Internet Marketing Blog

One way to ensure that traffic comes straight to your site is to take advantage of the numerous Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising programmes that are offered by the search engines and their partners.

All four major search engines – Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask – offer PPC advertising which appears either above, to the side of, or below the natural, non-paid search results.

There are three PPC providers which serve the four major search engines – Google Adwords for Google and Ask.com, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) for Yahoo!, and MSN adCenter for MSN.

There are variations in the way each of the PPC programmes works but there are aspects of setting up a PPC campaign that are common to all three. We will focus on these factors, giving you an idea of how all three work and how to set up your own PPC campaign.

Goal Definition

It is important to know what you wish to gain from the PPC campaign – what search terms do you wish to appear for? How much can you afford to spend per sale/lead? Remember, you will be paying for each click that comes through to your website from the PPC ad, so it is important to know what you hope to achieve from the campaign. Knowing this will allow you to better analyse the traffic you receive from the campaign and make adjustments as needed to improve the performance.

Keyword Research

Once you have defined your goals for the campaign, the next step is to undertake keyword research to determine the best terms to advertise for. There are a number of tools available to help with task. They include Google’s own Keyword Research Tool, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

When choosing keywords, it can be tempting to pick terms that are broadly focused on your product or service range. Be aware that these terms may cost more per click than more specific terms and may have less chance of producing a sale due to the traffic generated not being as pre-qualified.

Similarly, when choosing keywords, consider whether the term you choose might have a dual meaning. Terms that have multiple contextual meanings can result in poor quality traffic and reduce the cost-effectiveness of your campaign.

The best keywords to choose are those that are the most specific and relevant to your products and services.

Campaign Set-up

Once you have your list of keywords, you will need to register with your chosen PPC Provider and set-up your campaign via the PPC Provider’s user interface. As mentioned before, the three main PPC Providers have their individual qualities but generally the process for setting up the campaign involves the following:

• Define Campaign settings – this involves choosing the geographic targeting – do you wish to your ads show in a specific country or region, setting the daily/monthly budgets, define whether the ads are to be shown on the search engine’s results specifically, or across the broader network of partner sites.
• Create Ad Groups – Divide your keywords into groups that have specific themes. Each group of themed keywords is known as an Ad Group due to the fact that they will trigger the same Ads. It is better to have more Ad Groups with few keywords than few Ad groups with a lot of keywords. The fewer the keywords in an Ad Group, the more relevant they will be to the Ad Group’s respective Ad. Within the Ad Group level of a PPC Campaign, you will also be able to set the maximum cost per click you wish to bid. This, in part, will determine your ranking in the PPC search results.
• Create Ads – The Ads in the campaign will be shown when the keywords in the respective Ad Group are searched for in the search engines. With this in mind, the Ads should be as relevant to their respective keywords as possible. Generally, the anatomy of a PPC Ad involves Title, Description, Display URL and Landing Page URL.
  
  The Ads should also be concise, include a call to action of sorts and deliver the user to a page that is as relevant to the searched keyword term and Ad content as possible. It is important to add a tracking code of some sort (depending on what tracking/web analytics software you use) to the Landing Page URL in order to track the performance of your campaigns through to conversion.
• Payment details – Once the Campaign, Ad Groups and Ads have been set up, the next step is to add the payment details. Depending on the PPC Provider, you will have the option of choosing either pre-paid payment – you add funds to the account – or post-pay – you will be invoiced at the end of each month or when you reach a pre-determined credit limit.

Once all of this has been carried out, you can switch on the PPC Campaign.

Monitoring the Campaign

Be sure to check the campaign’s progress once it is running. Be sure to check the cost per conversion – how much each sale or lead is costing you – and adjust either the settings of the campaign as needed. You can adjust all aspects of the campaign while it is running – the geographical targeting, the daily budgets if applicable, the ad content, the cost per click, the add content and the keywords that are live in the account.

All PPC Programmes provide reporting of campaign stats so that you can quickly compare results of different ad groups, keywords and ads.

Statistical Analysis

Once your campaign is running and sales/leads are coming through, you can further tweak the account by taking advantage of the function of tracking code that you should have added to Landing Page URLs of your Ads.

Using your webstats software, you will be able to track traffic from your PPC Campaigns through your website right up to the post conversion page i.e. the “Thanks” page. This data will enable you to see what keywords work best for your website and see if there are any changes that can be made on site to improve the conversion rate.

These last two points are probably the most important factors in a successful campaign – monitoring and analysis. So long as you regularly manage your campaigns and respond to poor performance quickly, your campaign will continue to prove you with high quality leads and business at an affordable rate.

YouTube is like other social networking sites in that it is completely generated by the users, but in this case we are just talking video content and more to the point, video sharing.

Although figures are pretty scarce it was reported that in January of 2008, 79 million users were watching over 3 billion videos. Not bad for 3 guys who used to work for PayPal and a site that only launched in 2005.

Needless to say, search giants Google spotted the potential and acquired the company in November of 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock, just over a year and a half after YouTube’s launch.

According to Alexa, YouTube is the 3rd most popular site on the web with 65,000 videos uploaded everyday and 16% of the internet population visiting the site. Not surprisingly YouTube is no.1 for online video and video sharing, which is incredible when you think about the fact that it has been created entirely by the users.

These days, anyone can be a star and with YouTube just egging you on, everyone can have their 15 minutes. Just look at Corey Delaney. The 16 year old from Brisbane shot to fame after a throwing a ‘near-riot party’ at his home when his parents were on holiday. If you are unaware of his work, then please watch this video, which has (along with his stunt) earned him celebrity status and worldwide support and kudos on every social networking site in the world.

Why do we like YouTube?

YouTube is a great tool to get to know your audience and help them to get to know you. You can create a profile upload videos, watch other people’s videos, start a video blog or ‘vlog’ as they are know, email, comment and rate. You can search for videos by category, watch the most viewed videos, view channels and find your favourite band, enter contests and share it all in the community areas. YouTube will also keep you up to date with what is going on in their blog as well as allow you to test their latest developments and comment on them. Do you feel part of a community? We sure do.

So what can you do with YouTube?

You can use YouTube to tell the world about you. Think of it as self promotion. It could be for your music, movie previews, interviews or adverts, or you can use it as a revenue stream by integrating sponsored advertising from Google Adwords.

If you want to use YouTube then we would recommend creating a group and encouraging people to get involved by uploading their own videos. You could run a competition alongside it and really get the buzz going around your brand. Let us know how you get on, or if you need some more pointers, then why not give us a call on 0845 838 7435 or drop me a line.

There are four main rules when it comes to email marketing, which are governed by the Privacy and Electronics Communications Regulations Act 2003 (EC Directive) and Data Protection Act ’98.

1. Permission and Consent

You must have permission to contact the person that you are emailing i.e.: they must have opted in at some point. There are three ways in which they could have opted-in:

» Their email was collected in the course of a sale or negotiation – this could have been whilst making an online quote or filling in a survey. The sale does not have to have been completed, but they have to have been given the opportunity to either opt-in or opt-out at some stage in the process.

» They have agreed to receive emails regarding a similar product or service.

» They simply did not opt-out – they must have been given this option in the first place.

2. Who

If you are emailing then you must not conceal who you are – the recipient must know who the email is from.

3. Valid

The email that you are sending must have a valid originating email address via which they can contact you for opting-out purposes.

4. Unsubscribe

You must provide the facility to unsubscribe from your emails.

Consumer Data and Business Data

The ‘grey areas’ of email marketing apply to consumer data and business data. If you have had a relationship with a company or organisation then you can market directly to them. You can even collect data on companies from resources like open directories (or even Yellow Pages) and use this data to directly market to. This does not, however, apply to consumer data where they have to at some point agreed to receive emails from you. Whether you are talking to a consumer or corporate audience you must always follow points 2,3 and 4.

Buying Data

The data that you buy could have been collected one of many different ways including surveys, telephone interviews, online questionnaires or from a 3rd party. If you are buying data then you can be assured (as long as the company is reputable of course) that it has passed all of the checks for consent and permission and now all you have to do is make sure that they know who you are, allow them to opt-out and make sure that they can contact you should they so wish to do so.

If you are at all confused by email marketing, then why not contact us and we’ll be more than happy to explain the opt-ins from the opt-outs.

FaceBook, like many other Social Networking sites, is being used more and more by companies to promote their brand. Whether they have created a fans page or they are simply advertising, social networking is a very accessible platform that you can use to address your target audience.

FaceBook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg whilst he attended Harvard University. Originally intended for the use of the student body at Harvard, FaceBook went onto expand to the entire Ivy League, then any university student, then high school students and finally to anyone over the age of 13.

While we all kick ourselves for not coming up with the idea first (and please note that Zucherberg never finished Harvard, and it is estimated that his creation’s internal evaluation is set at £8 billion), we should turn our focus more to how FaceBook can be used by us ‘mere mortals’.

What you have to remember with Social Networking is that the web is no longer just a place for research or controlled and run by big companies sat in ivory towers. The web has grown into a place run by the consumer, for the consumer, giving everyone a voice, where freedom of speech is positively encouraged.

Blogs, podcasts, video sharing and Social Networking in general is growing at an astonishing rate, showing no signs of waning with FaceBook boasting a reported 250,000 new users on a daily basis. If you thought that Social Media was a fad, like Soda Streams, then you would be wrong. Social Media is here to stay.

But what makes FaceBook so special?

Not only is FaceBook the 6th most popular website in terms of traffic ranking, but it also embraces all aspects of Social Networking. You can upload photos (and if you have then you will have contributed to the 14 million that are uploaded on a daily basis), post videos, publish notes, join networks, create groups, play with applications, sell something and see what everyone else is up to (within their privacy terms, of course).

As far as a Marketing opportunity, FaceBook has it all, but you have to remember that this site is intended for conversation and the audience are not receptive to having your marketing rammed in their face, so you have to bring something to their party.

Here are some ideas for you on how you too can use FaceBook:

Create a group

Why not create a group around your company. It will give you a face and humanises what you do. Start a discussion, post news, share photos, videos and invite your friends, colleagues and clients to join.

Join a group

If you have something to add or share, then why not? Perhaps there is a relevant group of people who are looking for an answer and you have it – help them out!

Market Place – Sell something or give it away

You just never know who might be interested in the 3 day, paintballing extravaganza that someone has just pulled out of and you need to flog.

Make Friends

You can never have enough friends, so get social and tell people about you and what you do. You can be as open and honest as you want and if you aren’t ready for them to see the picture of you dancing at the Christmas Party, then you can adjust your privacy settings.

Become a Friend of Juretic >>

Firstly it is important to understand the difference between a press release and an article. A press release is a story with news worthy content, like ‘Juretic launch O’Neill Highland Pro site’. An article is just that, ‘an article’, for example ‘Publishing your Press Release’ and is usually informative as opposed to a news story.

Press Release Syndication

One of the many places that you can publish your press release is on a PR Syndication site. These are sites where you can publish your press release and other people re-use and re-publish your content and links on their sites.

The way to make this work for you is to ensure that not only is your content optimised for your specific key terms but that you also anchor links to your site to your keywords.
For example: “Juretic Media is a Digital Marketing Agency.”

By ensuring that your content is optimised and anchoring specific URLs to key words you will increase your search engine ranking position (SERP). The higher the quality of the link the more effect it will have on your site and its listing.

There are a range of sites that you can use for this from free sites like Article Alley and IdeaMarketers to paid sites like PRWeb and PRNewsWire, who do a lot of the leg work for you and put more weight behind your story. Once your story is out there is could be picked up by Google, Yahoo! or MSN and once it is out there it will keep going.

A good example of how all of this works can be seen when you search for an article that we syndicated on David Beckham’s signing to be the new face of Sharpie. We published the press release on several PR Syndication sites (and sent it to a plethora of marketing publications and to the relevant trade press – see below) and now if you Google ‘David Beckham signs with Sharpie’ you can see the result.

Trade Press

Whatever industry you work in, there are people who are interested in what you are doing and want to hear your news. There are literally hundreds of trade publications with an editorial team who are sat by their computers right now waiting for your email and press release.

Perhaps you have just designed and launched a new website, say for the O’Neill Highland Open surf comp and you want people to shout about it. So why not send your press release to surfing magazines and surf related sites. Not only will you get some great ‘back links’, but you will also gain some priceless exposure too.

Local Press

Do not underestimate the power of the community. Local papers and publications love to shout about local people doing well, so if you have a triumph then let them know about it. Not only will it gain you great exposure in your ‘neighbourhood’, but it will also create more back links to your site and in turn increase your search engine ranking position.

Remember that your press release must be news. If it is not deemed as news worthy enough or not well written, it could be rejected so make sure you have a story. If you want to know more about this service and how it could work for you, then drop me a line or give me call on 0845 838 7435.