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SEM Is A Service, Not A Product

By Steve Baldwin in Featured

Fellow search insider columnist Aaron Goldman and I have been batting at the RFP pinata for the past few weeks, because our view is that using RFPs to select SEM agencies clearly doesn’t work very well, either on the client or the agency side.

Unfortunately, I am doubtful that our modest reforms to the procurement process will be widely embraced, because of a particularly widespread misperception about what SEM agencies do. This misperception is that SEM agencies are suppliers of a product, not a service. This distinction isn’t just an academic one: let me explain why I believe why it’s so damaging.

Late last year, Didit, the SEM firm I work for, took on a new client’s PPC account from another, generally well-regarded SEM agency. Upon looking over the state of the client’s account, our client services team was appalled by what were a number of jarring pre-existing errors, including all keywords set to broad match, plus the complete absence of negative keywords. These errors of omission supported the prior complaints from the client that “our old agency didn’t do anything.”

The reason I mention this anecdote isn’t to bash a competitor. What I’m trying to get at is the question of why SEM agencies, for whatever reasons, in certain cases either “do nothing” or are perceived as “doing nothing.” And the answer, sadly enough, is that in many cases it’s not because they don’t want to do the work, or that they don’t know how, but because they simply can’t afford to do it at all. Tasks such as testing and implementing keyword match types or enumerating negative keywords aren’t rocket science-level tasks, but they’re labor-intensive, requiring the services of trained people, paid by the hour, who are compensated with money from the agency’s markup on media spend. SEM agencies, in other words, provide a service, not a product.

And yet SEM agencies providing such services are routinely pitted against each other by RFP-wielding clients in bidding wars in which the lowest-balling vendor gets the job. This would be OK if we all sold a similar commoditized product. But it’s a prescription for disaster if one is buying a service, because as we all know from life, there are wide variances in the quality of service you’re going to get from, say, a lawyer who’s just passed the bar and one who knows every judge on the bench.

Clients should realize that they’ll never get the level of work required by beating up any service provider on price. If you pay your lawyer half his fee, he’ll do half the work: this is simply the way the world works. When buying a service, you always get exactly what you pay for.

Agencies should realize that accepting a low-ball bid to win an RFP competition isn’t good for them either, because it ensures that such a relationship isn’t going to be happy in the long run. At worst, signing a client you can’t afford to support can unfortunately result in having one’s company reputation dragged through the mud by this same client at a later date.

We’re keen in this industry on being technologically focused, and that’s fine, because technology is in our DNA and clients need to know about how this technology works. But SEM is as much a people-centric discipline as it is one driven by machines. You might be able to buy a machine at a discount, but you’ll never be able to buy the discounted service of a true professional. Unless we are somehow able to move the conversation beyond price, we’re going to keep going round and round in the same unhappy dance. My fear is that we as an industry have been doing this dance for so long that it may be too late to change the music.

Steve Baldwin is editor-in-chief at Didit, an agency for search engine marketing and auctioned media management based in New York. You can reach Steve at steve.baldwin@didit.com.

How To Use Web Analytics To Grow Your Business

By Mike Tekula in Featured

Got a website? If you own a business, chances are you do.  But don’t pat yourself on the back too quickly. By now it’s widely-accepted that if you have a business card you should probably have a website.  It doesn’t matter what your company is selling – a website, however modest, has become a standard.

The real question is: what is your website doing for your business?

Top 3 Reasons Why Article Submission Services Drive More Traffic To Your Website

By B Hopkins in Featured

In today’s world of Internet marketing, it is necessary to have multiple means of getting traffic to your website. Not just any traffic, but targeted traffic, which will more likely result in the desired action you wish your readers to make. Article Internet marketing is a great way to get this targeted traffic to your website. There are many ways to market your articles however the most effective way is to maximize the use of your time when marketing these articles. If you market your articles efficiently, you can write more and get even more traffic to your website. Article submission services are one of the most efficient ways to get traffic to your website from your articles. Article submission services are services that automatically submit your articles to article directories and publishers for you. Some of them may have their own submission requirements to be able to submit to the maximum number of directories, so it is important to follow their submission guidelines. If you don’t follow the guidelines, you are only hurting yourself.

1) Instead of spending time submitting articles to directories, you are writing articles.

Let’s say there are over 500 article directories and publishers out there that you could be submitting your articles to. If you are submitting your articles to all these directories by hand and it takes you about 10 minutes to submit an article to a directory, then that is 5000 minutes, or about 3 ½ days. You can write a lot of articles in 3 /12 days! The amount of time you may spend submitting an article to an article submission service may be 30 minutes at most. 1 submission vs. over 500; how much is your time worth?

2) Additional exposure for your article.

Many times, article submission services have their own directories and lists that only members of their submission service have their articles on. These services also spend time getting traffic to their websites as well as provide ways that you can use to market your articles easily, such as RSS feeds, article directories and other tools. You get the benefit of the traffic that is on their article directory already because that traffic can stumble across your article.

3) Data you can use to more powerfully market your products/services through your articles.

Most of the good article submission services will keep statistics about who looks at your article, who downloads your article and who uses your article feed. This is valuable information that gives you insight into what kinds of articles your target market finds interesting and what kinds of titles draw them in. You can look over time which kinds of articles are out-performing the other articles and from there you can tailor the kind of articles you would write to produce even better results in terms of getting more traffic to your website. This is free marketing information that is very powerful feedback in being able to enhance your marketing message through your articles.

These are the top 3 methods of why article submission services will help you to drive more traffic to your website. However, there are other benefits as well of article submission services that will really enhance your results of driving hungry visitors to your website. When authors take all of these into account, then they will put themselves out in front of their competition on the Internet. A well-developed strategy is the key to success.

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Want to send targeted traffic to your website but don’t know what service will help you? Get help with this article submission service review at Discover how to make money with your articles and article internet marketing

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

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WWGD: Why Google TV Won’t Match Google Search

By Dave Morgan in Featured

I just started reading Jeff Jarvis’s book “What Would Google Do?” —   and I love it. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since he told me about his idea for the book almost a year ago. As many of you know, Jeff is a former journalist and media executive and now very high profile blogger at Buzzmachine.com.

In Jeff’s book, he writes about the very successful — and fundamentally different — approach that Google takes in running its business relative to virtually every other company in the world. He details its obsessions in serving users, its “publicness,” its ability to create and exploit network effects. Then he hypothetically applies these principles to a number of other industries, from banking to retail, always asking the question, “What would Google do?” His stories and ideas are fascinating and the book is a fast read. I highly recommend it.

However, my purpose in writing today about Jeff’s book was not just to review it, but also to follow his advice and turn the question back on Google. Why? Because as I read the book, it occurred to me that Google has done some things that are not “what Google would do.”

Google has built an extraordinary business in search by focusing on the user and giving searchers more and better information faster than any other company. Its effort to organize the Web’s information certainly created “the world’s greatest Yellow Pages.” Then, the company combined this search directory with an enormously powerful and profitable advertising business, AdWords, which delivers commercial messages that are very relevant to the search results. Finally, its strategists extended the scale of the AdWords business with the creation of AdSense, where tailored commercial messages are distributed across millions of other Web sites. The combination of Google Search, AdWords and AdSense has given the company a media franchise of a size, growth trajectory and profitability such that the world has never seen before.

I think that the order in which Google created these businesses is important. AdWords worked because of the power of Google Search. AdSense worked because of the existing power of AdWords. These products would not have worked nearly as successfully, if at all, if they had been launched in reverse order.

Why then, when Google launched Google TV and Google Print, did it focus first on the advertising sides of those businesses? Essentially, these products aggregated commercial inventory from traditional media companies and offered them for sale through the same kinds of self-service interfaces used for AdWords and AdSense. Both Google Print and Google TV seem to have been the company’s attempts to horizontally extend its online ad franchise into traditional media, but neither product had the advantage of leveraging a massive user base viewing a “Googlized” directory of print or television content. Neither of them really focused on the user, nor did they follow users.

To me, Google Print and Google TV seem like the kinds of new business extensions that more traditional corporations would implement — on the counsel of expensive, brand-name management consultants, of course — rather than follow the model that Google did in building its core franchise. Maybe this is why Google Print wasn’t successful and was recently shut down. I don’t know how Google TV is faring, but my bet is that it will never be anything like the franchise the company has in search.

Why? Because they didn’t do it like Google would. What do you think?

Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA and Real Media, is Chairman of — and a partner in — The Tennis Company, which owns TENNIS.com, and TENNIS and SMASH Magazines.

9 things you MUST know before you start any conversion rate optimization

By Khalid Saleh in Featured

During a time when every visitor matters, every click is a potential loss or gain, the tide has shifted: everyone seems to be pondering ways to increase their conversion rates. The average e-commerce store converts less than 2% of its traffic to customers. Yet, some e-commerce sites report a double digit conversion rates.
So, if you are thinking about optimizing your site, here are few things to keep in mind:

How to Troubleshoot Dropped Search Engine Rankings

By Ross Dunn in Featured

Are you baffled about a recent drop in your search engine rankings? Do you know where to start and get a handle on what the problem might be and how to remedy it? One option to consider is using search engine forums as a resource. They are full of questions from people who have experienced similar situations and are great resources for an answer or two. But let’s say you really want to get to the bottom of the problem and you want to do it yourself. The following are some of the beginning steps StepForth takes when evaluating dropped rankings.

Bloggers Checklist

By Jennifer Horowitz in Featured

Below are some of the crucial items you should have on your Blog. Take a look at this list and your Blog and see how you measure up. I can tell you that I did it myself and I had to create an action plan to fix my own Blog.

You see, just because I know what needs to be done doesn’t mean I always have time to implement it myself.

It is like the shoe cobbler’s children going to school with their shoes falling apart. I am so busy helping clients, I don’t have time to work on my own things.

The same may be true for you. You are so busy but you know you want to, actually you need to, Blog. So you start it and don’t necessarily have everything in place.

That’s OK. The key is to find out where you are lacking and create an action plan so you can take steps towards getting everything in place,

So, here is your checklist. Do you have:

A strategy in place? Do you know why are you Blogging? What are you hoping to accomplish? Do you know how often you have to Blog, what types of posts you need in order to accomplish your objective?

A posting schedule? Ideally you should have at least 2 new posts a week, and up to 5. Less than 2 is too little, and over 5 is often too much (unless you are a great writer and have lots of news and information to share, so you aren’t just writing fluff).

A comment policy? Do you moderate? If so, how long does it take to approve comments.

An ‘About Us’ section? Since Blogging is about connecting, sharing information and creating dialog to form relationships, you need to be sure to tell people who you are and what you are all about. Including contact information is a good idea

A Blogroll? Be sure to include NON company links. Point your readers to sites/blogs that you think THEY would be interested in reading. Yes, you can add your website, but please mix in some non-company sites as well to show people you are truly interested in being a resource for them.

RSS subscriber buttons? Give your readers a way to subscribe to your Blog, via a feed reader. Feedburner is a quick and easy way to get this done.

Photos, graphs or charts to create visual interest.

Videos to engage users.

Personality and opinions so people feel they are really hearing your voice and not just some regurgitated industry news.

Links back to relevant pages on your website.

A custom header graphic that doesn’t take up too much space but shows that your Blog is uniquely yours and not just some out of the box Blog platform that has no customization. Some people choose to have their header match the look and feel of their main site.

So go check out your Blog right now and see how you measure up.

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Jennifer Horowitz is the Director of Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. Since 1998 Jennifer’s expertise in marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has helped clients increase revenue. Jennifer has written a downloadable book on SEO and has been published in many SEO and marketing publications. Check out “Blogging For Dollars” for more Blogging tips and advice. http://www.searchenginewebpromotion.com/home/a/

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

Permalink: http://www.submityourarticle.com/a.php?a=50417

Article Marketing: 5 Ways To Tell What Topics Are HOT With Your Readers

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Are the articles you’re writing striking nerves with your potential customers? If they’re not, you’re losing out on a valuable opportunity to establish yourself as an expert adviser to the folks who might be interested in your services. Being an expert on a topic doesn’t necessarily mean that your articles will be pertinent to your readers. Sometimes as “the expert” we lose sight of the more basic or practical concepts that our readers are interested in.

To a potential customer, you show your expertise by providing them with information that they want to know, information that will help them succeed.

But how are you supposed to know what specific topics are setting your readers’ brains on fire?

It’s hard to be a mind reader, but thankfully we do have ways of getting insight into the minds of our readers.

What types of topics are hot with your customers? You’re about to find out…

1) What questions are customers asking you most frequently?

When we’re trying to think of articles topics, sometimes we completely overlook the obvious. Because we’re experts in our fields sometimes our brains immediately think that the most advanced ideas will be the most perplexing to our customers, but sometimes it’s a beginner idea that stumps folks at the starting gate.

Remember that your readers may be beginners, and they may not even know the very basics of your topic.

2) Which posts get the most comments on your blog (if you have one)?

With our articles we usually don’t get the chance to see first hand feedback from our readers, but that’s not the case with a blog. If you have a blog, have you written any posts that generated an avalanche of comments from readers?

If so, that’s a clear indicator of a hot topic that deserves further elaboration in an article (or several articles).

If you don’t have a blog, this tip still applies to you. Just find a popular blog in your niche and watch to see which posts generate the most comments.

3) Pay attention to mainstream media.

When we’re marketing online we can get “Web 2.0 tunnel vision” and completely forget that there is a whole world out there offering clues to the interests of your target market.

Most of us have niches that in some way blend over into the offline world, so be sure to keep an eye open to print magazines in your niche, newspaper stories about your area of business, and even television shows that frequently talk about your niche.

If you have a very specific area of business that is rather obscure, you may try going a little broader as you look in mainstream media. For example, sometimes when I’m looking for topics in mainstream media to inspire my articles, I’ll look at magazines about writing or marketing. Both of those topics are mainstream, and both cover ideas that my target market would find valuable.

4) Check out Digg.com to see what topics are ranking the highest in your niche.

Digg is one of the biggest social bookmarking sites where readers can vote on online content. To see if there is any content that addresses your specific niche on Digg, just use the search box on the front page.

5) Look at the page views and publishing count for your previous articles.

Most article directories will provide stats of how many folks have read/viewed your article on their site and how many publishers have looked at your “publish page” for your article.

Do you have any articles that have unusually high numbers?

If so, that’s a sign that your article is popular (or at least more sticky than your other articles).

You did something right with that article–why not try further exploring that same article topic in another article or maybe write other articles in a similar topic vein? Seeing your most popular articles gives you an insight into what ideas your target market finds most interesting.

By using one or more of these 5 “topic hotness barometers”, you can gain valuable insight into the mind of your target market. Which one will you start with?

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After you’ve written your article, you’ll want to invest in a high quality article submission service so that your article can get maximum exposure with minimal effort. SubmitYOURArticle.com distributes your article submission to hundreds of targeted publishers with the click of a button. For more information go to=>
http://www.SubmitYOURArticle.com

MySpace Founders Comment On Social Media Arms Race

By Catharine P. Taylor in Featured

Was settling in to relax a bit on the couch last night, after a long day of blog posts, tweets and friending, when, in my nightly channel surf, I came across Charlie Rose interviewing this guy who screamed Silicon Valley: boyish good looks, a J. Crew-style sweatshirt, and graying hair that hadn’t been combed since he got out of bed or the shower.

Turned out it was Chris DeWolfe of MySpace, who, with his even more boyish co-founder, Tom Anderson, was being interviewed by Rose. A few statements by DeWolfe and Anderson stood out:

• They view their competitors, at least in terms of ad revenue, as being Yahoo and MSN, not Facebook.
• They view Facebook as being a more utilitarian communications tool, and MySpace as “more about culture and creativity and expression,” per Anderson.
• They pooh-pooh suggestions by people such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch that Facebook will surpass MySpace in unique users by January of next year. (Note: Though it wasn’t specified in the interview, Arrington was talking about Facebook surpassing MySpace in the U.S.)

Interesting observations, these, as it has become popular, at least in the social-networking circles in which many of you travel, to declare MySpace over and Facebook the victor. (Yeah, I’m guilty of it, too.) We do this even though Facebook hasn’t reached MySpace’s critical mass in terms of users or revenue.

Here are my thoughts about what DeWolfe and Anderson said:

• That the portal’s true competitors are Yahoo and MSN: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or five minutes on MySpace or Facebook, to figure out that if Facebook is the Upper East Side, MySpace is Times Square. Ads are everywhere. What’s interesting about this view of their competitive set is what DeWolfe and Anderson didn’t say. While much of the social media world is concerned about embedding marketing into social media in ways that make marketing a welcome part of the social stream, that isn’t as much of a concern for these guys. The big concern, said Anderson, is getting “the advertising world to understand that … what we have is not that different from what Yahoo has, which is a big audience of people.” Are they wrong? Or are the rest of us so hung up on user experience that making money in social networking has become viewed as a bad thing?
• Facebook as more of a communications tool: When I look at my Facebook usage — which may, or may not, be typical — it’s true that it is primarily concerned with various forms of communication: posting links, tossing up status updates and emailing within Facebook. MySpace does host massive amounts of audio and video — I could throw that “Times Square” analogy back in here — but I’m not sure I agree with Anderson’s contention that MySpace is “more focused on the whole world and all the things that people are interested in” rather than just being a people-to-people communications device. If you want to find a way to connect with your passions, Facebook is also a great place to do it.
• On Facebook surpassing MySpace by January 2010: “No. We’re focused on obviously growing our user base, which we are,” said DeWolfe. “Year-over-year our unique users are way up, our engagement is up 40%, number of minutes spent on the site is 50% more than our nearest competitor. ” (In reply to a question by Rose, DeWolfe added that MySpace users spend an average of 400 minutes per month on the site.) He didn’t cite his sources, but one reason those stats may sound odd is that many of us saw a post Mashable did in December featuring U.S.-only numbers from Nielsen Online. It’s very likely DeWolfe was quoting global numbers. Meanwhile, the Mashable numbers showed that, as of November, average time spent on MySpace per month declined in the last year by 23%, to 1 hour and 52 minutes. It also showed Facebook’s domestic uniques going up 116%, to 47 million, while MySpace’s went up 3%, to 59 million. ComScore’s number paint a very different picture for MySpace, showing, as of December, that uniques are up 10% year-over-year and total minutes spent on the site are up 42%. There’s much more data drilling to be done here to figure out what is really going on.

As I was writing this column, the full interview was posted here at charlierose.com. I’d suggest you take 32 minutes and stream it, then come back and comment here, of course. In the social networks arms race, it’s fuel for thought.

Catharine P. Taylor has been covering digital media and advertising for almost 15 years. She currently writes daily about advertising on her blog, Adverganza.com. You can reach her via email at cathyptaylor@gmail.com, follow her on Twitter at cpealet, or friend her on Facebook at Catharine P. Taylor.

SEO and the Cycles of Optimization

By Jeffrey Smith in Featured

With SEO, being faster is not always better. When you are targeting competitive keywords, slow and steady wins the race. Just as what goes up must come down, understanding the dips, peaks and valleys of search engine algorithms and how they impact the search engine result pages is a work in progress.

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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