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Affiliate Marketing Tips : Use Press Releases To Gain Media Coverage

By Andrew Holtom in Featured

Press releases are a powerful way to promote your affiliate marketing products. Let’s look at how you can use them to best effect.

A press release is really a newsworthy article or story that can be submitted to a variety of media outlets – including online sites, newspapers, magazines, radio. By providing journalists with a story you are satisfying their constant need for new stories to cover, whilst you can gain free promotion of your services/products or website.

By preparing a press release in a particular manner, you will gain more chance of it being featured by a media establishment. So how do you go about creating a press release?

Pick your angle - the type of news the media really enjoys is news that is amusing, controversial or remarkable. If possible try to find an angle that will appeal due to it’s quirkiness or because it is a human interest story. Link to famous people if possible, but do not write anything that you cannot back up. Do not base your story on promotion of your affiliate marketing products, it really best to pick another angle to feature – but to allude to your products in the quote.

Length - your release will need to be between 300 and 800 words long for it to be most useful.

Quality - grammar and spelling will need to be correct and standard. Use the active voice as much as possible as this will read better and will also be more current than using past tense.

Headline - the headline is what will sell the story to the media and then to readers. You’ll need to attract attention and to round up what the story is about all in one. Put yourself in the media’s shoes and consider what they might find interesting.

First paragraph - this is your summary paragraph and should convey the whole story as a summary or in a nutshell. It should be strong enough to stand without the rest of the press release.

Further paragraphs - this is where you will explain more about who, why and when. Write about the benefits of the product that you want to promote. However, remember that this has to be done in a manner that does not appear to be a direct sales approach – it really is about finding an angle that the media will find of interest.

Quote - add a quote from the people involved in the story. In my experience, this is where you will add any sales type information – about what an individual thinks of a particular product.

Where to submit your press release - there are plenty of places online to submit your press release to. The best approach is to build a list of the sites available, then weed out those that aren’t going to work for you based on cost, topics covered and then over time you will learn about which sites work best as you watch the results. Try to select the sites that will provide you with information on how many hits/reads there have been of each press release. To find press release sites that might suit you, check out competition in affiliate marketing and study which sites they use.

HARO - Subscribe and follow the HARO (Help A Reporter Online) requests that are sent out twice daily. These requests are from journalists looking for people to take a story or a quote from. Quite often you can find international opportunities for promotion via well known media that beats paying for advertising and will reach your target audience.

Being successful in affiliate marketing means that you should take advantage of any opportunities that you find along the way. Press releases can be used to suit promotion of products and membership sites, it’s just honing your skills so that you produce usable and remarkable articles.

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Andrew Holtom is an experienced and accomplished online marketer. Andrew enjoys introducing newcomers on how to successfully make money online. If you are looking for an easy way to get started with affiliate marketing, internet marketing and an online business, then visit http://www.webmarketinformation.com and grab a free 94 page guide for immediate download.

Small Business Social Media – Where Do You Start?

By Christopher Bayes in Featured

Small business social media starts with making the decision to be part of the conversation. Not as easy or cut and dried a decision as one may think. What are the factors involved in this process? The pros and cons?

Pros:

* Potential to raise website page rank

* Potential to find new customers or clients

* Potential to make new business connections

* Potential to reach current customer base with new products or services

* Potential to get customers talking about me or my company

* Potential to find out what you are not offering to your customers that they want

* Potential to have your own PR department consisting of your customers

* Potential to get great reviews from happy customers

7 Unbreakable SEO Rules – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Nick Stamoulis in Featured

As a practice and industry, SEO is constantly evolving. Sites are seemingly at the mercy of the search engines, who usually can’t be bothered to give the site owners a heads up before they update their algorithm. Every few weeks it seems like someone is heralding the death of SEO, but evolution does not equal demise. Over time, tactics and methods change to work inside the guidelines of the search engines and to meet the needs of the online user, but the core fundamentals of SEO have remained the same.

Here are 7 basic rules of SEO:

1. Understand User-Intent

Keyword research is the cornerstone of any SEO campaign. Understanding user-intent when conducting and selecting your keywords is critical to getting your SEO off on the right foot and helping the right audience find your site. For instance, are “gym shoes,” “sneakers” and “tennis shoes,” the same thing? For some consumers those three words are completely interchangeable. But if a tennis player were looking for a new pair of shoes, they would search using “tennis shoes” and expect a very specific result. It doesn’t matter how you would search for your brand/products, it only matters how your target audience searches. Targeting the wrong keywords because you failed to understand the intent of the search means you’ll miss out on potential traffic and customers.

3 SEO Tidbits Every Ecommerce Site Should Know – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Chris Warren in Featured

Ecommerce webmasters face unique problems when trying to optimize their sites for SEO. The standard logic behind listing products on the web is often in conflict with current SEO best practices. To make it even worse, it is generally much harder to change the structure of a site that has hundreds or thousands of categories and product pages even when it is clear a change could provide a great benefit. Due to this unique nature, ecommerce sites have different priorities as compared to other SEO campaigns.

Pay It Forward

A common situation in ecommerce is that a site owner learns that their site is in violation of some SEO logic and wants to solve the problem immediately. A few examples would be poorly written or generated title tags, long URLs and messy site structure.

Most ecommerce owners will likely have run into at least one of these issues and figuring out how to proceed from that point on is critical. If your URLs are too long you cannot simply shorten them, 301 redirect the old pages and hope for the best. That might result in a significant loss in link juice that outweighs the benefit you receive from shorter URLs. It is important to realize that you cannot transform your site overnight so create a plan of attack with an understanding that you do not want to undercut your current traffic.

The best plan in this example would be to have shorter URLs on newly created pages and test out redirecting a small sample of pages to see if there is a potential benefit. It is critical to remember that your competitors are in the same boat as they do not have perfectly optimized sites either. Think about how to use your discovery to create an advantage in the future. If you are already ranking and getting organic traffic this means you are in contention so executing a forward moving plan can result in sizable advantages.

Get It Indexed

It might seem obvious that indexing your content is important, but for large ecommerce sites this should be one of your primary concerns. Ecommerce sites often struggle to get links pointing at their product pages, so ranking these pages for less competitive longtail keywords is an essential source of highly targeted traffic. Take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools account under the sitemaps section (assuming you have submitted sitemaps!), and see the ratio of URLs you have submitted to the URLs showing up in Google’s web index. I highly recommend having separate sitemaps for different sections of your site as this will reveal more information than a single sitemap if one section is underperforming. In doing so you will have a basis to compare against which will aid in identifying the causes of the indexation problems.

Another critical aspect of getting pages indexed is to understand that not every page on your website is created equal. Google typically will index by crawling the pages with the most link juice and navigate outwards via links from that page. In most cases this is going to be the homepage so the pages you choose to link from there should be your most important. A common mistake for a large ecommerce site is to link to just the main categories or to be linking to too many pages. You want to use your homepage’s link juice to highlight the best pages on your site and this often may not be your main categories.

Furthermore, the closer a page is to a well linked page on your site the better the chance it gets indexed and ranks well. This means you will want to be linking those pages from your homepage and be cognizant of how your site structure prioritizes your pages in Google’s eyes.

Site Wide Improvements

As mentioned earlier the difficulty in managing SEO for an ecommerce site is often caused by the breadth of the categories and products already on the site. However, this can actually be a strength when you are able to make a small improvement that will have a site wide effect. Increasing your site’s overall rankings by 5% could increase your traffic exponentially higher than 5% because of the mechanics of how people click on search engine results pages (higher results get the majority of clicks). Things like improving your site’s loading time or getting some extra backlinks are massive opportunities for ecommerce sites to receive an across the board boost to their rankings. As Google moves towards supporting strong brands, the benefits of this kind of improvement cannot be understated. A trusted site will often rank competitive words simply on the strength of their domain and these branding benefits will likely be even greater in the future.

While ecommerce sites do present uncommon challenges when embarking on an SEO campaign, understanding the nuances is an area where large opportunities still exist. Because SEO for ecommerce has an added degree of complexity, it is a great barrier to help you differentiate from your competition making it all the more worthwhile.

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Chris Warren is a web content specialist for www.batteriesinaflash.com an ecommerce store for batteries, chargers, solar panels and accessories. Follow him on twitter @BIAFgreen.

Article Marketing: Content is King and Syndication is his Mistress – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Ben Jackson in Featured

Article Marketing is not only a misunderstood means of promotion, it is also probably the most misunderstood means of backlinking. It seems that everyone does article marketing, but we all have a different understanding of how it works and how to approach it.

Some people do AM for traffic and some do it for backlinks. Likewise, some people try to advertise with their articles, and some simply provide content. Well, there isn’t really a wrong way to do article marketing, but there is definitely a right way. Let’s clear the air and break down article marketing into its two core components and what they mean for your site’s traffic and rankings.

Distribution and Syndication

Distribution is where you submit your articles, and syndication is where they are published after they are found in the places you distributed to. For example, you submit (distribute) an article to EzineArticles. A week later, a webmaster finds your article and publishes (syndicates) it on his/her site. These syndication backlinks are usually much more powerful than any link you will get from a directory. Also, these links can and will send targeted traffic to your site. So to review, your article is distributed to directories where you will get some traffic and weak links, and then it is syndicated on other sites that give you a lot more traffic and better links than the directories. That means these links give you more traffic NOW and more traffic LATER because they help your rankings more. Our conclusion is that you want to create content that is made specifically to be syndicated – content for webmasters.

Here’s how you do it:

First, you want to consider the length of your article. If you were a webmaster looking for content to publish on your site, how long do you think you’d want it to be? The answer is basically as long as you can find! Longer content means readers stick around and read for longer and sites with more robust content often rank better. Rather than writing two 500 word articles that get little syndication, you should write one 1,000 word article because its chances for successful, widespread syndication are much better. And to reiterate, this means there’s a better chance of getting a whole lot more traffic and much stronger links.

Next, you want to look at the way the content itself is written. Article marketing works best with content that is very informational and even instructional in nature. Do NOT write advertisements. They will not get syndicated, and they possibly won’t even be accepted on any directories in the first place. It can be tempting to write an advertisement – don’t do it. Simply write an article that you think readers would find helpful, and also, if you can manage it, entertaining as well. People go online for information and entertainment. If you can provide one, you’re good. If you can provide both, you’re golden. If you’ve got a 1,000 word, informative and entertaining article on your hands, then you’re holding a powerful piece of promotional content. It is well worth your time to write like this because the benefits can be fantastic.

One aspect that cannot be stressed enough is the priority of quality content over well-optimized content. Concern yourself with writing a great article first, then worry about optimizing it for your keyword. Believe it or not, this will actually help your SEO in the long run. Everyone always talks about getting quality links. Well, duh. Who ever said that low quality links would be better? The problem is sorting them out and
understanding exactly how these high quality links are obtained. This is how: through excellent content. If you write lousy articles, they get published exclusively on article directories which give lousy links. But, if you write great articles, they get found and syndicated on great sites. Internalize this:

Great sites only publish great content, and great sites give great backlinks.

Your answer to these high quality backlinks everyone’s been talking about is through quality content. The content itself is the most important factor for SEO, followed by anchor text in your links, followed by your keyword in the title tag and keyword density. You can’t always have it all and the choice is usually between having a slightly optimized article on a great site or a well-optimized article on a lousy site. I’ll take the former any day.

Besides the quality of the content itself, widespread syndication for your article requires one other thing, proper distribution. You want to place your article where webmasters will find it. This basically means putting it on all the top directories, such as EzineArticles. This is all you have to do. However, there are a lot of services and products such as Article Marketing Robot for mass distribution. You do not have to use any of these for successful article marketing, but they do help. To restate, the links you get in directories are weak, however, in bulk they can still garner SEO benefits and slightly better chances of syndication. Overall, a combination of targeted and mass submission is best for a complete article marketing strategy.

Article Marketing can be a complex beast to master. It is a muddled area simply because so many people use it for so many different reasons. The strategy outlined above will, in my opinion, give you the biggest gains in traffic and the greatest boost in rankings you can achieve per article.

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The most important part is the content creation itself, but for article submission, you can do it yourself or you can use an article submission service to automate your submissions for you. Check out our SEO course for more free information on SEO and related topics.

The Key Benefits Of WordPress for SEO: Your WordPress for Newbies Article

By Taylor Jordan in Featured

WordPress is one of the most robust and extremely versatile content management systems available. It might be used to make a basic blog site, or it can be used as the robust support driving your ecommerce business. What is really special about WordPress is that you are able to effortlessly design both kinds of websites without any help; even if you do not know anything on the subject of creating a web site or Html code. Still the greatest thing about WordPress is that it is amazingly Search engine optimization friendly. Here are some reasons why WordPress is one of the best content management systems for SEO?

1. Search Engine Optimization Friendly Permalinks: Permalinks are in essence links or URLs to your article. When you generate a post or article in WordPress, a URL is immediately created. WordPress lets you make URLs or permalinks that are made up of key words which search engines are attracted to. This allows for search engine crawlers to rank your site for the word of your choice.

2. SEO Compatible Article Titles: WordPress can be set up to automatically make the article titles a permalink. A keyword rich title utilized as a permalink to your internet site will make it simpler for you to achieve greater rankings in Google along with other search engines when people are searching for data or products that you are offering.

3. Allows You to Create Tags: Tags are similar to labels. Tags are found at the end of a article on any WordPress blog site and enable you to use keyword phrases to describe your post. At the end of this article you will likely see several words or tags at the bottom of the post such as “Word Press”, “WordPress for beginners”, or “WordPress for SEO”. These tags or key words will let the search engines web spiders better index your blog post which actually will assist surfers who are searching for information like “WordPress” or “WordPress for SEO” to find your website.

4. Lets You Cross Link Content: WordPress allows you to easily link associated content which helps with search engine optimization. Cross linking is where you create a link from one of your articles or blog posts to another relevant article on your website. Using this article as an illustration, I could create a link within this article that when clicked would bring you to a different WordPress
article which you might find insightful. The link would be a keyword, or keyword phrase such as “learn WordPress”. This is another WordPress tool to help with your search engine optimization.

5. You Can Ping New Articles or Posts: Each time you post or edit either a posting or a blog page your WordPress web site can alert a range of different web sites that you have updated your web site. This is known as pinging and it is another very valuable aid that you can use to help your web site with getting ranked in the search engines.

6. Effortless Install of Google Sitemaps: Google Sitemaps has two important advantages for site owners. Not only can it help site visitors see a outline of exactly what they can find on your web site, but it helps Google to further index and rank your website by letting Google know exactly which blog pages are the most important.

7. Ability to Create Categories: Categories enable you to automatically arrange your content on your website. Think of categories like folders or maybe, a directory. A visitor to your internet site can find any article that you have ever published on your website, or any product that you want to sell easily because WordPress lets you assign a category. If you have visited websites where you can easily choose a list of subjects or products based on type, that website has set up categories. As you’ve probably suspected, search engines like it when website information is well organized and this will also help with the indexing of your internet site on Google, or any of the search engines. Quick tip: Use keywords that your audience is searching for as categories to make it simpler for people to discover you. Building a website that is SEO friendly is a snap because of the tools built in to WordPress.

If you want to make it easier to be discovered for the net, WordPress is definitely a powerful search engine optimization tool that you can absolutely not do without.

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Taylor Jordan writes for Tools For Social Media, http://www.ToolsForSocialMedia.com and Social Media For Business: http://socialmediaforbusiness.tumblr.com/ Check out more search engine marketing tips.

Creative Brilliance and Logo Design – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Gayle Hawks in Featured

David Ogilvy, who’s widely considered the father of modern advertising, focused heavily on creative brilliance – the BIG IDEA (which he always wrote in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS) was of extreme importance to him. In his opinion creativity and originality were useless unless they brought results for clients with whom he did business. When presenting something in an ad, it had to be functional and relevant. “Unless your advertising is based on a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night”, he preached over and over again.

Thankfully, his emphasis on the BIG IDEA doesn’t need to translate into complexity. Simplicity, especially in the area of logo design is something we can still adhere to while following Mr. Ogilvy’s advice. So, with that in mind, I’d like to offer a few thoughts for those of you who are just starting the process of thinking through a logo design for your new company.

There are many logos that can be highlighted as examples of accomplishing the BIG IDEA while remaining simple at the same time. There are many global companies who adhere successfully to this:

- 3M
- AT&T
- Adobe Systems
- Caterpillar (CAT)
- Citi Group
- Dell
- Electronic Arts
- Verisign
- UPS
- SnapOn

All of these companies have simple, yet incredibly effective logos that identify their companies. These companies are industry leaders and well known around the world simply through their logos. Several of these companies have created incredible revenue streams just through the marketing of their logos. Many of these companies sell apparel and other merchandise that displays their logos, which in turn generates millions of dollars in additional revenue for their companies. They are simple, yet extraordinarily successful logos.

Logo designs for some recent corporations would easily fall under the same, simplistic design parameter. Some examples would include such company logos as:

- Aflac
- GoDaddy
- Apple
- Monster Worldwide
- Google
- Yum! Brands
- Yahoo!

Several of these companies are focused solely on the Internet. Google, Yahoo!, GoDaddy, and Monster Worldwide are primarily web based companies. However, their branding and logos are universally recognized symbols for them. Yum! Brands is an internationally recognized company. Not only is their logo simple and easily recognizable, but so are the restaurants it owns: Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Long John Silver’s. Aflac’s logo is simply a combination of their name and the primary character of every advertisement…the duck. However, every time someone sees it, they immediately recall the last advertisement they saw. They say “Aflac” in their best duck voice, and they recall the type of insurance services they provide. Their logo is simple, yet exceptionally valuable to their mission as a company. Their logo is the pinnacle of creative brilliance and sums up the BIG IDEA for Aflac. In fact, every one of these logos functions the same way for each of these companies. Their logo completely fulfills the mission of their BIG IDEA.

As we mentioned earlier, most of these companies generate millions of dollars in additional revenue for their companies by simply selling items that display their logos. Think about NASCAR, the NFL, and the myriad of other places where advertising reigns supreme. These companies are all present there. They have created an additional product by simply creating a recognizable symbol for their company that people want to purchase. The consumer is interested in attaching themselves to a company and identifying with them through the usage of their logo on apparel, stickers, and additional products.

The power of exercising creative brilliance and generating the BIG IDEA for your company logo is so amazingly important. This is the reason that virtually everyone recommends seeking professional help in designing a great logo for your company or new product. There are two very poignant quotes from David Ogilvy that sum up the importance of designing your logo correctly. Ogilvy said, “It takes a BIG IDEA to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product,” and “Unless your advertising contains a BIG IDEA, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

So, what’s your BIG IDEA and how are you implementing it into your logo design?

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Color Card Administrator is the parent company of PrintBusinessCards.com and several other innovative Real Estate Business Cards website, we’re eager to share with you what it is we do. Give us a call today at 858-522-9335 or email at Author@CardAdmin.com for Online Business Cards. We look forward to discussing your comments, suggestions, or hearing any ideas for future article topics you may be interested in regarding business cards design or business card management.

Google’s Panda Update: Haters, Cheaters and Consequences

By David Jackson in Featured

Whenever Google has a major algorithm change or update, like clockwork, you can count on a huge army of “haters” to come pouring out of the woodwork complaining about the injustice of it all. Google’s last major update, “Panda” was no exception. The criticizing and complaining came fast and furious and non-stop. And even though the update occurred months ago, people are still posting diatribes about it on websites across the Internet. Sheesh…get over it, already!

Or, as they say in the hood, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game!”

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about those individuals whose website took a hit, who are just venting – blowing off a little steam. I can appreciate and understand their frustration.

No, I’m talking about all those Google haters out there (you know who you are) – malcontents who gripe and complain about anything and everything Google does – for no other reason than the fact they hate Google for its sheer and utter dominance.

I’m particularly amused by those individuals who threaten they are going to get revenge and teach Google a lesson. They say they’re going to boycott Google and start optimizing their sites for Yahoo and Bing. Yep, that’ll show Google who’s boss alright.

What Is The Most Effective Way To Measure Your Blog’s Success? – A SPN Exclusive Article

By David Smith in Featured

You can measure your blog’s success using the right metrics for your blog type and purpose. For example, you can determine the success of a business blog based on the number of clients the blog earns for the business. An affiliate blog site’s success can be measured based on its affiliate sales and an industry blog’s success can be measured based on its subscriber rate.

Depending on the nature and the purpose of your blog, the metrics that you can use to successfully measure your blog’s success can be varied. Fortunately, there’s a host of sophisticated tools that’ll help you achieve the results you want, whether your blog is a personal outlet or a business blog.

What Is Your Blog’s Purpose?

Your blog’s purpose has a great deal to do with how you can measure its success. Is your blog a personal outlet, a place for you to share your thoughts, desires and opinions with like-minded folk? With this type of blog, the determining success factor is the quality of its content. You can measure the success of a personal blog by tracking readership, evaluating comment rate and tracking where your blog is being discussed and followed.

Personal blogs can become enormously popular and can even transform into businesses. Many of the present-day business-related blogs were once personal blogs. With mounting traffic, revenue options are explored and it doesn’t take long before the blog’s success has to be measured using different metrics, such as conversion, retention, income stats and so on.

A Step By Step Process To Measure Your Blog’s Success

Whether your blog is for personal or business purposes, you can use this step by step model to measure success.

1. Define Goals

If you have a business blog, define your website’s goal and your company’s goal. If your blog is personal, define your goals for engaging in it. Finally, define what you think should be your audience’s goal in consuming your content. Determine what you want your blog to achieve, as follows:

* Do you want your blog to raise awareness of a particular issue?

* Is your blog meant to showcase and sell your product and service offerings?

* Is your blog meant to generate a conversation around certain specific topics?

Based on the goals that you define, you can set up measurement metrics and measure your blog’s success accordingly.

2. Measure Reach

Comments are good and let you know that your blog is being read. However, unless you have a reasonable volume of comments over time, it’s hard to measure your blog’s reach using the comment rate alone. Rather, measure the reach of your blog via shares, page views, number of new visitors and traffic volume. Check how many people are actually viewing your overall blog, and then find out how many people are reading individual posts.

* Evaluate your blog’s overall readership over time to get a solid sense of your blog’s reach and growth.

* Evaluate the readership of individual posts to know the kinds of posts your viewers like to read and how often they like to read them.

* Track the sites where your blog posts are reposted and how often this occurs. You can track this metric using a tool such as Google Alerts.

* Staying on top of the growth of your RSS subscribers over time will let you know how popular your blog is and how your committed readership has grown over time.

* Use Google Analytics to evaluate where people are hearing about your blog. Are people following your blog on Twitter, or Facebook? Are your email subscribers forwarding your newsletters? Google Analytics can track traffic sources, giving you the metrics you need to evaluate your blog’s reach.

3. Measure Acquisition Rates

Measure acquisition rates by checking visitation rates by new visitors, pages viewed and time spent on your site. Start tracking response rates to your Ads and promos. This will let you know how your advertising dollars are being spent and in which area your dollars are being wasted.

By measuring acquisition rates, you can generate good leads to convert into paying customers. Tracking your response rate allows you to figure out cost per lead. You can arrive at customer acquisition costs by tracking how many leads turned into a sale. Use a tool such as Google Adwords or Google Analytics to define goals and track response rates. If you are using a Google Adwords campaign, you can use the same tool to measure cost per customer acquisition, or cost per lead.

4. Measure Conversion Rates

Depending on the nature of your blog, your conversion rates will give you the most effective success measurement metric. Identify and measure all the activities that lead to a goal in a conversion chute.

* How many of your readers click links to your website?

* How much time do your visitors spend on your website and which pages do they most visit? How much time does the average visitor spend on specific pages?

* How many readers click your Ad links?

* How many of your readers subscribe to your newsletters?

* How many of your readers choose to follow you on Twitter and Facebook after reading your blog?

* If you are a product affiliate blog, how many of your readers are clicking links to product reviews and product sites after reading your blog?

* How many of your leads are resulting in a sale? Based on this metric, what is your lead-to-sale conversion rate?

5. Measure Retention Rates

Using retention rates, you can estimate the present and future growth of your blog and its related business.

* How many of your first time visitors are returning visitors?

* How many existing customers or visitors do you have, versus new visitors?

* How often do new visitors view content that’s mostly meant for existing visitors and customers?

* How many existing visitors or customers post comments, make return purchases or contact customer service?

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David Smith works for conversion rate optimization company Invesp and helps businesses in
improving conversion rate of their online marketing campaigns.

Use SEM to Generate Organic Leads – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Adam Shore in Featured

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably executed Search Engine Optimization campaigns and are interested in finding new ways to boost your website’s visibility and lead generation capabilities. True, SEO is a continuous process, and results might not come right away, but if you set your sights too far into the future, you may miss out on some immediate benefits. By implementing a pay-per-click lead generation campaign (PPC), you can quickly improve your SEO efforts both now and in the long run.

Both marketing channels are essentially trying to achieve the same goal – generate leads and increase sales revenue. When properly implemented, just about everything you do for SEO can be coordinated with your pay per click campaigns, and you can drive targeted traffic to your best and most profitable content using PPC. Combining PPC and SEO enables companies to maximize return on investment, provide consistent messaging, and jump start efforts that may have been slow to take off.

For newly developed brands or companies, marketers can use PPC to buy targeted traffic while the site gains search engine authority through SEO. At the point in time when your site has established its online reputation and built links and traffic flows, you can shift your strategy so that PPC becomes more of a complementary tactic.

Design Your Pages for People – Not Search Engines

This refrain is the go-to line of advice from Google’s Matt Cutts. Certainly, it is a safe phrase designed to summarize what your should do to boost your site’s SERPs, without disclosing Google’s secrets. If you have recently adopted ppc advertising after exhausting your seo ideas, buying traffic can be cathartic. PPC advertising is expensive. When you are charged for every click, you must rack your brain to maximize
the impact of each visitor. In doing so, you will notice that you begin to focus more on the behavior of visitors, and less on how you believe search engines will treat your content. You might be surprised to find out that by designing your content for users, you are actually designing it for search engines.

You can learn a lot about SEO by understanding PPC, and vice-versa. For instance, someone who has extensive experience with PPC can learn a lot regarding improving their quality scores by learning basic SEO basic best practices.

Unified Messaging

Many companies delegate the tasks of SEO and PPC to separate individuals. If this is the case in your organization, you should understand that both marketers are not competing with each other, are on the same team, and that their message needs to be unified. Both share the responsibility of driving traffic and generating leads. Communication is essential to ensuring that both marketers are utilizing similar phrasing and language. Again, the goal is the same, only the routes used to get there are different.

Social Media & Direct Links

It’s no secret that social graph metrics now play a key role in SERPs. By purchasing traffic, you increase the exposure of your website, and increase the opportunities for users to “like” your page, tweet your content, or directly link to it.

While social media recommendations, tweets, etc., are all the rage of late, direct links are still the most powerful avenue to boost your site’s rankings. Search engines treat backlinks from other sites as a recommendation of your site’s quality.

The same is true from social media, only with an added twist. Google now includes pages recommended through social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s very own +1, in search results for users. While this is still in its infancy, it stands to reason that recommended links experience a higher CTR than regular results, and thus, generate more leads.

CTR and Direct Search

Google’s algorithm has hundreds of components. Most SEOs believe that a site’s organic click through rate and volume of branded searches for your site are among factors Google looks at when ranking your site. By increasing the overall volume of traffic to your site, you are bound to see an increase in users searching directly for you.

Double Rainbow!

…or close enough, and it does mean something. Once your site has been indexed and ranks for your coveted keywords, you will begin to reap the benefits of valuable double links. A double link occurs when your organic listing appears on the same page as your ppc advertisement. Users will often see both listings and perceive your content to be relevant. Obviously, you would prefer if the user clicks on the free link, but even a click on your paid listing will improve your ad’s quality score, and reduce costs in the long run. Still, if possible, try to
creatively incentivize the user to click on the organic search result.

Conversion Data

Increasing the total volume of traffic to your site can give you a better idea of which keywords actually convert into leads and sales. By using SEO alone, you are limited to data surrounding the keywords for which you have a high rank.

You naturally have pre-conceived and biased notions of what the best keywords for your business may be. Often webmasters and marketing coordinators are surprised when they discover leads generated by keywords they once deemed irrelevant.

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Adam Shore coordinates marketing for an offshore call center in the Philippines, while living in Massachusetts, USA. His expertise includes lead generation, data entry outsourcing, virtual assistant services, customer support, and appointment setting.

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