My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘pay-per-click’

I can’t stress strongly enough how important it is for an Internet Marketer to know what marketing keywords they should use for their products, and how much their competition is willing to pay for those same keywords. This may seem like a complicated process, but it really isn’t. In this article we’ll discuss three free websites that all internet Marketers can use to find this information.

Let’s first talk about keywords… When I say ‘keywords’, I’m referring to marketing keywords. These are the words that your potential customers would use to describe your product. These are the same words that somebody would type in an online search engine to find your products.

If you have a business website and you don’t know which marketing keywords your website is geared to, then you’re website is certainly at a huge disadvantage. Why? Because you will be losing business. And you can bet that your main competition WILL know their marketing keywords, and they WILL be strategically using these keywords in their website and advertisements.

You see, when search engine spiders crawl your website, they’re looking for text in your website that can be indexed and used to describe the content of your website. If your website doesn’t contain the proper keywords that people use to find your product, then your website will likely not show up in their searches. So your website really needs to be optimized with the relevant marketing keywords that the majority of people are using to search for your product.

Another example where it is vital to know your marketing keywords is when using Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertising. Pay-Per Click advertising is typically done through search engines where you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement (link). Your advertisement will appear after a user goes to the search engine and runs a keyword search (which is just a regular search). The search engine looks at their submitted keyword(s) and then cross references those with the keywords associated with the PPC advertisements. If they match, the PPC ads are then returned with the users search results… Go ahead and go to Google and run a search. The ads you see on the right-hand side of the screen are the PPC ads.

(Note: The order in which the PPC ads are returned are dependant on a few factors: the price you’re willing to pay for each click, the search engine used, the ad Click-Through Rate (CTR), etc.)

Let’s now go through a quick and free process for finding good keywords for your website.

1) Go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https:adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox)

Enter some key words into the textbox that you think people would use to conduct a search for your product. When you’re done, click the submit button. You will then be shown specific and similar keywords. Write down the ones that you think would apply to your product.

2) Go to the Overture Keyword Selector Tool (inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/)

Enter each keyword that you have written down from step 1, then click the right-arrow button. This will allow you to see which keywords are the most popular in Overture. Note: the most popular keywords aren’t always the most appropriate. For example, if your website sells guides on how to rebuild a 57 Chevy, then you will probably want to specifically target ’57 Chevy’ keywords, instead of the less specific ‘Chevy’ keyword. Why? Because you want to get your ad/website in front of the people that are most likely to buy your product.

The above 2 websites should give you a great keyword list that you can now use to optimize your website. But if you want to advertise using PPC, you really need to know what your competition is paying for your keywords. This is an easy task as well.

3) Go to the Overture Bid Tool (uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/)

Enter your keywords into the textbox, and then click the search button. This will return the Overture bids for that keyword. The highest bids likely get the highest placements &ndash meaning the ads are closer to the top position on the first page of the user’s search results. The goal is to get as high as your budget will allow to the top position to ensure maximum exposure of your ad.

There you have it… three great websites that can help your Internet marketing campaigns &ndash and best of all, they are all free to use!

Sincerely,

Michael Ellis

Keywords and Ad Words aren’t the only way that search engines score relevancy; links to other similar sites are another important factor. Keywords have been so abused by some webmasters that links are winning much more relevancy points. Google is said to love them. It might sound strange to suggest that your users should check out your competitors, but they probably know about them anyway.

If your competitors have a higher ranking than you, linking to them can often give you a higher relevancy score with the search engines and the subsequent increase in traffic will make it worth your while.

Alternatively, you can link to your own site by creating a subdirectory. This is like building another web page, but the URL will include your keyword. So if you were selling stuffed toys, the new URL would be YourDomain.com/stuffed-toys/stuffed-toys.html.

You could then write a short paragraph on the home page, describing the new page and including a link. You’ll get big relevancy points for this!

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their web pages to yours. You give them a similar link in return.

When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don’t reduce the quality or content of your own site. You don’t want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to buy first. One way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a “Resources Page” and link to that page from your homepage. This doesn’t take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners.

In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users.

Picking Your Partner

Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to determine where people interested in your product might be looking online. For example, if you’re trying to sell a book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers. Online casinos then could be good partners.

Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address of their webmasters. You can also identify your competitors, see where they trade links and then follow suit.

Tips for Talking to Webmasters

Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your home page or resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a high quality link. Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it. You don’t want them to think you’re message is Spam. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will probably open and read it, thinking that you’re a potential customer.)

Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you.

Tell them in detail where you have placed their link and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage. Tell them that if you don’t hear back from them within 2 weeks, you will consider that to be a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site.

The Pay for Performance or P4P was originally invented by Overture. Overture observed that the internet was growing into a unique kind of shopping mall, where people could shop conveniently and easily and that advertising was gaining grounds on the internet. But now, Overture has been taken over by Yahoo and hence popularly known as Yahoo.

A visible and popular website attracts more and more people. It provides ads in other sites that link to a particular site can direct potential consumers and customers to that site thus increasing traffic and sales in that website. Yahoo provides a service using which it is possible to show ads kept in their websites when people input certain keywords.

Using Yahoo services, any willing website can have their traffic increased by utilizing the same. When more and more people become aware of your site, the traffic to your website would automatically increase. This in turn would increase the chance of people viewing your pages and products. Even if a small fraction of those people actually buy your products; that would still mean a substantial figure for you and your company.

It is the goal of every internet based company to get a high volume of potential consumers to their website. To accomplish this, the companies try a handful of methods to make their website more and more popular and make the people all over know about the existence of their services.

Yahoo/Overture is very similar to Google’s Adwords. Both of them use the same principle in showing ads according to keyword or keyword phrase searches. Whenever someone types in a phrase or a keyword in their search engine, the result page shows the usual results and along with it, shows the ads matching the search criteria on the right side of the same page. These ads in turn link to the websites of the respective companies.

As an example, let us consider that you run a car parts retail/wholesale site and you have chosen for Yahoo/Overture services, choosing some keywords that can trigger your ad to be displayed. Then, if somebody searches for Honda Accord, your ad might show up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. Using this system, you don’t even need to optimize your website with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

With some labor and work, you can make your site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search and you would have the chance of your site being displayed on the top of the list or at least, on the first page of a search result, thus increasing your chance of people clicking on your links. This is a fast way to have traffic and visitors to your website.

However, remember that this service is not free. There are different ways in which Yahoo/Overture might charge you. They could charge in the number of keywords or keyword phrases your as uses or in the number of times your ad gets clicked on. Similar services might offer other features like having your ad show up on some third party sites, besides showing it on the search result page. You should look out for those.

Some third party supports placing ads that have similar content to that of the site. The more sites your ads are shown, the more is the chance of getting visitors to your site, especially, if the site where your ad is shown is a popular website.

With the internet being the largest network and still growing and which has shrunken the whole world into a global village, with online businesses mushrooming, it is high time to start advertising and surge ahead in this rat race of getting visitors to your site. Yahoo/Overture is a great place to make a start. There are many who have used Yahoo/Overture and have had great success. It is a market strategy which will direct swarming traffic to your site and that in turn will boost your sales and result in profit.

Often it is seen that to make money, you require money. But by using services like Yahoo/Overture and other such types of low cost or free market strategies, it is often possible to get overwhelming results faster and on a big scale. Many of the online companies have learned this fact the hard way. Your company should, however, not be one of them.

For realtors the Internet can no longer be ignored. Significant numbers of home buyers on going online to do their preliminary research for real estate and agents. Recent surveys suggest over 50%.

I personally know a number of local realtors, and it is interesting to see how some are easily adapting to this media, while others are sitting on the sidelines wondering why they are seeing a decrease in prospective buyers.

The Internet is not going away, and if someone plans to make real estate a viable career they must incorporate online marketing in order to not only succeed, but to survive. So how can realtors cost-effective connect with potential customers? In addition to MLS listings, they can reach a very targeted audience through search engine marketing. There are basically two forms of search marketing, organic and pay per click advertising.

Organic Search Marketing

Organic search marketing is about ranking at the top of the search results. It is accomplished through search engine optimization (SEO). The goal is to get your web pages at the top of the search results for targeted terms and phrases. For example, if you are a realtor in Boise it would be profitable to have your site rank at the top for terms phrases like “Boise Realtors” or “Boise Real Estate.”

How do you accomplish this mysterious feat? First, you have to optimize your web pages around certain phrases like “Boise Real Estate.” That term becomes the theme of the page, and there are certain techniques that let the search engines know it is the theme.

In addition to optimizing the page you have to convince the search engines that your site is important enough to deserve a prominent ranking. This is achieved by getting other web sites to link to your site. When a web site has a hyperlink to your site, the search engines consider this a vote of confidence. It is more complicated than just getting a bunch of links, since some links are considered more important than others. But in general, the combination of optimized pages and external links results in top rankings. SEO takes time and effort. If you are a new site, you may not see results for 6-9 months with Google.

Pay Per Click Advertising

In contrast to SEO, pay per click advertising (PPC) can provide instant gratification. With Google you can set-up a marketing campaign in less than an hour. With Yahoo it takes 24-48 hours to be approved.

PPC is where you pay to have your web site listed at the top of the search results for particular terms that are relevant to your business. There are basically two search engines where you want to pay to market, Yahoo and Google. PPC is based on an auction model, where you bid for the position of your ad. The ads appear above and to the right of the organic search listings. They are listed as “Sponsored Links.”

PPC advertising is based on an auction model. You bid for positioning on terms that are relevant to your business, just like how you would optimize your web pages for similar terms. Once again if you are a realtor in Boise, you would bid on terms that your prospects would use to find services in your area. The position of your ad depends on how much you bid in relation to your competitors.

The appeal of PPC advertising is you set the bids, you set a maximum daily expenditure and you can turn your campaign on or off at any moment. Even more important is the ability to track exactly how your advertising dollars are being spent. With with this information you can tweak your bids and your ads for maximum performance.

It important to note that buyers who search online tend to be better informed, spend significantly less time with their realtor, and preview fewer houses than traditional buyers. That is another reason why search engine marketing is becoming essential.

Time is running out to ignore the Internet. Either you are going to be a player or you will be cut from the squad.

Promoting your internet business can be done in hundreds of ways, some of which are more effective, some less so. Others can be total flops. But what matters at the end of the day is simply this: RESULTS…RESULTS…RESULTS. All your efforts should be geared to this one goal alone: Results that put money in your wallet.

So what really works?

1. People just cannot resist…FREE! Yes, FREE!

Imagine: You are out shopping for perfume. You pass the cheese counter. A gorgeous lady offers sample tastings of smelly, bluey Gorgonzola. You hate cheese, it gives you eczema. But you take some all the same &ndash maybe not to eat, but take it anyway as it is free. Lesson: People just love… FREE! If it is free, people will take it. Send out free newsletters; offer a free trial period/services/information. Tease your potential customers, for example, with FREE PC reports or PC scans. After running these free services, alert the customer of problems (potential and existing) on their credit record or PC. Then show them what it is, or repair the problem for a fee. This can be an effective way to get information to your potential customers, create sales or to generate traffic to your site.

2. Turn KNOWLEDGE into traffic to your site.

You will probably be an expert on your product/ business. Leverage this expertise by writing articles and publishing them in an ezine or an article information site. The most effective way is to give away your articles for &ndash FREE! In return, ask the publisher for authorization to include a byline. A byline is a very short summary of the author, his credentials and website. Your byline is a way to claim a ‘visible’ place, a niche on the world wide web for you/your business. With time, readers will come to regard you as an expert in your area of specialization. The logical progress and outcome will be trust in your site as a source of credible information.

3. Click-Click-Click to riches

Some search engines allow the purchase of website rankings.This is an excellent, inexpensive and effective online marketing technique. With Pay-Per-Click programs, you choose keywords that are relevant to your site, and determine yourself the bid prices for each keyword/s. When surfers enter these words, your site will appear with other sites bidding the same words. Higher price bid words rank the site higher in the list. You are only billed for that click if the surfer chooses to view your site. Many Pay-Per-Click programs offer other benefits such as updated lists of commonly used keywords.

4. In the Real World, we live…OffLine

You business may be online, but…remember that in the real world, everything else is offline. Utilise the myriad media advertising available: Newspapers, magazines, the radio, the television. Send out press releases to distribute your information to thousands of people across the country you live in.

5. Net-keting

We are not islands unto ourselves. Many online entrepreneurs share similar marketing ideas as you. Networking with these people via link-exchanges and customer referrals could bring exponential growth to your online business. However, caution must be exercised in the choice of a networking partner: everything that you recommend is a reflection of yourself/your business, hence you owe it to yourself to do due diligence and ascertain that your networking partner is reputable.

Using Banners to market your web site

Banner advertising is on just about every web site you visit today. Banners are a form of advertising. This advertising is used to help pay for the site and help make the owner money. Regardless of the type of business or web site you have, you can use banners to help increase your income. The advertising revenue generated from banners falls into 3 groups: Pay Per Impression (PPI), Pay Per Click (PPC), and Pay Per Sale/Lead (PPS).

Pay Per Impression

With PPI banner advertising you are paid each time your advertiser’s banner is shown on your web pages. A term CPM is often used with banner advertising. It means cost per thousand, which basically means you will be paid $x.xx for every 1000 banners displayed to the visitors of your web site This is the easiest method to earn money with as every time someone visits your web site you get paid. However, this is not used very much and is very easily abused. If you have a 1000 visitors per day and are paid $5 per thousand then you make $150 per month. As an advertiser you do NOT want to use PPI. It would be like paying the newspaper or phone company money every time they said someone opened the newspaper or phonebook.

Pay Per Click

With PPC banner, you are paid more than with PPI but only when the visitor actually clicks on the banner rather then just seeing it. With PPI you many be paid $5.00 CPM (per thousand) and with PPC you could be paid $5 per click. However, not as many will click on the banner. Banner design has a lot to do with what we call the conversion rate. That is basically how effective is the banner. Conversion rates for banners is usually less than 1%. A very good banner may have a 5% conversion rate. Remember that is a passive income stream. It is working around the clock and requires no work on your part. So, if you have 1000 people a day coming to your web site and you have a 1% conversion rate with a payment of 50 cents per click, you could be earning $150 a month just for having the banner there. As an advertiser this is a little better than PPI. At least now the visitor is on your web site and you have a chance to gather information about them and possibly sell them your product or service.

Pay Per Sale/Lead

PPS banner advertising using pays the highest dollars of these three methods, but only generates income when the advertiser makes a sale to someone visiting from your web site It will have the lowest conversion rate of the three. PPS banners only work well for the web site owner if the advertiser does a good job with the banner design (creating a desire to click), selling (presenting information), and closing (getting the sale). None of these do you control directly. Selecting PPS advertisers for your site should be well thought out. As an advertiser, this is the preferred type of banner advertising.

Where to find advertisers

I think the best place to find people that want to place banner ads on your site will be the affiliate programs. This is also a good place for you to advertise that you would like to place banners on others sites as well. Read the pages carefully. Banners can be expensive if you don’t generate any sales.

If you have friends or business associates that you do business with you can ask them if they would like to place a banner on your site or if you could place a banner on theirs. These exchanges become more and more popular as your site becomes more popular as well.

A new source for banner ads are from the major search engines. Google Adwords are probably the best known new source for advertising on a pay per basis. This works both ways. You can pay to have your ad/banner placed on others sites as well as have other web site ads placed on your site. When your ad is displayed and someone clicks on it they will visit your site and you pay Google for the visit. When you allow Google to place ads on your site and someone clicks the ad, you get paid.

In the resource section of rd-webhosting.com you will find more information on using banners to market your website.

Using Classified Ads to market your web site

Classified ads are just like in the newspaper. They are small detailed ads that offer your product or services and provides a contact (your email or web site). A quick search on Yahoo for classified ads will find over 58,000,000 entries for sites and people who will either sell or place your classified ads on their web sites.

Classified ad sites fall into two categories: Free and Paid. Free sites should be avoided. BE CAREFUL… most free classified ad web sites. are farming your email address to sell to others. You will find you email box loaded with tons of offers and once it starts it will never stop. Paid classified web sites, however, can be like having a store in the world’s largest shopping mall for pennies a day in rent.

One of the largest classified ads web sites is…eBay. Think about this. For about 30 cents an ad (item to sell) you get listed for one week where over 1 million people a day come to shop. I have more information on eBay and other auction sites under Web Basics.

There are other forms of advertising as well. One of which we discussed before was newsletters. Others include, your email signature, banner ads, ebooks and affiliates. Each are discussed here. Click on the Marketing Resources to review each form of advertising.

This is part one of a multi-part series of Marketing you web site. Please visit us at rd-webhosting.com for the rest of the series. In the next section we will cover marketing you web site using email, e-books, letterhead and magazines. More information on marketing, website design and other areas of Internet Business can be found at rd-webhosting.com in our resources area.

With its global audience, the Internet provides a unique revenue generation platform with search engines. This is where your business will be made or thrown on the refuse pile.

Marketing on Search Engines &ndash Getting the Biggest Bang for Your Buck

Search engines are similar to the streets of a major city. Some search engines represent the major avenues where people congregate while others are more similar to back alleys where almost nobody goes or at least not the kind of people you want to meet in…a dark alley.

Cutting to the chase, your traffic generation efforts should focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines control the vast majority of traffic on the Internet. Not only do lots of people uses them to find things, the big three provide search results to many other search engines as well. For instance, Google supplies ads and search results for AOL. Dogpile compiles the various search results from the big three in its listings. Alta Vista uses Yahoo search results. This scenario is so expansive that the big three search engines are simply the only way to go. This means you need to focus on them to the exclusion of others.

When you focus on these sites, two approaches can be taken &ndash pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Other forms of search engine marketing, such as banner ads, produce poor results and should be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the big two.

Pay-per-click advertising [ppc] is platform whereby you pay for placement on a search engine. The two major ppc platforms are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture places ads on the Yahoo and MSN search engines. Google Adwords places ads on Google and AOL search results. Both platforms place ads on other search engines and sites, so you will see your listings appearing everywhere.

The advantage of PPC advertising is you get immediate traffic for your site. You can use the traffic to test the content on the site and whether visitors convert into paying customers. The downside is you are paying for traffic, which means you must pay close attention to your return on investment. All and all, PPC advertising should be used at the outset of a marketing campaign while you wait for optimized pages to get natural rankings.

Search engine optimization [seo] is by far the most effective way to go on the big three. Once you obtain top three rankings for a keyword, you receive more traffic than you would from ppc and it is all free! This does wonders for your profitability. If you can figure out seo on your own, your cost of marketing should eventually become your time and a few dollars a month for tools. This results in obscenely high profits margins. If you prefer to use a seo firm, your costs are going to go up significantly. Once the free traffic starts rolling in, however, you should get an excellent return on investment.

The downside to seo is it takes a lot of time and work. You can expect to wait up to a year for top Google rankings, although Yahoo and MSN rankings will appear much sooner. In light of this waiting period, PPC advertising is a must at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign.

Internet marketing is a fairly simple game. Focus on the big three search engines with a combination of ppc and seo efforts. Stick to these two and you should see good results.

The key components of an Internet marketing program include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Placement, Affiliate Marketing and Viral/Social Marketing. The goal of all of these is to increase a website’s traffic (number of people who visit) however each uses a different tactic to meet this goal. An effective Internet marketing program leverages a mix of these components to maximize their value at a particular point in the overall program.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an attempt to increase your website’s ranking in ‘organic’ (non-paid) search results in Google

In this article, we are going to discuss a major problems involving keyword selection for existing businesses. It is a simple mistake, but one most people do not think about.

Keyword Perspective &ndash Avoid This Mistake At All Cost

The two prime Internet marketing platforms are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. The issue we are going to discuss today applies equally to either of these platforms as well as any other internet advertising you undertake.

The biggest mistake most businesses make with marketing is keyword perspective. Keyword perspective refers to the point of view one has when developing keywords for any type of Internet marketing. There are primarily two perspectives, but each only works with one audience. If you get them crossed up, you are in for a nightmare.

The industry perspective is usually the area where I see the biggest problems. Industry perspective refers to using industry terminology to develop keywords instead of using terms your prospects actually use. For example, a mortgage professional might view HELOC [home equity line of credit] as a keyword. Most prospects, however, are not going to search for this acronym. Instead, they will search for home equity line of credit or simply line of credit. When you are marketing to the general public, do not use industry terms. Instead, use the terms your prospects apply to your services or products.

The opposite of the industry perspective is found in the business-to- business field. If you are providing services or products to businesses, than you may very well want to use industry terms! If you sell medical equipment to hospitals, your prospects are going to be both sophisticated and using technical terms in their searches. They will search for medial collateral ligament isolation braces instead of knee brace. In the business-to-business scenario, use of laymen’s terms for keywords my kill your marketing plan before it gets off the ground.

Whatever your business, picking keywords is all about knowing your audience. Focus on terms your prospects actually use and you will have a good starting point for your marketing plan.

Copywriting is an essential element in the marketing of any product. More so, in a shrunken global village. Whether it’s online advertising or Offline advertising. A good ad could mean the difference between success and failure of a product. The tips mentioned below will give an insight to a write a good Ad.

Writing a powerful Ads is the key to maximum sales. What is good copy writing? and How to write a good Ad?. Let’s see some basics of good copy writing.

Understand Customer:

It is important to understand the intent of the customer and his/her business background. A good understanding helps to find more about the customer’s target audience.

The Product:

Complete understanding of the product for writing a copy or ad is very essential from the marketing or advertising point of view. Questions like – What is the product, the benefits, the objectives, the target audience, the medium of advertising, what the surveys talk about, the price and the region of advertising. All these factors are directly linked with the product and it’s advertising.

The target audience:

To understand the target audience, it is imperative to understand the product and which age group the product is being targeted at. Once the age group is narrowed down, the next step would be to understand the psyche of that age group, the region they belong to, tastes, likes and dislikes are some of the factors that need to be considered before coming with a dashing ad.

As the saying goes… “A thousand words don’t make an impact as one deed. A poorly written Ad could destroy a good product and an effectively written copy could send the mediocre product sales skyrocketing.

The next time you write a Ad copy consider these factors and you’ll copy up with a Killer Ad.