Thursday, September 04, 2008

Internet marketing with search engines and PPC

Hi, I don't have a lot of time today but I just quickly wanted to add something to the previous post on Pay per click advertising. It will also help your way of thinking about Internet marketing in general and especially search engine optimization (SEO) which we'll look more in detail in later posts.

Whenever you have anything to do with search engines or any other web site you should think about what THEY are providing their customers and set up your web sites or ads accordingly...

So, what does Google want? As a search engine, it wants to serve the most relevant and useful results to the user because if they don't, people will stop using it and Google could go out of business... That's not going to happen, though, because they employ many people that work on algorithms and other ways to improve searching experience for the web surfer.

So, the key in succeeding in search engine marketing is to provide a site that delivers relevant, fresh and useful information. Tricks work, but they only work short term.

The same goes for pay per click advertising. Do you think google wants to display irrelevant results just to make a quick buck and risk loosing millions of users over a very short amount of time? Nope. Can they absolutely control everything at every second? Nope.

So what CAN they do?

Well, they can reward good advertisers and punish bad advertisers. So in the long term only good advertisers will prosper! And they do this by many ways, one of them being: how much an ad costs (based on relevancy obtained by click-through rate, keywords and surfer's reactions -- back button).

One way of succeeding with SEO and PPC is to also imagine being the owner of let's say Google and think of "What would I encourage my customers (in this case webmasters) to do to make Google an even better experience for everyone?"

You certainly wouldn't encourage them to create useless blogs stuffed with keywords and affiliate links, would you?

If you get and implement this small piece of advice, you can't loose in the long term and that's what really counts in Internet marketing!

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Internet marketing -- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) part 2

As I mentioned in the previous post, the first thing you need for pay per click advertising are your keywords. There are many ways of getting them and in your Adwords account, you'll find a keyword suggestion tool you can use for your initial set of keywords.

After you have those, you'll have to optimize both keywords and ads to get the cheapest possible clicks as well as the best position compared to your competition.

As I said before, tracking and testing are necessary components of any Internet marketing endeavour. After a while, you'll get an insight of what keywords work, what ads work, and what ads and keywords don't work as well or even at all. I won't get very technical as you probably know much of this and I'll rather concentrate on how to make your ads work and how to get them to the best position for the smallest price...

As I also mentioned in the previous post, Google also ranks and charges for ads depending on RELEVANCY. It calculates relevancy by the context of the ad, by how many clicks it receives and by how many people quickly press the "back" button in their browser! For example, if you bid on the term "Internet marketing" and your ad talks about cats, Google will know it isn't relevant. Furthermore, your ad will receive less licks because people searching for Internet marketing advice aren't interested in cats at that moment. And last but not least, those people that will click on your ad will have a high probability of very quickly pressing the "back" button in their browser to return to the page with relevant ads. All of these three things can and will hurt your campaigns as well as your wallet.

But... here's a simple solution:

Adwords allows you to create multiple ads for the same keyword as well as group several keywords for certain ads. This makes it easy to make your ads as contextual as possible. Besides that, if you create different ads for the same keyword, Adwords will rotate those ads and will measure which ad is doing the best job. After a while, it will serve the best ads most of the time.

So, in short, here's how you can make a good Adwords ad (I'll make all the examples up and I'll base them on the term "Internet marketing")...

Make the title as appealing as possible. It must draw attention. Some use shocking statements such as "Internet marketing scam". Some use precise amounts of money they made... "I made $1395,62 today". Some involve promises: "You'll never work again" and so on. If you can include your keyword in here, good. But rather focus on attention grabbing.

Then there's your first line. This is the first thing the viewer will read after the title of your ad! It's important that it keeps their attention and gets them to read the third line and click on the ad. Here you should state what benefit your client will have by using your product or service. You have 35 characters to do this (including spaces). Try fitting your keyword in this line if you didn't use it in your title. You can also do this in your last line. For example: "Focus on growing your business and" or: "Even a child could do this" -- you can use little tricks like putting "and" at the end of line 1 to get the reader to also read line 2...

In the last line you can continue with the benefits or add some features. Some people also add the dollar value of their product or service to avoid freebie seekers. You can use power words like "underground", "new", "proven"... For example: "let our proven system work for you".

The last line is for your displayed URL address.

So my ad could look something like this:

Internet marketing trick
Even a child could make a fortune.
Let our proven system work for you
http://www.mysite.com

Next time we'll go over some more details and go on with other techniques. Hope this helps with your PPC Internet marketing.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Internet marketing -- Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

In the previous posts we discussed planning your Internet marketing campaign. In the last post, Internet marketing plan III, we generally looked at some ways to drive traffic to your sites through paid advertising.

Here, we'll discuss Pay per click advertising more in detail.

As with all things connected to Internet marketing (I'll say this again and again), pay per click advertising should also be subject to extensive testing.

Just in case you don't know exactly what pay per click advertising is, simply put, it's a way of advertising, where you pay a certain amount of money only if a visitor clicks on the ad presented on some site and comes to your site. Some other forms of advertising are also PPM (pay per thousand views of the ad) -- here you pay for every thousand visitors to the site with your ad on it. It's not necessary that they click on the ad and visit your site. Another form is PPA (pay per action). Here you only pay for each visitor that performs a certain action on your site (for example, joins your newsletter, buys a product etc.).

With PPC, some sites will charge you a fixed amount of money per click (Yahoo!, MSN, ...) and some sites offer a bit different bidding scheme (Google). In both cases this means that generally if you bid more than your competitor, your ad will rank higher and have a higher chance of being seen and clicked on.

The main difference between, for example Yahoo! and Google is that Google implements a special technology where in case of click, you pay only a penny more than the below ad's maximum bid. So, if you bid $0.20 and someone bid $0.15, when your ad is clicked, Yahoo! will charge you $0.20 whereas Google will charge you only $0.16. Furthermore, Google also rewards RELEVANCE of the ad which is what I'll explain below.

Here we'll focus on the most popular pay per click advertising provider... Google. It's PPC program is called Google Adwords and most beginner (also many advanced) Internet marketers are using it as a main "instant" traffic source. After you've read this, you'll have a much better understanding of PPC so your campaigns will work better than 99% of all people beginning to use this method of advertising. I'll also recommend some resources so you'll be ahead of even more advanced users, so pay attention...

OK... the first thing you have to know when using pay per click for your Internet marketing campaign are the keywords. Through testing you'll learn which keywords produce the best results and which don't work at all. Nobody can tell you for sure, you'll have to test!

Thankfully, Google provides us with some awesome free tools to very easily do just that. I suggest you take a minute and sign up for Google Adwords as well as google analytics. Explore the sites for a while and get a feel of what they offer. I'll continue writing about PPC in my next post.

Before you go, be sure to sign up for my newsletter. You can do it on Internet marketing secrets main site in the bar on the right. Just enter your name and email address in the provided fields and press the "Subscribe me!" button. I know you'll love it and I go so much more in depth in the newsletters.

Come back soon as I'll have some very interesting things for you!

Take care and enjoy your Internet marketing!