Category Archives: Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1] Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings

What is SOPA? What is PROTECT IP? How SOPA and PIPA might affect you?

What is SOPA?

How SOPA would affect you?

SOPA and PIPA would censor the Web

SOPA and PIPA wouldn’t stop piracy

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as House Bill 3261 or H.R. 3261, is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011, by House Judiciary Committee Chair Representative Lamar S. Smith (R-TX) and a bipartisan group of 12 initial co-sponsors. The bill, if made law, would expand the ability of U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods.

Presented to the House Judiciary Committee, it builds on the similar PRO-IP Act of 2008 and the corresponding Senate bill, the PROTECT IP Act.

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.

Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

What is PIPA?

How PROTECT IP Act would affect you?

The PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 or PIPA), also known as Senate Bill 968 or S. 968, is a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to “rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods”, especially those registered outside the U.S.

The bill was introduced on May 12, 2011, by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and 11 bipartisan co-sponsors.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that implementation of the bill would cost the federal government $47 million through 2016, to cover enforcement costs and the hiring and training of 22 new special agents and 26 support staff.

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill, but Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) placed a hold on it.

…. for more details visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

How PIPA would affect you?

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

The bill defines infringement as distribution of illegal copies, counterfeit goods, or anti-digital rights management technology. Infringement exists if “facts or circumstances suggest [the site] is used, primarily as a means for engaging in, enabling, or facilitating the activities described.”
The bill says that it does not alter existing substantive trademark or copyright law.

The bill provides for “enhancing enforcement against rogue websites operated and registered overseas” and authorizes the United States Department of Justice to seek a court order in rem against websites dedicated to infringing activities, if through due diligence, an individual owner or operator cannot be located.

The bill requires the Attorney General to serve notice to the defendant.

Once the court issues an order, it could be served on financial transaction providers, Internet advertising services, Internet service providers, and information location tools to require them to stop financial transactions with the rogue site and remove links to it.

The term “information location tool” is borrowed from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is understood to refer to search engines but could cover other sites that link to content.

The Protect IP Act says that an “information location tool shall take technically feasible and reasonable measures, as expeditiously as possible, to remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the order”. In addition, it must delete all hyperlinks to the offending “Internet site”.Source:PROTECT IP Act of 2011, S. 968, 112th Cong. § 3(d)(2)(D); “Text of S. 968,” Govtrack.us. May 26, 2011. Retrieved June 23, 2011. Bill Text – Protect IP Act

Nonauthoritative domain name servers would be ordered to take technically feasible and reasonable steps to prevent the domain name from resolving to the IP address of a website that had been found by the court to be “dedicated to infringing activities.”The website could still be reached by its IP address, but links or users that used the website’s domain name would not reach it. Search engines—such as Google—would be ordered to “(i) remove or disable access to the Internet site associated with the domain name set forth in the [court] order; or (ii) not serve a hypertext link to such Internet site.”

What people are saying about about SOPA and PIPA?

Members of Congress are trying to do the right thing by going after pirates and counterfeiters but SOPA and PIPA are the wrong way to do it.

1. SOPA and PIPA would censor the Web

The U.S. http://youtu.be/Qcbg29Q0DhAgovernment could order the blocking of sites using methods similar to those employed by China. Among other things, search engines could be forced to delete entire websites from their search results. That’s why 41 human rights organizations and 110 prominent law professors have expressed grave concerns about the bills.

2. SOPA and PIPA would be job-killers because they would create a new era of uncertainty for American business

Law-abiding U.S. internet companies would have to monitor everything users link to or upload or face the risk of time-consuming litigation. That’s why AOL, EBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga wrote a letter to Congress saying these bills “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation.” It’s also why 55 of America’s most successful venture capitalists expressed concern that PIPA “would stifle investment in Internet services, throttle innovation, and hurt American competitiveness”. More than 204 entrepreneurs told Congress that PIPA and SOPA would “hurt economic growth and chill innovation”.

3. SOPA and PIPA wouldn’t stop piracy

…
read more: https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/

Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet

When I found out Fight for the Future needed help with their campaign against a new bill called PROTECT-IP, I had to take a little time away from Everything is a Remix Part 4 and produce the video above. PROTECT-IP is the latest piece of legislation aiming to chip away at your online rights in the name of protecting the entertainment industry’s business model. It’s legislation that won’t work, will give us yet more lawsuits, and will make the net worse.

Whether you lean right and hate business regulation, lean left and hate censorship, or lean neither way but hate useless legislation, PROTECT-IP is a bill everyone should oppose. I encourage you to head over to Fight For the Future and contact congress.

More here: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa

So, it is up to you to decide support it or not.

Call your Senators today.

The Internet is a thriving ecosystem that powers our economy and our society. PIPA and SOPA threaten the web.

Join Our Censorship Protest!

Related articles

Cool Visualization Of Facebook Users

Where Facebook Is Not Popular Yet?

Visualizing Friendships

by Paul Butler on Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:16pm

… When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it.

One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them …

Facebook is one of the largest websites in the world, with more than 500 million monthly users. The site was started in 2004 by founder and CEO <!—->Mark Zuckerberg when he was an undergraduate student at Harvard.

Since September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address can join Facebook. Users can add “friends” and send them messages, post announcements, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US. The intention of the book is to help students to get to know each other better.

Facebook is huge in North America, Europe, India, and Indonesia, but is almost unused in big swaths of Asia and North Africa.

Artist Ian Wojtowicz put together this graphic based on Facebook’s <!—->map of connections combined with NASA’s pictures of the earth at night. He then took the places where Facebook was inactive, pinpointed them to specific cities on the <!–NASA–>NASA map, and highlighted them in yellow.
The map was highlighted by Flowing Data earlier today.

Here’s the whole world.
Dark areas are where Facebook is most prominent, where yellow cities are places where few people use Facebook:

Facebook NASA mashup

Sources of Information:

Image: Ian Wojtowicz

http://station.woj.com/2011/07/unfacebook-world.html

The original Facebook blog post explaining the visualization in more detail and here’s a link to a high res version of the image.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Email Marketing Best Practices

Did you know?  Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent US $600 million on email marketing in 2010.

So it big Market for Email marketing if you know how to use it.

What is Email Marketing?

By Wikipedia: Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

  • sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
  • sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
  • adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers, and
  • sending email messages over the Internet, as email did and does exist outside the Internet

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing (on the Internet) is popular with companies for several reasons:

  • An exact return on investment can be tracked (“track to basket”) and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
  • Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
  • Over half of Internet users check or send email on a typical day.
  • Email is popular with digital marketers, rising an estimated 15% in 2009 to £292m in the UK.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

A report issued by the email services company Return Path, as of mid-2008 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.

Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States’ Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM), the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider’s acceptable use policy.

Important tips for anyone managing the email marketing.
1. Send emails to persons who have requested to receive them.

2. Include content relevant to the type of content the person has requested.

3. Be consistent with your sending frequency.  Pick a schedule, whether it is weekly, biweekly,
or monthly and as often as you can stick to that schedule.

4. In most cases it is best to send business to business emails Tuesday through Thursday. We’ve found that the best
times of the day to send are just after the start of the day around 9:30am or just after lunch around 1:30pm. It
is best to avoid sending business to business emails after 4pm or on weekends.

5. In most cases it is best to send business to consumer emails either between 5pm and 8pm Tuesday through Thursday or between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.

6. To improve deliverability, add a message at the top of your emails that says something like: “To ensure receipt of
our emails, please add you@mycompany.com to your Address Book.”

7. Make the From Name for your messages either your company name or the name of a person at your company.
Once you choose a From Name, keep it consistent. During the split second decision subscribers make whether
to open your email, the most important factor in their decision is whether the From Name is familiar to them.

8. Be sure to include both a plain text and an HTML version of your newsletter.   If you don’t
include a plain text message, around 5% of your recipients will see a message with nothing in it.

9. Don’t use all caps or multiple exclamation marks within your subject line or body. Doing this will trigger spam
filters.

10. Build your list at every opportunity you have. If you have a retail location, add a point- of-sale sign-up form. At conferences or events, bring a paper sign-up form or have a laptop with a sign- up form set up and available for interested parties. Finally, add your newsletter signup form to every page on your web site.

Email Marketing Terms.

1. ROI (Return on Investment) – Your ROI is the measure of the profit you make and/or costs saved at your business. For your email marketing campaigns you calculate cost of sending email plus time.

ROI = [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100

So if you made $780 on your email campaign, your time was worth $50 to create it and it costs $15 to send it, it would look like this:

(($780 – $65)/$65)*100 = 1100% ROI (which is really good!)

If you want to take it a step further subtract your cost of your products or services as well.

2. Open Rate – Your open rate is simply the number recipients who opened your HTML emails. It is typically measured as a percentage of the total number of emails sent, although calculation methods may differ. The open rate is considered a useful metric for judging response to an email campaign but it should be noted that open rates for text emails can’t be calculated AND some email clients don’t display images as a default which would under report your total number of opens.

3. Above the Fold – The bottom of your browser window or the bottom of your email before you have to start scrolling is commonly referred to as the “fold”. These viewable areas should be where your most important information should be located since it’s the first thing your viewer will see.

4. Preview Pane – Email programs like Microsoft Outlook, Entourage, and Mac Mail allow users to view email through a preview pane before your recipient clicks to open. The preview pane is important to bear in mind when composing the opening lines of an email so you can get your recipient’s attention fast.

5. Copy – Your copy is simply the text of the email you write.

6. Hosted Email – A hosted version of an email allows users to view the email message as a web page, ensuring that all formatting remains intact. VerticalResponse does this for you for free you just need to include the “hosted version” link. Hosted versions of your email are also great for you to send your Twitter and Facebook followers to when you launch your campaign.

7. Spoofing – Email spoofing involves forging a sender’s address on email messages. It can be used by malicious individuals to mislead email recipients into reading and responding to deceptive mail. These fake messages can jeopardize the online privacy of consumers and damage the reputation of the companies purported to have sent the messages. Spoofed email often contains phishing scams. VerticalResponse doesn’t allow for this in our systems.

8. Phishing – In a phishing scam, a spammer, posing as a trusted party such as a bank or reputable online vendor, sends email messages directing recipients to web sites that appear to be official but are in reality fraudulent. Visitors to these web sites are asked to disclose personal information, such as credit card numbers, or to purchase counterfeit or pirated products.

9. Targeting – Targeting gives you the ability to deliver emails to those most likely to respond to your emails, based on a variety of things like their geographic, demographic, psychographic and behavioral information.

10. Whitelists – Whitelists are usually created by an ISP (internet service provider) and are made up of commercial emailers (including email service providers — ESPs) who have been approved to send email through their gates. The ISP requires a list of IP (internet protocol) addresses that email will be sent from, and in some cases a test period where the commercial emailer will be approved or rejected. VerticalResponse is on all available whitelists.

11. Web Friendly Fonts – Almost all web browsers are capable of displaying four primary fonts properly: Times, Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana, as well as their variants (Arial Narrow, Times New Roman, etc.) If a web developer decides to stray from one of these fonts he or she risks browser compatibility problems and the prospect that their pages may render inaccurately when viewed through certain web browsers.

Places to Include Information on How to Subscribe to Your Newsletter
6. On customer satisfaction surveys
7. On product shipping forms
8. In confirmation or transaction emails
9. On credit card receipts
10. On warranty and product registration cards
11. On Invoices
12. Within articles
13. Within press releases
14. On trade show lead forms
15. On sweepstakes entry forms
16. On shopping cart order forms
17. Company publications