Louisville SEO

Have you ever sent an email to a friend that included a link to a website you thought they might find interesting?  If you answered yes, then you have participated in social bookmarking.

With that, social bookmarking allows you to save links to web pages that you want to remember and/or share. This is made possible by simply tagging a website and saving it for later. However, instead of saving the websites to your web browsers, you are saving them to the actual web.

Not only can you save your favorite websites and send them to friends, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. This is made possible as many social bookmarking sites provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. As a result, subscribers are enabled to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

Click here to learn more about the benefits of social bookmarking.

Bebo, a social networking site owned by AOL, has been a hit on the web since 2005.  Standing for blog early, blog often, Bebo contains profiles and messaging similiar to Facebook, but does offer a few tricks of its own.  It allows users to view friend’s activities from MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, and other online sites.  Bebo continues to add new features, including pages for bands and music, and video boxes.  Currently available in several countries, and has added a mobile site to make quick work of updates on the go.  Learn more at www.bebo.com, or find out more about social networking sites for your business from Media Venue.

A company advertising to a niche market seeks to meet the needs not being addressed by the mainstream market. What’s the upside of this type of focus? There is significant identification that develops when a product is meeting a select need. Monogrammed stationary, team or city themed merchandise, haircare products that exactly target your frizz… What’s the downside to this focus? It can be expensive, especially in advertising and marketing, and especially in the vastness of the Internet.

There are two great ways your company can consider targeting a niche market online- social advertising and search engine optimization. Social advertising is all about niches, groups of people meeting on networking sites, blogs, and forums to discuss topics and share ideas. Search Engine Optimization makes your site ready, so when someone is searching for just what you have to sell, they will find it fast. You can learn more about these two services, and others that we offer on our website, www.mediavenue.com

Happy Niche Marketing!

Photo: Fieldstone Alliance

Smart business owners and decision makers know, to reach your customers, you must go where they go.  There’s a reason beer instead of Barbie dolls is advertised at football games.  Even the movie theaters understand the rules, go to a chick flick-see other chick flick trailers, go to an action film-see other action trailers.  The same rules apply to Internet advertising.  With the majority of the US population online every day, Internet advertising isn’t just for companies targeting teens and computer geeks, it is for everyone.  Take time to think about your prospective customer, are they looking at news websites, home and garden, blogs, social networking, HGTV, ESPN, travel sites? The list can go on and on, and so can your advertising dollar if applied correctly to your target audience.

Don’t know where your audience is? We do, drop us a line to learn more about finding your niche.

1. If you’re building a new site, expect to spend 2X that amount again in the year after the site launches. Unless you want it to sit there, all alone, with no traffic.
2. If you want a site built by a single untrained individual who ‘learned how to use Dreamweaver’, expect to spend less than $2000. Also, expect to build a new site within 3 months.
3. If you want a site built by a 5-10 person, boutique-style agency, expect to spend, at an absolute minimum, $10,000. These are experts, and they deserve to be paid as experts.
4. If you find a 5-10 person, boutique-style agency that’ll build you a site for $2000 or less, expect something that looks like they had a sneezing fit during the design phase.
5. If you expect to get a #1 ranking on Google for $99, you’re insane.
6. If you hire a smart individual with a proven track record to optimize your site for search engines, expect to pay at least $5000, one time. Unless they’re your friend, or they’re willing to work hourly.
7. If you hire a big agency with all sorts of fancy tools, an army of copywriters and other expertise for search engine optimization, expect to pay, at an absolute minimum, $50,000 for a one-year engagement.
8. If you want to double your sales this year, you are going to have to pay more than $1000 to do it.
9. Reliable hosting costs more than $9.95 a month.
10. If you’re spending $250,000 to build your product and get it to market, don’t tell me you can’t spend $15,000 to give it a decent web site, unless you want to watch my eyes bug out like I’ve been suddenly depressurized.

post courtesy of Ian Lurie: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/09/setting-your-internet-marketing-budget.htm