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For some people, creating new content is a struggle. It really needn’t be. There is fresh content to inspire you all over the Web. However, you should always create unique content, rather than copying someone else’s work. Internet marketing, whether it is SEO, SEM, PPC, Web PR, all relies on informative, keyword rich content to work properly.
Use the resources below to find exciting content to get your creative juices flowing in no time.
Squidoo – so many people maintain their lenses (or mini websites) regularly, and there are thousands of people who follow specific lenses and encourage the authors to post more often. Look for the top ranked lenses on your keyword, or most recently updated.
Delicious – is one of the many social bookmarking sites and offers a wide variety of search mechanisms which will open up thousands of new sites for you to investigate for inspiration. Others include Digg and Stumbleupon – feel free to add more in your comment below.
Twitter – it’s really quite staggering how many Tweets are now sent each day, and the search feature is becoming ever more useful for finding latest news for particular niches. When it is working, that is!
Alltop – is a funky news site (but be warned: you can get lost in here easily, so use the eggtimer to prevent that!)
That should keep your pen busy scribbling on the paper for a while with all the news and views that are available.
Which sites help you to develop new content, write blog posts, or just get into heated debates with colleagues?! Let us know.
According to an internet marketing behaviour survey out this week conducted by Microsoft’s AdCenter, 73% of small businesses would rather do their taxes than plan or implement a search engine marketing campaign.
400 small businesses in the US were surveyed, and whilst the majority do take steps to develop a website, the vast majority do nothing to market their online presence. 59% do not use Pay Per Click as a marketing tool, and of those, 90% had never even attempted to.
So, whilst 9 out of 10 of those surveyed suspect they may be missing a trick or two, as well as some serious opportunities in this economically tough time, there is major apathy, or perhaps fear, about implementing search engine and internet marketing within the small business community.
After almost 14 years in this game, I would strongly suspect that similar figures would be obtained in the UK if small businesses were quizzed about their online marketing strategies and behaviour.
In order to run PPC campaigns well, you need to up the game, monitor and use bid management tools. Which is why many businesses bring in the experts to manage PPC bids and campaigns. However, to run a basic PPC campaign and win extra traffic for your website and qualified leads for your business is definitely not rocket science. You won’t even need to hold on to your hat!!
To get you started and help you overcome your fear of the unknown, there is a FREE best practice guide to implementing a successful PPC campaign here for you today!.Small businesses must grasp the nettle of Internet marketing and start to implement IM campaigns now in order to beat the recession.
And whilst you are on with it, why not check out the FREE best practice guide to successful SEO and the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Marketing
If you are going to experiment, and you need to, then it is interesting to note that the Google ethos of letting their employees experiment with new ideas etc, also includes the sentiment, “Do it, but do it wrong quickly”.
(Sadly, I can’t find the quote for this interview as an internet marketer has just nicked this philosophy/phrase from Sergey, Larry or someone, and entitled his new book that!)
At this time of economic downturn, experiments are somewhat of a luxury. Research and development departments are cutting their budgets, whether in science or internet marketing. Shame really, as knowing what works and what doesn’t is vital to your success. And helps to make that marketing budget go that little bit further.
The point is though that you still need to know what will work for you and your business, and where to best spend your marketing pounds. (Or dollars). However, with careful consideration, you can conduct online marketing experiments that give results, fast, and then act upon those results to increase your leads and sales.
So, here’s the competition. Conduct the experiment below and let us know how it goes! Hopefully, the lessons learnt will be invaluable for others. The closing date is one month from today – 9th January 2009. The prize will be …who knows? Probably something one of us gets for Xmas that could find a better home with one of you!!
So, here goes. Customise the experiment as you see fit but it shouldn’t cost more than a few bob and some moments of your time. And it could make you back far more than you spend! Not just in £££s or $$$s but also in lessons learnt. As well as a surprise present from ClickThrough Marketing!
Pick a product you think will sell great this Christmas or holiday season. It doesn’t even have to be your product, but ideally it should make you some profit. (Or be one that you are seriously considering ditching from your product line in 2009 or need to test on a focus group).
Now, have a quick look on Ebay and Google to see what competition you have. Create a down and dirty landing page for your product – here’s one I prepared earlier! A single call to action. Either “Buy it now”, or “Call today for free to talk to a sales rep”. Or maybe “Give me your email address and I will send you the white paper”. Just one simple call to action with text that encourages people to respond to that call.
Post the URL of your landing page to this blog in the comments section.
Now pick 5 keyword terms that you think are relevant to that product. (Can’t think of any? Try Wordtracker) If it is a highly competitive product, then don’t buy #1 terms because you don’t want to bankrupt yourself in the experimentation process! Create your ads and go bid on them on Google PPC or similar. Don’t forget to submit your landing page to Google if you intend to keep this experiment going for a while. (However, it is possible to get brand new pages indexed within literally a few days under the major keywords on established sites…..)
That’s the basics, but you can add to this (if you want a wider experiment) by doing some standard Web promotion – blog marketing, write an article on the benefits of what you are selling, find a few backlinks, post in forums etc.
Right, now watch your traffic with an analytics tool like Clicky or Google Analytics.
As you see traffic come in, take a long hard look at it. Is it coming in from your PPC terms? Are they working? If not, adjust the ads until they start to drive traffic.
What is your bounce rate? Are people lookin’ an’ leavin’? If so, adjust your landing page so it starts to get responses to the calls to action. If necessary add a ‘Call me Now’ button or run a competition or survey to encourage people to interact and give feedback.
Run each tweak for a couple of days or so so you can actually measure what works and what doesn’t. If something isn’t working, CHANGE it.
If you aren’t getting any traffic at all, that may tell you something about your product as well as your PPC ad.
If you are getting traffic, but no responses, then your product may be desirable but something else isn’t. This could be your text and style, your call to action, your terms and conditions, your price. You need to consider all of the factors leading to your failure.
If people are starting to respond to the call to action but then drop out – work out why this might be so. Does your shopping basket actually work? Are you not offering enough choices for payment? Do they need to give too much information? Is it browser unfriendly? Is the price wrong, or are there shipping costs which would put potential customers off?
Anyway, you get the idea. Let us know how it goes, and add any comments for others who have entered the competition.
Pay Per Click, when successfully used, can cut your cost of customer acquisition by substantial sums. Driving down CPA is important if you want to see a return on investment on your PPC and long-term gains for your business.
One great way to measure acquisition costs is to use call tracking to monitor the effectiveness of your landing pages for your PPC ad groups and bids. By using specific phone numbers for specific ad groups, you can measure whether a landing page is achieving its goals, and if not, make the appropriate changes to the landing page to make it work.
Of course, you also need to make sure if you are using call tracking to measure CPA and ROI that the person answering the calls is educated in the core objectives of the business and doing the hard sell so tip #2 is to train your staff! Sales techniques and harvesting information such as email addresses will help increase your ROI more than just increasing your PPC bids to beat the competition.
Landing page optimisation is vital for reducing CPA and it is still not an exact science but it does work. Don’t leave LPO to the amateurs. Good landing page optimization can reap great rewards and you can expect to see 40% or more increases on conversion rates with well designed, clear and concise landing pages. Keep your calls to action simple, and monitor the results and goals achieved using your web analytics.
The value of the long tail is finally being researched; however, even without the evidence, it has been known for a long time that long tail terms can bring in lucrative, quality traffic to a website.
Seeking long tail terms that bring valued customers to your site should start within your traffic logs. There are far too many businesses who only give the most cursory attention to their web traffic stats, but they are packed full of valuable information about your site visitors.
Take a look at your referrals today and the search terms that have brought these people to your website, and investigate how much those keywords cost on any of the PPC engines. Undoubtedly, they will be cheaper than your core list of keywords and it is worth experimenting with landing pages to see how many conversions to sales (or your other key goals) they bring to your site. Have a go today!
And don’t forget to consider our PPC Services for any of your PPC needs…..
Never one to re-invent the wheel unnecessarily, it seems worthwhile to point our readers in the direction of a well-written and lucid article about the pros and cons of the different PPC offers from the major search engines. In fact, we shall undoubtedly be pointing you to the whole series during this coming week!
There is a timely reminder at the outset of the article just how large a share Google Adwords has of the paid search market – approx 70% – so if you only run one PPC campaign, it ought logically to be on Google. However, it is important to remember that running a PPC campaign can only work well if you make time to optimise the campaign, and that does mean attempting to understand what is in the Google (and other search engines’) box of tricks.
Yahoo are next in volume of search traffic, and it is worth remembering that many people still stick to the default options which come with their computer and browser. Many people are so utterly unaware of how a browser works that they will type ‘Google’ into the Yahoo search bar to reach Google, rather than just changing their homepage to Google or typing the URL into the location bar if Google is their preferred search engine! These visitors will apply the same thinking (or lack of!) to finding you so don’t ignore Yahoo PPC. The same applies to MSN search bar (which invariably comes as the homepage on a pre-installed copy of internet Explorer), and hence the Microsoft AdCenter network.
Both of these can bring surprising amounts of quality traffic, and should not be ignored. However, if you have a limited amount of time and budget for PPC, consider employing someone who can focus on optimizing your campaign and who keeps up to date with the continual changes in PPC. Not just the reporting aspects and hence optimising correctly, but who can also manage your campaign and keep your budget down to the minimum for maximum results. This will bear fruit and free you up to do more exciting internet marketing and promotion …..more tomorrow.
