]]> As Giants and Patriots get ready for Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis this weekend, so do 100 million viewers in US alone. Many of them will show up not for the biggest single game in US sports, but another thing it represents – the advertising industry day of the year.

While Super Bowl clearly caters to the masses, are there similar events you can use to reach your specific target audiences? What is the Super Bowl of your niche market and how do you prepare for the game day?

On Super Bowl Sunday the biggest brands from auto, retail, insurance, film, food and beverages industries, with an occasional outsider joining this traditional roster, bring out the big guns – a 30 second slot during the game will cost them 3.5 million USD, so I imagine they would certainly hope to make the most of it.

Why Super Bowl?

It is a single day when big brands can reach tens of millions of viewers at once and drive them online to socialize and create a week- or month-long buzz by sharing and commenting on new creative accomplishments they were presented with.

And since Super Bowl is a family event, there will be many people watching the game who don’t really care who takes home the Lombardi trophy, and most certainly don’t know there’s even a left guard of Croatian descent playing for the NY Giants. They will gather to spend some quality family time together, and some will be there for the commercials alone.

For these viewers it will matter more to see if Hyundai creative team beats Kia than how many times Tom Brady gets sacked by the Giants’ defensive line.

This incredible audience reach plays a major role in brand awareness potential of the event, and is the sole reason why the biggest brands come back year after year.

It has even gone so far that it has become a must for certain brands to appear – not showing up on the ad roster could be perceived as the sign of a weakening brand – just ask Pepsi how many Super Bowls have they decided to skip recently.

So, what if you had this kind of opportunity for your business – to reach out to many members of your target audience at once and amaze them? Oh, wait – you probably do…

What is your niche market Super Bowl event and how do you prepare for it?

Brands that appear in Super Bowl ads mostly prepare stories that relate to the masses, and have huge budgets to work with.

However, every industry and each niche market you’re doing business in inevitably has a “Super Bowl” event of its own, it’s only a matter of recognizing it, scaling it and preparing for it adequately.

This can be a specific trade show, an awards ceremony, an arts festival – you name it – it’s only important that you define it as a time and place where you can reach your most precious audience members. And the beauty of it is that telling your story to your target audience won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Once you have that figured out – it’s your turn to prepare a game plan and rise to the occasion.

Of course, brand awareness isn’t something that can happen in a single day, and there’s very little you can do if you don’t have a great product or service to begin with, but let’s imagine you are really good at whatever you do on a daily basis.

In that case, a Super Bowl event for your niche market is where you get the chance to be at the top of your game in front of those that matter most to your business.

Your approach can be to prepare any number of things:

• a customer-engaging campaign leading up to the main event
• a fun, emotional or educational “hope-to-go-viral” video
• a creative booth team with a stunning visual presentation of your product
• a special once-in-a-lifetime offer to your customers
• a fundraiser for an important cause
• an unexpected celebrity endorsement

I’m sure you have more than enough good ideas on how to get your message across and raise awareness, but you should definitely strive to make an impact on your own Super Bowl – after all, it doesn’t come around that often.

I believe this goes without saying, but just in case – any action you decide to take should be highly leveraged by a wide array of social media channels at your disposal.

If you manage to shine when the stakes are high, your audience will start expecting your presence on such events, and that will be a sure sign of their good will and appreciation towards your hard work – once you achieve that, that’s where the fun actually starts as you’ve only just begun.

Imagine a Super Bowl without a commercial for Bud Light or Pepsi, or a Comic Con without a Marvel booth.

Better yet – imagine a Black Friday with everyone at Best Buy taking a day off or a Cyber Monday with Amazon offering no special deals.

You should aim to become someone without whom your Super Bowl just doesn’t feel the same.

Now, what are the Super Bowl events in your niche markets? Find them, prepare for them and make sure you’re at the top of your game when it matters most.

Magento Super Bowl

We as Magento developers have one such event coming up shortly – Imagine eCommerce Conference in Vegas (April 23-25) – a showcase of who’s who in Magento and X.commerce.

The organizers aren’t even trying to hide that with this event they are actually looking to become “the Super Bowl of eCommerce” as that’s the tagline they go by – so, there you go – if your business is evolving around Magento – that’s where you should be.

Can this conference live up to its expectations? We certainly hope so, and you’ll get the chance to meet some Inchooers there in April – Viva Las Vegas!

]]> I was reading a print magazine (yea I know, so nineties of me) called Plan B (which is a beautiful Croatian magazine I would classify as “made by geeks for geeks”) and found a really cool and creative ad in it. So I decided to make a video and share it with you. The ad was for Stozer, a creative agency.

P.S.
Remember: Not subscribing to our YouTube channel causes death of cute puppies.

]]> There is actually no such thing as free website promotion unless you are really lucky. You always have to invest at least some time and effort, and as we all know time equals money which means no promotion is actually free.

However, if you are looking into ways to promote your website online while not spending any money, here are some ways you can do it. Most of these are generally well known but you might find something new and useful.

1. Start a blog. If you already don’t have a blog you have no idea what you’ve been missing. As we all know, content is king and having an ability to deliver fresh, engaging, and interesting content to potential visitors is crucial for any organic SEO success.
2. Be guest author on specialized blog or eZine. You can’t just wait to be invited to write for someone. You should contact respected blogs or web magazines in your industry and ask them if you can be a guest author. In most cases they will allow you to link back to your website and thus for you will gain free promotion. Being a guest author in respected media in your industry is also very good for raising the brand awareness of both you, your company and your services or products. Thanks to Dan in comments, we know about a website that enables you to easily find blogs where you can guest post or find guest authors for your own blog.
3. Get guest authors for your blog. By getting other people to write for you you will save time of writing an article of your own and you will be able to spend that time on promoting your website. In most cases guest author will also promote the article on his own, giving you free promotion. To find guest authors you can search for relevant bloggers and contact them or if you already are established website with community of its own, you can ask your community to participate in blog posting.
4. Comment on other blogs. Most of the blogs will allow for you to make your name on the comment appear as a link to your website/blog. By commenting on relevant blogs you will in most cases bring targeted traffic to your website and raise awareness of your existence to the owner of the blog. If you are investing lots of time and effort into creating valuable content in your comments, the blogger migth decide to award you for the effort and link to you via blogroll. Some of these blogs are “do follow” blogs and commenting on them will provide you with SEO benefit to.
5. Link to relevant content in your articles / blog posts. By linking to other relevant sources you show your give additional value to your content for the readers. Most of the websites track their visit statistics and referral sources and this way you will also raise awareness of your existence in the eyes of your niche. Some of them might be so nice to link back to you in some cases while some websites have automated systems of showing track backs to their articles.
6. Ask bloggers for your product or service reviews. Most of the bloggers are actually looking for something to write about. If your product or service is relevant to the blog’s content, the blogger might agree to test it and write a review of it for free. There is nothing for you to lose, you only need to ask nicely. Send an email to as many relevant bloggers as you can find and ask them to write about you. Eventually, you will get lucky.
7. Create a Facebook page and/or group. Facebook is one of the best social networks out there that you can use in order to bring some targeted traffic to your website. You should strive to create viral marketing effect when dealing with social networks such as facebook. Groups that encourage users to buy your service and / or product will not be very effective. You have to be clever and think of ways to lure people that might be of interest into your products and / or services into your group without being clearly obvious that purpose of the group is to direct traffic to your website and make people buy from you.
8. Create a Facebook application. Facebook applications tend to create even bigger viral effect then facebook groups or pages, especially if you play the cards right. Make something cool and fun that people will love to share and make sure to have a plan on how will you benefit from the application.
9. Use Twitter. Twitter is undeniably the next big thing in social media burning the web with over two million users right now! The ability to promote your product via twitter almost effortlessly should not be ignored. It’s really easy to gain followers on twitter and once you have a nice number of followers it’s as good as an RSS feed. You should read some useful tips on how to use twitter in marketing purposes and how to gain twitter followers.
10. Use LinkedIn. While Facebook and Twitter both have huge user base and potential to bring millions of visitors at your website’s doorstep, LinkedIn can sometimes prove to be much more ROI effective. LinkedIn is a network full of highly educated professionals from different industries and in some industries it will send much more targeted audience then other social networks.
11. Create a LinkedIn group. And by creating a group I don’t mean create a group about your company. Try going much broader and create a group that concentrates on your entire industry. Invest some time and effort to bring people into your group and once you built yourself a nice community you might be lucky enough and your group starts growing on its own. If you succeed you will have an army of your industries professionals at your disposal. You will have ability to send emails to entire group and to make any discussion featured and thus for control where the traffic of your group will be sent.
12. Be involved in LinkedIn discussions. The discussions on linked in (group discussions and questions and answers) tend to bring really nice and targeted traffic if you place a relevant link to your blog post or article in it. Try not to look spammy and only link to your articles when they solve the problem someone asked in discussion.
13. Create YouTube channel and post cool videos. YouTube is currently the 2nd largest search engine in the world! Imagine how much traffic you could pull from there especially considering the fact that in most industries competition on YouTube is pretty low compared to the big search engines. You should try not to put on commercials on YouTube (unless they are extremely funny) but instead put something interesting that might go viral. Be sure to always include a link to your website or the relevant article or subpage to the video on your website into the sidebar.
14. Create accounts on other video websites (YouTube clones). There are really lots of similar websites that don’t actually have as much traffic as YouTube does but they also have much less competition. If you already made a video for YouTube it’s not very time consuming to also upload it to other video websites and it’s really worth of effort.
15. Publish press releases. This is not as effective as it use to be but it’s still worth the effort. There are quiet a number of websites that allow you to submit your press release for free. Just Google it and you’ll find more then enough to fill your appetite.
16. Post a Wikipedia article about your company / website / product. Wikipedia tends to rank really well on Google and appears to be really good source of targeted traffic. You’ll have to invest some time and effort into creating the wiki entry as you don’t want your entry to be disapproved (deleted as soon as editor realizes you are just trying to promote yourself). If this is your first time submitting something to wikipedia, you should spend some time researching the similar wiki entries and reading the guidelines.
17. Exchange links. Use search engines to find relevant websites to your industry and contact them in order to try to establish a link exchange. In most cases both websites will benefit from such a exchange as long as you are exchanging links with websites relevant to yours. Avoid exchanging links with spammy and scammy sites.
18. Exchange banners. In some cases you will find banner exchange more efficient then link exchange. The same rules apply here as in link exchange case. Try avoiding the big banner exchange networks and rather concentrate on setting up exchange deals on your own with websites you actually wont to exchange banners with.
19. Submit your website to web directories. There are really lots of web directories that will allow you to list your website on them for free. Try concentrating on biggest ones such as DMOZ and also on really targeted ones for your website’s niche.
20. Submit your website to CSS / design galleries. If you have a nice looking website design, it’s a shame not to share it with the world. Some of these galleries are really popular and could bring nice traffic. There are also specialized galleries for different type of website such as Magentique (Magentique is showcase of web stores made with Magento ecommerce platform).
21. Use Digg. Recent stats show that digg’s traffic is declining, however, it still remains one of the most valuable sources of free and targeted traffic you can find online. It’s not enough just to submit the article to Digg, it won’t hit the front page by some magical IT voodoo dance. You have to build yourself a network of friends on Digg which requires a lot of time and effort.
22. Use social bookmarks. You should use social bookmark services and be active part of community. The most popular ones are also free to use and only thing you invest is your time and effort. You should try with StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. Also using less popular social networks might bring you some traffic easier as competition is lower.
23. Be active member of your niche’s forum communities. Most forums will allow you to put a link to your website in your forum signature. Some of them will even allow multiple links in signature which means you can also build some deep links easily. In some cases you will be able to mention some of your blog posts or articles in forum discussions when they actually solve the problem asked in discussion. This will bring highly targeted free traffic to your website.

]]> After we launched TeraFlex Suspensions website few months ago, we created a new similar website for Teraflex PLUS. Although the name is similar, this is not the same company. The primary goal of this site is to help Jeep owners to upgrade their pets with parts and accessories for any type of adventure. The secondary goal is to create a Jeep enthusiast community in Utah, USA and surroundings. The site is powered by WordPress and Magento combination.

Magento is a superb Shopping Cart, but it lacks some of the CMS features. WordPress is a superb CMS, but it fails to provide the needs for the eCommerce goals. The combination of these can create a very powerful website. We present you  TeraFlex PLUS : Jeep Adventure Outfitters
http://www.teraflexplus.com/

Magento part of the site can be viewed if you click at Shop by Vehicle or Shop by Brand tabs from the main menu, but you will notice that some blocks seamlessly integrate between two solutions.

We developed this site as the Surgeworks team. The design was created by one of out top designers, Rafael Torales. We hope you enjoy it and feel free to post your comments.

]]> Creating YouTube videos can be a valuable online marketing strategy and many marketers around the world are already using it for viral campaigns. it is a well-know known fact that YouTube is the largest video-serving website on the planet, but no one expected that YouTube would become such a big player in the search industry.

ComScore reports that YouTube now generates 25% of all Google searches making it the 2nd largest search engine. A few years ago, when YouTube first started the video revolution on the Web, its power as a search engine was not anticipated. YouTube is now generating more searches then Yahoo!, the previous second most popular search engine.

This ComScore data also indicates that search engine industry is going through a surprising big change: that the battle for search industry domination is far from over. Other major search engines will have to adapt the way they serve their search results as the world is slowly adopting to new age of the Internet–and age dominated not by text and pictures but with videos. With time, video content will become more important than text and pictures and marketing campaigns will have to adopt to the technological advancement if they are to succeed.

Not many marketers realize this yet. As a result, video marketing is far less competitive than other forms of marketing. Some of the early adopters of viral video marketing via YouTube have made a significant results with minimal investments.

YouTube is currently dominated by small budget video producers, often individuals. People like Philip DeFranco, Michael Buckley, Lisa Nova, Kev Jumba, Fred and similar are investing almost no money in to their video production while earning (most of them) over $ 100k per month from their YouTube videos. Soon this will change as marketers around the world start accepting this new trend in marketing. Some change is already visible, as Pepsi launched their “PopTub” YouTube channel where they are trying to indirectly promote themselves. They gave the show its own identity and only attached a small Pepsi logo inside the videos. This makes Pepsi one of the early adopters of this new age in Internet advertising.

]]> Most of the researches show that online advertisement, despite economic recession, will continue to grow. According to IAB’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report, first half of ’08 was up by 15.2% compared to the same period in 2007. According to the same report, most of the revenue of online advertisement (44%) is generated by search engine advertisement followed by display adds (banners, rich media, digital video, sponsorship) which generated 33%. The last place is reserved (as usual) for e-mail (2%).

Why do people continue to expend their budgets for online advertising?

It’s all about control. Compared to the advertising in traditional media, online marketing offers more control over your budgets. When advertising online you can see exactly how much costumers has any of your adds broth to you and thus for you can cut your resources on campaigns that produce low conversions.

Also online advertising is in many cases much cheaper then advertising in traditional media witch means you can advertise more cost effectively. If you invest the same amount of money in to traditional media advertising and online advertising you will gain much more money from online advertising.

However, if you are thinking about massive amounts of money and branding an huge international corporation you will still need to rely on traditional media.

According to a June McKinsey & Co. survey, 91% of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide are using online advertising. Due to economic recession 55% of them are going to cut traditional media advertising budgets precisely in order to increase budgets for online marketing.