party favors

party favors

Wedding Favors

wedding favors

Testimonials

Include testimonials on your web site to build credibility. You can spice up your testimonials by offering pictures, audio, and video. If you have a store, you can ask your customers to give you a 10-30 second video testimonial that you can later post on your home page. If you have clients that call in with testimonials, record them and post them on your web site, so people can listen.

Testimonials are one of the easiest ways to build credibility. They are are easy to get and they will go a long way in building credibility for your business.

Identify Your Target Market

As you designing or redesigning your company web site, you should consider your target market. Once you have identified your target market, you can tailor your site to their needs. A web site that targets a young adult market is going to look and feel very differently than a web site targeting business executives.

Always consider your target market when considering the site navigation, the web site color, the overall flow, and technologies you are utilizing.

Build a Web Site and Forget It

Once you build a web site you can forget it. Many businesses do forget about their web presence once their web sites were built. Consequently, most of them will be disappointed in the results. The real work begins after the web site has been completed.
A web site without visitors is an expensive project without benefits. Generating traffic is the red headed step child of the web design community.
I don’t want to blame the designers because the decision is the client’s to make. It is key for web designers to remind customers that there must be an effort to drive traffic to their newly designed or redesigned web sites.
Unfortunately, it is hard sell. Clients are most often not interested in search engine optimization, link building, or other traffic building efforts.
It is a shame that they see the need to have a web site, but do not see the need to drive visitors to their sites.
I hope we can do a better job convincing clients that a web site without traffic is nearly useless. Building a wining web presence starts after the completion of the web site.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 5

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, provide listings on a per bid basis called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. PPC has evolved into one of the most exciting forms of online advertising. In the past, websites received traffic through organic results. Note: Organic results are accomplished by website optimization, link popularity, and many other factors. The highest bidder for keyword phrases typically drives PPC results. The more you are willing to pay for a click the higher your link moves to the top of the paid results. PPC is one of the most effective online advertising methods.

Practical example: A banner ad campaign might cost you $50.00 per thousand impressions. You can expect a 0.5 percent click through rate that should result in 5 clicks to your site. That means that you are paying $10.00 per click. Let’s say you have a 1 percent conversion rate, and you need 100 clicks to get one sale. The 100 clicks will cost you $1000.00. Now, consider your margins. Can you afford to advertise through banner ads?

Why Use PPC?

PPC advertising is infinitely more effective than banner advertising. Instead of paying for impressions, you are paying for clicks. To take it one step further, you are paying for qualified clicks. Only people searching for your selected keywords see your PPC ad, therefore, only interested web surfers will be able to click your ad. PPC give the advertiser more control than any other form of advertising technique. In addition to getting immediate traffic to your site, PPC can help you get quick feedback.

PPC can help your business with your organic search efforts. Before you optimize your site for a certain keywords phrase, you can test it in a PPC campaign. Once you quickly test the conversion rate for a keyword, you can dedicate more time to improving organic results for the same keyword. You might believe that a certain keyword is the most important keyword for your site. With the help of PPC, you can test your theory. If your theory was incorrect, you can try another keyword. It’s better to spend a few dollars on a theory than to spend several months. The instant feedback is one of the most revolutionary aspects of PPC advertising.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 4

The Players

The three largest PPC companies are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. There are many other smaller players on the market, but the above three own the search market. Smaller search engines have minimal traffic compared to the big three.

Use the big three for the following reasons:

· Yahoo, Google, and MSN handle over 95% of all Internet search. The smaller search engines have little traffic.
· They are reputable companies, actively fighting click fraud
· Quick feedback
· Scalable performance
· Excellent tracking
· They provide higher quality traffic
· Simplified management

Losing Money With PPC

Running a successful PPC campaign requires skills. It takes time to learn the ins-and-outs of PPC. Expect to lose money, et least in the beginning. Start with a small budget. Think of the money you spend as tuition. You are learning a valuable skill that helps you build a successful business.

The following are among the most important subjects you have to learn:

· The buzz words such as CPC, CTR, etc
· Writing effective ad copy
· Testing ads
· Bidding practices
· Ranking strategies

Learning is important because you are up against larger companies with more experienced PPC managers. Not only that your competitors know more than you, they might have larger budgets. As you study your competitors’ PPC ad campaigns, you might be looking at something that has been tested for years.

Bid Management Strategies

Never start the bidding process until you’ve determined the highest amount you can bid on a keyword phrase. Pay no attention to how much others are paying for a keyword. The two most important factors to determine Before you do anything else, understand your conversion rate and your average order size. If your average order size is $100.00, and your average CPC (Cost Per Click) is $2.00 with a one percent sales conversion rate, it will cost you $200.00 to make $100.00. Sounds like a bad idea.

Your conversion rate and your average order size are the two most important factors determining your maximum CPC. The maximum CPC is not set in stone. Improving you conversion rate will decrease your CPC. Let’s see how the results of the previous example influenced by doubling your conversion rate. Your average order size of $100.00 with a two percent conversion will result in a much lower CPC. Now, with 2 percent conversion you CPC is $1.00 instead of $2.00.

As the cliché goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. PPC advertising is a business process that has to be measured. Understanding the numbers is essential as you determine the effectiveness of your campaign. Is your business growing as a result of PPC advertising?

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 3

Developing A Successful PPC Campaign

The most effective method to develop a successful PPC campaign is by considering your profit margin. Let’s say your average order is $100.00 with a profit margin of 20 percent. That leaves $20.00 profit for each order. With a one percent conversion rate you can expect one sale for 100 clicks. If you have $20 margin to play with for 100 visitors, your maximum CPC is twenty cents.

Revenue is another consideration for developing your PPC advertising. If your goal is to spend 10 percent of your revenue on PPC, your budget is $10.00 per every $100.00 revenue.

Writing Your Ad

Research the most effective keywords for every one of your ads. Avoid generic terms. Even though you are paying for each click, you are still competing with other advertisers. If you select the right keywords, you might get better results than a higher ranking ad with poorly selected keywords.

Study printed advertising materials as you write your PPC ads. Many techniques easily translate to online advertising. Pick up a magazine and study the wording within the ads. Experiment with some of the same words in your own ad. Embed keywords in your ad. Some of the search engines highlight the keywords in your ad that match the search query.

Use active verbs in your ad, especially in the beginning of your title. Some sample titles with good active verbs in the beginning are: “Avoid Late Payment,” “Reduce Your Monthly Bills,” or “Save Big Now.” Active verbs breath life into your PPC ads.

Don’t Bid For The #1 Position

The top position is the most expensive spot. By insisting to the in the top position, you are putting your business at disadvantage. By being the first, you guarantee that you are spending the most per click. Your competitors will know that you have to work with narrower margin because of your higher CPC.

Serious buyers don’t make the purchase on the first website. Online buyers visit multiple sites before they buy. There is no reason to be the first because most shoppers will click through at least the several top results. It is unlikely that a consumer will click on the top result and buys without looking further. By allowing searchers to find you in lower positions, you let them pre-qualify themselves. A lower positioned ad is safe from compulsive clickers, and it is more likely to attract serious buyers.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 2

Don’t Pay More Than You Have To

PPC bids are often separated by pennies.The top bid might be $2.00, the second $1.97, the third $1.96. If you recognize larger gaps, you can reduce your CPC.

Bid Position CPC
1 $2.00
2 $1.97
3 $1.96
Bid Gap $1.25
5 $1.24
6 $1.23
7 $1.20
Bid Gap $0.95
9 $0.94

Is it worth to pay $1.96 instead of $1.25, to move from position four to position three? It might, or it might not. It depends on your maximum CPC. If your CPC is closer to $1.25 than it is to $1.96, it is an easy decision to make.

Contextual PPC Advertising

Contextual advertising is a great way to add relevant advertising to any web page. It is the ideal revenue source for content-based websites such as a blog, a news site, or an article site. With this form of advertising, targeted ads appear determined on the page content.

Contextual advertising is a hotly debated topic among PPC advertisers. Many advertisers complain that contextual PPC offers poor ROI (Return On Investment). PPC advertisers often don’t understand the difference between regular PPC and contextual PPC. As regular PPC ads show within search results, contextual PPC ads show on content network sites.

Contextual advertising is similar to banner advertising. The sites displaying the ads are hoping that the site visitors will click the ads at some point. Contextual advertising converts at a lower rate than normal PPC, because, instead of clicks, it mostly generates ad impressions. In other words, just like most banner ads, contextual ads are mostly ignored. This form of advertising might not result in great sales results, but it might be great to create brand awareness.

If you are new to PPC advertising, it is best to turn off this feature. Once you become more experienced, you might start contextual ads for some of your best converting campaigns. Lower your bids for contextual advertising until you have a chance to measure performance.

Geo Targeting

Refining your PPC campaign might require geo targeting. Geo targeting is the technology that enables PPC advertisers to target certain geographical areas. Search engines perform this task by filtering searchers based on IP address.

Geo targeting enables your business to limit searches to people within your desired geographical area. For example, if you own a flower shop, you might only want your advertising to appear to searchers in your immediate geographical area.
Taking advantage of geo targeting might reduce the number of competitor websites you have to compete with for your keywords. Geo targeting also helps you focus in on the specific market.

A good PPC search engine should enable you to target your ads to:

· a radius around your business,
· any zip code,
· any metropolitan area, or
· any defined coordinates.

Pay Per Click PPC Strategies For Your Online Business - Part 1

Fighting Click Fraud

Click fraud is one of the most pressing concerns among PPC advertisers. Even though search engines try to minimize the problem, people are concerned about click fraud. In a recent survey of nearly 50 percent search marketers had planned to monitor click fraud. The key to fighting click fraud is to have a plan tailored to your own campaign.

Even though the major search engines monitor click fraud, you can take certain measures to help them.

· Monitor your CTR (Click Through Rate). Look for sudden changes such as a sharp increase.
· Watch for changes in conversion rates. If your ad campaign normally converts at 2 percent, and it suddenly drops for no obvious reason, it might be a sign of click fraud.
· Observe how quickly you go through your daily budget. If it used to take your business to go through your daily budget in ten hours, and now it only takes 4-hours, it could indicate click fraud.
· Check your log files for suspicious IP addresses. Some PPC search engines offer IP address filtering.
· Monitor your account for traffic from unusual geographical locations. If you haven’t done it already, turn on geo targeting.
· Scrutinize your conversion rate.

Market Research With PPC

PPC is a great tool for testing. Let’s say you want to introduce a new product, but you are unsure about the name. After a brainstorming session, you could come up with a few potential names. Then, you could set up a PPC campaign for each of the product names. Within a day you would have you own research project running. What used to take weeks or even months, can now be done in a matter of days. Market research through PPC costs money, but it is a lot less expensive than traditional methods.

Landing Page Strategies

Creating the appropriate landing page for your campaign can be the difference between failing and succeeding. Link to a landing page not your home page. Your website might list 500 products while you are bidding on 100 keywords. For best results you should have a landing page for each keyword you are bidding on. If the searcher ends up on your home page instead on the landing page for the product they are looking for, you are making the buying process more complicated. Nothing hurts conversion rates more than a convoluted buying process. The simpler you manage to keep the process, the better conversion rate you can expect.

Great landing pages have the following characteristics:

· No navigation. While we are told that navigation is part of good web design, landing pages shouldn’t have any. The reason is that you don’t want the visitor to click off the page. You have spent good money to drive them to your landing page, so keep them there. The only reason to have any navigation on a landing page is to help with closing.
· Pay special attention to your link text. People are more likely to read links than regular text. Make sure the link is appealing and easy to read.
· Use the keywords throughout the page copy. If the searcher landed on your page after searching for “keyword a,” make sure “keyword a” is loud and clear throughout the page.
· Don’t try to fit a book on your landing page. People glance at web pages. Write simple concise copy. Leave ample of white space to make it easy on the eyes.