21st of March 2010: Changes race ahead in online world

Interested visitors, as online marketing hits up and more and more people the world over look to the internet as a quick fix to their usual woes and economic decline, it's interesting that a new not for profit site has emerged from the wilderness discussing the wonderful world of promotional products and promotional marketing.

No doubt at all that promotional merchandise sales are growing all the time and much of this can be put down to the freedom the internet provides to allow simple research and study of ideas. Equally the budget which is freed up from savings in traditional media can be simply reinvested in a promotional marketing campaign which will inevitably result in large revenues flowing to the lucky parties.

3rd of February 2010: How Time Flies

Gentle readers, is it not true that whilst one's head is down and posterior is facing upwards engaged in development of the world's largest promotional products network that time doth have wings? Fresh Promotions has now well any truly cemented itself ans the premier promotional products website in Australia, and one of the top 10 in the world. Dominating online retail sales of products such as promotional pens and promotional confectionery there appears to be no end to the wonders of Fresh Online.

27th September 2008: Endless tide of Imitators

The launch of the new websites is almost complete and Google has been eating up the results; our rankings have increased across the board and traffic is growing every day. I guess we should be flattered but there are new entrants every day into the market copying our site layout and online strategy.

13th September 2008: New Website, New Functions

The new site has just gone live after months of work. After a lot of study of the way things are done in online retail we have built the site to maximise the range of products and information available to shoppers.

We'll continue with the blog entries now that the new site is running and our software is perfected. I'll keep you up to date with the latest information in the online advertising world and the glamorous promotional products industry. br>
1st July 2007: Spend Your Online Funds Wisely

The sudden boom in expenditure on on-line advertising was been widely reported in the media. Users of the internet would also be aware of the growing number of banner ads, pop-ups and interactive flash driven marketing ploys which are appearing on sites across the board. Most people who are spending on-line are getting a greater return on their money than they have with traditional media and in many cases this has led to marketing spends being looser than they may have been. The same principles apply with on-line advertising as they always have. The objective is to maximise your return on marketing investment both in terms of impacts (views) and conversion (sales).

One of the real danger areas into which a number of on-line novices have fallen is paid search engine marketing or Pay Per Click. Famously Google festoons the front page of every search term with a wide range of paid advertising but there are a number of traps for our players in bidding up the pay per click cost. We will discuss these at length over the next couple of entries, but the issue is you must look closely at the total value of a visit to your website and the overall advantages for your business in attracting traffic.

Different online marketers have different reasons for buying traffic and on-line business. In may of the markets the cost of PPC advertising has been driven beyond the value of the sales it may immediately attract. This is because people are obsessed with the prestige of having the number one position and also as they may see the first acquisition of business as being a cost they can offset against future sales from the same client. This is of course a legitimate marketing strategy, but one which should be signaling potential danger to users of PPC advertising strategies. Personally, I believe that in the long term many of the markets using PPC will become unsustainable on a cost per acquisition basis as people seek to use the positions on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) more as a branding exercise than as a process for generating leads.

1st June 2007: Building Worthwhile Links to Your Site

The internet and success on the net is about attracting traffic. Obviously there are a number of ways to do this, but the best long-term strategy is all about building a range of incoming links from directories, complimentary sites and information centres.

Besides some of the largest presences on the net most successful on-line marketers would see the majority of traffic coming through search engine results (SERPS). While search engines are the best source of converting leads any company would be advised to develop a network of other traffic sources. The behaviour of the search engines in listing your pages in their results can largely be determined by assumptions put together through observation of the processes the algorithms appear to follow. However in the end people have theories about the search engines formula not solid equations. In any case the process the Search Engines use to develop rankings is not set in concrete and is tuned regularly.

So building incoming links to your site is something any serious online marketer should have at the top of their list of priorities. Not only is the link likely to guide traffic to your site, but the rankings attributed to your pages are largely determined by the quality and number of incoming links.

14th January 2007

Welcome Back To Work

The holidays are over and Fresh promotions has never been busier. So far January has been a crazy month for us. As usual in January we were all expecting to knock-off early and go to the pub, but the volume of orders and new projects has had us working harder than December. A good example of the surge in business is traffic on this website. We have recorded more unique visitors and page loads in January than we did in December.

Looks like being a big business year, because most of our clients and suppliers have been experiencing the same thing.

I�ll get back into the swing of offering our on-line marketing thoughts and suggestions in the next couple of weeks, but right now and spare time is going to be spent building our new promotional marketing network. Or at the pub.

21st January 2007

Building a Link Strategy

Way back in October and November last year, before we got so busy the entire dispatch department developed RSI from taping boxes, I began the process of introducing you good readers to the basics on on-line marketing. From the feedback we�ve received and the clients who have asked us to build them websites of optimise their websites it appears that somebody is reading this stuff.

At least ten times in the last month we�ve been approached by companies who want us to do for them what we�ve done for ourselves. I guess there�s no better advertising of our services than to see it in action. If somebody has found us and likes what they�ve seen that has to beat all the promises and powerpoint presentations in the world. (Anyone else out there hate powerpoint?)

Other than obvious design and information flaws in a site the place to start with building a website�s traffic and profitability is the �links strategy.�

If you�ve spent time surfing the net, you�ll know links are what makes the internet work. If sites were not linked to each other the only point of entry would be through a search engine or by directly typing a url into your browser. So you can see how the correct links, in the correct places, must be a very powerful tool in building the traffic to your site.

The first aspect of building your links strategy is establishing a budget. As discussed in previous blog entries, get over the mentality that the net is free. You might get lucky and be able to rank without any spend on links or content, however Google and the other search engines reward those who invest in the net . Equally sites which can deliver traffic to another are entitled to be paid for the service they provide.

29th January 2007

Ways to Get Links to Your Site
In a nutshell, here are the ways you can build or attract links to your site:

a. Buy Them
Either by buying listings in relevant, high ranking directories or by negotiating to buy links from appropriate on-topic pages on other sites. Directories like the Yahoo business directory or business.com are good place to start. Not only will these links improve your search engine rankings, but they will deliver traffic of their own accord which, if your listing is properly constructed, should pay for their cost. The improved rankings will be a bonus.

b. On Topic Articles and Information
Another strategy is to attract links by adding interesting and useful information to your site. While this is a strategy which has no guarantees it can pay-off massively if you post something interesting and attract the attentions of a major news or business site.

c. Trade Them
There are a range of automated software packages which identify websites of interest and automatically request a link exchange. In the past this strategy was successful in improving search engine rankings, but now it can actually be detrimental. Google can see long list pages of links without any other worthwhile content as spam and can actually mark you down for your efforts. While some reciprocal link exchanges may work, we wary, particularly if you are contacted with such an offer.

d. Free Directory Listings
It doesn�t hurt to register your url on free business directory listings, particularly if they are relevant to the services or products your supply and are geographically targeted. However be wary of giving too much information to too many of these organisations who may use your credibility to cover their less honourable activities. In summary, have a few directory listings, but no more than 10% of the links in your network.

8th of November

So far I�ve talked about building a picture which allows you to understanding the internet in visual terms. Using the analogy of a road system we look at the next part of optimising your site; building links to bring taffic, value and search engine rankings.

Imagine you were Google and you had to invent a way of listing millions of websites and billions of web pages. How would you do it? You couldn�t do it the traditional way of using alphabetical order, that would always favour somebody who�s name started with �A�. The whole net would be like the first page of the phone book, a bunch of turkeys with companies called AAAAAAAABB, etc.

Google had two options:

1. Let the most popular and best sites come first because people had voted with their mouses, or
2. Let the person who comes first pay for it in an open market.

Being owned and run by very clever people Google did both. In the process they created two markets. The major listings, called �organic� are a battle of content, traffic and connectivity (links). The paid listings are an open market where the highest bidder rules on a minute by minute basis.

So how then, if you were google, would you determine which sites are worthy of the highest natural listings in search results? Thinking in terms of the net being a network of roads, doesn�t it make sense that the location which has the most roads feeding into it, and the largest roads feeding into it would on the surface be the location which was of most interest to people? In terms of roadways the highest rank would go to the CBD with smaller regional centres ranking below.

The number one way to have your site recognised by Google and ranking highly is to have quality links feeding into it. In the next blog entry I�ll describe the nature of a successful link strategy and the relative value of different links in improving the ranking of your site:

30th October: Getting Started with Your On-Line Marketing

If you are in an industry dealing business to business you�re crazy if you don�t have an online budget allocated. While there are still people taking out full pages in the yellow pages who have virtually no exposure on the net. I could guarantee with a good SEO program you could put almost any website in any category on the first page of google for the annual cost of a full page in the yellow pages.

So how do you start advertising on the net?
Step 1: Get your site right
Step 2: Buy appropriate directory listings to your site
Step 3: Buy or negotiate links to your site
Step 4: Keep the site �fresh� and regularly update the content.
We�ll cover each of these individually in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned, the valuable information is on its way!

28th October: No Free Lunches on The Net
In previous posts I have been suggesting that the first step in understanding the internet and its marketing opportunities is to get a mental picture of how the net works. Human behaviour and thinking is strongly built around our sense of sight. If we can�t see something it either doesn�t matter, doesn�t exist or if we know it�s there but can�t see it, sometime a source of fear. Also the fact that the internet is not something we can see makes it less tangible, and encourages the mentality that the internet is just chunks of computer code being exchanged and therefore has no authentic value.

If you want to succeed on the net, you must forget the mentality that the internet is free.

24th October - Yellow Pages Changes Strategy
I criticised the Yellow Pages in an earlier entry here. Yes, I know, we�re nasty bullies here at Fresh. I�ve had a few emails form people amused by these comments and telling me stories about how overpriced and arrogant Yellow Pages (Sensis) have been in past dealings and the sudden miraculous change in their attitude to being �user friendly� and �business partners� now that they�re on the slide. The news is there�s only one direction for their business to go - down - and at an ever increasing rate.

They obviously know this, because I saw an excellent ad on TV last night promoting their on-line service. Great piece of creative, beautifully produced. Must have cost a fortune. Pity is their website stinks, the online strategy is poor and the prices they are trying to charge for their dubious directory listings are over the top. Some people don�t like to see an elephant in its death throes. But to me it�s more like a voracious man-eating shark which has been harpooned and dragged onto a beach. The long suffering public are crowding around putting the boot into the carcass. It�s a great spectacle and I wish we could get the concession to sell ice-cream to the bystanders. But hey, maybe that�s what we�re doing here. Ice-cream, get your tutzi-frutzi ice-cream!

25th October - Change Your Thinking About Investing On-Line
As I mentioned in the last entry, to get your head around advertising and promoting your business on the internet you have to try to picture its structure and content in terms of traditional media and communications.

We�ve spoken with a number of clients, all who have spent a squillion on huge websites and can�t understand why nobody is visiting and why their sales on-line are zero. To get traffic to a site you simply have to make an investment in links and directory listings. Every time we say this a look of horror crosses the client�s face. Pay for links! Why should I pay for something which is FREE! Links aren�t worth ANYTHING!

Wrong on every count. That�s 1990�s internet thinking. You have to pay for links because that�s one of the ways the internet becomes profitable for the big providers and its a way of producing cashflow from sites with high traffic.

Think about this. Google and the other search engines manage the use of the internet. They want the internet to be profitable and they want companies to spend their advertising dollars on-line. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure companies which make an on-line investment are rewarded with traffic and higher search result listings.

If we go back to the real-estate analogy used in the previous post, the companies which have pegged out on-line property and have spent money doing it are entitled to charge you a bit of rent for your tenancy and the credibility they transfer to you with a link.

Yes, the natural reaction is that a link from a website should be free. But to be successful on-line you have to overcome this thinking. Take the plunge, buy some directory listings and get your site visible and you�ll begin to get your head around the whole process. Even better, speak with an experienced on-line advertising and promotions organisation like Fresh and we�ll show you how to get the on-line inquiry and sales happening.

18th OCtober 2006

Changes to the way we access information

There was a letter to the editor in the Sydney Morning Herald a few months ago which really caught my attention. A father had written in, bemused by the fact that his daughter had received a text message from a friend sitting an exam in Norway, asking her to check some obscure fact of geography - the capital city of Wyoming or something similar. The writer�s daughter checked on Google and sent the information straight back by SMS.

While the tone of the letter was one of concern about the possible cheating which had occurred. To me those two girls deserved 10 out of 10 for initiative and lateral thinking. Girl #1 in Norway needed to know something. She cleverly used the tools at her disposal. She answered the question correctly. And she showed that by using a bit of creativity she had more information available to her than the kid who had sat up all night remembering the list of state capitals off-by-heart.

Surely that�s what you should be learning at school these days. Not memorising stuff like a parrot, but knowing how to find the information you need when you need it and how to tell good information from bad.

It also makes me think that all the oldies and idiot politicians whinging on about how they don�t teach the �3Rs� any more haven�t visited Google recently. Whether they like it or not those two girls who co-operated to solve a problem using modern technology are going to be more successful in the modern world than the swot sitting about memorising the capital cities of the 50 states of the USA.

16th October 2006

Get Your Head Around the Internet

On the surface, on-line advertising and promotion look like a new paradigm. However a phenomenon like on-line viral marketing (where a new advertisement or offer is spread naturally by people emailing and posting links to each other) is really no different to traditional word-of-mouth, it�s just that the speed of communication and the interconnectedness of the population has increased. Once you could tell one person at a time about the movie you saw. Now you can send an email to everyone on your mail list or post your review on a forum which is viewed by hundreds at their own discretion. The fundamentals are the same, it�s just that the means of delivery and accessing of information has changed. As somebody told me recently. �There used to be six degrees of separation. The internet delivers the possibility that one day there will be a one degree of separation.�

This is all great and mildly amusing, but what has it got to do with on-line marketing?

Firstly, to begin understanding the internet it�s important to realise the fundamentals of communication are the same. Second, it helps to get a picture in your head of how the internet works. Try this one, because it works for me.

Imagine the internet is all the roads in a city. People using the net are like traffic flowing along different routes. Now imagine your website was a billboard. Where would you like your billboard? On a back road which had a couple of travellers a day, or on the corner of two major roads? But the internet allows you more control than that. Coca Cola might put up a billboard on a freeway where only 25% of the people who drive past are in their preferred target market (men 16-39). Internet marketing delivers the possibility of putting up a billboard where maybe 90% of people who are going past are in the target market.

Think about the image of the internet being a pattern of roadways, or more correctly a three dimensional network of roads. How these roads connect and funnel traffic is the key to positioning your website so it is noticed by the most people and so that the people who notice your message are more likely to be interested in what you have to say.

16th October 2006

SEO vs. SEM
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The objective of SEO is to have your site and its pages ranking high in search engine listings.

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, a more general term which refers to �pay per click� advertising, or other variations based on paid inclusion on the results pages. When you go to Google the top two results highlighted in blue and all the listings in the right hand column are paid inclusions. Most of the ads only cost the business owner money if you click on them, though a service also exists guaranteeing a certain number of page impressions for a fixed price. Under this system there is no gurarantee your site will be visited. It�s a bit like buying a classified ad in a newspaper.

SEO is a more complicated and long-term strategy, but ultimately more rewarding as the click through rate for the natural or �organic� listings are estimated to be 10-12 times higher than interest in the pair advertising sections. The major disadvantages of an SEO strategy are that it requires a substantial up-front investment in purchasing or negotiating links to your site and may require major reworking of th internal navigation and code driving your site.

With SEM, however you can open a Google AdSense account, bid for position and have your ads appearing within 24 hours.

11th October 2006

What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is about producing or modifying a website to attract the attention of Google, MSN, Yahoo or one of the other minor search engines.

How Does a Search Engine Work
Google aren�t publishing the algorithm they use to rank pages, but it�s safe to say their objective is to rank highest the sites which contain the best spread of useful, on topic information. Google (and all other search engines) collect information from websites by sending out automated pieces of code called �bots� which crawl through the links on the web and download the data on the pages they visit. The data is transmitted back to the local data server where the pages are reconstructed and stored awaiting a retrieval request by a search engine user.

There are two basic elements involved in optimising a website:
1. Flagging the importance and relevance of a site with incoming links
2. Providing worthwhile and on-topic information supported by logical site navigation
SEO is a combination of structuring the information on a site in such a way that the search engines can readily identify the data the site contains and supply that information in response to keyword searches being made by search engine users. But to find your site and rank its relevance and relative strength search engines use a formula based on the number of incoming and outgoing links. The links strategy attracts the attention of the search engines and ranks the relative power of your site while the user feedback content flags the relative quality of the information it contains.

Come back again in a few days and I�ll give you the layman�s description of how a links strategy works and the basics of what information a search engine likes to see in a site.

9th October 2006

We�ve been asked so many questions by so many of our clients in the last six months about on-line advertising, the subject deserves its own space on the site.

There are a range of areas to cover so over the coming weeks and months come back and check out the posts here about the latest successes and failures we come across.

Yesterday we received the new copies of the Yellow Pages. I've never been a fan of advertising in the Yellow Pages. It's expensive, I hate having an ad surrounded by my competition and the print quality is lousy. Anyway, have you noticed how skinny it is? It's the thinnest Yellow Pages I've seen in years. Where do you think the budget is going? Correctomundo, on-line. Serves 'em right. They've been gouging Australian business owners for years, and their on-line strategy stinks.

Whether you like it or not, on-line marketing and promotion is the future, or at least a big hunk of it. A lot of companies and marketing managers are in denial about this, however the speed with which it is growing, the results it is generating for the switched-on operators and the unprecedented statistical feedback and budget control it offers marketing managers will guarantee that more and more money will drawn from traditional media budgets and pushed into on-line activities.

Here�s a juicy fact for you........ In 2005 the projected budget for company spending in the USA on SEO (search engine optimisation) was US$9 billion. The actual spend was something higher than US$34 billion. Why? Because the companies which transferred budget into their on-line marketing saw such a great return on investment they carved into their traditional media budgets and upped the on-line spend.

The predictions for SEO spend in the USA this year are around the US$60 billion, this amount is purely for optimising websites, not building, maintaining or running on-line businesses.

Interested in learning more? Check back here every week or so and we�ll keep you up to date with the ins and outs of on-line marketing as we work our way through explaining this whole new world of promotion and advertising.