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The Best Web Marketing of 2008

Which types of online advertising provide the highest ROI? Who's really clicking on your PPC ads? Why do PPC costs keep rising? How can you convert more clickers into buyers? Are Web 2.0 technologies now mainstream?

Learn these answers and more from this collection of blog posts and articles, some of the best reporting on online research topics so far this year.


Online Marketers See High ROI from SEO by Marketing Pilgrim

Blogger, SEO expert and PR pro Janet Meiners reports on an MarketingSherpa study detailing the growth in paid search and organic search engine optimization. Read her post to discover which types of online advertising get a thumbs up—and which are losing favor with interactive marketers.


Who's really clicking? by iMedia Connection

Sandeep Krishnamurthy, Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce at the University of Washington, paints a bleak picture of the future of PPC advertising—then gets blasted for it in the Comments by some fairly high-profile sources. My take is that he does miss the distinction between B2B abd B2C here (PPC ads are very productive, especially for software and computer hardware products) but he's absolutely correct that search advertisers often underappreciate the value of branding and PR to enhance PPC results.


The Main Factor Necessary to Convert Visitors to Customers by Marketing Pilgrim

In another enlightening post from Marketing Pilgrim, Internet marketer and online entrepreneur Greg Howlett reports that the average conversion rate for an online retailer is 2.5%—then explains how leaders like Office Depot, QVC and Lands' End are converting at a 16-20% rate.


Direct sales, branding primary SEM objectives: SEMPO survey by DMNews

Ellen Keohane highlights findings from a SEMPO study showing how marketing budgets are shifting, what marketers think of the branding value of search engine marketing, and how they feel about experimenting with new forms of media.

Previous posts in this series:

Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - SEO Guidance, Part 2
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Search Engine Marketing, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Cool Web Tools, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So far) - Social Media Optimization, Part 1
Best of 2008 (So Far) - Blogging for Business, Part 1

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Contact Mike Bannan: mike@digitalrdm.com

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All Time Greats

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Google AdWords and PPC

MARKETING: 101 Looking for some online marketing strategy or social media tips to grow your business? Well, you’ve come to the right digital marketing resource! Web Market Central has been doling out the proper digital marketing advice for years. And as you already know, marketing to customers online is 100 times easier than using dated, expensive and traditional marketing tactics. Like seriously, who uses billboards in 2019? But you already know how effective digital marketing can be in the modern age. So now that you're totally convinced of what you already knew, let’s give you today's top-notch digital marketing tip! The Pure Unfettered Power of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and PPC Campaigns Just like optimizing your site to rank for keywords, you can use our online marketing tips to pay to run advertisements on Google so that your business is shown on the first page of search engine results. Ranking this way is instantaneous whereas SEO (Search Engine Optimizati...

How to Use SEO: Leverage SEO To Be Found Online and Boost Your Online Marketing

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Top-Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Advertisements That Make Sense

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Web 2.0 Social Tagging Sites, Part 6: Tier 2 Sites

Here in the second of three posts on the effectiveness of specific Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites at driving B2B website traffic, based on my two-month test, are the mid-tier sites. These sites drove a meaningful though not large volume of traffic across the half-dozen B2B websites and blogs in the test. In ascending order, the mid-tier sites are: 7) Newsvine Though much more heavily-used than WireFan, results were similar. Categorization of news items is helpful but overly broad. 6) Simpy Works better with IE than Firefox. 5) MarkaBoo Clean design, easy to use, respectable results. 4) NowPublic News-oriented, a great place to expose user-targeted, thought-leadership PR. 3) del.icio.us Given it's incredible popularity, B2B traffic results were surprisingly second-tier (though near the top of this group). 2) RawSugar Primarily for blog promotion, but works for B2B thought leadership content as well. 1) Reddit The best of the second tier, though the delay it im...

Top Notch Digital Marketing Tip: Optimize Your Site

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