.mobi Domain Names

Mobile domain names are here. It's still first come, first serve like .com TLDs (top level domains). Your domain may be gone. You can check on register.com for availability. But, the big idea is to determine why you'd spend the extra money to register the .mobi domain name.

This depends on who the audience is and what is the target user experience. If the answer to any of these questions is 'yes', your content is a candidate.

• Do your users have smart phones?
• Do your users travel?
• Are your users sophisticated?
• Do your employees need access to information on the road?
• Are you in the Travel & Tourism industry?
• Do people drive to your location?
  

Here's an example of Google's mobile content which is where google.mobi goes. Internet Honey has mobile content here. As you can see the content is very short and designed for a small screen and slower connections. The good news is that creating these webpages isn't tough or expensive. It's often re-purposing (I love that word) what you already have.

Banner Ad Relevance for Customer Acquisition

Recently banner ads have become more sophisticated in their ability to deliver. From the outset banner ads have had trouble with relevance. For example, an ad for shaving cream is shown on oxygen.com (a website for women). The ad isn't relevant to the audience that is coming to that website. So, the audience has become accustomed to ignoring banner ads. To make matters worse, many website owners piled all the banner ads into one area creating a nascar effect. This makes it easy for the user to ignore all of the ads at once and deem them all irrelevant.

Over time banner ad performance for Internet marketing has decreased. It's required many Internet marketing agencies to contract with specific websites for targeted positions. Recently, many of the banner ad networks, listed here, have added features helping to target the ads. You can show ads only to those people who have already been to a particular website (indicating likelihood of relevance) and repeat buyers.

However, the same problems plague many banner ad networks. They don't have the control needed for customer acquisition. Search engines continue to provide a very relevant environment for customer acquisition. And until the banner ad networks can solve this problem, they will continue to perform poorly for customer acquisition.

As a branding exercise and for brand awareness, banner ads can still provide an effective choice. And if you can find the correct destination website, they can provide a source of traffic that search engines can't match. When they provide better insight into their network and segmentation of the users in the network, I'll let you know.

Performance Marketing Defined

Performance Marketing has been bandied about lately and needs some clarification. It's a collective term for any marketing effort that can be measured and the results can be compared to the costs. It's closely tied to direct marketing but more strongly associated with new media. Direct marketing has been tracking marketing performance since it could track results of individual campaigns. Direct marketing was pioneered by Wunderman, see more on this guy here, in the 1970's and his group is still a leader in that field.

So much of Internet marketing has a measurable component that it's very similar to direct marketing in that regard. Email campaigns, for example, follow the direct marketing cycle in many instances. They're planned, launched, measured, adjusted, and re-sent. Then this process is repeated for as small an audience segment as possible.

For some reason the industry felt it necessary to distinguish the larger discipline of direct marketing from what was happening in Internet marketing and call it performance marketing. Since direct marketing has been tied to some more traditional media like direct mail, performance marketing has come to represent the newer media that can be measured. For example, there are some opportunities now for pay-per-call marketing. Leads on the Internet are directed to call with interest. Marketers only pay when the call is generated. This can be woven into a direct marketing campaign. But, its newness would lump it in with performance marketing.

Welcome to the Internet Honey Internet Marketing Blog.

Welcome to the Internet Honey blog. Our conversations will be posted here to build a guide and reference for our clients. Many clients have similar thoughts and questions regarding Internet marketing. We'll post the responses to those questions. By searching the blog you may find what you need.

As you may know, we talk with contacts in the industry often. We attend trade shows, conventions and the sort. We'll post our findings from those as well to share with you here. We hope you will talk with us directly in the event you don't find something here. You can always find more at our website http://www.InternetHoney.com

Thank you.
R. A. Burrell