Get More from Search - Your Concentrated Serving of Search

Vortaloptics custom search engines include revenue components that empower its clients to maximize the return on investment from their engines. Since the engine is completely controllable by the client, they can improve the relevancy of the search results and also place key partners and affiliates into their engines.

Vortaloptics never recommends listing irrelevant content just to profit from clicks, but rather consults our clients to focus on the most relevant content that users are seeking and match advertising, affiliates and partners to the search results pages to those search phrases to build a better user experience.

Because the content on our client results pages is hyper-relevant to the search terms and those results pages provide contextual ad and partner content, the ROI from clickthroughs is typically much higher for our clients than from traditional ads placed on blogs, for instance.  Search results page ads typically outperform regular page advertisements anyway, but because our clients can control the content of their results pages the ROI is on average, 10 times greater.

With clients being able to hone in top performing ads, they can now focus on the search phrases and clickthroughs that pay the most. Optimizing your website revenue is particularly important in a tough economy. One way to do this is to seek out the top affiliate programs and add as organic search content and banner listings.

As an example, Speedy Cash is launching a new affiliate program with one of the highest commissions per lead in the financial payday loans industry. Vortaloptics’ local search clients could signup for the Speedy Cash affiliate program and insert banners, text links and search results into their search engine for this payday loans affiliate program. When users search for or click on the financial services subcategory, the Speedy Cash program can receive prominent placement.

Being able to maximize revenue efforts by focusing on the top paying affiliate, partner and advertising initiatives makes good business sense. A well placed $85/lead link is worth the effort over a $1/lead program. Vortaloptics provides the technology to help administrators quickly focus their efforts on the top ROI programs and provide better value to their users.

Tweet This  Post by David Gosse.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. And the answer is, a resounding yes!

Twitter’s success is nothing short of incredible and its rise to a preeminent social network is secure, with 6 million users and 55 million monthly visitors. The micro-blogging service is outranked in popularity only by Facebook and MySpace.

By now, you’ve either heard of Twitter, use it, or are addicted to it. Being able to communicate to your audience in 140-character micro-blogs can open up new opportunities for your business.  Whether Twitter becomes ubiquitous is yet to be seen, but with an increasing number of brands registered and millions of people using their personal accounts to establish themselves and their companies as “experts,” Twitter should become part of your social media mix.

If you’re a user, you probably went through the strategic part of setting up an account: “What am I trying to accomplish here? What will I write about? Who do I want to follow me? Is this for fun or for business?”  This is an important part of the process and will impact Twitter’s payoff.

What can Twitter do for your business?

• Keep in touch with customers, vendors, partners, employees and consultants
• Establish partnerships
• Learn about competition
• Build your network
• Open up new opportunities to participate in confererences and events
• Drive traffic to your website or blog
• Establish you/your business as an expert in an industry
• Improve productivity
• Grant you instant alerts on the latest news, stats, tools

Whether you’re already tweeting or haven’t yet caught the twitterpated bug, here are a few tips to illustrate how to optimize Twitter’s social media benefits for your business.

1. Structure your posts to get retweeted. To do this, keep your tweets short (around 120 characters, which leaves room for the necessary “RT @username” verbiage) and be relevant (ask questions, share helpful epiphanies, promote useful news and events). This “twetiquette” account is a cute and useful service to remind us all of best practices in Twitter.
2. Engage your audience. You can direct questions or topics to individuals or to your following. Using Twitter platform services such as TweetDeck or Twhirl will organize your follower’s posts, your @ replies and your direct messages. Program in searches for keywords that when posted, will alert you when you’re more apt to have something relevant to say. Keywords might be your name, your company’s name/products/services, hot industry terms, hash tag topics (#hashtag), or topics and people you’re interested in learning more about.
3. Target who you follow. Basically, follow those you want to follow you (industry leaders, popular companies, potential customers and partners). Follow-backs aren’t standard, and some think that following everyone who follows you is good “twetiquette” but by doing this, you’ll dilute the impact of your targeted audience. However, by being relevant and engaging your audience, the prospects of your targets seeing your content and following you back is much improved. Twellow lets you search for Twitter users or search by category of user).

Oh, and if you find this useful, please take a moment and retweet it!

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

To follow up on my last blog post and illustrate just how much strangers now influence our opinions and decisions, I thought I’d post some revealing findings about the importance of worldwide input via social media.

In Universal McCann’s recent report, “When did we start trusting strangers?” in the “Proliferation of influencer channels” section, it is posited that the web is encouraging trust among strangers the world over. This trend does not correlate with the societal assumption that strangers are out to get us. Rather, we see the web as an equalizer; a readily accessible platform for expression of all peoples. Tapping into that global authority expands our knowledge boundaries and allows us to shape our opinions based on the widest range of (assumably) unbiased, unsolicited and candid information. If knowledge is power, then it seems that we’re craving the power of that collective voice so much that we now hold stranger’s opinions in nearly as high a regard as the people we personally know.

• We trust strangers online almost as much as face to face recommendation
• The top four trusted forms of recommendation are all direct conversation - significantly two of these are now on internet channels: email and Instant Messenger
• We would much rather trust a stranger than a celebrity, by a long way
• We trust a stranger over any paid-for communications or advertising
• We trust a stranger more in a regulated environment like reviews in a retail site such as Amazon or an auction site like eBay
• Blogs are becoming a trusted form of opinion, blogs from people you know rank at number 7 and those by from professionals or micropublishers, number 15.
• Blogs are almost as trusted as their written word counterparts, magazines and newspapers
• Not everything online is trusted: emails from companies are only marginally more trusted than celebrities

(Source: “When did we start trusting strangers?” page 35.)

Those in our “strangers” sphere might not be our BFF just yet, but from the looks of this report and others cropping up weekly, it seems that they’re quickly becoming PGF (pretty good friends).

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

When you’re looking to purchase, what mechanisms drive your opinion and finally form your decision? As media changes, so do the channels that we rely on for information and the weight we give to those channels.

Word-of-mouth has always been a major influencing factor, with friends and family topping the trusted list. But it is the advice from strangers with experience in what we’re seeking that has nearly doubled in value in the past 10 years.

Other influentials include teachers, religious leaders and then media such as newspapers, magazines, radio personalities, TV news reporters, followed by bloggers, advertising and finally, telemarketers (from eMarketer’s chart, “Trusted Sources of Information according to US Consumers, 1997 & 2007″). But a revolution is well under way: we now trust the opinions of strangers whose material we read or view online as much as our friends!

So when did strangers become such a heavy influence upon our decisions? The boom of social media has given us access to billions of ratings, reviews, videos, blogs and micro-blogs, from people we don’t personally know. This state of affairs has been referred to as the “democratization of influence to the masses.”  This is a serious call-to-action for all marketers. Social media is now key in our hierarchical decision-making processes and must be recognized as a tool to meet your audience on the new communication grounds.

So how do we come to trust Stranger X’s opinion more than Stranger Y and Z? What strangers have to say is obviously important, but perhaps as important is strangers’ ability to identify with us that makes the difference.  As we look at avatars, read profiles, skim comments and blogs and view video clips, we look for clues that help us decide whether this is an opinion we’d trust. It might be abstract, but it’s the little things that influence whether we identify with that someone in one way or another.

It might be their work or life experience, notoriety, social life, family situation, appearance, personality or their style of communication that help form our “online” opinion of these strangers. As we gather those clues, we filter them through our own prisms of experience and knowledge. Does their opinion add up? Can we supplement our knowledge base with the views expressed by Stranger X? We’ll count or discount these influencing factors, and move onto the next review, comment, tweet, chat message, email or video until we’ve reached our own decision-making comfort level. And, we’ll add in a dash of traditional media opinion if applicable, and wrap it all up into our defendable decision.

You may be a little ahead or a little behind this curve, but the reality remains that the opinion of the masses is increasingly important in our lives. Its wise to join the conversation but don’t jump in without some preparation.  Transparency and good user experience are essential ingredients if your goal is successful viral marketing. Consumers want to know what makes your company tick, they want to see the faces behind the image and most importantly, they want a great product or service.

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

A new shopping behavioral trend has emerged in recent months: the info shopper. Fiscal responsibility is top of mind and whether we need or want something, we’re going to pour over the details before we spend our hard-earned cash.

Even offline purchases are scrutinized these days. People are increasingly suspect of TV ads, particularly frustrated with the lack of critical decision-making information available via the traditional format. Consumers are pursuing their curiosities online, learning a lot and gaining confidence throughout the process. 92% of respondents to a recent survey by Penn, Scoen and Berland have more confidence in the information they glean rather than in store clerks or other sources. Cars, homes, computers and medical care are top info-seeking areas, with 4 out of 5 shoppers gathering data online before buying.

As is usually the case, consumer behavior is changing more rapidly than marketers of products. People want full disclosure upfront. Dyson’s model of sharing the secret of their unique products with customers builds trust and increases loyalty.But many companies fail to divulge details that have become necessary for consumers to even consider buying their products.

The trend manifests in everything from big ticket items to daily personal care products. For instance, instead of just buying the same shampoo they’ve always purchased, people want to know whether it will work well with their hair type, color, whether the plastic is recyclable, what the ingredients are and what other shoppers think of the shampoo. Trivial information perhaps to some, but important to others who care more about value then ever before. After all, why waste money on a purchase that isn’t in the good to excellent category when better buying decisions are a few clicks away?

Well-informed decisions are now a right, not a luxury. That’s why aggregator and search sites will become more valuable, as they mash-up content from reviews,  manufacturers and press, giving buyers more of an unbiased story from which they can draw their own conclusions.

Tweet This  Post by Jennifer Gosse.

Vortaloptics Inc. has obtained a patent for its vertical search engine software. premise of the search invention is a Net-native administrative interface that gives users instant control over search results, enabling specific keywords to be associated with specific URLs within a search database.

David Gosse, CEO of Vortaloptics and co-author of the patent, assigned the patent rights over to Vortaloptics shortly after it being officially awarded on October 21, 2008 by the U.S. Patent Office. He explains how a genuine need for controllable search software prompted him to invent the software: “I wanted to create search engine software that could be controlled. The search engine that I wanted to embed into my websites and client websites needed a way to administer the results and change them so that they were more relevant for the site. So I co-invented a controllable search algorithm.”

The unique control mechanism provides flexibility to customize each URL in a search database and thus, every keyword assigned to that website.

Search results returned to users are prioritized based on relevancy (keyword match) and the total relative score of the search terms used to conduct the query. Additional relevancy and priority controls are provided via the administrative interface.

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SEOptimise’s blog, “Five online marketing New Year’s resolutions,” provides five healthy reminders for your 2009 goals, especially if you’re still not optimizing your online marketing potential via search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) quite like you should.

Resolutions include: set a budget, start a blog, focus on your auidence, seek experts (especially when you don’t exactly know what to do), and be personable (build relationships, don’t base your online voice on tooting your brand’s horn).

Don’t let fear or failure or the unknown daunt your marketing resolutions. Sure, there are signficant changes in the economy, consumer behavior and online marketing techniques. While our realities are undergoing constnat evolution, there are certain SEO truisms that still reign supreme, such as: lots of relevant, keyword-rich content; great inbound links and proper site architecture and fomratting.

Focus on the basics, put forth a plan for this year and just take the first steps. A little action, even if imperfectly executed, is better than procrastinating for a better quarter, a bigger budget or a more stable economy. Go forth and resolve to better position your site and establish better relationships with your audience in 2009!

Tweet This  Post by David Gosse.

SearchIgnite reports a 33% increase in retailer’s ad spending over last year illustrates that retailers are likely pouring more dollars into search campaigns which can be monitored and tweaked in real-time.

Roger Barnette, president of SearchIgnite notes: “Advertisers are shifting more dollars to paid search and digital media. Retailers want media they can buy on a performance bases to track and measure.”

Despite a decline in overall consumer spending, people are steadily purchasing goods over the Internet. Observationally, retailers are offering more incentives earlier in the season than is typical,  likely incentivizing consumers to go ahead and make necessary and discretionary purchases.

Tweet This  Post by David Gosse.

Online advertising data offers some light in the current economic do. Third quarter figures reveal an 11 percent increase over 2007, coming in at $5.9 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The first nine months of revenues set a new record, climbing 14% over the same period last year. This data not only shows that Internet advertising has continuing to grow as predicted, it reveals that its becoming a haven for ad dollars in the downturn. Continually hailed as the most cost-effective and measurable method of reach customers, online shines while other ad outlets fade.

Tweet This  Post by David Gosse.

The social media hype continues and is enticing companies of every shape and size to dabble in creating new networks. To facilitate the craze, dozens of open source social networking platforms have launched. Jeremiah Owyyang’s blog lists over 60 brandable software platforms that can plug into your existing domain, allowing you to create your very own social network.  But should any company build a social network?

In a Deloitte study of 100 businesses with online communities, Ed Moran found that 35% of these communities have less than 100 members and less than 25% have 1000 members. 6% of the businesses studied spent over $1 million on their social networks. Sadly, all too many fail at their attempts to connect customers to their brand because instead of focusing on the community itself, businesses are focusing on the value that social community could provide for their business.

Despite the failures, there are definitely industries that DO have ready-made communities with well-established brand alliance, and have a greater chance of building successful online communities. These verticals might include: local television networks (daily news watchers), radio (listening audiences), niche local communities (apartment renters, child-safe search) and education (school districts, private schools, universities).

Clark County School District, the 5th largest school district in the nation with nearly 300,000 students, was a few years back, reportedly the largest user of bandwidth in the Las Vegas valley. Schools are instant communities – not just in the “will you be my friend” sense of students, but in the student to teacher, student to parent and teacher to parent and relationships. Because they already have distinguishable groups in these necessary and long-standing relationships, Clark County can foster those relationships through a community network, which they’ve begun to explore with the CCSD website.  Feedback mechanisms aren’t yet extant, but Homework Hotline, a public television program, gives students an outlet during the week to call in and ask teachers their tough homework assignment questions. Their content management system, my.CCSD.net reach the three main constituents in these ways: 1) teachers can create personalized websites to communicate with students and parents; 2) students can access to homework resources and assignments; 3) parents can locate their children’s classroom and assignment information online without involving the child or teachers. A cursory look at some teacher sites didn’t provide a lot in the way of content or personalization, but it is summer after all; the start of the school year should light this online community back up.

Another example where community exists is the multifamily industry. Most multifamily companies have a couple clear-cut missions in life (e.g. collecting rents and driving occupancy rates), and one of those is to establish and promote their brand for longer-term connection with an increasingly transient population.  Before signing a rental contract, an individual needs to identify with what that apartment provides. Thus, the rental market is now driven by amenities. “Lifestyle” is the buzzword for providing more than a roof over people’s heads at the right price and location. Now, apartment companies need to provide online services ranging from rent pay to pet sitting to VIP concierge services and customized local search while hosting real live social activities such as community pool parties, golf instruction classes and more. While it may sound exhausting (and it probably is), apartment companies are finally optimizing their built-in community of residents and finding creative ways to connect the residents together, along with meaningful lifestyle amenities that cement the value of their brand, while gaining loyalty in the minds of renters.

Riverstone Residential, the nation’s third largest apartment management company representing around 340,000 residents, offers a moving program, Riverstone-to-Riverstone. This amenity helps transfer residents to another Riverstone community within a metro or across the country, sans application process and deposit fees. Combined with their Living Made Easy features, including “Your Neighborhood Directory,” a local search engine launched in three metros, where users can find just-down-the-street local businesses via a true search results format (e.g. not just Yellow Page data), residents benefit from buying into the Riverstone community and the value it provides to their daily lives.

Morals of the story:

• If you don’t have a pre-existing community, don’t assume that you can create one (and don’t spend a lot of money trying to create one).
• If you do have a pre-existing community (and they already visit your website regularly), focus on the value that your social network will provide to your users.

Tweet This  Post by David Gosse.