Article Categories

• Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• Article Marketing
• Blogs & Podcasts
• Branding
• Business
• Cloud Technology
• Ecommerce
• Email Marketing
• Facebook
• Google
• Keywords
• LinkedIn
• Linking Strategies
• List Building
• Local Search
• Marketing
• Miscellaneous
• Mobile Applications
• Page Rank
• Pay Per Click
• RSS
• Sales Copy
• SE Optimization
• SE Positioning
• SE Submission
• SE Tactics
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Security
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Networking
• SPAM
• SPN Featured Articles
• Technology
• Video Marketing
• Virtual Office/Telecommuting
• Web 2.0
• Web Design
• Web Development
• Webmasters
• Website Promotion
• Website Traffic
• WordPress
• Writing

SiteProNews Blogs

• Editor's Corner
• Darren Dunner
• Jerry Bader
• John Sylvester
• Kalena Jordan
• Mel Strocen
• Titus Hoskins

When Paid Search May Be Losing You Money and You Don’t Know It

By Tom Wilson in Featured

Using a PPC strategy was a good idea. From your perspective, it’s worked and it’s making you money. The figures tell the story. The click through rate is above average. The keywords and ads are working well. And you’re getting a satisfactory conversion rate and ROI.

But simply taking your results at face value can give you a false picture. Because you can be making a big mistake when looking at these.

The criterion of success for PPC search is whether it can meet your goals profitably through conversions. For instance, you could be trying to get subscribers for your newsletter. Or trying to generate leads. Or online selling (e-commerce). No matter. In all cases, these goals are about converting visitors into prospects or customers.

So, the decision to use a PPC strategy is about the value of each conversion to you. And the amount you have to spend in advertising to get it.

THE CONVERSION RATES TO EXPECT

Although Google does this for you, here is how to work out the average cost per conversion. Divide your total costs per click (CPC) by the number of conversions. Let’s say you spend $1200 on paid search clicks and you get 20 conversions.

That makes your average conversion cost $60. To put it in practical terms, $60 has been the cost of every sign-up, lead or online sale.

Of course, it depends on the conversion rates can you expect from your keywords and ads. Unfortunately, there is no precise formula. And rates vary across industries. It also depends on the quality and nature of the offer you’re making. But here are some general guidelines. Especially if you are giving something away, sign-up conversions can be very good. I’ve hit rates of 30% and more, but up to 10% is more realistic. Lead generation is lower, 2-4%. E-commerce can be as little as 1-2%.

Imagine you are in e-commerce. Each click is costing you $1 and your conversion rate is 2%. The outcome is that the cost of each sale is $50. Assuming your average basket or sales value is $50 or more, you would appear at minimum to be breaking even.

THE BIG MISTAKE

But the assumption you’ve just made may not be accurate. Many PPC advertisers misjudge the situation by failing to look beyond the sales value. They forget that this is not their profit. Imagine that the total value of the products in the basket is $50. But let’s assume that your profit is only $20.

So, for every $100 it costs you in clicks, you get back only $40. Your PPC campaign has made a loss of $30 per transaction. If you count just the profit, as you should, then at $1 CPC to breakeven you would need a basket value of $125.

Of course, these figures are generalizations, but they should prompt you to look again at your results. If the bad news is that you PPC is not profitable, don’t just abandon it.

THE SOLUTION

It’s likely that you could perform a lot better. To some extent because you thought your results were fine you unconsciously became complacent and did not do as much work on your campaigns as you should have.

So, re-examine your whole approach to paid search. If appropriate, look again at your PPC strategy. If you’ve been using a management company consider firing them. Because a good professional would have brought this matter to your attention from the outset.

With good PPC management, ongoing optimization and improving the quality score on your keywords and ads, you could cut your CPC and improve conversion rates. And perhaps then transform your PPC marketing into a profitable strategy.

---

Tom Wilson is an expert in Internet marketing and an award-winning marketer. He specializes in internet marketing and has been providing marketing services and consultancy for almost 10 years. He is a Chartered Marketer, and a Google AdWords qualified professional. His website http://www.cluedup-ppc.co.uk offers SEO services and a range of PPC services. These include PPC management, campaign setup, mentoring, and AdWords training courses.

Search Engine Advertising – A Good Investment?

By Toby Russell in Featured

I want to introduce you to a beginner’s guide to traffic generation by using paid-for ads on search engines. Now I have to be honest and say most of my experience has been really with Google Adwords primarily, however I’ve done some with Yahoo, which has returned some very good, cost effective results. Try them all and then decide for yourself.

Little Bit of History For You

Overture, which is now owned by Yahoo, basically created P4P (pay for performance), as we know it today. They realized and anticipated the growth in online shopping, that activity would increase dramatically, and advertising was going to be huge because of all the online businesses.

You need visibility to get web surfers to visit your site to buy, join your list etc. Placing ads that can send visitors to your sites not only increase sales, but traffic as well. Yahoo now has this service (since buying Overture some years ago), which allows ads for companies or websites to be visible in response to certain keywords that are entered by the browser.

More Visitors Helps Your List Building Activity

Any company can drive more traffic to its site by making use of this service. More traffic means that you’ll get more people seeing the pages of your site and getting the benefits of your site’s info, or better yet, buying your products or joining your list. If you’ve got a high volume of traffic, then it makes building your list somewhat easier and quicker as well. Naturally the advantage of getting people onto your list is that you are then able to market to them on a regular basis with the hope that they are not just one off customers, but over time will buy further product from you, and a website owner they have come to trust. Hence the phrase “the money’s in the list.”

The lifeblood of every website is to get a large and consistent traffic flow to the website. Visitors to your site are vital obviously, and if you can get as large a number as possible who are targeted (i.e. they have an interest in whatever your site is about) using internet marketing tips like these, it will help towards getting sales and increased awareness of your site’s products or services.

So How Does it Work?

Yahoo Overture works in basically the same way as Google Adwords. Both services use searches based on keywords and keyword phrases to place ads on sites that are relevant.

The browser’s keyword selection will determine what results come up. When you do a search, you’ll see ads on the right side of the results page. At the top of these ads will be paid ads. These are ones where the company or website has paid for them to be listed for that keyword or phrase.

Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you have a site that sells retail and wholesale auto parts. You can choose certain keywords that will bring up your ad when they are searched. When somebody types in, for example, Ford Explorer your ad comes up because you’ve chosen the phrase Ford Explorer for your ads.

Using this technique, you don’t have to worry so much about optimizing your site’s content for search engine optimization. However, in my opinion an important internet marketing tip is you should SEO your site anyway, as highly optimized sites will always rank better and can take advantage of changes in web technology that are bound to come about from time to time – so do it anyway.

By using Yahoo/Overture it’s possible to get your list listed on the first page, obviously depending on how competitive your keyword choice is and the budget you have to spend. A word of caution here – keep your budget very small and tight until you have tested the system. However, using search engine advertising is a quick way to get more traffic to your site. But obviously the best plan is to use SEO and other free methods of traffic generation as well.

OK So What’s The Cost?

The only trouble is that you’ll have to spend some cash to use this method. Yahoo/Overture has a number of different pricing options, depending on the number of keywords your ad has in it, or the number of times you get clicks. They also offer deals that allow your ads to show up on third party sites and not just search engine results pages. Visit their site to check out the current costs.

As far as the third party sites go, they’ll put your ads on sites that are relevant to yours. In other words, they are going for the same or similar keywords. This ensures that the people who might be interested in your site will see it. It would be meaningless for them to put your ads on an unrelated site.

Invest in Your Business’s Future

You can and should see this money as an investment. The idea is to pull more visitors to your site, and thus to increase sales. When it works, you will make good on the investment. The trick then is to work on your site so that those clicks turn into cash. In other words, don’t just get them there; get them buying and joining your list.

They say it takes money to make money. Actually, there are a number of free or low-cost ways to drive traffic to your site. But using Yahoo’s Overture (and the other search engines ) can help you get there faster. It offers quicker traffic on a bigger scale. If you don’t want to wait around for the search engines to start finding your site, it can be well worth the money!

So there you have it, Internet marketing tips like these are all about using the arsenal of tools, tips and methods to quite literally ‘market’ your site.

---

Toby Russell, Internet Marketer, Publisher & Property Investor offers tried and tested methods to help you succeed on line. Find out how to drive huge amounts of targeted traffic to your own Internet Marketing business with his popular Free step-by-step Special Report. Chapter 12 tells you how to use PPC advertising, available at => http://www.startinternetmarketingonline.com

Clever Use of AdWords Lands Man Top Advertising Job

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

What’s a job at the top of your field worth to you?

To unemployed advertising executive Alec Brownstein, it was worth around USD 6. That’s what Alec paid Google AdWords to get the attention of New York’s top advertising agencies and score himself two job offers.

Alec decided he wanted a job at one of New York’s top ad agencies. But to get an interview via the regular channels could take months. So he decided to bypass normal job application procedures and appeal to the egos of the Creative Directors instead.

How did he do it? He set up PPC ads using Dynamic Keyword Insertion that would appear whenever one of the Creative Directors Googled themselves, otherwise known as a *vanity search*. So a Google search for Gerry Graf, David Droga, Tony Granger, Ian Reichenthal or Scott Vitrone would trigger Alec’s ad to appear.

The ad read:

Hey [Director's Name]
Googling yourself is a lot of fun.
Hiring me is fun, too.

A click on the ad led to Alec’s site and contact details. According to Brownstein, nobody was bidding on the names, so he was able to achieve the top ad slots for around 10 cents per click.

The result? Alec scored interviews with 4 out of the 5 Creative Directors and job offers from both Ian Reichenthal and Scott Vitrone of Y&R Advertising. He took one of the offers and now has a permament gig at Y&R New York.

Clever eh?

Organic SEO or PPC advertising?

By Andrew Plimmer in Featured

Sadly enough, there are still many online business entrepreneurs who take it for granted that they can still use the old marketing techniques in order to overtake their competitors. Little do they realize that those old basic techniques such as including a simple “click here” link, simply doesn’t cut it anymore. If for example you own an online business which is currently in dire need of some changes, then you may need to consider taking advantage of online marketing techniques which include the likes of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already heard about these techniques from some of the world’s best internet marketers, but the truth is, you might be reluctant to begin integrating them into your existing business. However, there’s nothing to be gained by simply keeping these strategies on hold, so here are a few tips on how to go about using search engine optimisation (SEO) and PPC advertising.

Search Engine Optimisation

Organic search engine optimisation is essentially an online marketing strategy which is dependent on having momentum and some long term commitment. By utilising SEO, you’ll be taking a step in the right direction in terms of accumulating information regarding link building campaigns, relationship building with other webmasters, and even some respectable and desirable publications. Of course, in order to be in full control, you need to set certain milestones so that you’ll be able to monitor your progress as you proceed.

For example, you need to ask yourself what it is exactly that you wish to accomplish. You also need to pay attention to your current image and to the level of optimisation regarding your website.

An experienced SEO specialist will be able to help you determine which the best keywords to use are, and of course they’ll be able to help you integrate those keywords into your meta tags so that you’re able to restructure your marketing strategies in order to overcome any negative fallout resulting from your previous attempts. Over and above SEO, you could of course also take advantage of other techniques, such as paid one way links and link exchanges for example, providing you do so with other reputable websites. But don’t forget – once you start organic SEO, you need to continue with it in order to maintain the momentum or else your diligently attained rankings will go down.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

PPC advertising places much emphasis on keyword usage and the placement of adverts which are relevant to a specific website. In fact, it’s often said that this form of advertising has revolutionised the world of online advertising, in that it can provide small businesses with the same amount of leverage as what the big businesses have. Providing it’s done correctly, PPC advertising can certainly help you stand out from the crowd. If you’re currently considering a PPC campaign then you should also pay attention to the following three questions:

1. What do I have to offer?
2. Why will customers want to click on my advert?
3. How can I hook them with just ten words?

At this point, the most important thing for you to do is to integrate an ideal title and ten words which tell potential customers what your business is all about. The most difficult aspect of PPC advertising is that you will be in close proximity to your competitors, both in search engine results and in sponsored positions. Remember, if someone types in a search relevant to the type of website you own, your advert will appear at the top of the page or on the right hand side, and it’s vital that your advertisement must be powerful enough in order to trigger an immediate response.

Essentially, in order to get the best results you should ideally consider using SEO and PPC advertising simultaneously, rather than just opting for one of them.

---

Andrew Plimmer is CEO of Suncoast Internet, SEO Sunshine Coast, web design and web development specialists. For more information on Internet Marketing go to => http://www.suncoastinternet.com.au/

How To Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) To Send Traffic Anywhere You Want!

By Riley West in Featured

Do you think anybody is going to argue about the fact that Traffic (people coming to your web page) is the most important component of direct selling via the Internet?

When I first started in this business of Internet Marketing, I didn’t think of traffic. It was like when I came into this business I checked all my previous training at the door! And this from a guy who spent over 30 years creating traffic to retail stores.

Go figure. I guess I came to this form of selling with a totally open, and, in some cases, blank, mind.

But Traffic IS the most important thing. It doesn’t much matter how you get the traffic as long as it’s a form of traffic called “targeted traffic”.

And that is exactly what you get when you buy traffic from the PPC Search Engines.

You probably know this already, but it is a good idea to repeat it. And that is that selling something by means of the internet has an incredibly simple formula.

Here it is…Traffic + Conversion = Sales. That’s it. Expanded for effect it would be Targeted Traffic (people) + Conversion(people purchasing) = Sales (money).

So, first things first, get traffic to your offer. But not just any old traffic…we want it to be “targeted”. What that means is that the people coming are people who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

People can be “sorted” by the search terms they type in. Ingenious, isn’t it?

There are lots of ways to generate traffic but pay-per-click advertising is one of the fastest and one of the best for a couple of reasons that we’ll cover here.

Two of the most important reasons are that your visitors will be “targeted traffic” and you’ll only pay when they click and arrive at your offer!

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have a web page with an offer on it selling free movie downloads. Automatically, one of your major keywords is “free movie downloads”.

So you go into your PPC area, and write an ad. They are little four line classified type ads and the last line of the ad is the URL you want them to go to.

Now, Google is the king of PPC and, since they are all about relevancy (the art of bringing up good search results when someone types in a keyword) Google wants relevancy for it’s sponsored ads, too. Hence the marriage of your ad and your chosen keywords.

You’d write an ad that looks like a four line classified ad with copy like this …

Free Movie Downloads/ Download Any Movie You Want Forever/ For A Small One Time Fee/ USAFreeMovieDownloads.com

You’d put the ad into an ad group with your chosen keywords at your chosen price (bid).

Let’s say you picked the keyword “free movie downloads” and agreed to pay (bid) $1 every time someone clicks on your ad and, subsequently went to your offer.

Warning: I inadvertently sent 1700 people (clicks) to a 404 error page instead of my offer due to a typo. It cost me about a thousand bucks. I don’t do that anymore.

So you turn the campaign on and start watching. The fun can begin in just a few minutes!

If you make $30 every time someone buys your offer at your web page, and you are paying one dollar per visit (click) when someone types in “free movie downloads” there is a certain ratio you are looking for.

Essentially, to be profitable, you have to pay LESS than $30 to get a sale because that’s what you MAKE on a sale. More ideally you want to pay $15 to get the $30 profit.

These little sponsored search ads are responsible for billions of dollars in highly targeted traffic and sales.

And really, doesn’t it just seem likely that someone who typed in your chosen keyword and clicked on your ad and was then transported to your offer on your web page would probably buy? Yes, it does to me, too.

You can bet on it. In fact, that’s exactly what you are doing, but they don’t call it gambling. They call it advertising. That’s business.

---

Riley West can show you lots of ways to earn money online! From PPC to article marketing to web page offers… see it all at Riley’s blog now and receive a FREE MONEY MAKING PDF and two Ebooks you can’t find anywhere else. Go to :=> http://www.makinganinternetmarketer.com

Is Online Advertising – A Good Way for small companies to beat the credit crunch?

By Mike Gracia in Featured

The credit crunch is hitting just about every business, small or large, however, it is the smaller companies that are usually at most risk.

It is common practice for businesses to re-evaluate their expenses when times are tough, and this often includes marketing budgets. Indeed, recently many people have reported decreases in offline (print) marketing budgets, due, mainly to the credit crunch and financial turmoil that both the US and UK are experiencing.

It is interesting to note however that conversely, Online advertising spend is on the increase.

Why is this? What is the difference between online and offline expenditure, and why should one be on the decline due to a credit crunch, while the other is increasing?

Advertising ROI

The most rational and likely explanation for this is the huge difference between instant Return On Investment. Whilst print advertising can be a great way of developing brand name  and awareness, the financial returns for every £ or $ spent are known slow to arrive. This means that, during times of prosperity funds are freely available for Print based advertising.

Online advertising tends to see a much quicker and higher ROI, with either instant or swift results.

Advertising Budget, or Cost of Sale?

Some companies have even been quoted as saying that, although they are reviewing their Offline advertising, with a view to cutting costs, they now consider Online promotion to be more of a ‘cost of sale’ than an actual advertising cost.

It is easy to see why…

In a survey by iProspect, 68% of internet searches don’t look further than the first page of  Google for products or services they are looking for. This means that if you don’t appear on the first page, you are missing out on a seriously high percentage of your would be revenue.

This means that funds spent increasing a websites online search rankings are more or less guaranteed to increase the levels of sales that the website realises. This does imply that Online web promotion should be seen as more of a Cost of Sale than a straight advertising cost.

During financial hardships, it makes sense for businesses to cut advertising costs, so long as they can still achieve a level of income to keep them afloat. Thus, cutting funds from Offline advertising, which may well be seen as a brand awareness raiser that can presently be ill afforded, and allocating those funds to Online web promotion, which tends to give a much quicker return, is, perhaps good business sense.

One person we spoke to stated that they feel someone that is actually searching for a product on the internet is much more likely to convert to a sale, than someone that merely sees a company’s advert in a related magazine.

Forms of Online Marketing

Just like the offline advertising world, Online marketing has many sub divisions. The most popular are:

• Pay Per Click campaigns (such as Google Adwords),
• Banner adverts,
• Search Engine Optimisation,

Which is the most effective?

To a large extent, this depends on what you are trying to marker online, and how long term your goals are.

Let’s look at each Online marketing sub group in turn;

Pay Per Click.

The most popular pay per click advertising network in the world is Google Adwords. The effectiveness of this online advertising medium is definitely a proven fact. However, if you do not take care, you can easily waste thousands of pounds running an ill planned campaign, and be left wondering where it all went wrong!

Pay Per Click advertising is often said to be best served to websites that sell ‘impluse buy’ type products. PPC tends to give a very quick Return, but in the long term is more costly and gives less of an ROI than a traditionally, organic SEO campaign.

Banner Adverts

Most marketing professionals have at least heard of the term ‘advert blindness’. This phrase has been traditionally used to describe the mental process of the ‘filtering out’ of adverts by magazine readers. It is more and more frequently used in the Online advertising world in regards to banner adverts.

Basically, most people ignore banner adverts these days without even thinking about it. This means even if you get a good deal on your banner advert campaign, the results can be poor.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (A.K.A. SEO) is a huge area, viewed by many traditional businesses as murky waters. Many are confused by the terms used by SEO professionals, and unsure whether funds set aside for this will be recouped.

If the right Ethical SEO specialist is chosen, however, the results can be astounding, and the Return On Investment excellent. It is important to stress the word Ethical here, as some SEO consultants are far from ethical. Go with a company that is willing to take the time to understand your needs as a company (or individual) and won’t simply apply a ‘one size fits all’ type of affair to your SEO.

The returns for an SEO campaign are usually realised after 2 to 3 months, at which point your website should be experiencing not just an increased number of visits, but an increased number of ‘targeted’ visits. It is this targeting that is important. There is little to no point having your website ranked for terms that are not related to your website, or do not have a medium to high number of searches per month.

Used correctly, search engine optimization techniques will give you a good ROI compared to PPC advertising, as your website will be placed in front of the eyes of those actually searching for your products or services.

About The Author:

Mike Gracia writes content for Kingpin-seo. Kingpin-seo is one of the leading ethical seo, and is also proud to own a Google News approved Press Release site, meaning kingpin-seo are very well placed to offer Press Release Distribution services.

PPC Direct Linking vs Landing Pages

By Peter D in Featured

When it comes to traffic, there are two proven ways to get targeted and interested buyers to flood to your websites or affiliate offers. That is organic (search engines, writing articles etc) and paid traffic (Pay per click being the most effective).

While both methods are capable of bringing in huge amounts of targeted traffic that are ready to buy from you, the paid option has certain benefits over organic search engine listings.

First of all, paid traffic is able to bring in traffic in lightening fast time as opposed to organic traffic. Whilst organic traffic from the search engines might save you money over time, it’s also important to realize that time is also money!

So why do a lot of struggling marketers still shy away from paid advertising such as Google Adwords? Is it because it doesn’t work? Well, maybe it didn’t work for them personally but it sure does work for millions of other marketers. So the real question is how to make it work for YOU.

If you are promoting affiliate offers then the first thing to consider is whether you will be able to link directly to the merchant’s website using your affiliate link in the PPC ad, or if you would be better off sending your traffic to a landing page hosted on your own domain (or on a free domain elsewhere if you don’t own a domain yet).

This is a common hurdle for affiliates and there are pros and cons to each method. Let’s look at why you’d want to link directly to the merchant’s website instead of using a landing page on your own site:

1. You can quickly throw up an entire campaign and test the water with a product

2. You don’t need to worry about writing sales copy or actually creating web pages

3. You eliminate one less hurdle for the visitor to go through before making a purchase

Whilst all of these benefits seem pretty conclusive, the truth is that there is actually a greater effectiveness of using your own landing pages to pre-sell the visitor on the affiliate product that you are promoting, such as:

1. You can warm the visitor up and prepare them for the sales pitch

2. You can tell your story and make the visitor connect with you emotionally, which rockets conversions!

3. You can get the opportunity to capture an email address so that you can send out multiple offers to the same person (all for the same product if they don’t buy straight away).

Another problem with directly linking to affiliate offers is that Google Adwords will often penalize you for doing so, if other advertisers are also doing this on the same keywords that you’re bidding on. Google doesn’t want a ton of duplicate ads for a keyword, so you need to be unique.

Ultimately, tests have proven that sending people to a pre-sell landing page that either contains a personal recommendation, a review or a chance to capture people’s email addresses is likely to rocket your conversion ratios beyond belief.

And in the lucrative but competitive world of PPC advertising, where every click cuts into your profits, then a higher conversion ratio is your ultimate goal.

Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.

---

We are facing an overload of products that teach us how to get rich with affiliate marketing…so it is crucial that you pick a product that not only works but is right for YOU personally… Don’t buy any one of them before you have read my reviews at: http://www.clickhere-direct.com

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

Home Newsletter Archives SEO Forums Webmaster Tools Webmaster Resources Link to SPN Top SEO Tools Website Templates SPN Partners Contact Us Privacy Advertise

ExactSeek SiteProNews MetaWebSearch SPN Videos EzineHub ISEDN DropJack NewWebDirectory.com SEO-News SEO-News Forums Blog Search FreeWebSubmission SmartWebGadgets