Make Money Online

What is the first thing that most people associate with Thanksgiving? Well, probably turkey, but pumpkin pie comes in a close second. As I am not a fan of the traditional pumpkin pie, I set out on a quest to find a delicious alternative this year. My search led me to a robust cookbook sitting on my kitchen shelves. Sheri Yard’s Desserts by the Yard is an amazing compilation of a pastry chef’s career spanning from coast to coast. What I found in that book turned out to be the most fluffy, decadent, flaky, scrumptious pie I have ever tasted. And apparently my officemates liked it just as much — the triple silken pumpkin pie and I took home first place in last week’s bake-off at our New York office! So if you’re looking for a holiday-perfect pie, I encourage you to try out the recipe (PDF file). It takes a little time to make, but it’s so worth it.

Happy baking, and happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Kayla Wilson, Recruiting Coordinator

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Triple silken pumpkin pie takes the prize

With so much focus on “building” and “adding” friends, karma, votes, points, followers, kudos et al, we may tend to lose sight of the quality of our online connections and friendships. Does size really matter when it comes to building your online community? In short, more could equal less.

I have this imperfect habit of adding most people who add or follow me. It seems the polite thing to do. Unless they are hocking something unsavory or obviously trolling the online waters with some free, downloadable spamware and clearly not really interested in me as a person but rather my keyword profile, then I’m game to be pals. But we all might be diluting our online cup of wonderful by falling prey to the numbers game.

Colloquially speaking, “It ain’t about quantity; it is about quality.”

And now I step upon my cardboard box to share a bit of unsolicited advice. Determine the goals of your community first, be they profit for not, and be strategic about building your community in whatever venue: Facebook, Ning, Twitter, Friendfeed (insert ad nauseam list of social media sites.) Building an online presence is all about personality. And with your online persona comes the responsibility of the company and the conversations that you keep.

Things for brands and marketers to remember when community building:

1. Lose the obsession with adding people for the sake of numbers but rather take the time to befriend people specific to your niche and engage in and provoke quality conversations.

2. Define your voice and build a trusted and consistent body of work before you begin shot gunning every social network; remember it’s not a race.

3. Let the community know you’re listening by inviting them to a conversation thread, sending out a welcome post listing all your newcomers, and inviting people to list their own social networking profiles to expand their own networks.

4. Don’t be afraid to hold the mirror up and ask the community what they see. Don’t be afraid to ask people how they perceive your brand and see if that matches up with your brand’s vision.

5. With your community building strategy in mind, create a physical map of your social network. Check out Mind Manager as a resource for online flow charting software. Seeing is believing.

Thoughtfulness need not lose its footing when mining for quality community members be they in the form of friends on third-party social media platforms or on your own company-owned website. Slow down, take your time and remember, “It ain’t about quantity; it is about quality.”

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Community Building: Does Size Really Matter?

Keyboardr is an interesting website I found this week. It’s a search engine that is a mashup of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube which as you type in the search bar, will find results relevant to the keywords typed. Once the search results come up, you can use your keyboard arrows to navigate and press enter to go to that website.

Since it’s fairly new it’s kind of barebones right now, but the concept is pretty clever if you’re into shortcuts. They are planning to support Friendfeed, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Google Docs and many more.

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Keyboardr: A Search Mashup

That was the conclusion reached by market research company IDC  in a recent study as described by MediaWeek. It seems that while IDC recognizes the aggressive growth rate of social networks, they see ads being ignored.

According to IDC’s report (U.S. Consumer Online Attitudes Survey Results Part III), more than three quarters of social networking site users log on at least once a week, and 57 percent do so daily. And these folks are logging an increasingly large amount of time on these properties, as more than 61 percent of users spend more than a half hour on these sites per session, with 38 percent staying at least an hour.

Yet despite those huge usage numbers, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook significantly under perform when compared to overall online advertising, found IDC. Just 57 percent of social net users report clicking on an ad over the past year versus 79 percent of all users, according to IDC’s study. A similar disparity is evident when it comes to online shopping.

Social networking sites continue to evolve how they display ads in order to combat this lackluster performance. Facebook has made several enhancements to its advertising options including new ads that appear in news feeds as well as ads that appear next to relevant user actions.

I disagree with placing all the blame on these social networking sites. Many advertisers have just not figured out how to use this new advertising medium. Advertisers make the common mistake of treating these social networking sites like a media buy and throw up the same creative ad units they use in display campaigns. Messaging must be tailored to this audience and ad designs should look to leverage the social networking platform rather than ask it to mimic other advertising platforms. At NETexponent we have been running social media campaigns for several months and just formally launched our Social Media Services division. Here are a few of the tips we have learned.

1. Target – Social networking sites offer a slew of tools that advertisers can use to target their audience by demographic, geography, and interests. The interest targeting ability is what really makes these marketing channels unique so be sure to target accordingly. You may want to target different campaigns to different segments to enhance your ability to tailor the ad to each segment.

2. Tailor – Make sure your message is tailored to your audience. Once you target the right segment be sure to customize the marketing message so that it appeals to that audience but keep in mind that you are in a social media environment. Hard sell call to action messages like “buy now” may not work in this environment. Try first to engage your users with softer call to actions such as “learn more” or if you have customer testimonials try “hear what others have to say”. Create different messages for each segment you target since they will most likely respond to the most relevant message.

3. Test – Many social sites provide enhanced reporting but none of it will replace your good old ad serving solution. Test out different ads and even test ads that look like text to see how they perform. In addition to testing landing pages perhaps you want to test driving traffic to your company/product fan page. How about special consumer offers for facebook users?

My overall point is that advertisers have a unique opportunity to tap into this new and growing online channel. Nobody has published the secret formula for success but it is out there if you are willing to search for it. I have seen the rewards and they are definitely worth the effort.

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Social Networks Not Clicking?

Over the last week I was part of a spirited private private debate about the death of banners and display advertising. Peter Figueredo even posted on this subject while I was composing this. It was all sparked by Procter & Gamble’s GM for interactive marketing and innovation, Ted McConnell saying  “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”  With CTRs around 0.35% and eCPM rates dropping like a rock, what are publishers to do?

Let’s look at the issues.  First, headlines are there to get people to read more. Did mine “get” you?  Second, journalists may even have a slant that they want to get across. Third (and I’ll stop numbering), people may be looking at a piece of the animal and not stepping back to see that it might make sense. eMarketer recently published some stats on display ads that notes that while they still can’t measure many of the ads on social media sites, Facebook has already claimed a 1.1% share of display ad views.  This is sure to increase as they find ways to measure new concepts such as Facebook’s Engagement Ads.

Friend, Jaffer Ali, does a guest post for Jack Meyers where he asks Has Online Advertising Lost Its “Schwerpunkt”? You really should read this whole article closely as it is pretty complex.  I think I read it three times.  He starts with an analogy, but moves into a generic “Online Advertising”discussion where he posits that we are allowing technology to drive too much and losing the relationships and creativity that are needed to really move forward and get into what is coming next.  I may not fully agree with hi, but there are places where he makes perfect sense. Coming from the performance marketing side, we never really did watch CTRs.

Dave Morgan has his version of this in MediaPost where he asks, Whither The Banner? Again, Dave is someone who knows this space better than most.  I guess where I disagree with his assessment is that “banner” is pretty generic and can mean different things. To me, “banner” is everything display and all sizes and formats.  Dave talks about Web video and Rich Media as separate entities from the banner.  I really don’t differentiate between a basic static banner and an expandable banner that shows a movie preview or allows interaction with the user.  These are just evolutionary aspects of the same banner that went from static images, to animated GIFs, to Flash, etc.  I’m not arguing that banners (my definition) will be here and strong forever. But I do think that they have quite a bit more staying power than they are being given credit for. Read the comments on this one as well, because you will see some great minds who also read this and left their thoughts.

Not to be left out, David Koretz’s MediaPost headline, Display Advertising Needs To Die, is a bit more inflammatory. I have zero experience in Brand advertising personally, but I have learned a bit about it through conferences and dealings with others who have made this their area of expertise.I think I do agree with what he is trying to say as the underlying message, but this does not meant that the other side of the coin can’t be the same thing.  His point is that building a brand should not be the goal of advertising, instead it should be building (measurable) sales. David is arguing for the CPA model quite strongly, and for that I am quite happy. It is very nice to see CPA move into the mainstream and even be used as an argument against display advertising. I do think that there is room for both brand and the more direct transactional related ads. The entire TV model (other than late night direct response and QVC type channels) is based on influence advertising.  I don’t see that going away too soon.  Though I would not mind seeing a few percent of it moving to online affiliate (CPA) sales.

AdWeek jumps on the bandwagon with their version, Is the End Near for Display Ads? My beef with this article is that again, there is no reason that measurable cost per action advertising needs to be excluded from the broad category of Display.  Citing sources such as Young-Bean Song and David Hallerman, it is hard to knock the data and research talked about in the story. It is the curse we caused ourselves by touting the measureability of online. By telling people how much better online is because we can measure just about everything, advertising runs into problems when we then go off and try to tell them how online is influencing offline behavior. This article does moderate the tone a bit noting that “the Web is miles ahead of print and TV when it comes to proving its worth.”

It’s not like we haven’t seen this before.

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The Banner is Dead

Many companies are slashing their marketing budgets and evaluating how marketing dollars are spent due to the tough economic times. Slashing budgets is a clear sign that “Lean and Mean” is the current theme for many businesses. On average most research suggests that (while growing) online advertising still only represents less than 10% of where marketing dollars are spent. Yet even online advertising budgets are getting scrutinized.  J.P. Morgan recently predicted a down turn in online spend specifically impacting display advertising as advertisers turn towards more performance based advertising. A recently released study by MarketingSherpa further supports this trend:

For advertisers who wish to get the best ROI for their online marketing dollar the focus tends to shift to display advertising and whether or not they should keep spending in that category. We all know that display advertising (eg banner ads on websites bought on CPM or cost per thousand impressions) is typically the hardest online advertising initiative to measure. Comparatively, CPA (cost per acquisition) campaigns can be directly tied to ROI. Therefore, when under pressure to justify every marketing dollar spent the inclination is to slash display advertising budgets and increase more accountable marketing channels such as affiliate marketing. At the surface this seems to make sense. However, if you take a holistic approach to looking at this situation you may find that display advertising plays an important role.

At NETexponent we have seen how display advertising can boost other online marketing efforts such as paid search and affiliate programs. We evaluate all marketing channels in order to get a holistic view of our clients’ online marketing effort. This outlook has shown us time and time again that spikes and dips in performance driven marketing channels such as search and affiliate can sometimes be directly related to display advertising efforts. When significant display advertising campaigns are running for clients we usually see a boost in traffic and conversions in other online marketing channels. Therefore, display advertising can play an important role even in ROI focused advertising efforts.

Measuring the impact of display advertising on other media channels and choosing the right allocation of marketing dollars is where the tricky part comes in to play. I am not advocating that all advertisers go out and boost display ad spending because it may not have the impact they want. It is true that even boosts in performance related to display could come at a price that is too high for advertisers. My main point is that companies should evaluate the impact display advertising has on other online campaigns and use that data to determine exactly how much spend to allocate to this channel in order to maximize online marketing ROI.

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Is Display Advertising Worthwhile In A Down Economy?

So we’re heading into the holidays, but the economy is in a serious rut. People have shopping to do, but consumers are restricting their budgets. This leaves affiliates wondering: what should I be promoting?

The obvious answer is that if consumers want savings, affiliates should promote savings. But with all different kinds of savings to be had online, even that answer isn’t too helpful. Well, some recent statistics suggest that affiliates should be pushing family-related coupons.

Coupons Rising
Months before the credit crisis peaked, both comScore and Hitwise were already seeing coupon downloads rising. For instance, as far back as May, Hitwise reported that visits to coupon sites were up 85% year-over-year. Consumers were also spending 39% more time on these sites that the previous year, and searches for the term “coupons” were up 45%. Then in July, comScore observed that 59% of shoppers coupons were using coupons to save money.

Coupon Opportunities
Consumers use coupons in two different way during the holidays: (1) directly, by saving on actual purchases, and (2) indirectly, by helping them save on necessities so that they have more to put toward holiday purchases. Of course, promoting coupon offers on a wide array of potential gift ideas can be challenging and time-consuming, so affiliates might want to focus on helping people save on basic necessities. After all, the numbers show that the majority of coupon users are women, and that coupons related to family necessities are the most popular.

In October, the Marketing to Moms Coalition found that some of the most popular ecommerce activities for women were shopping for their children and downloading coupons. By promoting family-related coupons, then, affiliates can not only target the kinds of products that consumers look for in a recession, but especially the demographic that is most actively searching for them.

Recession Affiliate Strategies
A recession marketing tactic used by many merchants is to offer strategic pricing or customer incentives. A good affiliate recession strategy, then, is to target online shoppers who most actively seek out these strategic pricing offers. Mommies are a great recession niche because they are (1) they most actively seek out deals on family-related necessities, and (2) download more coupons than any other demographics, and family-related coupon downloads searches are up across the board.

Although a recession entails an economic slowdown, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is less opportunity. Rather, it represents a new set of opportunities. After all, there are just as many consumers as there were before, it’s just that their spending habits have changed. This means as an affiliate you are dealing with a whole new set of market demands, and that demand is largely for savings, especially on basic necessities.

When it comes to basic family necessities, there’s considerable opportunity for affiliates. Since moms often manage family budgets, they use much of their time online to find savings. By helping these moms find those savings, affiliates can both continue to profit despite the recession, and help families stretch their budgets further.

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Holiday Recession Opportunities