Robert Pagliarini brought AB Strategic on board to assist in the design and development of ‘The Other 8 Hours’ book promotion website. AB Strategic was up to the task.

Robert’s goal was to create a website that engaged readers beyond the book. We worked with ThoughtNozzle to bring Robert’s design ideas to fruition. Site features include the integration of a podcast solution, automated lead generation forms, and custom front-page widgets.

Featured on Good Morning America

The book has been well received by reviewers and the site has seen an increase in traffic each month. We’re happy to announce that Robert was recently featured on Good Morning America to discuss the book (embedded below). Congrats to Robert for being featured on GMA. It was a really fun project for our team to work on.

About ‘The Other 8 Hours’

The Other 8 Hours shows how anyone, anywhere can use even just a few extra minutes each day to make more money and feel more satisfied.
You’ll begin looking beyond your job, your commute, credit cards, or even just that gnawing feeling that life is sometimes passing you by. You’ll get fresh solutions for carving out more time. And you’ll find the inspiration to spend that free time in a more productive way — whether it is starting a business, writing a blog, losing weight, or developing a hobby.

It’s a whole new, clear-headed, do-able way to live life to the fullest. The Other 8 Hours takes you there using stories from my own personal experience. Countless examples of profiles of others. Proven research. And easy self-analysis tools to help you find and implement your own opportunities to get more time, money, and enrichment.

Order your copy now!

Let’s continue our journey through the top 10 hottest internet marketing trends in 2010.

6.Email Marketing Makes a Comeback

Not that email marketing ever died, but 2009 saw the rise of the school of thought that email marketing was no longer a relevant tactic. According to Panelists at the Internet Summit 2009, email marketing is the most common tactic used by internet marketers. Email is still considered the number 1 form of communication by a growing percentage of the population.

What to Do?

Don’t think for one second that email marketing is a dying trend. You need to maximize your email marketing efforts by being relevant, planning for the future, as well as understanding your audience and delivering what they want. Do this by first understanding that the dynamic of Email marketing has changed. Bulk email efforts no longer work effectively. However, personalized email efforts do work. I recommend using software like Infusionsoft for getting the most impact on your personalized email campaigns. Email marketing is still one the best ways to communicate directly with the people who buy your products. Continue to build your list and profit from it.

7.Real-Time

Many people have started to compare the increased popularity of the real-time trend to the Web 2.0 trend in 2007. This trend shows us that people expect immediacy, and if you do not provide it, your competition will. Google Wave is an excellent example as it is trying to be a combination of wiki, email, and instant messaging. While the utility of Google Wave has not become mainstream, or completely understood by many, it is an example of what many future technologies will look like.

What to Do?

Don’t fall behind the curve and start planning now. Much of the technology has not become commonplace, but will. Start planning your strategy now so that you will be prepared for when it takes hold.

8.Widget Marketing

Widget marketing has grown by leaps and bounds in the last several months. Widgets are now being used to quickly introduce their services and new products to their readers. A large number of blog oriented services have put a great deal of effort into ensuring that widget marketing will be successful. In addition, you can even enhance your boring Facebook fan page by building a custom widget with Sprout Builder.

What to Do?

Widget marketing will continue to grow in 2010 and could prove to be a very effective means on online marketing. It could also lead to a trend of selling widget space instead of ad space on many blogs and websites. You need to decide early if widget advertising or the use of widgets on your websites could be productive because every marketing trend is most effective when it is new and users have not gotten used to it.

9.Video Search

Right now, videos are searched and sorted by meta tags, titles, and descriptions. In 2010, there is a good chance that technology will start be released that can interpret what the content of the video actually is and images. This will make videos an even more powerful tool for building a brand and gaining recognition within a community. Google and Bing have already taken small steps towards this goal by adding image-recognition to their arsenal. In the long run, this will greatly affect what is being said in a video. The future of designing and scripting a video may very well follow the same guidelines as SEO content writers follow today.

Everyone is a social star in their own right. However, as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like continue to grow, every person is creating their own personal brand. As these companies sign over rights to their content to search engines, people will start to notice a voluntary erosion of privacy. With public sharing growing at astronomical rates and the rise of location-based services, anyone can learn anything about everyone. Personal privacy online is a thing of the past.

What to Do?

There are really only two things that you can do. First, you should keep your eye out for a very serious debate to rage about personal privacy online and pay even more attention to the results. If nothing changes, then personal privacy will continue to erode and you will be held accountable for every click that you make online. To this end, plan your actions out far into the future, so you don’t get caught in the crossfire or called out by an angry customer.

2010 holds a lot of promise and could be an exciting year with all of the potential changes ahead. Some of the these changes could continue to enhance Internet marketing, while the effects of others are far from known. Just keep an eye on the ever-changing trends and stay one step ahead of your competition. Happy New Year!

Internet marketing is constantly evolving and as 2009 ends, it is time to take a look at what will be leading the way in 2010. It is important to not only know what lies ahead, but what you can do to position yourself for success.

Here are the top 10 internet marketing trends to keep in eye on in 2010.

1.Bing Makes a Stand

Bing has made big moves by signing exclusive contracts with multiple online publishers for their content. If this trend continues, Bing will continue to grow its market share for the simple fact that it has content available that Google can’t get their hands on.

Signing a deal with Yahoo was a great step because it gave Bing access to all the innovative search technology. While many people disregarded the importance of Yahoo several years ago, they were making big breakthroughs in search technology.

What to Do?
Sign up for your Bing webmasters account as well as get to know their ranking criteria. It may only grab around 10% of the total search market right now, but this is already a boost from earlier in 2009, and chances are, they continue to gain ground in the future.

2.Video Marketing

I know that video marketing is not the newest of ideas, however many internet marketers will still not have produced their first video by the end of 2009. Every search engine is placing more weight on video than any other form of online media and will continue to do so in 2010. Video sharing is already easy, and many companies are still looking for ways to make it even easier in 2010. The “experimentation period” is over. Video marketing has proved to be successful at gaining traffic and adding profits.

What to Do?
Video, Video, Video. Every word on your website could be used in a video. Even if, for some reason, you do not integrate video into a majority of your site, it is still a great advertising tool. Make videos for online sharing galleries like the ever popular YouTube. People want to see you and hear you, not just read what you write. A good Indianapolis online video firm to connect with is Cantaloupe. They actually have a special holiday deal going on that looks pretty good.

3.Mobile Marketing

A large segment of the Asian market already uses mobile payment technology. However, many Western countries, including the United States, have been lagging behind. Look for mobile payments to make their way to Western markets by the end of 2010. Keep an eye on companies and programs like Square (enables merchants to accept payments via the Apple iPhone), PayPalX, and the Amazon Mobile Payment platform for developers.

What to Do?
Make sure that you are ready when mobile payment technologies gain traction in your market. In addition, begin spending some dollars in mobile marketing. With the surge in smart-phone devices, particularly the iPhone, surveys show that there’s a huge potential in the mobile marketing arena where penetration is at its peak.

4.Shift in Freelance Costs and Talent

Freelancing hit it big in 2009. Websites like Odesk saw record high numbers of willing freelancers, many of them new to the online marketplace. A large reason for this is the job loss experienced in several large economies but most notably the United States. This has given rise to a large number of online freelancers with little to no experience. With such a large amount of lower end experience and talent, many middle-level talent freelancers have taken this opportunity to raise their rates because they look like comparatively better talent and can now charge more. More talent is also being outsourced, especially to the Philippines, because of the low cost.

What To Do?
The first thing you need to do decide what level of talent you are willing to pay for, from writing articles to designing websites. Then find the best provider possible. Many low-end providers do not focus largely on continuing relationships, they focus on creating as much as possible as quickly as possible with little regard to quality. The best bet is to build relationships with mid-level talent, as they tend to look for work from buyers that want a long term relationship, thus a long time paycheck. If you need top-tier talent, then an economical choice is to pay mid-level talent to create what you need and then you can pay top-tier talent to edit and revise instead of create.

5.Emphasis on Social Prominence and Search Engine Rankings

Search engines are starting to focus more on social data. Indexing and crawling social sites like Twitter or Facebook is only the first step. This data will soon have a much larger impact on search engine rankings.

What to Do?
Have a social presence. Create profiles on top social sites and become a prominent figure in your niche or community. To do this, understanding the online social dynamic and ways to effectively engage and participate in the community will be critical.

[Photo Source: BrandAnywhere.com - Agency specializing in Mobile Branding]

Across the world, Starbucks is known for fast coffee and the Starbucks brand. There corporate identity is as strong as any company world-wide. They are known for great coffee, lots of choices, and being fast. Their stores become known for being a great place to hang out and surf the web, write, and study. Most notably, however, is the green and white logo that is on every store, every cup, every bag of Starbucks brand coffee found in the isles of every grocery store.

But with the backlash against big companies like Starbucks taking over the simple things in life, Starbucks needed to make a change. Coffee and Corporate are words that most people do not like hear in the same sentence. The issue with Starbucks was never their quality of product. Even people that hate Starbucks, enjoy their coffee if they do not know that it is from Starbucks.

To change their corporate identity, the New York Times is reporting that Starbucks has opened stores that sell beer and wine, alongside their traditional coffee and tea. There is no Starbucks sign above the door. There is no Starbucks logo on any of the products. The shop names are not even Starbucks. They are named after whatever street they are on.

Why did they do this?

Starbucks is widely regarded as great coffee and fast coffee, but not cheap coffee. With the downturn in the economy, many people started to shy away from Starbucks as they recognized it as a luxury product. These people have not stopped buying cups of coffee on the way to work, but rather switched to “cheaper” options.

By changing their corporate identity, Starbucks has been able to grab a share of the market, that was out of reach until recently. Starbucks simultaneously has become luxury coffee and its cheaper alternative.

This change easily marks one of the biggest changes in corporate identity in recent history. More importantly one of the most successful. Next time you go down to “12th Street Coffee” to grab your daily Starbucks coffee alternative, you may not be grabbing an alternative at all.

Can you think of a better shift in corporate identity in the last 10 years?

Photo Source: Inlander

As whole, e-commerce sales have been considered to have been surprisingly good throughout the recession. The steep decline that traditional brick and mortar stores experienced has not moved into the virtual world. The biggest reason for this is that e-commerce businesses have been able to stay on top of the latest trends in internet advertising and make adjustments when needed.

The mindset of the average e-commerce website owner is aggressive, and it has to be in order to survive online. The online environment is competitive, cut-throat, and more intense than any other business environment. The biggest factor to e-commerce success online being able to adapt and infuse current trends and use them as an asset to the e-commerce site.

In 2009, e-commerce sites have seen some big changes that will alter the competitive landscape for years to come. The first is the evolution of internet access. With mobile commerce continuing to rise and smart phones advancing at exponential rates, e-commerce website must have a mobile strategy. There are new phone apps coming out every hour to promote and advance mobile commerce. While the big names (Ebay, Amazon, and Starbucks), are firmly in the lead, there is room for a large increase in competition.

E-commerce sites also saw a growing trend of social media use as a solid advertising strategy. E-commerce sites are continually being updated to allow for customer feedback and social integration using tools like Facebook and Twitter. These formats have been used for customer support, direct advertising, and company updates.

With all of these changes happening at once, e-commerce website have been struggling to keep up, often joining a trend without really knowing how advantageous the move really is. In the online world, optimization is everything. Without a strategy that optimizes time, space, and finances it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a quality e-commerce website.

The Big Problem: DATA, plain and simple.

However, the problem is not a lack of data, but an excess of data. With technology trends and social media trends continuing to evolve and expand, e-commerce sites can quickly become buried in data.

Data is useless if a business does not know what it means and how to use it to optimize their future actions. There is so much focus placed on staying on top to current trends, especially in the social arena, business are not set up to analyze all of data that they gather along the way.

Improved business metrics is critically essential and should be THE focus of companies coming into 2010. The internet will only continue to grow and expand and become integrated into everyday life. If your e-commerce site does not have the ability to digest the immense amount of data streaming in on a daily basis and more importantly, take immediate, and correct, action upon it, then you will quickly get left behind in 2010.

How are you handling your data? Are you overloaded?

While almost every element of your website design is important, every element can be broken down into two important groups.

1.Essential
2.Profitable

Essential properties get a lot of press. The reason behind this is simple. Without these properties, your website will get ignored by most users.

Odds are, you have heard of many if not all of these. Some examples include: simple navigation, fast load time, easy to read text, using complimentary color palates, consistent website design.

While all of these factors are critical to your websites success, none of them directly translate into more money. In order to create additional profits from your website design, follow these simple strategies.

Profitable Website Design Priorities

1.Easy Newsletter Sign up

This profitable website design has two distinct parts and both are required to maximize how profitable your website will become. Newsletters are a great way to keep in contact with potential and previous customers. This allows you to build personal relationships with them as well as direct them back to your website when you are having a sale or have launched a new product or promotion.

However, a newsletter with no sign-ups has no value. The first way to get sign-ups is to make the sign-up form accessible on every page of your website. This way, if they miss it on one page, they will see it on another.

Second, you need to give them a reason to sign up for your newsletter. It may be to get updates about future deals, discounts on current products, or even a free product. It is becoming more and more popular to offer a free report or piece of software in exchange for signing up for your newsletter. It is much easier to make money, long-term, by creating repeat customers through your newsletter than by any other method online.

2. Re-Order and Compare

By making it simple for customers to re-order your product list in multiple ways is a great way to make sure that they find what they need. It doesn’t matter if you have exactly what they want and need if they cannot find it.

By allowing them to re-order your products in different ways, increases the chances that they will find the right product for them. Common ways to allow re-ordering is by price (high/low), user ratings (high/low), etc.

You also directly increase the chance to make a sale by allowing customers to directly compare products.  Everyone loves comparison shopping whether they know it or not.  You can compare prices, quality, name brands etc. A great way to do this, is by adding a comparison feature either in the shopping cart or just before the shopping cart. This allows them to make informed and confident decisions as well as places them either in or next to the shopping cart. By placing items next to the shopping cart, they are more likely to buy.

While there are many things that are essential to a quality website design, do not overlook elements are website design that are directly profitable. There are many more ways to modify your website design to directly increase your profit, so keep your eyes out for new ideas.

What do you do to directly increase your website profitability?

How many websites, profiles, videos, blogs, and social media accounts have you set up to create an effective and trustworthy brand for your online followers and potential customers?

All of this hard work can be wiped away in a matter of hours with the speed that information is being shared online. Any person that complains loud enough online will get someone else to agree with them; and that person will get someone to listen to them, and so it continues.

How long did it take you to build your companies online brand?

Most companies have focused on creating thorough and effective contingency plans for this kind of situation. With everyone online and the ability to say anything they want about whoever they want, this type of problem is almost inevitable. While a contingency plan is necessary, it has caused most companies to lose focus on what is really important.

PREVENTION!

In this case, defense is the best offense. By utilizing an effective prevention plan, 9 out of 10 of these situations can be avoided.

Here are 2 tips to ensure that ensure a comprehensive prevention strategy by creating an environment where people inherently trust your brand and not the random person lashing out against your company.

1. Own Your Property

Make sure that you take control of all online property that can relate directly to your business. This includes user names for social media and pertinent forums such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, WordPress and Blogger domains, and related self-hosted domains such as misspellings and additional domain extensions such as .net and .org.

When you own all of the related property, other people cannot take control of it and use it in ways that would make your company less credible. The most famous historic example of this is whitehouse.gov and its pornographic counterpart whitehouse.com. Even if you ever intend to use these resources, it is an excellent defensive move to ensure that no one else can use them either.

2. Create a Community

It is critical that you are tied to other businesses and influential bloggers online. By having your ad on their website, allowing them to post articles on your website or by posting articles on their websites, or simple by having a link from your website to theirs and one from theirs to yours. You can also have multiple people or websites connect to your social profiles such as LinkedIn or Facebook.

By creating a support community around your business, they will inherently step up and protect your reputation because their image is tied to yours and may be in a position to squash any negative comments before they become viral. However, you will need to align yourself with companies that you stand behind because you may be put in a situation where your company will need to protect them.

These are two simple, yet effective, ways to play defense and protect your companies brand and image.

What preventative efforts have you made to protect your brand and online image?

In today’s economic climate, your business needs to do more than just wheel out the same old tired marketing strategy year after year. The popularity of online publishing tools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr – have created a unprecedented media opportunity for businesses to promote brand awareness by becoming an information authority on topics that are relevant to your industry.

Benefits include creating a sizable following that can help provide quality feedback on products or services. According to research performed by Forrester Research, 34% of retailers say social marketing has helped increase sales. The conversation is happening. The question is are you going to join? Here are a few tips to help make the transition into social marketing easier:

Question
Take the time to learn about the most popular publishing tools and the audience they reach. This can be a time consuming process but should not be overlooked. Consider hiring a professional to manage the process for you if time is an issue. I guarantee you will yield a higher rate of engagement that can be tracked properly for ROI purposes. Understanding the feature-set of each social utility will enable your business to engage in the conversation more effectively. We suggest only trying two to three publishing tools in the beginning so you have time to familiarize yourself with each before adding a new one.

Learn
Once you understand the nature and context of the blog, Twitter feed, video or
online discussion where relevant topics are being discussed, think about how you want to respond or
engage in the conversation. Utilize the search features included in each social marketing network to learn about what is being said about your brand. Learn from the conversations and prepare a strategy that enables you to guide it in the right direction.

Decide
Often times businesses utilize social media publishing tools independently from each other. Resulting in off-topic conversations that are challenging to track and convert in sales. Your companies goal should be to harness all of the communication channels collectively to serve the overall marketing strategy of your organization. For example, use software such as Seesmic to help manage multiple networks at the same time.

Prepare
Most online publishing tools include features that enable users to customize the look and feel of their accounts/profiles. Prepare yourself by researching the guidelines of each network before creating a new account. This way you’ll be able to engage in conversation immediately without sacrificing the power of your identity. Create graphics that compliment your brand and provide contact information on each that can be measured by your analytics software.

Act
Craft your responses to ongoing conversations by being transparent, respectful, clear and concise. Keep in mind that most of these social network utilities are indexed by search engines. Thus, stay on message and craft your messages clearly so they can possibly be used to help others in the future. It can sometimes be tempting to become defensive when someone attacks your brand/services. How you respond to the situation can sometimes turn a bad situation into a positive experience.

Social Media such as Blogs, Micro-blogs, Wikis, and Social Networks are not only helping many people communicate and connect, but are also powerful tools for business as well. They can be used to promote your products and services, engage customers in meaningful conversations, network and develop new relationships, or simply to distribute information about your business online.


Recently, the media has been awash with reports about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but many of you may be unclear about the concept, or unsure of its relevance to your business activities. In order to understand how to use it effectively in your business you must first understand what social media means:

Social Media is, at its most basic sense, a shift in how people discover, read, and share news and information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, tranforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many.)
Source: Brian Solis

Marketing Plan Integration

Position social media as a component of your overall marketing plan. Similar to print marketing, the ROI of a Social Media campaign can be challenging to measure by itself. As a result, Social Media should be one medium you’re using among many in your communication with your audience and customers. Proper integration with other forms of marketing will bolster their effectiveness and enable you to sell it up the chain of command in your corporate environment.

Sales & Promotion

The ideas is to harness tools such as twitter and blogs to assist you in sales conversions. Please note that alone they probably won’t turn into a conversion. However, they’ll help you get the eyeballs looking at your products where you know your website can close the deal. The great thing about twitter is that you have the ability to communicate directly with your potential audience. It essentially becomes a unique and innovative tool they can use to spread the word. As long as you’re providing useful content for your audience, they’ll appreciate your effort and most likely visit again.

Example:
I like talking about the Zicam example. Zicam would use twitter searches for people complaining of suffering flu like symptoms. They would then use Twitter to send a direct message to the user with a creative message. Often times the message would include a link to it’s product (sorry your feeling down…here’s a coupon for Zicam). Think about ways you can use this formula for your business.

Reputation Management

Many clients find success in using blogging and twitter as a method for gathering customer feedback. Social media is supposed to be a conversation, correct? Well, treat it as such and allow your audience to participate in the future of your products. In addition, your audience will also use services like twitter to voice their experiences with your product. The way you respond to these users will show others that you care about your services/product.

Example:
I was speaking with a fellow Fishers Arts Council member the other day, Lisa Sirkin, about how she tweeted a bad experience with an email marketing product. The software maker responded to her within minutes and has been working with her since to resolve a software complication. Lisa explained to me that while frustrated with the product she was really impressed that the company went the extra step to make her experience right.

Join a group of web designers and developers, and you’ll hear the word “interactive” thrown around a few times. The term is used liberally in these circles, but from a business standpoint, it’s a fairly foreign concept. When is a site interactive, and what do you call a site that isn’t? More importantly, what does interactivity really mean for business?

Let’s start by defining the term. Interactive basically means that something is reciprocally active; that is, both parties can put their two cents into the mix. A phone line is interactive because people can talk on both ends. Likewise, a site is interactive when viewers can speak up and influence the way your site behaves. Games, forms, and shopping carts are all forms of web interactivity.

Interactivity and customer needs

If we go by the definition above, then 90% of active websites are interactive. But success lies not just on meeting that one standard. You can pay a fortune for a swanky Flash site, but if you don’t address customer needs, you can end up off the Web and/or out of business.

To do its job, an interactive site should address at least two important elements: information retrieval and social interaction. Customers go online first to get informed, and second to interact with others. Of course, there are countless other customer needs and we can spend all day discussing them, but when you’ve got these two covered, the rest can be addressed along the way.

Giving information

Providing information is a given for most web businesses. But presenting the info is where it gets tricky. Hyperlinks alone won’t get your readers where you want them; you have to direct them to the right pages with context clues and navigational design. Today’s websites use a menu-driven system where people are intuitively steered along a path, which eventually ends on the sales page.

Communication is another thorny patch in this area. Maybe you don’t have the staff to answer individual questions, or maybe you’re just strapped for time. But that’s no reason to give out canned responses. Make your information personal; when you receive a question, take five minutes to type out a reply instead of lifting it from your company manual. By personally addressing customers, you show them that you’re committed to helping out.

The human factor

Some years ago, come big fashion houses decided to strip down their site to a splash page—no links, no words, just one static image. In other words, they stopped being interactive. A bold move, to be sure, but not necessarily a smart one. Instead of the mysterious, alluring effect they were going for, what it did was alienate customers. It also drove home the fact that they were a money-making enterprise, rather than a human-run business.

Give your site a human side by keeping things light, casual and open. Encourage conversation by adding forums, chat rooms, and other interactive features. Keep your style friendly instead of formal. It’s these elements that anchored such big businesses as Yahoo! and AOL: by presenting themselves as fun and approachable, they drew in a large customer base and really took off.