The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

Make Sure Your Landing Pages Work!

The topic of today's post may seem obvious. I mean, who wouldn't make sure their landing pages work before launching a pay per click campaign? Well, we do make the assumption that you would test your pages before launching the campaign...but what about afterwards?

You should check your landing pages periodically. Hey, things happen. If your landing page is completely static (straight-up HTML with no server-side code), then chances of it breaking are minimal. But what about your form?

Your landing page probably has some kind of form. If it doesn't, then what's the point? Your form will have to use some kind of server-side component or script to deliver the contents of the form to your site (or to process an order). And that's where things can break.

We have a client whose account recently began performing quite poorly. It turns out that her hosting company had moved her site to a new server. In the process, they had broken the form confirmation page (the page that sends the contents of the form to our client in an email). We spotted this by submitting the form ourselves to make sure it still works. We did this on a hunch after noticing that her site had stopped showing any conversions in her search engine conversion stats.

So...don't let this happen to you. Once a week, check all of your landing pages to make sure your forms are still working. The nickel you save could be your own.

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

Labels: internet marketing, landing page, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, sem

Monday, April 21, 2008

Lose the Ego - It's About the Keywords, Not Your Name

Get used to being known as a keyword rather than a name. If you're trying to generate search engine rankings, at least. For example, which of the following would make a better signature for an article or blog post response?

www.franks.com - Jackson's pool table retailer.

or

www.franks.com - Jackson's pool table retailer.

Intuitively, you might think the first one is better, since your business name is hyper-linked. However, the second link will help boost your ranking for the specific keyword "pool table". Assuming that that keyword accurately reflects the products you sell (and that you have done some keyword research to make sure the keyword generates traffic), then the second one is much better for your business.

If your goal is to achieve search engine rankings, then you need to put your ego aside, and do everything you can to seed the Web with links to your site that contain your main keywords. Article writing is a great way to do this. Personally, I'm not convinced that making forum posts with links is still a valid method. I feel like the search engines probably discounted the value of those links a long time ago. But there are plenty of other techniques.

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

Labels: article marketing, internet marketing, keyword research, linking, linking campaign, search engine optimization, seo

Thursday, April 17, 2008

How to Promote a Web Site on $100 and 2 Hours per Week

Recently, I responded to a question on LinkedIn (or it could have been Yahoo!) where someone had asked the best way to promote a web site if all you had was $100 per month and a few hours of time. I thought it was an interesting question, but one that I felt I had a good answer for.

Based on our experience, here is what I would do with $100 and 2 hours per week:

With the money, purchase some links from a link broker. You should be able to get quite a few links in the area of PR3, which will help your link count.

With the time, I would suggest writing articles. 2 hours per week is enough time to write and distribute at least one article. Over time, links from those articles will really build up. However, to get the greatest distribution possible, I would also highly advise that you use an article distribution service. I suggest articlemarketer.com. However, you will probably need to subtract $10 or $20 from your $100 monthly budget to pay for that.

To make this work, you need to have one or at most two specific keywords in mind for which you want your site to rank. That keyword then needs to be used in your paid links and in at least one link in the article (or the article author box).

There are other factors that affect your rankings, of course - the age of the domain name, the competitiveness of the industry, how well-optimized your site content and code is - but a strategy as described above will make a significant difference, all else being equal.

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

Labels: article marketing, article writing, articles, linking, linking campaign, search engine optimization, search engine rankings

Monday, April 14, 2008

An Introduction to the Kelly Formula

Today we're going deep. We're going to examine a mathematical equation created years ago by a guy named J. L. Kelly. Kelly was a brilliant man who devised a formula that is so rudimentary, yet so critical, it is the foundation for many systems in the world of finance AND gambling. Here is the formula:

Fraction of bankroll to invest = Edge / Odds

Edge means any information you have that gives you better than 50/50 odds. For example, if you have a quarter that is weighted in such a way that heads should come up 60% of the time, then your edge would be 10%. On any one flip of the coin, you would have a 10% edge if you bet on heads. In the world of finance, an edge can be any information you receive that gives you an advantage over other investors.

Odds are odds. It is the payout from winning the bet or gamble. For instance, going back to the coin flip example, the odds would likely be 1:1, or even money. In the formula, this would just be represented as 1. If you guess the coin correctly, you would win an amount even to your bet. If the odds were 2:1, then a 2 would be used in the formula.

So using the above edge and odds in our formula gives us:

Fraction of bankroll to invest = 10% / 1, or 10%.

The formula tells you that you should invest 10% of your total bankroll on every coin flip.

If the odds were 2:1, then the formula would look like:

Fraction of bankroll to invest = 10% / 2, or 5%.

So...what does this have to do with search engine marketing? Everything.

To be as successful as possible in your search engine marketing, you need to allocate your funds to those keywords, ads, and campaigns that generate the highest return on ad spend. If you had enough information, you could use the Kelly formula to allocate your budget. If you don't have enough information, it is still a good mental model for you to follow. Put more of your money on keywords that have proven to be most effective.

We will be discussing these types of concepts more in later blog posts. I just wanted to introduce you to Kelly and get you thinking about the process of maximizing the return on your paid search ad spend.

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

Labels: bid management, Kelly formula, paid search, pay per click, pay per click management, ppc, search engine marketing, sem

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Exciting New Blogger Features that Will Bring Your Boring Blog to Life

Google has been working on some new features of the Blogger blogging platform which are really cool. To try them out, you just need a Blogger account. Then, rather than logging into blogger.com like you normally do, you log into draft.blogger.com. The new features include blog post scheduling, which lets you specify a particular date when a post should go live, and a blog list feature to display information about other blogs you recommend.

The coolest new feature we see is the ability to add Google Gadgets to your blog. This now GREATLY expands how dynamic your blog can be. For instance, I am considering starting a new financial blog. Lucky for me, there are already hundreds of Google Gadgets in the Finance category that can do things like display financial market information or stock tickers. So just like that...bam!...my new blog will be able to display information related to stocks that I talk about in the blog.

There are lots of different categories of gadgets that can be added to a blog. Some more examples include sports gadgets that can do things like feed sports news or photos to your blog, and games that you can add to your blog. Another category of gadgets with a ton of useful potential is Communication. This includes gadgets like Google Talk and Skype, which facilitate communication with your readers and friends. There are currently over 1,300 available gadgets in the Communications category, so you have lots of options to choose from.

Google seems to be working hard to make its blogging platform competitive with other platforms, especially by leveraging Google Gadgets, of which there are many, to add excitement and interactivity to Blogger-hosted blogs. We have recommended Blogger on many occasions and continue to do so. We certainly like the fact that it is owned by Google, so maybe, just maybe, you gain a slight advantage in getting your content indexed for inclusion in Google search results.

If you need some help using your blog for marketing purposes, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: blog, blog marketing, Blogger, blogging, blogging advice, blogging service, google, internet marketing

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Designing a Pay per Click Management System

In the course of working on our latest book, I have put a lot of thought into the concept of a trading-style system for managing a paid search campaign. There is definitely a correlation between investing in securities and investing in paid search. Every keyword you bid on is sort-of like a stock: you are bidding a certain amount in anticipation of turning a profit on it.

Possibly the investing concept (also a gambling concept) that is the most relevant to pay per click is money management. You want to allocate your budget to the keywords that will maximize your profit and minimize losses. Unfortunately, unlike with securities, you have no historical data to use to test your beliefs except your own. And it costs money to generate your own data.

There's no way around it. If you want to successful in paid search, you have to be willing to pay the price to generate enough data to know what changes you need to make to your account.

Another big difference between trading securities and managing a paid search account is that there are other variables other than just the keyword (the "security") and the price paid for it. With paid search, you have more "touchy feely" things to deal with - namely, your ad copy and landing page copy/design. You can have your account set up just right and your bids set perfectly, yet still not be successful because of your ads and landing pages. There is a complex relationship between the keyword, bid, ad, and landing page. A weakness in any of the elements can greatly diminish the effectiveness of a pay per click campaign.

But again, it all just comes down to generating data, and the way to do that is to test, test, test. With our new book, we hope to give readers a reasonably simple system to use to properly allocate their budget. The rest is just good ol' split-testing and constant revision.

If you need help with PPC management NOW and can't wait for our book to come out. feel free to call us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

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

Friday, April 04, 2008

Battling Amazon

We have become involved in somewhat of a political movement in protesting recent actions taken by Amazon.com. It has to do with print-on-demand ("POD") books, which are books printed a single copy at a time. Many independent authors use POD services to sell their books through Amazon. When a copy of the book is purchased, the POD company prints it and usually ships it directly to the customer. It's a very smooth transaction. And it provides a reliable marketplace for independent authors.

But very recently, Amazon began contacting authors who use POD to inform them that they would have to use Amazon's own print-on-demand company, Booksurge, for their book printing. Amazon is responsible for over half the market for POD books. An author who wants to sell as many copies as possible needs to use Amazon. So in one swift move, Amazon essentially took over the print-on-demand industry. Where once there were many options, now there is only one.

To make matters worse, the Booksurge service is known for poor quality. Even if Booksurge has fixed its problems, authors should still be free to do business with companies with whom they already have established relationships. Authors will incur considerable expense in switching POD companies; authors will now be paying Amazon a high percentage of their sales, in addition to charging them for the printing. These additional expenses will be passed onto the consumer in the form of higher book prices.

It is clear that Amazon.com is now just a corporate machine; far, far removed from the little online book seller that started a revolution. We're advising people not to do business with Amazon.

We have also been maintaining a blog on this subject, http://www.AmazonBookSurge.com, that we invite you to check out.

As far as how this relates to marketing, how about this:

Never make massive changes to your business overnight that are going to negatively affect a great number of your customers.

Seems pretty obvious. Especially on the Web, where it is not hard to research the opinions of others. For instance, try performing the following search in Google: Amazon.com customer complaints

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

Labels: amazon.com, internet marketing, public relations, publicity

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Technology Problems are Bad for Business

We had some serious trouble with GoDaddy this week. We have recommended GoDaddy on numerous occasions, both in our blog and in-person. But our days of recommending GoDaddy are over. We had a terrible experience with them this week in which a mission-critical application was down, and it took two whole days of repeated calls before we finally talked to someone in their technical support department who knew what he was talking about. Our problem could have been fixed in a few hours, rather than three days (Sunday through Tuesday).

So...GoDaddy is probably fine for registering your domain names, but I would be careful about using them for hosting or running a server. I think they probably just have too much business to handle. The company has obviously been very successful. Too successful.

Who would we recommend? Heck if I know. The hosting companies we have worked with include DataPipe, HostNexus, 1and1, and GoDaddy. With both 1and1 and GoDaddy, we had a dedicated or virtual dedicated server. In both cases, customer support has been pathetic. With HostNexus, we had a bad experience involving the time difference between us and them (they are in Australia). DataPipe is probably be the best of the group.

If it is critical that your site not go down, your email always work, and that customer service be an option, then you should probably look for a local company. You may end up paying more, but we have definitely learned that you get what you pay for. Don't make the same mistakes we have made. Bad hosting can make your company look very bad.

Although this post may not seem like it has anything to do with Internet marketing, it does. You must protect your image, and you must be responsive to your customers and prospects. This means your web site must be up. Your email must work. You must be able to deliver on your promises, but if your technology is bad, that becomes much more difficult. All the search engine marketing in the world won't do you any good if your prospects have a bad experience.

If you need some help with your search engine optimization or pay per click management (or making technology decisions as discussed in this article), please contact us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: email, internet marketing, technology, web hosting