Blog

Review – Social Media Camp, Long Island June 25, 2010

This free event was a fascinating collaboration of business, educational and technology providers across Long Island. I had the Chance to sit in three sessions all of which were very informative.

Social Media Now, by Kathy

Social Media is developing its role as a relationship builder in a community that can and will become clients and customers. The role of social media is to introduce you, not your products.   Through this process, people become familiar with the person behind the product or business and convert social media into positive ROI.

Podcasting 101, by Aaron

This wonderful media tool allows people to interact and capture the attention of followers through audio and video events (recordings). Audio Podcasts are still the top provider of media for outreach and education in technology.  This method makes for great networking and exposure. This is a great tool to establish a loyal core following of supports and establish you as an authority in your area of expertise.

Facebook, by Bruce

Facebook “Business Pages” or the Like Pages (aka Fan Pages) have customizations to them that few people take advantage of. With control over the landing page when a visitor visits or “Likes” your Business Page, the ability to customize those pages using PBML gives a unique and presentable feel to the business or product.

The event was very informative and diverse. This was a great opportunity to learn, network and have fun.  I highly recommend it to everyone in the future.

Actual business ownership and entrepreneur opportunities have never been easier, nor will they likely be ever again. The worst thing I have ever heard in the last decade as a Consulting Coach is I need to wait, or choosing to wait, it’s the deathtrap no one ever gets out of. There are lots of ways to build a business and a brand in very short order. Puglisi Consulting Group has been doing this for business owners and even divisions of major corporations for a while now.  Like anything else, until you educate yourself it always seems like to much or impossible.  If you really want to be your own boss the only way you will get there is by starting today.

Website – $500 to $2000

Prime Office Space – $199 month – $5000 a month

Marketing Materials (Highest Quality) $55 – $200 to start

Social Brand Marketing – well you get the picture

A basic business can get started  for around $750 with only about $200 recurring monthly. Granted, you have to put in the time to make it up in other areas, and you’ll need to be able to actually do or sell something, oh and get at least a county clerk business cert ($27-$45 onetime fee).

Point is everyday big business dries up the talent of small business owners and our population becomes stuck in the misconceived notion that they have to work for someone else.

Obviously, I could go on and there are other details to consider, but if you got a talent, time and a week’s pay in your pocket, you got all you need to receive both your own finances and the economy.

www.puglisiconsulting.com

Pay-per-click and Adwords advertising may be two of the fastest ways to drive visitors to your website. Although there may be a bevy of free methods available, that may also indeed work in their own time, nothing comes close to PPC and Adwords in terms of efficiency and speed.

There have been great successes and great failures with PPC as well. With well defined learning curves some users seem to launch themselves in a bit too early, with a bit less education than is required, which can be one sure way to fail, and quickly. However, once you know the basics you should be able to lay a firm foundation with your PPC and Adwords campaigns.

Targeted Global Marketing

Why would any business owner limit their marketing areas locally if they have such quick and handy tools available that can literally get the word out worldwide. Targeting a global marketplace with these methods will give you the opportunity in advertising to customize your ads for over two hundred countries in their appropriate languages.

PPC Launching Tips

Start cautiously and slowly. Learn to track your outcomes while maintaining adjustments until you learn which item, product or even technique is generating the outcome you desire.

Although you should start out slow once you get a feel for what targeted ads generate the most income, you should then begin to aim for the sky and take the risks necessary to gain substantial benefit from future successes.

Adwords

When planning your Adwords campaign be certain to utilize the keyword tool to find the best chances at keywords with the highest probable hit rates. Although Google’s keyword tool will be sufficient to begin, once you begin to rake in some money, you may want to switch over to a more detailed keyword research tool such as Site Build It.

With a bit of study, drive and maintenance even the least savvy marketing business owner can make great leaps in the ad revenues they can generate with a few simple products advertised in all of the right places.

Banner display networks can offer business owners the ability to target customers, vertical markets and other advertising aspects on the pages they are already browsing. This kind of ad serving technology can provide instant global visibility.

How Do Banner Display Networks Work?

Users create or have created for them professional banner ads that are displayed on many thousands of websites across the internet on the users behalf. Banner display networks target niche ‘viewers’, which means those who are already viewing your competitors products and services, may very well see your own banner displaying your products and services as well. This is called an ad impression.

Another important aspect about banner display networks is that the more your ads are displayed to prospective buyers, the more familiar your company, or brand, begins to be to possible buyers. This can be known as building your brand’s awareness. Marketers understand that often you will need to put your product or service in the customers view, and hopefully their minds, four to seven times before they may decide to make a purchase from you.

Where Will My Ads Be Displayed?

Commonly, a user will choose from their targeted categories of sites that you would like to display your banner ads on. Good banner display networks will also offer the option to geo-target some of your audience. If your business is offline as well as online, this can be a vital form of advertisement when users try to search engine browse for products and services in your particular area.

Banner Options

Dependant on the quality of the service you use, you may be able to gain the services of a professional graphics designer who will communicate with you about what you would like your banner to display. There is also likely to be a large choice of templates to be used as the base option for your banner. These options will include the type of banner ad such as top-bar or side-bar options.

Banner display networks do have their price, however, most are able to boast a level of efficiency in helping their users to achieve higher viewed status on their websites.

Came across a great article on Bloomberg BusinessWeek last week; “Google’s YouTube Boosts Display Advertisers 10-Fold”. Very interesting that the King of Search has discovered display advertising. Now let’s be honest, YouTube has massive reach but so does Google so is search declining?

–
According to Brian Womack who wrote the piece for Bloomberg, “As growth slows at its main business of selling ads next to search results, Google needs more revenue in other areas”. My guess is that as the economy is rebounding, we will start to see more brand advertising and a continued increase in “traditional” digital advertising campaigns. According to eMarketer, “spending on the major categories of display, which includes banner ads and video, may rise 9 percent to $7.92 billion this year”. Clearly Google saw this trend coming  as they expanded their own display offerings when they purchased DoubleClick in 2008 and Teracent last year.

So what do you think, search or display? Are they independent of each other or are they both part of the same strategy?

You can read the full article from Bloomberg BusinessWeek  at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-03/google-s-youtube-boosts-display-advertisers-10-fold-update1-.html

Sitepal has introduced a rather impressive new set of speaking avatars. While the technology behind this type of avatar may be complex, the simplicity of its use may make it worth its weight. Thanks to 3-D Photoface, who has some of the most life-like avatar creations on the web, these avatars are of a quality perhaps never seen before in this type of public use format.

Although Sitepal already boasts over 250 customizable avatars, they now offer those who cannot find the perfect match among that batch, the opportunity to build their own virtual web speaking avatar by doing no more than uploading their own photo of choice, and selecting a few options in the avatar creation wizard.  

Sitepal can now laud their avatars as having intensely human characteristics, all the way down to customized voice personalities and detailed facial movement and expressions. The ability to fine-tune an avatar so specifically for your site now, may have some users considering the usage of this kind of website capability for themselves.

Sitepal does offer a free trial so that users can test out their limits with their product. However, if you find yourself newly addicted to the features it provides, even a basic account will cost you at least $9.95 per month. That includes only the most basic of features.

Integrating audio through microphones, telephone or from a custom recording.

Available editor that includes over sixty characters and hundreds of background videos and images. You can also use your own scene if you choose.

The ability to publish to emails, PowerPoint, or HTML web pages.

Basic users get up to 1,500 streams per month as well as email support. This is not a terrible deal if your site can utilize this type of speech technology.

Many of the other features that a lot of users find helpful such as Sitepal’s text-to-speech scripting will require a higher paid membership. High end Sitepal features can cost up to $250 USD per month. Higher paid accounts of course receive a higher stream allotment as well as other key selling points such as eBay store integration.