The Web Tycoon's blog » Internet Marketing

The Federal reserve is cheapening the recovery with low interest rates

The-Web-Tycoon — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 02:43:10 +0000

Earning money too easily has its own risks. First fed the real-state bubble, now, despite what we could think, could be cheapening the economic recovery.

When reducing the interest rates to almost 0, the Federal Reserve helped to prevent an economic collapse. However, in front of a weak recovery, many thing than the Federal Reserve is creating deflation.

The question of the million is why banks aren’t spreading credit, specially to small companies who are the motors of economy. One of the answers is that there isn’t demand of credit, but the lack of supply has his role too.

Ronald McKinnon, a teacher of economics in the University of Stanford, says that interest rates near to 0 brake the inter-bank market, what affects the growth of credit. According McKinnon, big banks doesn’t lend to small ones because the profit they might take is ridiculously small.

According data from the Federal Reserve, the amount of pending inter bank credits at the end of May was around $160 Bn, what supposes a fall by 60% in a year.

At the same time, banks are reducing credit and accumulating funds. According showed data from the Federal Reserve, its amount of Treasury Bonds and governmental debt increased by 19% respect the previous year. Industrial and commercial loans fell by 18%.

Small and medium companies have been the most affected. In the first quarter, the pending debt of small and medium companies fell by $70Bn, according data from the Federal Reserve, while big companies have seen his debt increased by $100Bn.

The negative to give credit is understandable. Banks can obtain cheap money to invest in high profitable governmental debt, a phenomenon called carry-trade.

This contrasts with consequences that interest rates nearly 0 have on investors, that had to move to risky assets in order to obtain something for his money.

Making money more expensive, would damage the economy, because some companies and individuals paid more for the float rate of his debt. But it could compensate banks to increase loans in inter-bank market. Profits from carry-trade investments would be reduced and banks may try take higher performances with traditional loans.

In this case, “increasing interest rates could have an inflationist effect” Comented Jopseph Mason, Finance professor inn the University of Louisiana.

The Federal reserve is who has to decide whether take odd measures or continue with a so aggressive monetary policy.

Improve your Google rankings With Wikihow

The-Web-Tycoon — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:59:43 +0000

To improve the rankings of a website, is a good idea to have an article in the Wikipedia linking to it.

Another alternative is WikiHow, a wiki-based community focused on the creation of how-to guides/manuals on just about anything.

In Wikihow anyone can write and edit how-to guides that are licensed under “Creative Commons”, this means that if someone redistributes any of wikiHow’s content, he/she must attribute the work to wikiHow and provide a link back to wikiHow’s site. Also, he/she must not use the content for commercial purposes. Furthermore, any work derived from (i.e., altered, remixed, transformed, or built upon) any wikiHow content may and should only be distributed under the same licenses as that of the original wikiHow content.

The idea of wikiHow is to provide people with free and useful information/instructions to help them solve the problems of everyday life. The site covers a wide range of subjects/categories including arts & entertainment, computers & electronics, family life, pets, health, relationships, travel, and many others.

The Wikihow is more than a typical junk directory

The Wikihow receives a hugue traffic, in just one month can have 20 millions of unique visits as this screenshot shows:

The first steep in Wikihow is creating a profile, by just going to http://www.wikihow.com you can create a profile with the URL like if it was Twitter, and will have a new backlink.

But the Wikihow Isn’t just creating a profile, after logging in, you can go to articles and write some useful guide about your products, with a link pointing to your website.

The links from the wikihow will not just bring traffic to your website, but also trustrank from a reputable site, that will surely improve your rankings in Google.

7 Things you Shouldn’t do to your Landing Page When Using Google Adwords

The-Web-Tycoon — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:05:27 +0000

The landing page is something very important when using Google Adwords, her you need to catch the attention of the visitor and obtain a conversion. Fortunately, this is something that has been very studied. These are the things you shouldn’t do when building a effective landing page to use Google Adwords:

Asking for Too Much Information

Remember that Google Adwords is likely to slap websites that ask for too much information Only ask for information that is absolutely necessary to complete a certain transaction.

Long forms intimidate people. And when people feel intimidated, they go away. Do not let your forms make for a horrible user experience by putting too many fields on it.

Use too much text, as if people was using Google Adwords to study an encyclopedia.

Nobody cares about your text and your sales copy as much as you do. When it comes to text, think “less is more”. Less text is good for conversion, it’s good for attention, it’s good all around Google Adwords conversions. When you write for your landing page, write in the “inverted pyramid” or newspaper style. Put the most important information first, put it in the headline, then follow it up with details. It’s okay to have lots of details, but you have to segregate them under “more detail” links.

You need not worry about people from Google Adwords not seeing what you want them to see because if you are able to catch their attention and stir-up their curiosity, they will surely try to find out more even without being told to.

Have an unclear call-to-action

As large part of the visitors from Google Adwords will decide in 2 to 3 seconds whether they’re going to stay on your site or not. Your Landing page need to catch the attention to these visitors or the money you spend in Google Adwords will be wasted.

Your call-to-action need to be placed prominently on your landing page, draw people’s attention to it. Make it “call out” to them. Give all the emphasis to it and de-emphasize everything else. Do not drown it by putting highly engaging visual elements or useless clutter on your page.

Having a landing page with Too Many Choices

In the past, putting a lot of stuff in a landing page was a good idea for an Google Adwords campaign because people was very likely to click every banner in the Internet, nowadays this approach is wrong.

Having too many things that are equally emphasized on your landing page diminishes the importance of all.

Not Keeping Your Promises

People doesn’t visit your landing page from nowhere. They are coming from somewhere,like Google Adwords, and they come with a purpose.

they have seen something in that has piqued their interest and urged them to click on the link Google Adwords published to your landing page. So, make sure you are able to match your visitors’ intent or frame of mind as soon as they arrive on your landing page.

Lack of Credibility and Trust

Social proofs, endorsements, and trust marks/symbols will help you earn your visitors’ trust. Place them prominently on your landing page but use them sparingly. Don’t get too carried away as they can easily distract your visitors from Google Adwords.

Visual Distractions

Jaw-dropping and highly engaging visual elements may be cool, but a landing page is not a place on which to show off your visual design prowess. You want to convert traffic driven form Google Adwords

Having too many visual elements on your landing page will cause your visitors to look at the wrong things and, possibly, miss the call-to-action that was intended on the page.

How to use a company blog for your branding strategy

The-Web-Tycoon — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 21:51:15 +0000

A company blog can be very effective for your branding strategy, Nowadays people is more likely to use social networks, but a blog has the advantage of being the center of all the profiles of the company. In other words, the social media can be good spots for your branding strategy, but It’s very interesting to have a company blog as center of all them.

Having an own domain name is a good idea in your branding strategy, If you don’t have one, you should reserve it right now or some leeches will buy the domain in order to resell it to you. Once your have the correct domain name for your branding strategy, you need to set up the company blog itself, The Wordpress platform is very good if you have your own hosting, some plans will create your blog with a single steep. And you will only need to choose an adequate template for your branding strategy before beginning to add content.

It’s relatively easy to create a Wordpress Blog, but if you don’t want to spend money in contracting a hosting or you find it difficult, you can try Posterous as a solution for your branding strategy. And remember,It isn’t a good idea to Spam people about your blog.

Let’s Rock our branding strategy by attracting the crowds.

Once the blog is created, you need to attract people there, otherwise you will feel like your are writing something that anybody will read, and your branding strategy will be as effective as a top secret attempt to capture an alien and interview he on TV, will be successful in your fantasy only.

So, you will have to boost your branding strategy with useful content that people will enjoy, then use your spots in the social media to promote It, and the most difficult of all,. get people feel like eager to return and read more content to your blog. When promoting, just remember that if your Spam people, your branding strategy will work like a defamatory campaign, everybody will believe that your company just delivers Spam.

Google Adwords will slap who ignores the nine comandments

The-Web-Tycoon — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:20:01 +0000

It is well known that Google hates Spam, and the Google Adwords isn’t a exception. This saved us from finding junk content when we are surfing over the Internet. But this may lead to uncomfortable situations when the anti-Spam crusade of Google hits us.

I’m meaning the so called Slap of Google Adwords, a punitive action that Google takes against advertisers who submit poor quality landing pages, the effects of the slap are basically two:

your ad’s cost-per-click price will increase, sometimes dramatically, there are advertisers who have been slapped, paying over $40 per click.
your ad’s ranking in Google Adwords will go down., most times it will go so down that anybody will find it.

The Google Adwords Slap has been existing for many years, in the past, if a landing page was slapped, you only had to improve it, and change the domain,but since September 2009, the policy of Google against low Quality landing Pages became harder and when you are Slapped, what is most likely to happen is an automated email like this:

“Your Google AdWords account has been suspended due to multiple submissions of poor quality landing pages. We are unable to revoke your account suspension, and we will not accept advertisements from you in the future.”

What Uses Google Adwords to determine the quality of a website?

The high quality of a landing page as well of avoiding suspensions, will increase rankings. The five pillars Google Adwords uses to determine quality are , original content, transparency, navigability, and load time, so a Good landing page must have the following:

be quick to load;
be designed in such a way that it will enable users to easily find what is promised in your ad;
be able to openly declare information about your business;
be a conversion page, or a page where people can purchase and/or obtain the advertised product/offer;
feature unique content that is not found anywhere else on the web, Google hates duplicates;
contain and provide substantial information;
not alter a user’s computer in any way without asking for the user’s permission first;
not request for personal information without a privacy policy and a disclosure;
allow access for unregistered users to part of the content;

Following these 9 comandments you will be more succesful with the Google Adwords.

The Facebook Tycoon proposed new privacy settings that are potentially harmful

The-Web-Tycoon — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:41:39 +0000

You should have noticed a message sent by the Facebook Tycoon mark Zuckerberg informing about some privacy changes in Facebook, this message can be seen after logging in in the platform during several days is you aren’tstill configured the new privacy settings.

As we can se from the Mark Zukerberg's profile, the person who is selling our privacy, does not follow it's own philosophy.

What the Facebook Tycoon has been saying is that the standard way we should use Facebook is by showing our information to everybody, not just to friends. And according many experts, this is considered as a privacy invasion.

24 hours after the announcement of the Facebook tycoon, the answers of security companies and privacy foundations invaded the web, as a example, we have the Electronic Frontier foundation that published a reaction to the Facebook Tycoon’s new privacy concepts.

Effects of the new privacy settings

The Facebook tycoon said that people will be able to remove its information, but what he doesn’t say is that other websites can use it out he control of the platform, just think in what Google and Bing will do with the new information are they able to crawl.

What is likely to happen, is that people will continue using Facebook as if nothing happened,and problems may come later. The Facebook tycoon’s platform is believed to have decided to handle with some privacy issues in order to obtain the benefits of being Google friendly.

This Video shows how to configure privacy settings to prevent a lot of problems in the future.

Best tips on marketing analytics to measure the ROI of your social media campaign (part two)

The-Web-Tycoon — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:48:38 +0000

Last week we seen how to monitor measurable things with marketing analytics and determine the ROI, and we also approached the concept of return on investment as a way to make your boss happy. But not every time in social media we have results that can be counted with numbers.

Sentimental Marketing analytics

Not for count the exact number of mentions, you will know if they are positive or not, so sentimental marketing analytics are so useful, but you can also use them to determine a baseline before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

With the tweetfel I discovered that about 50% of twitter users, do not like it.

There are many tools that will make sentimental marketing analytics easier:

Viral Heat , is relatively affordable and eases sentimental marketing analytics by offering social media monitoring features, including a breakdown for Twitter mentions,

Sometimes, companies spread coupons in the facebook, and so they know if a customer comes from a social media campaign, but also by identifying trends and determining with marketing analytics that this was because of your work, you will keep your job as social media manager safer.

Twendz, Can be used in twitter but is a very basic tool.

Crimson Hexagon, is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. Sentimental marketing analytics with it will be impressive because uses an algorithm for a so called VoxTrot Opinion Monitor, that will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mention

Tweet Feel, is a search engine that lets you monitor twitterers more efficiently and be more productive with you sentimental marketing analytics..

The powerful social media product suites

These powerful tools are very useful in all kind of marketing analytics, the social media suites are designed for big companies and make the determination of social media ROI very easy, they are simply the best.

Vitrue SRM, is dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. the acronym means Social Relationship Manager. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. This tool isn’t exactly about marketing analytics to measure ROI, but will help to improve customer service and get a handle of problems quickly, saving companies from potentially costly mistakes, thin that can be taken into account when computing ROI.

ContextOptional, offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

One last steep to make your boss Happy

As resources aren’t infinite, your boss may prever to invest in other things rather than social media if your marketing analytics do not show a result. Many times, people comes to the shop after seeing something in the facebook, and it’s very easy to understand that the social media campaign has been idle if there aren’t direct purchases in a blog or a profile.

For that reason, the first step in marketing analytics to measure ROI is to determine the baseline, once you know it, you will be able to understand if the situation of the company has improved after implementing a social media campaign.

For instance, if after posting something in facebook or the beginning of the social media campaign, the sales in the shops of the company were doubled, then you can guess than your work has done well and you just need to demonstrate with your marketing analytics that the true cause of this growth, is the social media.

Best tips on marketing analytics to measure the ROI of your social media campaign (part One)

The-Web-Tycoon — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 02:07:47 +0000

Marketing analytics reached the web 2.0 as companies and executives are beginning to use social media campaigns, there is a growing necessity to measure the ROI using marketing analytics. Without doing this, social media marketing wouldn’t work for everyone,because companies and brands need to know what are exactly doing with the money, and for this reason, the Return on Investment, or ROI, must be measured. The Marketing analytics to determine the profits of a social media campaign, aren’t easy because data is though to track, but I’m writing these two serial articles to explain how to track the pieces and measure the ROI you are getting on social media.

First of all, we need to know what is the ROI before beginning with marketing analytics around it, the formula is very simple:take the profits ( not the revenue), divide it by the expenditure, and multiply it by 100. The result is a percentage, a ROI less than zero, i.e -20%, means that we are losing money, and a positive one means the opposite. So companies love big ROIs because they want the highest profit possible.

ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value.

Roi is usually measured in dollars and cents, but if you are using Marketing analytics to measure another kind of value, you can use this formula too. But you will also need to know what is your exact baseline. In other words, If the value wanted by the company is the number of conversations about a certain product, first you need to begin with marketing analytics to know, what is people saying before beginning the campaign, otherwise you will not have the Y of the formula.

Of course, you need to define clear goals, know in advance which values you will measure.

Marketing analytics with Metric Tools

When your goals are measurable with numbers, like web traffic, number of comments, Twitter followers or Facebook fans, your marketing analytics shouldn’t only rely in bigger amounts. If you have more visitors you must know if they are interested in buy things from you, or they are just reading something or being redirected from somewhere.

Measuring web traffic isn’t just a matter of numbers in marketing analytics, the movements of your visitors while are visiting your page are important too, so there is a list of good tools, some are for websites, and others are for social media profiles:

Google Analytics, as Google can fetch a lot of information with it, gives this tool for free, providing a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture With this tool you can track Facebook and Twitter metrics to have data for your marketing analytics..

TweetMeme Analytics , I use this plugin, that puts the TweetMeme’s retweet button than I have in the top right of my posts, provides data about the website fetched from twitter, but this tool isn’t only useful for marketing analytics, because people can Tweet my posts very easily by clicking on the button.

PostRank Analytics ,is a suite of tools that measures social engagement on other platforms and services.

HootSuite, is a great Twitter manager but also offers a lot of data for your marketing analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to read the second part of this article I will publish next week, I will continue with marketing analytics centered in sentiment values, in other words, measure the feelings of people.

Best Tips to Build a Branding Strategy using Twitter

The-Web-Tycoon — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:37:41 +0000

Your Branding strategy can be easily directed to the amount of new users Twitter had over the past year, so if you haven’t signed up yet, do it right now, because this is the first steep to leverage it for your business and your branding strategy.

A branding strategy in twitter may be affected if you haven’t created an account in the name of your business. Because somebody can use it for Spam purposes and hurt your business more than you expect. Sometimes, can be your own competitors who will register your business name.You can also build your branding strategy sending Tweets from a personal account, but Twitter has put together a simple guide to help you understand what Twitter can do for business.

Once you have created your Twitter accounts, spend at least 15-30 minutes on Twitter’s homepage searching the content relative to your competitors to know whether they are building a branding strategy in twitter or not, It is also useful to know what is saying people about your business. For example, if you are selling robot hamsters, make searches for the therm ”robot hamsters” and you will see what is saying people around the branding strategy in twitter of your competitors. Then you can begin to think in how to leverage Twitter for your business.

There are a lot of twitter tools in the Internet, some are harmful and others are good for your branding strategy, for example, there are useful tools to manage the number of followed accounts, friend or follow will check statistics like who are you following you that doesn’t follow your back, to be sure that you will not mass-unfollow more than 650 accounts when using Twitterfollower.

Since a branding strategy in Twitter isn’t just follow and unfollow people, you must learn to use some desktop and mobile Twitter clients, like TweetDeck , Seesmic , and Tweetie.

Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your branding strategy in Twitter. One of the best possibilities of those clients is the ability to pre-define searches to group people you follow so that you can minimize the noise and focus on the real content.

There is also a tool called Twitterfall, which allow you to define custom searches and highlight them with a color, this tool was very useful when twitter.com wasn’t able to create lists, but nowadays you can still use it for your branding strategy in Twitter.

The Dollar Currency is falling again, and the Euro is now at 1.50

The-Web-Tycoon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:16:54 +0000

The dollar currency fell again this week and this pushed the Euro currency more near to 1.50 dollars. And all this just in the beginning of the Asiatic tour and a debate about the revaluation of the Chinese Yuan currency.

The change of the dollar currency against the rest of the main currencies are getting each time lower, the Euro has risen by another 0.57% to the 1.4988 dollars, very near to 1.50

The British pound currency is also rising, by 0.51% to 1,6762 dollars, the same thing happens with the yen currency, that rose by 0.34% against the dollar.

Japan was precisely one of the attention focuses in the currency exchange market. The Japanese GDP is growing by a 4.8% very more than the expected by analysts. At the same time,the data about the Japanese GDP was featured and began the four days long visit of Barack Obama in the region of Asia Pacific, whose leaders previously agreed to keep the stimulus plans to ensure the exit of the crisis.

USA and China launched new calls to the economic collaboration in a more equilibrate way, and at the same time, the president of the IFM, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asked China to strengthen the Yuan currency to help improve the global economic situation, at the same time that defended the dollar as the international reference currency.

In front of the expectations around the Asiatic tour of Obama, one of the investment alternatives to the dollar currency, the gold, reached a new historical maximum. In his rally of nearly a 30% in 2009 surpassed the 1133 dollars per Oz.

The feature of the macroeconomic data in the US, did not affect in great measure the value of the dollar currency, an increase better than the expected in retailer sales, by1.4% in October, reaffirmed trust on the recovery of the consumption.

Now people is more inclined to risk, and is leaving the shelter currencies like the Yen, and the reference currency, the dollar.