posted by Amir

This is an important question for any business owner or online marketer, and one that isn't easy to answer. While some businesses will devote all, or nearly all, of their advertising and promotional dollars into a web strategy, most companies face a dilemma when it comes to finding the right mix: put in too little, and they might see sales drop off; throw too much money at finding customers on the web, and their expenses end being counterproductive.

A lot of advertising “experts” advise putting anywhere from 10 to 75% of your marketing budget into Internet ads and promotions, but they aren't running your company... you are. For most businesses, the answer is going to fall somewhere in the middle. Here are three questions you should ask yourself to help find out where that middle is:

Where are your current leads and sales coming from? It's never a good idea to stop doing something that's working, especially when we are talking about finding the money that's helping you make payroll, run your business, and earn a profit. Regardless of what your future plans are, take into account where you are leads and sales coming from at the moment and make sure that revenue stream will continue.

Where will future sales be coming from? Are you likely to gather lots of new buyers from the Internet? If so, then try to start moving more of your marketing expenditures in that direction, until you can either find a flood of new business, or figure out that the money would be better spent elsewhere.

How profitable is your online marketing effort? Every form of marketing or advertising faces diminishing returns at a certain point – people stop responding to more of it, or you just end up chasing customers that aren't worth the money. Monitor your online marketing expenses closely so that you can identify the point without going past it.

posted by Moiz

Besides being a handy marketing tool to reach hundreds or thousands of your customers at once, Twitter is just, well... a lot of fun. The equivalent of an online party with all kinds of little conversations going on at once, it can sometimes cause even seasoned marketers to let down their guard. After all, if everyone else is having a good time and posting whatever they want, shouldn't you be, too?

As in all other situations, there's a fine line. One of Twitter's best qualities – and indeed one of the greatest things about social networking in general – is that it lets us drop some of our professional façade and let people in. This can be a great thing for relationships, business or otherwise, so long as you know how to keep yourself out of trouble.

Here are four tweets you should never, ever send:

Anything with obscenities, slurs, ethnic remarks, and so on. It should go without saying that these are the kinds of thoughts you should keep to yourself – if you insist on having them at all – but recognize that just one of them is likely to leave a permanent impression on your business and career.

News that isn't public yet. From new client contracts to earnings reports and future product releases, it's best to keep sensitive information in-house until it's been reported elsewhere.

Complaints about customers or coworkers. The quick, fluid nature of Twitter can make people feel anonymous. You aren't, so keep that in mind as you decide what to post, because it will get back to whomever you're writing about.

What you had for lunch. Also included would be your pet's favorite food, what you thought about a certain celebrity’s choice of clothing, and anything else that's likely to bore readers. Twitter, even more than other social networking sites, runs on attention. Make sure you give people a reason to tune in, or they'll go elsewhere.

posted by Mark

As we noted a few weeks ago, YouTube is currently gathering more than 1 billion hits a day, effectively making it the world's second largest search engine (behind Google), and a hot destination for online marketers looking to spread their message virally.

Like a lot of things in life, however, marketing on YouTube is a lot easier to talk about than it is to actually accomplish. That's because viewers go there looking to learn or be entertained... but rarely to be sold to.

For that reason, the marketing message has to be wrapped up in something more interesting – like medicine that tastes like candy, it needs to be fun before it can be effective. You can only take this idea so far, though; videos of your employees falling down the stairs might get lots of hits, but they aren't going to bring many sales.

With that in mind, here are the five items on your YouTube marketing checklist. Don't upload a video without them:

A crisp, relevant, and interesting topic. The most impactful videos are short and to the point. They should show off your expertise while teaching the viewer something special they can use in their work or home lives.

A script. A lot of marketers are tempted to “wing it” and produce their videos without any script or rehearsal, but it’s not something we would recommend. While you don’t want your clip to be so practiced that it seems unnatural, it’s a good idea to at least run through your thoughts a few times before you shoot the final version.

A catchy opening. If the first 5 or 10 seconds of your video are boring, no one is going to bother watching the rest. Aim to capture attention quickly.

Good production. Shooting quick videos with a handheld cam is a great way to save money… except that it usually costs you future customers. If you don’t have the equipment to produce and edit sharp-looking video, find a creative partner who does.

Contact information and a call to action. Invite viewers to visit your website, download a free report, or take some other action. Otherwise, they may click away to the next video and never return.

posted by Amir

In many ways, the explosion of social network marketing has mirrored the growth of search engine optimization just a few years ago. Both are focused around content, both change the ways that businesses can attract new customers (not to mention the philosophy behind those methods), and both are largely considered necessary for any company with an Internet presence.

In fact, given that they are coming so closely related, you might be wondering: are search engine optimization and social media marketing still different topics?

The short answer is that they are... but only just so.

At the moment, SEO is a lot like commercial real estate. You might start out at a remote location, but through the careful investment of time and effort, you can steadily move your business into a high traffic, high profit neighborhood in a relatively short amount of time. It's still one of the most cost-effective ways of finding new customers, and the process that often takes on a life of its own once you've got it moving.

Social network marketing, on the other hand, closely resembles networking events in the off-line world. Approach them the wrong way, and you'll quickly find yourself stuck in a mixer with low-level marketers talking endlessly about products nobody wants. But open the door with the right kinds of content and profiles, and you can slip behind the velvet rope and talk deals with the movers and shakers. In other words, social networking is a great way to meet individual decision-makers – rather than a horde of "generic" customers – as well as deepen relationships with your existing buyers.

Search engine optimization and social network marketing definitely overlap, and the two are inching closer to one another all the time. For now, however, they are still separate disciplines that yield separate results. But even though you might have to spend a little time on each one, both are great ways to bring new business into your company

posted by Mark

Recently, we posted an article pointing out that YouTube – with more than a billion daily hits – had effectively become the world's second-largest search engine. But as much as we'd love to take sole credit for the idea, it seems that we aren't the only ones who noticed.

It’s difficult to find solid numbers, but estimates suggest that users are adding more than 200,000 new videos every single day, or about 13 hours worth each minute. While lots of those undoubtedly involve house pets dancing to modern hits, many of the new additions are coming from savvy online marketers just like you... and the trend is only gaining strength.

Here at Blue Beetle, it reminds us of something.

It wasn't that long ago that regular old search engine optimization was the hot new thing. Companies had just started figuring out that fresh content was the key to working your way to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing), and so they got into a mad rush to add articles to their websites. In many cases, this was a great thing, because it brought valuable information to the Internet. But just as often that meant marketers who were trying to make a quick buck posted poorly-written collections of key words they called articles, making it difficult for searchers to actually find the useful pages they were looking for.

The same thing is beginning to happen on YouTube. For all of the wonderful advice and entertainment that has already been uploaded, we are starting to see badly-produced videos coming from marketers looking to take shortcuts. A few of them might find a way to make money from this strategy, but it's bound to fail in the long term because people don't go online looking for junk—they're searching for quality advice and insight.

With that in mind, we are going to tell you something you probably already know: the goal of your video marketing campaign shouldn't be to have the most YouTube videos, but the most effective. Post material that educates and entertains, not clips that take up a few minutes while parroting your sales message again and again.

One good video on YouTube can bring you millions of views and thousands of new customers, but a badly done piece only costs everyone time and aggravation.

posted by Mark

Social networking is every online marketer’s favorite new toy, and that’s a good thing… mostly. After all, anything that lets you find new customers, improve your search engine positioning, and possibly even spread your message virally is going to be a useful tool. And really, that’s why it’s at the top of so many experts’ “must try” lists for 2010.

It’s that last bit that gets us in trouble.

The second the majority of us brand any idea as something you need to try, there’s a temptation to feel like you… well, need to try it. While that’s the wrong idea to approach to take to any marketing effort, it’s especially true with social networking.

The beauty of working with blogs, as well as sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others, is that they allow for a kind of informal give-and-take. In other words, they let you reach behind the curtain a little bit and engage your customers in a friendlier way.

The quickest way to ruin that is by coming at them with something that's boring – or worse, overtly commercial. And yet, that's exactly what tends to happen once you start to treat social networking like just another item on your "to do" list. Your posts and ideas become more and more stale, until all that's left is a steady stream of fluff that few people would actually take the time to read.

With that in mind, think of social media the right way: as a tool for engaging customers in spreading the word about your company in a semi-personal way. Don't treat it like an ongoing press release or just another piece of business communication – the moment it becomes uninteresting to you, you'll start giving that impression off to the buyers you're trying to attract.

posted by Mark

Search engine optimization, like any facet of online marketing, is a little bit harder than it looks. Just when your company has gotten its site to the top of Google for one of your most important keywords, a Malaysian pop star decides to use a similar phrase as the title of her newest album and pushes you back down, or a competitor gets hit with a lawsuit that makes you want to scrub the term as quickly as possible.

In other words, it's not easy and the game is always changing.

For that reason, a lot of businesses get a little bit desperate when it comes to SEO. What starts as a mission to improve online business quickly becomes an obsession with RSS feeds, embedded tags, and long-tail key phrases. And really, there's nothing much that's wrong with that... so long as it doesn't interfere with a core marketing strategy.

There should be a reason you're trying to improve your search engine position, and one that goes a bit deeper than "trying to get more hits." Having some sort of established plan can keep you grounded in moving forward, even in the face of inevitable distractions and setbacks.

There's no way around it: good search engine optimization takes time. Looking for shortcuts, or just moving things around to stay busy, isn't just a waste – it’s counterproductive. That's why it's so important that you have a good idea of where your best clients are coming from, and how you can find more of them through Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

This is a small step, but one that's critically important, because without it you'll find yourself constantly chasing the latest fads and trends. There certainly is a time and place for working the details and staying ahead of the curve, but it's only after you've covered the basics.
Search engine optimization is a complicated topic, and that's why so easy to "miss the forest for the trees," so to speak. Have an online marketing plan, stick to it, and then examine your progress from time to time. It might not be as exciting as frantically updating pages, but it's going to be a lot better for your bottom line in the long term.

posted by Mark

As Google continues its well-documented run as the world's most popular search tool (garnering an 85%+ share, according to some estimates), many in the Internet marketing industry are left to wonder whether the recent merging of Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing will allow them to ever catch up… or at least gain some ground among searchers. Or could it be that people really do prefer all Google, all the time?

It turns out, the question is flawed. That's because there is already a strong second-place search engine, and one that's doing just great – YouTube.

While it's true that most people wouldn't classify YouTube is a search engine, and it might not technically count as one, the lines begin to blur a bit as you take a step back. After all, with more than one billion hits a day, it's obvious that people are turning to its short videos to find and learn, and they're doing it far more often than they are turning to non-Google search engines.

This highlights an important fact for online marketers: if you aren't getting your message out on YouTube, then you're missing a big piece of the market share. It isn't all cats jumping through hoops or lonely kids acting out movie scripts; any company can produce a video that has the potential to go "viral," or at least enhance their marketing message by adding a new format.

YouTube isn't a new phenomenon anymore, but it is one that lots of companies are just beginning to take advantage of. In future articles, we'll take a look at some ways you can use YouTube to increase sales. For now, though, just ask yourself this: with billions of people tuning in every week, why are they finding your business?

posted by Mark

Marketing is all about results. One of the quickest ways to destroy the profitability of your campaigns, whether they are online or off-line, is to keep feeding a process that isn't making any money. Managers and business owners have to be ruthless in cutting off ads and promotions that aren't working – or even those that aren't working well enough to justify the costs.

Sometimes, though, the desire to be efficient can cause us to give up just a little bit too soon, especially when the conventional wisdom is that some tactic or idea is "dead." Since everyone knows it doesn't work, why keep putting time and money into it?

I think that's what's happened to e-mail marketing. Even though there are plenty of businesses still working profitable campaigns, many companies have given up on it for fear of the impression that they're spamming their customers. The reality, however, is that they are missing out on sales and profits that they could get with just a little bit of effort.

Here are four ways to make your e-mail campaigns work:

Start with the right list. To have a successful e-mail campaign, you need working addresses of people who want to hear from you. The best way to get those is from your existing customers or prospects. Have them opt in to receive some small promotional item or coupon – you’ll end up with a list that's both valid and interested in what you sell.

Keep things to the point. Don't send long e-mails with complicated ideas. If you can't communicate everything you need to a few hundred words or less, save part of it for the next message. It's better to have people interested in reading small bits at a time than it is to go straight into their trash folder.

Be consistent… not annoying. Few companies can get away with sending an e-mail newsletter every day, or even every week. It might take some trial and error, but try to find out how often your customers want to hear from you and then stick to that schedule.

Track and optimize. It's not enough to send out e-mails and hope for the best. Use state-of-the-art tracking software to find out which links, products, articles your customers are clicking on responding to. Then, you can use that information to optimize your future marketing messages and make them even more profitable.