Marketing During An Economic Downturn

We're seeing lots of questions on blogs, tweets and mainstream media reports about how the current economic downturn is going to impact marketing. The impact on our daily newspapers in virtually every major market in America has been well documented. (According to eMarketer, US newspaper ad revenues are expected to drop 42.5% in the next seven years.) Marketing budgets are being slashed, yet the pressure to increase revenue is only more intense and marketing executives are feeling the heat.

Marketing Sherpa has put together a great overview that analyzes how marketing departments across the country are dealing with the challenges of marketing during an economic downturn. 30% of those surveyed reported that they plan to increase direct marketing investments as a result of the current economic conditions, including specific increases in direct mail, event marketing and telemarketing. As one survey respondent said, "Heavier investing in direct mail and online is working well since many competitors are reducing marketing investments, and our collective share of voice is increasing our sales".

Traditional media, on the other hand, is not going to fare as well. 59% of respondents reported a planned decrease in budgets for TV and radio while 44% plan a print advertising decrease.

If you are looking for more measurable marketing options, direct mail is a great way to target former customers and those prospects who are most likely to become new customers.

FishDirectMail.com is currently helping our customers explore building lists of new prospects based on analysis of current customer databases. We're also helping customers explore personalized message targeting utilizing variable printing and PURLs to differentiate from the competition and increase ROI tracking and measurement.

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Your Domain Name - How Important It Really Is For Your Website

One of the most important steps in creating your website is to choose a Domain Name.

A Domain Name is the address of your website on the Internet. It consists of up to 67 basic characters. You can't use any special characters, e.g. #, &, etc. in your Domain Name, only letters and numbers. You can, however, use underscores and hyphens to separate the words.

Your Domain Name should be relatively short (three words or less) and also be easy to remember and spell. Imagine trying to find the following website on the Internet: rememberpetsthebeststoreontheinternet.com. This looks like a long version of some of the vanity license plates on cars - and you know how hard they are to decipher! If you use a long Domain Name, your visitors will have to really look hard to determine what your name really is.

It is a good idea to actually spell certain Domain Name words that people will use to search for your website. For example, if you want your domain name to be 'happiness through candy.com', you have a better chance of getting traffic by using the word 'through' rather than 'thru'.

But don't be surprised if you find a website called 'happinessthrucandy.com'. There are many people out there who will jump at the chance to register any misspellings of popular Domain Names and grab your visitors. So, try to register both Domain Names to be sure that you get all of the traffic.

Adding hyphens between the words of your Domain Name lessens the chance of people misreading your actual name. Consider the first above example of a long Domain Name. If you added hyphens it would look like: remember-pets-the-best-store-on-the-internet.com. Not a great choice for a Domain Name but at least it is readable and more memorable than the first example without hyphens.

You should always register your Domain Name with the extension of '.com' which means that your website is commercial. This is what most people expect to see when searching for your website although it is also a good idea to try to register your Domain Name with '.net' and '.org' extensions for added protection. If someone has your Domain Name ending in '.net' you could easily lose visitors which could lead to fewer sales.

It is relatively easy to register your Domain Name. There are many Domain Name Services who will check the availability of your selected Domain Name and, if the name is already being used, they will give you a number of available website names using your keywords in the Domain Name. You can then choose another name and register it as your Domain Name.

Most Domain Name Services have monthly, yearly or multiple yearly fees. They are generally inexpensive and you should take advantage of the many sales that are often offered. Just Google 'domain names' and you will get a large number of websites from which to choose to register your Domain Name.

Domain Name registration is one of the most important steps when creating your website.

If you would like more information about Domain Names and other elements of a website, I have just written a free ebook on website creation.

Download it here: http://www.newwebsiteteacher.com/index2.html

Sharon Zolna is an author of numerous articles as well as being an instructor of website creation for an online business and other related fields. Please visit her website at: http://www.newwebsiteteacher.com and sign up for frequent tips on creating your own online business website.

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Making Cash With Your Domain (Parking)

Sometimes you buy or register a domain and for one reason or another you can't do anything with it, may be because you don't have the time to work on it or you don't have resources to execute what you purchased the domain for or just for any reason you can't make money out of it. And possibly you may get angry with yourself for embarking on a task you feel you can't finish or start to regret taking that action. Perhaps you are looking for an easy way to make money on the internet without stress and it seem no easy way. Well don't give up, why because all you need is knowledge to make good use of what ever you have. The answer to your worry is domain parking.

Domain parking is using your domains that are not in use for a website or blog or forums at the moment to generate cash through adverts that are placed on the domains by the parker website, when ever the adverts are clicked or something is purchased you get a commission from them. You can liken domain parking to land leasing (because domains have similar principles that govern land, they are referred to as virtual real estate). So you generate cash even when you are not doing the business yourself.

And as the traffic from your domain parking increases you can decide to put up you domain name for sell or continue to make more money from parking it.The cash generated can be like using Google adsense where you generate cash from people clicking the links on the adsense.

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Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization)

Hello, Hello. Is anyone there?

That is, exactly, what a business website can feel like if it has not been optimised for search engines.

You may have a great product or service to sell. You may, even, have the world’s greatest looking website, but, if no one knows you are out there, in World Wide Web land, you have wasted a potential chance to reach, tens, hundreds or, perhaps, thousands of new customers. Not very good for business and not very good for you.
But, I hear you say, the internet is supposed to be where everyone goes these days to check and buy products. Yes it is.

"But, we set up our website months ago. Colin (our sales rep) is really into computers, so, he was asked to set up our company site and the website looks great. So, why aren’t we inundated with clients?"
"Did, er, Colin use SEO when he designed your website?"
"No, he used a computer."

Search Engine Optimisation:
Search engines collect information from websites to enable them to increase the relevancy and speed in which it can supply results when a search term is entered. Your business website must provide content on your website that allows search engine crawlers (spiders or bots) to discover exactly what you are selling or the service you are providing by regularly updating the contents of your web pages, which must include keywords and phrases relevant to your business. This is known as making your website search engine friendly. This then allows search engines to place your website in the correct results category and at an appropriate level or page ranking. Search engines display results in the order that they view to be the most pertinent to the searchers requirements.

Bearing in mind that a website that is updated with appropriate content frequently will have a page ranking much higher than a website that had perfectly adequate search engine optimisation in place when it was set up in 1998, but, that has not been updated since.

UK internet marketing (UKIM) are specialists in search engine optimisation for business websites and by designing or editing your website they can improve your page ranking, making your website appear higher within the natural search results and increase visitors to your website, thus, improving your return on investment and letting poor old Colin back to what he does best, selling your products.

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