Editor's Note

The March issue of Dynamic Internet Marketing Newsletter is full of exciting news! We start with an article about first major industry lawsuits under the new federal anti-spam law. Then we continue with results from a survey about relationship between Internet penetration and local shopping behavior.

All of this is accompanied by our tips on web promotion tools that can help you to grow your business on the Internet. This time we cover email marketing and to very serious marketers introduce complete internet marketing solution.

Enjoy the reading and take care!

Internet Marketing News Flash

Yahoo introduces new search technology

Yahoo!® Search will be rolling out its new Content Acquisition Program (CAP) this week as part of Yahoo! Search's ongoing efforts to enhance search quality and comprehensiveness. CAP enables non-commercial and commercial content providers to better interact with Yahoo! Search Technology by directly providing their Web pages, which are then added to Yahoo!'s search index and displayed in search results based on their relevance to a search term.

Overture, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo!, has launched a new paid inclusion program, called Site Match, as the commercial component of CAP. Site Match allows commercial content providers to effectively submit Web content, update it frequently, obtain additional targeted leads, and track and optimize their performance.

For more information please visit
» http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1144.html
» http://www.publish.com/news/912-Publish News.html

Looksmart increased its search distribution

FindWhat.com signs amended marger agreement with Espotting

Major ISPs Launch Spam Lawsuit Under New Law

AOL, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo! jointly announced six lawsuits against hundreds of defendants under the CAN-SPAM Act. Officially called the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, the CAN-SPAM law went into effect on Jan. 1. The four companies, meanwhile, have been officially working together on fighting spam since forming an anti-spam alliance in April 2003.

The CAN-SPAM law criminalizes tactics spammers use to spread junk e-mail including deceptive solicitations, use of open proxies, falsified "from" e-mail addresses, absence of physical addresses in the e-mail and absence of electronic unsubscribe options in the e-mail. Each of the four complainant companies filed lawsuits in California, Georgia, Virginia and Washington states.

"Congress gave us the necessary tools to pursue spammers with stiff penalties, and we in the industry didn't waste a moment," AOL executive vice president and general counsel Randall Boe said in a statement.

Some industry observers applauded the moves but cautioned users not to expect dramatic results from the legal actions or the CAN-SPAM Act alone.

"This is definitely a step in the right direction and demonstrates that ISPs are willing to take legal action to protect their customers and networks," said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer of MessageLabs, an e-mail security services provider. But according to MessageLabs, spam has continued to increase since CAN-SPAM's passage and spam now accounts for 64 percent of e-mail traffic.

"If these suits prove successful, they will mostly likely act as a deterrent for the less technically sophisticated spammers who are unable to take steps to cover their tracks, such as those using open proxies. It remains to be seen how many spammers go legit or move their operations offshore," Sunner said. "We continue to believe that laws and lawsuits are tactics in the war against
spam but not silver bullets."

Article by Scott Bekker, Editor in Chief for ENT News
You can contact Scott about "Major ISPs Launch Spam Lawsuit Under New Law"
at sbekker@entmag.com.

This article originally appeared at http://www.entmag.com at the following URL:
http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=6160

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• Schedule your email campaign at a specific time
• Create automated follow up at a regular time basis
• Send courses to subscribe automatically once the payment has been processed
• Subscribe or un-subscribe email address from your mailing list
• Remove bounced back emails automatically
• Create auto-responder to process your regular task automaticall
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Local Search Growing, but Small Biz Advertisers Cautious

Local search is a hot topic, but both search providers and small business owners face significant challenges before location based finding services gain broad acceptance.

Users Embracing Search for Local Information

Last November, The Kelsey Group and ComStat, Inc. conducted a telephone study of 1,006 people among a representative sample of U.S. households. Among other things, it sought to determine what specific sources consumers and business owners were using to find local product/service providers and whether Internet penetration had changed local shopping behavior. The survey found that 81% of users had Internet access either at work or home and about 40% had high-speed access at home. Despite these penetration rates, the survey also found that the top methods used for local shopping were still traditional, "offline" sources: printed yellow pages and local newspapers.

Among the "media used in the past year," yellow pages was first (75%), followed by newspapers (73%), white pages (58%) and search engines (47%). These numbers were largely unchanged if the population was limited to Internet users. The only significant difference was that the number using search jumped 10 points to 57%. However, the frequency of monthly usage was highest for search engines among all media.

More recently, in early February of this year, The Kelsey Group and BizRate.com jointly conducted an online survey of more than 5,000 online buyers-people who had made at least one purchase in the previous year. Search behavior was divided into non-commercial ("not looking for anything to buy") and commercial ("looking for a business, shopping or doing research before buying").

The survey results showed that 25.1% of commercial searches were local.

The data also showed:

• 44% of respondents were performing more local commercial searches than one year ago.
• Google was cited as the most frequently used search engine by 56% of respondents. That was followed by Yahoo! (21%) and MSN (13%). This compares with new Nielsen data showing that 39% use Google, 30% use Yahoo! and 30% use MSN.
• 71% of respondents used search engines seven or more times per week and 25% used search engines 30 or more times a week.
• 64% of people said that search engines were the "main way" they find things on the Internet and 6% percent said search engines were "the only way" they find things online.
• Commercial search results were rated as "good" or "excellent" by 80 percent of respondents.
• 64% said "search engines are better" than printed yellow pages for finding commercial information. And 52% said search engines are better than other "offline" sources such as newspapers, magazines and direct mail.

Search engines were, however, not rated better by a majority in comparison with the following: Internet Yellow Pages, online vertical directories or telephone directory assistance.

These recent findings appear to contradict those of the November study, but they don't represent an "apples to apples" comparison.

Beyond indicating the need for additional research, the difference in the two surveys can be partly accounted for by the fact there were two different survey populations: a representative sample of the U.S. population as a whole vs. a self-selected population of users who are somewhat more "Internet savvy" or sophisticated than the general U.S. population. The November study also revealed that people are increasingly using multiple sources for local shopping/business information.

Despite the fact that the quality of local search results is still very mixed, local search is clearly gaining traction with users.

Small Businesses Still Cautious and Confused

The other side of local search, of course, is geo-targeted advertising. And the biggest potential market is small business. As I discussed in Local Search: The Hybrid Future, the U.S. has roughly 10 million small businesses, the majority of which have fewer than nine employees and conduct most of their business within 50 miles of their physical locations.

There are lots of dollars at stake in the local market. Depending on whose numbers you choose, local advertising is worth somewhere between $22 billion and $94 billion. That includes all forms of advertising and marketing, from yellow pages and newspapers to direct mail, magazines and local TV and radio. And the larger number includes national advertisers targeting local markets.

Yet beyond the large numbers, there's also something of an imperative for search-based advertising to "go local" (and international). Last week eMarketer issued a report that projected paid search advertising growth would drop to 22.5% in the U.S. in 2004 and 17% in 2005, down from 123% in 2003. The Kelsey Group has estimated that local search revenues will be approximately $2.5 billion by 2008.

To achieve any sizeable revenues from the local market, paid search needs to gain small business advertiser adoption. But how much of the small business market will pay-per-click (PPC) be able to penetrate? There are some very practical challenges, which include:

• The complexity and time involved in keyword bid-campaign management
• Limited ad inventory and competition between national and small business
  advertisers for that inventory
• The absence of local sales channels to "push" PPC to small business advertisers
• The lack of websites among as much as 70% of small businesses

These are not insurmountable by any means, though they should not be minimized. It's also important to point out that many small businesses are currently users of paid search advertising. But for the great majority of small business, there may be considerable ignorance and even skepticism about PPC.

Beyond "structural" challenges, such as the absence of local sales channels and small business websites, when it comes to small businesses, paid search providers clearly have a sales job cut out for them.

February 24, 2004
Article By Greg Sterling gsterling@kelseygroup.net
This article originally appeared in Searchenginewatch.com's daily newsletter
SearchDay, at the following URL:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3316741

Greg Sterling is the managing editor of The Kelsey Group http://www.kelseygroup.com, which covers local and small business advertising, Yellow Pages and digital directories.

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