Over the year of 2007, Internet advertising went up a total of 27% over the previous year. While Internet advertising is up, Google’s market share is down a little in the fourth quarter of 2007. According to Web Pro News:

For the entire year 2007, online ad revenue grew 27 percent year over year to $25.5 billion.

IDC said that Google’s net U.S. market share dropped for the first time in two years because of a slow down in growth in domestic fourth quarter sales. Google’s net U.S. advertising market share decreased 0.5 percentage points to 23.7 percent last quarter compared to 3Q07.

Google still has a commanding lead in Internet advertising, but things at Microsoft are looking up. Microsoft is a relatively new contender in Internet advertising, however, they have managed to wrestle valuable points away from Google of late and should they manage to take control of Yahoo, they will be a force to be reckoned with.

For website marketers, continued growth in Internet advertising tells us two things, there is still some confidence in the market despite an apparently looming recession and that retailers are seeing benefits from their Internet advertising. If people are buying less, that factor is being muted by the fact that more people are researching their purchases over the Internet. While this is not necessarily good news for the economy, it is good news for those of us in our web-based micro-economy. As long as Internet advertising maintains a healthy level, it will be business as usual for website marketers.

The beauty of website marketing as a business is that you can literally take it with you wherever you go. To ensure that your website marketing venture is truly mobile, you will need to make some sacrifices and perhaps a few compromises, but it can be done very easily.

Mobilizing your Website Marketing Data
Most people use a spreadsheet application for their record keeping and we are all for that, but did you know that it is possible to backup your spreadsheets with Google Documents? Try it some time, it works quite easily. It is a great way to keep a second copy of all of your website marketing data. I don’t feel Google Documents is at a point where I would bother using them exclusively yet, but they are worth making use of as a backup service.

If you use Firefox, you can make use of the Gspace add-on which allows you to use a Gmail inbox as a hard disk drive. You can use these as a backup hard disk for your website marketing files.

Mail forwarding is a great way to run your communications from the road, should you ever need to. Gmail has a lot of forwarding options that make it a really useful tool. If you are running multiple small websites, it pays to make use of the commercial Gmail services (some of them are still free). These will allow you to have an email address that is registered to your domain name. These Gmail accounts have the same forwarding options as other Gmail accounts. You can set each of them up with a mail client and have them forward to another address. Create a catchall account that all of your website marketing sites can forward to and you will be able to see all of your messages in one location. Gmail is useful in this regard because they offer both POP access and mail forwarding, whereas other free email accounts do not.

Mobilizing your website marketing business is not a whole lot of work, but it will require a lot of different passwords and these can be difficult to keep track of. If you want to keep all of your passwords in one safe, secure location, Roboform Pass2Go allows you to run the popular Siber Systems password manager from a USB key.

A mobile website marketing environment is not for everyone, but having the ability to go mobile should it be required is a great advantage. Whether you wish to relocate, or simply run the office from Starbucks for a couple of hours per day, it is nice to know that you can set up your system for some mobile website marketing action.

If you are in the business of website marketing, then website lead generation is probably one of your biggest focuses. A lead is a website visitor that converts to a sale. Website lead generation is the science of making website sales, but it is a rough science at best. There are plenty of different ways to go about improving website lead generation and this post is not about that, it is about analyzing your website lead generation performance and identifying areas that can be improved.

There is a range of analysis software that can be implemented and in order to really have a deep look at your site, you are going to need some. Free analytics services probably won’t give you the depth of information you require, but if you do not have much of a budget, they can help. If you do have the money, go for a professional service, you will get a great deal more information.

All websites perform differently, so it is quite difficult to give percentages in relation to website lead generation. The trick to your traffic analysis is not to compare your website to other websites but to compare pages of your website to other pages of your website. You need to identify the paths that people are taking through your site and the pages that they are stopping on when they buy. Your most popular sales pages might not necessarily be resulting in all of that great website lead generation, the path through your site is more likely responsible. You need to identify the paths that people take through your site that lead to sales and find out what pages, if any, are having that increased benefit to your website lead generation.

The next step that you need to take is to identify the paths that are not successful in generating leads. Look very carefully at the pages that are not converting to sales. What is it that makes them a dead end, why are they failing at website lead generation. If you can identify any apparent weaknesses, deal with them.

There are always plenty of new opportunities when it comes to website lead generation. You can identify these opportunities based upon the strengths and weaknesses of your own website and those of others. Check out your successful competitors and emulate what you can. If they have been in business a while, chances are that they are getting the website lead generation side of their website management down.

I could have titled this article, “Why you Need Website Advertising to Promote your Business.” Website advertising is a certain way to get your website noticed and can achieve results much faster than would be possible with an organic marketing campaign. Whereas an organic marketing campaign can take months to get you noticed, website advertising is immediate. It is a surefire way to drive traffic to your website and it is remarkably cost effective.

There are a few things that you need to remember when it comes to building a successful website advertising campaign.

• Set a budget and don’t exceed it. Your website advertising budget should not be a burden to your business. You are spending money to get more business.
• Do your research. You don’t want to pay too much more than the market price for your website advertising and you certainly do not want to pay less.
• Plan a longterm website advertising strategy. Don’t go into a website advertising campaign with a, “how much can I afford this month?” mentality. Have a longterm game plan. You can always alter it should the need arise. You should not be spending as much as you have left each month, as you can always continue the campaign later.
• Support your website advertising campaign with a robust website. There is no point in beginning a website advertising campaign with an incomplete website. Get your website taken care of first.
• Use website advertising in conjunction with organic marketing techniques. There is no point on relying on one or the other.
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Keywords are at the heart of keyword rich content and play a big part in website search engine optimization. Choosing the right keywords for your keyword rich content can mean the difference between success and failure in your organic marketing. How does one go about choosing keywords for his or her site and then make use of them in producing keyword rich content? This is the question that we are going to look at today.

Choosing Keywords for Website Search Engine Optimization
Any site can use more keyword rich content. Content writing is not something that is every going to be complete. You are always going to want to cover more keywords and were your keywords ever to be completely covered, you would want to create fresh content for your original keywords anyway. Website Search Engine Optimization is a never ending process thanks largely to the fact that fresher content usually translates into higher search relevance.

• The first step to choosing keywords for website search engine optimization is always to brainstorm. Start thinking of the terms that you would be likely to use to find a website like yours. Type them into your favorite search engine and see if some of your competitors come up. Make a big list of search terms and write them all down.
• Hit up competitors sites and browse their content for keywords that they are using for website search engine optimization. Include any that you do not have on your list.
• Use a keyword research tool like Word Tracker to pick up still more ideas.
• Go through your list and sort it into core and non-core keywords. What I would consider core keywords are the simplest and most obvious searches. These are often the shorter key phrases and one word search terms.
• Now pick a few keywords related to your brand. Such keywords would more likely be business name related rather than topic related.

You should now have a fairly long list of keywords and it is time to start writing. The next stage is to actually write the content that you are going to use for the website search engine optimization of your site. Our next Website Search Engine Optimization Basics article is going to be about that very topic.

We are going to go right back to basics on website search engine optimization here. If you are a seasoned website search engine optimization veteran, you might wish to weigh in with a few of your own ideas.

What is website search engine optimization? The term, “website search engine optimization,” or SEO as it is also known gives you a pretty good clue about what is involved. Website search engine optimization is all about optimizing a website so that it performs better in searches. In order to understand the concept of website search engine optimization, you first need to understand how a website search works.

When you perform a search, you go into Google, type in a keyword or key phrase hit enter and wait for the results. How does a search engine come by those results? Simply put, they index the keywords of many different websites and apply an algorithm. This algorithm determines the relevance of a website to a particular search. The higher the relevance, the higher the website will appear on a list of search terms. With website search engine optimization, you tweak your site to perform better in searches. One way of doing that is with keyword rich content.

Keyword rich content is simply content that is written with a certain keyword or key phrase used throughout. There is quite a large number of companies that make it their business to provide professionally written keyword rich content for the purposes of website search engine optimization. You can either outsource this part of the process, or you can write your own.

Our next Back to Basics article will help you make sense of the keyword selection process, come back tomorrow for more tips on website search engine optimization.

Writing articles to submit to various sites around the web is a great way to build links to a website and thus improve your search engine ranking. According to an article on SiteProNews:

Not only do you help build backlinks, but you contribute to your community, and make a name for yourself. Don’t write spammy articles, or try to advertise too hard. Make something useful that others will want as content on their own site.

If you are trying to build up a bit of recognition for your site, articles are a fantastic way to do it. In order to get those articles out and start boosting your search engine ranking, there are a few things that you need to do.

• Become a part of the community. The blog world is something of a community and while it is competitive, there still exists an atmosphere of camaraderie. Comment on other people’s blogs, link them to your own blog and send emails. Build your own social links and before too long you will be building those search engine ranking boosting web links that you crave so much.
• Start your own blog and publish regularly. How long does it take to write one or two short blog posts each day? If you get into the habit of it, you can pump them out in ten or fifteen minutes apiece. It helps you build a name and acts as a kind of portfolio for your work.
• Include interesting content. People will be more inclined to publish your work if your own site has interesting content. Building a name and a reputation will help you gain the recognition that you need to get those articles out there.
• Never oversell your product or service. Spammy articles are a real turn off to most people. It is not a good way to get your work published.

Building quality links will help you boost your search engine ranking, but you should be aware that it is a process that can take a great deal of time. You can get there eventually. With a lot of hard work and some careful strategizing, you can have a better search engine ranking.

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Website marketing content providers have long been singing the praises of Wordpress. Wordpress is geared towards our bread and butter, which is helping sites to rank. For a good rundown of exactly what Wordpress does, read the following passage from an article in SiteProNews:

The WordPress blog platform already has strong internal links and produces organic anchor text throughout the pages using breadcrumbs for titles in links in the navigation, deep links (from themed pages to ideal posts) and external links (links from other pages) as a result of your RSS feed.

When combined, these components increase the on and off-page optimization factors that push the sites global keyword density higher (the higher allinanchor relevance a site has the higher the ranking). Even if the blog is a subdirectory, your entire site gets stronger as a result.

Website Marketing Content Writing in Wordpress
How do you write website marketing content for the Wordpress platform? You write it the same way as you write for anything else. The key to writing for Wordpress is drawing a regular audience. You want people to subscribe to your feed and that means that you will need to make your work entertaining. It is a little different to the regular keyword rich website marketing content that most people push out.

As with any website marketing content writing, you want it to be keyword rich, but at the same time you do not want it to seem spammy. You want people to enjoy the content and that can mean making a few sacrifices in relation to keyword density. You can make up for that by producing a lot of material. You do not need to write a tome for every post, two hundred words ought to be enough. If you feel you can go longer, do so, but don’t push it out further than you are comfortable with writing. If you want to push a keyword further, write another post.

Wordpress allows you to make use of a few different features with your website content writing, use them. Use rich text editing functions, if your version of Wordpress does not have them, look them up. There are plenty of Wordpress tags that you can use to give your website marketing content a little more punch. Remember that you are writing website marketing content, not just search engine optimized content.

There are many people that are wondering what will happen to the Yahoo! brand under Microsoft’s ownership. According to Microsoft, it is not going to go anywhere. “We love the Yahoo! Brand,” says Microsoft, so it looks like it is here to stay. I tend to agree with the analysis of the situation that we see on Web Pro News.

It makes perfect sense. MSN is pretty much a failed shot at creating a Yahoo-type division, with the only successful parts of MSN either being rolled into Windows Live (Hotmail, Messenger) or existing as popular but rudderless content websites. Microsoft has never been good at content, so rolling the content side of MSN into Yahoo will give those sites a future and a more coherent strategy going forward.

Microsoft has enormous brand recognition, they have done very well for themselves in this regard, but it is true that they have failed to create a strong Internet presence. Don’t get me wrong, MSN Live has been growing in leaps and bounds, but it lacks something that the Yahoo! brand captured quite well.

Bringing Yahoo! under the Microsoft helm may in fact strengthen its brand. One thing that has been a constant topic of conversation is Yahoo!’s lackluster marketing techniques. The Yahoo! brand has always been strong, they just never made the most of it. With the deep pockets of Microsoft running the show, things might change and it will be interesting to see how the Redmond behemoth steers the brand into the future.

There was an interesting blurb on SEO Book today that I thought was worth repeating:

As large media sites open up to user generated content they are going to keep losing brand and value to niche channels owned and operated by people who are so passionate about their subject that their brands have purpose and lasting value.

You might disagree with this, but think about it, are people going to keep supporting massive online retailers when they have highly focused niche suppliers to connect with? While some might argue that it is getting tougher for the little guy (and it is by the way), future trends might be a little different. If you take a look at enthusiast websites, you can see that a lot more of them are selling than ever before. In some of these cases they are drop shipping or mere affiliates in large retail networks, but a good number of them are selling their own merchandise and their website branding is getting better, much better.

Niche channels are the way of the future, especially as social networks feature more heavily in online retail. If your website branding is not up to scratch, it will be very easy to fall by the wayside.

Could your website sales be better? Of course they could, website sales can always be better, there is always room for improvement; It does not matter if you are running a hobby web shop or Amazon.com. If your website sales are lagging and you want to see some positive growth, then you might want to consider employing some of these tried and tested techniques.

Five surefire methods to kick start your website sales

• 1. Rewrite your sales content. If your content is not selling, it might be because it is not convincing enough. An enormous problem that a lot of websites have is that their content is written for robots not humans. If your website has some human optimization as well, you will see healthier website sales.
• 2. Check your relevance. Just because you were on the first page of Google six months ago, does not mean you will be there now. It might be time to start freshening up your SEO content in order to boost that relevance. Staying at the top of the page will help to ensure that you enjoy healthy website sales.
• 3. Buy some links. Buy links at sites with healthy page rank and you might start to pull a bit of extra traffic.
• 4. Write for blogs. Get to know the niche sites in the area that you are writing and offer your services for free. A good blog article can pull a great amount of traffic. It never hurts to ask and you would be surprised to find how many blog owners allow this practice.
• 5. Prepare individual product landing pages. Landing pages can work wonders for website sales. A landing page per product can take a long time to prepare, but it is well advised to go to the effort that it takes to produce them.
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Website lead generation has less to do with the amount of traffic than it does with the quality of traffic that finds its way to your site. Today we are going to address some ways that we can improve website lead generation levels and hopefully make some more sales from our web marketing sites. The first thing that we need to do is to identify the methods by which traffic finds a website.

There are three types of search that a person is likely to come to your site by; text, video and image. Of these three search types, which is most likely to convert? Put yourself inside the mind of a web surfer and the answer becomes quite obvious. Text searches are most likely to convert, with video perhaps coming second. Image searchers are hit or miss. A good number of people do image searches looking for pictures, not information and not products. It pays to keep images optimized, but they fall quite far behind the other types of searches. The reason why image searches are less likely to yield website lead generation results is simple. In most cases, images do not contain information. If someone is looking for a product, an information type search is the most common. Images and video do have a part to play, but generally text searches are the front line when it comes to website lead generation. Therefore it is, in most cases, best to focus your search engine optimization efforts on text first and worry about any unoptimized images or videos later.

Search engine optimization is a great way to bring in more traffic, but where they land crucial to converting leads. If your website marketing content is slapdash, then you will find that your sales suffer. Using analytics it is possible to identify the key pages on your site and the paths that most of your visitors take. Take the time to polish the writing and presentation of these pages and your should start to see results.

Becoming a social marketer is a great way to boost your website lead generation potential. Social bookmarking sites are a great way to market your site and to get people to visit. If you are not sure what social bookmarking sites are worth using, you should probably start off with one or two and work your way up from there. Del.icio.us would probably be the best place to start.

Visit other sites and stay on top of the latest trends in website lead generation. Website lead generation is a rough science at best, and works mostly by combining numerous well established techniques.

Website marketing content can take a great deal of effort to write at the best of times. Figuring out how long it takes often comes down to simple math exercises. You know how much website marketing content you will be able to produce in one hour. Divide the number of articles you are required to write by your work rate; that is how long it should take. I say should because it does not always work out that way. There is any number of things that can get in the way of your website content writing. Usually, the biggest distraction is the computer itself. Here are a few suggestions if you are easily distracted, but serious about website content writing.

• 1. Get a separate PC for your work. It is nice to have a clean, uncluttered system. No games, no distracting bookmarks, the bare minimum to get the job done. That usually means an Internet connection, a mail client and a word processor. You don’t need a power PC for the job; you just need a simple notebook. If you have trouble staring at a notebook screen, you can always plug it into a desktop screen and you can plug a separate keyboard into most notebooks as well.
• 2. Get a decent keyboard. I have worked on keyboards of various quality levels. Any keyboard above the $50 mark should get the job done nicely. Cheap keyboards tend to offer too much resistance and can lead to aches and pains further down the road and really put a dampener on your website marketing content writing career.
• 3. Website marketing content writing is a real job, treat it that way. Start and finish work at fixed times each day. Try to work solidly as opposed to spreading work out between extended periods of procrastination.
• 4. Posture is important. Website marketing content writing is all about output. A full time writer will be making a lot of keystrokes and be sitting for extended periods of time. Care needs to be taken to prevent conditions like RSI.
• 5. Take short regular breaks. While you don’t want to break between each article, it is nice to take a short ten or fifteen minute break between sets of articles. Have a cup of coffee, go for a walk, do something other than staring at the screen. You are not necessarily wasting time on such breaks, you are refreshing yourself and it provides an excellent opportunity to plan your next set of website marketing content articles.

Website local advertising is going to take a bigger slice of the local advertising pie, but it is unlikely to take the place of traditional forms in the foreseeable future. That is the gist of some new research offered by Jupiter Research and reported in Marketing Pilgrim:

Online advertising will continue to grow for years to come, especially local business advertising. JupiterResearch. According to the US Online Local Advertising Forecast, by JupiterResearch local advertising will grow 13% in 2007 to 2012. Online advertising generally is expected to grow 12 percent during that time. Advertisers will focus on local display and search advertising the most.
Compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) are expected to be 18 percent and 16 percent, respectively, during the next five years.
Online advertising is taking a larger proportion of budgets than in past years, but won’t replace traditional advertising.

As the small business sector is infused with fresh talent, you can expect to see a lot more Internet savvy business owners than there have been in the past. More people will realize the benefits that website local advertising has to offer. It was not that long ago that most people found a business through the Yellow Pages or local newspapers. This is less often the case now as many people turn online to find a product or service. Website local advertising is a great way for business owners to make sure that they pick up valuable local customers.

Microsoft has really been shaking up the online advertising sector lately. In an area that they are relatively new to, they have been making big gains. A recent addition to their client list is none other than Wall Street Journal. It has been announced that Wall Street Journal’s online advertising will be served by Microsoft. Could this be a sign of things to come? For many people Google has become too large for comfort and it is nice to see an alternative contender. To take on Google a company needs some serious financial clout and Microsoft certainly has that.

“This deal is a significant win for Microsoft for two key reasons,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions at Microsoft. First, it makes the extended Microsoft advertising network the premier destination for advertisers interested in reaching financially minded users, as it complements our offering in this vertical through MSN Money and other syndication partners.
“Second, this deal is a strong indicator that we’re gaining significant traction with our advertising platform. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network is one of the largest financial services publishers in a very dynamic vertical segment, and we’re delighted to add it to our portfolio.” Source: Web Pro News

Clearly WSJ has chosen Microsoft for their online advertising provider because they believe it to be in their best interests financially. Google has raised their prices recently and there are suggestions that there are some financial ties involved. Whatever the reason, a client like WSJ is a great gain for Microsoft which seems to be going from strength to strength. As their web search percentages grow, I would expect them to achieve even bigger gains in the online advertising sector.