ONLINE MARKETING DICTIONARY ( K - Z)

16. Keyword --> Keyword is the term used for words included in a web page that would match words used by web surfers in finding that web page (via a search engine). Identifying appropriate keywords and using them on a web site is important for search engine optimization. Keywords can simply be words included in the body text of the document, or added to the header using meta tags to increase the number of keywords. Using keywords in the title tag is also important. Selecting keywords, that match your target audiences' use of the web when searching your product, is a critical marketing tactic.

17. Marginal Costs --> Marginal costs are the costs associated with creating an additional unit of product. This is similar to variable costs, which are the costs that increase directly with the increase in production (unlike fixed costs). Digital products typically have very low marginal costs, when compared with traditional goods (materials, labor etc.) and if the product is distributed via a web site, then the marginal costs can be zero. The consumer is bearing the distribution costs, and there are no packaging costs. This is why companies are able to market their products for free on their web sites, in order to try to entice further purchases at a later time (in the hopes of creating lock-in perhaps).

18. Marketing Mix --> A Marketing Mix is the combination of product offerings used to reach a target market for the organization. The marketing mix comprises the Product (what the actual offering comprises), Price (the value exchanged for that offering), Promotion (the means of communicating that offering to the target audience, promotional mix) and distribution (also known as Place, the means of having the product offering available to the target audience). The marketing mix is also known as the four P's.

19. Opportunity Costs --> Opportunity costs refer to the costs associated with giving up an opportunity. They are relevant in the marketing of digital products when one considers the value lost to the company when giving away a product for free. Since digital goods primarily consist of fixed costs and often have zero marginal costs then marketing strategy often dictates to give-away a version of the product to encourage consumers to upgrade at a later time (assuming lock-in etc.) The only cost incurred here would be the opportunity cost of the lost revenue from the consumers that would have paid for this version of the product in the first place. To avoid this situation, companies typically segment their markets, and offer a free product, with limited functionality (and no customer support or documentation) to a casual user group, and an upgraded version, at a price, with customer support etc. to a more sophisticated customer. The company will hope the casual users will upgrade to the upgraded version as they become more sophisticated users and more reliant on the product. They also assume the sophisticated user will not be satisfied with the free version, due to its lack of functionality. Eg: blogger and jot.

20. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) --> SEM comprises SEO and search engine advertising. Search engine advertising, in its current model, typically uses text-based advertisements that the marketer bids on based on the keywords the marketer wants to associate with the advertisement (contextual advertising). The business model is typically PPC. Goto.com pioneered the PPC model for search engine advertising. Goto.com was purchased by Overture which was ultimately purchased by Yahoo! Google's Google Adwords is the main competitor.
Both these networks supply advertisements for other sites.

21. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) --> SEO refers to the art of designing a web-site for better listings in search engines. This includes ensuring you have the appropriate keywords in the body text of the site, in the title tag and the meta tags. Google's PageRank algorithm also rewards sites that have inbound links, and even considers the anchor text of the inbound links. Search engines also reward sites with fresh content. Regularly updated blogs therefore serve as a good SEO tool.

22. Shopping Cart Abandonment --> Shopping Cart Abandonment refers to the loss of a customer who is going through the check-out process of an online transaction. Some statistics suggest that this can be as high as 75%. It is principally caused by poor usability of the site and the check-out process (too time consuming, too many clicks), and hidden shipping charges.

23. (Web) Spider --> A spider (also known as a crawler) is used by a search engine to
identify web pages in order to be cataloged in the database of the search engine (web site designers can also submit web pages to be cataloged in a search engine). Spiders therefore help search engines to keep up with the evolution of web content by crawling through the web seeking new sites. To control spiders in terms of cataloging a web site, a designer can include a robots.txt file that instructs a spider to exclude pages that are not to be cataloged.

24. Text Advertisements --> Text advertisements are text links that are paid for by the sponsors of the target page of the advertisement. They are a form of advertisement that can be considered more contextual (assuming the text link is relevant to the subject of the web page), and less obtrusive than other forms of advertising on the web. Text advertisements can also be used for affiliate advertising and the emerging search engine advertising programs from Google Adwords and Overture.

25. underdelivery --> delivery of less impressions, visitors, or conversions than contracted for a specified period of time.

26. Viral Marketing --> Is a marketing technique that takes advantage of a marketer's
customers in promoting the product. This technique was pioneered by Hotmail. Hotmail
launched its free web-based e-mail service with the tag line (at the bottom of each e-mail) "Get your free e-mail at Hotmail." As customers used this e-mail service, and were e-mailing others, they were effectively sending an advertisement for the product. This attracted new customers, who repeated the process. Once a critical mass of consumers were using Hotmail, a tipping point was reached, where the number of new users started to increase non-linearly. Hotmail soon became the fastest growing media company in history.

27. Web 2.0 --> Web 2.0 comprises technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasting and RSS. It is a term that tries to embrace a participatory web; a web where all can now participate in content creation and consumption. It thus presumes that Web 1.0 was a 'static' environment.

28. Web Analytics --> Web Analytics is the field of data mining the data that is generated from those navigating a web-site. Web Analytics allows a site designer to understand the flow of those going through a site, essentially measuring the behavior of the site's users. Which pages are most popular, which are the entry and exit points, and which are the referrer URLs. Metrics used include page views, hits, sessions and impressions. There are a number of software providers who provide web analytics tools, and a host should also provide this service to its clients.

29. Weblog (blog) --> A blog is a website that is updated frequently by its author, in a standard format, with the most recent entry at the top, and older entries archived. Each entry is a unique URL, a permalink. Entries also include trackbacks and the option for allowing comments. Blogging software (such as Blogger.com and typepad.com) allow anyone the opportunity to be a publisher on the web (no need to know html), thus truly democratizing the process of publishing information (a potential threat to traditional media organizations). Blogs are used to annotate and collect news sources across the web; used as personal journals and for sharing experiences; and used by businesses to reach out to their customers and engage in conversations.

30. Word of Mouth Marketing --> Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM) refers to the marketing that can be gained by actively engaging customers to share insights with each other (create buzz that goes viral). WOMM has clearly been around since the inception of marketing, but has gained more prominence with the evolution of the internet, and the ease with which customers can share their stories. Web 2.0 technologies such as Blogs and News Readers are enabling WOMM. Discussion Boards have helped customers form communities. Good WOMM relies on great products that customers willingly evangelize. Marketers have been prone to try to 'effect' this by incentivizing 'fake' customers to talk about their products. This can backfire.

WOMM

Well the most important question asked is, how to create BUZZ, or how to be in the market. There are many companies that are devoting a considerable amount of time and money to the creation and amplification of conversations concerning their products or services. This is one of the better means to create BUZZ in the market.
An example of a kind of WOMM advocated by a vodka company was to hire beautiful gals in the crowded bars and order the vodka of the company. This is one means of creating a BUZZ. This doesn't work in the B2B industry.
One of the simplest way to market the product or create BUZZ in the market is to allow the most satisfied customers to speak about the company and their range of products (be it home appliance or software suites or anything under the sun). We can achieve this by bidding more on the advertisements and brand the product in the beginning then carry on. An example to this is the main sponsor in a hosted show or a game then through regular marketing on Television, radio and of course the power house of all the information- the internet.

There are many people who adopt stealth marketing along with normal marketing by advertising through the media making it more popular to an extent that you name a product only that company name comes to your mind. The strength of the product and the market lies in the simplest way the product is explained to others (like colleagues and friends) and they come clicking at your website.

The other easy and better way to be on top of the internet market is, by paying more for their contents to be on top (many criteria's go into it). Many feel this as one of the better way to stay on top (who find it better to cut the competition and don't mind to pay money to stay on top), but there is other side to this. What if you were the leader till date using this technique and someone uses the same strategy to put you down and take the lead? There are limits to every thing in the market. By doing these types of marketing no company can stay on top for ever, unless they don't match their product quality with the kind of marketing that they are doing.

There are many cases where the WOMM and BUZZ gets created in the market about the product and its quality and service that it doesn't spend much on marketing, and this happens until the keep the quality to the satisfied level of the customers. Most important is to get new customers; more important is to retain old customers. Its these people who pull the crowd to us.

WOMM should work not by just advertising. it should be from the other side, that is: You create a product and when the need comes, all the manufacturers of that product comes to your mind (or to others), but which is the first one. This makes a lot of difference. This is what is the another form of WOMM; a healthy WOMM and a desired marketing.

There are many events where people are participating in open discussions on WOMM, as this will also help them in their strategies and plans. Off late ethical part of the contents are coming to picture.

Blogging is easy, but getting famous is difficult

1. Sitemaps - First things first, Google is the leader of the free internet world. But unfortunately for them to like you, you need to give something back! Well thing is sitemaps are what you have to give them back. Sitemaps are like links in a xml format defined by w3c. They also have a update and a priority level that comes with it. Using this to your advantage is necessary. Make one. If you use wordpress, then there are plenty of ways of getting a sitemap. There are plugins that do that for you. The page template for sitemap is another one. Visitors should be able to browse your website without any issues. Sitemaps in templates help that. The xml sitemap can be submitted here http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . They also help SEO ( search engine optimization ) quite a lot.

2. Meta tags & description - Meta tags and description is another one of those things which are important for SEO. They basically describe what that post or page is about for that particular story. Meta tags like meta keywords help recognize all the ones that are related words by adding them to the list. Meta description helps search engine help understand well…..description for that page. Sites like http://whois.domaintools.com/digg.com go on that info.

3. Linking - Cant emphasize this enough! Link dammit. People do link! Just because you don’t believe in linking with an inferior blog doesn’t make your blog any worse than what it already is. If anything it might travel that extra little bit and get you better conversion rates because it is true, hits from other bloggers do infact get you better conversion rates. Not to mention if the other blog has a high page rank, it does get transfered to you! This means faster searches and better results all around as far as blogging with search engines go!

4. Analyze - Use google analytics or something. But for your own benefit please track your blog. You never know where your traffic is coming from if you don’t do that! Once you do know the origins, reap its benefits! People don’t do that enough. People leave it to some SEO company and then just relax back and think that flow of traffic is going to grow on its own! Well thats not going to work. You need to build it upto a certain point and then make something of it. Find out your most famous article and who is behind that extra bit of flow. What did you do in that popular article that others haven’t received similar traffic for.

5. Polish - Bloggers are lazy, which is to be admitted. We may never polish our posts. Well for one thing, we should be doing that more often. Remember, its these polished blogs that will fetch you your money maker. That extra bit of editing could be the difference between a B+ article and the outstanding A+ which is your money maker. Revisit your old posts and have a feel of whether there has been a growing polished feeling in your posts and compare.

6. Categories - Categorization is the key to success. It means that if its in an irrelevant category, don’t bother posting. Make sure you have the right categories done. Try not to be general but if you are then try to stick to the topic.

7. Permalinks - Use permalinks to your advantage! Make something of it. No one likes it when you are searching through google and you get posts like blah.com/?=38 . Seriously use permalinks. It looks better when its something like blah.com/archives/omg-i-lik-u/. Its also better for SEO.

8. Social Bookmarking - Don’t just blog and forget about it completely! Please use social bookmarking to your advantage. This is the coolest thing happened to bloggers since …….. wordpress.

9. Advertisement - Do not use pop-ups, we are bloggers, people are there to read and be enlightened. Make it subtle. Not in your face! Try to ease it out and soothe it in to the website. Get a webmaster or a friend to give you an idea of what should go where.

10. Template - Get a unique template. All serious bloggers need to get one of them. The odd casual blogger can get away with inconsistency as well as a generic look. But a serious blogger should get a template. Its easy to get a template especially a unique one. It only costs a couple of hundreds. Its the uniqueness that defines your site and reminds everybody of the blog. Keep working on it. Also customize your template. Don’t just do something as stupid as get a template thats recommended. Add your input into it. The most customized template makes the user feel at home, feel like they should come back for more.