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.

Monday, March 31, 2008

Monday Morning Update

Okay, we're back in action (as far as this blog goes). My daughter had her surgery Wednesday, and it seemed to go well. I tell ya, babies are tough. If I had had the same surgery, I would have been lying around moaning for days. My daughter, on the other hand, was crawling around, happy as could be when we took her home the next day. Amazing.

Anyway, we have a busy week. We have a new client in the legal industry, Lucius Hawes, an attorney based out of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. We also took on another client who has asked that we not reveal our working relationship. But we're glad to welcome some new clients, even if we can't brag about who they are.

We will be working with our Indian developer to hopefully finish the Google Dominator application this week. I think the app turned out to be more complicated than our developer had anticipated, but we are confident that we'll get it done.

I have also made great progress on our latest book. This one will not be available for free on our site (sorry). It represents the culmination of two years' worth of research and writing, so we will be shopping it around for publication. We may just end up selling it ourselves, depending on what happens with publisher discussions.

That's our company update. Sorry, no lesson today. We're too dang busy! But I'll post again Wednesday and we're get back to the normal business of learning about search engine optimization and pay per click management.

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

Labels: internet marketing

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

That's all for this week...

This may be our last blog post of the week. My 11 month old daughter is having surgery tomorrow, so I will be out of the office the rest of the week. I will be working on some things at the hospital, but I probably won't be blogging. Chris doesn't do much blogging because he's too busy keeping the company going. Hey, we gotta make a living.

I will be working on our newest book which I mentioned yesterday - a systematic, trading-style methodology for managing paid search campaigns.

And work on our Google AdWords management application continues. Hopefully VERY soon that will be ready for beta testing by some of our clients and friends.

So...this is it for this week. If there is anything we can do to help your business be successful in its online marketing, please call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing

Monday, March 24, 2008

Thinking Hard About Pay Per Click Management Strategy

I've been reading a lot lately about trading systems - that is, rules-based strategies for making short-term investments in stocks or other securities. So far, most of my personal stock purchases have been made in more of an "investing" mode, as opposed to trading. In other words, I'm buying stocks that I think are undervalued or that have strong future prospects, in order to realize long-term appreciation in the stock prices. Trading is completely different. It is based purely on things like volume of purchases and momentum.

What's the point, you ask? It's that there is a strong correlation between the trading of securities and the management of a paid search campaign. For instance:

When trading, you are buying something at one price in hopes of selling it at a higher price. In pay per click management, you are biding a certain price for a click in hopes of turning a profit on it.
When trading, many, if not most, of your trades will be losers, with the hope that your winning trades outweigh your losers. In pay per click management, most of your clicks will be losers, with the hope that you have enough clicks that convert to outweigh your losers.
Trading involves a set of stocks or other securities. Pay per click management involves a set of keywords or web sites.

One major area of difference between a trading account and a paid search account is that paid search has a strong creative element. Even if you do the math right, if your ads are lousy or your landing pages are lousy, you're still going to lose. But we have some ideas that we think will make the creative side easier even for novices.

We have begun work on our newest book, that will be a rules-based strategy guide for managing paid search accounts. This one will be shopped around to real publishers, rather than publishing it ourselves as we have in the past.

For the time being (until you get a chance to buy our book), the point is to think of your pay per click campaign as an investment. Your keywords are the entities (your securities) that comprise your portfolio of keywords. Some keywords are going to make you money, and some (if not most) keywords are going to lose money. You need to figure out which ones are your winners.

If you need some help with your pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: bid management, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, web site marketing

Friday, March 21, 2008

Breaking Out of Our Shell

For a blogger, I don't get out much. Most successful bloggers spend all kinds of time reading other blogs, posting, being active in blog communities...and I don't know how they do it. How the heck do you do that and still get any work done? We still don't visit many blogs and get into that community stuff too much, simply because of the time required. But we have started doing something that moves us in that direction that i think may be of value to you.

We've been going to "answer" sites and responding to questions that deal with search engine marketing topics. A couple of good examples of the types of sites I'm talking about are:

http://answers.yahoo.com

and

http://linkedin.com/answers

To answer questions on either site, you have to have an account. Signing up doesn't take long, but you might want to spend some time working on your profile just in case people reading your answers want to find out more about you.

You may or may not receive any boost in your search engine rankings from these sites. Linkedin, for example, uses a redirect for your web site link, so it's not a link straight to your site. And Yahoo! inserts a nofollow attribute in links contained in answers. But with Yahoo!, we have seen many links contained in answers appear in search engine lists of links to a site, so we think you are getting some value there.

Even if you receive no search engine ranking boost, you will expose your expertise to people looking for help in your area, so chances are good that you will receive some traffic. It's just another form of on-line networking. You've got to get your name out there, and answering questions is a good way to do it.

You do need to be careful not to use the answer sites simply for promotional purposes. Your accounts will be banned quick if you do that. If you're going to do it, you need to look for questions for which you can honestly provide some insight, and type out complete, well-written responses.

If you could use some help implementing a search engine optimization or pay per click management campaign for your business, give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, social bookmarking, social media

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Latest Things You Should Know About Google

Here are a couple of items of news from the Google camp that we thought were interesting, and that you should know about.

First off, Google now takes the loading time of your landing pages into consideration when determining relevance for AdWords ads. Google requires advertisers to pay more for clicks if it determines that there is low relevancy between the keywords, ads, and landing pages. It wants to make sure that there is a strong sense of congruency - that everything relates and is relevant. But now they have gone a step further and are measuring the loading speed of your landing pages. Advertisers who have pages that load too slowly will be punished by being forced to pay more for clicks.

We don't agree with this move by Google. Economics takes care of this kind of problem. If an advertiser's keywords are not appropriate, or if its ads are not effective, or if its landing pages take too long to load, the economics of the situation will drive the advertiser away. The business will lose too much money to keep doing it. Google's micromanagement continues.

The other Google news item is that an ad purchasing system similar to what Google offers for newspaper and radio is now in beta testing for TV. The new platform lets advertisers purchase TV ad time on the Echostar satellite system. It is currently being tested by a few select advertisers, but early feedback seems to be very positive. The day is fast approaching when Google's advertising platform can be used to manage a completely integrated marketing campaign incorporating search, online content, print, radio, and TV.

Speaking of Google, we are still finishing up the first iteration of our AdWords management tool. We've been fixing bugs for weeks, but hopefully it will be ready to try out next month.

If you could use some help with Google pay per click management or any other online marketing activity, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 of Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, sponsored search, TV advertising

Monday, March 17, 2008

Improving Return on Equity with Pay per Click Marketing

The mark of an exceptional company is the ability to generate ever greater returns on equity. For instance, if your company has $1 million of accounting equity, and you generate $200 thousand in earnings (profit), then your return on equity is 20%. Your goal for next year, then, might be to generate a return on equity of 25%. This kind of analysis is particularly relevant to public companies, but it is also valid for private companies as a measure of performance.

One way to increase your company's return on equity is to invest in things that will increase sales and that can be measured so you know how much they are increasing sales. These "things" consist of advertising and other forms of marketing. Unfortunately, most forms of advertising make it very difficult to track how much business you are actually generating in return for your advertising dollars. But you and I know about a form of advertising that does not suffer from this weakness.

Paid search, or pay per click.

Pay per click lets you know exactly what your return on investment is for all of your keywords, ads, and landing pages. Over time, as you generate data and do more split-testing, you should be able to make your return on investment from paid search improve. Improving the ROI on your advertising improves the return on equity for your overall business, all else being equal.

So if you are looking to improve your company's financial performance, look to advertising platforms that are cost-effective, easy to implement, and provide complete transparency with regard to return on investment. Paid search is your best bet.

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

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, roas, roi, search engine marketing, sem

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Work Media - Business Update

Here are just a few happenings from around the office. Not that this stuff is particularly interesting to anyone, but I gotta write about something. I'm not feeling particularly creative today.

We had a fantastic call today with a company in California that is selling some world-changing products. We became enamored with their products as soon as we checked out their web site and are very hopeful of doing a deal with the company soon. More to come about that.

We had a call with Columbia State Community College yesterday and they are thrilled with the performance they are getting from their paid search campaign and instructed us to continue on at least until the end of April.

We continue servicing our hard wood flooring client in Memphis and are having great results. Month after month, his rankings are improving and his natural search traffic is improving. The way the site's ecommerce functionality works, we are unable to accurately track conversions. But all indications are that the business is doing very well..

We have a developer in India finishing up work on the beta version of our Google Dominator application. We hope to go live with that in April.

We did an online press release this week about our Keyword Relative Value concept. Soon you should be seeing something about that in one of the Mediapost publications. In addition to the press release, we've been doing a ton of article marketing for our own purposes and are starting to see some good results. I am a huge fan of article distribution as an SEO technique.

That's all for now. If you need some help implementing a search engine marketing campaign for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Keyword Relative Value: a Simplified Way of Measuring Search Engine Visibility

This week we published an article on our web site discussing a concept we have developed called Keyword Relative Value. The article can be accessed via the link below:

http://workmedia.net/articles/Keyword-Relative-Value.asp

To quote from the article:

We developed a formula intended to attach a numerical value to a web site's search engine ranking for a specific keyword. The resulting number, called the Keyword Relative Value (or “KRV”), places a value on a keyword for a particular web site based on two parameters: the amount of expected traffic for the keyword and a site's ranking in a particular search engine for the keyword.

Here is the KRV formula:

KRV = ROUND(T*(SQRT((1/R)^3)),2)

where T = the expected traffic for a keyword and R = a web site's ranking for the keyword in a particular search engine.

The above formula derives the value for one particular keyword. A much more instructive exercise is to calculate the KRV's for a group of keywords. We call this the Aggregate Keyword Relative Value ("AKRV"). The formula for AKRV is as follows:

AKRV = X(ROUND(T*(SQRT((1/R)^3)),2))

where X is the number of keywords that have search engine rankings.

The point of these formulas is to boil your web site's search engine visibility for a common set of keywords down to a single number. You can then track this number over time and compare it to your competitors to gauge your visibility against your competitors. We believe this concept is a powerful new tool to give web site owners a stronger sense of how well they rank in the search engines, in an easy-to-understand format: a single number.

To learn more about KRV, please read the article linked above.

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

Labels: internet marketing, keyword relative value, keyword research, keywords, KRV, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, sem, seo

Monday, March 10, 2008

Publicity the Easy Way: Using PRWeb

We just paid to have a press release distributed via PRWeb. PRWeb, if you don't know, is a press release distribution service that is tied into a large network of web sites and people to whom it distributes press releases. PRWeb has four basic levels of service which cost up to $360, although you can also spend more than that depending on what extra features you utilize. One such feature is a podcast feature by which PRWeb staff will call you and record a 4 to 5 minute podcast from the call. This service starts at $100.

After distributing a press release, PRWeb provides the following statistics: Reads (the number of times the press release was accessed via PRWeb), Pickups (the number of times the press release was accessed via a consumer or media person), Prints (the number of times the press release was printed), Forwards (the number of times your press release was forwarded via a link on the press release), and PDF Downloads (the number of times your release was downloaded via PDF). Depending on the level of service you pay for, you can also view information such as visits by country, search engines, and search terms by search engine.

Unlike articles, you can place a true hyperlink in the body of a press release. This has considerable value, as you can load the text of the link with keywords relevant to your business. So unlike articles, where your link has to appear in the author's box, which appears beneath the article, an online press release can contain a link back to your web site at or near the top of the body copy.

One problem with online press release distribution is how glutted the market is. It is no secret that online press release distribution is a fantastic SEO technique. As a result, every day there are hundreds or thousands of press releases distributed that are little more than fluff. So, if you want your press release to stand out, you should have something legitimate to talk about. Think from a reporter's perspective. If you were a reporter looking for something to write about, would the press release issued by your company spark your interest? It better.

This press release we're doing this week is the first one we've done where we have paid for PRWeb's top level of service. We'll let you know how it goes, and if we feel like it is worth the money, or if you're better off sticking to the $200 level.

If you could use some help composing and distributing an online press release to promote your business, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, linking, linking campaign, online pr, online press releases, online publicity, pr, PRWeb, publicity, search engine marketing

Friday, March 07, 2008

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Our Thoughts On Several Second Tier Paid Search Platforms

We have been experimenting with second tier, or alternative, paid search platforms. Here are our thoughts on these platforms:

Turn. This is a really cool concept. We love the pay per action model, where you specify an amount you are willing to pay for the completion of some action - having the prospect fill out a form, make a purchase, or whatever. Unfortunately, we have had no luck generating leads on Turn. Perhaps we are just not bidding high enough for conversions, but we know what we can pay and still engage in a profitable transaction. So far, Turn just hasn't worked for us.

Miva. This is a content network. We're a little divided on Miva. We used it on one paid search campaign very effectively, but on another...nothing. So you might want to invest a very small amount in Miva and see how it does. If your first attempt doesn't produce anything, abandon this one.

GoClick. Don't waste your money here. Their search marketing interface is pitiful. We burned through our entire budget in a couple of hours, without having any idea where the traffic came from, and without a single conversion.

Enhance. This is a content network with which we are starting to see some nice positive results. The interface is more professional than some of the others as well. This one is worth a try.

SearchFeed. We had mixed results on SearchFeed. It might be worth a try, but start conservatively.

Though not really a "secondary" platform, we should also mention that we have had mixed results with Ask, but we definitely recommend you include it in your marketing mix. It has much wider distribution than the above mentioned platforms and is somewhat cheaper than Google or Yahoo!.

Even though we have not had outstanding results with any of the second tier platforms, we still recommend that you experiment for yourself to see if you can find something that works. Google and Yahoo! are not the only games in town. If you could use some help managing a wide, multi-platform paid search campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Ask, Enhance, GoClick, internet marketing, Miva, paid search, pay per action, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem, Turn

Monday, March 03, 2008

SEO Linking: How to Find the Links that Matter the Most

An excellent source of links to your web site are the sites that already link to your highest-ranked competitors. Do you want to really get in-depth in researching what web sites link to your competitors? Then follow these steps:

1. If you don't have the Firefox browser installed, go download it: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

2. Install the SEOQuake plugin. You can download it here: http://ff.seoquake.com/

3. Go to http://search.yahoo.com and search for the links Yahoo! has recorded for your competitor's web site. The search query will be in this form:linkdomain:websiteaddress.com -site:websiteaddress.com -site:www.websiteaddress.com

You will be returned a list of web sites that point to your competitor's site, excluding links from the same site.

4. Turn on SEOQuake if it is not already. This is done by clicking the small SEOQuake icon on address bar on the right-hand side of your browser screen.

5. Sort the links by PR or by age by clicking on the down arrow next to "PR" or "Age" on the line that starts "Sort:" directly above the first search engine result.

Now you will have a list of sites, sorted by age or importance, that link to your competitor. These may be excellent candidates for linking to your site as well. Certainly target the sites that appear to be involved in link swapping, because you can get a link from these sites very easily by just providing a link on your site back. Then go after the ones that may be more picky.

Building up links to a web site can be very frustrating and time consuming. If you could use some help with anything related to SEO or pay per click management, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, link research, linking, linking campaign, search engine optimization, search engine rankings, seo, web site marketing, Yahoo Search

The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Monday, March 31, 2008

Monday Morning Update

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

That's all for this week...

Monday, March 24, 2008

Thinking Hard About Pay Per Click Management Strategy

Friday, March 21, 2008

Breaking Out of Our Shell

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Latest Things You Should Know About Google

Monday, March 17, 2008

Improving Return on Equity with Pay per Click Marketing

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Work Media - Business Update

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Keyword Relative Value: a Simplified Way of Measuring Search Engine Visibility

Monday, March 10, 2008

Publicity the Easy Way: Using PRWeb

Friday, March 07, 2008

Top 5 Article Writing Tips for Making an Immediate Impact

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Our Thoughts On Several Second Tier Paid Search Platforms

Monday, March 03, 2008

SEO Linking: How to Find the Links that Matter the Most

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