Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is defined as”Revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model” Marketing.about.com. It is different than Pay-Per-Click advertising because payment is usually only given if performance has occurred, such as a sale. Therefore, affiliate marketing reduces the risk of click fraud, and is more effective for the advertisers/merchants because they are getting a sale or sign up, in return.
At the start of the school year, I was browsing through my VIU day-planner that is given to every student from the student union. One advertisement in the day-timer interested me, and I went to the website for more information. The ad read “The Studentsaver program introduces its new online mall-with free cash rewards! It’s easy, it’s free, it puts money in your pocket!” Studentsaver.ca. The site is full of over 60 stores websites, where you can get anywhere from 1% -10% back in cash (most being 2% or 3%). How can a website pay you cash rewards to shop on it? The answer is affiliate marketing. The merchant sites pay Studentsaver.ca to direct sales traffic to them; most operators keep the money, but Studentsaver.ca passes the money to the student shopper.
Another case in which I have recently encountered affiliate marketing was in a message that I received on Facebook from a friend. She claimed that she now works for a travel website comparable to the leading Expedia.ca called GlobalDestinations.ca. She said that she makes money every time someone books a trip through her linked site, but she insured me not to go to the site directly, as I must go through her link in order for her to earn some money. This is so the website knows that she generated the sale, and can pay her accordingly.
Many people depend on affiliate marketing as their main means of income, it is an acceptable job for stay at home moms, or retirees looking for a little extra money. One main problem is that getting your money is not always easy. They are usually paid out at least one month later, and often require a minimum amount before payout is allowed. Studentsaver.ca for example states “once you earn $25* or more in cash rewards, you can cash out. *there is a $4 service fee on each payout.” In other words, once you spend about $1300 and received only $25 from accumulating 2% cash, they are going to take another $4 off and send you $21.
Text Message Marketing
“SMS (Text Messaging) is a breakthrough communication medium as evidenced by growth year after year. As of December 2006, over 18.5 billion text messages are sent every month – and that number has grown by 250% each year for the last two years” Sellsigns.com. All of my friends own mobile phones, and text message on a daily basis. Texting is fun, easy, and convenient, as you have the ability to text in places were it would be inappropriate to talk on the phone (such as in class, on the bus, at the movies, or in line somewhere). Text messaging is booming, therefore it holds the potential of being very strong and effective when brought into your marketing mix.
“You can send instant coupons, promotional messages, and much more via text messages. When you write your copy for your text-message advertisement, you will need to keep it as brief as possible and get directly to your point” smallbusiness.yahoo.com. This is important because most mobile phones have a limit to how many characters may be sent and received. My phone only allows 160 characters per text message. This makes it difficult for me to get my point across in some instances, and I find myself revising my text to fit the required characters, yet still deliver my message effectively.
Once you know who your target market is, and what message you want to give to them, you need to find a way to accumulate the phone numbers of your target market in order to send your message to the right people. There are companies available for hire that will provide a subscribers list, and deploy your ads. The most popular company to do this is called Simplewire. “Simplewire offers a starter pack that includes everything you need included to kick off your first campaign. You can to add on additional units of subscribers or try the starter package to see how your first campaign does. Just create your message, and Simplewire will handle the rest.” Allbusiness.com.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Click Fraud
Googles 4 layers of Click Fraud Prevention
Search Engine Optimization
The first thing I do when I want more information on something is look it up on the Internet. Of course, I do not know exactly what website will best answer my question, or give me the information that I am looking for, so I go to Google to search for a website that best fits my needs. I then continue by typing in the words that i do know, for example, if I am looking to buy a new phone, i would type in words that contain features I want my phone to have. I could type, camera phone mp3 bluetooth and search results would appear with websites most containing those words. The next thing I would do is begin clicking on the links in order from top to bottom until i find exactly what I am looking for. However, if i do not find what i am looking for by the end of the first search results page, i quit looking or change my keywords. THIS is why it is so important to get your website onto the first page of the search engine, and as high up the page as possible!
There are companies that will help you search engine optimize your website for a fee. When I Googled Search engine optimization, the first company that appeared at the top was SEO Search Engine Optimization Company Expert. If I were looking for a company to help me search engine optimize my website, I would definitely want them to because it is obvious that they are good at their expertise, as they are at the top of the search engine themselves. SEO claims, “SEO Expert arms you with ability to capture best search engine spots on major search properties and effectively drive targeted visitors, interested in your products or services, increasing leads and sales generated with your website.”
But don’t think that they will optimize your site without a hefty price tag attached. “Optimization pricing can range from as low as $1000 right up to $30 000″. In addition to this price, your site will require monthly maintenance to insure that your site remains above your competitions. The price for maintenance range from $300-$10,000 monthly.
Before going out and blowing a large portion of your savings or loans, I would strongly recommend doing your own research and optimizing your own website. There are so many great tools on the internet today to help you find keywords. You can look up the statistics of keywords most used for certain catagories at Ratings & Stats- Search Engine Watch. Or you can use Googles Keyword Genterator, which generates possible keywords that are related to the words you type in.
Facebook Marketing
There is no doubt that Facebook is booming. I cannot think of a single friend my age that does not have a facebook page. Recently, even younger and older generations have joined Facebook, as many parents are on to find old friends, and keep an eye on their children, and many of my younger cousins, some only ten years old, have Facebook. Everyone freely adds their personal information for their friends and even strangers to access. This gives marketers a great opportunity to market to the exact target market of their choice. “MySpace and Facebook scan their members’ pages to try to figure out what sort of ads the people who posted them might be interested in.“On Facebook, we know exactly what gender someone is and exactly what age they are,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.”They are able to see everything from whether you are male to female, how old, what religion you are, where you live, what your interests are, anything you ad to your page! This allows for direct marketing to specific types of individuals. I usually tend to block out banner ads, yet Facebooks seem to grab my attention because I can usually relate to them and they are usually of interest to me.
There is much more ways of advertising on Facebook then banner ads. Businesses can develop Facebook profiles, groups, pages, events, or marketplace. The Facebook Marketing Bible goes over 24 different ways to market your brand, company, product or service inside Facebook. I am a member of a Facebook group for a clothing store. The group is much like a mini-website, which clearly lays out the store location and contact information, and overview of what brands are sold there, and a album of pictures with the products that they sell along with prices. The groups also contain a wall where people can chat about the store and share their thoughts and ask the owner questions. Having a group also enables businesses to send out mass emails to the members of the group, they can inform people of new products or upcoming sales. People can pass the group to their friends, which is an example of viral marketing. Much of the marketing on Facebook is viral, as friends pass things along the network. “Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, (Creater of Facebook).
This is an example of a Facebook group. This diagram details the group page, and what possibilities it has to offer for businesses
Viral Marketing
I think Viral Marketing is genius. To create an advertisment that people love to much to want to pass it along to their friends who then pass it on to their friends and so on, is great marketing. Viral marketing can take many forms, but viral marketing on the internet is the most popular because of all of the networking available.
This is a visual explaination of viral marketing through e-mail
We are used to people hating commercials, and skipping past them on their Tvos, however there are many sites that display countless amounts of commercial and advertising video’s that people watch as a pastime. YouTube is the most popular site that we have all heard of, where you can watch all sorts of videos that people personally post, but there is a wide selection of commercial that people watch for fun. There are also websites designed specifically for viral videos. ViralVideoChart.com has a section of the top 20 viral commercials.
One Degree explains what they think are the top 10 viral marketing best practices:
-Think High Concept
-Work Backwards from the headline
-Keep it Simple
-Humour Sells
-Sex Sells
-Big Names Sells
-Topicality Sells
-Dont try to hard
-Reality Sells
-Mystery Sells
Thinking back on the viral marketing campaigns I have recently received by e-mail, they all fit into at least one of these ten practices. The most common one I find is the humour one. I often receive funny advertisements and commercials from my friends through e-mail. But when it comes to the popular Dove evolution ad, reality sells that advertisement, as ladies appreciatetheir own beauty, and realize the how much editing is involved in the faces of models. When if comes to the viral marketing campaign for the movie Cloverfield, mystery is the selling/pass along point, as they did not release the title of the movie in the first trailer, and created a unexplained website of mysterious pictures.
Customer Experience-Avatars
The customer experience “refers to a target customer’s perception and interpretation of all the stimuli encountered while interacting with a firm” (Mohammed et al pg 130). With that in mind, we can all agree that the customers experience walking into Future Shop to look around, is much different than that of browsing Future Shops website. ECommerce has changed the way the customers experience is portrayed. Rather than looking for a sales associate in store to help you find something your looking for, you can do it yourself on-line by searching keywords. However, it is interesting that they give off a similar feel. The colour schemes , the text fonts, and the price imaging are all identical on the website as in the store. It is important to match the customer feel on-line as in store because if you were to go to Future Shops website and Futureshop was in a different text than usual and the colour scheme is blue and green, you would feel it was the wrong site, because you associate Future Shop with Red, and Grey. I was even greeted on the main of Futureshop.ca by a virtual customer service representative. He told me if I had any questions, I could ask him, and he would do his best to help me. His name is Aaron, and he is a pre-recorded avatar. “Aaron represents a large group of Product Experts. He is available to help you find your way around our site and put you in touch with Product Experts, manufacturers and other customers – all here to help you make an informed decision. Oh, and he can do this 24 hours a day. What a guy” futureshop.ca. Avatars a great way of improving the customers experience online, as it imitates face-to-face service. GenesysWire claims, “the latest innovation in customer self-service technology is the avatar. “ However, not just any avatar will give a customer a welcoming feel, and a good customer experience. The avatar should suit the company, brand, and target market. “the right persona is crucially important to the success of voice self-service applications. Kilgore emphasized that all speech contains personality as it communicates gender, age, attitude, intelligence, and trust — all in less than three seconds. All of these traits can be harnessed to reinforce a corporate brand identity and create a customer service experience that welcomes users and makes them feel they have come to the right place.” CEO Wes Hayden.
Web Presence
Deciding that your company needs a website is the easy part. But making it happen involves much more preparation and planning than most would expect. Understanding your target market is very important because you want your websites to fulfill the needs of your target market customers. If you are unclear on who exactly your target market is made up of, you can take a look at a competitors current market. A great website that I came across to let me see who is visiting existing websites is called Quantcast. This website is a Internet rating service, and allows you to search certain websites and attain their audiences demographics. For example, if I am planning to launch a website for my on-line poker, but was not sure what age or demographic to cater to, I could checkthe profile of Pokerstars.com, who i consider my closest competition, and see who would be most likely to access my site. Once you find who your target audience is, you need to develop a site structure that best suits your audience. You will want to look for a web service provider that best suits your website needs, you can do this by looking at different sites that they have developed, and look at the service providers own website. I was able to use Googleand find a website provider that specializes in online poker and gambling. Qesign.comsays that they will tailor to my needs and preferences, and use my ideas to create the best possible gambling website. If i choose Qusign to create my site, I need to make sure it within my budget, and make sure they they will be able to make my site easily found on search engines by my target audience. Its also important to see how long the company has been in business, and what qualifications they have, and what devices will the website be available from. If you get reasonable answers for a reasonable price, you can make the next step and settle a deal.
Web Analytics
I find it really fascinating how literally every click I do on the internet is tracked. Whether I visit a homepage of a site and go back to my search results because it was not what I was looking for, or I go ahead and proceed to purchase something online, my destinations online are being used to improve websites. Web analytics track consumers behaviours online, which helps website creators improve their pages. Because web analytics are able to track everything clicked on the net, this allows for pay-per-click advertising or PPC ads. You have most likely came across PPC ads today when you searched something on Google without even realizing that they were ads. When I typed in “Halloween Costumes” into Google, I had distinctive websites come up at the right of the page and the top of the page that were faintly labelled, “sponsored links”. Hence the name, the advertisers only pay if a web user clicks on their ad. Since these advertisers pay every time their ads are clicked on, people can click on their ads with no intended interest of the site, just to make money off of it (from the publishers point), or charge the advertiser unfair charges (from the competitors point). This type of internet crime is called Click Fraud, and people have been arrested for it. I recently received an e-mail from a friend, claiming that she now works for a travel website comparable to the leading Expedia. She said that she makes money every time someone books a trip through her linked site, but she insured me not to go to the site directly, as I must go through her link in order for her to earn some money. This is made possible by the use of web analytics. The website can see who is brought to the site by my friend, and therefore reward her for it.
Internet Security
I was very surprised to learn that over 50% of Canadians are concerned about online credit card use, and 44% were concerned about online banking. These numbers seem very large to me. I have been using online banking for years, and depend on the internet when it comes to managing my accounts and my credit card balances. It never occurred to me that my money was in any kind of danger I guess I was naïve, I still seem to ignore the dangers of identity theft, even though it happens to people everyday. My information is everywhere on the internet, but I am just one of 1.4 billion people using the internet according to the World Internet Usage Statistics http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Therefore, I felt as if my chances were limited, and that is why I felt safe online. Many sites now have security tags at the bottom of the page. This can help gain trust in the site, as it displays a recognizable mark stating that it is a safe page use their credit cards and personal information on. Another way to gain trust is through permission marketing. An example of such would be signing up on Costco.ca and checking the box for newsletters and coupons to be sent to you by e-mail.
On the other hand, cookies don’t mean much more than a chocolate chip treat to most people in North America. However, cookies are a main source of collecting information about someone over the internet. Cookies can track what websites you visited and remember information that you used on the sites. Marketers can use cookies to see what you have been looking at, and suggest what things you may be interested in. They can market directly to who they think you are, and what they think you will want. Because it uses your computers IP address, it can recognize if you are a returning visitor or if it is your first time on the site. This may seem like an invasion of privacy, however, every site must disclose how they use their cookies and whether they use it for marketing purposes or sell your information to 3rd parties, or whether it is strictly for user name recollection. So as long as you read the privacy statements, you can protect yourself online, and feel more comfortable to what is being seen by others. This site has a top ten list to protect your privacy online http://www.cdt.org/privacy/guide/basic/topten.html, reading privacy policies is number one. Until recently, I believed that cookies were bad and related to viruses somehow. This is because people stress about deleting cookies, and my Norton Anti-virus detects cookies as a threat and recommends I delete them, so I do. Many people believe that cookies are viruses, this video clears up any misunderstandings of cookies
I think the main thing people need to realize is that the real dangers on the internet are hackers sitting in their basement at home, and not marketers trying to sell a product.
