Marketing to College Students — the College Demographic
In 2008, 95.7% of college students—17.4 million people—will go online at least once per month.They are the most digitally connected demographic group in the US.
Students have grown up with technology and it is a seamless part of their lives.They are increasingly likely to own a laptop computer, and about 90% of undergraduates have a mobile phone. Students are key drivers of change in technology usage.They brought social networks into the mainstream, and such sites remain hugely popular with this group. Watching online video is another activity that is growing fast. And students will be mobile Internet trendsetters in the coming years, as they demand access to friends and information, whenever.
Key Themes
Several traits characterize today’s college market:
- Students want both to be accessible and haveaccess to information whenever, wherever.
- There is rarely a moment when students are completely out of touch.They want to seamlessly get information and interact with friends in multiple ways. “They feel like everything should be available to them on-demand and they expect to have several things going on simultaneously,” said Samantha Skey, executive vice president for strategic marketing at youth marketing company Alloy Media + Marketing, in an August 2008 interview with eMarketer.
- Several traits characterize today’s college market: Students want both to be accessible and have access to information whenever, wherever.
- There is rarely a moment when students are completely out of touch.They want to seamlessly get information and interact with friends in multiple ways. “They feel like everything should be available to them on-demand and they expect to have several things going on simultaneously,” said Samantha Skey, executive vice president for strategic marketing at youth marketing company Alloy Media + Marketing, in an August 2008 interview with eMarketer.
Social networks are still a mainstay.
In a report slated to be published later this year, the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research found that use of social networks among college students is rising. Nearly twice as many undergraduate students visit social networks daily in 2008 as did so in 2006. More time is spent online than watching TV. Despite all the talk about students’ multitasking abilities, they report spending more time online than they do watching TV.Two-thirds of undergraduate students surveyed by Burst Media reported watching TV 3 hours or less per week. By comparison, over one-half of students (53%) spent at least 6 hours online per week. Students are leading the way to the mobile Internet. The iPhone was high on the list of cool back-to-school items, thanks to its price cut and the resurgence of Apple computers on campuses.According to researcher Youth Trends, nearly one-third (31%) of male undergraduate students who own a mobile phone and 21% of female mobile phone owners have a smartphone. “The iPhone is changing everything. It’s the device dujour among college students,” said Mr. Britton.
College students are mini-media brands. Students are not only media consumers, they are media publishers.They broadcast their thoughts and actions to friends on social network sites; publish music, video and pictures online; and write blogs and record podcasts.
It is somewhat of a myth that college students are difficult to reach with marketing. With their intense media consumption, they can be found in many places. But their media usage is also highly fragmented—in bits and pieces between classes, studying and socializing with friends. For this reason, marketers who want to each the college crowd effectively will need to rely heavily on word-of-mouth marketing, both online and offline.
US Consumer Spending on Back-to-College Products, by Category, 2008 (billions)
Electronics
$11.05
Clothing
$7.01
Dorm/apartment furnishings
$4.74
School supplies
$3.57
Shoes
$3.05
Collegiate gear
$1.84
Note: ages 18+; includes spending by parents of college students and college students themselves
Source: BIGresearch for National Retail Federation (NRF), “2008 Back to School Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey,” July 22, 2008
Slowing Down
As usual, I’ve been a bad blogger. Nothing new with that!
I just wanted to keep you updated with what’s going on with me:
- I got a new laptop
- I am on vacation on Seabrook Island, South Carolina
- I graduated High School
- I have been dabbling with Contextual advertising with Vomba and have seen great returns. I’ll be writing an article on this when I am back home
The Semi-Automated Directory Submitter
Have to make this quick, but I finish high school this coming Tuesday, so I’ll be posting a lot more!
This program will help you submit to some directory sites. Its nothing special, but it may help.
Tim
Tracking202
Like other affiliate marketers, you haven’t had a choice if you want to track how well campaigns and keywords are profiting.
Until now…
T202 is the Perfect Solution
Wes created T202 to provide affiliate marketers an easy way to track PPC campaigns large or small. With T202, you no longer have to spend hours just to see which campaigns are making you money.
T202’s real-time tracking gives you to up-to-the-second data on all your PPC accounts! With easy to read graphs, automatic keyword trackers, and automated profit calculations, you don’t have to waste time logging every one of your PPC accounts and affiliate networks to manually record data.
T202 has the Most Features!
Most of the current tracking programs out there don’t have nearly as many features as T202. Plus they can only track a few of the bigger PPC networks such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. With T202, you can track any network, big or small. And unlike PPC networks, T202 tracks clicks in real-time-you see every click as it happens.
EPC Calculator
T202 maximizes EPC (Earnings Per Click) calculations. How would you feel if you knew exactly what you needed to bid for a keyword for it to be profitable? Then you could adjust your bids accordingly and turn a profit within seconds.
Know your EPC:
- EPC per Keyword
- EPC per Text Ad
- EPC per Referrer
- EPC per PPC Account
- Much More!
Spy View
Spy view is a feature you will only find on T202. With Spy View, you can see real-time actions your visitors make with your ads. What’s more, you can subscribe to your own Spy View RSS feeds to get up-to-the-second information anywhere!
Top-Performing Keywords
T202 tells you which keywords are making you money and which ones are losing you money. So you can weed out the losers and turn any campaign into a profit monster!
Keyword Cloaking
T202 gives users the ability to cloak their keywords from advertisers and affiliate networks-so all of your top-performing keywords are a secret.
Why risk your Affiliate Manager or the Advertiser finding out your best keywords, copying them for their own campaigns, and putting you out of business?
To be successful at Affiliate Marketing you must track your keywords and they must be cloaked.
Direct Linking a Landing Pages
T202 works with direct linking through PPC campaigns or with your own landing pages. Now you can track whether your campaigns profit more with direct linking or landing pages.
Forum
T202 is not only a world-class PPC tool, it’s also a thriving community of Affiliate Marketers and PPC experts. Get answers to questions and network with pros in the community forum.
Tracking202 Respects Privacy
Tracking202 respects the privacy of their clients. To currently use Tracking202 services, T202 does not require users to provide them with your PPC accounts or Affiliate Network logins and passwords. Tracking202 services is able to keep track of all of the above services and more utilizing real time click tracking and subID submits. I actually checked this out to be sure, not that I don’t trust Wes, but just to be sure. It all came up clean!
What Are YOU Waiting For?
T202 is constantly being updated with new features, tools, and other cool things. Why not test drive T202 today , it’s free.
How to Get More Feed Subscribers
The Almighty Feed is very helpful to build a loyal community around your blog. Imagine this case, a visitor came to your website through search engine found something interesting, made a couple of comments and he disappeared for ever. If you have promoted the feed in right way, he would have subscribed to the feed and might be reading your posts daily.
Make it visible
Don’t expect your visitors to search for your feed on the sidebar of your wordpress blog. Make it obvious to them!
- Make your RSS feed more visible. (a bad example is my own blog, I should have a bigger icon)
- Don’t show the number of subscribers until you have something in 3 digits.
Use a Single Feed
It is very important to promote a single feed. I recommend using FeedBurner to manage your feeds. Feeburner will take all the /feed/atom etc URLs and make them into one smartfeed.
Promote your Feed
It is very important to promote your feed in places OUTSIDE of your blog.
Use other blogs to promote your feed, in the comment area of blog, instead of your blog url enter your feed url. The chances of them subscribing to your feed increases as they are just a click away.
Promote your feed url in Forum signature, the conversion will be very high as the person in blog is related to your niche. vBForum software based forums (DigitalPoint is good for this) lets to add your feeds directly in your user panel, so it appears every time you post. Post more often on forums to make your feeds visible to larger audience.
If you are using wordpress there is a wonderful plugin which will remind users to subscribe to your feed. It uses cookies, to find out how many times the visitor has visited your blog. You can choose the number of visits for the reminder after which it will no longer bother them. The plugin is called What Would Seth Godin Do.
Submit Your Feed to Feed Directories
I offer a free tool
In summary of promotion:
- Promote your Feed in Comment Box of other Blogs.
- Promote your Feed Via Forum Signatures.
- Promote your Feed by posting more often in forums.
- Promote your Feed Via Messenger Status.
- Promote your Feed Via Social Networking.
- Get the What Would Seth Godin Do plugin for wordpress.
- Promote your Feed Via E-mail Signatures.
and finally Some Do’s and Don’t
- Do offer full feed subscription, don’t expect them to check your blog to read the rest of the entry.
- Do write some kind of tutorial to make them understand how the feed works.
- Do shameless promotion of your feed. It doesn’t matter if you beg them to subscribe.
- Do maintain your posting schedule. Irregular bloggers can loose subscribers.
- Don’t change your feed url once you have choose it, it would spell disaster.
How to find profitable freelance jobs with a broker
Today’s post is about freelancing. Every day more and more people join freelance sites and post jobs and bid on jobs. This makes it hard for the average “little guy” to find work on these sites, because they start off with no ratings and have to compete against freelancers all around the world.
I am now running a freelance broker service that find jobs for you to complete. This takes the hassle out of finding jobs for yourself, as we have dedicated clients, and we also search freelance sites, forums, and blogs.
If you are interested, please comment and I will write a new post about the process.
Thanks!
Tim
I’m Back
Why was I gone?
- I was super busy getting a few products ready to launch
- I wanted to see how traffic would hold up without me posting
- Wow, what an excuse. I have a few posts in the oven, so stay tuned, and my apologies for not posting!
Tim
Craigslist Classifieds Alternatives
Craigslist can be hard to post to if you have the same information in each ad, which is why I like to diversify my posting to a lot of sites.I also use Easy Ad Poster Deluxe to post to Craigslist, because I can create a “token” system of variables that randomizes all of my conten, allowing me to post more ads!
Here is a good list to post to:
- Google Base (attached to Google Product Search, formerly known as Froogle)
- Kijiji (eBay’s free listings, big internationally, just launched in USA)
- MySpace Classifieds
- Facebook Marketplace (becoming bigger than MySpace, and attracts an older audience)
- Yahoo! Classifieds
- Local.com
- Vast
- vFlyer (auto-posting to Craigslist, Google Base, and has widgets)
- Oodle, iqZone, Edgeio (are also multi-classifieds blasters, aggregators, and search engines)
- Verticlans (new)
- RealpeopleRealstuff.com (video based classifieds)
- MyStore (new & very social sharing “2.0″ oriented)
- Yample.com is also social/2.0
- …AND MANY MORE
Updated Stumbleudon Invite
The last one was used, so here is another:
http://stumbleudon.com/signup.php?r=177&c=54ealmvkwf47c10ec7e1
http://stumbleudon.com/signup.php?r=177&c=11388grl5a47c1f37069
I will update this link as people use it.
Birthday Giveaway
Its my birthday today, and in the spirit of birthdays, I’m going to give away as much free stuff as possible!
- Free Google AdWords Training Guide Videos — Regular price is 100 bucks, so save yourself some cash and learn adwords!
- If you haven’t already seen my free domain giveaway post, check it out here! I have already given away a few, and many are in the works of being transferred.
- I made a followup video to the Stumble Guide that shows its power in not only bringing stumbles, but pure traffic. The full video is here: http://timelfelt.com/videos/StumbleTrafficProof/
- It’s like a 5 minute clip showing live hits coming in to one of my pages. On that page is also an m4v if you are the iPod type.
- Free Blackhat report– make money with Brring
- Free Yellowbook.com and Yellowpages.com Scraper
- Coming soon
Have fun with all this! I’m off to go party
Tim