ad spending declines in the range of 11 percent to 16 percent this year. Though even Internet advertising is expected to fall a bit, by about 2 percent, the fall is not so pronounced. Also, it continues to be seen as the future of advertising, the report points out.

Small businesses these days must contend with the same potent Internet security threats as most other larger firms do. The threats have become more pronounced in recent years. On the other hand, they have become even more discreet.

If you are running a smaller business and budget is tight, you can develop your own security policy, but that can expose your business to some risks. Of course, as your business starts growing in size, you are better off leaving security of network and data in the hands of experts.

It involves considerable effort and discipline when it comes to changing passwords on a regular basis, performing periodic backups, and checking for software updates. The inputs and intervention of independent security organizations can help minimize the risk.

There are how-to guides on offer that can provide you with clues. For instance, the Internet Security Alliance has its ‘Guide to Cyber Security’ specifically aimed at small businesses. It is available to registered users as a free download. You can check some of its material in the SysAdmin, Audit, Network, Security (SANS) Institute’s ‘Network Security & the SMB’ essay.

The checklists with instructions probably worth repeating are as follows:

• Protect user accounts with peculiar and uncommon passwords
• Change the passwords on a regular basis.
• Scrutinize carefully all e-mail attachments and other links.
• Install and update antivirus antispyware software on a regular basis.
• Keep all your operating system as well as applications, current and patched.
• Set up and make use of a firewall.

Social networking is resulting in the number of services, which help users convert long URLs into small Web links. URL shrinking services are useful on sites like Twitter, limiting tweets to 140 characters.

There are several URL shortening services that are available today. However, few online communities have made it easier for people to tell where the shortened links will take them. Also, the lack of a standardized or built-in approach to URL shortening services – within individual social networking websites – only adds to the complexity.

For instance, many Twitter users opt to shorten long Web links with bit.ly, but some Twitter users are also likely to see Tweets with links shortened by the services at tr.im and ow.ly. While bit.ly offers a Firefox add-on, which lets users of that browser view a portion of the longer URL at least, there is no other easy way of viewing the long version of links at either tr.im or ow.ly.

Many URL shortening services allow their own users to preview shortened links, whereas a few others don’t offer that option. There are several websites you can use to view a long URL just by cutting and pasting a shortened link like longurl.org.
TinyURL is among the longest-running services for URL shortening.

It lets users preview all shortened URLs. For those browsing the Web with Firefox, an add-on called Long URL Please is recommended. It also works in other browsers like Internet Explorer. Expandmyurl.com is another approach, which works well across browsers.

User base created and sustained through a search engine thrust is the core of your site traffic. Studies have shown that popular search engines like Yahoo and Google provide as good as most other techniques of web advertising and cost effective as well…

You can attract sizable traffic through SEO. There are several ways in which your website can be made search engine friendly and enhance its capacity to generate traffic by means of the free advertising a top listing in leading search engines can provide you with. You need to get your web pages optimized.

High position for your domain specific keywords on the search engines greatly helps. There was a time when website owners were advised to stick to keyword density (kd) between 1% and 3%. What it means is that the keyword your web page is structured around should feature at least one to three times prominently in every hundred words. It may not sound a lot.

However, if you have a Web page with roughly thousand words, it would have about 30 incidences of the keyword. This is not a wise idea as Google might even penalize your site by giving it a very poor listing. You can now replace keywords with terms, which make the topic clear by employing statistical analysis of the content on your Web page.

Last but not the least, establish a blog. It is one of the top traffic generation methods.

At its simplest, the new Wolfram Alpha function like a calculator, albeit one that understands things such as quantum mechanics.

Do you wish to know what size shoe to purchase in Japan, to exactly match your British size 11s? Google will help you find conversion tables but Wolfram Alpha will do the job for you. It is probably most handy as a ‘homework engine’ focused on science, mathematics and engineering, rather than the arts and humanities topics.

The shoe size conversion is just one of the dozens of example queries, which it provides. It is excellent at comparing different stock prices. It can also convert some currencies. Studying such examples will save you considerable time in the long run, because the more accurate your question, the more likely you’re to get a relevant answer.

Wolfram Alpha looks to occupy a space somewhere between Wikipedia and Google. The site’s slogan states it’s a ‘computational knowledge engine’. The search box carries an ‘equals’ sign at the end. Its concept originates from Mathematica software by Stephen Wolfram that has been around for over two decades. It’s a computational tool, which enables you to manipulate, analyze and visualize data: its wide capabilities range from creating real-time 3D graphics to solving equations.

Wolfram Research has added data from fields like geography, sociology, finance, music, medicine, education and sport. Currently, it’s short of material in several areas. This is largely because it doesn’t search. It only employs data tested and uploaded by its own engineers.

Wolfram states that when computing began, 50 years ago, people felt they ‘would be able to ask a machine any factual question, and let it compute the answer. It didn’t really work out that way’. It’s now becoming possible, he asserts, thanks to the loads of data on the web, and Wolfram Research’s Mathematica plus NKS (A New Kind of Science).