Twitter social networking and blogging messages are known as tweets messages.  These tweets posts are text based statements consisting of up to 140 characters, displaying related searches on Twitter.

Twitter users are twitting on news, education, political campaigns and simple daily things one wants to share with others. Twitter usage is on the rise with around 74.000.000 users in January 2010 worldwide; a sharp 8% rise from December 2009.

According to www.travelmole.com, the second global travel survey, 85 percent of travel companies are due to increase or maintain the same online marketing budgets for 2010, which promises to be a highly competitive year in the travel industry for internet marketing.

27 percent of the participated 227 companies including hoteliers, travel agents, tour operators and airlines expect online budgets to increase by up to 50 percent, as securing online bookings pushes for more advertising.The Travel Mole study revealed that overall 54 percent of the travel companies will be increasing their budgets to promote themselves online for 2010, while only 15 percent will be investing less. 84 percent believe that the role of SEO will be more than ever, the number one priority for 2010, in order to maintain or declare company presence on the ever increasing online community.

Social media marketing, as well as the use of original content translated into different languages to capture a wider market, is a top priority for more than half of the companies involved in the survey.

Welcome to today’s live blogging from the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference here on OptimizeYourWeb.

We are getting under way right away, as is often the way of things. The welcome speech from Ingvar Hjálmarsson was light and entertaining but now the keynote speaker Rand Fiskin is on stage.

He is starting with something of a summary of methods used in internet marketing: blogging, SEO, PPC and the like. Which of these channels is appropriate for me as a company?

Rand’s personal feeling is that Conversion Rate Optimization is the crème de la crème of internet marketing…despite the fact that he works in SEO. Landing Page Optimization is important in bumping up the conversion rate. In fact, a simple experiment SEOmoz conducted increased the CR from 1.8 to 2.2 – meaning several million dollars extra revenue per year.

On SEO, he says that using the search engine analytical tools allows you to find out the query volume, and their relevance. SEO is fundamentally linked to links – three quarters or more in fact.

Affiliate Marketing is of moderate importance only, because your product simply has to appeal to your affiliates. Affiliates are just looking for the biggest pay outs with the smallest effort, so it’s difficult to get successful there.

Banner ads are great for branding, but much less so for direct click throughs.

Social Media Marketing is great just because most people participate, and getting individuals interested in your community.

The next step is to use web analytics in order to optimise your optimisation. Applying the results to business practice can then be tested with low intensity tests. Although the small scale of the testing is a limit, but Rand loves it because the cost and effort of doing it is tiny – but its results are still an important indicator on what to do with the channel in the future.

The internet is such a trackable medium, the costs and benefits of investments should be easy to keep track of. And that is simply essential. Keep your finger constantly on the pulse of how you are spending money and what it is netting you.

On a similar note, competitor analysis helps too. Are your competitors investing heavily in an area you’re not? Are they stupid, or is it something you should be in? Is there room or is the market full?

In conclusion, Rand is going to make some predictions for the future – despite the fact that he hates doing so!

… and the a4uexpo stands for THE Affiliate Marketing Conference and Expo where guests will learn strategies to increase their online revenue using affiliate marketing, This will also include related topics such as Search Engine Optimizing (SEO), Paid Search (PPC), Video, Mobile, PR, Cashback and the king of all topics Social Media.

Must say that I’m really excited about this event and it has a great line-up of speakers including Andy Atkins Kruger og WebCertain, Dixon Jones of Receptional, Mel Carson AdCenter Community Manager at MSN, The SEO Chick Judith ‘deCabbit’ Lewis, Joost De Valk from Onetomarket in Holland plus some 10 other great speakers.

It’s held at the ExCeL in London, see you there!