Advertising Age asked readers recently to consider the future of digital production – particularly, if small digital production shops working directly with clients will turn large digital agencies into antiquated and unnecessary middlemen. A strong 64% of respondents voted “yes.” Interestingly, but not really much of a surprise, the comments on the poll from both producers and consumers of digital production work seemed quite divided, with the majority of those involved in larger agencies defending the need for the bigger houses to continue to exist. Other respondents seemed in favor of the big, bloated studios with their lack of client engagement going the way of the dinosaurs. One thing is crystal clear, however – the demand for quality digital production will continue to grow at an exponential rate as more and more companies seek innovative and effective methods to communicate their value to core audiences. And although rough and cheaply produced “viral” videos will continue to pop up to entertain and surprise us from time to time, most companies will still want to make good impressions on their audiences with high production values in their Internet videos. At Fathom SEO, our Instant Replay Internet video production team has been doing just that – working directly with clients to produce high-quality, informative Web videos that market their products and services – at affordable prices hard to resist in a tough economy. Visit our site and learn about our offerings. See for yourself what Internet video production and marketing can do. And read the entire Advertising Age poll.
1 Comment »Advertising Age Poll: David vs. Goliath Digital Production House Debate
A recent Advertising Age poll asked readers if small digital production shops working directly with clients will turn large digital agencies into unnecessary middlemen. A surprising 64% of respondents responded “yes.” What does this say about the future of Internet video marketing for ambitious companies in the new millennium?
Google Local Extensions – A Key to Online Marketing Success
Google recently got rid of the use of local business ads for pay-per-click marketing. Luckily, Google is now offering local extensions, which are easier to set up and offer a lot of power.
Looking Deeper into the Reverse Broadcast System
In traditional advertising (print, radio, TV), users are receiving the message in a passive manner. They aren’t necessarily thinking about “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” when they’re watching TV, they just want to catch the latest re-runs of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” In other words, they are being broadcast to. In search, it’s the opposite. Users have to actively consider what it is they want, then hop online and perform a search to find whatever it is they are seeking.
3 Key Elements to a Good Subject Line
We all put extra thought into crafting the perfect subject line. Subject lines make the first impression and have a huge impact on our open rates. It can often carry through to our click-through rate and conversions so it’s clearly one of the most important elements to an email.
Help! My Rankings Have Fallen and I Can’t Get Up
High rankings are a serious issue only if they actually drive traffic. Business executives shouldn’t get nervous when they lose a top ranking if the keyword phrase wasn’t doing much to deliver visitors in the first place. Here are 10 tips to help you get through the crisis.
It’s likely you’ve seen breadcrumb navigation in place of site URLs in Google’s SERPs. Maybe you noticed in passing or, like me, you heard colleagues talking about it and knew to be on the lookout. But no matter which situation you were in when you first noticed the breadcrumbs in the results, there’s no denying that they are quite compelling when they appear.
It is this compelling display that makes breadcrumb navigation an important factor to consider. In competitive spaces where you’re fighting against strong online competition, an increasingly sophisticated universal search display, sponsored ads, and more, having an element that can help break through the information overload means people are going to be more likely to click on your search engine result.
Furthermore, search engine results that display breadcrumb navigation in place of URLs allow users to click not only on the traditional blue title, but on the breadcrumbs in the listing as well. This not only promotes site usability (which web searchers can deduce before they even get there), it means there are more places for users to click to get to your site – something your most vicious competitor may be lacking.
It remains to be seen how prominent these new SERP breadcrumbs will become, but even if Google decides to close shop on this experiment after a time, remember that breadcrumbs provide an opportunity for SEMs to incorporate more keywords onto their clients’ pages and that they promote easier navigation for users who do end up on the site. So even if you try to optimize the way a website shows up in Google’s SERPs and it doesn’t pan out, you’re still optimizing elements of a website you can and should control – and implementing one SEO factor that can keep a website on the path to success.
Google has been criticized more than once for being a threat to the newspaper business, but it appears a friendship has actually been blossoming under the radar between this search engine giant and two of the country’s leading news publications. Google, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, launched a new collaborative online news tool yesterday.
The Living Stories Project is an experiment in presenting news in an online environment. It builds upon a concept that some newspaper websites already adopt – grouping articles and related subject matter by topic. Eight pages in total, three for the Washington Post covering health care reform, DC schools and the Washington Redskins, and five for the New York Times devoted to Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, swine flu, and health care, will adopt the new Living Stories format.
Living Stories allows you to find full stories in one place, on one unique URL. Developing stories about a hot news topic are grouped together on a single web page, and new updates are automatically highlighted at the top of that page each time you return. You can read summaries of each story, explore it in depth in a variety of different mediums, view a timeline of events, filter for specific aspects, and more. Aside from the benefits this offers the average online news reader, the Times and Post may begin to see their Google rankings soar as their pages are pushed to the top of the list when people search for hot news topics.
Living Stories may lack some of the technological pomp and circumstance we are used to seeing with new Google tools, but it is still early. The pages are going to reside at Google Labs for a couple of months, and if all goes well they will revert to each newspapers’ website, and Google may expand this service to other papers as well.
Hopes are high for this new tool, but only time will tell if Living Stories is going to make waves in the realm of online news.
1 Comment »3 Common Mistakes to Become a Pay-Per-Click Loser
If you are a smart business person, your goal should be to maximize your total profit dollars, not just your profit margins. So if you have a Return on Advertising Spend of 400%, and your are breaking even with a Return on Advertising Spend of 150%, it would make sense to bid on more keywords that may not be as profitable but will still yield Return on Advertising Spend in excess of 300%. This gives you more total profit dollars.
15 Online Marketing Do’s and Don’ts
Online marketers have a ton of choices to make with their websites. Here are 15 tips that can help with rankings, traffic and conversions.
A/B Testing Your Way to Email Success
You should always A/B test your emails. A different subject line could increase your open rates by 5%. Moving the position of your call-to-action could get you 20% more clicks. And which day of the week you send your campaigns could increase your sales by 70%. I have seen it all happen!
This Year, Put Content on Your Holiday Wish List
Content is King. This all-too-familiar mantra may seem a bit clichéd, but those well-versed in the language of search engine optimization know that its message holds true. Quality content is your website’s key to attracting visitors and increasing search engine rankings.
Blu-Ray Quality Online
It was only a matter of time before online video started matching up with the quality of HD cable. YouTube had waited years after the wide-spread proliferation of HD to even start offering higher-quality non-HD video, so it wouldn’t have surprised anyone if YouTube had stayed at the 720p mark for at least another year. But YouTube wasn’t content to ride along with the rest of the pack. In mid-November it went beyond 720p – and right past 1080i – straight to 1080p.
