Pitfalls Archives - BOLLYWOOD SURKHIYAN

Pay Per Click Advertising and Pitfalls

Internet marketing, as its name implies, is the promotion of a product or service using the Internet. This is one of the marketing outlets today that entrepreneurs are taking advantage of because (1) the Internet captures a wider audience (think worldwide), and (2) it is a cheaper than television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising.

But as the demand for the Internet as a marketing vehicle becomes grows, it becomes a new battlefield where various businesses compete for attention of a prospective customer. Whoever is persistent and is on the top of the search engine gets the sale.

To be on top, Internet marketers employ various strategies and ties together all the aspects of the Internet – its design, development, advertising and sales into one moving force to engage customers and get the sale.

If you want to venture into making business in the Internet, you must know the basics of how you will be able to make your website, your products and services remain visible to web users.

Pay Per Click Advertising

The Pay Per Click advertising model involves a trigger that generates a payment from the merchant. The trigger is that the ad is clicked and the merchant pays the affiliate.

The advantage of this set-up is that even if an affiliate does not generate clicks, and therefore no sales, the merchant has no costs at all. Follwing the main business Models

Bid-based PPC In a bid-based PPC, an advertiser competes with other advertisers in an automated fashion in a private auction of the publisher or advertising network. The bid is the amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for a given ad spot, which is usually a keyword.

Flat-rate PPC In a flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount as payment for each click. Advertisers can negotiate a lower fixed amount committing to a long-term contract.

The flat-rate PPC model is popular in price comparison services. Price comparison services present the various list of prices for a specific product or service. Examples of this are PriceWatch and Streetprices. An advertiser do not pay to be listed, instead pays for every click on a price.

Automated bid management systems are used to maximize success and cover as many areas as possible.

Getting Started

The following are what you need to remember in getting started with PPC advertising:

Choose 10 to 15 keywords and expressions of different categories related to your product or service. You must use quality keywords to get the target audience. This is the trickiest part of PPC advertising and must be the subject of a study before finalizing the keywords. Reach-out to those who really wants to buy and no one else.
Use selling words, such as sale, guarantee, delivery, etc. in the composition of your advertisement to eliminate non-commercial inquiries.
The three important components of an ad for a PPC are the header, the advertisement text and the link to the website of the advertiser. The ad must be interesting and able to convince a buyer. It must also be concise, without stops, and precise.
You have to bid if you want the most desirable keywords. The higher the bid, the higher is your ranking.

PPC Advertising Pitfalls

A problem with this online advertising method is that it is open for abuse. Click fraud, which generates a charge using a simulated user of a web browser maliciously, clicks on the link without having a genuine interest in the target of the advertisement. This type of Internet crime is a cause of controversy because the fraud benefits the advertising network. It has since been considered a felony in a number of states in the USA.

Pay Per Click Advertising is only one of lots of other possibilities to make your web visible on the Internet. There are other similar models like PPV (Pay Per View) or getting found naturally with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques.

Integrative Business Planning – 10 Tips On Common Pitfalls To Avoid

Business Planning, whether at the start-up of a new venture or during its growth, requires an integrative approach. It is important that all crucial aspects are addressed and balanced. The following tips show some of the common pitfalls that should be avoided in the business planning process:

Certain aspects of a detailed and integrated business plan are ignored. A typical example would be market research. This is often due to the cost and time involved, lack of know-how or ignorance of the importance thereof.
The different aspects of the business are not match. It is for instance important that there is a good fit between the team and the opportunity.
Over-optimistic projections are used. Sales and market share projections are quite often not realistic.
Assumptions are not tested and adjusted where necessary. An example would be where it is assumed that $x of marketing will result in $y of sales.
Not enough time is allowed for the business planning process. The importance of proper planning is often negated in favour of execution.
The reverse of tip number 5 also occurs regularly. Especially new entrepreneurs tend to fall in the trap of over-planning and almost seeing the business plan as an end in itself. A fine balance should exist between planning and execution.
The use of resources is underestimated. More people, time and materials are normally needed than anticipated. This cause budgets of capital and cashflow to be insufficient with potential grave consequences.
Critical obstacles and even fatal risks are ignored. It is important to work through and resolve any potential problems and not to turn a blind eye.
Measurable and achievable goals and mileposts are not set.
A big problem, of adhering to the requirements of integrated business planning, is that entrepreneurs often have preconceived ideas that they don’t budge from. This can be due to a lack of knowledge combined with specific personality profiles. It is extremely important to be flexible, acknowledge when you are wrong and to get assistance when needed.

Website Redesign: The 5 Biggest Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

My hairdresser told me that a customer earlier in the day had had such a bad experience at another salon that she had worn a wig to her appointment. Underneath, her hair colour was patchy and the hair itself was coming out in clumps. The client was terrified and distrustful of having her hair styled again and it took all the longer to calm her down and try to repair some of the damage.

As a freelance web developer, I often feel that I am looking at the web design equivalent of this experience. So many companies, especially SMEs, are duped into buying web design or CMS (Content Management System) packages which are costly and do not fit their business. Others pay top dollar for design and then find out it isn’t workable on the web.

You may think that sounds like a gift to a trusted web developer like me who then gets the business, but I don’t like it. It makes people distrustful of the whole industry and makes SMEs despair that they don’t understand their website or how to make it work for their business. That’s not good for my business. So, here are my top tips: five pitfalls to avoid when considering a website design or web redesign.

1) Budget, budget, budget

During the process of designing and developing your website, there will inevitably be some to-ing and fro-ing between you and your web developer to get things the way you want them. When you ask the developer to quote for the project, make sure you get the quote broken down into specifics. Find out exactly what is included in the quote and whether this is a flat fee or an hourly rate. What happens if the web project overruns? Is web hosting included? What about Search Engine Optimisation? Ongoing maintenance?

Every web developer or web design company is different, but once you have your quote, get a second and third one from other sources, just to check that it’s about right for the web development work you want done. There’s no harm in letting the web developer know that you are getting other quotes: this will mean you get their most competitive rates or package.

2) Specify that your end product needs to be in valid HTML

The web developer or web development company you choose should be able to produce code, run it through HTML and CSS validators and show you the results. Many graphic designers who also claim to produce websites work in Photoshop, so they produce images not code. Other developers use Flash which will look very pretty but will be completely unreadable to Google and won’t work at all on some browsers and the iPhone. It’s a bad idea to overuse images or Flash on your website, because they damage your Google ranking.

If you have a graphic designer who is going to produce images which then need to be translated into HTML, that’s fine, but be aware that the cost will increase as a second professional will be required.

3) Ask for in-built Content Management System (CMS)

So many web designers and developers offer CMS as standard that it shouldn’t be adding to your bill to make this request. Content Management means that you will be able to update your site to meet your requirements in future. This is especially important for blogs and news pages which will need to be kept up-to-date.

4) Ask what measures the company is using to secure you a good place on Google and Bing

In other words, investigate Search Engine Optimisation. By far one of the best ways to do this without even needing to contact the web developer is to Google likely keywords for their site and see if you can find them. If they can’t optimize their own website, are you going to trust them to optimize yours?

Bear in mind that SEO is a game of two halves. The first is on-page: your website needs to be designed so that the content is working for you, not against you. The biggest considerations here are the use of images and Flash (see above), but valid CSS and HTML and a clean site structure are also important. Your website designer needs to ensure that your text content is relevant for your keywords, that headers are the right size to give prominence to the right keywords and that images are correctly labelled for text readers, to name but a few SEO design considerations.

The second stage of SEO happens once the site is up and running and primarily involves promoting your site via other web sites, social media etc. This part of SEO may be more within your control and remit as the business owner, but if you are asking the web development company to do this for you as well, ask for evidence of previous success and get a bulleted list of actions the web developer is going to take on behalf of your web site.

5) Take ownership

When you agree on a price for the web site redesign, establish whether or not you are purchasing the copyright to the design as well. Will the web developer want a backlink to their site and is that OK with you? If bespoke features (e.g. custom web hosting, CMS, SEO tools) are being used, do these tie you in to buying certain products or services from the web design company in future?

Bear in mind that you might want to change things around in the future so keep things as flexible as possible. There are plenty of open source programs out there which will help you keep your independence so that you can keep your costs low.

There is, of course, a thread which runs through all of this advice. Employ a web developer you can trust and establish a good working relationship where both parties expectations can be met.