When you want to make money online or off you need a product or service. It’s as simple as that nobody is going to buy from you unless you have something they want, otherwise its donating to the cause of your existence and that simply does not happen often.

So its simple you need something to sell, but what. Well you can think up your own product and design, build and patent it; but that takes time and money. So it may not be a viable option. What is next? Well the alternative is to sell someone else product, but buying it and adding your profit to it may take it out of the affordable market. Enter affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s product without the upfront investment of buying that product. It also eliminates the need for you to stock that product. Affiliate marketing allows you to make a percentage of the sale without stocking or buying the product. Just provide a link for your customers to click on, and when they buy it goes into your account.

Using videos as marketing tools has now become common practice on the web. Creating them to explain your site or services will increase your conversions and overall sign ups. Once produced, viral videos can be embedded into your website or blog when placed on YouTube. Creating a YouTube channel for your business that is focused on your industry can also allow you to gain credibility as an expert in your field. If users enjoy your videos, they will be more inclined to subscribe to your channel which keeps you always in front of them and more able to effectively market whatever your product or service is. With mobile search continuing to grow and phones like iphone hitting the market, video marketing is rising consistently and quickly and most likely will be the number one online marketing technique.

Another benefit to video marketing is that it builds a sense of trust among consumers. Customers are naturally weary and can smell a sales pitch from miles away. By putting your message on video, you are given the opportunity to let possibly interested candidates see your face and honesty (if you’re honest of course!) rather than your company and what you are trying to sell.

To support this growing trend, Google has now included a video option within AdSense where publishers can purchase “InVideo” ads where a video ad appears at the bottom of a video, as well as text overlay ads that place text below that video. These new ads are paid on a CPM basis and the text overlay ads are paid on a CPC basis.

Fortunately, you do not need to be a professional to create these videos. If you have a digital camera with video capabilities, you are good to go! Most PC’s come with a little application called “Windows Movie Maker”. If you take the time out and play around with it or perhaps read up a few tutorials on how to use it, you can find that you can work wonders with it! Not only can you ad text, music, photos and more but it does make your video look a bit more “professional” if you are looking to do that.

Overall, video marketing is the future so get on the bandwagon now!

Here is a great web marketing video from Web Marketing Today featuring Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim. It is about a very important aspect of web marketing, monitoring your competitors. Andy Beal talks about some great ways to monitor your web marketing competitors including Technorati and Google News and how to make the most of the information that you learn there.

Another thing point that is made in the video relates to “making your competitors weaknesses your strengths.” If you catch a product recall or a problem with your web marketing competitors you can use the problems to promote your own products. One point that he does make is that you should learn from your competitors without getting too negative. Your competitors will take care of themselves in this regard, it is best not to get too dirty or the favor just might be returned sometime.

It is a very interesting web marketing related video and well worth the five minutes of your time that it takes to play, enjoy.

Web marketing and snail mail marketing campaigns could not seem to be further removed from each other, however, there are a few companies that make use of this technology. There are a few rules that you should be aware of if you want to use direct mail for web marketing. You want your communications to be appreciated and not seem like an intrusion.

Using Direct Mail for Web Marketing

• The first thing that you need to remember relating to direct mail is that letters from places that customers do business with are not always appreciated. You need to inform your customers that you intend to run a direct mail campaign and make it an opt-in service.
• Be discrete, it does not matter what product you are selling, you do not need to advertise on the envelope; some tasteful branding is enough.
• Make it worthwhile. A direct mail campaign can cost a great deal of money. You want to make sure that you have something to offer your customers that they cannot get in your regular web marketing emails.
• Invest in stationery. Just as you would brand a website for web marketing, you should brand your direct mail communications.
• Ration your communications. A direct mail once per quarter ought to be enough for a web marketing enterprise. There are other ways to get your message across.

Direct mail can strengthen your web marketing campaign and when used correctly can be a very effective marketing tool in its own right. If you are not using direct mail as part of your web marketing strategy, perhaps it is worth considering. Not every web marketing enterprise can benefit from direct mail, but if you are profitable enough and you want to extend your approach it could be for you.


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Staying on top of recent trends and changes is the best way to stay profitable in web marketing. Some recent web marketing related news that grabbed my attention involved Internet presence in Russia. There are some wildly diverging figures on the amount of people that have Internet access in the country, but the more conservative figures of ComScore provide us with the most valuable web marketing information.

What is the Internet population of Russia? It depends on if you believe comScore World Metrix who says that in September 2007 Russian Internet penetration was 12 percent with 14 million users or eMarketer who predicts Russia will have more than 40 million Internet user by the end of the year.

The ComScore figures are probably the most useful to those of us in web marketing for two main reasons. They only count Internet users fifteen years of age and over and they discount people that use the Internet from Internet cafes. eMarketer counts Internet users over the age of three and includes those that access the Internet in Internet cafes.

Either way, Russia is a large country with a growing web presence. Whether the figure is the conservative 14 million or the slightly hyperbolic 40 million, there is a large web savvy population that you can target. If you have been missing Russians with your web marketing, maybe it is time to bring them into focus.

Who or what is Proximic? That is the question that most people are asking with the news that the ad serving company has just inked deals with Yahoo Shopping and eBay. It is being touted as a potential Google killer, but then the Internet has always been a place for outlandish hyperbole. Here is what we know about it courtesy of Web Pro News, and I will admit that it is sketchy:

Given their reputation, this inevitably brings us back to how little the average person knows about Proximic. For a company that claims to “connect publishers, bloggers and end-users by delivering related news, articles, background information and ads,” it certainly isn’t big on announcements - its press pages were last updated in early October.

Also, although Erick Schonfeld was able to interview the co-founder and CTO, he writes, “Nitsche is vague about exactly how it works.”

So, with those disclaimers in place regarding imprecision, here you go. The “it” in question is Proximic’s ad delivery system; the system functions using some sort of character pattern analysis rather than keywords. And the system will now advertise about 20 million items from each of those two big friends we mentioned earlier.

The big news for Proximic is big news for web marketing on many levels. Bloggers will have a new dependable income stream, and Proximic gets about 40,000,000 extra ads to sell. I am not sure how all of this is going to work out, but it is exciting to get a new, big player on the block (even if we had not heard of them before). Keep your eyes and ears peeled for news on Proximic, they look like they are about to make a huge impact on the web marketing world.

Despite prophecies of doom and gloom from some amateur market analysts, web marketing sales are up and holding. End of the year spending was higher than ever, with Green Monday retaining its title. December 10th saw some truly massive sales with $881 million changing hands in a single day. If you check out the other days you will see that some of them are just as impressive. The following table comes to us courtesy of Marketing Pilgrim:

Day - Dollars Spent (Millions)
Monday, December 10 (“Green Monday”) - $881
Tuesday, December 11 - $819
Thursday, December 6 - $803
Wednesday, December 5 - $798
Tuesday, December 4 - $776
Wednesday, December 12 - $754
Monday, December 3 - $753
Friday, December 7 - $734
Monday, November 26 (“Cyber Monday”) - $733
Thursday, November 29 - $733

The web marketing sales figures for the holiday period total $29 billion which is a 19% improvement over last year. The web marketing doomsayers will point out that 19% is a shadow of the 26% growth that was seen in the previous year. 19% is some impressive growth and the sales figures speak for themselves. More people are doing more of their shopping online. Let’s hope that 2008 is an even bigger year for all of the web marketers out there.

Want to get an idea of what a well planned job site can be worth? Take a look at Jobfox, yet another job site in an already crowded pool. They just pulled $20 million from investors and are set to double their sales and support offices in the United States. It gives you an idea of what is possible with some clever web marketing.

From Web Pro News:

Jobfox.com – yes, another job site – is having a good year so far. Record 2007 sales and third round financing pulling in $20 million from investors, the company plans to double its US sales and support offices.

Investment firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson led other investors, which includes Menlo Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

Sites like Jobfox can teach us a great deal about web marketing. It is the perfect example of web marketing done right. They were professional from the beginning. They launched with a slick website, great branding and a slightly different approach to the whole job site theme. They went with more of an executive search styled site, placing the focus on employees a little bit more than some of the other big sites have in the past. While they did not really find a unique web marketing niche, they found one that had been underexploited.

If you are looking to build a new website, take a leaf out of the Jobfox textbook and who knows, maybe one day you can be pulling in $20 million from investors to fund a massive expansion.

In an article appearing in Web Pro News, Jason Lee Miller provided an interesting yet useful suggestion for the web marketing sector.

Increase sales – and start by raising prices.
Most successful business owners focus their energies on growing revenues to the point where the business can stand up comfortably, and keeping them there. Cutting expenses never hurt, but success come from growth.

“Growing sales should be a focus for you all year long, but the first part of the year is the best time to raise prices,” says Evers. “And you can reinvest added revenue into making sure this coming year is the most successful your business has ever had.”

I really think that he hit the nail on the head with that one. The beginning of the year is the perfect time to give your prices a little hike. You never want to drive them up to high, or they will drive customers away. A small to moderate price rise is likely to be tolerated and it can bring in great additional income to your web marketing company.

If you are planning a price rise, remember to plan ahead. You will need to make sure that all of your databases are amended and all of your web content takes into account your new price list. You probably don’t need to go through all of your old marketing blog articles, but you might want to send out an email catalog to your web marketing customer base so that they can be aware of the new prices. If you need any assistance preparing for your new year price rise, please contact us.

If you are a web marketer then you are no doubt already aware of the difficulties that are involved in building product awareness among clientèle. The preferred method for this in web marketing is to make a press release, but as you know, there are press releases and there are releases. A good web marketing press release adheres to SEO principals. Of course, you want to let your existing clients know about your knew product, but it never hurts to build some new business in the process.

One of the services we offer here at Brick Marketing is the writing and distribution of press releases. We are experts in generating online publicity through professionally written press releases and tried and tested delivery methods. Our press releases will be tailored to your precise needs as the service includes an interview. Following the interview we will prepare the press release for your approval. From there, if you desire, we will distribute your press release to a global audience.

If you would like like more information about this, or any other of our services, please contact us at Brick Marketing.

If you want to boost your Web Marketing performance with some search engine optimization techniques then read on. The Web Marketing Journal is dedicated to marketing on the web without a website, but we understand that line can become a little blurry at times. It may be that you want to use a website to promote some of the products that you are selling elsewhere on the web. If that is the case, it is time that you learned some of the golden rules of search engine optimization.

Web traffic revolves around search engines. Primarily Google based on percentages, but when you take a look at the numbers that make up the smaller percentages, Yahoo and Microsoft are worth taking note of as well. If you want to optimize your web marketing site, then you are going to need to gear your promotional pages toward drawing search engine traffic. You do that through search engine optimization. If you have not yet built a site or blog to do this, then you are probably better off. It is a lot easier to start from a fresh slate, than it is to incorporate later on.

First, select the keywords that you believe best characterize your product and your website. You will need both keywords and key phrases. Remember, you want to choose the keywords that other people are likely to pick, not necessarily the keywords that you would pick. Think of as many of them as you possibly can and then get a keyword research tool to find some more. The goal is to then produce articles that cover these keywords, the articles will draw search engine traffic, which you can use for your web marketing purposes.

Pictures are great, but only if they are tagged. Tag all of your pictures with your keywords. This can help your product perform in image searches. If you don’t have tags, you won’t perform.

Make use of meta tags, but there is no need for overkill. Meta tags can have an influence on your relevance, so it is best not to forget about them.

If you are getting started, you would probably do better to make use of a content management system. There are a lot of them out there and some of them free. If you get an account with Go Daddy, they will provide you with free installation of some very effective content management system scripts. If you are new to website management, but have some experience in web marketing, then a script like Joomla is likely to be fairly easy to use.

If you want to look for new markets for your web marketing business, then consider building a search engine optimized website. It is a great way to drive more traffic your way. If you would like to learn more about web marketing, please visit us at Brick Marketing.

If you needed any more proof that web marketing is on the up and up, take a look at the following passage from Marketing Pilgrim.

While print advertising is still the majority of advertising with newspapers (newspaper website advertising now accounts for 7.1% of total newspaper ad spending), the online spend continues to get bigger. Spending for online ads is still in the millions while print advertising brings in $10.1 billion. And print advertising is down 9% compared with the third quarter of 2006.

Here are some more numbers for various types of advertising: classified advertising fell 17% to $3.4 billion. Retail declined 4.9% to $5.1 billion, and national was down 2.5%, coming in at $1.7 billion.

If newspaper advertising figures are decreasing and website advertising figures are increasing. Eventually the two lines are going to have to cross. With computers now cheaper than ever before and the Internet accessible through so many more means, it is a matter of time before most people start doing the bulk of their shopping online. Web marketing has long been having an impact on newspaper advertising, but in recent years it has become more tangible.

If your business does not have a web presence, now is certainly the time to create one. You don’t even need a website to get started in web marketing. There are all kinds of different options for getting started. If you need advice on how to get set up, come in and talk to us at Brick Marketing. We have helped numerous clients establish a commercial web presence and will be happy to help you to take advantage of the web marketing boom as well.

Rightly or wrongly, Google is the biggest, most popular search engine on the planet. This is a given, they control the lion’s share of search, they also dominate advertising and are now moving into payment solutions. Google would be foolish not to use the largest search engine in the world to maximize their profits and that is exactly what they do. Recently, Bizrate has seen a massive downturn of relevance. The only thing that I can think of that this could be linked to is Google Checkout. It is in Google’s interests to squeeze out websites that do not pay for Google AdWords and do not use their payment system. This is just idle speculation, but there could be something in it.

Google’s algorithms are a complete mystery to most people and few serious web marketers doubt that some human editing is done. One can argue about the ethics of such activities as much as they like, but the more profitable course of action is to work within the system. Whether you like it or not, Google is pushing Google Checkout. It is not a bad payment system and the rates are reasonable. Whether it will or won’t improve your search relevance remains to be seen, but it certainly isn’t going to hurt your search relevance. If you need advice relating to the incorporation of Google Checkout in your Website, please contact us at Brick Marketing.

In a recent article appearing on web news pro, David A. Utter examines the problem of spam. He takes a very hard tone, but there are a few interesting tidbits of information that apply to web marketing which can be gleaned from the article.

Take a look at the following passage, which appeared in the November 20 article:

Criminals will give email recipients plenty of opportunities to be fleeced like bleating little lambs. Symantec has noted spam occupying 71 percent of all emails trafficking the Internet currently.

The security company even delivered a top ten list of the most spammed products. Prudent online shoppers ought to delete these at the first opportunity.

Laptops
Replica watches
Business cards
Male enhancement drugs
MP3 Players
Discount software
Free cellphones
Handheld video games
Weight loss solutions
Gift cards

What this shows us is the topics that illicit emails are covering. There are legitimate web marketers involved in these types of products. How does one ensure that their emails are getting through to their intended recipients if the bulk of the spam that is in people’s mail boxes corresponds to the same topics? Is there any way that you can ensure that your emails will be noticed when three fourths of what people receive is junk?

There are a few tricks that can help you beat the overactive spam filters and see that your legitimate web marketing emails are reaching their destinations. If your product is on that list of commonly spammed products then consider some of these simple techniques:

If your web marketing enterprise includes commonly spammed products, you will need to exercise a little more caution in sending out your emails, but you can do a lot to ensure that they reach their destinations. If you encounter problems from some screening companies, you can always contact administrators and plead your case. I managed to get my email address onto a white list or two when I was involved in legitimate marketing of a commonly spammed product, you can too.

If you have any questions about web marketing solutions or strategy, do not hesitate to contact us at Brick Marketing. We have helped numerous web marketing professionals develop more effective eCommerce practices.

One important thing to make a habit of if you are involved in Web Marketing, is to keep track of your contacts. Building up an email safe list is a great way to bring your customers back time and time again. Managing your customer information is the key to securing repeat business. While you don’t want to bombard your customers with information and you do not want to overstep the line that separates solicited email from spam, you do want to do all that you can to maintain a relationship.

Keeping in contact with hundreds or thousands of people would be a very time consuming process. There is no way that you can physically email each of the people on your list personally, nor is there any need. Using form emails makes life a lot easier. The thing that you will need, however, is some designated system in place to deal with your mailing. You cannot run a large mailing list out of a free account, you are going to need to invest in some infrastructure.

There are a number of ways that you can deal with the email situation, you should make sure that it is within your level of technical proficiency. Perhaps the most complicated, but certainly the cheapest is to host your own mail server. This will allow you to send as many emails as you desire. You don’t even need a dedicated server in order to do this, as you can define the header information on your email yourself. The return address can be a free account. The trouble that a lot of people find with these types of programs is that they are not particularly user friendly. A lot of the settings need to be done in command line and if that is not your cup of tea, then there are better options.

The second option that you have for your web marketing mailing list is to send your emails from a special mailing account. Most web hosting companies will have some options with regards to email limits. Choose one that is within your price range and suitable for your purposes. It is nice to be able to send out a full set of emails within a few hours. The type of program that you use here is a kind of blind carbon copy mailer. It will send an individual mail to everyone on your list. Its efficiency is limited by your Internet connection speed and the number of emails that you are able to send out per hour. This method is perhaps the most cost effective, as you are using a program that is able to mail unattended using a regular POP account. As these types of program are frequently used by spammers, most free email account providers will block them. If you want to mail yourself then you will need to pay for an email account. Go Daddy has some options in this department. You will need to maintain your email list, carefully and make sure to remove anyone that requests it.

The third option is by far the easiest solution, there is an email service package called Constant Contact. It is an all-in-one communications management suite where the pricing is scaled according to the number of people on your mailing list. The prices at Constant Contact are quite affordable and it really takes the work out of communications. If you are looking for specific advice relating to setting up a commercial quality email system, do not hesitate to contact Brick Marketing.