David Iwanow

David Iwanow blogs about the benefits of including affiliate marketing in your small business marketing mix.

“The main benefit is that it’s performance based, so you pay when affiliates deliver leads or generate sales. It’s also a great platform as it overlaps with other marketing methods both offline and online.

Over the past few years the biggest hurdles I can see for any business to succeed online is their ability to be able to measure the traffic to their website. It seems alien to me that a company would spend hundreds, thousands if not more on building a website but fail to add the basic features of a web analytics like Google Analytics to track the ROI of their website.

The first point is that there are a lot of consumers out there shopping for a better deal and your competitors are increasing the savings for those who take the time to compare broadband plans online (for example) to find a better deal.

The reality is that Google provides the bulk of traffic to Australian websites and small business needs to invest in SEO.

SMEs needs to wake up and start looking at how they are allocating their online budgets and start thinking smarter about their web design projects starting with your choice of content management system (CMS).

One of the key benefits of domain registration is that it helps form a longer term strategy around brand protection for both your trademarks but also generic business area, but it can often a trap for new players or trusting business owners.

While it is clear that locational based checkin services such as FourSquare are continuing to grow at phenomenal rates, adding 15,000 users a day they appear to be missing the mark on small to medium sized business.

In the purchase of ITA Software, Google is able to control the whole vertical for Travel and threatens both traditional travel agents as well as online ticket and booking companies.