As most of you will know I blog on another blog (SSM Marketing) and just recently have added a pop up email subscription box. The box will only display once to everyone that goes to that website and it incentives them to subscribe by offering a free gift.

Now since we have put that pop up live our email sign up rate has increased by 37% which is awesome, but the thing I was to ask you is what do you think of Email Subscription Pop Ups? Now if your unsure what this is got to ssmmarketing.tv and make sure that you have your cookies cleared and you will see what I’m talking about.

Personally before I saw the results I hated the Email Subscription Pop Ups but now that I have seen the return that they are providing to our business my mind certainly has changed.. What are your thoughts?

Last night I was searching around on Twitter and found someone that was talking about SEO and how they had just hit number 1 in google for a keyword that has 45.1Million competitors which is a fair bit so it was quite a good effort.

But me being me decided to bring up Market Samurai to do a keyword search to see how many weekly searches were coming up for that particular keyword. I found that it was only getting 7 search a week, and only 3 of those were going to SEO traffic and the other 4 going to PPC traffic. Then I had a look at some other keywords that were getting 80 - 400 searches a month with less then 2 million competitors.

Now personally I would have thought that ranking on a keyword with less competitors and more searches would have been better for a online business then if it was the other way around?

When I put this to the person on twitter the reply I got was “Put it this way… My program is obvously earning me more money than yours is… dont try to dig when your a nobody”..

So again me being me, I went through this persons tweets and found a video that he had put up on youtube that he had been tweeting about and promoting fairly heavily, so i went and viewed the video and it had only 3 views (including the view that I had done) plus he would have more then likely did a test view of the video, so really he only got 1 person watch his video.. And i’m the nobody? C’mon my videos that I create for SSM Marketing are getting between 50 and 500 views, yes not alot but a shit load more then 3..

Marketing Research is often partitioned into two sets of categorical pairs, either by target market:

• Consumer marketing research, and
• Business-to-business (B2B) marketing research

Marketing Research is the gathering, recording and analysis of data about marketing products or services. Marketing Research is more commonly know as Market Research, however, alot of people would draw a distinction in that market research is specific with markets, while marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes.
Marketing Research is normal set in to categorical paires, either by target market:

• Consumer marketing research, and
• Business-to-business (B2B) marketing research

Or, alternatively, by methodological approach:

• Qualitative Marketing Research, and
• Quantitative Marketing Research

Okay so I got bored this arvo and started searching Google for different things and one of the funniest things I came across was that apparently Myspace is dead and yet it is better the facebook. Now when Google suggests that to you how can you disagree?

Interestingly Google also has some rather “nice” thing’s to say about Digg:

Honest! I haven’t been lazy lol..! I haven’t been blogging here alot lately but that is only because I’ve been blogging elsewhere alot! Yup, I’ve got another blog.. If you wanna see it’s at: http://ssmmarketing.tv/ or you can just click: SSM Marketing

I’ve written before about Twitter Losing Respect and my disappointment in how the the Twitter Trends worked and also how some of the “big” users were starting to unfollow HUGE amounts of Twits due to getting “spammy” Direct Messages.

Today I wanted to re-visit that debate and expand on it, because it still pisses me off (excuse the french!). As I write this “Snow Leopard” is one of the top trending topic because Apple have just released their newest OS X which is great (I’m a HUGE Mac fan). Now for someone who isn’t online as much as me (take my Dad for instance) and they wanted to know why Snow Leopard was trending they could have a look and this is what they would find:

Now apart from telling you some idiot is SPAMMING the crap out of twitter by using 3 of the top 5 Twitter trends to get their affiliate link some traffic, what does it tell you? It tells me nothing about what Snow Leopard is. Okay, so you might be saying “Well that’s just one tweet Spamming the trends”. Oh if only that were true! Look at the below 6 tweets and their are only 2 Tweets giving me any idea on why Snow Leopard is trending, 1 is from a RSS feed and the other doesn’t really give me much idea about it anyway!

So your probably now saying “who cares?”, well obviously I care because i’ve now written two posts expressing my annoyance on this topic, but I’ve had conversations with hundreds of others on Twitter who hate this almost as much as I do. Think about it, Twitter is quick becoming the top place to get up-to-date news and information but how are you ment to find out anything when the trends are dominated but either Twitter bots or Spammers trying to get traffic to an affiliate link or worse a virus.

C’mon Twitter clean this crap up!

(Note: this post was written two weeks ago but failed to publish)

I read a lot of the posts that go up on Mashable.com and I remember reading an article a while ago about how all the stats are saying that Teen’s Don’t Tweet and i’d like to think that that is untrue mainly because I’m a teen and have a lot of friends that tweet with me.

After mucking around online for a while tonight I started to realise that either adults really like Nick Jonas or Teen’s actually do tweet, and they tweet in force, you see 3 of the 10 teen trends on Twitter (as I write this post) are about Nick Jonas and the Jonas brothers. Now lets not kid ourselves by thinking that 30 something year old really love the Jonas brother’s enough to be tweeting about them ALL night long especially when one of the trends is #nickjonassideboob which is coming from a TwitPic they did earlier.

Now last week #getwellmiley was trending for 5 or 6 hours because @mileycyrus was complaining about having stomach pains, now I know their are a lot of Mum’s using twitter but again I say are they really tweeting about Miley Cyrus’ sore belly? Of course not, it’s the teen’s that are putting these trends on the board, not the oldies

Just because there aren’t as many teens tweeting it doesn’t mean that Teen’s Don’t Tweet. Ultimately most of them are yet to move on from MySpace and haven’t embraced Twitter. Over in Australia Rove McManus is HUGE and a few months ago he did a big push for twitter which brought a big amount of Australian teen’s to twitter.

There may be few of us (teens), but we know how to tweet!

As you may know with my blog posts I don’t generally write them in any particular order. I just write what I feel. So today’s post is a little bit out of order as I’ve written about Market Research before, but I wanted to give you an idea of What Market Research is.

Okay, so What is Market Research? 

A definition from Wikipedia (you will start to realise the wikipedia is a very powerful learning tool as we go through the stages and processes) on Market Research is:

The systematic gathering, recording and analysis of data about issess related to marketing, products and services. 

Make sense? I wouldn’t think so, so here is my definition of Market Research:

Finding out who you customers are, what they like and don’t like, and how to best reach them.  

Simple right? Market Research isn’t ment to be hard, but if you over analyise your data you could get stuck sitting their scratching your head wanting to give up. But in saying that if you don’t get it right it could be a fairly huge disaster, Market Research plays a very important in Internet Marketing, without it we wouldn’t know if our product or service is going to succeed or not. Market Research allows us to take most out of the risk out of being in a business online. 

Why do Market Research? 

If your still wondering why or if you should be doing Market Research let me sway your mind some more. 

By doing Market Research you are able to find out valuable information on who your potential customers are, what they like, what they don’t like, what they need, how much they are willing to spend for a particular product or service and most importantly the best way to find them and get them to buy your product or service. Do you think if you had all this information it would be hard to develop a product that these people are almost guaranteed to buy it as soon as you market it. 

In a nut shell Market Research is just finding out as much as you can about your potential customers so you can build your product or service to match their needs to make it easier for them to buy.

If you are doing Market Research I suggest that you try using Market Samurai, one of the best Market Research tool available. Click here to have a look at Market Samurai’s features

Earlier this month Firefox celebrated it’s 1 billionth download which is an amazing achievement no matter what’s being downloaded. But Microsoft has come out saying that 1 billion downloads doesn’t seem like a truthful number. They claim that because there is only 1.6billion people online daily the download number can’t be right.

Are Microsoft just trying to hold onto the legacy that they used to have or is their some truth in what they are saying? Personally I think the 1 billion number is quite possible, just because their is only 1.6billion online each day doesn’t mean that Firefox can’t have hit the billion mark, I know that I’ve had 3 computers that i’ve downloaded firefox on and I’m sure that thousands of others have done the same thing as me.

Honestly, I believe that Microsoft are just trying to fuel a fire that isn’t their to be fueled. Why can’t they be happy for Firefox? No one was hurt with a bit of healthy competition were they?

Another short and sweet post today for you all.

I’ve just finished writing my very first ebook which is pretty exciting when you think about it. I’m a school drop out (like alot of people) and yet I can still write a 100 page ebook. Admittedly there will probably be a few spelling mistakes but that’s what’s mum’s are for right? Nobody’s a better editor then your mum

For those that are wanting to know what the ebook is, it’s a tutorial on how to monetize Twitter using some strategies that I’ve been using for the past 4 months. If you want a copy (it will be free for a short time) let me know and I’ll tell you how you can get your hands on it.