That $14.9 billion spent by U.S. Internet advertisers during the first six months of this year represents a 23.2 percent year-over-year increase, eclipsing last year’s first-half record of $12.1 billion in revenue, according to the latest Internet Advertising Revenue Report from IAB.

A whopping 23.2 percent increase over last year! Even though Google is still dominating the search market, there are many competitors to Google's display advertising service, with new companies starting all the time. Not only new companies offering display but exchanges that offer the ability to tap into the bigger search marketing display advertising platforms, where you would normally have to start with a $5k or $10k minimum media buy.

All of which show me pretty clearly that online advertising is where its at, where it's going and where you've got to be.

Here's Eric Schmidt giving some interesting stats and ideas about search marketing and display advertising earlier this year;

Eric Schmidt Delivers the opening keynote at the 2011 IAB Annual Leadership Meeting

Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of the Board, Google, shares his vision for technology, mobile, search marketing and advertising, the world and beyond.

Source

Search Marketing

What is Search Marketing? – definition

I build all of my websites and those of my customers on the WordPress platform. One of the features of WordPress that makes it so astonishingly great is plugins!

It's probably true to say that without plugins WordPress would have died. Glad it didn't, as there are new and ever powerful plugins coming out all the time and a lot of them help us with internet marketing and traffic, automating the mundane chores that suck countless hours from days.

There are numerous ways you can cultivate an active community around your blog that goes way beyond simple traffic generation.

After all, who wants the kind of traffic that comes and leaves to never come back, right?

Our ultimate goal should always be to make sure that our blog is sticky enough to turn the first-time visitors into fans and loyal readers and that’s what I’d like to talk about today – how to get them to stay, read our fabulous content, and share it with others.

I get asked on a daily basis what all those fabulous social engagement plugins I use on Traffic Generation Cafe are.

All the plugins we will be talking about today have been designed with one goal in mind: to keep your readers interested and to get them to share your content within their social networks.

I suppose that’s two goals then…

Here's a quick video from Yaro Starak where he talks about blog design and how important it is; I couldn't agree more with him on this;

Does Blog Design Matter? – Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

In this post, professional blogger Yaro Starak discusses whether blog design really matters.

==> Read all about the plugins on Yaro Staraks main blog Entrepreneurs-Journey

Back in May comScore reported that Facebook served about 346,000,000,000 ads in the first quarter of 2011.

Facebook is so large that it now accounts for about one out of every three ad impressions in the U.S., according to the latest statistics from comScore Ad Metrix. In the first quarter of 2011, comScore estimates that 1.1 trillion ads were served to U.S. Internet users, and 346 billion of those (or 31 percent) were on Facebook. This percentage is up from 23 percent in the third quarter of last year.

Recently another report estimating earnings has been put forth;

Facebook now accounts for one out of three ad impressions in the U.S., and that, really, no other web property in the U.S. comes close (Yahoo was second with 10 percent). That means that Facebook served approximately 340 billion ads in the first quarter. It’s probably not a surprise, then, that advertising makes up for about 89 percent of the social network’s total revenues, which are estimated at about $1.6 billion for the first six months of 2011.

So based on those numbers, which I find hard to comprehend, Facebook revenue in 1 quarter was roughly $800,000,000 (half of 1.6 billion). And 800 million dollars divided 346 billion impressions is 0.0023 cents per impression or $2.30 per thousand impressions or CPM?

You don't have to buy advertising on Facebook by CPM, in fact, most savvy advertisers start off paying per click and then move to CPM when their ads are performing well.

I know you can theoretically get 1 cent click on Facebook, but in recent experiences with their advertising platform I have seen click prices soar to Google levels!

Not unusual to start with a bid estimate of 3,4 even 5 bucks a click.

Sure those prices will come down if you get a reasonable click through rate (CTR), but even then you'll still be paying 60, 70 cents a click, which as far as I'm aware is now good

Are we going to see ad revenues surge into the trillions in the second half of 2011? Is my math off? Have I gone insane?

Here's a lady with a very nice voice explaining some basic about the Facebook advertising platform…

How Advertising Works on Facebook

Ever wonder why you see certain ads on Facebook? This video explains how our ad system works to show you relevant ads without sharing any of your personal information with advertisers.

==> Original article on techcrunch

==> Latest article on the crunchy thing

Lots of news recently about the feds getting all bent out of shape;

WASHINGTON — The fed­eral government has put Google, Microsoft, Apple and other technology companies on notice: Give consumers a way to keep advertisers from tracking them on the Web – or face regulation.

Absurd paranoia?

Washington's call to arms is a response to growing concern that invasive Internet marketing practices are eroding privacy online as every consumer move is observed, analyzed and harvested for profit.

I'm not sure if this is coming up because of advances in what is called "re-targeting' technology, my guess would be that's it.

What re-targeting does is allows you to show your ad specifically to a person who has happened upon it once online; so it does seem a little bit eerie sometimes when you start seeing the same ads popup everywhere you go…

And yes it does use a cookie on the visitors computer.

But there's no harvesting of information from a users computer.

Sure you can get an idea of where a user may have been online, Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the ailing economy a new record has been set for Internet advertising revenue in the first half of 2010 – $12,000,000,000, that's 12 billion!

Search advertising produced the most revenue, pulling more than $5.7 billion of advertising spending in the first half, an 11.6% improvement over last year.

Display advertising—which includes banners, digital video and rich media accounted for $4.3 billion, up 15.9% over the year earlier-period.

Lead generation dropped from $728 million to $642 million.

Email advertising spending was $120 million.

Here's the full report.

http://www.iab.net

You’ll probably be relieved to know that this article is not all about the technical structure of your website. I could go on about that for days on end, but fortunately, structure for you is non-technical and pretty easy to understand. So here goes…

Getting Rid Of The Brochure Mentality Most small business owners and entrepreneurs build a website without understanding the fundamental reasons for doing so. As such, they create what I call a ‘brochure’ website. You may have done this already.

Well don’t be upset, it’s a pretty natural thing to do. For some reason we decide to follow the lead of the majority, thinking if everybody is doing it, it must be the right thing to do… WRONG!

So, going against all conventional wisdom, why do we put up a website? What is the best way to use it?

Read the rest of this entry »

The main goal of your website is LEAD GENERATION Unfortunately most people believe the main goal is online sales, but that would be considered the ultimate goal. In order to get sales you have to generate leads first. Once you follow up with those individuals, if you do everything right it can produce a sale.

One thing to understand is that if you think about your website as a lead generation portal, then that’s what you’re going to have in front of you. However, if you think of it like a company brochure, then the dullness and approach will be the same. As Earl Nightingale said ‘we become what we think about’ and so it is with our websites.

The Concept of Lead Generation In order to create a lead one side (your website) has to make an offer, and the other (your potential prospect) has to be interested in it. If you have this scenario then you have yourself a “hot lead” as some people call them. These are definitely the ones you want to follow up with whenever they come across your path.

The Exact Nature of an Online Lead Let’s be perfectly clear. You absolutely must get visitors to your website to give you their email address. This has to be obtained ethically with the visitor’s permission. Think about it. If you don’t at least get their email address how will you follow up? You can and sometimes must also get a street address, phone number etc. But for now, let’s assume you’re trying to get an email address.

Providing an Offer In order to get someone to actually provide an email address, you usually need to offer them something. It has to be something they need that will entice them to join your subscriber’s list. It has to be of VALUE to the reader, which in turn their email address will be valuable to you.

So you see; there isn’t much point in just asking people to subscribe to your newsletter. I’m not saying they won’t. I have customers that do just that and get subscribers. But most people are already overloaded with information and their inboxes are bulging, so they probably won’t sign-up unless the information is valuable or specific.

Get the Offer In Front of the Visitor There is little point in hoping that a visitor will stumble across your website, search for and find your newsletter sign-up link and then subscribe happily to your newsletter. It just isn’t going to happen! Here’s the kicker. The MAJORITY of websites DO EXACTLY THAT! Have you heard the term landing pages? Well, YOU GENERATE YOUR LEADS ON YOUR LANDING PAGES! That’s right. Give your visitor the option to subscribe to a list that is relevant to the content of your landing page, with an offer that is also relevant and valuable.

Lead Generation IS List Building This article is about lead generation marketing. There are a lot of online marketers that call this effort List Building. It is that, but I prefer lead generation as it makes me think more specifically about whom I’m trying to interest with my offer and how I’m going to follow up with them. You may have heard the saying ‘The Money Is in the List’? Well, the list is the end result of your lead generation efforts. And yes, the money is in the list, but you have to know what to do with the list and how to do it.

Personalization of your sales message is very important and most people don't do it. You personalize a message as simply as adding the persons first name into the copy you are writing, so it speaks directly to them. It's really simple to do if you are using an autoresponder beacause you can add the name field tag of the autoresponder to the message. Very few people actually take the time to do this though. You really should, because personalizing your message is proven to increase response by 10% or more… Now the spamming bastards of the world are trying it too! I've recently had some unsolicited email form these scumbags with very tardy personalization attempts. But at least they're trying! Here's a couple examples for your viewing pleasure… This one is even made to look like an html newsletter, very sophisticated! Of course, having my actual email address name embedded looks really stupid, but it's an attempt at personailzation and if my email was just Steve@ then it would work! This is another, less sophisticated example;

Twitter is exploding at the moment and everyone is climbing on the bandwagon, blogging about its benefits etc, and you could be forgiven for thinking that this was the new easy way to online success.

In the real world, clients want to talk about search engines, search engine optimization or search engine marketing (Google Adwords / Pay-Per-Click).

Why? The current economic downturn is having an impact on businesses and with the majority of people now using Google (mainly) to find information on an all subjects across the board, many organizations are re-evaluating their online marketing and website strategy. It’s an area that clients in every market are asking for advice on.

Many are now concerned by their visibility to prospective customers. Businesses that previously saw a website as an online brochure are waking up to the fact that online they’re completely invisible to those searching online for the products and services that they offer. Not a good place to be at the best of times, but a business killer in a recession. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading recently about some major newspapers requesting, and getting, tax breaks because they are failing in the current economy.

A tax cut has been approved in Washington state; I quote “Newspapers across the country have resorted to layoffs and other cost-cutting moves to deal with a wounded business model and a recession-fueled drop in advertising”

Read about tax breaks here

I really don’t get it. They are even blaming Google for their problems? I’ve been recently checking into advertizing rates for display and other types of ads in local papers and magazine here in Sarasota. They have got to be kidding! Sky high prices, with no way of really tracking results. And yet they are still failing?

I think most people see printed news as largely outdated and cumbersome.

This video post from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand. I’m off to apply for a bail out too!