Make your Site Googleable

You can help make sure that your site turns up in search just when it should by taking advantage of these tips from Google's Search Quality Team.

1. Not sure if all your pages are being seen by Google?
   Search for your site's address after the command "site", like [site:fuchsiasoft.com].
   When you see your pages in the results, check your snippet content and page titles.
   Include information that matches the topic of a particular page.
   If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools.
   
   
2. If you upload new pages or topics faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a Google Sitemap and include a refresh rate.
   
   
3. Label your images appropriately. Users searching in Google Image Search will more easily find the image on your site.
   Don't miss out on potential traffic because of [001.jpg] instead of [NintendoWii.jpg].
   Image Search is one of the largest search properties out there, so you should take advantage of it.
   
   
4. Manage your SiteLinks. Your most valuable links may not be the ones that Google chooses as SiteLinks, so remember you can remove any that you don't think users will find useful.
   
   
5. Check for errors and keyword traffic in Webmaster Tools. See Google's diagnostics checklist.
   
   
6. Serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you've retired a page permanently, serve a 404. If you've simply relocated it, serve a 301.
   The more Google know about your old pages, the faster Google will find the next best page on your site for a given query.
   
   
7. Users and search engines like organic content. Make some of your own!
   
   
8. Read Google's recently released SEO Starter Guide.
   
   
9. Watch Google's Tutorials for Webmasters.
   
   
10. Find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.
    
    
11. Get the latest updates from the Webmaster Central Blog.
    
    
12. Find answers to your questions in Google's Webmaster Help Center, or ask your questions in the Webmaster Help Group.

Original Source: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/12/light-up-your-site.html

Selling Online

1. Define your USP - your Unique Selling Proposition. Why should I buy this, from you, today, instead of anything and everything else on the Internet?
What do you uniquely guarantee? If you have a good USP, not only will a good bit of your statement fit in a Google ad, the ad will almost write itself.
It may be VERY helpful to do some keyword-based market research (i.e. Livingston method) - this makes defining your USP color-by-numbers.

2. Find a steady and reliable source of traffic, people who are looking for a solution to the problem you solve. This by no means has to be Google AdWords.
According to Chris Cardell who is one of the best-known marketing consultants in the UK, said,
"Most of the online successes I have seen built their business on Google AdWords - not SEO, not social media, not YouTube videos, not blogging, not affiliate ventures. Google ads bring steady, reliable traffic day in and day out. It allows you to perfect your sales process, scientifically."
To which we could add, the ability to go into a competitive market and buy clicks and get interested customers to your site - who then spend money - that's what separates the men from the boys.
If you can't do that, you're playing on the sidelines. If you can...
No one can stop you.

3. Build a sales funnel. Where the sales process matches the buying process.
If it's a quick, impulse buy then it's a quick, impulse sale. If it's a process of decisions and relationships, then it's got a lot of steps. Break it down.

4. Test and track. Once the funnel is built, test the pieces of the funnel.
Break it into pieces and make the pieces work. Split test landing pages and sales pages A/B, the same way you test Google ads.

5. Define your product so as to accommodate a range of buying appetites. Have something not only for the curious guy who wants to stick his toe in the water, but also something for the serious aficionado.

6. Expand your Strategy. Once your sales funnel is performing admirably, incorporate Perry Marshall's "Expanding Universe Theory" -

1. Google AdWords
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Other PPC's like Yahoo and MSN etc etc.
4. Email promotions
5. Affiliates
6. Press Releases
7. Direct Mail
8. Print Advertising

....as you go from one item on the list to the next and the next,
your traffic expands exponentially. And so do your sales. You go from being merely a player to being a market dominator.

This process is linear. It's straightforward. It's color-by-numbers.
It's predictable. If you've got a USP that your market loves, you go through the steps and you get the results.

Source:
Perry Marshall's newsletter

Dominate Google Rankings

The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search results; pages ranked by tangible value. That tangible value is a combination  of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking  in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking.)

Here are a few tips that will help you take full advantage of Google's love of linking...

1.) Link Deep and with Relevance
So why is deeper better and what's this about relevance? Google figured out that a link to a homepage is only good if that homepage has the information the visitor needs. If a person clicks a link for "amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe" and ends up on the home page, which has nothing of the sort, Google discounts it as a wasted link. On the other hand, if the link leads to the page containing info on the "Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe," even five levels deep, the link has huge value to the visitor and to Google.

Want some proof? You already have it if you've ever used Google's AdWords pay per click service. They will not even accept PAID links to pages that are not the most relevant for their visitors, regardless of what you are willing to pay per click. Now that's saying something!

2.) Use Absolute Links Internally
It sounds complicated but it's not. Absolute links are those with a fixed full URL. There's another kind, called "relative" links that skip the first part of the domain and remain "relative" to the file structure. Let's take a look at the difference...

Here's the absolute link to the Google Ads page from Google's homepage: "http://www.google.com/intl/en/ads/"

Here's what it might look like as a relative link: "./intl/en/ads/"

Long story short; absolute links help your SEO efforts and relative links don't.

3.) Use Keywords in Anchor Text
Use relevant keywords in your link anchor text (that is the text within the hyperlink.) Forget about "Click Here" like you see on so many sites. Not only does that not help your ranking, it actually lowers the relevancy of your real keywords because Google believes that if a word is important enough it will likely be used as part of a link to get the visitor where they want to go.

4.) Follow the 1% Solution
Make no more than 1% of your page text into links (both outbound and internal.) That is, if you have 500 words on the page there should be no more than 5 text links total. And don't overuse the same keyword text for the links. So if you have three mentions each of three different keywords, try to use each just once in a link. Then use similar text for any remaining links.

Example: If "chocolate chip cookies" is your main keyword phrase you might use "chocolate chip cookies" as the anchor text for one link and then "my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe" for another link.

It's also a good idea to use 10 Links Max per page whether you have 1,000 words or 10,000 words on that page.

5.) Add a Link Failsafe
This is really simple and almost nobody does it. Links get broken more often than we like. Sometimes it's because we moved a page and sometimes it has nothing to do with anything we consciously did (especially with blogs.) The solution is to create a custom 404 page (Page Not Found) that looks just like any other page on your site and has a simple note like "We're sorry we cannot find the page you are looking for. However, if you love cookies of all kinds we think you'll find exactly what you want by clicking on one of the following links..."
Then of course you have a navigation system for them to follow.

6.) Get the Best Links Possible
This is extremely important yet often overlooked because it can be such a difficult and time consuming job. If you take nothing else away from this article, please take this... Finding the best possible inbound links is the single most important thing you can do to make the number one spot on Google.

Here are three tips to help minimize your time and effort while giving you results SEO experts charge an arm and a leg for.

A.) Get listed in directories.
Submit your site to the top directories like Jayde.com and DMOZ.org. Once they link to your site you will have great relevant inbound links and some instant credibility with Google.

Here are some great free directories in order of value, starting with the best... dmoz.org, jayde.com, webworldindex.com, turnpike.net, and directoryvault.com. Yahoo is important but charges $299 for commercial site inclusion.

B.) Use "Special Commands" to do the legwork for you.
The best linked sites can easily be found with a simple search command called "allinanchor:" Here's how to use it. Go to Google and type in "allinanchor:keyword goes here" (no quotes and no space after the colon.) Now hit Enter and you'll see the sites that have the highest relevancy for keywords used in anchor text. Look for any that you know are competitors and outrank your site.

Now take the URL for any of these and use this command "link:www.theirdomain.extension" (again with no quotes and no space after the colon.) This will show you all the sites linking in as well as internal pages linking back in.

In short, these two special commands give you an inside look at exactly how the competition does what it does with the results they get. This is huge!

C.) Use good SEO software whenever possible.
If you can afford to spend one or two hundred dollars to save huge amounts of time and get professional results, it's well worth it. Like many SEO professionals whose livelihood depends on results, I've been using SEO software to get top search engine placement for years. The best ones not only help you identify great link partners but will even help you contact them and make sure they don't cheat you in any way.

If possible, get a tool that also does rank checking and reporting. Once you begin you'll want to check rankings every so often and an automated tool will save you a ton of time. Oddly enough I bought SEO Elite primarily for rank checking then discovered it was worth its weight in gold as linking tool as well. So whatever tool you use, get as much out of it as you can.

About Author:
Mike Small is the founder of the free SEO (search engine optimization) site SEOpartner.com and author of numerous search engine optimization books and whitepapers including the SEO Notebook.

10 Serious AdWords Beginners Mistakes

1. Neglecting to Split-Test Your Ads. I've gotta say one of the coolest discoveries of my whole life was, in my first week of playing with AdWords 5+ years ago, noticing that "create new ad" link and seeing that I could create a 2nd and 3rd and 4th ad and try different text. Running them simultaneously, then seeing how teeny tiny changes made huge differences. I still get jazzed about this. It's like practicing psychology without a license.

2. Letting Google Retire Your Ads Without Testing: In Campaign Settings, when you turn "Optimize Ad Serving" OFF, you declare a winner and a loser much faster. Turn that option off if you're checking in every day.

3. Split Testing for Improved CTR Only: At first, Click Thru Rate is the only thing you can measure. You want it high so you get the most traffic. But eventually what REALLY matters is conversion rate and cost per new customer. Sometimes high CTR ads don't bring buyers. Conversion is what matters most.

4. Ignoring the Display URL Line in your Ad: If you own www.redwagon.com, you should try www.RedWagon.com, and www.RedWagon.com/RadioFlyer, or www.RadioFlyer.RedWagon.com, or RedWagonStore.com. Tiny hinges swing big doors.

5. Creating Ad Groups with Unrelated Keywords: Do not write an ad and dump every keyword under the sun into the ad group. Make tight ad groups based on a narrow set of related keywords matched closely to the ads and the landing page.

6. Muddying Search and Content Results: If you run all three streams of traffic (Google / Search / Content Network) through the same ad group, you lose the ability to distinguish among the very different kinds of traffic. I prefer to separate Google & Search from Content, in different campaigns.

7. Ignoring the 80/20 Principle: The 80/20 Rule says that the vast majority of outputs (impressions, clicks, leads, sales) are caused by a very small minority of inputs (ad groups, ads and keywords.) Spend your time on the vital few instead of the insignificant many.

8. Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Slowly: If you can declare a winner twice as fast, your site improves twice as fast. I recommend combing through your ads as often as you can announce a winner. If you go to www.splittester.com you can enter the # of clicks and the CTR of any two ads and it'll tell you whether the better one is really better, or if it might just be luck.

9. Declaring Split-Test Winners to Quickly: If one ad got 1% and 5 clicks, and the other got 2% and 8 clicks, that's not enough clicks to know for sure the winner is a sure thing. Again, let www.splittester.com decide their fate. Rule of thumb: 20+ clicks on each ad.

10. Ignoring negative keywords: Just about ANY ad group should probably have some negative keywords. It should always be on your checklist. It increases your Click Through Rate because your ads don't get shown to people who shouldn't see them. Less waste.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

What Google Wants from an Advertiser

The cynics in the crowd will say, "OUR MONEY!!!" ...but that ain't necessarily the case. As anyone who's had Quality Score problems will know.

Google wants much more than that. If that was all they were after.... they wouldn't have any. It's their willingness to walk away that makes them successful. (And there's a lesson in that, too.)

Today, some clues to the difference between what is merely good and what is great.

-First of all, Google wants ads that get clicked on. If nobody clicks on your ad, they don't get paid for the click. That's why your ad position is not just determined by bid price but by the Click Thru Rate. I've seen CTR's lower than 0.1% for search traffic and CTR's upwards of 30%. The difference between a bad ad and a good one is gigantic.

-Google rewards and prefers stability and longevity. When you first open a brand new Google account, every assumption they make is *not* in your favor. Before the very first click comes - while they're still taking all the risk for you - they're going to assume you don't know how to write good ads, that people who come to your website will probably leave right away, that you're incompetent.

You pay the highest click prices in the beginning.

But.... if you establish a good click thru rate and users don't hit the "back" button once they hit your site, the Big G starts breathing a sigh of relief and gives you more breathing room of your own. I've been observing for years now that good advertisers' click costs tend to stay level. I've even seen, lately, some going down instead of up. Just last night I talked to one of my Roundtable members, who's competing with hundreds of advertisers, and in the last year he's seen his click costs slowly drop from $2 a click to under a buck.

I think some of that is his market but some of it is also the trust he's earned from the search engine. His websites are quality, his ad campaigns are properly constructed, and he's got an automatic advantage over the New Kid In Town. At least until New Kid In Town proves himself.

-I know another guy in an equally competitive niche who started out paying $11 per click but after a few days dropped down to about $2. Once again, it's that trust and stability Google was looking for.

-Google likes to see a low "bounce rate." That's the number of people who click to your site and immediately bail. Google Analytics (which will be covered in detail during the upcoming Bobsled Run, starts September 25) reports this for you as a percentage.

-Ideally Google would like to see those people click on your ad, disappear into your site and never be seen again. Hopefully because your visitors are so deliriously happy and involved in what you are doing that they don't want to search again. THAT is your mission, should you choose to accept it.

-Ads that consistently have a high ranking and high CTR will begin to show up on the premium space across the top of the search results, instead of running down the right side.

What you most need to know is that the "real money" in your website is all about what happens after the first click - and after that - and after that - and after that. What that person does over a long period of time. That's where the real wizardry is. I can assure you, there's a ton of money you're leaving on the table right now. But it can be yours.


Source: Perry Marshall's email newsletter

How to Defend your Website from the Google Duplicate Proxy Exploit

There is a current and active way to knock a website out of Google's search engine results. It's simple and effective. This information is already in the public domain and the more people that know about it, the more likelihood there is that Google will do something about it. This article will tell you how it works, how to get a website knocked out of the search engine rankings, but most importantly, how to defend your own website from having it happen to you.

To understand this exploit, you must first understand about Google's Duplicate Content filter. It's simply described thus: Google doesn't want you to search for "blue widget" and have the top 10 search terms returned copies of the same article on how great blue widgets are. They want to give you ONE copy of the Great Blue Widget article, and 9 other different results, just on the off chance that you've already read that article and the other results are actually what you wanted.

To handle this, every time Google spiders and indexes a page, it checks it to see if it's already got a page that is predominantly the same, a duplicate page if you will. Exactly how Google works this out, nobody knows exactly, but it is going to be a combination of some or all of: page text length, page title, headings, keyword densities, checking exactly copy sentence fragments etc. As a result of this duplicate content filter, a whole industry has grown up around trying to get round the filter. Just search for "spin article".

Getting back to the story here, Google indexes a page and lets say it fails it's duplicate content check, what does Google do?
These days, it dumps that duplicate page in Google's Supplemental Index. What, you didn't know that Google has 2 indexes? Well they do: the main one, and a supplemental one. Two things are important here: Google will always return results from their Main index if they can; and they will only go to the Supplemental index if they don't get enough joy from their main index. What this means is that if your page is in the supplemental index, it's almost certain that you will never show up in the Search Engine Ranking Pages, unless there is next to no competition for the phrase that was searched for.

This all seems pretty reasonable to me, so what's the problem? Well there's another little step I haven't mentioned yet. What happens if someone copies your page, let's say your homepage of your business website, and when Google indexes that copy, it correctly determines that it's a duplicate. Now Google knows about 2 pages that it knows are duplicates, it has to decide which to dump in the supplemental index, and which to keep in the main one. That's pretty obvious right? But how does Google know which is the original and which is the copy? They don't. Sure they have some clever algorithms to work it out, but even if they are 99% accurate, that leaves a lot of problems for that 1% of times they can get it wrong!

And this is the heart of the exploit, if someone copies your website's homepage say, and manages to convince Google that *their* page is the original, your homepage will get tossed into the supplemental index, never to see the light of day in the Search Engine Ranking Pages again. In case I'm not being clear enough, that's bad! But wait, it gets worse:

It's fair to say that in the case of a person physically copying your page and hostíng it, you can often get them to take it down through the use of copyright lawyers, and cease and desist letters to ISP's and the like, with a quick "Reinclusion Request" to Google. But recently there's a new threat that's a whole lot harder to stop: the use of publicly accessible Proxy websites. (If you don't know what a Proxy is, it's basically a way of making the web run faster by caching content more local to your internet destination. In principle, they are generally a good thing.)

There are many such web proxies out there, and I won't líst any here, however I will describe the process: they send out spiders (much like Google's) and they spider your page, take your content, then they host a copy of your website on their proxy site, nominally so that when their users request your page, they can serve up their local copy quickly rather than having to retrieve if off your server. The big issue is that Google can sometimes decide that the proxy copy of your web page is the original, and yours is not.

Worse again, there's some evidence that people are deliberately and maliciously using proxy servers to cache copies of web pages, then using normal (white and black hat) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to make those proxy pages rank in the search engine, increasing the likelihood that your legitímate page will be the one dumped by the search engines' duplicate content filters. Danger Will Robinson!

Even worse still, some of the proxy spiders actively spoof their origins so that you don't realise that it's a spider from a proxy, as they pretend to be a Googlebot for example, or from Yahoo. This is why the major search engines actively publish guidelines on how to identify and validate their own spiders.

Now for the big question, how can you defend against this? There are several possible solutions, depending on your web hostíng technology and technical competence:

Option 1 - If you are running Apache and PHP on your server, you can set the webhost up to check for search engine spiders that purport to be from the main search engines, and using php and the .htaccess file, you can block proxies from other sources. However this only works for proxies that are playing by the rules and identifying themselves correctly.

Option 2 - If you are using MS Windows and IIS on your server, or if you are on a shared hostíng solution that doesn't give you the ability to do anything clever, it's an awful lot harder and you should take the advice of a professional on how to defend yourself from this kind of attack.

Option 3 - This is currently the best solution available, and applies if you are running a PHP or ASP based website: you set ALL pages robot meta tags to noindex and nofollow, then you implement a PHP or ASP scrípt on each page that checks for valid spiders from the major search engines, and if so, resets the robot meta tags to index and follow. The important distinction here is that it's easier to validate a real spider, and to discount a spider that's trying to spoof you, because the major search engines publish processes and procedures to do this, including IP lookups and the like.

So, stay aware, stay knowledgeable, and stay protected. And if you see that you've suddenly been dumped from the Search Engine Rankings Pages, now you might know why, how and what to do about it.

About The Author
Sophie White is an Internet Marketing and Website Promotion Consultant at Intrinsic Marketing an SEO and Pay-Per-Click firm dedicated to supplying Better Website ROI.

10 Steps To Top 10 Rankings In Google

Most webmasters go totally "gaga" for top 10 rankings in Google. And for good reason, Google is the most dominant search engine on the net and will deliver the largest amount of traffic.

Even those webmasters who are fortunate enough to get No. 1 rankings for their keywords in all the three major search engines will tell you Google is the one that will deliver the majority of their traffic. Hands down.

More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffic is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business. In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good search able keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money. 

How To Proceed?

First, you must know the rudimentary basics of how keywords work. Keywords and keyword phrases are the exact words someone types into a search engine to find what they're looking for online. If you have a site on "dog training" then your goal is to get a top 10 ranking for the keywords "dog training".

Now if no one searches for "dog training" it would be a useless keyword, you would get no traffic no matter how perfectly your site is optimized for that keyword. 

How Do You Know If A Keyword Is Good? 

To find out, you have to do some keyword research on your particular keywords. Many professional online marketers use keyword research software like Brad Callen's Keyword Elite. However, you can also use the keyword suggestion tools supplied by Google Adwords or Overture. Try here:

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/ 

Now if you check "dog training", you will find it receives around 4,469 searches each day. That's a lot of traffic but you must realize that it may be too good, or rather too competitive for your purposes, especially if have a new site.

Biggest Mistake When Choosing Keywords

The most common mistake most novice webmasters make is targeting keywords which are too competitive. You simply will not be able to compete or place for extremely competitive keywords. Well established sites and businesses with very deep pockets have the resources to completely dominate those keywords.

While it is not entirely futile nor a waste of time to concentrate your efforts on highly competitive keywords, you will have better success if you target low to medium competitive keywords.

Long Tail Keyword Marketing

Besides online marketers have discovered that longer keyword phrases are usually the most lucrative. These phrases deliver traffic which is better targeted and more likely to convert into a sale. "Dog hunting training" which gets around 100 searches a day will be more targeted than the general term "dog training" and if you have a site devoted to training hunting dogs then this keyword phrase may convert better for you.

Always keep this "Long Tail" keyword strategy in the back of your mind as you implement the following steps to achieve your own Top 10 Rankings in Google.

1. Make A Master Keyword List 

Your first step is to make a master list of the keywords you wish to target. Obviously these should be closely related to the theme of your site. As you can see from the example above, it is best to choose low to medium competitive keywords. Check the keyword competition by seeing how many sites are listed in Google for that keyword. Webmasters also check the Google PageRank of the sites that hold the top 10 positions. If all those sites are PR6 and above it may be hard to get ranked high for your keywords.

2. Choose Related Keywords

Once you have your master list of keywords, find long tail related keywords to target. Again, check out the competition and daily searches made for each chosen keyword.

3. Use Quality Content For Your Keywords

Creating quality content should always be your main goal. Write for actual visitors who will see and read your content. First and foremost you must have good useful content that your visitors will use themselves and recommend to their friends or colleagues. Tie this quality content in with your chosen keywords. Use one keyword phrase per page.

4. Use Keyword In Domain Name, Title And URLs

Having your keyword in your domain name will score big points from search engines. Plus, each page of content should contain your keywords in the title & meta tags for that page. Most experts also suggest you have your keyword in the URL and use hyphens to separate your keywords. Although the author has gotten good results by using an underscore and htm in URLs. Example: www.yoursite.com/your_keyword.htm

5. Do On Page Optimization

Keyword ratio is a much discussed topic by SEO experts and many suggest you should have your keyword in the H1 or headline title of your page. Sprinkle your keyword and variations of it throughout your page. Don't over do it but make sure the robot/spiders will clearly discover what your page is about. Many webmasters make sure they include their main keyword in the first and last 25 words on their pages. 

6. Use Traffic Modules

One technique that works extremely well in Google is clustering a closely related topic or subject into a distinct separate section on your site. For example, if you have a marketing site, you could create a whole section on article marketing where you would have 50 to 100 keyworded pages all relating to your subject. Writing articles, formatting articles, submitting articles, article software... place a keyword linked menu on each page to connect all your pages together.

Keep in mind, your main objective is to supply quality information to your visitors. One reason Google may favor this type of structure is because they want quality content returned in their SERPs. 

7. Try Article Marketing

Article marketing is writing short informative articles on keyword topics related to your sites. You then submit these helpful keyworded articles to ezine directories on the web, when your articles are picked up by related sites you receive quality One-Way links. The higher the quality of your article, the more links you will receive. 

Another ranking tactic to use, if you're just starting out your site will probably have a low PR rank and you will find it hard to rank for even modest keywords. That's why it's useful to take advantage of the higher PageRank of the major ezine directories. Your keyworded articles on these high PR sites will get picked up by Google and displayed in the top 10 rankings. Now the displayed URL will be the article directory site but the links in the resource box will be pointing back to your site. Over time this article marketing technique will raise your own site's rankings for those keywords. Simple but effective.

8. Anchor Text And One Way Links

Off page optimization is important in obtaining high rankings in Google. Getting quality One-Way links is very important. Anchor Text simply refers to "the underlined clicked on words" in your links. Most webmasters include their keywords in their anchor text as this tells the search engines exactly what the links are about. 

9. Tags, Blogging And Web 2.0

Take advantage of Web 2.0 by using blogs, RSS feeds and the social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg. Try AddThis.com for a simple social bookmarking system. At the very least your site should have a blog and RSS feed attached to it as this is an effective way of boosting your keyword rankings. 

Tags have become very important for getting higher rankings. Keep in mind, in Free blogging software such as WordPress, categories will automatically be seen as tags. Blogger, which is owned by Google, now has a form where you put your keywords (tags) for each post you make.

10. PPC vs Organic Search

Of course, one of the fastest ways to get your links displayed on Google is to pay for them by using Google Adwords. Your ad and links will sit side by side with the organic link results. In Pay Per Click advertising you bid or pay so much per click for your keywords and you only pay when someone clicks your links. But smart marketers also know since you're getting millions of impressions advertising your products, acquiring name recognition and branding through PPC advertising can be a major side-benefit. 

However, most webmasters would say that organic links (SERPS) will return better traffic than paid links or advertising. In most cases, this may be true because Google's organic rankings are becoming more respected and more trusted by users. They simply carry more weight with surfers.

This makes it even more beneficial to obtain top 10 rankings for your keywords in Google. Depending on the competitiveness of your chosen keywords reaching the first page listing or even the favored number one spot is well within any webmaster's reach. Just go for it. The rewards are well worth your efforts.

By Titus Hoskins

The author is a full-time online marketer who contributes his high rankings in Google as the major source of his online income. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools

Google AdWords vs. Other Advertising Media

"Sometimes Google AdWords is the least effective way to reach your target customer."

A chance conversation in New York City shows why other advertising media may be better for you - because each form of advertising slices the world in a different, unique way

Last May I was in New York City for Gary Bencivenga's now-legendary copywriting seminar, and taking the day off on a lovely Sunday afternoon. Just off Broadway and a few blocks from Central Park, I was drinking coffee in a donut shop when two guys struck up a conversation with me.

Turns out one of them was a senior sales executive for the Thomas Register. In case you're not familiar, the Thomas Register is a very old company that, pre-Internet, used to make a gigantic set of green books that you would see in a company library, purchasing or engineering office. These books, which probably weighed 100+ pounds, were the national 'Yellow pages' for every kind of manufacturing you can possibly think of.

And pre-Internet, if you wanted to buy machine tools, adhesives, pump controllers, conveyor belts or literally hundreds of thousands of other items, the Thomas Register was probably the easiest way to find all of those things.

But now you just do a Google search. Right?

And that's what this guy hears when he's selling space at ThomasNet.com (they don't even print those big books anymore) - his prospect says 'Hey, I don't need to advertise on your site, I'll just advertise on Google.'

Well nobody's in a better position than me to say that sometimes Google AdWords is NOT the best way for his prospect to reach a new customer! Sometimes it's a lousy way to reach your target customer. Let me give you some examples:

* Last year I had a client who manufactures AC Adapters - you know, those big black plugs that provide power for your CD player or charge your cel phone. We tried mightily to make Google AdWords work, and couldn't. Why? Because this company sells custom lots of 500 units or more to manufacturers, but all the traffic for "AC Adapters" and related keywords is everyday consumers looking to buy one unit at a time. Our Google campaign was a total failure, despite our best efforts to dis-qualify the customer. The ads would say "minimum lots of 500," but Joe Consumer would click on the ad anyway, then leave. A manufacturing directory is a much better way to reach other manufacturers than Google in that situation.

* Let's say you sell some kind of high-end equipment, software or consulting to high level executives - and lower-level people are a waste of time for you. (Very common scenario!) Is bidding on keywords a good way to target those executives? No, not really. Maybe only 1% of the people searching are executives, the rest just waste your clicks. Direct mail would be much, much better for that. A FEDEX envelope on the executive's desk is a rifle shot.

* Keyword based advertising only works when people know they have a problem and can describe it to themselves and believe that somebody on the Internet has a solution. But many people have severe problems they don't even realize they have. If that's the case, search engine marketing isn't a very good way to reach them. You need to interrupt them instead. So again, direct mail, ads in magazines they read, TV, radio - all of those media might be better. Search engine marketing only gets you people who are proactively looking to solve their problem right now.

* Sometimes search traffic gets you, ironically, the lowest quality, least-interested and least qualified prospects. People who regularly visit specific web sites are much more interested and much more qualified. Here's an example: Let's say you are doing fundraising for environmental activism. You could bid on the keyword "environment," but what you'd probably get is high school kids doing homework assignments and writing papers about the environment. Now it may be nice to reach those kids with your message, but you ain't gonna get any money out of them. And if you think about it, people who are already active and interested in that probably are not typing "environment" into a search engine. They already have sites they like to go to. You get much better traffic, and more donations, advertising on those sites. (That's why, in some categories, AdSense gets you better traffic than Google searches.)

Every kind of advertising media slices the world in a different way. Bidding on keywords slices the world according to who's got an itch to scratch, right now. Direct mail slices the world according to what magazines people subscribe to, what mail order products they've purchased, what charities they've donated money to. Compiled mailing lists slice the world according to where they live, what income level they're in, what positions they hold in their jobs, what kind of home they live in.

"Rock - Paper - Scissors"

Print advertising slices the world according to topics people are interested in - if you advertise in Bass Fisherman magazine, you get guys who are rabidly interested in bass fishing. If you advertise on the radio at 7:30 in the morning, you get people who are on their way to work. The pros and cons of every form of advertising are sort of like that game "Rock - Paper - Scisssors" where each has its unique advantages and disadvantages.

So I told the Thomas Register exec that he just needs to come out and say that yes, sometimes Google is hands down the easiest, cheapest way to get new customers. (His prospect will be rather surprised to hear him say that! Coming clean will boost his credibility.) But he can point out that also sometimes, as with those AC Adapters, Google may also be one of the worst ways to get a new customer.

For most people, the truth is somewhere in the middle. For most people, Google is a great way to get a certain amount of high quality leads, but there are only so many available. It's like an oil well that pumps out just so much every day, and no more. Plus you never want to have all your eggs in one basket, that makes you very vulnerable. So you need to explore other avenues.

In conversations I've had, people have been using any or all of the following ways to acquire new customers:

* Buying space ads in e-zines
* Endorsed email blasts from affiliates
* Pop-under and popup ads on other sites
* Postcard mailings
* Direct Mail
* Magalogs - catalogs that look like magazines
* Spots in other peoples' catalogs
* FEDEX envelopes to highly-targeted prospects from carefully selected mailing lists
* Banner ads
* Radio
* TV
* Telemarketing
* Issuing a Press Release
* Writing a Book
* Being an "Expert" on a Talk Show
* Exhibiting at Trade Shows
* Flyers distributed house-to-house or business-to-business
* Doing a custom teleseminar for another person's email list
* Ads in magazines
* Remnant space in local newspapers, purchased at a deep discount rates
* Speaking at seminars
* Card Decks - i.e. packet of postcards that comes in the mail
* Writing magazine articles and e-zine articles
* "Buyer advocate" sites like Thomas Register and Globalspec
* Flyer inserts in newspapers, magazines or mail-order shipments (that's called "Insert media")
* "Lumpy Mail" - sending people interesting objects, like one guy I know who mailed out a six foot canoe paddle

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So save this list for the next time you have one of those days when it seems impossible to find a new customer!

Remember that every other advertiser out there has access to some customers, and many of them know they can make a little more money (and not lose any business) by giving you controlled access to their customers. And many times even though those other media may have a higher customer acquisition cost, the customers may be higher quality.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Marketing & Sales Message

Your marketing & sales message must effectively answer the following four questions:

1. Why should I read or listen to you?

2. Why should I believe what you have to say?

3. Why should I do anything about what you’re offering?

4. Why should I act now?

These are very basic questions, but few sales people can fire back fast answers to any of them. There are all kinds of companies who are the greatest in the world, but can’t give you a really solid explanation of what they do or why it matters.

Your precise answer to these four questions is your Unique Selling Proposition. You must have this message clearly defined and focused. It must be written down and you must be able to repeat it in the middle of the night when your spouse wakes you from a deep sleep. Everything you do should answer those questions in a consistent way, whether directly or indirectly.

Every time you communicate with your customer, you should reinforce the core ingredients of your sales message.

People forget. It’s never good enough to say something just once. Once your prospects have contacted you, they should regularly get things from you that reinforce what you told them the first time, and every time you talk to them, you must communicate your core sales message.

It’s easy to get tired of constantly saying the same thing all the time, and it’s easy to stop doing things that work just because you get bored with them. But you must resist this temptation and consistently, persistently reinforce that message.

Your message will never be consistent unless everyone in the company agrees on what it is. If you change your message every month, you’ll never get real traction in the marketplace because customers will have only a vague idea of what you do.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Sales Leads on Auto Pilot

A true marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month after month, year after year, so your salespeople only spend time with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem.

Our entire modern world is only possible because we can automate many things. If new cars were assembled by hand instead of machines, they would cost $100,000 instead of $20,000. If we used Pony Express to deliver mail, each letter you send would cost $100 instead of 37 cents.
Just as manufacturing in developed countries must be automated, similarly no sales person can effectively compete in the 21st century unless automated marketing tools are doing the most unpleasant and inefficient grunt work for him.
A finely-tuned marketing system is automated. It’s like a machine used in manufacturing: If you power it up and put raw material in one end, it produces qualified results – prospects – on the other end, predictably and reliably, around the clock.
Every day when you walk into the office you know it will produce new potential customer relationships for you to cultivate.

A Website Can Sell on Autopilot: 24/7/365
One of my most interesting successes was creating a web page that sold a product on the Internet. It was a four page sales letter that used those time-tested marketing formulas to move my customer from mere casual interest all the way to typing in their credit card information and ordering the product online. There was no phone number where they could call and ask for more information, and no email address. The website had to do all the work by itself.
That web page has hardly been changed in three years, and it is still successfully selling that product to one out of every twenty-five visitors. It literally runs like clockwork, a selling machine that works on autopilot. You can’t do much better than that, can you? The product and the website together are like an annuity that works for me 24/7/365 and puts money in my bank account month after month with 55% gross profit – all with no maintenance and no annoying phone calls.
Wouldn’t you like your business to run that way? Wouldn’t you like your sales process to be a machine that runs on autopilot, constantly generating leads or sales orders whether you’re awake or asleep, whether you’re in the office or on the golf course?

Sales Leads on Autopilot, 24/7/365
I’m here to tell you that your business CAN run that way. Now please understand, if you sell two million dollar printing presses, nobody’s going to order one from your website with their VISA card, as though it were a $12 book on Amazon.com. However, you CAN get lots of quality sales leads for that printing press, the exact same way, if you know how to do it. Make no mistake: Once you have a system like that in place, your life as a sales professional will change for the better – forever. You will NEVER go back to the old way of selling again!
When you have that kind of marketing machine working for you, you’ll make more money, have less stress, experience less month-to-month variation in your sales numbers; your sales people will be more motivated, you’ll attract reps and resellers and get more mind share from your sales people because they don’t have to work nearly as hard to get appointments.

Autopilot: Not a Fantasy, But A Necessity
“Marketing on autopilot” is not some fantasy or theoretical ideal. It is a the cornerstone of literally thousands of businesses and it quite literally is the difference between failure and success for many people. If you look around at all the really successful people you know, they all have systems that work for them when they’re playing or working on other projects. Maybe it’s their stock portfolio, growing their money year after year. Maybe it’s real estate income, maybe it’s their employees and the businesses they own. But in any case, they’re not using manual labor. If you can make the transition from manual-labor grunt work sales to marketing on autopilot, you’ve literally built a foundation for business success.
Do you or your sales people spend 50% of their time prospecting for new business? There are millions of sales professionals who spend most of their waking hours doing just that. It’s even worse for brand new salespeople, who often spend 80-90% of their time doing prospecting and cold call grunt work.
Believe me, I’ve done it. And it was tragically wasteful.
What would happen to your commission checks if you could end the never-ending battle with voice mail and eliminate the time wasted getting past gatekeepers and setting up appointments? What if you spent all that time in front of qualified prospects instead? Wouldn’t you double your sales and your income?
Convert that wasted prospecting and grunt work time to productive sales time. Generate a steady flow of interested prospects who call you and want you to help them, and make sure your sales people are spending 90% of their time in front of those prospects. You’ll make twice as much money and cut your stress level in half!

Eliminate the Stomach Churning Misery of Cold Calls and Rejection
There are several other huge benefits to this, by the way: first, the life of your sales people dramatically changes for the better. The stomach churning rejection and constant stream of no, not interested… not today… call me in three months… you’ll have to talk to the purchasing department about that… all that goes away. It’s far less tempting to procrastinate when you know that everyone you call on the phone is at least somewhat interested in having your help in solving a problem. It’s a lot easier to roll out of bed in the morning when you know that when you get to the office every day, you’re going to have a number of hot leads on your desk that have come in via the website, email, fax machine or voice mail, people who understand what you do and are waiting for you to help them solve their problem.
Second, it’s easier to attract and keep good sales people, whether they work directly for you or if they’re commissioned representatives or resellers.
Now if you sell a cutting edge, high tech product, then despite the fact that it’s cool and sexy, it’s probably very hard to sell. The world has an overabundance of neat products that nobody feels compelled to use. This forces small, innovative companies to do backbreaking missionary work to sell that neat new product. This is the #1 reason why hi tech companies go out of business – the cost of acquiring new customers is simply too high.

Getting Those “Lazy” Distributors to Go Sell Something
Have you ever tried to get your distributors to sell a bleeding edge “missionary work” type of product? It’s like nailing jello to the wall. You can’t get a distributor who’s making maybe 20% gross profit to stock and promote a product that nobody’s eager to buy. It just doesn’t make business sense for him to do so.
A lot of manufacturers think it’s just because those distributors are lazy. They think, “These guys are all bozos! They just don’t understand how great our product really is!” No, actually it’s because they’re too smart. They’ve fallen for that before, probably more than once, and they’re not going to do it again. They work on commission; they’ve got car payments and a mortgage. And they don’t like eating baloney sandwiches and ramen soup.
So if you have a cool, sexy, cutting edge, high tech product, and if you use my lead generation system, then you won’t have any problem getting serious potential customers to raise their hands and express interest in that product.
The system will educate those prospects at very low cost before you make any significant investment in them, and you’ll be certain that they’re pre-disposed to buy before you get in your car and go see them.

Your Marketing System Can Protect You From Lousy Prospects
Please listen very carefully: You should not visit anybody, unless on a scale from 1 to 10, they’re at least a five in terms of “likely to give you their money.” Personally, I ain’t even calling a customer on the phone unless they’re a 5 and they’ve called me first. And I’m not going to actually, physically go see them unless they’re a 7 or 8.
You can actually have such a wide funnel that captures so many leads and interested prospects that you then devise second, third and fourth steps in your marketing system that further separates the diamonds from the dirt. You can even make prospects jump through hoops to talk to you, if necessary.
A built in feature of a true marketing system is that it qualifies leads for you so you can determine the quality of each lead with a high degree of accuracy. Then you can actually adjust the size of the bottom of your funnel as business conditions change, and literally regulate your sales volume from one quarter to the next.
If you’ve got plenty of sales leads that are 4’s, 5’s, 6’s 7’s and 8’s coming in every day – and the occasional 9 or 10 – then you’ll find that VARs, reps, and even your own sales people are much more eager to go see those customers, because they know those customers are genuinely interested.

Original Source: Perry Marshall