Retail Store to Revolutionize Online Advertising?

An Orlando based SEM/SEO firm is first to market with a retail initiative that will help drive awareness and education of Online Advertising to Local Business Owners and Marketing Managers. The smoke and mirrors days of SEM seem to be over with this launch......

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Search Enigne Watch LIVE Columbus- What I learned from the Big Dogs

I attended the Search Engine Watch LIVE conference in Columbus yesterday, and was shocked at the amount of fairly simple web marketing tactics that I had not thought about. Fairly simple ideas such imagining a search engine has a human brain, finding niche keywords that will get conversions instead of the keywords you think the masses are searching, and having extremely clear expectations of what a success really is before ever looking at analytics. These suggestions are not brain surgery, but rather ideas that always need to be kept in mind when carrying out a web marketing campaign.


The most memorable thing that I took away from the conference was not the technical processes behind getting high Google page rank, local directory space and PPC conversions. It was that although these processes are not exactly easy they are not the most difficult part of making a companies web marketing strategy work. The most difficult part of a campaign in my opinion is knowing a company well enough to combine the methods into the exact mix that will get the conversions for that company. Finding this mix can take extensive trial and error. Try doing this for hundreds of small local companies, with little budget and few clear campaign expectations and you have yourself a chore (welcome to our lives).

If you are interested in some of the strategies and learning more about what was discussed at the conference check out the speakers on the Search Engine Watch agenda. All of the speakers were excellent and very insightful, but a few stood out. I really enjoyed Sage Lewis' discussion on social media and blogging, (very nice guy) and Jeffrey K. Rohrs, who's SixDegreesofBacon Blog will have you rolling.

Forums are back!....and making big bucks.

You may think chatrooms and forums are a thing of the past but think again. With the big boom in social networking in the past year and web 2.0 in the near future, forums may make a comeback. A blog post I recently read gave four reasons why forums may be the way to go to create a website that pays. The post first pointed out that forums work best for hobby related websites, where visitors already share a since of camaraderie. In addition to creating value and relevant content that keeps visitors coming back forums have the following advantages...

• Allows interaction of visitors between each other


• Increases retention of traffic therefore relying less on search engines


• Increase new traffic from search engines from long tail search key terms


• Allows better feedback from your visitors & interaction to get suggestions to improve or offer new services to safeguard its long term future.

So if you have a website based around people who love to congregate, such as pet products, sports, or even a restaurant, creating a forum may be the way to increase traffic.

For more information on how to draw traffic to your website get ahold of me at evan@cornerstonelocal.com

Some May Say the Internet is The Devil, One Church Calls it a Miracle.

I was always taught in college that advertising dollars should not all be spent on one advertising medium. "It is about finding the right combination of mediums,"my professors would preach, but the more I learn about the internet the more I am doubting my professors understanding of today's advertising world.

This article spoke about a church that increased it's congregation by 277% in just 18 months with just $11,500. They used a combination of billboards, direct mail and internet. But the article also stated that their website traffic increased 73% in the first month, making the site the deciding conversion factor in the mix. Sure most of this spike in traffic was due to the people seeing the outdoor and direct mail advertising, but it was ultimately their visit to the website that got them to attend.

So in some sense my professors were right, you can never really go wrong by using multiple mediums, but the internet is the best medium, in my opinion, for conversion into sales. If the internet can convert passersby on the highway into one huge congregation, what can combining the internet with portable mediums do? Very soon our cell phones will be a huge advertising medium. Once this happens advertising will be extremely personal and internet advertising will be in people's faces 24/7. Will you really still need other advertising mediums?

Why The Future Is Now.....And We Should All Be Skurred

I have been reading a lot lately about new technologies and I am finding more and more that my mom was right "anything is possible." "You're going to see a lot of interesting stuff happen in 2007," says Mobot vice president Kevin Wells. He's partnering with wireless carriers on movie promotions that let you snap a pic of a movie poster and instantly get show times and trailers for that flick, right on your phone.

What? I have used my phone to get movie times before but it was never as simple as taking a picture. Texting is great and all but I must admit it is getting old. I have to agree that taking pictures is much more fun that typing and the idea of using picture recognition technology in everyday is pretty cool. Just as my parents generation are buying their first digital camera, my generation is running around taking pictures of posters with our phones and having it tell us how many steps until were at the theatre entrance. This is kind of disturbing to me. If I'm the old lady walking around still taking pictures on a 1.6oz camera phone of the sky to find out when my husbands drivable plane will land so we can head back to our smart home, what will my grandkids be doing? SCARY!