There are many exciting changes in the online marketing world coming in 2010 which will foster both new challenges and great opportunities.  More and more businesses will be using Internet marketing strategies in 2010 or will be increasing current online spending during 2010.  Companies that invested in online marketing last year are analyzing their results and making appropriate adjustments to those campaigns.  Businesses in all industries are continuing to realize that strategic online marketing is faster, more cost effective, measurable, and targetd. 

Many studies have been done over the recent months to assess how businesses will spend their online marketing budgets.  According to www.eMarketer.com, the majory of businesses surveyed will increase online budgets primarily in website design and development, email marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, and social media. 

Google also completed a survey with similar but slightly different results.  Some of these results were reported by B2BOnline.  Google asked b-to-b marketers where they will increase and decrease their marketing budgets this year and the responses showed:

• The top areas that will see increases are Website design and development (cited by 57% of respondents), search marketing (55%), webinars, podcasts and online events (50%), e-mail marketing (49%), social networks (47%) and blogs (44%).
• Areas that will see budget cuts include print advertising (51%), printed vertical directories (50%), direct mail (37%), outdoor (34%), TV advertising (31%), sponsorships (30%) and events (28%).

The results showing increases in website development most likely reflect companies that are revamping their website's appearance, performing conversion optimization to increase inbound marketing efforts and lead flow, and integrating Content Management Systems to make website maintenance easier and more cost effective. 

Our Vision for 2010

Internet Marketing Inc. is a full service interactive agency with a focus on cutting edge search engine optimization strategies and web design/conversion optimization/usability.  Internet Marketing Inc. continually monitors the pulse of the economy in order to better understand the business and financial goals of our clients that exist in all types of industries.  Our core goal is to increase online exposure and botton line profits for every client we service.  We design strategies that are specific to each client and align those efforts to achieve the client's core goals.  The company is backed by a strong management team highly educated in business, finance, law, and marketing. 

Most importantly, the company is driven by our outstanding team of professionals with decades of combined experience in website design, development, search engine optimization, paid search, social media, email, affiliate marketing, and mobile marketing.  With a focus on cutting edge search engine optimization, mobile search, and local search, Internet Marketing Inc. has redeveloped our SEO department under the leadership of our new SEO Director, Benj Arriola.  Benj has won multiple global SEO awards and designed SEO strategies for fortune 1000 clients.

The company has many new layers to ensure an even greater level of attention to detail, skillful project execution, and adherence to our specialized processes and procedures.  We are continuing great projects with brands like the US Army, Road Runner Sports, and Tropicana Las Vegas.  Between our San Diego, Las Vegas, and New York offices, Internet marketing Inc.'s growth from 2008 to 2009 was approximately 700%.  We look forward to a great year!

Brent Gleeson, CEO

In case you didn’t know, we’re in tough economic times.  These economic conditions have drastically cut budgets across the nation and world, leaving meager allowances for marketing and advertising in its wake.

Nonetheless, expectations for 2010 remain optimistic.  In a new study released yesterday, StrongMail reveals nine out of ten business executives plan to maintain or increase their marketing budgets.  Execs aren’t thinking conventionally for the new decade either, instead the survey’s respondents indicated they were open to marketing strategies that utilize the Internet and maximize their dollar.  Next year, 69 and 59 percent of business executives anticipate increasing their email and social media marketing, respectively. Another 42 percent claimed they expect to spend more on search engine initiatives, such as SEO and PPC.  The survey’s results indicate a migration to internet marketing tactics, as advertising and direct mailing initiatives are expected by less than 30 percent of execs.

Furthermore, the study showed a desire among business executives to combine the tested and proven tactics of emailing potential customers with social media.  Execs did not, however, demonstrate uniform confidence about how they would go about implementing such strategies in the upcoming year.  Instead, one out of five executives claimed they had no idea where to begin.  With more businesses seeking to establish an online presence in hopes of finding cheaper alternatives to conventional advertising, it is certain that social media marketing and search engine initiatives will play integral roles in the year 2010.

Not just for elementary school playgrounds anymore, Foursquare, a new online social network/gaming platform, is catching on like the common cold in a fifth grade classroom.  And this isn’t their first venture: just a few years ago, this same crew gave us the mobile social network Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google in 2005, and then later canned.  But unlike Dodgeball, FourSquare presents an expansion to the simple notion of broadcasting your location to your friends.  Foursquare tracks your “check-ins” at various locations like bars, restaurants, museums, retail outlets, and even street vendors, and awards you for such notable achievements as “Gym Rat” (for frequent visits to the gym), “Mayor of ___” (for frequent visits to a certain location), and “School Night” (for checking in late on a weeknight).  These achievements are then published on your personal profile and available for viewing for the whole Foursquare community.

Friends can use Foursquare as a means of finding each other when they’re out as well as compete with each other to get the most badges or Mayor statuses.  One can see how addictive the game could get; similar to Facebook, Twitter, and the likes, users can easily become preoccupied with the number of “check-ins” and forget the real reason they even go out.

The team has also partnered with Twitter as another broadcasting channel for their check-ins, a partnership which spurred some chatter about the similarities between the two social networks.  Mashable blogger Pete Cashmore commented on Robert Scoble’s observation: “Go back three years ago. Twitter was being used by the same crowd that is playing with Foursquare today.”

The application also allows for highly targeted marketing initiatives for participating locations, such as drink specials for the “Mayor” of a bar or reduced ticket prices for those who frequent a specific art gallery.  The novelty in this could quickly wear out, though, as many perceive to be the fate of Twitter’s marketing abilities.

With key competitors including Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite and Google’s Latitude, Foursquare’s path to success won’t be smooth sailing.  But their unique offerings will surely give them a head start against the rest of the pack, and I’m sure we can expect many more great things added to the Foursquare platform in the near future.

I recently read and article with a somewhat missleading title, but the content was interesting, and a bit scary.  The article is from the LA Times and was called “Congress is Cracking Down on Internet Marketing Companies“.  Now, when I think of Internet Marketing companies I think of firms offering actual marketing services.  In this case the article is really referring to Internet advertising and sales technology companies.  Either way, the topic is about these technologies being used by major retailers which use people’s credit card info and share it with other services.  Next thing you know you are getting reoccurring bills from some site you have never heard of.

Here is an example.  You are ordering tickets online and during your check out process an ad pops up urging you to “click” in order to get $20 off your next purchase.  That click then automatically sends your credit card info to another company you have never heard of and signs you up for a “membership”.  You then get billed automatically for months before you realize it and cancel.  Most people are too busy to notice or forget whether they signed up for something and never really pursure it beyond cancelling. 

As I said before the article refers to these firms as online marketing companies.  The companies they are talking about are the ones who are creating and distributing these technologies and then partnering with major retailers.  Some of these companies include (according to the article)  Affinion, Vertrue, and Webloyalty.  The scary thing is that these shady companies have been able to partner with major retailers like Hotwire.com and Continental Airlines.

The article stated that stories like these have encouraged members of Congress to seek legislation designed to crack down on these types of aggressive sales tactics (and the technology that makes them a reality).  This type of thing is no doubt something no consumer should have to worry about!

Has this ever happened to you?  Please share!

I was recently speaking at the 2009 PubCon in Las Vegas on both an Organic Site Review Clinic & an SEO Site Design Panel.

The Organic Site Clinic on Wednesday November 11th was only myself & Alan K’necht of K’nechtology where we were aligned on foundational & canonical SEO for the sites we reviewed as we are both sticklers for proper back-end coding.

We even came across a site that was using a MORE link to hide content at the bottom of each of their pages – the site will remain unnamed

Later that Wednesday after lunch I was on an SEO Design & Organic Site Structure panel with Ted Ulle of Converseon, Lyndsay Walker of Canada’s Web Shop, Scott Polk of Search & Social Media.

Moderating this motley crew was Christine Churchill of KeyRelevance with QA moderator Taylor Pratt of nFusion.

We all agreed we would keep our presentations to under 5 minutes so people could ask plenty of questions and get some great takeaways rather than just simply hearing us talk on and on, on stage.

I spoke on foundational SEO concentrating on what I term the big 3 of the .htaccess, robots.txt, & Webmaster Tools – I included my presentation below:

Ted went over some great foundational design information while Lyndsay went into coding advice and Scott provided some great tips, but where I disagreed with Scott is on using file extensions over directories.

I like & respect Scott Polk as he is great speaker with a wealth of knowledge & experience coming from Bruce Clay thus I didn’t want to undermine him publicly so I simply nodded in agreement with Ted on stage with him stating he prefers directories.

All things being equal a page at abc.com/xyz.html has just a good chance to rank as abc.com/xyz/ but with the directory page you have the added benefit of not having to change reference links if you go to another web page format such as php, asp, cfm, etc plus I feel its better organizationally since you can place related pages & files in this directory giving them added keyword weight.

Scott stuck to his guns on extensions over directories while also being correct that you can simply resolve the new web page format issue in the .htaccess, but I still contend directories are better long term both organizationally &  for SEO.

What do you think?

Last week, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) announced a new set of rules to govern bloggers with a connection to any company selling a product they are writing about. So, how far will the government go?  Right now, it’s unclear, but the guidelines could extend to regulate posts people make on Facebook and other social networking sites.

So what does this mean for our 1st amendment rights?
•    The government will have the ability to further dictate the parameters of individual communication via the Internet.
•    Several new questions arise about what exactly constitutes blogola and disclosure. (For those unblog-savvy types, “blogola” refers to posts made by bloggers who have been given some sort of incentive to post about a product.)  Should the disclosure be written in the post or can it be in the bloggers “about me” page? Is blogola really that different than traditional forms of advertisement and promotion?

However, here at IMI, we do believe that there are two sides to every story:

•    Libel is illegal. Defamation is illegal. Do they still happen frequently?  Yes.  Do they happen on the Web?  Way too often, but it’s not rigorously regulated online at the moment.  These new regulations will hold people responsible for their blog posts, which is a logical extension of current laws surrounding these concepts.
•    Has anyone ever posted anything nasty about you or someone you know on ripoffreport.com, juicycampus.com, etc.?  These sites continue to pop up every day, constantly grow in usage and exposure, and have significantly injured the reputations and careers of many.

So, what’s fair?  What do YOU think?  We’re interested, let us know…

Michael Gray of GrayWolf has postulated that by Google providing free Android Ion phones at Google I/O is actually a breach of their own paid links guideline.

Michael’s logic is that the phone (valued at approximately $400 – although sold on EBay for nearly $800) is a way of Google “paying” people to generate buzz and thus link to them.

Michael Gray: @dannysullivan seems like a double standard to me google gives free stuff & links are fine but on viralconversations.com I have to nofollow

Michael Gray: @dannysullivan I jumped thru all sorts of hoops getting Viralconversations.com google complaint and google breaks all those rules today

Michael Gray: @dannysullivan I specifically have to tell ppl to nofollow any links but google nope they dont have to follow those same rules

Michael Gray: @dannysullivan how hard would it have been to put a note with the phone enjoy the phone but please if you link to us use the nofollow tag

Then Michael redirected his wrath to Matt Cutts

Michael Gray: @mattcutts oh so google is judging paid links on intent now … google gonna borrow the term mind meld too to figure that out?

Michael Gray: @mattcutts srsly you cant have everybody else operate under one set of rules with gifts for links and not google #arrogance #aristocracy

Michael Gray: @mattcutts I thought google would have learned from buying links in japan guess not #googlebuyslinksbutyoucant

Matt Cutts: @graywolf google.com is the most-linked-to domain on the web. We don’t need links & aren’t looking for them. We’re looking for developers.

Michael Gray: @mattcutts and just because you dont need links doesnt mean you didnt give away cash in kind gifts to get them

Michael Gray: @mattcutts just remember when celebrities get caught shoplifting its still a crime #googlepaidlinksdoublestandard

Michael Gray: @mattcutts so when are you going to punish google.com for selling links the way you did google.jp or do they get a “bye”

Michael Gray: @mattcutts how hard would it have been to put a note here the phone for free if you link to us please use a nofollow tag #leadbyexample

Michael Gray: @mattcutts the ebay link is proof the gift has cash value or is a cash in kind gift #paysattentioninclass

Michael Gray: hey @mattcutts how those paid links for android.com working out how many of the 57K came from the free phones http://tinyurl.com/mk7mdx

Michael Gray: looks like those phones google gave away and turned into links to android.com have a cash in kind value of $760 http://tinyurl.com/kmy29u

This all started when Michael was recently arguing that TechCrunch should NoFollow the Sponsor links using http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/contenture-wants-to-fail-whale-your-ad-network/ as an example.

I was eating lunch with Matt Cutts & MG Siegler of TechCrunch along with Danny Sullivan so it presented the perfect opportunity to get to the bottom of Michael Gray’s concern.

Michael Gray: @googleandblog good I hope @mattcutts mentioned this post too http://tinyurl.com/opkmun #sponsoredposts

MG stated he wasn’t aware of it and when Matt looked at the offending page he said he didn’t have an issue with it since it wasn’t within MG’s control.

Michael Gray: @googleandblog sorry I call BS its an advertorial

This whole time Danny was fighting back to stay out of the fray.

Andy Beard even chimed in with this post.

Do you think Michael Gray is getting carried away or does he have a point in either or both paid link concerns?

I was going to ask Sergey Brin about this but instead asked about his thoughts on Microsoft constantly changing search engine names as it relaunches officially at SMX Advanced in Seattle next week.

Danny Sullivan: @googleandblog asks sergey what he thinks, bing or kumo? sergey doesn’t answer but says “we been happy with google”

There was laughter throughout the room when Sergey responded that he is happy with the name Google which was picked up on several sites including TechCrunch.

I was invited to cover Google I/O since I run a popular Android site as Google’s Android platform for mobile devices was front and center at this Google Developer Conference.

At the conclusion I got on my flight home to San Diego with my Ion phone ready to present at SMX Advanced on Tuesday June 2nd, 2009 in Seattle representing Internet Marketing Inc – please come say hi if you are attending.

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It seems so easy to “stick out” in the media today. Online it is 100% different going online to use or buy a service or product. You cannot just walk into a store and feel what you are purchasing. There is no sales person online – your website is your sales person. So you need to convey your business to the website visitors. You need them to feel comfortable and trusting while surfing your website. The first part is getting people to your website through internet marketing. Next keep them on your website – make them use your service.

I visited 3 different Salon websites. Beside the 3 very different design types there are a couple of things I noticed right away. They all said the same thing:  they all tell you they are the best in town with the logo of an award they won, they tell you the services they offer, and what products they use.
Well this is all wonderful information but I got the same information from all three of their websites. So none of them really enticed me to choose their salon and give them a call. You need to make your business “Stand Out” and capture the users attention! What makes your company different than all of the other ones on the market? On all these 3 websites I looked at they said the same thing, what are the differentiators? Why would I pick A over B? Especially in today’s market you need to make sure you are setting your business apart for others. Consumers are doing more and more research before making any decisions. This means you need to tell them about your business and what sets you apart from the rest.

There are a few simple ways to do so:

Statistics:  all companies keep some type of statistics. This is very useful to spread throughout your website. Make sure to do this a little throughout your websites be careful of cramming to much information in.

Stories: If your company has a great story behind the foundation or name tell the consumer. If you do hair for the stars tell them.  If you are Jessica Biel’s hairdresser tell them.

Samples: This is a great piece to have on any website. Add testimonials – before and after pictures – client pictures etc. this is great to let the consumer k now what your style is. It amazes me that there are so many salons that don’t even have before and after pictures on their website. Or pictures of clients they have worked with that came in what a sob story and ended up looking better than ever when they walked out!

With the economy today you need to make your business stand out in a crowd. So use these simple tips and make sure you are adding new information to the website to attract people and have them coming back.

So you have a new online business and want to get it up and running. As we all know, money is scarce and both VC’s and Angels have tightened their belts. Angel investors are trying to stay a bit more liquid and really looking hard for the right investment. Often times they are looking for proprietary technology rather than service based businesses. The problem with that as an entrepreneur with a new company is that its take time and money to develop proprietary technology. So how does someone with a new start-up tackle the challenges and stresses of bootstrapping?

These economic times are going to forge smart, savvy, and tough minded business people because we will all be forced to make hard decisions and in the long wrong might be better off for it. Not getting those much needed investments can often turn out to be a blessing in disguise. You will be forced to work hard, keep your company lean and mean, and focus on your core initiatives.

Step 1: At first, focus on cash flow rather than profitability (this will quickly change of course and profitability will be your life line). The reason for this is that you will have expenses and your own bills to pay (need cash to pay them). Keep your overhead as low as possible and pay your bills on time.

Step 2: Forecast from the bottom up not the top down. In so many business plans you see people making projections based on the percentage of the market they plan to capture…usually it is the standard 1% to 5% depending on the industry. Rather than make these estimates, keep it more simple. By focusing from the bottom up you can project the productivity of your team, the ability to sell a certain amount of your product or service each month, and the growth plan for each component.

Step 3: Hire people you can actually afford. It may not be the time to go out and build your dream team. This can lead to a massive payroll expense and overstaffing issues. You will end up having a bunch of high paid people sitting around doing nothing. Make your team building strategy gradual and understaff if you can. This will lead to each team member having to work a little harder but so what…thats part of the start-up experience right? Once you hit a threshold where you think quality might start to suffer, go hire another person.

Step 4: Make good hiring decisions. You can’t afford to waste money on people that will not produce for you. Have a formal hiring process even for your lowest level positions and call references given. At the end of the day though you have to go with your gut feeling. I have hired people who I knew would be great even though one of the references was not that great. It turned out to be one of the best decisions we have made.

Step 5: As mentioned above, even if you plan to develop proprietary technology, you may not have the resources to start with this at the beginning. This will take time and significant resources. Have a service you can sell that will build a client base and get your name out there. This can include providing consulting services related your industry and future proprietary offerings.

Step 6: Don’t spread yourself thin. Focus on your core competencies and internal processes. The more formal your internal process is, the more scalability your model will have.

Step 7: Keep your eye on the competition and have a value proposition that differentiates you from the existing competition. Be ready to answer the question, “Well ABC Company has been around ten years and has a similar pricing model…why should we use you”. The answer can of course include more customer attention, better quality, a unique approach, a niche focus, etc.

Step 8: Accurately project your cash flow. Now how much cash you have; and if you are running negative, by how much? What is your burn rate and how can you decrease/slow the bleed?

Step 9: Have a cost effective Internet marketing strategy in place that will help bring you new business. If you can invest in SEO then my suggestion is to never wait. Creative social media marketing can also be a great way to drive some awareness to your new online business.

Follow some of these basic steps and you will be able to focus on growing your business rather than constantly worrying about investors that aren’t calling you back. In the long run, you will make better decisions and still have controlling ownership of your company!

I will be representing Internet Marketing Inc. at SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 2nd as a speaker on the Mobile Search panel.

SMX Advanced is a two day event taking place at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center from Tuesday, June 2 to Wednesday, June 3 in Seattle, Washington.

There will be a Meet & Greet party at the Odyssey Maritime Museum on Monday June 1st hosted by Microsoft who has timed the announcement of its new search engine KUMO later at the conference.

SMX Advanced in my opinion is the pinnacle of all major Internet marketing conferences as such if you could only attend one conference all year this should be the one, although PubCon would be a close second.

This conference has sold out each year and the last chance to get the early bird lowest pricing is on Friday May 1st by saving $200 at this SMX Advanced Registration page.

Please let me know if you will be attending the conference or in the Seattle area in early June by emailing me at mike AT internetmarketinginc DOT com

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