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Sites To Remember

Maybe not one of the seven wonders, but definitively a Site To Remember

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I know that you habe been interested by creating a website, or by enhancing your existing one.
I have been working 50 years in the computer environment and 15 years in the web environment, and to know it all would be pretentious and untrue. But to learn about it, and to learn more is very satisfying. This is why I am planning to send you regularly some of the learning which I think could benefit you: if you agree with this process, please replying to this email. You can opt-out at anyone time.

Summary: The early Web's explosive growth rate has slowed, but even the mature Web is still expanding and recently crossed the 100 M websites mark.

Netcraft's latest Web survey found 101,435,253 websites in November 2006. Not all of these sites are live: some are "parked" domains, while others are abandoned weblogs that haven't been updated in ages. But even if only half the sites are maintained, there are still more than 100 M sites that people pay to keep running.
Surpassing 100 M is a big milestone, and represents immense growth since the Web's founding 15 years ago.
The chart shows, the Web has experienced three growth stages:

* 1991-1997: Explosive growth, at a rate of 850% per year.
* 1998-2001: Rapid growth, at a rate of 150% per year.
* 2002-2006: Maturing growth, at a rate of 25% per year.
You can find a more comple graph and survey at
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/11/01/november_2006_ web_server_survey.html

Adobe ® Flash ® Player (free to download) is the world's most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching 99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices.

Comparison of Flash versus Windows Media Player, Quick Time, Real One Player

This software is the industry-leading authoring environment for creating engaging interactive experiences. It allows for someone to deliver:
- Sounds/music (like in MySpace),
- Movies/Video (like in YouTube)
- Animation (whether animated object, or smooth transitions between pages)
- Interactivity (allowing the viewer to choose his/her course of actions)

You may or may not have heard of the term "Social Media Networking" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media). Well, if you didn't hear; it will resonate when I tell you that Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace are just the elements of it.
Just as an example the Facebook Growth is pretty amazing.
- Facebook Surpasses 175 Million Users, Continuing to Grow by 600k Users/DayFebruary It grew from 150,000,000 users in January to 175,000,000 users today.
- 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.
- The fastest growing segment in the US: Women over 55, up 175.3% in the last 120 days. Facebook growing faster with women than men in almost every age group.
- The number of people on Facebook grew by over 10% monthly in 52 countries in January. It grew by over 20% monthly in January in 13 countries.
- Facebook’s monthly growth accelerated by at least 25% in 30 countries in January vs. December 2008."

Twitter? Facebook? Squidoo? These sites are soon becoming your new marketing platforms. Are you ready? Do you know how to use them? Are you even aware of the value they hold and the growing number of business professionals that are quickly gaining market presence by using them?

Do you remember when email was laughed at? Why would I email when I can just pick up the phone? Ha! We all DEPEND on email now! The same is happening with social networking sites. "Now you can learn how to unleash the power of social networking from leading experts, authors and speakers. Twitter? Facebook? Squidoo? These sites are soon becoming your new marketing platforms. Are you ready? Do you know how to use them? Are you even aware of the value they hold and the growing number of business professionals that are quickly gaining market presence by using them?

Social media are distinct from industrial media, such as newspapers, television, and film. While social media are relatively inexpensive and accessible tools that enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information, industrial media generally require significant resources to publish information. Examples of industrial media issues include a printing press or a government-granted spectrum license.

"Industrial media" are commonly referred to as "traditional", "broadcast" or "mass" media

A blog (a truncation of the expression web log)[1] is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Until 2009 blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject. More recently "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into societal newstreams. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)
A majority are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers. There are high-readership blogs which do not allow comments, such as Daring Fireball.

Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as edublogs.
On 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence. On 13 October 2012, there were around 77 million Tumblr and 56.6 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide. According to critics and other bloggers, Blogger is the most popular blogging service used today.

Radio: Compared to television, magazines and newspaper, radio does deliver Target Audiences at very, very low costs. You can reach, say, Females aged 25-44 for as little as $8.50 per thousand in a local radio :60 or even $1.99 per thousand on XM/Sirius. The same ladies would cost $30.00 or so per thousand in a TV :30. A full page color ad in TIME, PARENTS, or COSMO could easily cost $85.00 per thousand impressions. Most people listen to the radio for 8 to 12 hours a week. They spend 20 minutes or so thumbing through magazines.

Newspaper Ads: The oldest form of advertising is still an effective way to reach a large number of people. Find out if it's right for you.

Appropriate For Any business

Typical Cost: $200 (for local ads) to $20,000 (for local or national ads), depending on the publication, ad size and your contract with the publication

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/advertising/adsbytype/article83096.html#ixzz0IWRtEQRG&C

Television Advertising Costs - A Primer

How much does a TV advertising campaign cost? Many entrepreneurs assume television is incredibly expensive and don't even consider it. The reality is that it's worth learning more about television advertising costs. Advertising on television may be more economical than you might think.

Sooner or later, every entrepreneur is tempted by the allure of television advertising. Yet most will never seriously explore the possibility of promoting their product in a TV commercial because they assume it is cost-prohibitive. But is that really true? Is television advertising cost-prohibitive for small- to medium-sized business owners? The answer is, well, complicated.

When pricing a television commercial, you need to weigh the costs of two separate things: (1) the cost of producing the commercial, and (2) the cost of airing it.

It has been estimated that the average cost of producing a 30-second national TV commercial is nearly $350,000. But before you panic, understand that like any other form of advertising, a television commercial can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it. Not surprisingly, the cost to produce the commercial goes up as the quality and complexity of the commercial increases.

Small- to medium-sized businesses cannot afford to invest $350,000 in a single commercial. But, decent quality TV commercials can be produced for as little as $1,000 if you know where to look. The best place to start is with freelancers or small production agencies.

Internet Cost Hosting: Free to 200$/month and more (depending on space needed, number of simultaneous readers)

Creation: Free to $20,000 dollars, depending on the complexity, interactivity, design, animation.

Maintenance: $20/month and up (and even more if company has a full staff to maintain)

Major advantage:
- Information always up-to-date,
- Possibility (SEO or Search Engine Optimization) to rank the positioning of the site on Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc).
- Possibility to enhance the ranking by using the "PaypPer-Click" mechanism (More on future email)
- Analysis of the number of readers, the time spent, the page viewed Lowest cost per number of characters/information given compared to all other medias
- This will not become obsolete compared to other medias, because Internet is the major information trend in this century

1- Be sure that every page has a title. The website title appears on the home page and in the title bar of web browsers.The website title does not affect the website address. The website address (known as the URL) regardless of the website title.

Check http://informationr.net/ir/7-3/paper130.html for more.

2- Confirm that your site has keywords and description: The keywords are searched by the search engine, and the description is in the listing results of the search engine, and provide an incentive for the viewer to know more about your "offering" without having to click on the line, and therefore leaving the page where the results are listed.Keyword research is crucial for successful search engine website site optimization, managing pay per click keywords and acheiving top search engine rankings. www.keyworddiscovery.com

3-Website Description and Website Content. Creating the right Website Description for Your Website Contents. Although many people prefer modern Web design in FLASH with lots of JAVA applets and CSS and they might think that the old-fashioned, plain HTML, text based web design is something that belongs to the history, the truth, regarding to the search engine optimization is far more different. For most of the Search Engine Spiders, those pages are not readable. Images are not readable too. Neither are Adobe PDF documents (although there's now some beta version of spiders who can read PDF documents). Most of JAVA applets also are not readable, and indexing of Dynamic ASP, PHP and HTML pages if their contents change very often, could be avoided as well. http://www.optimize.se/search-engine-optimization/basic-seo/website-description-and-website-content.html

I thought of learning this from Microsoft, because of today's importance. Microsoft also thought of this subject so important that with Windows Defender, they are offering a totally free Virus protection (http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/)

Phishing is a type of deception designed to steal your valuable personal data, such as credit card numbers, Windows Live IDs, other account data and passwords, or other information. It is also known as identity theft, and is a type of social engineering.

You might see a phishing scam:

* In e-mail messages, even if they appear to be from a coworker or someone you know.
* On your social networking Web site.
* On a fake Web site that accepts donations for charity.
* On Web sites that spoof your familiar sites but that use slightly different Web addresses, so you won't notice.
* In your instant message program.
* On your cell phone or other mobile device.

Often phishing scams rely on links in e-mail messages, on Web sites, or in instant messages that seem to come from a service that you trust, like your bank, credit card company, or social networking site.

Tip Tip: To see updated examples of popular phishing scams or to report a possible phishing scam, visit the Anti-Phishing Working Group Archive.

The purpose of social engineering is usually to secretly install spyware or other malicious software or to trick you into handing over your passwords or other sensitive financial or personal information.

How can I protect myself from phishing scams?

Your first level of defense against phishing scams is to secure your computer. For more information, see 4 steps to protect your computer.

Watch out for links. Since many phishing scams depend on users clicking a link, a good way to protect yourself is to be careful with links in e-mail messages, instant messages, and on Web sites. If you receive an e-mail that you weren't expecting and it contains a link, type the link directly into your browser. If the link is from a Web site that you visit often, use your personal bookmarks to access the site.

Recognize suspicious sites. Learning how to spot phishing and social engineering techniques is the next step. Use the SmartScreen Filter in Internet Explorer 8 to help detect unsafe and potentially unsafe Web sites as you browse.

Video advertising is one of the oldest forms of advertising ever made, something that comes next to print advertising. The commercials you see in TV are concrete examples of video adverts. Since video adverts are considered as more effective than print advertising, online marketers have adopted the system in every possible manner.

Apart from the medium, internet advertising is classified on the basis of pricing techniques. There is lot of flexibility when it comes to internet buying and selling. Here everyone can choose what they need and eliminate the rest. This makes things more cost efficient and targeted. Even the advertisers have to pay only if their advertisements are in demand. In other words, if no one watches your ad, you don't have to spend on it. This is the reason why methods like Pay Per Click and Pay Per Lead advertising became so popular. As time went on the system became more goal specific. Now advertisers would pay the host only if someone buys their product or expresses an interest in buying or hiring their services. This method is technically known as Cost Per Action marketing. It is a more specific online marketing technique where the advertiser pays the ad network only if someone responds to his advertisement.

Forrester Research expects the online video marketing market to explode to $7 Billion by 2012, with a 72% compound annual growth rate! But measuring the effectiveness of online video campaigns is at the forefront of many a marketer’s mind.

Nearly 60% of marketers surveyed in Forrester’s recent study, Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch, 2008 cite “measuring effectiveness” as the greatest challenge to using online video as a marketing tool.

I invite you to download a complimentary whitepaper entitled "Video Marketing: Proven Strategies and Future Trends" today from http://getwsipowered.com/

 

7 Things to Stop Doing Now on Facebook (from Consumer Reports.org)

1) Using a Weak Password: Avoid simple names or words you can find in a dictionary, even with numbers tacked on the end. Instead, mix upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols. A password should have at least eight characters. One good technique is to insert numbers or symbols in the middle of a word, such as this variant on the word "houses": hO27usEs!

2) Leaving Your Full Birth Date in Your Profile: It's an ideal target for identity thieves, who could use it to obtain more information about you and potentially gain access to your bank or credit card account. If you've already entered a birth date, go to your profile page and click on the Info tab, then on Edit Information. Under the Basic Information section, choose to show only the month and day or no birthday at all.

3) Overlooking Useful Privacy Controls: For almost everything in your Facebook profile, you can limit access to only your friends, friends of friends, or yourself. Restrict access to photos, birth date, religious views, and family information, among other things. You can give only certain people or groups access to items such as photos, or block particular people from seeing them. Consider leaving out contact info, such as phone number and address, since you probably don't want anyone to have access to that information anyway.

4) Posting Your Child's Name in a Caption: Don't use a child's name in photo tags or captions. If someone else does, delete it by clicking on Remove Tag. If your child isn't on Facebook and someone includes his or her name in a caption, ask that person to remove the name.

5) Mentioning That You'll Be Away From Home: That's like putting a "no one's home" sign on your door. Wait until you get home to tell everyone how awesome your vacation was and be vague about the date of any trip.

6) Letting Search Engines Find You: To help prevent strangers from accessing your page, go to the Search section of Facebook's privacy controls and select Only Friends for Facebook search results. Be sure the box for public search results isn't checked.

7) Permitting Youngsters to Use Facebook Unsupervised: Facebook limits its members to ages 13 and over, but children younger than that do use it. If you have a young child or teenager on Facebook, the best way to provide oversight is to become one of their online friends. Use your e-mail address as the contact for their account so that you receive their notifications and monitor their activities. "What they think is nothing can actually be pretty serious," says Charles Pavelites, a supervisory special agent at the Internet Crime Complaint Center. For example, a child who posts the comment "Mom will be home soon, I need to do the dishes" every day at the same time is revealing too much about the parents' regular comings and goings.

Copyrighted 2009, Consumers Union of U.S., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

When I built your website, we mainly worked on its design components - elegance, limited scrolling, smooth navigation and the pleasant display of attractive images. The initial focus for your website was to be an extension of your business card.

I know that you are concerned with getting new customers and developing your brand …ultimately growing your business. While this may seem obvious, what is less apparent is how other successful businesses of all sizes are using the Internet to achieve rapid growth.

Yes, you already have a great looking Web site, but having a Web site and using it to really grow your business are two different things. Here’s what SEO people are doing to bring in a constant flow of new customers:


Search marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). Google, Bing, and Yahoo are the most powerful tools on the Internet driving commerce. He helps you harness their power and get you at the top of the search engine result pages.

 

Social Media Optimization (SMO). Twitter and Facebook are just a part of any effective campaign to drive traffic to your site. He sets up your social media presence and even tweets, blogs and posts for you on a regular basis.

Consulting. They works with you to significantly grow your business and get to the next level using the web site you already have in place.

It’s important to realize that a good Web design and effective SEO enhances branding, offline advertising, and direct marketing. In this way, your other marketing campaigns, when orchestrated with good search engine visibility, can achieve a high degree of success. SEO in tandem with good Web design, makes your other marketing activities that much more effective.

Please let me know, if you’d like to set up a call or meeting to see yourself how you can attract more customers and grow your business.

Go ahead, take him up on his offer and let me know what time works best for you.

 

Latest Development in the World of Search Engines

Though this email is short, it provides you with some important information that will be changing how we all see and use the web.

Google rolled out the "+1 button" similar to Facebook "like" button.

Google also confirmed that the +1 button will influence search ranking positions.

The number of +1 clicks and the person who clicks on your +1 buttons might influence the search ranking of your pages.

Read more about it here: http://aceseoconsulting.com/what-is-google-plus-one/

Top 3 search engines unite to make the web richer than it already is.

With www.schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google,

but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.

Learn more about it here: http://aceseoconsulting.com/what-is-schema/

What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor's information through a lead form. A good landing page will target a particular audience, such as traffic from an email campaign promoting a particular ebook, or visitors who click on a pay-per-click ad promoting your webinar. Therefore, it’s important to build a unique landing page for each of the offers you create. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content offers (ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), or sign up for offers like free trials or demos of your product. Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads.
Landing Pages Generate Leads
If you could do one thing right now to drastically improve your marketing and increase your return on investment, it would be to use landing pages on your website.
Too many companies send their email, social media, and search traffic to their homepages. This is the equivalent of throwing leads away. You could capture these leads at a much higher rate simply by sending them to targeted landing pages.
Think about it – let’s say someone clicks on an ad for your latest ebook offer. Do you want to send them to your homepage? When they get to your homepage, what are they supposed to do? What do you want them to do?
Once you figure out what you want your visitors to do, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do just that. By sending your visitors to a targeted landing page instead of your homepage, you are directing them to the exact place that they need to be in order to sign up for or download your offer. This makes the process simpler for your visitors, since they don’t have to navigate your website to find what they’re looking for.
Landing pages eliminate any confusion about what to click on. They keep your website visitors from growing frustrated about not finding the form or deciding it’s not worth their time to figure out what they must do to receive your offer. This means that directing your visitors to a landing page -- the exact page with the offer and the form they must complete to get it -- makes it more likely that they will complete your form and convert into leads.

Learn more about it here and download the eBook at : http://www.hubspot.com/thank-you-intro-to-building-landing-pages

There are different factors that you need to know when using Flash (a software sold by a company called Adobe, mainly used in Internet) in a website.

A Flash website is one that either is
- all Flash when you arrive on their home page or
- has a section of Flash on the homepage or elsewhere on the site.
When you enter a website which has a countdown clock on it, then it is loading the Flash file; if you see animation/moving images, then they are Flash files.

On Flash sites, it was impossible for the Google to read the contents of your flash elements (whether text, images or animation). For years now the humans behind Google have understood that there are people who want to have Flash files on their websites for a stunning visual appearance. Google can read to some extent the textual content in your Flash files. Google takes a snippet of that and then can index that file. Google can now also find the URLs that appear in your Flash files and crawl those URLs. Google is getting better at this every day but they are not perfect at it yet. But that comes with a big IF and conditions. Google according the Google Webmaster Blog does not recognize the image files in your Flash. If your Flash files only contain images they will not recognize it or index any text within those images. Google also does not index FLV (movie) files.

On the Con side
1) Flash is also very power hungry on the desktop/laptop using the viewed page
2) Flash for political reasons, cannot be viewed on iPad and iPhones (but yes on Android phones)
3) Flash is not Google best friend
4) There is a new standard (HTML5) emerging to do what Flash is doing to convey audio files

On the Pro side:
1) Flash has flair; it creates stunning and interactive effects
2) Flash is unique for its rendition of animation
3) Flash is very convenient to stream Audio or Video files

The Etiquette of Social Media Marketing by The Hispanic Chamber of E-Commerce

“Social Media” is a trendy term these days, meaning everyone and their cousin are trying to jump into the bandwagon. The trouble is that most newcomers to the social arena aren’t quite sure of the best ways to promote their brands and services. And while you can learn through trial and error, it’s best to at least start with some notions of social media etiquette. Read through this article, and you’ll have a much better chance of getting positive returns from the time and effort you put into social media marketing.

Look before you post While it’s tempting to just sign in to your social media accounts and start posting whatever’s on your mind, this not a good approach. You will be much wiser to spend some time looking around and seeing how other users behave. These observations will help you get the feel of what’s going on, and will make it so much easier to say the right things, when the right time comes.

Give before you ask When people start using the social media with a commercial agenda in mind, they tend to focus too much on asking for small favors. They will ask you to vote for their website and share their content and what not, assuming it’s not such a big deal. Needless to say, this isn’t a good practice. If you start asking favors from people you barely know – even small favors like clicking a “share” button, you will build a poor reputation in record time. Focus on giving before you asking and everyone will be much nicer!

Be relevant, interesting, useful The same principles hold true in social media as in a regular group conversation: If you don’t have anything relevant to say, it’s sometimes better to hold your peace. If you want to join an on-going discussion, make sure you have something relevant and interesting to say. At very least, make sure your social media interactions are useful to your target audience. Otherwise, they will quickly perceive your intent as merely self-promotional… and you will have a really hard time drawing positive attention.

Be quick, responsive, consistent Saying the world of social media is fast is quite the understatement; it’s beyond that – it’s instant. And if you want to stay close to the forefront, you need to work on your quickness and responsiveness. Don’t wait for tomorrow if you’ve got something meaningful to say today. Strive to be consistent as well as responsive, and you’ll quickly be recognized as an authority in your field.

The secret to social media ROI If there is a big secret to selling via social media - that would be… don’t sell! No matter whether they’re soft sales of hard sales, your attempts at selling via these channels are likely to fail. You need to focus instead on teaching. Because when you teach something you are recognized as a specialist, and then people will come to you and ask they’ll be the ones to express their desire to buy. In succinct terms, the secret would be: teaching sells. Hope you found this useful! We wish the best of luck with your social media campaigns.

Create safer passwords

August 2012

If juggling a ridiculous amount of passwords for your various online accounts is driving you crazy, you’re not alone. For security reasons, passwords are required for everything from email to social media networks to online banking and shopping accounts, and even logging into your computer. But if you aren’t careful about how you choose your passwords or where you store them, the very thing that’s supposed to your make personal information secure might actually be putting it in jeopardy.

How to choose a secure password Using the same password for multiple accounts or choosing a word or phrase that’s easy to remember (such as a house address, birthday, last name) is very common—and a big mistake. Those kinds of passwords happen to be the easiest for hackers to crack. There are several things to consider when creating a password that will keep your information safe.

Choose passwords that use a variety of letters, figures, symbols and cases. Try putting your hands on the keyboard and just typing randomly—a gibberish password can be very secure.

Use similar-looking substitutions to create alternatives for words that you remember easily. For example, the number zero can replace the letter “O” and the dollar sign can replace the letter “S.”

Phonetic replacements are also a good idea (e.g., “Luv2Laf” for “Love to Laugh”).

Avoid including personal information, words or acronyms that can be found in the dictionary, phrases that can be tied back to you, sequential numbers and repeating characters.

Many websites will let you know whether your password is safe when you’re in the process of choosing it. Pay attention to that, and if the site indicates that your password is not secure, pick a different one.

To keep your passwords safe, never send them to anyone via email—even yourself. It’s also recommended that you change passwords every 30 to 90 days and never write them down or keep them anywhere near your computer.

How to remember your passwords So when you have a variety of passwords composed of random characters that you’re not supposed to write down and that (should) change every few months, how on earth are you supposed to remember all of them?

There are several password management solutions online that are secured by one ultra-strong password and can store all of your passwords for you and recall them as needed. They range in price from free to varying monthly and yearly fees. Many of them have enhanced mobility so you can access your information from anywhere on a smartphone.

Password alternatives If you’re still frustrated by managing multiple passwords, advances in technology are starting to provide alternative methods for keeping information secure.

-Face Recognition is an innovative technology that uses your notebook’s webcam to take a photo of your face. That image is then used in lieu of a password to log into your laptop and all your important cloud services and websites, using a single sign-on.

-HP ProtectTools saves your information in a protected vault and automatically logs you in when you want to access websites, applications and networks. It also offers added security with the HP Fingerprint Sensor that uses your fingerprint instead of a password.

While password security may eventually give way to more precise and manageable ways to keep data secure, it’s still unavoidable right now. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind the various strategies to limit the vulnerability of your personal information and remember what’s at stake when you’re creating your passwords.

 

CPew: 25% prefer Internet access via smartphone

As more and more Americans swap their old feature phones for smartphones some are shunning their home computers in favor of accessing the Internet on their mobile devices. Pew's first-ever smartphone use survey reveals why.

Today in the US 42% of mobile phone users, and 35% of all adults, pack the power of a smartphone in their pocket. Most smartphone owners (87%) use their device to access the Internet and their email while on the go, and 68% do so on a daily basis, found the Pew Internet Project's survey on smartphone use.

Portable, prolific and powerful as they are, smartphones aren't yet replacing the use of desktop or laptop computers to access the Internet. Pew's survey found that 84% of smartphone owners also own a laptop or desktop computer.

However, there is a shift towards using mobile devices as a primary connection to the Internet and 25% of those surveyed by Pew said they prefer to use their smartphone for this task.

There's a clue in Pew's findings as to why that 25% might prefer to access the Internet from their smartphone.

"While many of these individuals have other sources of online access at home, roughly one third of these "cell mostly" Internet users lack a high-speed home broadband connection."
And the most popular smartphone operating system is...? Android, according to Pew, with a healthy lead at 35% compared to 24% apiece for iPhone and Blackberry.
Nielsen recently revealed that the amount of data used by the average smartphone user has risen a whopping 89% over the past 12 months. This "mobile data tsunami", as Nielsen's Don Kellogg refers to it, is being driven by smartphone adoption and app-friendly operating systems.

Today there are about 1.2 billion mobile web users around the world according to a 2012 study by MobiThinking.

A growing number of these users never browse the web on a laptop or desktop computer. According to the same study, 25% of mobile users in the U.S. are mobile only–meaning they rarely ever browse the internet on a desktop or laptop computer.

In 2010, Morgan Stanley produced an 87 page report charting current internet trends and forecasting the future of web. They predict that mobile web browsing will overtake desktop internet usage by 2015. Microsoft Tag forecasted in 2011 that this would happen in 2014.

Not yet distributed

Video Statistics: A Digital Marketer’s Summary

Video drives search results  Video increases the chance of a front-page Google result by 53x—Forrester  Video results appear in about 70% of the top 100 listings, the type of content most displayed in universal or blended search results –Marketingweek  Videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click through rate than their plain text counterparts—ReelSEO  Each day, 1.9 billion people are online, searching for what they need—eMarketer  YouTube is the number two search engine next to Google—comScore

Video increases engagement  85% of the US online population has watched a YouTube video; 65% watch one video per week—Google  60% of people prefer watching video over reading text—bubobox  People remember 50% more from a video compared to 22% with written content—bubobox  Landing pages with professional video generate 4-7x more engagement and response rates— Search EngineWatch  Video in email marketing has been shows to increase email click-through rates by over 96%— bubobox

Video drives sales  52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions—Internet Retailer  Video is a driver of consumer confidence. Consumers are willing to watch videos 60% of the time they are found, and 52% of consumers report that they are less likely to return a product after viewing a video—Website Magazine  More than three out of five consumers will spend at least two minutes watching a video that educates them about a product they plan to purchase, and 37% will watch for more than three minutes—Marketing Charts  Retail sites with video increase conversion by 30%—bubobox Mobile commerce is growing  Mobile commerce will reach $119 billion by 2015—MobiThinking  Mobile and tablet shoppers are 3x times as likely to view a video as laptop or desktop users— Forbes

 28% of smartphone owners will watch videos on their phones in an average month—Experian  Nearly 40% of consumers report that videos increase their likelihood of making a purchase on a mobile device—Ecommerce Times  During a three-month period, 49% of smartphone owners watched at least one product video— Ecommerce Times  The most popular use for mobile action codes, such as QR and bar codes is linking to mobile video: 40% of codes link to video content, including product demos—MediaPost

Video increases conversion  Visitors who view product videos are 85% more likely to buy than visitors who do not—Internet Retailer  Retail site visitors who view video stay two minutes longer on average and are 64% more likely to purchase than other site visitors—comScore  Professionally produced video optimized for eCommerce outperforms user-generated video (UGC video) by 30%, delivering a 24.7% lift as compared with an 18.7% lift for the UGC video— comScore From SMB’s to large corporations, businesses are implementing online video  Business spending on video will reach $8.3 billion by 2015—Interactive Media Strategies  Videos produced for business purposes will grow in excess of 50 percent annually through at least 2015—Interactive Media Strategies  SMB spending on digital media will grow to $16.6 billion by 2015—BIA/Kelsey  29 percent of executive-level retailers stated online video will be where they spend the majority of their budget in 2013—eTail survey  Nearly 87% of US brand and agency marketers polled in January 2012 said they created videos for content marketing—Outbrain  29% of B2C marketing professionals worldwide believe video content is the most effective social media marketing tactic—eMarketer  Online video production will account for more than one-third of advertising spending within the next five years—Borrell Associates  76% of marketers plan to add video to their sites, making it a higher priority than Facebook, Twitter, and blog integration—Social Media Examiner

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