The post “Askvertising and the Future of Online Advertising” coins the phrase “askvertising” to describe when websites ask visitors to click on their affiliate marketing in order to help support the site. This raises a good question, how can you expect website authors to be impartial and trustworthy when their livelihood is made by people clicking on the affiliate advertising? The blog entry compares asking people to make their purchases through a site’s affiliate links to a church or charity asking for donations. The difference is that this type of donation cannot be made unless the visitor has decided to purchasing something from the (or one of the) affiliate websites. This provides more of an incentive for the website to encourage people to make purchases, especially on the products that earn them high commissions.

So how does an affiliate website gain the trust of visitors? The blog entry “Offer True Value to Gain Affiliate Marketing Success” suggests that the website author show that they are familiar with the product and that they have tried using it. Some suggestions of how this could be done are by posting photos of themselves with the product or using it, write about the benefits and disadvantages of the product focusing on its use, and talk about or show the outcomes of using the product. So for example a digital camera review could show familiarity with a camera by having photos of the camera with a hand for scale comparison, photos taken with the camera, and explaining how the controls on the camera worked compared to other brands and models.

When I was a kid I loved the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books that allowed you to read multiple stories with different outcomes for the main character by choosing different actions and going to the appropriate page. Video ads that allow users to choose what happens also allow marketers to track what audiences want to see from advertisements and can then apply it to their non-interactive offerings, as mentioned in the “Choose Your Own ADventure” post about a related topic of choose the ending ads in movie theatres through text messaging. An online example of this type of video format, although not an ad, is “Choose Your Own Adventure – Election ’08” from Panda Smash and Break.com which allows the viewer to decide what happens when Barak Obama and John McCain randomly meet at a beach.

Another option for allowing viewers to choose advertising is by having settings that allow users to let online ad companies know what products they are currently interested in so that ads on all sites run by that advertising intermediary could be tuned to the set preferences. The entry “Choose Your Own Advertising” on the Techdirt blog mentions this as a progression for the simplistic thumbs up and thumbs down advertising rating that sites like Facebook have in place to give users some say on what type of advertisements they see.

The Punk Marketing blog entry “Choose your own ad on Hulu” looks at the video site Hulu allowing users to choose between a few pre roll ads on the videos they watch. The problem lies in the fact that there are a limited number of ads to choose from. This means that users who frequently watch videos on the site will be forced to watch the same ad multiple times regardless if they are interested in it or not. Although this is allowing users to interactively choose the ad they watch the lack of choices makes them less valuable than ads driven by the previous technique of using user set preference to choose what ad is displayed.

What types of websites can make the best use of geo-targeting? The previously mentioned entry lists four types of websites that can benefit from this technique: small bricks and mortar stores, service businesses that serve a specific area, regional businesses with bricks and mortar locations, and large organizations looking to drive business in certain areas. The article “Is Geo Targeting Just For Local Businesses?” recommends that geo-targeting be used for more than just bricks and mortar stores because it is also beneficial for sites that cater to specific geographic markets or that want to increase visitors from target areas. Targeting campaigns to areas where a target market lives can increase the return made on the advertising investment compared to non-targeted campaigns.

How do you go about setting target areas your advertising? The post “Broaden Your Advertising Horizons with Geo-Targeting” advises gathering data through analytics and previous orders in order to decide which regions to target. Once the regions have been decided on setting up separate campaigns to monitor how each area responds is essential in order to have comparables. Like non-targeted advertising campaigns it can take time to get the correct mix so testing different campaigns and different areas is essential in order to find a combination that works.

Google provides an outline of the factors that its algorithm uses to rank web pages in their Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines are boiled down into the three broad topics of having a good layout, good quality content, and other sites link to you, by the post “Search Marketing 101”. Google is trying to provide the most relevant results to make searching the web easier for everyone and will delete any websites from its database if they are trying to manipulate the system. The techniques to avoid, as they are commonly used to manipulate search engine results, are also provided in the Webmaster Guidelines.

Creating content for a site is something that is in your control to do, however the other main component of search rankings are in the amount and quality of links to your web page. The entry “Google Reveals More Linking Secrets To Webmasters” looks at what links are considered quality. Google expects linking to other sites to be done with the user in mind; links that are quality are ones that offer value to a visitor’s experience. So for example, a directory of unrelated links is not a quality link but a reference in a blog entry is.

By changing their algorithm and not providing an exact formula for how they rank sites Google is trying to reward websites that are providing content for their users with higher search rankings instead of those that aim to be perfectly optimized to achieve the best search engine results.

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The Slideshare presentation “What Makes a Website Credible?” suggests that web credibility is based on the formula, perceived trustworthiness + perceived expertise = perceived credibility. Without either the belief of trustworthiness or expertise the website is not thought of as credible by visitors.

Perceived expertise can be attributed to how narrow the focus of the blog the post topics are, as suggested by the entry “SMB4: Bloggers – Credibility VS Popularity”. A blogger who posts about a certain niche topic, depending on the content of the posts, comes across as knowledgeable in that topic. In contrast someone who posts on whatever is on their mind and might not have two posts on the same topic likely will come across as less knowledgeable on the subject. Expertise is essential to gaining credibility whether it is gained through education, experience, or through a connection with the reader, such as a shared interest.

Being discovered as being paid to post about certain products or services can take away from the perceived trustworthiness of your blog. By taking money for endorsements a blogger can be thought of as promoting things they know nothing about or even dislike in order to get paid. However a paid blogger who has the other factor in the equation, expertise, and has a history of saying what they feel, as described in the post “How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them!” would be perceived as being more trustworthy than a blog that promotes anything and everything.

So as the Businessweek blog, Blogspotting, mentioned in the post “The blogosphere is not ‘credible’” blogs cannot be generalized as credible however individual blogs can be assessed for credibility.

Just like in a television ad, people watching are more connected to viral videos that elicit an emotion with them. This connection is what prompts the viewer to forward the video on to their friends and family in order to share the emotion with them. The blog entry “The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement” explains how different emotional reactions can work for different campaigns depending on their target market. The element of surprise is important in all viral videos as it wakes the viewer up from a “lean back” state that videos promote to the normal “lean forward” state of the internet so that the video will get passed on.

The idea that viral marketing is an easy way to advertise is becoming a thing of the past as videos have to compete with not only other viral campaigns but also videos that are posted by users without a marketing agenda. Viral campaigns need to be effectively seeded and marketed in order for people to see it and spread it to others. The entry “The Secret Strategies Behind Many ‘Viral’ Videos” on the blog TechCruch was posted by guest blogger, Dan Ackerman Greenberg, about his work promoting viral videos. Some of the tips he gives for getting your viral video noticed might be considered unethical, such as paying people to embed the video on their blogs and creating a controversy using different usernames in the comments in order to get more buzz. These techniques and others can be used to get your video noticed more effectively than seeding it alone by taking advantage of the systems YouTube has in place.

Viral marketing creates better brand awareness as viewers become advocates for the video, and by extension the brand, through sharing it with others. This can make the technique as beneficial as word of mouth referrals providing that the video is well suited to the brand and the viewer easily makes the connection between the two. The “Viral Video Marketing Budgets To Increase” entry on the Viral Blog looks at a survey identifying that more companies are increasing their spending in this area in order to produce and market videos that will spread effectively through their target market.

Image from Conversational Media Marketing

There are many ways to keep your website fresh including press releases, blog posts, and newsletters. For a list of ideas for adding content to your site see Part 10 of the article “Developing Your Website: Tools for Women“. An important point made in the blog entry “Why Your Web Site Needs an Oil Change” about frequent updating is that if your site maintenance is outsourced it can be costly to update your site. One solution to this cost is a website powered by a content management system so that new content can be added from within the company into the website template. If you don’t have time to update frequently, RSS feeds can be a way to keep your site fresh without writing new content. An RSS feed inserts information from another site into your site, like headlines with links to articles or blog entries detailed instructions of how RSS should be added to a site are described in the blog entry “RSS or a Website Freshness!”.

A fresh site keeps visitors coming back to check on the latest information, where a site that is not regularly updated will lose repeat audience, as explained in the article “7 tips to make your web site fail!”. Another reason to keep the content on your website fresh is that it affects where your site falls in search results. People are more likely to link to your site if there is new content on it, and the number of pages that link to a site effect how it ranks in search engine results. A Google patent recently divulged that when a page was last updated is included in the algorithm that determines search result rankings. Both ideas are explained in the blog entry “Google Patent Reminds Us To Keep It Fresh”.

Finally how often do you need to update your site for it’s freshness to be effective? The “Fresh Content” entry on the Web Site SEO and Technologies blog suggests that you check how often your competitors’ websites are updated and add new content more frequently in order to raise your search results above theirs.

Before you start setting the tone for your target visitors you need to define who you expect those users to be. The article “Setting the Tone” from the University of Leicester recommends understanding what your audience needs and expects from your website including looking at if they are a specialized group, such as one that would all know the same jargon, or a diverse group, like females between the ages of 19 and 35. After this is done a list of words describing the site that the defined user would like can be developed and the elements of the tone chosen based on the description.

A slightly different strategy for setting the tone of your website is to personify the company the website is for. The Spiral Media Website Planning Guide (pdf link) provides a list of personality traits, such as traditional or innovative and solitary or open, and asks that you describe the company as your target audience sees it. Using these traits a tone can be developed that suits the idea people have about your company. For example if you are a surf board manufacturer you do not want a tone that is professional and stuffy but one that is fun and has a beach feel.

One of the most important things to remember when designing a website is that it should complement your company’s other communication strategies, a point explained by DOWdb on their home page. Incorporating your brand into your company’s website is important for integrating it with your other marketing strategies. By doing this your company will present the same tone to their target audience no matter where they are seeing information about the company.

Following these ideas you can ensure that the tone of your website reflects your company and is a space that will please your target audience.

One problem with Google Analytics is that it tracks internal visitors of the site without differentiating them from external visitors. This is problematic for companies whose CSRs use their website to find the answers to customer’s questions. The data collected can become skewed as CSRs look up new information that they do not know off the top of their head, making it appear as though more customers are interested in the new information than actually are. Internal visitors can be excluded from the statistics using their IP address, even if it has been dynamically assigned. The “Excluding hits from a proxy with dynamic IP address” blog entry provides instructions to exclude internal users from the measurements.

Another problem with Google Analytics is the way the information is sent to the server, as outlined in the blog entry “Google Analytics – Flawed and Misleading?”. One of the reasons for this inaccuracy is due to the use of javascript. If multiple scripts are used on the same page they can conflict and the information will not be sent. Also javascript can be turned off within a browser’s options to protect the user from malicious scripts. Another problem is the script is at the end of the page, so if it does not load completely then the visitor is not recorded.

Google Analytics can also mislead is by having titles that are confusing to its users. A full analysis of this topic is provided in the blog entry “Google Analytics: Worst Titles Ever”. The titles that are used do not accurately reflect the information on the page. One example is that the information titled “Visitor Loyalty” is a measurement of how many times a visitor returned to the site during a time period, which is not necessarily the equivalent of loyalty. For example I have been known to visit the websites of my favourite Jr. A Hockey Team’s opponents in order to get information about away games. If the two teams play multiple games in a time frame the analytics would insinuate that I am a loyal visitor when it is likely the only time of year that I visit the site.

Despite the problems that Google Analytics has it is a good solution for websites to track the visitor trends and behaviours.

Google Analytics Example Image from Robin Good

A recent study suggests that retention is one of the top concerns for companies. A good customer relationship management system can be used in efforts to retain customers. Email can be used in combination with CRM collected information to keep in touch with customers and remind them what your company has to offer.

Amazon is a prime example of using customer information for retention. They do this by sending out regular emails notifying customers of new products they might be interested in based on their past purchases. For example, last Christmas I purchased gifts on Amazon including a book based on the video game Mass Effect and since then I have received an email letting me know about new products including the next book in the series. Amazon also uses a blanket email approach for information about sales and promotions. Customers can easily opt out of email lists by changing their preferences in their account information. By remaining in regular contact with customers and reminding them about the deals they offer, Amazon is able to retain customers by keeping their website at the top of mind. It is made more effective by customizing the information sent based on the customer’s preferences using Amazon’s sophisticated customer relationship management system.

Customized emails based on a customer’s preferences work better for retention than blanket emails sent to all customers. However, how do you effectively customize information for customers that you have not collected information on? Many websites that offer a variety of topics ask new users to specify which ones they are interested in. Free Patterns.com, a website offered by DRG Publishing, does just this using an effective opt-in strategy. During the registration process necessary to access the collection of free patterns new users are asked what types of crafts they are interested in. The registration process also collects contact information and allows customers to subscribe to a variety of newsletters if they wish. This information could then be used to create a customer profile which can be further refined by tracking which patterns the user downloads. Both the free patterns and newsletters help remind customers about the magazines between publications and encourage purchases by highlighting new magazine issues.

Customizing email communications does not require a complex CRM system. By using customer preferences emails can be useful and keep the company at the top of mind, leading to customer retention.

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