Ad Tracking Success

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of money involved with affiliate marketing. This is only true however, for those who are serious and hard working on their affiliate program. The biggest part of succeeding depends on your perseverance and determination. Even the best of affiliate programs won’t prosper if you don’t build the business on a solid foundation. Nothing happens if the banners and links you place on a website just decorates the pages. The affiliate must convince visitors to click on the banner or link then proceed to the program to buy products. Affiliate marketing can be easy if you have planned your campaign well and have taken the right steps towards success. Choosing the right product and designing your website with banners and the right material are keys to making things happen. An ad tracker is a software program that will allow you to trace and monitor every click that is made by visitors through your referral link. To make things even better, you know exactly where you placed the link. You can either use a service provider or purchase ad tracking software. With ad trackers, you can monitor the progress of your campaigns, even advertising offline. If you have several affiliate accounts, this tool can be very good to have. Each and every decision about Affiliate Marketing you make should be well grounded in facts. By using an ad tracker, you’ll be able to generate traffic reports for your personal sales page. Armed with the proper knowledge and an ad tracking software program, you’ll have no problems succeeding in the affiliate marketing world. It can be tough to get started – although once you start making money you’ll be glad you took the chance! My Best Wishes José Franc Admin of josefranconline.com

Selling through your Home Business Online

Consider Opening an Online Home Business. It is easy to open an online store just sell through the more trusted websites. Online shopping is becoming a mainstay of American commerce and more people are comfortable with making purchases from Internet Home Business. If you have something that you are passionate about selling, Before you start an online home business, do some research online and check out your potential competition. If you have a business idea in mind, it is worth the time and effort to see what else is being sold in your category of products. If you have no idea what you want to sell, you’ll also want to head online to search out what would be most profitable to sell. When you make the selection of what you are going to sell, remember to think a niche. A niche is a small category of products that meet the needs of a specific group of people. Your online home business shouldn’t have a “Wal-mart” approach where there is a little bit of everything for everyone. Online commerce is all about small categories of interest. There are so many things to choose from, you have more success when you cater to a small and specific group of people. The best place to start with finding a niche is thinking about your own interests. When you sell to a niche that you know well, you are more likely to know what products will be of interest to those people. You can sell to your clientele based on your own experience. Moms Working in a Home Business Many Wahms start an online home business because they have homemade products to offer. One example is handmade baby clothes and cloth diapers. Many Wahms have found success with putting their sewing skills to work and selling their wares online. Other popular handmade online stores include bath and body products, candles and gift baskets. This does not mean that you can’t have online store success if you don’t make your own products. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of Wahms who have success by opening stores stocked with store-bought inventory. Whatever your choice, whether handmade or store bought, there are many options for hosting your online store. These options depend on how comfortable you are with web design. Many companies, like Yahoo, offer store websites that are very user friendly and simple to set up. They can cost anywhere from $30 to $200 per month for the storefront services. Many Wahms also find success with eBay stores, which allow them to sell in auctions or in a fixed price format. Look At All Of Your Options Before You Choose Your Online Home Business Hosting Remember that the quality of your hosting will reflect the quality of your business. The last thing you need is your entire website going down due to cheap hosting. The best choice is to find a reputable host that will provide you with a storefront and hosting for a reasonable price. Don’t try to pinch pennies on this aspect of your business. You could end up out of business in no time. Once you’ve found a place to host your online home business, you’ll need to drive internet traffic to the home business. One of the easiest ways is to trade banners with other Wahm online home business. Many Wahms support each other in their online efforts. This form of networking is a great way to introduce your products to customers who already look to support Wahms. You can also advertise using pay per click advertising and work on your website so that it increases in page ranking for certain search terms. Keep your customers coming back with an easy to navigate website, simple ordering techniques and good customer service. Even though most of your business will be done online, it’s a good idea to get a business phone line and put that number on your website. This way customers can feel confident in purchasing from you because they know they can speak to a real person if there is a problem with their order. If you follow these tips you will be successful selling online no matter what type of online home business that you open. My Best Wishes José Franc Admin of josefranconline.com

10 easy steps to help your business flourish on Facebook

Whether your business is new to Facebook marketing or just in need of a refresh, columnist Will Scott’s Facebook tips will help you build a vibrant and engaged Facebook presence. If your business isn’t making itself visible on Facebook, then you’re missing out on one of the most cost-effective places to meet new customers. Everyone is aware of the popularity of Facebook, but not as many people appreciate the opportunities available to businesses that develop a social media presence. With social media, you have unprecedented control over your brand image, and you can put your message in front of the users who are most likely to be interested. Use these simple tips to take advantage of the internet’s most popular social media platform. 1. Flesh out your Facebook page Even if you already have an engaging and user-friendly website, take some time to completely fill out a Facebook page for your business. Include pictures of your storefront and staff, to make your business trustworthy and relatable. Your Facebook presence gives you a foot in the door with social media users who are looking to learn more without leaving their social media app. Be sure to include contact information, hours of operation and a link to your website. 2. Schedule frequent and consistent posts Once you have pictures and information about your business, an active page should also have relatively frequent posts. Try to post original content at least once a week, but prioritize quality over quantity. Posting several times a day might annoy your fans, causing them to unlike or unfollow your page. When you post blog updates or other business announcements, Facebook posts allow you to amplify that message to a wider audience. Direct social media users to visit your blog or special offers page. 3. Learn about your customers Once your page has attracted some attention, the Audience Insight tools gather quantitative information about the people who like and visit your page. Learn more about their demographics, and use that information to reach out to new groups. If your page is attracting more middle-aged women than expected, for example, then you may want to include posts that are particularly relevant for those potential customers. You can also make a point of reaching out to customers in other age groups to explore untapped markets. 4. Pay attention to — and encourage — reactions and comments Pay attention to the posts that get reactions and comments. Comments generally indicate a higher level of engagement because it takes more time to type a response than to simply hit “Like,” though the variety of new reactions provide more information than the older “likes.” Depending on your target audience, you may want to elicit a wide range of reactions to make your brand more relatable. Be careful about responding to negative comments, but invite dissatisfied customers to call or email directly. When your business does engage, interaction should be succinct and professional. 5. Post content that gets shared Even for a business page, social media can feel like a popularity contest. When more users share your post, your message goes a lot farther, hopefully generating leads for your business. Of course, not all popular content will be appropriate for your brand. Be especially careful of posts and links that could have political implications or alienate potential customers. It’s best to avoid controversial subject matter and stick to your area of expertise. 6. Stay engaged If your business replies quickly to messages on Facebook, then others will be able to see that your page is active and responsive. Make sure your posts are relevant to your target audience in order to get a response, and try to focus on things that readers will genuinely find useful or newsworthy. Present yourself as a resource for timely and interesting industry news. Consider engaging with your employees through their social media pages, too. 7. Connect with the community Stay relevant by posting information about local festivals and other regional news. If your business is connected with charitable organizations, then social media gives you an opportunity to highlight that connection. Post photos of your employees when they volunteer with local non-profits, and show the community how your brand has a positive impact. As a bonus, when you have an active Facebook page, other businesses and profiles can link their posts and thank-you announcements to your page. 8. Post and share events Create Facebook events for your next big sale. When events are happening in the community, you can draw attention to those as well. Many businesses fail to leverage events as opportunities to promote their social media page. Given the number of people on Facebook, creating an event page can also increase the turnout for your real-world event. Facebook events make it easy for users to invite friends and see how many people plan to attend. 9. Pay for advertising Once you collect a few hundred fans on Facebook, you’ll notice that your posts don’t seem to get as many views as they should. Your posts don’t necessarily get 50 times more exposure when your page has 50 times more followers. This gives new pages and startups an advantage when they first develop a following, but larger business can still have a big impact on Facebook. Paying for advertising allows you to target people with interests relevant to your industry. You can also target specific demographics and areas to maximize your advertising dollar. 10. Build social media into your SEO budget Like updating your website for search engine optimization, social media is a long-term project for your business. You may not have anyone experienced or qualified to manage your social media presence, and few businesses can afford to hire a new employee for this highly specialized job. Many managers have a hard enough time keeping employees off of their personal Facebook pages. Creating engaging content takes time, and the simplest option is often bundling social media maintenance with other SEO services. Final thoughts Maintaining an online presence

How To Act About Voice Search

Generation Z and early Generation Alpha will likely be the last of us to type. Keyboard users are a dying population. Who is the next generation? Voice users. If you spend time with young kids, you’ll notice that they favor voice assistants over keyboards. And who can blame them? People rarely turn down easier ways of doing things! Marketers need to be thinking about this shift, because voice search will have a significant impact on content discovery through search. Although currently there is no simple or precise way of identifying voice vs. non-voice queries, “Okay Google” queries are becoming far more common in search query reports for our clients, and they’re even showing up as rising terms in Google Trends. To be successful in this shifting landscape, marketers need to start fine-tuning their strategies across media and content types, including text, image and video. For website content, it may be in your best interest to have specific natural language pages that come from CRM (customer relationship management) exchanges so that search engines can index them and return more accurate information to consumers based on past conversations. Queries like “best running shoes” will start to fade, and hyper-specific requests tailored to that individual, like “Okay Google, I need a size 10 and a half running shoe with a 5-star rating that’s on sale in-store on Newbury Street,” will start to increase. For images and videos, traditional SEO factors such as naming, tagging, descriptions, titles, transcripts and where the assets reside will continue to be crucial to help map natural language queries to the best content. So if you’ve optimized toward head terms like “running shoes,” you may want to revisit the core value propositions of your products and work toward always winning on specific and critical points of differentiation. You can then optimize toward these specific attributes, because it’s unlikely that someone is going to use “Okay Google running shoes” as their voice search query. What are people actually talking to Google Voice about? The first step in pivoting your strategy to account for the rise in voice assistants is to understand how people are using them. The good news is that all marketers who run paid search can see all the things people are saying in voice when they receive an ad impression. You can download the raw data from Google AdWords Search Query Report and filter for “Okay Google.” Technically, I don’t think the activation line “Okay Google” is passed in every time there is a voice query. Also, I think many instances of “Okay Google” queries are from individuals who got a bit impatient and said the activation phrase multiple times, thus logging it. However, at this time, filtering by the activation line is the only way to clearly identify a voice query from a typed one, although some voice queries are easy to identify when looking at mobile-specific queries. Overall, it’s clear that a class on “How to Speak to Voice Assistants” would go a long way. Although I’m sure all the voice assistants would love to be your friend, they are simply not there, and there’s a specific way you need to speak to actually get what you want. That fact, however, doesn’t seem to prevent people from attempting to shoot the moon. Below are examples of real voice queries, and I find them to be hysterical, but also very informative. If you invest heavily in paid search, this data can be extremely valuable for many areas of your marketing, including your digital strategy, product development, and brand communication, which brings us to point one: 1. Consumers talk to their assistants like they’re people, not programs Overly complicated queries with multilayered requests are hard for assistants to answer. “Okay google go get the number for Ken Gop for me in San Bernardino California and also Dallas please” Close, but not quite. I don’t think Ken Gop is a real person. I looked into it. 2. Consumers are struggling with the basics of using voice assistants Consumers specifically struggle when Google Voice is already on and they don’t realize it: “you know I don’t like asking it it creeps me out, okay google when does tempe marketplace close?” Not bad, but I doubt Google will give you the closing time if you call it creepy. To be fair, voice assistants commonly join the conversation without being invited. My favorite moments during work meetings these days are when someone who has placed their phone on the conference table unexpectedly has their voice assistant join in after believing it heard an activation phrase. 3. Consumers who appear to understand voice functionality tend to get specific, sometimes disturbingly specific “okay google find the closest place my seven year old son can get white skinny jeans” C’mon brands! Where is the organic content that showcases 7-year-olds’ skinny jeans? Creating content with as many characteristics and dimensions as possible is going to be important for voice assistants. When I talk to my voice assistant, I’m going to ask for jeans that are 32w 30l, dark, on sale, high ratings — and if you serve me an ad that gives me anything but that, I will leave. I simply don’t have the time to click around. I’m a millennial after all. 4. People get personal and honest with their voice assistant “Okay Google, I want to get him trashy pajamas for Christmas.” Poor guy. So, Kohl’s… ouch. Google thinks you have the trashiest Christmas pajamas. But if there are sales to be had, I can’t blame you. In all seriousness, this highlights an important point for brands, especially as voice integration becomes common everywhere: You don’t want to be discovered for bad things. For example, when using Alexa to browse Amazon to buy pajamas, I’ll say, “Alexa, I want to see the highest-rated pajamas that are on sale.” In return, I’ll receive a list of 10 pajamas, and they look great. Then I will ask, “Which of these pajamas has received the

5 Luxury Marketing Strategies – increase your conversions

There’s a reason Gucci doesn’t do infomercials for tiger print duffels. That Equinox doesn’t offer a discount for January first’s newly health-obsessed. That anthropomorphic Hamsters break dance in front of Kia Souls instead of Range Rovers. Advertising for luxury brands tends to focus on, well, luxury. The happiness they inspire. The quality. The sheer opulence that becomes a piece of one’s life when he or she buys free-range leave-in conditioner infused with dolphin tears, or an ornate bottle of some top-shelf botanical cordial. Whether you’re storyboarding a TV spot or building out an ad group, your target audience needs to feel as though your product or service is a physical manifestation of luxury. Now, this sort of strategy (creating the appearance that your product embodies some specific quality or trait) is not exclusive to luxury brands. Taco Bell, for example, is most certainly not a luxury brand, but their marketing efforts (and new product development), are wholly focused on the late-night munchies-sufferers among us. The language and images used in Taco Bell’s marketing materials speak to these consumers; there’s very little pomp, just an often-entertaining reminder that there’s no better place to shove eleven cheap tacos made out of Doritos and meatstuff into your face hole. The ad above exemplifies this perfectly. Cheesy neon signs. Colloquial language. An assortment of various corn or flour vessels oozing tasty mysteries. Now that you’re sufficiently hungry (or repulsed) let’s switch gears and refocus on advertising for luxury brands. Check out this text ad for Rolex, arguably the world’s most recognizable luxury watch company: Notice the language used. “Timeless” and “luxury” and “performance” and “prestige.” There’s an undeniable sense that a Rolex is opulence incarnate and an implication that if you manage to wrap one around your wrist, you are elite. Now, you may not be as recognizable as Rolex, but we can show you how to leverage the same tactics and then some (I’m looking at you, notably bland CTA) so that you can use PPC to grow and market your luxury brand. Luxury Marketing Strategy #1: Account-Wide Negative Keywords The first, and easiest, strategy for marketing your luxury brand is classic “addition by subtraction.” You’re probably already incorporating negative keywords into your optimization routine, but did you know you can save time by uploading them at the account level? Account-level negative keywords are a simple addition to your AdWords efforts; all you need is a CSV file loaded with negative keywords. From there, you simply upload the file in the Bulk Upload tab of the Shared Library and then apply it to as many campaigns as you’d like. Doing so has a handful of benefits, but the most important for marketing luxury goods and services is the ability to weed out unqualified traffic. Think about it. Say you sell shoes hand cobbled by the finest artisans in all of Montana. While the keyword “shoes” will certainly yield traffic, and some of those searchers may very well be interested in buying your exceptional kicks, the overwhelming majority of that traffic falls outside of your target demographic. This becomes even more of an issue as you begin to consider keywords with modifiers. “Cheap,” “sale,” and the dreaded “free” are all words that, when appended to a query, ostensibly eliminate a searcher as a prospect. Account-wide negative keywords ensure you never bid on terms you have no interest in paying for (on purpose or accidentally). Luxury Marketing Strategy #2: Make Bing a Priority For the majority of search marketers, AdWords is the end all be all. Bing and other networks (Yahoo Gemini among them) tend to exist in their arsenal complementarity, if at all. Generally speaking, this is a bad idea. For luxury brands, it’s a cardinal sin. What does that 30% mean, exactly? 160 million unique searchers. 5 billion monthly searches. But perhaps most important to your business is the fact that Bing allows you to reach 59 million people who aren’t reached on Google. Yes, for the most part clicks on Bing are cheaper than they are on AdWords. This is awesome. But the network’s real value is the fact that you can get an additional 118 million eyeballs (a third of which have are attached to six-figure incomes) on your luxury goods. Luxury Marketing Strategy #3: Elevate Your Ad Copy Expanded Text Ads are now our reality, and there’s never been a better time to market your high-end product using the power of paid search. With all that extra space comes the ability to differentiate yourself from the rest of the SERP with language instead of relying solely on brand recognition. After all, even when you’re bidding on branded keywords, there’s a good chance you’ll be competing with third party distributors and your direct competitors. The copy you use in your text ads will be the difference between earning a prospect’s click and watching them scroll on by. But what does better ad copy look like? Great question! As you can see in the column on the left, STA (what used to be called Standard Text Ads) placed tight restrictions on your ability to say anything compelling in your ad copy. How can you stand out from the competition when everyone’s pigeonholed into using the same five-ish sentence fragments? Off the top of my head, hiring a commercially motivated haiku writer was the only plausible solution. Today, though, with the addition of a second headline and more space in the description (plus the URL pathways), you can parlay your brand’s unique sales proposition without truncation. You can wrap it in enticing, alluring, wholly irresistible copy. Don’t just tell your prospects to buy now: tell them why they have no other choice. Check out this text ad for Chanel. What do you notice? In the good ‘ol days, this is an ad that would fly in the face of best practices. Today, though, I’d say it represents an interesting A/B test. Now, are this ad’s headlines great? No. They lean so heavily

Internet Marketing in the cognitive age. The Big Data.

We define marketing strategies to achieve business objectives. We analyze the behavior of our audience, find how it interacts with our brand, define the strategy and launching a series of actions to achieve the objectives. In this process we must make many decisions based on data. Decision-making in current marketing We are aware that we will never have all the information we need to get our decisions right. The number of variables that affect the outcome is so great that it would be impossible to achieve. That is why we try to stimulate the best decisions possible based on the data we have. To do so we have multiple sources of data, so many that we have troubles to assimilate all information and become it into knowledge for the company. In the context of online marketing we typically handle data file such as: surveys, databases, campaigns, web, social networks, etc, but this is only a small part of the data that we are capable to take into account to stimulate the best possible decision. Use big data to optimize marketing strategies The more unstructured the data source is, more difficult the analysis is. We are talking about big data, of its three V’s: data that are created at a great Velocity, are unstructured (Variety) and are generated in large quantities(Volume). When we talk about inserting big data in decision making, the most sensible recommendation is for the company to take control of the data it currently manages( Basic data ) to continue to optimize the online channel( Small data) and to consider the Step or not to the big data. In this context of the analysis of the big data, its used only for make business decisions (in terms of marketing, patently its applications are numerous) is when cognitive technology takes on importance. Big data and cognitive computation Including unstructured data in decision-making is very complicated. If we add that 80% of the information collected has not been encoded in language( so our systems can read it) and is in formats that our systems are not able to interpret, it is “invisible” info for our company. What is cognitive artificial intelligence or cognitive computing? Seeking for sources of information to illustrate this article, the definition that I liked the most was Cognitiva (IBM partner): Definition of cognitive computing “Cognitive computing is described as a new type of technology system that understands the world like humans do: through the senses, learning and experience. Cognitive systems continually learn through each interaction and with each new part of information and thus gain value and knowledge over time.” What are the phases of the functioning of cognitive technology? Understand Watson has the ability to read the equivalent of 1 million volumes per second. The more information he process, the more powerful his response will be. This technology reads the data and construes it use the natural language, in addition to understanding them, is able to detect intention, feeling, etc. To understand us, it would be the evolution to the nth power of the listening software in social networks. To reason Once you have processed the information, you group the data according to their relevance, then utilize a series of algorithms to stimulate hypotheses so you can compare them with the actual data you know to determine which is most likely. When you come up with this most likely hypothesis, it also gives you the contentions on which it is based in order to be allowed to evaluate the answer. To learn Based on the decisions made and their results, Watson discovers. And with each interaction it becomes smarter. This is how humans become experts in one area. We understand, reason and learn. Applications of Cognitive Technology to Internet Marketing As you have seen in the video the applications are immense. From medicine, to overseeing an oil rig,… is something incredible. But what if we could use this data in marketing decision-making? What would happen if we could combine our present sources of information with this technology and all that “invisible” info? Optimize paid media campaigns, by analyzing structured and unstructured data to detect these components that most influence the acquisition decision and using them to launch targeted ad. This is applicable to all manner of campaigns: showing, Adwords, social ads, etc. Know and understand our audience: being able to interpret all kinds of data, we can take what is spoken in social networks and blogs about our product and brand, calls received in the bellow centre, …( any source of information that contains feelings of our audience) and investigates it. For: Define your audience profile. Know the reasons to choose one product over another. Find out what they are looking for (to launch a product that fits their needs). Knowing the impact of an external factor( period, for example) on buying behaviour, Improve the conversion of our website: Identify the most common client travels and interactions (micro conversions) that most influence your purchasing decision. Develop automated systems that allow natural interaction with our audience. This is directly related to the posts I have written about chatbots and also with the ability of brands to influence our audience in surroundings where brands have limited access. Develop a smart product advisor. You insure the possibilities are almost endless.