The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) - Pay-Per-Click Advertising(PPC) - Website Traffic and Path Analysis - Optimized Press Releases - SEO Copywriting - Blogging - Article Writing - Newsletters - Everything you need to know to be successful in your Internet marketing.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Internet Marketing Nuggets and a Bit About Football

Just a few nuggets of information for your reading pleasure:

In a continuing push to give advertisers more options and control, Google has released a new feature for the AdWords interface that allows advertisers to create a campaign template that can be used to quickly set up new campaigns. We have not had a chance to try it out yet, but we'll let you know what we think of it when we do.

Quick tip: when setting up ads in Google with dynamic titles, if you use the form "{KeyWord:your keyword}" where the "K" and "W" in "Keyword:" are capitalized, then the words in your title will be capitalized. Now, this is not necessarily a good thing. For instance, if you are bidding on keywords for which lots of advertisers are using dynamic or similar titles, then you might be better off using all lower case in your title in order to look different. You never know until you try.

Privacy groups are filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission regarding the new advertising platform being launched by Facebook. You may want to hold off on investing your marketing dollars in Facebook at this point.

The Yahoo! Store ecommerce platform shut down for many of the sites using it on Monday because of the extremely heavy volume. If you run an ecommerce site, that might make a strong case for using your own platform on your own server.

Last, but not least, the SEC football championship game is this weekend! Being based out of Nashville and being UT fans, we are excited at the opportunity for our Vols to bring home a conference championship. The season the Vols have had this year can serve as an important business less for all of us: never give up; never stop fighting to accomplish your dream. After three blowout losses to Cal, Florida, and Alabama, it looked like the Vols were down for the count. But they kept fighting. Five games later, they are 9-3 and headed to Atlanta to face the LSU Tigers. Go Vols!

Labels: Facebook, Google Adwords, internet marketing, Yahoo

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Ready, Fire, Aim - the Right Way to Launch a Paid Search Campaign

'Hope everybody had a fantastic Thanksgiving. I headed down to Memphis to spend a few days at my in-laws'. I lived in Memphis for several years. The city has gotten some bad press recently because of its' crime rate, but it's a great city with lots of interesting shops and places to eat. Nashville, where we're located, is more of a corporate city. Memphis is more "down home."

Anyway, the day before Thanksgiving we got contacted by a business needing a paid search campaign up and running the same day. We're a small firm, so we have the capability to drop whatever we're doing and change directions. But getting a complete campaign created, funded, and up and running in just a few hours is quite a task. But we got it done.

The reason we were contacted is that the search marketing firm that was originally hired (about three weeks previous) was taking way too long to get the campaign on-line and was only spending a trickle of what our client wanted.

The problem the other firm made was that they spent days and days setting up a broad, super finely targeted campaign before launching. Our client needed traffic immediately. What they should have done (and what we did) was launch the campaign with a small set of keywords, start generating traffic, and then build out and fine-tune from there. This is a strategy you should adopt if you are an aggressive user of paid search.

It's sort-of like the old "Ready, Fire, Aim" marketing maxim. In other words, launch the campaign, generate data, examine that data to see what changes you need to make, and adjust accordingly. It makes no sense to spend too much time tweaking a campaign before you have any data to examine.

If you need some help with your paid search marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, November 19, 2007

Google Changes Site-Targeted AdWords Campaigns

Google has changed the name of its "site-targeted" AdWords campaigns to "placement-targeted." We're not sure of the reason behind the name because it's the same thing it was before - a way for advertisers to advertise on specific web sites that are part of Google's content network, rather than on Google's search results pages. Perhaps the name change relates to Google's ongoing efforts to expand its advertising platform beyond just web sites, into areas such as radio and newspaper. Who knows.

The only difference, as far as we can tell, is that you are now allowed to bid on a cost per click ("CPC") basis for content ads, in addition to the existing method of bidding per thousand impressions ("CPM"). There have been occasions when our effective click cost for CPM campaigns was less than CPC, and there have been times when it was more. We like the fact that Google now gives you the option of bidding either way. It gives the advertiser more flexibility to try different bidding strategies and see what works best.

On a related note, we have noticed that Google's pay per action platform has been down for quite a few days now. We have one client using PPA (it is only available to select large advertisers), and we are beginning to see some very nice results with it. Our cost per acquisition is substantially lower than with pay per click. We aren't generating nearly as many total conversions as with pay per click, but we'll take a cheap conversion any way we can get it. But what is the deal with it not working? Is Google shutting it down already because they're not making enough money with it? We'll see.

If you need some help managing your Google paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per action, pay per click, ppa, ppc, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Powerful Search Engine Advice Straight from the Source

Matt Cutts is an engineer with Google who has become quite famous within the Internet marketing community for his blog posts that help online marketers better understand how Google works. A recent MediaPost article focusing on tips culled from various Cutts blog posts revealed the following strategy for optimizing a web page for a particular keyword:

Once in the title, once in the description tag, once in the heading, once in the URL, once in bold, once in italic and once high on the page.

Brilliant. The above sentence masterfully and simply summarizes how to optimize a web page, at least from a content perspective. Now, certainly there is more to on-page optimization. For example, the way a page is coded can have a significant impact on its ranking. But if you combine clean coding with the above copy writing strategy, your web pages should be very well optimized.

Possibly the hardest part of this strategy is getting the keyword in the URL. The ideal solution is to have a domain name that contains one or two critical keywords. This is often in conflict with a company's branding strategy, however. I mean, we (Work Media) might possibly generate more search engine rankings if we had the domain name "internet-marketing-search-engine-optimization.com", but it just doesn't flow as well as "workmedia.net". It would definitely be harder for people to remember.

Fortunately, blogging provides a way to generate web pages with keywords in the URL. We use Blogger, but most blogging platforms probably work in very similar ways, in that pages are automatically created based on the content of the blog posts. If you use important keywords early in your blog posts, and use keyword-rich tags to describe your posts, then your blogging platform should create archive pages that contain those keywords in the URL.

As for the other parts of the strategy, it's easy. Just figure out the best keywords for which to optimize your site (we've discussed keyword research in previous blog posts) and use those keywords often in your pages, spread out exactly as recommended above.

If you need some help implementing a search engine marketing strategy for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We're here to help!

Labels: blog marketing, blogging, blogging advice, content, content creation, google, internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web site marketing

Monday, November 12, 2007

Five Pieces of Blogging Advice

Here are five pieces of advice for your blog (you do blog don't you?).

1. Go deep. Here's what we mean - unless you're the kind of writer who is so fascinating that people will hang on your every word no matter what you say - and it's probably a safe bet that you're not - the best way for you to attract readers is to focus on a narrow subject. Pick a niche and stick to it. Become known as a top expert in a very narrow field.

2. Establish relationships with other bloggers in your field. Now, I will admit, we are terrible about doing this. We publish this blog but do little posting of comments to other blogs, which is what we should be doing. My only excuse is that we're so dang busy we do good just to get this blog posted. But YOU should do better. Spend some time reading and commenting on others' blogs and you will help drive traffic to your blog.

3. Use traffic-generating keywords in your blog. Set up an account at Nichebot.com, then use it to find keywords that generate a lot of traffic. You might also want to go to some of the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and look in the tag clouds to see what tags people are using for blogs in your industry. Using these keywords in your blog will increase your blog's exposure and drive traffic to it.

4. Monetize your blog...subtly. Use in-text links to link to products or services for which you are an affiliate. You will probably have much more success with this style of link than a more obvious banner or AdSense-style link. Not only will you generate more clicks, but it will seem less like you are advertising than simply making recommendations. If your readers trust you, then they might just take your recommendations...and make you some money.

5. Blog a minimum of three times per week, and ping your blog out to various directories every time. If you don't have time to effectively author and promote your blog, then you need to find someone who can do it for you.

Work Media offers a blog authoring and management service. If you need some help with your blog, feel free to give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, blog, blog marketing, blogging, blogging advice, blogging service, internet marketing, keyword research, keywords

Friday, November 09, 2007

Search Engine Marketing - You Get What You Pay For

Work Media is in business to provide top quality search engine marketing services - both organic and paid - for a fair rate. Unfortunately, our fair rate often seems very high to people we talk to who don't realize how much work is involved in the process. We often find ourselves bidding against competition that is much lower in price - ridiculously so. To those who are considering very low cost search engine marketing services, we just have to say - Be Careful!

There are a couple of ways SEO firms can offer super low prices. One is by just not doing very much work. SEO is a time intensive, manual process. There are some cursory things you can do related to SEO, but to get real results you have to put a lot of work in, and that work has to continue month after month. The second way to offer super low rates is to contract the work out to foreign companies. The problem there is that there always seem to be language issues. It does you no good to have your pages rank well if the language on those pages is not proper and convincing. Too much is at stake to leave your site to firms that don't take great care in crafting pages that both rank well and convince the reader to perform some action.

Another way to get really low cost SEO services may be to have it done by your son, daughter, kid down the street, etc. This is often the case when it comes to the initial design of a site. But here's the deal - there are a whole lot more people who can design a site than know how to promote one. Often, a design created by someone with no search engine marketing experience will look great but be lousy from a search engine perspective. In most cases, there is absolutely no correlation between knowing how to design a web site and knowing how to get search engine rankings.

Search engine marketing is serious business. That's why we do not try to compete on price. We compete by providing professional quality service and getting results. When comparing services between providers, we advise you not to look at it in terms of what each company costs, but rather in terms of what each company can provide. Are you wasting your money on something that won't give you results, or are you investing money in something that will increase your business?

If you could use some help with your search engine marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Fight the Power - Dealing with the Search Engine Ranking Shakeup

Recent search engine updates are causing havoc. They are completely wrecking people's lives and causing babies to starve in third world countries. They are probably responsible for the draught in the Southeast U.S. as well as the California wildfires.

Okay, so we exaggerate. But a lot of people are doing a lot of hand wringing because of changes happening in the search engine indexes. In Google, for example, many sites have experienced a drop in their PageRank, which, as you know, is a measure of the value Google places on a web site. Work Media has experienced our own drop in PageRank. So if your PageRank has fallen does that mean you are going to lose your rankings?

Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, it is completely out of your hands. So don't worry about it. Rather than worrying, get aggressive with your promotion. One of the main reasons for Google's current update is to devalue sites that have a lot of purchased inbound links. Google does not want you buying links. It wants you to get them the old fashioned way - by having interesting content that people want to link to. So do it! Write articles. Do press releases. Add your site to directories. If you don't have time, hire someone to do it.

Another way to fight the effects of search ranking shuffling is to fill your site with new, constantly changing content. Search engines still love content. You can't have too much of it. A blog is an excellent vehicle for doing this. A technique we really like is to use our own blog RSS feed to place content on our site that changes every time we update our blog.

You may also have to be strategic with your optimization in terms of keywords. Don't automatically assumed that the keywords that are most used are the best. If you can uncover some keywords that people use that have little competition, then those may be better keywords to target.

If you keep on creating new content, are strategic with your keyword selection and optimization, and adding new non-purchased links to your site, you will be fine. Google won't be able to deny you.

If you have lost search engine rankings and need help getting them back, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, internet marketing, linking campaign, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, November 05, 2007

The $100,000 Business Lesson

Hey, we're not just Internet marketers - we're also business men. And our point in this blog is to teach you all that we can not just about Internet marketing, but about lessons we learn and experiences we have along the way. We just had a real life business lesson that cost us $100 thousand. We don't want you to make the same mistake in your business, so we thought we would share our lesson with you, our valued readers, in hopes that you will do better.

So what is the $100 thousand business lesson? It's this:

Always be thoroughly prepared for any communication you will be having with potential customers - ask if there is a particular agenda or topics that will be covered in advance; anticipate questions they will ask; take notes in advance. Do this regardless if it is an in-person meeting or a phone call.

We were pitching for a prospective client and thought we had the deal in the bag. There was a scheduled telephone to discuss a "plan" - what I did not realize is that the call was really an interview because our prospect was also talking to another company. I was expecting something much more informal and didn't do any extra preparation (having already devoted many hours to the writing of a proposal). As a result, the other company got the gig and we lost a piece of business that would have been worth nearly $100 thousand.

So if you are pitching business, even if it is to a company with whom you already have a relationship, be overly-prepared for every interaction you have with the prospect. Assume that the fate of the deal rests on every phone call or every meeting. Take nothing for granted.

There you have it. $100 thousand worth of business advice, and you got it for free just for reading the Work Media Internet Marketing blog.

If you need some help promoting your company online, call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: business advice, communications, internet marketing, marketing

Friday, November 02, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 5

Yes, yes, development of our proprietary Google AdWords application is still ongoing. We just finished a section of the application that I am excited about it because it will be a major time saver in setting up Google campaigns. What we've done is give our keyword research page the functionality to create multiple ad groups at once. The list of keywords returned from a keyword search has a textbox next to each keyword where you can specify the name of an ad group for that keyword. Keywords for which you type the same ad group name will be added to the same ad group. This is a continuation of our plan to break away from the 1.2.3. approach to setting up ad groups that is used in the AdWords interface.

The next step will be finding some way to add some automation to the ad creation process. This may involve setting up a global ad template that will apply to all ad groups within a campaign. We're still trying to work out the logic in our heads and haven't really coded any of that yet.

We are running up a decent bill in Google API fees. We learned too late about using Google's sandbox AdWords API classes, which would have let us do our testing for free. But I did not want to go back and have to recompile all of our classes again. We had to add some custom code to the classes to get them to work anyway because of a bug (not really a bug, just a bad feature) of the .NET platform involving the way it communicates with Web Services. So it just seemed easier to pay the Google API fees than go back and have to re-do a bunch of work. Dealing with the API fees just from our testing certainly has shown us that we will need to be careful to price use of the application to cover the fees we'll run up once we open the application up to our clients. By the way, the trick to using Google's sandbox API is that you use a different URL for each Web Service when compiling your classes that make the Web Service calls.

Development of the application has slowed the last couple of weeks due to client demands. The thing has come a long ways - but it has a long way to go. We hope to be ready to launch by January.

If you could use some help with pay per click management or search engine optimization, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, search engine marketing, sem