What do you do if you want to show your ads to single females between the ages of 22 and 26, who are interested in Jack Johnson, traveling, and enjoy the hit TV series “Lost”. - Answer - Facebook Advertising

You can only narrow your targeted advertising down so far when using some of the traditional online advertising strategies. Google Adwords allows you to target specific keywords (a proven method), and they will use IP addresses to geo-target your ads to people in specific areas. You can roughly determine the demographics of a particular website for your CPM (cost-per-impression) advertising based on content..e.g. the most frequent visitors of dating sites are single males between 30 and 45 years of age, and they are interested in …

Like many advertising services, Facebook offers you the option to pay on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, which means exactly that. You only pay when someone clicks on the ad. You can also choose the CPM method, which can save you money and offer more overall exposure for your $. They launched the program in November, and have received both positive and negative criticisms. Read the rest of this entry »

After our recent post highlighting a recent duplicate content issue we faced, we decided it would be a good time to start giving out free advice for building your web rankings.

One of our most commonly requested services is web site optimization. Unfortunately (and fortunately) web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. As web development continues to be outsourced, many developers just don’t feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort that truly does go a long way.

You may be familiar with some of the following issues, as I’m trying to keep this list simple, but hopefully there are a few gems that may help you on your way to the top. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to comment and we’ll help in every way we can. Read the rest of this entry »

To those of you that have kept up with us, we appreciate your readership and support. Everything has been invaluable for a couple young guys trying to start something up. As a marketing company, we’ve been able to grab a few clients and expand our online marketing ability. It’s all about developing a knack for what’s interesting or cool or fresh. It’s been a fun experience not only growing, but keeping ourselves fed… and a little buzzd too.

However, we all have the big visions and the projects we’re working on and we’re still trying to figure out exactly what to do with Tastevine — we were caught up in the wine 2.0 euphoria of ‘07 and put out a wine community and recommendation engine that had some value. However, every time people saw us as the Facebook of wine, we knew that something was off. We realized that in the effort of creating something that would make wine fun, sexy and fluid, we actually found ourselves not even using what we created!

Why is this? Probably because the only type of people that were attracted to a wine community are winos themselves. Not people like us that don’t know anything about wine. People that are young want a sexy brand that brings in new wines from around the world that actually taste GOOD — young palettes like ours are picky and we need something subtle, sweet, but yet still sophisticated. After we find a brand with these type of wines, we’d love to use them to develop our taste and get involved in an online system that helps us find new recommendations.

Read the rest of this entry »

We recently started a series on getting your online sales vehicle rolling. Today, we are going under the hood to talk about the e-commerce engine used to power your shopping cart. At Grape Thinking, we have an established relationship with Inertia Beverage Group, as Paul, Andrea, and crew, in our humble opinions, have the best grasp and influence on the changes in the industry and are truly “Powering the Wine Revolution”. As such, they rank as our recommended engine.

So, what does this sales engine do exactly? As a winery, it has the vital role of coordinating the sales request between your customer and their bank, your fulfillment center and your bank.

A good engine should: Read the rest of this entry »

If you own a website or a blog, it’s a hard feeling to beat when you receive your affiliate payments. Of course, it is always important that you set-up affiliate networks with products/services/companies that you trust and ideally use yourself. One of the easiest ways to do this is through a service such as LinkShare. LinkShare allows you to choose who you will be advertising for, as they have a huge selection of merchants. Once you sign up, which is a very easy process, you can do a search “google style” or browse through their selection of merchants by category or product. You are then forwarded to a page to accept the terms and agreements for that particular merchant, and review their referral fees. Afterwards, you can then review the many options that you have for banner ads and links.

Now… here comes the fun part. Getting YOUR link out, and turning that funny looking bit of text into revenue to use for dinner and a movie. Here are some things that can help:

• Write a blog post, incorporating your new affiliate link
• Place the banner ads in rotation on your site
• Seek out people who need your product (forums and other blogs)
• Run a viral campaign based around one of your affiliates (We can help here!!)
• Don’t forget to include links in your newsletters
• Create an additional page on your site listing all of your affiliates, and why you chose them

Most importantly, remember that when you send people to someone else’s website you are laying out your reputation. Don’t be an affiliate just for the money, make sure you would actually use the product or service.  Check out our some examples by doing a search at TasteVine.

If your trying to sell your wine online, check out this post on “Building a Direct Sales Vehicle“