• 

• Recent Posts

  • Talking soccer and SEM
  • Your “Digital Footprint” and “Ego-Googling” by Kate Elphick
  • 2012 Olympic Logo disaster
  • Adgator
  • Facebook Self-Service adverts
• 

• Recent Comments

  • Kate Elphick on Your “Digital Footprint” and “Ego-Googling” by Kate Elphick
  • marcashton on Adgator
  • SA Publisher on “Cancelled” affiliate sales
  • rivalblogger on Rollover adverts
  • addynamo on Rollover adverts

• Tags

  AD:DYNAMO Ad Dynamo Adgator advertising Affiliate AfricaWin AlterSage Blogs branding Brands CPM Design disasters Digital Footprint E-mail Ego-Googling Facebook Google Google AdSense Justplay.co.za Kate Elphick Keywords Logos Marketing Mxit newsletters OfferForge Online Pay-Per-Click Pay-Per-Lead Pay-Per-Sale PPC rollover adverts Search Engine Marketing SEM social media TrafficSynergy Twitter Web Website publishing

By Carla at Altersage

 It’s 2010 – the year that South Africans have been breathlessly anticipating since 2004. We’ve had six years to prepare, and now, with a few months to go until the kick-off of the FIFA World Cup, South Africans are white-knuckled with excitement at the prospect.

What a lot of people aren’t thinking about, though, is what’ll happen once the games are over. South Africa has spent all this time and money on infrastructure for the games – and it’s sure to be a phenomenal event – but, once the matches are over and the sporting glitterati have returned to their Spanish villas, what’ll become of our massive stadiums and luxury hotels? It’s all well and good to pour so much effort into a grand event, but it’s also important to keep the momentum going once it’s over. That’s the only way to keep attracting visitors to the country and to continue to boost tourism-generated revenue in South Africa.

In a way, it’s much the same with an SEM campaign. For most websites that haven’t been optimised, significant work is required at the start of the project. The site structure is often overhauled, extensive optimisation is undertaken, and usability is improved. Following these initial changes, the optimised site begins to improve its position on the search engine results pages. It starts to attract more visitors, and it generates higher revenue. It looks great. The SEM campaign is doing exactly what it said it would. Fantastic!

Sure, these results are fantastic. But the problem is that this is where many companies or website owners decide to abandon their online marketing campaigns. A solid foundation has been laid for the site, and it’s attracting more visitors than ever before. So why continue with the campaign, is what many of them ask.

Because, just like a car or a building or a city, an online marketing campaign needs to be maintained, even after it has achieved its initial goal. SEO is an ongoing process that, once implemented, needs to be tweaked and adjusted from time to time to ensure its continued efficiency. There will always be competitors optimising their sites, improving their online visibility and attempting to eclipse your brand. It’s only through committed SEM initiatives that you’ll continue to attract visitors and generate revenue through your site. If you don’t maintain it, it’ll fall to ruin and your visitors will go elsewhere.

Essentially, an online marketing campaign is an investment that needs to be managed over time. After the initial energy and finances are invested in it, it needs to be monitored and maintained to ensure continuous returns. Although it requires less time and money once the right foundations have been laid, it still needs ongoing attention in order to offer rewards over the long-term.

So, whether you’re a mayor or a webmaster, the directive’s the same: Create a solid infrastructure to attract visitors, and keep it maintained to ensure that it stays foremost in their minds – and their search results.

I was forwarded the following article from Kate Elphick and I thought there were a couple of interesting points raised. Some of it comes across as a bit of soft and fluffy attached to social media but I think she raises a couple of interesting points.

Your thoughts:

Revitalise your personal brand for the new year

By: Kate Elphick

 In the digital age, our Digital Footprint is often people’s first impression of us. The changing social media environment requires that we manage our online personal brand more carefully than ever.
Have you ego-googled yourself recently? For those of you who are wondering what an “ego-Google” is, it is when you do a Google search for yourself, and it is an essential part of the management of your professional (and personal) brand. Of course there are a lot of other search engines out there and it won’t do any harm to “ego-bing” etc. yourself.

Ego-googling is your professional mirror to your digital brand, in other words it reflects your on-line profile, in the same way as your business cards, CV and behaviour reflect your professional brand. When we leave home in the morning, most of us take care to look professional for work because we recognise that first impressions count. The Internet makes it so much easier for us to discover things that many people now Google someone before meeting, hiring or doing business with them. It is important that our professional off-line brand that we have crafted for success (all be it unconsciously in some instances) matches our digital brand, because the digital brand is rapidly becoming the new first impression.

If someone Googles you and they don’t find any indication of your expertise, or worse still, they see evidence on your Facebook profile that you are a drunken reprobate, chances are you won’t even know that you have missed a business or job opportunity. Finding New Business Many people start the business process by using search terms to identify the players with whom they may do business. If your potential client is looking for a CRM consultant, say, chances are that they will search for “Customer Relationship Management Consultant in Gauteng” etc., and if you emerge as the pick of the CRM bunch (by appearing in the top three results) then you have done a fantastic Search Engine Optimisation job. But constructing your brand so that search engines can find you is more than having the right technical tags on your website.

What if the business hasn’t realised that your services are available? How do you make sure that opportunities come your way? In order to ensure that people who are searching for professional services find you, you need to leave a digital trail of evidence that you are an expert in your field. In the real world, you would speak at conferences and network at business breakfasts. In the digital world you can participate in on-line industry forums, or upload presentations that you have developed on the subject. Managing Client Relationships Today, with web 2.0, the boundaries between businesses and clients are blurring, and organisations are increasingly experienced as a collection of people, rather than an institution.

People and businesses can enhance their future success by ensuring that the individuals’ professional brands are carefully built and maintained on the Internet. This is a pretty labour intensive exercise in the beginning, filled with more introspection than many of us have undertaken in a long time. The maintenance of a professional profile is a relatively pain free discipline. Steps to creating a personal professional digital brand So you have recognised that you need to maintain your professional profile on-line, what do you do next? Do you register yourself on Plaxo, Ning, Linked-in, Facebook, Twitter etc.? This is the equivalent to getting someone to design you a logo and thinking that you have created a brand.

Personal brands are all about how people experience you, what they believe about you and what they expect from you, it talks a lot of thought to craft an personal brand. Step 1 Who do you need to be in your professional life to be successful? We all have CV’s of experience that we have built up over the years (some more comprehensive than others). We used those CV’s or experiences to get to the professional position that we are in now.

The first thing to do is to dust off (metaphorically speaking) and update that old CV. This is the starting point, your collection of skills, education, awards, experience and competencies. The next step is to ask yourself what your CV should look like for what you want to be professionally, and to update it to be the framework of your professional brand. You may also identify that you need to acquire more skills, or register with more professional bodies etc.

Step 2 Prove it

Once you have understood who you are and who you need to be, you can set about creating a strategy for creating your professional brand on-line. If your CV indicates that you are a great writer, include proof of your writing skills as collateral in your professional brand strategy. Ask yourself what you could blog about that proves that you have fabulous writing skills. The same goes for blogging to demonstrate innovation, thought leadership, creativity, management and leadership etc. You need to design some evidence that you are as good as you say you are. At the same time, look for public endorsements of your professional brand, do you have recommendations from clients or bosses, have you won any awards for projects you have managed?

Step 3 – Select your Social Media

There are many choices of Social Media out there for you to choose to create your digital brand. Because you know what you want to achieve, you can select them to support your strategy. If it is important for you to be seen as a fun loving guy, because you are a tour operator, then Facebook and Twitter are perfect mediums for you to upload photographs and provide ongoing commentary on how much fun people are having around you. If it is necessary that people trust you, let’s say you are a doctor or accountant, then by all means, use Facebook, but ensure that the information about you and the updates are all about wholesome things like family rather than debauched parties. Make sure that your updates are thoughtful, not silly. Look for communities of interest like the 702 ad feature group, where if you are an advertising professional, you can demonstrate your knowledge of the advertising world, by commenting meaningfully on the latest advertisements.

If you are a professional, either self employed or working within a large corporate, choose Linked-in and Plaxo and pro actively surround yourself with people that you want to be associated with. Link up to industry leaders, join in relevant conversations and discussion groups. Blogging is an incredibly good way to express yourself, many of the social media platforms enable you to pull in blogs that you have written on other sites, so that no matter where a potential opportunity encounters you, you will be equipped with the professional collateral that demonstrates your professional brand.

Step 3 – Maintain

The modern internet is all about dynamism, we no longer create brochureware once and leave it for an annual review. Our professional profiles are ongoing manifestations of our personal brands and need to be kept active so that we don’t run the risk of an out dated (read unkempt) personal brand. Many people will be reading this article and thinking “I couldn’t do this, it would be like boasting, or vain”. The reality is that in the same way as you wouldn’t dream of leaving home inappropriately dressed and you engage with people in the real world (through phone calls, eMail or in the boardroom), on the Internet people are assessing the professional value you have to them, and in the plethora of noise on the web, you have to stand out as a professional brand to be taken seriously.

About Digital Bridges
Digital Bridges creates high performance organisations by unlocking the business value of the web. We create digital strategies, user requirement and functional specifications for Intranets, websites and web applications. We also develop and implement social media strategies and create powerful digital brands using eMarketing and Communication. Digital Bridges is technology agnostic and partners with great technology companies in order to ensure that our solutions are fit for purpose and deliver on organisational strategy.

Digital Bridges approaches the web from a management consulting position and relies heavily on rigorous academic thinking as well as business experience. It is headed up by Kate Elphick who has a Law degree and an MBA from GIBS. Kate has spent the last fifteen years of her career on the business side of the IT industry with companies such as Datatec, Didata, Business ConneXion and Primedia. Her skills include innovation and growth through marketing, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, human capital, performance management, process engineering and BI. Digital Bridges has a broad range of experience working with significant, successful clients in the Financial, Gaming, Tourism, Pharmaceutical, ICT, Legal, Airline, Professional Services, Media and Public Sectors. To find out more about Digital Bridges, please visit www.digitalbridges.co.za or contact Kate Elphick on katee@digitalbridges.co.za.

Contact information:
Kate Elphick
Director
Digital Bridges
083 250 8558
www.digitalbridges.co.za

 

If you are a bit of a sensitive reader then please ignore this post – if you can see humour in some bad advertising / branding then read on….

…

Have anyone seen the new logo for the 2012 Olympics?!  It looks a helluva lot like Lisa Simpson (from the cartoon series) performing a sex act on another cartoon character:

I was alerted to it by a Facebook group which has in excess of 700000 members… err… excuse the pun.

As much as there is plenty of room for “creative talent” in a production house sometimes it helps just to give your designs to an outside pair of eyes before you sign it off?

Adgator is a tool which brings bloggers and advertisers together in a unique advertising solution. At one stage it was listed as #20 of 31 “top non-US startups to watch worldwide” by tech publication Business 2.0.

In September 2008 it was bought out by MIH (part of the Naspers stable) before they bought themselves out and exited the corporate fold.

Stats from the Adgator team indicates that they serve 5.6 million page views each month and advertisers will reach no less than 1.7 million unique people through the network.

Adgator differs from other ad networks around in that unlike Google and Affiliate Networks – which bill on a pay-per-click basis – Adgator serves ads on a Cost Per Thousand (CPM) basis and share this revenue with you 50/50. This means that for every impression served on your blog you will earn money.

 Encouragingly Adgator has managed to sign up three new advertisers this year which is quite positive for them. A problem they had faced was getting advertisers to commit to the product and with such a small advertiser base they were notoriously short of ad stock.

Best wishes to them for 2010! Feel free to give your feedback below on Adgator as a tool for either advertisers or for monetising your blog.

There is a very interesting article on TBI Research about the Facebook Self-Service Adverts and how effective - or more specifically ineffective – they have been in initial tests.

Effectively a self-service ad means that the advertiser can design it online and then configure it to be served to a specific audience.

The findings from the study showed a real click-through rate (CTR) of about 0.038% which is very low. Basically it implies that while your advert might be served a lot of times, the effectiveness of this can be lost after a while as readers become “blind” to it.

TBI Research seems to have some very nice research on the electronic media market and should be a site to be checked out on a regular basis.

 I have just come across a South African website – www.justplay.co.za – which I think offers a really nice potential advertising and market research platform for South African businesses.

Basically what it is, is an online survey site where users sign-up for free and then particiapte in online research to assist companies to work out demand for their product.

As a participatnt you can win TV’s, motorbikes, play-stations and other electronic goods etc with values of between R2000 and R10000 simply for completing a bunch of surveys.

For the companies using Justplay.co.za it looks like you can get qualified leads, build your database and in general increase brand awareness through various promotions on their platform.

At the moment it appears to largely be populated by insurers but there are other recognised online retailers, casinos and travel initiatives listed with them as well and the prizes are pretty awesome.

Anybody out there used this platform? Success?

Two of the most powerful (and under-rated) online marketing tools for business are Pay-Per-Lead (PPL) and Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) campaigns.

A PPL campaign typically involves a banner ad which connects to a sign-up page where a potential customer can request further information, request a quotation or request a representative to contact them regarding a specific issue – a good example of this is insurance companies whose banner ads litter many websites

A PPS campaign involves paying a commission to websites who direct visitors to your online store. The more traffic they send you, the more likely they are to generate sales for you.

As you can see, you literally only pay for marketing when it turns into either qualified leads or sales for you.  It’s extremely easy to calculate and maximise your return on investment (ROI). It can be a brilliant tool for small to medium sized enterprises (SME) to market themselves.

If these type of marketing campaigns tickle your fancy, it is recommended that you use a professional campaign administrator such as TrafficSynergy and OfferForge (See banners left).

As somebody who has been a publisher of these campaigns my one piece of advice is for the advertiser to make sure they are 100% transparent with their publishers. Try to find ways to incentivise people who send a lot of leads or sales through to you.

Some of the affiliates offer a sliding scale for publishers who send through an above average number of sales – you’re basically hiring an army of ”commission only” sales people.

These can be a really nifty tool for small businesses and should be considered as part of any decent marketing campaign.

Being an online publisher we are always interested to weigh up the pro’s and cons of different Pay-Per-Click (PPC) networks as ways to monetise our sites.

We primarily use Google AdSense but more recently have begun shifting to AD:DYNAMO. The move across (as both a publisher and advertiser) to AD:DYNAMO is primarily because as a business we are big believers in supporting South African technology and SA entrepreneurs rather than foreigners.

I recently came across AfricaWin which describes itself as “the online advertising agency exclusively reserved to the African market”.  

I’m not sure about “advertising agency” nor some of the grammar on the landing page but I’d be curious to know what kind of success publishers have had with it. An observation I have is that (according to the website) the minimum payment threshold is 40 euros which isn’t too bad when compared to the US$100 for Google.

I definately think it is a positive step to see other African technology companies coming to the fore. I wonder whether or not they have the critical mass needed to become a decent network.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

I was on the IOL website this morning and I have found my navigation being somewhat frustrated by their big MTN Ayoba rollover advert.

It is understandable that online advertisers are keen to find ways to get better click through ratios for the adverts but when half your screen is taking up by a rollover advert then I simply close the tab and leave the article. Anybody out there got any suggestions in terms of how rollover adverts can be effectively used and implemented without interfering with an online users ease of use?

Ad Dynamo is a South African pay-per-click (PPC) network solution aimed at publishers and advertisers.

The network is aimed at providing local businesses and publishers with an alternative to mainstream offerings such as Google.

On the whole the network is relatively small but the company is making inroads into attracting users and growing their publisher base. We have used Ad Dynamo from both an advertising and publishing perspective with mixed results.

The traffic generated by the PPC still seems to be a little hit and miss, possibly because we are still getting our heads around keywords and keyword bidding. On the publishing side our revenues have been very low and the click through ratio has also been low.

We have primarily served small sky-scraper ads (primarily image) across our blog network. Following some feedback from Ad Dynamo we have made some changes and also now serve 120X600 and 160X600 sized sky-scrapers.

Will monitor and provide feedback.

• 

• Blogroll

  • Artificial Intelligence blog
  • Bad Entrepreneur
  • Bundu Basher
  • Bundu Reviews
  • Bundublog
  • Chess Mate
  • Democratic Capitalist
  • Ferronews.com
  • IT Geeks
  • Liquid Trader
  • ManufacturingHub.co.za
  • Radio Review
  • RemSpecED
  • Rival Industrial
  • Rival Pioneers
  • Rival Radio
  • SA Social Investor
  • Sports Mongrel
  • TBI Research
  • WordPress.com
  • WordPress.org

• 

•