There are many ways to generate business for your company, but what are the best ways to do so in the current ecomonic climate? Traditional media like TV, Radio, and Print are really struggling right now and will likely continue to do poorly at gain advertising dollars. “Branding” is out, and measurable ROI is in. Putting your advertising budget into online advertising is the way to go for a variety of reasons. Of course you have to do it properly so you can gauge the effectiveness of your online campaigns. Here are some of the best ways you can leverage online marketing to increase business.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to grow your traffic and revenue. The great part about affiliate marketing is that it’s on a strictly performance basis, which means you only pay a commission when a sale or lead occurs. Affiliate marketing is still a growing and thriving industry so the more resources you put into it the more you will get out of it. But simply launching an affiliate program is not going to get you there. Your affiliate program needs to be managed properly, with the right techniques and methods. Most companies make the mistake of not allocating enough resources to their affiliate management or in growing their affiliate program. Personally I prefer the Commission Junction Affiliate Network for launching and managing large-scale affiliate programs. They have the most affiliates and best platform for management.

Search is another source of traffic that should always be improving and growing for your company. Putting resources and dollars into improving your SEO is always money well spent if you do it properly. There are many SEO firms that will vie for your business, but doing your on-site SEO internally is always the way to go in my opinion. Having a well-optimized website, with good meta-tags and on-page content is a must for maximizing your search rankings. Adding additional pages of unique content to your site, like articles and blog posts, is a great way to expand your organic SEO reach. Building out your site with more pages of unique content is a great strategy and something that should be done on a daily basis ideally.

Another great way to maximize your online traffic is to put together partnerships with other ecommerce companies. By approaching other online merchants you can put together deals to promote each other’s website through mediums like: newsletter placements, solo emails, site placements, and other sponsorships. This can all be done on an affiliate basis, with each company earning revenue when actions occur. This takes a lot of business development, but well worth it when you get a good sized company promoting your offer to their customer database.

Perhaps the best feature of running online campaigns is the fact that you can track the effectiveness of each online campaign. Being able to see exactly how well or not well the traffic is converting from a particular source is invaluable at making decisions about how much to spend with that traffic source. This is where online marketing is better in this economic climate than traditional media. Also, most companies aren’t usually maximizing their SEO, PPC, or affiliate channels because of various reasons. But in this day and age more emphasis should be placed on maximizing all of your company’s online marketing channels.

All and all, I think companies should be putting the majority of their advertising budgets into online marketing. It has to be managed well and done properly to get the best results, and this may take some trial and error to get it right. Once you are maximizing your ad dollars on the Internet you can look for other online traffic sources to test out. You should always be looking for new campaigns to test on a very controlled basis. My advice: anyone trying to sell you a CPM campaign should be hung-up on immediately! Push hard for cost-per-sale or cost-per-lead campaigns and don’t relent. I look forward to your feedback on the issue of online marketing vs. traditional media.

It seems that Myspace and Citi have launched a new credit card with a rewards system, by which people can redeem points for song dowloads and other online services. In a little bit of a different twist, card members will be able to earn points for socially responsible acts like: donating food, switching from paper-based transactions, and installing light bulbs that are enery-efficient. MySpace-Citi card holders can also will access to secret shows and other neat stuff.

Sounds like a great idea to me actually. I have always been a big fan of rewards systems. When done right they can really benefit both the company and the consumer. What I hate is when companies are really cheap with their rewards points…

In the bleakness of the current U.S. recession, a bit of good news about online retail from ComScore. Online retail sales were up 2% in January compared to a year ago. However, the ComScore report also mentioned that twice as many people think the economy will get worse over the next 3 months and three-quarters polled are cutting back on their spending, which isn’t a good sign for retailers. Traditional retailers took a pretty big hit in January, with sales declining between 6% and 14% in categories like cars, electronics, furniture, and apparel.

These numbers reinforce the need to focus more resources into online retail as more people shop on the Internet as opposed to going out to the malls and stores. People are looking to save money anyway they can, so they are visiting coupon sites more than ever! This is excellent news for the affiliate marketing community.

Some of the categories losing steam this year already are luxury good, event tickets, toys, and office supplies. Looking for ways to save money, consumers have been flocking to coupon websites, which is great for the affiliate marketing industry. Coupon code sites drive a tremendous amount of traffic for online retailers, and this trend should only increase throughout the year. So online retailers should look to push out more coupons and deals through their affiliates to take advantage of the changing tides.

Last week, Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis announced the search/discovery startup was cutting 10% of its staff (or 6 people) as the economic downturn continues to cause nervousness in Silicon Valley.

It looks as if Mahalo is searching around for revenue channels to accompany the $20 million raised in venture capital funding.

While playing with the new Mahalo interface I noticed that there is now a Mahalo loyalty program that seems to be based on visits alone…

The text on that page reads:

“We track the number of pages people view and reward our most loyal visitors with prizes. We don’t track the specific pages people view.

The number of pages you’ve viewed is right below the search box in the upper right corner of the Mahalo homepage.

If you’d like to opt out of this program, click here.”

While this seems like a novel idea in the Valley, affiliate-minded companies such as UPromise, eBates, Cashbaq, Fatwallet, Microsoft’s JellyFish, iGive, ValueClick’s MeziMedia, etc have been in the loyalty space for years and have come close to perfecting (or at least experimenting enough to find a profitable margin) the loyalty paradigm.

Rather than basing the Mahalo Loyalty program solely on such an easily manipulated metric as visits or pageviews, Calacanis and Co would be wise to look at what these affiliates have done and how the combination of pageviews plus action committed produces a much better result than just pageviews.

Even Microsoft seems to be “getting it” with their Cashback platform (which is actually doing well according to the analytical sites). Of course, Microsoft and the loyalty affiliates rely upon a conversion of a purchase or subscription for success, but Mahalo could very well find paydirt by leveraging a loyalty program composed of its massive amount of content with a developing loyal user base and affiliate programs.

We’ll see how they develop things.

Mahalo Loyalty Program – Mahalo