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Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Jeff Diskin, Senior Vice President of Brand Performance for Hilton Hotels.  In his position, Diskin is responsible for providing strategic brand direction for the Hilton full service brand, targeting market share growth, meeting revenue targets, overall brand positioning, brand marketing, and establishing and maintaining brand standards. Prior to his appointment as Senior Vice President, Diskin served as President, Chief Operating Officer – Hilton HHonors Worldwide, and was responsible for the worldwide marketing and operations of the award-winning Hilton HHonors hotel guest loyalty program. He joined Hilton Hotels Corporation in 1989 as Manager of Business Programs, and later was promoted to Director of Business Programs for the company. Prior to joining Hilton, Diskin held a variety of account service, customer service, and creative management positions at Marketing Performance & Innovation (MPI), a subsidiary of United Airlines.

For entertaining advice join hosts, Ray Schilens and Brad Forsythe, for a lively and informative two-hour discussion.

When you start out a home based business it's a common mistake to start off advertising your website. If you have a website with lots of things for sale on it you'll probably just end up confusing your potential customer. They may or may not be able to determine what it is that's for sale. Here are a few reasons why it's better to advertise a Splash Page/Squeeze Page vs. a Website.

1. If you're using Google Adwords to drive people to your site then you'll want to get sales for your advertising dollar. If you're paying for people to come to your website and they are confused about what it is that's for sale, chances are that they will click on through. If a splash/squeeze page is used then you can capture names, email addresses and a whole lot more useful information. By using the splash page/squeeze page you will at least get some information in which you can use for a sale down the road. Having a newsletter sign up on the splash page/squeeze Page will accomplish this.

2. If your using Traffic Exchanges for your advertising then you'll want to make sure that your surfing is all for not. Using a Splash/Squeeze Page to capture leads for your business is what people are doing more and more now. The splash/squeeze Page forces the surfer to put in info by using a method like: "If you join now I'll give you this free.....", or "Join up now before it's too late". By using this method the seller accomplishes two things; they obtain info on the potential customer and give away probably some sort of viral e-book/software etc... This method of advertising is becoming more and more popular. Why? Because it produces results.

3. Joining Ad forums/groups is another yet not as effective way to advertise yet the same thing applies here as well. By using a well thought out ad and using a splash page/squeeze page to obtain information you will accomplish some results. If you just advertise your website, again people will tend not to take your offer up because they get confused about what's for sale.

By using a splash/squeeze page you will obtain very important information on your potential customer which will give you an opportunity to repeatedly give you chances to sell what ever it is you're selling. The whole idea of Internet Marketing is to have buyers for your products and to be able to have repeat customers is what the splash page/squeeze page is all about. If you just advertise your website then you risk the customer clicking through and not ever seeing them again.

About the Author

To find the Best Home Based Business Ideas and Opportunities Visit: http://www.siriusfreehomebiz.com/blog

Co-host Brad Forsythe interviews Susanne Lyons, CMO of Visa USA. Susanne is responsible for all aspects of brand, advertising and marketing services for one of the world’s most successful payments companies, and serves on the company’s Executive Management Committee as Chief Marketing Officer. She has held senior marketing and general management roles at some of the largest financial services companies in America. She also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. In her ten year career at Schwab, she held various marketing and general management positions, including Enterprise President of Retail Client Services, where she was responsible for 4000 customer service employees.

Blogging live today from the American Marketing Association Hot Topic: Ahead of the Curve – High Tech Trends in Marketing

Dave noted an interesting shift when it comes to consumers trying to own the brand, such as in a recent case with Southwest airlines, where Operations gets involved and takes precedence over marketing and the 'designed' brand experience. Customers tried to take control of the brand experience, Southwest's operations team shut the customers down. What's a marketer to do?

The real magic in consumer marketing is in the consideration cycle, specifically in the consideration phase, where word-of-mouth is an HUGE component. The biggest question that you need to answer for the consideration phase is:

Would my customer recommend my company/brand/product/service?

Who likes podcasting? People that have a story to tell!

How many of you have an 'audio recorder' in your home? ....hmm, let me bust out the old cassette recorder.

How many of you have a video recorder? Oh, yeah, got the video/digital/web camera right over here!

Video is powerful. And gaining traction.

Dave talks about education marketing (vs. an infomercial). Infomercial are pitching a product, where as 'education marketing' is all about getting after the things that customers are really interested and helping them be more effective in their complex purchases. It's about really helping customers through it. It's not for everyone. If you're not a category leader, or don't have a product that warrants an educated purchase, then don't bother. This is not for you.

Technorati Tags: AMA Hot Topic

Communicating with your Clients and Prospects
Most people talk about different things with different people. With one friend the conversation might usually focus on relationships, while with another, perhaps talk turns more naturally to movies, books, sports or politics.

You would be unlikely to appeal to your relationship-discussing friend if you were to engage in a monologue about your opinion of our current political leaders. However, if you started in with that same screed to your politics-loving friend, he or she would greet it with a smile that says "let the games begin!"

The same theory applies to communicating with your customers and prospects. "One of the most important things to keep in mind when developing your campaign is relevance, says Yael Penn, Principal of Imagine Creative Marketing. "If you send a message recipients are interested in receiving, you will get their attention and your campaign will be a success. However, if your message is not relevant to their interests or current needs, they will most likely ignore it, or even worse, unsubscribe from your database and you'll never be able to communicate with them again!"

Segmenting your Database
So now you may be thinking, "Not all of the people in my database have the same interests, what to do?" Before you send out a campaign, you should segment your database into several groups of people who share specific traits, whether it be age, gender, hobbies, job function, purchase history, etc. Take whatever information you already have about the people in your database and put it to good use. This exercise will also give you some insight as to the type of information you will want to gather moving forward to better segment your database in the future.

Then, once you're satisfied with the way you've segmented your database you can create a message that will be relevant to each of those groups. "A lot of people make the mistake of creating email campaigns that appeal to themselves, rather than their target audience," says Penn. "The more you know about your customers, the more you can customize the message, look and feel to better speak to the people you are marketing to."

Enhancing your existing database
When you went through the exercise of segmenting your database for the first time, you probably thought about what type of information would be helpful to have to better communicate with your customers and prospects. Make a list of the most important things (e.g., age, gender, magazines subscriptions, job function, industry, geo) and incorporate these questions into all of you opt-in forms and order forms. The fields should be the same across the board. That way, you consistently collect the relevant information from all new customers and prospects. If you are able to create drop down menus for these fields to standardize the way information is fed into your database, even better.

Once you've incorporated everything into your opt-in and purchase forms, you might want to send out a survey to your existing database to gather this missing information. An enticing premium will increase your response rate. But remember, the premium should be enticing to your target audience, not yourself.

In addition, it is very important to keep good records of what people are buying, when and for how much. These sorts of buying patterns, combined with demographic data, will also prove very valuable for future marketing campaigns.

Communicating with your database on a regular basis
This is where the demographic information and the buying records are going to come in handy. Let's say you sell gloves, hats and scarves. Some of your customers have purchased red women's gloves but not the matching red hat and a red scarf. So you might send them an email with information on a special for the matching red hat and red scarf. However, you will probably want to send a different email to the women who purchased the grey gloves and a different email with an offer for men's accessories to the men in your database. "You should customize your permission-based email marketing efforts to appeal to specifics," says Dan Forootan, President of the StreamSend Email Marketing Service. "By doing this you can greatly increase both your sales and revenue."

"Its important to communicate with your customers and prospects on a regular basis," adds Penn. "but you need to have a good reason for communicating with them, one that brings value in some way. If you're opt-out rate is high, it's a good indication that its time to rethink your messaging as well a how frequently you are communicating with your database.

Track your campaigns
Tracking the results of your campaigns will enable you to determine what's working and what's not. One easy way to do this is to incorporate a field in all your forms called "offer code". Assign a specific code to each email campaign you send out and be sure to give people an incentive to use the offer code when responding.

After each campaign expires you should analyze the results, including how many people you sent the email to, how many emails were delivered, how many people clicked through and how many people opted-out (most email marketing systems will give you these stats). In addition, if you look at the number of people who responded using the campaign offer code, you will be able to calculate the campaign response rate.

Last but not least!
As you are gathering more and more information about your customers, you can use this information to "paint a picture" of your "ideal customer". These are the people who bring you the most profits and you definitely want more customers like these!

Neil Anuskiewicz is the Marketing Manager of EZ Publishing. In addition to developing custom web applications, EZ PUblishing is the creator of the StreamSend Email Marketing permission-based service.

It seems everyone is jumping into the "traffic domain name" game - either purchasing them for their own use or purchasing traffic from others who own these domains. For those that don't know, a traffic domain is one that has either expired and still receiving traffic, or one that is being typed into the browser url location (type-in traffic) by users looking for a particular website. These are hot little properties but often abused as some register typos of an existing popular domain - such as Google for example. Yes, Virginia, there is a lot of traffic in those typos.

I own a number of expired and type-in traffic domains and have overall had good results. The worst one gets about 10-15 visitors a day but manages to earn anywhere from $5-$20 in revenue through a pay-per-lead program I use. Combined, all my traffic domains pump out a nice chunk of change without me even having to host them, look at them or even think about them.

On the other side of expired domain and type-in traffic is services which allow you to purchase traffic from domain names which they control and manage. Now you would think this sounds pretty good after what I reported about my own traffic domains, but the sad truth is that the majority of these services are complete scams.

Oh yes, they'll deliver the "targeted" 5,000 or 10,000 "hits" you purchased, but the reality is that the actual traffic from their domains either doesn't exist at all (generated by software to create an illusion of unique visitors) or comes from sources like auto-surf sites. And it's not like you can really monitor and evaluate this traffic to know if it's real or not, and you certainly have no way of knowing if it's targeted or just junk hits. You're basically putting all your trust in the site offering the service and since none offer any guarantee that the traffic will bring you sales, they're off the hook.

Look at it this way - let's say a service is offering 100,000 premium targeted visitors for the very low price of just $49.95. Think about it. If you had 100,000 targeted real visitors at your disposable, would you sell them off for essentially pocket change? Of course not. If you were selling a product for $29.95 and only 1% of those 100,000 visitors made a purchase - then that would be 1000 sales totalling $29,950. Can you really believe that they would let that amount of money slip through their fingers just so that they can do you a favour?

Do yourself a favour - If you're thinking of purchasing traffic from one of these services, keep your money to invest in more reliable and proven options or learn about finding and registering expired domains (an article on this topic coming soon) and register them for yourself.

About the Author

Carole Nickerson has been a web developer and internet marketer since 1998. Visit http://www.thenetter.com for more free articles, tips and software.

Web services are still really big at Microsoft. I can't wait for the public releases of Indigo to make this all much easier to do. On the MSDN and SDK teams there has been a lot of talk about exposing web services, adopting RSS as a standard syndication mechanism, etc.  I distinctly remember in the V1 .NET Framework when Jeff Richter worked with Jim Gray to create the TerraServer web services.  This is really a great use of a simple API backed by a huge system that provides real value that you would never want to try to build yourself. Looks like they are still up at http://terraservice.net/webservices.aspx  The API is pretty much the same as in 2000... that is goodness!!

Google seems to have a pretty straight forward set of APIs via a web service too.  http://www.google.com/apis/  It is great to see them support VB with their samples.  I can't seem to find the MSN Search web services...maybe someone can point me to them.

Where are you successfully using web services?

What are the next big ideas for the services in the consumer space?

Thoughts, rants, and raves welcomed. -Bret

Om Malik posted a great conversation starter entitled Attack of the You Tube Clones, talking about all the video sites that are out there now from the "majors".

AOL just announced Uncut Video, their own version of online video sharing ala You Tube. (Read Mashable’s take on it.) Niall Kennedy says that Yahoo is working on something similar as well, and said so in its analyst day meeting with the financial analysts. Niall says that “The new video site includes videos from around the web and a few from Yahoo! users as well.”

With Google Video and MySpace Video already up and running, I wonder what are the exits for companies like You Tube and other such services? Will someone buy YouTube for its traffic? What are your thoughts on this?

The bits of setting up a video sharing service are fairly simple. Or at least, the Web 2.0 tech platform for running a community website. Of course the Drupal framework can be used as one example (this story about Bryght in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix apparently quotes Roland as saying we'll build a clone of MySpace for $100K), but Ruby on Rails or any other decent web framework can be used to easily build web applications/community sites.

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (requires subscription or can be purchased), you could and you should strive towards integrated sales and marketing departments as the benefits of having both groups work in harmony are plentiful.

Stop marketing departments who spend on advertising without tying the results to sales, stop sales departments that only fulfill demand instead of (co)creating it, and stop managers for whom marketing is nothing more than selling and sales support... p.l.e.a.s.e!

The authors see two main sources of friction between sales and marketing - one economic and one cultural. The economic one has to do with the power distribution between sales and marketing in three of the four P's - promotion, pricing, and product. The cultural one, which may be even more entrenched, has to do with the fact that the two departments attract vastly different types of people - with different educational backgrounds, skill sets, etc.

The article offers a few suggestions to better align the marketing and sales departments:

• Encourage disciplined communication - and that does not mean more communication, which is expensive.
• Create joint assignments and rotate jobs
• Improve sales force feedback

Once you have your sales and marketing departments aligned you can go a step further and work towards achieving an integrated relationship. The authors suggest the following actions to achieve integrated departments:

• Appoint a chief revenue or chief customer officer - a CRO or a CCO
• Define the steps in the marketing and sales funnels
• Split marketing into two groups - strategic and tactical groups
• Set shared revenue targets and reward systems
• Integrate sales and marketing metrics

While some of the advise and terminology may seem a little staid or even passé (after all, is marketing still about the 4 P's? and is the buying process still a funnel?), the advise is solid and practical and should benefit any company with dysfunctional marketing and sales departments.

[Tags: sales marketing hr organizational behavior]

I have been using the MSN Search service in its beta form for several months. To be 100% honest here, I started using it primarily because I work for Microsoft, but I was also very curious to see how the MSN search folks were doing. I know some of the folks working on that team and they are really pushing the Windows platform hard to make this competitive.

It took me a while of switching back and forth between the MSN search beta and Google to prove to myself that I wasn’t wasting time using MSN search.  I wasn’t. Here are my approximate, unscientific results:  about 60% of the time I find what I am looking for on either site on the first page within three searches, about 20% of the time I find it faster on MSN and about 20% of the time I find it faster on Google.  I also use the site tag (site:msdn.microsoft.com) on either search for MSDN specific searches. 

So for now, I am 85% switched to search.msn.com and my theory here is that that they are still just learning how to make search work…so MSN should be better a bit faster rate, right?   I still like the fact that it is easier to type “google” + Ctrl + Enter to get to Google (especially on other peoples machines), but now that the MSN search is the default on the “msn” + Ctrl + Enter… it is a wash.

I use them both a lot and can’t imagine trying to write code without them any more. So I am basically a convert and use http://search.msn.com most of the time.

So, without meaningless rants, what do you think is good and bad for developers about either MSN or Google search?  What can we ask them do to make our lives better? 

I love my RSS reader. I have a gazillion website, blog and news feeds set up in there, and I get the latest information from all of my favorite sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it with you. And RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect that rings when there are new feed entries to read. So wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I also get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to announce the new feed entries.

As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because of my RSS reader I was one of the first to cover adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that will help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was on it first, I popped up in the first five Google search results for this keyword for a while, which drove traffic to this site. So watch your RSS reader.

All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as auto update feature for websites and blogs. The first application was RSS feeds that automagically update your site with articles in your subject area from a free article site. The rationale is that this will give you fresh content that search engines will eat right up. They call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read some of these articles? There's a wide disparity in quality from one to another, and I would never allow articles to be put blindly on my web site without my approval. For crying out loud...you spend hours and hours of time getting your site to a certain level of quality to build a certain level of trust with your visitors, and then you're going to allow some hack to put his content on your site without your approval, just so maybe a search engine will come a few extra times? That's just stupid.

Need more content? Turn off the football game and write some.

Seriously...if you want to use articles as supplemental content, hand pick them. Just like famous Internet marketer Wille Crawford did on his blog when he picked my article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there). I have at least 20 - 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that I'm going to post on the site as soon as a I get a chance. That's the good news - the bad news is I went through 500 or so articles to get those.

Closer to home, affiliate merchants are starting to get into datafeeds, which are sort of like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access to merchant products using text files. The file contains a list of products, services, special offers, coupons or other information that you can display on your site. You then upload that information to your server and use some kind of tool or script to display the different items in that file. There are programs on CJ, LinkShare and Shareasale that have datafeeds.

While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it with the same jaundiced eye as the whole article thing - it all depends on your niche, the level of trust you want to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want to get.

If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate program, you might try a product feed. If you want to put up an occasional coupon or special offer, you can probably do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo jumbo.

We are starting to see products that convert merchant datafeeds to RSS, allowing you to auto-display products from affiiliate programs. Again, if you can maintain relevance across the entire affiliate line, it's a good idea. If not, you're not going to get conversion anyway, so you're wasting your time. Personally I want everything including the advertising, to have relevance to my visitors.

There's always a shortcut - in this case you're shortcutting the time and effort involved in finding relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some sites.

If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some resources:

1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I think they're plugging their own tool.

2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh...they also have a tool.

One last thing - while I was out looking for links and information, this is what someone said about using datafeeds:

Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot and never have to think about the blog again after I spend a few hours setting it up!

How do you think that blog is doing?

About the Author

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com - A resource for Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.

AffiliateBlog is his latest venture, and was started as a resource to help site owners and bloggers get more revenue from their sites.

Tina Valiedi is the Executive of Marketing and Chief Editor of MPStrategies Firm,a company whose breakthrough service unleashes the power of the internet to drive hidden potential clients to your site. For more marketing how to information visit: http://www.mpstrategiesfirm.com

Search engine marketing, internet marketing, google, yahoo.

Online visibility and online traffic are, quite naturally, of paramount importance to everyone and anyone marketing or conducting business online, period.

While RSS will not perform as your key tool to improve online visibility and generate more traffic, its importance for helping you do so cannot be disputed.

It will help you:

• increase your traditional search engine rankings;
• improve your online visibility by making your content available where people are increasingly searching for new content, such as RSS search engines and content aggregation sites;
• drive traffic from other websites covering your topic, by helping you make your content available at these websites more easily.

Deliver Your News to Where It's Searched For: Generate Traffic From RSS Search and Content Aggregation Sites

The fundamental media shift is not only happening between offline and online, but within online itself as well.

Just a few years ago the search engines, the largest portals and news sites, were more or less the central hub of where online users got their online information. They still are today, but are now challenged by the growth of new online search engine and content aggregation website categories.
It's quite simple.

Go to Google, Yahoo! or MSN and do a keyword search. What you get are somewhat the most relevant results for what you're looking for ? but without a timestamp. Search engines provide results based on universal relevancy and not on recentcy.

But what if you're looking for the latest relevant content, instead of just the most relevant content?

Enter the news engines, content aggregation sites and RSS search engines. Instead of providing results by universal relevancy, these sites provide results by actual recentcy, with of course a better or lower level of relevancy.

The point is that these websites are starting to become the central hub of searching for news online and latest content online.

Google and Yahoo! know it too ? their own news engines are among the top of breed.

But what if you don't want to search for specifically the latest news or the latest general content, but just want to search for the latest blog posts pertaining to your topic of interest?

Enter blog search engines, which will only return results from blogs. And Google has one as well, although this one is not on top.

And so on ?

Why this matters to you?

If you want your latest content to be found where people are actually searching for the latest news and other latest content, even video and audio content, you need to start using these new search and aggregation site categories to increase your reach and attract new traffic ? traffic that is interested in what you have to say right now.

And the RSS connection?

Most of these new services, although not all, rely on RSS to receive the latest content just as it becomes available and then offer it to their visitors.

In many cases, RSS is the key tool that will get you indexed and then found and read, being used to get your content from your website to the service, which will then make it available to the world.

And additionally, you can expect to receive extra traffic from RSS directories, used by people who are proactively searching for new RSS feeds to subscribe to.