SEO or PPC Which is Best for My Business?

Search Engine Optimization or a Pay Per Click Campaign
When speaking with business owners, concerning their website marketing budgets, sometimes the question that is asked is should they use a SEO strategy or a PPC strategy.  I personally like to diversify my marketing efforts so I use a combination of both with several other marketing strategies included.  However, lets look at some reasons why to choose one as oppose to the other, or why one would be more valuable to your business than the other.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.--Wilkepedia

SEO is a long term strategy.  It is an investment into a website that, if performed properly, will pay off for years and years to come.  SEO isn't an overnight answer to low traffic concerns.  In fact, I usually inform clients that they are looking at 3 to 6 months before they notice any significant traffic increases.  SEO at first glance may seem to be an expensive marketing tactic to many small business owners, due to the many hours involved and the website re-design that usually accompanies it.  However, when compared to other traditional marketing strategies such as television and radio; SEO can be an excellent ROI given the competitive advantage that website owners receive and increased conversion rates.


Pay Per Click Campaigns (PPC)

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.--Wilkepedia

PPC campaigns are what you should turn to if you are looking for immediate increases in your traffic.  They are simple to run but tend to get complicated the more keywords you have and the larger the number of products you are trying to promote.  An online e-commerce site will usually hire a professional consultant to manage their PPC campaign while they concentrate on running their business.  The major work with PPC campaigns is the keyword/key phrase research and writing compelling ad copy that not only brings traffic but qualified traffic.  Remember, with a PPC campaign every time someone clicks on your banner or link, you have to pay for it.  If you get a lot of clicks but no conversions, this can become quite costly.  


Conclusion:
In conclusion, you can see how either marketing strategy can greatly benefit a websites marketing needs.  As stated earlier, I like to use a combination of both strategies when promoting a website.  The best thing to do before deciding is sit down and create the objectives and goals that you want to accomplish then it will be much easier to decide which one will be more helpful for your business.


Love to hear your questions or comments or anything that you guys feel I left out that you would like to add.

Email Marketing Campaigns

Email Marketing Campaigns

An effective email marketing campaign can be an excellent marketing strategy.  By providing a sign up form for your website visitors, you harness information.  You are able to learn more about your customers and what they like and dis-like.  Lets face it, everyone that visits your website does not necessarily purchase your products or service at that visit.  They may return at various later times or never again.  However, if they sign up for your newsletter, then there is an opportunity to convert them to a customer at a later date.

Email marketing campaigns keep you in the minds of your customers and potential customers.  They give you the opportunity to tell them about news, new products, and just to make a connection.  Just imagine if a potential customer went to your website and there was a product they wanted to purchase but it didn't fit their budget at that time.  By keeping in touch with them through your email marketing campaign; when their budget does allow for that purchase, they have a quick link to your website and not one of your competitors.

Their are a couple of excellent services that can help you achieve great results if you decide to take on the challenge of an email marketing campaigns.

• Constant Contact--They provide email marketing, online surveys, and event marketing.  They have become an industry buzz word, however, they can become a bit pricey.  They tend to charge for extra pictures which get annoying and every service that I mentioned above also has an individual charge.
• Rate Point--This is the new kid on the block.  They offer the same features as constant contact, however, they don't nickel and dime you for every little feature.  When I am starting an email marketing campaign, I like to use them.  The product is great and the customer service is even better.

Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior

The study of when, why, how, and where people do or do not buy.  It attempts to understand the buyer decision making process, both individually and in groups. It studies characteristics of individual consumers such as demographics and behavioural variables in an attempt to understand people's wants. It also tries to assess influences on the consumer from groups such as family, friends, reference groups, and society in general.--Wilkepedia.com

Why do we study consumer behavior?
By studying the consumer, it helps organizations, businesses, and firms to improve their marketing strategies.
We can explore the psychology of how consumers think, feel, reason, and select between competing alternatives.  The influences of the consumers' environment such as family, friends, culture, and media also reveal their importance when we delve into the study of consumer behavior.  Consumer behavior gives us a chance to study how consumers shop and make their buying decisions while shopping.

By researching all of this information, we can adapt and improve our marketing campaigns and marketing strategies to more effectively reach the consumer.  Studying consumer behavior not only helps us to refine our marketing strategies, but it also makes us better consumers.  It shows us how to check for bargains and teaches us the benefits of buying in bulk as oppose to smaller, more expensive supplies.

"Consumer Behaviour - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia." Main Page - Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.

Your Website Should be Your Hardest Working Employee

Why take the time and money to invest in the design and development of a website just to have it sit on the Internet like an old abandoned building, or even worse, stand around on a smoke break, like some questionable employees do, just collecting a pay check.  Well, take into consideration that your website is an employee that works for the company like everyone else.  If it doesn’t perform then it may be time to send it to the un-employment line, or at least give it a stern talking too.

The problem with creating a website in today’s environment, is understanding why you are creating it and what you are going to use it for.  Yes, it is no secret that if you want to do business in 2010 and beyond, you need to have a website to be taken seriously.  However, don’t just have one designed and created just because you read an article that said you should.  You need to have a complete plan on how making this investment is going to pay off for your business before you even think of having it designed.  The key is you want to design it to meet your goals not wrap your goals around its design.

Another key point to remember is that creating a website is an ongoing effort.  The worst mistake you can make is creating a website and then just leaving it on the Internet and hoping that the magic god of traffic will refer you customer after customer.  You have to be an active manager of your website or hire managers for your website, just as you do your employees.  You have to set goals and objectives for your website to meet.  Make sure your website finishes its projects on time. When making an investment you have to either constantly cultivate it yourself, or hire a professional to do it for you.  Make sure that if you invest in building an online presence, that presence isn’t  just left to run however it sees fit.  You are the boss and your website is an employee, tell that lazy bum to get to work.

Establish a Problem Then Position Yourself as the Solution

Defining a problem and having everyone or at least your target market see you as the solution is one of the ultimate goals of marketing.  When you mention marketing to most people they tend to classify marketing as sales or advertising.  Sales and advertising are a part of marketing, however, marketing is a much, much larger.

Create a product and then decide how to market and advertise that product.   Well, this is the standard approach that many companies choose when trying to bring something to market.  Unfortunately, most products brought to market during the year fail.

The failure rate for new product launch ranges from an estimated 50% and 75% (PRLEAP.COM) 

I hypothesize that this high failure rate can be contributed to marketing.  Marketing should be the very first step in the product development process.  Before you spend $1000s or even $1,000,000s of dollars developing a product and then advertising it and creating partnerships and distribution deals only to see it sell about 100 units; why not do some market research and determine if it is a product that is NEEDED by the consumer.  When opening up a new pizza restaurant or fast food chain, research the location and decide if that particular market can handle another restaurant such as yours.  Are there already too many of them in the area, do the demographics of the people living there actually like that type food?  These are all questions that marketing helps us to answer.

Remember:  The best marketing strategy there is, is  to establish a problem and then to position yourself to your target market as the solution to that problem.

Know Your Competition Better Than They Know Themselves

Throughout my marketing career, just as many other marketers have, I have had the responsibility of creating and implementing marketing plans.  I have found that there are many different techniques and channels for marketing different products.  Each product is like raising a child and even though every child has their own personality and special needs, for the most part every parent no matter where in the world they are or what culture they are in,take some of the same approaches.  


Well, marketing can be the same way.  Every product or service definately has their own needs and certain channels work better than others, however, they all share some of the same marketing prinicples.


Whenever I start to begin forming a marketing strategy, I like to take a look at the competition.  I want to know more about the competition than they know about themselves.  I want to know what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.  I want to gather as much information about them as possible.  Scour the internet to find strategic information on your competitors.  I have even pulled the unbelievable from time to time and just called them up and talked to them.  If they have a brick and mortar store then gas up the car and take a trip.  Talk to their customers and get a feel for your competitors brand experience.


Remember, the more you know about your competitors, the more you are equipped with the ammunition you are going to need in order to compete with them.  If you know where their weaknesses are, then you can exploit them and improve your company's brand and increase your market share.

Marketing Strategies 5 Tips to Success

Developing a marketing strategy is like creating a map to the future success of your business. It gives you an opportunity to mark X as the destination you are trying to get to and lets you see what the playing field looks like. Without a good marketing strategy its like you are just cruising on the highway with no destination. A business needs a destination, so everyone in the company knows what to strive for.

5 Tips For Developing a Marketing Strategy

1. Define your service or product
Define what you are offering in clear precise terms. You want to answer the question, "What does your company do?"

2. Know your competition

It is a good practice to take the time to know what other companies are offering the same or similar products or services to your own. Whenever I am creating a marketing plan or strategy, I like to say, "Know your competition better than they know themselves."

3. Determine your target market.

You have to find out who needs your products or services and where they are located. How they get their information and which products would be most beneficial to them.

4. Establish a marketing budget

A marketing budget is an important part of any business. If your budget is too large then you could over spend and lose money on disastrous marketing campaigns. If your budget is too small then you may miss out on opportunities to promote your company.

5. Keep track on what you spend and the results.

Marketing is mostly a process of hypothesis and testing. Some campaigns go well and some, well we just won't even discuss them. You need to track what works and what doesn't.

Are you a Business Owner, or Self-Employed?

Just because you have a business license and you are the boss you answer to doesn't necessarily mean you own your own business. You can even have a staff of employees and still be self-employed.

What's the difference? Well, the key difference between a business and being self-employed is that a business makes you money when you aren't there, being self-employed you have to be there to make the money.

Being a Business Owner

When you are a business owner, yes you can or cannot be very involved in your company. You may show up everyday to make sure employees are working, to ensure that processes are running smoothly, and to grow your business but if you decide to take a vacation or skip a couple of days of work, guess what; the business keeps right on making money.

A business is a process that can be taught, duplicated, and sold. This is how we get franchises and licenses. You are authorizing others to learn your business process and then duplicate it to make themselves money, and you even more money.

Being Self-Employed

When you are self-employed, you may be the boss but if you are the key component to the business and it cannot operate its day to day functions without you being there, then you are still self-employed. This can be the case of a highly skilled worker that owns their own business but hires individuals around them that are simple support staff. If that individual doesn't have other individuals that are trained in the same trade and a decision making team (that has the power to execute their decisions) in place then every decision has to go through the owner and that becomes in-efficient and destroys the whole purpose of having a business.

Remember:

A business is a process that can be taught, duplicated, and sold. If you have to show up everyday and complete the majority of the work, make all the decisions, and the business makes no money when you aren't there; then you are self-employed.

Your Employees Can be Your #1 Marketing Option

The best investment that any business can make is in its employees. Creating a team of top notch employees that share the company vision and want to see the company succeed will offer the greatest returns overtime than any other marketing campaign.

If you keep your employees involved in the business and excited, then they will promote the business in return. I personally believe that everyone that works for a company is a salesman. Remember, one of the first questions people ask when they meet someone is what do you do? Being that many professionals actually spend more time working than with their actual families, most people associate themselves with their job or profession.

Keeping your employees involved in the decision making process and allowing them to take ownership of their projects helps to establish trust between supervisors and workers. Employees should also be empowered to be able to solve everyday problems that pop up. Having to run every little decision through upper management can be time consuming and professionally insulting. Why hire individuals whom you don't trust their opinions or decision making?

The worst mistake that any manager or supervisor can make is micro-managing your team!!! Yes you have to monitor employees and make sure that the work is getting done and that everyone is staying on the same page, however, you shouldn't try to control every little task and every aspect of the things they do. This destroys your work forces creativity and can cause the company to miss out on may different new ideas.

To sum it all up, if employees are inspired then they will tell the world about the company they work for and push your message forward; if they are micro-managed and un-respected then the organization will suffer for it.

Promote Your Business Like a Rapper

Well, I was listening to some hip hop the other day riding in the car and getting my shine on. As I remember the featured artist was Rick Ross. No need to mention which song he was performing because the main concept was the same. No matter what song he rapped he continued to say "Rick Ross" throughout the entire song. The bass and hard hitting drum patterns may have overpowered the words in many of occasions, however, you could always make out the words clearly "Ross".

Referring to one's self repeatedly throughout a song is no new concept to rap. In fact, I think it would be hard to find one rapper that actually made it through a song without saying their own name at least 5 times. It would seem that rappers have broken the code to branding and put marketers to shame. Repetition, repetition, and more repetition!!!

On average, it takes at least 7 to 12 times for a person to hear a marketing message before they actually listen to it, effects of continued advertising bombardment from today's media driven society. This technique should be adopted by all business professionals. If you want someone to remember your business, then you have to continue to tell them about it. Entertainers have known for years that once you leave the public eye, you are forgotten about. The same is true with business, if people don't know about your products and services, then your business is forgotten about.

So if you want to be successful then promote your business like a rapper and get your shine on.

Good Enough Isn't Good Enough in Business

In today's economic crisis, businesses are working with very limited resources and personnel. Hourly Employees and Executives both are having to push themselves harder and harder to pick up the slack of trying to make a profit in an very financially unstable economy. I have even seen our CEO put down his golf clubs, roll up his sleeves and pitch in a helping hand.

Being that staffs are so stretched and pulled in different directions, we may sometimes feel that some things don't matter or that we can let some things slide. This can be the worst mistake a company can make during hard times. When business after business starts to go bankrupt, you have to stay on your A-game unless you want to be another statistic in the next Presidential Speech.

So many people are out of work that new companies, especially service companies, are springing up at an exponential rate. Keep in mind that whatever thing you are letting slide, your competitors are probably not letting slide. In fact, they are waiting for you to make a mistake so they can take advantage and gain a little more market share. A business owner must stay humble and remember that your business is built one customer at a time. When you don't have the money for a large marketing or advertising budget, you have to be creative and find other ways of advertising. I have always found that the best source of advertising tried and true time after time is "Word of Mouth".

I have never found any form of advertising to give me a greater return on investment. That is why customer service is such an important task of any business of any size. The happier your customer is about the products, the more they are going to talk about them and tell others. Wow, and this is all for free. No television adds, no radio spots, and no pay- per- click campaign to manage.

Take care of your clients, respect your employees and remember to be humble.

These are the ingredients to success in today's economy. An attitude of that presentation isn't quite done but it's good enough just won't cut it. You only get first impressions with most clients today because there are so many different vendors to choose from. If you are having a small complaint from a customer and it is pretty easily taken care of, then solve it as soon as possible before it grows into something big. If you promise your clients something and can not deliver on time or exactly what they want, be transparent with them. Keep your clients updated on what is going on. Don't forget those same Social Media channels that you are using to broadcast the features of your product, your customers are using them to broadcast things about you and it can be good or bad.

Personal Branding in Today's Economy

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is quite simply the future of career development. The global economy exposes us to great new products at affordable prices, but it also exposes companies and firms to great new talent. This is where personal branding comes in.

Personal branding is the process by which individuals differentiate themselves and stand out

from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leveraging it

across platforms with a consistent message and image to

achieve a specific goal. This way, individuals enhance their recognition as experts in their field, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confidence.

How do I get started with Personal Branding?

Questions to answer:

Who needs to know about you?

What need are you best positioned to fill?

What differentiates you from others in your field?

The goal of a personal branding campaign is to create a strong, consistent, and specific association between the individual and the perceived value they offer.

Establish an inventory of core competencies, expertise, demonstrated abilities, and an existing level of recognition.

Personal Branding Consists of:

· Value Proposition

· Differentiation

· Marketability

Social Media Marketing ...How to ??

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How Web Analytics Help.

Web analytics is the study of the behavior of website visitors.

In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.--Wilkipedia.com

We live in the information age and analytics are a great information gathering tool. Unfortuanatly, some people beleive that the more hits you get the more conversions you get. Not necessarily! What is the point of having a million visitors to your website a day yet only 5 people actually decide to purchase your products. You optimize your website for search engines and you run a pay per click campaign. Your daily visitors increase and your website is getting traffic and you think it's the solution to all your problems. No, we still have the pesky little problem of converting that traffic into sales or newsletter sign-ups or whatever type action you want visitors to take. This is where analytics swoop in and save the day.

In order to have your online business succeed, it is vital to understand exactly how your website works and where the weak points are situated. Having a web analytics solution can help you in developing strategies to acquire new visitors, retain existing visitors, understand visitor paths, understand visitor behavior, search terms and the search engines that drive your traffic, pages that are visited most, main exit pages, and maximazation of your profit.

With a Web Analytics solution:

• Monitor where your traffic is coming from (IP Addresses)
• Track unique visitors and how many sessions they have.
• View the path of your visitors (Time spent on each path and the sequence of browsing)
• See what were the top entry pages, top exit pages and how many files they downloaded
• See what pages are giving you referral traffic
• View which search engines are referring traffic, and which search terms are providing traffic.
• You can see the demographics of your visitors.
• Track referrals and affiliates that provide traffic to your site.

Once a complete analysis of the user behavior has been completed, decisions can be made for your marketing strategy. After the in-depth web log analysis is complete, any changes to the website can be made in order to ensure you don't lose visitors who may be interested in your product or service.

Why should I choose Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very simple concept. It is about producing sales leads. Instead of utilizing advertising dollars to annoy people that have no need of your products or are just not interested. You concentrate on people that are looking for you or the type of products or services you offer to be more precise, inbound marketing vs. direct marketing.

PPC advertising is quickly becoming the advertising choice for small business owners.

Why is it so attractive to small business owners? Well, it's affordability!!!

Imagine advertising on the television and not having to pay for that advertising unless a potential customer sees the advertising and actually picks up the phone and calls your business or even better, they get in their vehicle and actually drive to your store. Well, that is exactly what you get with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. You don't have to pay for the ad until someone actually clicks on the ad or with some PPC programs you are also charged for a certain number of impressions (views), usually after about thousand views you are charged a small fee. With PPC you actually set the price of how much you are willing to pay and then your account is deducted each time your ad is clicked. There is no set price, it is determined by the competition for that particular keyword and several other factors calculated by the PPC provider you are advertising with (Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter, and Yahoo). However, compare the cost of this service with that of a billboard or television and radio. Quite a large savings in cost. PPC may be a cost effective alternative to other traditional forms of advertising, however, it can still be a very expensive investment if not managed carefully. In general, the budget for PPC search engine advertising may be a $100 to $100,000 depending on the number of keywords used. These prices can increase easily as more and more sites bid for the same keyword.

Link Building for Your Website

Link building is an extraordinary way of making your website or blog popular. This process of creating inbound links to your website utilizes: newsletters, directories, search engines, and anything else a crafty marketer can think of. Link building has several advantages. It helps in getting quality traffic from relative sights which increases sales. The higher the quality of incoming links the more valuable search engines will see your website. Link building is a valuable tool in creating awareness, visibility, and the credibility of your website. Through proper link building, your site will obtain wider search engine exposure and help to get your website indexed by search engines. The quickest and simplest way of building links to your website or blog is through the use of directories.

Web directories are collections of web pages that contain similar subjects and contents. Internet users see directories as a valuable source of information. The more directories that your website becomes listed in the better chance that your site will be added to the popular search engine listings: google, yahoo, msn.....etc.

What do you get out of directories?

There are 3 types of traffic that directory listings supply:

1. Click-through traffic-anyone who ends up on the directory page will be able to see your website and information.

2. Indexing your site-once directories find the links to your website, they will begin indexing the pages and bringing you traffic again and again.

3. By increasing your ranking on the search engines themselves when they find the volume of links and references to your website or blog.

Link building is one of the best ways to improve your traffic to your website or blog. The higher the quality of the links to your page the higher page rankings you will achieve in search engines. However complicated or time consuming it may be, building links to your website will help to improve your site traffic.

How Affiliate Marketing Works.

Affiliate marketing is a simple but effective way of exposing your products to a wide range of viewers. With this internet marketing practice a business pays affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's efforts. Basically it is a type of crowdsourcing. This form of marketing utilizes a very simple process:

1. First, the affiliate agrees to feature the merchants products on thier website.
2. A potential new customer views the affiliate's website.
3. Next, there is an action such as clicking the ad, the result of which the viewer is sent to the merchant's website, via your personal affiliant link.
4. If the customer goes on to make a purchase, it will be tracked back to you since they entered the merchant's site using your affiliate link.
5. Upon a successful transaction, the affiliate will be credited for the sale and given a commision.

Affiliate marketing has basically three main components:

1. The Merchant
2. The Publisher
3. The Consumer

The merchant is the seller. The merchant is the one that wants to advertise their products to as many potential buyers as possible. Next we have the publisher. This is the affiliate, the one that writes great sales copy to get thier viewers to click onto the merchant's site. Then we have the consumer. This of course is the person that completes the transaction and makes money for everyone.

So how do you know if your blog or website will be an excellent candidate for affiliate marketing?

You have to take a few things into consideration.

1. Having high traffic is a key component to your website or blog.
2. Next you have to find relevant products or services that relate to your website or blog.
3. You also want these products and services to be of good quality. (If you reccommend low quality products to your readers then they may begin to distrust your message.)
4. Your readers have to also be in a buying mood. You can have the best product or service for sale but if some one isn't in the mood to make a purchase then it just won't matter.
5. This is where the ability to write good sales copy comes into play. If you can write outstanding copy, then you may be able to influence the buyers mood and swing them to make a purchase.

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What is Email Marketing?

I remember a time when we had to make a trip to the store to buy envelops, paper, and pens. Then on our way back home or to the office we stopped at the local Post Office to buy book after expensive book of stamps. Then we we prepared our correspondence and had to make another trip to the post office and wait in long lines to send our marketing messages to our customers only to have them thrown in the trash without ever being opened. Thank the marketing gods that technology has advanced and cut our costs dramatically. Email marketing is simply defined as the email that you send to a customer or potential customer. Email marketing is usually broken down into three segments:

• Sending direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again.
• Sending emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship.
• Placing your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people.

What makes electronic email so popular?

1. Sending email is cheaper than most other forms of communication.
2. Email lets you deliver your message to the people.
3. Email marketing has proven successful for those who do it (Well, those that do it right).

Email marketing is a wonderful tool for the multi-channel marketer, however, it has its problems. First the designing and delivering of email messages to the right people can be a very complex task. This complexity can be minimized by using email services such as Constant Contact or iContact these email marketing services offer businesses solutions to their email and survey campaign management. A list of the 2009 top ten online email marketing services and reviews can be viewed at http://email-marketing-service-review.toptenreviews.com/. Next you have to get the recipients to read and respond to your message. Then finally you have to measure and analyze the results.

IMPORTANT: Don't be a Spammer!!!

If you send emails to people without the email owners permission then it is SPAM. If you are accused of sending spam, then you may have your email accounts

closed down, your website shut off, and your reputation tarnished. Some parts of the world it is against the law.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

So you have finally decide to make the investment and create a website to promote your business or service. Or maybe you just started a blog and you want to get the word out about it. After you have told all of your friends and family about your website and emailed your contacts and associates, its time to step up into the big leagues and get world wide promotion. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is important tool because it helps in creating qualified customers. Instead of going out into the street and yelling to everyone that you are selling widgets, these are people that are actually looking for widgets (excuse me sir, do you have any widgets for sale). Now you can turn your campaign to people that really want what you have instead of wasting valuable marketing dollars on non-widget buyers. This alone should help to create an improvement on your marketing Return on Investment (ROI). SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Search captures an individual at the moment they view query results, creating immediate sales opportunities. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to indexing activities of search engines. Web crawlers (a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner) are one of these such indexing activities. Being one of the most cost effective methods of advertising, search engines are the primary way Internet users find websites. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) continues to deliver the highest pre-qualified audience online.

What is Brand Management and Why is It important?

Wilkepedia defines Brand Management as the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand. It seeks to increase the product's perceived value to the customer and thereby increase brand franchise and brand equity. Marketers see a brand as an implied promise that the level of quality people have come to expect from a brand will continue with future purchases of the same product.

How is brand measured, usually by comparing one brand to another. For example, Burger King vs. McDonald's. The whole point in a nutshell is what do people think of my product as compared to my competition. Are my products considered to be of higher quality or of lower quality or perhaps equal. The higher the perception of quality, usually the higher price that the brand is able to charge. The more value that your products provide to customers, the higher quality that your brand will be perceived to be. Business Week offers an annual guide of The World's Best Brands that list the 100 top companies in order of brand value. Next important question. Why do brands matter and to who? There are two groups of stakeholders, consumers and producers.

Consumers value brands because they offer:

• Identification of source product.
• Gives an assignment of responsibility to the product maker.
• Reduces dis-satisfaction risk.
• Search cost reducer.
• Establishes a bond with the product producer.
• Provides a sign of quality

Producers value brands because they offer:

• Offer a means of identification to simplify handling or tracking.
• Its a means of legally protecting unique features.
• Provides a quality level to satisfied customers.
• Source of competitive advantage.
• Source of financial returns.

Brands are considered tiny businesses within a company and the brand managers in charge of them have several duties to attend to:

• Monitoring the competitive landscape of the category in which your brand resides.
• Developing strategies to exploit market opportunities.
• Executing those strategies with the help of a cross-functional team.
• Delivering the sales volume, market share, and profit projections for the business.

Brand managers craft elegant business plans and submit them to senior management. They focus on the minutiae of a daily sales-volume report, and they dream big dreams when it’s time to update the vision for the brand.