Internet Marketing On Into the New Decade

by John Eberhard

At this time of year I usually try to look forward into the coming year and predict or make a statement of what I think are going to be the most important Internet marketing strategies for the coming year.

While it is impossible to know what new technologies will be developed in the coming year, here’s an overview of my take on Internet marketing into the new decade.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising: PPC advertising continues to be a dominant aspect of Internet marketing, partly because you can directly control it, whereas with some other website marketing actions, you can only indirectly control them. PPC is a great fit for local companies of medium to large size. Google AdWords is the major player. Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center merged in October, now both under the banner of MSN. Facebook also has a pay per click advertising program. In some industries it does not work well because of excessive competition. I think it’s best to work with an experienced consultant.

2. Google Maps: This is a relatively new offering from Google. When they detect that your search is local in nature, i.e. you are searching for a local business such as a pizza restaurant or a dentist or a home improvement company, they will display a map showing where the local businesses are. The map is shown in the right hand column, with balloons marking where the businesses are. Then in the left hand column, the listings for those businesses appear, with balloons to show that they are associated with the map.

You have to go through a specific procedure to get your business on Google Maps. Just because you have a Google AdWords or Google Analytics account does not mean you will appear on Google Maps. It also helps to put up accounts on about 8-10 other specific sites, which Google recognizes, and that helps to push your Google Maps listing toward the top.

With local businesses, getting a listing on Google Maps is vital, because if you can get near the top of the Google Maps listings, it immediately puts your listing on page one of Google results.

3. SEO and Link Building: SEO and link building remain a vital aspect of getting your web site to rank well for your targeted keywords. SEO or search engine optimization means to select keywords for your business that have good traffic but not a ton of sites competing for them, then putting those keywords into specific areas of your web site.

Link building means to create links to your web site, on other web sites. Google says that the number of links to your site from other sites is the number one criteria they use in how high to rank your site for your keywords.

Many companies used to do what is called reciprocal link building, where you contact owners of other sites and offer to trade links. Google downgraded the value of these links about two years ago, so I don’t do this and don’t recommend it. But a lot of people still think this is what you do when you’re talking about link building.

The best methods for link building, in my opinion, continue to be article marketing and optimized press releases. These methods can be used to build your links up to 2,000-3,000 in just a couple months. I have heard of some new link building methods on the horizon and we’ll see how they shake out in the new year.

4. Blogging: Blogging continues to be a vital part of website marketing. You write anything from a short post (100-200 words) up to a full article (400 words or more) or a press release, and post them to your blog. The key is to write and post things on your blog regularly, i.e. once a week or more. Then you must notify the blog search engines that you have new content, using www.pingomatic.com. Wordpress sites allow you to do this automatically. You can also link up to 3 keywords in your post back to your main web site, which creates links.

5. Social Media Marketing: Facebook and Twitter remain the top social media sites. The trick in marketing your business through these is two-fold: 1) get lots of friends or followers, and 2) engage with your friend or follower group via regular communication. On Facebook, as an example, you can post things about your business, but you also have to post personal comments occasionally, like about your family or your vacations or whatever. If you only post things about your business, your friends will get bored with you or even remove you from their friends list. This is especially true if you are constantly asking people to buy your book or attend your webinar or sign up for your teleseminar. It is also vital to view the updates of other people and make comments about them occasionally. That’s part of the social media interaction or engagement. For Twitter I use a software program called Tweet Adder to build up followers. With this product I have built up my own Twitter account to 6,800 followers.

6. Email Marketing: This is still a very relevant and valid way to market your company. But in my opinion rented email lists no longer seem to have much punch. So I’m talking about developing your own in-house list of prospects and customers. You have to have some offerings on your web site that will entice people to give you their name and email address, such as a free email newsletter, free reports or white papers on topics related to your products or services, or free tools or software demos (for software companies). Then send them regular emails offering your services. Also, use one of the online email services like Aweber or Mailchimp.

That’s my summary of Internet marketing in the coming year. May the New Year be your most prosperous yet.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Pay Per Click Advertising – an Introduction

by John Eberhard

Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of Pay Per Click Advertising. This term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines such as Google or MSN, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears.

For instance, if someone goes to a search engine and enters "antivirus software", you will see regular search results that come up for this term, but on many search engines, you will also see paid advertising, usually labeled as "sponsored links." That means that some company that sells antivirus software has paid to have that listing appear when anyone enters the search term "antivirus software."

One can choose any word or phrase at all and choose to have your ad appear when people enter that phrase on that search engine. However, you want to select words or phrases that are at least somewhat popular, i.e. that a lot of people are entering. That way you get decent exposure for your ad.

One of the biggest advantages to pay per click (PPC) advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with Google or MSN, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With PPC advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are currently including sponsored links as part of their search results. For Google, the most popular of all the search engines currently, the sponsored links appear in the narrow, far-right column (and also with the top three results along the top), whereas the regular search results appear in the wider left-hand column. Google’s PPC program is called "AdWords."

There are a number of other benefits to this type of advertising. First of all, with search engines, one always has the advantage that the web visitor went there specifically to get information on what you sell. If you sell antivirus software and you can put your ad in front of people that are looking for antivirus software, it doesn’t get much more targeted than that.

Secondly, it is very easy and quick to get started. You can start an account and have your listings up and running within hours. And you don’t have to struggle through and worry about the myriad requirements of the search engines in order for you to be listed high in the regular or “organic” results. Not to say you can’t do that too, but what we’re saying is that PPC advertising is a lot easier and is very effective.

Getting Started

Google is the largest PPC program in that it has by far the most traffic. Yahoo Search Marketing recently merged with MSN Ad Center, so if you start an account on MSN your ads will also appear on Yahoo.

Determining Your Best Search Terms

One of the first things you will have to do is to select the key words or key phrases on which you will pay to have your ad appear. Here’s how we recommend you do this:

1. Try to adopt the viewpoint of a person who would be looking for your product or service. Think about what words or phrases they might type into a search engine in order to find your product or service. Start making a list.

2. Go to the web sites of one of the companies competing against you. From your browser select View | Source. This shows the HTML source code of that particular web page. Near the top you will see a paragraph like this:

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="pay per click search engines, pay
for placement, pay ranking search engines, bid position, pay per
click">

This is called the meta-tag area of a web page, which is hidden when you view the page normally but is visible when you select View | Source. Meta-tags on a web site help in order to achieve good rankings in the regular (non-paid) search results of a search engine.

After where it says CONTENT=, and within the quotation marks, are search terms or phrases that that company thinks are significant for their product or service. Those are phrases where they hope to appear near the top of the regular listings when people type those phrases into a search engine.

I used to advise people to go to a free site to see what the search numbers were for all the keywords before they got started with a Google AdWords account. Now I advise people to just put them all up in an ad campaign on Google and see how the numbers look after a week or so. Google also has a keyword tool which you can use once you start your account.

Bids and Bidding

For PPC advertising, during the process of setting up your account and your ads that are connected to specific key phrases, you will be asked how much money you want to bid for that keyword. In other words, how much money you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site.

In general, the higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear amongst all the ads of all the advertisers running ads for that keyword. It is definitely not necessary to be in the #1 position in order to get people coming to your web site.

In general we recommend bidding $1.00 per click when first setting up an account or new campaign. Then review your account over the next week and see how high that places your ads. And see if you are getting a fair number of clickthroughs. If your ad is appearing low and your clickthroughs are low, raise the bid.

Budgets

Google and MSN allow you to set a budget for your campaign. So figure out what you want to spend for your clickthroughs for a month and divide by 30, and that’s your daily budget.

I’m going to say some things that may discourage you from doing PPC advertising. In setting up and managing dozens and dozens of PPC accounts over the last 6 years, I have observed that you have to a monthly budget of a certain size in order for your campaigns to be successful.

In the beginning I used to have client accounts where their budget was $200 per month, $300, $400, etc. Hard experience has shown me that budgets of this size rarely work. For whatever reason, I have seen that accounts with small budgets like this have not had successful campaigns in about 80% of cases. I have seen that accounts with monthly budgets of over $1,000 have been successful in about 90% of cases.

I define a successful campaign as getting an adequate number of sales or leads, with a viable cost per lead or sale. So if you can only afford $200 or $300 per month, I’d advise you not to do PPC advertising. Wait until you can afford to do a larger budget.

Writing Your Ad

The next important issue is the writing of your ad. The ad will consist of a headline, ad text, and an Internet address. On Google AdWords, you get a strict limit of number of characters per line for the headline (25 characters including spaces), and two lines of text with 35 characters each.

The headline will appear in bold. So you want to grab the person’s attention with your headline. It is often a good idea to include the key phrase in the headline, though this is not a hard and fast rule.

One of the many advantages of pay per click advertising is that you can write your ad copy, and put the ad up, and then see what the response is, and if it does poorly, it basically doesn’t cost you anything.

You can experiment with different wording for your ad and your headline. Whenever you make a change, Google automatically records data on the change, so you can review your “change history” later to see which changes you made when. Then when your response goes up or down, you know what the change was that caused it and when that change was made.

Your Landing Page

When you set up your ad on Google or MSN, you will have to choose a "landing page" for the ad. That’s the page where the person lands when he clicks on your ad. A few tips on how to work your landing pages:

1. In all cases, it is best NOT to have the landing page be the home page of your site. We recommend to create a new page whose sole purpose is to be a landing page for that paid ad on one of the search engines.

2. Do not put navigation buttons on the landing page to the rest of your site. Design the page so that the only thing they can do on that page is fill out the form you want them to fill out. This will always increase response, and giving them full navigational buttons to every other page under the sun on your site will always lower response. Giving them only one option controls the process to a much greater degree.

3. Design the landing page so that there is a bit of sales text on the top of the page, including any graphics as needed, and then there is a phone number and a form on the lower part of the page. If possible, do not make them click through to yet another page to fill out the form or buy the product.

Geo-Targeting

Google and MSN now have a feature called geo-targeting, where, when you set up your campaign, you can select where your ads will appear geographically. So if you have a local business that sells to the public in the greater Los Angeles area, you can select the metro LA area and your ads will only appear there. This is very important so that you are not paying for people to click on your ads in places where you can’t sell your product or service to them.

Managing and Measuring Your Campaign

On Google and MSN, by logging into your account you can see various statistics on your account. Here are the most important things to look for in measuring how you’re doing:

a. Impressions: These are the number of people that saw your ad, meaning they entered one of your specific keywords or phrases, and your ad appeared. You can see the total impressions by day, for the week, and you can break it out so you can see the impressions for specific key phrases.

High impressions means that you have selected key phrases that a lot of people are entering.

b. Clickthroughs: This means the number of people that, having seen your ad, clicked on it and arrived on your landing page. The search engines will show the clickthroughs as a raw number and also as a percentage compared to the impressions.

High clickthrough percentages means you have been successful in writing an ad that a good percentage of people were interested enough to click on, to go to your site.

c. Conversion Rate: This means the percentage of people that clicked through and went to your site, that actually did what you wanted them to do. If you are selling products right on the site, the conversion rate means what percentage of people that arrived there actually bought the product. If you are advertising to generate leads, the conversion rate is the percentage of people that clicked through that filled out the form and sent you their information.
In order to have this conversion rate information, you have to put what is called “conversion code” on your “thank you page” that people come to after they fill out your form. Many people don’t know about this (both Google and MSN have it) but it is a vital tool in measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The conversion rate is a measure of success of your landing page. If you are getting good conversion rates that means you have done a good job of writing and designing the landing page. If your conversion rate is poor, that means you need to look again at the landing page and figure out where you could change it to make it better, or at what points you might be losing people.

In our experience:

1. A good clickthrough percentage is anything over 0.5%. If you are getting 1.0% or better, that’s pretty good. If you are getting less than 0.5%, you should test some changes to your ad. Remember that a poor clickthrough percentage is a reflection of your search engine ad, not your landing page. So make changes to your ad, not your landing page, when trying to improve it.
2. A good conversion rate is anything from 3% to 5%. The highest conversion rate we have ever gotten on a web site is 50%. If you are getting 2% or less, you should test some changes to your landing page and try to improve it.

And likewise remember that a poor conversion rate is a reflection of your landing page, so make any needed changes there.

Summary

In the constantly changing landscape of the Internet and Internet marketing, pay per click advertising is currently a very successful tool. If you are selling a product or service that costs over $200, we recommend you try it.

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Building Quality Links with Online PR in 2011

by John Eberhard

Having links to your web site from other sites is very important. In fact, it is the primary factor used by Google in deciding your site's ranking for any given keyword.

In other articles I have discussed submitting articles to "article directories," also called "content hubs." This is a great way to build quantity links to your web site, as your articles appear on the content hubs themselves and they count as a link to you, plus your articles get downloaded and posted on other web sites and blogs.

Optimized press releases are a great way to build quality links to your web site. I recommend doing this in conjunction with submitting articles to article directories. That way, you're getting the quantity and quality links.

Online PR consists of writing optimized press releases, putting them out on a blog, and also submitting them to online PR or press release sites.

There are a fair number of web sites now that are public relations sites, where you can register, then submit press releases to them. These online PR sites serve several purposes:

a.Journalists can use them to find interesting news stories, which they will then print in other news outlets, including web sites, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV stations.

b.When you submit a press release to an online PR site, the content from these press releases can get into Google News and other big news sites, where it then influences the search engine rankings for your web site.

c. These online PR sites rank really well on search engines, so your release will rank highly.

Optimized Press Releases

An "optimized press release" is a press release which announces an event of some kind, and which contains your selected high priority keywords. These are the keywords that you would like your web site to rank highly for in the regular search engine results pages (SERPs).

By writing press releases that are optimized for the keywords you would like to rank for, and then submitting these to online PR sites, these releases will get listed in Google News, and will then move over into regular Google listings.

It is ideal to write an optimized press release and send it out on online PR sites once a week, and continue doing this over a several month period. But if you can’t do this every week, once or twice a month is still very helpful.

Blogs: How They Work

One important thing to do with a press release is to put it on your blog. Blogs are treated as more important than a regular web site by the search engines, as they tend to be updated more regularly with new information. And the people running the major search engines consider fresh content to be very important.

I used to take new articles on my site and client sites and put them into an RSS feed, which stands for “really simple syndication.” However, I don’t bother with this anymore because all blogs create an RSS feed automatically and update it every time you put a new post on the blog. But for people who are interested, they can pull your RSS feed into an RSS feed reader, which is a handy way to review new content from selected sources that you want to follow.

After you post a new press release on your blog, you want to ping (send a notification out to) the blog search engines. There are about 30 of these specialized search engines. This then gets your latest article or release listed in the blog search engines. Wordpress blogs can be configured to do this automatically every time you post something. For other blogs you can use the site www.pingomatic.com which only takes a minute and is free.

The key things to keep in mind with online PR and optimized press releases are:

1. Write a new release frequently. Weekly is best.

2. Use the keywords in the release that you want to be ranking highly for.

3. Submit the press release to at least one free online PR site. Select one that will get the content into Google News. We submit client releases to 5 sites.

4. Put the article up onto your blog.

5. Ping the blog search engines.

6. Repeat the process each week and keep it up for several months. This will really start to raise your rankings for the keywords you are targeting in your optimized press releases.

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Tracking the Success of Your Web Site 2011

by John Eberhard

Now that you have a web site and you are trying to get people to come to it and become leads, or sales, or just to use the site, it is vital to be able to measure how well you are doing each week. By watching your web site statistics, you can gauge how well each new change you make to the site or to your promotional efforts is working. You can reinforce the things that are working well and drop the things that aren't.

Following Your Statistics

It is vital to have a good statistics program to be able to track the statistics of visits to your site. I used to recommend several programs or services for this purpose, but Google Analytics is a free service from Google and is quite good, so I recommend to everyone to set up Analytics on their web sites now. It just takes an hour or two to set it up, although you need to have the right software to do it.

By using Google Analytics you can really see what's happening with your site daily, weekly, monthly, or for even longer periods.

The key statistics you want to be able to track weekly include:

1. User Sessions: This is the number of people that came to your site in a given week. Some statistics programs track the total number of User Sessions, which can include multiple sessions from one person, and others track unique User Sessions, meaning they count each user only once. I personally think total User Sessions is more valuable as a statistic, because theoretically you want people to keep coming back. Analytics can tell you both.

2. Page Views: This is the total number of pages that people looked at on your web site in a given period of time. This of course will always be higher than the User Sessions unless your site only has one page (I would hope it has more). Obviously, the higher the Page Views are in relation to your User Sessions, the better. That shows that people are staying on your site and looking around, not just coming to your home page and then leaving.

3. Referrals: Analytics allows you to see what other web sites people are coming to you from. These could include search engines or other sites where there is a link to your site. This is probably the most important thing to monitor on your web site, because it shows you how successful your online marketing actions are.

4. Page Views by Page: You should check out how many Page Views each individual page on your site is getting. This shows how well people are moving around the site and which pages are attracting the most attention. This is especially important as you put up new features and new pages and you can see how people are responding to them.

Analytics will also show you which pages most people entered the site through, and which pages they exited the site from. This is important because if you see that most people are coming to your home page and also exiting the site from your home page, it shows you are not enticing them to stay. That tells you that you need to make the choices on the home page more interesting or more appealing. You should use market research surveys to tell you what your public wants, and then use that information to get them to stay and move around the site.

5. Keywords: I like to look at what keywords people used to find your site on search engines. This gives you an idea of which keywords you are currently ranking well for on the search engines.

6. Sales or Leads: Some sites are set up to generate leads, i.e. people responding that your salespersons can call, while other sites are set up to generate sales directly online. Which one you have usually depends on the price range of the product or service. For higher prices you usually need a salesperson to bring home the sale, whereas with lower prices you can get people to buy it online.

Whichever one you have from your site: leads or sales, you should track these weekly and see how the various actions you are doing or changes that you are making are contributing to or detracting from your online leads or sales, and manage accordingly.

Tracking statistics from your web site is vital to your overall website marketing success and should be done at least once a week.

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