Who are you marketing to?

Whether you’re doing business at the local mall or online, you’ve got to know your market. And if you’re doing business on the internet, over the last seven years the average internet user has changed.

According to eMarketer, the internet market that use to be mostly men is now mostly women – and likely to stay that way. In 2007, women equal about 51.7% of the internet population, and those numbers are expected to reach 51.9% by 2011.

Among other information reported, the eMarketers’ Women Online report analyzes the impact that new Internet video content and advertising are having—or not having—on female Internet users, who make up that very large US Internet population.

Amid all the excitement online video is causing, marketers must keep one fact in mind: Of the estimated 97 million females online in the US, only 66% of them actually watch videos online, compared with 78% of males who do. This and other statistics may change the way you want to market to your potential clients.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business

No more sitemaps? You don’t say . . .

For those of us with websites, the competing search engines at SES (Search Engine Strategies) made the following announcement yesterday:

“Today, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! together are announcing support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.”

Find the full report at Ask.com’s official blog.

As far as I’m concerned the jury is still out as to whether sitemaps are worth the effort made by web owners. Personally I’ve found I have more pages indexed without a sitemap – autodiscovery or manually submitted. With my 60 page site I can count on having all my pages indexed unless I have a sitemap. With a sitemap my total pages indexed usually drops to 20 or so. And I’m not alone.

Many website owners I’ve talked to find they have the same results. To be fair, there are those who believe sitemaps are just wonderful. (The cat's meow.) My opinion is you need to test for yourself. Try your site with and without sitemaps and see which works best for you.

Until next time . . .

All the best,
Joyce
Start a Work at Home Business