A PROJECT REPORT ON
MARKETING AND REVENUE GENERATION STRATEGY FOR NEWLY LAUNCHED SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE FOR STUDENTS
SUBMITTED BY MR. SUSHIL S MUNDADA ROLL NO. 11 IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF POST GRADUATE DIPLOMA IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
SHREE CHANAKYA EDUCATION SOCIETY
INDIRA COLLEGE OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
(AFFILIATED TO UNIVERSITY OF PUNE) SHIVAJINAGAR, PUNE 5
2010-2012
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that Mr. Sushil S Mundada is a student for academic year 2010-12 of our Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management. He / she has carried out project on “Marketing Strategy for newly launched Social Networking Website for Students” in the Marketing area of specialization. The project is completed under the guidance of Prof.Rajeev Deo.
Subject Teacher Director
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Date: 25/2/2012 Place: Pune
ICBM
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DECLARATION I hereby declare that this report titled “Marketing and Revenue generation Strategy for newly launched Social Networking Website for Students” is a record of independent work carried out by me as a part of Final Year Project for the PGDBM course of Pune University for the period starting from January 2012 to May 2012. The above project was performed under the guidance of Prof. Rajeev Deo. I declare that the information given in the above project is true to my knowledge.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The work on this project has been an inspiring, often exciting, sometimes challenging, but always an interesting experience. At the very outset, I wish to thank Prof. Rajeev Deo for giving me the opportunity to participate in this interesting research project, that helped me gain insights into the Internet World. He has supported me with his guidance, insights, encouragement and many a fruitful discussion on. I am grateful to him to have spared his time and showing the patience to our answer our queries. The kindness shown by him, in spite of him being so busy with his work, is highly appreciated. I would also like to thank Prof. Suneel Kelkar, support staff of Indira College of Business Management and all my fellow colleagues who supported me at all times. This ensured the prompt completion of this project.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Executive Summary.........................................................................................................9 2 Introduction...................................................................................................................10
2.1 Sector profile in brief.......................................................................................................10 2.2 Emerging trends in social networking............................................................................10 2.3 Rationale of the study.......................................................................................................11
3 Industry/ Sector Profile.................................................................................................13
3.1 Industry size and Growth trends - Internet Advertising Statistics:..............................13 3.2 Government support and policies...................................................................................16
4 Company and Product Profile......................................................................................17 5 Literature and terminologies.........................................................................................19
5.1 Website Basics..................................................................................................................19 5.2 mar·ket·ing [mahr-ki-ting]..............................................................................................19 5.3 Contemporary approaches to marketing........................................................................19 5.4 Social marketing ..............................................................................................................20 5.5 Internet marketing...........................................................................................................20 5.6 ad·ver·tis·ing [ad-ver-tahy-zing] .....................................................................................21 5.7 Features of Advertising....................................................................................................21 5.8 Types of Advertising........................................................................................................21 5.9 Cost per impression CPI or CPM (Cost per mille)........................................................22 5.10 Clickthrough rate (CTR) ..............................................................................................23 5.11 Pay per click (PPC) (Cost per click)..............................................................................23 5.12 A Social network ............................................................................................................24
6 Objectives and Scope of the project .............................................................................26
6.1 Objectives..........................................................................................................................26 6.2 Scope..................................................................................................................................26
7 Marketing Options.........................................................................................................27
7.1 Affiliate marketing ..........................................................................................................27 7.2 Referral marketing ..........................................................................................................27 7.3 Facebook ..........................................................................................................................27
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7.4 Twitter...............................................................................................................................28 7.5 Marketing on Forums .....................................................................................................29 7.6 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ...............................................................................29 7.7 Article marketing ............................................................................................................29 7.8 Guest writing on Blog posts ............................................................................................29 7.9 Squidoo .............................................................................................................................29 7.10 Viral marketing .............................................................................................................30 7.11 Developing Your Marketing Strategies ........................................................................30
8 Revenue generation options..........................................................................................32
8.1 Affiliate marketing ..........................................................................................................32 8.2 Google AdSense ...............................................................................................................32 8.3 AdBrite .............................................................................................................................32 8.4 In-text advertising ...........................................................................................................33 8.5 Youtube ............................................................................................................................33 8.6 Flat rate ads .....................................................................................................................33 8.7 Pop-up ads or pop-ups.....................................................................................................33 8.8 Hover ads .........................................................................................................................34 8.9 A web banner or banner ad.............................................................................................34 8.10 Standard sizes of banners..............................................................................................34 8.11 SMS Alerts advertising..................................................................................................35 8.12 Electronic Direct Mailers (E-Mailers)...........................................................................35
9 Choosing the marketing strategy .................................................................................36 10 Choosing the revenue maximation strategy ..............................................................37
10.1 Business model of social networks.................................................................................37 10.2 Determining you ad price...............................................................................................37 10.3 Projecting expected number of registered users..........................................................38 10.4 Projecting expected number of page views per day.....................................................39 10.5 Projecting expected time spent per person on the site.................................................39 10.6 Sample Rate list for various banner options available................................................40 10.7 Revenue projections using different advertising mechanisms....................................40
11 Conclusions.................................................................................................................41 12 Suggestions / Recommendations.................................................................................42 6
13 References....................................................................................................................43 14 Glossary.......................................................................................................................45
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Global Industry Size and Industry leaders.......................................................15 Table 2: Example of niche local social networking sites for sudents............................15 Table 3: Common Behaviors of Youth on Social Networks...........................................15
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1 Executive Summary
The new millennium has brought us on the brink of the I.T. Revolution. This revolution has been aided by the advent of the Internet in a big way. Internet is fast changing the way people used to do things. Naturally, the same would have an impact on the advertisers. The Internet has been accepted as the most powerful media for advertising due to the absence of geographical barriers. Advertisers are trying to use the 'net' to advertise their products and hence 'net' their customers. A social networking service (SNS) is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. If you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the Internet. It’s as true for advertisers as it is for consumers. Social networking is the ultimate manifestation of user generated content, and as such, holds more potential for growth than any other form of content on the Web today. There have been several efforts to monetize social networks mainly through advertising. Because of their inherent charateristics, social networking sites need to have different ways to market themselves to attract users to the site. The revenue generating capacity of the sites depends on number of registered users and visitors to the website. There are few global social networking sites controlling the maximum share of the market. There are also a lot of upcoming niche local social networking sites targetting a specific market group. The company under study us about to launch such a special social networking site for students in India. The objectives of this project can be summarised as follows: 1. Study the various marketing options for the newly launched social networking site. 2. Choose the options which will incur minimal cost and attract maximum users to the site. 3. Study the various revenue generating mechanisms for the newly launched social networking site. 4. Choose the strategy for maximising the revenue with the current user base as well as prepare a foreseeable plan for the future strategy; expecting an increase in user base and scope.
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2 Introduction
2.1 Sector profile in brief
A social networking service (SNS) is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. The main types of social networking services are those that contain category places (such as former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with selfdescription pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook, Google+, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn widely used worldwide. Web-based social networking services make it possible to connect people who share interests and activities across political, economic, and geographic borders. Social networking sites have become an important part of day-to-day life for millions of people, thanks to sites like Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, LinkedIn. The proliferation of social-networks on the Internet, has allowed companies to collect information about social-network users and their social relationships. Social networks allow us to determine who is acquainted with whom, how frequently they interact online, what interests they have in common, etc. Users are spending increasing amounts of time on social network websites. For instance, a recent survey that ranks websites based on ‘average time spent by a user’, identifies MySpace and Facebook among the top 10 websites.
2.2 Emerging trends in social networking
As the increase in popularity of social networking is on a constant rise, new uses for the technology are constantly being observed. At the forefront of emerging trends in social networking sites is the concept of “real-time web” and “location-based.” Real-time allows users to contribute content, which is then broadcast as it is being uploaded - the concept is analogous to live radio and television broadcasts. Twitter set the trend for “real-time” services, wherein users can broadcast to the world what they are doing, or what is on their minds within a 140-character limit. Facebook followed suit with their “Live Feed” where users' activities are streamed as soon as it happens. While Twitter 10
focuses on words, Clixtr, another real-time service, focuses on group photo sharing wherein users can update their photo streams with photos while at an event While there are global social networking sites, there are also local players in the market on focusing on specific areas. These niche social networks focus on a particular customer segment, georaphical location, interest group, etc. There is real opportunities belong in niche social networks.
2.3 Rationale of the study
There have been several efforts to monetize social networks mainly through advertising. Because of their inherent charateristics, social networking sites need to have different ways to market themselves to attract users to the site. The revenue generating capacity of the sites depends on number of registered users and visitors to the website. Also, since these sites have fairly new way of doing business and revenue generation. So it is important for a new entrant to study the various options and the upcoming trends in the field of social networking. The primary source of revenue for the social networking sites is advertising. It is important for the sites to adopt the best strategy to market themselves as well as generate maximum revenue through various sources. This study will analyse the various marketing options as well as revenue generating capabilty of the various sources of revenue. This will help the new site to position itself correctly in the market and maximise its income.
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3 Industry/ Sector Profile
3.1 Industry size and Growth trends - Internet Advertising Statistics:
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The world is home to 7 billion people, one third of which are using the Internet. Younger people tend to be more online than older people, in both developed and developing countries. 45% of the world’s Internet users are below the age of 25. There are more than 1.2 Billion Social Networking users in the World. 82% of World’s online population is on Social networking sites Nearly 20% of overall time spent online is spent on Social Networking Sites – i.e. Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes Internet Users: Penetration: 10% of India’s population (Source ITU) Broadband Internet connections: 13.30 million in December’11 ( Source TRAI) One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users) People spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook Each Facebook user spends on average 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook 30 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook each month People on Facebook install 20 million “Apps” every day YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011) YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years) Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors People upload 3,000 images to Flickr (the photo sharing social media site) every minute Flickr hosts over 5 billion images 190 million average Tweets per day occur on Twitter (May 2011) Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day Google+ has more than 25 million users Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)
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Table 1: Global Industry Size and Industry leaders Name Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Description/Focus General. General. Microblogging, RSS, updates Business and professional networking Photo sharing, commenting, photography related networking, worldwide Registered users 800,000,000+ 300,000,000 120,000,000 Global Alexa Page ranking 2 9 13
Flickr
32,000,000
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Table 2: Example of niche local social networking sites for sudents Name pagalguy.com aglasem.com managementparadise.com bharatstudent.com Description/Focus Focus on students appearing for MBA entrance exams Focus on engineering students Focus on current MBA students Focus on stundets in general India Alexa Page ranking 423 3550 4012 181
Table 3: Common Behaviors of Youth on Social Networks See what my friends are up to Sent a message to someone Posted/updated my profile Looked at profiles of people I didn’t know 86% 79% 70% 65%
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3.2 Government support and policies
Because of the power of social networking sites, the various governments have kept an eye on the developments in this space. The Indian Government in its latest move has asked the internet companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft to create a framework to prescreen the data before it goes up on the website. The Indian Government found some defamatory content on one of the social networking sites and in that pretext has asked the internet companies to find a way to ensure that defamatory or inflammatory material is screened before it goes online. The Indian Government wants the content on the social networking sites to be regulated (read: censored) in the country. The Indian government has given the green light for the prosecution of “21 social networking sites.” The list features 10 foreign-based companies, and could affect websites provided by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube.
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4 Company and Product Profile
The newly launched social networking sites will cater to the student community in India and help them to network with each other and offer host of specialised services like connecting with alumni, finding jobs, sharing notes, reference material, project counselling, etc. Since the newly launched company is a start-up it has limited financial resources, so it has to use innovative marketing mechanisms to market the website and attract users to the site since the revenue generating capacity of the site will be directly proportional to number of registered users and visitors to the website. The main target audience of the website is the higher education students. As of 2011, India has 42 central universities, 275 state universities, 130 deemed universities, 90 private universities, 5 institutions established and functioning under the State Act, and 33 Institutes of National importance. Other institutions include 16000 colleges as Government Degree Colleges and Private Degree Colleges, including 1800 exclusive women's colleges, functioning under these universities and institutions.The emphasis in the tertiary level of education lies on science and technology. Indian educational institutions by 2004 consisted of a large number of technology institutes. Distance learning and open education is also a feature of the Indian higher education system, and is looked after by the Distance Education Council. Indira Gandhi National Open University is the largest university in the world by number of students, having approximately 3.5 million students across the globe. Thus there is a big market available for the website with millions of higher education students across the country.
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5 Literature and terminologies
5.1 Website Basics
• Domain name is address of your website • Web Host (Registrar) is company that allows you to publish your pages on internet, and develop additional features like chat room, blog, forums etc. It provides server space for your web pages.
5.2 mar·ket·ing [mahr-ki-ting]
noun 1. the act of buying or selling in a market. 2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling. Marketing is defined by the AMA(American Marketing Association) as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, marketing management is one of the major components of business management
5.3 Contemporary approaches to marketing
Recent approaches in marketing include relationship marketing with focus on the customer, business marketing or industrial marketing with focus on an organization or institution and social marketing with focus on benefits to society. New forms of marketing also use the internet and are therefore called internet marketing or more generally e-marketing, online marketing, search engine marketing, desktop advertising or affiliate marketing. It attempts to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope, because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media.
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5.4 Social marketing
It is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote society's well being as a whole.
5.5 Internet marketing
It is also known as web marketing, online marketing, webvertising, or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing (generally promotion) of products or services over the Internet. Types of Internet marketing: Internet marketing is broadly divided in to the following types: • Display Advertising: the use of web banners or banner ads placed on a thirdparty website to drive traffic to a company's own website and increase product awareness • Search Engine Marketing (SEM): a form of marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of either paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion, or through the use of free search engine optimization techniques • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results • Social Media Marketing: the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites • Email Marketing: involves directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail • Referral Marketing: a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth • Affiliate Marketing: a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts • Content Marketing: involves creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers
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5.6 ad·ver·tis·ing [ad-ver-tahy-zing]
noun 1. the act or practice of calling public attention to one's product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.: to get more customers by advertising. 2. paid announcements; advertisements. 3. the profession of planning, designing, and writing advertisements. Advertising is paid non-personal communication from an identified sponsor using mass media to persuade or influence an audience
5.7 Features of Advertising
• Advertising is a paid form of communication, although some forms of advertising, such as public service announcements, use donated space and time. • Second, not only is the message paid for, but the sponsor is identified. • Third, most advertising tries to persuade or influence the consumer to do something, although in some cases the point of the message is simply to make consumers aware of the product or company • Fourth and fifth, the message is conveyed through many different kinds of mass media reaching a large audience of potential consumers. • Finally, because advertising is a form of mass communication, it also nonpersonal
5.8 Types of Advertising
• Print Advertising: Newspapers, Magazines, Brochures, Fliers: The print media have always been a popular advertising medium. Advertising products via newspapers or magazines is a common practice. In addition to this, the print media also offers options like promotional brochures and fliers for advertising purposes. • Outdoor Advertising: Billboards, Kiosks, Tradeshows and Events (OOH): Outdoor advertising is also a very popular form of advertising, which makes use of several tools and techniques to attract the customers outdoors. The most common examples of outdoor advertising are billboards, kiosks, and also several events and tradeshows organized by the company. • Broadcast advertising: Television, Radio and the Internet: Broadcast advertising is a very popular advertising medium that constitutes of several branches like television, radio or the Internet. Television advertisements have been very popular ever since they have been introduced. • Covert Advertising: Advertising in Movies: Covert advertising is a unique kind of advertising in which a product or a particular brand is incorporated in some entertainment and media channels like movies, television shows or even sports. There is 21
no commercial in the entertainment but the brand or the product is subtly (or sometimes evidently) showcased in the entertainment show. • Surrogate Advertising: Advertising Indirectly: Surrogate advertising is prominently seen in cases where advertising a particular product is banned by law. Advertisement for products like cigarettes or alcohol which are injurious to heath are prohibited by law in several countries and hence these companies have to come up with several other products that might have the same brand name and indirectly remind people of the cigarettes or beer bottles of the same brand. Common examples include Fosters and Kingfisher beer brands, which are often seen to promote their brand with the help of surrogate advertising. • Public Service Advertising: Advertising for Social Causes: Public service advertising is a technique that makes use of advertising as an effective communication medium to convey socially relevant messaged about important matters and social welfare causes like AIDS, energy conservation, political integrity, deforestation, illiteracy, poverty and so on. • Celebrity Advertising: Although the audience is getting smarter and smarter and the modern day consumer getting immune to the exaggerated claims made in a majority of advertisements, there exist a section of advertisers that still bank upon celebrities and their popularity for advertising their products. Using celebrities for advertising involves signing up celebrities for advertising campaigns, which consist of all sorts of advertising including, television ads or even print advertisements. • Internet Advertising: Internet promotion is one of the newer types of advertising and can be accomplished in a number of ways. Flash advertising refers to messages that jump onto your computer screen and often move around. They can be hard to close and are annoying, but effective at gaining your attention. Pop up and scrolling ads are other examples of these types of advertising. Pay per click advertising refers to marketers paying to have their web pages placed high on search engine results pages. These are also called sponsored links. • Unicast Ads: A unicast ad is basically a TV commercial that runs in the browser window. Ithas enriched audio/video content. The ads can last anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds. These ads have similar branding power as a TV commercial. However, a unicast ad offers something that TV ads cannot -- the ability to click on the ad for more information. These ads are getting very effective, as the average click-through rate is 5%.
5.9 Cost per impression CPI or CPM (Cost per mille)
These are phrases used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic.They refer to internet marketing campaigns where advertisers pay for every time that their advert is displayed to a user usually in the form of a banner ad on a website. CPM advertising is often preferred by publishers because they can be more certain about the revenue they will generate from their website traffic, but CPM can be compared with different marketing strategies by examining their Effective cost per mille (eCPM). eCPM 22
informs the publisher what they would have received if they sold the advertising inventory on a CPM basis by taking into account the Clickthrough rate (CTR) and/or Conversion rate (CVR) of the campaigns
5.10 Clickthrough rate (CTR)
It is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website. The clickthrough rate of an advertisement is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. For example, if a banner ad is delivered 100 times (100 impressions) and receives one click, then the clickthrough rate for the advertisement would be 1%. Click-through rates for banner ads have fallen over time. When banner ads first started to appear, it was not uncommon to have rates above five percent. They have fallen since then, currently averaging closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent
5.11 Pay per click (PPC) (Cost per click)
It is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC “display” advertisements are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads. This approach differs from the “pay per impression” methods used in television and newspaper advertising. In contrast to the generalized portal, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, PPC implements the so-called affiliate model, that provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites. The affiliates provide purchasepoint click-through to the merchant. It is a pay-for-performance model: If an affiliate does not generate sales, it represents no cost to the merchant. Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser's keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site. In PPC you bid on keywords which you want to rank high for. Everytime someone clicks on your ad/site link you pay a fixed amount.
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There are two primary models for determining cost per click: flat-rate and bid-based. In both cases the advertiser must consider the potential value of a click from a given source. This value is based on the type of individual the advertiser is expecting to receive as a visitor to his or her website, and what the advertiser can gain from that visit, usually revenue, both in the short term as well as in the long term. Among PPC providers, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model.
5.12 A Social network
It has three baseline components: • A profile that contains a person’s information • The ability for people to connect to each other via those profiles, often called a social graph and • the ability to do something useful or valuable they couldn’t have done otherwise Features such as discoverability or public access are often cited as social network features. The common denominators across most social networks are the following three characteristics: Maintain a Rich Profile: Google recently launched new features called Google profiles which allows users to upload profile pics, include personal information and preferences, and allow it to be discoverable on the web. These are coupled with a Google account such as gmail, and is at the core of these efforts. Connect and Communicate With Others: Individuals using the Google profiles can connect to each other and share information using a variety of tools, not all of them necessarily social. For example, Gmail and Google Talk contain not just your contacts, but also understand with whom you communicate the most. Google doesn’t explicitly ask if you’re a ‘friend’ or ‘fan’ of someone, but rather, allows people to connect to each other in a variety of communication tools. Centralize Information In A Useful Way: Allowing people to build profiles and communicate with each other isn’t of much value unless it can provide a more useful experience not previously available. Google provides a number of tools like Google Wave, a collaboration tool we’ve started to experiment with, Gtalk instant messanger, and Gmail which rivals Facebook’s newsfeed, chat, and inbox respectively.
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6 Objectives and Scope of the project
6.1 Objectives
The revenue generating capacity of the site will be directly proportional to number of registered users and visitors to the website. The objectives of this project can be are as follows: 1. Study the various marketing options for the newly launched social networking site. 2. Choose the options which will incur minimal cost and attract maximum users to the site. 3. Study the various revenue generating mechanisms for the newly launched social networking site. 4. Choose the strategy for maximising the revenue with the current user base as well as prepare a foreseeable plan for the future strategy; expecting an increase in user base and scope.
6.2 Scope
• The project report does not divulge into the details of the product offering of the new website. • The projected earnings will be based on the assumption of the user base increase. The exact increase in number of users will depend on lot of unforseeen conditions. • The project will cover the earnings of the website only though advertising. Any other way of revenue generation will not be part of the study.
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7 Marketing Options
There are many ways to market a social networking website. The marketing is required to attract more and more number of users to the site so as to have users spend increasing amount of time on the site. The different ways are described below:
7.1 Affiliate marketing
It is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. It is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales. o The company that owns the products pay you a comission for any sale your site generates. o Affliate links can also be put in docs/pdfs for download. o Sponsored ads can be part of the download docs/pdfs. o RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – This allows people to stay updated with your content by simple subscribing to your blogs feed using an online RSS reader (like Google Reader)
7.2 Referral marketing
It is a structured and systematic process to maximize word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers and contacts to think and talk as much as possible about their supplier, their company, product and service and the value and benefit the supplier brings to them and people they know. Online referral marketing, using digital marketing as a platform, is the internet based approach to traditional referral marketings
7.3 Facebook
With facebook, you can have a number of ways to promote your site. Here are some of the other tools available to marketers to engage the Facebook community. • Engagement Ads: Allow community members to interact with the ads in the profile and newsfeeds without leaving the Facebook site, increasing interaction, social spread, and brand engagement. Encourages members to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans. To combat dismal click through rates 27
of traditional advertisements, these features emulate widgets and encourage users to increase member adoption, viral growth, and brand interaction. Brands will only succeed with these “WidgetAds” if they create content that puts community first, lean on new interactions, integrate with other tools, plan for the long haul, and change how they measure success –traditional internet advertising tactics won’t apply. Facebook developed engagement ads that allow more communication between the advertisers and the Facebook users. The most common form is a fan page where users can receive automatic updates, comment on ads, and RSVP to events. These small interactions of commenting, voting and “liking” activities allow brands to see what consumers like and dislike. The page’s fan base allows companies to pinpoint their actual target market. • Standard Advertisements: These Text and image ads can appear on homepage or profile pages, neatly integrate with the new redesign. • Social ads: Are helpful for brands to increase the velocity or acceleration by marketers, allowing them to buy ads that echo the behaviors “what did my friends do” of opt-in users. These primarily appear on the newsfeed, which will encourage spread to an individuals network. • Traditional IAB graphic ads: Advertising laden brands may still purchase the standard IAB skyscraper and banner ads. • Facebook pages: Launched last year, brands can (at no charge) create their own pages, embed applications, encourage discussions, and start to garner “Fans” of it’s products. • Event Feature: Based pages allow marketers to promote events through viral invites, rsvp tools, and event rollups from media and community interaction. While a useful utility, for most brands that market on the web, this is often a side-effort, not the primary push. • Facebook Connect: Perhaps the biggest untold story is the day when Facebook (and other social networks) will connect with corporate websites. • Applications: Facebook was a first mover to allow third-party developers to create an entire eco-system of applications that are growing their own applications. Most brands are harassing successful apps through sponsorships, cross branding, and a few are building their own apps.
7.4 Twitter
Great traffic generating tool. Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”.
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7.5 Marketing on Forums
Add your site adddress in your signature and post 5-10 posts per day. Once you become known on forum, people wil start visiting your website
7.6 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
It is process of getting your pages ranked high in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. SEO is targeted since people who search are looking out for some thing and your website is relavant to those people. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users
7.7 Article marketing
Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles about themselves as a marketing strategy. A primary style for the articles includes a bio box and byline (collectively known as the resource box) about the business. You write original article and submit on sites like www.ezinearticles.com, if someone uses your article, they must also print your info box and link to your site. So it is like viral marketing.
7.8 Guest writing on Blog posts
A blog is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. The guest articles are written on sites which are heavily trafficked, to get the traffic back to your sites.
7.9 Squidoo
Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Allows you to create one page site (or lens) on any topic of yur choice. You can link it to your main website to increase the traffic
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7.10 Viral marketing
It is a promotional method that is of the customers, by customers, and for customers. It refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing socialnetworks to produce increases in brand awarenss, through self-replicating viral processes. marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily Viral marketing is not only about getting someone to interact with a message, it needs to be viral - it needs to have a pass-along effect. The viral catch depends on a high passalong rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of people, the overall growth balloons very quickly, but if the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles. Its vital component is encouraging individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, it takes advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands – or even to millions.
7.11 Developing Your Marketing Strategies
Here’s a framework of 22 tools to consider with notable brand examples: 1. Blogs (Johnson & Johnson, Delta Air Lines) 2. Bookmarking/Tagging (Adobe, Kodak) 3. Brand monitoring (Dell, MINI) 4. Content aggregation (Alltop, EMC) 5. Crowdsourcing/Voting (Oracle, Starbucks) 6. Discussion boards and forums (IBM, Mountain Dew) 7. Events and meetups (Molson, Pampers) 8. Mashups (Fidelity Investments, Nike) 9. Microblogging (Method, Whole Foods) 10. Online video (Eukanuba, Home Depot) 11. Organization and staffing (Ford, Pepsi) 12. Outreach programs (Nokia, Yum Brands) 13. Photosharing (Rubbermaid, UK Government) 14. Podcasting (Ericsson, McDonalds) 15. Presentation sharing (CapGemini, Daimler AG) 16. Public Relations – social media releases (Avon, Intel) 17. Ratings and reviews (Loblaws, TurboTax) 18. Social networks: applications, fan pages, groups, and personalities (British Airways, Saturn) 19. Sponsorships (Coca-Cola, Whirlpool) 20. Virtual worlds (National Geographic, Toyota) 21. Widgets (Southwest Airlines, Target) 22. Wikis (Second Life, T-Mobile Sidekick) 30
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8 Revenue generation options
8.1 Affiliate marketing
It is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. To find affiliate programs www.cj.com, www.associateprograms.com. check www.linkshare.com, www.shareasale.com,
The newly launched website could tie up with any of the above affiliate programs to start generating revenue by sending customers to the different sites.
8.2 Google AdSense
It is a program run by Google Inc. that allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, and rich media adverts that are targeted to site content and audience. These adverts are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they can generate revenue on either a per-click or perimpression basis. Many websites use AdSense to monetize their content; it is the most popular advertising network. AdSense has been particularly important for delivering advertising revenue to small websites that do not have the resources for developing advertising sales programs and sales people to generate revenue with. Everytime an ad is clicked on your site Google pays you a percentage of what advertiser is paying to them for the click. Googles technology will generate the ads relevant to your content.
8.3 AdBrite
It is also an option to AdSense; the different being you can also host flat-rate ads. However you need to share profits with AdBrite.
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8.4 In-text advertising
It is a form of contextual advertising where specific keywords within the text of a webpage are matched with advertising and/or related information units. Kontera and Infolink are companies that provide in-text text become underlined ads. Kontera's technology is semantic, statistical, linguistic, and yield-maximization content, extract and rank topics and keywords, and advertisements, content, and information. advertising. Some keywords in based on several proprietary algorithms that analyze online then match them to relevant
8.5 Youtube
A channel on YouTube is the home page for an account. It shows the account name, the account type, the public videos they've uploaded, and any user information they've entered. You can customize the background and color scheme of a channel along with controlling some of the information that appears on it. YouTube channels can also display favorite videos from other users, activity streams, comments, subscribers, and other social networking features. As your channel becomes popular, you can become partner and earn revenue from ads displayed on and around your video.
8.6 Flat rate ads
It is a way of advertising where you charge a fixed amount to place an ad on ur website
8.7 Pop-up ads or pop-ups
These are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements. A variation on the pop-up window is the pop-under advertisement, which opens a new browser window hidden under the active window. Pop-unders do not interrupt the user immediately and are not seen until the covering window is closed, making it more difficult to determine which web site opened them.
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8.8 Hover ads
These are a special type of pop-up ads created using Dynamic HTML, JavaScript and similar web browser technologies. Because they do not scroll with the web page, they appear to “hover” over the page, usually obscuring the content.
8.9 A web banner or banner ad
It is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. These images are usually placed on web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece. Affiliates earn money usually on a CPC (cost per click) basis.
8.10 Standard sizes of banners
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner Name Width / (pixels) Height / (pixels) Aspect ratio Rectangles and Pop-Ups Medium Rectangle 300 250 1.2 Square Pop-Up 250 250 1 Vertical Rectangle 240 400 1.67 Large Rectangle 336 280 1.2 Rectangle 180 150 1.2 3:1 Rectangle 300 100 3 Pop-Under 720 300 2.4 Banners and Buttons Full banner 468 60 7.8 Half banner 234 60 3.9 Micro bar 88 31 2.84 Button 1 120 90 1.33 Button 2 120 60 2 Vertical banner 120 240 2 Square button 125 125 1 Leaderboard 728 90 8.09 Skyscrapers Wide skyscraper 160 600 3.75 34
Skyscraper Half page ad
120 300
600 600
5 2
8.11 SMS Alerts advertising
Text advertisements could be sent along with the regular SMS being sent to registered users of the site.
8.12 Electronic Direct Mailers (E-Mailers)
Advertisements could be sent e with the direct emails being sent to the registered users of the site. For example in the email containing monthly newsletter which reaches all our registered users. Sponsored Admission Notifications
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9 Choosing the marketing strategy
The marketing strategy plan must include both short-term and long-term strategies in order to succeed. Short term marketing strategies are those that bring you a temporary boost in traffic. Although these techniques are very important to your over-all plan, they are only a temporary traffic source and must not be solely relied upon. Short term marketing strategies include: • • • Purchasing Advertising Participating in Forums Search Engines
Long term marketing strategies are those that bring you a steady stream of targeted traffic over time. These strategies will continue to produce results even years down the road. Long term marketing strategies include: • • • • • Blogging Social Networking Sites Social Bookmarking Sites Giving Away Freebies Article Marketing
By creating and implementing a balanced marketing strategy, using both short-term and long-term strategies, you will drive a steady stream of targeted traffic to your web site.
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10 Choosing the revenue maximation strategy
10.1 Business model of social networks
Few social networks currently charge money for membership. In part, this may be because social networking is a relatively new service, and the value of using them has not been firmly established in customers' minds. Companies such as MySpace and Facebook sell online advertising on their site. Their business model is based upon large membership count, and charging for membership would be counterproductive. Some believe that the deeper information that the sites have on each user will allow much better targeted advertising than any other site can currently provide Social networks operate under an autonomous business model, in which a social network's members serve dual roles as both the suppliers and the consumers of content. This is in contrast to a traditional business model, where the suppliers and consumers are distinct agents. Revenue is typically gained in the autonomous business model via advertisements, but subscription-based revenue is possible when membership and content levels are sufficiently high You can sell ads by impressions, clicks or monthy basis. It is imperative that an costbenefit analysis is done for each of the methids
10.2 Determining you ad price
One way is to check your eCPM (earnings Cost per Thousand) statistic from any ad Program. E.g. If your eCPM is 5$ it means you earn 5$ for 1000 ad impressions.
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10.3 Projecting expected number of registered users
Month 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 No of users 2000 6000 12000 18000 25000 35000 40000 45000 52000 60000 70000 75000 80000 86000 90000 95000 102000 110000
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Increase in number of Registered Users
1 2
120000 100000 80000 No. of Users 60000 40000 20000 0
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Month
15 16 17 18
Figure 1
10.4 Projecting expected number of page views per day
10.5 Projecting expected time spent per person on the site
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10.6 Sample Rate list for various banner options available
*Rate/CPM: Cost per 1000 views **Rate/Month: These would be fixed banners and would not be rotated with that of any other client.
10.7 Revenue projections using different advertising mechanisms
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11 Conclusions
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12 Suggestions / Recommendations
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13 References
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6187.html http://www.startasocialnetwork.com http://www.2createawebsite.com/books/theperfectsiteguide.pdf http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p189-hartline.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing http://dictionary.reference.com http://www.itu.int http://www.invesp.com/blog/social-media/social-networking.html http://www.barandbench.com/brief/2/1891/Indian-Government-v-Social-Networkingsites:-Expert-Views http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/india-oks-censoring-facebook-google-microsoftyoutube/7308 http://dictionary.reference.com http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/02/20-stunning-social-media-statistics/
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14 Glossary
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doc_546156898.doc
MARKETING AND REVENUE GENERATION STRATEGY FOR NEWLY LAUNCHED SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITE FOR STUDENTS
SUBMITTED BY MR. SUSHIL S MUNDADA ROLL NO. 11 IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF POST GRADUATE DIPLOMA IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
SHREE CHANAKYA EDUCATION SOCIETY
INDIRA COLLEGE OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
(AFFILIATED TO UNIVERSITY OF PUNE) SHIVAJINAGAR, PUNE 5
2010-2012
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that Mr. Sushil S Mundada is a student for academic year 2010-12 of our Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management. He / she has carried out project on “Marketing Strategy for newly launched Social Networking Website for Students” in the Marketing area of specialization. The project is completed under the guidance of Prof.Rajeev Deo.
Subject Teacher Director
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Date: 25/2/2012 Place: Pune
ICBM
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DECLARATION I hereby declare that this report titled “Marketing and Revenue generation Strategy for newly launched Social Networking Website for Students” is a record of independent work carried out by me as a part of Final Year Project for the PGDBM course of Pune University for the period starting from January 2012 to May 2012. The above project was performed under the guidance of Prof. Rajeev Deo. I declare that the information given in the above project is true to my knowledge.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The work on this project has been an inspiring, often exciting, sometimes challenging, but always an interesting experience. At the very outset, I wish to thank Prof. Rajeev Deo for giving me the opportunity to participate in this interesting research project, that helped me gain insights into the Internet World. He has supported me with his guidance, insights, encouragement and many a fruitful discussion on. I am grateful to him to have spared his time and showing the patience to our answer our queries. The kindness shown by him, in spite of him being so busy with his work, is highly appreciated. I would also like to thank Prof. Suneel Kelkar, support staff of Indira College of Business Management and all my fellow colleagues who supported me at all times. This ensured the prompt completion of this project.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Executive Summary.........................................................................................................9 2 Introduction...................................................................................................................10
2.1 Sector profile in brief.......................................................................................................10 2.2 Emerging trends in social networking............................................................................10 2.3 Rationale of the study.......................................................................................................11
3 Industry/ Sector Profile.................................................................................................13
3.1 Industry size and Growth trends - Internet Advertising Statistics:..............................13 3.2 Government support and policies...................................................................................16
4 Company and Product Profile......................................................................................17 5 Literature and terminologies.........................................................................................19
5.1 Website Basics..................................................................................................................19 5.2 mar·ket·ing [mahr-ki-ting]..............................................................................................19 5.3 Contemporary approaches to marketing........................................................................19 5.4 Social marketing ..............................................................................................................20 5.5 Internet marketing...........................................................................................................20 5.6 ad·ver·tis·ing [ad-ver-tahy-zing] .....................................................................................21 5.7 Features of Advertising....................................................................................................21 5.8 Types of Advertising........................................................................................................21 5.9 Cost per impression CPI or CPM (Cost per mille)........................................................22 5.10 Clickthrough rate (CTR) ..............................................................................................23 5.11 Pay per click (PPC) (Cost per click)..............................................................................23 5.12 A Social network ............................................................................................................24
6 Objectives and Scope of the project .............................................................................26
6.1 Objectives..........................................................................................................................26 6.2 Scope..................................................................................................................................26
7 Marketing Options.........................................................................................................27
7.1 Affiliate marketing ..........................................................................................................27 7.2 Referral marketing ..........................................................................................................27 7.3 Facebook ..........................................................................................................................27
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7.4 Twitter...............................................................................................................................28 7.5 Marketing on Forums .....................................................................................................29 7.6 SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ...............................................................................29 7.7 Article marketing ............................................................................................................29 7.8 Guest writing on Blog posts ............................................................................................29 7.9 Squidoo .............................................................................................................................29 7.10 Viral marketing .............................................................................................................30 7.11 Developing Your Marketing Strategies ........................................................................30
8 Revenue generation options..........................................................................................32
8.1 Affiliate marketing ..........................................................................................................32 8.2 Google AdSense ...............................................................................................................32 8.3 AdBrite .............................................................................................................................32 8.4 In-text advertising ...........................................................................................................33 8.5 Youtube ............................................................................................................................33 8.6 Flat rate ads .....................................................................................................................33 8.7 Pop-up ads or pop-ups.....................................................................................................33 8.8 Hover ads .........................................................................................................................34 8.9 A web banner or banner ad.............................................................................................34 8.10 Standard sizes of banners..............................................................................................34 8.11 SMS Alerts advertising..................................................................................................35 8.12 Electronic Direct Mailers (E-Mailers)...........................................................................35
9 Choosing the marketing strategy .................................................................................36 10 Choosing the revenue maximation strategy ..............................................................37
10.1 Business model of social networks.................................................................................37 10.2 Determining you ad price...............................................................................................37 10.3 Projecting expected number of registered users..........................................................38 10.4 Projecting expected number of page views per day.....................................................39 10.5 Projecting expected time spent per person on the site.................................................39 10.6 Sample Rate list for various banner options available................................................40 10.7 Revenue projections using different advertising mechanisms....................................40
11 Conclusions.................................................................................................................41 12 Suggestions / Recommendations.................................................................................42 6
13 References....................................................................................................................43 14 Glossary.......................................................................................................................45
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Global Industry Size and Industry leaders.......................................................15 Table 2: Example of niche local social networking sites for sudents............................15 Table 3: Common Behaviors of Youth on Social Networks...........................................15
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1 Executive Summary
The new millennium has brought us on the brink of the I.T. Revolution. This revolution has been aided by the advent of the Internet in a big way. Internet is fast changing the way people used to do things. Naturally, the same would have an impact on the advertisers. The Internet has been accepted as the most powerful media for advertising due to the absence of geographical barriers. Advertisers are trying to use the 'net' to advertise their products and hence 'net' their customers. A social networking service (SNS) is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. If you’re not on a social networking site, you’re not on the Internet. It’s as true for advertisers as it is for consumers. Social networking is the ultimate manifestation of user generated content, and as such, holds more potential for growth than any other form of content on the Web today. There have been several efforts to monetize social networks mainly through advertising. Because of their inherent charateristics, social networking sites need to have different ways to market themselves to attract users to the site. The revenue generating capacity of the sites depends on number of registered users and visitors to the website. There are few global social networking sites controlling the maximum share of the market. There are also a lot of upcoming niche local social networking sites targetting a specific market group. The company under study us about to launch such a special social networking site for students in India. The objectives of this project can be summarised as follows: 1. Study the various marketing options for the newly launched social networking site. 2. Choose the options which will incur minimal cost and attract maximum users to the site. 3. Study the various revenue generating mechanisms for the newly launched social networking site. 4. Choose the strategy for maximising the revenue with the current user base as well as prepare a foreseeable plan for the future strategy; expecting an increase in user base and scope.
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2 Introduction
2.1 Sector profile in brief
A social networking service (SNS) is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks. The main types of social networking services are those that contain category places (such as former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with selfdescription pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook, Google+, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn widely used worldwide. Web-based social networking services make it possible to connect people who share interests and activities across political, economic, and geographic borders. Social networking sites have become an important part of day-to-day life for millions of people, thanks to sites like Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, LinkedIn. The proliferation of social-networks on the Internet, has allowed companies to collect information about social-network users and their social relationships. Social networks allow us to determine who is acquainted with whom, how frequently they interact online, what interests they have in common, etc. Users are spending increasing amounts of time on social network websites. For instance, a recent survey that ranks websites based on ‘average time spent by a user’, identifies MySpace and Facebook among the top 10 websites.
2.2 Emerging trends in social networking
As the increase in popularity of social networking is on a constant rise, new uses for the technology are constantly being observed. At the forefront of emerging trends in social networking sites is the concept of “real-time web” and “location-based.” Real-time allows users to contribute content, which is then broadcast as it is being uploaded - the concept is analogous to live radio and television broadcasts. Twitter set the trend for “real-time” services, wherein users can broadcast to the world what they are doing, or what is on their minds within a 140-character limit. Facebook followed suit with their “Live Feed” where users' activities are streamed as soon as it happens. While Twitter 10
focuses on words, Clixtr, another real-time service, focuses on group photo sharing wherein users can update their photo streams with photos while at an event While there are global social networking sites, there are also local players in the market on focusing on specific areas. These niche social networks focus on a particular customer segment, georaphical location, interest group, etc. There is real opportunities belong in niche social networks.
2.3 Rationale of the study
There have been several efforts to monetize social networks mainly through advertising. Because of their inherent charateristics, social networking sites need to have different ways to market themselves to attract users to the site. The revenue generating capacity of the sites depends on number of registered users and visitors to the website. Also, since these sites have fairly new way of doing business and revenue generation. So it is important for a new entrant to study the various options and the upcoming trends in the field of social networking. The primary source of revenue for the social networking sites is advertising. It is important for the sites to adopt the best strategy to market themselves as well as generate maximum revenue through various sources. This study will analyse the various marketing options as well as revenue generating capabilty of the various sources of revenue. This will help the new site to position itself correctly in the market and maximise its income.
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3 Industry/ Sector Profile
3.1 Industry size and Growth trends - Internet Advertising Statistics:
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The world is home to 7 billion people, one third of which are using the Internet. Younger people tend to be more online than older people, in both developed and developing countries. 45% of the world’s Internet users are below the age of 25. There are more than 1.2 Billion Social Networking users in the World. 82% of World’s online population is on Social networking sites Nearly 20% of overall time spent online is spent on Social Networking Sites – i.e. Nearly 1 in every 5 minutes Internet Users: Penetration: 10% of India’s population (Source ITU) Broadband Internet connections: 13.30 million in December’11 ( Source TRAI) One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users) People spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook Each Facebook user spends on average 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook 30 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook each month People on Facebook install 20 million “Apps” every day YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011) YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years) Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors People upload 3,000 images to Flickr (the photo sharing social media site) every minute Flickr hosts over 5 billion images 190 million average Tweets per day occur on Twitter (May 2011) Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day Google+ has more than 25 million users Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)
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Table 1: Global Industry Size and Industry leaders Name Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Description/Focus General. General. Microblogging, RSS, updates Business and professional networking Photo sharing, commenting, photography related networking, worldwide Registered users 800,000,000+ 300,000,000 120,000,000 Global Alexa Page ranking 2 9 13
Flickr
32,000,000
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Table 2: Example of niche local social networking sites for sudents Name pagalguy.com aglasem.com managementparadise.com bharatstudent.com Description/Focus Focus on students appearing for MBA entrance exams Focus on engineering students Focus on current MBA students Focus on stundets in general India Alexa Page ranking 423 3550 4012 181
Table 3: Common Behaviors of Youth on Social Networks See what my friends are up to Sent a message to someone Posted/updated my profile Looked at profiles of people I didn’t know 86% 79% 70% 65%
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3.2 Government support and policies
Because of the power of social networking sites, the various governments have kept an eye on the developments in this space. The Indian Government in its latest move has asked the internet companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft to create a framework to prescreen the data before it goes up on the website. The Indian Government found some defamatory content on one of the social networking sites and in that pretext has asked the internet companies to find a way to ensure that defamatory or inflammatory material is screened before it goes online. The Indian Government wants the content on the social networking sites to be regulated (read: censored) in the country. The Indian government has given the green light for the prosecution of “21 social networking sites.” The list features 10 foreign-based companies, and could affect websites provided by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and YouTube.
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4 Company and Product Profile
The newly launched social networking sites will cater to the student community in India and help them to network with each other and offer host of specialised services like connecting with alumni, finding jobs, sharing notes, reference material, project counselling, etc. Since the newly launched company is a start-up it has limited financial resources, so it has to use innovative marketing mechanisms to market the website and attract users to the site since the revenue generating capacity of the site will be directly proportional to number of registered users and visitors to the website. The main target audience of the website is the higher education students. As of 2011, India has 42 central universities, 275 state universities, 130 deemed universities, 90 private universities, 5 institutions established and functioning under the State Act, and 33 Institutes of National importance. Other institutions include 16000 colleges as Government Degree Colleges and Private Degree Colleges, including 1800 exclusive women's colleges, functioning under these universities and institutions.The emphasis in the tertiary level of education lies on science and technology. Indian educational institutions by 2004 consisted of a large number of technology institutes. Distance learning and open education is also a feature of the Indian higher education system, and is looked after by the Distance Education Council. Indira Gandhi National Open University is the largest university in the world by number of students, having approximately 3.5 million students across the globe. Thus there is a big market available for the website with millions of higher education students across the country.
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5 Literature and terminologies
5.1 Website Basics
• Domain name is address of your website • Web Host (Registrar) is company that allows you to publish your pages on internet, and develop additional features like chat room, blog, forums etc. It provides server space for your web pages.
5.2 mar·ket·ing [mahr-ki-ting]
noun 1. the act of buying or selling in a market. 2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling. Marketing is defined by the AMA(American Marketing Association) as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, marketing management is one of the major components of business management
5.3 Contemporary approaches to marketing
Recent approaches in marketing include relationship marketing with focus on the customer, business marketing or industrial marketing with focus on an organization or institution and social marketing with focus on benefits to society. New forms of marketing also use the internet and are therefore called internet marketing or more generally e-marketing, online marketing, search engine marketing, desktop advertising or affiliate marketing. It attempts to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope, because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media.
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5.4 Social marketing
It is the systematic application of marketing, along with other concepts and techniques, to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote merit goods, or to make a society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote society's well being as a whole.
5.5 Internet marketing
It is also known as web marketing, online marketing, webvertising, or e-marketing, is referred to as the marketing (generally promotion) of products or services over the Internet. Types of Internet marketing: Internet marketing is broadly divided in to the following types: • Display Advertising: the use of web banners or banner ads placed on a thirdparty website to drive traffic to a company's own website and increase product awareness • Search Engine Marketing (SEM): a form of marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of either paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion, or through the use of free search engine optimization techniques • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results • Social Media Marketing: the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites • Email Marketing: involves directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail • Referral Marketing: a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth • Affiliate Marketing: a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts • Content Marketing: involves creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers
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5.6 ad·ver·tis·ing [ad-ver-tahy-zing]
noun 1. the act or practice of calling public attention to one's product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.: to get more customers by advertising. 2. paid announcements; advertisements. 3. the profession of planning, designing, and writing advertisements. Advertising is paid non-personal communication from an identified sponsor using mass media to persuade or influence an audience
5.7 Features of Advertising
• Advertising is a paid form of communication, although some forms of advertising, such as public service announcements, use donated space and time. • Second, not only is the message paid for, but the sponsor is identified. • Third, most advertising tries to persuade or influence the consumer to do something, although in some cases the point of the message is simply to make consumers aware of the product or company • Fourth and fifth, the message is conveyed through many different kinds of mass media reaching a large audience of potential consumers. • Finally, because advertising is a form of mass communication, it also nonpersonal
5.8 Types of Advertising
• Print Advertising: Newspapers, Magazines, Brochures, Fliers: The print media have always been a popular advertising medium. Advertising products via newspapers or magazines is a common practice. In addition to this, the print media also offers options like promotional brochures and fliers for advertising purposes. • Outdoor Advertising: Billboards, Kiosks, Tradeshows and Events (OOH): Outdoor advertising is also a very popular form of advertising, which makes use of several tools and techniques to attract the customers outdoors. The most common examples of outdoor advertising are billboards, kiosks, and also several events and tradeshows organized by the company. • Broadcast advertising: Television, Radio and the Internet: Broadcast advertising is a very popular advertising medium that constitutes of several branches like television, radio or the Internet. Television advertisements have been very popular ever since they have been introduced. • Covert Advertising: Advertising in Movies: Covert advertising is a unique kind of advertising in which a product or a particular brand is incorporated in some entertainment and media channels like movies, television shows or even sports. There is 21
no commercial in the entertainment but the brand or the product is subtly (or sometimes evidently) showcased in the entertainment show. • Surrogate Advertising: Advertising Indirectly: Surrogate advertising is prominently seen in cases where advertising a particular product is banned by law. Advertisement for products like cigarettes or alcohol which are injurious to heath are prohibited by law in several countries and hence these companies have to come up with several other products that might have the same brand name and indirectly remind people of the cigarettes or beer bottles of the same brand. Common examples include Fosters and Kingfisher beer brands, which are often seen to promote their brand with the help of surrogate advertising. • Public Service Advertising: Advertising for Social Causes: Public service advertising is a technique that makes use of advertising as an effective communication medium to convey socially relevant messaged about important matters and social welfare causes like AIDS, energy conservation, political integrity, deforestation, illiteracy, poverty and so on. • Celebrity Advertising: Although the audience is getting smarter and smarter and the modern day consumer getting immune to the exaggerated claims made in a majority of advertisements, there exist a section of advertisers that still bank upon celebrities and their popularity for advertising their products. Using celebrities for advertising involves signing up celebrities for advertising campaigns, which consist of all sorts of advertising including, television ads or even print advertisements. • Internet Advertising: Internet promotion is one of the newer types of advertising and can be accomplished in a number of ways. Flash advertising refers to messages that jump onto your computer screen and often move around. They can be hard to close and are annoying, but effective at gaining your attention. Pop up and scrolling ads are other examples of these types of advertising. Pay per click advertising refers to marketers paying to have their web pages placed high on search engine results pages. These are also called sponsored links. • Unicast Ads: A unicast ad is basically a TV commercial that runs in the browser window. Ithas enriched audio/video content. The ads can last anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds. These ads have similar branding power as a TV commercial. However, a unicast ad offers something that TV ads cannot -- the ability to click on the ad for more information. These ads are getting very effective, as the average click-through rate is 5%.
5.9 Cost per impression CPI or CPM (Cost per mille)
These are phrases used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic.They refer to internet marketing campaigns where advertisers pay for every time that their advert is displayed to a user usually in the form of a banner ad on a website. CPM advertising is often preferred by publishers because they can be more certain about the revenue they will generate from their website traffic, but CPM can be compared with different marketing strategies by examining their Effective cost per mille (eCPM). eCPM 22
informs the publisher what they would have received if they sold the advertising inventory on a CPM basis by taking into account the Clickthrough rate (CTR) and/or Conversion rate (CVR) of the campaigns
5.10 Clickthrough rate (CTR)
It is a way of measuring the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website. The clickthrough rate of an advertisement is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. For example, if a banner ad is delivered 100 times (100 impressions) and receives one click, then the clickthrough rate for the advertisement would be 1%. Click-through rates for banner ads have fallen over time. When banner ads first started to appear, it was not uncommon to have rates above five percent. They have fallen since then, currently averaging closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent
5.11 Pay per click (PPC) (Cost per click)
It is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC “display” advertisements are shown on web sites or search engine results with related content that have agreed to show ads. This approach differs from the “pay per impression” methods used in television and newspaper advertising. In contrast to the generalized portal, which seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, PPC implements the so-called affiliate model, that provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites. The affiliates provide purchasepoint click-through to the merchant. It is a pay-for-performance model: If an affiliate does not generate sales, it represents no cost to the merchant. Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser's keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a web developer chooses on a content site. In PPC you bid on keywords which you want to rank high for. Everytime someone clicks on your ad/site link you pay a fixed amount.
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There are two primary models for determining cost per click: flat-rate and bid-based. In both cases the advertiser must consider the potential value of a click from a given source. This value is based on the type of individual the advertiser is expecting to receive as a visitor to his or her website, and what the advertiser can gain from that visit, usually revenue, both in the short term as well as in the long term. Among PPC providers, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model.
5.12 A Social network
It has three baseline components: • A profile that contains a person’s information • The ability for people to connect to each other via those profiles, often called a social graph and • the ability to do something useful or valuable they couldn’t have done otherwise Features such as discoverability or public access are often cited as social network features. The common denominators across most social networks are the following three characteristics: Maintain a Rich Profile: Google recently launched new features called Google profiles which allows users to upload profile pics, include personal information and preferences, and allow it to be discoverable on the web. These are coupled with a Google account such as gmail, and is at the core of these efforts. Connect and Communicate With Others: Individuals using the Google profiles can connect to each other and share information using a variety of tools, not all of them necessarily social. For example, Gmail and Google Talk contain not just your contacts, but also understand with whom you communicate the most. Google doesn’t explicitly ask if you’re a ‘friend’ or ‘fan’ of someone, but rather, allows people to connect to each other in a variety of communication tools. Centralize Information In A Useful Way: Allowing people to build profiles and communicate with each other isn’t of much value unless it can provide a more useful experience not previously available. Google provides a number of tools like Google Wave, a collaboration tool we’ve started to experiment with, Gtalk instant messanger, and Gmail which rivals Facebook’s newsfeed, chat, and inbox respectively.
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6 Objectives and Scope of the project
6.1 Objectives
The revenue generating capacity of the site will be directly proportional to number of registered users and visitors to the website. The objectives of this project can be are as follows: 1. Study the various marketing options for the newly launched social networking site. 2. Choose the options which will incur minimal cost and attract maximum users to the site. 3. Study the various revenue generating mechanisms for the newly launched social networking site. 4. Choose the strategy for maximising the revenue with the current user base as well as prepare a foreseeable plan for the future strategy; expecting an increase in user base and scope.
6.2 Scope
• The project report does not divulge into the details of the product offering of the new website. • The projected earnings will be based on the assumption of the user base increase. The exact increase in number of users will depend on lot of unforseeen conditions. • The project will cover the earnings of the website only though advertising. Any other way of revenue generation will not be part of the study.
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7 Marketing Options
There are many ways to market a social networking website. The marketing is required to attract more and more number of users to the site so as to have users spend increasing amount of time on the site. The different ways are described below:
7.1 Affiliate marketing
It is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. It is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales. o The company that owns the products pay you a comission for any sale your site generates. o Affliate links can also be put in docs/pdfs for download. o Sponsored ads can be part of the download docs/pdfs. o RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication – This allows people to stay updated with your content by simple subscribing to your blogs feed using an online RSS reader (like Google Reader)
7.2 Referral marketing
It is a structured and systematic process to maximize word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers and contacts to think and talk as much as possible about their supplier, their company, product and service and the value and benefit the supplier brings to them and people they know. Online referral marketing, using digital marketing as a platform, is the internet based approach to traditional referral marketings
7.3 Facebook
With facebook, you can have a number of ways to promote your site. Here are some of the other tools available to marketers to engage the Facebook community. • Engagement Ads: Allow community members to interact with the ads in the profile and newsfeeds without leaving the Facebook site, increasing interaction, social spread, and brand engagement. Encourages members to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans. To combat dismal click through rates 27
of traditional advertisements, these features emulate widgets and encourage users to increase member adoption, viral growth, and brand interaction. Brands will only succeed with these “WidgetAds” if they create content that puts community first, lean on new interactions, integrate with other tools, plan for the long haul, and change how they measure success –traditional internet advertising tactics won’t apply. Facebook developed engagement ads that allow more communication between the advertisers and the Facebook users. The most common form is a fan page where users can receive automatic updates, comment on ads, and RSVP to events. These small interactions of commenting, voting and “liking” activities allow brands to see what consumers like and dislike. The page’s fan base allows companies to pinpoint their actual target market. • Standard Advertisements: These Text and image ads can appear on homepage or profile pages, neatly integrate with the new redesign. • Social ads: Are helpful for brands to increase the velocity or acceleration by marketers, allowing them to buy ads that echo the behaviors “what did my friends do” of opt-in users. These primarily appear on the newsfeed, which will encourage spread to an individuals network. • Traditional IAB graphic ads: Advertising laden brands may still purchase the standard IAB skyscraper and banner ads. • Facebook pages: Launched last year, brands can (at no charge) create their own pages, embed applications, encourage discussions, and start to garner “Fans” of it’s products. • Event Feature: Based pages allow marketers to promote events through viral invites, rsvp tools, and event rollups from media and community interaction. While a useful utility, for most brands that market on the web, this is often a side-effort, not the primary push. • Facebook Connect: Perhaps the biggest untold story is the day when Facebook (and other social networks) will connect with corporate websites. • Applications: Facebook was a first mover to allow third-party developers to create an entire eco-system of applications that are growing their own applications. Most brands are harassing successful apps through sponsorships, cross branding, and a few are building their own apps.
7.4 Twitter
Great traffic generating tool. Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”.
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7.5 Marketing on Forums
Add your site adddress in your signature and post 5-10 posts per day. Once you become known on forum, people wil start visiting your website
7.6 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
It is process of getting your pages ranked high in Google, Yahoo and other search engines. SEO is targeted since people who search are looking out for some thing and your website is relavant to those people. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users
7.7 Article marketing
Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles about themselves as a marketing strategy. A primary style for the articles includes a bio box and byline (collectively known as the resource box) about the business. You write original article and submit on sites like www.ezinearticles.com, if someone uses your article, they must also print your info box and link to your site. So it is like viral marketing.
7.8 Guest writing on Blog posts
A blog is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. The guest articles are written on sites which are heavily trafficked, to get the traffic back to your sites.
7.9 Squidoo
Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages (called lenses) for subjects of interest. Allows you to create one page site (or lens) on any topic of yur choice. You can link it to your main website to increase the traffic
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7.10 Viral marketing
It is a promotional method that is of the customers, by customers, and for customers. It refers to marketing techniques that use pre-existing socialnetworks to produce increases in brand awarenss, through self-replicating viral processes. marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily Viral marketing is not only about getting someone to interact with a message, it needs to be viral - it needs to have a pass-along effect. The viral catch depends on a high passalong rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of people, the overall growth balloons very quickly, but if the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles. Its vital component is encouraging individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, it takes advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands – or even to millions.
7.11 Developing Your Marketing Strategies
Here’s a framework of 22 tools to consider with notable brand examples: 1. Blogs (Johnson & Johnson, Delta Air Lines) 2. Bookmarking/Tagging (Adobe, Kodak) 3. Brand monitoring (Dell, MINI) 4. Content aggregation (Alltop, EMC) 5. Crowdsourcing/Voting (Oracle, Starbucks) 6. Discussion boards and forums (IBM, Mountain Dew) 7. Events and meetups (Molson, Pampers) 8. Mashups (Fidelity Investments, Nike) 9. Microblogging (Method, Whole Foods) 10. Online video (Eukanuba, Home Depot) 11. Organization and staffing (Ford, Pepsi) 12. Outreach programs (Nokia, Yum Brands) 13. Photosharing (Rubbermaid, UK Government) 14. Podcasting (Ericsson, McDonalds) 15. Presentation sharing (CapGemini, Daimler AG) 16. Public Relations – social media releases (Avon, Intel) 17. Ratings and reviews (Loblaws, TurboTax) 18. Social networks: applications, fan pages, groups, and personalities (British Airways, Saturn) 19. Sponsorships (Coca-Cola, Whirlpool) 20. Virtual worlds (National Geographic, Toyota) 21. Widgets (Southwest Airlines, Target) 22. Wikis (Second Life, T-Mobile Sidekick) 30
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8 Revenue generation options
8.1 Affiliate marketing
It is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer. To find affiliate programs www.cj.com, www.associateprograms.com. check www.linkshare.com, www.shareasale.com,
The newly launched website could tie up with any of the above affiliate programs to start generating revenue by sending customers to the different sites.
8.2 Google AdSense
It is a program run by Google Inc. that allows publishers in the Google Network of content sites to serve automatic text, image, video, and rich media adverts that are targeted to site content and audience. These adverts are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google, and they can generate revenue on either a per-click or perimpression basis. Many websites use AdSense to monetize their content; it is the most popular advertising network. AdSense has been particularly important for delivering advertising revenue to small websites that do not have the resources for developing advertising sales programs and sales people to generate revenue with. Everytime an ad is clicked on your site Google pays you a percentage of what advertiser is paying to them for the click. Googles technology will generate the ads relevant to your content.
8.3 AdBrite
It is also an option to AdSense; the different being you can also host flat-rate ads. However you need to share profits with AdBrite.
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8.4 In-text advertising
It is a form of contextual advertising where specific keywords within the text of a webpage are matched with advertising and/or related information units. Kontera and Infolink are companies that provide in-text text become underlined ads. Kontera's technology is semantic, statistical, linguistic, and yield-maximization content, extract and rank topics and keywords, and advertisements, content, and information. advertising. Some keywords in based on several proprietary algorithms that analyze online then match them to relevant
8.5 Youtube
A channel on YouTube is the home page for an account. It shows the account name, the account type, the public videos they've uploaded, and any user information they've entered. You can customize the background and color scheme of a channel along with controlling some of the information that appears on it. YouTube channels can also display favorite videos from other users, activity streams, comments, subscribers, and other social networking features. As your channel becomes popular, you can become partner and earn revenue from ads displayed on and around your video.
8.6 Flat rate ads
It is a way of advertising where you charge a fixed amount to place an ad on ur website
8.7 Pop-up ads or pop-ups
These are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements. A variation on the pop-up window is the pop-under advertisement, which opens a new browser window hidden under the active window. Pop-unders do not interrupt the user immediately and are not seen until the covering window is closed, making it more difficult to determine which web site opened them.
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8.8 Hover ads
These are a special type of pop-up ads created using Dynamic HTML, JavaScript and similar web browser technologies. Because they do not scroll with the web page, they appear to “hover” over the page, usually obscuring the content.
8.9 A web banner or banner ad
It is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. These images are usually placed on web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece. Affiliates earn money usually on a CPC (cost per click) basis.
8.10 Standard sizes of banners
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_banner Name Width / (pixels) Height / (pixels) Aspect ratio Rectangles and Pop-Ups Medium Rectangle 300 250 1.2 Square Pop-Up 250 250 1 Vertical Rectangle 240 400 1.67 Large Rectangle 336 280 1.2 Rectangle 180 150 1.2 3:1 Rectangle 300 100 3 Pop-Under 720 300 2.4 Banners and Buttons Full banner 468 60 7.8 Half banner 234 60 3.9 Micro bar 88 31 2.84 Button 1 120 90 1.33 Button 2 120 60 2 Vertical banner 120 240 2 Square button 125 125 1 Leaderboard 728 90 8.09 Skyscrapers Wide skyscraper 160 600 3.75 34
Skyscraper Half page ad
120 300
600 600
5 2
8.11 SMS Alerts advertising
Text advertisements could be sent along with the regular SMS being sent to registered users of the site.
8.12 Electronic Direct Mailers (E-Mailers)
Advertisements could be sent e with the direct emails being sent to the registered users of the site. For example in the email containing monthly newsletter which reaches all our registered users. Sponsored Admission Notifications
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9 Choosing the marketing strategy
The marketing strategy plan must include both short-term and long-term strategies in order to succeed. Short term marketing strategies are those that bring you a temporary boost in traffic. Although these techniques are very important to your over-all plan, they are only a temporary traffic source and must not be solely relied upon. Short term marketing strategies include: • • • Purchasing Advertising Participating in Forums Search Engines
Long term marketing strategies are those that bring you a steady stream of targeted traffic over time. These strategies will continue to produce results even years down the road. Long term marketing strategies include: • • • • • Blogging Social Networking Sites Social Bookmarking Sites Giving Away Freebies Article Marketing
By creating and implementing a balanced marketing strategy, using both short-term and long-term strategies, you will drive a steady stream of targeted traffic to your web site.
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10 Choosing the revenue maximation strategy
10.1 Business model of social networks
Few social networks currently charge money for membership. In part, this may be because social networking is a relatively new service, and the value of using them has not been firmly established in customers' minds. Companies such as MySpace and Facebook sell online advertising on their site. Their business model is based upon large membership count, and charging for membership would be counterproductive. Some believe that the deeper information that the sites have on each user will allow much better targeted advertising than any other site can currently provide Social networks operate under an autonomous business model, in which a social network's members serve dual roles as both the suppliers and the consumers of content. This is in contrast to a traditional business model, where the suppliers and consumers are distinct agents. Revenue is typically gained in the autonomous business model via advertisements, but subscription-based revenue is possible when membership and content levels are sufficiently high You can sell ads by impressions, clicks or monthy basis. It is imperative that an costbenefit analysis is done for each of the methids
10.2 Determining you ad price
One way is to check your eCPM (earnings Cost per Thousand) statistic from any ad Program. E.g. If your eCPM is 5$ it means you earn 5$ for 1000 ad impressions.
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10.3 Projecting expected number of registered users
Month 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 No of users 2000 6000 12000 18000 25000 35000 40000 45000 52000 60000 70000 75000 80000 86000 90000 95000 102000 110000
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Increase in number of Registered Users
1 2
120000 100000 80000 No. of Users 60000 40000 20000 0
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Month
15 16 17 18
Figure 1
10.4 Projecting expected number of page views per day
10.5 Projecting expected time spent per person on the site
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10.6 Sample Rate list for various banner options available
*Rate/CPM: Cost per 1000 views **Rate/Month: These would be fixed banners and would not be rotated with that of any other client.
10.7 Revenue projections using different advertising mechanisms
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11 Conclusions
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12 Suggestions / Recommendations
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13 References
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6187.html http://www.startasocialnetwork.com http://www.2createawebsite.com/books/theperfectsiteguide.pdf http://www2008.org/papers/pdf/p189-hartline.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing http://dictionary.reference.com http://www.itu.int http://www.invesp.com/blog/social-media/social-networking.html http://www.barandbench.com/brief/2/1891/Indian-Government-v-Social-Networkingsites:-Expert-Views http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/india-oks-censoring-facebook-google-microsoftyoutube/7308 http://dictionary.reference.com http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/02/20-stunning-social-media-statistics/
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14 Glossary
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doc_546156898.doc