Marketing Home Products

Long gone are the days when a milk man delivered the milk. We have gained, however – especially with the Internet’s advancement – infinitely more services… way better, perhaps, than milk delivered to your door.

These days, there are services available to meet almost every need. We watch DVDs via Netflix, stream music and shows online, print pictures and documents at labs, read newspaper and magazine articles for free and so on. With these services, who needs to own physical DVDs, CDs, or even a magazine subscription?

According to an article in The Atlantic, the future of consumption means owning fewer products and using more services.

What if this theory of consumption expanded to home products?
For instance, the article quotes a post at Harvard Business Review by Henry Chesbrough:

What’s more exciting is how you will consume refrigerators in the near future. Will you even need to buy one? Perhaps manufacturers will lease you a fridge and charge a low monthly rate for managing your refrigeration needs. They might bundle energy costs in as part of the package and then help you find ways to reduce energy usage. They’ll probably invite you to share clever ways to use refrigerators, or comment on their own ideas, and innovate even better offerings next time. We will increasingly consume products like refrigeration as services rather than as products.

So, products such as refrigerators (and one could assume ovens, microwaves, dishwashers, etc.) could become services for your needs. In the future, we may all possibly save on energy costs and furthermore not worry about actually purchasing any of these products.

What home products would you want to see become services?

Computer technology is constantly changing. Laptops are getting lighter, faster and some even have touch-screen capabilities. A new component in the works, an eye-tracking device, could make laptops even faster and, most impressively, more personable.

The device can be used to play games, scroll text and much more—all without the use of a mouse cursor!

The eye tracker works by shining two invisible infrared lights at the user. Two hidden cameras then look for flashes of light off the eyeballs and reflections from each retina. It’s very personable and needs to be calibrated for each user. The eye tracker works for people with or without eyeglasses.

Seems surreal, doesn’t it? Well, according to a recent AP article, these eye-tracking devices are already produced by Tobii Technology Inc., a Swedish firm, and have been used for years by researchers and the disabled.

In a couple more years, these devices will be available to consumers.

Looking ahead, these devices could be a crucial component to the home and building industries. Think about it…

Builders could design homes by using their eyes, instead of their hands. Decorators could purchase home goods without clicking a mouse cursor. Consumers could research products online without having to scroll, except with their eyes.

Would the eye tracker make these industries more efficient? What do you think?

Photo courtesy AP

If you’re trying to promote your business or just looking to find a voice on the web, you’ll inevitably run into a few unfamiliar terms. The world of internet marketing is full of jargon –specifically acronyms– that can get a little confusing if you’re just starting out.

After reading Maureen Streett’s useful list of keywords to know while in cyberspace, K&A’s social media team put together a list of a few additional terms to keep it all straight.

SERPs
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are simply the pages of search results for any particular search. According to a post on slowseo, the website ranked first for the search term will likely receive 42.4% of the traffic searching for that term. Second place typically gets about 11.8% of the traffic, and the following 8 share 35.7%. However, if you’re not on the first page, you share the remaining 10.1% of traffic with every other website not on the first page.

Alt Tags
An often overlooked component of SEO, alt tags are the tags associated with images.  Because search engines cannot evaluate the content of an image, alt tags are helpful for telling search engines what they’re about.

Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the prevalence of a certain keyword on a page. For instance, if a page uses the keyword “best marketers in Atlanta” 5 times in a 500 word post, the keyword density would be 1%. The more a term appears on a page, the more that page is associated with the term, making it more likely to show up in the SERPs for that search. However, a keyword density that is too high will seem unnatural to search engines and may result in the site getting penalized in the form of a lower ranking in the SERPs. No one can really say what a perfect keyword density is; just write naturally and on-topic… good rankings will follow.

Back links
Back links, as the name suggests, are links that “link back” to your website. Users that see your content and link to it from other websites online are making back links for you. Back links are one of the most important factors for ranking well in search engines and gaining traffic. Not only do search engines like Google use back links to rank your page, but users often click these links themselves, making back links doubly important.

Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text that a user sees for hyperlinks. Anchor text is often something like “click here.” Avoid this kind of generic anchor text for SEO purposes, as it’s not helpful to search engines. However, if you have a lot of back links with anchor text like “best marketers in Atlanta” pointing back to your site, your website’s position in the SERPs for the term “best marketers in Atlanta” is likely to rise.

Organic/Paid Results
Some search engines, such as Google, display ads around search engine results. These results are inorganic, as advertisers paid for users to see them. Conversely, organic search results are the results that naturally appear in the SERPs.

Google Analytics
If you’re looking for a way to comprehensively track traffic to your website, Google Analytics is a great option. Google Analytics is a free tool from Google, which allows webmasters to track page views, pages per visit, bounce rates, and more.

This list only scratches the surface of internet marketing, as it is a complex and ever-changing model. By periodically reading articles and blogs on the topic, you can stay up to date with the latest social media lingo.