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Archive for January 21st, 2010

The Truth About Business Cards, Yellow Page Ads, And Val-Pak Coupons

January 21st, 2010 No comments

In today’s world, businesses are faced with many decisions when it comes to marketing and advertising. How do you get started? What media to use in your marketing campaigns. These are just a couple of the immediate challenges. The reality is that all of the options available will work to one degree or another. The key to your success, regardless of the medium you select, is to present yourself in a manner that appeals to your prospect. When this is understood, you can be successful regardless of your selection.

Too often people follow the generally accepted trends and styles. This happens with the clothes we wear (anyone remember Beatle Mania?), the beer we drink (what age are you?) and the way we advertise in things like the Yellow Pages. Try scanning the Yellow Pages and you will see page after page of similar looking business card layout and wording. What happens is we start to mentally purge the look-a-likes and carry on until we see something that is different.

Some of the most interesting, and different, ads that I have seen appear as public service announcements. They have headlines like: Warning! Don’t Even Think of Using a Travel Agent Before Calling FREE Traveler Awareness Hotline! The copy below this ad would offer free advice on how to book the best rate for your next trip. I was scanning the travel section because I was obviously interested in taking a trip and this advertisement, because it was different, caught my eye. To make it really successful it also had an 800 number at the bottom to call for a Free Report. There was no ad sponsor so the whole presentation was non-threatening. I was given a safe way to get information I wanted without having to speak directly to a Travel Agent whose will endeavor to sell me.

The same method can be used regardless of the medium you select for your advertising. Be it Yellow Pages, Business Cards and Val-Pak Coupons. The key is to use the criteria that make it different, interesting and non-threatening. As much as the principles are basic – there definitely is an art to this type of marketing.

I have learned of a company, that over the last 12 years, has developed automated systems that allow business people to incorporate any type of marketing and/or advertising into an overall Marketing Strategy. That company is Automated Marketing Solutions or AMS. They differentiate themselves by not only providing solutions, but by educating their clients on the proper techniques to use including how to create the right message by the form of media being used. It doesn’t stop there. AMS provides the capability for a company to place their ENTIRE Marketing Program on Auto-pilot. Once a business marketing program (including voice messages, e-mails, faxes and other broadcast and mail out collateral) is compiled and sequenced, their Lead Management System or LMS provides the unique ability to control and manage the program without any further human interaction.

The benefits to this system are significant time savings on what would otherwise be labor intensive tasks and consistency in marketing messages. It also means that businesses never need worry about losing customers who misinterpreted your lack of contact for apathy. If you would like to hear more about Direct Response Marketing and how it can benefit your business, visit Automated Marketing Solutions today. You will be surprised at how quickly and economically you can implement and start benefiting from AMS tested and proven technology and experience.

If you would like to hear more about Direct Response Marketing & Lead Management Systems & Hotline & Website Technology and how it can benefit your business, visit Automated Marketing Solutions today.

Competition For Specific Keywords For Your Product

January 21st, 2010 No comments

An Internet advertising model used on websites that use a Pay per click (PPC) system is when an advertiser pays the marketer only when their ad is clicked. An advertiser will typically bid on keyword or keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than using a bidding system. The first step is to decide your budget and the level of risk you are willing to take. These aspects will help you determine which PPC search engine(s) you ultimately choose to start with. The larger search engines have a less risky endeavor, because they have an excellent coverage and offer a lot of assistance to their users. But they are the most expensive in terms of how much money you must spend to acquire a visible ranking.

The amount of money an advertiser pays search engine and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website is called Cost per click (CPC). This seeks to drive a high volume of traffic to one site, PPC implements a so called affiliate model that will provide purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites. The affiliates provide purchase-point click-through to the merchant. This is considered a pay-for-performance model so if an affiliate does not generate sales it represents no cost or loss to the merchant. Variations include, banner exchange, pay-per-click, and revenue sharing programs. The second step is to choose your keywords.

Having fierce competition for specific keywords on a given PPC search engine. Most PPC search engines automate the bidding process for you, but personal involvement and the careful use of third-party tools by the user is advisable to ensure that the tracking mechanisms built into the search engine’s control panel are in sync with what is actually happening. The general rule was that the business that bid the highest amount of money for a specific keyword would be ranked first, the second would be second, etc. An element called “quality score” has become the determining factor for PPC search engines to limit the number of PPC ads on a results page to less than 10, and unless you are in the first 3 or 4 of the PPC ads, you are much less likely to be visited by visitors.

Simply put simplicity can be deceiving. You can set up a PPC on a search engine with only a few steps and get results that will satisfy you, but if you want to milk all that you can from the PPC method of advertising, you need to be prepared to take advantage of every option and every advantage available to you. You need to investigate the details of the programs you are taking part in, keep an eagle eye on your bids and the performance of your ads, and spend time keeping up with the latest changes in the search engines to ensure your money is placed where it will do the most good. It takes time and effort, but it is not rocket science – at least not yet!

When utilizing PPC ads on your websites they will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. These advertisements are known as sponsored links or sponsored ads and will appear adjacent to or above organic results on search engine results pages, or where an advertiser chooses on a content site.

There are many PPC providers that exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model. Cost per click (CPC) varies depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular keyword. There are plenty of free, independent tools available to help you research keywords. Many will also reveal current bids for specific words or phrases on different search engines.

The most popular PPC search engine is Google; their PPC advertising program is called AdWords. The next most popular search engines are Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Ask. A large number of other search engines offering PPC advertising opportunities are available – ranging from metasearch engines that incorporate traffic from numerous other engines and online sources all the way to small, niche search engines that specialize in one or more categories or topics of interest. Here at PPC Universe, we have included reviews of what we consider to be the Top 10 Search Engines, as well as a section of reviews of other search engines that offer paid advertising opportunities.

A recent phenomenon, many online business owners not understanding the meaning of the term “pay-per-click advertising,” and they don’t realize its enormous potential for increasing their online presence and bringing more traffic to your website. A PPC’s listings on a search engine results page typically consists of a title, which is usually a short heading (around 50 characters maximum) and/or a long (typically no more than 200 characters) description of your service with some type of promotional wording, as well as a link to your website. Even those who understand basic search engine marketing techniques sometimes blunder when making the distinction between pay-per-click ad campaigns and organic search engine optimization.

This next step is the composition of the headline that will appear on the search results page, and a description of your product or service, or other promotional text. Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines are those that offer a marketing option to the users. PPC advertising is the placement of a small ad on the search results page for a specific keyword or keywords in return for a specified payment when a visitor actually clicks on the ad. Advertisers pay nothing to appear on the results page per se; they only pay the amount they have agreed to (or bid for) when someone actually clicks on their ad and is taken to the landing page on their website. The term “pay per click” means just what it says each advertiser pays you each time a visitor clicks on the ad.

Then you must open an account with a PPC search engine. Be prepared to supply your name, company name, address, phone number, email address, and so on. As a rule, opening an account is free. No charges apply until you have bid on the search words you want and have funded your account. Be sure to read the fine print in any of the agreements you choose as to be clear on minimum deposits required, as well as what happens to your deposit if you decide to cancel your campaign. The normal deposit for a PPC ad campaign is usually between $20 and $60. Some search engines will even give you a nominal amount of money as a bonus to begin your campaign.When you first register the keywords you have chosen with the search engine you must specify the maximum amount you are willing to spend for those keywords. The price of a keyword can range anywhere from 1 cent to a few dollars or more depending on its popularity as a search term.

With competition so fierce, most PPC search engines do not require a minimum amount of money be invested in a campaign, some will even give you a nominal amount of money to begin your campaign. Some may require a deposit, but this money is then applied to your account. Be sure to check out the fine print in the agreement to be clear on minimums required, deposits required, restrictions when you cancel your campaign. But most of you need to spend a fair amount of time monitoring your campaign, especially in the beginning.

With more and more people looking online for information about products and making more purchases online than ever before, getting the potential client early on takes on even more importance. The highly relevant PPC ads results on the first search engine results pages will be a prime source for conversions and sales. PPC ad programs are becoming easier for first-time advertisers online to understand and use. The programs are flexible, can handle anything from one keyword to thousands of keywords, offer an array of bells and whistles, and come packaged with analytic and reporting options that range that are simple with some parts more complex for the novice.

Since you have become knowledgeable of the basics of PPC and have learned more about the options, tools, and search engines that offer this form of marketing, you will be in a position to fine tune your campaigns and perhaps try some of the niche-market PPC search engines that can offer lower keyword costs and may be more suited to your product/service. Even companies with experience in online marketing struggle with the intricacies of the techniques needed to judge which PPC search engine to use and how best to play the bidding game. Each campaign is different and depending upon the bid amounts, number of actual click-throughs and the Return on Investment (ROI) generated.

Now that you decided to give pay-per-click advertising a try, to start you need to choose a search engine on which to advertise. Different search engines will offer different advantages and disadvantages and the amount of risk you are willing to take depends upon your needs. It’s not too difficult to begin to consider and evaluate the usefulness and efficacy of PPC advertising for your own products and services. The rewards can be good and the risks can be minimized as long as you check out the keyword research. It is definitely worth consideration for any online business today.

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Blog Myths and Facts

January 21st, 2010 No comments

Despite the huge popularity of blogs around the Internet, people still have so many misconceptions of the whole phenomenon. Here are just some of them and real-world experience to debunk these myths.

Any ordinary Joe can start a blog. Not quite sure about that! Do you enjoy writing? Do you have specialized knowledge you want to share? Are you passionate about a certain topic? If you answered No to any or all of these questions, think again.

Anyone can set up a blog. It all depends on your blog host. Some blogs hosts have simpler user interface and in minutes your blog will be up in minutes. But there are others that get far more technical than the average user may be ready for.

Blogging is grade-school. When in comes to blogging, it’s the actual writing that’s the toughest nut to crack. The more engaged and knowledgeable you are with your subject, the easier and more interesting your writing will be.

Most blogs are political. Nope, only some. Many blogs focus on political topics but most blogs are just bloggers discussing their lives, loves and travels. A list of the 50 most visited blogs at BlogHub (http://www.bloghub.com/top50blogs.htm) shows very few political blogs.

Blogs are in competition with the main-stream media. This is true in a few cases (not as many cases as bloggers would have you think). Just recently, there have been some very popular and influential social and politically-oriented blogs that have caused main-stream media outlets to back-track and change their coverage of important events.

Bloggers are just having fun criticizing everyone and everything and have no new information to add. True in some cases. Today, blogging is much more than the personal activity it used to be. Corporations, media outlets, public personalities, politicians and experts in almost every field have now joined the ranks of blog producers. Considering all this expertise, one would have to say that bloggers have a lot of new information to add to any debate.

Not everything written on a blog is true. That’s a bit of an overstatement. You’ll run across bad information and even intentional untruths in blogs but, for the most part, bloggers who state facts are stating what they honestly believe to be fact. It is always up to the reader to verify that any information they receive is accurate information.

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SEO Optimization and Link Building

January 21st, 2010 No comments

There is a lot of work that goes into generating web content and it may be tempting to opt for easy solutions to text generating and link building but overall this will provide very little diversity on the web and won’t really make your website stand up and get noticed by the search engines.

If your web site is going to include links to other businesses, or any other web site, you want to include a lot of new and diverse content. Many of the tools that are used to create web sites will just use the same content, repetitively. When you are looking for your web site to attract attention, especially from the search engines, then you need to have as much unique content as possible.

When designing your web site, there are many ways to generate content for your web site. One option is to hire a consulting firm that can generate large amounts of relevant, unique content for your web site. The more common your products or services are, and the more business that have web sites that offer the same products or services that you do, the more important it is to have relevant, unique content. This makes the use of a consulting firm a great choice, since they can provide this content for you at a relatively inexpensive cost. This will be very beneficial for your web site’s search engine optimization, which means more people will find yourself web site in the search results list, which should translate to an increase in traffic for your site.

Generating a bulk of fresh new content will give you many opportunities to link build and to connect with other sites. Users, those who are link building and search engine spiders will all appreciate your unique relevant content and this will help you build up your internet authority as well as your own website.

The internet is constantly changing and growing, and as it does web advertising strategies and link building strategies continue to evolve as well. It may seem overwhelming to keep up with all of these changes, however the more you do, the more you will increase your search engine rankings, and develop a reputation for having a good site with good information. It may be a lot of work to build the links on your site manually, and not use a tool to generate the links, but it will be worth it when you are attracting more web traffic, which will hopefully translate into more new customers for your business.

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Google Friendly Hosting To Provide SEO Services

January 21st, 2010 No comments

Many have heard of GFH, Google Friendly Hosting, which operates in the United States and United Kingdom. They are a a web hosting company that extends free SEO services, in addition the it’s web hosting service. They are also the only web hosting service that is currently offering this free SEO service with their web hosting.

Now you may believe that just because you aren’t paying for this service that you aren’t really getting the level of search engine optimization that you would get from a SEO management firm, but this is not the case at all. Actually this service that they are providing promises to stay in effect until your website ranks on the first page of Google for relevant keywords and that is just about as good as SEO management gets.

Google Friendly Hosting is operating under the assumption that their customers will be more willing to pay the current, large fees for their dedicated servers and IP addresses, since they will be receiving the SEO management services for free.

The search engine optimization services that are being provided by Google Friendly Hosting are limited in the fact that they will only optimize your web site for the Google search engine. Google Friendly Hosting will not optimize your web site for other search engines, like Bing, AOL, or Yahoo. This is one drawback to the services being provided by GFH. Typically when you acquire the services of an SEO management company your site is optimized for all of the search engines. Another issue with the SEO services being provided by Google Friendly Hosting is that GFH is not actually doing the optimization, they have contracted out the work to a third party vendor.

Will we see more web host providers offering SEO services? Will we start to see SEO management companies providing web hosting services? It would certainly seem that this is a possibility in the near future. The real question for consumers, though, is can an SEO management company provide the same quality web hosting as the existing web hosting companies, and vice versa? Many experts think that these companies will not be able to provide both of these services at a high quality, even though it is certainly more convenient to deal with one company for your web site needs. Consumers will just have to wait and see how everything plays out.

search engine optimisation refers to building a web page that will be discovered by search engines. For more information on this topic log onto seo moves at www.seomoves.com.au.