Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Pay Per Click
How Does Internet Marketing Work?
Aug 31st
Internet marketing is a relatively new concept, which leaves many people scratching their heads as to just what exactly it is. And even those familiar with the term may not be aware of what’s involved and how it works. So, let’s see if we can shed some light onto something that’s become indispensible if you’re a business owner and want to get your business noticed on the internet.
The Basics
Boiled down to its bare essence, internet marketing is basically all about getting visitors (or traffic) to your web site, and, once they’re there, to generate enough interest for them to want to return to your site, or, better still, take some kind of positive action that results in a relationship being established between themselves and the web site, or business.
But, how exactly do you get to the point where you’re getting sufficient visitors who take the action you would like them to take? The devil is in the details as far as internet marketing is concerned, so let’s take a high-level view of the details to see what’s involved.
Internet Marketing Methodology
There are several internet marketing methodologies that can be followed, some of which can be applied simultaneously, but all of which share the common goals of driving traffic to your web site and converting that traffic into customers. These methodologies are:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Web Analytics
- SEO Web Design
- Online Branding
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation, or SEO as it’s commonly referred to, is the art of getting your web site set up so that it ranks well in the organic search results of the major search engines for specific keywords.
The first step of any good SEO campaign is to determine just who your target audience is and what they’re searching for. After all, if you don’t know who’s interested in what you have to offer, how are you ever going to get your web site in front of them? This involves using the right keywords strategically placed throughout your web site, with each page optimized for just one or two keywords.
Having selected your keywords, the next step is to create unique content based around those keywords. Bear in mind that search engines don’t rank web sites based on the site as a whole but based on the quality of unique content presented on individual pages.
The structure of your web site not only determines how easily your visitors can navigate around it, but also how easily search engines can find your site and index it. One thing you should definitely do is submit a sitemap, which represents an outline of your entire site.
Setting up a blog or forum on your site helps keep your content fresh, and, therefore, the search engines happy. It also helps establish your site as an authority in your particular field.
Finally, one of the most important factors in search engine optimisation is creating backlinks, or links from other authoritative sites back to your site. The number and quality of such links play a major part in the algorithms of all major search engines, and will reward your effort and attention.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Whereas the goal of search engine optimisation is to rank highly within organic search results for specific keywords at no cost, pay-per-click (PPC) involves paying for the placement of your site within the sponsored section of search engine results, while competing with other advertisers.
The difference between a visitor clicking on your site in the organic search engine results and clicking on your site in the sponsored results is that the former is free, whereas you pay for the latter, regardless of the outcome.
A combination of both SEO and PPC is recommended, but PPC should be approached initially with care and with a strict budget limit, since you’ll be charged for clicks in real time, so you must stay on top of your campaigns. PPC campaigns never sleep, and neither should you (well, maybe 40 winks here and there!)!
Web Analytics
Web analytics sounds a bit intimidating, but no need to panic – it’s not really that scary at all. It’s all about tracking all the activity connected with your web site, including traffic and user interaction, providing you with the ability to check the sources of traffic coming to your site and allowing you to improve your traffic generating strategies, including search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, etc.
As a result, you can tell which keywords are sending traffic to your site and which aren’t, and make adjustments accordingly. Analytics can also be used to set goals and track the results.
SEO Web Design
In the early days of the internet, you could almost throw together any old site and achieve a reasonable amount of success. Nowadays, not only have search engines become much more sophisticated, but so have users. As a result, much more care and attention needs to go into the design and construction of your web site to please both users and search engines.
- You must know who your target audience is and ensure your site is set up to cater to that audience
- Check the competition and what they’re doing and see if you can improve on it and/or offer something that makes you stand out
- Decide on an appropriate navigation strategy that will allow users to move freely and easily within your site, while ensuring the strategy also makes sense for the search engines (having a link that goes nowhere will bring the search engines to a screeching halt – not good!)
- Which technology will you use to build your site? HTML? Flash? Ajax? PHP?
- Create high quality, informative content that establishes your site as a subject matter expert
- Test the site thoroughly, checking for ease of navigation and that all links work correctly
Online Branding
Building your brand has become one of the most important aspects of building a successful business, both offline and online. As far as online brand building is concerned, internet advertising plays a huge role. Again, this begins with knowing your target audience and determining their needs and desires.
Once you know what your audience is and that they need what you have to offer, your aim then must be to get your company and its name and everything connected with it in front of that audience by every means at your disposal, including your signature, web site, blog, logo, newsletter, etc.
Though it’s a very difficult goal to achieve, branding is regarded as one of the most important marketing strategies since it can be the thing that separates you from your competition and can turn a visitor into a customer. Everything a user sees that’s connected with your company should carry a stamp of quality that the user associates with your name, and thus your brand, ensuring they’ll remember you and your company and will come back to you again and again.
Whichever methodology, or methodologies, you choose to implement, the ultimate goal, when all said and done, is to get visitors to your site and convert them to customers who will hopefully return time and again, since that will be the measure of the success of any internet marketing methodology.
Choose the methodology that’s right for you, and get started on your journey to online success via internet marketing.
Tips on Adword Campaigns
Jul 30th
An ad campaign can make or break a company, if you do it well people will look at your products or services and if it is bad it will simply not generate you any revenue.
People tend to think of their ads and Adword campaigns as seperate entity to the core of their business, they look at it as help for the business and not as part olf the core business and traditionally this was and to an extent still is true, however when you have an internet business it just doesn’t nor shuold it work that way.
Many business owners spend extraordinary amounts of time and money building their online business presence yet spend little if any time on the advertising they do online which seems to defeat the objective they are trying to ultimately achieve which is to gain customers.
They spend very little real time in the creation process and almost none in the fine tuning and monitoring of weaknesses in the performance of their marketing campaign. Today’s post looks at a few tips how we can help are Adword campaigns perform better and cost less.
What is an Adword Campaign
An Adwords campaign is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising system, which means that advertisers pay each time a visitor clicks onto a specific ad that takes them to an advertiser’s website. Advertisers pay to create their ads with AdWords, and publishers get paid to display those ads on their web sites with AdSense.
Most online business owners who use AdWords use it to drive targeted traffic to their website by creating ads and choosing keywords related to their business, products or services. AdWords places the ad on Google so that when people search for your specified keywords your ad will show up.
It also places ads into AdSense placements on related websites all across the internet. AdWords is a pay-per-click system so you only pay when AdWords brings targeted users to your web site. It is a cost effective method of advertising as you can choose your budget yourself.
Choosing your Adword Campaign Keywords
Every business owners objective is to generate revunue and to that end they must sell his product or service effectively, this means that they need to attract customers, get them to the right place on their website to make a purchase, help them find the product they are looking for easily and make the buying process extremely easy and simple.
On top of this the business owner must be able to drive targetted traffic to the site and supply the right information to help the prospective customer proceed to purchase. But for this to work and for the Adwords campaign to work the business owner must first target correctly the keywords he will use in the campaign and these are not always the obvious ones.
What a business owner should do is look for words that best describe the function of the product or service, if the Adword is about your website in general then look for words that best describe it. However most internet businesses are looking to target a specific product or service and Adwords campaigns do tend to work better if you target something specifically rather than generally targeting your whole site.
Just like choosing the keywords for your site, only use those specific to the objective to bring traffic for that product, now this may seem obvious but you would be surprised how many people do this wrong, think customer not you when choosing keywords.
Next think of not only the one word keywords but also the combinations of two or three words a client may use i.e. a service that helps businesses grow online – single word business (very general not much use), business coach (more specific, but open enough to get maximum results, but could be still too general) or internet business coach (this is very specific and will ensure only people who enter this combination of words or similiar will potential click your ad as they are looking for someone like you).
Using Your Keywords for your Adwords Campaign
Once you have chosen your keywords that will best describe your product or service in the ad it is time to actual go to the Adwords site on Google and create your ad. If you choose the right keywords and they are used frequently enough by people searching, they will see your ad and choose to click it. The more frequently it is clicked is the higher the quality score given to that keyword. The higher the quality score the better the ad placement will be and the number of times it shows will also increase.
This is good for your business as a high quality score generallly means a lower price per click. So well worded precise ads can potentially gain you cheaper click cost if the quality score is high.
Keeping your CPC low
Obviously we need to control costs on any campaign and one of the best ways is to split similiar keywords and use them in their own campaign, another is to remove what is known as negative words i.e something that will not bring you a conversion, this could be any word which could potential induce a person to click your ad thinking they would get something else so for example you do sales of computers you would remove a word like repairs as you do not repair computers you only sell them. Ensuring you have your demographics correct so if you are in the UK do you want to service the whole of the UK or just your local town and finally ensuring you have a good landing page, all of these things will help to keep cost down.
It is the life blood of all online business that they need new customers, to get them you must advertise but this does not mean it should cost you the earth. When using Adwords remember to do you keyword research diligently and make precise ads that can help lower costs, try to think like your customers and most of all test your ads, if they are not working you really need to change them.
Pay Per Click and Local Gold
May 30th
Pay Per Click (PPC) is an internet marketing medium which permits you to advertise your product based on a keyword phrase which has a certain monetary value i.e. let us say the word is carpet; its worth 0.5 Cents per click (sorry but everything online seems to be US dollars), if you decide to use this word it will cost you 0.5 cents every time a person clicks on your advert that uses that keyword. A keyword’s cost per click is determinated by the amount of competition there is for the keyword/s and the search engine’s standards.
Current Pay Per Click providers are Bing, Yahoo and Google Adwords. Approximately 70% of all advertising for keywords is done through Google hence many specialists within Search Engine Marketing have used it consistantly since 2004. This does not mean that you should not bother with Bing and Yahoo in fact as a small business these are probably great places to start your online marketing campaign due to less competition, but more on that later.
Marketing using PPC (Pay Per Click) has many benefits like:
1. Speed: it allows quicker ranking on the surface of the Search Engine Result
Where to Look for PPC Ads
2. Predictability: it allows you to be able to predict your Return On Investment (ROI).
But that’s all well and good the question is how do I get started? what do i need to do first? here is a brief outline
First look at what your business offers from your customers point of view, they need your service, it is late in the evening, they are tired from a hard days work and they want an answer to their problem now – Question – what would they type in to find you? Make a list and then put them down for the moment, you will need them later.
Then search your keywords from your list earlier, check to see the amount of searches that where performed by potential customers, the amount of competition for those keyword and the cost of that keyword, if you find that the competition is very high and the price is also quite high you may wish to consider an alternative or use long tail keywords instead. Equally if the search total is too low then this will not benefit you either as the click through rate necessary to make your sales may not come to your site.
Having sorted all of your keywords out next you need to look at the figures i.e. how many visitors would it take before you get a conversion for your product or service, for example let us say that you have 1000 visitors and only ten perple convert, then this means that your conversion rate is 1%, most sites if done decently will convert much higher than this in fact the ratio can be done by using the 80/20 rule however looking at the worse case scenario tends to give you a better picture, simply because if you do not even convert at your worse figure then you truely are doing something wrong and need to go back to the first step or review your website or topic again.
So why is this important – well it helps you to consider how much you can afford to spend on your PPC campaign and what price you need to charge for your product or service in order to recoup the cost of 100 visitors – get it.
Once you have done the figures you can understandably look at how next to precede, how to calculate your expenditure and where best to place your campaign. Now remember in the beginning I mentioned not to count out Bing and Yahoo and this is why – if you can spend less per click for your given keywords and have less competition for those keywords- where do you feel that will place you? Clearly it is advantageous.
Finally go run your campaign, remember to test, test and test again. Now if you really want to take this to the next level you can make your PPC campaign really work for you by using geographical localisation in order to make your product more appealing to a specific, area, region, location than it would have been in the general category that most people vi for.
Now here is the gold, most people never do PPC for their personal geographical location, worst still they do not realise how much money they are leaving behind.
When using PPC geographically something wonderful happens – yes you got it the price per click is substantially lower than for a general category keyword and the competition is also much lower which means, you can buy more clicks, it costs less to convert a prospect and also gives a potentially higher conversion rate, leading to potentially more money for you. This form of internet marketing still has gold in it if you know how to align your thought and research, plan and execute it well to gain your business better profits.
