Undertaking any new advertising campaign should also entail the optimization of your landing pages. These pages need to be set up primarily to convert the visitors that your advertising generates. No matter the method of marketing or advertising you use, even offline advertising, you should have a clear understanding of the visitors that it will produce.

- What keywords, if any, led a visitor to your page?
- Are your visitors looking for information or products?
- Where are your visitors likely to be from?

Results from a survey conducted by Cambridge-based Internet design and marketing company, Netflare revealed some startling statistics about small businesses and eCommerce.

Stats like:
- 23% of sites hadn’t been updated since their launch leading to inaccurate and obsolete content

- Only 8% even had an eCommerce element to their site

- 25% had no way of tracking online sales

- 38% didn’t have a budget at all for updating their sites
And the survey covered small businesses in 19 different sectors.

Ah, the good old tactic of using controversy to get exposure. The “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” cliché. Though this may be true sometimes, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that.

Lets take a look at the positives and negatives of controversial marketing.

Why Controversy Can Help Your Business

Do you know what your target audience wants and how they are looking online? As an Internet Marketing Consultant I am often surprised that many website owners don’t know who their market is, and how to target them with web copy and SEO.

Keywords are the words that web surfers enter in search engines to find websites about their search terms. If you want to get in front of your potential audience, it’s important your website has good search engine rankings for your keywords that are related to the theme of your website.

New Internet marketing tools are coming online each and every day. Why should you care? Mainly because these new marketing tools can have a dramatic impact on your online traffic, leads and sales. So much so, your online competitiveness can greatly depend on you finding and using these new marketing tools before everyone else does.

And as Internet marketing grows more and more lucrative, it is becoming more competitive each day, so staying aware of what’s happening has become vital to your online success. More importantly, if you’re a full-time marketer like me, your livelihood will largely depend upon you being able to keep on top of all the new ways of marketing on the web.

Even for those of us who have been dabbling in the Internet marketing arena for a decade or more, all these latest frenzied “Info-Product Launches” are downright scary. In recent months it is not only the product launches themselves that have become a little frightening, but also the rate at which these product launches keep bombarding all of us in the marketing world. It has become so relentless you feel like you’re an extra, ducking for cover in some war movie; Saving Private Ryan comes quickly to mind.

If you want to promote your product or service, then consider using public relations. The best part of PR is that it costs nothing. In fact, public relations is one of the best kept secrets of small business owners who are successful. Use these powerful techniques to get picked up by local and national media.

1. Be an expert.

The media relies on experts for their information. The news that gets printed is only as credible as the source from which it comes. Begin by selecting a news related story to comment on. It should be a story that you are qualified to speak about, aligned with your area of expertise.

You won’t find many article marketing secrets being given away online, because very few people properly understand the power of this internet marketing tool. It is more than simply a way of getting links back to your website, but a very powerful tool that if used properly can increase your sales to another level.

If you are provided with ’secrets’ then they are well known by almost everybody. I will admit that even the ’secrets’ I am about to divulge are not secrets at all, but well known article marketing techniques. However, what I will also say is that the three provided here are neither appreciated nor used by all of even those that profess to be marketing ‘gurus’.

The Web 2.0 social media revolution is in full steam. Are people finding your website?

As an entrepreneur, how do you make your business website stand out amongst 435 million other websites and more than 1 million blogs competing for your audience’s attention?

It’s not as hard as you might think.

To begin, let’s look at the demographics of Web 2.0 social networking sites, Myspace.com, Facebook and YouTube.com. This will give you an idea on how to position your message in the Web 2.0 World.

The Web 2.0 Social Networking Revolution

Web 2.0 is a real revolution on the Internet. And these aren’t just college kids…

Social marketing is a relatively new, often misunderstood form of online marketing that is reaping huge rewards for website owners who incorporate it into their marketing plans. I work with clients and customers who, while being very new to social marketing, are seeing results in the following areas:

1. Higher search engine rankings for their top keywords.

2. More rankings of additional keywords or “long tail” keyword phrases.

3. More link popularity from sites linking on their own accord.

4. More link popularity from social media sites.

5. More activity on their blogs, such as more commenting and interaction.