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Inbound Advertising Your Secret Weapon For Branding... Imagine if you will your company logo on the home page of Google for a day. Many would say this would be the ultimate in inbound advertising. What would the effect of such an anomaly be on your business?...

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New iPad app Flipboard Shows Us The Future Of Internet... New iPad app was released this week that might indicate a seismic, revolutionary shift in how users perceive and consume content, as well as offer a true silver bullet for a troubled media industry scrambling...

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Example Of One Of The Very Best Landing Page Designs...   A landing page is an important component of your online marketing campaign strategy. They are the pages that your online ads and some SEO terms will drive visitors to. The number one goal...

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Inbound Marketing Verses OutBound Marketing The Winner... The Internet has changed the overall landscape and scheme of the business world, companies must gradually transition from “old marketing” techniques of outbound marketing to the “new marketing”...

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The 2010 Internet Brings New Content Management Creation... It is the new dawn in Internet advertising and the year 2010 brings in with it new services for content management and creation. Look at the latest statistics and trends. Internet advertising...

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Inbound Advertising Your Secret Weapon For Branding A Company On The Internet

Category : InBound Advertising

Imagine if you will your company logo on the home page of Google for a day. Many would say this would be the ultimate in inbound advertising. What would the effect of such an anomaly be on your business? Take this logo or any logo for that matter and just put it right above the search box on Google. Wow what a titillating concept. Let’s first think about what assumptions most consumers would make. Hmm. This must be the best company ever to have such a prestigious honor of getting to put their companies image and logo on Google.  As the owner of the company you sit back and relax and watch the hits come pooring in. Let’s snap back to reality.

Inbound Advertising once you understand it’s concept and principals really has three core tenet’s, image, quality, and service.  What you are really hoping for is to have your company come up in Google when someone is looking for your products and services right, wrong. Do you think let’s say for example Amazon.com needs to have it’s logo on the front page of Google, I mean sure they wouldn’t mind it, but they have an image. Consumers already know who they are. They have a good reputation for quality, and are providing consumers good service. They are a branded respected and well recognized company. Things are changing you have to see the bigger picture.

Isn’t that what you are really hoping for; to have your company be a well respected branded well recognized company. Well Inbound advertising is your new secret weapon for branding your companies identity on the Internet par none. A good friend of mine and a client who has a financial services and insurance company once told me that in his local market when he does traditional outbound advertising, he found that when he did three or more different kinds of advertisements at the same time that the response was better all the way around. Why do you think that is? I will tell you why? The repetitiveness of the message to the local public of the company. Hmm. I saw this ad in the movies, in the coffee shop and a bunch of other places. This must be a great company, I think I will do business with them. The perceived value is there.

Most companies in the past have become branded through traditional outbound advertising and marketing, companies like Gillette, Proctor and Gamble, McDonald’s etc. Google on the other hand achieved most of it’s recognition through inbound advertising, yes that’s right. People just got accustomed to going there when the needed to find something on the internet, but ladies and gentlemen this was before the phenomenon of social media. How has this changed things? It has changed things quite a bit and will continue to change things even more. Facebook has just surpassed 500 million users. That is a staggering number isn’t it.    

So you have a window of opportunity now to be a pioneer in this new and evolving Internet as one of the new companies to succeed by using inbound advertising. If you are not exactly sure what inbound advertising is, you need to take some time to wrap your brain around this concept. I would suggest you start with the 7 series eCourse at Internet Billboards. It is a free course that has tremendous scope on the subject matter.

Remember you are attempting to attract more prospects to your website. Inbound advertising is like honey for bees. Make it a sweet proposition and they will come. Once they get there that is another story but we will save that for another post.

To your Success,

Tom George,

Founder

Internet Billboards

New iPad app Flipboard Shows Us The Future Of Internet Content

Category : Content Publishing

New iPad app was released this week that might indicate a seismic, revolutionary shift in how users perceive and consume content, as well as offer a true silver bullet for a troubled media industry scrambling for ways to generate revenue.

The Flipboard iPad app aggregates all of your chosen social media environments and displays that content in a slick, easy-to-use “personal magazine.” Every time the app is launched, your magazine will show articles, images, links and videos that your friends – and presumably you – find interesting. As said in the video demonstration below, “It always has content you care about.”

This is the future of content – personalized, engaging and valuable to consumers. It’s not to be taken lightly and will soon go far beyond social media.

Watch the short video below then continue reading as we examine why this is so important to the Web industry.

Implications for Business

Flipboard is a prime example of discretionary content. Users are increasingly (and with greater ease) deciding what they view, how they view it and from whom. As a publisher, this one app highlights major reasons to get involved in or amplify your presence on social media today, and demonstrates why it is so very important to create customized content for users moving forward.

Let’s look at this from the user’s perspective. If I’m setting up my personal magazine, I could choose to include a favorite Twitter feed, such as @chicagotribune; Facebook Page, such as local radio station WXRT; and my brother’s Facebook profile. When I open my Flipboard, I’ll see some of the latest breaking news stories complete with accompanying images and video (not just 140 characters with a link) from the Tribune, read about and listen to a sample of a new band coming to town from WXRT, and see video of my niece’s first steps taken just seconds ago. That’s powerful stuff.

One very important takeaway from all of this is the idea that consumers will start viewing content on a very personal level. That means providing what they want without overwhelming them. Twitter offers one way for publishers to do exactly that. For example, if I run a local news website, I could set up separate Twitter accounts for politics, sports, business, entertainment, etc. Then, a user can pull only those feeds they are interested in to display in their personal magazine. That makes your brand valuable to them without bogging them down with information they don’t need or want.

Also, this new level of personalization requires a sense of social media responsibility. For example, a user will not want their personal magazine littered with duplicate updates or endless retweets. This is about engagement – not clicks or pageviews.

At this point, you might be thinking: that’s great but this is one app, on one device. For now, that’s true. But Flipboard and the iPad are harbingers of what’s to come.

So-called “couch computing” is very real. Soon, the market will be inundated with tablet computers and Flipboard or an alternative will be available for every one of them. Most importantly, this Flipboard style of media consumption is in demand. This one app crashed servers just hours after its release due to the flood of consumers attempting to connect to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

I’m comfortable saying that this app or another iteration of it will be one of the most downloaded of all time. And those millions of users will need content to fill it up.

The Big Picture

The Web is a fractured environment – you have to spend a lot of time and energy reading headlines, clicking links, scanning articles, watching videos and reading updates to get what you want. Flipboard shows us that there is another way. There is a way to get everything you want in one place, in an engaging, entertaining way that offers real value. And this is where the media industry as a whole stands to benefit the most.

Remember micropayments – the idea of charging a few cents for a particular piece of content? With Flipboard (or something like it) charging for piecemeal content is a very real possibility. You could view the latest episode of your favorite television show, the business section from The New York Times, the sports page of the Chicago Tribune and see the latest product releases and daily coupons from your favorite retailer (and be able to purchase), all in one place, for a nominal fee.

I don’t know about you, but I would pay for that before paying to access one website – as Rupert Murdoch has suggested. Why would I pay for content I’ll never read? Instead, why not pay for only the content I want? Back in the day when I still subscribed to a print newspaper, I would rifle through a six-pound Sunday paper to pull small sections out that I wanted to read, then throw the rest away. That was a tremendous waste of time, energy and resources. And we all know what’s happened to the print newspaper business.

If I could open one app and see and hear everything that’s important to me? Well, I’d buy that for a dollar. Or more. And, until now, I haven’t even mentioned the advertising possibilities.

Example Of One Of The Very Best Landing Page Designs By NetFlix

Category : Marketing Tips

 

A landing page is an important component of your online marketing campaign strategy. They are the pages that your online ads and some SEO terms will drive visitors to.

The number one goal of a landing page is to convert a prospect by having them register information with your site. That information could be for a free whitepaper, webinar an online newsletter, free demo, or another call to action.

Many online products company have their homepage function as a landing page. These companies succeed by having people signup for their products/services and pay monthly subscriptions.

I recently came across one of the best landing pages I’ve seen at Netflix.com. Netflix business model relies on converting visitors into subscribers that will pay them a monthly fee, and their landing page is optimized to do just do that.

Here are five quick takeaways from the Netflix.com that you can use on your own landing page, whether it’s your site’s homepage or an interior page that people are driven to via ads.

  • New visitors are critical. Your landing page’s goal is to sell new visitors on your company, not to help current customers use the service. The Member Sign In is a tertiary concern on the Netflix page, after the trial signup and how it works graphic.
  • Offer something in exchange for the signup. Netflix achieves this point by offering a free trial, it’s a lot easier for someone to turn their information over to you when they’re getting something in exchange. Other popular offers in exchange for signups are whitepapers, podcasts, and free consultations.
  • Optimize for small monitor resolutions. Make your information and call to action available to as many people as possible, this means optimizing for even laptops. By not forcing even the smallest screens to have to scroll, Netflix is minimizing the necessary effort to learn about and sign up for their service.
  • Keep the main navigation simple. Don’t overwhelm visitors with menu options that encourage them to leave the landing page and registration form.
  • Less is more. Minimize the amount of text on the page. Make it easy for visitors to quickly get an understanding of your product or service and the offer you’re making to them. Netflix does this by using graphics and very little text, making it easy for new visitors to quickly understand the service.

The overarching theme of the landing page is to make the page simple yet enticing. Woo the visitor with graphics and powerful offers, but don’t overwhelm them with information and complicated processes. What are some other good landing pages out there? Any good stories about signing up on a landing page because it was just that enticing?