What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing is a marketing strategy that relies on individuals rather than traditional campaigns to pass along a message to others. It usually refers to marketing on the Internet. Viral marketing is so named because of the tendency for messages to use "hosts" to spread themselves rapidly, like a biological virus.

The term "viral marketing" first became prominent when used to describe a marketing campaign for the e-mail service Hotmail.com. When the company launched, every outgoing message contained an advertisement for Hotmail and a link to its website at the bottom of the e-mail. As people e-mailed their friends and colleagues, they were also advertising the service. Recipients could simply click on the link and sign themselves up, and as they e-mailed friends from their new account, the message spread within existing social networks and was passed along with little effort from the company.

This example demonstrates all the key elements of viral marketing. Its cost to the advertiser is minimal. Instead, it takes advantage of existing resources by making everyone who uses the product an involuntary spokesperson. It exploits common behaviors, such as sending an e-mail.

Viral marketing uses communications networks that are already in place. In the case of Hotmail, it implies endorsement from a friend. People who received an e-mail from a friend using the service learned that the product works and that their friends use it. And most importantly, viral marketing offers the ability to spread a message exponentially faster and to more people than conventional third-party ad campaigns.

There are different types of viral marketing, all using the same fundamental principles. Pass-along messages encourage users to send them along to others, such as e-mails with instructions to forward at the bottom or humorous video clips. Incentive-driven messages offer rewards in exchange for providing e-mail addresses. Undercover viral marketing presents messages in an unusual page or false news item without any direct incitement to pass it along, in the hopes that word-of-mouth will spread the message. Gossip or buzz marketing seeks to get people talking about something by creating controversy.

Viral marketing has come under criticism from consumers, privacy advocates, and marketing pundits because of concern over unsolicited e-mails. The best campaigns, however, use the principles of viral marketing tactfully to avoid negative reactions and ensure a high pass-along rate - the number of recipients that will pass the message to others. Much like the common cold, effective viral marketing uses people to unwittingly transmit a message within their social network. It takes the concept of word-of-mouth and enhances it with the instant global communication afforded by the Internet.

PPC beat Long tail keywords

After most years of selling upon a internet, we have come to comprehend which a most creative selling plan is PPC advertising. Adwords Pay Per Click however has it’s drawbacks. If you have been new marketing with really small believe of keywords, you mount a possibility of losing a lot of money. It is utterly a plea perplexing to contest for same keywords with a some-more knowledge marketers who have a income to outbid their competitors. That is a reason we indicate expanding your horizons by regulating prolonged tail keywords for improved formula with PPC.

Long tail keywords have been shady treasures which most home commercial operation entrepreneurs mostly fail to notice. A lengthened tail keyword is a password as against to a singular word. Instead of regulating a keyword related to topic, you can put together to have a prolonged tail keyword such as how to get topic. Long tail keywords have been really in effect since not all people simply dig for a singular word, in actuality most internet searches will be a mixed word search.

Living in renouned make make use of of prolonged tail keyword word in your PPC ad campaign, regulating keyword collection such as Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEO Book. These supports have been now used for working out a volume of a competitors to a stream buzzword. You will additionally be means to find out how most searches per month for any keyword word is created. In further to assisting you win a Keyword Tool PPC promotion costs for a due series of keyword phrases to urge your campaign.

Using prolonged tail keyword not usually assistance me to beat a price of PPC promotion though it additionally assistance me to get front page chain with my blogs and articles. Long tail keywords has been obliged for branch my PPC campaigns in to an online income creation machine. Before you give up upon regulating Pay Per Click promotion we indicate you cruise regulating prolonged tail keywords in your campaign.

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like SEO for Xmas Time

While the weather outside may be frightful, launching new SEO campaigns for the Holidays can be incredibly delightful. And like any other marketing campaigns, competition for keywords can be fierce. Here are a few tips on how to get your site ready for the Holidays.

Cater Campaigns around Special Offers

Speak to your affiliate manager to find out about the Holiday promotions they have going on. Once you know what you have that you can market that is going to be competitive, you can begin to research keywords to use and create content around those things.

Do Your Research

It should come as no surprise that Holiday search terms are very competitive. Competition for phrases like “Christmas gifts” is high, and with some terms, getting even more generic ups the ante just that much more. So, how does one beat those Christmas keyword blues? Specialize your keyword phrases, but be very specialized. Phrases like “unique Christmas gifts” face even tougher competition, but if you were to get even more specialized, then the competition is lessened. The bottom line here is that the research is key to your Holiday campaigns. Find out where you can compete, and go for it.

Embrace the Seasonal Flu Virus and Get Viral

Not every video will, or even can go viral. If you can get your video to do so, you have staged a major coup. And even if you can’t, people love helpful videos. Product reviews and helpful tips will help you create buzz, and if you have these videos embedded on your site, you have a chance to engage your audience for a little while longer than you would with text.

Provide Value

The name of the game, no matter what time of year it is, is still relevance and uniqueness. Provide surfers with something that they’re not going to find somewhere else. Give them a really good reason to read your content. A really big reason for people to read content during the Holidays is savings. Use terms like discount, sale, or savings in your copy along with the keywords that you are optimizing for. You should, however, never forget that content is king, and always will be.

Get Meta

If you are using Meta Keywords, all you are doing is telling your competition what keywords you are after. It has been quite a while since search engines have looked at this at all. What they do look for, and what your potential visitors will see, is the Meta Description. This gives you 150 characters to reach your audience. Use the keywords you have optimized the page for in this description, and make sure that you are using copy that convinces people to click. This is your first introduction to surfers, and first impressions are everything. Make sure you’re giving the searchers what the searchers want.

Get Social

If you’re not using social media as a way to reach out to your potential customers, the only question at this point is, why not? This is an excellent way to grab your customers’ attention and keep them engaged. And if you can provide special sales or incentives for people to follow you via social media venues, then you are sure to find that people will be even more likely to sign up.

Google Ad Planner

A new free tool called Google Ad Planner to potentially increase its already widespread influence.

It’s a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan. Using Google Ad Planner, you can quickly create media plans and export to a .csv file, which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications.

So, with Google Ad Planner, you can:

• Define audiences by demographics and interests.
• Search for websites relevant to your audience.
• Access aggregated statistics on the number of unique visitors, page views, and other data for millions of websites from over 40 countries.
• Create lists of websites where you’d like to advertise and store them in a media plan.
• Generate aggregated website statistics for your media plan.

The Google Ad Planner account interface consists of:

• An audience definition tool, where you define your audience by language, age, and other criteria.
• A list of sites matching your criteria. The site list includes traffic, reach, and other key data for each site to help you make informed decisions about where you might advertise. To make your research more efficient, Google Ad Planner automatically refreshes the site list when you enter, remove, or edit audience definition criteria.

With Google Ad Planner, you can choose to research sites only or create a media plan to save a list of your desired sites and placements for future use.

How does Google Ad Planner work with Google AdWords?

Google Ad Planner can help you identify appropriate sites to target through Google AdWords. First, filter your Google Ad Planner results to display sites in the Google content network and export the appropriate list of sites to a .csv file.

You can then take any of the following actions in your AdWords account:

• Create a Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
• Edit an existing Google AdWords placement-targeted campaign: Be sure to select the List URLs option, and copy and paste your sites from column A of your .csv file into your campaign when prompted.
• Use Google AdWords Editor to add placements to your ad groups: You won’t need to create a new spreadsheet, because Google Ad Planner has already done it for you. Simply copy sites from your .csv file directly into AdWords Editor.

Excellent Firefox Plugins/ Add-one for SEO

Which browser do you use? Which is the best browser? These are some of the common question which many people asked me.

Well as a SEO specialist my answer is very obvious…”FIREFOX” , though all browsers are important for graphic & web designers as they have to check their design, work & functionality on each & every browser. They have to check the compatibility of the site on each.

Anyways..I really like FireFox because it has many great Plugings that makes my work easy & helps in quick SEO analysis.
If you are an expert or just starting to learn SEO, these Firefox plugins are great. I use the majority of these SEO Firefox plugins on a daily basis, if not more often.
Here’s a listing of the best plugins available for SEO work:

Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

Clipmarks: Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

SeoQuake: Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. General set of parameters consists of such parameters as:

Google PR (Google PageRank of current page)

Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version)

Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain))

And similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

LinkChecker: Check the validity of links on any webpage.

SEOpen 0.8: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

Search Synchronizer 1.3.0.3: Synchronizes the firefox searchbox 16 default search engines, and the ability for you to add more!
So when you search for something from the google website, for example, the firefox searchbox shall automatically show that search. Works with:
-Google
-Yahoo
-MSN
-Ask.com
-and 12 others!

SearchStatus 1.25: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar 3.9.2: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

FireFTP 0.99.1: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

About This Site 1.1: One-click access to web site metadata – traffic, related and linked pages, and more – added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Page validator 0.3.3: Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal

Google Global 2.0.1: Google Global allows users to see organic and paid Google search results as they appear in different countries, cities, regions, ZIP codes and IP addresses.

Google Pagerank Status 0.9.3: Display the google pagerank in your browser’s status bar.

Web Developer 1.1.6: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

StumbleUpon 3.23: With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector 0.6.4: Detects Duplicate Bookmarks when bookmarks are added and specify where the previous URL is. You can also search and delete duplicates URL already in your Bookmarks.

del.icio.us Complete 1.3: del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

This extension is not only a sidebar it provides an excellent post dialog as well.
Social Media for Firefox : A submission on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Delicious is sometimes a good candidate for submission to the others. This add-on makes saves you the time of checking if an item has already been submitted by showing vote counts right on the home pages of these social bookmarking sites.

In addition, vote counts are shown in the Firefox status bar as you move from page to page again saving you the trouble of going through the bookmarking process if someone has beat you to it.

Compete.com: The Compete Toolbar automatically creates three alerts for every web site you visit:

Trust Scores: help you experience a safer web by warning you of potentially malicious (spyware, phishing) web sites

Site Profiles: tell you how popular the web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing

Deal Light: automatically lights up if there are any special promotions or coupons that can save you money on the web site.

I am sure these plugins will increase your SEO efficiency.

Improve Alexa Ranking of Your Website

Alexa provides traffic statistics for the websites. You can measure the number of visitors on your website using this ranking tool but to track the count of visitors using this tool, it is essential that this tool should be already installed on the visitors' browser. Unluckily, most of the visitors don't have this toolbar pre-installed on their browsers. Due to which we can't say that Alexa Rank is a true indicator of visitors count on your website, it's just a subset of your visitors.Looking at this, Alexa addresses some of these concerns as:• Traffic rankings of one lac and above should not be regarded as authentic one.• The closer a site gets to #1, the more trustful its traffic ranking becomes.So we cant say that Alexa ranking is an accurate ranking system, it is important only if you plan to monetize your website. Instead, you may use some way outs to improve the Alexa rank of your website.Append An Alexa Rank Widget To Your WebsiteSetting up this widget on your website will help in increasing its rank. Using this widget, all the visitors of your website could be tracked. If, sometimes, loading of a page takes time with a widget added on that page, to still retain its benefits preferably place it at the very bottom of your website, or at the end of your source code.Install Alexa Toolbar in Your Browser tooJust set your website as your homepage. Doing this way, you can increase the rank of website's traffic rank because your visits to your website will also be reflected in your rank.Spread the word to Install the Alexa ToolbarTry to make aware everybody, your visitors as well as your friends, that installing Alexa toolbar helps to give correct number of visitors to any website.Use Alexa Auto-Surfing WebsitesThis approach is workable only if your Alexa rank is too poor, but these websites sends visitors to your website that have this toolbar installed for sure.Look for WebmastersGenerally, web developers and tech-savvy people have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browsers. So, if you visit discussion groups, or forums, you may ask for feedback on your website, thereby increasing website visits.Therefore, it's crystal clear that Alexa traffic rank is not a true indicator of your website's visitors. It can count near to real visitors, only if considered along with other performance metrics. Hitherto, using above mentioned tips, you can improve Alexa rank of your website, thence the value of your website could be enhanced in front of potential consumers.

Worried About why Google is not showing ads on Google Search results

Many people have this common query that “why Google is not showing our ads on Google Search or content results, though we are running Ad-words Ad Campaign”….

Here, I am listing out the most common or possible reasons:

No Billing Information:

Your Ad-words ads can’t begin running until you enter valid billing information in your account. If you pay with credit card or other post pay option, your account will be activated once you submit billing information. Depending on the processing time associated with your payment option, your ads may begin showing and accruing costs immediately. If you pay with bank transfer or another form of prepayment, your ads won’t run until we receive and process your first payment. This can take 8-10 days (and occasionally more) after you’ve submitted your billing information and made your first payment. To enter your billing information, sign in to your AdWords account and click the My Account tab. Then click the Billing Preferences link and enter your billing information.

Campaign Daily Budget:

If your daily budget is lower than the system’s recommended amount, Google will show your ad when it has the highest demand, depending on traffic patterns. For example, Google might show 70 percent of your daily budget in the morning if the demand is higher at this time, and 30 percent in the afternoon if demand is lower at this time. This way, you’ll have a better chance of reaching advertisers when they’re searching for you. To make sure your ad shows for all relevant searches, you can increase your daily budget to the recommended amount.

Campaign settings:

Check your campaign settings also. You might have running Ad Scheduling for your campaign & stopped your ad for a particular time period.

Also, take care of your Ad Delivery method under “Budget Options” of campaign setting tab.

If your daily budget is lower than the system’s recommended amount & you have chosen the “Accelerated: Show ads as quickly as possible”, option then Google will show your ad continuously until your budget will not consumed completely for that day. In that case your ad will not run throughout the day.

So please make sure about your campaign settings!!

No ad/ Inactive Ads:

Make sure that there is an active ad in your Ad Group. If you have not created any ad for your ad group or if all ads within your Ad Group are currently paused or deleted, this means there are no ads running for your keywords.

Ad disapproved:

Make sure that all of your ads are following the Google’s guidelines. If an ad doesn’t meet Google’s Editorial Guidelines, Google will stop your ad from running, and you’ll see the word “Disapproved” listed below that ad in your account. Once you’ve made the appropriate edits, simply save your changes to automatically resubmit your ad for review.

Maximum CPC exceeds daily budget:

If you’re running a keyword-targeted campaign, your ad won’t show if your maximum CPC for an Ad Group is higher than your campaign’s daily budget. Because your daily budget could be exceeded in one click, Google recommend that you lower your maximum CPC or raise your daily budget, so that your daily budget is more than your maximum CPC.

Ad Rank:

Your ad might not appear on the first page if your Ad Rank isn’t high enough to place it in one of the top slots. Google don’t show the same ads on each page, so your ad might be appearing on one of the next pages. To see additional pages of ads, click ‘Next’ at the bottom of the page, or click the ‘More Sponsored Links’ link below the column of ads.
If you’d like your ad to appear on the first page, you can increase your CPC and/or refine your ad text and keywords to help increase your Quality Score.

Keyword Performance:

If a keyword underperforms, it may become inactive for search and stop triggering ads on the search network. Keywords typically become inactive when they are very general and therefore do not perform very well. Your ads may also only be showing on certain variations of your broad or phrase matches due to a low Quality Score. To monitor your keyword’s performance, check the keyword status column on the ‘Keywords’ tab of your Ad Group Details page. Or, to get a detailed view of performance and Quality Score, visit the Keyword Analysis page by clicking the magnifying glass icon beside the keyword you’re interested in.

Geo-Targeting:

You can target your campaign to specific languages, countries and territories, regions, and cities. If you don’t target your own geographical area and the language of your Google interface, you won’t be able to see your ad. (For instance, if you’re in London and you’ve targeted your ads to Tokyo only, you won’t see your ad when you search for it in London.) If you’re targeting a region or city, Google shows ads based on a user’s internet protocol (IP) address. Sometimes Google is unable to obtain IP information. In this case, Google would be unable to identify the user’s location and therefore wouldn’t recognize which regional ads to deliver. If Google can’t determine the user’s location, it will show nationally-targeted ads instead of regionally-targeted ads.

Language Targeting:

You can view your Google interface language setting by clicking the ‘Preferences’ link to the right of the Search Box on the Google homepage. If your Google interface language isn’t included in your campaign language targeting selection, you may want to edit your campaign language targeting in order to see your ad. You can also edit your Google interface language setting by selecting the appropriate language from the dropdown menu and clicking ‘Save Preferences.’

Google Network:

Your ad will not show on sites and products in the content and search networks until it has been reviewed and approved according to our advertising policies. Therefore, image ads, video ads, and other multimedia ads won’t begin running until after review and approval. Your ad may not appear on Google Network sites if its Ad Rank is too low. In this case, improving your Quality Score through optimization, or raising your CPC or CPM bids, can help increase your Ad Rank. In addition, some sites in Google network may restrict advertising or keywords based on their own policies regarding content and editorial standards. In this case, your ad may not appear on a content or search site even if you have chosen keywords which seem to match it.

Image Ad:

Image ads will only run on content network sites, and must be reviewed and approved before they will appear. The format of the ad you’re running must match the size and format accepted by each website. For example, if you’ve uploaded a 160×600 wide skyscraper ad, make sure the site you’re looking for your ad on runs ads in that format.

Placements:

If you are targeting placements in your campaign, and your campaign setting is ‘Relevant pages only on the placements I target’, your ad will appear only on the websites you specify. Those websites must be part of the Google Network. Make sure you’re looking for your ad on one of the sites you selected. In addition, your bid may be too low to win impressions on the site or sites you have chosen. This is especially likely if you have targeted popular sites that many other advertisers may also have targeted. Raising your bids may help your ad appear more often. It’s also possible that your ad simply isn’t showing at the moment you view the page.

You can use the Ads Diagnostic Tool to learn the exact reason why you can’t see your ads.