Ask.com is abandoning its effort to compete with Google and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives reports the SF Chronicle. About 40 employees will be laid off as a result.
The company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions - about recipes, hobbies and children’s homework. The decision to cater to married women primarily living in the Southern and Midwestern United States comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.
Ask ran the Internet’s fifth-largest search engine More»

Labels: Internet Marketing, Search

An ISP in Canada is experimenting with adding content to user pages to get their attention and provide them with information. CNET has the particulars on this approach from Rogers, which acknowledged it is experimenting with splicing content onto existing websites.
Although I have not seen this technique used by my ISP Charter Communications, they routinely have what I think is a sneaky practice of pushing out Charter advertising listings during some searches that are formed incorrectly.
Frankly this is an area where Microsoft has not been very aggressive at all, owning as they More»

Labels: Internet Marketing, Microsoft

There’s much that marketers can be doing right now to ensure a smooth and successful holiday marketing campaign, and email is an easy channel to plan ahead for.
Top tips for polishing your holiday email marketing campaign include:
1. Send out emails early to capture those early-bird shoppers.
2. Prepare an auto-responder for those periods when you may be too busy to create new content..
3. Promote your gift cards, which are proving to be a very popular gift option this year.
4. Increase convenience by providing easy web-to-store deliveries or entice users in to their local store.
5. Ramp up relevancy More»

Labels: eCommerce, Internet Marketing, Online Advertising

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting today that internet ad revenues has hit an all time high of $5.2 billion for Q307 and has been consistently setting new records each quarter of 2007. Revenues for Q1 was at $4.9 billion, and $5.1 billion in Q2. The IAB claims that this is attributed to both larger as well as smaller companies recognizing the role of digital marketing as pivotal to their overall marketing strategy.
The more interesting part of this report is their assertion that Web 2.0 promises to provide even more opportunities for marketers to More»

Labels: Advertising, Internet Marketing, marketing 2.0, web 2.0

Traditional Web Marketing needs to evolve, and this post intends to kick start the next generation.
What’s a corporate web site?It’s the domain they use after every advertisement where you can learn more about a company, ya know it, anycompany.com.
But we’re tired of the corporate website and all it’s happy marketing speak, stock photos of smart looking dudes or minority women crowded around the computer raving about your product, the positive press release, the happy customer testimonials, the row of executive portraits, the donations your corporate made to disaster relief, the one-sided More»

Labels: design, Internet Marketing, marketing 2.0, social media, web 2.0, web marketing, web strategy