Academic script

A Web site is a related collection of World Wide Web

(WWW) files that includes a beginning file called a
home page. A company or an individual tells you how
to get to their Web site by giving you the address of
their home page. From the home page, you can get to
all the other pages on their site

Since site implies a geographic place, a Web site can

be confused with a Web server. A server is a computer
that holds the files for one or more sites. A very large
Web site may be spread over a number of servers in
different geographic locations. We reside on a
commercial space provider's server with a number of
other sites that have nothing to do with Internet
glossaries.

There are seven design elements – 7Cs – that should

be considered when creating a website intended for
commerce and sales.

 Context: A website’s layout and overall visual

design needs to be uncluttered, easy to read and
navigate, the color scheme needs to be appropriate
for the marketing design. Having some white space
will also aid in the overall design and readability.
 Commerce: If the website is intended for
commercial transactions, then it has to be safe and
the fact that is has been made safe must be
communicated to the customer, most websites use
a "lock" symbol in the corner to indicate that it has
been encrypted.
 Connection: Any links that lead the customer
away from the website.
  Communication : How the company talks to its
customers ; this can be done through signing up for
special offers, email newsletters, contests, surveys,
live chat with company representatives, and
company contact information.
 Content: The text, graphics, sound, music, and/or
videos that are presented.
 Community: The website may allow interaction
between customers through message boards and
live chat.
 Customization: Companies can allow customers to
personalize aspects of the website or it may tailor
itself to different users, for example having
different colors and graphics for people who speak
different languages.
Sales Management

Sales management includes more than tracking the

business you book and providing support for your sales
team. It starts with helping develop the right products,
setting the right prices and distributing in the right
places, and continues with marketing messaging,
customer service and other selling efforts. All of these
efforts must be coordinated so one doesn’t interfere
any of the others. Setting plans, monitoring them and
tracking results lets you continue to adapt, eliminate
weaknesses and take advantage of opportunities.

The FIVE ‘M’s of Sales Management:-

 MEN (Labor/Labour).
 MONEY (Finances).
 MACHINERY (Equipment).
 MINUTES (Time).
 MATERIALS (Factors of Production).
Promotion of website

While it’s not only important to have a web site these

days, keeping it up to date is equally important. Even if
a long-established brick & mortar business, without a
web presence, Websites losing out on a large pool of
potential. So, if it fail to keep content updated or list
the basics like hours and contact information correctly
on the web site, as well as update search engine
listings, it will not only turn off new customers but may
cost the business the ones it has.

Why do you need website promotion?

In an information world, knowledge is power. The

concept is simple: increase legitimate content and
provide helpful resources to the visitors and thereby
increase its value. The execution is a little bit more
challenging. This in turn will raise the probability of
sales, brand loyalty and search engine rank; which will
make your website and company more successful.

Updated content = more traffic & profits

The 5 Ss of Internet Marketing.

Smith and Chaffey (2006) distil the situation of a

business using Internet as part of its business under
the following 5S’s:

 Sell – Grow sales and attract business using digital

technologies.
  Serve – Add value through the benefits of the
Internet such as speed.
 Speak – Get closer to customers by making your
business available to them at home, work or on the
go with mobile technologies.
 Save – Reduce costs by using information
technologies to make your business more efficient.
 Sizzle – Extend the online brand (or create a new
one) – remember sell the sizzle not the sausage i.e.
the benefits, aesthetics or value of a product or
service rather than its features.

Benefits of Website Promotion:-

Promotion of a website is very important. Usually, a

website helps in developing online identity for some
company, business, or individual. In order to get
maximum attention of internet users, it needs
promotion through various proven techniques.

Website promotion provides following benefits:

Increased Incoming Traffic - It helps in increasing

the amount of incoming traffic to a website. It is
primary aim of website promotion. During promotion,
people engaged in the process submit websites to
numerous web-directories and search engines.
Webmasters also take help of social media and social
networking for direct promotion of the website in front
of potential customers. All these techniques help in
driving more and more organic traffic to the website.

More Sales and Revenues - It helps e-Commerce

websites in generating more revenues by increasing
sales. With well-planned online promotion campaigns, a
website can gain top ranks in Google and all other
major search engines, which is guarantee for more
sales.

Brand Identity Development - A website helps in

developing brand identity. For global customers, it acts
as primary appearance of a business or company. The
information present on website, customer testimonials,
and media updates helps in developing credibility of
website in front of customers.

Instant Communication with Customers - Websites

has become an important medium for customer
communication. They have made it easier to get
customer's feedback/opinion about a newly introduced
product or service. Website promotion helps in getting
maximum attention from targeted segment of
customers.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is essentially part of marketing. But

what is the difference between digital marketing and
Internet or web marketing? What are the digital
marketing tools? And how do marketers plan for digital
marketing? This lesson aims to answer these questions.

Marketers planning for digital marketing

There are two ways of looking at this.
  An existing organization may embark upon some
digital marketing as part of their marketing plan.
 An organization trades solely on the Internet and so
their marketing plan focuses purely on digital
marketing.

The marketing plan in either case is the next step,

whether focused upon digital marketing or all
marketing.

The tailor-made digital marketing plan which

conforms to the acronym AOSTC which is
described as follows:-

 A – Audit – An audit of internal strengths and

weaknesses, an external opportunities and threats.
 O – Objectives – SMART digital marketing
objectives.
 S – Strategy – digital marketing strategies.
 T – Tactics – an digital marketing mix.
 C – Controls – measuring the performance of our
digital marketing plan.
So the place to begin defining digital marketing is to
consider where it fits within the subject of marketing.
So let’s start with a definition of marketing. The
American Marketing Association (AMA) definition
(2004) is as follows:
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of
processes for creating, communicating and delivering
value to customers and for managing customer
relationships in ways that benefit the organization and
its stakeholders.
Therefore digital marketing by its very nature is
one aspect of an organizational function and a set of
processes for creating, communicating and delivering
value to customers and for managing customer
relationships in ways that benefit the organization and
its stakeholders. As such an aspect, digital marketing
has its own approaches and tools that contribute to the
achievement of marketing goals and objectives.

This also helps us to differentiate between digital

marketing and E-commerce, since E-Commerce is
simply buying and selling online.

The difference between digital marketing and

internet or web marketing

There is no real difference between digital marketing

and internet or web marketing. However, with the
arrival of mobile technologies such as PDA’s and 3G
mobile phones, as well as Interactive Television, both
terms tend to be stretched to include these new media
technologies. On the other hand, others would see
digital marketing and internet or web marketing as
subtly different, for example:

Internet [or web] marketing is achieving marketing

objectives through applying digital technologies.
Digital marketing is achieving marketing objectives
through use of electronic communications technology.
Whilst this distinction is wholly acceptable, it is difficult
to see where the distinction lies between digital
technologies and electronic communications
technologies, especially with the convergence of
technologies such as mobile devices.

The digital marketing tools

The Internet has a number of tools to offer to the
marketer.
  A company can distribute via the Internet e.g.
Amazon.com.
 A company can use the Internet as a way of
building and maintaining a customer relationship
e.g. Dell.com.
 The money collection part of a transaction could be
done online e.g. electricity and telephone bills.
 Leads can be generated by attracting potential
customers to sign-up for short periods of time,
before signing up for the long-term e.g.
which.co.uk.
 The Internet could be used for advertising e.g.
Google Adwords.
 Finally, the web can be used as a way of collecting
direct responses e.g. as part of a voting system for
a game show.

To use the BCG Matrix, analysts plot a scatter graph to

rank the business units (or products) on the basis of
their relative market shares and growth rates.

 Cash cows is where company has high market

share in a slow-growing industry. These units
typically generate cash in excess of the amount of
 cash needed to maintain the business. They are
regarded as staid and boring, in a "mature" market,
and every corporation would be thrilled to own as
many as possible. They are to be "milked"
continuously with as little investment as possible,
since such investment would be wasted in an
industry with low growth.
 Dogs, more charitably called pets, are units with low
market share in a mature, slow-growing industry.
These units typically "break even", generating barely
enough cash to maintain the business's market
share. Though owning a break-even unit provides
the social benefit of providing jobs and possible
synergies that assist other business units, from an
accounting point of view such a unit is worthless, not
generating cash for the company. They depress a
profitable company's return on assets ratio, used by
many investors to judge how well a company is
being managed. Dogs, it is thought, should be sold
off.
 Question marks (also known as problem
children) are business operating in a high market
growth, but having a low market share. They are a
starting point for most businesses. Question marks
have a potential to gain market share and become
stars, and eventually cash cows when market growth
slows. If question marks do not succeed in becoming
a market leader, then after perhaps years of cash
consumption, they will degenerate into dogs when
market growth declines. Question marks must be
analyzed carefully in order to determine whether
they are worth the investment required to grow
market share.
 Stars are units with a high market share in a fast-
growing industry. They are graduated question
marks with a market or niche leading trajectory, for
example: amongst market share front-runners in a
high-growth sector, and/or having a monopolistic or
increasingly dominant USP with
burgeoning/fortuitous proposition drive(s) from:
novelty (e.g. Last.FM upon CBS Interactive's due
diligence), fashion/promotion (e.g. newly
prestigious celebrity branded fragrances), customer
loyalty (e.g. greenfield or military/gang
enforcement backed, and/or innovative, grey-
market/illicit retail of addictive drugs, for instance
the British East India Company's, late-1700s opium-
based Qianlong Emperor embargo-busting, Canton
System), goodwill (e.g. monopsonies)
and/or gearing (e.g. oligopolies, for instance Portland
cement producers near boomtowns),etc. The hope is
that stars become next cash cows.
Stars require high funding to fight competitions
and maintain a growth rate. When industry growth
slows, if they remain a niche leader or are
amongst market leaders its have been able to
maintain their category leadership stars become
cash cows, else they become dogs due to low
relative market share.
As a particular industry matures and its growth
slows, all business units become either cash
cows or dogs. The natural cycle for most business
units is that they start as question marks, then turn
into stars. Eventually the market stops growing thus
the business unit becomes a cash cow. At the end of
the cycle the cash cow turns into a dog.
As BCG stated in 1970:
 Only a diversified company with a balanced portfolio
can use its strengths to truly capitalize on its growth
opportunities. The balanced portfolio has:

 stars whose high share and high growth assure the

future;
 cash cows that supply funds for that future
growth; and
 question marks to be converted into stars with the
added funds.

The five different categories under Customer

Loyalty Ladder are:
1. Suspects:
They are the potential customers for an organization.
They may be aware of the promotional campaigns of
the organization but are currently doing no business
with that organization.
2. Prospects:
They are the ones who have been impressed with the
organization’s promotions and are in serious
consideration of buying products of the organization.
The organization must treat them cordially and solve all
of their doubts.
3. Customers:
They have bought products of the organization for the
first time and are currently using them. The
organization must extend them all possible after-sales
assistance in order to pacify their concerns.

4. Clients:
They are doing business repetitively with the
organization and are willing to foster the engagement
in future.
5. Advocates:
They are not only doing repetitive business with an
organization but are also recommending the
organization to their own acquaintances.
They are the most valuable players and the
organization must treat them royally with the highest
priority.

The concept of Customer Loyalty Ladder comes under

Relationship Marketing which deals with establishing
long term relations with customers. It is said that the
cost of attracting new customers is 4-6 times more
than that of doing business with existing customers.
Hence it is worth for any organization to keep its
existing customers happy and satisfied in order to do a
more profitable business. Loyalty Ladder thus helps an
organization plan engagement strategy wisely so that
the customers would be tempted to move up the
ladder.
Commitment: It is all about people and team effort.
Organizations and marketers must work hand in hand
and be passionate about what they want to achieve in
order to be successful.

Planning: Behind any success story is a plan with

clearly set goals, a range of tactics and strategies,
requirements for people and resources as well as a
project map to successfully reach the set objectives on
target and on time.

Product/Service: You need to provide a product or

service that people actually want and in order to build a
great brand you need to provide quality to sustain your
success.

Education/Information: The more you know about

what it is you are trying to achieve and about the
different available strategies, the more informed
decisions you will be able to make.

There are many improvised “online marketing experts”

and being able to discern professionals from frauds will
save you a lot of trouble and money.

Patience: The journey towards success is a process.

As any process, it takes time to implement, measure,
adjust and fine tune to find the formula that works for
your business. Rome wasn’t built overnight!

Design & Usability: A great seamless user experience

and clean and professional design is the way to success
and higher conversion rates.

Keyword Research: This is specific to the online

world. People find you through search engines (such as
Google or Yahoo) by typing keywords. Knowing what
keywords people use is critical to being present in the
result pages of search engines. These keywords and
their relevancy (or performance) become even more
critical when you start paying for them (Pay Per Click)

Analytics: Measuring what people do on your website

will enable you to learn from their behaviour and
validate the performance of your online strategy. And
with all the advanced tools now available, you can
easily measure your success online.

Tools: Analytics, Competitive Keyword Search, Meta

Tag Generators, Rank checking, PPC campaigns, etc.
are some of the tools that will help you implement,
measure and analyse your online marketing strategy.

Crawlability: Search engine websites “crawl websites”

with “spiders” in order to analyze the content of pages
and the specific code (Meta Tags) that are setup for
them to read and interpret. Make sure that your
website has been optimized for search engines (hence
the coined science of SEO – Search Engine
Optimization).

Content: This is what online visitors come for:

information on your products or services, how to
contact you, Frequently Asked Questions, your
organization’s history, your Terms and Conditions,
what you have to say on your Blog, etc.

Add “Services” to McGee’s block as visitors also use

services to: share photos/videos/stories, buy products
& services, find jobs/homes/cars/soul mates/news.

Links: Search engine websites give you a better

“ranking” in the result pages if your website is well
linked to. This means that the more other websites link
to you, the more traffic you’re potentially going to
receive and the more relevant your website will appear
to Search Engines. As a consequence it is important to
link into various strategies to have these other
websites link to you. Also, the more important the
websites are that link to you, the higher the ranking.

Social/Local Findability: People will look for you on

popular social websites (such as Facebook and
YouTube) and on most used online directories (such
as Yahoo, Google Maps, YellowPages or 411).

Depending on your products and services, if you’re B2B

or B2C and the strategy behind your brand, it might
not be worth investing a lot of energy but always keep
in mind how people find you.

Reputation Management: With the proliferation of

Blogs and social websites that enable customers to
leave reviews, you’ll want to keep an eye on what
people (customers, former employees, fans, etc.) are
saying about your brand. The best strategy is usually
to enable them to express themselves on your own
website and address their complaints directly (if they
happen to have any) and show them that you care.

Trust: This is the ultimate goal. Trust creates loyalty.

Loyalty creates recurrent business. It is way more
expensive to gain a new customer than to keep one.
Anything you could do to create and renew trust,
whether in the real world or online, is the best
investment you can make for your brand.

Digital Marketing Mix

The digital marketing Mix is essentially the same as

the marketing mix. It is simply the adaptation
of price, place, product and promotion to the digital
marketing context. Of course one could also include
physical evidence, people and process when marketing
planning for an online service. Below are a series of
lessons that consider how markets can apply the digital
marketing mix to their organization’s own product,
service, brand or solution.

Digital marketing Price

The digital marketing mix is simply an adaptation of
the traditional marketing mix, and ‘P’ for price.
However, the Internet has influenced how online
businesses price in a number of ways.
Digital marketing Place

The digital marketing space consists of new Internet

companies that have emerged as the Internet has
developed, as well as those pre-existing companies
that now employ digital marketing approaches as part
of their overall marketing plan. For some companies
the Internet is an additional channel that enhances or
replaces their traditional channel(s) or place.

Digital marketing Product

Two tools for product decision-making have been

introduced – Product Life Cycle (PLC) and the Three
Levels of a Product.
Product Life Cycle (PLC)

Three Levels of a Product

Digital marketing Promotion

It considers many important ways of building your

traffic, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
social media optimization (SMO), and social business
networking (SBN) are the most popular techniques of
the website promotion. Apart from that, conventional
modes of online advertising like banner advertizing,
link exchange and email marketing are still in use. Paid
processes like, Pay per Click (PPC) and paid inclusion
(featured website listing) of websites are also in use.
Build your traffic.

Content is king. Write good quality content that visitors

value and that keeps them coming back. This is a
golden rule. Try to make sure that you have substantial
content before putting your site online. No site is better
than one that is poorly prepared. Make the content
easy to read and digest. Keep it focused upon
keywords, and keep content up-to-date. Remember,
your site is not an online brochure or gimmicky sales
promotion. On the other hand, in order to save the
trouble, many companies simply employ the services of
an SEO Consultant.

Your domain name should be innovative and does not

necessarily have to say what your site does. For
example British Airways has an online ticket websites
called Opodo.com.

When building the site, keep the design simple. Flash,

Java and Javascript look great but have been known to
confuse spiders. Keep It Short and Simple (KISS).
Remember that not all visitors will have fast Internet
connections – much of The World still uses 56k
modems.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important. This

will help search engines to read your pages. There are
many ways to do this – try to include keywords in your
title, in your description tag, in your heading tag, in
your URL (if possible), and some would also say try to
represent your keyword in content – in bold, in italics,
and high in the page.

Word density – your keyword should not represent

more than 20% of your total wordage.

Try to link between your pages. This is call ‘cross

linking.’ So if one of your pages attracts high numbers
of visitors through search engine, then link to less
exposed pages around your site. Then add links to the
top pages of your site a.k.a. ‘root’ pages. Try not to be
more than two clicks away from root pages. This
makes it easier for visitors to stick around.

Submit to search engines where you can. However this

is becoming more difficult. Today it is more likely that
the search engines will find you – when you obtain in
links, spiders and bots will come through your site as
they follow outbound links form other sites. You could
also try to get listed in directories such as DMOZ.

Once your site is online monitor its progress. This is

how you control your online presence. You need a stats
package that monitors every detail of your site’s logs
including inbound links, keyword searches, page views,
visitor number (rather than hits), and page popularity –
data needs to be available for every day of the year.

Links To your site – especially form higher-ranking

sites – are very important. Links need to be from sites
that have similar keywords to those of your pages. This
is time consuming and you need to build slowly.
Contact sites and offer to exchange links. Links in text
are better that stand alone URL’s, so put links from
your site in paragraphs of text that allow visitors to
click on them as they read you content. However, try
not to offer too many outbound links because visitors
need to be kept on your site as long as possible.

What is SEO, Exactly?

The goal of foundational SEO isn't to cheat or "game"
the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to:

 Create a great, seamless user experience.

 Communicate to the search engines your intentions
so they can recommend your website for relevant
searches.
Technical SEO v Onsite SEO.
Onsite SEO elements are those which the user can see
without looking at the source code. So It include
things such as -
 Title Tag
 URLs
 Headers
 Body Text etc
Technical SEO involves the elements of a page that the
user can’t see without looking at the source code.
These will include elements such as -
 IP Detection / Redirection
 Site Speed
 301 and 302 Redirects
 HTTP Headers
 Crawler Access
 Javascript
 Flash

Stands for "Search Engine Optimization." Just about

every Webmaster wants his or her site to appear in the
top listings of all the major search engines. Say, for
example, that Bob runs an online soccer store. He
wants his site to show up in the top few listings when
someone searches for "soccer shoes." Then he gets
more leads from search engines, which means more
traffic, more sales, and more revenue. The problem is
that there are thousands of other soccer sites, whose
Webmasters are hoping for the same thing. That's
where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes in.
SEO involves a number of adjustments to the HTML of
individual Web pages to achieve a high search engine
ranking. First, the title of the page must include
relevant information about the page. In the previous
example, Bob's home page might have the title, "Bob's
Soccer Store -- Soccer Shoes and Equipment." The title
is the most important part of SEO, since it tells the
search engine exactly what the page is about. Within
Bob's home page, it would be helpful to repeat the
words "soccer" and "soccer shoes" a few times, since
search engines also scan the text of the pages they
index.
Finally, there are META tags. These HTML tags can
really distinguish your site from the rest of the pile. The
META tags that most search engines read are
the description and keywords tags. Within the
description tags, you should type a brief description of
the Web page. It should be similar but more detailed
than the title. Within the keywords tags, you should list
5-20 words that relate to the content of the page.
Using META tags can significantly boost your search
engine ranking.
So what happens when a bunch of sites all have similar
titles, content, and META tags? Well, most search
engines choose to list the most popular sites first. But
then how do you get into the most popular sites? The
best way is to submit your site to Web directories (not
just search engines) and get other sites to link to
yours. It can be a long climb to the top, but your
perseverance will pay off.
SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your
Site
1. Your Website is Like a Cake

The links, paid search, and social media acts as the

icing, but your content, information architecture,
content management system, and infrastructure act as
the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is
tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.
2. What Search Engines Are Looking For
Search engines want to do their jobs as best as
possible by referring users to websites and content that
is the most relevant to what the user is looking for. So
how is relevancy determined?

 Content: Is determined by the theme that is being

given, the text on the page, and the titles and
descriptions that are given.
 Performance: How fast is your site and does it
work properly?
 Authority: Does your site have good enough
content to link to or do other authoritative sites use
your website as a reference or cite the information
that's available?
 User Experience: How does the site look? Is it
easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it
have a high bounce rate?
3. What Search Engines Are NOT Looking For
Search engine spiders only have a certain amount of
data storage, so if you're performing shady tactics or
trying to trick them, chances are you're going to hurt
yourself in the long run. Items the search engines don't
want are:

 Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords on your

pages.
  Purchased Links: Buying links will get you
nowhere when it comes to SEO, so be warned.
 Poor User Experience: Make it easy for the user
to get around. Too many ads and making it too
difficult for people to find content they're looking
for will only increase your bounce rate. If you know
your bounce rate it will help determine other
information about your site. For example, if it's 80
percent or higher and you have content on your
website, chances are something is wrong.
4. Know Your Business Model
While this is pretty obvious, so many people tend to
not sit down and just focus on what their main goals
are. Some questions you need to ask yourself are:

 What defines a conversion for you?

 Are you selling eyeballs (impressions) or what
people click on?
 What are your goals?
 Do you know your assets and liabilities?
5. Don't Forget to Optimize for Multi-Channels

Keyword strategy is not only important to implement

on-site, but should extend to other off-site platforms,
which is why you should also be thinking about multi-
channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms
include:

 Facebook
 Twitter
 LinkedIn
 Email
 Offline, such as radio and TV ads
Being consistent with keyword phrases within these
platforms will not only help your branding efforts, but
also train users to use specific phrases you're
optimizing for.

6. Be Consistent With Domain Names

Domain naming is so important to your overall
foundation, so as a best practice you're better off using
sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome)
versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Some
other best practices with domain names are:

 Consistent Domains: If you type in

www.example.com, but then your type in just
example.com and the "www" does not redirect to
www.example.com, that means the search engines
are seeing two different sites. This isn't effective for
your overall SEO efforts as it will dilute your
inbound links, as external sites will be linking to
www.example.com and example.com.
 Keep it Old School: Old domains are better than
new ones, but if you're buying an old domain, make
sure that the previous owner didn't do anything
shady to cause the domain to get penalized.
 Keywords in URL: Having keywords you're trying
to rank for in your domain will only help your
overall efforts.
7. Optimizing for Different Types of Results
In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience,
make sure to focus on mobile and tablet
optimization as well as other media.
 Create rich media content like video, as it's easier
to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to
get a plain text page to rank.
 Optimize your non-text content so search engines
can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDFs, make
sure you read up on the latest best practices so
 search engines can crawl that content and give
your site credit for it.
8. Focus on Your Meta Data Too
Your content on your site should have title
tags and meta descriptions.
 Meta keywords are pretty much ignored by search
engines nowadays, but if you still use them, make
sure it talks specifically to that page and that it is
also formatted correctly.
 Your meta description should be unique and also
speak to that specific page. Duplicate meta
descriptions from page to page will not get you
anywhere.
Title tags should also be unique! Think your title as a
4-8 word ad, so do your best to entice the reader so
they want to click and read more.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is a cost-per-click (CPC) online

advertising program. Essentially that means that you
decide upon a keyword that relates closely to your
product or service.
Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is where an organization offers and

incentive to other web-based organizations to market
the products or services that it offers. So a company
selling surfboards could have an affiliate program that
is offered to other web-based organizations that offer
information on surfing destinations. The affiliate
program is supplied by one organization – whereas the
‘affiliate’ is the website that promotes on behalf of the
supplying organization.

Put simply – affiliate marketing is a basic agency

arrangement. There is rarely any pay-per-click cash,
but affiliates tend to take a commission on any goods
sold as a result of the click. What does it look like?
Affiliate marketing sees a banners advert or a text
advert placed upon an affiliate’s website. When the
advert attracts a click, the visitor is taken through to
the site that originated the affiliate program. No cash
changes hands until there is a sale, but affiliate
rewards tend to be higher than regular pay-per-click.
Commission Junction (CJ) is a well-known example of
an Affiliate Marketing company. CJ acts as an
intermediary between affiliate program. suppliers of all
types and sizes. So if you have a successful website,
that does well in the search engines and is popular with
visitors, you should register with CJ and place affiliate
adds onto your site.

Offline Promotions Strategies.

Of course to promote website you should also consider

offline promotion strategies such as those used by non-
Internet businesses.
Here a selection of other suitable approaches to offline
promotion:

 Create a media release or announce a media

conference regarding your website.
 Advertise using other media such as TV, billboards,
radio, newspapers and magazines, or the cinema.
 Send out direct mail shots and run campaigns.
 Print your domain name and e-mail contact
addresses upon all of your corporate material.
 Offer free products and services. FREE is one of the
most powerful words in marketing.
 Provide free material e.g. fact sheets or guides that
could be posted or e-mailed to customers.
 Offer competitions or quizzes (with prizes when
possible).
 And many, many others…
Using Google’s tools, you price how much it would cost
your per-click for your chosen keyword – this could be
10 cents, $1.50 or more, depending on the popularity
of the keyword. So the keyword – ‘marketing’ – would
be more expensive than the keyword – ‘marketing
cheese china’ – because of its level of popularity. You
then allocate a budget, and pay Google by credit card.
You can control the length of your campaign, or end it
as soon as the money runs out. Alternatively,
companies often opt for the services of a specialist
agency in PPC management (Pay-Per-Click
management) or recruit a verified Google Adwords
Professional.

Adverts appear alongside Google search results – so go

to Google and search for ‘marketing.’ The ad’s
appearing along side the main search results are CPC.
Ad’s also appear on selected content websites – such
as www.chichesteruk.com – look at the adverts along
the top, and down the right hand column – this is
where ad’s based upon the keyword ‘Chichester’ would
appear. You only pay for adverts that get clicked – not
for page views – so you pay nothing if your advert is
simply viewed.

There is also an opportunity for ‘Smart Pricing’ whereby

you pay more for the advert if a sale is guaranteed e.g.
you have a website based upon fishing – you write a
review of a new type of fishing rod, the visitor then
sees an ad for the same rod in an Adwords text ad
running on the ‘same page,’ then clicks on it – and
buys from the advertiser.

Adwords is a very targeted and controllable way of

online advertising – hence the huge rises in income and
profit for Google over recent times.
Best practices on mobile SEO
Here is a summary from the infographic of best
practices for mobile SEO to consider:

 Responsive web design. Considered industry

best practice and is recommended by Google. This
includes using CSS media queries for device
rendering, and using uniformed HTML across all
devices.
 Dynamic Serving. Google notes that different
HTML can dynamically live on the same URL if
responsive design is not optimal.
Separate mobile URLs. Fair game, and do not
actually affect organic search traffic, nor weaken
your “link juice” as mobile users may have
different needs to desktop users and thus need
different copy messaging.
 Sites first, apps later!. Apps are limited in their
reach, while sites will drive traffic. 50% of
consumers would not recommend a business with
a bad mobile site, while 40% said they would use a
competing business if it provided a better mobile
experience.
 Researching your mobile audience. Prior to
creating your mobile site, it is imperative to
understand the wants and needs of whom you are
trying to reach.
 Broaden your topic scope. Mobile users search
differently than desktop surfers; often times they
ask very specific questions and sometimes they
use voice requests.
 Use internal mobile site search tools. Pay close
attention to your mobile traffic in web analytics
and identify unique mobile searches and referrers.
 Doing this will help you further profile your mobile
users’ needs.
 Optimise your mobile content. Mobile users are
often on the go and do not have the same goals as
those sitting behind a computer. Create custom
mobile content to give researchers exactly what
are looking for.
 Accessible desktop pages to mobile
searchers. Point blank: An unreachable desktop
page is unusable to mobile searchers.
 Content, content and content. Content needs to
be useful, entertaining, or both – will help attract
links from other sites increasing your mobile
search reputation. (check out our content
marketing services)
 Maximise Site Speed. A faster site will provide a
better mobile user experience.
Optimise socially. Optimising social profiles for
social topics will add to your site’s relevancy since
most people often access their social media
through mobile technology.
Search Marketing.

Overture and Yahoo!

Overture is the Yahoo equivalent of Google’s Adwords.

Now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing, Overture has
a series of sub-products that make up its digital
marketing program. Here are some examples:

(a) Sponsored search – displays your advert at the top

of the search engine results. So your potential
customers search for a ‘keyword’ and your advert
appears at the top of the results page (this is very
similar to Adwords). Again, as with Adwords, the
advertisers bid against each other to obtain the
position that will generate the most convertible traffic
to their site. Popular keywords will cost more –
obviously.

(b) Local Advertising – gets your business listed in

Yahoo’s business directory. So if you wish to promote
products in specific regions next to specific search
keywords, this is a very targeted geographical service.

Overture has many other similar services such as

Search Submit, Product Submit, Travel Submit and
Directory Submit that could be considered.

Our Three Top Tips on SEO:

1. Have a Content Strategy: Develop good quality

content that your customers will love you for. As a
result people will follow you and you will build your
own Tribe. Most audiences have people at different
levels so make sure you produce easy and then
more advanced content e.g. SEO for beginners,
SEO advanced SEO…
2. Create Word of Mouth links: Be social and you
will be rewarded with people liking your content
and if it is good sharing it with their friends and
colleagues. How good is that. Many businesses get
the offline referrals right but forget to use their
online networks effectively.
3. Be smart with your links: Creating masses of
links has no value and can hurt your site if done
badly. Smart linking works because you link to
other relevant contentand websites and the search
engines will recognize this.

Email Marketing

In a nutshell you send an electronic communication

which contains a message to your customer or client. It
could be a message about some updates regarding
your business. It could contain a voucher for a
particular promotion. Other popular calls-to-action (i.e.
the purpose of your e-mail and the reaction that you
require from the respondent) might include a free
game, money off codes, a paid for or free webinar, and
any other tool which helps you to retain customers and
to extend new products and services to them.

E-mail marketing is a foundation of Customer

Relationship Management (CRM) and there is plenty of
material on the Marketing Teacher website about CRM.
A popular definition of CRM is Customer Relationship
Management is the establishment, development,
maintenance and optimisation of long-term mutually
valuable relationships between consumers and
organisations. CRM is designed to recruit and retain
customers, and to extend products and services to
them over their lifetime. E-mail marketing is a
fundamental approach for this.

It’s important that your e-mail is something that your

respondent wants to open. So you don’t even need to
have anything major to offer since you could just be
telling them about a small change in the law, or you
could summarise key events from your particular
market from the previous week’s news.

e-mail such an important digital marketing tool

Today Information Technology (IT) means that the high

cost of traditional direct marketing or mailshots is
reduced substantially. In fact if you recall your first
direct online dialogue with a company, you will
probably recall that e-mail was the first social
interaction which you had via the Internet. So e-mail
marketing is one of the cornerstones of social media
marketing as we know it today.
E-mail is still a powerful medium of online
communication. It is simple, straightforward and your
visitors and clients are familiar with e-mail, where they
may not be so familiar with Facebook or LinkedIn and
other popular social media solutions. However you
want your e-mail communications to be focused and
targeted, and ultimately to retain customers and keep
them buying from you. You don’t want your
communication to be a piece of on opened e-mail in
someone’s inbox, or worse labelled as junk mail or
spam (which Is mass, unsolicited e-mails). To your
loyal customers your communication has value, and so
does e-mail marketing.

Email marketing campaigns

Let’s take a look at the best way for you to design your
e-mail marketing campaign. As with most other types
of marketing, e-mail marketing campaigns work best if
they follow a marketing planning format.

Based on marketing principles ask yourself who exactly

are you targeting your e-mail at? Who are your
customers and clients? Who is your target audience?
There may be a number of segments that you are
targeting, and in which case you would adapt or
change your e-mail campaign.

Keep the message short and succinct, and use constant

and straightforward text. Your logo needs to be
strongly placed at the top of the e-mail, and the first
few sentences are your opportunity to make an impact,
because if they don’t the recipient will not read on.

Once the recipient has opened your e-mail you need to

direct them through a text or image link to your
website. Hence you need a landing page on your site
that will take the recipient through to the next stage.
This is also no as funnelling, where the following start
wide and then directs the recipient to the point of
purchase. Landing page needs to be consistent with
your brand and also the e-mail. Key aspects of your
offering need to be repeated on the landing page to
reassure your recipient, and again include a call to
action to move them towards the final stage purchase
or signup (obviously it depends on what your
purposes).

Next you need to test your e-mail. This is really simple

when you use one of the popular e-mail marketing
services. Simply send an e-mail to yourself or to staff
and colleagues, and ask them to respond with any
necessary changes. This is also reassuring to you.

The campaign must be measured and monitored, so

that you can compare and contrast success of various
strategies. You can measure of all sorts of indicators
including how many e-mails were delivered, and many
were opened, how many recipients on your link and
began her journey through your funnel. You should be
able to compare the amount of e-mails which you sent
to your actual sales. Again some e-mail marketing
providers allow you to measure the value of each
individual client in your mailing list, and you can rank
and prioritise them.

This also allows you to remove people from your

mailing list it don’t open your e-mails and will never
become customers. Again this may reduce the cost of
the mailing. The mailing list needs to be current – so if
many of your emails bounce, remain unopened or
induce the client to unsubscribe, then you need to
refresh your list and/or change your approach.

Keep trying new ideas. By comparing and contrasting

your relative success you will make your campaigns
more successful. By changing small details you may
notice unexpected improvements.

You need to set yourself smart objectives. For example,

to inform my 100, 000 strong mailing list about a
product range launch within seven days. You also
would need to consider the finance needed to plan,
write, implement and monitor the online campaign.
Measuring your campaign is vital, and all e-mail
marketing service providers give you a toolkit to
control your plan, and there is always Google Analytics
in addition.

Having decided that you are going to prepare your

campaign you will need to segment, target, and
position your message not only for the entire email-
shot, but also for each individual that you are
communicating with. Your campaign should have
meaning for everyone with whom you are in contact.
Your purpose is to achieve a sale or call-to-action, and
success is more often down to segmentation rather
than creativity.

To grab the attention of your reader you need to make

sure that your subject line or title, jumps out and
distinguishes itself from the other communications in
your potential customer’s inbox. This will also help you
overcome spam filters. Keep it relevant to your topic
and include your website name where possible, for
example Marketing Teacher Launches New Course,
which would be of interest to our clients.

Next – you need to get creative! As with all marketing

communications it is important that you design an
email structure or template which is strong enough to
entice and retain customers. So here are a few tips to
help you to construct engaging e-mails.

Remember to give your respondent the opportunity to

unsubscribe from your mailing list. It may be that they
have changed jobs or have other interests and no
longer require your services.

Keep them keep the actual physical size of the e-mail

small enough for your clients e-mail program or
browser to be able to open it. If you pack it with Flash
imagery many e-mail packages will not open anyway,
and think about those people in countries where
bandwidth is small where the Internet service will be
much slower. Therefore it is also good advice to give
readers the choice of HTML or text versions of your
correspondence.

Write in simple language so that readers can quickly

scan through your message.

The call-to-action should be prominent. This is what

you want the respondent do as a result of reading your
message.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is simply a means of getting a large

number of ideas from a group of people in a short time.
Brainstorming is great for marketers! Marketers can
generate new creative ideas for products, services,
solutions or concepts. Not only is brainstorming useful
for creative thinking, but is can also be used for
marketing problem solving and marketing decision
making.

Evaluating ideas

1. Scrutinise all the ideas and pick out any that

instantly jump out at you.

2. Sort the remaining ideas into groups of a

manageable size and examine using some predefined
criteria e.g. profitability or relative competitive
advantage.

3. Subject ideas to reverse brainstorming. Ask the

question ‘In how many ways can this idea fail?’

Successful brainstorming depends upon four key rules:

1. Suspend judgement.

2. Let yourself go and freewheel.

3. Go for quantity – quality implies evaluation (which

means that you have not suspended judgement).

4. Cross-fertilize – pick up someone else’s ideas and

suggest others leading from it.

Steps in Brainstorming.

A. State the problem.

B. Restate the problem.

C. Select restatement.

D. Warm-up.

E. Brainstorm.

Oiling the Wheels

If brainstorming group dries up the leader can get the

ideas flowing again by using any one of the following
approaches:

1. Silent review – let the group review silently the

ideas already generated in order to stimulate their
thinking.

2. Quantity targets – encourage the group to go for 10,

50 or 100 ideas!

3. The one idea – get the group to focus on one idea

and use that as a stimulus.

4. Select a restatement from the list the group

produced earlier and brainstorm it.

5. Wildest idea – let the group silently review the ideas

already generated in order to use the wildest idea as a
stimulus for more productive ideas.

Six Thinking Hats

Edward De Bono. Six Thinking Hats (1985)

In our thinking, we often try to do too much at the

same time. We look at the facts of the matter. We try
to build a logical argument. We may try to come up
with some new ideas. We may even get emotional.
Marketing managers tend to be multitasking and often
have many projects on the go at the same time.
Marketers have deadlines to meet. Marketing is
creative, and the Six Thinking Hats helps us to provide
marketing solutions to marketing problems.

Green Hat.

The green hat is for creative thinking. Creative thinking

may mean new ideas, alternatives, new solutions or
inventions. It could also mean making something
happen. The main uses of green hat are:

1. To explore the situation in terms of ideas, concepts,

suggestions and possibilities.

2. To put forward proposals or suggestions of any sort,

e.g. suggestions for action, possible decisions, etc.

3. To consider further options or alternatives. The

green hat seeks to broaden the range of options before
pursuing any one of them in detail. Yellow and black
hat thinking are used to assess alternatives.

4. To come up with some new ideas. Lateral thinking

techniques can be used deliberately in order to
generate some new ideas.

5. To put forward some deliberate provocations. A

provocation is not meant to be a usable idea. It is a
way of releasing the mind from its usual track.
Blue Hat.

The blue hat gives an overview of our thinking. It

covers the following points:

1. Where are we now in our thinking?

2. What should we do next in our thinking?

3. To establish an agenda or sequence for our thinking.

4. To summarize what has been achieved so far in the

thinking.

The six thinking hats can be used occasionally as a

means of switching thinking or systematically where a
sequence of hats is established in advance to enable
the thinker(s) to go through each stage of thinking.

The six thinking hats is a method for doing one sort of

thinking at a time. Instead of trying to do everything at
once, we wear only one hat at a time. It’s a metaphor.
There are six colored hats and each color represents a
type of thinking.

White Hat.

The white hat means neutral information. White hat

thinking focuses on the available information. There are
three key questions:

1. What information do we have?

2. What information is missing?

3. How do we get the information we need?

Red Hat.

The red hat is for emotions, feelings, hunches and

intuition. Unlike white hat the red hat is not interested
in facts, but only in people’s feelings. The purpose of
the red hat is to allow us to put forward our feelings so
they can take part in the thinking. The red hat provides
a clear label for those feelings. Intuition is often based
upon experience about a matter, but we cannot exactly
explain why we have such an intuition. The red hat
allows the thinker to put forward a hunch or intuition
without any need to support or justify it.

Black Hat.

The black hat is generally the most used of all the hats.
It is the one that prevents us from making mistakes
and doing silly things. The black hat is concerned with
the truth, reality and critical thinking. The key
questions are:

1. Is it true?

2. Does it fit?

3. Will it work?

4. What are the dangers and the problems?

Yellow Hat.

In general the yellow hat is optimistic and looking

forward to the future. It can however be used to review
the past but from the perspective of what we can learn
from past experiences i.e. being positive and looking
on the bright side. The key questions are:

1. What are the benefits?

2. Why should it work?

Traffic Lights

A tool for creative marketing

As with many of the tools and techniques considered
on Marketing Teacher, traffic lights is a simple and
effective approach. It’s just like the traffic lights that
are seen in millions of streets throughout the world,
and is a basic metaphor for red, amber and
green. Red means ‘let’s STOP it,’ Amber means
‘PROCEED WITH CAUTION, but make some
improvements,’ and Green means ‘Go’ or ‘Let’s carry
on with this activity.’
RED – STOP
 Get rid of any distributors that favour competitor
brands over our own.
 Withdraw product lines that make a loss.
 Remove our branding from any none-ski wear
clothing.
 Stop sponsoring amateur or low ranking skiers, and
enhance the exclusivity of our brand.
AMBER – PROCEED WITH CAUTION , AND
MAKE SOME IMPROVEMENTS.
 Reduce the number of distributors that have
Serendipity agency agreements. Start backing our
proactive winners that really wish to endorse our
brand and make it central to their business.
 Promote or reposition products that are mature.

GREEN – GO OR LET’S CARRY ON WITH THIS

ACTIVITY.
 Reward our best distributors, and develop as the
bases for long-terms relationships.
 Develop and enhance products that are highly
profitable.
 Let’s continue to sponsor top skiers that enhance
our brand values.
Okay, now you’ve read the lesson, have a go at the
exercise (with answer).

Traffic lights is a creative marketing tool that can be

used in a number of ways.

 You could conduct a personal traffic lights exercise

based upon your own personal or professional
development.
 The exercise can be run at any stage of the
marketing planning or creative process. So you
could run it as you begin marketing, during a
marketing campaign, and at the end of a marketing
 programme as you review or control your
marketing activities.
Traffic lights have a number of benefits to
marketing managers:

 It encourages a creative approach to marketing

 Traffic lights is simple to use
 Traffic lights is quick to learn
 Traffic lights cross cultures, since most countries
use this common approach to traffic control.
 Traffic lights transcend interdepartmental and
disciplinary differences so that it is a common
platform for decision-making.