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e_Marketing Blog 2009 Will Be Pivotal for Microsoft 2008 has not been the greatest year for Microsoft, but they have still done surprisingly well in spite of the economic slowdown around the world. In an article from PCWorld called Microsoft's Top Three 2008 Mistakes, Shane O'Neill of CIO.com discusses some of the things that went well for MS, and some that clearly did not. In spite of aggressive marketing by Apple, Mac sales fell 1 percent over the year and Windows PC sales were up 7 percent. Microsoft's grip on the PC market remained firm - with 90% of users running Windows, and 70% of internet browsers using Internet Explorer. One has to think that the bad press MS keeps getting will have to impact these market shares eventually. Although it sure seems like both Apple and Firefox do not understand that their elitist attitude ("we're so much better and smarter than the other 90% of you") is an implicit criticism of the very customer they are trying to reach. 2009 will be a pivotal year for MS as they continue to try to beat off Apple, Google and Mozilla (Firefox). According to the PC Word article Microsoft's biggest mistakes for 2008 were: 1. Poor marketing of Windows Vista - They've been letting Apple get away with bashing Vista for years now. It's just not as bas as the critics say it is, and MS's own lack of promotion reinforces the idea that the critics are right. 2. Letting Apple Build Anti-Vista Momentum - Even though the sales figures may not yet show it in a convincing way, Apple has taken the marketing game away from MS with their constant Vista-bashing. MS has not shown that it can adequately respond. Expensive ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld missed the mark. Just recently I saw an ad touting the unique features of Vista in a straight-ahead way. It's about time. 3. The Failed Yahoo Bid - Early in 08 the bid for Yahoo looked like it might be a case of two search losers getting together. The failure of the bid did nothing for MS's image as a "winner" or a company forging into the future. As it turned out it was probably good for MS that Yahoo rejected their offer. Now Yahoo is worth a fraction of what MS offered, Jerry Yang, the big Yahoo opponent of the bid is gone, and new Yahoo investors are now courting MS. MS is still interested in Yahoo's search business, and may very well end up with it in 2009. WiMAX for Portland WiMAX service will soon be available in Portland, Oregon. What is WiMAX? It is a wireless alternative to cable or DSL. For a number of years this technology has promised to revolutionize the delivery of "last mile" service connecting homes and offices to internet access points. But these days the focus is more on mobile applications that make it a viable alternative to standard cell phone services. The provider of this service in Portland will be Clearwire, a company formed through joint cooperation of Sprint, Clearwire, Google, Intel, Comcast, and Time Warner. WiMAX will not be significantly cheaper than the alternatives, but it does promise to offer greater potential for merging disparate services such as internet, cell phone, Voip and cable tv. Free Blog or Your Own Domain? Once you've decided to create your own blog, the first question you have to address is whether you want your blog to be hosted on your own web hosting account or be part of an already established site like wordpress.com, blogger.com, or one of the many other free blogging sites. If you use one of the free "hosted" blogging sites (Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog.com, and many more) you can create a brand new blog in about 15 minutes. When you choose this option you become part of a larger site such as wordpress.com and your address will be something like http://yourtownrealestate.wordpress.com or http://yourtownmoneymanager.blogspot.com The advantage of this approach is that it is fast and cheap. Plus you will get some traction and search engine exposure for your blog because it will be part of a much larger network that gets crawled by the search engines on a regular basis. But in my estimation, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. |
EasyTrainerOnline.com is about online training - basic training courses, articles and demos of online technology that is used for training. Sources for corporate and institutional training programs.Online learning, online education resources. Search Engine Marketing Hype Killing Small BusinessesMay 11, 2006 - Linknet Internet News Cheap hosting - cheap web hosting, low cost personal and business hosting plans. Freesms versenden - kostenlos freesms in deutsche handynetze versenden. Make Money with PPC Ads - Premierad.com pays up to 75% of advertising revenue Search Engine Marketing Hype Killing Small Businesses Think about the first thing you ever heard about "marketing a website" on the web. 99% of the time the first words anyone ever hears are "search engine marketing." Or some semblance of the phrase. And from that point on, the hammering of misinformation never lets up. You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without the search engines. You are led to believe that only people who can guide you through the mine field of search engine optimization are the SEO "experts." Also you are told time and again that the only way to market online PERIOD is through the search engines. You are conditioned over time to focus most, if not all, of your efforts on tricking the search engines into liking your site above all your competitors for search terms where "there can be only one." Well, here's a wake up call: The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or know-how to turn an idea into a profitable online business focusing only on search engines. Just look at the deluge of information there is out there on Google and how to rank well with them. People are picking apart their ranking patent application right now to try an glean a website promotion strategy based upon what Google reveals in their application about their ranking system. Is this information valuable to a small business wanting to sell its wares to a whole market rather than just the part of that market which uses one of the big search engines? It is in extreme moderation, yes. In a well balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to bring in targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. You do what you can, and you move on to all the other ways there are to promote your business. Yet, so many people are falling victim to the gleam and glitter of search engine riches being pushed on them by SEO firms and people selling search engine how-to manuals. It is not long before a new business finds itself wrapped up in a game where the only winners are the geeks and deep pockets. If you do not fall into either of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you hop right off the porch to play with those big dogs. "But I hired a 'big dog' SEO firm to make my business stand out and compete with the geeks in my market niche." More power to you. In actuality, unfortunately, you probably just hired a teenager from India with an internet connection in his parents' house. Most small business start ups cannot come close to affording a major SEO firm. They charge corporate-level premiums to be able to access their services. Everyone else in the SEO world is practically working out of their garage in comparison. Scared yet? You don't have to be as long as you are spreading your marketing around to the non-search engine traffic you should be getting. Writing articles and syndicating them in your market is a direct traffic strategy that has nothing to do with search engines. Except that search engines find your site through those links as well. But you should be doing it solely for DIRECT TRAFFIC from readers on other sites and taking the search engine traffic boost as mere icing on the cake. You see, as people spam the search engines, they must adjust how they rank sites in order to compensate. This means a lot of good sites take a hit when Google changes the way it ranks sites. You could have done everything completely on the up and up and gotten dropped in the engines because they made a new rule that everyone who registers their domains only for one year is a possible spammer. There goes your legit site. Hope you weren't planning on search engine traffic for your SOLE source of traffic. Can you see how dangerous it is to get bitten by the search engine bug? YES you can propel your business overnight from a profitless dead zone to a glamorous profit machine with one top ranking. Of course that is possible. It is not likely. People who are turning their small online businesses into success stories are doing one thing across the board: Conducting a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes search engines along with a good mix of other non-search engine marketing such as reciprocal and non-reciprocal linking tactics too numerous to mention here. If you want long-term success online, you must be willing to look past all the sleeze merchants selling you dreams of riches through search engine marketing. Search engines care about one thing: Their own hides. You should care more about your hide than anything else and use a well-planned, disciplined marketing strategy that puts search engines in their place. Not in the epicenter of your marketing campaign, but just another tool in your toolbox for bringing in targeted traffic. Do this, and you will escape the fate of thousands of startups this year who will realize too late that they hung their hopes on the wrong marketing strategy as their engine for profits. Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey Jack Humphrey explains his proven marketing strategies in the all new Power Linking 2005 at http://power-linking-profits.com Jack is proudly NOT a "search engine expert." Article Source - SEO-Guru.info
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