Email marketing is critical to build up a connection with your website visitors. They may not become customers at first, but email is a useful way to send them solid information about your services and products, which may turn their eyes in your direction.

I have outlined below some of the basic concepts that you should bear in mind when planning email marketing:

• Permission is always important. Make sure your subscriber requested to receive the newsletter in order to avoid being blacklisted – always include clear opt-out and unsubscribe buttons in your mailing.

• Reliability and trust are essential to lead the subscriber to open the email. Some of the most important fields are “To:” and “From:”. This shows the readers you know them and that they know exactly who they are getting the email from.

• Interest. If the readers are not triggered by your subject line or headers they might not open the communication, or even worse, blacklist it. The content of the email must always match what the reader signed up for.

• Design and Structure have to be adaptable in all the different email providers such as Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo! & Gmail. Simplicity sometimes is best. Images may be blocked in some email providers, so make sure you use alt text. Build the email to be easy to scan, for those readers who choose to have just a quick look.

• Things to avoid: do not overuse CAPITALIZATION and punctuation (e.g. “!!!!” or too many “Click here!”) otherwise it may marked as a spam.

It’s important to build rapport. More than 30% promotion is not advisable, as you are informing and helping your subscribers at this stage, not just promoting.

In the end, if readers like and find your emails useful, they will make use of them either by enjoying your services, purchasing your products and, yes, forwarding to friends and family.

This isn’t all to consider in email marketing, but it is a good start. If you are looking for more email marketing resources, the Email Marketing Reports website has a very comprehensive best practices guide. Also MailChimp offers a powerful tool for Email Marketing and a PDF guide with 64 pages of useful tips.

The following is a guest post by Victor Tsen, leader of the Google Online Marketing Challenge winning team. As part of his victory, Victor recently visited the Googleplex in Silicon Valley and shares his experience below:

After many years of reading, watching and hearing about the Googleplex in Silicon Valley, I could not believe I was going to be heading there. After an early morning start and a 50-minute drive we arrived at the Googleplex visitor centre and were greeted by Googlers Lee Hunter and Karen Hudson, as well as global academic judges, Professor Jamie Murphy and Dr Larry Neale.

We were joined by the Americas regional winning team (Penn State University) and the two Americas finalist teams (James Madison University and Boise State University). All the teams were very friendly and it was a good feeling knowing that we have all come quite a long way participating in the Google challenge. Also I have to mention, true to what I have read, Google does have a fetish for lava lamps and has super fast, free wireless internet, which I gladly helped myself to.

Our first stop was the No Name Cafe for breakfast where I was greeted with a buffet containing a wide variety of mouth-watering food. This perk is definitely a great way to get people into work early and something I could really get used to.

After a very quick and filling breakfast we headed towards Building 1098 for presentations. In the first presentation we learnt about the history of Google and how the organisation works. It was very inspirational to hear how Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in a house garage and to see the company now as a multi-billion dollar corporation.

The 2nd presentation was on Google’s marketing operations. I’ve always wondered why Google never did much advertising for the products and services they offered, and the main reason being is that they have a marketing principle of “Letting others speak for you”. Their theory is if users (like you and I) like the Google product’s and benefit from them then we will spread the word to others.

One important thing I picked up from this presentation is that Google believes in launching products fast so that they can quickly improve and change them according to consumer feedback. Following this presentation was a quick break and I decided to duck into one of the many snack rooms, which are no more than 150 feet spread apart, to help myself to some drinks and snacks.

In the next presentation, Googler Karen Hudson gave us some feedback on our Google campaigns. Overall they were very impressed with all our campaigns, especially in the way we structured our accounts. Professor Jamie Murphy gave a quick run down on everyone’s campaign reports and mentioned that he had wanted to disqualify our team from the competition, because we managed to beat both his UWA graduate teams. I’m not sure if he was joking, but all I can say to you Professor Murphy is: “Better luck next time”.

Next, was a talk from two Googlers about the algorithm. Do you want to know how the secret algorithm that they used to short-list the campaigns works? Well, unfortunately it will stay a secret algorithm because not much was revealed. All we know is that the algorithm takes into account many factors and that most of the professors’ campaigns were not up to par with the majority of competing students’ campaigns.

We all received a well-deserved certificate and for the winners, our sweet Macbooks, which has finally turned me into a Mac-convert.

After a very satisfying (and free) lunch at the No Name Cafe we were given a tour of the Googleplex. Walking around Building 43 we saw pool tables, exercise balls, a big idea board, real-time live search queries and more lava lamps. Outside we saw the beach volleyball court, crews setting up for Zeitgeist 2008 and Stan the T-Rex. There is no doubt the work environment at Google is very cool with a great university campus feel. Professor Murphy told me they had bicycle stations for people to get around the campus and I even saw someone on a Segway when we arrived.

All in all, the trip to the Googleplex was just awesome and I definitely wished we could have stayed longer. I hope this was not be my last trip there and would love to also check out other Google campuses, especially Sydney Googleplex. Once again congratulations to all finalists and winning teams. I would also like to wish the best of luck to everyone competing in Google Online Marketing Challenge 2009.

More photos can be found on Gomcha.com.

Acknowledgements:
On behalf of my team and I we would like to thank Google and everyone who helped develop and work on the Google Online Marketing Challenge, including Google Lee Hunter and Professor Jamie Murphy for kick-starting this competition and turning it into a reality, without their efforts we wouldn’t have been given the chance to win this trip to Google.

Thank you to the judges who loved our reports and picked us as the global winning team and also to our lecturer Dr Fang Liu for organizing and using this competition as part of our assessment.

A big shout out and thank you goes out to our client The Hangout for jumping on board with us and being such a pleasure to work with. I personally would like to thank my team members for being such a great team. You guys worked really hard and worked well together and for that I want to thank you all.

After Microsoft’s latest proposal to only buy parts of Yahoo!, stocks of the company have risen by almost 2% in premarket trading.

Similarly in February, when Microsoft initiated an earlier deal Yahoo!, stocks shot up from $19 to $28 the next day.

However at the beginning of May, when Microsoft walked away from negotiations, Yahoo! stocks fell by a dramatic 19% while Microsoft’s stocks rose by around 3%. Over the last month Yahoo! stocks have slowly been rising back to around the $25 mark.

Microsoft has since moved away from previously more forceful tactics to dealing more openly with the company, contributing to the rising stocks.

Another factor behind this increase in stocks is Microsoft’s interest of now only attaining parts of Yahoo! such as the search technology.

In the ongoing conflict between Microsoft and Google, Yahoo! has become a surrogate in the war between the two internet giants. With both the companies looking to take advantage of Yahoo!’s user base of over 500 million, and success in social media news, email and display advertising.

At this point it seems as though Yahoo! will “…emerge from this battle stronger than ever, with a more defined direction and proven leadership in Yahoo driven content distribution and display ad revenue partnerships.” As speculated by Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal.

No doubt this won’t be the end of this long running saga; we will keep you updated with any further developments. Feel free to leave a comment on your thoughts on the issue.

From the Google update in October, some websites reported a significant drop in PageRank, which was rumored to be caused by the use of paid links. An unofficial confirmation of this was made by Google’s Mike Cutts. On November 22 Google made it official, with a reiteration of what it has previously said about paid links.

“Some search engine optimizers and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as,

Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag.

Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file”

The comments from Google are open to interpretation. It looks like buying paid links from websites that are related to your own, should not result in punitive action. To avoid any potential negative actions from Google, always source your links from relevant websites. If you have any thoughts on the use of paid links, please feel free to share them below.

Sponsored listings provide traffic and a high ranking to your online business. The Easy Search Advertising service can deliver loads of qualified traffic to your website. The challenge is converting these visitors into paying customers.

Here are 5 tips to help you convert traffic from sponsored listings into sales.

Landing page
Invest in a quality landing page. You only have one chance to get the attention of the visitor, so the landing page should make a strong first impression. From the landing page, the visitor should clearly understand what you offer, the benefits it provides, and how to get the product. The landing page should be an extension of the sponsored listing advertisement, reinforcing the proposition.

Understand the market
Is your product in demand right now? There may be external influences that effect the reputation of your product. Is now the right time to be selling your product?. You should know what your competitors are up to, they could be selling a product for less or offering a superior product deal.

Know your audience
Who are trying to sell your products to? Write copy for your target audience. If you know your target audience is price sensitive, highlight the potential savings you offer. Alternatively, if they are looking for immediate service highlight that. The key is knowing your customers well enough, so that you can create copy and propositions that meet their needs.

If the traffic from your sponsored listing goes directly to your website, take note of the following.

Quality website
When a visitor first enters your website, they should know almost immediately the purpose of it. A visitor should be able to navigate back and forward through your website, without getting lost. Products and their descriptions must be easily found. Don’t make your customer jump through hoops to find the information or product they are looking for.

Call to action
A clear “call to action” is imperative in converting traffic. Provide Specific words that encourage the recipient to take a particular action (e.g. “Buy now” or “To speak to a service representative click here”) There is nothing worse then wanting help or to buy, and not being able to find the obvious option to do so.

Many elements go into converting traffic. Consider these tips the basic essentials, applying these will help convert the traffic you receive from sponsored listings. Next week we will look at the other elements that go into increasing conversion.

Google has changed the way in which AdSense advertisements can be clicked. Previously users could click the entire box that housed the advertisement but now, only the title and URL are clickable.

According to AdSense Blog the move was implemented to,

“reduce the incidents of invalid and accidental clicks on ads and to encourage site visitors to stay on the site, interact with the site content and if they deemed it necessary, click on the ads. The new clickable format aligns with the text ad formats that is being implemented on Google. The new format would also benefit Google advertisers by making them pay for ad clicks that were intentional and would contribute to the success of their ad campaigns.”

The change is good news for advertisers, as now they will have a clearer picture of how well their advertising campaigns are going, with the potential decrease of no value clicks. However, publishers will most likely experience a drop in revenue, as it becomes harder to get clicks. Overall, it is a good move that should increase the accuracy of the AdSense service.

Fairfax Digital will no longer use “unique browsers” as the main audience measuring metric on its news websites. Instead, it intends using total time spent by users on site as its primary measurement metric.

Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings, said the change was prompted,

“by a continuing increase in the use of AJAX, and XML, which allows a Web site to refresh content without reloading an entire page, and to the growing use of audio and video streaming.

“It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,” Ross said. “Total minutes are the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, ‘How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?’”

Liza Boston founder of advertising agency Cracked pepper supports the introduction of time spent as a new metric,

“Unique browsers are currently the best metric to determine reach, but do nothingto determine engagement. Consider this, is it preferably to have 5 million people visit your site and click on one page only, or would you rather have 1 million people who spend hours a month engaging with your site? There is no doubt both are important.”

Fairfax digital has taken the first step in seeing if there is a better way to gauge interaction. One of the strengths of online marketing is the ease and speed at which interaction can be measured. Combining time spent and unique browsers will give publishers and marketers the best of both worlds.

Google while continuing to expand its advertising network has entered the video game market, with the purchase of AdScape Media, a company that specializes in video game advertising.

Advertising in games is relatively new, but has the potential to reach a huge audience. A recent Nielsen Entertainment study found that men aged 18 to 34 are spending more time playing video games (12.5 hours on average per week) and less time watching television (9.8 hours per week).

Google will now be competing against Microsoft, who has a rare advertising advantage over Google, because of the success of the Xbox 360 gaming console and a long list of gaming titles.

Michael Goodman, a program manager at research firm Yankee Group Research had this to say,

“Google would be playing catch-up against some significant entrenched providers, the biggest challenge for them is they might see themselves closed out of the Xbox as a platform to serve ads to.”

Google has been exploring advertising options outside of search by moving into print and radio. Google’s greatest success has been in contextual advertising. They’re yet to establish a dominant position in display advertising, which is the current method for in-game advertising. Time will tell whether Google succeeds in gaming as it has in search advertising.

In a move that will challenge the popularity of Facebook, Google is set to release OpenSocial, a service that will allow developers to deliver applications, that are compatibly across a variety of networks. For nearly a month, speculation has been rife that Google is aiming to release a challenge to Facebook. According to Arnold Zafra from Search Engine Journal, OpenSocial is,

“A collaborative tool that would spark and simplify web innovation, OpenSocial promises to standardize and simplify the development of social applications by offering a set of common APIs geared towards the development of “open” and “freely” available social network applications and tools.”

Myspace, Bebo and Friendster have joined OpenSocial. This will provide Developers all over the world the ability to build widgets that will work across all these sites with only minor tweakage.

Facebook was not included in the initial development stage. Some of the applications available on Facebook, were designed by people who are now involved in OpenSocial. Competition between OpenSocial and other social networking websites will provide a diverse group of services, which will probably clutter the market. The benefit of this is that users of social networking websites, will be able to find a service and applications that best suits their needs.