I just read a great article, “Top 10 Internet Marketing Tips for 2008,” By Gillian Meier. It was nice to see some of the experimental marketing avenues suggested in writing by a specialist. And it’s a good reminder of how fast the industry is moving. Even the foremost experts acknowledge that there’s no secret formula to internet marketing and that you just need to dig in and find out what works for you. With that in mind, also know that these channels aren’t entirely untrodden and that successful and failed methods of using them are shared regularly—for your benefit.

The top 10 internet marketing tips for 2008 are:

1. Optimize your website’s content
2. Create a content development strategy for your website
3. Invest in a paid search (pay-per-click) campaign
4. Publicize your website through article marketing
5. Develop a social media marketing strategy
6. Create a Company Blog
7. Experiment with video marketing
8. Engage your audiences with web widget marketing
9. Discover the benefits of mobile marketing
10. Create an effective email marketíng strategy

1. Optimize Your Website’s Content:

First and foremost, get your website content right. Make sure it is easily read by both humans and search engines. An essential variable applied by Search Engines in the way in which they rank websites is based on the relevancy of the content that the search engine is indexing.

2. Create a Content Development Strategy for Your Website:

In addition to optimizing the existing content on your website, it is essential that you develop a strategy to continuously grow your website’s content on an ongoing basis. All new content should be written specifically with the web reader in mind and should also be optimized for the search engines.

3. Invest in a Paid Search (Pay-Per-Click) Campaign:

When you pay for traffic (visitors) that click on your advertisements that are being advertised on search engines, this is called pay-per-click or search engine advertising. Paid search allows you to quickly leverage search engine traffic by bidding for keywords that are related to the products or services that you promote and sell on your website. Paid search advertising is particularly beneficial to companies who are not yet well ranked on search engines through natural search.

4. Publicize Your Website Through Article Marketing:

Article marketing is regarded by Internet marketing experts as one of the most effective promotional methods to publicize your website and to grow the number of back links (incoming links) to your website content. To ensure ongoing awareness, articles should be submitted to suitable article directories, content publishers, article announcement lists and content syndication (RSS feeds). Each article should be published on your website first and should include a bookmark button to encourage social bookmarking.

5. Develop a Social Media Marketing Strategy:

Studies show that by the end of 2007 more than 60% of top global companies will have had some form of social media marketing strategy in place. Corporates and small business owners should create a clear social media marketing strategy as part of an integrated communications and marketing strategy. Social Media has become an essential component of online marketíng and search engines are adjusting their rankings to include search personalisation. One of the effects of the social media revolution is an exponential growth in the amount of content online.

6. Create a Company Blog:

In the past, corporates have focused marketing and communications efforts on becoming faceless. This has changed significantly. Where the online consumer has become very much in control, companies will no longer be able to connect with their customers in a meaningful and emotional way without having a personality. More and more companies are starting to realize the significance of establishing a company personality and we are starting to see more Corporate Blogs coming alive. Business Blogging will continue to become more lucrative as more and more people look to new media such as Blogs and social websites for insight.

7. Experiment With Video Marketing:

There is tremendous power and revenue-generating potential in Video Marketing. With the rapid ongoing growth of YouTube’s traffic in addition to the emergence of Internet Television websites, streaming video is dominating the international web and marketers are quickly scrambling to capitalize on this exciting channel. As companies seek to simplify video sharing, video marketing will become more interactive which could have huge implications for Affiliate marketing.

8. Engage Your Audiences With Web Widget Marketing:

Widgets have made significant strides as an accepted marketing technique in recent months. Many new Blog oriented services are launching Widgets providing businesses with the opportunity to quickly introduce their services and new products to audiences.

Web Widgets are small applets that live in HTML and provide miniature versions of a specific piece of content outside of the primary web site. Web Widget Marketing is not only an exciting new marketing technique; it is fast becoming one of the leading brand-building marketing strategies for businesses advertising online.

9. Discover the Benefits of Mobile Media Marketing:

Mobile media marketing has continued to grow at a meteoric pace as many web companies recognize the huge potential in mobile marketing. As new technologies emerge and standard websites are converted to ones that can easily be accessed by mobile devices, companies will need to ensure that their websites are mobile-friendly. This leads the way for new and innovative opportunities to provide the consumer with improved brand and marketing experiences.

10. Create an Effective Email Marketing Strategy:

Introduce an effective Email communications strategy as part of your marketing strategy to grow your existing customer base and to expand your client base significantly through permission marketing and regular targeted communications. Engaging your customers with relevant, targeted information when, where, and how they want it is crucial to marketing success. By combining technological advances with tried-and-tested best practices, the future still looks bright for email marketers.

To conquer commercial combat, a significantly powerful Internet presence, supported by a brilliant E-Marketing Strategy, is paramount to ensuring that you remain competitive, grow revenue and magnetise your customers!

I’m writing to you this morning from a laptop that took an Italian soda bath late last night. With a sugar high in full gear, I reached across the desk and tipped a glass (that should never have been near my computer) right onto the keyboard.

Within seconds the screen flickered, the speakers crackled and then it was over – I was sitting in front of a lifeless machine, oozing syrupy raspberry liquid from every port. Consequently, within fractions of a second, I thought what files do I have open, what hasn’t been saved and is it all gone!

If this were the end of this machine and all the critical information that I’ve put into it, what shape am I in RIGHT NOW. Will I be able to finish my taxes or access my online accounts? Will I be able to recover the one-of-kind digital photos from the family reunion that I just downloaded to my laptop?

So what do my computer, a raspberry Italian soda and emergency preparedness have in common? Give your computer a bath and you’ll realize as well as I that these machines have become critical tools in our lives. The information storage, processing and access points that they provide will be no less important to you in the event of an emergency than your personal files and photo albums.

To continue my story… As I was sucking the soda out of the key board and speaker grill with my vacuum, I thought through the backup system that I had in place. As soon as the initial shock of the event started to subside, I recalled the comfort level that I was operating in on a day-to-day basis due to my “backup system.” Of course, the system hadn’t really been tested. I mean, why would you intentionally kill your computer to find the holes in your plan?

Is your computer back-up system adequate? Do you even have a system?

There are several components to my computer/data backup system. Some parts of my system may be overkill and not an option for some people and some elements may be grossly inadequate, depending on individual needs.

Hardware

Use an external hard drive to store a backup of all your data
Given the decreasing cost of digital storage (or the increased size at the same price), you can’t afford NOT to have a backup hard drive. The device is basically a spinning hard disc. It doesn’t contain all the extra components that a computer has and doesn’t use an operating system (the source of most computer ailments). Thus, without all the moving parts and yesterday’s software, the external hard drive’s life span and usefulness will be significantly longer than your computer’s.

In addition to its extended life, another key benefit of an external hard drive is that it is separate from your computer and can be placed away from your hazardous work space. I have mine sitting on a shelf away from my desk.

To take this element a step further, you can/should backup the information from your external hard drive to storage discs like a CDs or DVDs and keep these in an even safer place. Examples are a safe deposit box or a fire proof safe. Personally, I haven’t taken this step yet, but plan to do so in the coming days.

Keep a second computer on hand and up-to-date (if possible)
In the event that your primary computer dies (or takes a big drink of Italian soda), having a second computer on hand will allow you to actually begin computing and accessing your information right away. This is without question the least feasible element of my system for most people. Buying and maintaining one computer can be expensive enough.

To help alleviate some of the component and software compatibility costs, I purchased two of the exact same computer. In this way, I know that all the peripherals and system requirements and drivers and on-and-on are exactly identical. This makes maintenance, upgrades and new component purchasing much easier and less expensive.

Software

Move information from your computer to the backup hard drive
I use two separate pieces of backup software that perform two entirely different types of backups. One is doing a backup of individual files and the other is doing a backup of my entire computer hard drive, or an image backup. An image backup contains everything, including your operating system and configurations.

Which is better? They’re different!

File backup
I am using the software application ViceVersa Pro 2 from TGRMN Software (http://www.tgrmn.com/).

This method compares the creation or edit-date of files on your computer with those of the same files that have been backed up already. If you’ve updated or files on your computer since your last synchronization, then the software will update/copy those files onto your backup drive. In this way, you have a mirror copy of all of your files. These files are uncompressed and can be accessed just as you would the working files on your computer.

A benefit to backing up file-by-file, as mentioned above, is that you can copy the files over to another computer and begin working immediately. I experienced this benefit first-hand last night, after dowsing my primary computer. I fired up the secondary computer, browsed to the external hard drive in Windows Explorer (PC) and simply dragged-&-dropped the folder containing my backup files onto my secondary computer’s hard drive. Now, the transfer took about 20 minutes given the gigabits of information, but when complete I was working as though nothing had happened.

Image backup
I am using the software application Acronis True Image Home from Acronis (http://www.acronis.com/).

This method creates a copy of your entire hard drive, including the operating system, software, files and configurations—EVERYTHING! With an image backup, you could replicate your entire computer, without having to find your software installation discs (if you even have them—more and more, only pre-loaded or downloadable software is available) or key codes.

Image backups are compressed so that they don’t take up as much space as your uncompressed hard drive. On the flip-side, as mentioned earlier, individual files are not accessible from the image back-up (as far as I know). You would need to go through a step or two to access files. You can read more about it at the vendors’ site listed above.

A system that works
So in the end, the piece of mind that I was enjoying just before the crisis – was actually justified. My system was put through the paces and I came out the other side unscathed. There are an infinite number of ways to help secure your data, but you have to have the system in place for it to work. I recommend preparing now!

by Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company

So in part 1 of this series, we discussed the design phase of a website. An exploratory interview with the client has already been had and a graphical mock-up of the site has been refined and approved for development. This brings us to actually building the site.

As mentioned earlier, the push-button web creation function, provided by graphics applications like Photoshop, will not produce an optimal page structure or take into consideration forward-looking steps that will allow for a versatile and scalable website. During the design process, the designer/developer will have already mapped out the solutions for various site features and layout configurations. Given the different requirements surrounding these features, the site structure will be created to accommodate them.

Take a simple two column site layout for example. As the height of these two columns changes with varying amounts of content over time, how do the the columns behave? Does the overall site design depend on these two column expanding and contracting together or is it better suited to have them expand independently? Furthermore, do the pros of a table structure in this scenario outweigh the cons and what impact will this decision have on cross browser compatibility?

At this point, the considerations of structure have been made, the developer knows which language will be employed (according to their own expertise or perhaps simply based on the hosting server being used), and the site’s ongoing maintenance and accessibility has been factored in.

By this I mean, who is going to update the site and how? Even if the site is being built by an in-house developer who will maintain their own code, it’s simply not time and cost effective to maintain and grow a site from code view. Which bring us to building the site on a CMS (content management system). A CMS allows the site to grow gracefully, protecting sensitive code and maintaining the site design, while giving non-developers edit access to the site. There is a vast field of CMS’ out there to choose from and the one that’s right one for you will depend on your need. The demands of an online news agency, for example, will differ greatly from that of a local book club. Either way—big or small, high volume or low—a content management system is an absolute must.

Consider that we, professional web developers, use a CMS on everything internal that we build. Believe it not, I still see ads being placed by cost-conscious small business owners seeking low cost developers available to make frequent and ongoing edits to their site. That’s crazy! Done right, on the right platform and by the right developer, the upfront cost of building a site on a CMS is negligible compared to keeping a professional developer on payroll. In fact, when done right, the cost of building on a CMS can often reduce the cost of a project by allowing for quick replication of pages and page features as well as allowing the developer to set aside a majority of the content entry task for the client.

To be continued… We’ll continue our discussion of the development process in part 3 of this series. To be covered are site features, functions and integrated applications.

The web creation process begins verbally, then takes shape graphically, and won’t move into the code or programming phase until the final stage. This process isn’t well understood by those outside of web design. And why should it be? A great deal of “designers” don’t actually get it either.

Web sites aren’t conceptualized in a web development tool like Dreamweaver. The business needs of the client are discovered through an interview to identify wants, needs, the audience, the message, functionality, look and feel, and so on.

This discovery (scoping) information collected from the client is interpreted into a graphical mock-up in a graphics application like Photoshop. The mock-up is a non-functioning image of what the future site will look like—a flat image.

Once the graphical mock-up has been refined and polished, the image is then taken to code. Based on a number of considerations, including the programming languages to be used, web applications employed, search engine optimization techniques and more, the image is dissected and interpreted during the site building process.

It’s worth noting that modern graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop have a push-button website creation function, whereby anyone can use the tool to dump out the code and files required to post a web page. No doubt these features are quite amazing, but this method should not be confused with proper website development. Proper development takes into consideration usability, the target audience, ongoing site maintenance and scalability . . . not to mention the integration of different technologies that give life through functionality.