Every website has a bunch of web pages which get more search traffic than others. These pages are constantly visited daily by new visitors, people who have never seen the site in question before. I call these ‘money pages’ because they are a reliable source of immediate and future income.

But they’re not just ‘money’ because they bring in revenue: they are one of the easiest ways to grow your audience without much work. If you learn how to optimize these money pages (its not hard to do), you’ll really improve your website in so many ways. More revenue, more members, more influence and authority. Doesn’t that sound good?

In marketing and advertising, a ‘call to action’ is a message or statement which encourages the prospect to perform a specific action. Most of the time this involves buying a product, making a donation, subscribing to a newsletter or requesting for more information. The specific action to take is defined by the marketer in accordance with his/her goals.

If you think about it, call-to-actions are really a natural result of most human interactions. You call a friend to chit-chat and before you hang up, you ask her to have lunch together tomorrow. She thinks about her schedule for a moment and says “Sure, let’s do that”.

A fundamental aspect of marketing is to gain the attention of a target audience and engage or redirect it in a way which fulfills specific objectives, such as a positive increase in reputation, legitimacy, mindshare, exposure (visitor traffic), sales and captured leads (subscribers, users, clients etc).

In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content only for backlinks and traffic. Other savvy brands or individuals actively interact with online communities while moderating the impulse to ’spam’, in order to build legitimacy, authority and a better reputation in the specific field.

It’s the first month of a new year and at this time I’m itching to start new web ventures both for fun and profit. I usually do up a list of possible startup and site ideas and narrow them down into those with the highest potential. But success depends on execution and not just plans so I tend not to be too hung up about having a complete vision of what I want.

A little vagueness won’t hurt. I can always muddle through and change things up in response to market conditions or personal interest. No need to be perfect from the start.

If you’ve been to Japan, you might have noticed the popular practice of tissue-pack marketing. Companies hire agencies to distribute small tissue packages with advertisements inserted in them. These tissue packs are then handed out at crowded city areas to various types of passerbys. Some target only men or women, depending on the product/service advertised.

Around four billion tissue packs are distributed every year in Japan. An internet survey of over 100,000 consumers show that 76% will accept the tissue packs, with over 50% saying that they’ll definitely look at the ad. In terms of appeal, tissue packs are more welcome than flyers and are more likely to be retained by the recipent.

An image is an act of communication. Images play an important role in the presentation of ideas. Worth more than a thousand words, they encapsulate meaning by both simplifying and embodying conceptual theories.They make information more appealing, more persuasive. In the realm of art or activism, images reflect the underlying current of collective feeling by vocalizing both public consensus and private desires.

On the internet, you can see the same popular pictures in websites of every language. Russian, Chinese, French or English. Images transcend linguistic and cultural barriers faced by text. There is no need for machine or human translation. No need for mediation.

The internet is a fast-paced environment. People can come to your website at any hour from a wide range of locations, each of them with different intentions or needs. Unlike physical retail stores, you can’t see who is coming in and browsing around. You don’t know much about the people reading you. How can we develop a rough profile of all these individuals?

You already get a glimpse of them everyday when they interact with your website. Some may register for an account, leave a comment or send you an email. But many are ‘invisible’. They get to your site, see what you put out, click on a outbound link and disappear.

The Winner’s Curse is a term used to describe auctions whereby the winner will overpay because he/she overestimates the item’s actual market value. This tendency to overbid is due to factors like incomplete information or other market participants. Recent research show that people also overbid because of the fear of losing in a social competition. 

A team of NYU neuroscientists and economists conducted brain imaging studies and discovered that the striatum, a part of the brain’s reward circuitry showed an exaggerated response to losses during an auction game. When a group was told that they would lose $15 if they failed to win an auction, they consistently bid higher than others who were told they would win $15.

The decline of newspaper popularity has been attributed to the rise of the internet and the proliferation of web-based content. With an extremely low barrier of entry and variable cost, the web allows anyone with a computer to become an independent publisher: As a result, the amount and variety of content online far exceeds print publications in most fields.

So how can newspapers survive and do well as a business in the future? Perhaps by cutting back and going more niche to provide content that features deeper analysis and investigative reporting. In an article entitled ‘The Elite Newspaper of the Future’, Philip Meyer suggests that the money and audience comes from specialized, not general media.