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 just been reading an interesting article in Forbes magazine about YouTube. Apparently advertising rates for display ads on pages with user generated content has collapsed with rates on FaceBook, MySpace and YouTube having fallen 45% since Febuary this year… Forbes state the cost is now 18cents per 1000 page views… hmmm much cheaper than Google! But whats the problem here?

Well, it may have something to do with the fact that the conversion rates for those 1000 page views are extremely low. They can’t be very well targetted at all, so you just stick your ad up there and hope for the best. Just like a lot of people to with magazine ads or the Yellow book…

Apparently YouTube has done a lot of experimenting with ad formats and found some (Forbes says surprising) results.

Get this: Pre-roll video ads prior to the main video cause the viwer to click away 70% of the time. Surprising? I don’t think so. Those pre-roll, pre-view ads are abnoxious. Theres an example of advertisers thinking ‘we’ve got you by the short hairs so you just be a good girl and sit and watch our advertising dross for 20 seconds before we give you what you’re really looking for’… 70% say ‘F*&% you!’ and click away… go figure…

Short banners that pop-up from the bottom of the video window are better, with people clicking those ads 8 times as often as standard display ads next to the video… means you gotta get your ad integrated with the content, bet thats pricey . These pop-up or roll-over ads are more effective if they appear 15 seconds into the video. So what that tells me is 15 seconds is all you got before the viewers attantion span has waned and they are looking to move on, ‘oh look, a banner has appeared, lets click on it aimlessley…’ yehaaw, the miracle of the internet as an advertising media.

When the roll-over is run in tandem with a display ad next to the video the chance of someone clicking can be 46 times as good, whew.

I’ve been using gotoMeeting for a quite some time now and love it. I do all of my customer training using it and also do sales presentation with it. It’s just fantastic for both.

I recently did my first sales presentation to a new friend of mine named Joe Gaeta, who is a dental surgeon and has just opened a new practice on Siesta Key.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is that it was the first time I have done a sales presentation with gotoMeeting while the client was driving on I75! YUP! Now, I did make sure he was comfortable doing that and he insisted he was OK with it, so as he drove from Sarasota to Port Charlotte I did my sales presentation, demoing my content management system, newsletter manager, membership system, directory manager, keyword editor and this blog. Not once did his connection drop, he’s using a Verizon air card I belive and not once did he crash or come off the road, whew!

Modern technology eh…

Yes, eBay is pretty cool for a number of reasons.

1. It is possible to get some absolutely excellent deals on eBay. I just purchsed a new set of development controls for ASP.NET. They are called RadControls from Telerik.I had been thinking about buying these for a while and as I got closer to purchasing I decided to look on eBay. As luck would have it, I found another developer selling the exact same suite and I bid and won. I got the set for an incredibly good price!!

   You do have to be very careful though as there are a lot of scammers on eBay, so watch out!

2. You can get setup as a seller very easily and start selling items. Yes, there is a lot of competition, but a lot of the compettion is, frankly, pretty poor. Most competition is on price, which is not strange considering it’s an auction site.But you can sell high ticket items on eBay too. There are even people selling homes, jets, luxury cars etc. If you want to sell items over $15000 you have to complete some extra sign up steps. So you see, that eBay has matured somewhat. In fact, eBay is huge, gigantic actually and even bought PayPal last year. They paid a ridiculously low fee for PayPal and the two services combined are awesome.

   Taken public in 1998, eBay’s market capitalization is currently some $45 billion.

3. Traffic. Yep, the good ole life blood of the Internet. The numbers of people buying and selling on eBay each day are staggering. An you can hook into that traffic stream by putting up a listing or running a Classified Ad.eBay also has a listing website for free classified ads called Kijiji.They were working with Craigslist and rumour has it dumped Craig for some reason and then launched their own listing service for free ads to compete with Craigslist.Today eBay hosts retail and wholesale transactions on websites in 27 countries and serves buyers and sellers around the globe, to the tune of tens of millions of transactions every day http://ebay.about.com/od/ebaylifestyle/a/el_business.htm.

   So, there are 3 great reasons to take a look underthe hood of eBay and maybe clear some of that crap out of your garage or loft or spare room etc. Go on, give it a try…