Internet marketing has been making some pretty dramatic changes over the last few years, like the growth and evolution of the search engine optimization industry, viral marketing, pay-per-click advertising and the mainstream adoption of blogging. Despite the recent changes I predict that even greater change is still yet to come, thanks in part to the growth of broadband internet access, advances in hardware and software technology, and marketers need to reach consumers through multiple mediums.

As people’s lives become busier, fragmented media will result in more opportunities for both advertisers and web site owners. Standard advertising mediums such as television, radio and newspapers have been loosing effectiveness ( partially because of new technologies like TiVo and XM Satellite Radio ) while online advertising has become more effective. As an advertiser, there are more opportunities available than ever before to reach highly targeted prospects with a relatively small investment by advertising online. As a web site owner, there are more opportunities to generate additional revenue by providing advertising space on your web sites. As people spend more time online, this trend will continue to grow.

RSS will become a powerful, trackable marketing tool. In it’s current form, it is a great tool for reaching out to people who have the technical background to use it but it does have some limitations. Many customizable web portals (My Yahoo) let users display RSS feeds on their home page, but require users to sign in with cookies. Some email programs can display RSS feeds and several programs have even been specifically designed for displaying RSS feeds. However the user base is still fairly small. With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Vista, RSS will become mainstream and be adopted by soccer moms everywhere. Once that happens you can expect to see tools developed to manage and track the traffic from RSS feeds.

The search engine optimization industry is another area that will change considerably. All of the major search engine companies have taken considerable steps to reduce web site owner’s (or an SEO firm’s) ability to manipulate the ranking of their web sites. As the algorithms that determine the importance of a particular web page become more comprehensive and better able to filter out spam you will see two things happen. First, the search results will become more relevant. Second, the SEO firms that are using dishonest techniques in an attempt to rank higher will collapse one by one until only honest, ethical firms exist.

Wildfire Marketing Group would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas & a happy New Year. We hope you enjoy your holidays and wish you all the best of luck in 2006!

While there are some exceptions to the rule, a blog can help most businesses. Weather you’re blogging to help promote a political party, blogging to market a dinner preparation business or blogging to offer debt advice for your visitors, the effort needed to maintain a blog is usually outweighed by the results that it delivers.

So how can you use blogging to your advantage? After installing your blog you’ll simply post information relevant to your web site that will be useful to other people on a regular basis. This information can range from currently events in your industry to tips that people can use to better their business or themselves. This helps to keep both your web site visitors and the search engine spiders coming back on a regular basis because your content is updated more frequently. It can also help your web site to be viewed as a resource, and as a result other web sites will often link to it. Over time you will have developed a substantial archive of useful information, along the way you will develop more loyal visitors and improve your ranking in the search engines.

If you’re ready to get started you can take a look at Blogger, Wordpress or b2evolution. These are the three most common blog programs and are powerful, customizable and free. The installation is pretty straight forward and you should be able to have a blog up and running in just a few hours ? though customizing the appearance may take a bit longer. Once everything is in place you’ll just have to link to your blog from your main web site and then start posting on a regular basis.

Anyone who has started a business without a lot of start-up capital has faced a vicious catch 22. You have to market your company in order to increase sales, but until sales have increased (and you’ve received payment) you can’t afford to market your business. Fortunately, you’ve got more options than you realize, after all, more than a few other businesses have gotten past this hurdle. So can you.

First of all, don’t advertise in the newspapers, on television or the radio because it can take considerable time to see results from these mediums and at this stage of your business, your budget will likely be gone long before you see them.

One powerful way that a business with a small marketing budget can gain exposure is by networking with other people. There are many inexpensive or even free networking organizations in just about every city and all that you need is a handful of business cards and a winning smile.

Another way to increase you business is through co-op marketing with other related but non-competing businesses. If your company sells work-out clothing, you could partner with a gym and a supplement/nutrition store on a direct mail campaign. All three businesses could merge their data bases to reach a larger segment of the market while reducing their costs by roughly one third (or possibly more due to volume discounts on printing).

Establishing yourself as an expert can work wonders for your business because people will come to you first. This can be done by blogging, starting an email newsletter or public speaking on your industry. These can all be done with little or no money out of your pocket, just a relatively small investment of your time and some patience.

There is most likely a sizable wealth of leads that you are not tapping into. Think of all of the people you know - some may be potential clients and others may know someone that may be a potential client. You won’t have the chance to find out unless you tell people that you are looking for new business.

So far, e-commerce spending for the holidays totaled $12.75 billion, up 23 percent from the $10.38 billion for the same period in 2004 and is expected to surpass $19 billion for November and December, or 24 percent growth from last year. That estimate compares with Forrester Research’s forecast of $18 billion for the 2005 holidays.

Are you taking advantage of this growth? If your web site isn’t e-commerce capable then you are potentially missing out on a large share of business year round, especially if you target a younger consumer. Having an e-commerce web site developed may be a smaller investment than you think. Often it can be just a few thousand dollars. If that’s still beyond your budget and you have some programming experience you may want to consider an open source shopping cart such as OS Commerce ? but be prepared to roll up your sleeves and put in some serious work. Setting up and modifying a shopping cart is far more complex than a standard web page, or even a forum or blog.

A lot has changed in the search engine optimization industry over the years, but it’s been a while since such a drastic change has occurred in such a short period of time. For some time now, people have known that inbound links play a large role in the ranking of a web page and as a result various schemes have been developed and implemented to take advantage of this. Recently, Google flipped the switch on an updated index called Jagger that rivals even the infamous ” Florida ” update. After this update, many people saw their positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages) take a sudden and vicious plunge, Greg Louganis style.

Did Google’s engineers fail to plan out the possible implications to legitimate web sites as a result of this update? Did they become overzealous in their efforts to remove spam web sites from their index? The short answer is one that many people probably won’t like. Most of the web sites that were adversely effected by this update were optimized improperly?? even those optimized by so called “search engine optimization” firms.

The Jagger update more accurately analyzes the linking patterns of a web page to determine if there have been efforts to artificially improve it’s ranking for particular keyword phrases. A majority of the web sites that suffered had a large portion (or all) of their inbound links consisting of:

Some uneducated people in the SEO industry would like to have you believe that these types of links, or a mythical technique called Google bowling will hurt your web site. The fact of the matter is that a web site can not be hurt by any type of inbound links. The web sites that suffered after the most recent update were simply relying on poor or unethical search engine optimization techniques which accounted for most, if not all of their search engine optimization campaign. After Google filtered out the spam links, these web sites had nothing left and as a result, lost their position in the SERPs.

So how do we properly optimize a web site so that it has a better chance of maintaining or improving in the SERPs? The first and most effective way is to avoid any of the techniques listed above. By building your search engine optimization campaign from a solid foundation you won’t have to worry about loosing your footing. Building a web site with a substantial amount of quality content combined with an effective link building campaign will take time but in the end you will see far better results that are sustainable.

There are a lot of real estate agents, home builders, and plastic surgeons out there ? why do we choose one over the other? Usually it’s based on our perception that they are offering more of what we are looking for compared to their competition. When comparing several companies, the determining factor in our decision usually won’t be the same thing for every industry ? for example, you may want to find the real estate agent that will sell your home for the lowest commission but chances are that you don’t want to choose a plastic surgeon based strictly on their price.

So as a business owner, how do we use this information to our advantage? We decide what we offer that our competition doesn’t or can’t offer. Perhaps you are a home builder that specializes in building ultra exclusive homes?? instead of trying to reduce your price so that everyone can buy one, market them as something that not everyone can have. Not only will your existing consumers feel that they are getting more value by investing in one of your homes, the remaining consumers that are on the edge will convince themselves to stretch for it just to be part of that “elite” crowd. This can be applied to any industry, it’s just a matter of determining what separates you from your competitors and using that message in your marketing.

For some reason, many businesses are still avoiding online advertising, instead sticking to more traditional forms such as newspaper advertising, direct mail or television. While these are all great forms of advertising, they are also more expensive and their effectiveness can be very dependant of the budget - for example, a television campaign with a monthly budget of $20,000 would usually deliver less than half of the results compared to a campaign with a monthly budget of $40,000.

On the other hand, online advertising can often reach a large number of people for a much smaller investment. In many cases, online advertising can even be more effective than other mediums because many web sites have regular visitors who will be more trusting of advertising on a familiar web site than one in a newspaper or on television.

But online advertising is often ignored when it comes to one vital component of an effective advertising campaign - branding. In today’s fragmented advertising world where consumers quickly scan over newspapers, use TiVo to cut out commercials and subscribe to commercial free satellite radio, there is an underutilized tool that you can use to expand your brand exposure and reach beyond your competition. Are you taking advantage of it?

A survey of 2,574 U.S. consumers reports that Gen Y consumers prefer live marketing over TV or internet advertising. Seventy percent of 13 - 23 year olds surveyed said live marketing is extremely or very influential on their opinion of a product or brand. Sixty-five percent said participating in such an event would cause them to act more quickly in purchasing a product. Seventy-six percent said that participating in an event would make them more receptive to the advertising, and 74 percent said participating in a live marketing experience is something they would be likely to tell others about.

We recently posted about guerilla marketing but some people still are not sure what it is or how it can work for them. Back in August CNN also reported on some guerilla marketing tactics that various companies have recently used, some successful, some…not so much. So, if after reading our post and CNN’s article you’re still a bit unsure what it is, be sure to check back in a few weeks because we are currently planning a guerilla marketing campaign for one of our clients and plan to post a case study & video.