Marketing/Advertising

Mental Preparation for PPC Advertising with Google Adwords
 
Sooner or later many online entrepreneuers face the question of using Google Adwords to advertise their business or products. There are good reasons to consider Google Adwords when it comes to PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. It is one of the fastest ways to drive customers to a website. It’s one of the fastest ways to experiment what ads will work best and convert to sales. It’s one of the fastest ways to find out if a product is actually priced right and of interest for customers.
 
Unless you hire a professional SEO (Search Engine Optimizer), a Google Adwords Professional / Google Adwords Consultant, there will be a lot of work involved to be successful with PPC advertising. Be prepared to lose money. Be prepared to spend time reading forums, books, blogs, and websites about PPC advertising. If you don’t, your advertising campaigns are probably doomed the moment you decide to put them online. Assuming you want to do it yourself, you still need to be mentally prepared for PPC advertising. Imagine the look on my face one morning seeing hundreds of clicks in an expensive campaign and no conversion to a sale. And even better – all these clicks came in during the middle of the night when the campaigns would see least traffic due to people sleeping and a normal day would only show a much smaller percentage of clicks on a normal day. Like I did, you will probably complain to Google and ask for investigation and like it happened to me, the result was zero and you just pay for the bill. Tough PPC life.
 
Be prepared to see thousands or millions of ad impressions with no clicks on your ads. Don’t believe me? You will see for yourself once you try. Be prepared to see 95 percent of your keywords not getting a single impression. Be prepared to see the remaining 5 percent of your keywords being way too expensive to use them. Be prepared to see your minimum bid requirements pushed up to $5.00 or even $10.00 by Google. This all comes together factoring in your keywords, your adcopy, the amount per click you are bidding, and your landing page. The score out of this secret algorythm decides what you will finally pay per click.
 
Expect to see no ROI within your first one or two months. Expect to go back to the drawing board and to come up with alternate ad wording, different keywords, and the need to start new adgroups over and over again. Expect to see your landing pages not convert to sales and to re-write them over and over again until you find one that works. Expect to be ready to give up the whole more than once. Be prepared to one person saying "Solution A" will work for better conversions and then another person saying the complete opposite. And expect to see time and money go down the drain until you finally have your first day with Google Adwords where the income is exceeding the expenses.
 

What it all comes down to is:

 
You don’t know what the outcome is.
You don’t know if you will ever make a profit.
You don’t know if what works today, will still work tomorrow.
Don’t tell anyone what works for you because they will copy it and damage your success.
Don’t trust anyone who promises huge returns for you, because if they know it – why would they tell you and not make a fortune themself?!
 
Are you ready for the rollercoaster PPC Advertising with Google Adwords? Good Luck. If you still think you can make, you already passed by some competitors who just gave up.

How to write good ads for PPC advertising?
 
PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising is one of the most effective and most difficult ways to advertise a product or a website. If done right the pay-off can be tremendous. If done wrong the financial loss can be devastating. Writing good adcopy for PPC ads is highly critical for success. The text space for PPC ads is very limited. You will need to pack your sales message into a very small amount of words – usually spread out between a subject line and 2 lines of text. Depending on your domain name, you might get some extra descriptive keywords displayed that way. A descriptive domain name like "webhosting.com" tells you certain things right away.
 
Your PPC ads need to have keywords in the adcopy. Keywords should be search terms your customers might use to search for "stuff" in the search engine. Your ad will not look appealing and will nont invite many clicks if you keywords are missing. Your ads need to be descriptive. The product has to be clearly identifiable or your customers will be disappointed not finding what they were really looking for. You will be disappointed because you are wasting money on clicks that will not convert. Tricking people into a certain impression of what is behind the ad will not work well for you and cost you money.
 
Make sure people know upfront that your (example) cool ringtones are not free. You do not want to scare them away with price or not knowing that the offer is low-priced and well worth the money. How to get all this combined into a small ad – that is the art of adcopy writing.
 
Here are some examples of some PPC ads (taken from Google.com):
 
Search Term: Cheap Web Hosting
 
One of the first results of ads returned on a Google search is:
 
Cheap Web Hosting
Check out Gate.com We Have Windows
Hosting-Test Drive Us For Free!
www.gate.com
 
The Good:
This ad has the actual search term as the subject or headline.
 
The Bad:
The remaining part of the ad does not really show if the customer can expect cheap web hosting. All they would see if an offer for a free test account, but is there maybe a big surprise in form of expensive prices waiting?
 
 
Search Term: Cheap Web Hosting
 
The following ad was in 3rd position on Google.com
 
Cheap Web Hosting $5.95
Free Domain, Free Email, Free Setup
2500MB, Money Back Guarantee!
www.Ez-Web-Hosting.com

The Good:
The ad has the actual search term in the adcopy. It also lists a low price – leaving room for the assumption that this is the low price for web hosting. The ad also lists some features a customer probably can expect as part of the web hosting.
 
The Bad:
There is not really much in regards to the actual adcopy that would be considered bad. The ad is pretty clear. The only bad thing would be the actual bidding on the keyword "cheap web hosting" as it is very generic and broad. It does not separate between Linux or Windows Web hosting or what features a customer might need. But that is stuff for a different article.
 
These two examples only scratch the surface of what works and what does not work in PPC marketing. Expect a long learning curve when it comes to being successful with PPC marketing. There is a lot of testing and money losing involved. The nice thing with PPC advertising is the dynamic and the ability to see results almost immediately. It also allows you to compare different campaigns and keywords and to adjust accordingly.

Lots of literature has been written about how make Google Adwords and other program like MSN Adcenter work for you. Adwords Miracle and Beating Adwords are two of these guides that are available online. None of these books offers the key to online succes. BUT – they offer a solid foundation if you are new to PPC advertising. You could find all the information for free on the Internet by reading forums and websites. eBooks like the two mentioned can save you some time. You will find many more books about these topics. How much your time is worth and if you are in need of a shortcut – that is a decision you have to make.

Niche Marketing In Web Hosting

There are literally thousands of web hosting companies on the internet today. The competition is brutal and to become successful a web host has to overcome this competition by finding a way to distinguish his business from all the other web hosting companies. Pretty much every web hosting business offers the same features and hosting packages look like cloned across the board. A newcomer web host host should decide on specific market segment to carve out his niche. Catering a specific niche is called niche marketing and is an important key to gain customers without competing with the big guys.

Why finding a niche to focus on is important?

As a new web hosting business you usually do not have the advertising power or cash to cater the broader market. Niche marketing is often cheaper and more effective when it comes to how much money needs to be spend to acquire a new customer. Some of the bigger web hosting companies spend up to $200 dollars per client in acquisition cost, because they have enough cash and patience to recoup that expense over time. Unless things go really bad, customers often stay for years if they are happy with the service they receive. Patience and an extended investment can pay off for a web host. As a small web host you probably do not have the cash reserve and the cash flow to make this type of investment possible. However – smaller web hosts often have a certain advantage over larger hosting companies. Personalized service to a niche market. You can easily provide better service and attract customers by focusing on a niche market. By associating your services with your personalized service are able to get clients where a larger company cannot. Offering phone support where the customer always talks to the same person, being extremely knowledgeable about the niche market, visiting clients at their business location or home and helping them to get going – that is an advantage a large business will never have.

Niche Market can be Easier to Support.

Niche clients can be easier to support as you might be able to rule certain support situations right from the start. Depending on the niche market your servers might never be that busy. Depending on your niche market you might mainly see static websites on your server. Depending on your niche market …. you name it and it might help your business. Offer specialized tools for the niche market you are catering and life can be good.

Reputation

Because you are focusing on a small market segment or certain type of users your reputation plays a big role in how successful you will be. If you do not show knowledge and understanding of the niche market you are serving, customers will not take you seriously when considering who to trust their business.

Stand Out!

Even niche markets might have several players already that you are competing with. Competition might be less compared to the broader market segments. Make sure your business stands out from the others. Make your website look different. If you are hosting OSCommerce applications, show them that you know your stuff about OSCommerce and that this knowledge will help you to serve the clients even better. Become involved in one (or more) of the OSCommerce related discussion boards on the Internet. Show your skills and let the customers see what you are capable of. It’s your niche.

When SEO takes the value out of a website

 

Every webmaster would like to see his/her website to be the number 1 search result returned in search engines. A number 1 spot in Google pretty much guarantees loads of traffic to a website which can then materialize in high revenue for the website owner.

To reach that number 1 spot search engine optimization (SEO) is the tool webmasters have to use in almost every case. Several books have been written covering search engine optimization. Hundreds of websites cover the topic and give loads of advice. There is so much information about this topic – it’s almost impossible to digest. Webmasters have all they need available at their hands at any time and also share the knowledge.

Google (as an example) changes the rules all the time and missing out on these things can mean that a website drops down to the bottom of the search results delivered on any given search. The hunt for the best search engine optimization results is on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

As with anything there will always be people who go a step too far.

Search Engine Optimization is no exception. You’ve got the Black Hats who do use every legal or illegal trick to increase their website’s search engine ranking and you have the so called White Hats who play by the rules and only use legitimate SEO tools and tricks. And then you have people who just over-do it. They build their websites completely optimized for the search engines but seem to forget about the user in the end. These websites are stuffed with keywords and phrases all over.

Navigation and presentation of content is optimized for the search engine but they seem to completely forget about the human factor. Yes, driving traffic to the website from search engines is great. But what if the site is difficult to navigate for the visitor because it is optimized for a search engine and not for usability? A website not meeting the needs of humans is set up to fail.

Having the number 1 spot in a search engine will not materialize in higher profits and revenue if the site does not meet basics requirements for humans to a) navigate the site properly and b) to be able discover what they are looking for in an easy way. Articles stuffed with the same keywords over and over again are hard to read and the information the user is looking for is difficult to extract. Links to sub-pages covered under keywords over and over again will make it difficult to even get to the information the user is looking for. The user experience will be disappointing and will lead to the user moving on to other sites that are able to deliver information in an appropriate way. There are other webmasters who are able to achieve high search engine rankings and still offer satisfying experiences for users on their websites?

So, if you are a webmaster – will you optimize your websites for search engines or for the user?

Importance of Keywords in Links to Your Website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very complex process. It is a long-term process that will usually never produce results that you can see in days or weeks. By now you probably heard about the importance of getting other websites to link to yours so that you can get a higher ranking in search engines. You listed your websites in some directories and also received a few other links to your website.

But stop right here. How is being linked to your homepage? Are people just using a plain http://www.yourdomain.com for the link? Or is the link embedded in your business name? If so you are eventually loosing valuable points in your search engine ranking. To receive full ‘points’ from a search engine for a link to your website, the link should be embedded in specific keywords.

Keywords? What keywords? How are people searching for things related to your website? Almost nobody searches for your business by business name when doing a search in search engines. People are search for something specific and the search engine will eventually show a link to your page if it relates the search term to your website. If it does not associate a keyword with your website it will not display the link to your site and you are missing out on visitors.

You need to create a keyword strategy to optimize your website AND the associates links for search engines. Keywords need to be found on your website. Make sure there is enough text with the important keywords. Talk to friends, family, and customers to find out what search terms they would use and how that relates to your business and the website. This can be helpful information in your research.

Now when you go to exchange links with other websites use those keywords. Let the other sites link you with these keywords and the link embedded into those keywords. This will be an important piece to your search engine success. A good example of how this is done can be seen in the Author Resource information of this article.

The Power of Search Engine Friendly URLs

I recently invested quite some time into generating search engine friendly URLs for several of my websites to increase my ranking and to have more pages indexed. I can highly recommend to look into this if your own website does not have se-friendly URLs. Especially Google (the most important search engine nowadays) can be very picky in regards to URLs that are not se-friendly.

Example (the 2 URLs below bring you to exactly the same page):

http://www.beefkabobs.com/ShowCategory.php?CategoryID=13 -> this URL is not se-friendly and search engines will eventually ignore any page behind it or rank it much lower in search results. Visitors will have difficulties to remember this URL. These kind of URLs often come from dynamic database driven websites. Each page is dynamically created when requested. Look at the forums URL this moment, too. It is dynamically created and not very friendly to search engines or the visitor. You get the idea.

http://www.beefkabobs.com/kabob-recipe-category-13.html -> this URL is se-friendly and search engines will spider the page behind it easily. It is keyword enriched to increase search engine ranking. Overall – this URL is easy to be spidered and easy to remember by a visitor.

For one of my own sites I was able to increase the number of pages indexed from 36 to over 150 pages – just by making the URLs search engine friendly. The additional pages were ignored by the search engines because they could not read the URLs properly. The domain used in my example went from 20 pages to 80 within 2 weeks and should go to over 120 pages indexed (by Google) with the next Google update.

How do you make your URLs search engine friendly?

Your web host/web server needs to support the Apache Web Server module "mod_rewrite". This module allows to rewrite URLs a certain way. By using a ".htaccess" file you can give the web server the necessary commands to work with se-friendly URLs.

How does this now really works?

In general – you are faking the nice clean looking URLs and fool search engines and visitors to believe that the URLs of your website are se-friendly.

SE-friendly URLs work in 2 steps. 1) Your site needs to display the se-friendly URLs. 2) mod_rewrite and htaccess ‘translate’ the se-friendly URL and redirect the traffic to the ugly looking se-unfriendly URL in the background (invisible to anyone). You will need to setup the htaccess file with the command how you would like the URL to look like and what does it translate to (a certain ugly looking dynamic URL).

The code that generates the URLs dynamically needs to be adjusted to match the rules from your .htaccess file. You upload the code changes and the htaccess and off you go.

Can every website be modified?

Most websites with dynamic URLs can be modified if the server environment meets the requirements. Each website needs to be looked at separately to get the best results.

The learning curve on creating se-friendly URLs can be quite challenging. Spend the time and resources on creating se-friendly URLs. The results can be overwhelming.

About The Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful small business owner (Net Services USA LLC) and international author.

The website used as an example can be found at http://www.beefkabobs.com. A second example can be found at http://www.vitaminsinstock.com

This article can be reprinted as long as the author information and resource box stays intact. All URLs/Links must be clickable and active.

301 Redirects and Search Engine Optimization

There are multiple reasons to redirect URLs. For one, your web pages may have moved but their old URLs may still live in users’ bookmarks or in search engine indexes. Without implementing some sort or redirection, that traffic would be lost to a 404 Error Page.

On occasions, you may also want to register several extensions for your domain name: ‘mydomain.com‘, ‘mydomain.net‘ and ‘mydomain.org‘, and have ‘mydomain.net‘ and ‘mydomain.org‘ automatically redirect visitors to your site, hosted under ‘mydomain.com‘.

Furthermore, if your company sells several products, you may want to give each of them an individual domain name, and have it point to a specific subdirectory of your main site. For example, if you own a site called ‘businessvideos.com‘ that sells a product called ‘Marketing Made Easy’, you may want to set up a domain such as ‘marketingmadeeasy.com‘, and redirect it to subdirectory: www.businessvideos.com/marketingmadeeasy/.

There are several ways to redirect domains, however, most of them will get you in trouble with the search engines. The search engine friendly way to redirect URLs is to use what is know as a 301 redirect (you can see how Google and Yahoo! specifically endorse this kind of redirection). Here is my take about the different redirection methods and their implications on search engine optimization:

Meta-Refresh Javascript Redirect

You can redirect visitors by placing a snippet of javascript code within the HTML code of the page you want to redirect. With this method, you can specify the number of seconds before the visitor is automatically redirected to the new page. Search engines don’t like this method, because of the potential for abuse: you could write an optimized page for a non-competitive search term, and then automatically redirect your unsuspecting visitor to whatever URL you want. For example, it could be relatively easy to write a page about english literature, have it indexed and highly ranked by the search engines, and then redirect your visitor to a casino or Viagra site. If search engines allowed this, users would quickly stop trusting them. That is why search engines penalize this practice, and why you should avoid it.

Parked Domains

You could register an additional domain name, park it, and make it point to the DNS servers of your main site’s hosting account, so that when somebody types the additional domain, they will be transported to your main site. However, this approach may lead to search engines listing the same content twice, one for your main domain, and one for your additional domain. In the past, unscrupulous webmasters would use multiple domains to spam search engines and directories, making them list the same pages hundreds of times under different domains. Even if your intentions are good, we don’t recommend this approach to redirecting your additional domains, since search engines may penalize your site for duplicate content.

302 and 301 Redirects

When a request for a page or URL is made by a browser, agent or spider, the web server where the page is hosted checks a file called ‘.htaccess’. This file contains instructions on how to handle specific requests and also plays a key role in security. The ‘.htaccess’ file can be modified so that it instructs browsers, agents or spiders that the page has either temporarily moved (302 redirect) or permanently moved (301 redirect). It is usually possible to implement this redirect without messing with the ‘.htaccess’ file directly, using your web host’s control panel instead.

>From a search engine perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs. In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect.

The URL Forwarding Feature

Most domain registrars offer a feature called URL Forwarding. With this feature, you can register a new domain, such as ‘mydomain.net‘, and have it point to mydomain.com (or to any other URL). The problem, however, is that registrars usually do this by implementing a 302 redirect (page moved temporarily). While Google handles 302 redirects very well, passing link popularity from the additional domain to the main one, other search engines don’t do this well, diluting link popularity by splitting it between the two domains, and negatively affecting rankings. Therefore, it is better not to use this method, and implement a 301 redirect instead.

Redirecting Old URLs

To ‘301 redirect’ an old URL to a new one, just go to your web host’s control panel, and choose the “Redirects” option. You can then set up the redirect by filling the blanks. You want to chose redirect option “Permanent” to implement a 301 redirect.

Redirecting additional domains

To 301 redirect an additional domain (like in the case of the .net or the .org version of your domain name), you have to set it up as an add-on domain with your web host (some hosts offer this option for free, and some others charge a small monthly fee per domain). If the additional domain was not registered with your web host, you will first have to go to your domain registrar and change the DNS (domain name servers) to the DNS of your web host (you may have to wait a couple of days before this change becomes functional). Once you’ve done this, go to your web host’s control panel, choose the “Add On Domains” option, and set up your add on domain as follows:

New Domain Name: additionaldomain.com (Do not put any http:// or www)

Username/directory/subdomain: additionaldomain (Enter ‘additionaldomain’ by itself. Do not put any ‘.com’ or ‘www’)

Password: 123ABC (Enter whatever password you want).

Then, set up the redirection by filling the appropriate box with the URL of the landing page (where you want your traffic to go).

Once your additional domain is redirecting to your landing page, take this one last step to see if everything is working fine: go to a server header checking tool, type your add-on domain in the query box and hit enter. If you get a message similar to this: “Status Code HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”, then your 301 redirect is working.

You can also use 301 redirection for common mispelled versions of your domain name, or for other good domain names that you don’t want your competitors to get. 

About The Author

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), an internet marketing content site packed with useful articles and resources, and SEO Tutorial (http://www.seotutorial.info) where you can learn the basics of search engine optimization in four easy steps.

Successful Small Businesses Use PR

It’s obvious when a small business has accepted the fact that its most important outside audiences need lots of care and feeding. They do something about it.

There’s a sense of urgency and a recognition that those “key target publics” have behaviors that really impact the business, and that they had BETTER do something about it!

What about you? Are you ready to follow the winners and get public relations working for your small business?

The payoff can be significant – key audience behaviors that directly support your business objectives and make the difference between failure and success.

But, as always, there’s some work connected to reaching that pot of gold, but it’s really worth the effort.

If you’re willing, begin by listing those most important outsiders in a priority ranking. Probably, customers and prospects will take #1 and #2 positions. But others rate a spot on that list depending on how crucial they are to the success of your business. In fact, an audience only makes the list if, left unattended, its perceptions and behaviors actually can hurt your business.

You’re at a disadvantage when you don’t know what those important external audiences think of you and your small business. And the only affordable way to find out is for you and your colleagues to talk to members of that key audience by interacting with them. Ask questions about what they think of you, your business and its products or services. Especially watch for any negativity, misconceptions, inaccuracies, wrong-headed beliefs, or rumors. And monitor local print and broadcast media, especially local talk shows and newspaper pages, for similarly negative signs.

The responses you gather help you set your public relations goal. For instance, correct that wrong-headed belief; fix that inaccuracy; or straighten-out that misconception. The goal, by the way, will also become your behavior modification marker against which progress can be tracked.

But how do you get there? You select a strategy from the three available to you: create perception/opinion where none may exist, change existing perception/opinion, or reinforce it. The public relations goal you just set will lead you directly to the right choice of strategies.

The message you send to your target audience is crucial, and writing it can be hard work because it must alter the negativity you found when you interviewed audience members.

Above all, it must be persuasive while clearly presenting the facts. It must be credible, believable and timely as it explains truthfully what is at issue at that moment. In short, your message must be compelling.

Getting that finished message to the right eyes and ears is your next challenge. And that means selecting the right communi- cations tactics, and you have dozens of them available to you. Speeches, press releases, emails, meetings, radio and newspaper interviews, action alerts, brochures, newsletters and so many others.

Before long, you’ll be looking for indications that your new public relations program is making progress.

After the communications effort has had six or eight weeks to take effect, it seems obvious that the best way to determine that is to go back to members of your key target audience, interact with them again and ask more questions. The difference this time, however, is that you are looking for signs that your carefully prepared message is really altering the negativity you discovered during your interviews with those target audience members. And once again, keep an eye and ear on local media for similar signs that your message has been heard.

If you’re anxious to speed up the process, boost the number and variety of the communications tactics you’re using, as well as their frequencies.

What you want is for your second monitoring go-around to show marked perception change which tells you clearly that the behaviors you really want are on the way.

In the PR business, that creates success.

Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net.

Robert A. Kelly © 2003.

About The Author

Bob Kelly counsels, writes and speaks about the fundamental premise of public relations. He has been DPR, Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-PR, Texaco Inc.; VP-PR, Olin Corp.; VP-PR, Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.; director of communications, U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press secretary, The White House. mailto:bobkelly@TNI.net. Visit: http://www.prcommentary.com.