Internet Marketing Articles by Web Profits

Is Google Too Big?

When you need the help of a big search engine, which one do you turn to? For many of us, it’s Google. Even the name has turned into a part of the language. How many times have you “Googled” something?

But there are pros and cons to getting this big, and the question of whether the company is too big for the internet is debated quite frequently. There is some doubt over whether Google has gone over that tipping point, monopolising the search engine industry as a result.

It’s certainly not all bad, of course. If you have an online business to promote and you have ever tried the pay per click advertising solution, for example, the chances are good that you will have gone to Google to get your campaign underway. There is no other PPC avenue available on the internet today that even comes close to competing with the potential benefits of Google Adwords.

But even as far back as eighteen months ago people were writing articles which asked how wary others were getting about the company. The thinking is that it has got so big it cannot adequately control all the functions it is there for. Will this become one of those stories where the company itself becomes a victim of its own success?

Part of the issue seems to be the number of other companies that Google itself now owns. For example, Google owns the high profile site YouTube, and has done from less than twelve months after YouTube was launched. And it doesn’t stop there – because there are many other websites and companies that have since been swallowed by this huge company. And the chances are that we aren’t even aware of half of them.

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Should Your Website Be Appealing To A Particular Age Group?

Now there’s something that not every webmaster will have thought of. There is no doubt that some websites appeal to virtually everyone. Think about sites offering information on wide ranging subjects, for example. Unless the subject in question is very much engineered to be appealing to kids, or to the elderly, or another very specific age group, the approach will be to the general population.

But this doesn’t apply in every case. And if it isn’t something that has crossed your mind yet, you might want to think about whether the design of your website is alienating some of the people you are trying to appeal to.

When you are trying to make a living online, the concept of website promotion is obviously a very important one. But if you are attracting lots of people to your website and they don’t like what they see when they get there, that is going to be time and money wasted.

What you need to do is to make sure your promotional efforts and your website match up with each other. If you are giving out the wrong messages to people they won’t hang around on your site for very long.

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Reinvesting Profits For Future Expansion

There is one thing that is true of all businesses. When all is said and done, they all want to make a profit.

No matter what they sell or promote, profit is the bottom line. If they don’t make a profit then they are running at a loss. And no business which runs at a loss remains in business for very long.

This is why the profits gained in the early days of a business should be viewed as an investment. If you do not reinvest in your fledgling business, it won’t be able to grow.

The extent to which business people recognise this depends quite often on the business involved. And this could be one of the reasons why so many people fail online.

Think about it for a moment. Starting any kind of business requires knowledge, determination and perseverance. An internet marketing business is no different in this respect. If you take a look at people who have fought against the odds and succeeded in building their own online businesses, you will see that they all worked hard to achieve that success.

But unfortunately there are still plenty of people out there who think that making money online is easy. And if they do make any kind of profit, their last thought will be to reinvest it to grow the business they have begun. They will be far more likely to spend it in celebration.

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Is Selling By Email Dying Out?

If you were to get a group of internet marketers together in one room, they would probably all tell you that their email list was the most important thing in the world to them. Or at least it would be the most important part of their business.

This is largely because they will tell you that they can make a lot of money – over and over again – from that list of names and email addresses.

I’m sure you’ve seen them countless times before. You sign up to a newsletter and you start getting emails which not only contain a worthwhile newsletter to read (if you are lucky), they also have a sales pitch for a particular product the marketer is promoting.

Now this product could be one that they have come up with, or it could be one that they are an affiliate for. Whatever the case may be, you can be sure that 99.9% of the time they will make money off every sale that goes through as a result of sending out that email.

There’s no doubt that selling by email like this is still one of the strongest parts of web marketing. But are we as consumers becoming immune to the power of the email?

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How Big Should An Internet Marketing Budget Be?

If you were expecting a strict sum of money in answer to that question, you will be disappointed. But we will try and work out whether there are any guidelines that you can stick to here, as we attempt to answer that difficult question.

It’s pretty obvious that no two companies or businesses will have the same internet marketing budget. For one thing every one of them will have a different level of income, so while one may be able to afford thousands of dollars a month, the other might only be able to allocate a few hundred – perhaps even less.

But it isn’t just the size of the business that matters. You also need to think about your end goal. What kinds of web marketing do you want to do? Are you thinking about a few ads here and there to promote your business in general? Are you thinking about launching a brand new product and spreading the word as far and wide as you can? Or have you never been online before and you want to dip your toe in the water with a basic website and some search engine marketing to go with it?

It’s plain to see that there is no simple answer to this question unless you know what you want your outcome to be. This is quite often the best way to approach the situation. Ask yourself what you want to achieve, and then work out how much it would cost you to achieve it.

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Don’t Limit Yourself When You Are Considering Online Opportunities

Selling on auction sites, selling eBooks, making money via Google Adwords… all these and more are very popular ways of making money online. But should you automatically go for the same old methods that everyone else is trying?

This is a thorny issue. Many more people arrive online every single day, looking for a way to earn extra money or start a whole new career. But whatever your end goal might be, it’s vital not to limit yourself right from the start. Internet marketing offers a multitude of opportunities to consider. You certainly shouldn’t just go for the first thing you come across.

The one thing that happens a lot online is that someone new will read about a successful marketer and decide they can make lots of money in the same way. But instead of doing their research and finding out all they can about how they did it, they focus on that end result. They focus on the money and the success. But of course, you cannot expect to get there without the knowledge required.

The other sin that many people are guilty of is jumping in too fast. The internet is a huge place, and it is getting bigger by the day. If you dive straight in to the first opportunity you set eyes on, how will you know if it is the best one for you?

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Are Banners On Their Way Out?

We’ve all seen them. In its various different sizes the humble banner has cut a swathe across the internet for many years, advertising anything and everything you can think of.

But has the banner had its day? Do we ever really look at them in the same way that we did when they were new and exciting? It’s very much an individual point of course. Some people look at them all the time, while others no doubt gloss over them and cease to notice them at all.

If you take a look at the vast amount of web marketing efforts going on today, you will notice that a fair amount of it is banner advertising. So clearly it’s not a case of banners being used less than they have been in the past. Some websites might choose to offer other types of advertising than the banner, but surely that is a personal choice made by the webmaster rather than anything else. Some people certainly have a preference for different types of advertising, and that may be determined by the amount of space they have to promote on their website or blog more than anything else.

Perhaps it is more the response to banner advertising that is making people decide whether to keep using them or to ditch them instead. But can we lay that at the door of the banner format itself – or the people who are creating them?

Quite often it is the latter that is responsible for how well a banner performs, as opposed to the fact that it is a banner. If you frequent some of the biggest and most well known websites around today, you will see that some of them have large banners somewhere on the page. But these aren’t always plain static banners – they will usually be animated ones that cycle through a specific presentation. It’s rather like watching a mini television advert on your computer.

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Why You Should Stay On Top Of New Media Advertising Solutions

How seriously do you take promoting your business? If you have your own website then you will know that web marketing is essential if you are going to stay one step ahead of your competition.

Unfortunately, just like everything else in life it’s so easy to get stuck in a rut with your advertising and promotion routine. Most businesses know that they need to be advertising constantly to stand a chance of continuing to build their customer base and selling more items or services in the future, but if the methods they are using to do this remain the same all the time they are likely to be left behind sooner or later.

The reason for this is that the internet is developing at such a fast pace that what was cutting edge yesterday could be old news by tomorrow. New ways to promote internet businesses apart from the usual search engine optimization techniques that we are all getting used to are constantly breaking through, and that means we need to be on our toes if we are going to carry on developing into the future.

A clear example of new media advertising in recent times has been the option to use social networking sites – previously only meant for people to find friends and share their hobbies – to promote businesses in a more casual way. And with every day that goes past, someone somewhere finds another way of advertising their website that hasn’t been thought of before.

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Why Are So Many Websites Not Yet Mobile Friendly?

If you have a website the chances are pretty good that you will constantly be tweaking it and playing around with it to make sure it looks as good as it possibly can for everyone who visits it.

But have you thought about what people will see if they were to access your website using their mobile phone or other similar device?

If you haven’t thought along these lines yet, you are not alone. A lot of website owners haven’t looked into it yet – and many people don’t even realise that there is a difference between a site you view on the web and a site you view on your mobile phone.

In reality there isn’t a huge difference; but if your website is mobile friendly it will simply be a lot easier to view on a small screen than it would be otherwise. There is still the assumption that everyone viewing a website will do so on a nice big computer screen, but of course that isn’t the case, and if you don’t cater for the people who surf the internet while they are out and about you may well lose out on potential customers who cannot view your site well enough to persevere with looking around it.

In a sense, having a mobile friendly website is just another form of website marketing. You need to consider the different ways in which a person will find your site and use it, and the easier you can make it for them the more chances you will have to make more sales.

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NASDAQ’s Internet Index – Is It Worth Paying Attention To?

Back in November 2007, NASDAQ decided to create an index of the top one hundred companies that were involved in providing services and/or goods on the internet. But has it made enough of a splash – or are there still plenty of people who still haven’t even heard of it, one year on?

There is no questioning the fact that this was a good idea, at least in part. But like all good ideas it does have its drawbacks as well, not least of which is that the very nature of it means it really only applies in the US. Still, within that area it does have its place and perhaps we should expect a new index such as this one to take some time in establishing itself.

So what does this index tell us? Well in short, it tells us how the top one hundred internet companies that are concerned with internet marketing or other similar services are performing against each other. But since this only applies in that one country we have no way of figuring out how internet businesses are doing as a whole.

But maybe it will pave the way for a more global view of the internet market in the future. Most people would agree that while the high street suffers in times of hardship and recession, the internet never really seems to have many problems. Cheaper prices and the absence of queues and other hassles are indicative of every single online business, and that means people are more likely, not less likely, to flock to the internet when money is tight.

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