It seems that everywhere you turn there is something being said about social media. According to research the use of social networking increased by 21% worldwide in 2009. While it’s growing and more and more people are talking about it, it also seems that most businesses are still trying to understand why they should be using it in the first place. What’s that about? 

1.  It’s all about the bottom line

Well, the why is related to “how and what” a business does to engage in marketing with the aim of creating an opportunity for a transaction – that means sales. Why do businesses exist? Primarily to create value, attract a market who wants the value and engage the market in transaction. Again that means… yep, sales.

How then does social media become about sales and not just messaging, conversations and feedback? By understanding that social media’s very point is about engagement, interactivity and completely solicited information in a friend to friend referral sense, this makes it a highly effective channel to gain solicited and qualified leads. Leads handled properly turn into quotes and quotes mean sales. All you have to do is know how to ask in the right way.

2. Replace your push with pull

The “how” of how business engages with consumers, has changed from “push marketing” to “pull marketing” via relevant and relative conversations and interaction that attract the market you seek, to you. That really boils down to the fact that digital has a quality that no other medium has – the power of viral. Most marketers want viral. Why? Because viral is really just good old fashioned “word-of-mouth” and viral means money spent to make a transaction opportunity “better bang for your buck”.

In the traditional direct marketing models you can expect a 2% to 3% conversion rate. Yep that’s right 3% is considered good. But social media done right can give you at least 20% – If not 40 to 65%! That’s what most companies want. Leads that convert to sales and as many as possible.

If you make viral your priority with any activity in social media then you easily move from the push of a static online banner ad to the pull of an interactive competition, promotion, game video, widget etc.

3. Know that word of mouth (still) rules

Advertising relies on cool design, creative concept, clever words and often quite an enormous leap of faith by the consumer to follow and make a transaction opportunity real. PR relies on influencing the influencers to get the message across. Social media is about one friend telling another friend. Forester’s research says that a friend’s opinion is the most trusted source – weighing in at a whacking 83% trustworthy. Well then where would you spend your buck to make a sale? 

4. Find critical mass

Social networks are popping up left right and centre. Social networking provider Ning hosts half a million “self made” social networks on its platform. This from Ning’s launch in February 2007. It’s tempting to think, “I’ll just create my own Social Network then.”

Social media means changing how you market and conduct your marketing, it’s also about giving over some power to the consumer not necessarily creating your own collection of people.

So to be effective in a space that has a different “how and what” is best to head for where you can find critical mass.

Numbers give you safety but numbers also give you leads.

The stats say that Facebook grows weekly by 5 million people. The service has gained around this amount every month starting about midway through last year, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing.

Well, of course you might say, “Well that’s America where everybody is connected to the Net.” But Facebook’s market in South Africa is hardly shabby… a cool 2.4 million. Gaining access to an audience of 2.4 million Facebookers tomorrow seems like a no brainer. Leveraging that audience to interact with your brand just makes sense.

GIVE SOMETHING AWAY:  Offer free information, downloads, links, samples, whatever would be applicable to your site.  This will better guarantee that your site may be personally referred to someone else and that it will be bookmarked.  It’ll help to initially attract visitors to your site and provide an opportunity for them to explore further into your site.
 
BUSINESS CARDS:  Hand out personal or business cards with your website URL on them. Leave them in stores and on office bulletin boards. Hand them out at parties or whenever an opportunity arises! Get Free Business Cards
 
AUTO-RESPONDERS:  Sign up with an auto-responder service that will send a reply email to anyone who emails you or fills out a form.  Customize the auto-responder message and specify automatic periodic follow-ups.  Great resource for this
 
USE YOUR AUTOMOBILE:  Have a bumper sticker, window graphic, license plate frame, or magnetic door panel created with your site’s URL on it. Literally “drive” traffic to your site!  Great resource for this
 
WEAR YOUR WEBSITE:  Create t-shirts, hats, and more with your site logo and URL on it and wear them around town.  Free advertising! Great resource for this
 
LOCAL MARKETING:  Don’t overlook the local market in your area. People will usually be more interested and willing to visit the website of a local person and to buy from them, so post flyers in your neighborhood, at supermarkets, corner groceries, and library. Advertise your site in your local newspaper, church bulletin, and school newsletter. 
 
MONITOR YOUR EFFORTS: This is important in order to throw your energies into what IS working and quit wasting time on what’s not.  Using a link tracking service will go a long way towards accomplishing this. More On This
 
START AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM: Join one of the affiliate programs on the internet and rapidly accelerate your site promotion efforts by allowing them to recruit website owners to advertise your banners and text links on a pay-for-performance commission basis. More on this

1. Provide complete and accurate information about yourself, your company, and your service or product. One of the reasons often cited by consumers hesitant to shop online is the uncertainty of knowing exactly what they will be getting.  Erase that uncertainty by providing product photos and detailed descriptions. Convey your expertise in the field to which your site is related. List your credentials. Let your visitors know why they should have confidence in you and your service or product.
 
2. Ease of navigation is extremely important. Don’t attempt to dazzle your visitors with design at the expense of site usability.
 
3. Project an image of honesty and sincerity. Include prominent links to your site’s policies, such as those regarding privacy, shipping, refunds, and customer service. Compose a brief narrative in plain conversational language to express your true, unbiased viewpoint on your site’s topic, as opposed to a page full of nifty slogans.
 
4. Be upfront with your visitors about pricing. State the price on the first page or include a link to your pricing page there. Your visitors will appreciate this, and you’ll earn points immediately with them. If your visitors have to conduct an extensive search to find pricing information, they will soon begin to feel that your service or product must surely be overpriced and will leave without wasting another minute of their valuable time.
 
5. Give your visitors something for free, even if only information or links to related resources. If they don’t make a purchase at this visit, they will at least leave with the feeling of having received something of value from having visited your site and will bookmark it for future reference.
 
6. One of the most effective ways of lending credibility to your site is for you to “get real.” Your visitors need to feel confident that you are a genuine company in the real world. This can be accomplished via “people photos”, place of business photos, bio, a real physical street address, and several contact options (i.e., phone number, email, fax number.) This goes a long way in helping your visitors to feel you are not just another fly-by-night website.
 
7. Promptly reply to all customer inquiries. Let them know their needs and concerns are important to you and deserving of your immediate attention. Reply within 24 hours, even if only to confirm receipt of their correspondence and to let them know when they may expect an answer to their question.
 
8. Don’t overdo banner advertisements. A few banners strategically and tastefully displayed are okay, but do not bombard your visitors with popups on entrance and exit and ads all over the place mixed with the site’s content. This will only serve to confuse and annoy your visitors, who will probably make a fast escape and a mental note to never return.
 
9. Project professionalism by performing a thorough site check. Solicit a few friends to double-check for you. Your site design may look professional at first glance, but tiny little errors such as typos and broken hyperlinks are glaringly obvious to visitors and ultimately spell “amateur.”
 
10. Use the exclamation mark sparingly and not at the end of every sentence. No one can be that happy!

1.  You should, of course, review the actual text on your own pages to get ideas for keywords. Be sure to include every keyword you’ve used somewhere in the text on your page.  Get creative.  You can find a way to do this.  I’ve seen sites add a brief paragraph in the smallest font size at the very bottom of their page solely intended to use some of their keywords.  It was a readable paragraph with complete sentences that made sense.  That’s okay!  It’s acceptable.  Absolutely DON’T employ the use of hidden text (using a font color the same as the page background) or comment tags in your page source code filled with keywords.  Either of these tactics will get your site banned from the search engines.  SE’s are much smarter today in their ability to detect spam.
2.  You can also do a search at Google using the one most applicable keyword to your site.  Using the five sites at the top of the list in your search results, check the keywords they are using.  You can do this by visiting their site, right clicking on their home page, and selecting “View Source.”  It is a copyright violation to copy the exact keywords in their meta tags, but at least you can get some ideas for your own keywords.
3.  Each week you can receive an emailed list of the top 500 frequently searched words on the internet over the past week taken from various metacrawlers across the net absolutely free from Wordtracker.  You can then edit your meta tags, page title, description, and page text to use any of these *proven* popular keywords that may apply to your site to help boost your ranking.
4.  Don’t include common words (i.e., the, and, from, like, a.)
5.  Don’t try to fool the search engines by including words that are not applicable to your site (spamming.)  
6.  Be careful about copyright infringement (registered trademarks, copyrighted names, company names, brand names) when choosing keywords. You could be sued.
7.  Besides single keywords, you should also include phrases that you feel others may use when searching (i.e., web design, webmaster tools.)  If your site is a match for the exact phrase a person has used when searching, this will give your site a boost in the search engine results displayed.

Online marketing explained / Demystifying Internet Executives / What is the internet?  / Web Browser / What is this website thing about? / What is an Email? / Web directories / Web Traffic / What is a search engine and how does it work? / Organic Traffic / Paid Listings/Sponsored Links / Vertical Search Engine / What types of internet fraud are there? / Social Media / Blog / RSS feeds / Tag Clouds / Web Hosting / What is your domain name? /  / What is an IP address? / .com or .co.za? / Catchy banners / Banner Sizes / Tell me more about banners / Interactive Banners / Alexa
 / VoIP / Coregistration / Incentivization / What does the M in CPM stand for in online marketing?

Online marketing explained 

Question:
What is online marketing?
Answer:
The proliferation of the internet has revolutionized the way we view the world. 

With billions of people having access to the internet, translates to market potential that no business should miss out on. Any modern business knows that having an online presence is no longer optional, but a vital key to ensuring steady growth and maintaining a competitive edge. 

• Online marketing takes advantage of the benefits that the internet has to offer. 
• Marketing online allows your marketing campaign: 
• to be real time
• to access a high volume of prospective clients
• to cast your marketing reach all over the globe
• to measure the ROI from online marketing accurately
• to pay for what you get 

Many traditional marketing methods rely on statistical inferences and estimation to find out how much ROI is being gained from marketing spend. It’s difficult to measure the ROI from a billboard ad for instance. 

In online marketing tracking can be done from the page view through to the sale level. Conversion rates can be determined with pin point accuracy. The real time nature of online marketing also means that, strategic action can be taken to affect ROI real time, which reduces the risk of financial loss. 

Another important hallmark of online marketing is that most of the industry functions on a pay per performance basis. Merchants using traditional marketing methods have to include unnecessary expenditure on their budget, like a studio and crew in TV marketing. 

Online marketing allows the merchant to pay per impression. However, the option also exists for paying per click, lead or sale, which means that the advertiser gets branding free while still receiving quantifiable results. 

The kind of tools used in online marketing include websites, blogs, vlogs, emails, search engines, portals, web directories, social networks and other online media.

The TrafficSynergy Online Marketing Course aims to introduce you to many online media types, helping you to learn more about this new marketing science. Very soon you will understand how to maximize your return on investment and know precisely when your advertising is worth continuing. 

Demystifying Internet Executives  

Question:
What do internet executives do?
Answer:
The internet executive is a role in industry that hasn’t been there for very long. The proliferation of the internet has gained strength only recently with many business’ online presence being less than 10 years old.

The recency of this role and the internet as an industry in general, has caused a lot of confusion for internet executives in the industry in terms of remuneration standards and job description. 

A recent International study of corporate internet executives has revealed results that show how inconsistent the new role was viewed amongst other corporate colleagues and people within the industry. 

The role that many internet executives play in managing corporate online presences (according to results from the study) ranges from:  traffic analysis, branding exposure (through social media initiatives), online community development, producing fresh web content, and managing eCommerce logistics, to even developing web based software services. 

So as you can see the roles that internet executives have to fulfil covers a broad area of responsibilities. Many internet execs who participated in the study say that many of their peers with similar roles in the other industries have far less responsibilities yet they are remunerated so much more. 

Many participants in the study say this is the case because the role of internet executives is so new and that it is still largely misunderstood. 

There are many international forums being created in order to bring standards and benchmarks to the internet as an industry and to demystify the role of internet executives to the corporate world and the society at large. 

What is the internet?  

Question:
What is the internet?
Answer:
The internet is up there with fire, the wheel, the light bulb, in terms of technological advancement that has revolutionized the way the world thinks and works. 

The internet has made so many things possible that even as little as ten years ago seemed virtually impossible – like video calling some one in based in Russia while you are based in Cape Town. 

The internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchanges data via copper wires, fibre-optic cables, wireless connections and other technologies. In short the internet allows a computer based inCape Townto communicate with a computer (usually a server) based inRussia. Computers communicate with each other via the internet almost instantaneously, and is dependant on the physical limitations of the technology being used to relay the communication. 

The internet is also known as the information super highway, and allows web users to access information, download and upload electronic files (like audio, text, video, image, and others) to be viewed for the whole world to see. Websites, blogs, vlogs, emailing, IM, VoIP (internet calls) are a few of the applications of the internet that are common place in daily life. 

The internet is still in its infancy in terms of application development and regulation. International bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Protocols are being developed to try to bring order to the chaos that is cyberspace. 

Web Browser  

Question:
What is a web browser?
Answer:
You would not be able to read this blog post without a web browser. 

A web browser is a software application that allows a web user to view content on the internet, like web pages, images, videos, documents, blogs, etc. 

A web browser converts all the HTML code that most of the content on the internet is made up of, into a usable format for webs users. 

The mainstream web browsers include Mozilla, Netscape, Apple, Microsoft, and Opera. 

Web browsers communicate with web servers using HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to display content to webusers. 

What is this website thing about?  

Question:
What is a website?
Answer:
A website is a collection of web pages, images, videos hosted in a web server which is accessible via the internet. If you were using an internet explorer application and you typed the words www….. into the URL toolbar, the page that loads onto your screen is a website. 

In order for you to create an online presence for your business to promote your products and services a website is an essential component in doing this. Depending on your business’s needs, creating a website is very easy with all the easy to follow website creation software packages available. But if you would rather leave your business’s internet image to professionals there are many companies vying for your business. 

By having a website to promote your business gives you 24/365 access to the unlimited market potential that the internet has to offer, and it also gives you the free range to market your business which ever way you please. 

Once your website is up and running, the next thing to do would be to join the TrafficSynergy Affiliate Network, which will not only give you a chance to link your business to some high quality brands but also a chance to earn commission in the process. 

What is an Email? 

Question:
What is email?
Answer:
Gone are the days of writing a letter to your friend or loved one that’s emigrated to the other side of the world. The advent of the internet has made instant communication a reality, where people can reach each other at a moments notice at the simple click of a button. 

Email is short for electronic mail and is the electronic equivalent of sending someone a letter. An email is usually sent from an email account from the senders email server to the recipients account on another email server. The moment the sender clicks the send button, the email is sent to the recipients email server. 

You need to have an email account and an email address to send and receive emails and there are many free email accounts to choose from. With some of them boasting features like high storage capacity which means you never have to delete an
email. 

An email account allows an email user to type a subject and a message to the sender. Most email accounts also allow uses to attach other electronic documents like audio, video, text and other compatible electronic files. More advanced email accounts come with more advanced options like, calendar managers and customizable interfaces.

Email is an important tool in online marketing as it allows you to communicate to a large target market relatively inexpensively and quickly. Many international online marketing experts profess that a well managed email list is key to online marketing success, and make millions from clicking the send button everyday. 

Web directories  

Question:
What are web directories?
Answer:
A web directory is a collection of website URLs and descriptions of their content, categorized according to the content that they are providing their users. So for example all the news websites will fall under one category, and astrophysics websites will fall into another category. 

The advantage of using a web directory is that if a potential visitor does not know the URL of your website, they’ll consult a web directory and look for sites that are available on the web directory. The user will then be presented with a list of sites according to the category chosen. 

There are many website directories looking to list sites on their directory, and submission usually requires site scrutiny from the web directory. 

How this can help you, the TrafficSynergy Affiliate, is that you can increase the natural traffic to your site by listing your site on a good web directory. 

Web Traffic  

Question:
What do the terms unique visitors, site visits, hits and page views mean?
Answer:
In order to monetize on the traffic to your site, it is vital to be able to understand the traffic through your site. A media buyer wanting to buy advertising space on your site will be very interested in your site’s traffic statistics before advertising on your website. 

A unique visitor is every new IP address that visits your site. Every time your website’s server picks up that a new user’s IP address hasn’t been registered on the server before that will be counted as a unique visitor. 

A site visit is every time a user makes a trip to your site. So if one person visits your site for two weeks, you’ll have one unique visitor and 14 site visits. Fourteen site visits does not necessarily mean that 14 people have visited your site. 

A hit is every time an HTML file is loaded through your user’s browser. So if you had say 3 HTML images on your one page website. Every time the page loads you’ll have three hits. So you cannot assume that the number of hits is how many people have visited your site. People often confuse “hits” for the number of people visiting site.

Page views refer to the number of pages viewed by every visitor to your site. So if you have a 5 page website and one unique visitor who had one visit to your site for a week. You’ll have generated 5 page views for the week. This does not mean that your site had five visitors to your site. 

Tracking the site stats can also help you to improve the navigational experience of your users and the aesthetics of your website. By tracking the page views you’ll be able work out which of your web pages are not popular, which you could improve or remove if your users don’t visit those pages at all. 

There are many site traffic stats packages available for you to use to track the traffic to your site. A good place to start would be Google Analytics. 

What is a search engine and how does it work?  

Question:
What are search engines and how do they work?
Answer:
A search engine is an internet tool that is used to search information on the internet.

On any given day major search engines like Google, handle hundreds of millions of search requests from webusers. The search engine indexes web pages, images, and other types of files according to its relevance to the web user’s search request and ranks them accordingly. 

On a basic level search engines organize search results for their users by: 

* web crawling
* indexing
* searching 

When a search request is being processed the web pages relevant to the webs user’s search request are retrieved from the internet by web crawlers (called spiders). They search the web pages for extracts of titles, headings, and meta tags that are relevant to the keywords used by the web surfer. The results retrieved by the spiders then get indexed and ranked according to criteria set out by the algorithms used by the search engine. 

The search engine then presents a set of relevant results to the searcher in order of what is most relevant to their search. 

In the top right hand corner of the TrafficSynergy blog is an example of a search engine. Type in the search box any term relating to online marketing that you might need clarified.  Our search engine will then retrieve any blog content relevant to what you need clarified. 

Organic Traffic  

Question:
What is organic traffic?
Answer:
Organic traffic refers to the free traffic directed to your website via unpaid listings such as search engines or web directories. 

The more organic traffic that passes through your site the higher your website will rank on search engines SERPs (Search Engines Results Pages) and on website rank listings like Alexa.com. This relates to more traffic for your website which should lead to more sales for the products available on your website. 

The best way to direct organic traffic to your site would be to use white hat SEO techniques, to get to the top of the SERP. Internet studies have shown that the top result on the SERP gets the most clicks. If you think about it, when last have you gone past the second page of the SERP presented to you on your last Google search? 

The blog post Basic SEO guidelines offers basic tips that webmasters could use to direct more organic traffic to their sites. 

Paid Listings/Sponsored Links  

Question:
What are paid listings/sponsored links?
Answer:
Sponsored links (also known as paid listings) are when an advertiser pays a search engine, to have a link to their website display when a searcher makes a specific search request. 

Let’s say you are running florist website. You would naturally want your link to display when a user makes a search request relating to flowers. 

So if a searcher types flowers into a search engine, hoping to find a florist, the paid listings will show all the merchants who sell flowers and have paid to have their link display when this search result is displayed. 

Space on the search engines search results is limited, and thus sponsored links are offered to the highest bidders. Often merchants get into price wars where the smaller merchants are often out bidded by the larger corporates with larger budgets. 

The more general the search word is the higher the bidding usually goes, as general search terms are likely to direct more traffic to the merchants site. 

Vertical Search Engine  

Question:
What is a vertical search engine?
Answer:
A vertical search engine caters to niche traffic and not to general traffic like major search engines Google and Yahoo do. 

Searchers going to vertical search engines go there for a specific search item. Let’s say Amazon for instance, searchers go there to search for the latest best selling books, ipod junkies would go to the itunes website to search for the latest hit track. These are prime examples of vertical search engines. 

The search engine on the TrafficSynergy blog is also an example of a vertical search engine, this caters to traffic wanting to know more about online marketing. 

What types of internet fraud are there?  

Question:
What is phishing, whaling, phreaking and what can I do to prevent it from happening to me?
Answer:
Phishing, phreaking and whaling are all types of internet fraud where the fraudster tries to skim sensitive financial information from the victim. 

Phishing is when fraudsters send victims emails pretending to be from some valid entity like a financial institution, or an IT Administrator. Usually the email sent to the victim will ask them to follow a link in the email which lands them on a fake website asking them to fill in their details. The fake website (a knockoff of the original site) usually looks and feels so real that the victim isn’t aware that they have been redirected to the fraudster’s fake site. Upon filling in their details to purchase the product, the victim’s details are then recorded on the fraudster’s website and they then use these details to transact fraudulently. To prevent yourself from becoming a victim of phishing fraud make sure: 

• that you never reply to emails that are promising you money that you are not due to receive
• be wary when asked to click links on an email from a financial institution as this is not standard practice for them to communicate to their customers
• never share your password with anyone as sites should never ask you to confirm your password via email. 

Whaling is a type of fraud where the fraudster targets corporate executives of major corporations. The fraudsters send fake emails to executives that ask them to follow links to fake websites that downloads spyware secretly. The spyware records keystrokes and sends data to a remote computer along the internet. The fraudsters then gain access to company funds and sensitive company information by skimming passwords of the executives through the downloaded spyware. Companies can prevent this by: 

• installing appropriate anti-spyware software
• making sure that executives are vigilant with regards to the electronic communication they respond to
• Phreaking is when fraudsters tamper with telecommunication networks like public telephone networks. They tap into the audio frequencies used by the telephone networks and charge reverse charge calls onto unsuspecting victims accounts. This type of fraud is on the decline as audio frequency use is outdated and more telecommunication companies are now using coax cabling and satellite technology. 

Social Media  

Question:
What is social media?
Answer:
Social media refers an online multimedia platform that allows people to interact with one another in some or other digital format. The social media revolution allows people from different walks of life to share common experiences and goals, and is a space for people to get connected in common networks. 

Different types of social media include but are not limited to Internet forums, weblogs (called blogs), wikis, podcasts, pictures, video and gaming. Some of the technologies they use are blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs (video blogs), wall-postings, email, instant messaging (called IM’s), music-sharing (as in podcasts), crowd sourcing, and voice over IP (called VoIP), to name a few. 

The common ground that all social media share: 

• REACH: they provide scale and allow anyone to reach a global audience
• ACCESSIBILITY: social media tools are available to anyone at little or no cost
• USABILITY: media production in the social media arena requires little or no specialized skill which allows anybody to participate
• RECENCY: the time delay between communications produced in the social media arena is almost non-existent when compared to the rate of production in conventional media 

Some of the most popular social media applications in recent times include FaceBook.com, MySpace.com, Word Press, You Tube, Zoopy, Twitter amongst many other popular social media platforms. 

The advent of social media into mainstream online activity provides a superb platform for merchants to get their brands out there in virtual space and to direct large volumes of traffic to their websites through paid per click marketing. Social networking giants, Face Book, has 120 million active users worldwide, and My Space reported over 200 million users. Can you afford to not be using social media as a platform for your online campaigns? 

Blog  

Question:
What is a blog?
Answer:
A blog is a type of website that is one of the platforms of online social media, where the bloggers usually keep chronicled journals of their daily lives, descriptions of events and other online material. 

The blogosphere is part of the social media revolution that has taken over the online world in recent years. There are millions of Blogs online, covering topics ranging from politics to love, to the daily lives of ordinary people. 

Personal blogs are also viewed as a medium for self expression, where ordinary people chronicle and share their daily lives, experiences and moments of realization for the whole online community to see. 

Keeping a personal blog is also a great way for people to make extra money, through advertising. By placing merchants banners on their blog, many bloggers basically get paid for chronicling their daily lives. 

Corporate blogs are used by companies as a means to bolster their online presence. Companies use blogs to release company information and to communicate to their clients on a large scale. 

There are niche blogs like vlogs (using videos only), and photoblogs (using photographs only), that support only a specific type of electronic content like video, images or audio files. 

The TrafficSynergy Blog aims to help people new to online marketing and affiliate marketing with TrafficSynergy. The TrafficSynergy Blog allows people to comment and make suggestions to the topics covered in the blog. 

Great blogging forums like WordPress.com, offer free blogging platforms to people who want to join the blogoshpere and become part of the social media revolution. 

RSS feeds  

Question:
What are RSS feeds?
Answer:
The RSS in RSS feeds stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated works like blog entries. 

RSS feeds allow subscribers to blogs and websites to be updated with the latest blog and website entries by checking the blogs and websites for new and updated content.

The RSS feed stored in a subscriber’s web browser will usually contain the title of the entry and a portion of the content in the entry, the feed can also contain meta data like the name of the creator and the date that the content was published. 

RSS feeds allow webmasters to syndicate content quickly and automatically. 

RSS feeds are a great tool to use for SMO (Social Media Optimization) as they keep your bloggers and subscribers up to date with the latest content on your blog or site.

Wherever you see this icon you can subscribe to the website or blog and receive updates on new content regularly. 

Tag Clouds  

Question:
What is a tag cloud?
Answer:
A tag cloud can usually be found on a blog interface, and is a visual weighting of the popularity of the tags words of the content on a blog or website. 

Each blog post on a blog is saved under a tag word relevant to the content of the post. The tag cloud will contain all or most of the tag words contained inside the blog.

The importance of each tag word can be determined by the size or colour of the tag word in the tag cloud relevant to other words in the tag cloud. So if it were size, the largest tag word would be the most important. If all the tag words were red in the tag cloud, then the reddest tag word would be the most important. 

Importance of the tag word could be determined by a number of factors like the amount of times the blog is viewed, recency of the blog post, how important the blog post is in terms of content, or the amount of comments the blog post is receiving amongst others. 

A tag cloud can be viewed on the right of the TrafficSynergy blog. See what our most important blog post is, and read some more informative online marketing info. 

Web Hosting  

Question:
What is web hosting?
Answer:
Web hosting is a service provided by a web hosting company, to provide space on their servers to websites to access the internet. Web hosting companies usually own server farms, depending on the amount of websites they host. 

Personal web hosting is usually free, and the advertising on these sites usually pay for the website maintenance costs. Corporate web hosting usually comes with higher expense, because the website tends to be more complex and the other ancillary services required like database support and the provision of application development platforms. 

Hosting uptime refers to the percentage of time the host is accessible via the internet. Most web hosting companies claim a 99.9% uptime, which often does not take into account server downtime which includes restarts and planned and unplanned maintenance. 

What is your domain name?  

Question:
What is a domain name and web hosting and how are they linked?
Answer:
A domain name identifies an IP address; more simply you could call it the name of your website. So if you went to www.trafficsynergy.com, the domain name would be trafficsynergy.com (everything typed after the www.). A domain name is important because it can give an internet user a clue with regards to what services your website is offering. A carefully chosen domain name could also make search engines pick up your website a lot quicker when search requests are processed. 

Web hosting refers to an internet hosting service, where a host company provides you with space on their server to run your website and connect it to the internet. Usually the web hosting service provider will provide you with a domain name, but you can also create your own domain name. There are many web hosting service providers vying for your business, and a quick search for web hosting on any search engine will get you in touch with one. 

Once you have your domain name and website up and running, the next thing to do would be to join the TrafficSynergy Affiliate Network, and start earning commission with every click! 

What is an IP address?  

Question:
What is an IP address and how is it used?
Answer:
An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique number assigned to computers connected to the internet. It could be compared to an ID number used by people, as it is a unique number that could be used to identify a specific point connected to the internet. 

The IP address is important in geo-tracking because it allows the traffic through a site to be tracked. In doing so the traffic can be locked to a specific region, i.e. keeping to South African traffic only. 

It also assists in the prevention of fraud, by making clicks traceable it helps prevent double counting in trying ascertain the amount of traffic through a site. 

.com or .co.za?  

Question:
What extension should I buy for my domain?
Answer:
Choosing a domain name is vital in ensuring that your business’ online brand is garnering the correct exposure.

A domain name could practically be anything you want it to be, but unless your business strategy means going for the quirky and unusual, following the common route for your business’ domain name will be the safest bet for reflecting a professional image. 

International internet studies have shown that the most popular domains remains the ones ending in .com, since most of the international domain sale revenue comes from the sale of .com domains.

The .net domain was the second highest most sold domain, with the domain .biz coming in at third. 

Deciding to go .com, .co.za, .net, or .biz with your business’ domain is vital to ensure that you are reaching the correct target market. If your business is focused on doing business locally, following the .co.za route will help solidify your business as a local brand. If you are more focused on international business or a mixture of local and international business, the domains .com, .biz and .net would be more appropriate for you. 

Catchy banners 

Question:
What are creatives?
Answer:
Creatives are the banners used by advertisers to advertise their product or services on an affiliate’s site. These creatives come in different sizes (which are measured in pixels i.e. 120 by 600) and formats (text, image, image and text, or flash); and are available for affiliates to choose according to their website’s capabilities in terms of bandwidth; anticipated page views and type of content wanted or allowed on the website. 

The placement of  creatives on websites is also subject to the advertiser’s requirements. The creatives/banners also function as links to the advertiser’s website, so that when a site visitor clicks on the banner they land on the advertiser’s website either buying the product or service advertised or filling in a request form for such a product or service. The affiliate then receives a commission from the advertiser based on the number of  forms filled in or the number of products sold, that were the result of clicking on the creative on the affiliate’s site. 

Banner Sizes  

Question:
What are the different banner sizes available?
Answer:
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the international authority on internet advertising standards, has a set of banner sizes that form part of their Ad Unit Guidelines. 

Banners are measured in pixels and their size is given as a measurement of their width by their height e.g.: a 728×90 banner would have a width made up of 728 pixels and a height made up of 90 pixels. 

The most popular banner  sizes used on the TrafficSynergy Network are the Skyscraper (120×600) and the Full Banner (468×60). They are the most popular in terms of site placement because of their size. They are big enough to catch the web user’s attention but not to the point where the web user’s experience of the website content is hampered. 

The IAB banner sizes are summarized in the following table:

 Tell me more about banners  

Question:
What banners should I use in my campaign and why?
Answer:
Banners vary in terms of size and type. 

The different types of banners include static, animated, mobile (for wap sites), flash and text links. The type of banner you will need to use will depend on the specifics of the campaign that you are running. Text links, mobile and static banners are great for mobile campaigns given that they are so small in size and that are they easily downloadable for mobisites. For online campaigns static, animated, and text links would be preferable. The most popular banner types used in online campaigns are animated and flash banners, although static and text links are also favourable options in online campaigns. 

Banners are measured in pixels, those are the different little dots that make up the image in the banner. Banners are also called buttons in online marketing terms. There are five basic sizes of banners i.e.: 120×600 (usually called a skyscraper); 468×60 (usually called a banner); 728×90 (usually called a leader board); 160×600 (usually called a wide skyscraper) & 125×125 (usually called a square).  These sizes are the standard international sizes as set out by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Ad Unit guidelines. 

The most popular of the group being the skyscraper and the banner. The popularity of these banner sizes are due to the fact that they are visible enough in terms of catching the web user’s attention but are not so overwhelming to distract the user from the content on the website. 

Advertiser / merchant campaign research stats have shown that campaigns using all 5 banners sizes in their campaigns have reaped the maximum benefit in terms of online exposure and branding. This can be attributed to the fact that by using all 5 banner sizes collectively in the advertiser / merchant’s campaign, makes an advertiser / merchant’s campaign flexible enough to be displayed on any site regardless of the banner size requirements the site may have. 

Full banner support is available through adRands on banner packages – from just general placing advice through to full banner development. 

Interactive Banners  

Question:
What are interactive banners?
Answer:
Interactive banners are banners that allow the visitor to fill in an online form on the banner, without filling the details in on the main page on the website. 

Interactive banners allow a website owner to use a visitor’s details to redirect the visitor to the exact page on their website where the quote/answer can be viewed. Mini operations such as searching a price list can easily be auctioned via the interactive banner. This is done by redirecting the visitor to the merchant’s page where price and info on the product can be viewed. 

Interactive banners act as mini online forms which can be accessed without clicking through to the landing page. 

Interactive banners also facilitate the gathering of info as when the banner is clicked the data entered onto the banner can be stored. 

Read the blog post on How to download an interactive banner, for an explanation on how to download an interactive banner on your site. 

Alexa  

Question:
How can Alexa help the TrafficSynergy Affiliate?
Answer:
Alexa is a web information company. Alexa ranks websites according to daily, weekly, monthly traffic they have going through them. They only track the sites visited of web users who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their internet browser, but the many millions of toolbars that web users have installed internationally gives Alexa’s rankings very good credibility. 

Installing the Alexa toolbar and knowing your website’s ranking can help you, the TrafficSynergy Affiliate, in the following ways: 

- a high Alexa ranking can give you leverage for negotiating links to other sites with high PageRanks
- the higher your Alexa rating the more the search engines will index your site, which relate to a higher PageRank
- gives you a good measure of how well your website is ranking amongst its competition 

VoIP

Question:
What is VoIP?
Answer:
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. VoIP is the technology used to make calls over the internet. 

VoIP systems often integrate with existing traditional telephone and cellular networks which allow VoIP calls to be made to landlines and mobile phones. 

VoIP uses audio codecs which encodes the speech that is transferred over the internet, via an audio stream. 

VoIP service provider, Skype, provides low cost internet calling rates to people all over the world. Their services include video calling and IM applications amongst others. 

Coreg  

Question:
What is coreg?
Answer:
Co registration or coreg for short, is when webusers filling in a form for a product or service, are asked permission to forward their details to third parties. Usually the applicant is provided with a tick box which asks their permission to add their details to a third party emailing list. 

It is important to remember to get the applicant’s permission to share their details with a third party. Failing to do so is often a contravention of many international privacy and data protection laws. 

Incentivization  

Question:
What is incentivization and why shouldn’t I do it?
Answer:
Incentivization is when you encourage a visitor to fill in a form or click on a link/banner by offering them a reward or a prize, or misleading them about the actual service or product being offered. 

The reason incentivization is prohibited is incentivized leads/clicks  give the merchant customers who are not interested in the product or service they have to offer. 

Incentivization also gives merchants a false sense of the level of interest in their product as incentivized leads/clicks may not be interested in acquiring the product or service at all. 

There are instances where incentivization is allowed  in certain sale campaigns. In the case where a website owner wants to reward a customer for purchasing a product through their website, that incentivization is acceptable in that it encourages the customer to make a purchase. 

What does the M in CPM stand for in online marketing? 

Question: 

What does the M in CPM stand for?
Answer:
CPM is a term used in online marketing to represent cost per thousand, this term is used specifically to refer to the number of loaded impressions. So when the term CPM is used it means per thousand impressions loaded. The use of the letter M comes from the Roman numeral M representing 1000.