The Official Launch of VisibleU is this Wednesday!

Months of intense labor has finally paid off … Visible Shops is very happy to announce the launch of VisibleU!

The official launch of VisibleU is on Wednesday, October 21, 2009, at the NY XPO for Business. It’s the region’s largest B2B show, featuring a full day of business opportunity, growth and value. Not to mention plenty of time to network! If you have time to stop by, we highly recommend it. You never know who you’ll meet – besides us, of course.

In the meantime, we wanted to let all of you know that VisibleU is up and running right now, and we’d like all of our friends from Visible Shops to see what we’ve done and how you can benefit from it.

Through the past several years we met with many small business owners who really liked our concepts, our methodology and our people, but said that we simply cost too much for them. We decided a year ago to do something about that. We resolved to find a way to bring our concepts, methodology and expertise to every small business owner that wanted to take advantage of Internet marketing.

The rules we set for ourselves were simple.

1.    Must be affordable for all businesses no matter how small.
2.    Must be able to educate small business owners on Internet Marketing concepts and tools.
3.    Must provide access to our professional Internet Marketing Staff.
4.    Must be scalable so all businesses can get what they need.
5.    Should not require a long term contract.
6.    Should always deliver a positive ROI.

We did it! Now it’s available to you. Visit the VisibleU Web site and check it out.

But wait – there’s more…

Hiring the Internet goes Mobile

Some of our particularly sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that we’ve just upgraded our blog.  After years of being hosted as part of the WordPress.com community of blogs, we’ve decided to make the move to the freedom afforded by self-hosting. Our main reason for making the switch is so that we can make use of some of the vast number of WordPress extensions to add extra features to this site.

For instance: this blog is now available in a slick format that’s optimized for mobile devices, courtesy of the sexy WPTouch plugin. Just visit hiringtheinternet.com on your iPhone, Ipod or Android phone to check it out.

Interactive Marketing – Is That Really Where It's At?

It shouldn’t come as a shock that more and more marketers are taking their advertising efforts online. We’ve chronicled this shift fairly frequently, like in this post on the increase in spending in social network marketing.

But just because marketers are increasing their budgets for interactive advertising, that doesn’t mean they’re making money.

The good news is at least they think they will. And positive thinking has power, people!

According to the “2009 Promo Interactive Marketing Survey” from PROMO magazine, more than one-third of marketers believe that interactive marketing ROI will be more profitable than traditional marketing – such as TV, radio and outdoor – this year.

Take a look at this bar graph from eMarketer, which details the results of the survey:

Interactive Marketing – Is That Really Where It's At?

It shouldn’t come as a shock that more and more marketers are taking their advertising efforts online. We’ve chronicled this shift fairly frequently, like in this post on the increase in spending in social network marketing.

But just because marketers are increasing their budgets for interactive advertising, that doesn’t mean they’re making money.

The good news is at least they think they will. And positive thinking has power, people!

According to the “2009 Promo Interactive Marketing Survey” from PROMO magazine, more than one-third of marketers believe that interactive marketing ROI will be more profitable than traditional marketing – such as TV, radio and outdoor – this year.

Take a look at this bar graph from eMarketer, which details the results of the survey:

The Best and Worst Online B2C Practices to Boost ROI in 2009

Many online marketing companies want to know the numbers: what are the B2C (business to consumer) online marketing BEST practices to generate the greatest possible ROI?

Well look no further as we have numbers for your digestion.

Business to Consumer Marketing Best Practices

According to a year-end survey by marketingsherpa, B2C marketers responded that house email, SEO and paid search earned the highest ROI in the 4th Quarter of 2008. B2C marketers plan on increasing their budgets in these 3 areas of best practice.

The worst ROI happens to be the little blue blip at the bottom of the chart. Pop-ups and pop-unders are known as display advertising to the marketing world and confounded nuisances to the rest of the world. Surprisingly, only 30% to 40% of B2C online marketers ranked pop-ups and pop-unders as a best practice for ROI.

This chart should serve as a beacon for online marketers currently planning and revising 2009 budgets. Just follow the blue, brown, orange, pink, green and purple. It’s that simple.