Marketing Pilgrim

This post is the first from the Marketing Pilgrim Writer’s Garage to be posted on the main Marketing Pilgrim blog. The garage is now just a few weeks old and we are seeing some great content start to come in. We encourage anyone who has commentary on an Internet marketing issue, instruction or news to contribute to the Writer’s Garage and hopefully yours will be chosen to appear like today’s post. Look for more soon as we get more entries.

This post comes to us from Kathleen Colan, director of marketing and content for Mongoose Metrics. Thanks, Kathleen! Enjoy!

HOW CLOSED LOOP CONVERSION TRACKING CAN IMPROVE MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Closed-loop marketing is the process of tracking website visitors from the time they arrive at your website, to when they convert into a lead, and through to becoming a customer.

Bing has just released an upgrade to their mobile browser that takes the best of apps and combines it with the best of the browser for a faster, easier user experience.

SHOPPING

Like the Bing app, the Bing mobile browser offers a scrolling list of categories to help narrow down your choices from the moment you start to search. From there, you can jump to the updated shopping helper which uses more graphics than text to guide you through the next steps. Each category drills down at least twice until you’re presented with a list of pre-selected items, which, unless you’re gift shopping for someone you don’t know, is fairly useless.

Our job board has been very busy lately. I hope it’s an indication of the economy as a whole on the positive side. In reality it could even mean the economy is still on the fritz but the Internet is where investment and growth is happening because of cost efficiency etc. Heck, I don’t know, I’m not an economist but I do know a choice job opportunity when I see one. Here’s a few to consider.

Online Marketing / Social Media Manager for Easton-Bell Sports in Scotts Valley, CA (as a baseball fan this one is VERY cool)

Social Media Specialist / Startup Business Group for Microsoft in Redmond, WA (as a business fan this one is hard to not get a bit jacked up about)

I can’t remember the last time I had a chance to write a little something about Yahoo that didn’t involve the word boatloads, layoffs or a product’s demise.

Today, Yahoo has announced (hold on to your hats) a search improvement called Yahoo Search Direct. Ok, cue the cool video to behold this strange wonder called a Yahoo search announcement.

I took the beta which can be found at search.yahoo.com out for a spin and it’s nifty in that it is a different search experience. Is it a better one? We’ll see.

It worked well on direct terms and more widely searched terms. Where is falls down a bit is at the local search level but that may be something that will evolve with time.

AOL is closing the doors on nearly half of the 70 niche sites they maintain under the parent company umbrella. The news hit the web after a memo went out to the staff about the reorganization and though it’s bad news for employees, it’s good news for the AOL brand.

The graphic at the right is only a portion of the sites currently being operated by AOL and that’s before the acquisition of the Huffington Post. There was already quite a bit of redundancy across the sites, so streamlining only makes sense from both a financial and a brand standpoint. AOL Jobs. AOL Health. Fine. But FleaFlicker? ShelterPop? UserPlane? Oh, wait, those are the sites that are staying. The ones that are going away? According to Forbes, they include well-known TV news site TV Squad which will be rolled into the generic AOL TV. Financial site WalletPop will become part of Daily Finance, Politics Daily will roll into Huffington Post Politics.

This chart shows just how much the New York Times thinks of their content or how much they want their current paid subscribers to stick with their current print plan. It depends on your point of view. The chart comes from The Understatement.

How do you think this approach from The Gray Lady will work? Would you pay the premium for the right to view the NYT online or will you try the workarounds that the publisher is trying to cut off?