The fashion industry has had a love/hate affair with the internet for some time now.

The first factor is that fashion was traditionally a print business. Consumers poured through magazines to get photos of the latest fashion trends. What the models were wearing, what the celebrities were wearing, all it was visual and all of it was in print. The fashion industry was firmly in bed with the print industry. But times change.

Along came the internet, and with it, easy and almost instantaneous access to photos of what celebrities and models were wearing. The fashion print industry took a nose-dive, but the fashion industry itself, stores, outlets, etc., took off.

The story went a little like this:

1. Consumer saw a brilliant new gown on Celeb. A.
2. Consumer searched internet for designer
3. Consumer purchased the gown (or a knock-off) off the internet

But the story didn’t end there:

4. Consumer received gown and it either didn’t fit, or just wasn’t right for them once it was actually on
5. Consumer returned it

Fast forward a few years, and perceptive consumers are putting the fashion industry on the Local Search Marketing Map. How?

Like this:

1. Consumer sees a fabulous outfit on Celeb. A.
2. Consumer searches internet for designer
3. Consumer locates the nearest merchant selling the outfit using a local search
4. Consumer goes to the merchant to try on the outfit, and purchases it or buys another

The bottom line is this: Service providers aren’t the only ones reaping benefits from Local Online Advertising. The fashion industry is cozying up to Local Online Advertising because they provide the photos and the information, but local merchants provide the goods. Can the consumer purchase the clothing off the internet? Of course, but real fashionistas want to try the clothes on first.

If you are a local business looking to increase traffic to a website than pay per click could be your solution. While organic listings take time to grow and climb in the search engines Yahoo’s Pay Per Click is a fast convenient way to quickly get directly in front of your audience. Your local customers are no longer just looking in print and local yellow page books to find a place to shop. 

Your local audience has found that it is even easier to go directly to their computer and just look for whatever they need in a search engine rather than flipping through a book that only gets their fingers dirty. Yahoo offers an affordable solution to reaching out to your community. It is an avenue of advertising that many of your competitors are probably already using to generate revenues for their organization. Don’t think of pay per click advertising as a national campaign. You can very easily geo target your campaign and reach only the people you desire. If you are frustrated with your organic listings and waiting for your site to climb you should take advantage of a localized pay per click campaign because it could be crucial to the success of your company. Yahoo’s sponsored search website has made it very easy for you to come in and set up your campaign. Just create an account they will walk you through the rest of the process.  For more information please visit Yahoo’s sponsored search marketing site and take advantage of this traffic generating product.

There is a lot of talk about Social Networking for Business going on, so we thought it would be only fitting to write our next book review about it.

The introduction states that:

This book is written for anyone who wants to tap the power of social networking for professional reasons. Marketers, publicists, small business owners, independent professionals, job seekers, fundraisers, and activists all can find ways to profit from strategic social networking. It’s a viable business tool that opens up new ways to connect with others who can help you achieve your business goals. The goal of this book is to provide you with a solid foundation on the basics of social networking, give you some insight into future trends, and encourage you to think strategically about the best ways you can leverage the power of social networking to enhance your business, your cause, and your life.

The Truth about Profitting from Social Networking by Patrice-Anne Rutledge discusses the obvious target sites with gusto. In a chapter entitled “The Truth about the Most Popular Social Networking Sites” she goes into the myths and facts about the usability of MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Youtube.

The really interesting parts of this book are the ones that discuss the proper use of social networking as a tool. There are wrong ways to use a social networking platform get yourself ignored or, worse yet, banned. The author discusses these and gives advice and examples in etiquette and usage to those people who are either unfamiliar with social networking, or whom have tried it and failed miserably.

At around $12-$15, depending on which market you purchase this from, the book is economical. If you’re new to the social networking market and don’t have any idea how you’ll break into it, this book will be a helpful overview and help you avoid some social networking faux pas.

Unlike Facebook or Myspace, Linkedin is a social media network designed for business professionals to increase their network and social contacts…which in the business world means to better their business contacts. It is also a place for people searching for jobs can list their skills and business looking to hire can list their criteria. Linkedin gives business people the ability to make the contacts that they need to survive in the social media business network.

Adam Nash at the LinkedIn blog wrote a blog about LinkedIn after his key speeches at the 2008 Social Patterns conference.

•

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network: the new medium for how business gets done. Our members find new ways to interact with each other and improve their business every day.
• LinkedIn a Purpose-Driven Network. LinkedIn was built and designed specifically with the business professional in mind. That kind of focus and relevance makes us as valuable as possible to the professional who comes to LinkedIn for the specific purpose of getting business done.

He also wrote a piece on the use of LinkedIn in the entertainment industry that is worth looking at.

Link directly to your media properties
As LinkedIn represents your professional brand online, use the three outgoing hyperlinks to send people right to your movie, music, or filmography online. Got your projects on iTunes? Netflix? Amazon? IMDb? YouTube? Link to these and enable people to review your creative efforts first-hand.
–
Keep checking the LinkedIn Blog to find out how other industries are using the site to open the right doors and develop opportunities for their companies and careers. I’ll be here doing the dirty work for LinkedIn, leaving no stone unturned to get the story. Special thanks to Marcio and Telemetrik for use of their song “Nova”!

A good internet marketing firm will increase your traffic, conversion rates, and general product or service awareness in your target market. There are many ways for a firm to manage your advertisement campaign, and they differ wildly depending on the company that you hire.

Advertising/Marketing firms and webmasters that promise the quickest results with the dirtiest of strategies are to be avoided all together. Unethical companies will try to get their clients to buy into Commando Marketing, using tricks such as hidden text, interlinking, keyword stuffing, and more.

Under NO circumstances should you risk your company’s reputation and online presence with following BANNED practices:

Keyword Stuffing
One of the most commonly abused SEO tactics, this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. The text is usually unreadable except as a string of keywords. It is usually added at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is using text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. The idea is that search engines read a load of keywords on a page that is simply trying to bump it’s ratings, without having actual relevant content. This is blatant spam!

The above examples are NOT legitimate SEO strategies. Using them will get your website penalized and possibly blacklisted. If you have hired an advertising/marketing firm for your online business, and they recommend or, even worse, actually implement strategies such as this, it is your website and your business that will pay the price.

In the Local Pay Per Click campaigns, some businesses are still set on quantity, not quality. The amount of potential customers brought into your site was the only thing focused on for so long that some companies are reluctant to bring those numbers down. Less clicks?!? Less traffic?!? That’s bad!

Actually, that can be good thing. Geographic Targeting can, and (if done properly) will decrease the traffic to your site, but you will end up with higher conversion rates and a higher audience share.

Why is geographic targeting important, and is less traffic a good thing, in your PPC campaign?

Geographic targeting is about excluding traffic from outside a specific geographic area that you designate. Geographic targeting is highly valuable to advertisers who serve customers regionally and also to advertisers who want to focus their budget on increasing brand/product awareness levels in specific geographic areas.

It doesn’t make sense to present your ads to people in the UK or China if you don’t ship outside of the US. Drilling down even more, if you sell only in a single state, a single city, or a single neighborhood, you shouldn’t waste your budget on clicks from outside of that area.

When you apply this strategy to your local PPC campaign, your traffic volume will go down, but the key point is that your profits won’t. The consumers who are clicking on your ads are the consumers that can use your product or services.

Don’t focus so much on traffic volume. Instead, keep your eye, and your advertising budget, on quality.

As we discussed before, businesses are turning away from advertising and marketing using traditional media such as newspapers, television, and radio. Business owners are seeing their competition getting the edge by reaching a larger market share with online campaign using the same budget or less, and it just can’t be ignored any longer. It’s move on, or move out.

The current economic downturn is forcing consumers to research the best possible price for the best service, and the more consumers research businesses and services online, the more they are weeding out companies without an internet presence.

Robert Jaques at vnunet added his voice to the discussion on the internet’s increasingly large piece of the marketing and advertising pie.

Experts predict that internet advertising in the US will continue to “grow fast” in the face of an economic downturn that will force a reduction in overall ad spending.
IDC forecasts that current economic conditions will accelerate the transfer of marketing budgets from traditional to new media.
Internet advertising will grow about eight times as fast as advertising at large between 2008 and 2012, according to the analyst firm, while revenue will double to $51.1bn.
This growth means that the internet will go from the number five to the number two medium in just five years, making it bigger than newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV and second only to direct marketing.

Robert also apparantly agrees with us that the online Video marketing boom will be one of the biggest factors in the general increase of online marketing.

We talked about Yahoo’s potential buyout and how it could affect advertisers…

It could affect local online advertising in a number of ways:

If Yahoo! is unable to pull itself out of its looming financial crisis then it could eventually go belly up, leaving local advertisers with only two major choices for online marketing - Microsoft and Google (that’s not a real choice).
As Yahoo! continues to lose share value they may decide to seek another buyer and end up having to take less than Microsoft’s offer to sell and reap any returns for shareholders. That could affect Yahoo!s own prices for local advertisers in the long run.

Yahoo! may decide to turn its PPC offerings over to Google completely, which could change how Google prices its PPC advertising for all businesses.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! navigates the waters from here on out.

And now it appears that we have our answer:

With Microsoft apparently out of the picture, Yahoo! is turning to Google to help its chief executive, Jerry Yang, prove that he made the right decision last month when he turned down Microsoft’s takeover bid of $47.5 billion, or $33 per share. Yang asked for $37 per share, prompting Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to withdraw the oral offer.

If the Google partnership passes what’s likely to be a rigorous review by U.S. antitrust regulators and lawmakers, Yahoo! intends to use its rival’s superior search technology to display ads on its own Web site as well as those of its partners’ in the United States and Canada.

BigOak blog wrote a great piece on the continued usefulness of Wiki in the Local Search Engine Optimization wars. A lot of site developers stear clear Wikipedia due to it’s no follow policy enacted last year, but it’s extraordinary popularity with Google is still an essential SEO tool, if you use it wisely. So consider this your reminder to not erase Wiki from your Local Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Even though Wikipedia added nofollow tags in early 2007, backlinks you manage to snag there will still help you from an SEO standpoint. Why? One simple reason: content scrapers. Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet.

Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time

Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:
1.Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
2.Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.

Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.

Local brick & mortar business are always looking at ways to drive more foot traffic to their business but if they have ignored online traffic than they could be missing out on a great deal of business.  ProStores has made it easy for all local businesses to get up and running with an online web store.  This one stop shop has provided all the necessary tools for any local business to take advantage of the internet in selling their products. ProStores offers everything from starter packages to advanced enterprise packages making it easy an affordable for all business shapes and sizes. This program is designed to fit all experience levels. Are you an EBay seller?

If you are than this product could dramatically help you with you online selling. ProStores offers promotion and even hosting to make things as convenient as possible. ProStores can also help you search engine optimization for your web store so that it ranks even quicker with all the top search engines such as Google, yahoo and MSN. For any local business launching a web store could be a scary process.

So many choices and decision to make and with what vendor? Come and read client testimonials and gain the confidence that ProStores has what it takes. Many others have reached that same crossroad and ProStores came through the help.

For more information please visit www.ProStores.com and take a look at how this organization can help yours.

The advances and advantages of local mobile markets and GPS capability are moving
forward again. The past few years have seen advances that helped your customer
find you, literally, with mobile GPS. New appliations are coming now that turn
a 180 and help you find your customer and bring your physical business to them.

Digital Solid discusses:

The retailer (say, Starbuck’s) could aggregate cell phone data about your movements,
as well as everyone else’s who want the same services as you, and …
Anticipate through statistical means where to locate itself to fulfill those needs,
and …
Alert you via your cell phone where they are in real time (e.g., “We’re two blocks
away — care for your favorite beverage?”)
I didn’t expect this to happen overnight. In fact, two years was a pretty aggressive
time line in my estimation.

Therefore, I’m a little giddy to see the first part of the process being mapped
out and monetized. Check out the new Sense Networks product offering, for a peek
into the future of retailing that factors in predictive modeling of where customers
will be next.

Harvesting the low-hanging fruit, Sense Networks is focusing on helping find city
nightlife hot-spots. Its site explains how this product, Citysense, works:

Citysense is an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery and
social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody?”

Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and
places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp
and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a
free demonstration of the Macrosense platform that everyone can enjoy.

I see this as the beginning of a location-free bank branch or coffee shop. Exciting
stuff!

With local advertising picking up steam in the world of online marketing it will become more and more important to really find the right person that can handle this position with great confidence. eMarketingSilo  has become the one stop shop for your local marketing genius to help grow your company or your clients company.

Stop spinning your wheels at these large powerhouse HR websites where sifting through the bad apples becomes nothing more than chore but filter through many qualified candidates to find that local advertising superstar. With the overwhelming growth of this amazing industry the amount of bad apples will also rise. Since many local advertising employees will deal with local brick & mortar business it is even more important that you have an employee the represents your organization in the community with the most respect and integrity. Many of these businesses are just venturing into the world of online marketing and it is important that the right person at your organization makes that a very comfortable transition.  Online marketing could be a very scary area for many local businesses. Relying on print for so many years it takes the right person to hold their hand. Let eMarketingSilo help you find that reputable employee that will not allow your organizations name to get dragged through the mud.

For more information on how you can grow your firm or organization safely please visit http://www.emarketingsilo.com and find your new work force today.

Jennifer Osborne at SearchEnginePeople wrote a good article on the 26 Mistakes That Cost You Money in a small business PPC campaign. The article is a little lengthy (26!) but some of the points she brings up are worth noting.

11. Using very Broad keywords. Broad keywords tend to be used by people early in the buying cycle. Think about the difference between “Vacation”, “All Inclusive Vacation” and “Bermuda All Inclusive Vacation”. Generally we find that people using very broad keyword queries are very early in the buying cycle, in the Learning Phase. As a result, conversion rates for these types of keywords are very low. Yet broad keywords tend to cost the most.
Narrower, more specific keywords tend to be used by people who know what they want and are closer to the Purchase Phase of the Buying Cycle.
I’ve seen Broad keywords eat 50% of a Small Business budget without any conversions. In this scenario, by not bidding on those expensive keywords the client reduced their spend by half while maintaining the same # of Conversions and Doubling their ROI.

I love that tip, and I’ll explain why. Too many businesses get wrapped up in their PPC strategy and focus on the broad keywords that will get the most attention, but as Jennifer points out above, the broadest keywords queries are often used when potential customers are researching a purchase. They are not ready to buy yet, so your conversion rates are rock bottom.

Bidding on the more specific keywords might seem like you are targeting a smaller audience, (because you are) but that smaller audience is the one that is ready to purchase.

Focus your PPC strategy. Sharpen it. And ultimately make it work for you.

We have a lot of emails in our box asking us “Which is the best promotional strategy?”

First let’s look at the background:

There are over 140 million websites currently in existence, with millions more pages within them. While only a fraction of those sites are actively updated and promoted, statistically it still means that if your site doesn’t have a promotion strategy, it will never stand out bright enough to be seen in an endless internet sky.

Now let’s look at what your current strategy is for your website or internet business:

Are you relying on home-learned SEO tactics? Are you launching an all out Local Mobile Media Campaign? Are you relying upon a Pay Per Click model? What’s working? What’s falling flat?

Now lets give you the answer that you might not like:

There a lot of strategies out there to increase your exposure and traffic, and ultimately make you a tidy profit, but which strategy is the best for you? You’ll notice that I didn’t ask “Which is the best promotional strategy?” I didn’t ask it, because it’s a trick question, there is no magic bullet to internet marketing, there is only the creation of a strategy that fits your business model the best.

So What is Your Solution?

The solution for a business that is serious about their internet marketing campaign is to have a Local Web Marketing expert look at your business from every available angle and personalize a strategy for you. It’s possible that your current strategy needs only to be fine-tuned, and it’s possible that it will need to re-hauled completely to look into new marketing arenas.

Just about everyone is talking about Google Earth’s 3-D mapping images and how incredibly cool it is. Accesses maps, satellite imagery and aerial photography taken in the last three years has been combined to create 3-D maps that can be manipulated using a variety of features including navigational controls for tilting, zooming in and out and moving left or right.

Standard mapping tools such as distance calculators and routing directions are included, but it is the pure inclusive experience of really looking at something with the ability to explore it that has people buzzing.

Remarkably, I have seen very little about the local advertising potential that is exploding with this new imagery software. The travel industry is understandably the most excited, and why wouldn’t they be? If Travel Company A advertises its offerings using Google 3-D, customers will have the ability to really know and get excited about their destination; they can virtually visit the surrounding area of restaurants, shops, and fascinating side streets. If Travel Company B is advertising the same trips, with 5 static 2-D images, I can tell you straight out who is going to win that advertising war.

If you want to see how great this can be, go and see the Disney Google Earth site. I bet you’ll be taking a virtual vacation, and planning a trip there, in about 2 minutes flat.

There is potential for an absolute explosion of commercial applications for Google Earth 3-D for local advertising. Real Estate firms, retailers, service firms, Parks and Travel are just the beginning. If these companies don’t get into the 3-D game, they might find themselves lost in the dusty pages of search engine static.