Thursday, June 10, 2010

SEO In A PPC Marketing Blog?

Yes, I'm aware that this is Pay Per Click Marketing. And that SEO is more-or-less the whole other side of the equation. But from what I've seen, more and more PPC players are augmenting their paid search efforts with organic search traffic.

And that's not even mentioning the all-important landing page! Anyway, read this article about beginning optimization. You may find it more worthwhile than you think.

I'd love to hear from you regarding whether as a PPC person you find this subject at all interesting or relevant to what you're doing. Leave your comments below.

SEO For Beginners.

by Aya Wilkinson

Where to start with SEO? If you are new site or a long established site the process of SEO is very similar, it is just the speed at which you do things should vary. Everybody knows that when it comes to SEO Google is king, and with Google if you are not on the first page then you may as well not exist. Over 90% of all internet users do not get past the first page. Saying that, even lower positions on the first page get remarkably less traffic than the top positions. Is it possible to get your site to the top of Google?

Well the short answer is Yes, but firstly it is important to choose which keywords to get at the top for. It is easy to get at the top for many long tail keywords and ones that get hardly any traffic. What you need in you SEO is to aim at keywords which get the most traffic. Impossible you might think; I am a relatively new company, I will never make it to the top of Google for the most popular keywords in my industry. Well despite what most SEO companies tell you it is possible to get to the top of Google for any keyword you want, in just a few months.

Where do you start? Well the most important factor in SEO is what site you have linking to you. This makes up for probably 90% of a sites ranking. It is possible to trace what sites link to your competitors by using a simple tool that will show you all the links; everything is traceable on the internet! Since link building is not new idea, sites have been doing it for years, some site for popular key phrases might have over 100,000 links. A bit daughting you might think, but you can still challenge them.

The beauty of the online world is that it is anybody's game. With SEO done right small companies can be right up there with the big ones and have equal chance of receiving a visitor. How do you start to build links to your site? There are many different ways to do this. It is best to use a range of tactics encase one type of link variety is starts to be discounted from Google; it also makes your link building campaign look more natural in the eyes of Google.

The main methods of link building include article writing, blog commenting, forum posting, blog creation, link exchanges and social media. Don't worry if these sound like jargon to you as each can be researched individually, or even easier, you can get somebody to do it for you. What ever you do, don't sit back and wait for people to link to you. This is not going to happen unless you are a high ranking informative site in your industry. Even starting to create a useful blog for people to link to is a slow and tedious way to generate links. If you create a blog, link that to your site and there you are you have a back link!

Managing the aclickahead writers team is the major activity Aya Wilkinson performaing these days. She is expert in running (http://www.aclickahead.co.uk) SEO Company She has handsome professional experience being a leading (http://www.seoprofesionals.com) SEO Expert

Monday, May 24, 2010

Advertising Merchandise For Making Your Business In Demand

While we talk a lot about Pay Per Click marketing, we don't often talk about the reasons. For the most part, it's pretty obvious, however that may be taking some things for granted.

I recently came across this article that may help spark some interest in advertising your business online if you aren't already.

Of course it's reprinted with permission. I'd love your feedback regarding what you are targeting with PPC, whether you've thought in terms of simply advertising your business, etc.

Advertising Merchandise For Making Your Business In Demand

by Sarah Kendra Callister

People who have done some fund-raising happenings in the past know how difficult it is to get individuals and entities to donate money for a worthy cause. In recent years, more organizations have realized the potential of capitalizing on promotional merchandise in their campaigns.

Clients were more attracted to carrying another brand that supports a charity; this is according to a survey a few years ago. Indeed, there's nothing compared to the feeling of purchasing and knowing the stuff your purchased contributes to a fund that helps a cause or a special group in need.

Integrating branding products in your fund-raising won't make your project an instant hit, but taking these guidelines into consideration will help your campaign:

Offer unique advertising items. Consumers are more likely to purchase if they know your product cannot be comfortably purchased somewhere else. You might want to consider offering special-edition or numbered advertising personalized merchandise.

Lay out your goal. How much money needs to be raised? How much time do you need to meet your goal? Aside from the sale of marketing custom imprinted merchandise, what else can you do to augment your funds? Your ambition must be reasonable and manageable.

Do the math. Calculate how much your group will profit from the sale of these advertising custom promotional merchandise and note whether it will suit your goal.

Educate. Explain to your clientele in simple, concise terms how buying your advertising custom personalized merchandise helps your campaign. This knowledge will spread on to others, so you want to make sure those who hear about it will understand and assuredly support your cause.

Thank your clients. If you're organizing a donations-only affair, take the time to send out little advertising merchandise to say thank-you and show acknowledgment to individuals and entities that supported your cause.

Sarah Kendra Callister is a logo promotional items consultant on (http://www.printedbracelets.com/) promotional printed bracelets & (http://www.printedpad.com/) promotional printed padfolios. Look for topics by Sarah Kendra Callister on how you can market your products.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Boosting Your Paid Traffic With Free Article Marketing Traffic

Increasingly, I see PPC guys using Pay Per Click to validate a new niche or optimize a sales page, optimize conversions, and then move onto free organic search and article marketing to boost traffic without boosting costs.

Article marketing can be extremely powerful, and can even generate traffic that PPC misses altogether. That is, people who generally just wouldn't click on an ad, regardless of what it says or what it's for.

As such, I wanted to pass along this article that I found to be a very good adjunct to your article marketing efforts. I hope you enjoy it. Oh, and yes, it's reprinted with permission!

A Few Ideas To Help You Execute Effective Article Marketing

by Chris Adams

Nowadays, a lot of people put a high importance on information and facts, and any type of service that offers helpful knowledge will get a wide readership. Article marketing is an extremely useful tool in pretty much any type of industry, and there are several tips which can help you realize favorable outcomes in your selected field.

It's vital for your content to be informative; an article that provides audiences information pertaining to matters that they're not knowledgeable about would have way more buyers than a standard content piece which simply reuses common knowledge. However, you must also remember that successful article marketing also involves more than writing helpful articles. You must make sure your articles are succinct so viewers will be able to locate what they are searching for promptly. Write your content pieces so that they're readable and understandable, and always convey your sales message clearly.

Also, it is crucial that you give the viewers a great reason to read your write-up rather than somebody else's. This signifies that your title should be smart as well as intellectually stimulating, plus it must capture the buyers' attention so they're motivated to peruse the entire write-up. One other way to have your content piece get noticed would be to compose a nice and also dynamic opening paragraph.

Plenty of individuals ordinarily post their content in sites that are devoted to publishing content pieces. Even though this is a good strategy for each and every content writer, it's also important for them to publish their articles on their own websites since it's a good method of getting your target audience.

Among the primary purposes of writing articles is to publicize a service or product. However, when you make an article, you should be sure that you stay away from publicizing specific products or services because it will put off your readership. You ought to make the content more useful rather than using it to carry out a sales pitch. Article promotion will end up being more advantageous when you tell your buyers about what exactly you will be able to accomplish for them rather than immediately selling them a service or product. In the end, the reader must always have choices.

When you have a product or service to publicize, it would be advisable to make a teaser write-up consisting of just a couple of sentences. Then you can put in a section with a link that brings the client to your website, wherein they'll check out your product or service and probably also read more about it. It's also a good idea to make an electronic book out of your very best posts; you could then distribute the electronic book via e-mail or request your viewers to download it. These strategies will let you reach a broader readership.

To ensure success with article promotion, you should strive to make as much articles as possible. Customers often wish to have many different options; through providing them a large number of posts, they get to pick out the type of content they would like to read through. One content piece with more than 1 heading will offer you a great way of getting different types of individuals to start reading your post. Article spinning would also enable you to attract more prospective buyers.

Finally, be sure that you constantly revise your articles because this would help put your article on top of the search engines' rankings and also have a greater chance of being perused. Furthermore, make sure to ask your good friends and family members to look over as well as test each of your posts before you publish these in cyberspace; they could notice the glitches that you've overlooked, as well as come up with recommendations that could make your article more effective.

Article Marketing Search engines like google survive on content and backlinks. Without both web site is dead! Understand how you can promote your website and increase your rankings in the search engines by getting your FREE Marketing Report at UniqueArticleWizard.com. (http://www.purearticlemarketing.org) Article Marketing Article

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A Terrific PPC Success Checklist!

It's easy to 'lose your shirt' with Pay-Per-Click, however most who do, lose it rather quickly and bail out. Much more insidious is having marginal success, when it could be turned into substantial success.

A lot of it hinges on optimizing campaigns, keywords, adgroups, etc. Unfortunately, there is a lot to consider and keep track of. Too much.

A while back, I came across a terrific "checklist" from PPC wizard Ben Hart. He put together a list of things to remember and consider. This can take your drab or lackluster Adwords campaigns and turn them into real winners.

Do yourself a favor and print this out, and keep it close by when you create new campaigns, and while looking over and optimizing what you already have!

__ Turn off most of Google’s default settings.

__ Start by having your ads show only on Google. Turn off Content Network and Search Network to start.

__ Start with Exact Match for keyword searches. Turn off Broad Match and Phrase Match to start.

__ Make sure your geographic and language settings are correctly set.

__ Pick keywords and phrases your likely buyers are typing into search engines. Put yourself in their place. What is are they looking for?

__ Start by bidding low – perhaps 10 cents a click. If traffic is too light, ramp up slowly – a nickel at a time.

__ Don’t worry about being ranked #1 on the first page for your keyword. That might require you overpaying for clicks. For competitive keyword categories, a rank around #5 has delivered the best ROI for me.

__ For super-competitive keyword categories, I don’t mind if my ad is on page two of the Google list. Searches who get to page two and deeper tend to be more qualified as leads.

__ Do not take clickers on your ad to the home page of your website. Take them to a landing page specifically designed for your ad. Your landing page should be a continuation of you ad.

__ Include your main keywords in the headline of both your ad and landing page.

__ Determine the primary goal of your ad and landing page. What is your “Most Wanted Response”? Is it to make a sale or collect a lead?

__ Do everything in your creative power to capture the names and email addresses of visitors to your site by offering something of value free ( such as an eBook or “white paper” on the subject of their keyword search).

__ Build rapport and cultivate relationships by continuing to send your opt-in subscribers a valuable ezine that’s on the subject of their keyword search that brought them to your site in the first place.

__ Are you ready to do business when your ad campaign is on? Do you have a merchant account, a shopping cart, a way to take payments?

__ Does the headline of your ad stress the main benefit to the read of clicking on your ad?

__ Don’t make your ads about you. Make your ads about what your prospective customer is looking for.

__ Don’t use technical jargon in your ads. What the heck is a “gigabyte”? Instead, follow the lead of Apple’s great ad for its iPod: “1,000 Songs In Your Pocket.” What’s the main benefit to your reader of what you are offering?

__ Don’t try to buy your way to the top of Google’s search engine for an off-the-mark ad that’s getting few clicks. Write a great ad, that gets lots of clicks – targeted clicks from people who are looking for what you are selling.

__ Specific problems require equally specific solutions. Offer specific solutions in your ad copy and on your landing pages. “Improve Your Golf Score” is not nearly as strong as “Cure Your Slice in Five Swings.”

__ Understand who your customer is and what she’s looking for. Then provide it.

__ Every search and every click represents someone with a need. Can you fill that need?


__ Have more than one product to offer that’s on the subject of the keyword searches that brought visitors to your site. Have a steady stream of follow-up products and upgrade products. It’s tough to build a business on just one product.

__ Make an extensive list of keywords and phrases that you believe your customers are typing into search engines to find the main product or service you are selling.

__ Put all your keywords and keyword combinations on a Excel spreadsheet so that you can move them around easily and group families of keywords and phrases together.

__ Take families of underperforming keywords and create separate ads and landing pages specifically tailored for those families of keywords. This can result in you having many ads and landing pages, each with its small family of keywords.

__ If your landing page is intended for “lead generation”, is the free ebook, “white paper” or other free gift you are offering of high enough value to your visitor that she will want to fill out your sign-up form to get it.

__ Is your free offer that’s designed to get leads to fill out your form exactly in line with the AdWords ad that brought them to your site? (It must not be off the mark, even a little).

__ Have an email marketing system (such as Aweber.com or iContact.com) set up before you launch your AdWords campaign so that you can capture leads and follow-up with email.

__ Use powerful keyword research tools to help you brainstorm your keywords, such as Wordtracker.com, KeywordDiscovery.com and GoodKeywords.com

__ Don’t forget to include Negative Keywords – words that disqualify your ad from being shown where certain words are typed into an engine. A good negative keyword might be “free” if you don’t want clickers who are looking just for “free” stuff.

__ Always split-test two ads at a time. “Test” is the most important principle in marketing.

__ Use Google Conversion Tracker to track conversions on your landing page.

__ Use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on your site.

__ Test landing pages to see which ones are doing the best job of converting visitors into leads and then into buyers.

__Offer one and only one thing with your pay-per-click ad. If you sell more than one product, create different ads, one for each product . . . with each ad leading to a “landing page” also deigned to sell that one product.

__ If your ad is working well, turn on Search Network and see how that goes.

__ If your ad works on Search Network, test Content Network.

__ Start by setting bids low for Content Network. You can set separate bids of Content Network and Search Network.

__ Use the PPSeer.com tracking tool to see how individual sites on the Content Network are performing for you.

__ Tell Google not to run ads on sites that are delivering a lot of clicks, but few sales.

__ If your ads are running on the Ad Sense Content Network, understand how to use Demographic and Site Targeting.

__ Don’t use Google Budget Optimizer (unless you want Google managing your finances and making your marketing decisions).

__ If you are a local business, set up three kinds of ads – one configured for local business, one configured nationally but that uses names of local area towns and cities with keywords describing your service, and one in Google’s Local Business Center so that your local business appears with an enhanced interactive listing on Google Maps.

__ Don’t ignore the pay-per-click ad programs other search engines and many directories offer. offer. Yahoo Search Marketing is the #2 PPC program – and well worth using.

__ Use Google AdWords to conduct super cheap, quick and accurate market research for all your advertising and marketing campaigns (whether offline or online).

Saturday, October 24, 2009

One Opinion About Clickbank

One Pay Per Click marketer's opinion about Clickbank:

If you were to search affiliate marketing on google you are sure to come across the name clickbank more than once. Maybe when it first started it was a good idea and I'm sure there are a few making a tidy profit from it, but if you ask me it should be banned.

You can not search google anymore without page after page of affiliates trying to sell you some sort of money making venture or a system to whiten your teeth. Clickbank is the source of a lot of annoying ads floating around the web now, and most of them are full of lies.

If you are one of the people that believe the sales stories, you no the sort of thing, "I looked for years before I found this system, but as soon as I did, I was rich." then I'm telling you now, it is all lies, any ebook that was ever published on the subject will tell you to write whatever will sell the product, taking away any real advertisers credibility to sell good products of their own.

Clickbank has made the market so difficult for any new Internet marketer to even get their foot in the door, as they have filled up the net with rubbish, giving any potential costumer for a real marketer the sense they have seen it all before and a feeling of doubt before they have even started to read the page.

All I am saying is there should be some sort of quality control or a limit on how many products a marketer can promote, this would at least give any legitimate marketer a chance to start.


All that said, there are probably more Internet marketers using Clickbank for their PPC efforts than anything else.

The chief benefits of clickbank is the huge number of products, and the speed & ease that affiliates get paid.

Clickbank may not be the best affiliate marketing network, but it's one of the largest and proven over time.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Affiliate Marketing Home-Based Business

By Melanie Ullman
Affiliate marketing, which is a frequent focus for home-based businesses is a pretty broad term that encompasses managing traffic on the internet to maximize exposure of your company or product and therefore improving sales of the same. Affiliates would be those who advertise on your website and thereby bring in traffic by those who are interested in the affiliate, the advertiser, since they are not yet familiar with you and your product.

Affiliates can also be based on HITS, the number of people who come to your website because of the advertising, feeds or links from other companies. In this case, the affiliate might get paid based on the number of hits to your website or increased number of hits from the time of affiliate participation. There are firms that specialize in setting up web pages and other internet advertising to maximize the amount of traffic to your website.

Like all advertising, increasing exposure is far different from getting sales. Translating the increased traffic into sales would probably require additional sales techniques. Unlike traditional advertising which might measure success of advertising by the end result in increase in sales, affiliate marketing often gauges "success" based on traffic, or number of hits which actually does not necessarily translate into changes in sales.

There are risks with affiliate marketing as well, as people become more expert in linking their websites to others. The risks might include that people are merely skipping through your website and are actually going directly to the affiliate. One way of keeping your niche and therefore keeping your business would be to clearly differentiate yourself from the affiliate. This will take a bit of practice as you don't want a COMPETITOR on your website but you want complementary businesses.

As in all advertising, you also want to make sure that your affiliate is legitimate. In the event of controversy regarding your affiliate, you need to leave yourself a contractual "out" in that you can drop the advertiser for such cause. Further, investigations into an affiliate might bring you into a controversy that is inconvenient. We see this with search engines and listing services that make their money such as Craigslist.

Your common interests with affiliates must be clearly distinguished from your involvement with your affiliate. Marketing affiliates also might overload your website. You don't want so many HITS that your website becomes another search engine rather than a means of selling yourself and your product. There are affiliate marketing firms that often specialize in setting up websites. The importance of feeds from other areas on the internet are also stressed.

Often, the advertisements are accepted by beginning companies for free and therefore benefit the affiliate through no cost publicity for themselves that also provides you with publicity by having this better-known company as part of your marketing strategy. In cases of big search engines, companies PAY to advertise, realizing the value of the company.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Using Google Webmaster Tools To Best Use

Written by Melanie Ullman

It's been a while since I updated this blog, but I'll try and get back to a regular routine.

When you're trying to rank your landing page, whether it's for PPC or simply to get organic search traffic to an offer page, backlinking is the key. In short, the more back links you get, the higher you will go in the SERPs. Now of course this is a relative thing. Trying to rank against strong "authority sites" that have high Pagerank and thousands of backlinks can be an exercise in futility. But generally speaking, the more links, the better your site will do.

But all back links aren't created equally. Links from strong sites, those with a high Page rank, are worth more to your site than those with lower rank. It's actually the passing of this "link juice" that gives your target site it's boost. This means you want higher value links.

Just as important however, perhaps even more pertinently is whether or not Google sees and counts your links. Though they may index nearly every page, not every link they come across counts towards your SERP ranking.

How do you know which is which? That's where Google's Webmaster Tools comes into play. Webmaster Tools was designed to show the webmaster where their links are coming from. As such, you can see which of the backlinks you are taking the time to get are being seen AND counted by Google. If it isn't in Webmaster Tools, it isn't doing your site any good, at least as far as boosting your ranking is concerned.

Another great use for Google's Webmaster Tools is for you to see which links you might be able to take more advantage of. When you see that your links are sticking for instance from your blogs, Squidoo lenses, other sites, etc., you immediately know they are more valuable links.

So why not go back and re-visit those web sites? You might just be able to post more links, or put in links to your other sites. I spend a lot of time in Webmaster Tools. I look to see where my backlinking efforts are paying off, focus further efforts where they count, and reduce the time I put into those that aren't paying me dividends.

Plus I comb through the results always looking for new and better sites to go back to with more links.

It's also worth noting that Webmaster Tools will show you the specific pages where you are linking to. You should make sure to vary your links, vary your anchor text, and don't just link to your home page, but your inner pages as well.

Make Google Webmaster Tools a routine part of your own "site intelligence". You'll find you can spend your time in a more valuable manner, and that you avoid going through the process of building, checking, waiting, checking some more, all for something that won't help you in the long fun anyway.

If you've found some interesting or little-known, little-used tricks that you want to share, make sure you come back here and post them in the comments section. I'll be very appreciative, as will the readers! Plus, you'll get a lot of good Karma points!