Not everyone thinks their business needs a blog. But whether you sell polypropylene bags or transport cars — trust us — business blogging can help.

So, what can business blogging do for you?

Business blogging can make your business look professional. Anybody can make a blog, but not everybody can make a good blog — you know, one with regular updates, intriguing content, a sleek design featuring your company logo. Pulling all of that off will impress your customers, and maybe even attract some new ones.

Business blogging can make your business look casual. Wait — didn’t we just talk about looking professional? Yes, but acting casual — i.e. human — is just as important. Potential customers want to know what there are people behind all those www’s and 1-800-numbers. So go ahead, show off your personality a little!

Business blogging can help you deliver news. Visitors might not always remember to check your site for new specials, products, and services, but blogs are widely recognized as smart marketing tools for their ability to deliver fresh content. Use your blog as an interactive space to keep your customers updated and — just as important — hear what they have to say.

The Best Tweet Award was given today at the Hay Book Festival of Literature and Arts. The Tweets that entered the competition are, as one might say, our modern haikus, contemporary poetry, and the most beautiful tweet of our times belongs to Mark Mackenzie, a 41 year-old medical physicist from Canada.

Steven Fry, the British actor, director, writer and most of all gadget enthusiasts, was the judge and the regulations stated that the winning tweet can be eloquent, impassioned, emotive or a pun.

And the winning tweet?

“ I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.”

Poetic, yes. Sensitive, very much. Rewarding, indeed!

The news of the winning made Mackenzie’s stream (marcmack) to sky rocket from 150 followers to well over 1,000.

How can you benefit your business by using Twitter? Well, you don’t have to be a poet. You just need smart internet marketing.

There’s a lot of fun to be had with Google Trends. A public web facility of Google.com, Google Trends shows how often a specific search phrase is entered in comparison to the total search-volume across different regions of the world.

Google Trends can be so much more than just a cool way to see what other people are looking at. It’s a phenomenal tool for internet marketing. Realizing this, Google launched “Google Insights for Search” in August of 2008.

This public tool was designed specifically for internet marketing, allowing users to easily compare search patterns across any region, category, or time frame.

Google Insight can help you determine which keywords resonate best. This is vital information when attempting to market over the internet.

Data is displayed on a scale from 0 to 100, with each point on the graph being divided by the higest point of popularity. As Google puts it, “our system designates (the) peak as 100. Now let’s suppose that interest decreased significantly in December, where the next highest peak was approximately half of what it was in November. That peak would then be designated as 50, and so on.”

Often it’s not the most important phrases that are the most popular, and not knowing the most-used terminology can cripple your business. Both Google Trends and Google Insight can be exceptional tools in assisting you with your internet marketing.

Using an e-mail based online newsletter is an excellent and effective internet marketing technique that can be used to keep your clientele and customers informed about your company.

The main focus of any successful online newspaper should be to inform clients of valuable general business information while simultaneously grabbing their attention. If the newsletter doesn’t inform the reader, then it’s useless. If the newsletter doesn’t grab the attention of the reader, or motivate them to check future newsletters, then it’s just as useless.

A newsletter should include just that… news. It should not be a private endorsement or an e-mail commercial. Nobody wants their inbox flooded with advertisements.

An online newsletter can be as easy as simply sending a few short sentences on recent company news to your e-mail distribution list. However, as your company begins to grow, so will your distribution list. Maintaining your list can become extraordinarily time-consuming, and the best set-up usually involves an opt-in page on your company web site. This program will not only maintain the list of e-mails for your newsletter, but save you valuable time while doing so.

Not only is an online newsletter a great internet marketing tool, it’s also an effective way to keep current customers informed, as well as converse with prospective clients.

If you haven’t joined the SEO wagon, this might be the right time. A recent survey of more than 100 online retailers and store retailers, large and small, showed that search engine marketing remains a leading source of site traffic and sales.

The survey focused on search engine marketing, encompassing PPC campaigns and SEO marketing, and 27% of retailers surveyed said that search engine marketing is responsible for more than half of their sales online. 47% of the respondents said that they owe more than a quarter of their online sales to SEO and PPC.

In addition, 45% of the retailers noted that over the last year they’ve increased their SEO and PPC budgets and 49% of the respondents said that they will increase SEO budget during the coming year.

It’s never too late to start a smart internet marketing campaign. If you want to join the internet marketing revolution, visit www.AjaxUnion.com today!

Ok, so going to Google school isn’t exactly like enrolling for class at their headquarters. Though it must be said that there are robust and whimsical Google campuses (yes, plural) where employees indulge in free candy, game rooms, and yoga classes (again, plural) whenever their techie hearts desire. A programmer’s utopia, if you will.

While you’re not invited to crash a Google pool tournament (yet), you’re more than welcome to get Google Certified. Consider it a civilian perk.

Some quick facts on their AdWords certification program:

What: Google Advertising Professional Certification.

Where: Your desk.

When: Whenever.

Why: You advertise your business through Google’s AdWords and would like some Web cred to prove it. Or you’re set on harnessing the power of SEO through choosing advertising keywords that draw your ideal audience. Bonus: there’s a fancy logo you can splay on your website promoting your GAP Certification.

How: Get familiar with Google’s AdWords offerings. Use it early and often in your promotional mix to optimize smart internet marketing. Once you’ve reached a point where you’ve spent up to $1000 in AdWords placements over 90 days, you’re eligible to apply for GAP certification.

When you’re ready, zip through a $50 fee charge and take a qualifying exam. Congratulations! You’ve earned a special Google professional status page and have a certified grasp on optimizing your business’ online visibility.

Twitter is essentially a micro-blog and should be a key part of any smart internet marketing plan. Through Twitter, companies can post updates, comments and thoughts about their products and services in 140 characters or less, and this activity can help direct traffic back to their websites. It’s a no-cost way to engage with your customers and potential customers, and it demands little of your valuable time.

Companies can use Twitter to announce specials, deals or sales instantly to a large audience. Dell and Woot have embraced this form of marketing, with a lot of success.

If your company provides services like pest control or home modifications, you can use Twitter to announce interesting facts and trivia about your line of work.

Encourage interaction and conversation by posing a question, and when users reply or ask further questions, respond by placing an ‘@’ symbol in front of their username.

You can also use Twitter to post URLs to content on your company’s blogs and websites. If you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter, save space by converting into a short URL at TinyURL.com.

For more information about how Twitter and other forms of social media can help your business, contact an internet marketing company today.

“SEO,” or search engine optimization, is definitely the buzz word of the internet marketing world at the moment. And another word that you’ve no doubt heard thrown about lately is “organic.” So what’s organic SEO all about?

When  you take an organic approach to SEO, you are using a range of methods and techniques to help improve your business’s search engine rankings the “natural” way – as opposed to relying on paid advertising, known as PPC (pay per click).

Organic SEO is all about making changes to a site to make it more search engine-friendly and ensuring that there are plenty of incoming links. With organic SEO, your business’s position in search engine results can stay high simply because content is relevant and up-to-date – and not because of a big advertising budget, which is likely to dwindle fast.

Organic SEO can help you achieve sustainable, long-term results for your business. It’s affordable, and allows you to keep building your web presence over time with a few simple strategies.

So don’t throw away your cash. Get in on the organic SEO hype, and do your business a favor by calling a smart internet marketing company for advice today.

In the cocktail party of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) there are many competitors, but few are as tasty as others. For SEO, the AnewB plan is quite choice. The delectable combination of blogging, social bookmarks like Delicious and Stumble Upon, social networking like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, classifieds posted on Craigs List, Back Page,  and articles housed on database websites, is all insurmountable help to improving your search engine ranking.
I enjoy AnewB whenever I can, because it works out so well for my web site. It’s true that it has seen drastically improved traffic ever since I began ANewBing it. Interesting verbage. Yes, it seems that soon enough, in the same way that Xerox came to mean “make photocopies,” AnewBing will mean “to improve your company’s search engine ranking.” I coined it too, so don’t try and take the credit for it! You get enough help from the plan itself.
When ANewBing, it’s important to be patient and watch your baby grow. I enjoy tracking my website; I follow it daily as it moves around Google.  And the best part about Anew B is that daily, there are added features to your company’s plan, so literally every day, it grows and gets better.

Internet Marketing

New data this week confirms what internet marketing experts have known for a while: Facebook is on the rise. A phenomenal rise.

According to web analytics firm Expertian Hitwise, more people visited Facebook than any other website in the United States during the week ending March 13 – even ousting Google in popularity. Facebook has achieved the number one spot before – on the weekend of March 6 and 7 (the day of the Academy Awards ceremony) and on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day – but this was the first time it has achieved a sustained lead.

Expertian Hitwise said the market share of visits to Facebook increased a whopping 185 percent last week, compared to the same week last year. The visits to Google, on the other hand, increased only 9 percent during the same timeframe.

There are more than 400 million regular users of Facebook around the world. Around half visit the site every day to post photos or status updates, check their messages and friends’ news feeds, and, increasingly, play games. Popular Facebook games include FarmVille, Café World, Texas HoldEm Poker and Happy Aquarium.

Social media never sleeps, which means applications like Facebook are a key part of a smart internet marketing plan for businesses. More people are finding remote social networking a more convenient and instant way to socialize, as well as connect with products and services that interest them.