Feb
6
Marketing your business through a recession
Filed Under General Stuff, Pay Per Click | Leave a Comment
Andrew de Gabriele over at Pay Per Click Management has just published a great post on how to market your business through a recession.Â
“When times are tough, it is more important than ever - absolutely vital - to figure out how you can spend your money wisely to attract as many clients as possible …”
Oct
2
Well done Andrew for passing your Adwords Pro exam!! Andrew will be taking over the Pay Per Click management of our client accounts.
This was emailed to me from Google:
Thank you for taking Google’s exam. Please view your exam results below: =============================================
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Jun
13
Which is better SEO or PPC ?
Filed Under Pay Per Click, SEO | Leave a Comment
A question I am often asked is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or PPC (Pay Per Click) most effective? The answer for most site owners is the same…ensure that you have a balanced strategy which not only includes a healthy long term SEO plan and PPC but also includes other strategies such as advertising on other portals to generate sales leads or email marketing. We recently gained a client that had their whole Internet Marketing budget allocated to their PPC campaigns. There are some problems with this strategy - one being that as more competitors join your PPC arena, your costs go through the roof, you loose credibility by not being the natural search and when you stop your PPC campaign you are totally wiped off the search engines, whereas with SEO you will continue to be there for some time to come..
When we started our business six years ago, we were predominantly a web site design agency, but as the demand for online results has increased our services have evolved in this direction and we now aggressively market our clients online using several strategies. Not only are we using different ways to market our web sites but we are now closely tracking conversion results and stats.
The actual design of your web site only accounts for a small percentage of what actually makes it work! Other elements in having a successful site would include; the content of the site, ranking in the search engines, how well you deal with enquiries and how well you analyse the stats to interpret how your users are using your site. We now encourage our clients to start their own blog and constantly update it to keep their clients and potential clients informed of what is happening in their company.
The principles of marketing apply online as much as they do offline. Each strategy should be part of an overall objective which is measured and reviewed. Several of these strategies should be running at the same time with those that aren’t performing dropping off and new ones being added.
Oct
11
Why Ongoing Internet Marketing is Vital for Your Website’s Success
Filed Under General Stuff, Pay Per Click, SEO | Leave a Comment
You get your fabulous new website. You put it online. You sit back, and wait.
You design a great magazine advert. You file it away in a back room. You sit back, and wait.
The two are equivalent and the end result is the same!
Nobody will ever come looking for your ad in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet and the same goes for the online world. Just because your website is somewhere ‘out there’, it doesn’t mean that any of your potential clients (or the search engines for that matter) will find it. They have to be sent there!
This is why allocating a separate budget for an ongoing Internet Marketing campaign to drive visitors to your website is every bit as important as investing in professional Web Design. Many websites totally flop because their owners fail to grasp this vital (and seemingly obvious) point.
Read on to learn more about Internet Marketing and how to go about it.
Climb up the search engine rankings with ongoing Search Engine Optimisation
The best known Internet Marketing strategy is to get your website to rank high in the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc). This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO).
SEO should begin right from the Web Design stage, by designing your website and its structure in such a way that the search engines can easily access and index its content. Besides, you should entrust the writing of the text on your web pages to an experienced SEO copywriter, who will ensure that your web pages target the very keywords your potential clients are searching for.
Once your website is up and running, don’t be disappointed if it does not appear in any of the search engines right away it won’t! Only one thing will actually get your website to climb up the search engine rankings and continue to maintain its position there an ongoing SEO marketing campaign comprised of the following strategies:
- Add new content regularly to your website
By adding new web pages, articles or blog posts regularly – at the very least on a monthly basis – your website grows and gains greater credibility in the eyes of the search engines, resulting in higher rankings. On the other hand, if you do not keep on adding new content, your website will eventually be branded as ‘stale’ and penalise accordingly. - Add inbound links to your website on a monthly basis
The search engines can also estimate how ‘important’ your website is based on the amount of other websites that link to it. Some people will link to you eventually if you put a good deal of interesting and valuable content on your website, but this is not usually enough. The inbound linking aspect of SEO involves free and paying for a number of new links to be set up to point to your site. Keep in mind that rather than adding a large amount of inbound links at one go, it is much better (especially as regards Google) to add a few links regularly on a monthly basis.
Give your website an initial boost with Pay-Per-Click Internet Marketing
Achieving high search engine rankings is something that takes a considerable amount of work – and time. Your ultimate goal should be to get the majority of your visitors via the search engines and, since SEO generally takes about 8 months to 1 year to start producing results, it is something that you have to start working on right away.
In the meantime, you should drive traffic to your website using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, where small adverts are placed prominently on the search engines (in the search results of your target search terms) and you pay only when someone clicks on your ad and is sent to your website.
We recommend that you budget to run a PPC Internet Marketing campaign concurrently with your SEO for the first year. Eventually, once the Search Engine Optimisation is yielding results and you are getting traffic on your primary search terms, you can divert your PPC marketing budget as needed, to cover secondary search terms related to your business.
Effective Internet Marketing is crucial for your website to receive the consistent volume of traffic it needs to produce results. The sooner you embark on a properly organised campaign, the sooner you’ll begin reaping the rewards of your online presence.
You can read more about successful long term Internet Marketing here.
Aug
23
Microsoft launches its own pay-per-click service - adCenter
Filed Under General Stuff, Pay Per Click | Leave a Comment
It was inevitable once Yahoo purchased Overture in 2003 that MSN would enter the Pay Per Click search Marketing industry itself. Overture had been providing paid listings to both MSN and Yahoo effectively lost its “neutrality”.
Last week MSN officially withdrew its relationship with Overture (now known as Yahoo Search Marketing) and is now running a beta version of paid listings with selected agencies. The date for a worldwide launch has not been set, we will however be signing up all our clients on the new Ad Centre as soon as it becomes available.
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Aug
16
The aim of a well optimized pay-per-click marketing campaign is to get a steady flow of highly-targeted potential customers to visit your website for as low a cost as possible. But, of course, visitors do not automatically become customers, and how many of them actually do depends very much on the web page they are sent to when they click on your advertising. This web page is known as the ‘landing page’.
Choosing or designing effective landing pages for a pay-per-click campaign is not a task to be taken lightly. Your landing pages have to state your offer clearly and make it easy for your visitors to know at a glance both what you want them to do (for example, enter their details on an online form, join your mailing list or purchase a product directly) and why it pays them to do so.
Don’t send your pay-per-click visitors to your home page
One common mistake is to use the web site’s homepage as a landing page. This is usually a bad idea because, unless your website is about a single product, your homepage is unlikely to be targeted enough to convert a visitor who came in looking for something specific. Your landing pages have to be highly relevant to the ad that is bringing in the visitors, so that they quickly find what they are looking for and are motivated to stay on your website.
How to find the holy grail of landing pages
Now, keeping in mind that you have just a few seconds to gain your visitors’ attention once they click on an advert and reach your website, creating the landing page that converts as many visitors as possible might seem like an elusive holy grail. But there’s good news. Excellent news in fact!
The thing is that you can modify your landing pages at any time and so, you don’t have to get it absolutely right the first time. You can easily make small changes and test to see how they affect visitor conversion – and in fact this is exactly what you should be doing! By keeping what works best and discarding what doesn’t, you can make your landing page evolve into a killer marketing tool optimized for maximum results.
It is also possible to have multiple landing pages for a single ad running at the same time, where you send an equal number of visitors to each page and test to see which works best. This testing method is even more accurate because your results are not affected by the time of year (say, it’s Christmas one week and huge-credit-card-bills week the next).
Intuition is not good enough
Testing how different parts of a landing page affect its success is exactly what the people over at www.marketingexperiments.com have been doing recently. They found they could improve conversion ‘by more than 40% by making a number of key changes to the original page.’ If that’s not incentive enough to devote some real energy to testing and tweaking your landing pages, then what is?
Take a look at their reports here. Part 1 | Part 2
Some of the things these experiments revealed sound like plain old common sense, but others might appear downright counter-intuitive. For example, removing the price from a landing page resulted in a 6.6% drop in the conversion rate in one test they ran! In another test, removing a photo actually increased conversion by a whopping 39%.
Of course, some of these changes may have the opposite result in a different situation and the test results cannot be generalised across the board. But the clear lesson is this: take the trouble to test your landing pages to find out what works best for your market and do more of that. It will most definitely pay off with a dramatic increase in your return from your Pay Per Click advertising!
Jul
17
Pay-per-click advertising services like Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing may be just the thing you need to boost your online business. Here’s the basic concept, described in Google’s own words on the front page of their website adwords.google.com:
With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to help us match your ads to your audience and pay only when someone clicks on them.
It really makes Internet marketing seem like child’s play, doesn’t it? Just sign up, give your keywords and ads to Google, together with your credit card details and hey presto! Droves of visitors are flocking to your website wanting to do business with you.
Then, why are so many people disappointed with the results of their self-run PPC advertising campaigns?
The simple answer is that Pay-Per-Click advertising is not a magic formula just waiting to be applied, like Google would have you believe. Just as with any other kind of marketing, there are lots of factors that can make or break a campaign. For example:
- Choose the wrong keywords and you could blow your budget (by paying too much per click), attract the completely wrong audience, or both.
- Write bad adverts and you could be paying for lots of clicks from people who have no intention of doing business.
- Send your visitors to the wrong part of your website and you might put off even the most qualified prospect.
The list of potential pitfalls goes on, and each one could spell disaster for your online advertising campaign.
This is precisely why entrusting your Pay-Per-Click advertising to qualified experts will prevent you from squandering your online marketing budget and pay for itself countless times over in terms of drastically improved results. Also remember that even a finely tuned PPC campaign has to be regularly monitored – and its statistics carefully evaluated in the light of a changing market – for it to keep on performing well.
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In spite of the misleading front-page blurb, Google itself recognises that it takes experts to run effective PPC campaigns. This is why they came up with the Google AdWords Professional certificate system to recognise proficient campaign managers. And what’s more, our PPC director, Luigi Muto says that even after obtaining his Google AdWords certificate with an outstanding 85% score, he’s constantly discovering new ways to eke out still more performance from the Pay-Per-Click marketing machine.
So, whether you’re feeling brave enough to go it on your own with a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign, or if you’ve been disheartened by the tales of woe of those who have done so and failed, remember that there is another option. Put you campaign in the hands of our experts at PayPerClickManagement.eu and just sit back and enjoy the results.
It’s one simple and easy step to successful PPC advertising.
Jul
6
How to Enjoy Long Term Internet Marketing Success
Filed Under General Stuff, Pay Per Click, SEO | 3 Comments
A good and solid Internet presence is not something that comes free.
Whether you’re just starting out, or even if you have been online for years, your website will be totally unknown to the Internet masses unless you devote a portion of your marketing effort and budget to online promotion.
On the Internet, all websites, great and small, are just like shops set up in unfrequented side streets on the edge of town. People will not visit unless they are actually sent there. And you’ll need a good online marketing and advertising strategy to draw them in.
In recent years, Pay Per Click Marketing in the search engines and on other websites has established itself as an excellent way to quickly attract targeted visitors to your website.
In fact, the second best thing about Pay Per Click Marketing is that you can have your website’s traffic shoot through the roof almost instantly. And the best thing about it is that you can calculate your cost-per-lead, or even cost-per-sale down to the last cent and see exactly what you are getting for your investment.
Pay Per Click works so well that we would recommend you spend up to 70% of your online marketing budget on this method while your website is still new.
And yet, even such a great thing can be overdone! Many businesses completely give in to the temptation of quick returns that Pay Per Click offers and totally ignore other complementary Internet marketing methods that promise even better results in the long run.
If you want to get the most out of your online marketing, you should aim at ranking high in the free search engine listings related to your business. Although this, so called, Search Engine optimisation is something that will take a considerable time to yield results, it should be your long term goal and will boost your credibility way over that of your competitors who only appear in the paid listings.
So, how do you go about it?
1. Optimise your web pages for the search engines
One aspect of SEO involves optimising your web pages by embedding targeted key words or phrases in the text on your main website. These key terms must be carefully chosen to be ones that your potential clients are likely to search for. The overall design of your website should also be taken into account as it can affect your rankings too.
2. Allocate some of your budget to obtaining inbound links to your site
Many search engines also place a lot of importance on the number of links to your web pages from other websites. This is based on the idea that the more people link to you, the more important (and relevant) you must be. By spending a portion of your online marketing budget on acquiring inbound links from other websites, you work your way towards an even higher ranking in the search engines.
3. Regularly add new information to your website
The search engines tend to notice when you don’t add new information to your website and your content becomes stale, and you will be penalised by sliding down the search rankings. And of course, your human visitors just won’t return unless you regularly add new web pages and interesting articles to your web site.
4. Start a blog
Starting a web log, or blog, where you post news and short articles related to your business is an excellent way to keep your website fresh. But a blog is much more than accumulating relevant content for visitors and search engines. Blogging is a great way to interact with potential clients who can leave comments about what you write. And, if you go beyond pure self promotion and post worthwhile content that people will want to link to, you’ll eventually end up with lots of free inbound links and traffic too. We’re barely scratching the surface of the awesome marketing power of blogs here, so watch out for more in future posts.
There are also other non-SEO marketing strategies that you should seriously consider, including:
Advertising on other websites
Although not usually a cost-effective way to get inbound links, advertising on other websites can be a great way to piggyback on their popularity to spread the word about you. For example, if you sell real estate, you can have your portfolio displayed on web portals related to the country or region where you operate and reach thousands of potential clients that way.
Opt-in e-mail marketing
The key word here is opt-in. Spamming a random e-mail list is not only illegal, but highly inefficient too.
By encouraging visitors to your web site, as well as your current clients, to subscribe to receive interesting information, together with news and promotional advertising by e-mail, you build up a highly valuable mailing list of targeted people who are actually interested in your services.
You can also consider purchasing mailing lists from list brokers, but you have to make sure that the people on the list are not only highly targeted, but are there because they have expressed an interest in receiving info from your kind of business. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of time.
Well, those were a few Internet marketing ideas to consider as you plan your strategy. Remember, the secret is to think long term and, of course, to diversify your efforts for best results.
Jun
8
Sorted Sites Launches Pay Per Click Manager
Filed Under General Stuff, Pay Per Click | Leave a Comment
In early 2004 Sorted Sites started offering clients Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Advertising. So successful has this part of our business been that we have decided to market our Pay Per Click services via a separate website that will purely focus on providing a better service to our present and new clients. We hope that this new site will help educate and dispel some of the myths about Pay Per click Advertising. Please feel free to give us any comments on the new site: Pay Per Click Management
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May
10
 
Well he passed his exam with a whopping 87% some months ago but finally he has proof, Luigi Muto - our own Google Adwords Professional now has his certificate to prove it.
Well done Luigi!!!
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