eSpire Marketing

Hey all I’ve got some saddening but exciting news to announce. I am moving on from my previous position at eRetailing Associates to take over the online marketing for my family’s business. After 2.5 years with eRetailing, I learned a lot. When I started there (right around the time I started eSpire Marketing) I didn’t know a whole lot about marketing and specifically internet marketing. The team at eRetailing took me under there wing and helped teach me everything that they could over our years together. I learned everything from SEO, Social Networking, Video Marketing, and at the tail end I got a grasp on affiliate marketing.

Yesterday 4/30/2010 was my last day at eRetailing. It was a really bittersweet day for me. It was time to move away from the colleagues and friends that I had and move on to take over the web presence of The Flag Lady. With this new position come a lot of great challenges and exciting opportunities for growth. It was something that I needed to do not only for myself but also for the family business.

I am going to miss everyone at eRetailing very much but I am very confident that they will continue to succeed in all aspects of internet marketing. If you take a look at some of their web properties you’ll see just what I’m talking about. You can find all sorts of great deals on CustomizedGirl.com, BridalPartyTees.com, and their newest and most exciting venture CustomizedGraphics.com. They were a great company to work for and I won’t ever forget the great things I learned while working with them. Thanks for everything.

Google Buzz. If you haven’t heard of Google Buzz yet then you’ve probably been in some sort of coma for the past few weeks. Just to recap for all of you who might be behind the curve, Google Buzz is Google’s attempt to get involved in the social media scene. There have been all sorts of complaints about it’s privacy issues which apparently they have apologized for and even taken the time to fix the problem.

While that is a great job at PR by Google, I’m not buying it. Google really messed up here for a number of reasons. One, they forced all of the users of their gmail service into Google Buzz. Two, they forced each user to auto follow all of the other gmail users in their contacts list. Three, they made the default setting post your “buzzes” publically. Hello PRIVACY ISSUES! A simple apology is just not good enough from a company of that size. They didn’t just lose email files, their server didn’t just shut down. They essentially made everyone’s private issues public. Google, the largest search engine on the face of the earth, one of the most influential companies in the history of commerce, and the single largest holder of information in the world, made a big no no.

I don’t know if you’ve been reading about the latest search battle news but I’m pulling for Bing. Besides, competition in the search engine marketing world will be good for most internet marketeers. So the next time you search, I’m encouraging everyone to Bing It!

Recently the Federal Trade Commission has put the clamps down on the use of testimonials for website. This is more than likely to protect the vast majority of people who fall for the get rich quick schemes, pyramid schemes, or any other quick fix schemes that you can think of. My first reaction to this was a pretty disheartened feeling. One of the things that I love about the internet is how the government really seems to stay out of most of the content posted online. While this will protect people from falling for get rich quick schemes, it’s also going to hurt many legitimate online businesses from making top dollar for their goods.

A lot of online businesses have embraced how powerful the blogging community has become and how great a blogger can be at helping sell your products to a target market. One of the tactics that we use is to contact a blogger from one of our niche’s ask them if they’d like to review our product, and then we sponsor a contest in their honor. Well when they are reviewing the product, now they’ll have to make it blatantly obvious that they are receiving the item they are reviewing for free.

We never ask for a good review, we specifically ask them to be honest in their review of the product, and to tell all of their readers exactly how they feel. It’s a risk we take that they may or may not like the product. With this new FTC lock down on testimonials it is going to significantly hurt a portion of our revenue model, in an already down economy. Now we have been doing online commerce for years now, so chances are we’re going to survive, but what about all of the others who are just getting online, also trying to run successful businesses, and are already feeling the crunch of these poor economic times? They are going to be the ones really hurt by all of this. This is just another example of how government regulation in business does a lot more harm than it does good.

This is just my opinion. I feel very strongly about this issue and I’d love to hear what each of you think about it. In a time when sales are very hard to come by for almost EVERY industry, the government wants to make it even harder to sell. It’s just bad for business and bad for capitalism.
Click Here to read more on this issue

This is a trend we’ve been seeing for awhile now (not just this administration). In my opinion it needs to be brought to a screeching halt.

Extra, Extra, Read all about it! Facebook changed the home pages for every user once again. The New Facebook Layout now allows people the ability to check the “News Feed” and a “Live Feed”. The News Feed is a feed of all of the most interesting posts from the previous days activity, the live feed, allows you to watch your friends Facebook activity in real time. Why is this a good thing for you?

Think of it like this, before when you made a posting on your Facebook Page, or a status update that you really wanted everyone to have a chance to see, it was quickly pushed to the bottom of the pile by other status updates from other users. Now, your page updates, (contests, blog posts, and promotions) will still be able to be seen for a much longer time. This is about the single greatest thing that Facebook could have added for business promotions.

From what I can tell their doesn’t appear to be any real algorithm for success just yet for how to make it into these news feeds, even the Facebook Blog post at the end says “Raylene, a Facebook engineer, hopes this blog post made its way into your News Feed.” I guess it is once again even more important for you to post a lot of interesting content in order to reach your audience effectively. Good luck!

Starting this week I’m going to try something new that I’ve never done before. Every week I will be hosting a blog carnival right here on espiremarketing.org. The blog carnival will is called The Best Internet Marketing Blog Carnival if you are interested in submitting an article to be added to the blog carnival send your submissions here.

The Best Internet Marketing Blog Carnival will have everything from SEO, PPC, Social Media, Linkbuilding, and other Internet marketing news. I am starting this carnival because I believe it is important for each of you to find the best tips possible from as many sources as possible. As you know I always preach about how you should continue to learn, and seek out information. I hope that this blog carnival will bring a lot of great new ideas to all of you. Thanks everyone, now get out there and start reading and learning some more!

In a post from makeusof.com an apparently angry individual actually threatens to sue another site owner for tampering with the rankings. That begs the questions, do we have the right to sue for higher search rankings?

I think that this gentleman actually makes a compelling argument, even worse I think that some of our lawmakers might feel the same way. Could this be the potential knockout punch for affiliate networkers? It’s got me a little bit worried. I don’t know what the rest of you are thinking but I’d be very interested in finding out.

Below is a screen shot of the image from the original post:

The airlines are FINALLY getting with it. First it was the airports that were slow to get wireless connectivity in their airports for the traveling business people and now the airlines are going to offer wireless internet connections on premium flights.

United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta are all going to offer wifi service on their flights. The wifi connections are probably going to cost a little bit of money but if any of you have been as frustrated as I have that I could not access the internet in the air you’ll be willing to pay a solid amount just to be able to get work done. The wireless service will be based off of the aircell telephone technologies that were introduced to airplanes about 15 years ago.
Southwest Airlines is in the meantime looking into offering a satellite based internet connection. While they have not unleashed any official plans to bring internet connections to the air they are in the process of testing.

Obviously with 9/11 and the collapse of the air travel industry following those events, it wasn’t high on the priority list. But in this fast paced world of constant communication it is about time that they got some connections to their airplanes.

The pricing structure will likely be similar to some major airports in the country which are based on a per flight connection rate. The price is not yet known but it would seem to me they would be able to make their money back in ticket sales and added flight value in a very short amount of time.

My best bet would be that they will charge around $5 per flight to use the internet. I love and have to be connected at all times, so to me that is a fair price, but for the shorter flights that might be a bit steep. Either way, I am extremely excited about the news and I am betting that all of you are as well.