Companies spend a substantial amount of money in building a business each and every day. For instance, restaurants invest in the right equipment, the perfect location, and all the infrastructure needed. Universities and medical centers in particular spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build impeccable facilities.

Business owners in general start a business with a dream. But sometimes the reality of that dream isn’t what they expected. And they wonder why? They think: my facility is outstanding… I'm very knowledgeable… I work hard. Where are my customers? Why aren't people interested in my product or service?

The reality is that some business miss the point. They forget to put dollars aside for marketing. Most people believe that there is no need for marketing, and they prefer to rely in word of mouth. Even though it does work, it cannot be the main strategy for your business. It will not work. Period.

Marketing a business is essential. It is as important as a table and chairs are in a restaurant. We can't blame everything on the economy when we haven't put the money in the right places.

Promoting our own business is definitely an investment because the results are seen. It's like that old saying, "You got to put money to make money." There are different ways to promote a business.

Business need to utilize a customized mix of traditional and new media methods. It doesn't matter the size of your business–It could be as little as an ice cream stand or as large as a hospital. Being visible online is as important (or more important and more cost effective) as being on a billboard at the city’s busiest street corner.

Get your business back on track and realize the dream you set out to accomplish. Call us today to learn how we can enhance your Web visibility with SEO and SMM strategies.

Elizabeth Trimarche
etrimarche@netmcgroup.com

If you are a business in NYC using Internet marketing to promote your products and services, you need to ensure that you are implementing only the most effective techniques. There is nothing worse than a rolling out a new website with great expectations only to see its performance falling flat. But this happens quite frequently in the online world. In NYC, Internet marketing companies can offer you search engine optimization and social media optimization services but not all of them have the tools to give your website an impressive identity on the web.

If you feel discontented with the performance of your website and social media marketing campaign in New York, here are certain things that you may need to check:

A website that is just ‘I, Me, Myself’: This is a common error on several websites and also on social media profiles used for online marketing. You need to remember that your target audience may not perceive your brand like you do. A good business website needs to speak to its audience and address their needs and expectations. A narcissistic copy would spell death for conversion.

A website that just won’t stop: Irrespective of the numerous qualities that your business products/services possess, it is not good to speak about their ‘benefits’ in thousands of words. Effective NYC Internet marketing strategy calls for precise and to the point description in attention grabbing words and phrases. Remember most visitors are interested in finding out – what’s in it for them and if it is worth the price.

Design over substance: A website designed with jazzy navigational features and loads of pictures and symbols can be very distracting and even irksome to visitors. It is a good idea to be innovative, but not at the cost of clarity and usability. Qualified and experienced NYC Internet marketing professionals always strike a balance between design and content for a website.

A website that leaves the visitors hanging: Every page on a business website must have a purpose. The web pages without a good call to action may leave your audience confused. A business should not force, manipulate or restrict its online audience – it should guide them through its web pages.

NET is a reputed NYC Internet marketing firm that offers services for search engine optimization and social media optimization. We not only help you through the optimization of your online marketing, but also monitor your traffic and rankings. Contact NET for the most affordable and result oriented Internet marketing in NJ and NY.

A Florida search engine optimization service needs to pursue organic and ethical methodology for SEO to improve the rankings and performance of their clients’ websites. However, not all organizations succeed in using techniques that are ethical or fair. A business enterprise seeking services for Florida search engine optimization should understand the basics of organic and ethical search engine before choosing a service provider.

Optimized Internet marketing campaigns should be customized and site-specific, but should also be adequately effective and impressive for the search engines and web users. Organic SEO involves the results that a user gets from search engines and these are not paid or sponsored ads. This implies that the company has not paid a search engine to promote its business in the first page of search engine results. Ethical SEO can be better explained by contrasting it with black hat optimization – the deliberate use of techniques that aim to manipulate search engines and users into thinking that a website is one thing, while it is actually totally different. With ethical search engine optimization, the website is gradually built into an authority in its domain. This is a continual process and involves the use of high quality content on the website.

A Florida search engine optimization service that uses ethical SEO practices will use extensive research to prepare the best content for a client’s website. Keywords and meta tags are carefully selected to give a distinct identity to the website and make it actually attractive for search engines and users. Once the website is made into a spot where quality content can be found, link acquisition also becomes less problematic. Obtaining links from good quality and relevant websites is fundamental in terms of optimization.

Internet marketing has to embrace the opportunities thrown up by changes. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing keep revising and upgrading their strategies and any business organization that is serious about enhancing its online presence must keep pace with the changes. Organic search engine optimization in tandem with ethical search engine optimization can ensure high rankings and integrity of the organization’s website.

At NET, we use ethical SEO techniques for all our clients to create successful Internet marketing campaigns. Along with Florida search engine optimization service through our Orlando office, we also provide services for New Jersey SEO and New York SEO. Select our services to see how we help you to impress and win customers through your Internet marketing activities.

Facebook recently overtook internet giants like Google and Microsoft in customer engagement, proving that social network marketing is a force to be recognized. Corporations now want to be a part of social network phenomenon which has given them an effective and economical advertising medium to reach out for all potential customers.

Internet marketing through social media reaches the right customers who are actually looking out for your products and services. They are not impressed by the banal and repetitive commercials on the TV or radio and are only interested in the products/services that they specifically need. Finding these on their favorite social networking websites is a good way to gain the exact information they may be looking for. If they are impressed, they not only become your loyal customers, but also recommend your brand to their friends and colleagues. This is how internet marketing works and grows.

Around the clock availability of Internet makes it even more effective for marketing. Business pages on social media sites can be accessed anytime from anywhere, helping you to connect with your customers in a more personal manner. You can get direct feedback and understand market response to your products and services in a better way.

At NET, we provide the right social media optimization to strengthen your Internet marketing efforts. Our professionals can help your business pages to stand out and give you a winning edge, outshining your competitors.

Television, Radio and Print: the conventional modes of marketing have been used for decades by business organizations. Internet marketing, though fairly new, is not a completely unknown term anymore. With increasing number of people searching for their favorite products and services on the web, it is necessary for business organizations to have a strong online presence and visibility. If they are not found in search results on the web, many potential customers may not even become aware of their existence. Really, who goes to the Yellow Pages or the phone book anymore? Consumers go to the web first!

Web development is not exclusively meant for large business. Today's Internet Marketing levels the playing field. Small businesses can now compete with the big dogs!

Certainly the Internet crosses all boundaries but the changing trends of search show that people are now searching online for products and services in their own area. Let us just say, as a customer, you want to order a pizza for the night. Certainly, you would not look for a pizzeria in another state or country for a home delivery. The service has to be located in your own city! This is what makes Internet marketing for local businesses so important. Business organizations need to ensure that their web-savvy customers are aware of their presence whenever their products or services are needed.

Based in Orlando, Florida with offices also in Jersey City, NJ, NET has been helping numerous businesses to get a good visibility in search engine rankings with its Orlando SEO services and New Jersey SEO services.

We analyze the tastes and preferences of your target customers to select only the most appropriate videos, press releases, social media platforms, news, blogs and articles for your web page. With the choice of right key words and meta tags, we optimize your visibility in search ranking results.

We always stress that new media (social networking) does not replace traditional media (email marketing and other). And so we weren't surprised when we read a report published by eMarketer which states that new media or social media marketing boosts the benefits of email marketing campaigns because social media marketing is yet another way to engage with customers and prospects.

So if you want the stats on this, here they are:
 
Of the businesses surveyed by Emarketer, it was found that over 40 percent of business owners stated that they plan on integrating social media and email to their marketing initiatives in 2010. About a quarter of the businesses surveyed claimed that they had already done so and the rest were still researching on how to make it happen.

So the message is clear; businesses do see the benefit of increasing brand awareness, visibility, and engagement via social networks. Yet, many businesses aren't able to devote time or resources to make this happen. We at NET believe that that's where our biggest value proposition comes in because our customers can hand-over their entire marketing campaign to us. Using new and traditional strategies, we provide our customers with the biggest bang for their buck. Are you ready???? Contact us today to see how we can help!
 

Yep, so naturally if social media can help criminals, so can it help law enforcement catch the same criminals. Here's an interesting story which also highlights criminal stupidity.
 
Apparently, the thief, listed the Garmin Forerunner watch he had stolen from a home for sale on Craigslist. A man who wanted to buy the watch went and bought the watch from the thief. But when he tried to connect the watch to his computer, the new buyer discovered that the watch was registered to another individual.

After finding out the owner details that were listed for the watch's registration, using Facebook, the new buyer contacted the original owner of the watch along with four other individuals who had the same name. The victim of the burglary responded to the new buyer and also contacted the police. Long story short, the criminal was arrested and placed behind bars.
 
So, here's adding one more use for Social Media websites; Catching Thieves!

So I finally got around to checking out Google's Buzz. It allows convenient sharing of pictures, videos, and full links. And Buzz is like Twitter without the 140 characters, YAY!

Not quite like a full blogging platform, Buzz also allows setting up of groups of followers to post to. The format for posting is very fluid. You can comment on a Buzz in the Buzz folder or via an email or chat if the user and you are both on GTalk. Interestingly, you can also edit your messages later on. So you may find posts changed at a later time. Buzz interface collapses multiple posts from the same user by default. If you use IMAP, buzzes will appear as regular emails in your inbox. If enabled, Buzz on mobile shares your location down to street level with other Buzz users.

But over and over again, users in the social networks continued to criticize the Buzz for features that were encroaching on user privacy.

And so over the weekend, Google apologized to its users for those privacy intruding features and announced product changes. Basically Buzz allows users a ready-made circle of friends which was based on a user's most frequent e-mail and chat contacts in Gmail. Google announced that in the future, it will merely suggest a group of people rather than make them immediately available to the new user.
 
By turning off the auto-follow, Google has been able to quieten down the uproar to some extent. Google also plans to make the following changes to Buzz:

• Creating a new Buzz tab in Gmail’s settings page to allow users to hide Buzz. This will allow users to disable Buzz.
• Disabling auto-connect to picasa albums and items shared on Google reader.

Oh and Google announced that within the first 48 hours of its launch, "tens of millions of people" had tried Buzz. I was one of them!!!

I am not sympathetic towards Paul Chambers one bit. You'd think EVERYONE would know that bombing is NO joking matter anywhere, anymore, anyhow. Not that we'd ever forget 911 but after the recent almost-bombing of an airline on way to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, you'd think people would know better than to say "bomb" and "airport" in the same breath in public, never mind on a worldwide platform like Twitter.

Here's what happened.  Paul Chambers tweeted his frustrations about his England to Ireland flight potentially getting canceled due to snow, by posting something to the effect of "Robin Hood airport is closed, you've got a week to get your act together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high".

What the heck was he thinking posting something SO inflammatory?  I read some blogs where people thought the punishment netted out to Paul was excessive. Paul has been suspended from his job indefinitely, he is banned from Robin Hood airport for life, and his phone, computer, etc. were taken away after he was arrested for conspiracy to create a bomb hoax.

Come on people, let's get real here! A bomb threat is a bomb threat is a bomb threat. After what we're going through across the globe as we fight terrorism, everyone is sensitive to anything that remotely makes us suspicious. And frankly if I had been at Robin Hood airport and had read the tweet myself, I'd be calling 911 and reporting Paul Chambers for sure.

And this reiterates what I always tell my clients and anyone who'll listen to me: THINK before you post something online for the world to read. IF it can lead to jail, unemployment, or trouble with your family, zip it right up errr take a break from your online writing.

Happy New Year to you!

In December 2009, eMarketer released the fourth and last part of it's Business-to-Business (B2B) and On-Line Marketing Outlook series. The series primarily tries to predict the overall on-line marketing outlook for 2010. The predictions are provided by analysts Debra Aho Williamson and Paul Verna.

Here are two predictions from their 2009 fourth online marketing outlook.

Verna predicts that in 2010, twitter will grow into a serious web-based business from merely being an on-line phenomenon. He also predicts that Twitter will also make some money. It's a well known fact that despite tripling its user base in 2009, twitter hasn't made any money despite its the immense (??) popularity.

Williamson predicts that due to the growing integration of social media content with on-line search, social media will become important for businesses in 2010. She says that businesses will find new opportunities for advertising on social media sites and also warns of intensive scrutiny of such efforts by privacy pundits.

Now maybe I'm just darn good at this stuff. Or perhaps it's just simple logic that allows me to arrive at the same "predictions" as the above mentioned "industry experts".

I mean, wouldn't you as a business owner even be able to predict that eventually Twitter founders will monetize their baby (Twitter) one way or the other? They can't not know the power of handing greater than 6M users to advertisers on a platter. And of course social media will become important to businesses. How else can they get viral instant popularity if they have experts like us to help them market them online?

And finally, social networks are great for criminals who want to lurk and read up on every piece of personal detail shared by users. So of course privacy issues will continue to remain high on the minds of not just the site owners but also the people who want to advertise there.

So once again, Happy New Year! And look for more emarketer 2010 predictions (that are more interesting too) coming soon….