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Blog Site
 Alexi Vontas
Alexi VontasWebsite URL: E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Monday, 21 June 2010 12:18
Paid Web Advertising – Which is the Best Channel? With all the different channels of paid advertising on the internet, how can one decide which channel is really the best to invest in? Well, to a large extent it does depend on the line of business you are in, but let's use a small e-commerce business for an example and compare the different methods of paid adverts one should consider, together with their pros and cons.
Published in
Google AdWords Blog
Monday, 12 July 2010 12:13
Key Performance Indicators of a Website A website for many companies is a massive sales tool and can generate loads of free interest in your business, without much work. When your site functions well and offers the visitor a wealth of high quality information, it can be the function in your business that brings the highest return on investment and best profit yielding mechanism.It is, however, extremely important to keep a close eye on the vital signs of the site and ensure these vitals are positive and healthy, so as to retain as many visitors as possible, and generate the most business. If the key performance indicators are less than optimal, you will notice that your web presence brings relatively nothing in the way of new business, and a simple way of monitoring things is web stats system such as Google Analytics.
Published in
Google Analytics Blog
Monday, 03 May 2010 07:34
Enhanced CPC Beta Google has released the beta version of a new function in AdWords that will allow historical data to determine how likely a keyword is to result in a conversion and raise your bid for a search on that keyword. They are calling this Enhanced CPC beta.Users lucky enough to have this function available to them are seeing this as a mixed blessing. Look at it this way… If Google can predict which keywords are more likely to result in a conversion, it is great that they will raise your bid to allow your advert to show higher in CPC results. However, for people advertising more or less the same product, and iPhone for instance, won’t this mean that all your competitors’ bids will also be raise for the high converting keywords, only resulting in inflated earnings for Google?
Published in
Google AdWords Blog
Monday, 03 May 2010 06:46
10 Ways to Make Your Website More Exciting Very often people reach a website that may or may not be the exact source of information they were looking for, but because it looks dull, they leave. This is a scenario you never want to find yourself in, and if you use the following advice in your favour, you never will.Flash Banners These can bring movement to an otherwise static, simple looking website and a smartly designed banner can make the entire site seem revitalized. It is important to use imagery and text that make convince the viewer of your product. Animated GIF Buttons Getting people to the conversion point on your website is no easy task, but with the use of nicely animated GIF buttons, drawing the attention of your visitors to your contact page becomes much simpler. Be sure to use calls to action like “FREE”, “NOW”, and “INSTANT”.
Published in
SEO Blog
Friday, 26 February 2010 09:20
Why Internet Marketing is superior to Off-line MarketingWhen deciding which avenues to distribute your market offering through, it is important to take into account a few dimensions that will determine the best options for you. Your target market, the size thereof, your budget, your competition and many more will influence just how successful your marketing is and what your return on investment (ROI) is.
 There are a few reasons experts in the marketing field are moving more and more of their budgets into the online/internet marketing sphere, and the following more important reasons will now be discussed:
This advantage of internet marketing makes it almost unsurpassable in its accuracy and value, as you are only marketing to those customers that you want to attract. With traditional marketing methods, you show your message to millions of viewers and hope that the ones you are really targeting are taking in your advertising message. Internet and more specifically search engine marketing only shows your targeted marketing message to the people searching for your product, or those demographically chosen by you.
Published in
Marketing Blog
Thursday, 25 February 2010 12:49
Viral Marketing and its Potential Advantages
Let’s start off by defining what exactly viral marketing is. Viral marketing is the act of promoting any information, service or products that other customers feel compelled to share with friends, family and colleagues. This makes it a very good referral seeing that people are endorsing and re-advertising the message. There are several ways in which to virally spread a brands name on the internet and get increased publicity for relatively low costs and sometimes for free. These will now be discussed.
Viral marketing using Emails: This does not refer to sending mails with virus’ attached, but rather the act of creating and sending out an email that people find funny, interesting, engaging or alarming, and in turn sending the email to all of their friends and email contacts. This leads to a situation where a single person can reach hundreds of thousands of people with no cost at all, in a relatively short time frame. This spreads the brand awareness and also creates brand personality. Social Media and Viral Marketing: Having an article on your website that stimulates people to share what they have seen or read is a great way to get traffic and brand awareness to your website and business. And where the social media aids in the viral spread of the content, is they allow the visitor to literally “share” or “send to a friend” from any specific webpage you want. For instance, if you read a funny joke on my website and I have Facebook, Twitter and Stumble-Upon Social media buttons on my site, you will be able to click a button and send to your friends on these social sites very easily.
Published in
Marketing Blog
Thursday, 04 February 2010 12:49
5 Things your SEO Company should be doing for youAny company claiming to know anything about Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, should at very least be fulfilling certain functions for you on a monthly basis regarding the marketing of your website. If they are not doing ALL of the following, they are pulling the wool over your eyes, stealing your money, and giving good SEO companies bad names. To get the full impact of SEO, always ensure the following are being attended to:
On-site Optimisation  The pages on your website tell Google and other search engines what your website is about and what industry you are operating in. It is vital that your SEO company address the on-site elements and make ample use of your keywords in the appropriate places and even stipulate the area you serve to narrow down geographic location. This ensures any person searching for your product/service in your geographic area finds your site. Another SEO rule is that all links on your website should be follow-able by search engines (ie: text, not images). If your SEO guru overlooks this, alarms should start ringing. Search engine submissions No matter how well you website works or how amazing it looks to the viewer, the bottom line is that if your site is not submitted to the major search engines, it is highly unlikely that you will feature in searches for a long time. Google finds your site using links, and eventually when it follows a link to your site, it will index the pages. To save yourself time, submitting your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and others will speed up the rate at which your pages are added to its search results. Inbound linking Once your site is adequately SEO’ed, and search engines have decided where your site ranks when compared to other sites competing for the terms, the only way to climb constantly up the rankings in Google is to build high quality, one-way links to your website. This can be time consuming but really is the life-blood to reaching the first page for commonly search phrases. The more reputable the site you link from, the better.
Published in
SEO Blog
Thursday, 21 January 2010 09:31
Increase Sales Leads using Conversion OptimisationYour website might get thousands of visitors a month, but the bottom line is that if it is not making you money, it is costing you money. How do you make people buy products on a website, or make contact enquiries? This brings to mind the age old proverb, “You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink”. Or can you? The layout of your website and strategically placed calls-to-action are crucial to its success or failure. A call-to-action refers to an enquire button, a contact us link, or anything that engages the site visitor to take some kind of action that you consider valuable. There are various rules of thumb that should always be kept in mind when designing a layout for a site, and aiming for optimal conversion statistics. They are:
Right, now once you are getting all your visitors to the contact or sales forms, you need them to complete these forms before quitting. The conversion rate of any form is inversely proportional to the length of the form or number of required fields. So, the shorter the enquiry form for instance, the more people will complete and send it. A form with fifteen required fields however will have a relatively low conversion rate. Also a two step form will convert less than a single page form.
What this means to a webmaster is that without an increase in the number of visits to the website, we can increase substantially the number of leads we generate from the site using simple conversion optimisation techniques. Making it easier for users to contact you or buy a product, WILL increase conversions. Have a look at this great blog entry posted by the SEO Gurus @ SEOmoz - 11 Conversion Lessons from 2009.
Published in
Conversion Optimization Blog
Thursday, 10 December 2009 08:43
Advertising a Trademarked Term in Google AdWordsGoogle has just published that it now allows AdWords advertisers to display adverts for any keywords they wish, so long as trademarked terms submitted by the owner are not used in the adverts title, body or display url. This means that you can show your Google pay-per-click advert to anyone searching for any term, trademarked or not.  The problem comes in, when your adverts are not attracting the searchers attention due to it not being specific enough to their search query, creating a situation where your click-through rate becomes very low, pushing your quality score down and your average cost per click up. Eventually you might give up on advertising for those terms, as the ROI form those ads are just way too low.The solution is getting permission to use the trademark in your ad text, but how do you go about it? Simple... Ask the TM holder to submit an online form granting you exemption of the trademark restriction, and supply them with your Google AdWords Sustomer ID. They can find the form online at this address: https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmauth . Once the company submits the form, Google will notify them and you of the exemption, allowing you to use that term freely in your ad texts.If the trademark holder doeasn't want you to use it in the fear of damge to their brand or loss of revenue, they can of course deny you the use of the term. Let's hope they don't...
Published in
Google AdWords Blog
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