Forums: Did you know simply participating in various forums & posting your views & ideas can potentially bring new growth & life to your online business?

We are all looking for traffic to our websites & if we can get it for free with little effort, that’s even better. Did you know that when you sign up as a new member at a forum, you can usually create a “signature” line that will be attached to every post that you make in a forum. This signature line can contain your website URL & as other members read your post, this will provide a route for potential customers to find your website.

By participating in forums, you will meet other people who have online businesses & who have a lot in common with you. Not only can you share tips & tricks of the business, it’s sometimes comforting to know that there are others who share your occupational frustrations & will be there to support you if you need them.

Example: Aside from the thousands of general forums, there are also many niche forums on every imaginable topic on earth. You can go to a dedicated forum of the topic your business deals in, post a comment & leave your signature to get more traffic. If you are a real estate company then you can go to a real estate forum, start participating in the discussions & have a signature link pointing to your website to increase your brand visibility.

Blogging: A business blog can be one that tells customers more about the business & why they are a trustworthy company. This often gives a personal face to the company & instills confidence in both the business & the employees & services that are featured in the business blog. The blog should be updated regularly in order to attract regular readers who want to find out more about the business & any news that occurs within that business. Even a small business with little start-up cash can create a marketing blog.

Here a classic example of effective blogging: Nike has a blog of its own to promote its product, nikeblog.com. Here, they have detailed information of all the shoes launched & the readers can comment about them as well. By having a dedicated blog like this, Nike has expanded its marketing program without too much fuss or extra effort.

Social Marketing: This helps you build your brand loyalty & the customer base. By signing up for one of the services, you can market the brand to a large number of like minded audiences & increase your sales.

Example: You can sign up with Social networking sites like FaceBook, YouTube, Ning, & MySpace & use their free services to attract attention to your company’s products & services. It is not going to cost you even one penny & you can reach out to a large number of customers who can be your potential clients.

Viral Marketing: Another innovative way of marketing is Viral Marketing. Viral marketing is a strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others by creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure & influence.

Example: Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services used this strategy quite effectively. They sent free e-mail addresses & services where they attached a simple tag at the bottom of every free message such as “Get your private, free e-mail at http://www.hotmail.com” & sent it out to everyone. Then they waited for people to e-mail their own network of friends! Their strategy was simple. Amazing trick, isn’t it?

Directory Submissions: This is also another effective method of building links & marketing online. It’s effective especially when building links for niche & not so competitive search terms. If you’re not too greedy with the terms you target in your directory submissions, you could be pleasantly surprised with the results!

Here’s an example: The site statisticalforecasting.com used a directory submission service called www.directorymaximizer.com to submit its link to different SEO friendly directories. The site was submitted to directories using 5 different titles & descriptions. They used titles like ‘Forecasting & Statistics in Business’, ‘Statistical Forecasting’, ‘Methods of Forecasting’, ‘Statistical Techniques’ & ‘Statistics & Forecasting’. The most important thing to note is that this site has never been promoted by any method other than directory submissions by directorymaximizer.com & they’re still ranking in the Top10!

So, if you take advantage of any or all of these marketing strategies, you are bound to benefit too. It also saves your marketing money & start up costs!

Both the US Presidential election candidates, Senator Barack Obama & Senator John McCain gave each other cut throat competition in all aspects. The election strategies were many & among them was the attempt to influence voters through Internet campaigns. This time, candidates used text messages, videogames, satellite broadcasting & a highly contagious amount of viral videos to broadcast their message, interact with people & raise funds.

Obama chose an excellent marketing & campaign team & his instinct for marketing took him to great heights. On one hand, McCain’s emphasis was on tried & tested TV advertisements & print campaigns, whereas Obama on the other made use of novel marketing tactics such as connecting to the public online to get contributions through his website. Since the beginning, Obama’s campaign relied on fundraising through online donations. Obama’s campaign broke records for most money raised in a day. The campaign reports that it received an average contribution of $86 per donor from 3.1 million people—online.

The McCain campaign also leveraged online marketing & raised plenty of money online but it was not as thorough & impressive as Obama’s, who successfully leveraged the might of online tactics & communicated with his supporters in new & direct ways such as mass texting. Based on compete data Obama’s site received 5.5 million unique visitors, while John McCain’s site received 3.1 million visitors. With the usage of logos, slogans, comprehensive fonts & promotional ideas on the web, Obama marketed himself like a high end consumer.

To be in touch with the voters, Obama transformed his role from a candidate to a perfect socialite. He gained high traffic on every social networking site on the internet including MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube & Asian Ave. Not to mention, he had over 965, 163 fans on Facebook, compared to McCain’s unimpressive 583, 201.

Obama updated his website, blogs & even video games to engage not just donors & volunteers but all citizens. From the imaginative campaign logo to the thirty minute informative commercial, Obama’s communications were proficient & result oriented. His blog captivated the public more when compared with McCain. It is reported that Obama’s blog had 20 posts in a single day, after the last debate.

The campaign made its mark in both paid & organic search strategies, for every search for McCain there were 2.2 searches for Obama.

The video sharing website was also not spared by both the candidates & Obama’s strategies succeeded here as well. Obama’s YouTube channel has 100,000 subscribers & his videos have been viewed 17.1 million times while John McCain’s YouTube channel has only 24,000 subscribers & has been viewed just 11.1 million times. The video “I Got a Crush…On Obama” was an instant online hit, rebroadcast all over television, written about in newspapers & currently features on YouTube with over 10 million views.

Obama’s campaign was significant in teaching all online marketers the value of creating opportunities for consumers to interact with their brand as much as possible. The mantra was “more the brand interaction, better the brand loyalty” which was focused through various other online marketing strategies. “Obama everywhere”, “Barack TV”, “Obama store” & “Obama Mobile” are some of the features that drew zillions on Obama’s website.

A hope seller & a savior; Obama packaged himself as a product very well. A brand with the motto “change you can believe in” successfully narrated the power of internet marketing through his great victory.

The idea behind the launch of such a tool was to find out the most popular search terms or keywords across different people of different countries. Although the results were previously displayed only in the form of graphs, earlier this month, Trends updated its service, to now provide users with numerical representations accompanying the graphs.

More importantly, the new version of Google Trends has expanded its reach, working also for websites. This means that users can now enter specific domains into the search box to compare the traffic information from those domains. If a user wants to compare two sites, the two domains can be entered into the search box, separated by commas.

The information received from such a search broadly covers these three aspects: traffic numbers, location and related websites. That is to say that if one conducts a search to compare two domains, the result of the search would include:

1) The number of visitors for each of the two domains

2) The geographical area from which these visitors arrive at each site

3) The other websites that were searched for, or visited during the same session.

This new version of Google Trends can only bring good news to general search users, especially website owners. It provides a reliable source of information that could not only help in choosing the right keywords for a specific geographic area, but could also be used to track the number and the location of website visitors for one’s own as well as one’s competitor’s site.

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