According to a new study released by eMarketer, online ad spend will finally surprise print spend as it reaches the $40 billion annual spend mark in 2012. That’s a lot of money!

This is just one more major indicator of the importance of online marketing and why you should be implementing it into your sales efforts if you haven’t already.

The study shows an estimated increase of 23.3% over the next few months, from the $32 billion spend in 2011, to roughly $39.5 billion in 2012. Print advertising, which includes magazines and newspapers, is estimated to reach around $33.8 billion.

Emarketer has reason to believe that this trend will continue. According to the chart above, online ad spending is estimated to continue increasing at a steady rate, eventually reaching up to $62 billion in the next four year. Print advertising, on the other hand, is facing a definite decline, dropping slightly over the next few years.

With the amount of opportunity there is for businesses of all sizes to market online, and the relative ease to get started, there simply should be no question. You need to start promoting your business online if you haven’t already. More and more people are spending money online because it can be cheaper, it’s reach is much larger than print, and you get more information about your customers and visitors than ever.

For a great overview of marketing opportunities out there, and how you can get started, check out Unbounce’s “Noob Guide to Online Marketing“.

Live chat is one of the most neglected online marketing tools available to virtually every business owner.

The system is simple, imagine having an instant messenger (similar to AOL Instant Messenger, or Skype), where the people you chat with are visitors on your site.  As people browse your site, they can either opt into sending you a quick question, or you can directly message them with your question (ex. “How can I help you today?”)

Here are five good reasons why you should use Live chat:

Easy to Set Up – The majority of modern day live chat systems are easy to set up. Services such as www.olark.com, provide easy-to-follow instructions on how to install their live chat script on a variety of different systems. Anyone with some basic HTML knowledge should have no problem installing the system in a few minutes. Once installed, many of these services allow you to integrate it with popular instant messaging systems, so you can monitor visitors and questions right from your own desktop.

Some people don’t like to call – Many online visitors are most comfortable browsing the internet without calling a company for more information. For visitors looking for immediate assistance (rather than waiting for an email response), their options are either to find more information on your site, or go elsewhere. Don’t risk losing visitors who don’t like, or can’t call you. By offering a simple live chat option on your site, visitors can send you a quick question and receive their response in seconds.

Great ‘market research’ – Although it’s thought of as a customer service tool, Live chat is an excellent market research tool, allowing companies to get first-hand insight into what visitors expect, how they like their site, and what improvements needs to be done. So for example, if you chat with several people a day, and notice an ongoing trend of questions, you can use this information to make changes to the website and improve the user experience.

3x more likely to return – Market research shows that visitors who engage in live chat are 3x more likely to return to your site for more information.

Users spend 40% more time on your site – In addition to returning more often, many people, roughly 40%, spend more time browsing a website after engaging in live chat. By having questions answered directly, visitors are more informed and trustworthy of a website, encouraging them to learn more about you and your service.

Live chat is easy to use, accessible, and relatively inexpensive to set up. With the amount of information that it can provide, there’s no reason why companies small to large shouldn’t implement it on their site.

1) Have a website. In the year 2011, it is not very difficult to create a website (or find someone who does for a relatively inexpensive price). Even if you own a business that requires people to physically walk in the door and do not sell products online, it’s a great way to let visitors know of what you offer and what makes you different. If anything, it will help potential customers find your physical location and your phone number.

2) Create a business listing on Yelp.com. Over the past few years, the Yelp community has grown tremendously and is a great source of generating new customers. Yelp is a review website where people can rate businesses and restaurants on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, with 5 being the highest. I have personally used Yelp to map the best restaurants to check out on vacation. Also, there is a Yelp app that people can download on their smartphones and find nearby businesses which helps get even more exposure for businesses. If you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to local search engine exposure, this is something that is a necessity that has been a game-changer for successful business owners.

3) Create a business listing on Google Places. With Google commanding about 65% of searches on the internet in the US, it makes sense to do stuff with the giant. Google Places is Google’s way of pushing relevant local results to the searcher. Creating a business listing here would ensure you’re in their system and gives you an opportunity to get visitors calling you.

If these 3 things are implemented, as a business owners, your chances of getting more exposure to people in your area will greatly increase over time!

Over the past year or so, Google has been updating it’s algorithm with their new Caffeine web indexing system, which allows them to scan the web faster, and provide fresh content for search results. Just this month, they’ve made even more improvements, making searches even more current. News Articles or content that discuss current events pertaining to a user’s search query will appear ahead of older material. Writing about hot topics, such as the Occupy Wallstreet movement, or making articles about recurring events, such as industry tradeshows, are all what Google considers to be more ‘relevant’. So what should you do? Create new content! Focus on what’s important to people in the moment.

In addition to this ‘fresh’ new change, Google has implemented several new tech-based changes to their algorithm. You can check them out here: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html.

Saves time in Developing – A content management system works the like the framework of a automobile. The structure, wheels and overall layout is built for you, you simply take that structure and turn it into a full blown website. All the time that it would take a developer to write code that will pretty much mimic the functionality of what’s already created is saved. Developers who specialize in specific content management systems, spend the majority of their time working on the design (look) and extra functionality that your site needs, rather than the basics. This saves the developer time, and therefore money for you.

Easier to find another developer – If, for any unfortunate reason, you find yourself having to look for another developer, it’s usually much easier to find a qualified candidate if you’re working with a specific CMS. Since more management systems are open-source, this means their frameworks are generally well known to people. This way, a new developer is already familiar with the basic functionality of your site, and can therefore get in there much quicker. For websites using proprietary systems, it may take hours and hours for a developer to fully understand what he or she is dealing with, which can cost you lots of money before any actual work is done.

You can update it yourself – The main benefit of using an content management system is your ability to easily modify content on the website to fit your needs. Similar to a word processor, the ability to go into a page, and change an image, or a block of Text, or even add new pages is very simple to do. As a result, you don’t need to be bugging your web developer any time you need to make a minor change, and therefore not have to pay them on an hourly basis to make these changes.

Content Management Systems are a revolution in web design opportunities for businesses. While you may still need to higher a developer to design the site for you, they can save you so much time and money they’re worth looking into.

For the most part, most prospective clients tell us that they ended up spending thousands of dollars over the course of a few months to a company that kept ‘promising results’ without actually producing any. When we ask for the specifics of what the company did for them, we’re usually surprised to hear that the client had no idea. This is a big problem we find with most SEO companies; their insistence in being vague about their processes and refusing to disclose their ‘secrets’ to their clients. Don’t let your SEO company fool you into spending unneeded funds and time with them, here’s why you should force them to ‘open up’:

Proper disclosure = better understanding. The fact is, that as a customer, you need to be able to understand why and what you’re paying for. This allows you to build a better relationship with your service provider, and give you better insight as to how your business is performing. While you may not need to know the technical details to everything that’s done for you, you should at least know why and how it works.

They should have nothing to hide. For the most part, the SEO industry has no ‘magic secrets’, so if an SEO company tells you that they can’t release ‘proprietary information’ to you, fire them right now. The service you pay for should be designed to benefit you and get you closer to your goal of reaching more people and gaining more sales. If a company is refusing to disclose exactly what they’re doing for you, chances are they’re using antiquated or prohibited methods, or simply don’t have a full understanding of what they’re doing for you. No SEO company should have anything to hide.

Collaboration between client and agency is crucial! The fact is, that good SEO campaigns should be customized for each client. This means tweaking and organizing the campaign for different industries, objectives, and locations. If your SEO agency is working ‘behind closed doors’, that chances of them taking in your feedback and implementing things that are important to your goals are slim. Proper communication between you and your SEO agencies will ensure that you’re both well informed and working together to reach your goals.

Every SEO company should be 100% transparent about their methodology and workflow. The benefits you gain from a great SEO firm is not in their tactics, but in the strategy and professionalism in which they implement. If you’re company refused to acknowledge your questions, it’s time to move on to someone new.

Motoza Marketing is an online marketing strategy firm based out of Austin, Texas, with services ranging from basic SEO strategy consulting, to full marketing campaigns tailored to each client. For more information, visit www.motoza.com or call us at 1.855.9.MOTOZA (1.855.9.668692).

Imagine your website is a home you’re trying to sell to prospective customers. Here are a few factors to consider for your website (or your ‘virtual home’):

Make it Presentable – Regardless of your personal preferences, it’s usually highly advised to make your home presentable to guests (or in this case, potential buyers) so that you improve the chances of people accepting the home. Designing the look of the home is dependent on the type of buyers/visitors you have coming to your site. Looking at other homes (or sites) tailored to your specific demograpic can you give an idea of the colors, wallpapers, and imagery you should use throughout your site.

In addition, follow best practices for usability. Have a clear navigation, easy to read text, and complimentary colors in order to not scare away new visitors.

Design each room accordingly – Just like a home, it makes sense to have each room designed in a way that’s expected by a vistor/buyer. The living room should likely have a sitting area, while the bedroom should have a bed and a Kitchen a sink. When it comes to a website, make sure each page has relevant information expected from that category. The contact page should have easily to follow contact information and directions (if you have a physical address). The services page should clearly outline your services and provide information to contact you if more questions are needed. By providing people with what they expect, you increase the chances of them taking that next step.

Make the Floor Plan Easy to Navigate – Good homes have a logical floor plan that is easy to understand. For example, it’s not very common to have a bedroom right between the kitchen and foyer, so don’t design your website like that. By having a clear navigation, that contains appropriate sub-pages in each category, people feel comfortable navigating and finding the information they’re looking for.

When needed, hire an Expert – If you’re wanting to make your home presentable and ready for visitors, it’s sometimes wise to hire an expert to help with renovations. Most people aren’t advised to attempt to add an extra room to their house on their own, or add a deck, or work on plumbing. The same thing applies to some aspects of websites. For higher level development that may involve redesigning your whole website, structure, or layout, or for more advanced implementations like search engine marketing, it’s advisable to look for outside help. While it’s perfectly possible to do it on your own, the time and expertise required to do the job right is usually worth the cost. As with most home work, finding a suitable contractor is very important.

So the next time you look at your website, think to yourself “would I be happy to show my visitors around my home, or is it time to clean it up a bit?”

When it comes to search engine optimization, most companies only focus on ranking high in Google. This makes perfect sense, considering that Google is by far the most used search engine on the internet. However, while many agencies then recommend to go after Yahoo and Bing, it’s often overlooked that YouTube is the #2 highest used search engine on the web. As of May 2010, YouTube exceeded over 2 BILLION searches a day. This is only one of many indicators that video optimization is and will continue to play a very large part in online marketing.

Posting on YouTube is relatively easy and absolutely free to a regular user. The biggest barrier most companies have with using YouTube and other Video sharing sites is their lack of content (aka Video). While it may cost a lot to create a professional video for blogging or commercial purposes, there are several different alternatives available to small-medium companies. While I won’t get into all the details and options, video making sites such as www.animoto.com are a great start to look into.

If you do decide to create a video and begin promoting your business, here are three great tips to get you started:

1. Make video Relevant and View-able

Make sure you share a video that is relevant to your business/organization and will interest people enough for them to want to learn more. You can usually achieve this by having a funny video, adding ‘viral’ elements to the video, or using interesting imagery to increase interest. In addition to having a good video on YouTube, make sure to promote it on your site, and any partner websites you can think of. A popular video may not only increase your exposure, but also help your SEO rankings down the road.

2. Properly tag your video

YouTube allows video uploaders to add a variety of information to each video uploaded. It’s beneficial for you to add as much relevant content as you can (beside the video itself) so that search engine crawlers (Google visits YouTube too!) know exactly what your video is about and credit it back to your site.

Some of the tags you should pay attention to are: The Video Title, The Video Tags (aka Keywords), Description, Video Location (if your business has a physical office), Date of Video, and any citations/captions you have for the video.

3. Monitor and Interact with Commentary 

YouTube is a very interactive community. Part of what makes YouTube so powerful is the fact that people watch, share, and talk about videos of all sorts. Companies trying to promote on YouTube should attempt to interact with this community as much as possible, so that they can try to learn from prospective customers, share more information, and show the community that they’re active. So If someone comments on your video, whether its negative or positive, make sure to respond to the user so that if someone else has the same question/concern, you’ve already addressed it. It’s also important to monitor your comments and make sure there isn’t a lot of spammers attempting to gain links to their own sites.

YouTube can be a very powerful SEO and Conversion tool. Make sure your business is utilizing to its full power today!

1. If you fall, get back up. After Apple’s board of directors ousted Steve Jobs in 1985, he didn’t give up and throw in the towel. Instead, Jobs went on to start another company called NeXT, another computer company, which was later bought out by Apple 11 years later. Years later, he went on to become CEO of Apple, successfully turning it from an irrelevant company to a present-day powerhouse.
2. Never stop improving. Just because you have the best product today doesn’t mean it’ll be the best product tomorrow. Just look at the first Apple iPod, one of the most revolutionary gadgets of its time and sold like hotcakes. But Steve Jobs didn’t stop there…he made it better and better with succeeding generations with the iPod Mini, iPod Shuffle, and iPod Nano.
3. Never stop innovating. Today, Apple has an enormous array of successful products that include Macbooks, iPhones, iPads, and more. What made them special were their cutting edge technologies that were years ahead of competitors. By the time another company would catch up with Apple, Steve Jobs already had something else up his sleeve.
4. Work with the best. Steve Jobs couldn’t do it by himself, so he surrounded himself with smart people who could help drive his vision. Working with the top people in the technology and business helped Apple climb to the top.
5. Don’t settle for less than perfect. Every time you pick up an Apple device, there’s usually a feeling of awesomeness. Just look inside any Apple store and you can find dozens of people engaging with the newest gadgets. Steve Jobs was a perfectionist and products or employees who didn’t meet his standards usually ended up gone.

1. It’s not All about Just Translation -Localization, the process of turning your website or product accessible to a certain country/language, stems deeper than simply changing the language. While there are many automated systems out there (ex. Google Translate), the results are usually very poor and can hurt your marketing strategy. Straight translation can often cause confusing content in other languages, not to mention the variety of different cultural influences that go into languages. Spanish websites directed towards south americans may have completely different meanings, sayings, and even grammar, versus those directed towards the Spain.

2. Social Media still Works Overseas – Don’t just restrict your social media usage to your main country, Europeans and Asians have been shown to be very interactive when it comes to social media. In addition, by interacting with consumers in different countries, you’re engaging in highly valuable market research. The feedback your social media team can get out of these interactions can allows you to customize each localized campaign in order to improve your business globally.

3. Use TLDs - Buying up specific TLDs for your country, like .co.uk, .es, and .fr allows you to better protect your brand and presence in that country. As soon as you break into a different market and gain some sort of traction, you can be almost guaranteed that someone else will buy your domain name and use it to their advantage. Buy them before they can. If you plan to use the domains separately and hosted individually on servers, make sure to assign geo-targetting via Google webmaster tools in order to tell Google where the site is intended to be seen in the google ‘universe’.

4. Research Website Layouts for Each Culture – Make sure to research the browsing tendencies of each country before designing landing pages and websites for them. For example, it’s been shown that the Japanese market actually enjoys reading more information before engaging in a service or website. This is in contrast to American browsing habits, where bullet points, headlines and small paragraphs are shown to convert better.

5. Use Specific Country Folder and Redirect Accordingly – It may be too expensive for some businesses to have multiple domains and websites hosted across multiple servers around the world, so a good option to fix duplicate content and multiple localized sites is to create sub-folders on your domain for each country (ex. /uk, /espana) and have your localized TLDs remap to those sub-folders. Within the domain, you may be able to use canonical tags for any duplicate content you’re using across same language countries. It will also allow you to share the appropriate link juice across your domain and country sites, helping you rank better.