Many marketers are taking advantage of Twitter to drive traffic to their websites and take their business to the next level. We are not talking about those aggressive marketers who are bordering on spamming Twitter. But those who have treated Twitter as a way to connect with their prospects and provide value to them are reaping the rewards. You can think of Twitter as a communication channel that is very similar to your newsletter but it has a social aspect to it. Your followers on Twitter are much different from your e-mail subscribers, and your actions are much more transparent in a social community such as Twitter. Many marketers still rely on their e-mail subscribers to generate revenue for their business. Twitter can offer that and more.

Should marketers promote their Twitter accounts on their landing pages? There is no easy answer to that question. You never know how adding a small tweet button could affect your conversion rates. Would people be turned off by the low number of retweets your page has gotten? Could the button change the complexity of your landing page and make it less attractive to your visitors? Will your visitors actually navigate away from your site to spend more time on Twitter if you add a tweet button to your page? These are all questions that one needs to consider when it comes to implementing Twitter on a website. Twitter @Anywhere has certainly addresses some of these issues. (more…)

Twitter is finally becoming more active about making money. You can’t sit around and not make money forever. Not when you are as big as a company such as Twitter. This past week, Twitter announced that it will use Promoted Tweets to give advertisers a way to show up on the top of Twitter search pages. Twitter’s advertising service is not going to be available to everyone at first, but you can expect Twitter to find a way to get there:

We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America—with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

The service is going to be at its first stage for a while, giving Twitter the chance to gather information on how it can improve the service. In the near future, we are going to have a chance to push our ads in front of Twitter users the official way. These days you can do it through third party ad services and by signing up Twitter users to promote your goods or services.

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There has been a lot of talk lately about how Google has changed the search engine optimization landscape by adding speed as an organic ranking factor. There have been a lot of cries about the ramifications of this move. Everybody who has worked with Google knows that Google is a big business’ business. Sure, it allows millions of people to bring their ads to Google and get traffic through paid and organic search results. But the treatment that the big boys get from Google is not comparable to what others’ get. That is certainly not a problem if you are a small business taking steps to move to the next level. But unlike what Matt Cutts suggest, this latest move will essentially give Google the blank check to give a boost to those companies with big pockets. There are many ways to improve a website’s speed and having a big budget can certainly help.

I won’t go into why I believe this move can backfire on Google big time. But I do agree with Matt Cutts that faster sites make for better experience and better conversions. Have you ever gone to a small website to shop for something unique only to leave frustrated due to the site being too slow to get anything done ? As a marketer, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. There are plenty of people who are complaining about how they trusted Google and went with its recommendations only to be screwed this time around. In reality, you should spend your time and effort to speed up your website to improve your conversions. Sure. Your search engine rankings matter too. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if you are not converting, you are wasting your time.

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Credit: Avolore

Online marketers are quite familiar with the idea of click fraud. Let’s face it. When you are in a highly competitive market, there are going to be competitors who will do anything and everything to bring you down. Google discourages click fraud and does its best to catch clicks that are generated fraudulently. But who are we kidding? It’s almost impossible to catch all clicks that are generated by your competitors. Has Amazon been able to stop fake reviews so far? Yes. That’s a very different issue. But people seem to leave negative feedback for competitors’ books all the time, and Amazon does not have an easy way to remove those reviews. With Google, the problem is a bit different. After all, there is really no foolproof way to stop click fraud. Your best bet is for the fraudsters to be stupid enough to give their scheme away.

What’s surprising about click fraud is how it is perceived by most folks. People seem to be OK with clicking on ads for the fun of it. Of course, online marketers know the rules. But the average individual does not view these paid ads as they need to be perceived. If you are not interested in purchasing something from someone or finding more information about something, you should not click on those ads. They are not there to be clicked if you are not interested. It’s not a game.

I remember from this past presidential election in the U.S. that some were encouraging their supporters to click on the other party’s ads to empty their budget and make them spend more money. That seems to be still happening around the world.

Credit: www.marketingpilgrim.com

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