The Importance of Market Research

Marketing is a versatile, competitive world, and when developing your marketing plan, odds are you will not get it right the first time. You need time to learn about the demographics, geography, and psycho graphics of your customers before your marketing can really be effective. That is why it is important to not stick with your first plan, as you will need to change it frequently for one reason or another.

A good phrase to live by in marketing is, "Learn from your mistakes." Sometimes testing happens naturally. Some of your marketing campaigns will fail, but instead of getting discouraged, analyze what went wrong. Maybe you advertised through the wrong medium, or to the wrong demographic. Collect all the mistakes you have made and really look at them; do not try to forget or ignore them, you have to face your mistakes if you want to be successful.

If you hate making mistakes and want to get it right the first time, there is a way, and that is market research. However, full on market research is incredibly expensive and small businesses cannot afford it, but light end market research is possible. Basically, you just have to look at the demographic of your competitors and make that your demographic. It's not that easy, though. Demographics may vary between businesses of the same nature, and that is where testing comes in. You need to test if that demographic works for you, and if it does not, you need to test another demographic.

You should not spend a lot of money on market tests. The purpose, after all, is to find the medium and demographic through which you should advertise or market. For example, if you have a website, you might want to try out banner advertising. Don't spend a lot of money at first, only spend a little and see the ROI. If the conversion is good, you know you will want to keep advertising through that medium. Executing so many marketing tests is time-consuming and costly, but it all pays off when you finally develop an effective, recyclable marketing campaign.

How to Get Number 1 Rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN Using Video Hosting Sites

The other day, I did a test to see how fast my videos would be found in the search engines and to see how well they would rank for the keywords I was optimizing my videos for.

The results were outstanding and should bring hope to anyone who feels that getting a #1 or top 10 listing on the major search engines is out of reach. Everyone can get top listings, with videos

The process was very simple. I filmed a video, submitted and tagged my video, and 13 hours later, I was in the #1 spot. Then, 24 hours later that same video on different video networks occupied spots 1, 2 and 3 on Google.

So, how easy is it to do? Very easy, just follow these steps and you'll be getting #1 listings on Google, MSN and Yahoo in no time flat.

First - Create your video. Use a video camera or digital video camera and get the digital file on to you computer so you can manipulate it in a video editing program. If you don't have a video camera, no problem, all you need is a microphone and an audio recording program like Audacity, and you can create an mp3 audio file with 30 seconds to 5 minutes of audio, and convert that audio to video. Don't worry, that's easy too, I'll tell you how in the next steps.

Second - Edit the video file to have the look, feel, URL's and production values you like. If you made an audio file, put that audio file into the video editing software. Most PC's come with Windows Movie Maker, which is free, and you can drop the Mp3 audio in there and place, random Digital pictures throughout the length of the audio file to create the "video" images that go along with your audio.

Third - Upload the finished video file, which should be in wmv format to a video submission host, called Tubemogul. At Tubemogul, you can upload unlimited videos, and then have those videos uploaded automatically to some of the more popular video hosting sites on the internet like Youtube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Metacafe, Revver, and some other popular one.

Let me say that Tubemogul is also MORE than just a video posting service, they are MUCH more. They can track all the video views you get DAILY on EACH video hosting site. They'll provide charts and other track meta data, that is very important to marketers to daily track stats across all the video sites. And remember, it's all free to do this.

Fourth & Final Step - Push your videos out to the video hosting sites and let Tubemogul do the work for you. But a key element is, you want people to find your videos. The search engines find videos, not based on the content said inside them, but by the tags and descriptions about them. Tagging is the single most important element of getting traffic to other websites, based on what your video is tagged for.

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Internet Marketing - Past Present Future

"Believe the hype. The Internet and the World Wide Web have become the most important new communication media since television, and ones that are fundamentally reshaping contemporary understanding of sales and marketing." - Jim Sterne. During the last part of the 1990s, the Internet boom saw all kinds of brand new companies that were developing services and products that literally capitalized on the Internet's potential.

Unfortunately, the push-to-market often resulted in very poor planning and many business models failed to include realistic and profitable business objectives. When the year 2000 ended, many of the above mentioned companies closed their doors. After this black period, the surviving and the new opened companies realized that the web-based strategies and techniques must be taken into consideration just like any other classic marketing tools.

In the future, websites will be more personalized, as they will cater to consumers and niche markets. Internet marketing through audio newsletters will probably become a more accessible tool for targeted audiences. Other predictions made by experts regarding the future of Internet Marketing are:

• 50% of experts affirm that anonymous, free, music file sharing on P2P (peer-to-peer) networks will still be easy to perform a decade from now

• 59 % of experts agreed with a prediction that more and more business and government surveillance will occur as computing devices proliferate and become embedded in appliances, phones, clothes and cars

• 56% of experts agreed that as telecommuting and home-schooling expand, the boundary between leisure and work will reduce and family dynamics will change due to this reason

• 57% of experts agreed that virtual classes will become more widespread in formal education and that students might, at least occasionally, be grouped with others who share their interests and skills, rather than by age

All things considered, Internet Marketing is one of the most important aspects of the Internet world and many people are considering that this domain will have a very long future, along with the Internet. All website owners will have to take into consideration at least one Internet Marketing technique.