Apple's Brilliant 99 Cent Marketing Strategy

As most of you know, Apple sells songs for the cost of 99 cents per song through iTunes. Apple also sells iTunes gift cards in multiples of say 15, 25, 50. Why does this matter? When you purchase a song through iTunes, you are left with an odd number of credit remaining in your account.

This is brilliant marketing on two fronts, in my opinion. Not only does this strategy play on the psychological effect of 99 cents being cheaper than one dollar, it leaves your account with an odd number of credits. This creates a viscous cycle of purchasing credits for the sake of using the current credits. Its clear that the iPod has been a success, but this strategy has to have played a big part.

Getting Creative with Google Adsense

While doing some research, I came across this creative approach to displaying Google Adsense ads within your website worthy of a post on the topic. In the graphic above, the ads are displayed with a clear heading as being sponsored, but the approach is very creative. The designer of this law firm website places an attractive female to the right of the sponsored listings, looking into them to draw attention to the ads. Do you think this is a little "over the top"? Perhaps, but I can imagine this is very effective for the site owner.

Why SEO Tools and Plugins Rock

A few posts back I mentioned an SEO tool called Website Grader. This tool allows you to grade your website on a scale from 1-100, with 100 being the best SEO score. There has been a lot of talk about "cloud computing" and the like in the last couple years. Looking beyond the hype, cloud computing is really all about using collective knowledge to solve problems efficiently. Plugins, predefined web reports and tools help teams gain valuable knowledge. This process would otherwise take teams hours of trial and error to gather on their own. I'm very big web based helpers, they create efficiencies and gather collective knowledge from "the cloud".

What's your search engine rank eh'?

Rather than making the click across the border into Google Canada, or calling up your buddy in the UK to find out where your site ranks across the pond, you can switch search sites within the same search results using a handy Firefox global extension. I find it very useful when tracking sites or doing link research for any international search market. This tool works great with SEO for Firefox as well.

Internet TV is back ... and so are music videos

After downloading Joost, a free internet based TV service, about a year ago I was impressed but not completely sold on how the platform would flourish. The old Joost required a download, an install and didn't work on all computing platforms. Joost has come back with a web based version of their web TV service that is somewhat similar to YouTube. YouTube, ironically, is going the route of offering full-length network TV shows. Seeing a trend here?

It appears as though both Joost and YouTube have figured out that in order to make money you need ads and in order to deliver content you need open standards. Duh?! What I do like most of all about Joost are the channels for my favorite music videos. Right now, I'm watching the Beck channel which shows a short 15 second ad in between each video. I don't mind the ads, but it would be nice to see a subscription model that gets rid of the ads for a small fee each month.

Apple Store Under Construction

Looks like the Apple store is under construction for now. I've been awaiting the arrival of the new mac notebooks for some time now, along with my wait for the new Google G1 phone. Something is definitely brewing in the Apple store today. Perhaps 2009 will be the year I get a much needed tech upgrade to a mac notebook computer and G1 phone.

Avoiding HTML Email Design Mistakes

In order to gain the most exposure possible when sending htm email campaigns, keep in mind there are many design factors that can effect your total number of emails opened. Building your html using the tips below can help improve the performance of all your campaigns.

• Build emails in old school HTML - use as much HTML as possible to describe your message and use tables with strict HTML.
  
• Avoid CSS - CSS will not appear correctly on many new platforms such as Gmail, Outlook 2007, etc. Use tags such as the font, b, strong and spacer images to format emails.
• Use ALT tags - use ALT tags to describe areas of your email for calls to action, short descriptions and header copy.
• Avoid too many images - too many images will weight your email as possible spam preventing the email from being delivered by ISPs such as Google, Yahoo and company email server spam filters. Optimize your image size to the lowest size possible without losing too much quality.
  
• Avoid SPAM phrases and characters - key words such as $, !, buy now will have a negative weight on your emails.
• Avoid DIVs, Layers, Javascript, Flash - using rich media and scripting is a big no-no to spam filters. Again, advanced formatting will kill your email formatting and delivery.
• Not testing - by not testing your campaigns on many email browsers, you take the risk that your message will not appear to a large group of subscribers. Know your list and what email browsers to test.
  

Here are some additional resource for building campaigns:

• Email HTML Design Guidelines
• HTML Email Guide
• Email Standards
• Testing Services