What had caused the death of banner advertising?

This is according to the marketing experts of the internet. This is based from the fact that banners are expensive. According to studies, the number of people visiting and clicking through them are less and that the success rate is minimal. 

Chances are, people using banners would end up losing more money than the cost they have paid for them. 

The same people who were investing their money on banner business before were the first ones pulling out of this kind of advertising and turning to other sources.

There was once a time when banners were the most important forms of printing for information, educational, and advertising purposes. 

People see them everywhere during that time, big and small. Anywhere one looks, banners are displayed, showcasing different businesses and companies. Banners were put into websites in the internet age. 

These times, with graphic designs and colors that added a certain style into these things. That was before.

What people do not know about is that banner advertising is considered a dead business in the internet nowadays. 

What had caused the death of banner advertising?

Many banners are put in with so many graphics designs in them that people could not anymore understand what the banner is about. 

While incorporating more colors and graphics design made the banner look attractive enough, the essence of what is about gets lost in all these mixtures. 

Although the advertisers’ purpose of getting attention made its mark, the content is lost in the purpose. People get to admire them but after that, they tend to forget what they were admiring about. 

Designs, yes, but what else?

Graphic designs take up more of the space that could have been for the things to exemplify the banner further. Most of the time, the graphics that were used were not essential for what the banner is about. 

It should be kept in mind that the graphic designs and the banner should co-exist and not go over the other. 

People has the tendency to look more on the colors and pictures and forget what they were there for and what was it about. 

Banners should not go over with the graphics to avoid being swallowed by them.

Another reason is the long-winding details and explanations, along with all the graphics. As not all people have the patience to go through the long intervals and additional, it is better to get to the point. 

Banners are not TV commercials that need introductions and interruptions. It is best to give it to them straight on.

Did good-looking banners do more effectively than those not-so-good looking ones? 

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Online Sales Tax Law

Members of the U.S. Senate are joining with big business to impose billions of dollars in sales taxes on people who buy goods over the Internet. This annual ritual to hammer companies who do business online has a fair chance of approval this year as local and state governments make their case that they need more money to spend on government. 

The Marketplace Fairness Act would bind online companies to act as tax collectors for 45 states that collect taxes on sales. That means that many consumers who have enjoyed a tax holiday by shopping online will now be taxed on goods purchased. 

Most state tax laws were passed before the advent of computers, smartphones and online stores. Because states never foresaw the creation of the Internet, online sales allow customers to dodge the sales tax imposed by states on businesses. 

Supporters of the online tax claim that online businesses have an advantage over physical retailers that are required to collect taxes for governments. The shopper can simply buy the same item online and avoid the sales tax. The brick and mortar store then misses out on the sale. That's not fair, advocates of the online tax argue. The National Governors Association is also desperate for the estimated $23 billion in tax revenue that the online tax collection scheme would shovel into state coffers. 

Proponents argue that online sales cross state lines, and they are therefore subject to the Interstate Commerce clause. That means that Congress can wave its magic Commerce Clause wand and decree that online merchants must collect the tax that would be equivalent to what a state would collect. 

Opponents fire back that keeping track of thousands of different sales tax schemes would be an unfair burden on their operations. For example, would chocolate bunnies be taxed as a good or be allowed to escape the sales tax because it's technically food? These kinds of tax conundrums have kept the online sales tax monster caged for decades. 

Congress is trying to overcome these objections by hitting businesses with the tax collection scheme only if their sales exceeded $1 million annually. The small online mom and pop operators would be exempt from collecting the online tax. Congress may also require states to simplify their sales tax collection schemes before entering the online sales tax lottery. Trying to get 50 states to agree on standardized tax sales legislation should only take about 1,000 years. It's also possible that some sharp guy or gal might work up an app that would make figuring out 10,000 different tax schemes a snap. 

Leftist cheerleaders for this tax scheme, including most Democrat governors, are calling opponents cranky, old libertarians who oppose all taxes. Those opponents, including most Republican governors, are characterizing the pro-sales tax forces as big government and big business taxers who want to stick it to the little guy. 

Sales tax cheerleaders are scolding online businesses, telling them to grow up and take their tax medicine. “You are big boys now and e-commerce sales are a major part of the U.S. economy,” proponents say. E-commerce sales now make up 5 percent of the economy with $186 billion in retail sales in 2012. 

The pro-sales tax forces are trying to push through the Internet measure in the U.S. Senate before the anti-tax opponents can muster their base. Senator Harry Reed, majority leader in the Senate, rushed the online tax act onto the Senate floor before hearings could be held in committee. It was only a few days ago that senators were allowed to read what was in the legislation. 

Opponents quickly went on the attack, voicing concerns that online businesses would be burdened with collecting taxes for about 10,000 different local and state taxing authorities. The anti-sales tax forces complained that businesses would be strong-armed into collecting taxes for far-away governments where they had no representation. 

Walmart and other giant retailers, including Amazon, are boosters of the tax because they can easily absorb the financial cost of government-decreed tax collection, while smaller businesses will be hit with another unaffordable government dictate. 

Opponents also argue that this sales tax scheme is an attack on a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision. In Quill v North Dakota, the court ruled that remitting and collecting taxes where they had no presence was an unnecessary burden. The decision set an important legal precedence concerning cross-state taxation. ( addme.com )

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Were you prepared for the update? Was it “Mobilegeddon” for your site?

Impacted By Google’s Mobile-Friendly Update? - On April 21, Google began rolling out its mobile-friendly update, which makes the mobile-friendliness of a site a ranking signal. It has largely become known as “Mobilegeddon” by publications with a flare for the dramatic, as this name was given to it before it even launched or its effects were even felt. 

Were you prepared for the update? Was it “Mobilegeddon” for your site? Have you noticed any change (positive or negative) so far? Let us know in the comments. 

As expected, Searchmetrics has released a list of winners and losers from the update. Given that the update likely hasn’t finished rolling out yet, even Searchmetrics itself cautions that these are only preliminary results.

Following are the lists, which were first posted on Saturday. 

• The preliminary losers here
• The Preliminary winners here
• You can see SearchMetrics’ findings in a PDF here. They’re also updating data as the roll-out continues, so you can see the latest here. 

The effects of “Mobilegeddon” do have the potential to be felt by many sites who haven’t paid attention to Google’s warning. The update was officially announced in February, and was hinted at for months before that. Google has given webmasters time to prepare. 

Small businesses who don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to making their sites mobile-friendly, or even pay attention to the latest happenings in SEO, are likely to be hurt by the update the most. All of that said, this is still just one of over 200 signals Google is taking into account when ranking search results on mobile devices. It’s not everything. It’s also on a URL-by-URL basis, and is supposed to update in near real time, so webmasters can fix pages over time, and potentially increase their rankings without waiting months for Google to recognize these fixes, as they have with some other updates. 

Last week, Lawyer.com, a site which helps people find law firms, announced that it had analyzed the law sites in its database, and found that many of them will likely be affected negatively by Google’s update. 46% of solo firms failed Google's requirements, it said, while larger firms did a little better with a 33% failure rate. 

The reality is that the update shouldn’t affect any particular vertical more than the next. It’s not like Panda where it is specifically looking at the type of content. It’s strictly looking at technical elements that enable the content to be consumed on a mobile device with ease. Even if your content completely sucks, it can pass Google’s mobile-friendly test. It may not help you with other signals, but that’s a different story. 

Last week, Google put its latest round of guidance related to the update. This included an FAQ. The important takeaways from that included: 

• The update does not affect searches on tablets or desktops, and it's a page-level change. Only mobile-friendly pages will be able to get a boost as a direct result of the change.
• Google determines whether or not a page is mobile-friendly every time it's crawled, so webmasters won't have to wait for another update after they fix a page for it to get the advantage of the signal. This also means that if you weren't quite ready for the update today, it shouldn't be that big a deal as long as you can still fix what need's fixing.
• Google is saying now that the roll-out should take "a week or so". You can't determine whether or not you've been impacted on April 22.
• If your pages are designed to work well on mobile devices, but aren't passing Google's mobile-friendly test, it's probably because you're blocking Googlebot for smartphones from crawling resources like JavaScript and CSS. This is the most common reason that happens.
• You can still link to sites that Google doesn't consider mobile-friendly without fear of repercussions.
• "It's not the best experience for mobile visitors to go from a mobile-friendly page to a desktop-only page, but hopefully as more sites become mobile-friendly, this will become less of a problem," says Google's Maile Ohye.
• Mobile-friendliness is assessed the same regardless of whether a site is using responsive design, separate mobile URLs, or dynamic serving.
• It's naive to think you don't need to worry about the signal because you think your audience is desktop-only. More and more people are using mobile devices more as time goes on. Even if they're mostly desktop-only now, that doesn't mean it will stay that way.
• Pages with the old style of object YouTube embeds may register as not mobile-friendly. Make sure pages are using the newer iframe embeds.
• For tap target size, Google suggests a minimum of 7mm width/height for primary targets and a minimum margin of 5mm between secondary ones.

What do you think of Google’s update? Has it made search results better?

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Are you blogging less because of Facebook and Twitter?

"Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter," writes Verne G. Kopytoff. "They are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation." 

This idea that blogs are dying has been around practically as long as either Facebook or Twitter, and it almost always gets dismissed as a ridiculous notion. 

Wordpress founding developer Matt Mullenweg took some issue with the piece: "The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global 'unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,' meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)" 

In fact, in 2010, Wordpress had over 6 million new blogs created in 2010, and pageviews were up by 53%. 

The New York Times itself even has a whole directory of blogs: 

"Blogging has legs — it's been growing now for more than a decade, but it's not a 'new thing' anymore," says Mullenweg. "Underneath the data in the article there's an interesting super-trend that the Times misses: people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online." 

Major web content forces like AOL and Demand Media recognize the power of blogs. AOL is buying them, and Demand recently launched a blog syndication program. 

As is established every time this debate comes up, blogging and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter complement one another. End of story. Without blogs, people would have less interesting content to share on Facebook and Twitter. Without Facebook and Twitter, bloggers would have a harder time getting the readers. 

Kopytoff does make a critical point, however. The lines aren't always crystal clear about what is truly "blogging" and what isn't. Even Twitter use is often called "microblogging". 

"The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr," says Kopytoff. "Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue." 

People blog on Facebook all the time too. They call them "notes". No matter where it's happening, blogging is not going away. You can call it what you want, but people will continue to put their thoughts into words and publish them online. Sometimes, they'll even do it in more than 140 characters. Some people even think Twitter should expand their character limit.

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Email Is Not Like Postal Mail

One of the most popular and potentially effective advertising methods is direct email. If you deliver a well- written message and execute delivery properly you will be rewarded with new leads, sales, and traffic to your Web site. If the message is poorly written or you commit a netiquette faux pas, however, your efforts could end in disaster.

If you are new to Internet marketing, you might equate direct email to direct postal mail. The concepts are very similar; in both you broadcast a standard message to a large number of individuals in hopes of receiving positive responses. To the uninitiated, it is logical to assume you can approach the two in the same way. It seems like the only difference is the means of communication. If you are thinking this way, STOP! STOP! STOP!

Many people perceive unsolicited commercial message (UCE) - spam - differently than junk mail from the postal service. The sender pays for direct mail sent through the postal service. Not so for UCE. Spam on the Internet ties up the recipient's resources by using storage space, slowing down systems, and sometimes crashing equipment. For this reason and others, many abhor spam. Some assertively condemn spammers. If you spam you will undoubtedly be reported to your ISP and email provider. Depending on the circumstances, your accounts could be closed and your Web site may be shut down. Need I say it? This is NOT the result you are looking for from your email marketing program.

Some email advertisers feel that as long as there are unsubscribe instructions in the email or they only send one message it is okay to send unsolicited email. A few use never-passed legislative proposals in their defense. In marketing, perception is far closer to reality than loophole rationalizations. Some recipients are offended whether the unsubscribe phrase is there or not and they are offended even when they receive only one message from you.

Different individuals define spam differently. Some consider all forms of UCE or unsolicited commercial postings spam. This means that if you send advertisements without prior permission from the individuals you will get complaints. In all likelihood you will be reported as a spammer. Because service providers generally have user agreements that are stricter than current U.S. state and federal laws, you are likely to be reprimanded, have your site shut down, and/or be put on a blacklist if you send out UCE.

* Spam/UCE Law

As of this writing there are no U.S. federal laws governing UCE. Some states, however, have laws that regulate UCE. These states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Depending on the state, allowable claims range from $10 per message up to unlimited damages. Most state laws allow opt-out procedures. In other words, companies can *legally* add a recipient's email to a list without his/her knowledge as long as a means of removal is provided. For details by state, go to http://law.spamcon.org/us-laws/index.shtml.

International laws are stricter. Seven countries - Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Norway - have opt-in laws. In order to legally send UCE, you must first have the recipient's permission. Other countries have opt- out directives or pending legislation. Euro CAUCE provide details at http://www.euro.cauce.org/en/countries/index.html.

Worldwide, there is much discussion about UCE and laws are changing quickly. There are several sites you can monitor for details about UCE. These include the SpamCon Foundation (law.spamcon.org), the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE, www.cauce.org), and the spam section of The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Abuse/Spam).

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Tips for Cleaning Up Your Website Presence

A great website is not static; it is a changing, thriving organism. Don't make the mistake of thinking that, once developed, your web copy, web links, and information architecture need not change. To keep your fans engaged, try taking a user centric approach to your web presence, so that you are always thinking of what information you are conveying to the user and whether it meets the user's information needs. 

Setting aside time once or twice a year to evaluate your web presence can be helpful. Think of this like "spring cleaning" for your website. It's time to sweep out the dust and breathe new life into a static site! You may uncover small bugs that affect page performance, lists of resources that you intended to beef up that promise more is coming soon, and outdated images that no longer reflect your business goals or customer needs. 

Begin by searching for your brand, company name, or site URL in your favorite search engine, such as Yahoo, Bing, or Google. When you search Google, preview text appears beneath the site name that often holds keywords and descriptive data about your site. Are the keywords that appear relevant to your business and SEO rich, or would you be better served by changing them? If no keywords appear, adding some to your web page's section can boost your SERPs. If you find you are suddenly--and unintentionally--advertising prescription drugs like Viagra, your page has been hacked. Remove the spam links from the and reset your site password to get clean again. Pay attention to Google Instant, or the phrases that pop up as you type in your business name. For example, if you're a hotel and the name of your hotel plus "bed bugs" comes up in Google Instant, you've got reputation trouble. If you're suffering from a bedbug problem, you've got all kinds of trouble. If you up date keywords, you may want to change keywords in your online marketing?

Also check content and links within your page. Companies may go out of business or change domains, and making sure your links are current is a great way to keep your page looking and feeling up-to-date. You may want to edit resources links once a year to offer new information to fans. Read over your content. Has anything changed? Does the content accurately reflect policies and procedures? If not, revise and repost. 

Lastly, go shopping. Make sure your online shopping cart works well and that your e-commerce store is easy to shop, offers helpful information, and provides a secure shopping experience. This is the most crucial part to have up-to-date; if users can't shop, you lose out.

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