The 10 Hottest Trends in Online Marketing

To succeed in online marketing you must stay ahead of your competitors by developing new strategies and tactics.

By Jay Berkowitz, CMO, Moniker.com

To succeed in online marketing you must stay ahead of your competitors by developing new strategies and tactics. Yesterday’s winning strategy is today’s loser! Here are the ten hottest trends to help you get ahead in online marketing in the next six months:

1. Search Engine Marketing

Natural or organic search engine optimization is the practice of designing your website so that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN rank your site highly in their results. Make sure your site’s Title, Description and Keywords use the search terms a potential customer would use to look for your site. You can view these by opening your website in a browser, clicking on ‘View’ and scrolling down to ‘Source’, if your site’s Title is ‘welcome to mysite.com’ find a new webmaster who understands natural search.

Pay Per Click Search is the practice of purchasing “Sponsor Listings” on Google, Overture and o ther top Search Engines. This is an extremely effective form of marketing as you can adjust your bids on keywords based on the performance of each term. Setting up an account at Google or Overture is easy and inexpensive.

2. Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing appears in many forms, one example is Google’s AdSense, a tool that places ads on websites when specified terms appear in copy on the site. For example, if you wanted to run an ad for a Mutual Fund company, your Google Ad may appear beside an article about mutual funds on Fortune.com.

3. Shopping Sites

Shopping.com, Nextag.com and Google’s Froogle.com will revolutionize shopping online and fur ther drive prices down These innovative sites list all companies offering a specific product online, their price offer and a rating of the sites reliability.

4. Blogging

Blogs, short for web-logs are web pages that serve as a publicly accessible journal, originally for an individual but recently used by companies and political campaigns. Typically updated daily, blogs have been adopted by corporations due to their success with search engines. The engines ‘reward’ the web site for new information and current information. For example, if your CEO blogs about a new development in your industry and a prospect is searching for information about this development you should appear on page 1 on Google.

5. Your home page is NOT a landing page

A site’s home page has a distinct function; it is a directory of all information available on a site. A landing page is a page you link to from banners or paid seach links. It is focused on one job, to sell, or to sign up or to engage a customer in a free trial. There should be no o ther links, just a strong product demonstration and an obvious way for the customer to take action. If you give prospects o ther links chances are they will lose their focus and wander away from the purchase decision.

6. Usability

I'm seeing more and more companies focusing on user needs and cutting out the clutter that clogs most old school sites. Smart site are now getting a laser-like focus on user goals and making it easy for customers to find what they want in three to four clicks.

Permissioning

7. Permissioning is the active process of gaining and maintaining permission to market to customers and prospects. If you aren’t collecting customer ‘opt-ins’, permission to add them to email lists, start now! The internet service providers will likely soon require proof of opt-in in order to allow commercial entities to send email to their customers.

8. Relevance

Relevance is the on the lips of all internet marketers. Is site content relevant to visitors? Does a search turn up relevant results? We have higher standards for websites today, we expect the site to load quickly and we expect to find what we’re looking for.

9. Social Networking

Social Networking is now a significant part of internet life for millions of users. Registrants of popular sites such as ezboard.com, friendster.com and tickle.com are making business and personal contacts and are sharing ideas and leads. All three sites are in the top 200 most highly trafficked websites as ranked by alexa.com. Robert Labatt, CEO of ezboard, Inc said “We have 15,000,000 registered users and every month over 10,000,000 are actively using the site!”. Businesses can participate in a relevant network by placing appropriate comments or suggestions on boards, including personal contact information in the email signature.

10. Viral Marketing

The term vial marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others. Friends are sending links to view An American Express Seinfeld and Superman commercial, this 5 minute film includes a product feature. Burger King recently created a ‘subservient chicken’ that will do acts on command such as play air guitar or make a fort with couch pillows, invitations to visit this site spread from person to person – virally – and it became a top 1000 site on the internet. Viral marketing succeeds for marketers through word-of-mouth recommendations ‘have a look at this’ and by passing through most email spam blockers.

Jay Berkowitz is the Chief Marketing Officer for Moniker.com and webmaster of www.tengoldenrules.com, an online marketing portal. Mr. Berkowitz is a popular presenter at conferences and events such as The Association of Internet Marketing and Sales, The Direct Marketing Association, The Global Benchmarking Council and the American Marketing Association.

Do you know someone who would be interested in this publication?

Increase your site ranking on Google, Yahoo and other search engines
Create a reciprocal link with Moniker