Jetting Blogs » time

Optimize Pay Per Click Advertising In Relationship To Search Engine Optimization Marketing Strategy

BlogPostman — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:15:27 +0000

One of the most important steps to your search engine marketing success is to optimize per pay click (PPC) advertising campaigns. The thought that PPC advertising and search engine optimization are marketing strategies designed exclusively for the online marketing gurus is totally misplaced. However, it is imperative to realize that these two internet marketing campaign strategies work hand in hand. Search engine marketing usually can take a long time, sometimes up to one whole year before you begin getting high ranking. It is for this main reason that online expert marketers advice you optimize pay per click advertising campaigns. This is a critical step because it will enable you to get immediate traffic thus gauge the competitiveness of your keyword phrases. In addition, the responses you will receive from your visitors will help you to know whether your products will move or they will need to be improved on. Look at this scenario; you spend all your time getting inbound links from reputable websites. You even go to an extent of submitting articles with your specific keyword phrases, then you one day wake up to find your website on the first page of Google search results. But on close observation you realize that you are generating high volume traffic but very few sales leads. It is specifically for this reason that case studies on attracting business leads advocate for an optimize pay per click advertising campaign before embarking on SEO marketing strategy. Google has a great platform known as Adword where you can accurately test and thus optimize pay per click advertising campaigns. The approach is simple, test your intended keyword phases and see how much targeted traffic it will generate. If it attracts traffic that can convert to customers then you can confidently begin your search engine optimization marketing campaigns. Click the links below and harness more insightful information regarding SEO Marketing Strategies and Pay per Click Advertising Campaigns. - About the Author: Stephen writes rich content on Pay Per Click Advertising . His webpage is on Money Making Ideas and Generating Targeted Traffic. Visit his informative and insightful website at:- Money Making Secrets and learn more… Article Source

See the original post here:
Optimize Pay Per Click Advertising In Relationship To Search Engine Optimization Marketing Strategy

How I Started Blogging. What’s Your Story?

BlogPostman — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:48:35 +0000

While today’s online media are abuzz with the latest and greatest social media tactics and tools, for many of us that have been around a little while, it was blogging that started our social media careers. It’s funny to think that in 2002 a type of site called “blog” came up on my radar as a possible marketing tool. At the time, many blogs were personal diaries posted anonymously or by people with a little tech savvy and plenty of opinion. Writing personal thoughts on a public web site was absolutely the last thing I would ever consider doing. However, it was a curious thing and I started a few blogs anonymously to see what it was like. Unfortunately, the excercise was so foreign, poorly executed and without feedback, that I deleted them. In mid 2003 I began looking for online content outside of forums and started reading several SEO blogs including Search Engine Blog (Peter Da Vanzo), Search Blog (John Battelle) and Search Engine Lowdown (Andy Beal). Interestingly, only Search Blog remains what it was. In December 2003 after using Blogger.com as a group blog software for a few collaboration projects I finally decided to start a blog under the blogspot.com domain for TopRank Online Marketing , which by then, had been in business about 2 years. As you can see from my “ Hello World ” post in Dec 2003, I had humble goals to post news and information related to online marketing. We had a web site that pulled in a lot of search traffic, why would we need a blog? The reason was simply to see what blogging could do to get the word out about our expertise and to share information. Blogging was very new territory and there wasn’t anyone to demonstrate best practices, so I set out to find what those were while sharing links, news and resources. I suspect there are a good number of companies that treat other social media services the same way, whether it’s Twitter, Foursquare or building a social mobile app. It’s new territory and they want to find out whether those applications or sites would make sense in their marketing mix. The problem with that perspective is that it’s about the most inefficient and unproductive way to go about finding the right online marketing channels for a business. The biggest mistake I made 6 plus years ago when I started blogging was not creating a strategy. As a marketer, I knew better than to chase a tactic, but I had no idea at the time how much of an impact blogging would have on our business. In other words, despite a lack of strategy, we were able to use our marketing savvy, curiosity and interest in connecting with the online marketing community to achieve many of the goals we set out to reach in our business. It just took a lot longer without that strategic plan. Companies starting down the path of becoming more social in their culture to better connect with customers and to realize the marketing, PR, and customer service benefits from social media participation don’t need to waste that time. Doing the homework of researching customers, setting goals and developing a strategy are essential steps towards a successful social media marketing experience. Back to why I started blogging. The SEO community was a lot smaller in 2003 and 2004. Writing a post about anything to do with search engine optimization would be noticed and commented on by the small number of SEO bloggers. There were plenty of cross links and “hat tips” (whatever happened to those?) and openly shared opinions. Blogging even made a number of SEOs very popular, very quickly. Blogging to get popular is the goal for some people and there certainly is some relationship between notoriety, awareness and credibility with the ability to attract sales. The key (for me at least) is that creating awareness of oneself is simply a proxy to gaining visibility for your business. It’s not a goal in itself. As a result, Ive been open about using visibility to help others and make connections. The turning point for me in blogging was due in part to learning to liveblog at conferences. Steve Hall of AdRants provided my first opportunity to liveblog at a ad:tech event - an absolutely humbling experience for anyone that isn’t a natural writer. I met people like Frank Gruber and David Berkowitz at that event in 2004. I did some liveblogging for Barry Schwartz and Search Engine Roundtable after that which also provided great exposure and connections. Matt McGowan brought even more exposure opportunity by having Online Marketing Blog as a media sponsor for SES conferences . There’s a huge list of people that have been very helpful over the years, especially our longtime readers. Since then we’ve published a lot of content and provided a lot of insight into holistic SEO and online marketing topics. During that time I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to find your voice and stick to it. Don’t try to be what you’re not. It simply doesn’t resonate with readers or with the goals you’ve likely set. Whether it’s blogging or other types of content and networking, I think the real value from online publishing in a social context is of course, being social. Blogging has been a great experience in terms of developing relationships with people I would have never connected with otherwise. It has definitely served as a platform for making connections in the industry that have led directly and indirectly, to a lot of new business. I started blogging personally as an experiment and found a process and strategy along the way that has helped grow our business and the online marketing/sales performance of many of our clients. Long time blogging provides ample opportunity to make and learn from mistakes. Blogging also allows us to continue to be a resource while sharing our expertise with potential customers, partners and employees. We’ll be going through yet another evolution with Online Marketing Blog in the next month or two and I wonder about the experiences of our readers that also blog: If you’re a blogger, why did you start? What’s your blogging story? Did you start as an experiment? Did you start with a strategy? What was your biggest mistake? What have you learned? © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | How I Started Blogging. What’s Your Story? | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

View post:
How I Started Blogging. What’s Your Story?

Key Questions to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:45:01 +0000

I’ve been thinking about how entering the content marketing space is not for the faint of heart. It can be a signifcant undertaking both in terms of resources and a change in an organization’s approach to marketing and sales. Obviously, content marketing is better for some companies and industries than others. Outside help also makes a difference. While increasing numbers of companies are realizing they must provide more than product information to satisfy customers, many of those same companies fail by implementing random tactics and missing out on benefits like better search visibility. In order to take full advantage of the significant gains in search traffic that are available with a content focused marketing effort, it’s essential to answer some key questions: What do you really know about your customers? I put customers first before company goals because a social media and content focused marketing effort must emphasize the needs of those you’re trying to reach in order to meet your own. Think of it as, “Give to get”. Who are you trying to reach? Have you developed Buyer Personas ? How well do you understand your customers’ goals? What are your customers preferences when it comes to content discovery, consumption and sharing? What keywords do they associate with your products or services? Who are they influenced by? In what communities do they spend their time on the social web? What business objectives are you trying to achieve? What are your goals? What is your social media strategy ? What must happen for your customers before you meet your business objectives? What are teh key performance indicators that will help you measure the buyer persona’s path towards conversion? Do you have the measurement tools in place to properly monitor and measure for research and to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? What does the competitive SERPs landscape look like? What does the search engine results page look like for the keyword phrases you’re after? The SERPs page is a big part of the competitive landscape for SEO. What types of web sites appear in first page results? Who is linking to them and not linking to you? What type of Universal results are triggered? (News, Blogs, Real-time, Books, Products, Local) What types of media are included in the SERPs for your target phrases? (Images, Video). Will the new Google design have any impact on the SERPs landscape for your target keyword phrases? What other types of search engines should you focus on besides Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com? What resources will you need to succeed? Most companies are not in the publishing business. In order to achieve longevity for an optimized content marketing effort, it’s important to outline the resources available to implement including: content, people, processes. Content . What content do you currently have available for optimization? What content will you need to create according to your keyword glossary and customer needs? Know what digital assets you have available for publishing online and indentify what new media you may need to create, and who will be creating/promoting it. People . Who will create that content in your organization? What in-house content development resources do you normally use? What new content resources, including other departments, could you leverage for SEO? What other groups in your organization will you need to coordinate with in order to execute on promotions? Processes . what is the current content creation and promotion process? Identify how can you make optimization a baked-in part of established content publishing processes. Determin whether manual keyword glossary sharing is applicable or if the content management system can be modified to dynamically pull in keyword options when adding new content. Can SEO be made part of the corporate identity standards and incorporated into the style guide? What is the right tactical mix to help you reach your goals? Based on customer preferences, your goals, the SERPs and resources, what channels will you optimize? What mix of content creation will be used? Web pages, press releases, white papers, case studies, online newsroom with press releases, articles, video, images, audio, rich media, sharing content on social sharing web sites. How will you get the content creators within and external to your organization trained on content optimization? What oversight and monitoring methods will you use to ensure quality and avoid unfortunate overwrites? Also, what link building tactics will be emphasized? How can you leverage existing communications and relationships to increase relevant links? Can you tap into existing dealer networks, affiliates, branch office web sites and marketing partners for quality links? Can you get public relations on board with using links that are more likely to be included in placements? Can links be better optimized for SEO within other online documents such as press releases? How will you measure success and what tools will you use? Measurement is the most critical piece of an optimized content marketing program. Measurement with social media monitoring tools up front can be essential in defining the social conversations driving content creation, sharing and consumption that are consistent with your marketing goals. Once a program is implemented, analytics will help measure key performance indicators (KPIs), conversions and anything in between. There’s a lot you can measure so here are a few examples for SEO, Social Media and Online PR. SEO related measurement often includes search referrals and keywords that drive traffic to the web site, what search engines send traffic and what the visitors do once they visit. Relative measures of rankings and links can be useful as well. Ultimately, conversions are an idea measurement for SEO, whether it’s a white paper download, webinar signup or an actual product/service sale. Social media measurement often includes engagement metrics such as fans/friends/followers, comments, brand mentions & sentiment, referred traffic and links. Tracking buzzing topics on the social web can create opportunities for real time content creation/optimization and promotion. Online PR measurement often depends on determining the effectiveness of press releases distributed via email directly to a short list of journalists or to a newswire service for broader exposure online. Blog and publication mentions (unsolicited) as well as links and sentiment are also important. Do no underestimate the value and importance of using social monitoring and web analytics to help inform the ongoing content marketing opportunities and the creation of specific types of content in order to attract trending search traffic. Social conversations fuel search traffic. Understand the keywords most often used in social conversations and you may get a leg up on your competition by creating, optimizing and promoting content that’s being discussed and popular. © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Key Questions to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Here is the original post:
Key Questions to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

DoubleDutch: Foursquare for the Enterprise

BlogPostman — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:25:25 +0000

The buzz on geolocation marketing is hot. Recently Lawrence Coburn released the beta version of DoubleDutch, a platform for creating your own geolocation check-in app, ala Foursquare. I connected with Lawrence to ask more questions about DoubleDutch and to get tips for marketers that want to incorporate geolocation and review services into their online marketing. First, can you share a bit about yourself and your company RateItAll? We spoke on a panel several years ago at Pubcon and I remember that you have a great story about how your company started and really exploded with media attention. Sure, RateItAll is a story of endurance. I ran it out of a coffee shop for years (along with a number of other niche sites). By 2007 it had started to grow to a point that I couldn’t handle it by myself. It was making decent money, but I was struggling to keep the servers up. Mathew Spolin, our CTO joined us in 2008 and we were able to go out get a little funding for it. We now have a team of seven based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Congratulations on launching your new project, the iPhone App: DoubleDutch. I appreciate getting a pre pre alpha view of it and now you’re really added some great features – especially the ability to white label it. What prompted you to create DoubleDutch and how is it different than Foursquare and Gowalla? Lee, you were actually one of the first people to see DoubleDutch in the wild. We’re really excited about it – it has been called “Foursquare for the Enterprise” and “Ning for Mobile Social Networks.” We’re OK with both of those descriptions. We had been eying location based services for a long time. I was an obsessive user of Dodgeball (the SMS precursor to Foursquare). By the time 2009 SXSW rolled around, Mathew and I were determined to do something with location. We approached Foursquare to team up on a reviews + check-ins combo, but weren’t able to get their attention. So we set out to build the thing ourselves, leveraging RateItAll’s massive database of geo tagged data. Over the years we had signed a number of geo data partnerships, giving us a big advantage in entering the location fray. Our goal was to put together a collection of mobile, social components that could be remixed and customized by white label partners. In addition to the check-in functionality, some of our features include game dynamics (leaderboards, achievement stickers, and “Rockstardom,”), ratings and reviews, photo uploads, Facebook / Twitter integration, and many more. This app was in development for more than 6 months and we’re quite happy with how it turned out. Our big difference from Foursquare and Gowalla is in our emphasis on reviews. We think there is an endemic relationship between a social check-in and a review of a local business. Just as Amazon has been able to leverage sales data to convert more reviews than anyone else, we think that check-ins are the first step towards posting a review. We also believe strongly in the concept of “The community IS the social graph.” What I mean by this is that on public networks like Foursquare or Gowalla, you need to recreate your social graph for the apps to get any value from the service. Not so on a private network like DoubleDutch. You can imagine an app white labeled for a conference like Pubcon, in which every attendee could see the check in activity of other attendees. Think about what a boon this would be for networking – no more just heading to the lobby bar and hoping for the best. And because everyone was there for Pubcon, no friending would be required. Are widgets still sexy ? Of course! Just not as sexy as geo at the moment. In fact, I’m not posting much on Sexy Widget any more. I started a blog called Location Meme a few months ago with a friend. The folks at The Next Web took notice, and invited me to be an editor at that network’s Location blog , and that’s where I’m doing most of my writing now. Back to DoubleDutch. Not only is this a (another) geolocation iPhone app, but you’re offering companies or organizations the opportunity white label the DoubleDutch platform to create their own location-based iPhone app. Who is your target and how do you see them using it? What are your plans to make it competitive with the other apps out there that are already well entrenched? Our three target verticals right now are Conferences, Hotels, and Universities. We think that almost any community that is tied to a location could benefit from a location and knowledge sharing service, but we needed to narrow the universe down a bit. Conferences and Hotels are interesting because they typically are communities of people who are converging on a new city looking for recommendations and interaction. DoubleDutch helps on both counts. Universities are interesting because of their tie to a specific geography, and the demographic. You can check out some sample use cases on DoubleDutch.me. How does the Double Dutch app tie in to your main business, RateItAll? Great question. We are seeing signs that DoubleDutch has the potential to become our main business, with RateItAll taking a supporting role. RateItAll provides a tremendous foundation for the service, with its massive amount of geo tagged data, and its 4M+ reviews. Our server infrastructure is key as well as it allows us offer SLAs to our clients. Also, all check in, ratings, reviews, and photo activity is aggregated on RateItAll.com, making DoubleDutch another content collection channel. You were at SXSW, who won the geolocation prize there? Gowalla or Foursquare? I guess that’s a loaded question. What did they do right? Did you see any big mistakes? I think geolocation won the geolocation prize. Both those services got a big boost, but I think the whole space benefited from all the attention. At DoubleDutch, we are huge fanboys / fangirls of both services and wish them only the best. If you believe that Enterprise trails Consumer by two years (which we do), the faster that those services blaze the trail, the faster that DoubleDutch will grow. Please share 3-4 best practices and tips for companies that want to use geolocation based mobile apps to market their businesses? I think it really depends what kind of business you are. If you are a local business, you don’t really have to do much other than ensure that your address info is up to date on the mobile services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and of course, RateItAll. If you are a bit more savvy / experimental, you can try offering discounts / giveaways to Foursquare Mayors, and try and incentivize your customers to check-in and push to Twitter / FB. If you are a big brand, perhaps it makes sense to try and cut a deal with Foursquare or Gowalla to sponsor some Badges. Lots of companies are cutting these sorts of deals, and it’s a good way to drop your brand into the experience of those apps in the context of the location game. But if you are a big community, it might make sense to use a service like DoubleDutch to create a more pervasive connection with your customers / members / employees and extend your community out into the real world. Social check in apps are not only fun, but they can be productive. We’re talking to companies with some pretty innovative ideas for putting geo to work – for example, a real estate company wants to put this app in the hands of their agents to encourage more property visits, and help those agents capture photos and thoughts about each property. We have been amazed at how creative some of these companies are. What about tips for marketing within the consumer reviews marketplace overall? How important is it for companies to be active, whether it’s editorially, through advertising or offline promotion with services like Yelp, Epinions or even RateItAll? I strongly recommend that businesses be active on the big review properties. Being active does not mean being confrontational and bullying – it means engaging thoughtfully with customers, even the insane and / or angry ones. If you suspect cheating, don’t call out the customer – go to the host site. Most of these services allow commenting and messaging – on RateItAll, which is the 9th biggest review site, we see a number of big brands on the site every day making use of the free tools like commenting and messaging to engage their customers. Some of those folks pay us for access to a few more tools, but you don’t need to have a budget engage your customers. One question I like to ask smart and busy entrepreneurs like yourself is: How do you stay current with technology and marketing? Do you have favorite events, books, blogs, networks or some kind of crystal RateItAll ball to keep you on top of what’s important for the future of your business? I read and write as much as I possibly can. Writing makes me smarter about a topic, because I don’t want to come off as a moron. It takes a lot of research to write a post. Sexy Widget was born out of my desire to get smart about widgets, and my role as Editor at the Next Web was born out my desire to get smart about geo. In terms of reading, I hit Techmeme and Hacker News all the time, and also get a lot of good links from Twitter. My two favorite blogs are AVC and CDixon.org . Living in San Francisco, I have access to a number of technology meetup type events – I try and hit a couple per month. There’s nothing better than talking to entrepreneurs, because for them, predicting the next big wave is life or death. I tend to listen to folks running companies more than I listen to journalists. Thanks Lawrence. You can download the Double Dutch app here. RWW did a great overview with screenshots here. Lawrence Coburn is the founder and CEO of RateItAll and co-founder of the white label geolocation app, DoubleDutch . In his spare time, he is an editor of The Next Web’s Location blog . Lawrence is also a mentor at Ventures.io , a San Francisco based technology incubator. © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | DoubleDutch: Foursquare for the Enterprise | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Read the original here:
DoubleDutch: Foursquare for the Enterprise

Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:39:41 +0000

As companies that realize the value of online marketing understand the need to publish engaging content, one of the most common considerations is a company blog. Blog software is fundamentally one of the easiest content management software systems to install and use. Of course the software isn’t magic. The content and ability to reach and engage with customers is a big part of what makes a business blog successful. For those companies that are thinking of starting a blog or reinvesting resources into a company blogging effort that has gone stale, some of the most important questions to ask are: Have you identified specific goals for the blog? How will you measure success? In sports you can’t score if there isn’t a goal and it’s no different with business blogging. There are a variety of reasons why publishing ongoing communications that allow readers to interact adds value to a business. Add to that the distribution via RSS that extends the reach of your message and it’s easy to see why so many companies start blogging. The failure for many business blogs is centered around not making a connection between business goals, blog specific objectives and most importantly, how meeting customer needs leads to the first two. Here are three key questions to consider as you design your plan for business blogging success: Why start a business blog? What end goals or outcomes can you reasonably expect? There are many good reasons to start a blog. But are those reasons good enough to start and stay blogging for the long haul? Our survey on blogging and SEO showed 90% citing blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic. 94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months. Initiate and foster customer engagement Improve coverage by media and bloggers Improve search engine visibility Increase mentions on other blogs, social networking, news, bookmarking and media sites Build thought leadership Provide an informative communication channel Recognize employees, clients, marketing partners and especially brand evangelists How will you know your blogging efforts are successful according to those goals? How are you measuring blogging success? We ran a poll last year with our readers that ranked their most important measures of blogging success. Here is the distribution: Engagement: comments, links 36% Improved brand recognition 31% Build thought leadership 31% Search engine rankings 31% Better communicate with customers 30% Traffic to the blog 27% Coverage by media and other blogs 18% Traffic to the corporate web site 16% Sales leads 16% Industry Recognition 13% Sell products 2% Improved customer satisfaction 11% Page views 9% Time on Site 6% Ad revenue on the blog 5% What tools are you using to measure blog performance? Goals for business and the blog are great but it’s essential to have the right tools in place for analytics. One of the biggest mistakes is to rely on things like Google Alerts. Web analytics (Google Analytics, Woopra, Clicky, etc) Feedburner Social media monitoring tools Link analysis tools Comment tracking tools Clipping services Forum conversation tracking tools It’s fundamental, this notion of setting goals, understanding outcomes and the tools needed to measure. But you know the saying, “Common sense is the least common thing on Earth.” Companies can achieve great return on investment with the right plan and leadership in a blogging effort. The key is to do the baseline work to build a foundation upon which it can grow and succeed. Stay the course and leverage both listening and engagement tools to guide content. Develop networks and distribution channels to grow readership and reach. Take the time to really understand the impact of data provided by reporting tools and create reports for executives that highlight business goals. What are some of the challenges you’ve faced with setting, measuring and reaching business goals through corporate blogging? Have you started a business blog only to shut it down? Have your company blogging efforts been successful beyond expectations? © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com

Go here to see the original:
Setting and Measuring Goals for Business Blogging

Writing Ppc Ads That Get Most Click

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:36:59 +0000

I always research keywords first, and then write ppc ads thats the actual ad. If you find yourself setting up your AdWords Campaign before you have had time to write ads or do keyword research, then just create a bogus ad, and pause your Ad Group, so you can move on to the next step. You can return later to revise your writing ppc ads. In the keyword research, you grouped keywords into relevant groups. You’ll want to write ads for each of these groups of keywords. Then when you bid on keywords, you will specifically use those keywords in the ppc ad copy so that your ads correspond to the keywords in their respective Ad Group. Match your ad copy as closely as possible to the keywords in each family of keywords that are contained in individual Ad Groups.This will give your ads a higher relevancy score which will result in a lower cost per click. Google has some basic AdWords guidelines to consider while writing your ad. Your headline must be less than 25 characters (including spaces). You are given an additional 2 lines for text. Each line is limited to 35 characters (again including spaces). As you can see, you have a fairly limited space in which to entice your customers. Use it wisely! This is not the time to sell your product. This is the time to attract your customers, spark their interests and get the clicks. Your first eye catcher will be your headline. After your customer has clicked though your ad, the merchant site will list all the important features of their product or service. Get to know these features and ask yourself “How do these benefit the customer?” When writing ppc ads, don’t just think like an affiliate, but also think like a customer. Consider what brought the customers to your ad and what benefits they can gain from your product or service. Utilizing your keywords in your ad copy is one simple method to call attention to your customer’s interests and needs. If the customer reached your ad by typing in Tiffany Lamps then Tiffany Lamps in your ad will surely catch her eye. the more you load your ad with keywords from the ad group, the higher the relevancy score. Knowing that you are going to include keywords in your ad copy, begin writing your ad in sentence and/or paragraph form. State what it is your customer should know. Then reduce it and refine it. Get FREE 5-Day Course Gives You The Skinny On Google AdWords Via E-mail From Perry Marshall – About the Author: BILL ACHOLA WRIGHT writes Business Reviews programs to help online users to purchase the right program and to be full time and part time successful entrepreneur.Currently he is in the Internet marketing industry,where by he have developed the TOP BUSINESS MONEY MAKING PROGRAMS. Article Source

Follow this link:
Writing Ppc Ads That Get Most Click

Develop Your Ppc Plan

BlogPostman — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 18:47:46 +0000

No good business happens without a good plan. No good PPC marketing campaign can happen without an effective PPC plan . Know your resources The possibilities are endless (quite literally) once you enter the world of the internet. Before you even press the power button on your computer, you need to assess your resources. Set your own budget, know the time limits of your advertisements, decide if you are able to handle the influx of attention from PPC. Once you know your resources, you will know which venues are best suited to you and which you will prefer. Know the players There are the “big three” that are very trustworthy, tried-and-true. These PPC publishers are good options for nervous first-time advertisers. However, these venues carry heavier traffic and, therefore, heavier competition. Smaller publishers abound endlessly, but they carry a higher risk in terms of exposure, but also fraud. Knowing who is out there and their track record can mean a lot later in the planning phase. Know your goals Deciding what you want to get out of the PPC advertising experience is important to maximizing PPC effectiveness. Knowing who you want to reach, what you want to say to them and what you want them to see about you will help determine your ad and ad placements. Goals and budget must be reconciled with each other, but can unite to create a very successful PPC experience. The most important thing when forming a PPC plan is to educate yourself at every step. Knowing the industry norms will help you maintain status as a savvy advertiser. Setting high expectations within the realm of what is considered normal will acclimate you to the industry and promote a tradition of positive PPC experiences. No matter what you do, however, planning is the key. – About the Author: Joe Praveen Sequeira ~ is an award winning, best-selling author, speaker, educator and professional Internet Marketing Consultant focused on helping businesses of all sizes, increase their online sales, boost web site traffic and strengthen their overall brand through established online marketing strategies. He has overseen hundreds of Internet marketing campaigns for fortune 500 companies and is the Founder & CEO of The eMarketing Pro , a thriving Internet marketing and eBusiness consulting firm. Article Source

See the original post:
Develop Your Ppc Plan

Custom Business Banners

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:10:44 +0000

Since world finances are amiss, every business has had to tighten their belts. Even more successful business people have needed to take measures that will bring more customers to their doors. One of the best ways to bring more business to your door is the use of custom business banners. Banners get your name out there in front of people, and they are a very effective way to promote your business. You can select from various online companies to find the one that will work the best for you. There may be local establishments in your area that sell custom banners as well. Businesses who make custom banners use specialized software to create a template for your customized banner. Banners are an excellent choice when compared to posters, since they are made from materials of higher quality, and they will last longer than posters. Once you design a custom banner for your business, you can publish it in various ways. First, you can buy ad space online, but the most effective way to use a banner locally is to hang it outdoors. Your supplier will use premium materials to produce your outdoor banner, and you can hang them outside your location or around the area. These banners are large in size and they will catch a lot of attention. It seems that you see banners every time you turn around, so you will want yours to be unique, so it will stand out. Competition is brisk in most areas, so it will help you if your banner is colorful and more appealing than those of your competitors. Banners are inexpensive and durable, and they can be placed in many different locations. You will want to take the time to design a banner that fits with what you have established as your company brand. It should also grab attention, and invite viewers to read the whole statement it makes. Color is an important component in each banner you are making. Add in various colors, since people are naturally attracted to diverse colors. Select colors that will provide an attractive canvas for people to look at. Choose a background color that is appropriate for the colors and the sign’s wording, too. A simple background is often the best, so that people’s attention is drawn to the statement or the company name, not a cluttered background. Always use pictures, words and company logos that you use in your other business advertising, so that the color scheme will pop into people’s minds when they read your banner. Use words and phrases that are eye catching and thought-provoking. Logos and pictures should be clear and distinct, so that they are easily seen, and the viewer won’t have to think twice about what your banner says – unless you want them to. Various colors or themes are popular in different areas of the country, so check around and see what banners work for other businesses. Afterwards, you can design a custom business banner that stands out from the rest and is also appealing to the eye. Resource Box Bannerstoyou.com is a leading provider of Vinyl Banners in the USA and beyond. They can provide all your needs for vinyl banners for business or personal use. Bannerstoyou.com is a leading provider of vinyl banners in the USA and beyond. They can provide all your needs for vinyl banners for business or personal use. Tom Jacobsen is a writer for http://www.bannerstoyou.com who has worked in the industry for some years. Article Source

See the rest here:
Custom Business Banners

11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:28:30 +0000

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search. The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful: howsociable.com – Social visibility score knowem.com – Profile building tool Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings Google Insights – Keyword demand trends Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking trackur.com – Social media monitoring socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them. HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions. This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment. KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you. Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters. Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services. The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others. Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic. SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program. Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination. Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand. Eric Miraglia ’s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option. Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it. If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition. This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting the most links from. Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where. Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space. Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities. SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online. Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared. In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service. PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where. If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

Online Marketing Adwords Yahoo Classifieds

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:56:09 +0000

Today lets talk about getting your products or services marketed so your potential customers are aware that they exist.Until they know they are, your never going to make a penny. First of all you really need to set yourself a budget, a figure that your relaxed about spending each week or month. I suggest at least a budget that will last for the next 120 days. Of course spending money on advertising may be out of the question for now which is not a problem at all, there are many low cost and free ways to do this which we will discuss later. One thing you will need to do is remember to have fun with it, its not a huge monster to take, its just marketing. Thousands of people before have done it and so can you. An example of how easy it is ,is have you ever recommended a restaurant or movie to someone, well then you can market, that’s no different to any other form of marketing. Ok there are 2 main areas were going to talk about in the next few articles and that is online and offline. Online is advertising on the internet perhaps with google or yahoo and off line is more traditional like newspapers or magazines. With online there is an abundance of choice that will suit any budget. The most famous being Google Adwords otherwise known as Pay Per Click. This in lay mans terms is about you bidding on certain words or phrases connected with your product. When someone types in a word you have bid on, your advert will appear giving that person a chance to click on your advert and visiting your website were they can make a purchase. You pay a certain amount every time this happens ( you fix this price before hand) hence the name Pay Per Click. Now Google Adwords is the most popular but it can be the most expensive if you dont know what your doing in fact any PPC advertising will cost you dearly if your not careful. Me personally i prefer Yahoo’s PPC. Its a lot more easier to understand and is slightly less competitive. But there are many companies out there doing this that will suit your budget and criteria and there will always be a ton of information to get you up to speed. When used correctly these programs can generate massive traffic to you site. Another option is the online classifieds where you place an advert like you would in a news paper. There a many many places to do this, just type in google “Classified Advertising” and see what comes up. Its really dependant on what your providing. Some specialise in particular markets while others cater for all. These can be paid or free both work very well. What i suggest is when choosing a place to advertise you first check its list ranking on sites like http:// www.alexa.com . Here you can type in the web address and see how high it ranks in the search engines listings like Google or Yahoo. I suggest its at least in the top 100,000 for it to be worth your time or money. Another thing you can do is see how popular the site is in particular countries, you may want to target geographically. So that’s just a few ideas for you to mull over but before i continue in the next article with advertising i just want to give a tip. There are endless places and ideas about for you to advertise which can all become a bit overwhelming. I suggest you choose 3 ideas your happy with and stick to those, get good at them, persist with them until they work. Allow at least 3 weeks to start seeing results ( longer with newspapers) dont give up when nothing happens at first, just get better at it and persist. They all work and work well but only if you stick at it. Remember, the home business industry is a real industry just like any other that requires work so please dont loose sight of this Nick Squires have been working online now for several years enjoying huge success for himself as well as teaching others how they can replace their incomes and work from home. He is an industry recognised leader for his consistant efforts in showing people there is an easier way.He spends his time between Lisbon and Paris.To find out how he makes his money and to see if you could too, visit http://www.wealthcreationsgroup.com Article Source

Read the original post:
Online Marketing Adwords Yahoo Classifieds