3 Unconventional But Effective AdWords Optimization Secrets
Very often in my line of work I get asked for tips on how to optimize Google AdWords campaigns. I like to give the person asking the question a little scare with my first 3 tips, as these would often run contrary to what many believe to be proper AdWords management.
So basically we all know that to really make the most of your pay per click campaigns you need to be grouping keywords into relevant ad groups, testing ad copy, testing landing pages, making sure everything is relevant, and tracking everything that you do. We can easily find this information online.
Image Source:www.adviceinteractivegroup.com
So let me give you a few search marketing secrets that might sound a little crazy to some of you.
Starts Bids High
Yes, don’t be shy when it comes to setting the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay. The search marketing miser earns meagerly.
This is especially important when you are rolling out with a new campaign and keywords. You want to improve your quality score fast so that you could bring down bids and lower your cost per click (CPC) sooner, and it starts with getting a good click through rate (CTR).
Granting that your keyword or keywords are relevant to the ad, and your ad is well written, then the only way to ensure a good CTR is to get your ad the best visibility. By visibility, I mean making sure your ad is easily seen or noticed by the search engine user. Your ad position is decided by your Ad Rank, the ad with the highest Ad Rank will appear in the first position. Ad Rank is decided by Quality Score and your bid. So if you have a new keyword with no CTR history to it and likely having a low quality score, the best way to get your ad noticed is to bid high and try to get a good position for your ad.
A lot of people are afraid of bidding high, many don’t realize that it is likely they will not be paying exactly what they bid.
Google AdWords’ Discounter automatically reduces your CPC making you pay the lowest possible price for your ad position. So if you find yourself paying a little too high a CPC for your current ad position, try lowering your bid to bring down position by 1 spot and see if you are paying a significantly lower amount for more or less the same visibility. Your CPC is directly affected by the Ad Rank of the ad one spot below you, so you need to play around with your bids to find what max bid gives you the best position at the lowest price.
Start With a Small List of Keywords
By small, I am talking about the number of keywords you have in your ad group or in your overall campaign. While it is indeed sound practice to put together a huge keyword list, it would not be wise to start out with a big list especially if it is a new campaign since QS is affected by your account history, that in turn is a result of the CTR and performance of all keywords and ads in your account.
Rather than having a huge keyword list at the start, begin with a smaller group of very targeted keywords that would likely get good CTRs and then add more keyword groups later on.
One reason a keyword you are bidding on might be getting a very low CTR is the absence of negative keywords. This is especially important if the keyword or phrase you are using also gets searched for in combination with other keywords or modifiers that make it irrelevant to what you are advertising. In that case, your ad still gets triggered, but since the ad is not relevant to the search engine user it does not get attention nor get clicked.
Increase Your Daily Budget as You Increase Keywords
You can’t expect to get the same number of impressions if you keep adding more keywords to your campaigns but do not increase your daily budget. You simply have to increase your daily budget. Unless, you constantly prune your campaigns, and delete keywords that you find are not converting.
Ippn order to be able to identify the keywords that do not convert you would need to use the built in conversion tracking feature in Google AdWords which tells you which keywords brought in visitors that lead to a conversion. You can also use other ppc tracking software that will offer other valuable data, other than which keywords convert.
Some of these programs can tell you what time of day your conversions occur, which enable you to do time scheduling which can also greatly improve your CTR. The more advanced programs can even split test your landing pages and provide visitor engagement data, information that you can use to further develop your landing pages in an effort to improve conversions.
Learn more about the most popular pay per click conversion tracking software available today on http://www.ppc-conversion-tracking.com. You can also download more AdWords optimization strategies from that site, absolutely free.
Online Branding for Bands
This video tutorial on Online Branding for Bands was recorded specifically for the ArtistKo seminar that took place on June 26 at the Outpost.
Participants paid to be in this seminar, and now this is your chance to see the full video, free of charge.
Google Says My Blog is Number 1 in the Philippines
When people in the Philippines go to Google, and type this phrase, online marketing consultant… this blog comes up in the top spot, number 1 just as you see in the image below.
That was a few days ago though.. the big question is, is it still number 1?
The Social Media Manager and His Role in Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is more than just a buzzword or phenomena.
“Social Media Marketing is marketing of the future; where companies, businesses or individuals leverage on available Internet and communication technologies and use these as tools to deliver customer focused messages that encourage participation and dissemination, ultimately achieving branding and marketing communication goals.”
MarketingSherpa has released some research that reveals that more companies are shifting a lot of their marketing efforts from traditional to social media. Why? These companies are seeing higher ROIs from social media efforts, and traditional media not as effective as they used to. You can get the 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report here for $447.
This growing interest in Social Media Marketing has also created opportunities for a position that did not exist a short time ago, the Social Media Manager.
Everyone is going social media; these are not just Fortune 500 companies but any business or person who has a product or service to offer like dentists, mechanics, painters, wedding planners…. people who urgently need but don’t know how to run a social media campaign, and likely do not have the time to spend on Facebook or Twitter looking for new clients.
Forrester has published statistics showing that 99% of retailers are planning on developing an online presence specifically on Facebook by 2011. Now, here lies the the demand for social media marketers… people who are already experts on SMM and will deliver the results faster than a business owner striking out on an SMM (Social Media Marketing) learning curve.
But what do Social Media Managers do? Apart from creating and implementing your social media strategy, they are your brand’s executive assistants and perform tasks like:
1. Cleaning up your Twitter communications and weeding out the spam messages, leaving those messages that are important to you… or as in the case in customer relations / support, routing them to the appropriate individual or department in a company.
2. Blogging and all tasks related to blogging and functions that pertain to the maintenance of a blog such as comment approval and clean up; and in some cases for managers knowledgeable in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), blog optimization and content development.
They also help ensure that your blog posts / content, get the most traction by getting them out on other sites at different times of the week, or getting them exposed to your Twitter followers at different times of the day so more people would catch it.
3. In social networking, grow your network or followers. In Facebook these could be your profile friends or fans in the case of fan pages, and on Twitter, these are your followers.
It’s all about numbers, the more people on your network the more people see or read your messages. Social Media Managers will find people who are your target audience, follow or connect with them and then facilitate engagement to develop relationships.
The three keys to success being, network growth, sharing content and engaging your audience.
These tasks can take as little as half an hour to 1 or 2 in a day to do, which is why hiring a regular employee might not be cost effective. Doing this yourself or training someone within the company to do it might not yield immediate or ideal results for a variety of reasons. Which is why it would be best to simply hire an expert to do it for you, get results faster, and you get to focus on more important aspects of your business.
Who says no one can make money from social media? Companies and business are, so do the people that do the social media work for them, of course the latter probably have more fun… making a good living getting paid to play around on Twitter and Facebook all day!
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If you enjoyed this article please LIKE or SHARE with your Facebook friends. You will also find more posts on Social Media Marketing on this blog.
Image courtesy of http://koifishcommunications.com.
How to Get More Visitors to Read Your Blog Posts
Watch video below if you want to learn how to get more visitors to read you blog posts. Do LIKE or SHARE this video on your wall so your other blogger friends with traffic starved blogs can watch it.
Online Brand Management: The Importance of Online Brand Monitoring
Monitoring your brand online is important. You need to be able to keep track of what is being said about your brand, where links are posted and what people think of your product in order to build up and/or maintain a good reputation both online and offline. The internet is so widely used for communication, personal and work related, that a business must be informed of their presence and maintain control of their persona and credibility online because it can easily transcend into the business world on the streets and affect their credibility thus decreasing sales and setting a chain of events into motion that only lead into a downward spiral. Because the internet has made news and communication so easy you have to be especially aware of your brand monitoring online to be able to detect the rumblings of someone, like a competitor, trying to ruin your image or a descent in brand trust and loyalty. Monitoring is fairly easy and really only requires some basic research and tracking. These are some things to consider and places to look when monitoring your brand online.
One of the easiest, though not necessarily the most effective ways to monitor your brand is to create a Google alert account. How this works is you enter keywords and every time your brand name is mentioned or one of the other keywords you receive an email regarding this sending you a link to the destination online where the word was mentioned. This is all fine however it’s not the most effective way to really monitor your brand online because it doesn’t provide a full scope of what your brand is doing and the breakdown of where your brand is being discussed online in terms of percentages and so forth. For this you need to hire someone to track the figures or an advanced software that can do this for you. The best way is almost always through human work because they can determine the validity of a mention of your keywords or brand and analyze the context whereas a computer cannot or will make more errors in this regard.
So first you need to develop a list of keywords. This should of course include your brand name and trademarks or copyrights you have associated with that name as well as clients, competitors, the names of spokespersons, high ranking executives, stock symbols, products, abbreviations of your company name or products as well as common misspellings that a person might type in a search engine looking for your brand or products.
People talk to others about brands and products all over the internet from reviews to consumer news to blogs, forum posts and emails about things they like or dislike. So there is a lot of ground to cover in tracking and monitoring your brand online. Every day you need to look through blogs, Twitter, social networks, social media sites, wikipedia, message board, forums, consumer news, article directories and the tags on video and photo sites. Track these mentions whether they are positive, negative or indifferent and the frequency of these mentions in order to monitor your brand.
5 Easy Ways to Increase Blog Traffic
5 Easy Ways to Increase Blog Traffic
By Roy M. Sencio
Unless of course you’re a celebrity, why should anyone be interested to read your blog? And stop giving lame excuses to yourself that it is for your own pleasure and stuff. If it is so personal and pleasurable to you, why blog? You can always have and write your own diary that you can keep secret. Come on, a blog is a public article – give the attention that it deserves; make sure that people read them and appreciate them.
The main problem with almost 90% blogs is that they go unread. Why? Because the visitors can’t find your blog in the first place! Yes, that is the truth. There are some unique ways by which you can promote your blog. These are simple strategies that anyone can use and benefit from. The main idea of a blog is to generate traffic and readers that would read it.
Blog promotion is not impossible:
• Pillar Articles: If you can make some article length introductory remarks on your own blog, that will help generate more curiosity amongst the prospective readers. This will give them an idea of the quality of the posted blog. This habit will help you develop and generate some credibility amongst your readers. This habit should be made periodic; more when there is a change in your blog topic.
• Frequency: If you post more, you will be read more. People like to read only those blogs which are updated regularly and the author posts regularly. Try to keep as less time gap between two posts as possible. Too old blogs will make you lose your blog’s ‘public-appeal’!
• Domain: A domain name is also very important. Choose one which suits your blog and topic. That will help the readers to recall the address faster and easier.
• Comments: This is the most important part of your blog. Leave a space for comments. Critical analysis and comments on your blogs will surely attract more traffic to your blog. Increase blog traffic by giving others chance to add regular comments. Leave comments on your own blog as well!
• People: Other people matter too! If you give sufficient time to other people’s blogs and leave comments, chances are that they will read yours too! And will help spread more by word of mouth! Readers are the lifeline of your blog. Do not cut-off resources for them.
Moreover, you can use keywords to promote your blog. Increase blog traffic by using attractive headings and unusual ones. That is indirectly marketing your creative base! Let the people know that you’re a serious blogger and you mean business. The niche also is very important. For example, if you’re doing a product review, you’ll invariably get more traffic than if you did your review! These ways will guarantee a FREE and fastest ways to increase traffic to your blog.
Learn how you can promote your business blog, increase blog traffic and reach out to your potential customers. Contact Roy Sencio, an online marketing consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit his blog at http://www.roysencio.com, and avail of his free one hour consultation offer.
Article Source: 3 Easy Ways to Increase Blog Traffic
Click Distribution on Google’s Top 10
Did you ever wonder how many clicks each spot on Google’s top 10 search results usually gets?
A study on Eye-Tracking Analysis of SE Users’ Behavior conducted in Cornell University reveals the following data, which means number 1 is still the best spot to be on Google’s organic rankings.
But there are no guarantees to getting to number 1 and there could be too much competition.
Well, that is why multiple number 1 rankings for very targeted long tail search phrases that are dialed in to a search engine user’s intentions are better than general keywords that have higher search volumes.
To read the full article visit Distribution of Clicks on Google’s SERPs
Band Promotion and Marketing: How to Promote Your Band and Get More Gigs
I thought about writing this post on band promotion because I often hear new bands and struggling musicians wishing they got more paying gigs. Getting a paying gig is good, I mean… you spend a lot of time, energy and even money on getting your act together.. rehearsing, traveling to rehearsals and gigs (gas can be a pain if you travel by car), buying your gear, etc. But getting paid gigs for new acts can be very difficult.
While I believe it is great to get paid, I don’t mean to say you should think of a band as a business. What I am saying is, it would be practical to at least have your costs covered.
Of course, that would depend on you and your reasons why you are in a band in the first place.
Some bands want to play; love to play; feel that playing and getting their music out there is the best compensation there is.. and the return of their investment in effort, time and money is that opportunity to get up there and PLAY. There are also others who work towards a long term goal like building their own following and getting their music across to them.
The reasons why you do it, pretty much sums it up.
But, if you wanted to get paying gigs, here are a few things you can do.
1. Work on Your Product
Once in a while I come across a client who struggles with promoting their product or service, and put in a lot of effort only to get minimal results. The main reason is, they have not been able to accurately develop, define and refine their product, which is why aggressively promoting something mediocre will always yield mediocre results.
So what is your product? The band, and your music. The key question is how do you set yourself apart from the rest. What is it you do that is unique, or what is it that you can do better than everybody else?
“What do you want people to remember and LIKE you for?”
2. Define Your Music/Repertoire
Repertoire defines what type of band you are. It also defines who your audience is. I believe writing and recording original material is great because by having your own music you create an asset that others do not have. It is that that final sum of a collaborative creative effort that brands your band. BUT, does not guarantee success, since for your band to be successfully recognized for your music, you would first need to attract an audience that gets to hear and appreciate it.
On the same note, being a cover band does not mean you cannot get paying gigs. There are a lot of cover bands that get paid well for small bar gigs or even major events.
What it comes down to is the novelty of the band, and your draw. Novelty is that something about you that people will want to come see; and your draw is the size of the crowd you can gather at your gigs.
3. Market Yourself
You would need to sell yourself to people who you believe would appreciate your band and what you have to offer. There are basically two types of people you want to market to; there are the people who you want coming to your gigs and appreciating your music, and the people who are in a position to hire you for gigs.
This can actually be the classic “the chicken or the egg scenario”, where you actually grow your audience and get more exposure by being playing more gigs, but to get more gigs you got to get invited or hired by people who have a hand in making gigs happen.
But it need not be complicated. You just have to do both at the same time.
Networking is key. The more people you get to meet, the more contacts you establish, the closer you get to your goal.
Ways to Network.
a. Use the Internet, put up a website that tells people about you and your music. Use social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace to build a network. Use media sites like YouTube, MetaCafe and DailyMotion to spread your music and build a list of followers/subscribers.
Always mention these sites during gigs; when you talk to other people about your gigs, during shows, and include them on printed materials such as stage back drops, fliers, calling cards, etc.
Make people WANT to go to your site by offering them some sort of benefit they get by going, for instance.. you can tell them that they can listen to a live-stream of your music on your site, download your music from your site (if you allow), or tell them you give away free merchandise like shirts on occasion and mechanics on how to get free stuff are on your website.
b. Print business cards, or calling cards. That way you are able to hand people you meet something that they can refer to when they need to contact you or if they refer you to other people who might need you for gigs. A business card says a lot of things about you, it pretty much says, you mean business, you got it together, and your can be relied upon to deliver if contacted for a gig. It creates a good impression about your band.
c. Do quick sets at small parties that you are already there to attend in the first place. Parties or gatherings are a great way to build up a following. This grassroots approach can lead to viral promotion. Never underestimate the power of word of mouth. If you know that a friend is putting together a party, offer to do a few songs. Let’s face it, being in a band is cool, that may be one of the top reasons you even started one.. so don’t wait for an opportunity to play fall right on your lap, you create your opportunities.
d. If you are not that established, volunteer to front for other bands who are friends of yours AND are established. Established bands typically have a huge following, grab the chance to get yourself in front of that audience, their audience. You might not get paid for this, but it is an investment that will yield long term benefits. Through this opportunity, you show people what you can do, tell people about your website or where you are online, you can hand out business cards and talk with people in the audience or show promoters.
e. Find radio stations that play material from unsigned bands. Getting your music played on a radio station is one of the most difficult things to get done. You will be turned down by a few, but you cannot let that setback stop you from being persistent and trying them again later or trying to find other stations that will play your music. If you are in college, get your music on your campus radio station, if your university has one. That said, I personally found it a lot easier to market your band and network when in college, it was so easy because in college you meet a lot of new people all the time, and get invited to a lot of parties and events.
If your music does get airplay and attention, your band WILL get attention.
4. Management / Representation
You have to have a manager. An authority figure who you trust and count on to work for nothing less than the success and well being of the band.
A manager should be a tenacious businessman. He is a negotiator, understands marketing, and most importantly he believes in the product he is entrusted with. His main goal is to sustain and develop further the product he manages.
Having a manager can have many advantages, and one of the things I see managers being able to do that bands that manage themselves cannot, is be objective. The manager sees something that individual members in a band do not see, this is especially true when some members of the band develop egos that cloud their judgment. Members have a tendency to get tunnel vision and might not respond well to other people’s opinions that may not be flattering, a manager knows if criticisms are valid and take these not emotionally but objectively.
A manager is both a member of the group and outsider; a member because he works with the group to achieve their goals. He is an outsider who can make rational decisions and even be critical of the group if it fails to deliver what their audience expects.
Musicians can sometimes be the most stubborn of people, and the least receptive to criticism, and a trusted opinion from an authority figure can help the band work to better the product. Remember that the manager is above all a businessman, and he runs the band because it is “profitable”… the easier to market a band, the more money it makes, the more money the manager makes as well.
Managers should also be very aggressive and persistent, a friend of mine (a manager for a huge act) once told me a story about how she approached bar after bar only to get denied each and every time and was given all sorts of reasons and excuses. She never gave up, and did not give up on her band… today that band is a major recording artist… and actually they have been big for some time now.
So, if you are a new band that needs to promote yourself and get more gigs, and hopefully paying gigs…
- you have to be a band that can draw an audience
- you have the ability to make people who catch your gigs, like you or your music enough to want to be in touch with you so they know where to go for your next gig
- you have to build your reputation and brand yourself and your music
- you have be aggressive and get gigs and not simply wait for them, and if you are able to successfully do this and your band becomes successful, the offers will actually start coming to you
- you have to have someone.. a manager, who takes care of business and does this well, so that you are left to do what you do best which is put on a good show or create music that your audience appreciates.. as a performer it might be best to not worry about anything and let the manager do that worrying.. all you need to think about or focus on is having a good show or having a good time on stage.
A Guide to Online Brand Analysis
Your brand is now online and you’re feeling pretty good about your product knowing that you’ve made the global internet leap. But just because it’s online that doesn’t mean it’s presence is actually doing anything for you. In fact it could be hurting your reputation and sales if negative press is created on anything from personal blogs to product reviews to consumer news sites. You can monitor your brand online and get a rough idea of what is going on based on the activity it tracks. However to really understand your viability online and where you can leverage your business you need the monitoring converted into hard numbers that you can analyze. This is known as online brand analysis.
The first things you would typically look at when trying to measure a brand are the online revenue, total leads, average value of each order placed, conversion rates, cost per acquisition or transaction and the return on the investment of the online campaign. While these are all very valuable things to track and analyze that’s not all there is for online management. Since the online world can also correlate to the brick and mortar sales world and vice versa you have to look at how they influence one another and other units of measure to evaluate in looking at your total online presence and marketing.
Views of online advertising spots
How many times were your advertising commercials, videos other ads clicked on and watched? This will show you whether or not they were worth the page impression and later sales that they generated.
Visits to online store
How many people went to your online store? This is simple. Look for the number of unique visitors over a given time period and you have your answer.
Total page impressions versus sales
There may have been a million page impressions but how many turned into actual sales and what was the value of those sales? You need to see the average order total so you can make a numerical representation of sales versus page impressions and how that figures into the cost you spent in advertising and marketing to bring those sales in to begin with.
Duration of content viewing
How long did a person spend on each page of your site? Looking at the amount of time spent will help you see whether they were just popping in to look for freebies or actually shopping and learning about your products.
Traffic to web address from an offline ad
If you have specific web addresses that a person has to type in not be connected to through a search engine you can track this. Understanding how many hits come from an offline source can help you see how known your company is that a person can type in your website without searching for it or how well your outside campaigns are going.
Offline influence
The most important perhaps, how your online presences leads to offline sales. Look at how the online marketing and store increases or decreases your physical store sales.
If you have any questions about online branding, visit my blog and use the contact form to ask a question.
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