Marketing Archives - Page 8 of 14

Internet Marketing For Small Business – A Guide

Most small businesses don’t have huge marketing budgets, so they are looking for the most cost efficient way to get their marketing message to the most people possible. Only a few years ago, this would have been next to impossible. However, with the growth of the internet, what was recently impossible is not only possible, but is now quite easy for small business owners.

A popular internet marketing tool for small businesses wanting to start marketing online is Google AdWords. With the Google AdWords system, you can reach millions of people with your advertising message, while only paying for the people who show interest in your ads by clicking on them. This is in contrast to a more popular form of advertising which charges businesses based on how many people see their ad. The Google AdWords system of “cost per click” is much superior as it only costs the advertiser based on how many people are interested enough in their product or service to click.

One main way businesses can use Google AdWords is to advertise on the Google search engine and the rest of Google search network, which includes sites like Ask.com.

All you as an advertiser have to do to start seeing ads on these search sites is to follow these easy steps:

– Create a Google AdWords account: It is very easy to set up a Google AdWords account. All you need to do is create a Google account, or use an existing Google Account. It is very quick and easy to create your new Google AdWords account.
– The second step is to create a “campaign”. While creating your first campaign, just pick the option for showing your ads on the Google Search Network.
– Next, you’ll want to pick some keywords that searchers would use to find the product or service you offer. The closer the keywords are to what people will search, the better success you will have.
– Then write some ads that are related to your keywords and product. Make them very catchy and appealing, as you will want searchers to click on the ad and visit your site. However, make sure they are also accurate, because if your product or service doesn’t match what you advertised, the searcher won’t buy, and you’ll pay for their click without getting anything from it.
– You’ll also have to set your bid for how much you want to pay for clicks, and maybe a few other smaller settings.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll soon see your ads on Google and their related search sites. This is a great way to reach millions of people, as Google has over 70% of the entire search volume on the web. If you want to reach even more people, check out Google’s display network, which allows you to advertise on other websites, even sites like the New York Times. You can start advertising on these sites within the same Google AdWords account you’ve already set up.

Within a few minutes, you could be set up to get your product or service in front of millions of people, while only paying for those that are interested in your product or service. This ability gives you a huge advantage over businesspeople of the past, who could only have dreamed about such a great opportunity!

Internet Marketing For Small Business – Part 2 of 5 Steps to Succeeding With Google AdWords

Continuing on from my last article ‘Internet Marketing For Small Business – Part 1 of 5 Steps to Succeeding With Google AdWords”, here are the final steps to ensuring a successful Google AdWords Campaign.

2. Understanding Quality Score:

Once you have added your keywords, Google will tell you your quality score. Its important that you have a good to great quality score in your keywords (usually rated out of 10), if you get a poor or OK quality score, it means you have done something wrong. It could be that you are bidding on the wrong keywords, that your landing page is not specific enough for those keywords or Google does not think your ad is related to your keywords or that the page you are sending people does not have those keywords in it.

The quality score will be determined from a number of things:

You need to have a high CTR: A high quality score must be over 1% and this will also depend on how your ads are showing up. If your ad is appearing on the 2nd or 3rd page, then this will mean your quality score is lower but if you are in the top 5 or 6 positions, your CTR should be over 1%. Therefore you need to work on getting that CTR as high as you with a baseline of 1% as the CTR. You should always get a CTR of over 1%, even as high as 15% and the way you get a high CTR is by testing. You write 2 different ads and see which ones performs better. Usually after 30 to a 100 clicks, you pick the ad that gets a higher click rate and write a variation on it. You then go on and write another ad that is different to that one and see which one performs better again (beating the control). When you have found a theme that performs very well, you can tweak your ads by adding a question mark, quotations around it, switch the descriptions lines or even change your url. You can do any of these things to tweak your ad so that you can get a higher CTR, thus a higher quality score.
Its Not A Bidding War….Most people when starting out with Google AdWords usually say “I want to be in the top position, at number 1 and I am willing to pay more than anyone else to be there”. This is the wrong way to go about it. It should not be a bidding war, it should be a fight over who is the better advertiser, that is what Google really wants. Google wants you to write an ad that gets the highest CTR so that they make more money ie. the more clicks, the more money you pay them. So if you can write a better ad than your competitors, Google will be very willing to reward you for that. They reward you by charging you less per click and putting you in a higher position on the page. Lets say your ad gets a 2% CTR and your competitor gets a 1% CTR, it probably means you are going to pay half as much per click and be ranked higher than your competitor because Google will know the user is having a better searching experience. Hence you should always have two ads running and check which ad is performing better. If one is performing badly, pause it, write a better ad and see if you can beat your better performing ad.

3. Tracking:

AdWords is probably the best system for tracking that exists. It is very easy with Google AdWords to set up your keywords and track how well they are performing ( i.e. by making you money). What is most important is to track whether the clicks are making you sales or converting into leads or sales. If your clicks are not converting, you are obviously just wasting money so it is very important that you track down at a keyword level which ones are making money for you. This is called keyword conversion tracking and there are a couple ways of doing it. The best way is to have Google do it for you. Google has some keyword conversion tracking code which they will allow you put it on your thank you or finished page and they will let you track a sale or a conversion.

The other way you can track conversions is by assigning a specific URL to every keyword (help can be found at the Google AdWords Tutorial). The better you understand how to track conversions, the better your results will be with AdWords. You will find that as you get more clicks on your campaign and by tracking everything, different keywords will perform very differently even though they may seem very similar. For example ‘dog training’ maybe very different to ‘train my dog’, you may find that one of them may convert much higher than the other one.

On another level, you can track conversions through the success of your ad campaigns. Some ads may perform better than other ads, for example one ad may have a price and the other may not, this means anyone that clicks on the ad with a price knows that they have to buy something when they go to that page – that ad will convert at a higher percentage than if you did not have the price on the ad. It will probably have a much lower CTR but also a higher conversion rate. This is really something that needs to be tested on every campaign to see if you are getting a return on investment because in the end the goal is to make the greatest amount of money. Track everything!

4. Bidding:

Over the years bidding has changed, it use to be bid low and then raise your bid and to see what the lowest point was. That is probably not the wisest thing to do anymore – at least not right now. Right now what I suggest is start by bidding high, what this does is allow you to get a good position on AdWords and a good CTR. As you establish the CTR, Google will recognize that you are a good advertiser and then you can lower your bid everyday to what Google is actually charging you (whilst maintaining your high CTR). What you need to figure out is whether you are getting a good returns for the money you are actually spending so if you are spending a $1 and getting $2 back – you know its worth continuing the campaign.

5. Last words:

Please don’t get emotional attached to a keyword because you ‘like’ the keyword or believe it should work. Do not expect to learn everything upfront and then go implementing a Google AdWords campaign effectively. If you have your own full time business and love what you are doing – then get a professional in to run your own PPC campaigns.

Are You Wasting Your Marketing Dollars on Obsolete Strategies?

Many people who run businesses for a long time get into ruts or habits which may not be the best way to decide the most effective or productive strategies when it comes to marketing. What worked in 1980 or 1990 or even 2000, may not work today.

As we all realize, times have changed and along with them, consumer shopping and buying preferences. Whether your customer is an everyday person or another business, decisions about what to purchase, how much to pay, where to get it and how to pay for it have been greatly affected by the Internet.

Years ago, if you wanted to buy a used car, you would probably have picked up the classified section of the newspaper and scanned the appropriate listings. The same held true for real estate. If you were hunting for a job, where did you look? Of course, the want ads in the paper.

How about clothing, gifts, jewelry, golf clubs, books or even shoes? Well, you’d probably hit the mall for a tiring day of browsing, asking questions of a salesperson, trying things on, and lugging bags of purchases to your car.

How about tax services, medical consultation, planning a night out at good restaurant or pet grooming? Entertainment equipment, car insurance, office supplies or finding a local plumber? We used to pick up the yellow pages for all kinds of things we needed – you must remember those huge books filled with tiny type listing everything under the sun?

But we live in a brave new world. Today, practically everyone shops for everything online. Not only that, we use our credit cards to pay and have everything delivered to our homes or businesses for the ultimate in convenience.

So, how has that impacted how we reach our markets? Enormously! If you are still placing classified ads in the paper or buying expensive display ads in the yellow pages, you need to step back and reassess your decisions, which may be a little out-of-date.

Instead you should be capitalizing on all the free “yellow page” listing directories available online. This may take you some time to set up, requiring you to do some writing of short blurbs (otherwise known as paragraphs or “sound bites”) about your business, but are well worth the trouble for a couple of reasons. First, most people now use the Internet to find contact information for whomever or whatever they want to reach. And it is impossible to know which yellow pages they will use, so you need to be listed in all of them. But even more importantly, if you have a website, which you should, all those listings which usually include free links to your website, will help you with your SEO or search engine optimization. (That means that the time you invest in placing free listings will pay off handsomely by pushing your Google search rankings higher in search results if anyone is seeking your products or services online.)

I’m sure all the yellow page sales representatives will not appreciate my suggestions here. But, they are not the only ones whose printed products have fallen out of favor. I am still predicting the coming demise of the printed newspaper and many magazines, as much as I continue to enjoy sitting down to pour over the printed page when I get a few minutes. It’s probably just an old habit that I’ll need to break before it breaks me. First of all, as we age, our eyesight takes a turn for the worse, and seeing that tiny type in the paper is a lot harder than it used to be twenty years ago. Since I spend most of my days staring at my computer monitor, I take advantage of the enlarged type feature which makes it much easier to read. And although I consider the little time I spend reading actual magazines and newspapers as rare moments of luxury, to continue to do so in the future will probably only take place online or via electronic tablets or e-reading devices.

This means that if you run a business, your means of advertising must change as well. While you may feel you still reach the target audience you seek via a printed newspaper ad, which admittedly has become a lot more affordable when compared with rates charged in the past, you may change your tune once you explore the logic behind advertising on the Internet. Online text ads, in addition to banner ads (display “billboards” on the Internet) both of which appear in appropriately planned subject searches you control with pre-placement keyword decisions, are the modern, and perhaps, superlative method of target marketing. In much the same way we used to buy mailing lists to reach a certain segment of the demographic to which we were appealing via direct mail, today we can reach the markets we want by appearing within the subject matter of Internet searches. Granted, this is still quite new, but is evolving further as each day passes, clearly as the future of marketing.

Call me old-fashioned but I must say that direct mail can still be a lot more successful in its ability to land in a prospective customer’s hands compared with trying to elicit the click of a mouse from your customer’s scattered attention on the busy Google search results page! The advantage here is that the direct mailer if designed effectively has the power to keep the recipient interested with graphic influences of color, visual imagery and font size and selection. In comparison, the online text ad is just that, merely text, and looks like every other text ad on the Google page, giving you no greater edge to attract a click than anyone else. Whether the direct mail piece gets opened, read and responded to or whether it is immediately discarded without a glance continues to be the challenging factor to marketers everywhere. As with investing, there is no magic formula. To give a little guidance, if you are marketing to everyone anywhere, perhaps online text ads can make sense because of the large numbers of individuals which may possibly see your ad. That is provided your placement choices are in a popular area of interest. If your target is too small, then those numbers may dwindle considerably. While it is also possible to appeal to a small market in a small geographic area via online text ads, doing so successfully may require some diversification and support from other types of traditional marketing. At least until the Internet is the one and only means of marketing, or until Google is knocked off its Internet throne of infallibility.

With the proliferation of ways to enjoy the vast entertainment industry which includes radio, TV, movies, videos, games, and more, to name a few, investing marketing dollars into the right singular medium in a targeted market has become a lot more difficult. Trying to stretch your budget to appeal to the audience you want to reach can be frustrating with all the choices, distractions and short attention spans of most seekers of entertainment. From a marketing standpoint, and a 35-year history of experience, my advice would be to guard those dollars very carefully before making a rash decision about where to spend.

While I admit new venues have replaced old, some of the old choices still reach certain holdouts who refuse to accept today’s new technologies. Although few and far between, there are some markets still responsive to traditional yellow page, newspaper, magazine and other forms of advertising, which may justify maintaining a judicious presence within such media. It is hard to argue the merits of buying the back cover of the phone directories when thousands upon thousands will be delivered to countless homes even if viewed only that one time all year. The sheer numbers of that marketing reach are staggering. But to do so blindly into the future would be irresponsible if not totally wasteful, when there is now talk of “do not deliver” lists being added to the “do not call” rosters.

And when newspaper ads of huge proportion are sold for a fraction of the cost they once were, temptation sometimes trumps better judgment just for the momentary thrill of dominating the newspaper page for mere pennies. Any response is considered gravy.

This leads me to conclude that we are in a period of marketing limbo: some strategies are on their way out but the door has not quite yet slammed shut. The new strategies are a little intimidating but the old ones are much less effective. If you can bridge a balance between the two until time sorts out the survival of the fittest, marketing budgets will be preserved a bit longer and perhaps maintain a semblance of success despite the need to navigate seas of confusion, trepidation and obsolescence.

Make Bold Marketing Statements With Pull-Up Banners

Today, business networking is a popular term in business communities. If you’re not attending at least one networking function a week to promote your company, it’s time you considered doing so. More and more small companies, in particular, are finding business networking to be an effective way to get their company known through word-of-mouth.

I’ve often been impressed by the degree of preparation that goes into such events. Typically, networking meetings will open with each attendee doing a 30 second elevator pitch, briefly presenting the products and services their company provides. Then, one or two business owners are called upon to present on a topic pertinent to the group, be it on Internet marketing or Google AdWords or sales conversions or different trends in the marketplace. This is then is promptly followed by a handing out of business cards. At this point, you’ll typically hear conversations turn practical: “My neighbour’s looking for his roof to be fixed, can one of your roofers give him a call”. “Our office manager needs to hire a temp, can Tom call her this week to set something up?”, as the attendees swap business leads.

Whether you are new to business networking or a seasoned veteran, you might consider investing in a Rollup Banner. If you haven’t heard of Rollup Banners until now, don’t be particularly surprised. Although they have been in existence for decades, it’s only in recent years that they have become the next-best-thing to the company PowerPoint presentation and website.

If you’re wondering what’s a banner, and more particularly what’s a rollup banner, that’s a valid question. It certainly leaves a doubt in a lot of people’s minds. A banner is like a canvas, used pretty much like a film screen to project the company’s image, vision and ethos. And once they have served their purpose, banners are folded or rolled-up into a neat compact size.

Rollup Banners a special breed of banners. They are banners which are retractable banners, meaning quite simply once you’ve shown your audience of potential clients the banner, it’s rolled up discretely. Think back to your school days when the geography teacher would show you places on a wall-hanging map. Rollup banners are pretty much the same concept.

What better way to jazz up your networking 30 second elevator pitch than to have a banner to show your audience? This would make what your business pitch much more memorable than if you were to hold up a business card, or even a flyer. It’s a common fact that the 30 second elevator pitch seldom appeals to the visually-oriented members of an audience because most presenters need more than 30 seconds simply to set up an overhead projector. The simple process of unclipping and setting up, effortlessly, a banner stand will get heads turning. And be forewarned, you’re as likely to get audience members coming up to you afterwards to ask you where you got your nifty banner stand, as you are likely to get business enquiries. And this is the ideal moment to hand out your business card and ask them to call you during the week.

Brand recognition comes with hearing and seeing the same business messages over and over. If every time you attend a networking event, you show the same banner, not only will you likely impress your audience with your dexterity, but you’ll start gaining a new following. One sure-fire technique to know if your sales projections are on target, or not, for the upcoming fiscal year, is to ask yourself how often you managed to get the company image into circulation. Image sells. Enquire about getting a company banner today.

Learn My Internet Business Top 5 Free Marketing Strategies

I would like to share with you mine My Internet Business free marketing strategies that are generating for me great results. There are many free marketing strategies online, most of them will require to put some effort and not necessary much skill.

Here are some top free advertising strategies:

Article Marketing – writing articles can be a great way to generate consistent traffic to your website. If you are able to write few articles per day you will see descent traffic. Before writing any article first make some research for some good keyword you will be optimizing to. Include this keyword in article title and few times in body. Remember also to share some valuable content, share some knowledge and experience. Make your article easy to read and understand, simple language is a key.
Video Marketing – popularity of videos on the internet is growing constantly. The leader of video sharing sites is of course YouTube. If you want to use full potential of videos post it to the top video sites, with most traffic. The main benefit of making video is branding yourself and marketing your program. People will know you better, you will build a relationship with them even though you didn’t spoke to them. I’m promoting My Internet Business on YouTube and get amazing traffic. Google is listing videos really high in result pages.
Forum Marketing – forums is another great place to branding yourself, making contacts and relationships and of course promoting your business. Under any post you can write own signature, few lines promoting your site. Remember to make your signature short and sweet, offer free report or training, encourage people to click in your sig. There are forums about every possible topic. It won’t be hard for you to find some descent forums, just use Google.
Classified Sites – it’s a great free marketing strategy because it’s the easiest way to promote your business. Look for top classified sites first like Craigslist, Backpage, Kijiji, USFreeAds and start posting your ads regularly. The headline of your ad is playing a key role of getting more traffic. Make your title creating curiosity to people. To really see some good traffic from classified sites you will have to post consistently many ads to many sites. I mostly focus on posting ads only on Craigslist. Conversion rates for My Internet Business are great. Each site will bring you a little traffic that’s why to see some significant results you will have to post your add massively.
Blogging – blogs can be a great sample of free advertising. Blogs are trendy right now, Google is giving high listing to them and people really enjoy reading them. To set up a blog you can go to Blogger and with a few clicks you will have it created. You can post in blogs your articles and optimize for specific keyword to get better listing. There are many blog directories and web directories where you can easily and for free get a lot of quality backlinks.

As you see there are many free marketing strategies to promote My Internet Business. You don’t need to spend a dime to make sales. Using each of these strategies and implementing in your business will give you massive exposure online and flow of fresh and targeted leads. I recommend to anyone who is beginner in internet marketing to start from free advertising to really understand marketing online.

Affordable & Effective Marketing Tips to Promote Your Business Online

There are many ways that you can market your business without having to spend a lot of money and if you know what they are, then you can get started. You can do this simply by creating some stunning content and having it posted on your blog or even by writing for an industry-related magazine. These are just a few of the many options that you can pick and choose from, so make sure that you are considering what options are going to be ideal for you.

Affordable Marketing Tips

Make sure that you are looking at the budget that you have for marketing and that you are thinking of how you can get the most for your money. Here are some great tips that can help you to save money or get marketing done at affordable prices, including:

• Creating some of the best and most unique content that is found on the internet and posting it on your blog

• Create your own My Business Google account to ensure the visibility on various sites like Google Maps

• Build an email list of interested customers and make sure that you are letting them now when new services or added or when you have a sale

• Write an informative article for one of your industry related magazines

• Attend some of the functions for local networking

• Sponsor or even co-sponsor a giveaway or contest

• Build an affiliate program for your loyal customers

• Write guest posts for some of the popular niche sites

• Comment on various blog posts

• Create a group and profile page on Facebook for your business

• Offer some free introductory products on your page

• Create some stunning infographics that you can use

• Create business cards that will catch the eye

• Host some classes locally

• Post free information on your social media pages

• Interact with customers on social media through comments, messages and more

• Buy advertisements on Facebook and other social media platforms

• Consider PPC as an option

• Offer discounts to people who subscribe to your mailing list

Think about these various ways that you can save money when it comes to advertising since most of them would be affordable and can fit into any budget that you might have. Find the ones that work for you and that would cover the needs that you might have, so start looking now.

There are plenty of ways that you can get effective and affordable marketing without blowing up your current budget. Think about creating some great content and posting it on your site along with writing guest posts for other industry sites. Also, you should make sure that your business is claimed on all of the Google Business tools and that you are updating the information as it changes, if it does. You also want to make sure that you are finding the right marketing technique that would work for you, including giveaways and much more.

How Do I Market My Small Business – Article Marketing Is What I Advise All My Clients To Do

I work in the business of helping small businesses get noticed on the internet. Daily I am asked questions by small business owners about how I do so well in getting my clients ranked highly by the search engines. I have lots of tools in my bag of tricks, but if I had to say what is the main thing I use every single day it would be article marketing.

What is article marketing? Article marketing is a form of advertising in which businesses write short articles on topics relevant to their industry. These articles have what is called a resource box at the bottom of the article in which the author can link to their website or a website they are promoting. These articles are submitted to directories for publication. Many times if the content is well written the article will be syndicated to other sites all across the internet.

Article marketing is obviously good because of the traffic that it can bring you. If a person reads your article and thinks it was informative they are likely to click the link and read more on your website. They might join your list or buy a product from your site at this point. If your site is well done they may subscribe to your RSS feed or join your newsletter. If they do then you will have a consistent way to market to them provided that you continue to give them relevant, quality content.

One key that is often overlooked in article marketing is the fact that your articles provide your main website with lots of backlinks. Backlinks are when another site links to your site. When this happens you are seen by the search engines as more relevant and this you are ranked higher in the searches. The more popular the page is that has linked to you, the more weight the search engine gives it.

Another key that most businesses miss is that the article directories are often ranked very highly by Google and other search engines. When your articles are published you are seen as the industry expert because every time someone searches for information on your topic they see your articles. Wouldn’t you like it if every time a person did a search on Google they were inundated with articles written by you about that topic? If they saw all that and then found out they could have you to do the work for them they would not only let you do it, they would be excited to have you do it. That is where you want to be as a business owner.

Entrepreneurship Formula – Step by Step Guide to Start Your Own Business Through Online Marketing

Many people have a big misconception that they have to quit their job to start their own business. In reality, it is perfectly doable to start a new business while you are still working. I highly recommend that anybody starting their own business gives themselves a year to start getting online exposure before leaping into anything. Laying down the foundation for online marketing success is most important. These days, if you are not online, you will struggle to be truly successful.

First, I recommend that you start your own business as opposed to buying a franchise or becoming a reseller. Subway is not in the business of making you rich. Yes, some manage to do it. If it was a foolproof plan, however, everybody would own one. To avoid having to deal with manufacturers, begin a service type business. Also, think locally. When you are just getting started, don’t try to compete on a national level. Start small and work your way up little by little. If you take care with each step in the process, a few years down the line you’ll be ready to launch a much larger campaign and your competitors won’t know what hit them.

Lay down the foundation to get ranked highly on Google so your business can last for years to come. Follow these guidelines to make sure you do it right:

1. Pick a domain name that describes what you do. Do not name your company after your last name. Name it after the product or service. When I began my firm, I did not know this and it took me a while to get Google’s authority on a particular subject. Now, my site gets around 400 hits per day, though I feel this could have been achieved far more quickly if I had chosen a domain based on the service I was providing. Only use.com domains, and shorter names are better than longer ones. To give you an example of how important this is, Google “NYC Sales Recruiters.” Look at a company by the name of Sales Expert Executive recruiters. They have a template based 10 page website. Then, look at mine. We have 170 pages of articles written about sales recruiting. That is how much weight the search engine puts on domain names. It took me nearly a year to learn how to beat them in most categories.

2. Brand your company for Google. Start out with what are called long-tail keyword phrases. Long-tail keyword phrases are 5 words. When I began to learn online marketing, I went after words like “New York City sales recruiters.” Then, as time progressed, I began going after shorter keywords and the traffic to my site increased.

3. Study how to build backlinks to your website. There are tons of articles out there telling you how to do this. Building backlinks to your site is very important, and at first, should be done gradually. Right off the bat, the best way to build links is to submit your website to several website directories. You can find these through some very basic research. It’s well worth the money. Then, begin a blog and frequently update it with posts. Have HTML links with the keywords you are going after pointing back to your site. Also, write interesting articles and submit them to online article sites such as Ezine. Writing is the key to gaining backlinks to your site and is the most important facet of online marketing success. However, when submitting your first articles to these sites, make sure they are perfect. If you mess up on the first few, the editors will dismiss your subsequent efforts.

4. Keep track of your site’s progress. You should begin to see an increase in website traffic and your Google page rank start to climb. Make sure people can contact you through the website. There is no better way to gauge your success with online marketing then how many clients are coming in.

So that’s opening your own business, in a nutshell. Depending on the industry you choose and the product or service you are selling, you will run in to your own unique problems and obstacles. Figuring out how to get past them, however, is just part of the fun.

Affiliate Marketing – Using Pay Per Click to Sell Products

Cost Per Action (CPA) online internet businesses sign up affiliates to promote products for other businesses. Some CPA network businesses are Affiliate.com, RevenueLoop.com, Clickbooth.com, and ClickBank.com. The CPA affiliate networks are paid by a publisher who in return pays the CPA network. Then affiliates are paid by the CPA networks for selling these products to consumers. Affiliates promote business offers by using pay per click (PPC) advertising search engines such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search, Microsoft Adcenter, Miva and etc.

Affiliates join PPC search engines and write ads to promote CPA affiliate network offers. Ad formats vary by PPC businesses but each always contains a headline.

The headline is used to attract the attention of potential customers. It is important for the headline to immediately grab the attention of potential internet customers. The headline needs to be relevant to the product or service you are promoting. Also, it is important that the first letter of each word is capitalized because this makes the headline easier to read.

Keywords are used to attract potential customers. Affiliates bid on keywords to attract potential customers. This is accomplished by affiliates paying PPC businesses to put ads on their networks. Relevant ads are displayed on the computer based on data entered in search engine by internet users. When someone clicks on these ads, the sales page is displayed and the customer has the opportunity to comply with the offer requirements.

Generally, the higher the keyword bid amount, the higher the page rank and page position will be. The page rank is the page number on which the ad appears. Page one is the coveted ad position because this is the first page displayed in a Google search. The page position is the position the ad appears on the page. The affiliate pays the PPC business the bid amount or a lesser amount each time someone clicks on the affiliate’s ad.

The ad also contains a description. The purpose of the description is to show a benefit and have a call to action that results in converting the ad to a sale. The description benefit could be something like Discover Weight Loss Secrets. Get Your Free Weight Loss Sample Here would be an effective call to action for this example.

It is important to capitalize the first letter of each word in the headline and description. Capitalizing the first letter of each word in a sentence helps to grab the attention of the reader.

Attention grabbing headlines are important. Some internet gurus suggest that the headline should contain a relevant keyword to improve the page rank and page position. Others believe that relevant content in the headline is more important.

You can find more relevant keywords by using free tools available on the internet. Perform a Google search on “Free Keyword Tools” and use them to obtain more relevant keywords to promote CPA network offers. Then promote merchant products and services by purchasing keywords on CPA networks.

CAUTION: When bidding on keywords be sure to set a daily or monthly dollar limit. This is important to limit potential losses. Individuals not familiar with how the PPC businesses work risk having substantial PPC costs. This can happen when keywords that are not relevant to the product being promoted have numerous hits but no sales conversions.

Determine which keywords are converting, then write different ad headlines using these keywords. Try limiting headlines and the sales message to contain one keyword.

It is possible to promote CPA network offers by only using search PPC provided by Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter, Miva, etc. However, most internet gurus believe that an individual really needs a web site to effectively promote CPA affiliate network offers. This allows your site to display the offer landing page, provides the opportunity to pre-sell the offer, and this potentially makes the customer more prone to act on the offer.

Landing pages also allow the opportunity to have a squeeze page that provides the customer an opportunity to look at another offer. Squeeze pages are also used to get subscribers to newsletters, other offers, etc. Additional offers can be sent by email to persons who subscribe to your newsletter. However, be sure that you comply with the laws pertaining to unsolicited emails.

Another reason for having your own web site is that you can use landing page ad rotators to promote several offers at one time. Offers are rotated sequentially as customers visit your web site. This is a good way to determine which offers have the best conversion rates and then you can concentrate on promoting offers with the highest conversion rate.

Affiliate marketing can be effectively implemented using PPC search engines to attract internet users to CPA offers. Advertising ads placed on search engines can either be directed to the CPA network offer or directed to your web site and then subsequently being redirected to the CPA network offer.

Facebook Fan Pages – Key to Social Media Marketing

The phrase “Social Media” is everywhere these days, and if you are like me, you may be a bit unclear about what it actually is… the infamous phrase “I’ll know it when I see it” comes immediately to my mind!

I went looking online for a short, easy to understand definition and found this analogy:

Think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, however, you have very a limited ability to share your thoughts on the matter.

Social media, on the other hand, is an active two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate and respond.

As the internet develops and evolves, the various Social Media websites are also growing and changing. Several years ago, MySpace was the place to be but it is now, generally, considered to be on the wane. Likewise, on MySpace, 33% of its users are aged 17 or less.

Ravalry is a relatively new, large community based around knitting with over 1,200,000 registered users. As you would expect, its membership is primarily female and the average member age is not available.

Facebook provides this information about its users:

More than 500 million active users (I recently saw the number 600 million, but it hasn’t been changed yet, on the Facebook site)
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
Average user has 130 friends
People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

As you can see, each Social Media site appeals to and has a different user base than any other site.

One of the powerful considerations about using a Social Media web site is the fact that most of them provide a level playing field when it comes to small business owners vs the big boys. For instance, you can build a Facebook Fan page for your offline business and so can a major automobile manufacturer. Within those Facebook Fan pages, both you and the multi billion dollar car maker have the same tools and resources. On Twitter, as another example, both you and the big companies are limited to 140 characters per tweet. They can’t buy more characters and blast you out of the competition.

When considering which Social Media site to use with Social Media Marketing, you should consider the site’s membership but you should also evaluate its culture and how the members interact. It is important that any Social Media site have a population whose interests are in line with your goals and, also, that it have a structure and pattern of interaction that is compatible with your objectives.

In addition, you must keep in mind that things change on the Internet, sometimes at breakneck speed. As an example, between March 2011 and May 2011, Facebook implemented some major changes which changed the whole landscape of using it for business. Suddenly, controlling the content on a business Fan Page and using product images to build a brand became game changers… for those who knew how to do it!

While a particular Social Media site may be a good fit now, be aware that it may not always be a successful marketing vehicle for you! Monitor the efficacy of any Social Media site you are using AND also keep an eye out for the next big thing!

With all of that in mind, at the current time, I consider Facebook and Twitter to be the Social Media sites most likely to be compatible with the majority of offline businesses and their needs.

In this article I am going to briefly cover Facebook, its structure as it pertains to Social Media Marketing, discuss some of the pitfalls, and propose some strategies appropriate to it.

Facebook Marketing for Small Business

Facebook’s membership has exploded and is currently greater than 500 million, according to its own website.

It originally began as a way for college students to keep in touch with fellow students. As a result of that, the basic Facebook community seems to start from an academic basis, joining students and former students with friendship circles widening out from there. If you are like me, you will be shocked at how many members from your high school class seem to appear out of nowhere!

As part of the Facebook mechanism, possible Friends are suggested to you, based on Friends that you and the other person have in common. While you can do searches, it is hard to find and befriend a person that Facebook doesn’t think you should know. On the other hand, Facebook makes suggestions that will extend your network, based simply on friends you may have in common with someone.

Another important mechanism is the Facebook Like option, which has now been extended beyond Facebook Profile pages and Facebook Fan Pages and out into the web at large.

A third and exceedingly important Facebook mechanism is the ability to link between websites, Facebook Fan Pages, and Twitter accounts. This can be done with a variety of website creation software options. At the moment, I am encouraging my clients to use the blogging software, WordPress, for non blog websites.

With WordPress as your website management system, once you have signed up for the Networked Blogs Facebook App(lication), you can set your website to show any changes on your Facebook Fan Page and your Twitter account. Your Twitter Account can be set to show Facebook Fan Page Comments along with Posts from your WordPress website. In addition, your Tweets will be displayed on your Facebook Fan Page and your website.

Now, I know that the previous paragraph was confusing so let me give you the abridged edition! In my example, you have three web presences for your business – A Facebook Fan Page, a website built with WordPress, and a Twitter account. Any Post made on one of those three sites will automatically appear on the other two sites.

This is VERY powerful and is a REAL time and energy saver IF you take the time to plan your web marketing strategies with this capacity in mind!

With the potential of getting a three to one benefit from any of your Social Networking posts, as described above, let me go a bit deeper into the opportunities afforded to an offline business by having a Facebook Fan Page.

NOTE – It is important to understand that while a Facebook Fan Page can be considered a potential web site substitute, it offers long term hazards that, in my opinion, are not worth the risk.

Building your business’s primary web presence on a third party web site is taking the time, effort, and money to build a nice new house on land that you DO NOT OWN! You might be OK in the short term, but later down the road, you may lose you house, simply because you do not own the land.

While you may decide that it is efficient to start with a Facebook Fan Page, you should also plan to build your own website ASAP! As a business owner, you should be careful to own and control as many of your business assets as possible.

With that warning out of the way, before utilizing any Social Media site for your Social Media Marketing, take the time to read the site’s ToS or Terms of Service. Do NOT assume that you know what is allowed and what is not.

As an example, you may have multiple Twitter accounts, but each account must be tied to a different email address. Any email address can have only ONE Twitter account.

With Facebook, any human is allowed ONLY ONE ACCOUNT! This means that any Facebook Fan Pages built for any businesses will be offshoots of your primary, personal Facebook account.

If for some reason, you do not want a Facebook Fan Page to be obviously tied to your personal account, you can set the Privacy setting to obscure the connection. In the case of most offline businesses, this would not be a concern. However, I have a number of online businesses, some of which I am open about and others that I have chosen to run from behind the scenes. There is nothing questionable about doing this, I just prefer to keep the connection quiet to minimize others copying my business model. However, ALL of my business Facebook Fan Pages are offshoots of my SINGLE personal Facebook account.

Part of the evolution of the Facebook Culture is that, in most instances, it is considered appropriate to ask other members to share with their Friends about your Facebook Fan Page or your new post or any of a number of other Facebook interactions. This is markedly different from other websites and their culture, and as a business owner, it is a powerful tool.

It is perfectly OK to ask others to LIKE your Facebook Fan Page. In fact, this can be an important traffic builder for your Facebook Fan Page!

Google AdWords vs Facebook Ads

Another online marketing benefit offered by Facebook is the option to use their Pay Per Click advertising. In the Facebook universe these are known as Facebook Ads – which seems obvious, but online, things are not always obvious!

Last night, I was on a call with one of my consulting clients and she mentioned that she had just gotten a $100 voucher for Google AdWords. She wanted to know if this would be worthwhile. I said that I thought that using Facebook, creating a Facebook Fan Page for her business, and spending her limited budget on Facebook ads would be a better use of her resources, even considering her $100 AdWords voucher.

I explained it to her this way:

Google AdWords and Facebooks Ads are Pay Per Click… each ad is shown (this is called an impression) and you pay when someone actually click on the ad.

While the mechanism for figuring ad payments is the same (PPC or Pay Per Click) the basis for showing an ad differs drastically between Google AdWords and Facebook.

On the surface, the ads themselves are similar. While they may or may not have a picture included, the text or content of the ad is short and presented in plain and simple text. Ads are displayed off the side in vertical stacks or within the body of the page’s content. For the most part, these ads are subtle and unobtrusive.

However, the Ad Display Criteria is where the biggest differences lie.

In Google, AdWords are shown on the pages generated with Search Results as well as on website pages related to the Ad’s specified search term. This means that Google AdWords are displayed using a mechanism of which terms are being used in online searches. As AdWords have developed, in some instances they are also displayed according to the geographical location of the person doing the Search.

Facebook actually takes an entirely different approach – Facebook Ads are displayed in front of PEOPLE who meet the demographic requirements that you have chosen.

To simplify further, Google AdWords are displayed based on the content of the page where they are shown and Facebook Ads are shown based on the interests, and even the physical location, of the person doing the looking!

As you can see, there is a radical difference between Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.

This is one of the reasons that I feel that Facebook Ads may be far more beneficial for offline businesses.

It is also important to note that when creating a Facebook Ad, you have the choice of sending people who click either to an offsite web page or to a specific Facebook Fan Page.

All in all, I consider Facebook a strong option for offline businesses, since you have the ability to target both demographically and geographically. The potentially viral effect that is inherent in the Facebook culture is another good reason for adding Facebook in to your online advertising mix.

WordPress works well for integrating Social Media options

Finally, if you are using WordPress to build your website to blog, it is relatively easy to integrate WordPress Posts, Facebook Fan Page Posts, Twitter Tweets, and possibly even, your Autoresponder Service messages, so that each one appears on the others… AUTOMATICALLY!

Between the timesaving automation available and the three for one currently available combining WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter, spreading your company’s message across the internet has gotten MUCH easier!