Telemarket Office

Early History

Telemarketing is a registered trademark owned by Nadji Tehrani who founded TeleMarketing Magazine in 1982. Prior to that, the term was used extensively in Bell System communications relating to new uses for the outbound (WATS) and inbound (Toll-Free 800) services introduced in the late 1970s. It is a form of direct marketing where a salesperson uses the telephone to solicit prospective customers to sell products or services.

Categories

There are two major categories of telemarketing: Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer.

Within these two categories are two other broad divisions: Lead Generation, where the objective is to obtain information and Sales, where the object is to get someone to buy something.

Within these two categories, there are two other broad categories: Outbound and Inbound. Outbound telemarketing efforts are proactive, with the marketing person making phone calls to prospects or existing customers. Inbound telemarketing efforts are reactive, where the agent processes requests for information or takes orders. The demand is generally created by advertising, publicity or the efforts out outside salespeople.

Telemarketing may be done from a company’s office, a call center or increasingly from someone’s home.

Effective telemarketing programs often involve a two or more call process: The first call (or series of calls) determines the prospect or existing customer’s needs. The final call (or series of calls) motivates the prospect or existing customer to make a purchase.

Links

• American Teleservices Association
• Federal Trade Commission Information about Telemarketing Rules and Scams
• Federal Trade Commission Do Not Call Registry
• List of State Do Not Call Lists
• Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports regarding Telemarketing
• Telephone Preference Service – UK Do Not Call Registry
• Counterscript for use against telemarketers

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Telemarketing Avenger – Clip #28: Poor Dog

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business.
• Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something immediately.
• Adding advertisements in e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.

Researchers estimate that as of 2004 the E-mail Marketing industry’s revenues has surpassed the $1 billion/yr mark.

Links

• E-mail marketing article on About.com
• SpamCon Foundation
• Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
• DIRECT Magazine – E-mail Marketing

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Successful Email Marketing – How It’s Done

Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.

The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing, from the merchant’s viewpoint, is that with this pay for performance model, no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized.

Some e-commerce sites run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique, although research has shown in general the increase to be approximately 15-20% of online revenue.

Some advertisers offer multi-tier affiliate programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-affiliates. In practical terms: publisher “A” signs up the affiliate program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher “A” attracts other publishers (“B”, “C”, etc.) to sign up for the same affiliate program using her sign-up code all future activities by the joining publishers “B” and “C” will result in additional, lower commission for publisher “A”.

Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup. Most affiliate programs are simply one-tier.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

In its early days many internet users held negative opinions of affiliate marketing due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Currently there is much debate around the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of autogenerated webpages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of SEOing their sites with the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google’s algorithm update dubbed “Big Daddy” in February 2006 which was the final stage of Google’s major update dubbed “Jagger” which started mid-summer 2005 specifically targeted this kind of spam with great success and enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer generated duplicate content from its index.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Online Marketing is marketing on the Internet. It is a type of e-marketing, which in turn is a type of e-commerce. While at first the confusion of experiments, beta versions of websites, search engines and other online devices cause marketers to consider this world of the Internet unknowable and perhaps too unpredictable, there is now a growing body of work to which marketers are now paying attention in order to develop online marketing programs. The most known tools to marketers in the mid 2000s are currently tools grouped into 2 fields: online advertising and search engine optimization. E-marketing tools used to drive visitors to a web site include:

However, marketing online is simply not offline marketing applied to a new online world. Online marketing has a slightly different character and purpose as indicated in such seminal works as The cluetrain manifesto, Purple cow, Permission marketing, and other texts of smaller nature compiled in blogs and news sites.

References

• Smith, P.R. and Chaffey, D. (2001) eMarketing eXcellence: at the heart of eBusiness. Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK.
• Internet Marketing for Less Than $500 Per Year. ISBN 1885068697
• Building Your E-Bay Traffic The Smart Way. ISBN 0814472699
• The Online Copywriters Handbook. ISBN 0658020994
• The Complete Idiots Guide to Online Marketing. ISBN 078972037X

Video: Internet Marketing Secrets 1 of 3

Adware or advertising-supported software is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used.

An example of mild adware

Well-known adware programs

• 123 Messenger
• 180 Solutions
  • 180SearchAssistant
  • Zango
• Bonzi Buddy
• ClipGenie
• Comet Cursor
• Cydoor
• Direct Revenue
  • Aurora (adware)
• Ebates MoneyMaker
• Gator
• PornDigger!
• WinFixer
• Hotbar

Links

• Anti-Spyware Coalition
• Spyware / Adware Removal Tutorial – Spyware / Adware Removal Tutorial

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

 Malicious websites may attempt to install spyware on readers’ computers. In this screenshot a spamblog has triggered a pop-up that offers spyware in the guise of a security upgrade.

In the field of computing, the term spyware refers to a broad category of malicious software designed to intercept or take partial control of a computer’s operation without the informed consent of that machine’s owner or legitimate user. While the term taken literally suggests software that surreptitiously monitors the user, it has come to refer more broadly to software that subverts the computer’s operation for the benefit of a third party.

Spyware differs from viruses and worms in that it does not usually self-replicate. Like many recent viruses, however, spyware – by design – exploits infected computers for commercial gain. Typical tactics furthering this goal include delivery of unsolicited pop-up advertisements; theft of personal information (including financial information such as credit card numbers); monitoring of Web-browsing activity for marketing purposes; or routing of HTTP requests to advertising sites.

As of 2005, spyware has become one of the pre-eminent security threats to computer-systems running Microsoft Windows operating-systems (and especially to users of Internet Explorer because of that browser’s collaboration with the Windows operating system). Some malware on the Linux and Mac OS X platforms has behavior similar to Windows spyware, but to date has not become anywhere near as widespread.

Links

Guides

• Magoo’s Guide to Eliminating Spyware — Information on how to get rid of spyware and keep it from returning
• CareOfWindowsXP Spyware guide — Advice on spyware for beginners
• Spyware & Malware Removal Self-Help Guides — Self-help guides on removing different types of Spyware and Malware.
• Protection against Adware and Spyware – Beginners guide to preventing the installation of spyware

Prevention

• How Spyware And The Weapons Against It Are Evolving — Article discussing causes and possible remedies of the spyware problem
• “Using Virtual Machines to Defend Against Security and Trust Failures”
• SiteAdvisor – SiteAdvisor – free software to alert users about sites that install malware or otherwise breach security
• ShieldsUP! – ShieldsUP! internet vulnerability test, can detect a system’s weaknesses such as open ports that may allow malware entry

Organizations

• Anti-Spyware Coalition — A group developing formal definitions and best-practices
• StopBadware.org – A non-profit group (sponsored by Google, Lenovo, and Sun) that aims to provide “reliable, objective information about downloadable applications”.

Software

• http://www.lavasoft.com Ad-Aware antispyware program, free version available
• Safer Networking Spybot Search & Destroy and other free security programs

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Computer Virus, Spyware.

A KMail folder full of spam e-mail messages collected over a few days.

Spamming is commonly defined as the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail – that is, email that was not asked for (unsolicited) by multiple recipients (bulk). A further common definition of spam restricts it to unsolicited commercial e-mail, a definition that does not consider non-commercial solicitations such as political or religious pitches, even if unsolicited, as spam.

In the popular eye, the most common form of spam is that delivered in e-mail as a form of commercial advertising. However, over the short history of electronic media, people have spammed for many purposes other than the commercial, and in many media other than e-mail. Spammers have developed a variety of spamming techniques, which vary by media: e-mail spam, instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have effectively no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists. Because the barrier to entry is so low, the volume of unsolicited mail has produced other costs which are borne by the public (in terms of lost productivity and fraud) and by Internet service providers, which must add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in a number of jurisdictions.

Solutions to the spam problem

All manner of attempts have been made to curb unsolicited mass electronic communications. There are many solution categories in this constantly evolving field. Source-based blocking solutions prevent receipt of spam, while content filtering solutions identify spam after it’s been received. There are avoidance strategies, including disposable identities. Automated cancellation of netnews spam is ongoing. Contractual measures such as Internet Service Providers’ acceptable-use policies are also employed. Anti-spam laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have also been introduced to regulate or increase the legal penalties for spamming. Various vigilante and retaliatory tactics are also employed. Newer strategies include various cost-based and e-mail authentication and sender reputation solutions. The best means however is to be vigilant as to whom you give your email address. Constant distribution of your email address is bound to result in spam in some way. The best frame of mind is to decide whether the website can be trusted with your email address.

Newsgroups

• news.admin.net-abuse.email
• others in news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy
• alt.spam

Links

• IETF views on spamming can be found in RFC 2635.
• Ursine:Spam – Spam article in The Jargon Wiki.
• DMOZ Open Directory
  • Webmaster Forums at the Open Directory Project
• CircleID: Addressing Spam
• Spam Blocker Crawler Free public service for scanning guestbooks on link spam and send abuse in the Google and spammer’s hoster.

Anti-spam organizations

• Anti Spam Research Group
• CAUCE
  • APCAUCE – CAUCE Asia Pacific
• The Spamhaus Project
• Fight Spam on the Internet!
• Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group
• OECD Antispam Toolkit

Anti-spam articles and publications

• Spam In Developing Countries – part of the OECD Antispam Toolkit
• AOL Postmaster Pages – What to do if AOL blocks you
• Outblaze Antispam Pages – Articles on spam filtering by the postmaster staff at Outblaze
• SpamKings Blog by Brian McWilliams
• SpamHelp Anti-Spam Articles
• Anti Spam Whitepapers and Software
• Anti-Spam Topics
• Antiphishing Crusade Daily News of phishing spam collected from around the net.
• Article by Andy Coote in SC Magazine June 2004
• California lawyer who sues spammers
• E-mail Address Harvesting: How Spammers Reap What You Sow by the Federal Trade Commission
• Email Battles Daily news about spam, security, privacy, spyware, phishing and viruses from the front lines of the e-mail wars.
• Getting Rid of Spam (summary)
• Library of E-mail Spam Reports and Articles
• Spam FAQs
• Spamfo.co.uk News on junk e-mail, scams, fraud, legal aspects and reviews of software and services.
• SpamNews.co.uk Delivering your daily slice of fresh Spam. All the spam news, all the time
• Suggestions on how to choose an e-mail address and how to disclose it with care
• The rules of spam, according to net.admin.net-abuse.email
• The War Against Spam — a collection of reading material on the subject
• Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Research Six Month Report by the Center for Democracy & Technology
• UPI article about the economic effects of spam
• White paper from e-mail client developers
• Yahoo Domain Keys: Another Ineffective Spam Solution — shumans.com article, Dec 6, 2003
• Spam Techniques Research — do.homeunix.org paper and wiki, Jul 7, 2005
• A tool that deals with referer spam
• How to deny access to spam bots
• Why I Hate Spam by Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2003.
• Artist turns mortgage loan and Viagra spam into art Vyuz.com

Humor

• Spamusement A collection of humorously drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines.
• The Incredible Spam Museum A search engine like site that collects and publish spam e-mails.
• Spamradio Turns spam e-mail into online music streams.
• Spam Eulogy A guy that lives in a world of spam.
• WhamBamSpam Website that wants you to spam it’s forums, essentially free advertising, and spam discussions.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Spam, Phishing, and Online Scams: A View from the Network-Level

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients’ sites. Practitioners may use “white hat SEO” (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or “black hat SEO” (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters charge that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant.

Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay-per-click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a web site by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies can increase both the number and quality of visitors, where quality means visitors who complete the action hoped for by the site owner (e.g. purchase, sign up, learn something).

For competitive, high-volume search terms, the cost of pay per click advertising can be substantial. Ranking well in the organic search results can provide the same targeted traffic at a potentially lower cost. Site owners may choose to optimize their sites for organic search, if the cost of optimization is less than the cost of advertising.

Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites are seeking any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrase. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM revenue model. In contrast, many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate readiness to buy. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, allowing the sales force to close more business.

References

• Company Overview. Google. URL accessed on May 26, 2005.
• Editorial Guidelines for Ask.com. Ask Jeeves. URL accessed on May 26, 2005.
• Brin, Sergey; Page, Lawrence (?). “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“
• Our Search: Google Technology. Google. URL accessed on June 11, 2005.
• Google Patent Application List. History. URL accessed on October 10, 2005.
• Kent, Peter (2004). Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, Wiley Publishing Inc.. ISBN 0-7645-6758-6.

Links

• Google’s Guidelines on SEO’s
• Google’s Guidelines on Site Design
• MSN Search Guidelines for successful indexing
• Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Internet Marketing – Search Engine Optimization – Google

Billboards and street advertising in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, (2005)

Generally speaking, advertising is the promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas, usually by an identified sponsor. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy. Other components of the promotional mix include publicity, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.

Online advertising is advertising on the Internet. This particular form of advertising is a source of revenue for an increasing number of websites and companies.

There are two sides to online advertising, a legitimate one and an illegitimate one. The legitimate side of online advertising includes search engine advertising, advertising networks and opt-in e-mail advertising. The illegitimate side is dominated by spamming.

Though the range of advertising options has expanded since in the commercialization of the Internet, the use of rich media and static images is extremely popular. The ever-increasing audience of online users will likely continue to be a major advertising market.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.