Online Business Tips

Archive for July, 2011

PPC Advertising – Keep the “search” & “content” Ads Separate

Pay Per Click or PPC Advertising, if used correctly, can set you on a path to potential financial independence, but used incorrectly, you can lose your shirt, fast. It’s very important for newcomers to get the proper Pay Per Click education by reading one of the excellent books on Pay Per Click Advertising before actually getting in the trenches and spending money.

There are several different companies that you can choose for your advertising campaigns, Google Adwords, MSN, Yahoo Search Marketing, Kanoodle, Enhance and many more, but the undisputed king of Pay Per Click Marketing is Google Adwords. Google has changed their advertising rules several times now since opening their doors at the early part of this decade, but still has an enormous following. It’s estimated that Google gets apx. 47% of all searches being done on the Internet with Yahoo second at 23%, followed by MSN at 11%. Number two and three combined don’t get as much traffic on a regular basis as Google does. This means that placing your ad there can potentially bring you a lot of qualified traffic. It also means that the competition for that traffic will be fierce and potentially very expensive, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Read on.

One of the most recent changes that occurred at Google was the ability to separate “Search Ads” and “Content Ads” within your campaigns. When you advertise using Google Adwords your ads will not only be displayed within the Google search engine, but also may be placed on other people’s websites that have related subject matter and also on some of their “Partner Networks”. Some of these partners are other PPC Advertising companies just like themselves, but on a much smaller scale.

For you as an advertiser it’s very important that you keep these two entities separate when running your campaign. You now have the option to either pay less money for the traffic you receive through the Content ads or you can eliminate them from your campaign entirely. I recommend that, if you do choose to run them, even at a lower cost, you set up an entirely different campaign. I know that it sounds like a big hassle, but there’s a good reason for this. That reason is tracking your ads. If you don’t track your ads then you are losing money. It’s important that you know exactly where your clicks and sales are coming from in order to eliminate waste and only pay for what’s actually working. It’s virtually impossible to do this when you have both Search and Content running in the same campaign.

If you’re new this may seem like a lot of “chatter” to you. If that’s the case, I highly recommend that you invest in a good book on Pay Per Click Advertising, as mentioned above. If you’re not new, but this seems like a lot of extra work to you, think of it this way; you could be doing a labor job somewhere or continue in your day job for the rest of your life. Which seems worse now? Besides, once you get it set up correctly you’ll be able to get rid of the garbage, only pay for what works, increase your profits by redirecting the money that you were wasting into another area of your advertising portfolio and increase your bottom line by doing so. Does it still sound like too much work? Get those campaigns set up right the first time. Good luck!

Top 7 Tips for Improving Your Website

You may have heard that the days of Search Engine Optimisation are numbered. All those beautiful, customer-laden search engine rankings you were about to climb from some carefully repeated keyword placing. What is true is that search engines are getting more discerning. SEO isn’t dead. It just became part of a bigger pie. The trick is knowing how to charm the search engines because keyword stuffing has gone the way of the dinosaur. Google is getting a lot smarter at identifying what your site offers and how it relates to what people are searching for. So here are 7 tips to help you improve the content of your site and move your business up the search rankings quickly.

1.    THE IMPORTANCE OF SEO AND SEM

What is SEO? How does it apply to your business? Search Engine Optimisation is where guys like me use writing tools to improve your website, boosting its position in the search engine rankings. We know the right keywords for your business to refine your site so that when people type into their Google search engine the words ‘emergency plumber in London’, your name is at the right end of the search engine rankings.

The appliance of science

It’s never an exact science, of course, as the search engines are constantly shifting goalposts in terms of ranking criteria but, with a bit of work, you can move quickly up the search engine rankings and, in turn, increase your market share. So that’s SEO. Search engines are moving away from keywords to more of a concentration on overall website content and customer relationship building which, ultimately, helps with your link building (another important aspect of your site gaining in popularity).

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing is the new buzz phrase. Engaging customers on a personal level – blogs, vlogs, social media, it was all there before, but now people are beginning to understand the merits of using networking sites like Twitter (which we’ll look at a little later) to promote your business to the world.

Survival of the smartest

Who are the companies surviving this recession? It’s the brand names who have built up a loyal fan base, who are talked about with fondness on the web, the brands who ask their customers what they need during tough times and then deliver it. Driving through a recession is not about price cutting (although this is important in terms of cash flow), it’s about identifying what customers really want and giving it to them. The companies that are surviving are adapting…and fast. Most weren’t, sadly, prepared for how severe the recession would be and many paid the price (Viyella, Woolworths, etc). Business survival is about listening. Then delivering to the right place at the right time.

Giving your customers the right slice of the pie

So what is Search Engine Marketing and how does it differ from SEO? Well, think of SEO as a slice of your favourite pie. It’s delicious, right? You can’t wait for another piece. Suppose there are six of you and each one loves pie but one loves custard on his, another is vegetarian, another likes cherries on top, etc. SEM gives you all a piece of pie and it’s exactly as you like it. Ah, organic, natural online growth, don’t you just love it? SEM is the pie, being baked again and again to adjust to the particular preferences of Mr Cherry On Top and Miss Custard. SEM focuses on on-site and off-site adjustments in order to maximise rankings in SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). SEM uses all types of strategies (SEO, Pay Per Click, web visibility strategies, etc) to market your products online via search engines like Google and MSN.

2.    HOW TO BUILD CONTENT

Ah, that eternal question. How to build content or, to be more exact, how to build the right content. Clearly if you’re selling shoes made in China, an article about the quality of Italian shoemaking is going to be counterproductive. So what should you be doing to make your site more accessible, tailored and popular? How do you start to get noticed with the web full of people trying to do exactly the same thing?

Think about your marketing advantage

The first thing you have to think about is your marketing advantage. What is it that makes your product or service special? It may sound simple, but you would be surprised by the number of clients I deal with who can’t answer this basic question. Who am I? Sure, they can tell you right down to the nth component what they sell but they’re not looking at the bigger picture. Why do I sell this and what makes it different from all the others. So, first and foremost, thing about what makes you unique and, believe me, even if you don’t think you are, there is always something unique about your product. You just have to look for it. By now, hopefully you will have done a little research on the web. You’ll know that it’s good to have a HOME PAGE, an ABOUT US page, a PRODUCTS AND SERVICES page, a CLIENTS page, a PORTFOLIO page where people can see your work, the all-important CONTACT US page, etc. But what now? Again, it’s back to the quality of your content.

3. NEWSLETTERS – A GREAT CUSTOMER FACING TOOL

Back in the good old days when Gordon Brown was just a twinkle in the eye of…well, let’s not go there …long ago, before the internet was even born, people used to let their customers and potential customers know about their business by means of newsletters. If they were lucky, they might even have sold some ads in there too on support services. Nowadays, newsletters are everywhere on the web. The trouble with the web is that once a whole lot of articles get put out there written by successful copywriters telling people how great newsletters are as a tool, guess what happens. Suddenly everybody and his wife has a newsletter. So how do you separate yourself from everybody and his wife.

How to write a great newsletter

The key to the newsletter lies in its quality and identifying your customers. You may want to make use of a CRM tool to help you do this. I don’t know about you, but I receive a LOT of newsletters everyday, most of which are quickly sent to the junk folder but the ones that grab my attention are those which appeal to my senses. So, the trick of newsletters is to identify your customers and engage their thoughts and deliver the services they really want (sometimes they don’t even know they want it till you tell them). People don’t need to know what your cleaner does on their day off. They want to know who you are, what you can do for them and how much it’s going to cost. They want to know what new products you have on the market. They want to know how you feel about the world. They want to know your core values and whether they are aligned with theirs. This is about brand culture.

Why iPod became number one

Why did iPod end up leading the market? Style, design, lifestyle. People bought into the Apple culture. Apple understood and marketed the Osmosis Effect. People like to be associated with success and what’s perceived as cool. It’s human nature. If you can provide a service or product which can improve the quality of a life in your customer’s eyes, you can place that order for the Ferrari now (actually, given the current climate, make that two). The secret here is to get involved with your customers. Ask them what they want and then give it to them. In an uncertain world, people like to know about the people they do business with. So tell them but when you do, keep it brief, entertaining and informative.

4. USE NETWORKING SITES LIKE TWITTER TO YOUR BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

Twitter is a great way to get news out there. To be honest, when this site hit the press, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But, having used it, I can see it’s a great tool for getting little nuggets of news out there. Basically it’s a networking tool. You can update your ‘followers’ on any news you ha
ve and what you’re doing in 140 characters or less. What a great instant bulletin. That then goes to all the people in your groups instantly. Content is king! Make it short, snappy, funny even. But get it out there. Got a new product? Tell them about it and where to find out more. Twitter is a great example of how the evolution of the web into a sophisticated marketing tool is allowing even mum and dad businesses to spread their messages quickly and globally.

5. PRESS RELEASES

Sites like Twitter are a great example of a micro release and a good illustration that if you want to raise your brand awareness, you need to be proactive. The secret to a good press release lies in the words of F Scott Fitzgerald who once said, “Don’t write because you want to say something, write because you have something to say.” Don’t write to fill blank space, write because you have something important to say about your company and the products and services it offers.

6.    THE ART OF CONVERSATION

There’s a fine art to conversation. Kind of like that saying about ‘any fool can start a relationship but it takes great skill to end one’. It’s now generally accepted that conversational copywriting (if you prefer, conversational branding) is the way to promote successfully to customers. Look at brands that do it well – Virgin, Innocent, Apple – all well liked brands. In the old days, when Gordon Brown was just a twinkle in the eye of…ahem…way back when, people used to use regional-accented call-centre operators to appeal to customers with their gritty, down-to-earth reassuring voices. The two are interlinked. It’s about trust. Conversational branding is just that – trust. Trust in the person selling you, trust

Tips to be Remembered for Building Powerful Brands

Strong brands are a treasure. It is an asset of a company. It helps in generating more revenue for the company. A powerful brand persuades the customers to buy the product without actually forcing them to buy. It also increases their willingness to buy the product at a higher price. It entices customers to buy the product more frequently. They also happily recommend the brand to friends. The Customers does all this for the trust and love they have for the brand. The brand also in turn delivers more value back to them then the price they have paid.

In a nutshell, brands establish relationships with all its stakeholders and so it is very important to nurture it with lot of care and attention. So we should always remember the following few tips:

Creative Thinking: A person needs to think creatively. Out of the box thinking is required which attracts attention and gives it the extra mile for building the brand. Branding can be done not only through conventional advertising, but also through beliefs, thoughts, and latest technologies.
Honesty: While branding a product, false claims should not be made. This could give a short-term benefit but in the long run would cause severe damage to the brand. So we should follow the old golden rule – Honesty is the best policy.
Consistency in all aspects: Attention should be given to even small details and all aspects of the business to send the same message as the brand wishes to convey. It helps in giving the brand a persistent identity.
There should be strong commitment to product quality, economic efficiency and social responsibility. This helps in building a unique brand.
Try to offer customers more choice as it makes the brand more appealing, while staying true to the focused and distinctive brand features.
Try to evolve the brand overtime to stay distinctive in the market.
Involve the employees in delivering the brand experience. They are all brand ambassadors.
Recognize your brand as a financial asset and not as a fad.
Last but not the least. Understand your customers well.

6 Tips to Use Facebook for Your Business

Yesterday all the major news websites announced that Facebook has passed Fox, Ebay and Amazon on its way to the respectable fifth place in the Top 50  U.S. web properties list. More and more small business owners and advertisers seem to understand the power of social media marketing and divert some of their attention and budgets towards this relatively new medium. However, many of us just don’t know how to approach these tools and how to utilize them best for our business. As an early adapter, I have joined Facebook almost immediately after it allowed general public access, but it was only around 18 months ago that I began to understand its power and to study its business capabilities.

Here are some initial tips to get you started:

Always Use a Real Profile Photo – The whole idea of social media is the building of relationship and “friendships” over the web. Your users and future customers want to see the person behind the username/brand. Your profile photo is the first contact point with your potential audience, and as such should be both representative and personal at the same time. Always Be Interesting – people use Facebook on a daily (and even hourly) basis.  If you want to be always on your potential customers’ mind, make sure that you  update your status at least once a day (this is the  ’What’s on your mind?’ sentence in the top of the page). Make sure that you link to interesting content, provide important insights, connect to other similar friends etc. The more you appear on their wall the more they will remember you as an authority and a person to trust for interesting information. Of course, the rule of thumb here is to do everything in the right proportion in order not to be considered a spammer or a Persona non grata. Use Facebook Groups – Facebook provides two main platforms to gather “fans” or “followers” (people who likes your product or your brand and want to be updated about it). I will talk about the Facebook Pages in the next point. Facebook Groups is a powerful tool to create a (guess what…) group of people, all interested in one cause/product/brand/issue. While your first instinct would be to go and establish a group for your brand, STOP! Do not forget that people nowadays are very much aware of any direct marketing attempt and usually will not cooperate. So, the right way to use groups, in my opinion, would be to organize a group around a non-commercial cause (such as “Job Search Tips”). This will increase your attractiveness towards users who may have never heard of your brand but still would like to get job search tips. to know more about groups I suggest the following post from Read Write Web. Use Facebook Pages - Facebook Pages are what Facebook uses for business. This is where I recommend to introduce your brand. Here you can put your logo, your brand description and related commercial information. You can add “Fans” to your page and communicate with them through “Updates”. The secret here is to create discussions and conversations around your product/brand. The goal is to reach a situation where this page is running by itself – conversations and discussions are initiated by the users between themselves. This is a great tool to investigate what people have to say about your brand and to get first hand feedback without the need to conduct expensive focus group researches. Of course, it takes time to build such traction, but for this you have to be patient and follow the steps suggested on a daily basis to eventually succeed in reaching this goal. The Three C’s: Content-Communicate-Community –  This is the modern replacement for the traditional marketing four P’s formula. Nowadays, if you don’t produce constant CONTENT, if you don’t COMMUNICATE it with right tools, and if you don’t create a COMMUNITY around your brand, reaching your target audience and selling them your product or services will become almost impossible.  So remember, create quality content, send it along the social media river and dont forget to gather around you community of fans or followers that will wait for your next content and more importantly – will be an avid advocate of your brand. Cross-Collaboration – Once we thought that all the social media tools are competing with each other. We now see the next step of social media – a trend of cooperation and collaboration between almost all the social media websites. The most recent step in this direction is the release of Facebook’s Twitter App. What it actually means is that the social media tools allows you to post your content simultaneously in front of hundreds of millions of people with one click! So, make sure you have an account on Twitter (and don’t forget to follow me…), Linkedin, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, etc. It’s FREE and you won’t regret it.

PPC Advertising vs Organic Optimisation

If you are starting to market online, you will probably want to know what these two terms are as you may have heard them before. These are essentially the two main types of internet marketing and each one has its own benefits and disadvantages. This short article will show you the basics of each one.

PPC Advertising

Pay Per Click Advertising was an idea which was introduced by Goto.com back in 1998 at a conference a company which later became part of Yahoo. Google later introduced PPC advertising in December 1999 and it became the company’s biggest earner. It works by simply bidding on keywords and the highest bidder gets their site listed at or near the top of the search engine index results when that particular keyword is entered. In addition, the website must pay the search engine company (in this case Google) for every time that someone clicks on the link.

It sounds like a foolproof plan as logically, the more people that visit your site then the more business it will generate. Unfortunately, many people found themselves hit with the ‘Google Slap’ a term coined to describe the hefty bill a user might run up at the end of the week. This was because of people clicking on the site, not buying anything or availing of it’s services, and then clicking off. The company still had to pay for every visitor but didn’t have the turnover to fund it. From Google’s perspective, it was the responsibility of the website to turn those leads into sales. However, when done correctly, it yielded extremely quick results and could greatly improve sales in the short term.

Organic Optimisation

If a company didn’t have the budget to use a more traditional PPC campaign, the alternative was organic optimisation. This was done by employing a series of techniques used to help list a site high on the search results, purely by it’s content. This is actually something which is encouraged by Google. It demands that the webmasters and businesses focus on relevancy and keep the end user as the first priority at all times i.e. making sure the most relevant results reach the right people. Unfortunately, this isn’t perfect either. This is a longer process as it can take a site a few months to get listed on the search results. However, the results last a lot longer and ensure that the right people will be directed to your site more than PPC would, making it easier to sell to them.

There are SEO companies that will help you in both of these techniques as each can work extremely well, but it’s strongly recommended that you use someone with experience in optimisation to ensure that your site has the best chance.