PPC

Think Global, Market Local: How the Internet Attracts Customers from the Neighborhood

Announcement! We have our first guest post from fellow internet marketing ninja Shane Jones.  Thanks for taking the time to write this post for us.  It provides some great local marketing tips!

We often think of the Internet as a way to reach customers all over the world, but you don’t have to be a global company to reap the benefits.  In fact, online marketing can be a great way to reach customers right in your own neighborhood.

Everything is moving online, including your local newspaper, magazine, and radio station.  Since more and more of your customers are spending significant amounts of time online, you need to take your local marketing strategy there as well.  Here are a few ways to do it.

Get Listed

Your town may have listings on Citysearch and Craigslist, but it most definitely has listings on sites like Yellowpages and Yelp.  When you publish your site, get more traffic by registering it on all those sites.

Some web hosting services provide the tools and instructions for getting listed in local web searches.  Many of these sites will display your business name, address, website address, phone number, and even reviews from happy customers.  This helps local customers decide if your business can best meet their needs, but it’s also great if your business provides a service that people will need immediately when they search for it.  After all, how often is someone going to casually browse for a service like rodent control?

Advertise on Local Media

As mentioned above, your local newspapers, magazines, and radio stations are hosting their own websites.  Since you probably already advertise in their traditional formats, why not advertise online as well?

In fact, this is a good way to create an integrated strategy.  Buy your usual ad space, but throw in a few well-placed banner and display ads in the process.  This serves two purposes.

First, it creates a more cost-effective, accountable way to reach local customers.  Second, since traditional readers and listeners also go online, it doubles the chances that they’ll learn about—and reach out to—your business.

Create Locally Based Content

Blogs and other forms of content marketing have become very popular ways to promote your business and drive more traffic and sales.  But not many people create content that integrates their business expertise with their location.  Now is the time for you to start.

For instance, if you run a clothing store, you could talk about the same fashion trends that everyone else is talking about, or you could talk about the fashion trends you’re seeing as you walk around your town.  If you do this, you’ll see another benefit – because you’re focused on your local area, your search engine rankings will catch the attention of local people looking for your type of business, which is exactly what you want.

Find the Customers Next Door

The Internet spans the globe, but it’s a pretty good way to find customers in your own community as well.  Put your local marketing strategy online and find more customers right down the block from you.

 

Shane JonesAbout Shane Jones : I am an internet marketer, and blogging fanatic, who loves to write about business, the current economy, anything marketing, and SEO.  I also am an avid outdoors-man, who loves hiking, rock climbing, and kayaking.  You can also follow my opinions on soccer and sports at http://www.localsoccernews.com.  Tweet me @shanejones15 about anything! I’d be happy to talk!

Top 5 Essential Word Press Plugins For Starting Your Next Blog

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

Working with SMBs who are ready to make the jump into the blogosphere, I always find a few missteps.  They are make the correct assumptions by attempting to utilize the web to increase awareness, drive traffic, and eventually build revenue online, but they’re also putting themselves at a disadvantage by not incorporating the right tools from the get go.

This is my barebones list of WP plugins necessary to begin your online marketing journey.

  1. Akismet – Now included with WordPress installations, this amazing tool is your #1 resource for fighting blog spam.  It is definitely worth the time to sign up for the API and for the good it does, I recommend paying the $5.00 a month for a Pro Membership
  2. WordPress SEO  by the Amazing Yoast – His amazing WP SEO plugin is self described as “the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today” and the industry generally agrees.  All major SEO outlets recommend this  plugin for adding SEO to your posts.
  3. Google Analytics for WordPress by the Amazing Yoast – Another plugin from Joost de Valk.  This guy knows how to create useful plugins to help grow online traffic.. but he also created the best plugin to help you manage your online traffic.  This easy to install, update, and incorporate plugin will insure you dont miss a beat when tracking web traffic through your analytics accounts.
  4. WordPress Database Backup – There are a ton of these plugins out right now.  following the fiasco of wp sites getting generally destroyed last month with insecurities.  Making sure you continuously backup your WP database will insure you don’t feel the affects if another disaster strikes your website.  I recommend this one for one reason. It’s simple. It works.
  5. WP Super Cache – Another plugin now included in most WP org installs.  This caching plugin will generate html files that lower the drain on php and sql servers.  If you’re lucky and get the reddit or inbound.org affect on one of your websites, you’ll be glad you had this plugin installed…. for a few minutes.  Do the easy thing and turn this puppy on, avoid some headaches later.
  6. BONUS!  Related Posts –  There are a ton of these plugins, so just search on WP for them.  I would link to one, but the majority have too many ads and are a headache to navigate.   Add a Related Posts plugin as soon as you start blogging and TAG ALL OF YOUR POSTS.  As your blog grows, the link network will inherently grow as well.  This will increase readership while simultaneously dropping your bounce rate.   This is a win-win.

Do you have any better plugins I didnt mention? Did I completely miss the mark?  Let me know what plugins you like / dont like.

 

HTML5 SEO Round Up! schema.org and more!

I have been pretty backed up lately. I started a new gig helping a popular e-learning organization expand their SEO efforts.  I want to start out by saying how blessed I am to have been given this opportunity.  Through great friends, I have been able to accomplish a lot.  so thanks..

I briefly wanted to start sharing some links and information that has been playing a larger role in my recent efforts.  HTML5 is now on the forefront of all internet marketing chatter.  It’s effective and well organized.  More importantly, it is one of the few things that Google, Bing, and Yahoo all agree on.  I want everyone to start out by checking out schema.org.  These tags are going to pay a pivotal and important role in the future of websites and SEO.  By incorporating the best practices available on this site, you will have an advantage moving forward.  Furthermore, you will be able to provide authorship and in turn stewardship for your brand and goals.

I plan on talking about schema.org more in the near future.  But for now I wanted to offer a few quick links for everyone to check out. Hope you enjoy!

html5 Boilerplate this is a great template or starting point for building a framework for an html5 website.  They go out of their way to emphasize that they are not a framework.  I would honestly agree.  Take a few minutes to checkout this website.  After that, take a few more minutes and watch some videos. There is an amazing team behind this and I think they deserve some attention!  Then check out the next link…

Initializr its like the html5 boilerplate but better!  well.. its actually the same thing, with more customization.  I am loving and digging what they’re doing with this technology.  Check out the bootstrap template and figure out how you can use this on your own technology.

Completely different but similar is Bones an html5 wordpress base theme.  They took the boilerplate a step further and I am very impressed. I anticipate using this more when I have time to test it.  I also dig pirates.

Last but not least… 23 free templates based in html5   for free.

Check it out. Enjoy. I will be back soon with more detailed information on seo for schema and html5.

PPC Marketing vs Search Engine Optimization

I recently wrote a series of blogs for the company I work for.  I have changed it up a little but, but the general post follows –

Pay Per Click Marketing, unlike Search Engine Optimization, is a paid approach to search engine advertising.Companies pay the major search engines for placement in the sponsored links sections typically on the top and right hand side of the search engine results pages (SERPs.)The placement of a company’s sponsored ad depends on a Quality Score derived by the search engines based on the quality of content on the company website, the context of the ad, and the amount a company is willing to pay per position. For the most part, the business model works well for the search engines, advertisers, and potential customers.Unfortunately, there are a couple of glaring issues with search engine marketing.

The first issue with PPC is that there is a 95 character limit on ads for paid search.It is nearly impossible to offer product differentiation from company to company when confined to 95 characters.This makes ad copywriting a very creative and difficult task, as you need to find a way to provide relevant information as well as your value prop in a very confined space.To add a little perspective, twitter, which some view as restrictive, allows a tweet to be up to 140 characters.

The second issue with PPC is the persistent rise in cost per lead acquisition. Many companies are competing for the same piece of the proverbial pie and offer very similar products.This competition especially in paid search is continually driving the cost per click higher on the top industry keywords.Over the past year, we have seen as much as a 50% increase in cost per click for higher converting keywords.This directly increases the cost per acquisition across the industry and as each company tries to spend more to outbid the opposition for better positioning, costs continue to increase.Unfortunately, there is no short term solution for this cyclical increase in online advertising.Unless each of the company’s marketing managers and directors get together and put a cap on online spending (hint, hint), advertising spend will continue to increase until the cost per lead and cost per click reach equilibrium and the model implodes.

Obviously, Google loves this type of competition.If the statistics are correct and Google receives 90% of their revenue from Paid Search advertising, then it is absolutely no surprise why they have a market cap of nearly 150 billion and growing.I see no end in sight as long as this type of advertising continues to be beneficial to both Google and the advertisers who are using their AdWords platform.

Even though Google is the alpha dog and has a commanding lead in search traffic across the board, we have seen success in utilizing Bing and yahoo for paid search advertising.Both secondary search engines have a substantially lower cost per click and still drive a considerable amount of traffic to our website.

Although there are major issues with PPC, this advertising platform isn’t all bad.The company I manage PPC for sees quality leads come through our paid search campaigns on a daily basis.You, too, should work to gain market share with online advertising, and try out various PPC techniques to increase your quality score and gain competitive advantage.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising

Advertising for your business can be a difficult process.  Google, Yahoo, and MSN all offer their own respective options for Search Engine based advertising.  Personally, I prefer using Adwords as it is the most comprehensive, popular, and even yahoo is starting to roll it out on their website. 

Pay-Per-Click advertising is pretty straight forward.  A company designates a certain area of the webpage for advertising.  From there, a company trying to advertise will setup campaigns with one of the big 3 search engines.  The Search Engine will then determine what ads are relevant based on the content of a website and show the closest relevant ads.  For every ad that is clicked,  the company must pay a predetermined amount. 

In Adwords, a company can setup the maximum budget for a day or for a month.  From there, Google’s system will actually determine the amount of times the ad will show and can even spread it out throughout the predetermined time.  This software is very robust and offers many different options.  The enduser can see which keywords have the best conversion percentage and even chose keywords to avoid. 

There are also other methods that include Nextag, Revsense, and others.