Web Marketing Strategy Update

“Chat, flirt, socialize and have fun” is the tagline for the popular social dating site, Badoo. Founder of the site, Andrey Andreev, started Badoo in 2006 when it served only as a photo sharing site. Andrey was living in Spain at the time, and mainly because Spanish girls couldn’t be dated until the male had met her family, he thought it wouldn’t be a good idea to launch the site with a “meet new people” concept.

One year later in 2007 Andrey made an about turn on his initial judgment. He decided to test his views on Spanish women, and repositioned the Badoo as a place to meet new people, rather than just a photo sharing site. This decision came after Andrey observed that even though his site was not earning him revenue, the number of users had grown tremendously within the first year of its launch. The 2007 Google Zeitgeist recorded Badoo as one of the fastest growing search terms, second only to iPhone.
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While traditional outbound marketing continues to bombard prospects with print advertising, emails, telemarketing, trade shows and more in order to generate leads; inbound marketing concentrates on building longer and more intensive relationships with prospective customers, who are already searching your industry.

The aim of inbound marketing is to find highly targeted prospects and turn them into leads. The idea is to create compelling content which will draw the attention of the prospects who in turn visit the company website for further information about the product.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

How efficient inbound marketing is comes down largely to the quality and variability of your web content. Since the majority of prospects will look for information about your industry using search engines, effective SEO is crucial. Rather than spending a lot of money on paid search advertising, it’s wise to pay more attention to onsite and offsite optimisation techniques. An effective SEO strategy helps generate leads nationally and internationally as well as, crucially, in the local and immediate surrounding areas.
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Facebook claims to have more than 800 million active users, and for many of us online social networking has become a huge facet of our daily lives. To marketers social networking sites appear to be a great resource to reach potential customers and retain existing ones.

But how do the people they are trying to reach feel?

Facebook Users

It seems that these days many people define themselves by their profiles and interactions on social networks. As a result, they tend to feel that they should have total control over the environment on a site like Facebook which plays such a central role in their lives and captures their very essence. Most Facebook users take umbrage at any perceived commercial intrusion into their life on the network, as evidenced by the huge uproar that followed September’s changes to the news feed.
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Recently, I finally got around to looking at the scripts available for the Firefox plugin, Greasemonkey. I was not expecting what I found.

From the main site:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.

For example, you could:

• Make sure that all URLs displayed in the browser are clickable links
• Improve the usability of a site you frequent

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