爱你，离开你……

换个方式爱你

沒有驚天動地　沒有掌聲讚美
前路遙遠沒空氣　仍期望到最後會一起
直到冰天絕地　亦會開遍薔薇
無望完美　回頭或有驚喜

傳說愛會成就勇氣　飛出去世界更旖旎
行李載滿懷念幾重　總相信我會拿得起
曾抱過你然後兩臂　將一世記掛這滋味
請愛惜　愛惜你自己

若隔開天共地　換個方式愛你
停住時間或空氣　原來合上眼就會一起
做最好的夢寐　預最傷的結尾

長夜流過　從頭在記憶中　碰上你

若隔開天共地　換個方式愛你
停住時間或空氣　原來合上眼就會一起
做最好的夢寐　預最傷的結尾

從未忘記　從前在記憶中　吻過你

Affiliate Marketing

According to Magnum (2005), Affiliate marketing is a cooperative effort between merchant and an affiliate’s website. When customers want to buy a product, they can use searching engine like Google and simply typing in the key words. Then they will find the direct links of those online stores which use affiliate marketing with Google. Affiliate marketing is a popular online business idea. It creates great opportunities for business earning income online. The great advantages for the affiliate marketer are that they do not need to create their own product; they do not need to worry about purchasing, warehousing and shipping to customers. Affiliate marketers need to recommend other people’s products in order to gain commission. They also need to create attractive website to generate more traffic, and then send the traffic to the merchant’s site.

On the other side, affiliate marketing creates many benefits for merchant. For example, using affiliate marketing can increase the numbers of target markets and it has low risk. According to Magnum (2005), more sites will naturally create more sales, if the sites merchant have chosen to use are in their niche marketing. Affiliate marketing provides merchant a bigger market to sell their product. For example, when customers search “dining table” at Keycode.com, Keycode.com will show them many direct links to the stores which sell things related to dining table. By using affiliate marketing, it will give the store a chance to reach people who are not in their target market. Therefore, it leads an increase of total target markets and sales revenue. Furthermore, the paying system of Keycode.com is based on Pay Per Sale. There are no any up-front fees, clients pay nothing until a Keycode.com offer is actually used by a shopper. Pay Per Sale has relative lower risk because marketers only need to pay when customers exactly purchase products through the affiliates’ websites. Moreover, marketers do not need to worry about if they get fraud from affiliates’ websites due to no joining fee for most affiliate websites.

As Digital Web Marketing (2008) indicated there are three ways to make money with affiliate marketing. It includes Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per Sale and Pay Per Lead. Pay Per Click heavily depends on the keyword in the ad link. When customers click the ad on affiliate website and the link lead them to the merchant’s website. Affiliate earns certain amount commission. Pay Per Lead does not involve selling. It collects information when website visitors fill out a survey or give out their email address. It generates a lead for an affiliate. If the lead makes a sale, then there will be a commission.

In order to become a good affiliate and maximize the profits from the website, the Internet Marketing Center (2009) explained that affiliate marketers should focus on areas as follows:

• Define a niche market and target the affiliate products to that market.
• Build the good relationship and trust with website visitors. For example, sending regular emails, building blog comments and providing opinions from expertise.
• Constantly finding new ways to market the products such as create attractive web design to engage more visitors.
• Create “sticky” website. Affiliate marketers should create rich and useful content such as product comparisons, newsletters, helpful tips and contests etc.
• Constantly test marketing strategies in order to convert visitors to actual buyers.

Overall, affiliate marketing has many benefits for both affiliate marketers and merchant. It has great power to generate income online.

Reference

Magnum, T. (2005) What are the Benefits of Affiliate Marketing? [Internet]. Available from: <http://ezinearticles.com/?What-are-the-Benefits-of-Affiliate-Marketing?&id=41437> [Accessed 25 November 2009].

What is Affiliate Marketing & MoreNiche ? [Internet], MoreNiche LTD. Available from: <http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.moreniche.com/img/mn-graphic-affiliate-how-works.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.moreniche.com/affiliates-how-it-works.php&usg=__adDdApNH59kHKRoAgq16fNUzrNo=&h=297&w=572&sz=29&hl=en&start=32&tbnid=wp91RUHGlI5jkM:&tbnh=70&tbnw=134&prev=/images%3Fq%3Daffiliate%2Bmarketing%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18> [Accessed 25 November 2009].

Online Interactive Advertising

In the traditional advertising channels, marketers use many different ways to promote their product and services. For example, they use TV, radio, direct mail, print and trade shows. However, now more than ever, online marketing becomes a very competitive environment. Online interactive advertising provide marketers more advantages than traditional advertising. As Seth Godin explained about opportunities for ad agencies, marketers should take advantage to use clever and new technique such as internet to help organizations since internet can build a reliable media platform.

Interactive advertising is the online advertising that can engage the customer in the brand to build brand equity. Compare to traditional advertising, online interactive advertising is inexpensive. Marketers can innovate on the web such as using Facebook to create their product pages. It is free. In addition, by using online advertising, marketer can target more audience than other media advertising. For example, marketers put interactive advertising on the social networking such as My Space and Facebook. These social networking have huge customer base. It will create good word of mouth affect rapidly. Moreover, online interactive advertising is a good tool to increase brand awareness and purchase intent. According to Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) (2002), higher online frequency boosts effective branding. For example, during the advertising campaign, the Personal Care’s Dove Nutrium Bar’s online impressions increased from six impressions to twelve impressions in six weeks. Overall it increased the effective branding by 45% (IAB, 2002). Online interactive advertising helps the company continue to build good relationships with their customers through very creative way. For example, the online interactive advertising of Nokia SMS racer created a buzz and interests among Nokia cell phone users; and people kept talking about it online which was great word of mouth effect.

Online interactive advertising also shows brand names and benefits. Customers can view the products in more positive way. For example, mobile advertising is a good example for online interactive advertising. Nowadays there are huge amount of people heavily rely on their mobile phones. They often use it for browsing online, playing games and chatting with their friends and business partners. As now mobile phones get into hand-held multimedia computers, people can make the world around them clickable. With people carry their favourite websites in their pockets, marketers are able to connect them wherever they go. Marketers can send new product information and updated services such as new product ads and special product offers directly to customers.

Overall, online interactive advertising is a brilliant advertising channel for brand building and value adding. It has many advantages for the business. Marketers can no longer afford to ignore it. In addition, by using the enhanced interactive online media platform, companies will be able to create new revenue opportunities. 

 

Paid Search vs. Organic Search

Paid search such as Pay Per Click (PPC) is classic search engine pricing model. It is paying the search engines to get the results that businesses want. Organic search describes natural search engine results on any particular engine.

Compare to the paid advertising that appears in sponsored links search engine results, organic search engine results has no money influence the rankings of any individual sites. Organic search is more visible and people trust it more compare to paid advertising. Paid search are usually located on the right side of the web page. It is less visible and people are likely to ignore them. Paid advertising have quick feedback of the results. However, organic search takes longer to get results back. According to Dr. Wilson, sometimes it takes several months (Wilson, 2006). In addition, it is difficult for organic search to get top positions. Moreover, Paid search have better control of the keywords which related to the company, brand, products and services. It leads high volume traffic. Organic search have very low-cost compare to paid search.

Organic search engine results are very important. It is a method used for achieving a better search engine ranking through high quality and relevant content. Organic search engine optimization can draw more viewers to the business’s website. According to The Internet Digest, when people understand the difference between paid search and organic search, they will more likely to choose the natural search engine results (The Internet Digest, 2004). It has more positive influence about a particular company compare to a paid advertisement from the company. According to Seth Godin, in order to be the first in Google rankings, organic search results should provide people really useful information with a series of pages about a particular company’s site and their social sites (Godin, 2007). It should include the content that people really want to read.

Paid search advertising such as PPC relies on purchased keywords or search phrases to send visitors to a website. If the business struggle to get some traffic, paid search advertising is a better solution. However, paid search can be very costly. If the business wants a higher ranking without spending money, the organic search engine optimization is best solution. It makes online marketing more successful. Organic search engine optimization can significantly increase profits. The higher ranking placement will open profitable streams of revenue for every business. Moreover, most searchers believe that sites with the highest search listings are the top companies in their field. Organic search engine optimization helps the business increase their market wild presence. It helps increase customer’s awareness. It also increase brand visibility. Last but not least, organic search engine optimization brings in business any time, not just 9 to 5.

Bibliography

The Internet Digest (2004) Natural Search Engine Results – The Great Equalizer [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.theinternetdigest.net/articles/organic-search-results.html> [Accessed 11 November 2009]

Wilson, R.F. (2006) Organic Search vs. Paid Search (PPC advertising) [Internet], Web Marketing Today. Available from: <http://www.wilsonweb.com/paid-search/organic-paid.htm> [Accessed 11 November 2009].

Viral Marketing

According to Seth Godin, viral marketing is an idea that spreads and while it is spreading, it helps market business or cause. There are two types of viral marketing. First, the marketing is the product and there is a self-amplifying cycle such as YouTube and Hotmail. Second, it is a marketing campaign that spreads (Godin, 2008).

Viral marketing is very effective and powerful form of online marketing. In viral marketing, people pass on a piece of marketing message around, from one person to the others. It spreads the message around very fast. It is an online word-of-mouth advertising. Viral marketing helps business advertise and promote their products and services without spending large amount of money. Marketers just need to update their video or image advertisements on the free websites such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Viral marketing can generate more traffic, attract more customers and increase their interest about the products and services. For instance, according to O’Neill, referral is one popular form of viral marketing on Facebook (O’Neill, 2007). The referrals tactic is an effective way to encourage applications users to market application for the company. The application users market the application on their blogs, websites, forums and Facebook walls. They pass the message to their friends. The application users are highly involved in the marketing but not the company.

When using viral marketing, it should be well planned and organized. The product or service should be interesting and attractive for people spread around. When the message spreads, it should create benefits for the business such as enhance their brand image, reputation and profits. Moreover, when using viral marketing, creating good first impression is very important. It will lead people spend more time to do further investigation. For example, Honda-the Accord “Cogs” advertising is one of the best viral marketing campaigns. The advertising is very detailed and sophisticated. It grabs people’s attention from the first moment when the small cog starts the first move. People concentrated on the next moves. The advertising implied the high quality product with lots of details. People spread the message around the world on the internet. The viral marketing created big buzz for Honda Accord. It helped the company to enhance their reputation and continue to build the brand loyalty as well.

To sum up, viral marketing is very important for marketers to promote their business with less expense but higher profit. It also builds brand awareness and enriches the brand reputation.

Bibliography

Godin, S. (2008) What is Viral Marketing? [Internet], Seth Godin’s Blog. Available from: <http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/12/what-is-viral-m.html > [Accessed 26 October 2009].

O’Neill, N. (2007) The Top 5 Viral Facebook Techniques [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/07/the-top-5-viral-facebook-techniques/>[Accessed 28 October 2009].

Business Blogs

Business Blogs

 Many business managers and owners like to use blog. A blog is very easy to set up compare to set up a business web site. In addition, setting up a business blog is inexpensive. Many blogging services are free nowadays. According to Seth Godin and Tom Peters, blog is one of the best free marketing tool.

A business blog can be written in different styles. The biggest benefit is business blog has the ability to inform their customers of any changes, new products, promotions, events, and latest offers etc. The business blog helps generate more direct sales. People like spend amount of time to read specific blogs on a regular basis. Individual blog readers usually prefer a personal style. However, business blog style may vary according to different businesses. For example, many firms have used newsletter or e-newsletters to have regular contact with their current customers or potential customers. Using a business blog is much easier and quickly. It can be updated more frequently than when offering a weekly or monthly newsletter.

Blog helps business build brand awareness. According to Seth Godin, if a business is good at writing blog and respond people’s comments, people will keep reading it. It automatically builds the brand awareness. With each post, it gives the company an opportunity to mention their company’s name and it makes readers to think about the company when next time they are looking for a particular product and service. Moreover, a blog allows business to speak more freely and in a more informal and personal style than business website does. It builds more trust between the readers and the company. When people are more interest in the business, they like to visit the main site, click the links and purchase the product.

A business blog enables the company to gain insight into their customers and help to promote their business. For example, the food industry companies use blog to generate online buzz about their services and enhance their business. The Club Med will host a conference in 2010 in Mexico. The conference will gather together popular food bloggers and writers to share their expertise, hands on workshops and discussion about food blog. A business blog allows readers to post their comments. This gives the company a sense of how customers react to what they say. In addition, the company can also track which posts are being read more frequently and which generate a greater number of clicks. This is very important information when company doing market research.

According to Skellie, a great business blog should be

1. Use the professional voice.
2. Edit each post, maintain good grammar, spelling and fluid expression.
3. Present information clearly and concisely.
4. Be personal but not too personal and use interesting stories which related to the topic.
5. Keep the opinions and beliefs to yourself. For example, keep politics, morality and controversy out of the business blogging.
6. Be objective and treat the readers like your customers. Respond their comments and emails and answer their questions with best abilities.
7. Take time to develop well thought-out posts which can offer more values to readers.

Overall, a successful business blog can add more value to the business, create more loyal customers and build trust in potential customers.