Ordering one of our Hosting/Marketing packages is easy and fast. You can have your site up and rolling in just a few hours.

Blogging live today from the American Marketing Association Hot Topic: Ahead of the Curve – High Tech Trends in Marketing

Dave noted an interesting shift when it comes to consumers trying to own the brand, such as in a recent case with Southwest airlines, where Operations gets involved and takes precedence over marketing and the 'designed' brand experience. Customers tried to take control of the brand experience, Southwest's operations team shut the customers down. What's a marketer to do?

The real magic in consumer marketing is in the consideration cycle, specifically in the consideration phase, where word-of-mouth is an HUGE component. The biggest question that you need to answer for the consideration phase is:

Would my customer recommend my company/brand/product/service?

Who likes podcasting? People that have a story to tell!

How many of you have an 'audio recorder' in your home? ....hmm, let me bust out the old cassette recorder.

How many of you have a video recorder? Oh, yeah, got the video/digital/web camera right over here!

Video is powerful. And gaining traction.

Dave talks about education marketing (vs. an infomercial). Infomercial are pitching a product, where as 'education marketing' is all about getting after the things that customers are really interested and helping them be more effective in their complex purchases. It's about really helping customers through it. It's not for everyone. If you're not a category leader, or don't have a product that warrants an educated purchase, then don't bother. This is not for you.

Technorati Tags: AMA Hot Topic

It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.

I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.

On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.

Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.

Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?

Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.

About the Author

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.

I love my RSS reader. I have a gazillion website, blog and news feeds set up in there, and I get the latest information from all of my favorite sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it with you. And RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect that rings when there are new feed entries to read. So wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I also get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to announce the new feed entries.

As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because of my RSS reader I was one of the first to cover adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that will help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was on it first, I popped up in the first five Google search results for this keyword for a while, which drove traffic to this site. So watch your RSS reader.

All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as auto update feature for websites and blogs. The first application was RSS feeds that automagically update your site with articles in your subject area from a free article site. The rationale is that this will give you fresh content that search engines will eat right up. They call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read some of these articles? There's a wide disparity in quality from one to another, and I would never allow articles to be put blindly on my web site without my approval. For crying out loud...you spend hours and hours of time getting your site to a certain level of quality to build a certain level of trust with your visitors, and then you're going to allow some hack to put his content on your site without your approval, just so maybe a search engine will come a few extra times? That's just stupid.

Need more content? Turn off the football game and write some.

Seriously...if you want to use articles as supplemental content, hand pick them. Just like famous Internet marketer Wille Crawford did on his blog when he picked my article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there). I have at least 20 - 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that I'm going to post on the site as soon as a I get a chance. That's the good news - the bad news is I went through 500 or so articles to get those.

Closer to home, affiliate merchants are starting to get into datafeeds, which are sort of like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access to merchant products using text files. The file contains a list of products, services, special offers, coupons or other information that you can display on your site. You then upload that information to your server and use some kind of tool or script to display the different items in that file. There are programs on CJ, LinkShare and Shareasale that have datafeeds.

While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it with the same jaundiced eye as the whole article thing - it all depends on your niche, the level of trust you want to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want to get.

If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate program, you might try a product feed. If you want to put up an occasional coupon or special offer, you can probably do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo jumbo.

We are starting to see products that convert merchant datafeeds to RSS, allowing you to auto-display products from affiiliate programs. Again, if you can maintain relevance across the entire affiliate line, it's a good idea. If not, you're not going to get conversion anyway, so you're wasting your time. Personally I want everything including the advertising, to have relevance to my visitors.

There's always a shortcut - in this case you're shortcutting the time and effort involved in finding relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some sites.

If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some resources:

1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I think they're plugging their own tool.

2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh...they also have a tool.

One last thing - while I was out looking for links and information, this is what someone said about using datafeeds:

Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot and never have to think about the blog again after I spend a few hours setting it up!

How do you think that blog is doing?

About the Author

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com - A resource for Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.

AffiliateBlog is his latest venture, and was started as a resource to help site owners and bloggers get more revenue from their sites.

Every successful conference around blogging, podcasting, social media, RSS and the like seems to bring up the inevitable comment 'why don't you have more B2B examples for us B2B marketers?'

Point taken. In fact, point very well taken. Take, for example, the concept of 'micro-celebrities', which was the recent topic of conversation for Robert Young and for Ed Batista at AttentionTrust.org. i think that we're so attuned as marketers to talking in terms of 'consumers' and thinking only of the B2C folks that we overlook the power of some of these tools within the B2B context.

Micro-celebrities is one of those things that I see as being even more powerful in B2B than on MySpace or anywhere else. Think about it, who are the micro-celebs in your industry? I bet you know them, have met them at a conference or can access them through journals or other industry trade pubs. Granted, often times these folks are either consultants or tied to your competitor, however, that's not always the case.

Let's take the example of 'micro-celebrities' on MySpace and turn it on its head for B2B.

When it comes to advertising in mass media, a big name is required since such campaigns are only effective if the viewer already knows who that celebrity is. But in a social network, micro-celebrities who are well known within their network of micro-communities could prove just as effective and potentially even more so, particularly if such campaigns are able to generate buzz, excitement and a cool-factor.

As for MySpace’s role in all this, they are in the unique position to know better than anyone (as the owner of the platform with all the user data) who the 'brand-safe' users are within its network.

Thus MySpace can effectively play the role of talent agent by aggregating a list of users who would be appropriate for advertisers within various categories. In fact, the incentive 'to be discovered' is likely to spur many users to express themselves in a manner that will position them favorably for consideration.

OK, so we're not going to be doing much B2B on MySpace, but we could leverage professional associations, organizations and conferences to do something like what KI just did with Healthcare Spaces author Roger Yee at the recent NeoCon 2006 show. Who the hell is Roger Yee, you might ask? Well, that's the right response. You probably shouldn't know...he wouldn't be a micro-celebrity if you did! However, for the healthcare furniture market or the American Academy of Healthcare Interior Designers (AAHID), you know exactly who he is and a campaign targeted at your market would likely mean something to you. And you'd give it your attention! (after all, that's really all we have left - attention).

Getting after 'attention data' in B2B might be even less complicated than in B2C, and we could do it through the power of association(s). For example, if I'm a member of the DMA or AMA, and I attend their respective conferences, I am giving my attention to things like direct marketing or marketing research or something of the like. As a potential marketer to those folks, I need only to know a bit about the associations that they run with and the types of events they go to in order to more effectively target my marketing toward what my target base is paying attention to. It's still not the be-all-end-all for getting end-user attention data, but it's getting closer and it would seem easier to do with conference attendance and association membership because your target base is very actively self-selecting and directing their attention patterns.

Of course, smart marketers always want their customers to own their attention data, but I envision that we could see a major impact in B2B attention marketing if some of the larger associations were to promote services like the Attention Recorder.

Technorati Tags: attention, B2B + Marketing, micro+celebrity