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We’ve talked in the past about how helpful Ezinearticles.com can be for you. Here is a post directly dedicated to telling you why you need an account with this site.
Three Reasons Why You Should Open An Account
1. Get traffic to your website. Pre-sell on this site and the bio box will send people to your [...]
When trying to optimize your website for search engines, should you pick one keyword or optimize for multiple keywords? There’s no clear cut answer as SEO isn’t exactly black and white. There are different approaches you can take based on: how much time you want to spend, how much on-page SEO you plan and how [...]
Great newsletters as a form of e-mail marketing can sell stuff!
It’s happened to me, and I’m sure it’s probably happened to you too. In the past I have seen a good email newsletter and signed up to receive it in order to get hold of what looks like a good source of free information.
Things [...]
Free SEO tools are abundant online and can help you with your SEO and internet marketing efforts. Here’s another one worth mentioning.
Live Keyword Analysis is a url that offers a free keyword analysis tool. You can use this tool to help you hit a specific % of keyword density for your website content. This can [...]
In the world of Internet marketing it’s tricky to stay balanced. Sometimes we procrastinate and need to give ourselves a kick in the butt but more often than not, we don’t stop and smell the roses often enough because we’re so passionate about our business.
The holidays are a great time for spending time with family [...]
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to the regular readers (and to first time visitors) of SeanSEO.com
You’re wished a safe and happy Christmas and a very prosperous 2009! May you get those warm and fuzzy feelings with your family and friends, may the many treats you eat magically have zero calories whilst tasting like thousands and [...]
Getting started in internet marketing is an exciting prospect. But it can be overwhelming too. There are so many options to consider that you would be forgiven for not knowing where to turn or what to try first.
This is where a little thought can go a long way. Many people start off [...]
If you’re selling something online, there are a lot of ways you can earn money throughout the year and if you’re wise you can figure out how to earn MORE during the holiday season. The holidays present what some consider to be a bad time of year because some believe people are just too busy [...]
Are you pondering your internet marketing related new year’s resolutions? It’s getting close to that time of year where we consider what the new year will bring. We should realise that we have a lot of control over that and although many joke about new year’s resolutions being a waste of time, it’s a very [...]
An internet citizen can help become well known by their good deeds and it can pay them back multi-fold. Are you a good internet citizen? Not only can you spread the laws of attraction by being a good online citizen but you can improve your online profile so that like-minded people and potential customers gravitate [...]
Yesterday we talked about whether you can handle more than one blog. Well, after you’ve decided to start a few and have been bitten by the blogoholic bug, you can really take advantage of this. Using your many blogs to benefit your other blogs can be very beneficial. Here are some tips for using the [...]
Some people like to make the most of their internet marketing efforts, and a lot of people find that promoting their products with the help of a blog is a great way to boost their business.
Start Another Blog
Once you have a successful blog on your hands and it’s making your internet marketing business some money, [...]
When you are trying to make money on the internet, you might have varying strategies depending on the revenue-generating program you’re working at. Often, people work to get the click in a program like Google Adsense. Your job is to (without directly asking as that would be click fraud) convince people to click so you [...]
The web 2.0 movement has spawned a lot of social marketing tools that some people just don’t ‘get’. Microblogging might be one of them. If you’re not on the micro blogging bandwagon, you might just be missing out on something fantastic.
Tell The World What You’re Doing in 140 Characters Or Less
Well, why?
Why does the [...]
Outsourcing is something highly recommended in books like The 4-Hour Workweek. Is outsourcing right for you? You might be thinking about using a job bidding site or advertising for services needed to get various services such as writers and designers, programmers and virtual assistants.
When most internet marketers start out they get going as a one [...]
If you’re looking to sell products to people on the Internet being at the right place and at the right time can make a huge difference to your success. Timing can prime your business for success. While a certain amount of your copywriting should be timeless and evergreen, some well-timed words can compel your potential [...]
Regardless of whether you want your new blog to be with a free provider or you intend to have your own domain name and hosting, you still have an important decision to make. Which blogging platform do you want to use?
Deciding on a Blog Platform
This isn’t a decision which should be taken lightly, especially [...]
If you’re trying to sell something online, giving away a free bonus can do several things for you. Let’s look at the marketing potential of a free report.
Get the attention of subscribers to your mailing list. Then add them to your autoresponder series to see if they’ll buy something else from you in future
The report [...]
If you want to succeed in internet marketing, making online friends can help you. Once you make online friends, it can get you some great results such as:
Get you new leads
Get you help in the social sphere
Help You sell more stuff
Get help with problems
Get new leads when you stay in touch in online water coolers [...]
Yes, organizing your blog certainly can be time consuming, but it will also make your blog easier to negotiate when your visitors come to see what you have been writing about.
Easier To Read
If you look at anyone who is out there blogging in the internet marketing business at the moment, who does even a half [...]
Today’s featured free tool is Ping.fm. This is a pinging tool that lets you update all your social services with one update.This includes many types of services like sharing sites, blogs and micro blogging tools too.
Here are some of the popular services you can update with it:
Twitter, LiveJournal, MySpace, FaceBook, Tumblr, Hi5, Yahoo 360, Xanga, [...]
When trying to make money online, who you know can often impact your success levels. If you have online friendships, make the most of them! Here are some things you can do:
Ask for a blogroll exchange. You link to them, they link to you.
Ask for Stumbles, Diggs, etc. when you write a great post.
Consider doing [...]
If you have a site you’re trying to optimise for search engines that’s a blog, one of the greatest ways you can optimize it is to give it some link love. Consider putting up some or even all of the following types of links into every blog post you write. Here are three types of [...]
With Thanksgiving in the U.S people around the world might be considering what they’re thankful for. In internet marketing, there are a lot of things to be thankful for. Let’s look at a few of them:
Google
Google lets us earn, lets us be found and puts a world of free information at our fingertips. Yay Google! [...]
If you’re an affiliate who’s been making money online by selling other people’s products for a while, you might realise that there’s big money available if you can launch a successful product of your own. This isn’t an easy feat and there’s a great of time, effort and money involved in promoting your own product [...]
We’ve all heard those stories of affiliate marketers making thousands of dollars a week by selling products from ClickBank. All the money pours into their account faster than they could hope to spend it and they simply keep on selling more and more all the time.
Promoting Products
But we have also heard the stories of [...]
If you’re new to internet marketing and want to learn more about exploring search engine optimisation, you might not know where to start. Here are two starting points that you can look at as a starting point. You’ll find a wealth of information online to help you do these things on your own.
On Page SEO
On [...]
We recently talked about how forums can be valuable for you in terms of networking, building SEO, finding gigs and building your online reputation. Here are some forums that internet marketers might like to visit:
Warrior Forum: A great place to not only find out everything you might want to know about internet marketing but the [...]
The best part of having your own site is being able to do whatever you want with it. But that comes with a huge caveat which you should fully understand if you want to make the most of your internet or affiliate marketing business and bring in some decent income.
Benefit your Visitors
While you can [...]
Google Blog Search is a great tool for helping you to:
Get information about your niche
Assess your competition
Find blogs to network with
Google Blog Search is a search engine for blogs. Reading blogs from your peers and from mentors in your industry or niche can be very enlightening. By searching on a keyword or phrase you can [...]
Most people who want to make a lot of money online will find that there’s an awful lot of fierce competition out there already. How do you capitalise on the ability to earn money through the internet? You need to set yourself apart from the rest. You need a USP (unique selling proposition). Sure, you [...]
Here at SeanSEO.com we know that commenting on blogs can help your site’s SEO. We knew this already but we especially know this when we look at our spam filter in the back end of this blog!
If you’re not already commenting on blogs, you might consider doing so because:
Blog commenting can get you relevevant links [...]
Take a minute to step back and think about your internet business for a moment. Are you still enjoying it? Does it make you look forward to getting onto your computer and seeing how much money you made during the night?
Change your perspective
Or have you been lacking in that excitement of late? [...]
Community forums can serve many purposes for the successful internet marketer. There are thousands online on just about every topic you can imagine. Some are very busy and can have lots of members as well as a high Google page rank.
Here are a few of the ways you can use forums to your advantage:
Your forum [...]
Using free articles can help you make sales. Once you write those articles and get them approved thorugh article directories, go one further and use social marketing tools to promote your articles.
Using a social media tool can help you sell more of whatever it is you’re selling. And because there are so many online water [...]
If you’re looking for ways to sell and ways to promote what you’re selling, Squidoo lenses are great tools. They’re a lot like HubPages. These sites allow you to set up a robust looking page with all sorts of tools to help you promote including:
polls
pictures
text boxes
sticky notes
eye catching headline boxes
RSS feeds
links
and more
Not only can you [...]
Conversion rates are an important factor in internet marketing. If you’re new to the field of online marketing it won’t take long before you’ll be looking very closely at your conversion rates. The rate of visitors that perform the action you want on your site is the rate of conversion. Converting traffic into customers is [...]
What is one of the main activities you are always doing as the owner of an internet business, whether it’s large or small?
Put Yourself Out There
The answer is advertising and promoting. You are always trying to get people’s attention in some way. But how about just talking to people and getting yourself out there? [...]
Watching blogs about SEO is smart. You can get the latest and greatest info as well as learn new tactics you might not have thought of. SEO should be something that is a constant in your online career.
Here is some reading for budding and for experienced online entrepreneurs:
SEO Flow Chart by Aaron Wall.
Aaron Wall, author [...]
A lot of internet marketers are told that FaceBook is a great way to increase their earnings. Do you have an account yet? If you do, you might not be doing much with it because you’re not sure how to capitalise on FaceBook. Here are some helpful tips for you:
Internet Marketing With FaceBook
-Targeted FaceBook ads. [...]
Ryan from HubPages popped by in our last post when we talked about using HubPages to promote your product and site. Ryan reminded us in comments that free sites like HubPages are looking for unique content.
Content Pays
The more content you’ve got out there pointing to your site, the better! But in your quest for online [...]
Here are some basic SEO Tips to try and get better search engine rankings. They will help try and get you to that desired number 1 position in Google.
A few basic tips on how to increase your rankings with Google and the likes. Their are more advanced ways on how to increase your SEO but to start with these few tips should help you achieve that success.
If you’re interested in promoting a product or service online, you need all the free IM tools you can get! Today’s featured tool is HubPages. Here’s what I like about this self-promotional and monetizing tool:
It’s like a free article site except that you don’t have to give anyone the right to re-publish it elsewhere. While [...]
Do you want to have more subscribers on Twitter? Do you want to maximise your marketing impact in the Twitterverse? Your Twitter people, a.k.a your “Tweeps” are interested in following like minded people and / or very interesting people. If you try to sign up with the sole purpose of link baiting, you’re not going [...]
Should your domain name be your name? It’s a fair question. But what’s the answer?
Is it a good idea?
It can depend to an extent what kind of internet business you are in. If you are a writer then buying this kind of domain name is a good idea, since people will probably look [...]
If you’re new to internet marketing it might be tempting to sign up with every affiliate marketing plan you can find. The problem with this is that until you know what you’re doing and are hitting pay dirt on a regular basis, you should probably stick with one or two affiliate networks instead of a [...]
3 things you should use with blogging we talked about a magical traffic formula for your blog traffic. There are things you need to do to your main blog site to get constant traffic but with each entry you write, you should do a few things to bring in extra traffic.
Today we’ll give you a [...]
If you blog to make money online, here are three tools you need to use straight away. If you’re not already using these tools, they can make a difference to your traffic and your earnings. If you’re using them already and have some other tools that you find indispensable, we’d love to hear what they [...]
Today’s post shares some great blogs you might want to consider reading if you’re someone who wants to make money on the internet. Staying abreast of news in the industry and linking yourself to these blogs by way of commenting and pingbacks can also help your SEO.
5 Blogs to Read Today
TechCrunch: Just voted the most [...]
Deciding to blog is a tough decision isn’t it? What subject should it be about? What kind of posts should you write? Should you go it alone or get it hosted for free at a blogging site?
Blogging isn’t the easy job some people think it is. It can certainly be rewarding, [...]
When you use social media tools to try to increase your chances of making more sales, you can take informration in these tools and use them to your advantage. A lot of hype is spread around about monetizing Facebook, MySpace and Twitter but new marketers often don’t know how to mine these systems for information [...]
If you want to learn the secrets to your competition’s success, you need to analyse their moves. Google Alerts can help you do that. Use it to do keyword searches and to help you get hand delivered information about your niche and your customers.
Google Alerts for Creative Research
There are loads of free Google tools to [...]
A lot of people are drooling for the fat Google cheques. Google Adsense can be a bit of a catch-22 in internet marketing. When you display Adsense ads on your website or blog, you’re offering your competition a chance to grab your customers. When you use the ads to promote your own site, they’ll often [...]
Of course you shouldn’t read everything you read, right? This is especially true in internet marketing. There is a lot of good information out there but quite a lot of misinformation is out there as well. People fake their ClickBank earnings to sell you a product, people have their ‘friends’ or professionals write testimonials for [...]
How do you get to be a better article marketer? Here are some tips for you. Article marketers write articles to get people interested in their product. When you write, you need to pique interest and convince the reader to follow your call to action. Here are a few tips for you:
Solve a problem
If your [...]
You wouldn’t think that a simple little thing like spelling could get in the way of building a successful internet business that satisfies plenty of customers every single week would you?
And yet that is exactly what is happening to lots of internet businesses all over the world – and the sad thing is that a [...]
Marketing with free online tools is a great idea. How can you make the most of free tools like Squidoo? Here are some tips to help you!
A Picture: Worth 1000 Words
Put pictures on your lenses. Not just at the top either, put a picture into each module. If you don’t have any pictures in mind, [...]
Are you writing articles for free e-zine sites yet? If not, you should! Not only can you use these articles to make money via article marketing promoting affiliate products but you can also build up your site’s off page search engine optimization. This is a great tool for self promotion and it’s free! All online [...]
Here at SeanSEO.com we get our fair share of spam! Thankfully, we have Askimet. Askimet is a plug-in for WordPress that’s free to use and simply requires you activate it using your API. If you don’t know how to find your WordPress API, go to your global dashboard and you’ll find it easily.
Askimet doesn’t stop [...]
If you want great SEO advice you’ll need to look in more than one spot for information. Knowledge is power in anything you do, right? On a regular basis, internet marketers need to scour the web for intelligence on search engine marketing.
Here are some great SEO posts or sources of information that contain valuable SEO [...]
This blog is designed to give you, the reader, an insight into the possibilities of making an income online. There are many methods of making either a part-time or full-time income using the massive power of the internet. To give you an insight into what is possible to achieve utilising the internet, is the success of my mentor Sean Rasmussen, he has made over $4,000,000 online in the past 15 months! Sean has just written a fabulous book called “Year of the Affiliate” which is designed to give both newcomers and more experienced people a step by step approach to getting started and becoming successful in affiliate marketing. I will cover affiliate marketing in more detail in future blogs.
Some of the methods I will be covering in future blogs are:
Anyway, for now if you are interested in making money online, or setting up a home based business, there is a lot of information out there on the internet (some good, some bad) i would suggest searching for some of the above methods on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and start learning today as it is a fact that most of society in the future will derive their income from the internet, so starting to learn now will put you streets ahead of everybody else who chooses not to.
Lookout for my next post soon….Heres to your online future.
Making friends online can do a lot for those aspiring to make money on the internet. Not only can friends help you learn about internet marketing related stuff that can help you be more successful and share frustrations but they can also follow you, tell people about you and do some promoting for you as [...]
There is a lot of free information available online about internet marketing. But, there may come a time when you’re ready to delve a bit deeper and buy an e-book on marketing. Which ones are the best? Which ones are duds?
It’s a good idea to do a bit of digging on the author of books [...]
Here at www.seanseo.com we like to tell you about tools we think you’ll find useful. The AddThis tool is fantastic and a wonderful tool for any blog. Not only can it help you with traffic and social bookmarking but it’s aesthetically pleasing as well.
Social marketing is important but so is blog design and this tool [...]
One of the great things about being an online entrepreneur is the freedom. New months should have new goals and in fact, each day should have goals even if that goal might be to get balance and do some resting and relaxing.
Freedom comes at a price and that is the price of buckling down when [...]
Yesterday we talked about the value in your website stats and how they can be keyword goldmines to help you with your SEO. If you’re not already using your stats, here are some ways to tap into that knowledge.
Google Analytics
MyBlogLog
Wordpress Stats
AWStats
Google Analytics
Google’s free tool is quick and easy to join and provides you with valuable [...]
If you want to know the perfect keywords to capitalize on for your SEO and you’ve already got a modest to decent amount of traffic, the secret is in your stats. Your stats reveal two important things:
1. How people are finding you
2. What people are looking for
If your site has a decent level of writing [...]
You’ve got about 2.5 seconds to grab the attention of your readers. Can you do it? Here are some helpful tips when writing sales letters, blog posts and articles. All your content should speak to search engines and to the people reading the content as well. Here are some tips to help you get more [...]
What to do when you hit a milestone or goal in internet marketing? The road to success is paved with challenges and rewards and the number of successes you achieve can be determined, in part, by how you handle your successes.
Celebrate
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the arrival of a goal or milestone. In fact, you [...]
The search engines can seem flaky at times and it can get frustrating when you’re trying to rank but having trouble. It can be tempting to resort to black hat seo tactics. Rest assured, if you do things the right way, you’ll be much better off in the long run.
Tricking SE’s
Doing things like spamming and [...]
Of course there’s no single secret to success as an internet marketer but you can improve your chances of success with the right attitude. The laws of attraction are relevant to every single aspect of your life and if you apply the powers of positive thinking and surrounding yourself with positivity you’ll definitely be better [...]
It’s great when you realize how sharing and giving the online entrepreneur community is. Many newbies have a lot of trouble getting advice when they delve into a new area but when you get into online networking, you can definitely benefit from the experience of others. You only have to ask and you’ve got loads [...]
This blog is designed to give you, the reader, an insight into the possibilities of making an income online. There are many methods of making either a part-time or full-time income using the massive power of the internet. To give you an insight into what is possible to achieve utilising the internet, is the success of my mentor Sean Rasmussen, he has made over $4,000,000 online in the past 15 months! Sean has just written a fabulous book called “Year of the Affiliate” which is designed to give both newcomers and more experienced people a step by step approach to getting started and becoming successful in affiliate marketing. I will cover affiliate marketing in more detail in future blogs.
Some of the methods I will be covering in future blogs are:
Anyway, for now if you are interested in making money online, or setting up a home based business, there is a lot of information out there on the internet (some good, some bad) i would suggest searching for some of the above methods on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and start learning today as it is a fact that most of society in the future will derive their income from the internet, so starting to learn now will put you streets ahead of everybody else who chooses not to.
Lookout for my next post soon….Heres to your online future.
Finding the best key words and phrases for your website or blog can help you in a big way. Not only will you have the most chance of getting traffic but you’ll write content that appeals to people because you’ll write according to what they’re looking for. KWMap.Net is a free tool that will give [...]
Last post we talked about list building and how important it is. Once you have a list, what can you use to communicate effectively with your clients?
Autoresponders
In order to best manage your customer list and guide them through buying from you, autoresponders work like a charm. There are free and fee-based programs and what you [...]
Even in this modern era, there’s nothing as good as a customer list for those who are sales people. If you’re an internet marketer, your list is your lifeline to increasing your business. A list of customers with e-mail addresses is something you can use in many ways. For each sale you make, you should [...]
Ping your blogs, ping your status! Why? Letting others know you’ve updated or done something specific can bring you new traffic. A lot of ping services are available. Here’s a list of pinging services but let’s have a look at two: Ping-O-Matic and Ping.Fm.
Ping-O-Matic
Ping-O-Matic gets the detailed URL you want to ‘ping’ and will then [...]
Does every page on your website, landing page or blog lead the reader who arrives there to take action? Does it really? If you’re getting loads of pages views but your conversion rates are low, it might be time to tweak your copy. Perhaps your design is great, your content is good but you’re not [...]
I’m testing the twitter tool to see how effective it is in Internet Marketing. Will give a review after 2 weeks. #
I got my clients website to the top of Google’s ranking today and loving the feeling when they personally come into your office to thank you #
@cssjockey The best feeling is the feeling of [...]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Twitter Updates for 2008-09-11″, url: “http://www.binhnguyen.net/index.php/2008/09/11/twitter-updates-for-2008-09-11/” });
Wearing a black hat in SEO doesn’t put you in a very good position because eventually you’ll get caught and your losses can be significant as you’re banned from search engines.
More than ever, black hat tactics in SEO are on the decline for several reasons including knowledge about the risks and including the availability of [...]
SEO contests can help you with your search engine optimisation. If you want help, you might consider doing this on your website or blog. The theory is simple and there are many ways to do it. Get other people to do your SEO for you and the one who does the best job at getting [...]
Brand building is vital in internet marketing. If you’re trying to get a name as a trusted advisor in your niche, you want a good reputation so you’ll need to seoize more than your site. You’ll want to seoize yourself too.
Your name is your brand and people who are thinking of buying from you are [...]
The more you can learn about keywords and key phrases the better off you’ll be with your online pursuits. The Google Keyword tool is a helpful and free tool that internet marketers can use to help you find keywords that can help you with your business. Google offers other tools as well to help you [...]
Yesterday we talked about online networking clubs. Today we’ll explore ways for you to get involved in these types of exchanges. You can benefit in many ways by networking with social marketing sites and by getting involved in exchanges, you help a fellow marketer and they help you by linking to your sites, commenting on [...]
As social media spreads, web applications need to get smarter. They have to strike up a conversation with each visitor - and become sociable.
Part of the next evolution of the web - Web 3.0 to some - is claimed to be the Semantic Web, which enables websites to provide information about what information and functionality they have, and to communicate with other websites. It is a way to make information “understandable” by computers, so that they can perform tasks that humans would normally do.
Understandable data is great, and having a computer (your own or an online service) do your tedious tasks for you is brilliant, since it frees up your time to focus on other things. And time is one of the most valuable commodities we have, isn’t it?
But what about the troves of information that you have to wade through to sometimes find things on the web or on a website? Even though there is (or will be) information about the information on Web 3.0 websites, it will certainly take a long time before a significant part of the web is semantic. And even on semantic websites, how will it make your life easier?
At the end of the day, clever systems readable by computers don’t necessarily make them better for humans.
Social Media is a term used frequently with buzzwords like Web 2.0. Assuming that Social Media 2.0 is part of the Web 3.0 evolution, the Semantic Web should ping your friends and their social application whenever you do anything online.
Great socialization - or is it?
I admit that I have reconnected with old friends and made plenty of new connections through social media, but just because the communication and information gets better and ’smarter’, will it make social media better for us? Sure, we’ll be constantly connected, perhaps using the same applications across devices. That’s really smart, but nothing revolutionary as far as the web goes. I can do that already, with some tweaking (or enough money).
What the next generation of Social Media (the 2.0 one, or Web 3.0) really could do, is improve the way we interact with each website, application or interface. Make it an intelligent interface, who simply learns from your actions, asks you what you need, lets you tell it the details and finds it or solves it for you.
If Amazon will start talking to me when I visit, and give me the alternatives as I speak, I am likely to spend even more than I do already in their web shop (I buy several books a month).
If I can tell Google that I am looking for the absolute cheapest price on a DLNA enabled Digital Media Adapter that will work with my Linux network at home - and Google asks “in stock only?” or “available for shipping to Copenhagen?”, then we’re starting to have a conversation. With the Semantic Web, Google may find it for me, but the big deal for me is whether I could call Google via the mobile web and find and order the product with normal human-like conversation.
I do a lot of research for work, and read countless sources of information each week. The Semantic Web should help a few percent in finding information, but then the challenge to marketers becomes “who provides more/better semantics?”. If the next evolution of the web is simply about better information about information, will the competition be about providing the best information about information. Phew!
If, instead, interaction with conversational, learning websites that actually perform the task you ask for, that would be a leap up in Internet evolution!
One thing an internet marketer can definitely use more of is friends. Friends can help you be more successful. Online friends that you network with can do a lot for you. You can have a sort of symbiotic relationship that does well for you both. Beyond regular brainstorming sessions and getting insider secrets and leads [...]
Online Marketing is not an exact science - and far from what it potentially could be. One of the most important aspects on marketing online is to be able to measure your results and the effects of your marketing efforts. There is a plethora of marketing tools to quantify your marketing efforts for you - however there are a few large hurdles before there is a system available which can give you everything in one package.
Enterprise-size vendors like Coremetrics, Omniture and Unica are trying (each from their own perspective), they have actually gotten a long way already, but their systems are huge, expensive and nearly require a rocket scientist to set up.
For most companies using many online marketing channels, there is nearly one tool for each channel, plus one or two tools that consolidate the information. A lot of larger companies in Europe use a Marketing Relationship Management (MRM) tool for tracking paid marketing activities, and a Web Analytics (WA) tool for website analysis and direct or organic traffic.
Using these two types of tools divides online marketing into two parts, MRM and WA:
The MRM system provides the decision base for paid traffic, while the WA system collects everything else. Although there can be a lot of integration between the two (such as WA integrating with SEM and the ECommerce system), many companies feel that the paid/non-paid separation makes a lot of sense.
However, the missing industry standards for how to collect information, evaluate the information and display the results are apparent, just try for yourself by comparing any two tools. Yahoo’s newly acquired IndexTools is one if the tools in forefront by adhering to the WAA standards, but without the big players following the same standards, they will not be widely spread.
The traditional WA tools provide plenty (hundreds) of reports that tell you anything from your top exit pages, to bounce rates and session length. The first tools parsed and analyzed the webserver’s log files, which hold loads of information, however not in a format you can easily derive any actionable conclusions from. MRM systems are marketing focused, traditionally, and primarily look at the marketing performance of online marketing channels, partners, ads and the like.
It’s not necessarily so that you need to. However, there are some benefits to using one (or fewer) tools.
For some time, MRM systems have attributed ROI (Return-On-Investment) and commissions to the source of the last incoming click on a website. Payments went (and mostly still go to) the source of the last click - whether it be an affiliate, strategic partner, campaign or any other paid marketing activity. However, recently some tools vendors (like Coremetrics or ATLAS) have added functionality for making the entire marketing user journey visible - showing where each user clicked or was exposed to marketing before making a purchase (or any other conversion). These touch points can provide valuable information for marketers as to how to divide their budgets. SEM campaigns can have effect on organic search traffic, and ad campaigns plastered over strategic websites can effect which users enter your URL directly, without clicking on any ad.
All this sounds really smart - and is, for sure - but you cannot tell Google Adwords that they only get 74.1% of their click price, since they were only partly contributing to a sale. On the other hand, by using an MRM system for CPA (Cost-Per-Action) activities, and only giving commission for the last click, you limit your spenditure to the last touch point, regardless of previous (non-Pay-Per-Click) activity. It may give some marketers some peace of mind to not stretch their budgets further.
Where I work, we use this equation a lot - focusing on both Quantity, Quality and Value of the activities we engage in with our clients (don’t worry - this is NOT an ad).
Tracking technology aside (1×1 pixel vs. Javascript vs. other solutions), the MRM and WA tools have completely different focus. MRM systems are great at showing you the Quantity and Value of your marketing efforts - outside your own website. WA systems are great at showing the Quantity of anything measurable on your website and many are focusing on the Quality - visitor surveys and the like - but the monetary Value is not measured as well as MRM systems do, in integrating with ECommerce systems and online marketing channels.
What I see sorely needed is a top view - the “Web Marketing Dashboard” - showing the overall performance of each online marketing channel, related to the website performance, as well as the detailed drill-down into each channel and each web page performance, as related to external and internal details, respectively. My Web Marketing Dashboard would include the Quantity, Quality and Value of each of the above (top view, channels and web pages), and provide trends for each. With that information, the dashboard should easily be able to tell me what happened recently, why it happened and what I could do about it(!).
Do you have a complex setup for your online marketing? How do you work out your qualitative and quantitative information? And seriously, are the tools you use smart enough? Please add your comments! 
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