After a recent discussion and meeting among staff members we are reaching the conclusion the age of the traditional html websites are gone.

Let me explain when I say websites are no longer needed I want to point clearly to smaller regional companies. The tools are out there for a local pizza shop, plumber or carpenter to promoted there business without the need for a website. It would be great to have a website but look at it from this point of view and question are they needed.

Imagine if you paid for a website to be published and had this page listed on google. You may then require spend on a adwords campaign or SEO work in order to optimise the site and help generate traffic. As many business’s find out it’s all well and good getting a website but if no one visits the site it remains a pointless investment.

So your site is listed you have paid for traffic or getting optimisation. Now regional searches online are due to increase but my point is there is already a source of traffic that can provide you with much more exposure for a local business.

That is a Facebook Fan page in the matter of a few minutes and for no cost you can have in effect a free website that you can reach all your existing contacts. You may think facebook fan pages are great but how can I add promotions and what if someone isnt a member of facebook.

Facebook have an app called “FBML” this provides the ability to generate a static page that displays to non members visiting your business. Also with the use of a good User name for your page you can generate exposure from off line advertising also.

I can feel the scowls from Web designers across the country but take this as a positive. Understand Facebook and get to grips with its huge potential. Learn how to design Facebook fan pages for your clients sooner rather than later.

Websites will always have there place but a website for a localised business is no longer required in my opinion with the potential of Facebook.

Online fashion retailer Asos revealed last week that it enjoyed a 59 per cent increase in revenue after online marketing efforts put its new US website well and truly on the map.

Asos said that the success of the US site means that revenues from its are on course to match its UK operations in the medium term.

According to the company, which has been trading now for over 10 years, the launch of its American website in October boosted sales in the US by 267 per cent for the last quarter of 2010 – thanks to online marketing efforts, US sales are now growing faster than their UK equivalents did in the early days of Asos. In the first few years of the century, its growth rate stood at around 100 per cent.

Asos chief executive Nick Robertson told the Independent newspaper that “the US will be at least as big as the UK in the medium term, which is very exciting.”

photo credit: Idhren

The fashion retailer also announced that it is taking advantage of the growing prevalence of online advertising via social networks – with plans to launch its very own “Facebook Store” on Thursday. The new platform will allow Facebook users to buy Asos products using their usual login for the Asos site, which attracts over 11 million visitors every month.

Millions of Asos customers already interact with its main website via Facebook, and the company’s e-commerce director James Hart said: “Our Facebook Store will allow them to do this directly through Facebook.”

Facebook fan pages are a great route for companies to make the most of there presence within the world of social networking. A lot more companies are making the leap into the promotion of Facebook offline as a means of capturing there audience for future promotions. In a similar way to the registration of a domain name the registration of usernames on facebook is a great way of getting ahead in your particular industry.

If you have not registered a username already take a look at what is available but also with offline advertising in mind.

Facebook.com/ “Your prefered keyword” would be a fantastic way of generating traffic via offline advertising plus provide the right message to any perspective customers or clients.

Many companies that look at Facebook as something for teenagers and aimed at a specific younger generation really are missing a trick. Many Directors of companies discount the source of traffic again and again as something that isn’t suited to there business. We have actually had meetings recently with companies alongside there marketing advisors who actually advise them to stay away from Facebook !

Yes stay away from a source of traffic that has overtaken Google online and is Free. What are the reasons for these so called marketing experts discounting Facebook for certain industrys.

A Industry isn’t suited to Facebook they claim it is more business to business ? Plus it may cause problems with customers contacting each other discussing prices.  A solution to this is simple stop comments on the page this would solve any potential for comments that expose prices or enable people to reach each others via the page.

So why else would a marketing advisor prevent a company from joining Facebook a free source of traffic ?

The main reason in my opinion is a distinct lack of understanding and willingness to embrace new areas of internet marketing. The same advisors probably talked down the importance of Radio, TV and the Internet .Our advice is don’t let misguided advice hold back your company in joining the social networking revolution put simply there are no boundaries no matter how big, small or diverse your industry.

The head of an online services company has urged online marketing executives to make sure that their campaigns are capable of having an instant impact on potential customers.

The Growth Masters founder and boss Robert Kintigh said that the growth of online marketing has represented “the most dynamic evolutionary step” in the unique medium of advertising that took decades to develop on the radio and television.

“Back then, you had to write down information on a paper pad. Today, you click on a website or a link and you’re instantly provided the information you want,” he pointed out, arguing that because of this, anyone involved with online marketing has a smaller window of time to grab the attention of customers and pitch the attractions of their service or product.

Mr Kintigh said that ideally, effective online advertising is able to both capture the attention of its target audience and make them wish to desire the products and services on offer.

The increasing popularity of social networks such as Twitter and Facebook is making the process of online marketing even faster, British Interactive Media Association (BIMA) Justin Cooke argued recently.

Mr Cooke said that social networks will become the favourite platform for many users buying products or services online in 2011, insisting that the UK was “fast becoming addicted to checking in, following and snacking on social media snippets while on the move,” before pointing out that growingsales of smartphones mean that people are able to log on to Facebook and Twitter from almost anywhere at almost any time of the day or night.

“I have no doubt that this love affair will continue to blossom in 2011 and even bear some new digitalicious fruits,” Mr Cooke added, predicting that “major brands will create social transactional applications and it will become commonplace for users to be able to make transactions on social media platforms.”

An online marketing expert said recently that search engine giant Google is very unlikely to allow advertising hosted by social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Bigmouthmedia head of strategy Andrew Girdwood argued that allowing social networks’ ads on Google’s pages would weaken the company’s own position.

Currently, Google is carrying adverts from the Twitter network to a limited extent – allowing promotional Tweets to be carried by its Realtime search engine, but not its main one.

Social networking is widely seen as the next frontier for online advertising as it is the perfect environment for viral and search-based marketing campaigns. The total spend on online marketing efforts in the sector is estimated next year to rise from £130 million to £275 million.

Another future platform for online marketing is the internet television, according to Screen Digest.

The magazine’s head of broadband Dan Cryan said that more people are likely to start using internet TVs for general surfing, while privacy issues will keep the majority of social networking on computers.

The shift is likely to cause a fresh look at the way online marketing takes place – for a start, internet TVs are going to be watched by multiple viewers at once.

The number of internet televisions in circulation is set to boom in the next few years, according to DisplaySearch. In a recent report, the analysts said that over 122 million internet-ready TVs will be in households by 2014.

The fast pace of change in both technology and online habits is a constant, if refreshing, challenge for marketing workers.

Online marketing expert Craig MacDonald said this week that Facebook will be the place to be seen in 2011, with an expected surge in the number of companies advertising on the social network.

In an article for Search Engine Watch, Mr MacDonald estimated that online marketing departments are going to devote up to 20 per cent of their total advertising budgets to Facebook alone.

He admitted that promotions on Facebook suffered from “atrocious” clickthrough rates last year, but insisted that things are now very different, with the social media platform now competing with established search engines such as Google for conversion rates.

Stressing that Facebook is “huge, it’s global and it’s growing,” Mr MacDonald insisted that it now operates “dollar for dollar” as efficiently as Google, in online marketing terms.

Recent figures from Experian Htiwise would appear to support his thesis, showing that Facebook was the most visited domain in the US in 2009, with 8.93 per cent of all American online traffic.

Online marketing investment is set to grow throughout 2011, according to eMarketer analyst Geoff Ramsey.

“The bad economy has actually accelerated the shift to digital advertising,” he told the New York Times. “Online ads, especially search ads, are increasingly seen by many marketers as a more reliable bet than print ads, which are often difficult to tie to a measurable financial result.”

Mr Ramsey pointed to figures from November 2010, which showed that US computer users conducted over 17 billion searches in that month. Google remained the major platform for such searches, with 64.3 per cent of the total.