Social Media Wins In Marketers' '09 Plans

Marketers are directing their 2009 budgets toward content, custom media and social media initiatives, according to a new study from online marketing resource and vendor-matching tool Junta42.
More than half--56%--of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year, Junta42 found after surveying its community of corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals.
What's more, a full 31% expressed their intention to increase spending on content significantly, while 25% said they planned to increase it slightly.
Even in the face of dramatic cutbacks and decreased budgets, only 4% of respondents said they planned to decrease spending on content dramatically next year, while 9% said they planned to decrease it slightly.
"These findings are an acceleration of what we've been seeing for the past few years," said Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42 and author of "Get Content. Get Customers."
Notably, surveyed marketers were very clear that social media will be at the top of their investment list next year.
In terms of most important products/tactics, social media--other than blogs--resonated with 68% of subscribers, followed by e-newsletters/email (60%), blogs (56%), case studies (55%), online video (51% ), white papers (46%) and microsites (43%).
"If marketers will spend less in 2009, it won't be coming from their content development budgets," Pulizzi said. "More and more marketing professionals now realize that tomorrow's marketing is all about developing a conversation with customers."
The Junta42 community is made up of both corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals. For the study, 42% were corporate marketers, 22% were traditional publishers/media, 19% were marketing/advertising agencies, 15% were custom publishers and 3% were association marketers.
In addition, 85% of the surveyed audience makes marketing purchase decisions for their organizations. The Junta42 email study was delivered during the first week of December. A total of 1706 subscribers were invited to take the study, of which 196 completed the survey.

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How to Use Blogging For Your Internet Business

The Internet has given a new face to businesses. It is infact the most advanced way to conduct business. Internet business is the latest trend and hence Internet marketing is also in high demand.

Business---attract prospects---generates traffic---leads to sales---repeat customers.

Blogs have become a boon for businesses as they are extremely low cost and very effective. This is why the business owners and managers want to establish themselves as bloggers.

Here are few tips to get your blog up:

1. Join  blogging communities: Join a couple of blogging communities and make sure you stay within your niche. Build a good reputation within these communities by making daily appearances, interest and your expertise on the product. Establishing your reputation, develop a customer relationship and then  introduce your website. They will be glad to visit your website. Offer something different as well as valuable on your website and you will see good new as well as returning visitors. In any case, one time sales will not be fruitful but ongoing customer relationships will.

1. Identify your potential audience. As in any business it is very dificult to pinpoint your audience,  same here, in blogs you have to decide what you're going to write that will make them read.

why will anybody going to read your web log?

2. Decide your blog category. Next is determining where to locate your blog. Be careful while selecting the category for you blog. Watch for features that identify recent posts and the most popular message threads. This may be helpful in building traffic

3. Start talking: To really kick start your blogging traffic, visit and read other blogs, give your own views on the topic. This will attract the other bloggers to your site .

4. Blogrolling: Only giving fresh content and updating doesn’t bring visitors to your blog, “blogrolling” is one way to get more visitors to your blog.

Building traffic between blogs gives repeat visitors. Linking on your blog site identifies other sites on the Internet - related to your business or expertise will be valuable.

Write comments about what other bloggers have written, then link to them. Thus giving hyperlink while posting comments is another way to get visitors to your blog.

5. Keywords. Search engine is another way to attract traffic. Generating traffic by adding keywords in your blog title and blog content is indeed a good strategy. Suppose, your topic focuses on seo and internet marketing courses, then the words “seo courses” and “internet marketing courses” should be in the title, in the introduction, body of the content and also in the conclusion. This may give a push to your blog site toward the head of the search engine!! Also “Stay on one topic”, so that your content is focused on keywords.

6. Keep the content fresh. Stale content can bring the best blog down. Keep your blog as fresh and current as possible. Schedule your blog posts-may be weekly, fortnight or monthly.

Keep these steps in mind and see the traffic rising :)

Newbie Blogging Strategies

Blogging can be a fun, even if you are a newbie. Give your visitors that incomparable content which they are looking for and they'll come back for more of your blogging content. Here are a few blogging strategies for the newbies:

• Unique Topic and Content: The ideas of the blog should be unique. Do not blog on general topics. There are millions of websites with millions of searches, hence your blog title should be specific.This will also give you less compitition :) But do not make your blog title so specific that you don't get any visitors :( You will have to maintain the balance here and then start. This will give you exposure to you blog site and also give free traffic to your blog. Give good, informative as well as interesting content to the visitors. The visitors are only interested in your blog if you offer incomparable content.No visitor will spend time on stale and boring content. Deliver your messeges in a natural fashion, this will make your post more enjoyable and less like work. Remember making your content entertaining to the visitor will encourage them not only to return back but also refer others to your site.
• Stick to the Topic: If your blog is about "Trip to Europe", then it should not talk about real estate news in Europe.Should stay strictly to the topic.
• Quality Vs Quantity: The visitors will only read your blog if you offer unique copy of the content. So the quality is of great significance . In order to get more and more visitors, your blog should be large with lots of keywords. In other words your blog should have high quality content.
  
• Maintain Regular Schedule: Post your blog at regular intervals. Perhaps, it may be difficult to maintain on weekly basis, you can schedule your posts once or twice a month. When you stick to the schedule the visitors will return more frequently to your blog.
• Clear and Simple Content: Your blog is read by large and varied audience, hence keep the content of your blog simple and easy to understand.
• View and Comment on other Blogs: As a newbie it is good to visit other blogs within your niche. Leaving comments and inserting your link within the signature file on other blogs is a good idea to gain visitors !
• Respond to your Readers' Comments: This gives you a platform for open communication with your readers. Taking their suggestions into consideration and improving will definitely develop a greater feeling of community amongst readers!
• Blog Review: Review few best blog within your niche on a scheduled basis.This is one of the best way for a newbie to entice new as well as old readers to your site.

Implement these blogging strategies and soon you will be a Blogging Star!

Landing Page- What is it?

A landing page, as the name indicates is the page that appears when a visitor clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. It could be home page, or any other page in your site. A landing page can be a reference landing page or a transactional landing page

A reference landing page displays information relevant to the visitor. This information can be in the form of text, images, relevant links, etc

A transactional landing page pursues the visitor to make some activity by filling up a form, registering, and signing up with information like an email address, a name and telephone number –to capture the lead and add it to their mailing list. Always be careful not to provide too many distractions in the form while registering, or you are likely to lose them before they sign up. This action by the visitor is referred as a conversion.

The landing page should have all of essential information that a website offers. Landing page should be focused on topic and important information should be provided in the beginning not at the end of the page as the internet users spend just a few second judging your page. Well crafted landing pages will always give a better conversion rate and you will definitely have a captive audience.

In the ad campaigns, the landing page is customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements like text ads, banner ads, sponsored links, ppc acmpaigns.The effectiveness can be best measured if:

• The landing page should not be connected with the website (home page, other webpages/site map)
• The page should not feature in the organic search engine result page.
• Should not be directly accessed by a visitor.

By doing this the accurate ROI can be easily tracked and the ad campaigns can be analyzed and managed well.