Cost Per Click (CPC) :: Pay Per Click (PPC)

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2009-03-04T19:43:00.001-08:00

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2009-02-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

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7 Ways Your Opt-In List Can Generate Extra Cash

2007-08-30T17:54:00.000-07:00

An opt-in list is a critical and important component for any kind of Internet-based business. Big, medium, small and even the very niche players can benefit from an opt-in list, as it has the capability to stuff some extra cash into their pockets. Look around the Internet yourself and scour for the big e-commerce boys – you will see that all of them, without exception, feature an opt-in list on their website.

An opt-in list is a marketing tool. You'll have seen many fields on websites that scream "Subscribe to our newsletter/product promos, etc." – these are opt-in fields where the surfer fills in his email, thereby consenting to receiving communication from that website. The website that collects the email then keeps communicating with the subscriber and keeps him updated on the topic to which he has subscribed.

As the subscriber voluntarily submits his email ID, it is understood that there is mutual consent between the website and the subscriber. This is why opt-in emails are not considered as spam mails. Opt-in lists can be effectively used to dispatch a whole number of useful and informative materials such as catalogs, newsletters and other promotional offers.

The percentage of Internet surfers who subscribe to opt-in lists is small, so therefore it is imperative that your mails to this small community must be meaningful, informative and entertaining. If your communication with your small community is run-of-the-mill, then your list will shrink. Teasers, promos, entertaining snippets and short bursts of informative news will keep them coming back to your website for more.

The prime objective of maintaining a list is to sell your products and services, and these sales will generate normal profits. You have to make some extra cash out of your list, which is highly possible, if you have a sizeable database of subscribers. Here are seven great tips on how to make extra money using your opt-in lists:

1) Sell advertisement space: Many companies want to advertise on lists that have a genuine and a sizeable database. If you have one, you can easily sell ad space on your mailings. Just one thing: Do not forget to place these ads at spots where they won't irritate your subscribers. You can place several ads in a single mailing and this can be quite a money-spinner.

2) You must tie-up with websites who dabble in products or services that are related to your industry. Then you must evolve a CPC (Cost Per Click) marketing strategy and announce it to them. If they are interested, they may place CPC links on your list and pay you only on a per-click-basis. This is also called P4P or pay for performance.

3) You can strike deals with companies who are willing to sell their products to your list on a commission basis. Even if you're only able to get a few sales, it's money for jam.

4) You can also sell other companies' products to your list on a consignment basis. Consignment sales pay more than commission-based sales and you will be expected to give these products more prominence in your newsletter, highlighting them, placing descriptions, articles and photos of the products. Again, if you are able to make a sale, it's just more jam on the bread.

5) You can also try your hand at selling digital products such as e-books. Manuals, DIY and how-to articles are in great demand and their publishers pay a hefty commission – sometimes as high as 75%! Just take care to ensure that the e-book you're going to hawk on your newsletter is related to the content.

6) Network your list. Ask people to refer their friends and relations. The larger your opt-in list, the higher your revenue will go, as sales and advertisement rates will soar.

7) Turn some of your subscribers into your partners by offering them an incentive if they are able to resell your products or services. Remember, this is Internet marketing, so the more resellers you recruit, the higher exposure you will get.

In the end, remember that an opt-in list is no ordinary means of communication – if planned and executed correctly, it can boost your business to unimaginable levels.

Economics of Pay Per Click Advertising

2007-08-30T17:53:00.001-07:00

Pay per click (PPC) advertising has revolutionized advertising on the Internet. This allows for very targeted advertising to Internet users who are searching for the particular item that is being advertised. Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing are the two major PPC programs on the Internet today. Microsoft AdCenter is a recent newcomer to PPC programs.

It is easy to set up an advertising campaign under these programs, but one must be cautious and make good business decisions about the campaign. The intent is to make money rather than pay Google, Yahoo, or AdCenter more than you make.

When evaluating the potential profit from a PPC program, you will only be charged for the times that the user clicks your ad. However, there is another variable that you must consider which is called conversion rate (CR). This is the number of users who click the ad divided into the number of users who actually buy the product. A rough rule of thumb for CR is five (5) percent.

You need to project the economics of the campaign before you launch it. If you have a low cost per click (CPC) and the commission from your affiliate company is high, you can afford a campaign with a low conversion rate. On the contrary, if the commission per transaction from the affiliate company is low, and the CPC is high, you need a conversion rate that is high.

It is a matter of simple math to project the results of a sales campaign.

Profit per click = ($ per sale X Conversion rate) - (Average cost per click)

Let’s plug in some numbers and see how this works. Assume that the selling commission is $5.00, the conversion rate is 5%, and the average cost per click is $.10. Multiply the selling commission ($5.00) by the CR of 5% to get $.25. Subtract the cost per click (CPC) of $.10 from $.25 and you get a profit of $.15. This does not seem like a lot of money, but the Internet is viewed 24/7 so if you have 1000 clicks per month and convert 5% of them, you will make $150 for setting up the campaign and then monitoring it occasionally. If you set up several of these campaigns for different key words, you can make a nice supplemental income.

In summary, always do your homework and make solid assumptions about your campaign. Do the math so you are not surprised by a campaign that costs you money rather than making you money.

How To Get Internet Advertising Cheap!

2007-08-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

How do I get internet advertising cheap? Awesome question. Well lets start off with free internet advertisement and then move to cheap internet advertising.

Free Internet Advertisement

Among the best ways to get free ads for your site online are link exchanges. While frowned upon by some I have found them to be extremely successful. The basic concept of it is "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours". You put my link on your site and I'll put yours on my site.

Sounds easy enough right? Well it really is.

To get started with this link exchange concept you will need to create a links page on your site. Decide up front whether you want to put text links, or image links. Image links require banners and may make your links page load slow, while text links load faster and often don't take away from the overall look and feel of your site. I would suggest text links. In order for this free internet advertisement scheme of ours to work you need to find sites you would like to place your link / or ad on. It's always best to put your link on a page of similar content. The reason for this is simple; If you run a website for "Beach Volleyball Lovers" and you put your free advert on a site for Russian Hockey Fans you probably aren't going to get many people clicking through to your site. So find a site that is similar to yours and contact that person via email and say something like hey I run such and such site, and I would like to exchange links with you. The more people you contact the more internet advertisements you get.

Once you have that Free Internet Advertisement / Link exchange stuff down to a science it may to time for you to purchase some cheap or affordable internet advertising

Cheap Internet Advertisement

My 2 personal favorites on the way of internet advertisement companies are the 2 giants; Yahoo and Google.

Google Adwords and Yahoo Publisher are my current solutions to internet advertisement on the cheap. Yahoo currently has a .10 CPC(cost per click) minimum on all ads. Google on the other hand does not. It's possible to put ads on Google syndicated searches for .01 CPC That is as cheap as it gets. However if you want the ads on their search engine search results I believe there is a .05 CPC minimum. Either way Google seems to be the cheaper of the two companies as far as the advertisement goes.

Another concept I would like to touch upon is "branding" or getting the name of your company out there. If you sell antiques and put an ad on Google, it may be displayed 1,000 before it is clicked. That means your banner or ad with your Sites name was displayed 1,000 for .05 cents. Well.. dam that's a deal. Eventually people will start to associate your sites name Bubbas Antiques with quality quality antiques. Believe it or not people branding is what sells. If you are thirsty and see 2 pops (sodas) on a table one says Pepsi and the other says Bubbas cola you are most likely to buy the Pepsi.

So again there are many ways to get internet advertisements cheap or free. All you need to do is get out there and do it.

PPC Publishing - What You Should Know About PPC Publishing

2007-08-28T17:24:00.000-07:00

Pay-per-click (PPC) publishing is one of the most common methods of promoting your web site online. Though the concept of paying for the number of internet users who clicks your ad is a little bit unfair, this is how PPC publishing really works. There is truly no assurance that the one who clicked on the ad will purchase an item on your web site. However, the best thing to do is to think of ways on how to immediately convert these users into customers before leaving your site. How can this be done? Here are some ways to make it happen.

The first determining factor that will either make or break your online business is the design of your web site. This is your bread and butter because it acts as your sales representative. It is the one that is being viewed by potential customers so the design should match the products and services that you are offering. People who land on your web site should carry a good and lasting impression about you and your business. This may also be the reason why customers will return to your web site again and again so updating it regularly will make way for more profit.

Some other things to consider are the placements of your ads and the list of keywords that you will bid on. When placing an ad on a web site, one important thing to note is that it should somehow be associated with the products and services that you offer. Having your ads all over the place will only cost you a lot of money. Same is true with your chosen keywords on search engines. Bid only for keywords that best suits your business.

Ways to Make a Profit in PPC Publishing

2007-08-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

No business is said to be fully exposed to the consumers’ reach when no advertising has been done. Getting a wide market is, after all, every business’s goal. And depending on the strategies and techniques used, your advertising may reach your local neighborhood or the entire Internet-conscious community.

Inevitably, with the global community’s awareness of the prowess that the Internet could bring, every online business is undoubtedly equipped with a website that they can boast as their own. All these innumerable websites are aimed to lure and attract the same audience—the entire global market.

Pay-per-click advertisements are all those links that come up every time you make a search in any of the search engines—it could be in Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and all the other search engines out there. All these sponsored links are aimed to be visible enough for the online visitors and eventually convince them to read more about their products or services. Here’s how the pros make it in PPC publishing:

1. Identify the market you are targeting. This way, you will know how to specifically design your advertisements—formal for the professionals, colorful for the kids, and informative for those who are hungry for information.
2. Like your design, the language that your content will use should likewise be appropriate for the market you are trying to attract.
3. Update, update, update. Nobody would want to see a website whose content has remained the same for the past two weeks. Put up something that will tickle the curiosity and interest of everybody who happens to visit your site.
4. Keep things simple. Not everybody is that Internet-savvy, and people who are not in the mood for complex graphics and complicated content will definitely leave such a website as fast as they could.
5. Honesty remains the best policy even in our world when everything can be done in a single click. So clicking on your own ads for the money it generates is not well, being honest of you.

Targeted PPC Publishing - Easy Steps to PPC Publishing

2007-08-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

Advertising your web site online is very important to the success of your online business. There is a lot of promotion amongst the web based businesses these days. There is a huge market out there and all of the web based businesses want to get hold of a decent market share. As a result they need to compete with each other to get the attention of the people who belong to their target market. As a result all kinds of promotional and advertising activities are important to the success of an online business. There are many ways of promoting your web site in this regard.

You can opt for many ways to promote it. The actual target of a web marketer is to get people from your target market visit you. If this happens, the mission is accomplished. It is important that you know all the methods of promoting a web site before you choose for your own. Pay per click publishing is one such method. Many web sites have successfully established as an ebusiness by using pay per click publishing as the source to promote themselves. You can also promote your web site through Pay per click advertising by following certain easy steps.

You need to be sure about the keywords your target market may use while looking for some related content. Pay close attention to those key words. You need to bid on those key words which are the most probable ones which people form your target market may enter in the search bar. Place your bids and get your links places on the results page. The more key words you choose the better. This will help you in getting more search engine traffic. As this is quality traffic, you will experience an increase in the volume of your business.

New Strategy On How To Slash Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising Cost By Half Immediately

2007-08-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

So what is Pay-Per-Click Advertising really all about? The following report includes some fascinating information about Pay-Per-Click Advertising--info you can use, not just the old stuff they used to tell you.

Here's a simple keyword building technique I use to find the maximum possible variations of a keyword phrase. I use it predominantly for bidding on keywords at Google Adwords, however it can also be very useful for building lists for use in search engine optimization.

For example let's use the phrase "horses for sale". Here's how the various permutations of this keyword phrase would look. I use the free Keyword Tumbler tool for doing this.

horses for sale
horses sale for
for horses sale
for sale horses
sale horses for
sale for horses

As you can see there are a maximum of six possible ways a three word phrase could be entered into a search engine.

Now you need to find out if these permutations are actually being searched for. This is where the Wordtracker service comes into its own. Click here to get a free Wordtracker trial.

Go to Wordtracker now and in the "Keyword Universe" choose the database called "Precise".

Then in the right hand panel enter the six different keyword combinations, and hit the "Proceed" button.

Wordtracker now tells us that out of our six combinations, two of them appear in its database (NOTE: at the time of writing it did). They are...

horses for sale
for sale horses

You might be thinking that you could have figured this out for yourself. But its vital that you understand you need to stop second-guessing markets and users behaviors based on your own opinions and assumptions. Use these tools like Wordtracker to actually tell you how the markets are behaving.

I have sometimes found three and four phrase permutations using this method. Phrases that to me appeared "stupid" if entered in the search engines... but someone, somewhere is doing it! This why you need to do this step and NOT guess the permutations.

Also searchers sometimes enter a keyword phrase using the "space" and the "+" sign. E.G. "1 2 3" can be entered in as "1+2+3" and also "1 +2 +3". This is great tip if you want to use your keyword lists on Google Adwords.

So taking our example keyword phrase lets see how many permutations we can now generate.

horses for sale
for sale horses

I trust that what you've read so far has been informative. The following section should go a long way toward clearing up any uncertainty that may remain.

horses+for+sale
for+sale+horses

horses +for +sale
for +sale +horses

Now let's use misspellings to come up with even more keyword combinations. A great tool for this is Misspelled Keywords.

Simply enter "horses for sale" and select from six ways to find misspellings. Dictionary lookup, keyboard mistakes, trim first/last character, swap character, double characters, and... add 's' ending.

For this example I only selected the "dictionary lookup" and "keyboard mistakes". The tool returned 1360 possible misspelling combinations. If I'd used all the selections, it would have come back with over 8500. Just for one phrase!

Now let's enter these misspellings into Wordtracker's Precise database like we did above. The results? Wordtracker returns the following (NOTE: at the time of writing):

horses foe sale
horses fpr sale
horses for sail
horses for slae

Which now get turned into twelve new terms:

horses foe sale
horses fpr sale
horses for sail
horses for slae

horses+foe+sale
horses+fpr+sale
horses+for+sail
horses+for+slae

horses +foe +sale
horses +fpr +sale
horses +for +sail
horses +for +slae

Finally you are going to want to join the words together, so "horses for sale" becomes "horsesforsale", and yes this appeared in the Wordtracker database.

Using the method of keyword generation outlined above, what started out as one keyword phrase, "horses for sale" has now turned into 19 keyword phrases you can use on Google Adwords. Phrases that are actually being used by surfers in the search engines.

So there you have it, how to build adgroups which are TIGHTLY focused on the keyword phrase you are wanting to bid on.

You can't predict when knowing something extra about Pay-Per-Click Advertising will come in handy. I wish that this will benefit you very much.

Determining Quality And Low Cost Pay Per Click Internet Advertising Services

2007-08-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

As Pay per click’s name suggests, you only pay for actual click through to your web site. Inexpensive Pay per click internet advertising lists your web site according to your bid for a certain search keyword. Of course, Web sites which pay more are ranked higher.

Pay-per-click internet advertising can be a very reasonable cost compared to other manner of promotion on the Internet. You don't pay any amount until a visitor actually clicks on your listing and go to see your web site. The low cost pay per click internet advertising counts how many visitors click on your listing and takes the money out of an account you have set up with them.

You host the images to be used in your low cost pay per click internet advertising, so you can monitor and change the banner at anytime. Targeted advertising in pay for clicks will help increase the amount of customers you obtain at a controlled cost.

There are many low cost pay per click internet advertising solutions available in the internet. All you have to make sure is that the advertising solution guarantees your satisfaction and your web site’s traffic.

In determining good quality and affordable pay per click internet advertising service, make sure to run very carefully planned and structured promotions in order to boost the targeted traffic to your web site and increase guest conversion rate.

Make sure that the pay per click internet services you applied for studies your business as well as your competitors. Plus, don’t forget to give specific details regarding your target audience for your web site.

After the cheap pay per click internet advertising solution has finished studying and analyzing your business, research to produce the most appropriate keywords for your business. The pay per click internet advertising solution would then prepare an exclusive copy of the advertisement to be able to catch the attention of the would-be web site visitors.

For successful pay per click internet advertising, you and the solutions should identify appropriate landing pages. If needed, a number of changes are suggested to construct the perfect landing page which would work for an entry point to your website.

It is one great way to increase the visibility of your new web site. It is the fastest growing marketing tool there is today. Because of a wide range of companies servicing inexpensive pay per click internet advertising solutions, you must be careful to choose which company to trust. You should be able to research the service quality they are willing to offer

AdWords: Setting Your Max Cost Per Click

2007-08-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

We've received many emails from customers over the past several years asking how high we recommend setting AdWords' max cost per click. Generally, we recommend that our customers set the price somewhere moderately high, between the "base" rate and the max rate suggested by Google. For this entry though, I've decided to discuss a few options that may help you decide where to set your max cost per click to get a maximum return.

What kind of competition do you have?

Before you start, you'll need to do a little experimenting with the keyword tool and traffic estimator to see how high you'll need to bid. If the price to get your ad listed number one, in my opinion, it's a no-brainer. Bid what you need to bid to make sure that you have that number one spot. It will bring you the most visibility and generate the most clicks for your ad. Generally, the higher the ad, the better "quality" your clicks will be as well.

If the cost is relatively low, don't even think about it. Set your ads to be number one and then, if you're working with a limited budget, set your daily max spending limit to a number that is comfortable for you. It's generally better to have fewer clicks of "higher quality" than lots of clicks from "lower quality" traffic.

What if your keywords are highly competitive?

Some keywords in AdWords or in Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) are incredibly expensive. Terms for gambling, web hosting, insurance, credit cards and many affiliate program related topics are very, very expensive. It's probably just not feasible for you to get the number one slot. If your budget is limited, you might get one to two clicks a day before the budget is gone. In these instances, you're going to need to pick a bid level that is comfortable for you and work on making your ads better. You aren't going to be able to get the top slot by bidding, so you'll need to increase your ad's click-through rate and make it more attractive to the viewers who do see it.

Experiment and decide

Ultimately, the decision is yours. I've found that it pays to have higher placed key words when possible. They seem to convert better than lower placed ads. You're going to have to experiment with your ads though to see what works best for you. Experiment for several days with different maximum click prices to see how your clicks and conversions rank. Only then can you make an educated decision for your website.

How to Choose the Best Ads to Monetize Your Website

2007-08-23T01:55:00.000-07:00

Paid ads are the simplest way to generate revenue with your website, but there are many options you need to choose from. You can have banners, or pop-ups; image, or text ads; and they can be CPM, or CPC ads. Then there's the question of which ad network to use.

Banner vs. Pop-Up

Pop-ups are often considered too annoying, and visitors won't stay long on sites that open many. Also, most web browsers have good pop-up blockers, so they might not work very well. Even though they pay better, I would suggest not using pop-ups on your website.

Image vs. Text

The same arguments apply here: some users, especially those with slow connections, consider image ads annoying. Those users may also block images, though it is not as common as pop-up blocking. On the other hand, image ads usually pay more. I believe it depends on your site content: if you only have text as your main site content, you should use text ads only; if you have a lot of images, image ads are fine.

CPC vs CPM

CPC ads have a price per click. So if you have a $0.20 CPC ad on your site, and 50 visitors click on the ad you will earn $10. CPM ads, on the other hand, have a set price per thousand impressions. So if you have a $0.50 CPM ad on your website, and you have 20,000 page loads you will earn $10 from that ad.

CPM ads will earn you money even if no-one clicks on them, but they often have quite low prices. However, you can use many of them on your site, and each page load will generate revenue from each of them. A highly targeted CPC ad, on the other hand, may get many more clicks, but having many on a single page does not help that much. I find that a combination of both works best for me, but it depends on your site, so you should experiment with both types.

Choosing the Ad Network

One of the simplest ad programs is Google's AdSense. It only takes a few moments to sign up, even less if you already have a Google account. They serve a combination of CPC and CPM ads, and their system analyzes your page content for ad targeting. That's why I recommend you to try it out first. For reviews of more networks visit my site from the author link.

Google Adsense - (CPC) How to make $$$$$

2007-08-23T01:54:00.000-07:00

Google Adsense was started in the middle of 2003. In the beginning google adsense accepted only websites which had more than 20 million page impressions monthly, but later it began accepting even new website with nil or some impressions. Google provides 468x60, 728x90, 120x600 and 300x250 banner ads.

Google adsense site is very easy to browse and you can get reports easily. You can choose the color combinations of the ads which suites your websites. The report displays the impressions, clicks and amount made daily. You can use the google adsense code in your websites and blogs, but your site and blog, should follow the adsense guidelines.

The code can be easily incorporated in any webpage and it takes 5-15 minutes only for your webpage to show up the advertisements. The advertisement shown in the webpage is relevant to the webpage content.

The Price:

Google does not provide the cost per click to commission to the publishers; the cost per click would be anything between 5 cents to $20 a click. The statistics page in the google adsense site provides information on the number of impressions, clicks and payout. No doubt, this is the best paying CPC program in the world.

There are more than 100,000 google adsense advertisers and it is increasing day by day. There are lots of publishers who have been making good money with google adsense and websites which has lots of content should always try google adsense in their website. Google has started referral system wherein a person having a google adsense account can put a banner and if a person clicks and joins google adsense and after the publisher earns his first $100 (within 90 days), the referrer would be paid $100 for the referral.

CPC Advertising on a Budget

2007-08-23T01:51:00.000-07:00

I thought I’d share a few tips for those of you on a budget looking to use Cost Per Click advertising.

• Start with Google Adwords. There are many providers of CPC advertising, however many will fall short in sending the quality traffic you’re looking for. After achieving success with Google Adwords I would then move on to Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

• Set goals for your CPC campaign. If you offer a trial of your products and/or services determine your trial to full conversion rate and use this to determine the number of trials you’ll need in order to at least break even.

• Be sure to have a means of collecting information from those who click through your ads. If you invite visitors to sign up for your email newsletter many who do not immediately sign up for a trial will subscribe to your newsletter to receive additional information on your offerings.

•Use Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) to determine the number of times various keywords/phrases are searched on a monthly basis. Obviously the terms that are searched for more often will require a higher investment per click to raise your ad into a higher, more visible, ranking. Bid on specific phrases that are searched for around 1000 times per month and direct these visitors to the page that contains the relevant information connected to this phrase. For instance, if you sell shoes online perhaps bid on the phrase “blue and orange puma shoes” (searched for 756 times in December 2005) and link this ad to a search result on your website that contains a wide selection of blue and orange puma shoes.

• Experiment with various landing pages. Don’t always send visitors directly to the homepage of your website. As mentioned above, be sure to send visitors directly to the page that contains the items/information in which they are searching. Taking this a step further, try various layouts for displaying this information and see which design yields the greatest number of sales.

I hope these tips help all of you on a budget make the most of your CPC campaigns.

Google CPC a Practical Guide

2007-08-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

Google CPC is the new buzz word in search engine marketing. Every Internet savvy company has quickly realized the power of advertising on search result pages on Google or Yahoo. The reasons are not far to see. At the moment when the visitor is searching for information he is most amenable to communication about a product or service that could meet his need.

This means that the consumer that one can reach with placing small text ads in search result pages is "better qualified" for our offering. Realizing the obvious benefits many advertisers were quick to set aside large amounts for Google CPC and similar campaigns.

Intuitively makes strong business sense. In fact Google Adwords by all means should definitely be a a part of the scheme of things. However, you may sometimes find your Google client manager trying to "help" you refine the campaign by suggesting you increase your key phrase list and use the content network.

Here's a case study of a similar siyuation we were part of not too long back. Even though we had our own convictions we wanted to see how such suggestions worked out in reality. They did get back to us with a close to 1000 key phrase list against our original list of 200. We also enabled content network.

Three days later we stopped advertising on content network and reverted back to our old key phrase list. Here's our practical guide for anyone looking to use search engine marketing and specially Google CPC

Be very sure you need content network. The impressions served are so large that your budgets can get exhausted in quick time.

It would be recommended to use a click tracking mechanism to countercheck the CTR's reported specially if using content network. You can do this by assigning a campaign number to the content network ads and capturing it from the query string and inserting the same into a database. In recent campaigns where we ran ads on content network the difference between CTR's claimed by Google and the clicks recorded at our end was so large that it took us three days to stop.

Remember that while Google does an "intelligent" match of the copy matter of the page in which it serves the ad to the key phrases chosen, the consumer is not necessarily as qualified as when he is performing a search

When choosing key phrases we recommend that you prepare a list of all the the phrases you can think of. Let it be as large as it might get. Then against each phrase put one of the three states of the relevance index - Strong association, weak association and generic association.

For example if the campaign is for a mobile phone then the phrase "latest multimedia phone" would have a strong relevance whereas "mp3 songs" would have a generic relevance (since the user might be searching for mp3 songs to download and not necessarily mp3 feature in a phone). Similarly a phrase like "cell phone battery" has weak relevance since a visitor looking for a battery is not looking for a phone

Definitely place all your strong relevance keywords in the keyword list and watch the campaign for a few days. If you are getting deliveries below expectation add the generic relevance keywords to your list

The amount you pay for your minimum CPC is a function of your historical CTR. Hence the more generic and weak relevance keywords you add to the list the lower your CTR and the higher you end up paying for your clicks (and Google gets more money)

Remember, it's your business and your campaign. Plan your keywords well and spend your money wisely. We have seen so many clients falling prey to common mistakes and end up abandoning search advertising. Bottom line it works and works well ... remember the fundamentals and you will never go wrong.

Sabyasachi Mitter (smitter@interface.co.in) is part of the Internet marketing and consulting team at Interface Business Solutions. Interface specialises in providing cutting edge marketing and CRM support to global clients like Samsung, UTStarcom, Morphy Richards etc. The online marketing team at Interface Business Solutions manages SEO and SEM campaigns from an end to end perspective. To know more about how to make search engines work for your website contact Sabyasachi at interface.co.in

A Hard Look at PPC, Click Fraud and the Alternatives

2007-08-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

With the creation of the Overture and Google Adwords systems, many webmasters believed they had finally hit the mother lode. It was no longer necessary for small online businesses to invest large amounts of money into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to gain high search rankings in the natural search results.

Even webmasters committed to SEO campaigns began to realize its fleeting nature. Given frequent search engine algorithm changes, optimizing a website was no guarantee that in 6 months or less it wouldn't be back to square one and page twenty of the search results.

PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH ENGINE (PPCSE) PLACEMENT

With the advent of the PPCSE model created by Overture, and followed by Google Adwords, webmasters felt like they had finally found the level playing field that everyone talks about. Hiring a SEO company was no longer necessary to crack the top search engine results. A Page One placement could be purchased and often for far less than the cost of a SEO company's services.

Webmasters discovered that they could get traffic to their website for as little as one cent per click.

Pay-per-click, however, has evolved over the last 5 years and not to the benefit of most webmasters. Although five cents is currently the average starting bid price at most major search engines, many sought after keyword terms can cost as much as $30 - $50 per click. Given the increasingly competitive nature of PPC advertising and spiralling costs, many small- to medium- sized businesses today might be better served hiring a good SEO company to search optimize their websites.

WHO IS CLICKING YOUR PAY-PER-CLICK LINKS?

There are four types of people who click on pay-per-click ads. Knowing who these people are helps explain why experts keep telling us that 20% to 25% of all clicks on PPC listings are "fraudulent clicks".

Personality Type #1: True-Blue Prospects

These are the people for whom you have placed your pay-per-click ads. They see your advertisement; they like what they see; and they click your link to see if you can actually serve their needs.

Personality Type #2: Accidental Clickers

Every once in a while, even my finger misfires, and I click an advertisement that I did not intend on clicking. My first thought is usually, "Oh no...", and my first action is to find the back button.

I didn't mean to cost that person money by clicking his advertisement... but I did. It was an accident. Now, the advertiser has to pay for my mistake. That bites.

Personality Type #3: Jealous Competitors

I would like to think that all of my, and your, competitors are fine, upstanding people. And most of them are. But, there are some who are not, and they click on pay-per-click links just to be spiteful or just to cost their business rivals a few dollars.

Believe it or not, a good percentage of "fraudulent clicks" are believed to be clicks perpetrated by people against their competitors.

Personality Type #4: True-Blue Fraudsters

Not that long ago pay-per-click providers realized that there was tremendous opportunity in offering small website owners a method for cashing in on their limited traffic.

Today, a webmaster can go to any number of pay-per-click services, add a small piece of code to a webpage and start serving paid advertising the same day. Webmasters thus become revenue share partners with the PPC provider, splitting revenues with the PPC provider for each click.

Ethical webmasters, of course, put the needs of their advertisers first and focus on putting eyeballs on their website so that visitors can click on the advertising links.

But, the word "ethical" doesn't exist in the vocabulary of some webmasters. These are the "true-blue fraudsters" who believe in making "revenue at any cost... no matter who might be hurt by their actions." They devise schemes to have their own ads clicked in order to drive up their revenue share.

These webmasters, although a minority, are responsible for the vast majority of fraudulent clicks. And, they are the same people that should be taken out behind the barn, for a good old-fashioned flogging --- one lashing for each stolen dollar would be fine with me.

THE UNSEEN COSTS OF THE PAY-PER-CLICK SEARCH GAME

If the experts are correct in estimating that 25% of all clicks are fraudulent, then you are paying out 33% more than you should have to pay to get your business.

If you are converting PPCSE clicks-to-sales at a rate of $20 per transaction, then you should be aware that your actual conversion rate for non-PPCSE advertising would cost you an average of $15 per transaction. By escaping the pay-per-click search engine model, you could in effect make an additional $5 per transaction by cutting the fraud out of your marketing budget.

Personally, I would rather not pay the pay-per-click mafia the $5 a transaction that they are exacting against pay-per-click advertisers.

WHERE MY ADVERTISING MONEY WORKS BEST

I have always gained the best bang for my buck with pay-for-placement advertising. In a nutshell, I pay a monthly, quarterly or yearly fee to have my advertising seen on various websites. Banner advertising is always an option, but text links provide better click-through rates (CTR's).

At any one time, you can find links to my websites on dozens of other websites.

Here are a few examples of pay-for-placement, often referred to as "paid inclusion", advertising networks:

ISEDN.org Network: ( http://www.ISEDN.org )

The Independent Search Engine and Directory Network (powered by ExactSeek.com) is comprised of more than 200 specialty search engines, search directories and article directories. Through their system, you can buy quarterly or yearly top ten exposure (http://www.exactseek.com/featured_listings.html) for specific keyword phrases which are then shown through the ISEDN's 200 plus member websites. Their network claims to show paid inclusion ads 150 million times per month.

Pricing starts at $4 per month per keyword phrase and goes down according to the number of keyword phrases purchased. Quarterly and yearly rates for one keyword phrase are $12 and $36, respectively.

BraveNet.com Home Page Featured Advertiser Listing: http://www.adbrite.com/mb/commerce/purchase_form.php?zone_id=8181 4

BraveNet is the number one provider of free web tools in the world and through their AdBrite sales page you can purchase a 30 day text advertisement at the bottom of the Bravenet home page for $1500 or a 3 month advertisement for $3500. According to the Bravenet Media Kit ( http://www.bravenetmedianetwork.com/mediakit.php ), their network serves 500 million page views per month.

ColdFront Network: ( http://www.coldfront.net/index.php/content/view/100/50/ )

ColdFront serves the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) communities. With 150,000 unique visits and 12 million page views per month, they provide real advertising value, if your target market happens to be in this area. Paid inclusion can be purchased for $250 to $350 per month.

WHO LEFT THE BARN DOOR OPEN?

We put locks and deadbolts on our doors. In some localities, we put bars on our windows. We keep our valuables in safes. We keep our cars locked when we are not in them. We are a nation obsessed with protecting our valuables.

And yet, when we advertise our online businesses, we seem to be willing to let PPCSE providers steal 25% of our advertising budget? It boggles the mind.

Personally, I am done with PPCSE companies until they can assure me that my advertising dollars are protected from click fraud.

I have always relied on my own search engine optimization skills to strengthen my natural search results. And frankly, I am pretty good at it.

And, to supplement my own SEO efforts and organic search result placement sucesses, or lack thereof, paid inclusion currently offers me the best value for my money.

SEO or PPC - Deciding Which Type Of Search Engine Marketing Your Business Needs

2007-08-22T17:46:00.000-07:00

Before you get started with the Search Engines you should decide which of the two major Search Engine marketing strategies will work best for your site. This will help you to stay on track and not waste a lot of time needlessly.

The 2 major Search Engine marketing strategies that exist today are SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click). You should know and understand that these two methods are very different from one another. This will help you to be better enabled to decide which one is right for you and your web site. Of course, part of this decision will depend upon what your web site is like.

One of the main reasons why it is difficult to decide which of these 2 strategies is best for your site lies in understanding why you cannot use both of these methods. In reality, there really is no reason why you cannot use both of these methods. In fact, it is encouraged to use both strategies because PPC can work well with any SEO plan.

By using PPC you can help users become more familiar with your web site. Once these users become use to seeing your web site they will stick around. Plus, the more often that visitors come to your site, the better the Search Engines will like your site. This is one of the many reasons why it is so important to try to get as many people as possible to visit your site.

If you take some time to read about the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC then you can decide for yourself which strategy will work best for your web site. Since Search Engine traffic is still the best way to get targeted traffic to your web site, a lot of marketers are still going to do battle with Search Engine optimization.

You should understand that PPC is a form of text-based advertising on a Search Engine. Whenever you use PPC you will be charged per click whenever a visitor clicks on your ad to enter your web site. You will have to bid money in order to be listed first. In actuality, this is the same as sponsored listings.

On the other hand, SEO is an attempt to alter how you rank in the Search Engines by looking at factors such as link popularity and Page Rank. The rankings that you achieve through SEO will appear on the Search Engines’ main results pages, not in the box where the PPC links appear. A lot of people like this method because it is free, yet you will have to invest your time here.

Now that you know what is involved in each method, you are probably wondering how you can tell which method is better. Unfortunately, you really cannot say that one method is better than the other because each of these methods serves a different purpose. Usually you will be able to see that one method will be a better fit for your web site though. Here are some pointers to help you make an educated decision for your site.

If you are in search of stability and predictability then you will find this with PPC. You may think that this is going to cost you a fortune, but this really is not true. The stability and low cost are what makes this method so popular. In fact, most web site owners will try PPC before working with SEO because your site can rank high without doing all of the tedious work that is involved in SEO (i.e. finding link partners, posting links, etc.). As long as you have some money that you can invest in your web site then you can rank wherever you want with PPC. Another advantage to PPC is that your site will be listed when you add it, not whenever a Search Engine gets around to finding it. Unfortunately this is a very competitive market and CPCs (costs per click) are constantly increasing. This is because it works like an auction wherein the more people there the higher the price will be.

On the other hand, SEO can be done for free. Unfortunately the traffic will be unpredictable since you constantly have to guess, adapt and change your strategies. This is important to understand because you could rank in the top 10 one month and then fall out of the top 10 the next month, thus loosing some important income. You also need to realize that SEO is slower than PPC because Search Engines only update about once a month.

If you are still finding this a difficult decision to make you should think about whether or not you have money to spend. If you do have some money then go for PPC because it will have faster results. If your budget is tight then go for SEO because all you will need to invest here is your time. The best thing would be to use both SEO and PPC at the same time aiming for different keywords with PPC than you are using in SEO.

Needless to say, while people are constantly looking for new, unique ways in which they can bring more traffic to their web site, the SEO industry will continue to grow. Nevertheless, it is still important to understand what PPC advertising is. Once you have a thorough understanding of both SEO and PPC you will be able to decide upon the best Search Engine strategy for your site.

Article Marketing Wins Over PPC

2007-08-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

Most affiliate marketers think that PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are better at driving traffic, as compared to article marketing. They’re wrong. The fact is, article marketing carries with it far less risk and much more impact than PPC campaigns.

How does PPC work?

For those of you new to PPC, here’s an overview on how it works. Basically, PPC uses advertisements to get a reader’s attention. Once the reader clicks on the ad, the affiliate marketer earns a commission. A lot of research and money goes into placing ads in strategic positions. The competition is so fierce that organizations scramble to get their products listed in the PPC campaigns. Millions of dollars are spent each day on these campaigns.

Why spend so much when you can avoid it?

Yes, PPC campaigns, for all their hype, do not provide the same results as article marketing does. Why is it that article marketing is better than PPC?

Credibility: Article marketing helps an affiliate marketer to establish credibility on the subject. Writing for an extended period of time on a related subject establishes the person as a ‘subject matter expert’. This ensures more customers will turn to you for any information on this subject. PPC does not provide any such platform to establish credibility.

Inexpensive: Article marketing is free. It doesn’t cost a dime to start writing and posting articles on directories. PPC, on the other hand, requires plenty of investment to get the company listed among search engine results. With such tough competition around, if you don’t have adequate funds, someone else will get listed.

Low risk: Article marketing is less risky when compared to PPC. It’s free and therefore, even if you take some time to succeed, it won’t have an adverse impact. Whereas in PPC, the initial investment is so high, that not finding success can mean incurring heavy losses.

Displacement: With PPC, there is always the fear of being displaced by competitors. People are willing to shell out top dollar just to get their company listed. In article marketing, there is no such danger involved.

Adherence to search engine rules: PPC demands that advertisers strictly adhere to search engine rules and regulations as well as layout. Therefore, in case of any change in plan of a search engine, even the PPC advertisements need to be in sync with the new format. Article marketing does not carry any such drawbacks with it.

Not enough content: PPC campaigns require to be up and running very quickly. This can mean not having enough time to build content around the keywords provided. This has led to many disappointed visitors clicking on a PPC link and then discovering lack of content to back it up. This also adversely impacts the reputation of the organization. Whereas in article marketing, you have sufficient time to build content around the keywords.

Trial and error: PPC does not provide anyone the luxury of testing out the effectiveness of keywords. With high investments and lack of time, organizations are expected to be bang on target on the very first attempt. Else they lose out in the race. Article marketing provides ample time to try out keywords and analyze their effectiveness. This provides scope for improvement as well.

Only for large scale businesses: PPC campaigns are at best only suited for the large-sized businesses. The high amount of investment needed, coupled with chances of high risks, means that a small sized start up cannot afford such PPC campaigns. Article marketing, on the other hand, provides more leeway to experiment, test effectiveness and try new approaches. The best part about it is that it is free of cost. It also provides a steady way to grow an affiliate marketing campaign. With the right set of keywords, and well thought out articles, one can dramatically enhance traffic to an affiliate site, in a very short time span.

Does PPC Advertising Work?

2007-08-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

PPC advertising, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, allows website owners to get laser-targeted visitor traffic to their websites without having to stretch their budgets too far. It is is one of the most popular ways to get additional traffic to your website that are used today.

PPC advertising works on the following premise: that you only pay when the advertising has done its job. Essentially, you bid on certain strategic keywords or key phrases with search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN. If you win the bid for that term your website ad will come up high on the list of advertisers when those keywords are looked for in any online search.

The benefit of using PPC advertising is that you only pay your bid on a key word or key phrase if customers click on the link to your ad in the search engine results. The more your ad is clicked on, the more you pay. The overall goal with any PPC advertising campaign is to get website traffic and if you are paying more, you are getting more visitors to your website.

There are some important things to know as you begin to consider any pay-per-click advertising campaign. First, it is very important that you choose the keywords that are best suited to your particular web site. Your advertising dollar will do you little good if the people who find you through your PPC ads are not looking for whatever it is you are selling.

PPC advertising can be a very successful marketing tool when used correctly, but you must maximize the efficiency of your ads in order for it to work well for your business. PPC advertising can be used as your only method of advertising, or it can be used in conjunction with various other forms of advertising.

PPC advertising can typically take one of two forms. First are the ads you see spread throughout the Internet. These may be obvious or may be more effectively merged into the site construction and offer a short blurb describing your business and a link to your site. The second common form of PPC advertising is paid search engine rankings. This strategy allows customers searching for your particular keywords to find you at the top of the search engine listing, even if your site ranking wouldn't normally place you there otherwise.

There are many different ways to get your web site seen online. This type of advertising makes sense to people who want to make sure that they are only paying for results, and not pre-paying for something that may or may not prove beneficial. This is where PPC advertising works best for website owners; you only pay when someone clicks on your website through the search engine.

As an owner of several online business websites myself, I've learned that using PPC advertising can be beneficial in several ways. When I completed my first business web site and was ready to launch it, I wasn't really sure how I was going to attract new customers. A friend of mine was using PPC advertising with her own website, and explained the process to me.

Generally speaking, you bid for key words or key phrases that are targeted to your websites audience (with one or more search engines), and if you win one of the top bids the search engines will rank your website on or close to the top of the list when people use those keywords. Tip: you want to be seen in one of the top three ads if possible for best exposure.

The great thing about PPC advertising is that you only pay a certain amount when someone clicks on your ad link when it comes up in the search engine. To me, Pay-per-click advertising is a win-win situation, and though it isn't the only form of advertising I use, it is definitely one that I will frequently use.

If you are trying to get more exposure for your website you really should take a serious look at PPC advertising. It has proven over the last couple of years to be one of the most effective marketing tools in the business. It has been estimated that millions of dollars are paid out per year for PPC advertising, proving that it really has a place in online advertising. PPC advertising works because people respond to it.

Whether you are into PPC advertising to make money or you need exposure for your website you will find this type of marketing very lucrative. Google has really made a name for itself with pay per click advertising with its Adsense program and there are many programs that have followed on its heels.

Web publishers like the idea of PPC advertising because the links are relevant and they get paid for each web visitor that clicks on the link. Advertisers like the pay-per-click advertising method because their ad is placed on relevant web pages. Because the idea is to make the web page and the advertisement relevant to one another more people will click, benefiting both parties.

Pay-per-click advertising is simply genius, no matter what side of the business you are on. It works because if people don't find all of the information they need in one place they will click on the links on that page. Also, people trust web pages that provide good content, so they assume that the links on the page are worth clicking. All around PPC advertising works because it is set up to work! This is a truly flawless advertising plan.

Is PPC advertising suitable for you? If you're looking to increase your online presence, find new customers, sell more product or simply make your brand known, PPC advertising may be right for you. With careful thought, PPC advertising can be both profitable and beneficial for your online business.

Designing A Website Around Top AdSense CPC

2007-08-22T02:21:00.000-07:00

Many people who decide start using the Internet to make money do so without ever selling a product. What they do instead is sell a service by offering information. They get paid by focusing in on top AdSense cpc keywords to build their web sites around. This concept can be a bit difficult for newcomers to grasp, and honestly, it’s not always the best way to a payday.

Top AdSense cpc, or click per pay, keywords are those advertisers are willing to pay the most for per click. Each time someone clicks on an ad, the Top AdSense cpc clients pay Google the high stated rate. This doesn’t necessarily translate into a full payday for the web site that’s hosting the Google ad, however. Rather, they just get a piece of the pie.

It is quite possible to make money using top AdSense cpc words to create a site, but sometimes lesser paying words will actually draw more niche traffic that’s willing to click through on the ads. In the top AdSense cpc world, the truth is the highest click per pay rates aren’t always the best conversions.

Anyone who wants to make money by focusing a new web site in on top AdSense cpc keywords should do a few things. These include:

·Choose top AdSense cpc keywords quickly. While it’s tempting to go for the highest payouts, if 5,000 sites are doing the same, the split won’t be that impressive. Instead, pick a niche that falls into the top AdSense cpc and try to build around that.

·Make a web site heavy in the top AdSense cpc terms. Be sure to add content and lots of it to draw traffic to your site. This means a series of articles that explain the topic, offer useful information and insight.

·Don’t forget meta tags for pages that use top AdSense cpc words. These are unseen keywords on pages and in articles. They don’t show up on the pages, but they work with search engines to help drive traffic.

·Try a combination of top AdSense cpc words that create a logical mix. Pick a theme and build around it with different payout keywords that complement each other.

·Update the site frequently. If you sit down and write 75 articles based on the top AdSense cpc keywords or have the done for you, publish the articles a few at a time to keep the site looking fresh and updated. This will help bring new viewers in and can help increase chances of top AdSense cpc conversions.

Top AdSense cpc keywords can help guide a web site’s creation by showing the subjects that pay out the highest. However, some of the best strategies involve a combination of the higher and lower cpc keywords to create a more appealing web sites that’s more likely to draw traffic and conversions.

An idea about Pay Per Click (PPC)

2007-08-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines. Pay per click search engines has become an integrated part of search engine optimization. They are all based on the auction principle. You make a bid for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, and the amount decide the ranking.

Pay per click advertising on search engines allows you choose keywords you would like your site to appear for when a search is performed. You decide how much you are willing to pay each time a person clicks on the search results. The more you are willing to pay per click, the higher your site will appear in the results for the keywords you choose.

By searching,there are hundreds of pay per click search engines,but the most popular are Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Depending on the search engine, prices per click is between US$0.01 and US$0.50. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Abuse of the pay per click model can result in click fraud.

Parties Involved

In this area, a publisher is a webmaster that displays ads from the advertiser.In order to bring together advertisers and publishers,a number of advertising networks where established. they are often search engines, who already had many advertisers as clients, who they could link up with other publishers. The advertising network collects the money from the advertisers, and passes a portion onto the publisher.

Google is an example of this. Often these combined search engines and advertising networks,are referred to simply as PPC engines.

Categories

PPC engines can be categorized in "Keyword", "Product", "Service" engines. However, a number of companies may fall in two or more categories. More models are continually evolving. Currently, pay per click programs do not generate any revenue solely from traffic for sites that display the ads. Revenue is generated only when a user clicks on the ad itself.

- Keyword PPCs

Advertisers using these bid on keywords, which can be words or phrases, and can include product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appears in order of bidding. Keywords, or search terms, are the very heart of pay per click advertising.

There are hundreds of Keyword pay per click search engines. Notable PPC Keyword search engines include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture Services), Microsoft adCenter, LookSmart, Miva (formerly FindWhat), Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves), 7Search, Kanoodle, and Baidu.

- Product PPCs

Product engines engines are also called Product comparison engines or Price comparison engines. Product engines let advertisers provide "feeds" of their product databases and when users search for a product, the links to the different advertisers for that particular product appear, giving more prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting the user sort by price to see the lowest priced product and then click on it to buy.

BizRate.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, and Shopping.com,are noteworthy PPC Product search engines from hundreds of them.

- Service PPCs

Service engines let advertisers provide feeds of their service databases and when users search for a service offering links to advertisers for that particular service appear, giving prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting users sort their results by price or other methods. Some Product PPCs have expanded into the service space while other service engines operate in specific verticals.

Some of the PPC services include NexTag, SideStep, and TripAdvisor.

- Pay per call

Similar to pay per click, pay per call is a business model for ad listings in search engines and directories that allows publishers to charge local advertisers on a per-call basis for each lead (call) they generate. The term "pay per call" is sometimes confused with "click to call". Click-to-call, along with call tracking, is a technology that enables the “pay-per-call” business model.

Pay-per-call is not just restricted to local advertisers. Many of the pay-per-call search engines allows advertisers with a national presence to create ads with local telephone numbers.

Look before you leap: Consider SEO before engaging web designers

2007-08-21T18:00:00.001-07:00

n the fast moving world of online trading, performance within search engines has become everything. The rules of how the Internet now works currently revolve heavily around Google. Although not the only search on the market, you’d be forgiven for thinking it had invented the whole thing. Until others bridge the gap, Google for the time being at least, needs to be foremost in any website design and e-marketing undertaking.

While larger organisations are gearing up to carryout SEO (search engine optimisation) on their websites and to capitalise on PPC (pay per click) and Adsense advertising, there is a danger that the small organisation could miss the boat. Without good advice to hand the average SME (small medium enterprise) could invest their online budget in nothing more than an expensive secret – a slick but possibly well hidden website, failing to rank high in Google. Many SME’s are today attempting to re-design their previous forays into the online world, believing that e-commerce was the ingredient they last missed out. To some extent this may be true, but simply adding shopping carts and credit card payment facilities are no longer enough.

The shortsightedness of those who believed their websites would bring trade flowing in from around the world has been staggering. The speed with which every good idea was copied or even bettered has been widely reported; nevertheless some organisations still exhibit unrealistic thinking and lack any form of logic when it comes their expectations. Many still feel the answer is to simply to re-fresh and modernise, and it has to be said there are plenty of designers eager to oblige. Today, organisations should be seeking out designers with all round abilities or indeed design studios with specialists in many areas. To think of website design as being purely ‘design’ is where many go wrong. Designers who provide Internet solutions, mixing design with backend development and ongoing promotion, in the end will create a much better and more successful website.

The best websites require constant attention. A website is after all relatively easy to keep up to date and to grow. But many organisations see the launch of their new website as the conclusion or indeed the extent of their budget. The point often missed is that this is the time to go the extra mile and this is the moment to capitalise on the investment they’ve already made. This is where their competitor may have gone further, or not as the case may be. Is their competitor already enjoying the benefits of investing in site promotion or did they also falter? Further investment is essential as most companies are either trying to get ahead or else trying to catch up. To not look seriously at SEO, PPC and other forms of e-marketing is to severely limit the contribution their website can make to their bottom line.

Pay Per Click Management to Firms for high ranking in search engine

2007-08-21T17:58:00.000-07:00

PPC Advertising stands for Pay per Click Advertising. There are several multinational companies around the world which are spending thousands of dollars every single month on their PPC advertising campaigns. According to Forbes, by 2008, companies will spend $8 billion a year on PPC advertising.

There are three major parts of your pay per click marketing campaigns that you can constantly improve.

• Create more focused lists of keywords.

• Split tests your ads for better conversions.

• Your conversion rate including how your keywords are converting into sales and the effectiveness of your landing pages.

Nothing is perfect in this world; Pay per Click Advertising has some benefits and drawbacks also. No matter which keyword you are choosing for PPC campaigns, you should be familiar with all benefits, and drawbacks of PPC Advertising. Some of them are given below

Some of the benefits of PPC Advertising are: -

• You can start immediately without any knowledge of Natural Rankings/ Organic SEO.

• You will start to see results within 4-5 days.

• There is no need to design a website which conforms to SEO guidelines.

• Even if your website doesn’t show up on top pages of various search engines, you can still opt for PPC Advertising.

• You can target every single search engine on the globe.

• You can target any keyword you want.

You should always choose top level keywords for PPC Advertising, but along with their benefits they have their drawbacks too.

Some of the drawbacks of PPC Advertising are: -

• You have to pay a fixed amount every month to Google, Yahoo, or Msn.

• You pay for every single click your website receives. Sometimes your visitors are just your competitors, and other people simply fooling around on search engines. They can really increase your expenditure.

• If you are unable to pay the fees for the next month, your website is removed from the paid listings immediately.

• This form of Advertising is temporary, thus can be difficult to manage for a longer period.

• This form of Advertising is not recommended for a longer period of times, due to costs involved.

In order to make more money with pay per click marketing you should always try and improve your landing pages. There are so many questions, which are very important to know. Some of them are below.

What Is Your Conversion Rate?
How to Use Google's Ad Tracking Code?
How to Insert the Tracking Code into Your Conversion Page?
How to Test If you’re Tracking Code Has Worked Properly?

If you have no idea about these and want to know about these, check the following links PPC Bid Management India, Search Engine Optimization. The PPC advertising services at NDDW cover the entire range of PPC marketing services; covering sponsored and content page advertising as offered by Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Our goal is to respond as quickly as possible to you. Please Mail your queries to us at info@nddw.com

New Delhi Digital Works
301, Vardhaman Times Plaza,
Plot 13 Community Center, Road No.44
PitamPura, New Delhi-110034 India

E-mail: info@nddw.com
Skype: rajeevguglani
Phone: 91-9899121121

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Email: info@nddw.com

Pay per Click vs. Organic Search Engine Optimization

2007-08-21T17:54:00.000-07:00

When you get billed for each visitor through search engine, the business model is known as Pay per Click (PPC). Pay per Click results usually appear as “sponsored link“ above or besides the organic search engine rankings.
Organic search engine results are displayed as normal URL’s on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Although, both i.e. the results from organic optimization and PPC campaign are displayed on the same page, there are numerous differences between them:
PPC results can start showing up within 48 hours as compared to organic search results which may take 6 months or more.
With PPC each visit is being paid for! With organic search engine rankings, there is certainly an optimization costs but then that has the potential of attracting innumerous visitors without much change in the optimization costs.
PPC gives much greater control over what advertisement you wish to display, who you wish to display your URL to and when. While with SEO, it is much more dependent upon the search engines and their algorithms.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

Organic Search Engine Optimization
Organic search engine rankings are considered more cost effective as compared to a Pay per click program. According to a study conducted in 2005-06, 70% of the search engine visitors reported clicks on organic search engine rankings and only rest 30% clicked on the Pay per click results.
One of the drawbacks of organic search engine rankings is the duration required to get your website within the top listings. Also the ever changing search engine ranking algorithms revolves a fear of dropped search engine rankings and de-listing.

Pay per Click
The major benefit of Pay per click program is the immediate listings and the complete control of listings in the hand of the advertiser. The bid under the google adwords program begins from $0.01 and Yahoo Overture starts from $0.10 which can further go up to any limits.
The only drawback with the Pay per click program is the cost involved in the same. Achieving top positions for some of the search phrases under the sponsored results can cost thousands of dollars a day.

Summary:
With the increasing use of Internet everyday and emergence of the Internet as one of the most powerful media, PPC and organic SEO offer different options. However, small businesses must consider both the activities and perhaps, perform both ensuring a fine blend for enhanced ROI.

Pay Per Click Company : Guidelines to manage your PPC campaign

2007-08-21T17:52:00.000-07:00

Pay per Click (PPC) is one of the most effective techniques to get maximum revenue on your ROI. It helps to potentially boost traffic of your website. An effective pay per click campaign can help you to reduce the cost per click. While planning for your PPC ad campaign you need to focus on some important factors which are related to it and can affect your ranking. A well-designed pay per click campaign can improve your ad ranking in Google adword.

It is highly essential to keep comprehensive knowledge about PPC campaigning those who are planning to outsource their PPC campaign management service. Before outsourcing your service it is highly essential that you should measure your efficiency. Some of the important points are discussed below which can help you in measuring your efficiency.

• Your Expertise On PPC Management
As a Pay-per-click company, you should be fully aware of the different factors that go into measuring the efficiency of your organization before outsourcing your PPC campaign management service. Now-a-days, many companies are offering exclusive services and some of them have expertise knowledge among others. Hence, to become one among your competitors, you should have similar expertise in that particular field.

For this purpose, it fully depends upon you whether you want to hire employees from outside or you want to train the existing employees of your organization.

• Time and Resource
All the matters discussed above are a time-consuming process. One important thing that every Pay Per Click Company should consider is the time and resource. Typical campaigns can take one to two full days to set up and organize correctly. Apart from this, other tasks such as keyword research and competitive analysis are also included in the PPC campaign management. Since these processes take a great deal of time, you need to dedicate your time and resource for this purpose.

• Different Marketing Techniques

Since you are going to start or outsource your PPC campaign management service, your PPC management team should have thorough knowledge about different advanced SEO techniques. They should know the proper place of placing your advertisement. Your marketing management should write good marketing copy. All departments should maintain good relation among each other for better management of your service.

• Communication Skill
Communication skill plays important role to get success in this field. If you are dealing with foreign clients, then it is the most vital part to maintain global online presence. However, having the ability to communicate can take you a long way in dealing with you clients. Very few organizations are able to offer their service in multilingual language, so try to be one among them.

• Resource Utilization
For a pay-per-click company, resource utilization is the most important aspect. Your company managers should keep detail track record of their personnel, such as how they are spending their time. They should spend their time by coordinating various online and offline activities.

Understanding banner advertising

2007-03-15T19:37:00.000-07:00

Banner advertising is an effective way of getting your advertising message seen on the Internet. Banner ads should not be your only online form of advertising, but they are an essential part of your online advertising mix. This article assumes that the reader knows what a banner ad looks like, but do you know how they work, and how you can derive benefit from them? Let's define a few terms before answering these questions.

1. "Page views" or "page impressions." These terms are interchangeable and they refer to the number of times that a page within a website has been displayed on a website.

2. "Banner view." Like a page view, a banner view is the number of times that a banner has been displayed on website.

3. "Click through." A click through is the number of times a website visitor has "clicked" on a particular banner ad and was transferred to the website of the banner advertiser.

4. "CTR." CTR is the acronym for "click through rate," which is the ratio of the number of banner view versus the number of times visitors have "clicked through" to your website. CTR is expressed as a percentage, so a click through rate of 1% means that for every 1,000 banner views, 10 visitors have clicked through to your site.

5. "CPM." CPM is an acronym for "cost per M," where "M" is the ancient Roman numeral for 1,000. Translation: CPM is the price your business will pay to have its banner advertisement displayed 1,000 times on a website, e.g, the cost of 1,000 banner views. So, for example, if the CPM to advertise on a site is $80.00 your business will pay $80.00 for every 1,000 banner views.

6. "ROS." ROS is the acronym for "run of site," which simply means that a banner ad is displayed on every page in a website, as opposed to being displayed only in a particular category of a website or only when a particular keyword is entered into a search engine.

Everyone who is in charge of a advertising or marketing department (that's you if you're the sole shareholder of the company) knows that advertising is, in large part, a numbers game. The more frequently your message is seen or heard, the more likely the consumer is to purchase your service or product. Take Mattress Mac with Gallery Furniture , for example. If you live in the Houston area, or if your radio can pick up the signal of almost any Houston area radio station, you cannot go a single day without hearing or seeing an advertisement for Gallery Furniture. Peppering your senses with constant reminders that "Gallery Furniture Saves You Money!" has enabled Mr. McIngvale to build his single location furniture store into an empire. (Of course, advertising alone won't do it; you still must have a quality product or service).

I have no scientific data to support this assertion, but I'll make it anyway: I'm willing to bet that Gallery Furniture is known to more people in the greater Houston area than any other single business. How did that come to be? Mattress Mac understands the advertising numbers game and plays it better than anybody else. Banner ads are a numbers game. The industry standard click through rate for online advertising in general is around .5%. Not 5%, but .5%. Doesn't sound very encouraging for your banner ad campaign, eh? Well, there are ways to significantly increase the CTR of any given banner. The best way is by targeting a particular banner ad to a narrow audience, an audience that is looking specific for a product or service just like yours. Highly-targeted can boost your CTR to as much as 2%-3% or higher and significantly increase the traffic to your website. Another valuable purpose of the banner ad is branding.

Intertwined with the messages Gallery Furniture delivers about particular sales events or types of furniture is the company's consistent and recognizable logo, color scheme, and tag lines. Your banner advertisements can, and should, perform the same function; they should be designed using your company's logo and colors, at a minimum. Sometimes incorporating the tag line is the way to go, but other times you may want to advertise a particular special offer, product, etc. The important thing is that you take advantage of the numbers game by continually displaying your name, logo, and colors. The more visitors that see you, the more they will come to associate your name with your type of product or service, and the more likely they will be in the future to buy from you.

Back to basic: PPC (Pay Per Click) or CPC (Cost Per Click): What It Is, What It Costs

2007-03-13T23:38:00.000-07:00

Search keyword marketing is paid for on the basis of how many people click on your ad, so it's called cost per click, or CPC (also referred to as PPC, or pay per click).

There are other advertising methods as well: CPL (or cost per lead), where you pay for each "lead" or potential customer you get from the ad; and CPA (cost per action), with the action taken by the customer being defined variously as filling out a form or signing up for something. There is also revenue sharing, where the site carrying the ads gets a cut of any purchases made as a result of the ads.

An interesting variant on cost per click is cost per call, a service offered by Yahoo! and AOL that is particularly interesting for very local businesses. In this case, you list not your Web link, but your phone number, and Yahoo! and AOL track the calls you receive through that ad. Obviously, it's also handy for businesses that don't have a Web site at all. How cool is that?

OK, so you pay a cost per click — but what is the cost per click?

Well, that depends on what you're willing to pay, in competition with others. In this market, you are buying the right to have your ad displayed on the search results page generated when somebody has typed a particular keyword or search term into the search engine. Somebody searches on the phrase "life insurance" and, since you sell life insurance, you want your ad to pop up there. So you bid on the term "life insurance" and what you pay depends on what everybody else is bidding.

The minimum bid on Google is 10 cents. On Yahoo! it's 5 cents, but you'll only pay that amount for obscure terms that nobody else wants. Other terms are more expensive — sometimes breathtakingly more expensive: "Delaware incorporation services," for example, costs about $8 per click. The term "merchant accounts" is running about $6 per click at the time of this writing. Certain legal terms and medical terms, linked with diseases that are subjects of class-action lawsuits, can cost as much as $30 per click.

Quite a range! Although none of the major search engines publish averages, the sense of the industry seems to be that typical keyword buyers are paying between a dime and a couple of bucks per click.

Fortunately, you have a lot of control over what you pay. When you bid on keywords, you get a lot of information from Google and Yahoo! about what others are bidding, so you're not bidding blind. You can see which keywords are popular with searchers and which are popular with buyers, and plan accordingly. And of course you can tinker with your keyword purchases to find the best blend of price, response, and final results.

Google Adsense - cara mudah mendapat dollar dari internet

2007-03-12T20:44:00.000-07:00

Adsense adalah program penyedia iklan dari Google, sebuah search engine ternama. Sebelum membahas adsense, sebaiknya kita mengenal dulu yang namanya adwords. Adwords adalah layanan iklan dari google, bila seorang mencari informasi dari website google, ia akan mengetik suatu keywords tertentu, klik search dan tampillah daftar website yang berhubungan dengan keyword yang diketik tadi. Perhatikan pada sebelah kanan atas dari daftar hasil pencarian tersebut ada beberapa tulisan iklan yang tampil, itulah yang namanya adwords yaitu iklan (ad) yang berupa kata-kata (words). Sangat simple dan sederhana bukan? tapi begitu efektif karena iklan tersebut benar2 mencapai target karena hanya dimunculkan apabila isi iklannya berhubungan dengan keywords yang diketik oleh si pencari informasi. Pemasang iklan harus membayar jumlah tertentu kepada google apabila ada orang yangn men-klik iklannya, dinyatakan dengan CPC = Cost per Click. Besarnya tergantung dari harga sebuah keywords, makin banyak dicari orang biasanya pemasang iklan berani membayar lebih mahal supaya iklannya tampil paling atas di adwords. Inilah yang menjadi sumber pendapatan Google.

Ternyata google tidaklah pelit dan memberi kesempatan bagi para netter, webmaster atau orang yang mempunyai website untuk berbagi “kue” adwords, maka dibuatlah layanan adsense.

Submitting to Pay Per Click Search Engines (CPC/PPC)

2007-03-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

The listing below provides links to tutorials and tips on submitting your Web site to cost per click (CPC) and pay per click (PPC) search engines and which ones matter the most.

Pay Per Click Search Engines (CPC/PPC) Helpful listings with information about each one, and includes major pay per click search engines (Google AdWords, Overture), major second tier ppc players (Espotting, FindWhat, LookSmart LookListings), other notable services, and more pay per click resources. [Article/tutorial dated 08/13/2004, by Danny Sullivan Search Engine Watch.]
Submitting Via Paid Listings: Overture & Google AdWords To gain quick visibility, you might consider going the paid listings route, especially for a new site. This article/tutorial provides some helpful information about it and links to resources, too.

How to effectively select and use keywords for your website

2006-09-01T21:04:00.000-07:00

Correctly choosing the keywords that your website wishes to compete on is the single most important aspect of a search engine optimization campaign. Proper keyword selection can provide your business with an extremely solid foundation to build.

However, the opposite can be said for websites that make mistakes at this point. If your website dives straight into a competitive keyword selection there is a good chance of drowning in the oblivion of search engine results. Choosing keywords for your website requires a fine balance of research and modesty.

Be Specific
If there is a particular item or product range that your company sells then make sure your keyword selection reflects this. Being vague results in higher levels of competition. If your website sells golf clubs then optimize your pages to match what kind of golf clubs you are offering. Do they have graphite shafts? Do you sell a left-handed selection? What kind of brand are they?

Regionalise your selection if appropriate
Focusing on a regionalised market will result in a much more targeted market and the competition will also lower significantly. If you only sell your products and services within Ireland make sure you contain specific phrases (e.g. Ireland, Irish, Dublin, etc.) within your Title, body and anchor text.

Domain Name Selection
For many new (and existing companies) the ideal website name might already be taken. Or, for branding purposes, the choice of a keyword rich domain name may not be applicable. This shouldn't be a major concern to companies as the weight search engines give to the URL of a website is of limited importance when it comes to ranking well within the results pages. However, if your website contains keywords that your company wishes to compete on then you should exploit this when choosing your inbound linking text (a.k.a. anchor text).

Anchor Text
Inbound links from websites can provide your site with a two-fold benefit. The first (and obvious) is that these links can help your company by sending potential customers to your website. The second benefit is that Google and the other major search engines will see these links as votes of confidence therefore giving your website a boost in its rankings. When developing inbound links it is important to take advantage of keywords that your site might be targeting.

For example, my website is http://www.betteririshwebsites.com. It contains a number of articles that can help webmasters and companies promote their websites. With this in mind, a link that contains the anchor text Website Promotion Articles will help both visitors and search engines to understand what this website is all about. By developing links with keyword rich anchor text your website can rank higher in the search engine results for the terms that you are competing on.

Landing Pages
When choosing keywords you feel are suitable to target your desired market you may end up with a list the length of your arm. If you create a website with a logical structure containing a number of pages that deal with the range or products your company offers you will be able to professionally and effectively optimize your entire site for all of your selected keywords.

For example, if your company sells office supplies and office stationary (both extremely competitive keyword phrases) you could still drive a large amount of traffic to landing pages that sell "Executive Leather Chairs" and "Printer Ribbons". This is only an example, creating and optimizing landing pages is a technique that all websites could and should do regardless of what they are offering.

Remember, your optimization efforts should never stop after your home page is completed. Your entire site should be professionally optimized for maximum results.

Tips Before You Spend Online

2006-08-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

Marketers are flocking to the Internet and dedicating part of their ad budgets to that channel. A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers found that online ad revenue soared to a record $3.9 billion in first-quarter 2006, a 38 percent year-over-year increase.

But any opportunity brings challenges, and the task of designing, implementing and managing an online campaign can seem complex for someone just starting. Also, developing an online ad strategy can be daunting given the constant evolution of the Web. Add in the heated competition among businesses for search terms, and you may question whether advertising online is worth the effort.

But through a few tips and tricks, a targeted online campaign can outweigh the challenges. Here are some simple rules to consider before you embark on your campaign.

Start with the basics. An online ad campaign will fail without clearly defined, quantifiable objectives that you can measure against. Think about your campaign goals. Yes, you want to convert clicks into sales, but what other objectives do you wish to achieve?

Define your audience. Many innovative tools can help marketers target their campaigns. So it goes without saying that one of the first steps for success is to define your audience. Once you know this, it’s much easier to determine where your ads need to be.

Speak the language. Every industry has its own language. Online advertising is no different. There are targeting strategies such as “behavioral,” “content,” “keyword,” “local” and “geo-targeting.” You’ll also hear acronyms like “CPM” and “CPC.” Educate yourself so you speak the same tongue.

Integration is key. There are usually several ways to answer a question. The same idea holds true in advertising, where your customers complete the buying cycle in various ways. Often, an integrated marketing strategy will yield better results than limiting yourself to a single targeting tool.

Diversify. Everyone spends time online searching for information, but remember that search engines represent only a small part of the Web. The rest consists of content pages, which refer to anything that is published on the Web, whether it’s by Joe Smith or Dow Jones. Engines command lots of eyeballs, but it’s important to diversify beyond search to target the content pages your audience reads.

Combine ad formats. You’ve seen many types of formats designed to break through the clutter. A good combination would be to buy a mix of CPM display and CPC sponsored links. CPM refers to the amount an advertiser pays each time a user views the ad, while CPC stands for cost-per-click, or payment each time a user clicks on the ad.

Measure for success. Track your ad spend and the ROI of every ad purchase religiously. This will help you identify which ad format is giving you the best conversion rate for your dollars. Set up unique tracking for each type of online advertising you buy.

Tips To Maximize Your Results From Advertising With AdBrite

2006-08-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

Always check the hottest sellers list on the home page to see what sites might be new, or relevant at the current time period.
Always check out the “ad specials” section in the advertiser dashboard, you will typically find some great deals.
Think outside of the box, and think demographically. If you want college students where might they be?…if you want to reach women, what sites might they be on?
Try multiple campaigns with different ad copy to see what might be converting.
Setup multiple Run of Network campaigns at varying CPC rates. If CPC rates change or some advertisers drop out then your campaigns may see a big boost in traffic. Some at high CPC rates and some at the lowest.
Test a variety of offers at low CPC rates for Run of Network ads.
Make sure you add all of your key terms and all the Adbrite ‘categories’ that apply to your Run of Network campaigns, this determines how much traffic you will receive.
Buy ads on big traffic and small traffic sites. You can find some diamonds in the rough, small sites, and have 20 of these low volume sites at low rates and build up good results.

10 of the most important SEO design tips

2006-07-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

1. Optimise every page on your website

The major search engines are not looking at individual websites and ranking them, they are ranking pages from every website in the world. This means that if your website contains more than one page you should optimise for the specific content that is found on each page.

Optimising each webpage is overlooked by so many websites within Ireland and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as "Irish Hotels" and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as "Hotels in County Galway". After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about "Irish Hotels".

2. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. The keywords that your potential customers type into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are the keywords that your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100's of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the Title description (the blue bar you will see at the top of your screen) of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their "favourites".

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need put the information that you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords or keyphrases that your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords and keyphrases as much as makes sense. Read what you written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid... lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to online directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website. People will find your listing in a directory and click on the link to go directly to your site.

This not only brings visitors to your website, but it also creates links for search engine "spiders" or "robots" to find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn't have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying "click here" is not enough to help them understand what they're going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site. The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you're pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is another one of those many factors search engines that into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers that can make Flash and _Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and _Javascript it's important to know that search engine spiders can't read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.
Search engines do tend to like websites that create fresh content regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis.

However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, "If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it".
If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

10 of the most important SEO design tips

2006-07-28T01:34:00.000-07:00

1. Optimise every page on your website

The major search engines are not looking at individual websites and ranking them, they are ranking pages from every website in the world. This means that if your website contains more than one page you should optimise for the specific content that is found on each page.

Optimising each webpage is overlooked by so many websites within Ireland and can be the difference between competing for a highly competitive keyword phrase such as "Irish Hotels" and competing for a much less competitive keyword phrase such as "Hotels in County Galway". After that they can check out the rest of your website that is all about "Irish Hotels".

2. Pick appropriate keyword phrases

This is the single most important thing to do when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. The keywords that your potential customers type into Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are the keywords that your site should be using within the specific areas of your webpage (see below; Optimizing your Page Titles and Optimizing your Content). There are a number of useful keyword research tools available on the web. The most recommended and user-friendly are Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. Both offer trial versions.

3. Optimizing your Page Titles

All of the major search engines have 100's of different algorithms that compute where your webpage should be listed for different keyword searches. Putting your keywords within the Title description (the blue bar you will see at the top of your screen) of your pages is one of the most important SEO techniques and will help your website climb through the rankings and allow your visitors to remember exactly what your page is all about when they save it to their "favourites".

4. Optimizing your Page Content

It is sometimes very difficult to write content for your website. Not only do you need put the information that you want the visitor to see in front of them in an easy-to-read style, you also have to keep in mind the keywords or keyphrases that your page is targeting so that you can rank better within search engines.

One of the best pieces of advice that I have come across is to write for your visitors and include the keywords and keyphrases as much as makes sense. Read what you written out loud to yourself and a few others. If it sounds stupid... lather, rinse, and repeat.

5. Create an inbound linking strategy

Submitting your site to online directories is a very beneficial way to drive targeted traffic to your website. People will find your listing in a directory and click on the link to go directly to your site.

This not only brings visitors to your website, but it also creates links for search engine "spiders" or "robots" to find your website and index your pages within their results. If your site doesn't have a link pointing to it on the World Wide Web the search engines will never find it and you will never see any traffic from Google or the other big ones.

6. Descriptively labeling your links and images (aka the anchor text)

This technique is both common sense and good practice. Telling your visitors what the link that they are going to click on allows them to know exactly what they are going to be directed to. Saying "click here" is not enough to help them understand what they're going to find once they click through. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site.

The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes to be descriptive is that you can almost always describe the page you're pointing to by using its main keyword phrase which is another one of those many factors search engines that into account when it comes to ranking your web pages.

7. Make sure your site is spider-friendly

Your website may look fantastic. You and your web designer may be talented graphic designers that can make Flash and _Javascript dazzle your visitors with a show that would put RiverDance to shame. However, if your website contains Flash and _Javascript it's important to know that search engine spiders can't read this code (or appreciate the effort you put into the design). The way around this is to provide navigation alternatives to allow the spiders crawl deep within your website and index the web pages within their results.

8. Create Fresh Content

When you are optimizing your website properly you will see a trend. If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it.
Search engines do tend to like websites that create fresh content regardless of the format. If they know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it.

Blogs and forums are effective and easy ways of adding new information to your site on a regular basis.

However, if your only purpose of setting up a blog or a forum is for better search engine rankings then there really is no point in doing it. Only add a forum if it contributes something beneficial to your website and if you have the traffic to make it interactive enough for visitors to return to it. And, only add a blog if you have something of interest to say on a regular basis.

9. Do not think that you can trick Search Engines

As noted before, "If you are doing something that benefits your websites visitors then the search engines will reward you for it".
If you try to trick the search engines by hiding keyword phrases in your pages by making the text colour the same as the background colour, hiding keyword phrases in tiny font, joining link farms, or any other sneaky practice your sites will be removed from the search engines and it will take you a long time to get back in (and you will also have to spend more time cleaning up your website before they will accept you).

10. Offer something unique

If your website offers something that is unique and interesting to your target market and it is properly optimized (by applying all of the techniques that are listed above) you will not only rank well within the major search engines, you will also get the added benefit of people linking to your website in forums, blogs, and through other websites which will send your site more visitors and create more inbound links which will help it rank higher.

5 tips to get the most out of PPC.

2006-07-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

Get Ten Specific Keywords.
If you are a company specializing in exercise equipment, don't select "exercise equipment" or "gym" as your keywords. Chances are, there will be hundreds of thousands of other bidders waiting to jump on those same keywords. Be specific. Try "treadmill" or "stationary bike." Select a maximum of ten words, just to test the waters and see how your potential customers respond. If the first ten keywords succeed in getting you a larger market, then research additional keywords which are not as specific. However, if your first try yields less than satisfactory results, then try another set of keywords if you can still afford it.

Write Your Ads but Write the Truth.
Most ad writers will broadcast their wares as being the be-all and cure all of all ills and pains. If they do this, web users will click on their ads and storm the site. This is well and good if the product or service will live up to the ad's promise - but what if it doesn't? A customer clicks, you pay, but the customer doesn't buy. You lose.

Write a succinct but accurate ad that doesn't sue vague language. Avoid using words such as "free," "low cost," "extremely effective," and "cheap." Tailor your ads to fit the keyword, and if you can, include your prices on the ads. This way, you will get a buyer who is ready and willing to purchase your product or service.

Budget Your Bid.
It's tempting to go all out and set your prices, especially if you think your product will sell. But what if it won't? Set a monthly budget of about $100 for your bids, and bid just right - bid too high and you will run out of money, bid too low and your ads won't show up.

Even if you believe in your product, keep within bid budget, and do not get into bidding wars, especially with another advertiser who has a much larger budget than you. Don't waste your time thinking about your bids. Instead, invest your time in designing what your ad is linked to, which brings us to:

Make Your Site a Professional One.
The standard rules of web design apply. Check your web content for spelling and grammatical errors. Update your web content regularly. Fix any broken links and images. Design your website so that it will be easy to navigate and load, so do not use Flash animation, as this will slow down your buyers' browsers. Link your ads to the exact place on your site where your product or service appears.

Know When to Stop.
PPC ad campaigns can lead more buyers to you, but take care to check profit against spending. If you have already spent double your advertising budget, but have had little or no sales, consider dropping your campaign. You can also measure your progress in clicks. A total of 300 clicks is average for any ad. If your ad has reached 300 clicks and you have made no sales yet, then terminate your PPC project.

Equally as important as knowing when to stop is knowing that all is not yet lost and you can still go on. Running a web-based business means investing time, money, and effort, so keep your PPC up and running as long as you are raking money in. PPC, after all, may first mean pay-per-click, but, if you're successful, can soon mean Profiting Perfectly in Cash.

6 Steps to picking profitable adsense keywords

2006-07-25T01:41:00.000-07:00

Knowing how to find the best keywords for use in your Adsense ads is not a straightforward process. Finding and implementing high profit, low competition keywords in your ads really is the trick for making Adsense payoff big.The following process should yield profitable, low competition keywords for your Adsense ads. This process is not perfect, but when you analyze it and try it for yourself, you can see that it makes sense. Adsense that is.

Step 1 Research some keywords for your niche that have a high CPC value. To do this, first find your keywords using the Google Adwords keyword tool or another tool that will give you niche specific lists of keywords. Save those keywords into a spreadsheet program as a csv file. Copy and paste those keywords into Google's Traffic Estimator (you will need an Adwords account). The traffic estimator will give you the estimated clicks per day and the average cost per click (CPC) for each keyword. Copy and paste this information back into your spreadsheet file for later reference.

Step 2 Multiply the average CPC by 30% to get an estimate of your maximum earnings per click. The higher the average CPC, the more likely the CPC for the 2nd - 8th positions are high as well. You want this higher average CPC to start because if the CPC starts to drop off significantly after the 3rd position, your chance of getting high click earnings as an Adsense publisher will be diminished.

Step 3 Use any one of many tools available on the internet for helping to estimate the 1st - 8th position CPC values. These tools will estimate the CPCs for each position and allow you to see how much the CPCs drop off after the first position. This dramatically helps your analysis for picking the most profitable keywords. If the CPC values stay close to the each other and to the value of the first position, then you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.

Step 4 Now determine which Adsense ads occupy which positions. You can do this by searching on Google for your keyword and looking to see which Adsense ads are generated in the search results and in which order they are. Another way to estimate this is to use the Adwords Accelerator tool. It has a feature whereby Adwords ads are dynamically displayed for a given keyword you input into the tool to check. If the Adwords advertiser has used "Adwords for Content" in his advertising, these ads will be the Adsense ads someone else is displaying on their website.

Step 5 Compare the ads you found in step 4 to the results of using a keyword check function tool (available on the internet). If the advertisers you find by doing this closely match those you found in step 4, you will more than likely have a profitable keyword.If the advertisers are not he same, then the advertiser is possibly not using the "Adwords for Content" mode of advertising in his campaigns. This means that the keyword may not be the basis for the Adsense ads and may not be profitable.

Step 6 Now you must get the traffic. If you decide to get traffic using the Adwords approach, then just use the keywords in your Adsense ads that scored well from the above evaluation. Then, use lower cost per click keywords in your Adwords ads. The difference between the earnings from the click you get on your Adsense word from the cost of the click you pay on your Adwords word will be your profit.If you are planning to use search engine optimization techniques to get traffic to the website where your ads are, make sure the keywords you choose have the highest KEI possible. KEI is the ratio of the number of searches for a keyword to the number of competing sites having the keyword. The combination of a high KEI and a high score from the above evaluation will yield the best profit results.

Source: www.webfactorybulgaria.com

5 Tips tor improve your CPC/PPC

2006-07-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Improve Ad Delivery. If your ad does not show up every time when searches are performed under your keyword, it may be a sign that your daily budget is not high enough. As you now know, how frequent of your ad display is controled by the daily budget. If you would like your ad to be shown more frequently, please consider to increase your daily budget in order to receive a maximum exposure for your ad.Normally, you have 50% margin for your daily budget. For example, if your desired daily budget is $10.00 per day, you can set your actual daily budget on Google to $15.00 per day, because your actual spending is based on your click thru rate, by setting the daily budget higher will allow your ad to get more exposure, but your actual spending may still be in your desired daily budget range.However, be sure to monitor your daily advertising costs and if they are rising too high, decrease the budget on the safe level.
Improve Ad Delivery per Keyword. Each campaign can have one or more adroups. An AdGroup is a group of keywords and ads that will display when those keywords are searched for on Google. You may have experienced a situation when only few keywords out of the whole AdGroup trigger your ad. The explanation lies again behind the daily budget that controls a number of impressions for your campaign. These impressions are distributed between individual AdGroups and further between individual keywords. So it may happen that some keywords in a particular Adgroup have more impressions than the others, meaning some keywords trigger your ad more frequently than others.If you want to improve the ad delivery for your targeted keywords, you can consider splitting your keywords and creating a new campaign for keywords with low impressions. This should improve the frequency with which they will trigger your ad.
Optimize your Adgroups. As mentioned above, each campaign has one or more adroups that all share campaign's impressions. Often, the impressions are not divided evenly between adgroups. So it may happen that some adgroups have more impressions and show their ad(s) more frequently than others. It is a very similar scenario as with keywords we just described above.To improve results of your low-performing adgroups, you can consider to create a new campaign for them in order to increase the frequency with witch they show your ad on Google.
Analyse your Clicks. Make sure the clicks are made for specific, targeted keywords. If you're getting lots of clicks on non-targeted keywords, consider reducing Max CPC and/or your ad position in order to improve your ROI. Similarly, you can raise bids for targeted keywords that are performing well.
Optimize your Ads. Make sure you bid on targeted keywords, create compelling ads and link them to relevant content on your website. The keywords you chose will segment the market and target your desired audience. If you won't chose wisely, you'll finish targeting the wrong market and wasting your advertising budget. The ad you create needs to attract attention of your prospects. It needs to communicate your unique selling feature - in other words, what makes your product/service different from others and why a visitor should visit your website. Be specific about your offer and include call to action. Lastly, guide visitors to the content on your website where they can access more information about the offer advertised. The landing page should also clearly state what is the next natural step to make - buy your product, download the white paper, sign up for a free trial, etc.

PPC management requires lots of work and testing but if you stick to the basics you can make money instead of losing them. Remember, the only measure that matters on the Internet is the profit you make.

Source: www.learn.si

10 Powerful Tips to Optimize your Google AdWords Campaign

2006-07-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

Google announced in January 2005 significant changes in their popular AdWords Pay-per-Click System (PPC). In future only unique URLs per page will be displayed.

If several advertisers uses the same URL (i.e affiliates of the same program), only the one with the best Ad will be displayed. It is obvious that Google is trying to maximize the diversity in their AdWords results. Very popular Affiliate Programs, like Amazon.com, lead to hundreds of affiliates showing the same product with different Ads. For the affiliates using this system the "easy way to get money with affiliate programs" is now over, since it will be practically impossible to advertise just the affiliate link. Significant more effort, but also significant changes are the consequence.

The following tips can help you to get maximum benefit of your AdWords Campaigns.

1) Build your own unique "landing page" for your product. Remember that 99% of Internet users are looking for Information and thus, expect unique content from your side. Include Product pictures, Product reviews and interesting content related with your product. Use illustrative images of your product, trying to keep the load time of your "landing page" low.

2) Include a form allowing the visitor to enter his/her e-mail address in order to get more information about the product or service you are promoting. Do not sell, pre-sell. Try to build a long term "trused relationship" with your visitor. Offer free gifts or freebies to motivate your visitor to enter his/her e-mail address. Of course, consider this information confidentially. Use an autoresponder to follow-up your potential customer. You could dedicate one e-mail to describe your product or service in detail, enhancing the value for your potential customer. Explain why this product or service will add value. If you convince your prospect that your product of service will deliver the desired value, you will make real customers from your prospects.

3) User Ad Groups to manage "keyword families". Each Ad Group should be dedicated only to one Keyword family, i.e. all variants of a Keyword choosen to advertise your product. Example, if your Keyword is "shoes", try an Ad Group with "Blue Shoes", "Red Shoes", "Mountain shoes" and so on. Use http://Wordtracker.com to find Keyword families. Use a high number of negative keywords to avoids clicks with no sales (i.e. -free to prevent freebies seekers to click on your ad). With the time, create a good number of selected negative keywords for your campaign.

4) Include in the text of your Ad the Keyword choosen in 3) This (key)word will be printed highlighted and will lead to a higher CTR (Click Thru Rate), lowering your costs.

5) Include in the text of your Ad a line for the Benefit of your Product, i.e. Discount, short term opportunity. Explain in few words why the customer should click your Ad.

6) Mention explicitely the price of your product or service. This will prevent freebies seekers to click on your Ad and generate costs and no sales.

7) Create at least 20 different Ad versions per Keyword Group. Monitor the CTR of each ad and finally delete all versions with low CTR, keeping the most successful Ad versions. Experts create usually hundred of variations. Experiment, test, evaluate, change and keep only the best results.

8) Exclude the "content search" option to reach highly targeted traffic. Only in the case you have an amazing conversion rate, activate this option to maximize your profits.

9) Calculate the value per visitor on a regular basis. Just divide the achieved earnings in a given period (i.e. weekly) thru the clicks in the same period. This is your maxium CPC (Cost per Click). Adjust your maximum bid accordingly. Try to maximize profits, not just to lower the CPC.

10) Track your ads carefully. Google provides a tracking facility you can ad in your "thank you" page after each sale. Monitor closely which keywords convert and which not. Delete Keywords which obviously do not convert.

If you monitor your Ads on a regular basis and take care of the topics mentioned here, you may have a great benefit also from the new system used by Google. Try to differentiate yourself with high quality and content from your competition and enjoy your profits!

source: http://www.webmaster-money.org

5 Critical Pay-Per-Click Tips

2006-07-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is a good supplement to natural search engine optimization, IF you keep a few tactics straight.

1. Choose the right search terms.

If you go after the broad phrases and terms, you'll pay top dollar. Strive for more descriptive and specific search terms that reflect your products or services.

2. Map out a strategy.

Don't go after every possible keyword or phrase. Target your online ads around business priorities--such as seasonal purchases, your most profitable products and services, etc.

3. Use bid management software.

Software can regulate your bids and turn off keywords. You might be interested in clicks during business hours; you might not want to pay for those clicks at 1 a.m. (There's less of a chance that it's a business prospect at that time of night).

4. Write effective ads.

Google, Yahoo! Searching Marketing and other services have limits on characters per line. With Google, it's tough not to push the limits because space is so narrow. With Yahoo! Searching Marketing, focus on getting your message across without consuming every character. Long ads may discourage people from reading them.

5. Test. Test. Test.

Try different keywords, ad copy, landing pages and calls to action. Put your budget - whatever size it is - to the best use after effective evaluation.

Source: http://www.thmg.com/

AdWords Campaign Set Up Tips

2006-07-23T00:05:00.000-07:00

It's easy to overlook the basics of a strong AdWords campaign. Without them though, your AdWords campaign can be doomed from the very start. Follow these tips and you can be sure that your campaign will have a strong foundation for both short term and immediate success.

Use Proper Grammar and Spelling

It may sound basic, but ad text that uses slang, has misspelled words or doesn't read clearly isn't going to get clicked. If anything it makes your business seem unprofessional and could actually harm your business' reputation.
Make sure that you spell and grammar check your ads. You might also have a friend, co-worker or employee read through the ad text to make sure that it reads smoothly and makes sense. Input from others is invaluable when creating AdWords ads.

Start Small With Geographical Targeting

If you're just starting out, try limiting your ad's distribution to one or two regions (e.g. for businesses based in North America, limit your initial distribution to the U.S.A and Canada). By starting with a smaller distribution area, you will be able to keep your costs lower and "fine tune" your ads and keywords before you start to expand.

When you feel comfortable that your AdWords ads are profitable, start to expand several countries or regions at a time.

Scout the Competition

Chances are, no matter what kind of product you are selling, you will have a competitor who is already selling something similar and advertising it on AdWords. Search for the terms you wish to use on Google to see what kinds of ads your competitors are writing.

You might even try a tool like GoogSpy to see exactly what terms your competitors are buying.

Pay close attention to the terms they use, the deals or incentives they offer and the titles they use. You can learn a lot from your competitors. You don't want your ads to be exactly like theirs, but you can use elements from each competitor to make your ads perform even better.

Chris Burgess is a Marketing Expert with BuyItSellIt.com Online Stores (http://www.buyitsellit.com/). He has established and maintained successful pay per click campaigns for BuyItSellIt.com and many of its customers. To build an online store for your small business quickly and easily, sign up for your own free 30-day trial online store at BuyItSellIt.com.

Source: http://www.thmg.com

Google AdWords Tips: Search Engine CPC - Cost Per Click Programs

2006-07-22T23:45:00.000-07:00

Planning is the key to using Google AdWords well. Many amateur AdWords users will set up an account for ease of use. Typically, they'll bid on a number of related keywords and develop one advertisement for that group of words. Since your ads have to perform very well, one advertisement won't be suitable for each keyword phrase. You must take the time to write custom ads for each keyword phrase you bid on, and you should have suitable pages for the visitor to land on.

Always remember that people are busy. You must respond to their needs immediately upon arrival, otherwise they'll leave and you'll have lost this excellent opportunity to create a new customer.

Below is a Example of an AdWords Ad

Palm Zire Sale
Palm Zires for sale.
Check out the deals now!
www.example.com

The above ad is straightforward. There's no psychology involved with this one. It is a statement of fact and Palm Zires are for sale and the second description line delivers the key message: check out the deal now! For comparison and price sensitive shoppers, this is great. This ad delivers a price or deal conscious prospect to the advertiser's site. If you're not offering low prices on commodity type products, you may want to use another strategy.

Sony VAIO LaptopsPower,
Versatility and Mobility.
Get Free Shipping within Canada.
www.example.ca

This ad screens potential clickers by saying that they sell a particular brand of laptops. This ad cuts down on the number of poorly targeted clickers by referring to a specific brand.

LaptopsFast Delivery - 24/7
Tech Support
Shop at Official Site.
www.example.com

The above ad responds with the simple word laptops then quickly presents the company's value proposition, rather than just low prices. This targets shoppers who need responsive service.

Despite AdWords tips and guidelines, shoppers are unique and your well written masterpiece may not pull the click-throughs you'd expect. Some trial and error is inevitable. Remember that this is direct marketing and the better you understand your customer's impulse purchase behavior, the better your response will be.

Start your bids high to see where the traffic is and to generate a few click-throughs so that your ad will continue to be seen. You have to be in the top eight bids in order for your ad to be shown appreciably. If you start your bids low, your click-through rate will be poor and your ad may be cancelled.
Vary your bids. If your click thru rate is getting down too close to .05 %, up your bids for a short period of time to get some click throughs and that will keep your ad active.
Bid on position three or position eight and you may have receive better ROI in these ranks.

Additional Google AdWords Benefits

Easy account management.
You can check your Google AdWords click through stats online at any time. They're updated within a few minutes.
Google has an automatic bidding feature that keeps your bid high enough but only one cent above the nearest competitor.

Return on Investment

It's important for e-commerce operations to get a reliable estimate of the performance of their AdWords campaigns, in order to improve that performance.

Sales conversion is a term used to describe a completed transaction. Actually, you can track any desired activity such as a newsletter signup, free download or a sale of a product. AdWords offers a tracking service which places a cookie on visitor's computers and when that user reaches a post sale page, a conversion is recorded. There's no programming required. All you have to do is put a small snippet of code into your web pages and Google takes it from there. You can learn more about conversion tracking from Google here...

https://adwords.google.com/select/library/convtracking_jan05.pdf

All the particulars of the AdWords PPC advertising program can be found here...

https://www.AdWords.google.com/select/faq/budget.html

Google AdWords has experienced reporting delays recently that make campaign performance feedback less effective. It's annoying but not too troublesome.

Conclusion

AdWords Select offers good value for advertisers who don't have the resources to build pages for the free search engine results, or for those who can't seem to gain presence in foreign language search engines. These ads help to support a company's market visibility, credibility, as well as support listings in the free search engine results.

Source: www.seoconsultants.com