Friday, August 28, 2009

Driving traffic to your web site! Part Two: Pay per Click

Once you have defined the keywords and listed them in the appropriate section of your web site, you can pay to drive more traffic to your site using pay per click. Think of the pay per click technique as a miniature auction going on in the background whenever someone types a term into the Google search box. I have used Google Adwords and set up a small three line advertisement, listing my Sales Team Development services. Google picked up the keywords that I listed on my site, and it allowed me to select the words that I want to link to my ad.

Take a look at this link: www.Adwords.google.com

Now the fun part!

When someone types the keywords I selected, the bidding takes place over the placement of my advertisement. I can control which keyword triggers the display of my ad, and a range of how much I want to bid to get the ad placed on the screen. Since I just turned the pay per click on last week, I am still looking at this as a test to see which keywords get interest, and which drive traffic to my site.

Testing Tools

Google Adwords includes a lot of analytic functions which allows you to view the quantity of hits that each keyword receives. You can then decide which words you want to trigger your advertisement and how much you are willing to bid to place them. I recommend that you start small and then increase your bid based on the number of clicks each of your keywords receives.

The Microsoft Office Live web site development tools offer a report function to track the traffic coming to your site. The tool allows you to look at the volume of traffic, the referring source, and the keywords that drove the person to your site. Wow!

Keep in mind that this is an ongoing active process:

Set up web site
Enter keywords
Set up Google Adwords
Select keywords to trigger your advertisement
Monitor results and web site traffic
Adjust your keywords and pay per click amount
Monitor traffic to see effect of changes made
Add more pages and start all over

By monitoring the web traffic and its sources, you can adjust your keywords and advertisements and maximize the hits on your site, and grow you company.

I hope that this two part blog has helped you gain some insight into the tricks of the Wonderful World Wide Web!

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Thursday, August 27, 2009

SEO Tools.

This link has a lot of free tools for SEO.

I just downloaded two Firefox add ins to do more SEO research, with the goal of improving my web sites ranking.


SEO Tools.

Shared via AddThis

Free SEO Tools, Internet Marketing Tools and Backlink Checkers.

Take a look at this site for some free SEO tools.

Free SEO Tools, Internet Marketing Tools and Backlink Checkers.

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Monday, August 24, 2009

Driving traffic to your web site!

I have been researching Search Engine Optimization and recently set up a way to advertise my consulting company whenever someone searches for the terms I select. This is a very powerful tool to attract new customers. The goal of this Blog entry is to share what I have learned and help you the readers set up your own web sites.


First we need to define what are keywords?


When you set up a web site, you can select specific words and groups of words which will lead potential customers to your site. For example, I have selected the term “Outsourced Sales Management” as one of my keywords. I use Microsoft’s web site development tools which are part of Office Live Small Business to host my web site. For each page you set up on your web site, there is a Properties selection. When you click it, you can then enter you keyword into a box. Microsoft refers to the keywords as Metatags, and gave this description:


Metatags are invisible bits of code that search engines often use to index Web sites. These metatags can help search engines return the most relevant results for a particular search. The two important metatags are the keyword tag and the description tag.


Meta keywords should be keywords and phrases that your customers would likely use when searching for your page. Each word or phrase, usually between 5 and 10 words, should be separated by a comma or a space.


Try to think like your target customer.


What are they looking for?

hat is the problem that they are trying to solve?


Make up a list of words that prospective customers will be looking for that. These are the keywords to enter on your site.


Spiders!


The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are constantly searching the internet for new web sites, and creating indexes of the keywords. They use software robots called Spiders to search the web for these works and then update their databases with the results. When your potential customer types a term into Google’s web site, Google searches over its index database to find web sites that meet the search criteria, and then display the results.


Now the secrets!


There are ways to move your web site up to the top of the listings! If you have a new web page or only a few keywords, you may be on the 47th page of results that Google displays. Usually people only react and use the search results on the first or second page, so your website is lost without any traffic.


By placing the keywords on your site the robot spiders will find your site and move you up towards the top of the results. This technique is also called organic search results.



Next Chapter in the Blog will be about targeted advertisements called Pay per Click.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Avoid These Critical Mistakes With Your Newsletter

by Jim Palmer, The Newsletter Guru



In my business of creating and designing customer newsletters, I spend a great deal of time writing. Like most things, practice makes perfect. As I may have mentioned before, I read also read many books. Reading also makes one a better writer.

While most of my feature articles tend to focus on what you should do in your newsletter, in this week's newsletter I'm going to focus on a few things that you should absolutely avoid as you produce your own customer newsletter.

Here are Four Critical Mistakes You MUST Avoid!


Not providing contact information--It's hard to believe, but I have seen this too many times. If you're going to take the time to create a great marketing tool such as a customer newsletter, don't forget to tell your readers how to contact you, and preferably more than one way!


Forgetting it's not about you--There is always a big temptation when you start writing your newsletter to write about what is on your mind or what's important in your world. WRONG! If your customers are going to read and enjoy your newsletter, and therefore read it again and again, it must contain information and content that is important to them. My mantra for many years is that your customer newsletter needs to be fun, informative, and entertaining - to your customer.


Not enough pictures--One of the quickest ways to get your newsletter NOT READ is to load it up with a lot of text and no pictures. I often joke with my clients about my patented rule of thumb for readability. Here it is: if people look at your newsletter and quickly determine that it can be read in ten minutes or less, chances are it will probably get read; otherwise it won't. It will likely go into the pile of things that someone intends to read but probably never will.


Lack of distinctive personality--The kiss of death for any newsletter is being boring. People get enough boring marketing messages thrown at them every day. It is essential to give your newsletter some personality. Make your readers feel they are a part of something fun and unique. Trust me on this; your readers will look forward to every newsletter if they can learn something, are entertained, and know they will end up smiling.
By the way, pardon the shameless plug, but if you're looking for the ultimate resource of fun, entertaining, and informative content, then check out my wildly popular and successful Success Advantage 2.0 newsletter. This is the absolute best 'Done-for-You' No Hassle Newsletter program available, period! If you can "cut and paste," you will love Success Advantage.


Jim Palmer is known internationally as 'Newsletter Guru, the go-to resource for smart, effective strategies for maximizing the profitability of customer relationships. Jim is also the acclaimed author of The Magic of Newsletter Marketing - The Secret to More Profits and Customers for Life. Jim's most popular 'Done-for-For' No Hassle Newsletter program is called Success Advantage 2.0.



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