Brazil has a well-deserved international reputation for football wizardry, having won five World Cups and innumerable other trophies. Now its domestic clubs are turning to online marketing to boost their profile and revenue.

With over 83 million Brazilians having access to the Web and some teams boasting 25 million fans, it was inevitable perhaps that the clubs would see the immense potential of internet marketing, via websites, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, online TV and mobile applications. They are increasingly using them to sell team merchandise, themed online games and to host competitions.

One club, Sao Paulo’s Corinthians, has even created the “Corinthians People’s Republic” online, with its 190,000 fans declared “citizens” with their own currency, virtual “embassy” and ID documents.

Rio’s Flamengo club’s head of marketing Marcus Duarte told the Times of India that “the goal is not to have the largest number of fans on Facebook, but to transform them into consumers.”

“We still have a lot to learn from abroad regarding online marketing, but we are beginning to reach cruise control,” he added.

Another expert suggested that with such things as online memberships, merchandise sales, sales of advertising space on websites and web-TV, clubs can earn around a million Brazilian reais per month.

When it comes to online marketing, there’s three major factors you should be bearing in mind:

1. Conversion rate. One of the ways that you can really tell if your online marketing campaign is bearing fruit is whether it translates into more sales or inquiries. A good website will have methods for tracking this, such as Google Analytics.
2. The composition of your backlink profile. Backlinks are more important than ever now that Google has again updated its Penguin algorithm. When it comes to SEO marketing, backlinks matter, and an unexamined backlink profile will harm your place in the Google search rankings without you even knowing. A good online marketing service will be able to access your backlink profile and optimise it.
3. Visitor time and engagement. Another key indicator of the success of a campaign is how long visitors spend on your site. Ways to monitor this include tracking the average time a visitor spends on-site, tracking the number of visitors that venture beyond your home page and the number of ‘shares’ visitors make on social media sites. Increasingly, such metrics also factor into your SEO rankings.

Online marketing executives take note – expert opinion has it that SEO will be severely shaken up by the upcoming Google Penguin update.

Speaking last week at the SES San Francisco conference, Google’s Search Quality supreme Matt Cutts said that the update would be “jarring and jolting” for SEO marketing practitioners.

Although Google is, as usual, keeping the precise details of the update secret, most analysts agree that it will involve new signals for SEO marketing to interpret and respond to, which does tend to make things a little chaotic and uncertain until matters settle down again. Penguin is still a relatively young piece of software, meaning that new signals and improvements to the algorithm are being incorporated all the time. It is widely believed that this means the next few Penguin updates will be pretty involved, with greater impact on SEO than before.

In order to be prepared for the next “jarring and jolting” Penguin update, companies are being advised to contact online marketing experts to have their website ‘Penguin-proofed’.

Car buyers and sellers’ magazine Auto Trader has announced that its first online marketing campaign, centred around its readers’ emotional attachment to automobiles, will begin next week.

The online marketing experts behind the digital campaign wants to change how people perceive Auto Trader, and lies at the heart of a three-year strategy – with the ultimate aim of making Auto Trader more than a place where people buy and sell vehicles.

The internet advertising campaign will initially comprise of three videos to be hosted on the Auto Trader site, YouTube and MSN, in which customers speak of their relationship with their car.

The company said that it was the first time it has properly integrated mobile and online marketing. As well as the videos, users of Facebook and Twitter are also being urged to send in their own stories, where they stand the chance of winning one of 45 “dream driving experiences.”

The success of the online marketing campaign will inform the direction it takes over the next couple of years, plus a TV advertising campaign this autumn.

Arsenal Football Club revealed its new online marketing strategy recently, along with its ambition to become the Premier League’s “Tesco Clubcard” through its fan membership.

The north London club will be placing its CRM system at the heart of the new internet marketing initiative, starting off by making it easier to become a member – with different levels of privilege depending on the level of membership paid for. This will effect access to priority tickets, online access to resources such as the Arsenal video library plus a new raft of special offers and promotions.

Speaking to Marketing Week magazine, Arsenal’s head of marketing Charles Allen said that “we are investing in a CRM system to register interests and passions so we can then send those people on appropriate journeys of affinity and provide access at an appropriate level.”

The main vehicle for the online marketing drive will be social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Currently it boasts 10.5 million Facebook fans and 1.5 Twitter followers. These will now be targeted with various special offers and membership options.

The latest updates to the Google algorithm have now been officially named Penguin by the search engine giant, and continue to have major effects on the way that SEO marketing is carried out.

Since the previous update was dubbed Panda by Google, this simply continues its tradition of giving cute animal names to the no-nonsense tweaks it has been undertaking in a bid to weed out sites which try and exploit the rankings system through methods other than original written content.

Online marketing professionals have been concerned by some of the effects of the updates, which have led to the severe downranking of some bona fide sites on Google, while other less legitimate ones have moved far up.

Some online marketing companies that specialise in SEO have even called Penguin “the Titanic”, after the way it has sunk previously strong websites below the waterline, but the more forward-thinking professionals are rising to the challenge and seeking to discover what Google looks for to make the distinction between genuine content and spam.

The key, as with most online marketing, lies in ensuring that you seek quality original content over short-term boosting tricks – no matter how many times Google moves the goalposts, quality will out.

Recently, search engine giant Google has been issuing updates which have the potential to drastically change the way online marketing professionals carry out their link-building.

Link-building is especially important in SEO marketing campaigns, and Google’s latest changes mean curtains for so-called “un-natural” or “inorganic” links.

Google has itself condemned what it deems “over-optimised” sites, although it has been less eager to explain exactly what it means by this. What is certain, however, is that SEO marketing experts will need to take heed and focus not only on the amount of backlinks on a given site, but who is linking to it.

Another knock-on effect of Google’s changes is the increased need for online marketing efforts to focus on shareable content, such as blog posts or videos. These attract more “organic” links and will find favour with the search engine’s increasingly picky algorithms. The future is all about sharing – and all about not just the quantity of linkbacks, but the quality too.