What Should You Know About Article Marketing Vs Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Is there a difference in value when considering Article Marketing vs PPC Marketing? Most of us believe that separate values are assigned to something that lasts a long time and something that wears out quickly. This may be a cornerstone in determining the worth of two distinctly separate approaches to marketing.
PPC or Pay Per Click is right now and gives immediate results. It also requires a budget. Article marketing takes time to develop and results will certainly not be instant.
You may need a competitive budget for PPC to purchase keywords and key phrases. You will need to apply your management skills to identify your best buys. It will take some analysis to determine which words or phrases produce the best return on the funds you invest.
If you have a zero budget or little funding then you should consider articles as your primary marketing tool. The material presented in your articles may carry much more weight than an ad and create a dedicated readership. If readers benefit in some way they are much more likely to return and recommend your site.
When you purchase listings from a popular PPC company you will have a listing appear because you paid for it. With article marketing there is a sense that you earned your readership. A popular observation is that you will probably benefit from a marriage between both methods.
Even a limited expenditure on ppc can garner valuable information about which words should be important to use in articles. It is better to know your most valuable keywords and phrases before you write dozens of articles.
You have to determine how much money and how much time you have to spend. Both are currency considerations when you launch. People can purchase many boxed, canned, or frozen foods for the price of a family meal in a restaurant.
The restaurant meal is immediately satisfying and you have no cooking or dishes to clean. The meals prepared at home stretch your budget like article marketing. Each meal is planned and prepared just for a specific audience. Just like planning, preparing, and serving meaningful articles to a targeted group of readers.
With PPC you may need to commit to a constant budget of buying a position over and over again. If you are generating good monthly income this can be a worthwhile and effective tool.
Combining both approaches may be the ultimate return on both your time and your budget. Consider the available shortcuts and tools available when you are determining the route that is best for you.
Articles may result in terrific back links increasing your perceived authority. You could widen your recognition factor and gain new readers regularly. Your purchased situations may provide quick monetary gain and highly useful feedback immediately.
Learn more about Article Marketing vs PPC Marketing or to work with Bob Howard . By working with Bob you will be joining one of the top Internet Marketers and marketing systems on the Internet today.
Website Marketing: What You Need To Know Before Starting (Part 3)
Part 3 of 4. — The term “insurance” is too broad, and is subject to fierce competition. If your business isn’t listed in the first two pages of search results then its likelihood of being noticed is quite low, and most of the top insurance companies are billion dollar businesses. As such, the chances of a small business ranking favorably with such a keyword are quite low.
– There are many types of insurance such as car, home, health, dental, life, accident and even vacation insurance. Why create a general insurance site if you don’t sell all forms of insurance? (And if you do, you’d be better off creating a separate site for each.)
After talking, Matt determined that he’d like to focus on car, home or boat insurance because he knows them well. But, even these three terms are too competitive so we set out to find the term that’s “just right”.
Our research led us to three terms that had very little competition and, as such, would garner more notice for Matt’s business. These were “homeowners insurance,” “classic car insurance” and “yacht insurance.” While your first impulse may be to believe that businesses and terms with no competition are most desirable, unless you are a pioneer in your field, no competition also means no demand.
Matt chose to specialize in homeowners insurance, as it was a subject with which he was most familiar, while leaving the opportunity ope for future expansion into his other specializations later. Matt’s choice was sound on several levels. While representing himself as a homeowners insurance salesman online, nothing prevents him from building trust with clients and selling them classic car or yacht insurance at a later date. Had he positioned himself as a generic insurance salesman, he likely wouldn’t have gotten noticed. Similarly, had he specialized in car or boat insurance then his future expansion would be limited by the fact that those purchasing these types of insurance already owned homes.
OK, so he chose to have a site built about “homeowners insurance” but, because he’s an insurance agent licensed in Florida, having people call him from Oregon (or even from Georgia) would actually be a waste of his time. Therefore, we focused his site on “Florida homeowners insurance” and chose the domain name “Florida-homeowners-insurance-choices.com” for the benefit of the search engines. Yet, while that’s a good name for the search engines, it’s not easy to tell people or put on a business card. So that he’d have the best of both worlds, we simply registered another domain name (”MossHomeownersInsurance.com”) and redirected it to his main domain name.
All this is to say that you shouldn’t register a domain name first. Instead, let us do the research to find the most profitable keywords for your business.
The second biggest mistake made by many businesses is in purchasing web hosting before they know what their needs are. Hosting environments are quite different, offering a vast array of environments and features. In nine out of ten instances, the environment you choose will meet your needs. However, in the remaining instance, a wrong choice can waste your valuable time and money.
Furthermore, we have found one system that’s simply the best way to conduct business online: Site Build It (SBI). Basically, SBI is a hosting system plus much more. For the price of typical hosting, SBI provides a Website with dozens of built-in, automated tools that practically assure your success. Frankly, SBI is the right choice for about 95% of all of our clients and because SBI actually takes care of registering your domain name and setting up your hosting, it’s another reason that you should not do it yourself. Be sure to checks Parts 1, 2 and 4.
How PPC Can Improve Your Search Engine Optimization Campaigns
The more time spent focusing on Internet marketing, the more commonality I find between different marketing disciplines. Take pay-per-click advertising for example. PPC can be one of the most powerful tools you use to improve the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaigns.
Collecting information from your PPC marketing can prove incredibly valuable to your search engine optimization. As you already know, pay-per-click marketing can give you a tremendous amount of information in a very short period of time. What’s even better is that this information can help to direct other marketing campaigns including search engine optimization.
The greatest part of PPC, is that it gives you a good deal of data about which type of website browsers are the best. That is to say that through pay-per-click, you can find the right browsers that convert into buyers. This information can then be used to make your marketing more targeted - improving conversion at a much lower cost.
The concept that I teach in SEO training is the most effective way to combine pay-per-click advertising with search engine optimization is to focus on conversions. What keywords have you promoted through pay per click advertising that led to conversions? If you’ve been running PPC for a while and you are still unsure, then consider expanding your analytic capabilities to include Google conversion tracking.
Once you have the answer and know which terms produce the greatest conversions, regardless of ad variation, then you SEO keywords have been determined. You want to generate organic traffic to the same keywords you’re promoting through PPC as long as they are generating your highest conversions.
One way to think about this is a company that’s selling widgets. If they use PPC, they probably know that the term, discount widget converts the highest of any keyword term. As a result, they should be focusing their organic campaigns around optimizing that particular keyword. Once the phrase appears at the top of the search results, one can reduce the amount spent via pay per click and enjoy the benefits of targeted traffic.
After you’ve gotten more sophistication around converting pay per click terms and started an optimization campaign, it’s time to focus on other elements that can help with conversion. One of the most important is your web site and landing page. Most people work to optimize search terms that drive individuals to a web site. If that’s the case with you consider looking at your home page or web site landing page with a new perspective. Once a visitor is there, do you have a clear call to action? If not, consider revamping your landing pages to get browsers to take action.
Use what you’ve learning through PPC advertising to truly target your search engine optimization campaigns. By doing so, you can improve the quality of traffic you’re attracting to your site and reduce your pay per click costs. Don’t waste time optimizing your site for terms that no one is searching on or that never lead to conversion.
Outsourcing Adwords Management
Think it’s time to outsource your Adwords management? Perhaps your time is more valuable and better spent focusing on building other parts of your business or maybe you can’t afford to spend insane amounts of money buying all of the newest software and tools needed to professionally manage Adwords campaigns. Outsourcing your Adwords can be the Smartest decision or the Dumbest decision you’ll ever make.
You know it’s time to outsource your Adwords management when you find yourself having to spend more and more in Google for your clicks. The vast majority of Google Adwords users do NOT know how to properly set up and manage their Adwords campaigns and often find their click cost rising higher and higher. They find their costs climbing so high in fact that it makes more sense just to shut down their campaigns altogether. Whereas a Professional Adwords Management company could easily make it so that their click costs drop lower and lower and at the same time make their ad get shown higher in Google.
You Could Be Majorly Hurting Your Business in Two Ways- Are you having great success with your Adwords campaigns? By that I mean are you getting all of the traffic you want for the price you want to buy it for? I don’t care how high your ad shows up in Google, (anyone can get their ad ranked #1 or #2 by spending an insanely high amount of money per click.)
Successful Adwords management means getting more traffic by spending less money to get it. If you’re trying to save money by managing your Adwords campaigns yourself but you don’t know how to make it so that you’re spending less money and getting more traffic you’re really loosing a lot more money than you’re saving and hurting your business by leaving much more money on the table.
Where is your time best spent? Did you know that successful Adwords management can take hour of maintenance each month? Are you sure that your time is best spent trying to figure out Adwords management to save you from having to spend money on outsourcing? Are you aware that professional Adwords management companies use thousands of dollars worth of software and man hours. Quite frankly I don’t see how anyone can save money managing their Adwords internally unless that is they have at least 8 months off work to learn the ins and outs of Adwords management full time.
Here’s What You Need To Do What you need to do is begin thinking with this mindset, “Yes, I need to completely focus my time and energy in places where they well spent and where I can get the most accomplished for my business. I need to save money by outsourcing my Adwords campaigns so that I can get the most out of my Adwords investment. I need to insure that I put my Adwords management into the hands of a professional who will help me to get not just more click, but help turn those clicks into conversions, leads and sales for my business.
Website Traffic: Getting The Right Visitors
People talk incessantly about - gaining more website traffic - but they rarely mention that a site really needs targeted website traffic. The only way to have a successful site is to court targeted website traffic — or people who keep coming back to your site, visiting one page after another.
Targeted website traffic includes people who are actually interested in what your site offers. They have been -targeted- for that very reason. For example, when you look at a book ad on Amazon.com, they show you books other people bought who also liked the one you were looking at. That’s because it is reasonable to assume that if you’re interested in the first one, you’ll be interested in others like it. They are targeting a fantasy fan for their fantasy books, instead of trying to sell them to random people. That is what you need to do as well.
Now, targeted website traffic doesn’t mean guaranteed traffic — just a strong possibility of more website traffic. You don’t want to lure anyone and everyone to your site. Internet loiterers take up space.
Randomly luring people is the difference between displaying magazines for people to leaf through or snagging a loyal customer who returns to buy each month.
The starting point for building traffic is to look at the keywords that you’re using on your site and then see what keywords visitors are using to search. Words are the starting point for any internet search. If someone wanted to find soft dice they could hang from the rear view mirro in their car then they will type related words into a search engine.
This is why you’ll often hear internet marketers talking about ‘getting inside the head of the prospect’. What would they type into a search engine in order to find fuzzy dice? Would it be “car dice”, “furry dice”, “soft hanging dice”? Or some other variation that you’ve never thought of? Picking the right keywords is about improving your chances of success.
So what else are you selling along with your fuzzy hanging rearview mirror car dice? You can’t get targeted website traffic if you don’t know who you’re targeting, so figure out just what kind of site you have. Should car dice should be sold at a car accessories site, a weird gifts site, or a kitsch site? They should be sold on a site that has other merchandise that will appeal to the fuzzy dice people-like fuzzy steering wheel covers, or even animal print clothing, if it’s a retro shop. That approach will get you more website traffic.
Nobody can give you guaranteed traffic. Internet traffic is like the stock market — you can make predictions, but you can’t always know for sure whether the risk will pay off. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t significantly improve your odds of getting more website traffic by going after targeted website traffic. Go after the people who want what you have and, believe me, you will see some results.
The Benefits of the Top PPC Services
There are a multitude of PPC services that you could choose from if you’re starting a campaign. Yet, there are only a few real choices for a serious campaign. This is because of one reason - volume.
So what services are in the top tier of PPC (pay per click)? The industry leaders are Google and Yahoo, with Google AdWords claiming the lion’s share of the PPC market. Both Yahoo and Google offer a similar compliment of features, and either can be used to manage a very successful PPC campaign. So what differentiates the two? Well, if you are looking to run a very large-scale pay per click campaign, then Google is the most logical choice. The number of potential customers in the Google enterprise is staggering when compared directly against the leading other search engine services.
Yahoo’s search marketing service has many of its own merits, and can work very effectively for a campaign that doesn’t require its owner to completely dominate their particular industry. Many people choose to use both Google and Yahoo, creating a campaign that incorporates both of these top PPC services. For someone with a larger budget, this can be a very effective way to maximize reach.
While Google and Yahoo are the top PPC services out there, many other exist such as MSN and Ask Jeeves (ask.com) to name a couple. Either of these would also be an effective way to run a smaller campaign. And, because these services are not as competitive as the top PPC services, it is actually possible to get a lower CPC (cost per click) on similar search terms, and to increase the efficiency of each conversion. The biggest drawback, though, is a smaller potential customer base. These smaller services simply cannot compete with the astronomical numbers of Google and, to a lesser degree, Yahoo.
In truth, almost all of the PPC services you can choose from offer very similar features and benefits. There is a standard across the PPC industry, and most services comply tot his. But as Google and Yahoo are very large media companies, they have developed very smooth systems that are bug-free and streamlined. But what really separates the top PPC services is simply volume. Google does more customer volume than all the other PPC services combined. Yahoo is a solid (though distant) second place. Both of these campaigns can be used on a large-scale basis, while the other services are perhaps better suited for smaller, more specified PPC campaigns.
Four Easy Way To Manage Your AdWords Campaign
It seems like every day the bid pricing on Google AdWords is getting more and more competitive. While this is true to a degree, the potential effectiveness of an AdWords campaign has also never been greater. If you haven’t had much experience with Google AdWords campaign management, then you may want to remember these four simple AdWords management strategies for your next foray into the world of PPC advertising.
Before you can even start to run an effective campaign, you need to carefully choose relevant keywords. These, after all, will form the backbone of your campaign. Don’t just arbitrarily add keywords to create a broader potential consumer base. And, don’t use a relevant keyword generator unless it really is generating effective keywords. Remember that you only want clicks that will turn into sales. Empty clicks just means money down the drain.
The next thing you should take into consideration is your bid placement. It is a smart strategy to bid for the first page, but not for the first spot. Why is this? If you bid for the top spot, you are going to get a lot of wasteful clicks form people who aren’t really sure what they are looking for. So, if you are looking to generate brand awareness, this can be an effective strategy. But, if your margins are very critical, bidding for the top spot is a good way to get lower-quality leads and ultimately erase your margins.
The next tip you should think about when conducting your AdWords campaign is the necessity of monitoring and testing your keywords. Failing to do so for even a few days can spell disaster for your campaign. Because PPC advertising is an auction-type marketplace, the profitability of your keywords can go form high to low based on the actions of just one of your competitors. Additionally, a keyword that was very profitable the month before can become overly saturated and your margins can disappear without you realizing it. Make sure you keep on top of your campaign by continually monitoring and testing on a weekly or even daily basis.
The final AdWords management strategy you may want to consider is placing ads on relevant websites instead of just on SERPs. These bids can be priced by the click or as gross impressions. Paying by the impression is a great way to get bargain deals on ad listings. And since users are already browsing for products or services relevant to your own, they will still be targeted customers.
By implementing these four easy solutions, you can increase your chances of success in the PPC industry. Good luck.
Pay Per Lead vs. Pay Per Click
If you are like a lot of companies dependent on client leads to keep afloat, you may be noticing a trend from some of the lead generation companies out there. Not only are the leads expensive, but they aren’t as strong as they used to be. We are hearing this again and again from our clients who are shifting their budgets to crank up the stronger quality pay per click search leads.
Many lead gen firms use pay per click (PPC) search to attract their leads. Once they have a lead, they will ship it out to a variety of vendors, charging each the same fee. If you are seeing your leads get more saturated, it might be time for you to go right to the source instead of letting the middle men do that for you.
Getting into PPC advertising is not as simple as it used to be. Sure, you can set up a website with some contact info, but the competition has gotten more sophisticated in recent years. In order to really compete and push down your cost per acquisition, you’ve got to throttle up your effort and skills.
One thing we continually preach to clients is the importance of fine tuning every aspect of your online lead pipeline.
The first place to begin is with your pay per click ad copy. It’s fairly easy to place an ad and launch it. However, the pay per click engines are putting more emphasis than ever on “Quality” algorithms. If you are unable to make the daily effort to test your ad copy, you are going to fall behind those that do. A good PPC management company will run daily split tests for their clients. This is who you are up against more and more these days — experts who double and triple the click through rates of their clients’ ads.
Maybe that doesn’t sound important, but it is. Doubling and tripling your quality traffic can do the same for your number of leads. And, it can lower your costs per click in the process.
But don’t stop there, look at your landing pages (the pages where you send your pay per click traffic). Are the contact forms too busy or too buried? Is your phone number buried? There are ton of things you can do to convert leads at a higher rate.
If you can optimize your landing pages over time, you can now take that traffic and double or triple your lead conversions. We’ve seen it time and time again. So, put in the effort, it is worth the time.
If you don’t know where to start when it comes to Pay Per Click search, hire a PPC management company. They will develop keyword lists, find keywords from your competition, advise you on some ideas for your landing pages and conduct those daily split tests.
So, consider getting rid of the saturated lead gen services and heading for the source. The results can be dramatic.
Three Helpful PPC Bid Management Techniques
When it comes to PPC (pay per click) advertising, it seems like the marketplace is getting continually more saturated and competitive, making it harder than ever to run a cost-effective campaign. This is true to some extent, but there are still ways to run a campaign that gets great ROI. Here are a few PPC bid management techniques you can utilize to do just that.
First, don’t outbid your own budget. Just because there is a bidding war going on doesn’t mean you have to get caught up in it. Remember that if you spend more to get customers than the profit you earn by converting them on the backend, your entire campaign is not only a waste of time, it’s actually a waste of money also. It is much better to have fewer clicks and get them at a price where you can achieve ROI (return on investment) then to get caught up in a bidding war you can’t win. Plus, with fluctuations in the PPC market, just try to ride the low waves, and avoid the high waves.
The next thing you should do is forget about what ranking you are on a SERP (search engine results page). Bid an amount that you can afford, not for the spot you want. If you are in the top spot or the fifth spot, it doesn’t really matter. It is a good idea to try and get on the first page if you can, but beyond this you shouldn’t worry about it too much. Also, consider this: people click on the top spot without even thinking about it too much. This will lead to many clicks that have no chance of turning into conversions, drastically lowering your conversion rate and reducing your margins. Only bid for the top spot if you are the dominant player in your respective industry - or you wish to obtain this title, and realistically have the resources to do it.
Also, there is a technique called bid jamming that you might want to try. Basically, some PPC services have a visible bid system, meaning you can see the bids of all your competitors. Something you may not know is that your competitors don’t pay the price they bid for each click, but instead pay one cent higher than their next closest competitors bid. If you bid one cent lower than your next competitor, it will force him/her to pay full price for the bid, something that is hard to keep up for long.
These are some basic bid management techniques that can help you maximize ROI with your PPC advertising campaign. Remember that patience can go a long way to maximizing the efficiency of your PPC campaign. Don’t be afraid to wait for your moment, and then seize it when it comes.
PPC Management Services UK
Using some highly concentrated online marketing PPC campaign is a great strategy for improving sales in the UK. But occasionally the necessary time to manage a PPC campaign is just too much to handle without some outside help. If you reach this point, there are several available PPC management companies in the UK that offer varying types of campaign management service. This article talks about what they offer.
When a company offers PPC campaign management, they are usually offering to do 3 things for you. First, they will do a careful keyword analysis for keyword and keyword phrases related to your industry. Most access similar information to do this, and therefore will draw up similar results. The PPC management UK company will attempt to create the best possible mix of high-volume keywords and very targeted keywords, giving your campaign some diversity and, ultimately, giving it the best chance for success.
The next thing that most PPC management companies UK will offer is an ad writing service. Though this varies based on the company, most reputable PPC management companies will afford you this option for an additional fee. By writing different text ads for each keyword group, they should be able to increase the relevance of your ads, and subsequently increase the amount of clicks you get. And by providing a more specific ad, your clicks-to-sales conversion rate will likely improve once customers arrive at your sales page.
The third main feature of PPC management companies is the monitoring of your campaign. This means that they will track detailed statistics of your campaign’s progress and report these numbers back to you, along with suggestions for new strategies if they are needed. This is the most valuable service to many people who use PPC management because it is time consuming.
After taking these factors into consideration, you should determine if a PPC management service is a good fit for your needs. If you are conducting a smaller campaign, it will probably not be cost-effective to hire out a professional service. With a larger campaign, it may be worth it to save yourself valuable time. And, on a larger scale, you have a greater chance of offsetting these costs with increased margins. It is important to remember that a PPC management UK company will charge you for setting up your campaign, and then take a percentage of your monthly budget. If you can’t afford this double billing, then it may be best to run your own PPC campaign - something that is very doable.
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