Is Your Logo Helping or Hurting Your Business?

Written by Nathan Cain


Is Your Logo Helping or Hurting Your Business?

The quality of your logo can meanrepparttar difference between success or failure. It can be that simple!

Trademarks and Logos make uprepparttar 136116 most international language inrepparttar 136117 world. An excellent logo can cross many barriers and provide your organization with a means of delivering to your customers an unequivocal and uniform message.

Every successful company has its own "personality," and just as human personalities are complex, so too is your company's personality. A successful logo is a means of condensing a complex reality into a single, simple statement, one that can be controlled, modified, developed and matured over time.

Your logo needs to be much more than just a distinguishing mark for your company. It must be an indication of quality, value, and reliability.

Does your logo do these things successfully?:

• IDENTIFY your company, product, or service.

• DIFFERENTIATE it fromrepparttar 136118 mass of other similar companies.

• COMMUNICATE information as to your products value and quality.

• ADD VALUE by causing you to provide a quality service in order to maintain your company's reputation.

• REPRESENT potentially valuable assets. When people see your logo, can they tell byrepparttar 136119 design that your product or service is of high quality.

If your logo doesn't do these things, then you might need to update it, possibly seeking professional advice.

Is your logo design really that important?

It is extremely important! Your logo is a part ofrepparttar 136120 foundation on which you build your brand. Especially sincerepparttar 136121 recent explosion of Internet businesses, but even before that, consumers have an overwhelming variety of choices. Chances are that whatever you are selling, there is something similar to it available. Chances are there is someone in direct competition with you right now. Yes, there are very few products that are shielded from direct competition because of a patent or for some other reason.

It is because of this that much of your efforts in marketing and branding should be concentrated on building a distinctive and differentiated "brand personality" for your company.

Takerepparttar 136122 success of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. There is some difference between these two products, but this difference is very subtle. Plus, there are hundreds of other brands of cola onrepparttar 136123 market. Even so, these two brands, Coke and Pepsi, are able to dominaterepparttar 136124 world wide cola market. What isrepparttar 136125 main factor for their success? It isrepparttar 136126 strength and appeal of their brands.

10 Steps For Fighting Click Fraud

Written by Steve Dimeck


Pay-Per click fraud dates back even fromrepparttar time when Overture was still Goto.com. Only, it wasn't as serious as it is lately sincerepparttar 136093 pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is becoming very popular for getting highly targeted traffic as well as making an affiliate-based commission.

So, what's pay-per click fraud?

In an ideal world, you and I will pay a fee to a site that offers PPC program and hosts our ads whenever those ads are being clicked by a visitor. The visitor then examines our site and eventually makes a purchase. We make money.

In click-fraud-world as it is nowadays, those clicks that you and I pay for are not coming from potential customers. But from scam artists, automated scripts known as "hitbots", underhanded competitors, and even affiliates that just click on our ads in order to earn commission offered byrepparttar 136094 PPC providers. We lose money.

Fraudulent clicks or "click spam" can be defined as any kind of click that occurs with zero possibility for a conversion to occur, or a website visit not being originated by a legitimate user. Fraudulent clicks happen on a regular basis - even more than what we could possibly imagine.

Indiatimes published a shocking article about a mother who gets down to work every evening while holding a baby in her lap. She is clicking on PPC advertisements. She doesn't care aboutrepparttar 136095 ads, but diligently keeps count — it's $0.18 to $0.25 per click.

"The trend is catching up in India," - says Goutam Rakshit, chairman, Advertising Council of India - "It's a numbers game as far as media buying is concerned. And anybody who can manipulate numbers getsrepparttar 136096 edge. This is unethical, and needs to be curbed."

John Squire,repparttar 136097 vice president for product marketing for Coremetrics, estimated that his company's clients are spending approximately $10 million a year on fraudulent clicks. They are spending about $10 million on consumers that don't exist.

How much are you paying for customers that don't exist?

If you think your PPC campaign funds are depleting due to a fraudulent click activity, affiliate-generated fraudulent activity, or if you are simply suspicious ofrepparttar 136098 traffic that occurs without any increase in sales - then perhaps you need to start getting tougher with your PPC analysis.

You can always ask for refund fromrepparttar 136099 PPC provider running your campaign if you have suspected a fraudulent click activity. But, you won't getrepparttar 136100 refund unless you have hard core facts to prove it.

And now, let's get down torepparttar 136101 facts.

1a. On a less technical note, define a unique URL forrepparttar 136102 sales page that will go throughrepparttar 136103 PPC program. Clone your sales page and save it under a different URL.

If your page is selling vitamins for an example, and lets say your URL is www.hotvitamins.com, save it as www.hotvitamins.com/power. Or, create a sub-domain, such as http://power.hotvitamins.com.

Then, use this "cloned" sales page for your PPC campaign. That way,repparttar 136104 only traffic coming to that page is fromrepparttar 136105 PPC website. Only, do not link this new URL to any other website. You want to have 100% pure PPC traffic so you can keep an eye on it.

1b. For more technical people, you can assign unique session id to each of your URLs within your PPC campaigns. I'm seeing both techniques being used.

2. Use a basic log analyzer program to begin to investigaterepparttar 136106 data onrepparttar 136107 received clicks, including date, time, referrer, page views, URL, IP, etc. Your webhost should already provide you with a log analyzer program or a "Site Statistics Tool."

If not, maybe it's time for you to change your webhost, or you have to install log analyzer software yourself.

What you want to do at this stage is look for anything suspicious. Based on how comprehensive your "Site Statistics Tool" is, atrepparttar 136108 end ofrepparttar 136109 day you want to be able to capturerepparttar 136110 IP address from each click.

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