Apple has announced its iAd mobile marketing system will become available to European businesses from December.

The company said the system will allow advertisers to “reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users right in their favourite apps” and offer developers a new source of income.

Several major advertisers in the country have signed up for the service since it was introduced to the US in July and the feature is expected to account for 21 per cent of the nation’s mobile display marketing revenue.

Major European brands that have agreed to use the system include Renault, Louis Vuitton and L’Oreal.

Marc Menesguen, head of strategic marketing at the beauty product maker, stated iAd would offer online marketing services providers an “unparalleled opportunity to reach and serve the most engaged and discerning customers”.

The content will be available to users with products running Apple’s iOS platform, which according to a recent report by Gartner was responsible for 16.7 per cent of the smartphone market in the third quarter of 2010.

Source ClickThrough

Social media marketing is not only important to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it has become a nearly essential aspect of an SEO campaign. Since the birth of “Web 2.0” the internet has provided numerous ways to communicate with customers, share information, build social connections and build business connections. It is a brave new world and social media marketing is at the forefront.

Why is social media marketing important?

Mainly it is important because it give a new avenue to connect with customers. Social connections are instant and direct. It is also something that is accessible to the average person.

What is the Usefulness of Social Bookmarking to Social Media Marketing?

Social bookmarking is mainly using sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, and Delicious. The idea is that people go and bookmark their favorite sites which can be shared with others. Search engines will follow these sites because it helps them to index sites faster and gives them a measure of a sites “popularity”. If a bookmark for a site has been made it is assumed that someone thinks the site has value and a portion of that perceived value is passed on the site.

Social Media Marketing and Backlinks

Relevant and quality back-links (also known as inbound links) are well known to be an essential part of SEO. Many of the Social Bookmarking sites are also “do-follow”. Do-follow is a situation where the “bots” that Search Engine send out will “follow” the links to the site. They will then index the site and give “credit” to the site for an inbound link. Each backlink on a social bookmarking site actually counts as a “vote” for the site, in this way. The power of social bookmarking really comes when you are able to leverage a strong social network to also bookmark your page. This gives a much larger number of “votes” and can be used as proof for the search engine of a sites, “popularity” and therefore drive it higher in search engine results.

The Power of Networking

Networking is in many ways just another term for social media marketing. As you develop more contacts there is often a “you scratch my back and I will scratch yours” mentality with social networking. One of the best ways to get ahead therefore is to help others to achieve their goals. When a person is active and social and seems to really help others, people notice this and the social network of potential customers and “business partners” grows.

In summation Social Media Marketing is powerful and pervasive. Using it is not only great for SEO purposes but can drive direct traffic also. The best way to get ahead socially is simply to be social. When you take these steps you cannot help but grow and prosper.

Gene Patterson/Helium.com

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Google Instant looks set to change the face of search. But what does it mean for those who make their livelihood from Google’s results?

On the face of it, Google’s new Instant Search system heralds a significant change in how we look for information online. Instead of typing a request into Google, hitting return, and then seeing a list of results, Google users now see a changing list of results as they type. Google considers this a significant step forward in the evolution of search. It claims the new system will save between two and five seconds per search. Extrapolate that globally and 11 hours are saved every second. Not bad, for a company that strives to make search as efficient as possible.

The community is an endemically nervous one, and perhaps rightly so: a small change from Google can make or break an online business. In this case, however, the worry is misguided, for while Instant changes the engine’s interface, it leaves untouched Google’s core system for deciding relevant results. Type in ‘red striped socks’ to instant Google and static Google (it’s still available) and you’ll arrive at the same list of results. With Google Instant you’ll whizz through results for ‘red’ and ‘red stripe’ first, but as these produce listings on the DVD rental company Redbox and Red Stripe beer, they’re unlikely to hinder SEOs titling for the term ‘red striped socks’.

Equally, concern that Google is now serving personalised and localised search is hyperchondriacal. Google has been personalising results for users signed into Gmail since 2005; since December 2009, it’s even been personalising results for users not signed-in to an account. Personalised search is a variable that SEOs already have to consider.

Far more interesting than the white noise of worry emanating from optimisers is how Google Instant will alter search behaviour. Without the psychological full stop of pressing return, and with users able to see points of interest as they type and consequently refine as they go, it’s plausible that searches will get longer and more specific (feeding, not starving, the Long Tail). It’s also likely that ranking in the hallowed top 3 or 4 positions will become even more important, given that users probably won’t look further down the page while typing. If your result appears in those 3 and it answers the query, it’s going to get a very high Click Through Rate (CTR).

All of the above, of course, depends on one significant point: users actually going to the Google homepage, instead of using the search bar in their browser. Google Instant changes the way people can interact with search, but it far from sounds the death knell for search optimization.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Google’s Android platform saw its share of US smartphone subscribers climb by five per cent in the three months to the end of July, according to the latest figures from comScore.

The search engine, which launched a mobile version of its pay per click marketing service AdWords for Android, iPhone and Palm Pre devices in April, was the only one of the top five platforms to increase its overall market share during the quarter.

Research in Motion, which makes the BlackBerry, accounted for the largest proportion of subscribers at 39.3 per cent, down 1.3 per cent on the three months to the end of April.

Apple was second on 23.8 per cent (down 1.3 per cent), with Google third on 17 per cent.

Microsoft and Palm completed the top five with respective market shares of 11.8 per cent (down 2.2 per cent) and 4.9 per cent (no change).

Despite most platforms losing ground to Google, comScore noted that they all added subscribers and the overall market continued to grow.

In the three months to July, there were 53.4 million smartphone owners in the US, up 11 per cent on the previous quarter.

Source:  Google/ClickThrough

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According to a report published in San Jose Mercury News, Apple is working on a new subscription plan for newspapers on the iPad, and will announce the plan “soon.”

Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute in Columbia, Missouri, told the paper that “Apple probably will take a 30 percent cut of all subscriptions sold through the company’s online App Store, and as much as 40 percent of the advertising revenue from publications’ apps.”

According to CNET, Apple has allegedly decided to establish an “opt-in function” for future subscribers, meaning that those willing would be allowing Apple to share with publishers the data that is necessary to appeal to advertisers.

The Mercury News report also stated that the “Cupertino company has agreed to provide an opt-in function for subscribers to allow Apple to share with publishers their information, which includes vital data that news organizations use to attract advertisers.”

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The study was conducted by Microsoft Advertising and it took into consideration large clothing stores, big grocery retailers, fashion retailers and department stores. Of the firms surveyed, 24 were in the top 100 UK companies in terms of media spend. The study recommended retailers should increase their online advertising and print advertising budgets by 10 per cent and decreased television budgets by that amount.

“Print is very good for targeting specific audiences and getting eyeballs on key products,” said Joel Dawson, head of online marketing at Boots. “But the smarter businesses are integrating digital advertising into the planning process.”

The study comes as online advertising is rising and predicted to rise further. Deloitte, the professional services firm, has predicted that the global share of online advertising would grow from its current 10 per cent to 15 per cent by 2012.

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Follows Launch of ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub(TM), CoTweet 3.0 Enterprise Edition with Facebook, Salesforce.com Integrations

Twitter Chief Operations Officer Dick Costolo told attendees at Connections ’10, ExactTarget’s annual user conference, the new Twitter makes it easier for users to see information about the authors of Twitter posts, engage in conversations and more easily link to photos and videos.

“The new Twitter provides a richer, more compelling environment for businesses and customers to engage in conversation,” said Costolo.

Costolo’s comments follow the Tuesday launch of the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub(TM)and CoTweet 3.0 Enterprise Edition.

The ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub(TM) provides marketers the first solution to power all forms of interactive marketing in real time across email, mobile, social and sites. The Interactive Marketing Hub(TM) enables marketers to plan, monitor and track real-time interactive marketing programs from a single dashboard by aggregating all customer interaction data as it happens, allowing marketers to instantly take action on the data across all online channels.

CoTweet’s 3.0 Enterprise Edition enables marketers on Twitter and Facebook to link Facebook Fan pages to existing CoTweet workgroups, export tweets and Facebook posts to Salesforce and manage social media interactions alongside other interactive marketing channels through the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub(TM).

“Consumers are talking about and engaging with brands on email, Twitter and Facebook, but marketers have struggled to connect the channels and engage in the real-time conversation,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget co-founder and chief executive officer. “The innovations announced this week break down the silos between channels and allow marketers to drive deeper engagement and more effective interactive marketing.”

Connections ’10 concluded today. Marketers from eight countries and 38 states attended the three-day even that included keynote addresses by Sir Richard Branson, Virgin America’s Porter Gale and Word of Mouth Marketing author Andy Sernovitz. The event also provided attendees hands-on product training, more than 35 focused breakout sessions and featured entertainment by Grammy-award winning band Train.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub(TM) technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Aurora Fashions, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc.

SOURCE: ExactTarget

Article Marketing Tip 1 – First of all, it is very important to submit your article to the top directories on the internet. Doing this manually will take some time and effort but it will not cost you anything and the exposure you get from these top directories will benefit your home based business greatly. To find a list of the top directories, simply type in something like “top 25 article directories” in your favorite search engine search bar.

Article Marketing Tip 2 – There are many home based business forums that will allow you to post your articles. In the forums there will be a separate article posting section. Sometimes ezine publishers and webmasters look through these sections for material to publish on their ezine or websites. Another free high exposure method to market your article.

Article Marketing Tip 3 – Don’t submit the same article everywhere. Some of the bigger search engines wont pick up your article because they will see that article as spam. All you need to do is make some quick adjustments to your article. By tweaking the title, changing some of the sentence structure, and rewording your resource box, you will give yourself three or four unique versions of the same article. This method will actually trick the search engines into thinking you have many unique articles.

Article Marketing Tip 4 – Write useful information. You will gain trust and rapport from your reader by writing about things that will help the reader or answer questions to their problems. It is more likely that the reader will be more interested in what you write of offer in the future if you are able to help that reader in some fashion.

Using these home based business article marketing tips will help increase the results you receive. Article marketing is one of the most effective and cost efficient ways to increase back links and get traffic to your site immediately. Perfecting the writing methods will take some time but just getting articles out there is very important. The more articles you write and distribute, the more traffic you’re going to get. By using an article distribution service you will save eons of time and effort and the traffic results will also increase dramatically.

The English language market for search is largely made up of a few big giants. According to a report by comScore the market in October 2009 was dominated by Google (65.4%), Yahoo (18.0%), Microsoft (9.9%), Ask (3.9%) and AOL (2.9%), MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.

With the search market valued at $300 Billion that makes every single 1% worth $3 Billion if selling the company and you would do very well by conquering just a 0.1% slice of that cake. The amount of search start-ups is only going to increase with more venture capital wanting a piece of the market.

My list of 7 is search engines that could very well make news in 2010. Not all of them are new, some are, but all have in common that they have been innovating in 2009 and they deliver good search results.

Cuil

With two ex Googlers, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, in management and with the claim of being the worlds biggest search engine Cuil has a lot to deliver.

Overloaded servers that generated low quality search results hampered the initial 2008 launch giving Cuil a fair amount of negative media attention but of you try it out today you’ll find that the search results are good and there is an explore by category function that is among the best I have seen.

DuckDuckGo

Sporting a Zero-click information box with facts about your search term, categories to refine your search and a special designation for the official site for the search term this search engine combines results from Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and its own crawler DuckDuckBot to give you neat and really useful search results.

Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture and has grown steadily since its launch in September 2008. I think this search engine has a good niche carved out for itself, watch out for this search engine in 2010

Spezify

This search engine is totally awesome. It draws the search results as newspaper clippings spread out on the screen with a mix of images and quotes from web pages. By scanning some of the clippings you get a decent overview of the topic you are researching and can make an informed decision on which search results to visit and read more about.

Spezify is very handy tool for brainstorming. You’ll get a ton of new ideas for your article or blog post just by typing your topic into the search box and watching the resulting mix of clippings and photos.

Secret Search Engine Labs

This search engine provides alternative search results by giving small sites the same opportunity to rank as large sites. With Google’s notorious preference for large, established sites like the Wikipedia and About many small sites get lost among the big boys giving room for alternative ways of ranking.

Secret Search Engine Labs was started as a hobby project in 2007 by Finnish software engineer Simon Byholm, has been growing steadily, and now has the aim of becoming the worlds best search engine by providing alternative search results and transparency about how sites are ranked.

Bing

First we had MSN Search, then Live Search and now with the latest re-launch we have Bing. With a strong marketing campaign Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the marketplace for web search. The media attention surrounding the re-launch has fueled innovation adding new functions like the daily change in background photo, suggested topics and trends.

Watch Bing closely in 2010 as Microsoft is finally taking action to increase their market share. We are probably going to see more news from Bing in the year to come.

Blekko

This is a fresh start-up that keeps its secrets almost as well as Google when asked about the what and the when of their new search engine. The strong management team with former employees from Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search makes me believe they have something fascinating going on.

We are still waiting for Blekkos official launch. It was promised by the end of 2009 though so you can expect it to make some serious headlines in 2010. We can only wish that it is exciting news.

Monitter

Monitter is not a classic search engine but a real time Twitter search where you can monitor several keywords and see all tweets containing those keywords in real time as they happen. When you need to monitor you niche or area of expertise or if you just want to keep an eye on the conversation this is a great tool.

What About The Rest?

Chances are you already know that Google is innovating and you probably know they will make some noise in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is fascinating as it is the only major search engine that makes the results from data.

In addition to my list of seven there is also a multitude of new social and real-time search engines coming and there’s no way to know if one of them will become a permanent participant in the search market. You’ll find more information about these and thousands more at AltSearchengines.com

There is now signs that we could see radical changes in the search engine landscape after years of rule by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and to some extent Ask. There’s so much new technology on display. New search engines making use of social networks, visual presentation, new semantic algorithms and real-time results to stand out from the crown are popping up everywhere.

The result, even if we get no new top three, is that the ruling giants will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we’ll get a better search experience.

Source: Site-Reference.com

Mortgage Marketing Tip #1

Make your advertising and print media more effective by having a headline on everything: letters, greeting cards, ads, everything.

Headlines are what get the reader. They make them want to read more. They tell the reader what benefit he/she will get from reading more. And that’s exactly what you want them to do.

Make the headline powerful and include a benefit.

Examples:

3 things you can do today to improve your credit
Here’s something you might enjoy…
I started thinking of you when I read this article…

Make sure to include a headline in all your media and it will increase your results.

Mortgage Marketing Tip #2

When you do something for a client, brag about it.

What I mean is, if you accomplish something, make it a big deal.’

“Mr. Hity, I was holding my breath for a while, and that collection on your credit report made it real close, but I fought for you and got the lender to approve your loan!”

That’s a lot better than saying, “Hi, your loan was approved today. Congrats.”

Make yourself out to be the valuable professional you are. Make sure that your clients know exactly what you do for them.

Mortgage Marketing Tip #3

Write thank you notes to people everyday.

This one mortgage marketing tool can make you so much money your head will spin. Everyone loves to be appreciated and acknowledged. Being nice and having manners are a thing of the past. But when you take the time to thank someone, you connect to them on deeper level.

Get yourself some thank you cards from the stationery store and thank people who did something for you today. It could be for anything,

Thank your mailman for bringing the mail up to the office. Thank the underwriter for a speedy decision
Thank your client for calling to say they would be late
Thank the realtor for the referral.

These cards can make someone’s day. And you really stand out from the crowd as a caring mortgage professional when you use them.

Mortgage Marketing Tip #4

If someone answers your phone for you, have him or her use the following line.,

“He/she is working with a client right now, let me see if he can take the call.”

This does a couple things,

1. Makes you seem busy even if you are not. This shows the client that you are in demand and confirms that he made a good decision by choosing you.
2. Allows you to not talk to people you do not want to talk to
3. Allows you to say to the caller, if you pick up, that they are important enough to you to interrupt an important client meeting.

This might not be a “traditional” mortgage-marketing tool, but it will make you more desirable. And while it will not make the phone ring more, when it does, you will get respect from those on the other end of the line.

Mortgage Marketing Tip #5

CANI

Constant and Never Ending Improvement
Do something everyday to improve your business. 1 small change everyday can make a huge difference in a couple months. Implement one mortgage marketing tool at least once a week. At least.

Over the course of a couple years, the results will be dramatic.

Just one small thing is enough. Examples are:
· Hanging a certificate of completion on the wall
· Hanging a testimonial on the wall
· Adding a signature to your emails
· Adding a small consumer article to your website

Mortgage Marketing Tip #6

Look at other businesses for great ideas to adapt to your business

Most innovations come from other businesses.

Like the drive thru window. Who knows who started it, but fast food places use it, banks use it, pharmacies use it, and even restaurants are experiencing success with it.

What new services do you use that make your life easier? Can you adapt these to your business? How about emailing potential customers the interest rate everyday if they request it? Or Providing a Post-Closing Kit with items clients will need when moving?

You can use the marketing tools from other businesses too. If you see a marketing piece that really gets your attention, think about how to adapt it and use it in your business.

Mortgage Marketing Tip #7

It doesn’t matter how good a loan officer you are – if you suck at marketing, you will starve.

Knowing how to get clients is infinitely more important than any other knowledge you may attain.

Tony Robbins is not the best NLP trainer out there, but he is the richest because he knows how to market himself.

The Men-Mars, Women-Venus guy is not the best marriage counselor out there, but he sure made a killing in books, tapes, and seminars.

How much money you make has very little correlation to how much you know. Of course you must know the basics, but other than that, it makes very little difference at all.

He who markets best, makes the most money.

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