No Longer Recommend Tumblr.com

Over the past few years I have developed a link building method for myself and for clients, whereby I set up blogs for the client on 6 free blogging sites, including Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Posterous.com, Blog.com and Tumblr.com.

The purpose of doing this is more distribution for the client's content, but the main purpose is to develop more links to the client's main site.

But recently I was contacted by Tumblr.com and told that they had disabled my blog there for my business RealWebMarketing.net, because I was including links in my post. After email clarification going back and forth I verified that that is what they meant and that their reason was they objected to my including links in my blog posts.

I think this is idiotic, similar to the objection that HubPages.com has to people including multiple links in their articles posted on their web site (you can't have more than one link). Being a marketing person for 21 years, I have never understood the strange "anti-marketing" bias that is exhibited by some techie types.

I can no longer recommend Tumblr.com and predict their eventual demise.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Google AdWords Quality Score

by John Eberhard

Google AdWords has a sort of measuring stick they use called “quality score.” The quality score is applied to your campaign, and to your ad group within a campaign, and to your individual keywords within the campaign.

Your quality score is important because the better your quality score, the less you will pay for whenever someone clicks on one of your ads. And conversely, with a low quality score your cost per click goes up significantly.

Here’s what Google says about the quality score:

“The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).”

So we can see that your quality score is important because it affects how much you will pay for each click. This is vital because, especially with the amount of companies using Google AdWords today and competing for your keywords, if you’re not careful your costs can get out of hand and your campaign will not be viable. And when I say not viable I mean that you can end up paying too much for each lead or sale that you get.

“In general, the higher your Quality Score, the lower your costs and the better your ad position.”

“Quality Score helps ensure that only the most relevant ads appear to users on Google and the Google Network. The AdWords system works best for everybody -- advertisers, users, publishers, and Google too -- when the ads we display match our users' needs as closely as possible. Relevant ads tend to earn more clicks, appear in a higher position, and bring you the most success.”

It’s a little bit of work to sort through what they are saying and what you actually have to do in order to improve your quality score. So here it is simplified.

1. Relevancy: Your keyword, your text ad, and the content you have on your landing page have to all be the same topic. If for instance you have a set of keywords that are all very similar, and your text ad is about that same topic, and then the content of your landing page is all about that same topic, that’s good. You will get a good quality score. This also means that you should eliminate from your ad group any keywords that are only slightly related to what is on your landing page, as including them will lower your quality score.

1. Clickthrough Rates (CTR): In general, the higher your overall clickthrough rate is for a given ad group or campaign, the higher the ad group’s or campaign’s quality score will be.

There are several important implications for this. One is that between the search network and content network (which Google is now calling the “display network”) the search network always gets higher clickthrough rates, by far, than the display network. So it is best to set up one campaign that only goes to the search network, and another that goes only to the display network. That way, the quality score of your search network campaign will be much higher than if you just had both networks together in one campaign.

Another implication is that you should remove keywords from your campaign that have really low clickthrough rates, because including those in the campaign will lower its quality score. I called Google recently and found out from them that if you have a keyword which is getting impressions but has NO clickthroughs, that will not affect your quality score adversely. But as soon as that keyword gets one clickthrough, if the percentage is low, now it will affect your quality score adversely.

1. Search and Display Network: I recently read a book called the “AdWords Manifesto,” where the author said that for your search campaign, you should choose tightly focused keywords that are only on one topic, so that it has good relevancy. Then for your display network campaign, you can throw in related keywords and make it more broad. I actually called Google about some of the things in this book to ask if they were true. The Google rep said that this is not true, and the opposite is true, i.e. you can have a broader selection of keywords on the search network and a more focused group on the display network.

1. Landing Page is Not the Home Page: Many people put up a Google AdWords campaign and have their text ad set up so that when someone clicks on it, the visitor goes to the home page of the advertiser’s web site. This is not ideal and can hurt your quality score, because chances are your home page does not specifically talk about the specific product or service you are advertising in detail. This is especially true if your company has multiple products or services. So if the visitor lands on your home page and it doesn’t even mention the product being advertised, or just briefly mentions it, that hurts your quality score. Better to create a customized page for your Google visitor to land on.

1. Keywords in Text Ad: Including your keywords from your campaign in your text ad improves your quality score.

1. Keywords in Headlines: If you include your keywords from your campaign in the H1 and H2 tags, which are used to define your headlines in an HTML page, that helps your quality score.

Good luck with your Google AdWords campaigns.

 

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Online Reviews

by John Eberhard

Online reviews are becoming an important aspect to a company’s online presence, especially with local service oriented businesses such as home improvement, health care, photographers, or restaurants.

This article is going to be in two parts. In the first I want to caution people that writing a negative review on a company can have a very negative impact on their business. In the second part, I will outline how you can take control of the online review universe.

Cautionary Tales

I believe that in this day and age, with all the communications that go on between people online, from email to Facebook to commenting on blogs and articles to writing reviews, the Internet has somehow cheapened the quality of discourse. Perhaps because online you don’t have to come face to face with the person, people seem more willing to throw manners and civility out the window and viciously savage others when writing to or about someone online.

In the past few weeks I have seen several instances where a company had one or more negative reviews written on them that were having a major effect on their business.

1. A wedding photographer got a couple negative reviews online, which has virtually crashed the business he gets from the Internet.
2. A veterinarian got one very negative review from a client on Yelp. The vet felt the review was unfair and mostly untrue, and appealed successfully to get it removed from Yelp. But even though the review is gone from Yelp where it originally appeared, it still shows up on Google who pulled it from Yelp.
3. A plumbing company got two bad reviews viciously savaging one of their salesmen by name, that the company believes were put up by competitors.

So I want to make an appeal to you right now, that if you have a bad experience with some company, before you write a vicious review on the company online, contact the company and give them a chance to make it right first. Especially if the company gets a lot of their business online, your bad review can seriously damage their business. You may be angry now, but bear in mind that most businesses are really trying to do their best and service the public well. Even the best companies can blow it sometimes, but if you give them a chance they will often try to do something to make it right with you.

Taking Control

OK, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I want to offer a method whereby you can take control of your online reviews.

If you get a bad review on your company on some online review site, first contact the person and see if there is anything you can do to make it right with that customer, and then afterwards, ask them to amend their online review. If the review is just untrue or really unfair, you can contact the web site where it appears and ask them to take it down. Sometimes they will.

But the method I recommend to really take control is to flood the Internet with positive reviews of your company. Here’s how you do it:

1. Open up an account on one of the online email services. I recommend Aweber or Mailchimp.
2. Set up a list which we will call your “online review list.”
3. Set up a private form page on your web site that is not linked to from your other pages, that has a form to dump emails into this new online review list. Bookmark this page so you can find it easily.
4. Set up a series of 3 autoresponder emails that will go out to the people that you enter on this list. The emails should each say “Thank you for using our company. We want to ask you to write a review on our company on one of the online review sites.” Then include links in the email to the online review sites (Google, Yelp, Insider Pages, Angies List, etc.). Also it is effective to offer some sort of incentive for the person to write a review, such as a $5 Starbucks card or something like that. Set it up so that the first email goes out right away, the 2nd goes out maybe a week later, then the 3rd goes out a week after that.
5. Go to your private form page and enter the emails of new customers you completed work for this week that were very happy with the service. Continue entering those happy customers onto the list every week.

In this way you will be sending out a series of emails to remind your happy customers to write a review on you, and giving them the links right there in the email to go to the review sites. This will make you proactive, put you in better control and significantly increase the number of positive reviews you get. Even if you get a few negative reviews, the positive ones will drown them out.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Time to Get Your Marketing in Gear

by John Eberhard

Labor Day is now past, marking the official end of the summer season (even though we will still have some hot weather in Los Angeles and in some other parts of the country).

I have observed in past years that many business owners put their attention on other things over the summer – like vacations, fun, etc. Then right after Labor Day, their attention will sort of snap back to their business, and to marketing (including website marketing) and driving in new customers.

This is a good and necessary thing. Not that I’m opposed to vacations and having fun, just having got back from a few days at Big Bear Lake with my family. But as the old song says, there is a season for everything. And now that we’re in September, we are now in the season for getting back to business, school starting and so on.

I would say that this year, it is even more important than usual to get your marketing in gear and ramp up the promotion of your business. The so-called “summer of recovery” never really happened, and economic figures and indicators are not strong.

It is easy to get into the mindset of saying “Unemployment is at almost 10%. Nobody has any money to buy what I am selling.”

I believe that it is entirely possible to promote and drive in new business during the current economic climate. I think it is definitely harder if you sell a high priced luxury item. But if you sell a product or service that people definitely need, you can do it. You may have to change your approach, such as offering a discount or offering some free item along with the sale (an item that is inexpensive in relation to the cost of the sale). Changing your offer is probably a very good thing to do at the present time, especially if responses have been downtrending for a while.

I have stated in the past and I will say it again that it is even more important to continue promoting your business during an economic downturn than it is during good times. There are two reasons for this. One is that when sales or income are down, you should promote to get them back up again. The other reason is that if you continue promoting during lean times, and your competition cuts back, you will take marketshare away from them. And when the recovery arrives, you will be stronger than ever and your competition will be weaker.

And here is a third reason. You can respond to the economic climate by agreeing with it or disagreeing with it. Agreeing with the economy puts you in a frame of mind where you are at effect of whatever happens. Disagreeing puts you in a frame of mind where you can be cause, you can do something about it.

This is not to say that you sit there with your head in the sand and say “There is no recession. Don’t want to hear it. Everything’s fine. Just want to hear good news.” That’s not what I mean.

What I mean is that you should disagree with the recession, by deciding that you are going to find a way to promote your business that will work well during the current climate, and thereby get in new business and flourish despite the economy. This may mean trying a new offer, a new message, a new promotional medium, or even promoting to a new public. And by all means it is time to get your marketing in gear, and don’t stop promoting.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

RealWebMarketing.net Launches Website Marketing Campaign for California DanceArts

Campaign to Include Pay Per Click Advertising, Article Directories, Optimized Press Releases & Search Engine Optimization

LOS ANGELES: RealWebMarketing.net (http://www.RealWebMarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company located in Los Angeles, has launched a website marketing campaign for California DanceArts (http://www.CalDanceArts.com), a dance studio located in La Canada.

The campaign for California DanceArts will include pay per click advertising, article marketing with article directories, online PR with optimized press releases, and search engine optimization.

John Eberhard, President of RealWebMarketing.net stated, “California DanceArts wanted to start really utilizing the Internet and getting new customers online. So we have developed a campaign using pay per click advertising, and another campaign building up links to their site, utilizing article marketing, and online PR. I believe that in this economic environment, it is more important than ever to keep promoting and increase, not cut back on your promotional efforts.”

Erin Holt of California DanceArts stated “Our goal is to provide quality dance instruction to the local community and through our dance performances several times a year, to elevate the arts and interest in the arts in the community as a whole. We feel that marketing our studio through the Internet is a natural method since the Internet is booming despite the down economy.”

Since 1987, California DanceArts has been dedicated to the purpose of grooming and nurturing the talents of beginning to serious career dance students. The school has established a reputation as a career preparatory studio for dancers transitioning to the professional level. Currently located in beautiful La Canada, California, the school provides three large studio spaces featuring sprung floors designed to prevent injury, 20-foot high ceilings geared for unobstructed jumping, wall mirrors and air conditioning. Director Erin Holt also runs California Contemporary Ballet, a dance company that puts on several original ballet productions per year, including the Snow Queen (www.snowqueenballet.com), an original ballet with an original music score. This show is put on every December and is going into its 13^th season. The school’s blog can be seen at http://caldancearts.typepad.com. For more information about California DanceArts and the programs offered by the school, call 818-790-7924, or visit the school online at www.caldancearts.com.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for a wide variety of businesses for 22 years. RealWebMarketing.net was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area, and has clients all over the U.S, in a wide variety of fields such as dance instruction, ticket brokerage, direct mail, health care, consulting, construction, personnel recruitment, court reporting, drug rehabilitation, publishing, software, jewelry manufacturing and online sales, residential and commercial real estate, tax consulting, plumbing, dentistry, pool remodeling, and many others. The services offered by RealWebMarketing.net include web design, blog design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization, link building, article syndication, optimized press releases, RSS feeds, and video production.

 

 

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous