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What is marketing?
“Marketing is communicating the value of a product, service or brand to customers, for the purpose
of promoting or selling that product, service, or brand. Marketing techniques include choosing target
markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding consumer
behavior and advertising a product's value to the customer.”
A simple definition for marketing is that it is the creation and satisfaction of demand for your
product or service. If all goes well, this demand should translate into sales and, ultimately, revenue.
In 2012, Dr Philip Kotler defined marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and
delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled
needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit
potential” (Kotler, 2012). In order to motivate people to pay for your product or service, or to
consider your organisation superior to your competitors, you need to create meaningful benefits and
value for the consumer. The value that a marketer should seek to create should be equal to or even
greater than the cost of the product to the consumer. Doing this often and consistently enough will
grow trust in and loyalty towards the brand.

What is digital marketing?

\“Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices (computers) such as personal
computers, smartphones, cellphones, tablets Telivision sets TV and game consoles to engage with
stakeholders. A component of Digital marketing is Digital Brand Engagement. Digital marketing
applies technologies or platforms such as websites, e-mail, apps (classic and mobile) and social
networks. Digital Marketing can be through Non-internet channels like TV, Radio, SMS, etc or
through Internet channels like Social Media, E-mails ads, Banner ads, etc.”
If marketing creates and satisfies demand, digital marketing drives the creation of demand using the
power of the Internet, and satisfies this demand in new and innovative ways. The Internet is an
interactive medium. It allows for the exchange of currency, but more than that, it allows for the
exchange of value. A business on the Internet can gain value in the form of time, attention and
advocacy from the consumer. For the user, value can be added in the form of entertainment,
enlightenment and utility; content marketing is one powerful way to create value. The reciprocity of
the transaction is what's important here – in other words, the exchange is a two-way street that
provides benefit to both parties simultaneously. The Internet has changed the world in which we sell.
It is not a new marketing channel; instead, it creates a new paradigm for the way in which
consumers connect with brands and with each other. The complete scope of marketing is practised
on the Internet – products and services are positioned and promoted, purchased, distributed and
serviced. The web provides consumers with more choice, more influence and more power. Brands
have new ways of selling, new products and services to sell, and new markets to which they can sell.
The roles played by marketing agencies are shifting too. So-called 'traditional' agencies are getting
better at digital marketing, while agencies that started out as digital shops are starting to play in the
traditional advertising space. More than ever, integrated strategies that speak to an overall brand
identity are vital to achieving an organisation's goals. Consumers are increasingly more fluent in
their movement across channels and in their use of multiple of channels at once. They expect the
same from the brands with which they connect. Anyone still thinking in the old 'traditional versus
digital' dichotomy is sorely out of date. However, marketing on the Internet does not mean throwing
out the rule book on marketing and business principles. Instead, the Internet provides a new
environment in which to build on these. Profit is still revenue less cost. The Internet does not change
that. Brands build loyalty among users who love their products or services. Users fall in love with
products and services when their experience is tailored to their needs, and not the needs of the brand.
More than any other type of marketing, digital marketing is measurable. This gives brands the
opportunity to build tailored, optimised brand experiences for consumers.

Digital
What is digital? Bud Caddell defines 'digital' as “a participatory layer of all media that allows users
to self-select their own experiences, and affords marketers the ability to bridge media, gain
feedback, iterate their message, and collect relationships” In other words, digital is a new way of
exploring content (for users) and connecting with customers (for marketers).
Digital is not just a set of marketing channels – it's a different way of thinking about how people
engage with media, each other and the world around them. Digital enables you to segment your
audience and customise messages in a valuable and measurable way. The availability of information,
our inherent desire to contribute, and user-friendly technology have rewritten the rules of
engagement. People are not passive consumers; they are empowered as publishers, editors and
commentators. The conversation is multi-directional and usually not started or controlled by brands.

Understanding marketing
Before we can delve into digital marketing, it's important to understand the fundamentals that
underpin marketing itself. After all, digital marketing has the same purpose, intentions and
objectives. Dr Philip Kotler defines marketing as follows, “Marketing is that function of the
organization that can keep in constant touch with the organisation's consumers, read their needs,
develop products that meet these needs, and build a programme of communications to express the
organization's purposes”. (Kotler and Levy, 1969: p 15).

Understanding digital marketing

How does digital marketing fit into this definition? There is, in fact, no basic difference between
'traditional' marketing and digital marketing. They are one and the same. Ultimately, the aim of any
type of marketing is to keep customers and stimulate sales in the future. Digital communication
tools make it possible to connect and build long-term relationships with customers. Digital
marketing helps to create consumer demand by using the power of the interconnected, interactive
web. It enables the exchange of currency but, more than that, it enables the exchange of attention for
value. This is referred to as the attention economy. Digital marketing is powerful in two fundamental
ways. First, the audience can be segmented very precisely – even down to factors like current
location and recent brand interactions – which means that messages can (and must) be personalised
and tailored specially for them. Second, the digital sphere is almost completely measurable – every
minute and every click by a customer can be accounted for. In digital you can see exactly how
various campaigns are performing, which channels bring the most benefit, and where your efforts
are best focused.
Digital audiences
Both the media landscape and people's media habits have changed. There are many fragmented and
highly specific niche communities at play across multiple digital media channels. At the same time,
people's attention is fragmented by the many new media channels and tools available – on top of
traditional media, we now have social networks, emails, web tools, mobile devices and more
splitting our attention. With so many choices and too little time, audiences have become very skilled
at ignoring marketing messages.

Understanding marketing strategy

1-Business and brand strategy
Before you can delve into marketing strategy, take a step back and consider the business and brand
with which you are working. The end-goal of any business is to make money, in one way or another.
Business strategy asks the questions: 'What is the business challenge we are facing that prevents us
from making more revenue?' or, 'What business objective should we strive for in order to increase
the money in the bank?' The brand is the vessel of value in this equation. The brand justifies why the
business matters, and what value its adds to people's lives. The value of the brand is measured in
terms of its equity – how aware are people of the brand? Does it hold positive associations and
perceived value? How loyal are people to the brand?

2- Marketing strategy
The purpose of a marketing strategy is to address a business or brand challenge or objective that has
been revealed. An effective strategy involves making a series of well-informed decisions about how
the brand, product or service should be promoted; the brand that attempts to be all things to all
people risks becoming unfocused or losing the clarity of its value proposition. For example, a new
airline would need to consider how it is going to add value to the category and differentiate itself
from competitors; whether their product is a domestic or international service; whether its target
market would be budget travellers or international and business travellers; and whether the channel
would be through primary airports or smaller, more cost-effective airports. Each of these choices
will result in a vastly different strategic direction. To make these decisions, a strategist must
understand the context in which the brand operates: what are the factors that affect the business?
This means conducting a situational analysis that looks at four pillars:

1. The environment
2. The business
3. The customers
4. The competitors
Understanding the environment
The environment is the overall context or 'outside world' in which the business functions. It can
involve anything from global economics (how well is the local currency performing these days?) to
developments in your industry. Every brand will have a specific environment that it needs to
consider, based on the type of product or service it produces. An analysis of the business and brand
environment will typically consider political, economic, social, technological, legal and
environmental (PESTLE) influences to identify a clear set of considerations or issues pertinent to
the marketing strategy.

Understanding the business

There are several marketing models that can be used to understand the business and brand you are
working with. Since it's essential for all marketing messages to encapsulate the brand's identity and
objectives, this is a very important step. A crucial consideration is the brand itself. What does it
stand for? What does it mean? What associations, ideas, emotions and benefits do people associate

with it? What makes it unique?

Understanding customers In order truly to understand your customers, you need to conduct market
research (discussed in much more detail in the next chapter). Try not to make assumptions about
why people like and transact with your brand – you may find their values and motives are quite
different from what you thought. Ongoing research will help you build a picture of what particular
benefit or feature your business provides to your customers, allowing you to capitalise on this in
your marketing content. One important area on which to focus here is the consumer journey – the
series of steps and decisions a customer takes before buying from your business (or not). Luckily,
online data analytics allow you to get a good picture of how people behave on your website before
converting to customers; other forms of market research will also help you establish this for your
offline channels.

Understanding competitors
Finally, it's important to know who else is marketing to your potential customers, what they offer,
and how you can challenge or learn from them. On the Internet, your competitors are not just those
who are aiming to earn your customers' money; they are also those who are capturing your
customers' attention. With more digital content being created in a day than most people could
consume in a year – for example, over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
(YouTube, 2013) – the scarcest resources these days are time, focus and attention. When considering
competition, it's also worthwhile looking at potential replacements for your product. The Internet is
disrupting and accelerating the pace of disintermediation in a number of industries, meaning that
people can now go directly to the business instead of transacting through a middleman (look at the
travel industry as an example). To stay ahead, you should be looking at potential disruptors of your
industry as well as the existing players.

Digital marketing strategy

Once you have a clear sense of what the business challenge or objective is, and you have defined
how your marketing strategy will work towards fulfilling it, you can start thinking about your digital
marketing strategy.
Consider that in the early days of TV, when the new medium was not as yet entirely understood,
there were separate 'TV planners' who created a 'TV strategy' for the brand. Over time, this was
incorporated into the overall marketing strategy (as it should be). The same is going to happen with
digital. Increasingly, digital thinking is being incorporated into marketing strategy from day one.
This section considers digital strategy separately in order to highlight some differences in approach,
but this should change in practice over time. Digital marketing strategy builds on and adapts the
principles of traditional marketing, using the opportunities and challenges offered by the digital
medium. A digital marketing strategy should be constantly iterating and evolving. Since the Internet
allows for near-instantaneous feedback and data gathering, digital marketers should constantly be
optimising and improving their online marketing efforts. User-centric thinking, which involves
placing the user at the core of all decisions, is vital when looking at building a successful digital
marketing strategy. The digital marketing strategist of today is offered not only a plethora of new
tactical possibilities, but also unprecedented ways of measuring the effectiveness of chosen
strategies and tactics. Digital also allows greater opportunities for interaction and consumer
engagement than were possible in the past, so it is important to consider the ways in which the brand
can create interactive experiences for consumers, not just broadcast messages. The fact that digital
marketing is highly empirical is one of its key strengths. Almost everything can be measured: from
behaviours, to actions and action paths, to results. This means that the digital marketing strategist
should start thinking with return on investment (ROI) in mind. Built into any strategy should be a
testing framework and the ability to remain flexible and dynamic in a medium that shifts and
changes as user behaviours do. If we defined strategy as 'a plan of action designed to achieve a
particular outcome', the desired outcome of a digital marketing strategy would be aligned with your
organisation's overall business and brand-building objectives or challenges. For example, if one of
the overall objectives were acquisition of new clients, a possible digital marketing objective might
be building brand awareness online.

The Four Ps
The Four Ps of marketing help you structure the components that make up a brand's offering,
differentiators and marketing. They have been fundamentally changed by the Internet and need to be
looked at in the context offered by digitally connected media and from the perspective of the
consumer. How your brand is positioned in the mind of your consumer will ultimately determine
your success.

1. Products (and services)

Products and services are what a company sells. The Internet enables business to sell a huge range
of products, from fast-moving consumer goods and digital products such as software, to services
such as consultancy. Online, the experience the user has in discovering and purchasing can be
considered part of the product the brand provides.

2. Price
The prevalence of search engines and of shopping comparison websites, such as
www.pricerunner.co.uk, www.pricecheck.co.za/ and www.nextag.com, makes it easy for customers
to compare product prices across a number of retailers; These stories then go on to build connections
between people, ideas, brands and products. Communities of people follow truly great brands
because they want to be part of their stories. Apple is a good example of a brand with a dedicated
tribal following.
People want their products; they want the world to know that they have an iPhone or a Macbook.
This kind of tribal following spells success for any brand. With price differentiation becoming a
challenge, especially for smaller players in the market, businesses need to consider differentiating on
value. Value is a combination of service, perceived benefits and price, where customers may be
willing to pay a higher price for a better experience, or if they feel they are getting something more
than just the product.

3. Placement (or distribution)

Product distribution and markets no longer have to be dictated by location. Simply by making their
products visible online (for example, on a website or Facebook page), brands can reach a global
market. The key is to reach and engage customers on the channels they are using – this is why
choosing your digital tactics is vital. You want to engage customers on their terms, not yours.
Technology such as APIs, SOAP services, RSS and XML allow information and services to be
distributed throughout the world. For example, the API for a hotel reservations database allows a
diverse range of websites to offer instant online bookings for hotels in the inventory.

4. Promotion
The Internet, as an information and entertainment medium, naturally lends itself to promoting
products. The online promotional mix is an extension of the offline, but with some significant
differences. For one, online promotion can be tracked, measured and targeted in a far more
sophisticated way. But promotion doesn't just mean advertising and talking at customers – on the
Internet, it's crucial to engage, collaborate and join conversations, too. Interacting with customers
helps build relationships, and the web makes this sort of communication easy. That's why a good
portion of this book is devoted to engagement tactics and tools.

5. A new P: People
In addition to the existing Four Ps, the Internet requires you to consider a new P: People. This
element speaks to examining the powerful human element that the digitally connected world
permits: personalisation, peer-to-peer sharing, communities, and consumer- centric organisations
that allow people to participate in the brand story.
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis
A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is an ideal way to understand
your business and your market.
SWOT analysis. Always have a purpose in mind when conducting a SWOT analysis. For example,
study the external threats to your business, and see how learning from these can help you overcome
internal weaknesses. This should tie back in to your business and marketing objectives – strengths
should be promoted, opportunities should be sought out, while threats and weaknesses should be
minimised as much as possible. A SWOT analysis is part of a situational analysis and identifies the
key issues that direct the marketing strategy.

Crafting a digital marketing strategy

Any activity with an end goal (whether it's winning a war, building a city or selling a product)
should have a blueprint in place for every person in the organisation to

1-Context
The first step in crafting a successful strategy is to examine the context of the organisation and the
various stakeholders. We've covered this under marketing strategy earlier in this chapter, but it bears
repeating: What is the context in which you are operating (PESTLE factors) and how is this likely
to change in the future? Who are you, why does your brand matter and what makes your brand
useful and valuable? Who are your customers, and what needs, wants and desires do they have?
Who are your competitors? These may extend beyond organisations that compete with you on the
basis of price and product and could also be competition in the form of abstracts such as time and
mindshare. Thorough market research will reveal the answers to these questions.

2. Value
exchange Once you have examined the market situation, the second step is an examination of your
value proposition or promise: in other words, what unique value your organisation can add to that
market. It is important to identify the supporting value-adds to the brand promise that are unique to
the digital landscape. What extras, beyond the basic product or service, do you offer to customers?
The Internet offers many channels for value creation. However, the definition of what is 'valuable'
depends largely on the target audience, so it is crucial to research your users and gather insights into
what they want and need. Content marketing is the process of conceptualising and creating this sort
of content – examples of value-based content include a DIY gardening video for a hardware brand, a
research paper for a business analyst, or a funny infographic for a marketing company.

3-Objectives
Objectives are essential to any marketing endeavour – without them, your strategy would have no
direction and no end goal or win conditions. It's important to be able to take a step back and ask,
'Why are we doing any of this?

What goal, purpose or outcome are we looking for?'

 What are you trying to achieve?

 How will you know if you are successful? Objectives need to be SMART:
 Specific – the objective must be clear and detailed, rather than vague and general.
 Measurable – the objective must be measurable so that you can gauge whether you are attaining
the desired outcome.
 Attainable – the objective must be something that is possible for your brand to achieve, based on
available resources.
 Realistic – the objective must also be sensible and based on data and trends; don't exaggerate or
overestimate what can be achieved.
 Time-bound – finally, the objective must be linked to a specific timeframe.

4. Tactics and evaluation

Many digital tools and tactics are available once you have defined your digital marketing objectives.
Each tactic has its strengths – for example, acquisition (gaining new customers) may best be driven
by search advertising, while email is one of the most effective tools for selling more products to
existing customers.

1-SEO
This is the practice of optimizing a website to rank higher on the search engine results pages for
relevant search terms. SEO involves creating relevant, fresh and user-friendly content that search
engines index and serve when people enter a search term that is relevant to your product or service.
SEO has a key role to play in acquisition, as it ensures your organisation's offering will appear in
the search results, allowing you to reach potential customers. A site that is optimised for search
engines is also a site that is clear, relevant and well designed. These elements ensure a great user
experience, meaning that SEO also plays a role in retention.

2- Search advertising (PPC)

In pay-per-click or search advertising, the advertiser pays only when someone clicks on their ad,
ad. The ads appear on search engine results pages.
The beauty of search advertising is that it is keyword based. This means an ad will come up in
response to the search terms entered by the consumer. It therefore plays a role in sales, acquisition
and retention. It allows the advertiser to reach people who are already in the buying cycle or are
expressing interest in what they have to offer.
• Text Add
• Display Advertising on External Sites
• Ads in Mobile Apps
• Video Ads in YouTube
• PLA(Product listing adds)
• Remarketing Strategies

3-Social media
Social media, also known as consumer-generated media, is media (in the form of text, visuals and
audio) created to be shared. It has changed the face of marketing by allowing collaboration and
connection in a way that no other channel has been able to offer.
From a strategic perspective, social media is useful for brand building, raising awareness of the
brand story and allowing the consumer to become involved in the story through collaboration. Social
media platforms also play a role in building awareness, due to their shareable, viral nature. They can
also provide crowdsourced feedback and allow brands to share valuable content directly with their
fans.
“Generating the visitors and increasing the brand awareness using Social Networks.”

Facebook Pinterest

Google + Youtube

Twitter Linkedin

4- Online advertising
Online advertising covers advertising in all areas of the Internet – ads in emails, ads on social
networks and mobile devices, and display ads on normal websites.
The main objective of display advertising is to raise brand awareness online. It can also be more
interactive and therefore less disruptive than traditional or static online advertising, as users can
choose to engage with the ad or not. Online advertising can be targeted to physical locations, subject
areas, past user behaviours, and much more.

5-Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a system of reward whereby referrers are given a 'finder's fee' for every
referral they give.
Online affiliate marketing is widely used to promote eCommerce websites, with the referrers being
rewarded for every visitor, subscriber or customer provided through their efforts. It is a useful tactic
for brand building and acquisition.

6-Video marketing
Video marketing involves creating video content. This can either be outright video advertising, or
can be valuable, useful, content marketing.
Since it is so interactive and engaging, video marketing is excellent for capturing and retaining
customer attention. Done correctly, it provides tangible value – in the form of information,
entertainment or inspiration – and boosts a brand's image in the eyes of the public.

7-Email marketing
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that delivers commercial and content-based messages
to an audience. It is extremely cost effective, highly targeted, customisable on a mass scale and
completely measurable – all of which make it one of the most powerful digital marketing tactics.
Email marketing is a tool for building relationships with potential and existing customers through
valuable content and promotional messages. It should maximise the retention and value of these
customers, ultimately leading to greater profitability for the organisation as a whole. A targeted,
segmented email database means that a brand can direct messages at certain sectors of their
customer base in order to achieve the best results.

8- Digital Analytics
Digital analytics is about analysis of the website reports to make decisions based on dataWe work
with Google Analytics for analyzing the website traffic.
Benefits of Digital Marketing

• Reach Large Audience

• Target the Right Audience
• Cost Effective
• High Return Over Investment
• Scale the Business very fast
 Career Opportunities

Digital Marketing Job Profiles

• Digital marketing fresher's salary will be between 10K to 25K+ based on communications
skills and education background.
• Common Job Profiles
 – SEO Professional
– Adwords Account Manager
– Social Media Specialist
– Digital Marketing Consultant
– Web Analytics Specialist
“The term 'digital marketing' was first used in the 1990s. In the 2000s and the 2010s, digital
marketing became more sophisticated as an effective way to create a relationship with the consumer
that has depth and relevance.The rapid evolution of digital media has created new opportunities and
avenues for advertising and marketing. Fueled by the proliferation of devices to access digital
media, this has led to the exponential growth
of digital advertising.
In 2012 and 2013 statistics showed digital marketing remained a growing field.

Why Digital Marketing Is Important

Digital media is so pervasive that consumers have access to information any time and any place they
want it. Gone are the days when the messages people got about your products or services came from
you and consisted of only what you wanted them to know. Digital media is an ever-growing source
of entertainment, news, shopping and social interaction, and consumers are now exposed not just to
what your company says about your brand, but what the media, friends, relatives, peers, etc., are
saying as well. And they are more likely to believe them than you. People want brands they can
trust, companies that know them, communications that are personalized and relevant, and offers
tailored to their needs and preferences.

Three Keys to Digital Marketing Success

So, what does it take to do digital marketing right? Here are three keys to digital marketing success:
1. Manage complex customer relationships across a variety of channels – both digital and
traditional.
2. Respond to and initiate dynamic customer interactions.
Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster.

Digital Marketing Planning Process

The main components of an digital marketing plan will typically include the following stages:
1. Identify your target audience
If you identify multiple targets, rank them in order of importance so that you can allocate resources
accordingly. Profile each target group and understand their requirements and expectations so that
you can pitch your costs and benefits at the correct level.
2. Set your objectives
Possible objectives could include awareness raising (of your business or disseminating information
about your products or services), entering new markets, launching a new product, focusing on sales
(building internet sales of a product or increasing the frequency of sales from regular customers), or
internal efficiency (decreasing marketing costs, reducing order-taking and fulfilment costs, or
improving customer retention rates).

3. Decide upon the marketing mix

You should choose a mix of digital marketing activities that will help you achieve your objectives
and fit with any existing traditional marketing activities you already have planned. For an outline of
the range of digital marketing options, see our guide on how to generate business from your digital
marketing plan.
4. Agree a budget
Careful budgeting allows you to prevent costs spiralling out of control. By identifying the returns
you expect to make from your investment in digital marketing activities you can compare these with
the costs in order to develop a cost/benefit analysis.
5. Action planning
Iidentify the tactics for implementing the selected digital marketing activities. The plan should also
cover other non-internet marketing activities that are being undertaken.
6. Measure your success
Build in feedback mechanisms and regular reviews to enable you to assess the success of your
digital marketing activities, particularly as e-commerce is such a dynamic and fast-changing area.

Website Creation
Understanding about Internet , websites , domain , web server , web hosting etc.

Internet
The Internet is a large group of computers that are connected to each other. The Internet is used to
send information quickly between computers around the world. It has millions of smaller domestic,
academic, business, and government networks and websites, which together carry many different
kinds of information (facts and details) and services. So in other words, the Internet is a network of
networks.

Websites
A website, also written as web site, or simply site, is a set of related web pages typically served from
a single web domain. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such
as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet address known as a uniform
resource locator (URL). All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide
Web.

Domain
A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy,
authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures
of the Domain Name System (DNS). Any name registered in the DNS is a domain name.Domain
names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing
purposes. In general, a domain name represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a
personal computer used to access the Internet, a server computer hosting a web site, or the web site
itself or any other service communicated via the Internet. In 2014, the number of active domains
reached 271 million.

Web servers
Web servers are computers that deliver (serves up) Web pages. Every Web server has an IP address
and possibly a domain name. For example, if you enter the URL
http://www.ducatindia.com/index.html in your browser, this sends a request to the Web server whose
domain name is ducatindia.com.

Web hosting
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations
to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide
space on a server owned or leased for use by clients, as well as providing Internet connectivity,
typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the
Internet for other servers located in their data center, called colocation, also known as Housing in
Latin America or France.

Web Hosting is the service providing space on the Internet for websites.

Planning of a website

5 Keys to a Great Website

When it comes to website planning there are at least five key items to consider when coming up
with your website blueprint. If you make sure to take time to think through these five things your
chances for creating a successful website increase exponentially.
1. Determine the goals for your website. What are you trying to accomplish?
2. Pinpoint your target audience and try to understand what their interests are. How can you
provide them with the valuable information they are looking for?
3. What will your call-to-action be? Determine what you want your website visitors to do once
they land on your site.
4. Figure out how you will get your readers to easily navigate through your site in order for
them to complete your call-to-action
5. Create a list of keywords that you will use throughout your site in order to move your web
pages up the ranks of search engines like Google, Bing, etc.
Determining Your Goals for Your Website
Anytime you undertake a project of this magnitude it's critical that you set goals prior to anything
else. Without setting goals before building a website you are unable to determine what you're
looking to accomplish.
Identifying the Target Audience for Your Website
Who are you building your website for? What are their preferences for reviewing information? Do
they like to read content? Would they rather watch videos? How do they like to receive content? Via
a RSS feed? Via email? These are the types of audience-related questions that you need to ask
before you can determine what shape your website will take. It's important that you understand your
audience, this way you can make sure you can tailor your site to jive with their preferences. Doing
this will push your website to the top of their list of sites to visit when they want information on
your topic. It will keep your target audience coming back to your site, as well as, entice them to
share it with their friends. That's what it's all about, right?!
Developing a Call-to-Action for Your Website
The most successful sites have a prominent call-to-action within their pages. If you don't ask your
audience to take action, how can you expect them to do what you want them to do. Without a call-
to-action you cannot expect to accomplish your goals. If one of your goals for your site is to get an
e-book in the hands of your website visitors then one of your calls-to-action must be “download our
e-book”. If one of your goals is to grow your website traffic then perhaps another call-to-action is
“share this page with a friend”. You cannot expect that your website visitors will know what you
want them to do if you don't ask. Be sure to include one or a few calls-to-action within the pages of
your website. Having clear CTAs will help you accomplish your goals for your website.
The Importance of Website Navigation
Too many sites are created without thinking through their navigation. Far too often you land on a
web page and have no clue how to get access to the information you're looking for. Why do so many
people love Apple products? It's because they are intuitive. Users can look at an Apple product for
the first time and quickly understand how to use the product. If you take time to think through your
navigation before putting your website together you will find that your website visitors will navigate
to the pages you want them too. Let's go back to the e-book example. If your call-to-action is
“download our e-book” you need to make sure that you make it very apparent how visitors can find
the e-book and download it. Be sure that you don't include too many different pathways all leading
to the same page. This can confuse people. Usually a top, left, or right navigation bar for your main
pages is sufficient. You can then interlink pages within the content of your site. If you want visitors
to go from your blog to your 'Services' page, then be sure to use the content within that blog post to
link it to your 'Services' page. When choosing the words to hyperlink to your 'Services' page, it
would be smart to use the keywords from your keyword list.

Create a Keyword List for Your Website

Search Engine Optimization is critical in attracting quality website traffic. I say quality website
traffic because who cares if you have 10,000 visitors to your site per month if none of them
follow your call-to-action. You are creating a website to accomplish specific goals. You can only
accomplish those goals if you attract the right kind of traffic (ie. your target audience). In order to
attract quality traffic to your site, it's important to put together a keyword list.

HTML Basic
All HTML documents must start with a type declaration: <!DOCTYPE html>.
The HTML document itself begins with <html> and ends with </html>.
The visible part of the HTML document is between <body> and </body>.
Example
<!DOCTYPEhtml>
<html>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>

HTML Headings
HTML headings are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags:

HTML Paragraphs
HTML paragraphs are defined with the <p> tag:

HTML Links
HTML links are defined with the <a> tag:

Example
<a href="http://www.ducatindia.com">This is a link</a>

HTML Images
HTML images are defined with the <img> tag.
The source file (src), alternative text (alt), and size (width and height) are provided as attributes:
Example
<img src="Ducatlogo.jpg" alt="Ducat" width="104" height="142">
For more-http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_basic.asp
About CMS and creating website in Wordpress
WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it's
probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS)
in existence today.

Step one

Choosing your website platform - WordPress

Choose a website building platform

Building a fully working and eye-catchy website isn't that difficult – even for a beginner who isn't
very computer savvy. But things can go extremely wrong when you don't choose the right website
building platform. A lot of people think that creating a website from scratch is difficult and requires
high level of coding and design skills, but that's not true.
Before I help you to choose the right platform for your website, I want you to let you know that
there are tons of different ways to build a website. Back in 2004, most of the sites were built with
HTML, CSS or even FLASH.
In 2015, things have changed a lot to say the least. CMS (Content Management Systems) have
started to dominate the whole web development industry. See the graph below.

Image and data credit: OpenSourceCMS.com

As you can see, nearly half of the websites on the internet are running on WordPress website
platform. The reason is quite simple, actually:
1. No need to know HTML or any other web coding languages.
2. WordPress itself is FREE and it has tons of different free themes/layouts to choose from.
3. You can create access to multiple users who can publish content to your website.
4. You can add content, images and videos just by logging into your WordPress dashboard.
5. Your website will look professional, it'll work on mobiles and tablets as well.

Step two
Finding a web host and a domain name
Before I move on and give you the step-by-step instructions for setting up a web page with
WordPress, I have to let you know that it will cost you some money. WordPress itself is FREE, but a
personal domain name (YourSiteName.com) and hosting (service that connects your site to the
internet) will cost you approximately $3-$4 per month. If you don't get hosting nor domain name,
your site address will look unprofessional. Some examples: I've mostly used
If you already have a domain and hosting, feel free to skip this step and move onto Step 2, where I'll
going to explain you how to set up a website.

Step three
Setting up your WordPress website
First, you need to install WordPress to your domain. Almost all reliable and well-established hosting
companies have integrated 1-click-installation for WordPress. Simply browse around on your
hosting cPanel until you find the way to install WordPress. I've listed two possible ways to install
WordPress to your domain.
Install WordPress with “One-Click-Installation”
1. Log in to your hosting account.
2. Go to your control panel.
3. Look for the “WordPress” icon.
4. Choose the domain where you want to install your website.
5. Click the “Install Now” button and you should get access to your NEW WordPress website.
If you don't have the possibility to install WordPress automatically, look this manual guide below:
Choose the right theme/layout for your website
Once you have successfully installed WordPress to your domain, you'll see a very basic yet clean
site:

1) Log into your WordPress dashboard to change themes and start building and tweaking your site –
you can log in from http://yoursite.com/wp-admin
This is your WordPress dashboard:
Looks pretty awesome, doesn't it?
2) Now you need to start looking for a proper theme – make sure it fits with the overall topic of your
new website. You can find over 1500 free themes via the WordPress Dashboard (Appearance ->
Themes). If you want something more professional or elegant, head over to
However, at first I suggest you to try the free themes because some of them are actually really
professional and well made.

As you can see above, installing a new theme (outlook) for your website is very easy. All you need
to do is search for specific keywords and/or use filters.
Once you have found a theme you like, click “Install” followed by “Activate”:
Finding the perfect theme can take a while, but it's worth it. If you don't find anything good right
away, you can always return and search further later on. Changing themes won't delete your
previous posts, pages and content. In other words, you can change it as often as you want.
P.S: If you want a theme that works well on mobile phones, search for the keyword “responsive”.
Add content and create new pages
Once you have installed a theme you like, you can start creating content. Adding new pages in
WordPress is again very easy, but I'll cover the basics for you.
Pages: In order to create new pages such as “About Me”, “Resources” etc (like I have on the menu),
you need to head over to the WordPress dashboard and look for “Pages” -> “Add New”.
If you want those pages to appear on the menu as well, you need to go to “Appearance -> Menus”
and add them to the list.

Posts: If you want to add a blog to your website, you can use different categories and posts. Let's say
you want to create a category named “blog”. To do so, simply add it to your menu and start making
posts. Here's what you need to do:
a) Create a new category by going to “Posts -> Categories”
b) Create a blog post by going to “Posts -> Add New”. Once you blog post is ready, you need to add
the right category for it.
c) Add a new category to the menu
Tweak your website (Widgets, comments & just some “stuff” you need to know)
In this section I'll cover some of the basics things that will help you to tweak your website.
Changing website title and tagline: You probably noticed, that my website has a title: “How to Make
a Website” and a tagline: “… Step by Step tutorial“.
In order to change the title and tagline on your website, go to “Settings -> General” and simply fill
in the form.

Disabling comments for Posts & Pages: Some websites (business/organisation sites mostly) don't
need any comments from visitors.
While you are writing a new page, click “Screen Options” (top right) and then tick “Discussion”.
The “Allow Comments” box will appear at the bottom and all you need to do is untick “Allow
Comments”.
In case you want to turn off comments on every new page by default, go to “Settings -> Discussion”
and untick those options:

Static front-page: If you want your site to have a static front page, go to “Settings -> Reading” and
pick a static page for your website. If you don't do this, WordPress will take your latest posts and
start showing them on your homepage.
Editing the sidebar: Most WordPress themes have a sidebar on the right side (in some cases it's on
the left). By default you'll see something like this:
If you want to delete the categories, meta and archives (which are pointless in most cases) go to
“Appearance -> Widgets”. From there you can use drag n' drop to add different “boxes” to your
sidebar.
There's also a “HTML box” which is basically a text box where you can use HTML code.
Install plugins to get the most out of your website
WordPress gives you the opportunity to install different plugins that all add value and make your
website more “personal” and unique.
To start installing plugins, go to “Plugins -> Add New” and simply start searching. Keep in mind
that there are over 25,000 different FREE plugins .
Contact form 7: My website has a contact form on my About Me page. It's great, as people can
simply fill in the form and send me an email without logging into their email provider. If you want
the same, install Contact Form 7.
Facebook box: A lot of websites have Facebook plugins on their sidebar. A Facebook Box helps you
drive more traffic and likes to your Facebook fanpage (if you have one).
Forum: Interested in starting a forum on your site? Look for the plugin named “bbPress” and follow
their tutorials.

SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web
page in a search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural," "organic," or "earned"
results.

SEARCH ENGINES
A search engine is a web-based tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web.
Popular examples of search engines are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search.
Search engines utilize automated software applications (referred to as robots, bots, or spiders) that
travel along the Web, following links from page to page, site to site. The information gathered by the
spiders is used to create a searchable index of the Web.
A web search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World
Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results often referred to as search
engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of web pages, images, and other types
of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web
directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time
information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.

How web search engines work

A search engine operates in the following order:

1-Web crawling
2- Indexing
3-Searching

Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from
the HTML markup of the pages. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known
as a spider) — an automated Web crawler which follows every link on the site. The site owner can
exclude specific pages by using robots.txt.

The search engine then analyzes the contents of each page to determine how it should be indexed
(for example, words can be extracted from the titles, page content, headings, or special fields called
meta tags). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. A query
from a user can be a single word. The index helps find information relating to the query as quickly
as possible. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as
a cache) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, such as AltaVista, store every
word of every page they find.[citation needed] This cached page always holds the actual search text
since it is the one that was actually indexed, so it can be very useful when the content of the current
page has been updated and the search terms are no longer in it.This problem might be considered a
mild form of linkrot, and Google's handling of it increases usability by satisfying user expectations
that the search terms will be on the returned webpage. This satisfies the principle of least
astonishment, since the user normally expects that the search terms will be on the returned pages.
Increased search relevance makes these cached pages very useful as they may contain data that may
no longer be available elsewhere.[citation needed]
High-level architecture of a standard Web crawler

When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using keywords), the engine examines
its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a
short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. The index is built
from the information stored with the data and the method by which the information is indexed. From
2007 the Google.com search engine has allowed one to search by date by clicking "Show search
tools" in the leftmost column of the initial search results page, and then selecting the desired date
range.Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further
specify the search query. Boolean operators are for literal searches that allow the user to refine and
extend the terms of the search. The engine looks for the words or phrases exactly as entered. Some
search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search, which allows users to define
the distance between

keywords.There is also concept-based searching where the research involves using statistical
analysis on pages containing the words or phrases you search for. As well, natural language queries
allow the user to type a question in the same form one would ask it to a human. A site like this
would be ask.com.[citation needed]
The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back. While
there may be millions of web pages that include a particular word or phrase, some pages may be
more relevant, popular, or authoritative than others. Most search engines employ methods to rank
the results to provide the "best" results first. How a search engine decides which pages are the best
matches, and what order the results should be shown in, varies widely from one engine to
another.The methods also change over time as Internet usage changes and new techniques evolve.
There are two main types of search engine that have evolved: one is a system of predefined and
hierarchically ordered keywords that humans have programmed extensively. The other is a system
that generates an "inverted index" by analyzing texts it locates. This first form relies much more
heavily on the computer itself to do the bulk of the work.

Most Web search engines are commercial ventures supported by advertising revenue and thus some
of them allow advertisers to have their listings ranked higher in search results for a fee. Search
engines that do not accept money for their search results make money by running search related ads
alongside the regular search engine results. The search engines make money every time someone
clicks on one of these ads.

Difference between a search engine and a directory

A search engine, such as Yahoo or Google, is an online tool that helps users of the Internet find the
sites and information they're looking for. Most search engines use automated programs (sometimes
called spiders) to look for relevant information based on keywords entered by the user.
A search directory, such as Yahoo Pages, is a catalog of websites organized by category to allow
users to easily browse for the information they need. Unlike search engines, which locate and
display relevant information based on a formula or algorithm using an automated software program,
search directories are organized by real people who discover new sites and relevant information by
exploring the Internet themselves and by reviewing submitted sites.
Both search engines and directories can help drive customers to your website. Neither guarantees
that your site will be included in their listings.

What is site Popularity?

Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. Since the mid-1990s,
web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of
visitors and the number of pages they visit.

On-page optimization
In search engine optimization, on-page optimization refers to factors that have an effect on your
Web site or Web page listing in natural search results. These factors are controlled by you or by
coding on your page. Examples of on-page optimization include actual HTML code, meta tags,
keyword placement and keyword density.
Initial Site Analysis
Site analysis is an inventory completed as a preparatory step to site planning, a form of urban
planning which involves research, analysis, and synthesis. It primarily deals with basic data as it
relates to a specific site. The topic itself branches into the boundaries of architecture, landscape
architecture, real estate development, economics, and urban planning.
https://www.woorank.com/

Domain Name Importance in Ranking

Ranking today is a result of so many signals fed into the system the words used in a domain send
less and less information into the stack as a percentage of overall decision making signals. This is
great from our view (the engine) as it results in better results showing at the top since no one signal
can be manipulated. From the searchers POV, it's better simply because those sites trying to abuse
their way to the top with a keyword rich domain and irrelevant or poor content cease to rank well.

12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords

When you first begin your domain name search, it helps to have 5 terms or phrases in mind
that best describe the domain you're seeking. Once you have this list, you can start to pair
them or add prefixes & suffixes to create good domain ideas. For example, if you're
launching a mortgage related domain, you might start with words like "mortage, finance,
home equity, interest rate, house payment" then play around until you can find a good match.
2. Make the Domain Unique
Having your website confused with a popular site already owned by someone else is a recipe
for disaster. Thus, I never choose domains that are simply the plural, hyphenated or
misspelled version of an already established domain. I still believe that Flickr desperately
needs to buy Flicker.com - I hear kids in their 20's tell parents in their 40's and 50's to see
photos on Flickr and always envision that traffic going straight to the wrong domain.
3. Make it Easy to Type
If a domain name requires considerable attention to type correctly, due to spelling, length or
the use of un-memorable words or sounds, you've lost a good portion of your branding and
marketing value. I've even heard usability folks toute the value of having the letters include
easy-to-type letters (which I interpret as avoiding "q," "z," "x," "c," and "p").
4. Make it Easy to Remember
Remember that word-of-mouth and SERPs dominance marketing (where your domain
consistently comes up for industry-related searches) both rely on the ease with which the
domain can be called to mind. You don't want to be the company with the terrific website
that no one can ever remember to tell their friends about because they can't remember the
domain name.
 1. Keep the Name as Short as Possible
Short names are easy to type and easy to remember (the previous two rules). They also allow
for more characters in the URL in the SERPs and a better fit on business cards and other
offline media.
2. Create and Fulfill Expectations
When someone hears about your domain name for the first time, they should be able to
instantly and accurately guess at the type of content that might be found there. That's why I
love domain names like Hotmail.com, CareerBuilder.com, AutoTrader.com and
WebMD.com. Domains like Monster.com, Amazon.com and Zillow.com (whom I usually
praise) required far more branding because of their un-intuitive names.
3. Avoid Copyright Infringement
This is a mistake that isn't made too often, but can kill a great domain and a great company
when it does. To be sure you're not infringing on anyone's copyright with your site's name,
visit copyright.gov and search before you buy.
4. Set Yourself Apart with a Brand
Using a unique moniker is a great way to build additional value with your domain name. A
"brand" is more than just a combination of words, which is why names like
mortgageforyourhome.com or shoesandboots.com aren't as compelling as branded names
like bankrate.com or lendingtree.com. SEOmoz itself is a good example - "SEO" does a
good job of explaining the industry we're in and creating expectations, while "moz" gives a
web association, and an association with being free, open, and community-driven.
5. Reject Hyphens and Numbers
Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down
on being easy to remember or type. I'd suggest not using spelled-out or roman numerals in
domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other.
6. Don't Follow the Latest Trends
Website names that rely on odd mis-spellings (like many Web 2.0 style sites), multiple
hyphens (like the SEO-optimized domains of the early 2000's), or uninspiring short
adjectives (like "top...x," "best...x," "hot...x") aren't always the best choice. This isn't a hard
and fast rule, but in the world of naming conventions in general, if everyone else is doing it,
that doesn't mean it's a surefire strategy. Just look at all the people who named their
businesses "AAA... x" over the last 50 years to be first in the phone book; how many Fortune
2000's are named "AAA company?"

The importance of web site structure for an SEO optimized site

The structure of your web site, blog or ecommerce store is very important both in terms of SEO but
also for a great user experience. It should be user friendly, easy to navigate, fast and serve its
purpose: attract new customers, get more email subscribers, make a sale, get revenue from
advertising or just present the information in the best possible way.
The home page
The home page is probably the most important page of your blog, web site or online store. This is
the place to show off your best content, promote your brand and establish the unique identity of your
site. While the design of a home page (colors, images, theme and template) depends on the type of
web site and preferences of the blog owner or designer, some elements are essential and these are
explained below.
Logo and favicon – Your web site or blog should have a clearly designed logo to distinguish your
brand from the competition. If you cannot create your own logo it's worth investing a few bucks to
hire a designer to do for you. Odesk.com is a great place to find logo designers for reasonable prices.
Along with the logo you can also create a favorite icon to give your web site a more professional
perspective.
Show off your best content – This very important for SEO and it is advice suggested many times by
Google. Select 3-4 posts or pages of your web site that you want to promote and link to them from
your home page. These should be the pages/posts that you want to perform better in search. You
don't have to place them in the center or the page (as shown above) but make sure that these are
linked from your home page.
What's your site's primary purpose? – What do you want to achieve from your web site? If you are
running a blog (especially if it's a new blog), your primary purpose may be to get new subscribers to
your newsletter and more fans to your Facebook page. Depending on your design the actual position
may differ but your site's primary purpose should be visible from the home page. If you are selling a
book or product this should also be made available above the fold. Study the screenshot above and
also have a look at the home page of this web site.
My recommendation for new web sites is to concentrate first on building your subscriber list,
Facebook fan page, Google+ followers and anything else that can improve the credibility and
authority of your web site.
Main Menu – Either above the logo or below the logo, your web site should have a clearly defined
main menu. Include in your main menu links to your important categories and pages

Static VS Dynamic Home page

Many web site owners wonder whether to use static or dynamic Home pages. My recommendation
is to use a hybrid home page with both static and dynamic areas.
The static part can include your best content, products or services you are selling or that unique
characteristic that distinguishes your web site from the rest.
The dynamic part can include your latest blog posts, latest tweets or FB Page updates.
Updating your home page on a regular basic is an incentive for users to come back and see what's
new and it is also beneficial in terms of SEO to link your latest posts from the most important page
of your site.

Essential pages for a high quality site

About Page- A well designed about page improves the credibility and trustworthiness of a web site.
Typical items to include in an ABOUT page:
Contact Page – Email and or physical address, phone to contact the webmaster.
Privacy Policy – What is your policy regarding cookies and use of personal information. How do
you ensure the privacy of the data you collect from users?
Disclaimer – Especially important if you are running a health related web site or blog that provides
advice that if followed by a reader can create any sort of problems.

Navigation and URL Structure

In terms of web site structure, the URL format is related to the overall navigation experience of the
user and this is what I will cover below.
Navigation: The navigation structure of a web site should help the novice user find information in a
fast and easy way without guessing.
 Group related information together (products, articles, services) into categories and sub-
categories (if too many).
 Provide a way for users to access the categories from your home page and main web site
menu.
 Preferably plan your navigation structure before building the website so you know in
advance where each page should reside.
 Make sure that you have a breadcrumb in all your internal pages so that the user can go step-
by-step backwards.
 Assist the user in finding what they want by proving related content. For example if you
have an online shop show 'Related products' when a user is viewing a product (see what ebay
and amazon show when you display a product). If you have a content driven web site,
provide 'Related articles' at the bottom of each article (see screenshot below)
URL structure: The format of your permanent link structures (i.e. the URL of each page of your
web site), should help the users (and search engines) understand what the page is about. It is
therefore important to:
 Avoid very long URLs
 Avoid keyword stuffed links
 Use '-'(hyphens) to separate keywords in the URLS. For example: www.domain.com/this-is-
a-good-url
 Make sure that when you remove part of the URL the link does not lead to a non-valid page.
For example if a URL is: http://www.domain.com/products/games/call-of-duty and the user
removes the last part, the new URL http://www.domain.com/products/games/ should display
a list of games and not a 'not found page'.
 Make sure that you have a custom 404 page to handle cases where users enter or mistype
urls.
Keyword: What Are SEO Keywords?
“A keyword is generally a word or phrase that is a topic of significance. Searchers use keywords as a
way to identify and verbalize their problem or topic in which they're looking for more information.”
Your SEO keywords are the key words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for
people to find your site via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines
"speaks the same language" as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect
searchers to your site. Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO basics.

Types of Keywords
Broad Match Keywords: Broad match lets a keyword trigger your ad to show whenever someone
searches for that phrase, similar phrases, singular or plural forms, misspellings, synonyms,
stemmings (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations.
Long Tail Keywords: Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very,
very specific to whatever you are selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific
search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research' is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and
research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. Search
engine optimization professionals research keywords in order to achieve better rankings in search
engines.

Keyword research tools

Google AdWords Keyword planner
Google offers free tools to do some basic keyword analysis. All the results are relevant only for
Google search engines. Features of AdWords Keyword planner:
Get traffic estimates for the keyword.
Generate new keywords by combining different keyword lists.
Create new keyword variations based on initial keyword.
Limitations of AdWords Keyword planner:
Hides long tail keywords data as the tool is made for Adwords and not for SEO purposes.
Keywords generated by the tool may not produce good results as the tool is targeted towards
advertisers and not SEO.Many people get keyword data from AdWords. But there's other sources of
keywords and search volume. We're going to walk through a few of them now!

Bing
The newer Bing keyword research tool, although still in development, is a good place to check.
Sign in (or create an account)
Start with the basic settings. Bing's keyword tool is a little different than Google's. If set to 30 days,
it give you the exact amount of search from those 30 days.

You can export the data

Use the benefit of exact search numbers to judge long tail:

You can bring in Google AdWords data for a comparison of search volume metrics:
Now, let's get a little more refined. Set the language to English (assuming that's your target
language) — and expand the date range to 6 months. This is going to give you a large data set to
make good decisions:

Set to "strict mode" for basically Bing's version of "exact match”

match"

Wordtracker and SEO Book's Keyword Research Tools

These versions are free. You can also register and pay for the pro versions.

Run the report in SEO Book to export CSV's

Use the overall daily estimates for measure potential traffic across the entire web:

http://smallseotools.com/

Optimize the Link Structure of your Pages

Optimize your Link Structure and improve your Indexing, PageRank Flow & Rankings.
The Link Structure is a great SEO tool that enables you to analyze & optimize the Link Structure of
your page, eliminate all the broken links and improve the PageRank Flow of your Website. The tool
has been updated in order to give you better results, additional statistics and a more accurate
analysis.

What is keyword planning

The Keyword Planner is a more focused version of the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic
Estimator tool, and the focus is on doing one thing only: to make it easier for advertisers to get through the
process of creating new ad groups and ad campaigns, which is the key to getting your PPC accounts
https://goodkeywords.com/webapp/
Title Optimization
<title>Keyword1,keywords2,………</title>
<title>IT Summer Training, Java, .Net, Php, Oracle, Sas, Training Institutes In Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad,
Gurgaon, Faridabad, Greater Noida, Jaipur.</title>
An HTML TITLE tag is put inside the head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading
for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and is also what is displayed
when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser Favorites.
This is the one place on a webpage where your keywords MUST be present. Correct use of
keywords in the title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google - particularly
for the homepage. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do this!

Here are some considerations while designing the title of a webpage:

 The title shouldn't consist of more than about 9 words or 60 characters.
 Use keywords at the very beginning of the title.
 Do not include your company name in the title unless your company name is very well
known.
Improper or nonexistent use of titles in webpages keeps more websites out of top rankings on
Google than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of
quality links from other websites that point to your site.

Best Practices for Creating Titles

Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:
 Each page should have a unique title.
 If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every title of every page.
 Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword Phrase, followed by your best
Secondary Keyword Phrases.
 Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on your specific product, service,
or content pages.
 If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the title.
 Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on what WordTracker says is
searched on more often.
 Do not overdo it - do not repeat your keywords more than 2 to 3 times in the title.
 Make sure the <title> tag is the first element in the <head> section of your page - this makes it
easier for Google to find the page.

Optimized Metatags:-
Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their
sites. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes
only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.
There are two important meta tags:
 Meta description tags
 Meta keyword tags

Some search engines may display the meta description as a part of the search results, but
the meta keyword tags should not appear in search results.
The general consensus among SEO experts is that metatags are dead. Even so, many of
these same experts continue to use metatags in their own sites.
For Google, adding the description meta tag does not result in a boost in the Search
Engine Results Pages (SERPs), but the description might be used for the description for
your SERP listings in Google.
Yahoo! says, they use the Keyword Meta Tag when it ranks a page. Hence it makes
sense to add one for Yahoo! and any other minor search engines that still use.

What Do the Metatags Look Like?

You can add the following in the head section of the web page:
<meta name="keywords" content="KEYWORD1 KEYWORD2 KEYPHRASE1 etc.
about 30 to 40 unique words">

<meta name="description" content="An accurate, keyword-rich description

about 160characters">
Meta Description Tag Tips
Important tips for good Meta description tags:
 Use keywords in your meta description tag.
 Try not to repeat the words overly often, but try to use multiple syntaxes of your key
words.
 There should not be more than 160 characters in a description metatag of a single
web page.
 Use a different meta description tag for each page, as each page is different and
stands a better chance of being found if you place a good title and description on it.

Meta Keywords Tag Tips

Use the following tips for preparing good meta keywords tags.
 Use synonyms.
 Use unique keywords.
 No need to repeat any given phrase.
 You can repeat a word any number of time, as long as each time it is part of a
different phrase.
Robots Meta Tag
The important metatag that you may need sometime is the Robots Metatag which looks
like this:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/>

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Using the above metatag, you can tell a spider or a robot that you do not want some of
your pages indexed, or that you do not want your links followed.

The most important meta tags

<title>relevant and attractive phrase </title>
The title is the first (usually clickable) phrase you see as a search result.
 Click here for more information >>

<metaname="description" content="text">
A description of your website in 3 of 4 sentences.
 Click here for more information >>

<metaname="keywords" content="text">
The keywords under which you wish your website to be found.
 Click here for more information >>
·

<metaname="robots" content="selection">
How far do you allow robots to spider through your website.
 Click here for more information >>

<metaname="revisit-after" content="periode">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="2days">
How often do you want the spiders to come back and index your website again.
 Click here for more information >>

Other less used and known Meta tags

<meta name="copyright" content="text"> - Click here for more information >>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp"> - Click here for more information >>
<meta name="language" content="english"> - Click here for more information >>
<meta name="reply-to" content="email address"> - Click here for more information >>
<meta name="web_author" content="text"> - Click here for more information >>
<meta http-equiv="name" content="value"> - Click here for more information >>
<metacharset='UTF-8'>
<metaname='keywords'content='your, tags'>
<metaname='description'content='150 words'>
<metaname='subject'content='your website'ssubject'>
<meta name='copyright' content='companyname'>
<meta name='language' content='ES'>
<meta name='robots' content='index,follow'>
<meta name='revised' content='Sunday, July18th, 2010, 5:15pm'>
<meta name='abstract' content=''>
<meta name='topic' content=''>
<meta name='summary' content=''>
<meta name='Classification' content='Business'>
<meta name='author' content='name, email@hotmail.com'>
<meta name='designer' content=''>
<meta name='reply-to' content='email@hotmail.com'>
<meta name='owner' content=''>
<meta name='url' content='http://www.websiteaddrress.com'>
<meta name='identifier-URL' content='http://www.websiteaddress.com'>
<meta name='directory' content='submission'>
<meta name='pagename' content='jQueryTools, TutorialsandResources - O'Reilly Media'>
<metaname='category'content=''>
<metaname='coverage'content='Worldwide'>
<metaname='distribution'content='Global'>
<metaname='rating'content='General'>
<metaname='revisit-after'content='7 days'>
<metaname='subtitle'content='This is my subtitle'>
<metaname='target'content='all'>
<metaname='HandheldFriendly'content='True'>
<metaname='MobileOptimized'content='320'>
<metaname='date'content='Sep. 27, 2010'>
<metaname='search_date'content='2010-09-27'>
<metaname='DC.title'content='Unstoppable Robot Ninja'>
<metaname='ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles'content=''>
<metaname='medium'content='blog'>
<metaname='syndication-source'content='https://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-
tools/'>
<metaname='original-source'content='https://mashable.com/2008/12/24/free-brand-monitoring-
tools/'>
<metaname='verify-v1'content='dV1r/ZJJdDEI++fKJ6iDEl6o+TMNtSu0kv18ONeqM0I='>
<metaname='y_key'content='1e39c508e0d87750'>
<metaname='pageKey'content='guest-home'>
<metaitemprop='name'content='jQTouch'>
<metahttp-equiv='Expires'content='0'>
<metahttp-equiv='Pragma'content='no-cache'>
<metahttp-equiv='Cache-Control'content='no-cache'>
<metahttp-equiv='imagetoolbar'content='no'>
<metahttp-equiv='x-dns-prefetch-control'content='off'>

Company/Service Meta Tags

Apple Meta Tags
<metaname="apple-mobile-web-app-title"content="My App"><!-- New in iOS6 -->
<metaname='apple-mobile-web-app-capable'content='yes'>
<metaname='apple-touch-fullscreen'content='yes'>
<metaname='apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style'content='black'>
<metaname='format-detection'content='telephone=no'>
<metaname='viewport'content='width=device-width; content='width = 320; initial-
scale=1.0;maximum-scale=1.0;user-scalable=yes;target-densitydpi=160dpi'>
<link href='/apple-touch-icon.png'rel='apple-touch-icon' type='image/png'>
<link href='touch-icon-ipad.png'rel='apple-touch-icon' sizes='72x72'>
<link href='touch-icon-iphone4.png'rel='apple-touch-icon' sizes='114x114'>
<link href='/startup.png'rel='apple-touch-startup-image'>

<link href='http://github.com/images/touch-icon-iphone4.png' sizes='114x114'rel='apple-touch-icon-

precomposed'>
<link href='http://github.com/images/touch-icon-ipad.png' sizes='72x72'rel='apple-touch-icon-
precomposed'>
<link href='http://github.com/images/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png' sizes='57x57'rel='apple-touch-
icon-precomposed'>

Internet Explorer Meta Tags

<metahttp-equiv='Page-Enter'content='RevealTrans(Duration=2.0,Transition=2)'>
<metahttp-equiv='Page-Exit'content='RevealTrans(Duration=3.0,Transition=12)'>
<metaname='mssmarttagspreventparsing'content='true'>
<metacontent="IE=edge,chrome=1"http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"/>
<metaname='msapplication-starturl'content='http://blog.reybango.com/about/'>
<metaname='msapplication-window'content='width=800;height=600'>
<metaname='msapplication-navbutton-color'content='red'>
<metaname='application-name'content='Rey Bango Front-end Developer'>
<metaname='msapplication-tooltip'content='Launch Rey Bango'sBlog'>
<meta name='msapplication-task' content='name=About;action-uri=/about/;icon-
uri=/images/about.ico'>
<meta name='msapplication-task' content='name=TheBigList;action-uri=/the-big-list-of-javascript-
css-and-html-development-tools-libraries-projects-and-books/;icon-uri=/images/list_links.ico'>
<meta name='msapplication-task' content='name=jQueryPosts;action-uri=/category/jquery/;icon-
uri=/images/jquery.ico'>
<meta name='msapplication-task' content='name=StartDeveloping;action-
uri=/category/javascript/;icon-uri=/images/script.ico'>
<meta name='msvalidate.01' content='6E3AD52DC176461A3C81DD6E98003BC9'>
<meta http-equiv='cleartype' content='on'>
Windows 8 Meta Tags
<metaname="application-name"content="Contoso" />
<metaname="msapplication-TileColor"content=" #009900" />
<metaname="msapplication-square70x70logo"content="images/smalltile.png" />
<metaname="msapplication-square150x150logo"content="images/mediumtile.png" />
<metaname="msapplication-wide310x150logo"content="images/widetile.png" />
<metaname="msapplication-square310x310logo"content="images/largetile.png" />
<metaname="msapplication-notification"content="frequency=30; polling-
uri=notifications/contoso1.xml;
polling-uri2=notifications/contoso2.xml; polling-uri3=notifications/contoso3.xml" />

Blog Catalog Meta Tags

<metaname='blogcatalog'>

Rails Meta Tags

<metaname='csrf-param'content='authenticity_token'>
<metaname='csrf-token'content='/bZVwvomkAnwAI1Qd37lFeewvpOIiackk9121fFwWwc='>

HTML Link Tags

<linkrel='alternate'type='application/rss+xml'title='RSS'href='http://feeds.feedburner.com/martini'>
<linkrel='alternate'type='application/atom+xml'title='Atom
0.3'href='https://example.com/feed.atom'>
<linkrel='shortcut icon'type='image/ico'href='/favicon.ico'>
<linkrel='fluid-icon'type='image/png'href='/fluid-icon.png'>
<linkrel='me'type='text/html'href='http://google.com/profiles/thenextweb'>
<linkrel='shortlink'href='http://blog.unto.net/?p=353'>
<linkrel='archives'title='May 2003'href='http://blog.unto.net/2003/05/'>
<linkrel='index'title='DeWitt Clinton'href='http://blog.unto.net/'>
<linkrel='start'title='Pattern Recognition
1'href='http://blog.unto.net/photos/pattern_recognition_1_about/'>
<linkrel='bookmark'title='Styleguide'href='http://paulrobertlloyd.com/about/styleguide/'>
<linkrel='search'href='/search.xml'type='application/opensearchdescription+xml'title='Viatropos'>

<linkrel='self'type='application/atom+xml'href='http://www.syfyportal.com/atomFeed.php?page=3'>
<linkrel='first'href='http://www.syfyportal.com/atomFeed.php'>
<linkrel='next'href='http://www.syfyportal.com/atomFeed.php?page=4'>
<linkrel='previous'href='http://www.syfyportal.com/atomFeed.php?page=2'>
<linkrel='last'href='http://www.syfyportal.com/atomFeed.php?page=147'>

<linkrel='canonical'href='http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/06/9-things-to-do-before-entering-social-
media.html'>
<linkrel='EditURI'type='application/rsd+xml'title='RSD'href='http://smallbiztrends.com/xmlrpc.php
?rsd'> <linkrel='pingback'href='http://smallbiztrends.com/xmlrpc.php'>
<linkrel='stylesheet'media='only screen and (max-device-width:
480px)'href='http://wordpress.org/style/iphone.css'type='text/css'>
<linkrel='wlwmanifest'href='http://www.example.com/wp-
includes/wlwmanifest.xml'type='application/wlwmanifest+xml'>

<linkrel='help'title='FAQ'href='/faq'>
<linkrel='logo'type='image/svg'href='https://playfoursquare.s3.amazonaws.com/press/logo/foursquar
e-logo.svg'>
<linkrel='P3Pv1'href='/w3c/p3p.xml'>
<linkrel='publisher'href='https://plus.google.com/115081025762845243709/'>
<linkrel='image_src'href='http://du3itj18e4z0b.cloudfront.net/7b29fe/images/icon-
facebook.gif'type='image/jpeg'>

<linkrel='author'href='humans.txt'type='text/plain'>
<linkhref='http://thenextweb.com/2009/01/08/how-to-snap-up-that-twitter-username-youve-always-
wanted/'rel='original-source'>
<linkrel='profile'title='Microformats'href='http://microformats.org/profile/specs/'>
<linkrel='profile'href='http://gmpg.org/xfn/11'>
Optimized Anchor
Use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of
incoming links when ranking pages. Here is an example of anchor:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">Anchor Text</a>

Listed below are some of the important points to note about anchors:
 TheAnchor Title plays a very important role and is seen by most of the search engines. The
anchor title should have appropriate keywords. Anchor title helps the site visitors using a balloon,
and displaying written text.
 The Anchor Text is another important part, which should be selected very carefully because this
text is used not only for search engines but also for navigation purpose. You should try to use the
best keywords in your anchor text.
 The otherpage.htm is the link to another webpage. This link could be to an external site. Here,
you need to ensure that the linked page does exist; otherwise it is called a broken link, which
gives a bad impression to search engines as well as to site visitors.

Another example of an anchor could be as follows:

<a href="otherpage.htm" title="Anchor Title">

<imgsrc="image.gif" alt="keywords" />

</a>
In this case, Anchor Text has been replaced by an image. So, while using an image in place of an
anchor text, it should be checked that you have put alt tag properly. An image alt tag should have
appropriate keywords.
Content is the King
Content basically includes what you see on the site: the text, graphics, and even links to other
websites. You should not use excessive graphics because they are not Search Engine Friendly plus
heavy graphics normally put the users out when they get downloaded, especially over a slow
network.
Thousands of articles, books, and forum entries are available on how to make your website search
engine friendly, but ultimately, one rule stands above the rest: Unique, high-quality, unduplicated
content is the king.
Superior the quality of your content, the higher the ranking you achieve, larger the traffic you gain
and greater the popularity of your website. Search engines prefer good quality sites in their index
and search results.
Relevant, fresh, and timely content is crucial in attracting visitors to your website. It helps you both
draw traffic from search engines and create audience loyalty.

Unique, High-Quality Content

When people visit a website for information, they want your unique spin on a topic. How is your
material or content unique? Is that uniqueness obvious, and easy to find and to understand? Visitors
want unique, high-quality site content. It is not only your home page content, but also all the linked
pages should have useful and easy-to-understand content.
Now-a-days, search engines have become very smart and they are able to understand complete
grammar and complete phrase. Hence while ranking a page against other, the content available on a
page matters.
Sites with duplicated, syndicated, or free content are get given red flags by the search engines.

SEO Content Writing (Copy Writing)

SEO Content Writing (also referred as SEO Copy writing), involves the process of integrating
keywords and informative phrases which make up the actual content of your website.
While writing your webpage content, the following tips may help you in keeping it better than
others.
 The content should be directed for the specified target audience.
 Keyword density is strictly adhered as per search engine guidelines.
 Titles should always be eye-catching, compelling your visitors to read on and want to know what
you offer in your website.
 Do not use confusing, ambiguous, and complex language. Use small statements to make your
content more understandable.
 Keep your web pages short.
 Organize and distribute the content on the webpages.
 Divide your web page content also into short paragraphs.

Other Advantages of Having Great Content

It is not only SEO you need to think about. Many factors contribute to make your site popular.
 If your site is having something really unique, then people like to suggest it to their friends.
 Other webmasters like to create a link of your site on their sites.
 Your site visitors start trusting on your site and they look forward for the next content update and
keep coming again and again.
 Although you are listed out by search engine, a but net surfer will click only that page whose
content snippet looks more unique and interesting.

Conclusion
Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in
the end, the golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. It is not because of a search engine, but
it is for your site visitors. A page that is read by people is better than a page that is read by bots.
So, write your content after a serious thought. Keep your title, keywords, link text, metatags up-to-
date, unique, and interesting.

H1, H2, H3 tags-

Heading tags, as their name suggests, are used to differentiate the heading of a page from the rest of
the content. These tags are also known to webmasters as HTML header tags, head tags, heading tags
and SEO header tags. The most important heading tag is the h1 tag and least important is the h6 tag.
In HTML coding the header tags from h1 to h6 form a hierarchy. This means that if you skip any of
the tag numbers (ie. jump from 1 to 3) the heading structure will be broken, and this is not ideal for
on-page SEO.
For example, if your site is introduced with a heading in h1, and a sub-heading in h3, the hierarchy
will be broken, meaning the heading structure is not SEO-friendly. The coding should be something
like what is shown below:
<h1>Main Heading</h1>
<h2>Secondary Heading 1</h2>
<h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 1</h3>
<h2>Secondary Heading 2</h2>
<h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 2</h3>
The h1 tag is the most important tag. Every page must have an h1 tag.

Advantages of Using Heading Tags:

The heading tag is used to represent different sections of web page content. It has an impact on both
the SEO and usability of your site.

Header tags from an SEO point of view:

 Relevancy: Search engine spiders check the relevancy of the header tag with the content
associated with it.
 Keyword Consistency: The search engine spiders check the keyword consistency between the
header tags and other parts of the page.
 The Importance of an h1 Tag: The h1 is the most important tag and it should never be skipped on
a page. Search spiders pay attention to the words used in the h1 tag as it should contain a basic
description of the page content, just as the page <title>does .
 Enriched User Experience: Heading tags give the user a clear idea of what the page content is
about. Search engines give much importance to user-experience on a site, meaning the presence
of heading tags becomes an important component of SEO.

Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be
relevant to the page you're linking to, rather than generic text.

Anchor Text Definition

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. he blue, underlined anchor text is the most common
as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through html
code. Anchor texts are one of the many signals search engines use to determine the topic of a web
page, and can direct to an internal or external web page.
he anchor text is also known as the link label or link title. The words contained in the anchor text
helps determines the ranking that the page will receive by search engines such as Google or Yahoo
and Bing. Links without anchor texts commonly happen on the web and are called naked URLs, or
URL anchor texts. Different browsers will display anchor texts differently, and proper use of anchor
text can help the page linked to rank for those keywords in search engines.

Exact Match Anchor Text

An exact match anchor text has the same keywords highlighted as the targeted keyword of a web
page..

Anchor Text Variation

When websites aggressively build exact match anchor text links, a Google spam filter is triggered. It
is unnatural for web pages that link to your website to all have exact match anchor texts. A bit of
anchor text variation is natural, just like how a great portion of the internet's links are naked urls.
e.g. John runs a small dental clinic in Boston. His dental clinic

Anchor Text Manipulation

As a result of being a search engine signal for relevancy, it is possible to SEO anchor text, and hence
anchor text manipulation techniques and vocabulary evolved.

Header and Footer Links

Site after site that I visit lately has been showing a tendency for using footer links to run their
internal SEO link structure and anchor text optimization. While this practice in years past held
value, today I rarely ever recommend it (and yes, SEOmoz itself will be moving away from using
our footer for category links soon). Here's why:
 Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically
Check out the evidence - Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links, Bill Slawskiuncovers
patents suggesting the same and anecdotal evidence suggests Google might do this (or go further)
as well. Needless to say, if you want to make sure your links are passing maximum value, it's
wise to avoid the footer (particularly the footer class itself).
 Footer links are often not the first link on the page to a URL
Since we know that the first link on a page is the one whose anchor text counts and footer links,
while anchor text optimized, are often a second link to an already-linked-to target, they are likely
not to have the desired impact.
 Footer links get very low CTR
Naturally, since they're some of the least visible links on a webpage, they receive very little
traffic. Thus, if algorithms like BrowseRank or other traffic metrics start to play a role in search
rankings, footers are unlikely to have a positive impact.
 Footer links often take a page beyond a healthy link total
Many pages that already have 80-100 links on the page are going to lose out when they add a
footer with another 30-50 links embedded. The link juice passed per link will go down and the
value of each individual link is lowered.
 Footer links can be a time suck
The time you spend crafting the perfect link structure in the footers could be put towards more
optimal link structures throughout the site's navigation and cross-linking from content, serving
both users and engines better.

That's not to say I don't suggest doing a good job with your footers. Many sites, large and small, will
continue to use the footer as a resource for link placement and, just as with all other SEO tactics that
fade, they do carry some residual value. Let's walk through a few examples of both good and bad to
get a sense for what works:

Thumbs Up: Shopper.Cnet.com

I like the organization, the clear layout, the visibility and the fact that they've distinguished (through
straight HTML links vs. drop downs) which links deserve to pass link juice and ranking value. I'm
also impressed that I actually see a "Paris Hilton" link in the footer yet am not completely
unaccepting of the idea that it could be there entirely naturally, simply as a result of what's popular
on CBS.
Introduction to Alt Attributes
The purpose of alt attributes is to provide a description of the contents of an image file. One of the
most cited uses of alt attributes is to provide text for visitors who can't see images in their browsers.
This includes visitors using browsers that cannot display images or have image display disabled,
visually impaired visitors, and those visitors who use screen readers. If a viewer can see your
images, alt attributes will also show when the user hovers over your image.
If images do not show in a browser, for whatever reason, the alt text will show in place of the
images, giving context to what the images actually contain for those who can't see them.
In addition to ensuring the content in your image is communicated whether the image shows or not,
effectively using alt text can also be a great way to improve your site's placement in search engine
result pages because it allows the images on your pages to rank in image search results.

<img src="baby-crying.jpg" alt="Baby Crying"

Title=” Baby Crying”/>

 Keep it simple
 Master the art of saying a lot with a little.
 Be descriptive yet succinct
 Be strategic with your descriptions.
 Consider the text surrounding the image
 Placing images with alt tags near relevant text will help create a coherent experience for non-
visual users
 Utilize keywords to help your site rank better in search
 It's a great strategy to use your site's keywords in order to help your images rank
 Be careful not to misuse your keywords as it could end up hurting your SEO instead of helping

HTML validation using W3C

http://validator.w3.org/

what is Sitemaps
A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either
a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design, or a Web page that lists the pages on
a Web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
An XML sitemap is a document that helps Google and other major search engines better understand
your website while crawling it.
There are two popular versions of a site map. An XML Sitemap is a structured format that a user
doesn't need to see, but it tells the search engine about the pages in a site, their relative importance
to each other, and how often they are updated. HTML sitemaps are designed for the user to help
them find content on the page, and don't need to include each and every subpage. This helps visitors
and search enginebots find pages on the site. You cannot submit an HTML sitemap in Google
Webmaster Tools as it not a supported sitemap format.
XML Sitemaps
Google introduced Google Sitemaps so web developers can publish lists of links from across their
sites. The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only
available through the use of forms and user entries. The Sitemap files contains URLs to these pages
so that web crawlers can find them. Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps
protocol.
Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol,[2] having a Sitemap lets the four biggest
search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be
crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best
insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.[3] Google Webmaster Tools
allow a website owner to upload a sitemap that Google will crawl, or they can accomplish the same
thing with the robots.txt file.[4]
XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" by filling out a
form on the search engine's submission page. Now web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or
wait for search engines to find it.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) is much more precise than HTML coding. Errors are not
tolerated, and so syntax must be exact. It is advised to use an XML syntax validator such as the free
one found at: http://validator.w3.org

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/about</loc>
</url>
</urlset>

Sitemap tag definitions

The following table outlines all the tags required for sitemaps that list web URLs. To add more
detailed information about specific content types, see video, images, mobile, and news.
Tag Required? Description

<urlset> Encloses all information about the set of URLs included

Required
in the sitemap.

<url> Required Encloses all information about a specific URL.

Specifies the URL. For images and video, specifies the

<loc> Required
landing page (aka play page).
Shows the date the URL was last modified, in YYYY-MM
<lastmod> Optional
-DDThh:mmTZD format (time value is optional).
Provides a hint about how frequently the page is likely to
change. Valid values are:
 <changefreq> Optional  always. Use for pages that change every time they are
accessed.
 hourly
 daily
 weekly
 monthly
 yearly
 never. Use this value for archived URLs.

<priority> Optional Describes the priority of a URL relative to all the other URLs
on the site. This priority can range from 1.0 (extremely
important) to 0.1 (not important at all).
Note that the priority tag does not affect your site ranking in
Google search results. Priority values are only considered
relative to other pages on your site so, assigning a high
priority (or specifying the same priority for all URLs) will not
boost your entire site search ranking.

Submitting Sites to Google and yahoo Webmasters

Canonical/404 Implementation

Code used by search engine crawlers/spiders to tell search engines what URL is the original version
of your webpage.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.ducatindia.com " />

The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective.
In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301
does), without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL (often saving your dev staff considerable
heartache). There are some differences, though:

Custom 404 Pages

404s can appear if a URL is mistyped, a search engine link is out of date, or if a link on the site is
broken. You want to create a custom 404 page that will not confuse your readers so they can easily
be redirected back to your site.

A 404 page should include a link back to the home page or site map of your website so users can
quickly get back to what they were searching for. A search box, if you have a site search, is also a
good idea to add to a 404 page. Other than that, keep the page minimal, remove distractions and get
the user off the 404 error page as quickly as they got on.
Keep in mind most users may not be so savvy when it comes to the use of a custom 404 page and
other Internet jargon so simple explanations in English are key! Although, keeping it minimalist
does not have to mean "boring" when it comes to the use of a custom 404 page. The steps to make a
custom 404 page are simple and this site can explain in detail how to create one depending on your
server. By following these steps, even the most novice individual can achieve success in the
development of a custom 404 page.
301 Redirects
If you have old pages on your website that you want to remove or rename, use a 301 redirect to
preserve search engine rankings and pass on backlinks and/or page rank. You can even redirect
whole websites to new ones through the use of 301 redirects. The use of 301 redirects is easy to do
and is very search engine friendly.

The term "301" stands for "moved permanently." 301 redirects are created by using a .htaccess file.
Follow this guide to learn how to implement many different types of 301 redirects. When pages are
deleted instead of redirected with a 301, they turn into 404s Not Found Pages.

301 non-www to www

From what I can tell Google has yet to clean up the canonicalization problem that arises when the
www version of your site gets indexed along with the non-www version (i.e.
http://www.seoappoint.com &amp; http://seoappoint.com).

<code>
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^seoappoint.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.seoappoint.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</code>

The '(*.)$' says that we'll take anything that comes after http://seoappoint.com and
append it to the end of 'http://www.seoappoint.com' (thats the '$1' part) and redirect to
that URL. For more grit on how this works checkout a good regular expressions
resource or two.

Note: You only have to enter 'RewriteEngine On' once at the top of your .htaccess file.

Alternately you may choose to do this 301 redirect from

in the Apache config file httpd.conf.

<code>
<VirtualHost 67.xx.xx.xx>

ServerName www.seoappoint.com
ServerAdmin info@seoappoint.com
DocumentRoot /home/seoappoint/public_html
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost 67.xx.xx.xx>
ServerName seoappoint.com
RedirectMatch permanent ^/(.*) http://www.seoappoint.com/$1
</VirtualHost>
</code>

Note that often webhost managers like CPanel would have placed a 'ServerAlias'
seoappoint.com in the first VirtualHost entry which would negate the following
VirtualHost so be sure to remove the non-www ServerAlias.

301 www to non-www

Finally the www 301 redirect to non-www version would look like:

<code>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.seoappoint.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://seoappoint.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</code>

Redirect All Files in a Folder to One File

Lets say you no longer carry 'Best Travel Deal' and hence want to redirect all requests to the folder
/besttraveldeal to a single page called /new-offer.php. This redirect can be accomplished easily by
adding the following your .htaccess page:

<code>
RewriteRule ^besttraveldeal(.*)$ /new-offer.php [L,R=301]
</code>

But what if you want to do the same as the above example EXCEPT for one file? In the next
example all files from /besttraveldeal/ folder will redirect to the /new-offer.php file EXCEPT
/besttraveldeal/tours.html which will redirect to /indiatours.html

<code>
RewriteRule ^besttraveldeal/tours.html /indiatours.html [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^besttraveldeal(.*)$ /new-offer.php [L,R=301]
</code>

Redirect a Dynamic URL to a New Single File

It's common that one will need to redirect dynamic URL's with parameters to single static file:

<code>
RewriteRule ^article.asp?id=(.*)$ /seoservices.html [L,R=301]
</code>
Robots.txt Creation

The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file

webmasters create to instruct robots (typically search engine robots)
how to crawl and index pages on their website.
Robots.txt is a text (not html) file you put on your site to tell search robots which pages you would
like them not to visit. Robots.txt is by no means mandatory for search engines but generally search
engines obey what they are asked not to do. It is important to clarify that robots.txt is not a way from
preventing search engines from crawling your site (i.e. it is not a firewall, or a kind of password
protection) and the fact that you put a robots.txt file is something like putting a note “Please, do not
enter” on an unlocked door – e.g. you cannot prevent thieves from coming in but the good guys will
not open to door and enter. That is why we say that if you have really sensitive data, it is too naïve to
rely on robots.txt to protect it from being indexed and displayed in search results.
The location of robots.txt is very important. It must be in the main directory because otherwise user
agents (search engines) will not be able to find it – they do not search the whole site for a file named
robots.txt. Instead, they look first in the main directory (i.e. http://mydomain.com/robots.txt) and if
they don't find it there, they simply assume that this site does not have a robots.txt file and therefore
they index everything they find along the way. So, if you don't put robots.txt in the right place, do
not be surprised that search engines index your whole site.

Structure of a Robots.txt File

The structure of a robots.txt is pretty simple (and barely flexible) – it is an endless list of user agents
and disallowed files and directories. Basically, the syntax is as follows:
User-agent:
Disallow:
“User-agent”are search engines' crawlers and disallow: lists the files and directories to be excluded
from indexing. In addition to “user-agent:” and “disallow:” entries, you can include comment lines –
just put the # sign at the beginning of the line:
# All user agents are disallowed to see the /temp directory.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp/aboutus.html

The Traps of a Robots.txt File

When you start making complicated files – i.e. you decide to allow different user agents access to
different directories – problems can start, if you do not pay special attention to the traps of a
robots.txt file. Common mistakes include typos and contradicting directives. Typos are misspelled
user-agents, directories, missing colons after User-agent and Disallow, etc. Typos can be tricky to
find but in some cases validation tools help.
The more serious problem is with logical errors. For instance:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /temp/
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /temp/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
The above example is from a robots.txt that allows all agents to access everything on the site except
the /temp directory. Up to here it is fine but later on there is another record that specifies more
restrictive terms for Googlebot. When Googlebot starts reading robots.txt, it will see that all user
agents (including Googlebot itself) are allowed to all folders except /temp/. This is enough for
Googlebot to know, so it will not read the file to the end and will index everything except /temp/ -
including /images/ and /cgi-bin/, which you think you have told it not to touch. You see, the structure
of a robots.txt file is simple but still serious mistakes can be made easily.

Off page
Off page SEO refers to techniques that can be used to improve the position of a web site in the
search engine resultspage (SERPs). Many people associate off-page SEO with link building but it is
not only that.
 Search Engine Submissions
 Web Directory Submissions
 Social Bookmarking
 Article Writing & Submission
 Press Release Writing & Submission
 Comment Blogging
 Classifieds Posting
 Forum Posting
 Link Exchange (One way, two way and three way)
 RSS Feeds

PPC
About PPC Ad
PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is an internet marketing model where the advertisers use the
publishers' website to market their products or services through ads. The publisher gets paid by the
particular advertisers when a user clicks on their ads. It is a pull-type internet marketing of buying
user visits to a site.
Search Engine Advertising
One of the most popular forms of PPC marketing is Search Engine Advertising (SEA). It allows
advertisers to bid for placement of ads in the search engine's sponsored link, when a user searches
for a keyword that is relevant to a product or a service.
Whenever a user clicks on an ad, the link directs the user to the product's website. At the same time,
the product or service provider needs to pay some amount to the search engine, such as Google.
Behind every successful PPC campaign lies a catchy ad that can attract the attention of online users.
Advertisers focus on the following aspects while creating an online ad:
 Research for effective keywords related to a product or a service
 Choose the right keywords
 Group the keywords relevantly
 Arrange the keywords to create an advertise

More often than not, the ads that are useful and relevant are charged less fees per click by the search
engines. This is rewarding for the advertisers, as they get more business in exchange of minimal
fees.
Google AdWords is an example of a popular advertising system. It facilitates businesses to publish
ads on Google's search engine.
Entities Involved in PPC Advertising
The following entities are involved in PPC Advertising:
 Product or Service Seller
 PPC Advertiser
 Landing Page Provider
 Landing Page
 Viewer or the Visitor

Take a close look at the illustrations below that depict the general roles of the entities involved in
PPC advertising:

A product/service seller contacts advertisers for PPC based Ad programs.

PPC Advertiser creates Ads and provides landing pages for Ads.

Users click the Ads and visit the landing pages.

 PPC – Bird's eye view

Workflow of a PPC Ad
The workflow of a PPC ad is as follows:
 First of all, the advertiser creates an online account and loads her account with some money say
Rs 5000. Note that some organizations allocate their PPC budgets in hundreds, thousands, or
even millions of rupees per month.
 The advertiser creates a small text ad. In some cases, a PPC ad can include images.
 The advertiser specifies a list of keywords associated with the ad.
 The advertiser determines how much she is ready to pay each time someone clicks on the ad.
 On the buyer's side, a user visits the search engine – say Google.com, enters one of the keywords
or keyword phrases - say “Kindle Paper white” and clicks the Search button.
 The search engine finds the matching ads and places them on the results page.
 If a user clicks on the ad, she is taken to the advertiser's website, and the advertiser is charged for
the click.

History of PPC
PPC ads have been in existence over a decade now. The term PPC came into existence during the
year 1990 when organizations started conducting their business on the Internet. One of the
companies that pioneered the concept was goto.com. Yahoo took it over in 2003.
When Google launched its AdWords solution for PPC marketing, heavy activities started in the
domain of PPC. In addition to Google, a number of search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, 7Search,
ABCSearch, and Findology provide PPC ad hosting.
Properties of a Compelling PPC Ad
A compelling PPC ad has the following properties:
It is a part of a closely-knit ad-groups.
It can address the desired search queried by the users.
It takes the user to an appropriate landing page.
It drives the users to click on it and explore.
General Formula for Calculating PPC
The basic formula of calculating PPC is:

Advantages of PPC
PPC helps in branding and creating leads as well, both in parallel. PPC provides quick results in
contrast to SEO results that are equally important but may take months or even years to materialize.

 Quick Actions - PPC gives immense traffic, quick results, and more hype branding in a short
span of time.
 Negligible Initial Investment - Search engines do not charge fees to insert a PPC ad or to set up
an account. The user pays only when someone actually clicks on his ad.
 Business Gets Noticed Globally - A business can get global recognition, even if it has a small
local setup.
 Instant Results - As compared to SEO methods, PPC ads can deliver faster response, if quality
ads are posted.
 Ad group
 It is a collection of relevant keywords under one name. Maximum 20,000 keywords can be added
into an Ad Group.
 Ad Network
 An Ad Network is an online business that specializes in matching up of advertisers to the
websites looking to host the ad. Ad networks work as brokers for both suppliers (sites with
content that can host ads, for example, tutorialspoint.com) and buyers (the advertisers). An ad
network relieves the websites from having to set up and invest in their own ad servers and
tracking software.
 Ad Position
 Ad position is the order in which an ad is displayed on a webpage. For example, ad position "1"
means the ad is displayed first on the webpage.
 Ad Rank
 It is a value used to determine the Ad Proposition.
 Call-To-Action (CTA)
 This is a marketing term used for the action you want the website visitor to take.
 Campaign
 It is a series of relevant ad groups.
 Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
 It is a metric showing how often a visitor clicks your ad after seeing it. It can be defined as the
number of clicks per thousand impressions. CTR contributes to Ad Rank.
 Conversion
 Conversion is the action the user wants when he clicks on an ad. It occurs when a visitor takes
action. For example, the user makes purchases, signs ups, submits enquiry forms, views a page,
or downloads, depending on the program's goals.
 Conversion Rate
 It is the measurement of the success of a paid campaign. It is measured by the number of
potential visitors performing any of the desired actions such as buying a product, filling a form,
etc.
 For example, if there are 100 visitors to a particular webpage via a PPC ad, and three of those
100 visitors buy the product the website sells, then the conversion rate for that particular ad is
three percent. The larger the conversion rate, the more successful the website is.
 Cost Per Action or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
 It is the amount you pay for every lead, sign-up, or purchases.
 Cost Per Click (CPC)
 It implies the amount you pay for every single click on your ads.
 Cost Per Mille (CPM)
 It is the amount paid for every thousand views of the PPC ad.
 Destination URL
 It is where you want the user to land when he clicks on the ad.
 Display URL
 It is the name of a page of the website.
 Geo-targeting
 Delivery of ads to a particular geographic location of the users. It allows the advertisers to choose
specific locations where they wish to show their ads.
 Impression
 In the context of online advertising, it is a measure of the number of times an ad is seen
irrespective of clicking on it. Each time the ad displays, it is counted as one impression.
 Keyword
 It is a search query made by a user. A word or a phrase of words entered in the search box by the
user. The search engine matches your keywords and gives you relevant results on the Search
Engine Result Page (SERP).
 Landing Page
 It is any standalone webpage distinct from the main website on which the visitor lands.
 Negative Keywords
 They are the ones for which you do not want your ad to appear.
 PPC Bid
 It is the maximum amount of fees an advertiser is ready to pay for a click.
 Prospect
 Prospect is a potential user who can buy a product/service being advertised.
 Quality Score
 It is a dynamic metrics assigned to each of your keywords and ads. It determines the quality of
your keyword, ad, and the landing page. High quality score boosts the ad rank.
 Search Engine Result Page (SERP)
 The page that lists the results returned by the search engine in response to a user query.
 Split Testing
 It is a classic method of testing an ad to determine the effectiveness of a PPC ad. It compares two
versions of an ad that are identical except for one specific difference of a word or an image.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools help you to expand the list of keywords in most relevance of the seller's
product or service. These tools suggest numerous variations of the words from which we can select
the appropriate one.

These tools include:

 Google AdWords Keyword Planner
 Word Tracker
 SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tools
 Keyword Discovery
 SpyFu

Keyword Match Types

Keyword match types determine how closely a user query matches with the keywords provided by
the advertiser.
The keywords are matched irrespective of their case. That is, “perfumes”, “Perfumes”, and
“PERFUMES”, all are treated the same.
The following table shows the keywords match types from broad match tonarrow match:
Match Type Symbol Example Triggering Exampl
Keyword Queries of
Broad Match None women's They are buy
perfumes any word ladies
in your perfum
keyword, es
in any
order,
including
words
closely
related to
the
keyword,
misspellin
gs,
synonyms
Broad Match +Keywo +women's They perfum
Modifier rd +perfumes contain es for
the women
modified
phrase (or
near
variations,
except
Phrase Match "Keywor “Women's They are perfum
d" perfumes” the es for
keywords women
followed
by the
phrase or

Exact Match [Keywor [women's They are women'

d] perfumes] the exact
phrase
and near
variations

Negative Match -keywor Women Any Amoua

d searches ge Epic
without Man
Using keyword match types, you can help control the searches that can trigger the ad. More precise
is the keyword-query match, higher is the conversion rate.

Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are an important part of the keywords list.
They make sure that an ad appears only for a particular product the seller sells. They serve as ad
filters. A negative keyword ensures that an ad does not appear for that particular term and reaches
only the best potential audience.
For example, here is a list of typical negative keywords for books and manufacturing:

 Books - Download, Audiobooks, Kindle, eBooks, Films, Movies, DVDs, and CDs.
 Manufacturing - second-hand, used, rental, rent, hire, repair, and service.
Negative keywords can:
 Prevent the users from browsing for other products the seller is not offering.
 Help avoid paying for useless clicks.
 Reduce average Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and increase return on the investment (ROI).
 Increase overall Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of the PPC account in the long run.
 Help create more relevant keyword groups with higher CTR.
 Raise the Quality Scores.
 Lower the investment cost.

Adding negative keywords is an important task in PPC strategy, which is scheduled once in a month.
It is scheduled even more frequently, in case of large ads.

PPC - Setting Location & Language

A pay-per-click ad that targets mass market is seldom successful. Setting appropriate target locations
for advertising allows an ad to reach the consumer precisely with specific needs and demands. In the
long run, it benefits the business, as it allows to take better strategic marketing decisions.
For higher number of impressions, more CTC, and in turn higher ROI from the PPC ad, you need to
analyze the target locations beforehand.
A target market can be segmented on the basis of:

 Geographic location of users

 Demographics of users
 Language of users

Geographic Location of Users

Publishing an ad for the customers where they are located elevates the popularity of the product and
the possibility of higher ROI.
The method of determining the geolocation of the visitor with respect to country, state, region, IP
address, or device ID of the user's device, and showing ads as per the user's location is termed as
Geo Targeting.
The geographic location can vary from within a few kilometers distance from the seller's business to
faraway countries. If the business serves in several areas, the seller might wish to create separate ads
for each location to track the performance separately.

Demographics of Users
User demographics are an important factor while targeting a market. Demographics include age,
gender, income, occupation, marital status, literacy, and lifestyle of the ad recipients.

You need to consider the following demographics while creating an ad:

 Age - Users' needs and demands change with age.
 Gender - Male and female users react differently towards consumer products, jewelry,
magazines, etc.
 Income - Users' affordability varies depending upon their income levels.
 Occupation - Users' occupation affects their lifestyle which in turn affect the product or service
they opt for.
 Marital status - Experts say, single customers buy a specific product frequently than those who
are married. Also, married people are inclined to pay more price. Marital status is an important
factor.
 Literacy - Awareness and comfort level of the users with handling internet activities affect PPC
ads and in turn the seller's business targets.
 Lifestyle - The acceptance of a product is highly driven by the people's day-to-day lifestyle.

Language
You might get into a tough situation if the ad itself falls short of conveying the right message across
its consumers. In case of PPC advertising, you want the ad to show up for the customers who can
comprehend and convert them.
Language targeting allows to choose the language of the websites that you would prefer the ad to
appear on. For example, if an ad is in French, you probably would want it to appear it on French
sites too.
For creating an ad in a target language, you need to:
 Analyze the local terms, phrases, and dialects of the language.
 Have access to the translators and native speakers.
 Keep a list of carefully researched English keywords, but use them only as a starting point.
 Brainstorm with translators for alternative keywords and test the effectiveness of those keywords
using the keyword suggesting tools.
 Keep a dictionary handy but get to understand the context and culture of natives beforehand.

Every foreign language PPC campaign has its own unique challenges. With a little anticipation,
caution, and planning, it can increase sales and can tap into new foreign markets.

PPC - Writing a Killer PPC Ad

In today's world of internet marketing, the advertisers are in a fierce race of grabbing the space on
webpages to put up their ads. When thousands of advertisers compete, only those who create the
most effective and catchy ads stand out from others and help accelerate the seller's business.

Creating a PPC Ad
Refer the diagram shown below. To create an effective and compelling ad, the following
methodology is helpful:
Market and Audience Research
Research the market. Answer questions such as:
 How many people are using product or service that the seller is selling?
 How many people use various parallel products?
 What is the budget for the ad?
 What does the user want?
 What is user's motivation?
 Why does the user need this product or service?
 What words are going to resonate with each group of keywords?

Keyword Research
Find out the following:
 Which are the products searched by the users in the seller's business domain?
 Who are looking for the products similar to those offered by the seller?
 What is the cost to bid for PPC ad on relevant searches (keywords)?
 What keywords the competing advertisers are using?

Build Pay-Per-Click Ad
Build the PPC ad. Put groups of related keywords into one ad group. Create multiple ads and split-
test them for each ad group.
Build Landing Pages
Build the respective landing pages combining aesthetics, art, and technology.

Track, Measure, and Report

Monitor and measure the following:
 Impressions (how often your ads appear),
 Click-through rate (how often your ads are clicked on),
 Response rates (how often people respond to what website offers) for various keywords, ad
groups, and ads.

Optimize the Ad
Optimize the ad as follows:
 Using the monitoring data, refine and improve the keywords, ads, and landing pages as and when
required.
 Make sure all the changes are implemented and performance is trending in the right direction.
 Remove non-working words, images, links, and move on.

Elements of a PPC Ad
Refer the following image to understand the elements of a PPC ad.

 Headline - This is the main title of the ad. It must be magnetic, crisp, and compact.
 Display URL - This is the link of the relevant web page where the prospects will be taken onto. It
is not required to be the exact landing page but it should be relevant. You can, for example,
include your website with the top keyword in your Ad Campaign.
 Description Line 1 and 2 - This is the body of the ad. It describes the product or the service the
seller is offering.

Creating a PPC Ad Using Google AdWords

A well-written, persuasive, and concise copy can make a difference between success and failure in a
PPC advertising campaign.
Step 1: Know the Rules of Framing an Ad
If you use Google's AdWords, this is how you should frame the PPC ad:
 Headline: Catchy, Correct, Informative, Crisp, 25 characters long.
 Description: Two lines description of product or service, 35 characters long.
 Display URL: 35 characters long. If you run out of description size of 35 characters, do not
continue the description text into the Display URL. For example, do not frame the second
description line such as "Visit this site:" or "Learn more at...".
 Do not use the Display URL field as another line of ad text.
 Do not make the ad text appear cut off abruptly or incomplete.
 The Display URL is required to be on the same domain as the real URL.
 Pay due attention to the grammar.

Step 2: Identify True Competitors of Seller

Identify who is competing with you in bidding for your target terms and who is consistently getting
the top ad rank. Based on this insight, you can find out the companies and their ads. You also need to
consider the advertisers who are completely irrelevant to your business; treat them as competitors, as
they are also going for the same share of your prospect attention.

Step 3: Identify Seller's Assets, USPs, and Your Credentials

Go through the product or service offering of the seller and identify his online assets. What can you
offer to the prospective user?
 Testimonials - What are the user reviews of this product or service?
 USP of the seller - Unique selling proposition (USP) is a factor that differentiates a product or
service from a competing product. The USP includes:
 Cost of the product, value for money
 First of its kind product in market, innovative
 Quality of the product
 Additional offers along with the products
 Seller's Credentials - Has the seller won any awards? Is the seller proven to be the best in his
domain industry?
 Show Off to Your Prospective Customers - Have you work with any well-known brands? Then
this is a good time to show off your credentials. This way you stand out from your advertising
competitors.

Step 4: Create an Effective Call-To-Action (CTA)

Ad Copy is your only opportunity to convey your audience exactly what action you want them
to take, once they reach the website. For example:
 Direct Response Phrases - Call, Register, Purchase, Checkout, Download, and Donate.
 Lead Generation Phrases - Contact us, Request a Quote, Start, Verify, Access, Receive, Fill, and
Enroll.
 Engagement Phrases - Watch, See, View, Read, Discover, Uncover, Check Out, Visit.

Step 5: Write Your Copy of Ad

As an advertiser, you write for your audience, not for yourself. Think of the intentions your user is
searching with. Think how accurately your ad copy can answer their questions or help them.
 Use numbers and exclamation marks. They capture user's attention.
 Use abbreviations if they are well known and non-ambiguous. They save space.
 It helps increase Click-Through-Rate (CTR) if you capitalize each word besides the articles in
your copy.
 Use your keywords in the headline. Google makes them bold, which automatically makes the ad
prominent.

Step 6: Add Extensions

Another way to increase your click-through rate is to add extensions to your ads. Add contact
numbers, location information, well-organized site links, reviews and testimonials about the
product or services for the positive aspects given below:
 Contact numbers and location extensions boost conversation.
 Site links help users to get what they are looking for on the website with just one click. Site links
appear in ads at the top and bottom of Google search results.
 Reviews and testimonials build up confidence about the product or service.

Step 7: Repeat Keywords on the Landing Page

The keywords used in your ad should be repeated on the landing page. It helps the prospect feel
reassured of visiting the right place for his requirements.

Step 8: Test
Use AdWords Experiments (beta) to test different versions of your ad. If required, refine them based
on the judgment of what works best for your ad and what converts.

PPC - Landing Pages

If you create a beautiful and catchy PPC ad with an effective Call-To-Action and do not link an
appropriate landing page to it, then all your efforts go in vain.
It can be very annoying and disappointing for a prospect when he clicks on a great looking ad and
finds out that the landing page is irrelevant to the ad. Poor landing page management is a waste of
money.
Use of landing pages in the PPC ads helps to:
 Increase conversion
 Reduce Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
 Reduce bounce rate

Types of Landing Pages

 Click Through - This is the most basic type. It has general information about a product, why you
should buy the product, when it will be available, etc. It provides a button to take the visitor to
the page where the item can be purchased.
 Viral - This type of landing page tries to reach out to a large group of people. It is full of social
sharing buttons and catchy content.
 Lead Capture - There is no exit route when it comes to a lead capture landing page. Such pages
gather user data to send email marketing campaigns, connect with social media, call with special
offers, etc.
 Mobile - It provides bare minimum contents with eye-pleasing appearance.
 Homepage - Sometimes organizations just link to the homepage, which is not a good move. The
homepage is likely to offer different options and choices, when in fact the visitor is interested in a
specific link to get something specific.

Elements of an Effective Landing Page

The primary goal of a landing page is to pursue the user to convert. An effective landing page
has:
 Engaging and beautiful appearance.
 Well-organized contents.
 Tight coupling between advertise and page contents.
 Simple, yet descriptive and informative.
 Clear and discrete Call-To-Action and offers.
 Capability of building trust about authenticity of a product or service the seller offers.
 Capability of pursuing the visitors to take action.
An effective and well-formatted landing page resembles the following page:
Creating a Well-Formatted and Informative Landing Page
A well-formatted landing page as shown here grabs the attention of the visitors and compels them to
complete a conversion. For creating a good landing page, you need to do the following:

Keep a Clean and Organized Design

 Use pleasant and appealing colors.
 Keep high contrast among page background and CTA buttons.
 Set appropriate size of image, text, and buttons on the page.

Keep Minimal Required Information

 Provide all necessary information that encourages the visitor to convert.
 Avoid anything extra and pop-ups.
 Highlight the key points of the product.

Use a Header to Convey Offer

 Use a header for displaying the value of the offer on the product and convince the visitor how
unavoidable it is.
 Use sub-headings for descriptions.

Use Trust Signals or Trust Badges for Conveying

Trustworthiness
 Trust signals include testimonials, like counts, capitalizing on word-of-mouth, reviews, etc.
 Trust Badges include any endorsements, logos of popular brands, certain recognitions,
membership of some popular communities, etc.

Make It Mobile-Friendly
These days it has become absolutely necessary to make the landing pages compatible with mobile
devices, as the conversion rate doubles if the website appears smoothly on mobiles.
 Make the page easy to navigate
 Fast to load

Keep the Forms Short

 When it comes to gathering data from visitors, it is extremely necessary to keep the length of the
forms short.
 Lesser the number of fields in the form, more the chances of converting a prospect.
 If more information is required to be gathered from the visitor, plan it on the thank you or similar
page.

Match Contents of Landing Page and PPC Ad

Make sure you match the contents of the landing page with the keywords of the ad. This reduces
visitor's disappointment and cost, and encourages the visitor to convert.
Testing the Landing Page
You can test a landing page manually or using a tool. You can test the following:
 Loading time of the page.
 Appearance of page layout and design.
 Visibility of various elements on the page such as images and buttons.
 Focus on the buttons.
 Appropriate button functionality.
Use AdWords Landing Page Grader, a free tool that checks the PPC landing pages for best practices
and conversion rate.

PPC - Bidding
PPC - Measuring Results
It is very important to measure the success of your PPC ad. To improve an existing PPC ad further, it
is vital to analyze its ROI, conversion rate, and the problems incurred.
Even if an existing ad is doing well in terms of conversion rate and generating ROI, there is always
a room for improvement. To improve an ad in the right direction and elevate its ROI, it is necessary
to measure the success of the launched ad.
The following metrics can be used to confirm the success of your ad:

%Served How often your ad was

served in contrast to other
similar ads in the same ad
group.
Average Cost per Click (CPC) Total CostTotal number of The lower, the better.
clicks
Average Position How high in the results 1 is the highest.
page is your ad showing.

Bounce Rate The percentage of visitors The higher, the poorer.

who leave to navigate the
website after visiting one
page.
Clicks The number of times a The more, the better.
visitor clicks your ad.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR) The percentage of clicks The higher, the better.
divided by Impressions.
 Conversions The number of times a The more, the better.
visitor clicks on the ad
and completes an action
you defined as a
conversion within a
specific period of time.
Impression Share The percentage of the
total number of times
your ad could have been
shown versus the actual
number of times it was
shown.
Impressions The number of times The more, the better.
your ad was displayed on
the search results page.

Quality Score Relevance of the The higher, the better.

keyword, ad, and landing
page combined, which
affects your CPC.
ROI (Return – Investment) × The more, the better.
100

PPC - Ad on Google
If you want to display your ad with the help of Google, you need to use Google's AdWords.

Creating Google AdWords Account

Let us go through the steps of creating a Google Adwords Account:
 Open a browser. Type Google.com in the address bar. It opens Google's homepage.
 Type adwords in the search box. It displays all the results related to your query.
 Click on the link Google AdWords | Google (PPC) Google Pay-Per-Click Online…
Step 2: Look at the upper right corner of the page. It depicts that if you are already availing the
AdWords service, you proceed with using AdWords as shown below. (If you are not an AdWords
customer, skip Step 5 and continue with Step 6.)
Step 3: Click on Sign-in. It displays the following page:
Step 4: Google starts AdWords for you as shown below:
Step 5: Click on the button 'Start now'. You get to see Google AdWords welcome page as shown
below:
Step 6:
Enter the email ID with which you wish to create your AdWords account.
 Select appropriate country, time zone, and currency options.
 Click on the button 'Save and continue'. It brings up the next page of setting Google account as
shown:
Enter proper information in the fields Name, current email address, password, birth date and mobile
number, location, etc. Click 'I agree Google's terms of service and privacy policy'. It creates a new
account with Google.

Step 7: Click on the button 'Next step'. It displays the following webpage:
Step 8: Open the inbox of your gmail account. Click on the link for conforming your email
address to Google to start AdWords service.

Creating a PPC Campaign in Google AdWords

Before creating an actual campaign, let us take a look at a dummy advertising project. Suppose you
need to create a PPC ad for selling mechanical and electronic locks, keys, and their repairing
services.
You need to keep the following checklist ready:
 Budget per Month – Rs 10000
 Budget per Day – Rs 300
 Scope of Geotargeting – Hyderabad City
 List of Keywords – Key makers, Key makers in Hyderabad, local key makers, computerized key
makers, car key maker, car key makers, key maker for car, key makers for car, etc.
 A Ready Ad Copy with the Following Details:
 Heading of ad (25 char) – Locksmith Hyderabad
 Description Line 1 (35 char) – Looking For Keymaker?
 Description Line 2 (35 char) – Call For Immediate Response
 Display URL (35 char) – http://www.affordablelock.net
 Destination URL (1024 char) – http://www.affordablelock.net/remote_keys
 Landing Page URL- http://www.affordablelock.net/Purchase_Lock
 Design of landing page ready/not ready – Not ready
 Image required, if any
Start with creating the ad now.

Step 1: Sign-in to your Google account. After a few seconds, you get to see the following
webpage:
Step 2: Click on the button 'Create your first campaign'.
Step 3: It displays the following page. Enter the Campaign name as First Campaign.
Step 4:
Enter Type as Search Network only.

Scroll down for further entries. Enter the Location. If you want this ad to be visible only within a
particular geographical area, select the option Let me choose….

Enter Hyderabad in the textbox. Click on Advance Search. It displays the map.
Step 5:
Click on the button Search. It shows the location Hyderabad. Click on the button Add. Now click on
the button Done. It brings up the previous page with Targeted locations as Hyderabad, India.
Set the language. Default is English.
Step 6: To set up a bid strategy, there are two options. First, you can do it on your own and the
other offers you to let AdWords handle it. Select the first option I'll manually select my bids for
clicks.

Step 7: Enter Default bid as 50. Enter Budget as 300 per day. It sets the maximum number of
clicks to 6 per day. Scroll down further.

Step 8: As this is a very basic type of ad, leave the Location, Site links, and Call options
unchecked. Click on the button Save and continue. It displays the following page to create Ad
groups as shown below:
Step 9:
Select My landing page isn't ready. Enter the Ad group name asLocksmith Hyderabad. Add one
keyword as locksmith hyderabad and another askeymaker hyderabad. You need to add one keyword
per line in the list box of keywords.
Step 10: Scroll a little further. You will find the following options as shown below:

Step 11: Click on the button Continue to ads. It displays a dialog to create ads as shown below:
Enter the Destination URL as www.affordablelocks.net/remote_keys. Enter Write your ad as
Locksmith Hyderabad. This is the heading of the ad. Write the display URL as
www.affordablelock.net

Note: Both Display and Destination URLs need not be same, but they need to be from the same
domain.
 Now enter description line 1 as Looking For Locksmith? Enter description line 2 as Call for
immediate response!

Note: In addition to using effective keywords, it is important to use punctuation marks in

description lines to make them inviting.
Click on the button Save. It displays the following page:
Step 1:
Click on the button Review campaign to ensure that everything is set as per your requirements. The
review page appears as follows:
Step 2:
Click on the button Save and finish. You are done! Your first basic ad is ready! You get to see the
following page with details of the campaign.
 Once you create a basic ad, you can modify the settings of campaign name, type, target location,
language, budget, bid strategy, etc.
 You can also add extensions such as site links, contact numbers, etc. as per your requirement.
 Using the Keyword Planner feature, you can add potential keywords to your list of keywords.

PPC - Yahoo! & Bing Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based marketing where the advertisers pay the publishers a
fixed amount for each click. Though Google dominates PPC advertising, Yahoo gives certain
advantages over AdWords. Lower CPC and CPM are the prominent ones.

Your search traffic volume is low on Yahoo! Yet, you have less competition on ad position and
major traffic seems to be genuine. Also, Yahoo, Bing, and MSN make up for one-third of the total
web traffic. So, you might miss millions of searchers by skipping it.

Yahoo and Bing had an advertising deal that leads to merging of the two companies. You can
manage ads on 'Microsoft AdCenter'.
Structure of an Ad Account
An Ad Account is a cluster of all the attributes given below:
 Set of keywords.
 Ad group, which is the group of keywords packed under a name.
 Ads copy containing marketing messages that you draw on Yahoo! search network.
 Campaign made of one or more ad groups.

Creating a PPC Ad on AdCenter

To get on Yahoo and Bing Ads, you need to sign up with a Microsoft AdCenter account.
 Login to your MS AdCenter account
 Add a URL you want your traffic to redirect to
 To create a campaign, provide details such as name, time zone, budget, location, and language
 Add Ad groups
 Create ads
 Ad keywords
 Set prices (bidding)
 Add your location
 Verify your campaign
 Click on button 'Submit'
 Bill the amount using PayPal
You can even import an ad from Google AdWords.

Bidding
Bids affect your ad position directly. Although there are other features that influence the ad position,
the Auction bid is the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a single click.
AdCenter offers you:
 Controlled bidding
 Bid on individual keywords
 Bid on match types
 Suggested bids
 Incremental bids

You can set the bids in the following ways:

 Mainline bid – Shows your ads on the top of a search page.
 Best position bid – Fetches your ad the best position.
 First page bid – Displays the ad on the first page.
 Adgroup bid – Applies to all the keywords in an ad group.
 Custom value – Bids on selected keywords.

Key Features
 Yahoo! network comprises of 27 percent of the total web traffic in US.
 Yahoo! offers PayPal transfer mode with a minimum payout of $50.
 You only pay the amount you are willing to pay.
 Only genuine traffic arrives, since you pick the keywords yourself.
 Wide range of reporting tools.
 Easy account navigation.
 Free conversion tracker.

Yahoo/Bing Ads Editor

Yahoo/Bing Ads Editor is a powerful offline tool that lets you manage your campaign in a smooth
and flawless manner. It lets you create and manage accounts offline and in bulk.
You need to sign up for ads account and download the 'Ads Editor'. Once downloaded, you can
either create a new campaign or you can import it.
The editor menu band includes various options such as:
 Get changes – You can change any conflicts between offline and online accounts.
 Post changes – You can post and undo changes.
 Import – You can import campaigns. For example, you can import from Google AdWords
Editor.
 Export – You can export your campaigns.
 Show Statistics – You can have a look at performance data.
 Panes – On Ads Editor, you can find a few panes such as Manager pane, Editor pane, and
Browser pane.
 Manager pane – Lets you customize your account according to your requirements.
 Browser pane – Lets you browse your account.
 Editor pane – Lets you edit and view your campaigns.

\You can optimize an existing Ad account by visiting individual tabs on the platform and following
the instructions there. You can set default values for your new and imported campaigns and ad
groups. You can specify your dashboard to collect statistics. You may even select match types for
your keywords. Use keyword bid estimation tool for keyword mining. It also lets you choose custom
devices and demographic targeting.

Budget and Billing

You can set your budget on a daily or a monthly basis. Setting the daily options 'on' lets you control
your daily expenditure. However, in monthly basis, it depletes as frequently your ad is being
clicked.
 Daily Standard Budget – It is set by default. The budget is spent in a particular rate throughout
the day. If CTR is high, the rate of impressions reduces. It does not affect your budget. If you
monitor and change your budget frequently, set the 'daily standard' option.
 Daily Accelerated Budget – It shows your ad more frequently till the budget is over. If you
monitor and change the budget daily, set it to 'daily accelerated' budget.
 Monthly Budget – Here the budget gets depleted as your ad is being clicked on. It ceases the
impressions once the budget reaches zero. If you update your budget rarely, set it to 'monthly
budget' option.
 Yahoo/Bing allows you flexible payment methods as:
 Pre-pay – You pay before commencing the campaign.
 Post-pay – You pay the bill after a month. However, you can decide a threshold limit. You
impression ceases once this value is achieved.

You may pay using any payment mode, be it credit/debit card, net banking, pay-pal, or through
personal cheque. You can manage your payment methods by updating the 'Accounts and Billing'
feed. Under the tab, you can even review your billing summary.

Campaign Optimization
Campaign optimization is all about improving your campaign. You can track its performance by
measuring these three KPIs:
 Impressions
 CTR
 Conversions
To improve a campaign, you need to focus on the following:
 Ad quality and relevancy
 Delivery of maximum information without compromising the layout and grammar
 Compliance of ad with keywords, business, landing page, and USPs
 Provide correct information about seller's product and services
 Estimate what is working and what is not for the ad
 Keep an eye on your budget by generating expenditure reports
 Weigh up the performance and build up insights for account optimization
You can report in five formats:
 Performance Reports – Track how ads are performing at various levels.
 Change History – Tracks the changes made so far.
 Campaign Analytics – Report leads incurred, ROI generated, etc.
 Targeting Reports – Show what areas are targeted.
 Billing and Budget Reports – They track how much you are spending in an account.

Conversion Tracking
To track conversions, you need to place a small snippet of Java code in your ad, landing page, or
thank you page so that you can record your visitors and their origin.
By tracking conversions, you can find out:
 the audience you need to spend upon,
 the potential features in your campaign,
 which visitor is costing you less and how,
 the leaks in your website, and
 the ROI.

In AdCenter, navigate to campaign settings → Enable conversion tracking → Collect the page code
→ Click copy code → Add the snippet into your source page in the <body>………. </body> tag.
You can count one click as a conversion, a unique URL as a conversion, or all conversions without
any filtration.
Simply, keep a track of what you require and discard what is missing. Wise conversion tracking may
give an immense boost to your ROI.

SMO
Social Media Marketing describes “an interdisciplinary and cross-functional concept that uses social
media (often in combination with other communications channels) to achieve organizational goals
by creating value for stakeholders.”. Companies address several stakeholders through social media
marketing including (potential) customers, (potential) employees, journalists, bloggers and the
general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of the
implementation, governance, scope (e.g. more active or passive use) and the establishment of a
firm's desired social media culture. This requires marketers to incorporate user-generated content
(earned media rather than paid media) into their strategic approach

Social networking websites

Social networking websites allow individuals and businesses to interact with one another and build
relationships and communities online. When companies join these social channels, consumers can
interact with them directly.

Strategies
There are two basic strategies for engaging the social media as marketing tools:

The passive approach

Social media can be a useful source of market information and customer's voice. Blogs, content
communities, and forums are platforms where individuals share their reviews and recommendations
of brands, products, and services. Businesses are able to tap and analyze the customer voice
generated in social media for marketing purposes; in this sense the social media is an inexpensive
source of market intelligence which can be used by marketers to track problems and market
opportunities. For example, the internet erupted with videos and pictures of iPhone 6 bend test
which showed that the coveted phone would bend merely by hand. The so-called “bend gate”
controversy[14] created confusion amongst customers who had waited months for the launch of the
latest rendition of the iPhone. However, Apple promptly issued a statement saying that the problem
was extremely rare and that the company had taken several steps to make the mobile device robust.
Unlike traditional market research methods such as surveys, focus groups, and data mining which
are time-consuming and costly, marketers can now utilize social media to obtain 'live' information
about consumer behavior. This can be extremely useful in a highly dynamic market structure in
which we now live.

The active approach

Social media can be used not only as public relations and direct marketing tools but also as
communication channels (targeting specific audiences with social media influencers) and as
customer engagement tools.[13] Facebook and LinkedIn are leading social media platforms where
users can hyper-target their ads. Hypertargeting not only uses public profile information but also
information users submit but hide from others.[15] There are several examples of firms initiating
some form of online dialog with the public to foster relations with customers. According to
Constantinides, Lorenzo and Gómez Borja (2008) "Business executives like Jonathan Swartz,
President and CEO of Sun Microsystems, Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Computers, and McDonalds
Vice President Bob Langert post regularly in their CEO blogs, encouraging customers to interact and
freely express their feelings, ideas, suggestions or remarks about their postings, the company or its
products".[13] Using customer influencers (for example popular bloggers) can be a very efficient
and cost-effective method to launch new products or services Narendra Modi current prime minister
of India ranks only second after President Barack Obama in a number of fans on his official
Facebook page at 21.8 million and counting.[17] Modi employed social media platforms to
circumvent traditional media channels to reach out to the young and urban population of India which
is estimated to be 200 million.

Engagement
In the context of the social web, engagement means that customers and stakeholders are participants
rather than viewers. Social media in business allows all consumers to express and share an opinion
or an idea somewhere along the business's path to market. Each participating customer becomes part
of the marketing department, as other customers read their comments or reviews. The engagement
process is then fundamental to successful social media marketing.[18]
With the advent of social media marketing, it has become increasingly important to gain customer
interest which can eventually be translated into buying behavior. New online marketing concepts of
engagement and loyalty have emerged which aim to build customer participation and reputation.[19]
Engagement in social media for the purpose of your social media strategy is divided into two parts:
1. Proactive posting of new content and conversations, as well as the sharing of content and
information from others
2. Reactive conversations with social media users responding to those who reach out to your social
media profiles through commenting or messaging[20]
Traditional media is limited to one-way interaction with customers or 'push and tell' where only
specific information is given to the customer without any mechanism to obtain customer feedback.
On the other hand, social media is participative where customers are able to share their views on
brands, products, and services. Traditional media gives the control of message to the marketer
whereas social media shifts the balance to the consumer.

Facebook
Facebook pages are far more detailed than Twitter accounts. They allow a product to provide videos,
photos, and longer descriptions, and testimonials as other followers can comment on the product
pages for others to see. Facebook can link back to the product's Twitter page as well as send out
event reminders. As of May 2015, 93% of businesses marketers use Facebook to promote their
brand.[39]
A study from 2011 attributed 84% of "engagement" or clicks to Likes that link back to Facebook
advertising.[40] By 2014, Facebook had restricted the content published from businesses' and
brands' pages. Adjustments in Facebook algorithms have reduced the audience for non-paying
business pages (that have at least 500,000 "Likes") from 16% in 2012 down to 2% in February
2014.[41] [42][43]
PPC - Facebook Ads
Facebook is the most popular social networking platform. People of all ages, tastes, and
demographics use it, thereby creating a good option for an advertiser to reach a wide audience.
Facebook ads draw the attention of users and drive them to the seller's website.

Overview
Facebook ads follow the auction method. Here, advertisers are charged when their ad is clicked, or it
shows (impression) or a lead is generated by clicking the ad. It depends on the mode one has
selected (clicks, impressions, or acquisition).
Facebook ads run across all devices and platforms. You can reach the people who matters the most
to your business, no matter wherever they are.

Setting up an Advertising Account

To start running ads on Facebook, you need a working Facebook account.
Step 1: Search 'Ads Manager'.
Step 2: You are shown the present status of the ad.

Step 3: Click on the button 'Create Ad'. It takes you to building an ad. Facebook offers
different options of objectives of creating ads. Select the option 'Send people to your
website'.
Step 4: Enter the name of the website tutorialspoint.com you want people to be redirected to.
Step 5: Enter the campaign name as First Campaign tutorialspoint Website Clicks.
Step 6: Enter appropriate account information. Enter the account name as shown below:

Step 7: Keep the default location India. Keep default agegroup as 18 to 65years. Keep gender as All.
Keep languages as English (All), which includes US and UK English.
Step 8: Enter education level as In College and College grad.
Step 9: Enter interests as Technology.
Select behaviors as Digital activities → Internet Browser Used → Chrome and Mobile Device User
→ Smartphone Owners.
Enter the Per day budget amount as Rs 250.0 in Indian rupees.

Step 10: Select the option Run my as set continuously starting today.
Cilck on the button 'Upload' to add the image for the ad.
Select a facebook page as Tutorials on Cloud Computing.
Step 11: Scroll down few lines.
Enter Headline as Tutorials for Free.
Enter text as Free tutorials and reference manuals with examples for JDB, Haddop, Hive, HBase,
XStream.
Step 12: Select Call-to-Action button as 'Learn More'.
Preview the ad on the right hand side. Change the fields if required. You can create a page for your
ad for using text and links for your ad.
Choose ad category as Company, Organization, or Business.
Step 13: On the create page dialog, enter Page Name as Tutorial on Cloud Computing.
Choose category as Internet/Software.
Upload an image for the page.
Click on the button Create Page.

Step 14: After you finish entering all the inputs as per your requirement, click on the button 'Place
Order'. It takes you to entering the payment method where you can enter credit card details to pay
for your ad.
Once your ad is created, you can find it on the left-hand side of your facebook ad account profile
under 'account'.

Following Up Your Account

 To set the status of your account, go to Ads Manager → Campaigns tab
 You can manage your campaign. Set it 'active' or 'inactive'. You can set the delivery options and
can delete your campaigns, ads, or account. Other advanced features are available.
 To edit your ad set's budget or to reschedule it: Ads Manager → Ads sets → Budget
 To set the ad dates: Ads Manager → Ads sets → Date (on top of the graph) → select dates →
Save
 To change the bid: Ads Manager → Ads sets → Scroll over current bid → click pencil icon →
make bid changes → Save
 To edit the existing ads: Ads Manager → Ads sets → Ads → Creating, Targeting, and Pricing →
edit → Save
 You can add Account Groups to access multiple advertising accounts.

Managing the Ad
The next step is to manage the ad you created. It involves the following:
 Changing the running frequency of the campaign
 Changing budget of the ad
 Cahnging the keywords or images of the ad
 Assuring the changes are in place, implemented correctly, and working fine
 Engaging the users to visit more

Twitter
Twitter allows companies to promote their products in short messages known as tweets limited to
140 characters which appear on followers' Home timelines.[36] Tweets can contain text, Hashtag
photo, video, Animated GIF, Emoji, or links to the product's website and other social media profiles,
etc.[37] Twitter is also used by companies to provide customer service.[38] Some companies make
support available 24/7 and answer promptly, thus improving brand loyalty and appreciation.
Twitter is another social networking platform that allows registered users to read and write 140-
character messages called 'tweets'. It is available across all devices such as cell phones, desktops,
laptops, and tablets.

History of Twitter
Jack Dorsey, an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual
using a message service to communicate with a small group. Twitter was launched as an SMS-based
communication platform. Initially it was known as "twttr". On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey sent the
first ever tweet: "just setting up my twttr".

What is Twitter Marketing?

Twitter marketing is a powerful tool for companies of every size and structure to reach out to new
customers, promote their brand, and connect with the rest of the companies. Users can find out if
customers are talking about them, and the business can accordingly respond. Tweets create another
instance for the business that shows up in the search engine results. Twitter serves as a solid
foundation for your business to branch out into other social sites. Twitter is a great platform for
projecting what your company is doing and accessing a large audience, where your Tweets can
promote products and events.

Create a Twitter Account for Your Business

Before creating a profile, make sure every element of your profile reflects your business identity and
personality. Follow the steps given below to create an account for your business:
Sign up for Twitter or go to twitter.com Supply all the required information in the lower box on the
right side of your screen including your username, email address, and password.
Confirm your account Twitter will send you an email to the email address you provided that will
include a link that verifies your account. All you need to do is to click on the link to activate the
account. Make your first connections When you are done with creating your account, the network
will suggest people to follow. Twitter will recommend some popular accounts of celebrities to
follow. Skip this step if you don't want to follow an account.

Send your first tweet Everything is ready, now you are set to start tweeting! Hit the "Tweet" button
and you are off and running with Twitter.

How to Increase Followers on Twitter?

Grow your community by adding a follow button in your website and
 promote your username. Get noticed with hash tags like #smallbiz etc.
 Engage with your followers by collecting feedback to build a better business.
 Sync your email contacts with Twitter.
 Keep your bio updated with the events or the business campaign you are
 running. Embed your best tweets and tweet to people every day.
 You can promote your twitter account on any printed material, e.g.,
 business cards. Follow people who follow you.
 Make sure you are engaging with your customers on twitter and not to your product.

What is Hash Tag?

The symbol hash tag (#) is used to mark keywords in a tweet. It was originally created by Twitter
users. This symbol helps them to categorize the tweets and show them easily when people search for
them. Hash tags can occur anywhere in a tweet – middle, end, or at the beginning. If you tweet with
a hash tag on a public account, anyone who does a search for that hash tag will find you. A hash tag
is a way for people to search for tweets having a common to topic.

Sponsored Tweets and Hash Tags

Sponsored Tweets Sponsored tweets are advertising platforms that connect companies with tweeters.
Sponsored tweets allow brands to tap into a Twitter user's followers to reach out to new customers.
By giving companies access to your twitter stream, tweeters are compensated for each advertisement
they accept. The only thing tweeters need to do is to write a tweet based on some simple guidelines
provided by the advertiser. Sponsored tweets take care of the rest, and will even tweet it out for you.
Companies choose twitter followers they like based on a variety of factors, including how many
followers you have and how much influence you have over those followers. Sponsored Hash Tags
Sponsored hash tags place the tag of a customer's choice among the list of trending topics that users
see when they access the social network through the web.
LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site launched in 2003. It has 300+ million users
across the world. It is available in 20 languages. It allows users to create and customize profiles and
connect with people having similar interest areas.
Presently, it is the largest platform for social networking, assisting people with job opportunities.
Jobseekers can connect and follow hiring managers and can update their profiles in a defined
fashion to get easily discovered.
One can follow a company, get notifications, bookmark jobs, like and comment other's posts, and
invite others on LinkedIn. The best part of LinkedIn is that you can see your recent visitors and
endorse others' skills.

History of LinkedIn
LinkedIn was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and it was launched in 2003. Early on, its growth
was slow, but it accelerated by the end of 2003.
 In 2004, it introduced new features such as the ability to upload addresses to invite others and
introduce groups and partners with American Express. It assorted 1 million members.
 Jobs and subscriptions were introduced in 2005. Membership toll increased to 4 M.
 In 2006, LinkedIn launched public profiles as your current and past career record.
 In 2007, Reid Hoffman stepped aside and Dan Nye took over. Membership toll rises to 17 M.
 In 2008, LinkedIn becomes global by opening its office in London and launching the Spanish and
French version of the website.
 In 2009, the membership count tipped over 50 million. Jeff Weiner joined LinkedIn as its CEO.
 In 2010, LinkedIn grows amazingly with 90 million members and 1000 employees in 10 offices
around the globe.
 In 2011, LinkedIn became a publicly traded company on New York Stock Exchange and hosted a
Town Hall meeting with Obama. Membership reaches 135 million.
 The site was redesigned in 2012 focusing on making LinkedIn simpler and easy to use.
 LinkedIn turned ten in 2013 with 225 million users across the globe.
 By the end of 2014, Linkedin had grown to a significant extent with 315+ million registered
users and well over 5000 employees in 27 cities. It continues to grow, adding features and
delivering its users a better experience every time they log onto LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Marketing
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform and it has all the features of a great marketing
opportunity provider. Here you interact with people who mean business. To market through
LinkedIn, you need to do the following:
 Build a robust business page that displays your products and services in a compelling format.
 Invite clients and vendors to follow and recommend your page.
 Launch a group that is related to your business. It can attract significant traffic.
 Reach your audience through targeted advertising.

LinkedIn is a powerful social media tool. You just need to follow its policies and best practices.
Premium Account
LinkedIn offers different levels of premium account options for people with different goals based on
their specific needs.
 LinkedIn Premium for General Users starts at $24.95 per month. These plans include features
such as InMail, seeing more profiles when you search, access to premium search filters, ability to
view expanded profiles on LinkedIn, and more.
 LinkedIn Premium for Recruiters starts at $49.95 per month. These plans include talent-
finding filters, saved searches with alerts for new candidates who meet your criteria, reference
search, and more.
 LinkedIn Premium for Job Seekers starts at $19.95 per month. These plans include the ability
to zero in on $100K plus jobs with detailed salary information, ability to move up to the top of
the list as a featured applicant, access to the job seeker community, and more.
 LinkedIn Premium for Sales Professionals starts at $19.95 per month. These plans include a
Lead Builder organizer, introductions to companies you are targeting, and more.

While some features exist only under specific accounts, such as featured applicant status for job
seekers, most features are similar to the general user premium package.
Connect with Your Customers
You can use LinkedIn to connect with other users and convert them into your clients. To do so, you
need to:
 Maximize your links that direct to catchy pages. These links can lure users to take interest in
your products or services.
 Invite more and more people. Connect to even second degree connections. Message them
frequently. Keep interactions open.
 Make your profile professional. It imbibes faith of your invitees in your business.
 Stay current. Allow people to know what you have to offer and what advantages they can sought
from you.

Promote Your Business on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a valuable marketing tool. It involves targeting your own network and creating more
links from it. You can use the following tips to draw maximum benefit from LinkedIn:
 Search for highly targeted clients. Set filters to refine your search so that they meet your business
criteria.
 Stay updated and in focus of customers. Keep in touch with them by messaging, feed, etc.
 Post quality content. Keep posting new and correct information about your business. Make it
viral.
 Use sponsored post to reach the right audience.
 Connect to relevant groups and circles and encourage your employees to be a part of it.
 Customize your company page to make it compelling and descriptive. Use images, colors, and
clips to describe what you have to offer.
 Pay attention to your profile. Address in first person and make your points clear and succinct.
 Maintain good relationship with your clients. Nurture your specific connection without forcing
yourself on it.

Create an Ad Campaign
To create an Ad campaign on LinkedIn, you need to log on to https://www.linkedin.com/ads/.
Thereafter, follow the steps given below:
 Select 'new campaign' and 'start New'.
 Give a name to your campaign.
 Choose your desired language.
 Choose your media type – basic, video, etc.
 Write your ad copy. Use 25 characters for heading and 75 characters for Body.
 Include a desired call-to-action that is liable to convert.
 Choose demographic areas and location you want your ad to be targeted in.
 Choose payment methods between cost-per-click and cost-per-impressions.
 Set a daily budget. This is the amount you are willing to pay on paid marketing through LinkedIn
per day.
 Decide conversion metrics and trace them regularly to get the scope of improvement
Grow Your Business through LinkedIn Marketing
LinkedIn has 300+ million users. It is an ideal platform to showcase your services and
demonstrate your expertise. LinkedIn offers plenty of options to grow a business. Some
of them are stated below:
 Hire new talent for your business.
 You can establish credibility by discussing topics relevant to your business. Thus, you
can demonstrate the expertise of your company.
 You can reach cream prospect. You can reach top people who can support your
business.
 If you are using LinkedIn to market your products and services, then you have a wide
reach to incur traffic from.
 You can expand your market base by constantly promoting your products and
services.

GOOGLE+
Google+ is a social networking platform served by Google and relished by millions of
users. Besides being a networking platform, it is a channel to make you known to search
engines. Your presence on Google+ helps in improving your local search visibility. You
can follow people in 'Circles' on Google+ for sharing information.
Advantages of Google+
 Branding – Google will fetch data from Google+ for brand-named keywords. Your presence on
Google+ marks up high on SERP.
 Improved Search Rankings – Shares (+1) are like social recommendations that affect your
search rankings.
 Link Building – One link on Google+ acts as one backlink for your website. Your link gets
submitted to Google's index straightaway.
 Quality Reviews – Google flashes the ratings and the reviews you have received, making your
business more compelling.
 Appear in Local Carousal – You can mark the presence of your business on Google+ to be
more visible.

Creating a Business Page on Google+

Create a Google+ account. Visit https://plus.google.com/pages/create. Look for 'create Google+
page' options. Follow Up! Choose from the displayed options. You will come across:
 Local Business or Place
 Product or Brand
 Company, Institution, or Organization
 Arts, Entertainment, or Sports
 Other

Upon selecting the main category, you will be shown sub-categories to showcase your business with
more details. Select your sub-categories and move to next.
Add some basic information describing your business, provide your website link (optional), and
select a category your content is appropriate for.
Check "I agree to the Pages Terms....." and Continue....

Page Customization
Add a cover photo and a profile picture. You can either select them from your device or can import
from Picasa (if you are an active user).
Under Story, add a tagline and a storyline. Fill your contact information. Click the 'finish' button.
Use the 'About' section to make up how people see your business page. Add people in circles to get
the communication going.
You are ready with your Google business page. Start sharing contents...!!

Promote Your Business on Google+

Promote your Google+ page. Your business is automatically promoted...
Google+ can be a source that can draw immense traffic to your website. To promote your business
using Google+, try to use all its available features. Google+ helps your website stand out among
millions. It gives your website a measurable momentum and continuous growth. You can easily
integrate other services (YouTube, Hangout, etc.) to avail maximum benefit. It helps you build
credibility.

Tips and Tricks

 Make a descriptive business page. Include site URL and implement a good call-to-action to
compel users to visit your website. Embed cover photos related to your business.
 Create circles and segment them in themes. Share content in your circle. This is the best way to
make a post viral.
VIDEO MARKETING
We are compelled by what we see over what actually exists. In digital marketing, what people see
actually sells. This is the reason why 'online video marketing' is on the rise. Video Marketing is the
process of using a video in marketing to promote a business or a service.

History of Video Marketing

Video Marketing has been a key advertising module since 1940s. The first video ad was launched in
1941 by Boluva. It was a commercial on a New York TV station during Yankee game. Since then,
the popularity of video advertising is continuously rising.
 In 1979, video disrupted traditional media when MTV released the video of "video killed the
radio star." It was produced on a budget of $50,000 in South London.
 In 1984, Apple launched an iconic TV commercial for Apple Macintosh PC. Its production cost
was around $900,000.
 The year 1995 marked the beginning of Viral Videos. An Executive at Fox Commissions made a
video Christmas card (Jesus v/s Santa) for his friends and family and it became viral.
 In 1996, "The dancing baby" entertained millions by the humorous dance of an animated baby.
 "Charlie bit my finger again" took the world by storm in 2007.
 In 2012, the video Gangnam Style became a huge hit and broke all records in YouTube.
 In 2014, YouTube begins to create superstars out of video contributors. In the same year, charity
begins when ALS made a million people to take 'Ice bucket challenge' and raised $100 millions.

Gangnam Style made $10 million only from one video on YouTube. Here is a list of some other
examples of such viral videos:
 Will it blend?
 Red Bull
 Our Blades are f***ing great
 Old spice
The production cost of these video ads were pretty low compared to the result they achieved by
reaching millions of hearts directly. The key concept behind their success was a creative and unique
idea.

YouTube
YouTube is a video sharing website that lets you upload, view, and share videos. You can also like
and comment on videos. It is used by millions of users. It is a great tool for business branding.

Create an Account on YouTube

Branding through YouTube makes sense, as YouTube users are constantly increasing. Short clips or
a brief video description of your company can double your presence.
To create a business account on YouTube, tie it with your Google+ account. There are two discrete
ways of doing it:
 Use your Google+ account to create a YouTube account. To do so, click the dropdown on the top-
right corner of your Google+ page. Select 'create a channel' and follow the instructions.
 Create a YouTube account and it will automatically create a Google+ page for you. To do so,
navigate through YouTube. Click the thumbnails on top-right corner of the page. Click 'Creator
Studio'. Choose to create 'new channel' Follow-up next.

Upload Video on YouTube

 Signin to Youtube.
 Navigate to 'my guide' on the upper left corner of the screen. Search for 'my channel'.
 Click 'upload'.
 Select the video you want to upload and click 'confirm’

Vimeo
Vimeo is also designed to share videos just like YouTube, but the difference is that it is a community
of professionals. It is not meant for corporate advertisements.

Create an Account on Vimeo

 Go to Vimeo.com and sign-up. Fill in the required details. Now you are a registered member of
Vimeo.
 To create a channel, log in to Vimeo and click 'Create a channel' on the right.

Upload Video on Vimeo

 Log in to your Vimeo account.
 Click the 'Upload Video' button. Ensure that you are permitted to upload videos. Make sure you
are uploading original videos and not copyrighted ones.
 Click 'choose a file to upload' button. Select a file and confirm.
 Let the video convert. It gets converted once uploaded. Go through your E-mail to confirm.
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is similar to Vimeo and YouTube. It allows users to upload, share, and view videos.

Create an Account on Dailymotion

Join Dailymotion by registering on dailymotion.com. Fill in the required details.
Enter your e-mail, password, and date of birth.
Create your public name, link URL, and enter your passcode. Congrats! You are done with it.

Upload Video on Dailymotion

 Log in to your Dailymotion account.
 Click 'upload a video' button on the top-left of the page.
 Select the desired video from the dashboard.
 Choose the file and click 'Open'.
 Enter the required details on the form. Wait for the upload to finish. Confirm by saving it.

Ranking Factors of a Video

 Relevance – A video should be relevant to the user's search query. Since the content is video,
its'title'forms the basic relevancy measuring factor.
 User Engagement – The video should be able to keep the users engaged.
 Authority – Trust and authority affects the video ranking. Platforms check for authority as a trust
factor in order to avoid spams.
Increase Subscribers and Views
Seeking more visibility for your videos? Here is a list of tips and tricks that you can apply to
increase subscribers and views:
 Post consistently. Make sure you provide valuable content.
 Write titles of your videos strategically. Keep it basic and relevant.
 Make use of annotations. It may attract more subscriptions.
 Ask for likes and subscribes at the end of the video.
 Create a video channel. Make a posting schedule and stick to it.
 Develop transitions. It cultivates your brands to a wider reach. Thus it has large impact on your
branding.
 Subscribe to other channels to attract more subscribers.

Increase Video Views

You can increase your video views quite significantly by taking the following measures:
 Add video links to your blog.
 Share it wisely on social media platforms.
 Add it to your IM and status (say skype status).
 Create catchy titles.
 Make is compelling and worth seeing.
 Ask a third party to approve your descriptions.
 Add a custom/appealing thumbnail.
 Add annotations.
 Ask for shares.
 Create a jukebox type playlist of your videos. Idea is accumulate them in a capsule.
 Actively reply to comments.
 Purchase views.

Advantages of Video Ads

 Video ads are more eye-catching then text ads. Hence, they are more likely to convert.
 Video ads generate tremendous viewers' interest.
 Video ads rank well on SERP due to descriptive tags.
 A video ad can create quicker publicity as compared to text or image ads.

Promote Your Video Ads

To draw maximum benefit from a video ad, you must promote it and here is how you can promote a
video:
 Promote it on your blog or website.
 Include your video in your e-mail, IMs, status, etc.
 Make it viral on all video channels.
 Have a noticeable presence on social media.
Instagram
“Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and launched in October 2010 as a
free mobile app. The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April
2012 and over 300 million as of December 2014.”

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service that
enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them either publicly or privately on the app,
as well as through a variety of other social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr,
and Flickr. On April 12, 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for approximately US$1 billion in cash
and stock.

In May 2014, Instagram had over 200 million users. The user engagement rate of Instagram was 15
times higher than of Facebook and 25 times higher than that of Twitter.[51]According to Scott
Galloway, the founder of L2 and a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of
Business, latest studies estimate that 93% of prestige brands have an active presence on Instagram
and include it in their marketing mix.[52] When it comes to brands and businesses, Instagram's goal
is to help companies to reach their respective audiences through captivating imagery in a rich, visual
environment.[53] Moreover, Instagram provides a platform where user and company can
communicate publicly and directly, making itself an ideal platform for companies to connect with
their current and potential customers.[54]

Many brands are now heavily using this mobile app to boost their visual marketing strategy.
Instagram can be used to gain the necessary momentum needed to capture the attention of the
market segment that has an interest in the product offering or services.[55] As Instagram is
supported by Apple and android system, it can be easily accessed by smartphone users. Moreover, it
can be accessed by the Internet as well. Thus, the marketers see it as a potential platform to expand
their brands exposure to the public, especially the younger target group. On top of this, marketers do
not only use social media for traditional Internet advertising, but they also encourage users to create
attention for a certain brand. This generally creates an opportunity for greater brand exposure.[56]
Furthermore, marketers are also using the platform to drive social shopping and inspire people to
collect and share pictures of their favorite products. Many big names have already jumped on board:
Starbucks, MTV, Nike, Marc Jacobs, Red Bull are a few examples of multinationals that adopted the
mobile photo app early.

Instagram has proven itself a powerful platform for marketers to reach their customers and prospects
through sharing pictures and brief messages. According to a study by Simply Measured, 71% of the
world's largest brands are now using Instagram as a marketing channel.[57] For companies,
Instagram can be used as a tool to connect and communicate with current and potential customers.
The company can present a more personal picture of their brand, and by doing so the company
conveys a better and true picture of itself. The idea of Instagram pictures lies on on-the-go, a sense
that the event is happening right now, and that adds another layer to the personal and accurate
picture of the company. Another option Instagram provides the opportunity for companies to reflect
a true picture of the brandfrom the perspective of the customers, for instance, using the user-
generated contents thought the hashtags encouragement.[58] Other than the filters and hashtags
functions, the Instagram's 15-second videos and the recently added ability to send private messages
between users have opened new opportunities for brands to connect with customers in a new extent,
further promoting effective marketing on Instagram.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Web sites such as Delicious, Digg, Slashdot, Diigo, Stumbleupon and Reddit are popular social
bookmarking sites used in social media promotion. Each of these sites is dedicated to the collection,
curation, and organization of links to other websites. This process is crowdsourced, allowing
members to sort and prioritize links by relevance and general category. Due to the large user bases
of these websites, any link from one of them to another, the smaller website usually results in a flash
crowd. In addition to user-generated promotion, these sites also offer advertisements within
individual user communities and categories.[60] Because ads can be placed in designated
communities with a very specific target audience and demographic, they have far greater potential
for traffic generation than ads selected simply through cookie and browser history.[61] Additionally,
some of these websites have also implemented measures to make ads more relevant to users by
allowing users to vote on which ones will be shown on pages they frequent.[62]The ability to
redirect large volumes of web traffic and target specific, relevant audiences makes social
bookmarking sites a valuable asset for social media marketers.

Blogs
Platforms like LinkedIn create an environment for companies and clients to connect online.[63]
Companies that recognize the need for information, originality/ and accessibility employ blogs to
make their products popular and unique/ and ultimately reach out to consumers who are privy to
social media.[64]
Blogs allow a product or company to provide longer descriptions of products or services, can
include testimonials and can link to and from other social network and blog pages. Blogs can be
updated frequently and are promotional techniques for keeping customers, and also for acquiring
followers and subscribers who can then be directed to social network pages.
Online communities can enable a business to reach the clients of other businesses using the
platform. To allow firms to measure their standing in the corporate world, sites enable employees to
place evaluations of their companies.[63] Some businesses opt out of integrating social media
platforms into their traditional marketing regimen. There are also specific corporate standards that
apply when interacting online.[63] To maintain an advantage in a business-consumer relationship,
businesses have to be aware of four key assets that consumers maintain: information, involvement,
community, and control.[65]

Email marketing
Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its
broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email
marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations,
and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either sold
lists or a current customer database. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to sending email
messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous
customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or
convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and adding advertisements to
email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

Types of email marketing

Transactional emails
Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer's action with a company. To be
qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications' primary purpose must be
"to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed
to enter into with the sender", along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional
messaging.[1] Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket messages, password reset
emails, purchase or order confirmation emails, order status emails, reorder emails and email
receipts.
The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information regarding the action that
triggered it. But, due to its high open rates (51.3% compared to 36.6% for email newsletters),
transactional emails are an opportunity to engage customers: to introduce or extend the email
relationship with customers or subscribers, to anticipate and answer questions or to cross-sell or up-
sell products or services.[2]
Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives companies
the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails. There are also
software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services, which include
providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing
campaigns (such as customer referral programs.

Direct emails
Direct email or interruption based marketing involves sending an email solely to communicate a
promotional message (for example, an announcement of a special offer or a catalog of products).
Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional
messages to, or they can also rent a list of email addresses from service companies, but safe mail
marketing is also used.

Mobile email marketing

Email marketing now develops large amounts of traffic through smartphones and tablets. Marketers
are researching ways to capture the attention of users, in both span and volume. This is because the
rate of delivery still relatively low due to strengthened filters and also because certain users have
multiple email accounts that serve unique purposes. Because emails are generated according to the
tracked behavior of consumers, it is possible to tailor promotional material to their needs and to
present relevant details to potential buyers. Because of this, modern email marketing is perceived
more often as a pull strategy rather than a push strategy.
mailchimp.com/ Benchmark

Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is marketing on or with a mobile device, such as a smart phone.Mobile marketing
can provide customers with time and location sensitive, personalized information that promotes
goods, services and ideas
SMS marketing
Marketing through cellphones' SMS (Short Message Service) became increasingly popular in the
early 2000s in Europe and some parts of Asia when businesses started to collect mobile phone
numbers and send off wanted (or unwanted) content. On average, SMS messages are read within
four minutes, making them highly convertible.

Over the past few years SMS marketing has become a legitimate advertising channel in some parts
of the world. This is because unlike email over the public internet, the carriers who police their own
networks have set guidelines and best practices for the mobile media industry (including mobile
advertising). The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and the Mobile Marketing Association
(MMA), as well, have established guidelines and are evangelizing the use of the mobile channel for
marketers. While this has been fruitful in developed regions such as North America, Western Europe
and some other countries, mobile SPAM messages (SMS sent to mobile subscribers without a
legitimate and explicit opt-in by the subscriber) remain an issue in many other parts of the world,
partly due to the carriers selling their member databases to third parties. In India, however,
government's efforts of creating National Do Not Call Registry have helped cellphone users to stop
SMS advertisements by sending a simple SMS or calling 1909.[4][5]

Mobile marketing via SMS has expanded rapidly in Europe and Asia as a new channel to reach the
consumer. SMS initially received negative media coverage in many parts of Europe for being a new
form of spam as some advertisers purchased lists and sent unsolicited content to consumer's phones;
however, as guidelines are put in place by the mobile operators, SMS has become the most popular
branch of the Mobile Marketing industry with several 100 million advertising SMS sent out every
month in Europe alone.

In Europe the first cross-carrier SMS shortcode campaign was run by Txtbomb in 2001 for an Island
Records release, In North America it was the Labatt Brewing Company in 2002. Over the past few
years mobile short codes have been

increasingly popular as a new channel to communicate to the mobile consumer. Brands have begun
to treat the mobile short code as a mobile domain name allowing the consumer to text message the
brand at an event, in store and off any traditional media.

SMS marketing services typically run off a short code, but sending text messages to an email
address is another methodology (though this method is not supported by the carriers). Short codes
are 5 or 6 digit numbers that have been assigned by all the mobile operators in a given country for
the use of brand campaign and other consumer services. Due to the high price of short codes of
$500–$1000 a month, many small businesses opt to share a short code in order to reduce monthly
costs. The mobile operators vet every short code application before provisioning and monitor the
service to make sure it does not diverge from its original service description. Another alternative to
sending messages by short code or email is to do so through one's own dedicated phone number.

Besides short codes, inbound SMS can be received on long numbers (international number format,
e.g. +44 7624 805000 or US number format,[6] e.g. 757 772 8555), which can be used in place of
short codes or premium-rated short messages for SMS reception in several applications, such as
product promotions and campaigns. Long numbers are internationally available, as well as enabling
businesses to have their own number, rather than short codes which are usually shared across a
number of brands. Additionally, long numbers are non-premium inbound numbers.

One key criterion for provisioning is that the consumer opts into the service. The mobile operators
demand a double opt in from the consumer and the ability for the consumer to opt out of the service
at any time by sending the word STOP via SMS. These guidelines are established in the –CTIA
Playbook and the MMA Consumer Best Practices Guidelines[7]which are followed by all mobile
marketers in the United States. In Canada, opt in will be mandatory once the Fighting Internet and
Wireless Spam Act comes in force in mid-2012.

MMS
MMS mobile marketing can contain a timed slideshow of images, text, audio and video. This mobile
content is delivered via MMS (Multimedia Message Service). Nearly all new phones produced with
a color screen are capable of sending and receiving standard MMS message.

App-based marketing
With the increasingly widespread use of smartphones, app usage has also greatly increased.
Therefore, mobile marketers have increasingly taken advantage of smartphone apps as a marketing
resource. Marketers will aim to increase the visibility of an app in a store, which will in turn help in
getting more downloads. By optimizing the placement of the app usage, marketers can ensure a
significant number of increases in download. This allows for direct engagement, payment, and
targeted advertising

In-game mobile marketing

There are essentially three major trends in mobile gaming right now: interactive real-time 3D games,
massive multi-player games and social networking games. This means a trend towards more
complex and more sophisticated, richer game play. On the other side, there are the so-called casual
games, i.e. games that are very simple and very easy to play. Most mobile games today are such
casual games and this will probably stay so for quite a while to come.

http://bhashsms.com/
ASO is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store's search results. The
higher your app ranks in an app store's search results, the more visible it is to potential customers.
That increased visibility tends to translate into more traffic to your app's page in the app store.
The goal of ASO is to drive more traffic to your app's page in the app store, so searchers can take a
specific action: downloading your app.
Also, the ASO process requires a crucial understanding of your target customer base, including the
keywords your potential customers are using to find apps similar to yours. When you learn more
about which keywords are being used, you will have a better understanding of the language of your
potential customers – a crucial piece of any marketing plan – and you can home in on your keyword
choices.
According to Forrester, 63% of apps are discovered through app storesearches. This makes search,
in the app store, the most used method for discovering and downloading new apps.
AdMob
Being the child of the behemoth Google, AdMob should be the first advertising network for app
developers to consider for monetization. What makes it a worthy platform here is probably not its
brand, but its integration system a.k.aSDK (Software Development Kit) that helps you connect
across famous platforms such as iOS, Android and the rising Windows Phone.

Given the strong coding nature of Google, the SDK allows you to choose from a wide range of ad
formats for both mobile devices and tablets, including standard banner ads, interstitial (full screen)
ads, interactive ads and exclusive custom search ads. Integration is far less painful with AdMob, as
the documentation is clean and complete with recommendations for best practices.
However, tons of personal reports indicate that the eCPM or revenue on the AdMob is very low, and
as usual, support is hard to reach. Apparently best integration does not mean maximum revenue, so
you might want to try your luck with other reliable networks with dynamic monetization models
such as CPI (Click Per Install).

Whatsapp Marketing
Dos and Don'ts of Whatsapp Marketing
 Share your Whatsapp Contact details on your website and other social media platforms.
 Use whatsapp only when you have an established relationship with your customers even though
it is not made mandatory.
 Though whatsapp is an informal platform, always maintain a decorum while speaking to your
customer
 Respond immediately to queries. Timely communication is essential for any business. Who
knows you may even close deals by being prompt
 Post images and videos of your product. Visual messages have a greater impac
 Include some fun element in your messages- A joke or a meme would be appropriate.
 If you are not available all the time. Mention that you can be reached on a specific day at a
specific time period
 Select your prospects carefully
 Posting a product offer on FaceBook and follow up on Whatsapp is the key to targeted
communication.

Don'ts
 Do not send messages to all the mobile numbers that you get your hands on. If you send
irrelevant messages, you would anyway end up being blocked.
 Do not send messages too frequently. Overdose of information is not healthy for your brand
image
 Do not ignore customer feedback or queries. Customers may tend to lose interest on your brand.
 Keeping your profile inactive may also send a signal that you are not keen on promoting your
brand. Update your profile regularly.
 Avoid creating groups of unknown people. A group must have something in common- it may be
the locality or school or interest.
Following the above mentioned points will help you manage hassles in sending out marketing
messages to your customers. Text marketing has not lost its charm yet. With a few visuals you are
good to go. While Whatsapp does not come in to the category of permission marketing like that of
SMS and Email, we may expect the service to adopt the same sooner or later. Until then, anyone
with a phone number saved in his mobile phone may do Whatsapp Marketing.
Whatsapp Marketing to us must be a part of a well integrated market plan, ignoring it or fearing the
extra effort will only let you lose the reach to those you can otherwise easily influence.

Online Advertising ROI: 3 Useful Metrics

CPC,CPM,CPV
https://app.instapage.com/auth/signup

Understanding the Lead Generation Funnel

The sales and lead generation process is usually defined and described as a funnel. Like a real
funnel, the process involve sifting through a large amount of names and prospects in the beginning,
identify which of these names are viable as sales leads, then turning these leads into customers at the
end of the funnel.

Dayna Rothman presents a good example of this lead generation funnel in her article “Lead
Generation for Dummies”, presenting the process just like a literal funnel as shown in the diagram
above. Dayna describes the funnel as a tool for defining who your best leads are and where they are
in the lead generation process.
Getting a clear understanding of the process can help you optimize your campaigns to ensure these
leads come out the end of the funnel as customers. However, it would be important to note that each
business have its unique processes and sales situations. Their actual lead generation funnel may
differ slightly from what is presented here, but for general intents and purposes the following
describes the basic and most common stages involved in the sales funnel.

Stage 1: Awareness and Friend

Depending on how effective your inbound marketing is, the first stage of the lead generation process
will generate a huge amount of traffic to your site. The goals here is to create awareness through
social media marketing, SEO, paid advertising, and content marketing.

However, marketers need to be careful at this stage particularly when requiring first-contact visitors
to sign up, fill up a form or register. Doing so too early in the process can turn off or scare away
great prospects. On the other hand, you can also end up clogging your funnel with people who are
prematurely engaged – and will eventually fall off further down the funnel.

Stage 2: All Names

The next stage involves officially entering names into your database, although at this point these
names are not yet considered real leads. These are names your marketing efforts captured through a
variety of ways, getting their contact information as well as their permission to communicate or
market to them further.

Stage 3: Engaged
Getting names and contact information is your introductory window to prospective leads, enticing
them to move through the lead generation process further by signing up to a newsletter, attend a
webinar, downloading an ebook or accomplishing a lead capture form in a landing page, which leads
to the next stage in the funnel – engagement.

It is important that your prospects go through this stage in the process before you attempt to move
them through the funnel. Through engagement, you're assured that your prospects knows that you
are marketing to them and are open to your future communications and engagements with them.

Stage 4: Target or Prospects

If a contact engages with your marketing, you can now continue with the process and perform lead
scoring to determine if this particular contact can be a viable lead or not. There are many ways you
can perform lead scoring and these can be done both automatically and manually, depending on the
type of business and prospects you are targeting.

Through lead scoring, you will know if a particular contact fits the profile of your ideal lead. Profile
elements can be anything relevant to your need including job title, industry, size of company, etc.
Once you've identifies a lead through scoring, you can then begin nurturing and other steps further
down the funnel.
Stage 5: Marketing Qualified Lead
When a contact or target fits the profile of your lead and has been identified as having a high lead
score, then you can qualify this particular lead for further marketing. First and foremost, this lead
should have demonstrated considerable interest in your products and services to be deemed worthy
of further marketing efforts and direct contact from your sales team, otherwise your campaign will
just be flushed down the drain.

Stage 6: Recycled
Not all prospects can become a certified lead right away, but it doesn't mean that if they did not
become a lead the first time around they won't be viable leads in the future. Such prospects may
have demonstrated a certain level of interest in your products or services but at that particular point
in time – was not ready to commit to a sale.
Such leads can be placed in your recycled leads database and nurtured by feeding them with
continuous educational materials. Continue doing so until such time when they are ready to take the
next step and become a qualified sales lead.

Stage 7: Sales Qualified Lead

Once a lead has demonstrated great interest in your products or services and have good engagement
with your sales team, an account executive should then take over, engage directly with this sales
qualified lead, and make a careful assessment if the prospect is truly a sales lead or would need
further lead nurturing from marketing.

Stage 8: Opportunity
After an account executive identifies a prospect as a qualified sales lead, he or she can then identify
the prospect further as a sales opportunity and will undergo further opportunity marketing. At this
point, it would be important to understand that engaging with leads will incur cost, which include
cost of engagement, conversion and opportunity marketing.

Stage 9: Customer
At this point, the lead you have engaged with and nurtured with further marketing has finally turned
himself into a paying customer.
Again, it is important to reiterate that every company or organization have unique attributes and
targeted audiences, so it would be best to identify which stages are applicable to your niche and
make adjustments accordingly.

Proper Lead Management

Understanding what a lead generation funnel is and how it works is important to digital marketing,
but it is also vital to note that success in these areas can only happen with proper lead management.
Kimberly McCormick from Bayshore Solutions learned a great deal about these concepts on proper
lead management after attending the Marketing Sherpa Lead Generation Summit and shared these in
his article. Some of these learnings include:
 Treat leads as people and not just ordinary targets. Doing so, you can put into consideration that
each person has unique behaviors that even some of the best practices in the industry may not
apply
 If lead nurturing is not properly executed, prospects will not fall into the lead generation funnel
and will actually fall out. This happens if particular stages in the funnel are not executed well to
deliver the right results
 People are not programs that can easily be optimized by codes and scripts. They are driven by
thought sequences that should be optimized through marketing
 To optimize thought sequences, marketing should under further engagement and conversation
with prospects in order to generate a good value exchange that would lead these prospects
towards your sales and marketing goals

3 Lead Generation Pillars

Proper lead management is focused on three pillars that serves as the backbone of your lead
generation funnel. This includes:
 Lead Capture
 To generate great results from your lead capturing efforts, you will need to understand the critical
components particularly the Product you are marketing, the Message or the Presentation that you
are sending out to prospects, and the channel from where all engagement will take place.

 Lead Qualification
Not all leads captured are viable or qualified as a sales-ready lead. So it is important that the
prospects undergo lead qualification to determine if the lead can become a true marketing or sales-
ready lead, which eventually can become an opportunity, or if the prospects needs further nurturing.

 Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is a process that gives marketers good insight on how to deliver the right kind of
messages to the right kind of people at the proper time. This involves conversations, engagements
and opportunity marketing from you sales and marketing group to determine interest, intimacy and
intent insights from your prospects and leads.
In digital marketing, despite the fact that it undergoes various processes that involves the use of
technology, you are still marketing to people, each having their own attributes and situations that
affect their buying decisions. Lead generation funnel is a tool that puts this concept into great
consideration, nurturing each unique lead according to their attributes, eventually leading these
prospects and turning them into your ultimate goal – paying customers.

Content marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable,
relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to
drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing
content in order to acquire and retain customers. Content marketing is also defined as a strategic
marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content
to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action
Marketing is impossible without great content
Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your
process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:
 Social media marketing Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
 SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
 PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
 PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
 Inbound marketing Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
 Content strategy Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

Google AdSense Introduction

Google AdSense is a program run by Google that allows publishers in the Google Network of
content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, or interactive media advertisements, that are
targeted to site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained
by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-
tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick
offering (also owned by Google). In Q1 2014, Google earned US $3.4 billion ($13.6 billion
annualized), or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. AdSense is a participant in the
AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This
program also operates on HTTP cookies.

Google uses its technology to serve advertisements based on website content, the user's geographical
location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google's targeted advertisement system
may enroll through Google AdWords. AdSense has become one of the popular programs that
specializes in creating and placing banner advertisements on a website or blog, because the
advertisements are less intrusive and the content of the advertisements is often relevant to the
website. Many websites use AdSense to make revenue from their web content (website, online
videos, online audio content, etc.). AdSense is the most popular advertising network.

Google AdSense is probably the most popular advertisement service on the web. By including a
specific javascript code in your web site, it allows you to generate revenue though different
advertisements related to your web site content. The amount of generated income is based on the
type of advertisements and the number of clicks on them.Your income is generated both from clicks
on ads and from impressions (number of times the advertisement is shown on your web site).

Besides the clicks and the impressions, you can earn money by including a Google search box in
your web site code. If your web site visitors use it you will get a percent of the profit relevant to
their search terms. AdSense for Feeds and AdSense for Domains are also available . The first one
places ads in the feeds managed by Google for your web site. The second one allows advertisements
to be included for domains that do not open a web site with content.

All AdSense options are described

at:https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8433
Bear in mind that making money with Google AdSense requires a popular site with popular
keywords on it and attractive positions for the ad placements.Generally, the software is administered
by Google and you can monitor your balance through your Google profile.The service is freely
accessible for everyone who complies with the corresponding Terms of Use.

You can check the Terms of Use here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182

Google AdSense Integration

In order to start using Google AdSense you need to create an account first. This can be done at:
https://www.google.com/adsense/
Click on the Sign Up button to proceed. Fill in all required details and be sure to read the Google
AdSense policy before completing the sign-up procedure.
Once the sign-up procedure is completed, you will get a welcome e-mail with instructions on how to
use the Google AdSense tool.
Log in the Google AdSense panel and using the included wizard generate the Google AdSense code
according to your preferences.
It will be similar to the following one:

<script type="text/javascript">
<!-- google_ad_client = "pub-UNIQUE_NUMBER";
/* 300x250, created 29/03/10 */
google_ad_slot = "11111111";
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.
com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Instead of the "UNIQUE_NUMBER" string you will see a number which is generated by Google
and is unique for your account.
In the Google AdSense panel you can check the reports regarding the Google AdSense activity on
your web sites. Also, from there you can generate code for advertisement blocks with different
shapes and formatting and tune your AdSense setup.
Once you have the Google AdSense unit code you should include it in your web site.
If you have an HTML web site, you can include it directly in the source code.
If you wonder which is the best position for your Google Adsense advertisements, you can check
this article:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17954
Basically, the way to include the code depends on your web site technology and personal
preferences.
Most of the popular php scripts come with additional extensions which allow you to insert the
Google AdSense code without editing your files.
Here we will show different ways to include the code in open-source PHP projects.
We will start with Joomla 1.5, which is probably the most popular open source CMS.

Online Reputation Management Tutorial

Online Reputation Management (ORM) deals with everything about your company's brand in the
online community. This community includes the entire web – search engines, forums, blogs, news
sites, social networking sites, etc…

Online Reputation Management is first being mindful of your company's online brand then
building on that brand in the search engines (chances are this is where you are sought for the most)
through social media and other websites that produce and disseminate content.
Online Reputation Management is done through a funnel of three main processes:

Being mindful of your company's online brand (Monitoring)

First and foremost, you have a brand – as the owner and manager of that brand, you have to be
mindful about it. Know what's happening to your brand. Know what's the latest news about it. Know
what people think about it. Where are you mentioned? What are they talking about when your brand
is mentioned?

There are tons of tools that you can use in order to monitor your brand in the online world:

Google Alerts
This will be your best friend when you're monitoring your brand online. You can track web results,
news, blogs, video results, and groups results. There is no better way to get all of your brand
mentions than Google Alerts. 'Nuff said.

Yahoo Alerts
Set up for free to track news by keyword, stocks, local news, feeds and more. Receive notifications
via email, Yahoo Messenger or mobile.

Twitter Search
Twitter has grown to be one of the best places to monitor your brand in. Almost everyone in the
Twitter world retweets content with or without hashtag. The beauty of Twitter search is that it also
lets you set-up search parameters such as dates, links, location, sentiment, Twitter account, and
more.

Social Mention
Social mention is the social media version of Google Alerts. It helps you monitor your brand in
different social platform throughout the web. you can subscribe to the feed, get email alerts or
download the Excel file.

Building on that brand (Prevention)

Online Reputation Management extends to these factors connected to you:
 Your Name
 Company
 Brand(s)
 Product(s)
 High profile employees
 Handles/usernames
If one of these things get affected by a bad reputation, it would usually spread itself to the others like
a festering disease. Protecting your name, company, products and high profile employees are carry
less impact compared to your brand (which should almost always be your username). For this
tutorial, we will be discussing more about your brand and how to protect it.

BRAND / USERNAME:
This is the best thing you can do in managing your online reputation. Build and build and build and
build on your brand. Branding is key to ORM. Surprisingly, it's also arguably your most powerful
asset when it comes to SEO. Building your brand can start from getting all of your brand's social
media usernames. You can find it out using Knowem.

As soon as you know on which social media sites your brand is still available as a username, grab
the opportunity to register it there. These accounts are your online licenses to build 'online real
estates'. It will boost the chances of you filling up the first page of your brand SERP if you own
powerful social media accounts with your brand as a username.
Some of the key social media accounts you SHOULD get are:
 Facebook profile / page
 Twitter
 Google+ Account / page
 Quora
 LinkedIn
If you have these accounts, interlink them with each other and link to them from your blog / website
and they should rank really well in the search engines.

Get a Blog
Another great way to prevent bad reputation webpages from ranking as your brand is to create and
maintain a blog. Search engines love blogs. That's enough for you to know that you SHOULD get a
blog for yourself in order for you to rank well and to have that powerful leverage for your brand that
you can flexibly use whenever there is any newly published bad reputation out there.
There are a lot more reasons why you should have a blog for your company – you can publish
company news, establish a readership, promote products and services, etc…
We will be discussing more about ORM Prevention methods in the next lessons of this tutorial.

Fixing any damaging content to your brand (Cleaning)

Once the damage is done and you don't have any ammo to fire back, here's what you need to
immediately do:
 Hire an ORM consultant
 Contact the owner of the bad reputation site and humbly ask if he/she can put it down
 If it is against the law, contact any possibly concerned government body and ask them for help to
bring it down
 Ask Google to de-index it if there are any elements in the page against Google's guidelines
If all of those are not an option for you, start with getting all those powerful social media accounts
and create a network of links to them using your website. Start a blog and interlink that blog with
those social accounts and with your main website. It will take more time for these to rank – and
most probably the damage will already be done by then.
ORM work is mostly about establishing that bullet-proof reputation in the web by getting all the
possible 'real estate accounts' you can for your brand.
As much as possible, the Online Reputation Management campaign / work SHOULD NOT reach
the Cleaning stage. It amplifies the workload on any Online Reputation Manager – all the while the
damage has already occurred. The funny thing is, most companies that look for Online Reputation
Management only do so
whenever there is damage already done. Online Reputation Management is not about damage
control, it is about establishing online brand foundations.

Tips for Keeps: If you have not already taken your brand name as your username in all the
powerful social networking sites, do it. Now.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people's (or
company's) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit
for each sale that you make.
Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or
more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The
industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that
contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher
(also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity, resulting in
the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-
affiliates and specialized third party vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because
affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine
optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC - Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content
marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less
orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use
third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main
difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive
sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales.

Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and
website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a
much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing
strategies.
Following are some of the common terms associated with affiliate marketing:

Affiliates: Publishers like you and me who are using affiliate program links to promote and make
sales.
Affiliate marketplace: There are many marketplaces like Shareasale, CJ and Clickbank, which work
as central databases for affiliate programs in different niches.
Affiliate software: Software used by companies to create an affiliate program for their product, for
example: iDevaffiliate.
Affiliate link: Special tracking link offered by your affiliate program to track the progress of your
affiliate promotion.
Affiliate ID: Similar to the affiliate link, but many affiliate programs offer a unique ID which you
can add to any page of the product site.
Payment mode: Different affiliate programs offer different methods of payment. For example:
check, wire transfer, Paypal and many more.
Affiliate Manager/OPM: Many companies have dedicated affiliate managers to help publishers to
earn more by giving them optimization tips.
Commission percentage/amount: The amount or percentage you will be receiving in affiliate income
from every sale.
2-tier affiliate marketing: This is a great way of making money from an affiliate program. With this
method you recommend that others join affiliate programs, and you receive a commission when a
sub-affiliate makes a sale, (similar to MLM or multi-level marketing.) This income is popularly
known as sub-affiliate commission.
Landing pages: A unique product sales or demo page used for the purpose of increasing sales. Most
of the programs that you will be promoting have many landing pages, and you can run A/B testing to
see which pages convert best for you.
Custom affiliate income/ account: Unlike a generic affiliate account, many companies offer custom
affiliate income to people making the most affiliate sales for them.
Link clocking: Most of the affiliate tracking links are ugly. Using a link clocking technique like
URL shorteners, Thirsty Affiliates, etc., you can turn ugly links into links that can be read and
understood by your readers.
Custom coupons: Many programs allow affiliates to create custom coupons which are also used to
track sales. Custom discount coupons help you to increase affiliate sales as well.
Affiliates: Amazon affiliates,Infolink, Vcommission

E-Commerce
E-Commerce or Electronics Commerce is a methodology of modern business which addresses the
need of business organizations, vendors and customers to reduce cost and improve the quality of
goods and services while increasing the speed of delivery. E-commerce refers to paperless exchange
of business information using following ways.
 Electronic Data Exchange (EDI)
 Electronic Mail (e-mail)
 Electronic Bulletin Boards
 Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)
 Other Network-based technologies

Features
E-Commerce provides following features
 Non-Cash Payment − E-Commerce enables use of credit cards, debit cards, smart cards,
electronic fund transfer via bank's website and other modes of electronics payment.
 24x7 Service availability − E-commerce automates business of enterprises and services provided
by them to customers are available anytime, anywhere. Here 24x7 refers to 24 hours of each
seven days of a week.
 Advertising / Marketing − E-commerce increases the reach of advertising of products and
services of businesses. It helps in better marketing management of products / services.
 Improved Sales − Using E-Commerce, orders for the products can be generated any time, any
where without any human intervention. By this way, dependencies to buy a product reduce at
large and sales increases.
 Support − E-Commerce provides various ways to provide pre sales and post sales assistance to
provide better services to customers.
 Inventory Management − Using E-Commerce, inventory management of products becomes
automated. Reports get generated instantly when required. Product inventory management
becomes very efficient and easy to maintain.
 Communication improvement − E-Commerce provides ways for faster, efficient, reliable
communication with customers and partners.

E-Commerce advantages can be broadly classified in three

major categories:
 Advantages to Organizations
 Advantages to Consumers
 Advantages to Society

Advantages to Organizations
 Using E-Commerce, organization can expand their market to national and international markets
with minimum capital investment. An organization can easily locate more customers, best
suppliers and suitable business partners across the globe.
 E-Commerce helps organization to reduce the cost to create process, distribute, retrieve and
manage the paper based information by digitizing the information.
 E-commerce improves the brand image of the company.
 E-commerce helps organization to provide better customer services.
 E-Commerce helps to simplify the business processes and make them faster and efficient.
 E-Commerce reduces paper work a lot.
 E-Commerce increased the productivity of the organization. It supports "pull" type supply
management. In "pull" type supply management, a business process starts when a request comes
from a customer and it uses just-in-time manufacturing way.

Advantages to Customers
 24x7 support. Customer can do transactions for the product or enquiry about any product/services
provided by a company any time, any where from any location. Here 24x7 refers to 24 hours of
each seven days of a week.
 E-Commerce application provides user more options and quicker delivery of products.
 E-Commerce application provides user more options to compare and select the cheaper and better
option.
 A customer can put review comments about a product and can see what others are buying or see
the review comments of other customers before making a final buy.
 E-Commerce provides option of virtual auctions.
 Readily available information. A customer can see the relevant detailed information within
seconds rather than waiting for days or weeks.
 E-Commerce increases competition among the organizations and as result organizations provides
substantial discounts to customers.

Advantages to Society
 Customers need not to travel to shop a product thus less traffic on road and low air pollution.
 E-Commerce helps reducing cost of products so less affluent people can also afford the products.
 E-Commerce has enabled access to services and products to rural areas as well which are
otherwise not available to them.
 E-Commerce helps government to deliver public services like health care, education, social
services at reduced cost and in improved way.

E-Commerce or Electronics Commerce business models can

generally categorized in following categories.
 Business - to - Business (B2B)
 Business - to - Consumer (B2C)
 Consumer - to - Consumer (C2C)
 Consumer - to - Business (C2B)
 Business - to - Government (B2G)
 Government - to - Business (G2B)
 Government - to - Citizen (G2C)

E-Commerce - Payment Systems

E-Commerce or Electronics Commerce sites use electronic payment where electronic payment
refers to paperless monetary transactions. Electronic payment has revolutionized the business
processing by reducing paper work, transaction costs, labour cost. Being user friendly and less time
consuming than manual processing, helps business organization to expand its market reach /
expansion. Some of the modes of electronic payments are following.
 Credit Card
 Debit Card
 Smart Card
 E-Money
 Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT)

Credit Card
Payment using credit card is one of most common mode of electronic payment. Credit card is small
plastic card with a unique number attached with an account. It has also a magnetic strip embedded in
it which is used to read credit card via card readers. When a customer purchases a product via credit
card, credit card issuer bank pays on behalf of the customer and customer has a certain time period
after which he/she can pay the credit card bill. It is usually credit card monthly payment cycle.
Following are the actors in the credit card system.
 The card holder - Customer
 The merchant - seller of product who can accept credit card payments.
 The card issuer bank - card holder's bank
 The acquirer bank - the merchant's bank
 The card brand - for example , visa or mastercard.
Credit card payment process
Step Description

Step 1 Bank issues and activates a credit card to customer on his/her

request.

Step 2 Customer presents credit card information to merchant site or to

merchant from whom he/she want to purchase a product/service.

Step 3 Merchant validates customer's identity by asking for approval from

card brand company.

Step 4 Card brand company authenticates the credit card and paid the
transaction by credit. Merchant keeps the sales slip.

Step 5 Merchant submits the sales slip to acquirer banks and gets the
service chargers paid to him/her.

Step 6 Acquirer bank requests the card brand company to clear the credit
amount and gets the payment.

Step 6 Now card brand company asks to clear amount from the issuer
bank and amount gets transferred to card brand company.

Debit Card
Debit card, like credit card is a small plastic card with a unique number mapped with the bank
account number. It is required to have a bank account before getting a debit card from the bank. The
major difference between debit card and credit card is that in case of payment through debit card,
amount gets deducted from card's bank account immidiately and there should be sufficient balance
in bank account for the transaction to get completed. Whereas in case of credit card there is no such
compulsion.
Debit cards free customer to carry cash, cheques and even merchants accepts debit card more
readily. Having restriction on amount being in bank account also helps customer to keep a check on
his/her spendings.
Smart Card
Smart card is again similar to credit card and debit card in apperance but it has a small
microprocessor chip embedded in it. It has the capacity to store customer work related/personal
information. Smart card is also used to store money which is reduced as per usage.
Smart card can be accessed only using a PIN of customer. Smart cards are secure as they stores
information in encrypted format and are less expensive/provides faster processing.Mondex and Visa
Cash cards are examples of smart cards.

E-Money
E-Money transactions refers to situation where payment is done over the network and amount gets
transferred from one financial body to another financial body without any involvement of a
middleman. E-money transactions are faster, convenient and saves a lot of time.
Online payments done via credit card, debit card or smart card are examples of e-money
transactions. Another popular example is e-cash. In case of e-cash, both customer and merchant both
have to sign up with the bank or company issuing e-cash.

Electronic Fund Transfer

It is a very popular electronic payment method to transfer money from one bank account to another
bank account. Accounts can be in same bank or different bank. Fund transfer can be done using
ATM (Automated Teller Machine) or using computer.
Now a day, internet based EFT is getting popularity. In this case, customer uses website provided by
the bank. Customer logins to the bank's website and registers another bank account. He/she then
places a request to transfer certain amount to that account. Customer's bank transfers amount to
other account if it is in same bank otherwise transfer request is forwarded to ACH (Automated
Clearing House) to transfer amount to other account and amount is deducted from customer's
account. Once amount is transferred to other account, customer is notified of the fund transfer by the
bank.

E-Commerce - Security Systems

Security is an essential part of any transaction that takes place over the internet. Customer will loose
his/her faith in e-business if its security is compromised. Following are the essential requirments for
safe e-payments/transactions −
 Confidential − Information should not be accessible to unauthorized person. It should not be
intercepted during transmission.
 Integrity − Information should not be altered during its transmission over the network.
 Availability − Information should be available wherever and whenever requirement within time
limit specified.
 Authenticity − There should be a mechanism to authenticate user before giving him/her access to
required information
 Non-Repudiabiity − It is protection against denial of order or denial of payment. Once a sender
sends a message, the sender should not able to deny sending the message. Similary the receipient
of message should not be able to deny receipt.
 Encryption − Information should be encrypted and decrypted only by authorized user
 Auditability − Data should be recorded in such a way that it can be audited for integrity
Measures to ensure Security
Major security measures are following −
 Encryption − It is a very effective and practical way to safeguard the data being transmitted over
the network. Sender of the information encrypt the data using a secret code and specified receiver
only can decrypt the data using the same or different secret code.
 Digital Signature − Digital signature ensures the authenticity of the information. A digital
signature is a e-signature authentic authenticated through encryption and password.
 Security Certificates − Security certificate is unique digital id used to verify identity of an
individual website or user.

Security Protocols in Internet

Following are the popular protocols used over the internet which ensures security of transactions
made over the internet.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL)

 It is the most commonly used protocol and is widely used across the industry. It meets following
security requirements −
 Authentication
 Encryption
 Integrity
 Non-reputability
"https://" is to be used for HTTP urls with SSL, where as "http:/" is to be used for HTTP urls
without SSL.

Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (SHTTP)

SHTTP extends the HTTP internet protocol with public key encryption, authentication and digital
signature over the internet. Secure HTTP supports multiple security mechanism providing security
to end users. SHTTP works by negotiating encryption scheme types used between client and server.

Secure Electronic Transaction

It is a secure protocol developed by MasterCard and Visa in collaboration. Thereoritically, it is the
best security protocol. It has following components −
 Card Holder's Digital Wallet Software − Digital Wallet allows card holder to make secure
purchases online via point and click interface.
 Merchant Software − This software helps merchants to communicate with potential customers
and financial institutions in secure manner.
 Payment Gateway Server Software − Payment gateway provides automatic and standard payment
process. It supports the process for merchant's certificate request.
 Certificate Authority Software − This software is used by financial institutions to issue digital
certificates to card holders and merchants and to enable them to register their account agreements
for secure electronic commerce.
E-Commerce - B2B Model
Website following B2B business model sells its product to an intermediate buyer who then sells the
product to the final customer. As an example, a wholesaler places an order from a company's
website and after receiving the consignment, sells the end product to final customer who comes to
buy the product at wholesaler's retail outlet.
B2B implies that seller as well as buyer is business entity. B2B covers large number of applications
which enables business to form relationships with their distributors, resellers, suppliers etc.
Following are the leading items in B2B e-Commerce.
 Electronics
 Shipping and Warehousing
 Motor Vehicles
 Petrochemicals
 Paper
 Office products
 Food
 Agriculture

Key technologies
Following are the key technologies used in B2B e-commerce −
 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) − EDI is an inter organizational exchange of business
documents in a structured and machine processable format.
 Internet − Internet represents world wide web or network of networks connecting computers
across the world.
 Intranet
 Intranet represents a dedicated network of computers within a single organization
 Extranet − Extranet represents a network where outside business partners, supplier or customers
can have limited access to a portion of enterprise intranet/network.
 Back-End Information System Integration − Back End information systems are database
management systems used to manage the business data.

Architectural Models
Following are the architectural models in B2B e-commerce −
 Supplier Oriented marketplace − In this type of model, a common marketplace provided by
supplier is used by both individual customers as well as business users. A supplier offers an e-
stores for sales promotion.
 Buyer Oriented marketplace − In this type of model, buyer has his/her own market place or e-
market. He invites suppliers to bid on product's catalog. A Buyer company opens a bidding site.
 Intermediary Oriented marketplace − In this type of model, an intermediary company runs a
market place where business buyers and sellers can transact with each other.

How to create Ecommerce Website (OpenCart)

OpenCart is free open source ecommerce platform for online merchants. OpenCart provides a
professional and reliable foundation from which to build a successful online store. This foundation
appeals to a wide variety of users; ranging from seasoned web developers looking for a user-friendly
interface to use, to shop owners just launching their business online for the first time. OpenCart has
an extensive amount of features that gives you a strong hold over the customization of your store.
With OpenCart's tools, you can help your online shop live up to its fullest potential.

 Download Opencart
 Upload on Server
 Create Database
 Rename wp-admin-dist to wp-admin on main file Folder and admin folder

Ecommerce marketing strategy

Create a Content Marketing Strategy Before Starting
Nothing good starts without building a plan. Just like a movie studio goes through the preproduction
process, an ecommerce business needs a content marketing strategy. Write a list of all the methods
you plan on using to reach out to customers, whether it be blog posts, videos or newsletters.
Make it a point to check in with this strategy every week or month, evaluating how the content
creation and distribution process is going.
Quick note: we're trying a content-first approach with our first online shop, called matcha tea. So
we're going to sell matcha tea on it (doh!), but for the first 3 months we want to build an audience,
get some search traffic so that we actually have some potential customers when we'll have the tea
ready to ship. So far so good. Will keep you posted.

Generate an Email Marketing Campaign That's Automated

Email marketing is the bedrock of effective ecommerce marketing strategies, because it's still one of
the best methods for influencing your customers and convincing them to buy more.
Not to mention, consumers are known to open emails, even if they include simple advertisements.
Use an email marketing campaign to keep in contact with your customers, send them helpful
information and sell your products.
We've also built a comparison website called WebAppMeister where you can find the bestemail
marketing software for your specific needs.

With Social Media, Consider Diversifying Your Platforms

Social media is always a tough sell for ecommerce companies, since it's tough to figure out which
platforms work best in certain markets. There's a simple solution to this. Diversify, and eventually
cut the platforms that don't work well.
It's just like investing in stocks. You spread out the risk and realize which options are making you
the most money. Create Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus pages. Spread your content
through these mediums, and use social media analytics tools to understand which ones work best.
Even if one works better than another, spreading out your social media presence gives all of your
customers a way to connect with your company.
Who knows? You may only have 100 followers on Facebook, but one of them may be your best
customer. If you take away that Facebook presence you risk losing that person.
Put a Personalization Strategy into Action
Personalization is the best new form of marketing, since no one wants to spend money on faceless
companies. The idea is to brand your company along with a person, using one or two people as the
“face” of your business.
Address people with their names in your emails, send out videos and images of your employees, and
show how your products are made. Every little detail of personalization makes your customers feel
special and take a peek into the inner workings of your business.

Make Your Own Original Content

Nothing builds a strong connection with your customers like original content. Tying into your
content marketing strategy from above, you have the unique opportunity to choose between
unoriginal or original content.
Many companies use content pulled from around the web in their ecommerce marketing strategies to
free up time for other business tasks. This, however, doesn't have the same effect as original content.
How would your customers respond if they knew an original company podcast came out every
week?
Original content like videos, blog posts, audio segments and eBooks help you build your ecommerce
site as a knowledge base for those interested in learning more about your market.

Hit it Hard with Contextual Marketing

Contextual marketing has various meanings, but what we mean is using your marketing in formats
that connect with your demographics, putting the messages in the right places at the right time.
The perfect example of contextual marketing is the famous Oreos Super Bowl tweet, where they
played off the Super Bowl XLVII stadium lighting problem to show that “you can still dunk in the
dark.” It was the perfect combination of timeliness and humor, to an audience that loves snacks
during a game.

Opt for User Generated Content

User generated content is a wonderful way to build interaction with your customers, while not
having to put much money or time into the campaign on your end. Doritos is know for holding a
Super Bowl commercial submission contest every year, meaning that they don't have to pay for a
production crew to design a video.
This gets Doritos fans excited, and Doritos ends up with a commercial to air. This works well when
you ask for people to submit pictures, videos or even blog posts.

Implement a Loyalty Program

A solid loyalty program brings people back to your store, and it makes them feel appreciated for
spending money on your company. You convince your most loyal customers to spend a little extra
money, and they receive a reward for doing so.

Automate Your Social Networks

Not all social content needs automation, but you'll find that planning your social strategy frees up
time for other tasks in your business.
For example, when you schedule a month of Facebook posts, you no longer have to think about it
for the rest of the month. Moderating comments is still needed, but knocking out your social posts in
one day means you don't have to shift gears every week or day to post content on social networks.

Reach Out to Customers in Their Native Languages

It's common for ecommerce stores to sell items to people all over the world. Just because you speak
English doesn't mean that you can't sell a hat to someone who speaks Portuguese.
Reach out to foreign customers by providing translation features in your online store. Most
ecommerce platforms, WordPress ecommerce themes and WooCommerce templates provide
translation settings so that you don't exclude people in other countries who don't understand your
language.

A/B Test Your Checkout Process

The folks behind SimCity are known to test out their checkout process on a consistent basis, leading
to improved sales, because they know exactly what types of buttons and words convince people to
buy.
An ecommerce marketing plan without A/B testing is sailing blind, so it's essential to run tests
throughout the entire checkout process. This helps you see where people abandon their carts or find
it tough to pay you.

Optimize for the Mobile World

This has nothing to do with creating an app or mobile site. Nowadays your customers crave mobile
responsiveness. They don't want to open a completely different mobile site to see a mobile-friendly
interface.
Consider implementing a responsive interface so that your ecommerce website transforms for
devices like tablets and smartphones.

Think About Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising combines geolocation and mobile-ready ads to connect your customers to your
store while they are sitting on the train or in a doctor's waiting room.

Start Targeting Wearable Technology

All the big tech companies are releasing wearable technology like watches and even glasses. How
can you connect with these customers who have technology at their hands at all times? These
interfaces look different than the average smartphone, so your company needs to adapt.

Hire Someone to Create Long Form Content

Long form content is a nice way to standout from all the regular blog posts out there. Long form
content takes lots of time, so you may need to hire someone, but it dives deep into (sometimes
boring) topics, making them engaging and useful for the most interested users.
Use Social Ads for the Ideal Testing Atmosphere
Social ads are interesting, because you rarely have to spend a dime to test them out. For example,
Facebook lets you send out as many posts as you want on your business page. Once one of the posts
receives a bunch of likes and comments, you know that it's something that customers are interested
in.
Once you identify successful posts you can spend a little money and use the same posts as ads.

Brand Yourself with Your Own Personal Flavor

Placing a face on your company is one thing, but customers want to hear from the people who run
the show. If you hire a few writers or content designers it becomes tough keeping one standard
voice.
Develop a guide for these people so that they know you want a voice that communicates something
fun or more professional.

Reveal the Identities of Your Authors

One way to get around the “one voice” dilemma is to reveal the identities of your authors. Branding
under one name is fine, but your site visitors like to see all of the faces and names that contribute to
your blog or video channel.
This develops your personalization strategy and reveals who is at work behind the scenes.

Create a Face (Possibly Fictitious) for Your Company

We talked about creating a face for your company above, but what about using a fictitious character?
The Geico gecko is an ideal example, since everyone associates the brand with the little green guy.

Build Authority with Online Discussion Areas

A forum is the most common way to build a community on your ecommerce store, and this is
because people are familiar with the format.
Message boards, forums and even chat areas build your ecommerce store as an authoritative
discussion platform, using a unique form of user generated content to drive your store.

Personalize All Experiences

Building a personalized voice seems simple at first, but what about all of those random emails that
go out to your customers? Every ecommerce store has dozens of emails that go out for
confirmations, receipts, thank yous and more. Use customer names, provide relevant links and even
ask customers to reply to your emails for the ultimate personalization.

Make Your Delivery Options Better Than the Rest

Zappos has a reputation for fast delivery, and the occasional expedited delivery for random
customers. This makes people feel special. Does your company stand out in terms of delivery?
Think about ways to speed up the delivery process for an easy way to stand out from competitors.

Focus on Local Branding and Marketing

Not all ecommerce marketing plans require this, but if you have a connection with a brick and
mortar store you can focus on local branding and marketing. Reach out to customers near your store
with geolocation tools and local search engine targeting.

Look for Alternative Automated Marketing Techniques

Do you send out birthday or anniversary messages to your customers? What about automated
messages when people sign up for your email campaigns or buy a product on your store?
Free up your own time, and give your customers a reason to come back with automated email
campaigns.
Make How-To Videos for Creating a Connection and Showing
Products
YouTube channels are always a fun way to connect with customers, but what about putting a hard
focus on how-to tutorials? If you sell something like gardening gear, customers may not know the
best ways to use the stuff they buy. Videos bring them back to your store and ensure they feel right
about buying from you.

Get Creative with Your FAQs

The FAQ page is an area that gets lots of visits on ecommerce stores, but does it show off your
company culture? Think about whether or not you want to reveal a goofy or professional culture and
let it shine in the FAQs.

Pack Photos Into All of Your Content

People are more likely to click on links and read through content if it includes photos. Stray away
from stock photos and consider taking your own professional photos to keep people interested in
your content.

Turn Your Company into It's Own Media Outlet

Creating a magazine or TV channel sounds like a stretch, but many companies are taking the jump
to share their own original content on various different media outlets.

Always Stay Up to Date on Industry News

Industry news offers powerful content ideas for you to share with your customers. Some of this
content may seem a little complicated for consumers, so it's your job to break it down and make it
easy to digest.

Welcome Controversial Topics to Generate Discussion

Do you sell gun holsters on your ecommerce website? Are you always creating blog posts that favor
the freedom to carry guns? That's way too one-dimensional. Customers are smart, and want to hear
arguments from all sides. Think about creating controversial content that will get people fired up.

Forget About Catering to Search Engines

One of the best ways to creep up search engine rankings and build social media shares is to
completely forget about keyword optimization. Not only does this often look unnatural, but you can
stand out with creative headlines and content.

Use Pay Per Click Marketing Wisely

Pay per click marketing is extremely cheap if used properly. Run numerous campaigns, and test all
of them until you find the ideal options.

Dip into the Reddit Pool

Reddit is a huge forum with discussion for everything from bikes to romantic fiction. Did you know
that the platform offers advertising opportunities? Find the subreddits that cater to your industry and
put this in your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Upsell Your Products without Pushing Too Hard

Hit your visitors with relevant product links, but stray away from constant upsells. VistaPrint is a
good example of what not to do on your ecommerce site. They hammer customers with upsells,
many of which don't relate to the shopping cart.

Turn on the Image Boosters With Instagram

Instagram is a closed community for people who love images. If you can take photos of your
products, Instagram is perfect for sharing product previews, your items in action and user submitted
content.

Use Tools to Reduce Abandoned Carts

A/B testing and user experience testing tools put you in the minds of your customers. Implement a
few of these tools to find exactly why your customers are leaving your store.

Launch Stores on Multiple Platforms (Ebay and Facebook)

You can sell your items on platforms like Ebay, Amazon, Etsy and Facebook. All of these have new
opportunities for revenue streams, so give them a try to find more customers.

Optimize Your Email Capture Modules

Does your email capture popup area turn customers off? Do you offer a promotion or free eBook for
signing up? Using A/B testing to improve your email capture modules and bring in more
subscribers.

Go Crazy With the Email Newsletter

The email newsletter is a message that goes out every week or month, an it's completely un-
automated. This is a chance to share unusual content and personal messages.

Remind People About Their Wishlists

Wishlist are often forgotten, but they show you the items that people have thought about buying.
Consider sending out messages to get your customers to finish off the purchase process.

Test to Make Sure You Have the Fewest Amount of Steps for
People to Get What They Want
The best way to do this is to have actual customers walk through your checkout process and send
you feedback on how fast it was. Could you completely remove a checkout step? Only testing
reveals the answer.

Push Your Customers to Make Product Reviews

Product reviews provide the quintessential social credibility, convincing other customers to buy
products based on user feedback. How many times have you bought something online because of its
ratings and reviews?

Focus on Free Marketing Options

Landing an article in a big-time magazine takes lots of work, and sometimes money. Why not turn to
blogs with huge followings in your market? Just about every business can locate a blog that writes
about its products. Even better, if you approach smaller blogs, your submission usually only takes a
few minutes, and it doesn't end up in a huge pile of other submissions.

Talk to Your Visitors

Do you have a live chat module on your ecommerce site? Are you constantly responding to
comments on your social pages? Visitors like to speak with people at your company, so give them
the attention they crave.

Allow Ratings in Discussion Areas

Forum and customer discussion areas work nicely, but what if you added an extra element to the
community? Some businesses allow ratings in the forums, or you can earn badges when you
comment a certain amount of times.
Generate Reports to Anticipate Future Sales
Use your reports to think about how you can change your ecommerce marketing strategy in the
future. Without these reports you can't identify poorly performing aspects of your company.

Implement a Plan for Monthly Market Research

Are you coming out with a new product? Do you have any idea how your customers will respond?
Market research puts the product in customer hands, giving you a taste of how they will see the new
item.

Donate Products for Others to Review

You have a much better chance of receiving a review or magazine story if you send a product for the
writers and editors to test out. Not only does this help with their review, but it works as a little gift
for them to publish your article faster.

Set a Plan for Onsite SEO

Although your content strategy should focus on helping users and not search engines, your
ecommerce SEO needs keywords to help the search engines identify you as a store that sells certain
products.

Find Something Awesome to Give Out

Can you drum up buzz about your company with a raffle or free giveaway? Prompt people to share
your company on social media for more entries. This also works well on email signup forms or
simply to engage customers with cool contests.
I hope this list helps you in your ecommerce marketing journey. Let me know in the comments if
you have any additions or questions.