RealWebMarketing.net Designs New Web Sites for California DanceArts

New Web Sites Will Highlight Organization's Dance Instruction and Professional Dance Company

LA CANADA, CA: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company, has completed designing three new web sites for California DanceArts and California Contemporary Ballet, located in La Canada, CA (http://www.caldancearts.com, http://www.calballet.com and http://www.snowqueenballet.com).

California DanceArts is a dance school offering everything from contemporary dance instruction to classical ballet, for beginner to the professional level. California Contemporary Ballet is a non-profit professional dance company that puts on several major original ballet productions per year, including "The Snow Queen" in mid-December. The school and company were founded by Aerin Holt.

Aerin Holt, Founder and Artistic Director of California DanceArts and California Contemporary Ballet, stated “I am very pleased with the work that Real Web Marketing did on re-designing my site. My intention was to have a very big, bold, and dramatic web site that really showed what we do visually. We reviewed the web sites of other top ballet schools and companies around the country, and I think the final product that we got rivals any of them."

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing stated, “Coming from an artistic background myself, being a designer and formerly a full time musician, I enjoyed working with Aerin and creating a web site that highlights the creative work that she does."

All three sites are built using a similar design, where the entire background is taken up with a large photo of one of the school or company's activities, and each section of the site has a different background picture, giving a lot of visual variety to the sites. Plus the main text box and sidebar are partially transparent, allowing visitors to see the entire large background picture. And all the sites are built in Wordpress, allowing Holt to easily make changes to the content of the site.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for 23 years. Real Web Marketing Inc. was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area and incorporated in 2011, and has clients all over the U.S. Services offered include web design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization (SEO), link building, social media marketing, local marketing, copywriting, article syndication, online PR, and video production.

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Real Web Marketing Designs New Web Site for West Coast Fab Inc.

New Web Site Highlights Company's Precision Sheet Metal Fabrication Services

RICHMOND, CA: Real Web Marketing Inc. (http://www.realwebmarketing.net), a web design and website marketing company in Los Angeles, has completed designing a new web site for West Coast Fab Inc., a precision sheet metal fabrication company located in Richmond, CA, in the Bay area (http://www.westcoastfabinc.com). The site features an extensive photo gallery of samples of the company's products.

Tom Nelson, President and founder of West Coast Fab Inc., stated “I am very pleased with the work that Real Web Marketing did on re-designing our site. We wanted a site that was a lot more modern and dramatic. The new design accomplished that and it immediately communicates what our company does, and shows off our finished products and our facility."

John Eberhard, President of Real Web Marketing stated, “I enjoyed working with the folks at West Coast Fab. They obviously are a top sheet metal fabrication company and I wanted the site to reflect the level of quality that the company maintains."

West Coast Fab Inc. was founded in 1973. As a precision sheet metal manufacturing company, the company fabricates everything from enclosures to brackets, from chassis to panels, and faceplates to fixtures.  Their sole purpose is to provide our customers with the finest precision sheet metal fabrication possible. The company provides services to a variety of industries, including computer, lighting, entertainment, architectural, home improvement, automotive, sports and recreation, scientific, aerospace, military, marine, industrial, medical, semiconductor, communications, and construction.

John Eberhard has been involved in marketing for 23 years. Real Web Marketing Inc. was founded in 1999 in the Los Angeles area and incorporated in 2011, and has clients all over the U.S. Services offered include web design, pay-per-click advertising campaign management, search engine optimization (SEO), link building, social media marketing, local marketing, copywriting, article syndication, online PR, and video production.

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Building an Email List

by John Eberhard

Back around 12 years ago I did a lot of email marketing to rented email lists. Then we had the spam email explosion and that basically killed the rented email marketing universe, just because people were getting too much email.

I have never been in agreement with Seth Godin's idea that you must never email to anyone unless you have permission. A guy I used to work for said he thought it was easier to get forgiveness than permission, and I like that concept.

But on the other hand, it is good to build up a list of people who have contacted you and given you permission to send them email. Then they tend to be more accepting of and interested in your email when it comes.

So how do you build up an email list? Basically you have to put up multiple ways for people to contact you on your site, and offer them multiple things that they would want, where they have to give you their email to get it.

Unfortunately this takes a little time. But you need to formulate a strategy and implement it so that you can start building that list, because having a large email list is an incredible resource.

The point is that with a large email list, you can market to it on a regular basis for little to no money.

Building a List

The key to building a list is to offer things that people will respond to, giving you their email address.

1. Contact Forms on Your Services Pages: If you have various pages on your site talking about your products or services, put a form on each one of those pages so the person can contact you for more information. On my site I have forms for people to contact me regarding SEO, pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and so on. Then when someone fills out one of the forms, they get an automated email right away that tells them that they will automatically be subscribed to my newsletter, and they can opt out at any time.

1. Email Newsletter: Offer a free email newsletter subscription on your web site. This doesn’t have as much appeal as it used to because people are getting so many emails. But if you put together a good newsletter with good content and promote it, people will come. Of course you have to commit to writing and putting out the newsletter regularly.

1. Free Reports or White Papers: I have used this tactic successfully for a lot of companies. Come up with a topic that you think will resonate with your target public, write a snappy title, then write 1,000-2,000 words, and design it with a nice cover and some graphics. Put it in PDF format so you can email it to people for free. Your topic should be something that is directly aligned with your product or service, so that everyone reaching for it will be a possible prospect, now or later on. Then get the word out on various channels and offer the report for free, but of course require that they give you their contact info including email. Works great for consumers and business to business.

1. Software Demos: If you sell software, it is vital to offer a demo version of the software on your site, and this will get you more email addresses than you can shake a stick at, IF you are getting traffic.

I have sometimes seen companies have videos on their site and make people give their email to see the video. But generally I have not seen that work as well as offering people a white paper. Somehow the offer of a free report or white paper seems like more of a tangible item that people would receive, rather than just seeing a video.

What and How Often to Send

Once you build up hundreds or thousands of names, you can email to them on a regular basis. I would say that usually up to once a week is OK. More often than that and you will start to get a lot of askoffs.

Send them an email newsletter. I am sending mine out weekly now, and I get a steady stream of business from it. The main part of the newsletter should be some article giving advice or data of some value, but you can include ads or blurbs selling your products, and of course with lots of links to your web site and blog. You can have more than one article, or an article along with various news items about your company. But I have generally seen that one article is adequate content for a newsletter, along with some short blurbs and ads for your services. The article should be 300-800 words.

You can also come up with emails promoting special offers, new products, old products. You can also send out a press release announcing some new product or service whenever you start a new one.

How to Send

You can either send using an email program that sits on your computer desktop, or you can use one of the cloud based email services.

I used a product called Mass Emailer for years that is desktop based, but recently it just stopped working. I found a new product for desktop based emailing called Send Blaster, and that is working well for me. I create my HTML newsletters or emails in Dreamweaver, then send to my heart’s content.

There are also several online email services, including Constant Contact, iContact, Aweber and Mailchimp. Those are the most popular services. Constant Contact is perhaps the most well known, but I find it the worst in terms of giving you different options to do different things. I like Aweber the best and use it for most of my clients.

These services cost in the neighborhood of $20 per month at the beginning. You sign up, set up your list or lists, then create a web form, and put that onto pages of your web site. Some HTML knowledge is required to get it set up with your web site. Then to send something you log into your interface and either use one of their templates or upload a file you have created using Dreamweaver or some other web authoring program.

Also makes sure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, with mainly consists of putting your physical address in the email, and having an opt-out option for people. And you have to remove anyone who asks off in 10 days.

Good luck with building up your email list.

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Copyrighted Content

by John Eberhard

I want to warn my readers about a new trend that is happening with regard to the Internet.

When content is copyrighted, such as written text and pictures, that means that the copyright owner has the sole right to use that content. And if someone else uses it, he has the right to demand that they stop using it, and he has the right to demand that the other person pay him money for each use of the copyrighted material.

Technically, a person who wants to copyright something has to fill out a copyright form and submit that to the Library of Congress. But for practical purposes, all they really need to do to be able to support their claim to a copyright for content on the web, is to put a notice on the bottom of the page that the page is copyrighted.

I have seen that many people think that they can “borrow” content from other web sites, by copying and pasting written text, or downloading photos or other graphics. And I know this practice is widespread.

Over the last two years I have seen several instances where a person or company did this – borrowed content from another web site - and then were later threatened suit by the original owner of the copyrighted content. And the monetary demands were not small. In most cases in the $2,000 range or more.

Owners of stock photography sites, where you pay a fee for the use of a copyrighted photograph, have been doing this for years, i.e. locating people who had used their photos without paying money, then demanding money from those people. But lately I have seen owners of other web sites taking the time to try to locate people who had used their copyrighted content, then hiring a lawyer to send that person a demand for money.

We could comment on why this is happening now. Maybe it has something to do with the state of economy. Who knows? But the point is that borrowing copyrighted content from other web sites has now become a very dangerous practice. Search engines make it relatively easy for someone to search for their written text content, or even for the names of photo files if the borrower did not change the file name.

So the upshot of all this is to realize that you CANNOT use written text or photo or graphic content from other web sites, whether they show a copyright notice or not.

Secondly, I recommend that anyone who has borrowed written text or graphics from other web sites, spend the time to search through and remove it from any of their online content. I am not a lawyer so if you think you have a potential liability, you might want to consult a specialized copyright attorney (they are not cheap).

Good News

The good news is that there are a number of sites where you can find free photos for use on your web sites and blog posts. I use a site called Stock Xchange (www.sxc.hu) which offers free stock photos and has a lot of content.

Over the past several years I have purchased a lot of photos from iStock Photo (www.istockphoto.com) because they started out with very low prices, usually $2-5 per photo. In the last year, however, they have started dramatically raising their prices. So I have not been too happy about that. Then lately I found a site called 123RF (www.123rf.com) which has lower prices like iStock did in the beginning.

There is also a concept called "creative commons" with photo sharing sites, where people can upload their photos and allow others to use the photos for commercial purposes. Flickr has a creative commons area, where you can download photos and use for commercial purposes. And there is a lot of content there.
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

Here is a helpful article on creative commons:
http://www.savingforsomeday.com/blog-law-posting-and-using-photos-on-photo-sharing-sites/

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More on SEO Today

By John Eberhard

My recent article "What is SEO Today" got more responses than any recent article, so obviously there is a lot of interest in SEO (search engine optimization) these days. Here is more on how to drive traffic to your site with SEO.

Often when I go to look at a site where the site owner has asked me to evaluate their SEO or give them a quote for SEO, I will see lots of single word keywords being used. This is not a good idea for several reasons.

First of all, the idea with keywords is you want to select keywords to use on your site that you have a chance of ranking for. In other words, the goal is you want to rank well for a given keyword, so that people will see your listing and visit your web site.

You want keywords that have a good number of searches, but not a lot of competing sites. If there are a lot of competing sites, you will not have a shot at ranking well for that keyword.

The thing with single word keywords is that most of them have over one million competing sites. Chances are you are never going to be able to rank well for that keyword. And if you did, it would take you years and likely cost you a lot of money to get to that point.

The Search Cycle

At the beginning of the search cycle, people type in more general keywords, either single words or phrases that describe the whole category of thing they are searching for, such as “MP3 player.” Then after they have done some initial searches and learned a bit about the category, they will then enter more specific phrases, such as “ipod mp3 player.” Then as they are getting ready to buy, they will enter even more specific phrases describing the specific product they want to buy, such as “ipod nano 4GB.” Note that this final, third phase is the time when the person is most likely to BUY. At that point he is usually looking for places where he can buy the product and comparing prices.

Keywords that are from this third phase of the searching cycle, which are most descriptive and which tend to be 2-4 words or more are called “long tail” keywords. These keywords are not only usually easier to have your site rank for them, but they tend to be the phrases the person types in when he is closest to being ready to buy.

Most people who I talk to who are not trained in these facts tend to think that they want to target keywords that describe the overall category, usually single word keywords, like “golf,” “consulting,” “dentist,” “chiropractor,” “marketing,” “computers,” etc. Although these single word keywords tend to have lots of searches, people typing them in are not usually at the buying point in the whole search cycle. And because most of these single word keywords have millions of competing sites, in most cases you won't be able to rank for them.

Local Keywords

There are a number of SEO guys out there today pitching that they will get your site to rank well for local oriented keywords, meaning keywords that contain words related to your product or service, plus the name of the city or cities where you operate.

I think using local oriented keywords is a good idea. But I have some qualifiers. First of all, be aware that most of these keywords have little to no traffic coming to them. So it's great if Joe Blow SEO guy can get you to rank on page one for "landscape contractor Butte MT," but if there are 3 searches per year for that keyword, it is not worth the trouble to do that or to pay money to have someone get you onto page one of Google for that keyword.

So I think it is a good idea to take your highest traffic keywords related to your category, and add city names onto them and target those. But be aware of the traffic issue. Because you can be #1 on Google for a keyword but if no one searches for it, that won't help you at all.

For local businesses, I think it is more profitable to embark on a program to get to the top of the Google Maps / Google Places listings.

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What is SEO Today?

by John Eberhard

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is basically what you do to make a web site rank better on search engines and therefore get more traffic. Getting more traffic to a web site is the goal of SEO.

There are two parts to SEO, called "on-page optimization" and "off-page optimization." On-page optimization is what you specifically do to a web page to make it able to rank better.

Off-page optimization is where you build up links to a web site coming from other web sites. If a web site owner has not done any type of link building, a typical web site will have anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand links. To compete properly you should have links into the tens of thousands.

Google has stated that the number of links coming to your web site is its most important criteria for determining how high to rank the site. And the number of links that you need is determined by how many your competitors have.

Both on-page and off-page optimization are vital in order to achieve the goal of SEO which is increased traffic to the site.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization consists of:

a. Doing keyword research to determine the best keywords to target. You need to find keywords that have good traffic, but a relatively low number of competing sites. You generally want to stay away from single word keywords, as these will tend to have competing sites into the millions, so you'll never be able to rank well for those keywords. Plus multiple word keyword phrases (often called "long tail keywords") tend to be more detailed and are usually the keywords people tend to type in when they are actually ready to buy something.

b. Selecting three primary keywords for each page of your site, based on relevance to the page, high traffic and low competing sites.

c. Writing custom titles and descriptions for each page of your site, utilizing the primary keywords for that page. These are the titles (underlined in blue) and descriptions that appear on a search engine when your listing appears in response to a search.

d. Put the titles and descriptions onto the website in the appropriate places, and use the keywords in any other appropriate places.

This process used to be just called SEO, but in the past two years the term SEO has been expanded to include link building. So that's how the term "on-page optimization" was created by some bright chap.

Off-Page Optimization - Link Building

Link building is the process whereby you build up the number of links leading to your site coming from other sites.

In the past, the owner of a site used to email other site owners and ask to trade links, i.e. "I'll link to your site if you link to mine." This is called reciprocal linking and is not done much any more because Google discounted the value of it about four years ago. But some SEO consultants still do it, much to my amazement.

It is best to create what are called one-way inbound links today. The best ways I have found to do this are:

a. Write articles and submit these to article directories. This is the most successful way to get volume links.

b. Write press releases and submit these to multiple online PR sites.

c. Create multiple blogs and post the articles and releases from "a" and "b" above to all the blogs.

A link building program should be continued for at least 6-12 months.

Let's talk about volume for a minute. A successful link building program should be able to create 500+ links per month.

A few months I read an article by a well known Internet marketing lady, and she said she was testing three link building services. After a month the top one had gotten her 38 links. I practically fell over dead. If we got a client only 38 links in a month, I would assume we forgot to show up. You need thousands of links so 38 per month is not going to cut it.

In the past year and a half, we have heard a lot about the Google Panda update, and then the Google penguin update. Panda was in the spring of 2011, and penguin was in February of this year. What's this all about?

Well the deal with Google is that they have a system of ranking web sites and they try to make that work well for users. And over the years a lot of web site owners have used various methods to try to make their web sites rank higher. Because higher ranking means more people will see your listing and visit your site.

Google has branded a lot of these methods as "unethical" and maybe some of them are. But I think in their zeal they have adopted an attitude whereby they don't really want anyone to be able to be "cause" over their rankings. In other words, they have arrived at a point where they don't really want you to be able to do anything that positively affects your rankings.

And this includes SEO consultants. Google occasionally tries to make it appear like they are working with SEO consultants and all, but ultimately they don't really want SEO's to be able to do their jobs. It just makes more work for them. I've written about this before and hopefully won't belabor the point too much here.

But the upshot of all this is that supposedly the Google Panda update was designed to hurt or penalize the activity of using article directories. And supposedly the Google Penguin update was designed to hurt the activity of creating what are called "anchor text" links, where you get a link from some site linking to yours, and the words that are linked are a popular keyword.

We have been hearing for years that the best possible type of link you could get to your site was an anchor text link, i.e. a keyword linked to your site. So now Google thinks "Oh my gosh, we gotta do away with that!" Supposedly now you are only supposed to have a certain percentage of your links be anchor text, because anything over that indicates an "unnatural link pattern." I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up.

I say "supposedly," because I have continued submitting client articles to article directories for the past year and half, carefully monitoring results. And I can see absolutely NO negative affect from doing so over that period of time.

And when I learned about Penguin, I checked my client accounts and found that the percentages were OK. In other words, the percentage of "anchor text" links were not above the arbitrarily offending level.

Sometimes I think that Google says that they are doing something in the update, but it's actually just a threat and they don't really do it. One effect of the Panda update is that the number of article directory sites has decreased a lot, which is a shame because they are a great way to create volume links.

I have recently written some articles on SEO case histories, showing significant increases in traffic due to an SEO program. Doing an SEO program and sticking with it over a year will get your excellent results.

 

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Getting Survey Data Inexpensively Online

By John Eberhard

It’s important to know what your target public needs and wants before launching expensive promotion to that public.

But it’s often hard to impossible for small businesses to be able to hire a market research company to do surveys for them. So I’m going to tell you how you can get survey data inexpensively online.

Email Survey

The first inexpensive way to get survey data is to send out a bulk email asking people to fill out your survey.

The first thing that makes it possible to do this is that you have to have access to an email list of your target public. For instance, if you are a home improvement company, your target public is homeowners in your geographical area. So you have to get an email list of them. If your business does consulting to dentists, you have to get an email list of dentists. Bear in mind that only a small percentage will fill out your survey, so you have to plan on a list of thousands of names.

Next, you have to offer the person something of value in order to do the survey. It would be nice if you didn’t have to do this, but I can tell you that in this day and age you have to offer the person something. What kinds of things?

1. Starbucks Card: I have had success doing this type of survey, on professionals, by offering them a $5 Starbucks card. Depending on who you are surveying, a $5 or $10 gift card from Starbucks or some other place will probably work great. Of course if you offer some tangible item like that you have to make sure you get the person’s street address.
2. Fancy Pens: When I worked at an insurance claims company several years ago, we had fancy metal pens made with the company name on them. Then we sent out an email to claims examiners asking them to fill out the survey and including a picture of the cool pen we were offering in the email. That worked great. And friends who still work at that company tell me that they now use glow pens, i.e. pens that light up, and that that works great.

You can get creative and think of other things to offer. But if you think about it, if you can get a survey done for $5 to $10, that’s a pretty cheap survey, much cheaper than if you hired a professional surveyor to call people. And in the last 20 years, it has gotten harder and harder to get people on the phone in general, and professionals or high level executives in particular.

There is one other cost to think about and that is the email list. Unless you have been in business a long time and already have a large email list of clients and/or prospects, you will have to spend some money to get an email list. Some companies will sell you the email list outright, but that is rare. Most email companies will rent you the list, and you send your email to them and they will send it out for you.

You have to have a link in your email to the page where people will land and fill out your survey form. There are several companies that let you set up an account and then run online surveys on their system. Survey Monkey is one. One limitation with these services is basically your survey has to be mostly multiple choice questions. The plus is that for the multiple choice questions, the service automatically tabulates them for you.

I like to just put my questions into a form page on my web site and send people them there. Then the results get emailed to me and I tabulate them.

Email surveys are a great way to get survey information inexpensively. In a future article I’ll other ways to get market research information online.

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More Client Case Histories

By John Eberhard

In writing monthly reports for several clients recently I was able to see the results of our marketing their web sites over a period of time.

Client A
Tree Nursery, Northwest US
Designed a new web site for the company in February, 2011, did search engine optimization on the new site, then set up a Google AdWords account for them, and began a medium heavy link building program. The purpose of the link building program was to get them to rank highly on search engines for their targeted keywords, thus increasing their site traffic.

Current Keyword Ranking:
Keywords with #1 position: 4
Top ten ranking keywords: 24
Top 20 ranking keywords: 53
Top 100 ranking keywords: 121
Top 500 ranking keywords: 164

Current links to site: 15,700

Here’s a comparison of their site traffic this year compared to last year.

Month	2011 Visits	2012 Visits
April	4761	8175
May	3483	8071
June	1966	5786
July	3729	5297
August	3859	5,559
TOTALS	17,798	32,888

 

Client B
Editor for Authors, Texas
This client came to me in August 2010 and wanted search engine optimization done on her web site. We did the SEO and then began a medium program of link building. In the summer of 2011 we added social media marketing.

Current Keyword Ranking:
Keywords with #1 position: 12
Top ten ranking keywords: 19
Top 20 ranking keywords: 26
Top 100 ranking keywords: 35
Top 500 ranking keywords: 42

Current links to site: 14,100

Twitter followers: 5,198

Here’s a comparison of this client’s traffic from 2011 to 2012. Note that in May 2012 we had problems with Google Analytics and did not get an accurate count. Note most months in 2012 are double or more of the traffic from 2011.

Months 2011	Visits	Page Views	Months 2012	Visits	Page Views
Jan  11	316	901	Jan 12	650	1,249
Feb  11	239	759	Feb 12	551	1,288
Mar  11	248	562	Mar 12	703	1,474
Apr  11	189	524	Apr 12	679	1,322
May 11	283	757	May 12	314	838
Jun 11	294	655	June 12	556	1,098
Jul 11	246	617	July 12	684	1,476
Aug 11	298	806	Aug 12	715	1,591
TOTALS	2,113	5,581	TOTALS	4,852	10,336

 

Client C
Home Improvement Company, Southern California
This company came to us in August 2009. They wanted search engine optimization for their site, and we started managing their Google Adwords campaigns, and started a heavy link building program which we have continued for three years. We also started a blog for them separate from their main site.

Current Keyword Ranking:
Keywords with #1 position: 7
Top ten ranking keywords: 20
Top 20 ranking keywords: 32
Top 100 ranking keywords: 85
Top 500 ranking keywords: 103

Current links to site: 19,100

Twitter followers: 3,804

Here is a comparison of web traffic for the first six months we worked with the client compared to the last six months. The most recent traffic includes traffic to their blog.

Months 2011	Visits	Page Views	Months 2012	Visits	Page Views
July 09	877	3364	Mar 12	1689	3349
Aug 09	953	3268	Apr 12	1755	3821
Sept 09	978	2792	May 12	1513	3107
Oct 09	1020	2881	June 12	1477	2909
Nov 09	983	3000	July 12	1788	3484
Dec 09	730	2112	Aug 12	1462	3022
TOTALS	5,541	17,417	TOTALS	9,684	19,692

 

Summary

SEO, link building and social media marketing are extremely effective in building traffic to a web site. But it takes time and you have to be willing to stick with a program.

 

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Impact on Facebook

by John Eberhard

Social media sites are constantly evolving, partly because of the types of things that people post there. Facebook, the largest and most influential social media site, is no exception.

I am going to give you some tips on what types of things to post to Facebook when marketing some product or service, in order to get the most impact.

Facebook allows you a number of options in the types of things that you can post as a status update. You can post:

• A text only message
• A photo or graphic, including a text message about the graphic and if you like, a link to some other page on the Net
• A photo album, i.e. a collection of photos, plus text commentary about each photo if desired
• A link to some other page on the Net. Often, but not always, a small thumbnail of a photo from that page will get posted too. You can also include commentary about that link.
• A video, so that the video will play on the Facebook page
• An invitation to an event of some kind

Unfortunately, posting a text-only message on Facebook doesn’t have much impact any more. This is due to the heavy proliferation of people posting photos and graphics, often graphics with writing on them. With all this graphic content on Facebook, the text-only posts are getting sort of lost.

So if you want to post any content on Facebook to market your business, it needs to be graphic in content in order to break through the noise. Come up with some photo, video, or graphic that will promote your business. This is easier with some businesses than others. You may have to get creative and work on what type of graphic content would be right for your business.

And don’t use a tiny photo. Bear in mind that if someone clicks on the image, Facebook will enlarge it to take up almost the entire screen, with your text comment and any comments from others on the right hand side.

But I have sometimes seen people post some tiny photo, so when you click on it, the photo doesn’t get any bigger and is still tiny. As my wife’s old marketing boss used to say, use up some of that real estate. Plus, people now have the expectation that if they click they will see a larger version of the photo. Post a large photo, Facebook will reduce it for how it will appear in the news feed, and then when people click on it, it will appear larger. And a larger photo has what? More impact. That’s right.

I have recommended using Ping.fm, now Seesmic.com, and hooking up all your social media accounts to it, so you can post one thing and it goes out to all the different sites. The problem with this is that Seesmic.com is geared to Twitter, with the same limitations of text-only and a limit of 140 characters. So if you post via Seesmic, you will of course have a text-only post. Not that you can’t do that, but I think Facebook now merits special consideration and a custom posting just for Facebook, and of course, the use of photos or graphics.

And of course I’m talking about photos and graphics that promote your business, not cute photos of animals or feel-good sayings over a sunset.

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The Google Penguin Update

by John Eberhard

Periodically Google comes out with a major change in its algorithm, that then changes the way Google responds to people’s searches, and changes the way many web sites will rank. In other words, after a major algorithm update, your site may suddenly not rank as well for your major targeted keywords.

So fewer people will see your listing on Google, and fewer people will click on it and come to your site. Which would mean less traffic to your web site all of a sudden, potentially a lot less. For people who have spent years working on building up the traffic to their site, this can be quite upsetting.

Last year people were concerned about the Google Panda update that happened in May 2011. But the Google Penguin update (what’s next, Google Aardvark? Google Albatross? Google Komodo Dragon?) which came out in April 2012 has dwarfed concerns about the Panda update.

Quite simply Penguin is the most dramatic algorithm change in years. And some sites have been hit hard. If your site experienced a dramatic loss of traffic around the end of April of this year, you have likely been smacked by the Penguin.

Have You Been Gaming the System Again, You Naughty Boy/Girl?

The crux of the Penguin update has to do with search engine optimization, and specifically it has to do with links to your site.

The one thing that Google hates more than anything else in the whole wide world, is to feel that people are “gaming” their system. I have described elsewhere the silly logic that they have adopted, where they have based most of their ranking system on the number of links pointing to your site from other sites, but they don’t want you to do anything proactive to increase the number of links coming to your site.

You are supposed to just keep putting great content on your site, and people will see that and think it is so great that they will put a link to that content on some other site.

In my business I have opted for the road of (gasp!) proactively creating links to my site and clients’ sites.

So the Penguin update is essentially geared to detecting an “unnatural” link pattern, and penalizing sites where that pattern seems to indicate that we have been naughty boys and girls.

Types of Links

According to the makers of Market Samurai software, the Google Penguin update looks at all the links to your site, and puts them into three categories. Then if you have too many links of one type, your site is penalized. It’s all very arbitrary, but the general hope on their part is that they can stop people from doing all that pesky link building.

The three types of links are:

• Brand links
• Target links
• Generic links

These links are based on the words on the page of someone else’s site that links to yours. When you have words on a site that are made into a link (usually underlined and in blue) that is called “anchor text.”

Brand Links: These are links where the word that is linked, i.e. underlined and in blue, is either simply a web address, or the name of your company or your product. In my case these would be http://www.realwebmarketing.net, or “Real Web Marketing Inc.”

Target Links: These are links where the words that are linked are a keyword phrase that you are targeting. In my case this would be things like “web design,” “search engine optimization,” or “pay per click advertising.” If these words were underlined in blue and linked to my site, on someone else’s site, those would be considered target links.

Generic Links: These are links where the words that are linked are some random or meaningless words, not your name and not some keyword. For example, “click here,” or “learn more.”

It used to be that we were told that keyword anchor text, or “Target Links” according to this new system, were the most valuable type of links that you could have. But now Google has decided that these are the bad boys of the link universe, and if 50% or more of your links fall into the category of Target Links, you are in trouble. Your site has possibly already been penalized, or soon will be.

The safe percentages that Market Samurai recommends are:

• Brand links – 40%
• Target links – 20%
• Generic links – 40%

Luckily the link building program we have been doing for clients for years tends to produce the highest percentage of brand links, and a lot lower percentage of target links, so we are not particularly worried about this update.

We can do a check on anyone who is worried about their site and their links, especially if your site experienced a big dip in April.

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Generating Leads with a Web Site

by John Eberhard

Everyone who has a web site wants to generate leads with it. Sometimes the site isn’t doing anything. Sometimes it is generating some leads, but not enough. Sometimes it is generating a steady flow of leads, but the owner of the site wants to get more leads and at less cost.

How Much Traffic?

The first thing to put your attention on is the flow of traffic. How much traffic is the site getting? If you don’t know, the very first thing to do is to find out. Google offers a free service called Google Analytics, which will tell you how many people are visiting the site, where they are coming from, what pages they visited and so on. So if you don’t have a quality web statistics program on your site, the very first thing you should do is to install Google Analytics.

Generating Traffic

Here are all the various ways you can generate traffic to a web site:

1. Pay per click advertising
2. Getting organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) and link building
3. Having a Google Maps / Google Places listing that is near the top
4. Having listings on other business listing sites
5. Social media marketing
6. Blogging
7. Video marketing on YouTube
8. Having your web address on printed items such as brochures, business cards, fliers, direct mail, or ads

Pay Per Click: This is one of the best and fastest ways to generate traffic and leads from a web site, with Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center and Facebook ads. This works best for high ticket items because the cost is relatively high. I don’t usually recommend it unless you are able to spend $1,000 or more per month on your Google AdWords budget. Plus to compete well I recommend having an experienced person manage it for you. But for developing a steady stream of leads, pay per click is one of the best methods.

SEO and Link Building: This is where you get your web site to rank highly in search engines and so develop a steady stream of traffic. This is a great way to develop traffic, but it takes time (6-12 months) and doing it right is not cheap.

Google Maps: This is for local businesses where Google displays a map and 3-8 listings on the first page that correspond to the orange balloons on the map. This is much faster and less expensive than developing organic traffic. But with really competitive industries, it can still take several months.

Business Listing Sites: We put up listings on these types of sites as part of our Google Maps program. It’s a good way to get your business in front of people searching.

Social Media: This is probably the best way for a small business to generate traffic, especially if you don’t have any money to spend. But it is very effective for businesses at all levels. Larger businesses often pay others to generate friends, followers and connections for them, and sometimes to manage communications with the networks.

Blogging: Most people don’t understand that simply writing and posting content on your blog regularly will generate traffic. See my article on this.

Videos: Having one or more videos about your business, that explain what your business does and what benefits you offer, is a tremendous advantage in marketing. Prices have come down and are generally pretty affordable.

Printed Items: You should make sure that your web site address is printed on all of your printed items. People will often get some promo piece and then go to the web site for more information.

Conversions

OK, now you’re increasing the traffic to your site and you’re tracking how many people are coming. Now, how do you get them to contact you, by either calling or filling out some kind of form on the site? In web marketing we call that a “conversion.” We also call that a lead.

Well I have seen figures saying that the national average for web conversions is about 3%, meaning 3% of web visitors contact the web site owner and become a conversion. I have seen it be a lot more, and sometimes a lot less (like none). But the first thing that tells you is that if your site is only getting 50 visitors a month, you will be lucky to get one or two conversions.

One development in the last year or two in the direction of increasing conversions is that many marketers are putting a form in the sidebar on every page. Also put your phone number in a prominent position, either in the sidebar or the header at the top.

Another important consideration is what you are offering. You could offering a free consultation or free estimate, or some kind of discount. See my article on offers.

Another important consideration in increasing conversions is to make sure your web site is organized in a simple way and your navigational structure is easy.

If you get traffic to your site and make sure your site is well organized in such a way as to maximize conversions, you will increase your lead flow.

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Real Web Marketing Blog Categories

By John Eberhard

I have been writing a newsletter and blog article nearly every week for the last four years, and I was recently going through my blog and putting all the articles in categories. Blogs are organized in such a way that you can create categories for your articles, then assign each article to one or more categories.

Once you assign your articles to categories, the blog will display all the categories, you can click on one, then see all the articles that are in that category. It’s sort of a table of contents structure.

While I was doing this I was struck by how much material I had on all the various topics. And it occurred to me that probably most people, even those who follow my articles closely (and I occasionally meet people who say they keep all the newsletters and put them in a folder), have not been exposed to all of these articles.

So I decided to provide links to all of my blog categories. These can now also be seen on the sidebar of my website. The numbers next to each category show how many articles are in that category.

• Article Marketing (9)
• Blogging (23)
• CMS (4)
• Email Marketing (15)
• Internet Marketing (41)
• Link Building (13)
• Local Marketing (9)
• Marketing for the Arts (2)
• Marketing Offers (1)
• Marketing Strategy (10)
• Online PR (8)
• Pay-per-click (34)
• Reputation Management (1)
• Reviews (2)
• Search Engines (18)
• SEO (22)
• Social Media (37)
• Software (1)
• Surveys (2)
• Traffic Building (6)
• Uncategorized (24)
• Video (5)
• Web Content (12)
• Web Design (18)
• Website Tracking (8)

If you click on a category name the link will take you to that category and you will see all the titles plus a short excerpt from each article.

Enjoy!

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Marketing Analysis and Planning

by John Eberhard

 

Marketing analysis and planning is a vital action to do regularly with any marketing campaign. This means to review your statistics and then make decisions on how to proceed. You can do this weekly or monthly.

The first step is to collect your statistics.

Let’s assume that your marketing campaigns are oriented towards generating leads for sales people. Then the most important statistic you have to get is the number of leads.

I will define a campaign as either a) a promotion going out that has a specific message and/or offer, or b) a promotion going out utilizing a specific media, such as magazines, newspapers, Google AdWords, email, etc.

But in order to track things properly and do any kind of analysis, you have to also track where each lead came from, i.e. what prompted them to respond to you? This usually involves either asking the person what promotional campaign they responded to, or having some sort of coding system, where each form on your web site is coded to tell you where that person came from. Unfortunately most businesses are really poor at this.

Some other statistics you would probably want to track:

• Amount of promotion out
• Number of visitors to your web site
• Total number of leads
• Break down the leads by campaign or according to different media, i.e. from email, from advertising in magazines, from fliers, from pay per click advertising, etc.
• Cost per lead. This is the total amount spent on a campaign divided by the number of leads gotten. In some cases you have to let a campaign run its course before you can compute this. From this you will often find that a specific campaign in a certain media will have much lower cost per lead. That is your more successful campaign.
• Proposals out and/or dollar value of proposals out. If your company does proposals to prospects, then you want to track the number of proposals out and the dollar value.
• Dollar value of sales. You can track this by which campaign the lead came from, but you have to have a good sales lead database to do it.

The statistics you track could be some variation of the above, depending on how your business runs.

So what are we trying to determine from all these statistics?

1. We want to find out whether statistics are going up or down, and then take appropriate actions to get them up. Often we find that promotion has dropped out or gone down, which is the first step in the whole chain and one of the things that is easiest to be at cause over.
2. We want to find out which promotional campaigns are working and which ones are not. You determine that by which campaigns are producing leads in the door, and which ones have the lower cost per lead. If you have a good database set up you can also check which campaigns are producing actual sales.
3. If a campaign is working well, you want to either leave it running as is, or decide to increase it in some way.
4. If a campaign is not working well, either by having low leads (or no leads) or by having a higher cost per lead, then you want to either stop that campaign altogether, or change your campaign in some way. Changes could include changing the message or offer, changing the graphics or colors, or changing the media where the campaign is running.

Media: One of the first and most important jobs in marketing for a business is to discover which media work best for you, i.e. email, referrals, pay per click advertising, magazines, radio, TV. This is different in every industry. One tip here is to observe what your competitors are doing. If they are consistently using certain media you can be relatively sure that those media are producing results for them. Because they wouldn’t keep spending money on them if they didn’t work. Then when you try different media, you have to analyze the statistics as above to have a clear idea of what works best for you.

Message and Offer: You have to work out what your message should be and how to best communicate it. Surveying your target public is the best way to determine this. Another important thing is your offer, i.e. what you are offering to entice people to respond. An entire article could be written on this topic. You could be offering:

• Something free like a free report or white paper or newsletter subscription
• A free inspection or consultation
• Some free item along with the sale
• A discount of some type, often for a limited time
• Just offering the item for sale with no discount

You can survey different offers or just try different offers and track which ones work the best.

Summary

It’s vital to track your marketing statistics on a regular basis and make decisions based on what you find. You want to reinforce successful actions and drop out the unsuccessful ones. You may have to change the media where you are running your campaigns, or change your message or offer.

Good luck with your analysis and planning.

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A Premium Web Site

by John Eberhard

Everybody wants a good looking web site, but what are the factors that create a really top notch web site as opposed to a boring or mundane design?

I have been doing a lot of web design lately, and I want to present my opinions on what factors go together to make up a really stellar web site design.

Color
First of all and possibly the most important, a good web design has to have a good color scheme. There is a fair amount of technology on how to combine colors correctly, and you have to know the color wheel and what it means and how to use it. One technique is to combine color opposites on the color wheel, i.e. blue-orange, red-green, or yellow-purple. Usually you have one color that is the dominant one and the other is there to a lesser degree. I also think it is important to include contrast in terms of light and dark. You want to avoid a boring, monotone look.

Size
Size does matter on a web site Virginia. 3-4 years ago everybody had screen resolutions of 800 x 600, so all the web designers were making web sites 700 to 800 pixels wide so you wouldn’t have to scroll back and forth to see it all. Today those web sites look hopelessly tiny in the middle of the screen since everyone today has screen resolutions of 1100 pixels wide or more. So I think web sites today should be 1000 pixels wide or more.

Backgrounds
Most web sites today are designed with a centered text area and sidebar of fixed width, with a background around that. Some people prefer a white background and lots of white space, but often today you see the text area and sidebar in the middle with a colored background of some type around it. I tend to favor making the background some kind of pattern or color gradation, i.e. light at the top going to dark at the bottom or vice versa. You can also make the background a large picture.

Slide Shows
Many sites today have some kind of slide show on the home page. I like to make these big, usually going across the whole screen, which then gives them really good impact. I used to do these in Flash, but recently started using a program called the Nivo Slider, which gives some cool transition effects between the slides.

3D
Not everyone likes this and I don’t use it all the time, but one useful technique is to use Photoshop effects to make things in your header, navigational bar and sidebar look like they are in 3D. This includes beveling, drop shadows and other 3D effects. I think 3D effects can really add a lot to a web site.

Forms
This is not an aesthetic consideration but an effectiveness consideration. With a web site you want as many of your visitors as possible to either call you or fill out a form of some kind on the site. In online marketing we call this a conversion. So it is smart to offer something on the site and get people to fill out a form with minimally their name and email to get it. Lately the trend is to put a response form right in the sidebar so it is visible on every single page. It’s also smart to put your phone number right in the header so it’s very visible on every page.

Sidebars
It’s common for web sites today to have a sidebar, i.e. a bar that starts below the header and goes the rest of the way down the page. Sometimes you can leave this out on the home page. Then this content is visible on all or nearly all of the pages. Common sidebar contents can include:

• Your address and phone
• A response form
• Small pictures linking to various pages inside the site
• Links to social media accounts
• Business hours
• Testimonials
• Links to various free offers or things you are selling
• Links to your other web sites
• Sometimes navigation buttons are placed in the sidebar, though some content management systems like Wordpress make this difficult
• Share or like buttons

Movement
It can be interesting to add Flash animations or scrolling text or other things moving on your page. But be careful as this can easily be badly overdone.

Transparency
I have just started experimenting with having a large picture go all the way across in the background, and having the main text box and sidebar be partially transparent, so you can read the contents, but you can also still see the picture in the background. Stay tuned to see the results on this.

Text Box
The main text box in the middle of the page can be white, but it can also be a color, or it can even have a background pattern or gradation like the overall background of the page. This can work really well but you have to make sure it works in combination with your overall page background, and that it doesn’t detract from the contents of your page.

Summary
All these factors work together to make up your web page, and you have to work with them and try things and combine them until you come up with something that works and looks great. So don’t settle for mundane or mediocre. Go for greatness.

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Writing Relevant Content

by John Eberhard

If you have a web site, a blog, a newsletter, or any printed promotional materials for your business, you need to be able to write good, relevant content. This is also called “copy,” or the text in your promotional materials.

Not everybody is a good writer, and if you have tried and tried and haven’t been able to write good material, then hire a professional copywriter. But if you are involved in writing for any of your promotional efforts, here are some tips to help you.

First of all I want to divide copywriting into two categories. First there is the openly promotional material you write to get someone interested in buying your products or services. This includes most or all of your web site, promotional emails, and any printed promotional materials such as brochures and direct mail. Second there is writing informational material such as articles for use on blogs, newsletters, article syndication, or writing free reports or white papers.

This article will cover more writing for informational material. This is where you are not overtly promoting for people to buy your products or services. Instead you are offering information that the reader will find helpful. I wrote an article about this last October; “Becoming a Trusted Information Source.” The idea is that you put out material that is helpful to people, and by becoming a trusted source of information, you become more trusted in general and people are then more willing to and interested in doing business with you.

Although I think this strategy is not necessarily for everyone, it can be a powerful way of generating trust with the consumer today. And especially on the Internet, where someone has not heard of you or your company before, it is vital to develop that trust before the prospect will be willing to buy from you.

Solving Problems

One of the things I do with my writing is consider what problems the prospect may be experiencing, and write about how to solve those problems. In my case I write an article once a week. Sometimes it is hard to come up with a new topic every week, but I find that interacting with clients and prospects during the week, usually gives me ideas for article topics.

If a client or prospect problem gives me an idea for an article, I will write that down, so that on Tuesday I have a topic ready to write about.

Bleeding Edge?

In my field of Internet marketing there is a new technological development about every 30 seconds. Although you may not be in a highly technological field like mine, there are always new developments in your field. So the question is, should you write about the new, bleeding edge stuff?

I approach the brand new stuff somewhat warily. I see some writers in my field that are always writing about the brand new technology, even if it is untested and speculative. I tend to find such articles somewhere between mildly interesting and extremely boring. So I stay away from that.

Instead, I try to write about things that I know actually work and that people can use, not just the latest gadgets. One of my friends routinely criticizes me for not picking up on the new stuff fast enough, but my readers seem to really appreciate that the information in my articles is actually useful. The key to me is, do I know from personal experience that this new technology or solution actually works? If so I will write about it.

Tone

You have to select a general tone for your articles and pretty much stick with that. I use a down to earth, informal style, with a little humor thrown in now and then. You have to select a style or tone that is right for your business and your industry, and that reflects your personality. For some businesses, like say legal or insurance, a more formal style might be better, but don’t make it so stuffy that no one wants to read it. For some really serious subjects (like handling debt for instance), a more humorous approach can diffuse some of the tension of the topic.

If you’re in doubt about the correct tone to take with your writing, check out the articles or newsletters of competitors in your industry, and select the approach that is right for you.

Summary

A strategy of writing and disseminating informational material can be very effective today in making you or your company a trusted entity, i.e. safe to buy from. And the more you write, the easier it will get.

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Handling Negative Search Engine Listings

by John Eberhard

One of the perils of life today is that people can criticize you on the Internet.

So you hand out a business card to someone, or they hear an ad on the radio about your company, or they receive a direct mail piece or email about you. And they want to learn more about you. So they bring up their favorite search engine and enter your name or company name into the search bar.

What are they going to see on page one, two or three about you? Or about your company? Well unfortunately those listings aren’t always going to be what you would most like them to see.

So let’s say that you have a problem. Let’s say that when someone does a search using your name, or the name of your company or organization, page one has a number of listings that are negative about you or your company. Maybe most of them are negative. What can you do?

Well if there are listings that go to web pages that have actually false information about you, i.e. libel or slander, that’s a legal matter. You can legally force those people to take down false or slanderous information. I am not an expert in this area, but a letter from your lawyer to that person will probably go a long way. If this is your scenario, consult a lawyer.

But let’s say that the listings that appear when your name is searched aren’t libelous or slanderous per se, but they’re negative. So what can you do?

The basic handling for this type of situation is to put up lots of content on the web, that will rank highly when someone searches your name or company name. The idea being that these new listings will rise to the top and push all of that garbage down in the listings and off of page one.

The Handling

So here is the “Overwhelm the Garbage” program. Some call this "reputation management."

a. Write press releases and submit them to multiple online PR sites. See my blog or my book for advice on how to write press releases for online PR sites. These sites tend to rank highly on the search engines, so your press releases will tend to appear on pages 1, 2, or 3 when you search your name or company name.

b. Create social media accounts for the entity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. On Facebook start a personal profile and if for a business, put up a Facebook fan page. Your listings on these sites tend also to rank highly in the search engines. It also helps if you are putting up status updates on the sites regularly.

c. If it is a local business you can put up listings on Google Places and other local directory type sites like Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Hotfrog, Yelp, Insider Pages, Merchant Circle and others. There are dozens of sites like this and they all tend to rank pretty well.

d. Get videos produced about your company and post them on YourTube.

e. I have gotten good results by putting up multiple web sites, each with specific purposes related to my company. For instance, I have an articles blog on a separate domain, another blog that is just for press releases about my company, and another blog that is for press releases about my clients. I have put up several web sites and blogs for my political commentary.

c. Start multiple blogs and post items to them regularly. Include free blogs like www.blogger.com, www.blog.com, www.posterous.com, and others. When you post things there, include links in the articles linking back to your main site.

d. Write articles and post these to article directory sites. These tend to not rank as highly as some of the items above, but they’re great for volume.

This is a bit of work but it is an extremely effective program. I have done this program for myself and for one client. The client had quite a few negatives and now has none on the first five pages of Google.

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Pay Per Click Advertising in 2012

By John Eberhard

Pay per click advertising (PPC) refers to advertising on Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center, Facebook or LinkedIn. It is so called because you create ads that are then displayed online to people under certain circumstances, and then if the viewer clicks on your ad, you get charged.

Pay per click advertising is extremely effective in generating leads on a regular basis, and you can get them going fairly quickly.

Google and MSN

Google Adwords and MSN Ad Center function very similarly. Both allow you to put up ads that appear when people enter certain specific keywords. You can also select the geographical area where your ads will be seen, so if you have a local business that only services people in a certain geographical area, you can have your ads only appear to people in that area. You can select what your budget is going to be per day and thus control your expenses.

With both services you decide what your bid is going to be, i.e. how much money you will are willing to pay whenever someone clicks on your ad. Your bid, along with some other factors, will determine how high up on the page your ad appears. So if there is a lot of competition for the keywords you have selected, you may have to bid higher to have your ads appear near the top.

Google AdWords is the largest service, meaning they have the most traffic, and so in using them you will have the potential of generating a lot of traffic to your site. MSN, which merged a couple of years ago with Yahoo’s PPC program, has quite a bit less. And strangely the merger with Yahoo doesn’t seem to have raised their traffic much. The advantage with MSN is that you will not have to bid as high and so the overall cost of the leads you produce will be a lot less. You will just get fewer of them per given period of time.

Facebook

Facebook has a PPC program. These appear as small display ads with a little bit of text in the right hand column.

With Facebook you can select who sees your ads according to geography, age, sex, and according to who has certain keywords on their info page. So for instance, if you have a local dance studio, you can select a certain geographical area, then select girls between certain ages, who have the word “dance” or “ballet” on their info page. Once again you set your bid, and your budget.

I have found that Facebook’s PPC program works pretty well. It’s especially good if their demographic targeting factors work well for your business. You won’t get as much traffic as on Google, but you’ll probably get more than with MSN.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a relatively new PPC program. Once again you can select geography, bid and budget. But here you can target people according to membership in certain groups on LinkedIn, by job title, by working at certain companies, and by age and gender.

I have had only one client on LinkedIn’s PPC program so far, and it has been low in volume but the cost per lead has been very good, because we are able to really tightly target people who would be interested in his services.

Conversions

As I said earlier PPC is great for generating a regular flow of leads for your business. In my opinion it works better for generating leads than for generating actual online sales.

So you want to get people to click on your ads, but beyond that you want them to fill out your form on your web site and become a lead, or specifically in PPC what we call a “conversion.” A lot of this has to do with what you have on your landing page, how effective your sales copy is, and what your offer is.

Only a certain percentage of people who click your ad and come to your site will actually fill out the form and become a conversion. Supposedly nationally this works out to 3%. So if you are paying $1.00 for each click (not unusual today) and for every 100 clicks you get 3 people to become a conversion, then your cost per conversion will be $33.

Who Should Use PPC?

Because of the amount of competition in PPC today, which drives higher bids and higher cost per conversion, PPC does not work for low ticket items. If you are selling a CD or book, PPC will not work for you, because the cost per sale will be higher than the price of your product.

You could possible make PPC work for a low ticket item on MSN, Facebook or LinkedIn, but definitely not on Google.

I find that PPC works extremely well for home improvement companies, because the cost of their services is high enough to be viable with the cost per conversion on Google AdWords and the other providers. Those types of companies need leads and PPC provides a steady stream.

It’s difficult to give a hard and fast rule, but in general, high ticket items of say over $500 will do really well with PPC.

In 2012

I have noticed what appears to be a lessening of interest in PPC over the last year. I cannot personally see any lessening of effectiveness in PPC overall during that time period in generating a regular flow of leads for my clients. But I have noticed that there is a lot of competition, which in some cases leads to higher bids, and higher cost per conversion.

I also notice quite a few players in the market who are making many elementary mistakes in running their campaigns, which will cause them to get poor results and eventually drop out of the PPC market and conclude that “pay per click doesn’t work.” Just as one example, I see many PPC advertisers having the visitor land on their home page. This makes the visitor have to spend time figuring out your navigational scheme and find what they are looking for on your site. The correct action is to have the person land on a detail page for the specific product you are promoting with your ad, or even better, have them land on a custom page that is specifically for that ad.

PPC does work, but there are some basic rules that you have to know and apply. I believe it works best if you have a consultant manage your campaign.

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How Blogging Drives Traffic

by John Eberhard

Most people would like to have more traffic to their web site. So it should be good news to everyone that you can do something right now to drive more traffic to your site. And it’s free.

Here is how posting to your blog drives traffic. Every time you post something, you send out a notification (called a “ping”) to all the blog search engines via www.pingomatic.com. If your blog is a Wordpress blog, it does this automatically. If you have a blog on Typepad, Posterous, Blogger, or Blinkweb, you have to do it manually.

You fill in the name of your blog and the blog address. You don’t need to fill in the RSS address. Then check all of the blog search engines in the bottom left block. Then send the pings.

Once that ping goes out your new blog post will be indexed, or included, in all the blog search engines. So people who are searching for the topic you are writing on will see the listing for your blog post, click on it and come to your blog. So it makes sense to spend some time figuring out what the popular keywords are that people are searching for in your industry. Then include those in your blog posts.

I employ this strategy and write one article per week, and my blogs produce more traffic to my site than any other source.

So I’ve Got Traffic – Now What?

If your blog is located on your regular web site and has the same navigational structure, now people will wander around your site and see your product or service offerings.

If your blog is on a separate web address from your main web site, then you need to have sidebars on the blog and include various links to your products and services back on your main site.

If you are selling things like books, put a picture and link to the book in the sidebar of the blog. If you have any free reports or white papers that you are offering, put a picture of the cover and link to the free offer in the sidebar of your blog.

If you have a free email newsletter, put a form right there in the blog sidebar that allows them to sign up.

In other words, provide links and enticements that will lead them back to your main site and especially that will entice them to either buy something or at least give you their name and email address.

You can see how I’ve done this on one of my blogs:
http://www.realwebmarketingblog.com/

What to Post?

Some people start a blog and then get bogged down in trying to write long articles for the blog, and so they never post anything. Here are some tips that will get you posting on your blog.

Articles: The general length for an article to post on a blog is 400 words or more. But there is no hard rule on this. The article should be something that is informative and not just a plug for your services.

Shorter Content: You don’t have to write 400 words. You can post a comment about something that is 50 or 100 words or even less.

Link and Comment: You can link to some other content on the web that you found informative or interesting, and add a comment about it.

Video: You can post a video in your blog so that the video appears right in the blog and can play right there. YouTube provides embed code for this. You can post a video about your company and services, but you can also post a video about anything else that is of interest.

Note that any of these posts, even the shorter ones, will end up in the blog search engines, if, of course, you send pings to them via Wordpress or via Pingomatic.

One caution is that if the blog is for your business, all your posts should be related to your business and your industry. Keep it consistent. Don’t post one day about affordable solar panels, and the next day about your dog. Save the stuff on your dog for Facebook.

Good luck with your blogging.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous