Hello everybody,

The title of this article says a lot on what I think, especially after reading the figures hereunder compiled by Efficient Frontier and Marketing Sherpa.

However, I want to remind you that paid positioning (SEM) is essential when it comes to tackle the event field, the launch of a new product or service, or even a seasonal activity.

So, what does this survey say? Firstly, investments in SEM have risen by 21% in the United Kingdom over the first quarter of 2010.

Secondly, more than 30% of American companies using paid positioning resort to tools to copy keywords used by their competitors. It is really stupid, especially when you learn that these figures were obtained from $25 000 campaigns or more!!!

Inherently, SEO is made to distance oneself from others… benchmarking doesn’t have its place here!

The study is even more worrying when we learn that paid positioning (SEM) represents more than 80% in “Search” (SEM + SEO) investment in 2010.

Where are we going? Why do companies persist in spending huge amounts of money while a good SEO and SEM job would allow them to generate more considerable earnings without much investment?

To sum up, we can say that search engines are those making profit of the situation… In 2009, in the United States, search engines generated more than $65 per Internet user (it is 4 times superior to the international average)… Just think of it!

Have a good week!

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Dear web investors,

As we have already said on this blog, you won’t see any promising results if the traffic on your website is low or inexistent.

Recently, the Electronic Business Group has released the “Internet Marketing 2010” book from the e-marketing red books series.

Of course it won’t be as good as the work SEO, SEM and SMO experts can do, but this book might increase your web marketing knowledge. Here is one of the few tips given in the book:

Create a successful SMO campaign in 12 steps:

1. Get down your pedestal.
2. Concentrate on needs to satisfy, influences, sites on which traffic is important, competitors’ positioning…
3. Imagine a service answering an identified but unfulfilled need.
4. Make sure the Internet user can take part in the construction of your project.
5. Spread information again and again on most suitable social media websites.
6. Adapt your communication to your public: you don’t write the same way on a blog or on Facebook for example.
7. Use well-adapted and long-lasting avatars on social media websites.
8. Leave easy ways of spreading communication to your Internet users.
9. Follow-up regularly with your community by nominating a “community manager”.
10. You can’t control everything. Just admit it!
11. Make sure you have enough energy to implement your project.
12. Build a long-lasting relationship. We know that the ROI in SMO is proportional to the length of the operation. Think of a long-term action and optimize it!

Have a nice week!! Don’t hesitate to leave your comments or suggestions. It will be a pleasure to answer them.

See you next week!

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