Announcements from Yahoo state that their first quarter earnings doubled. This is the company’s first revenue increase since 2008’s third quarter.  The 1% increase in revenue was below some expectations by analysts, and a 14% drop in search advertising sales restrained Yahoo’s overall revenue gain. The boost in earnings for Yahoo included reimbursement payments from Microsoft as the two companies are taking steps to begin displaying Bing search results on Yahoo.

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Apple recently unveiled iAd, which is its new mobile advertising platform. Here are a few of iAd’s features and specs:

- Designed for Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, & iPod)

- Built into Apple’s OS

- An ad let’s you stay in the application while it’s still running

- Implements rich media

- Apple sells and hosts the ads

- 60% of Ad Revenues go to developers

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The launch of the new Twitter advertising model (launched 4/13/2010) provided a lot of buzz within the Internet marketing community this past week.  As a service to our readers Rise read through many of the blogs and news articles available and has bullet pointed what we believe is the most important information on the topic.  Below you will see an example of the new Twitter Ads (Promoted Tweets) and bullet points on the facts regarding the Twitter ad model.  We also included our thoughts on the latest news to send the Internet marketing industry abuzz. (more…)

In our opinion, understanding why someone would link to you is the first step in a link building strategy.  The main thing that you need to understand is that another company will link to you because it adds value to them.

Some of the ways you can add value to them are: (more…)

If you do a search for a product in Amazon using their search bar, the results that are initially displayed are ranked by relevance across all of the departments. If you select a specific department then you can also choose to sort the results by best sellers, price, and user ratings.

How does Amazon determine relevance? According to Amazon, they rank relevance based on key terms found within the product feed in the following locations:

-          Search Terms

-          Title

-          Brand

-          Designer

-          Manufacturer

-          Manufacturer part number

-          Standard product ID (UPC, EAN, GTIN)

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For those agencies and marketers with a total focus on ROI, sometimes branding campaigns can be confounding.  How can I measure the effectiveness of my branding campaign to optimize performance?  The answer is something we call a “Brand Metrics Calculator”.  A Brand Metrics Calculator will convert all brand touch points into a common unit, and thus a common financial value.  This way the marketer can determine the effectiveness of multiple brand touch points and shift budget accordingly, as they would say in determining that a paid search campaign generates leads at a lower cost than say a banner campaign.   While this is not by any means an exact science, it allows the marketer to make data-driven decisions on how to invest marketing funds. (more…)