Do You Rank Well On Yeow?

While meeting with my friend Steve yesterday, we were interrupted by a call on his business line. It was a woman from a big company trying to sell him on search engine marketing services – which he doesn’t need, of course, having such close ties to an industry expert!

Anyway, after politely explaining how he didn’t need their services and asking to be put on the company’s Do Not Call List, she went on.

Woman: Don’t you want people to find your business on the internet?

Steve: I’m doing fine, thank you. Please put me on your Do Not Call List.

Woman: Tell me what people would type in a search engine to find you and let’s see where you rank.

Steve: Thanks, but I’m really not interested. Please put me on your Do Not Call List.

Woman: Don’t want to rank highly in Google or Yeow?

Let’s stop right there.

Yeow?!

Now I’m the first to admit I don’t know everything about marketing online. However, I consider myself enough of an expert that I can say with a high degree of certainty that “Yeow” is not a big player in the online/search engine marketing game.

So either at that very moment a coworker flung a paper clip across the room which struck that poor woman right in the eye or she was trying to say Yahoo!. Since she continued on after this, reading from her script, I’m going to assume an eye injury wasn’t the problem.

Obviously this woman doesn’t have the foggiest idea about internet marketing. And while I doubt she’s the one actually working on getting clients ranked in the search engines, it kind of makes you wonder the quality of the work this company does if they can’t even train their telemarketers to pronounce the name of the #2 search engine.

One serious point I’d like to make here. A lot of huge companies out there (I get calls from SuperPages all the time) want you to sign on to their expensive services to get “ranked high” in the search engine listings. The problem is that the ads they run on Google, Yeow (sorry, Yahoo!), and others just point back to their sites that have you listed as one of hundreds of companies.

If you’re serious about search engine marketing, you should get your company’s ads listed directly on Google, Yahoo!, etc. by doing it yourself of hiring an expert to do it for you (if you need a name, I’d be happy to provide one!).

Why should you do this?

1. It will cost less.
2. Your prospects won’t have to go digging to find you on another website – you’ll be right there in the first set of search results they put their eyes on.
3. You have more control over the keywords, placements, ad text, etc.
4. You’ll be able to easily test different messages, landing pages, headlines and more which will provide invaluable insight into marketing your business.

Oh, and one last piece of advice. As you begin marketing on the search engines, start with Google. That’s where the traffic is. After you find a formula that works there, then move on to Yahoo!, MSN, or maybe even Yeow!

Are You Using Automatic Matching in AdWords?

The recently expanded Automatic Matching feature in AdWords came up at a client meeting the other day.

Here’s Google’s explanation of what automatic matching is:

Automatic matching is an optional feature that helps your ads reach targeted traffic missed by your keyword lists. It works by analyzing the ads, keywords, and landing pages in your ad group. It then shows your ads on search queries relevant to this information.

This feature originally appeared in some accounts in February and was greatly, yet quietly, expanded in May. The program has taken a lot of heat because advertisers were automatically opted in to this program. So if you don’t want this feature running in your account, you have to go in turn it off yourself.

There are some who think this is a conspiracy by Google to bleed every last penny out of advertisers’ budgets. I’m not that cynical, but I do wish advertisers had to opt in to the program instead of opt out of it.

Conspiracy or not, my feeling is that most advertisers are better served by not using automatic matching. The reason why comes down to one question:

Do you want control of your advertising budget or do you want Google to?

Google has already had a form of automatic matching in their campaigns for a long time – it’s called broad match. With broad match, you greatly expand the number of search queries that will trigger your ads. The downside is that your ads may be triggered by search queries that have absolutely nothing to do with your business. This can be a bid budget waster.

Automatic matching greatly expands the universe of search queries over what broad match alone would do. While this may bring in some additional quality keywords that you might otherwise miss, I think more often than not it will eat up your budget with traffic that’s not highly targeted to your business.

If you do decide to give automatic matching a try, here are a few tips:

1. Run search query reports and watch your server logs frequently to see what search terms are triggering your ads. If you start finding a lot of terms that aren’t relevant to your business, either turn off automatic matching or add a bunch of negative keywords to your campaign.

If you find some keywords that are relevant to your business, add them to your keyword list and optimize your ads and landing pages for them.

2. Make sure your daily budget is capped at a number you can afford.

3. Monitor your daily spend and conversions closely to see how much more you are spending due to automatic matching and what you’re getting in return. If the ROI isn’t there, opt out.

Jack Palance’s Secret to Marketing Online

Ever see the movie “City Slickers”?

Jack Palance plays a wise, crusty old cowboy named Curly. There’s a scene in the movie where he shares his secret of life with Billy Crystal’s character Mitch- a middle aged city slicker going through a mid-life crisis.

You can watch the scene on You Tube, but the bottom line is that Curly’s secret to life is this:

“One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that everything else don’t mean shit.”

So what does that have to do with marketing online?

In our last blog post in our “Fundamentals of Marketing Online” series we talked about how overwhelming marketing online can be and one way to make it more manageable (by focusing on core marketing strategies that have proven successful offline).

Another way to make marketing online less intimidating is to take Curly’s advice and just focus on one thing.

You’ll probably never be an expert on using Google AdWords, Facebook, MySpace, article marketing, SEO, copywriting, social bookmarking, video marketing, Twitter, FriendFeed, WordPress, etc. to market your business.

But you can become an expert in just one. Forget about the others. I’m not saying they don’t mean shit, but you can hire an expert to help you with them while you stay focused on your one thing.

I know this is tough to do. There are always cool new marketing tools coming along online. There are always emails in your inbox from one guru or another promising to make your filthy stinking rich if you use their methodology.

I’m not saying to totally ignore them. But focus the majority of your time on your one thing (the 80/20 rule is definitely in effect when it comes to marketing online).

So what one thing should you focus on? Well, Curly’s answer is “that’s what you have to figure out.” And he’s right. It all depends on your business and your goals.

Over the years I’ve hitched my wagon to Google AdWords and copywriting. I think that no matter what businesses I’m involved in, the expertise I’ve developed in those two areas will help immensely.

But they might not be right for you.

So my recommendation is to find what is right for you – your “one thing” – stick to it and master it so you can expertly use it to power your online marketing efforts.

The Secret To Marketing Online is Offline

It’s overwhelming.

When it comes to marketing online there’s PPC, SEO, blogs, article marketing, video marketing, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, and on and on and on.

Throw in the fact that many people starting businesses online have never run or marketed a business before and overwhelming is an understatement.

So where should you begin?

I’ve found there are a few core concepts to keep in mind that have helped me immensely when marketing online. So to start out our “Fundamentals of Marketing Online” series I’d like to share them with you.

The first of these concepts is: The secret to marketing online is offline.

What I mean by this is if you look at the marketing tools, strategies, and techniques that are proving effective online, they all have their roots in firmly established offline marketing tactics. The Internet may let you market in ways that are easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before, but the underlying principles come from offline marketing fundamentals that have been working long before the Internet was even a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye.

Take Google AdWords for example. Instead of getting caught up in all of its intricacies, first focus on the fact that AdWords is simply direct response marketing on steroids. If you’ve get a solid foundation in the direct response marketing strategies that have been working for decades, creating an effective, successful AdWords campaign becomes much easier.

I think this concept is especially important for those who tend to get intimidated or caught up in technology. My advice is forget about the technology. Become a marketing expert first.

Focus on learning the proven, time-honored, battle-tested marketing practices that have worked offline for years.

Determine which of these practices make the most sense for your market, your product/service, and most importantly, your prospects/customers.

Then find the best tools, techniques, software, etc. available to apply them online.

To get a good foundation in the basics of marketing, there are 3 books (all published long before the Internet reached the masses) that cover core marketing and advertising techniques (particularly direct response) that I’d recommend:

“Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy
“Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins
“Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples

Some more recent books I’d recommend are “Duct Tape Marketing” by John Jantsch and pretty much anything by Seth Godin.

Bottom line: Learn the fundamentals and keep them in mind as you market your business online. Then strategically select and adapt the online marketing techniques that make the most sense for marketing your business.

I’ve found this makes things much simpler than getting caught up in the latest and greatest online tools everyone else seems to be using and trying to adapt them to somehow fit your business.

The Fundamentals of Marketing Online

We all take things for granted.

This concept really hit me hard last month after attending an internet marketing seminar. It was a great seminar that covered about a dozen different ways to boost traffic to your website. And while I got a lot out of it, what struck me the most is that I could have taught the seminar.

I’ve been immersed in the field of marketing, and internet marketing in particular, for a long time. I’ve devoted more money and even more time to studying and testing what works and what doesn’t than I’d care to admit. But what happens when you become so engrossed in something is you often take a lot for granted. You forget how things that seem so boring, simple and mundane are REALLY fascinating and useful to others.

So with the wake up call from that seminar in mind, I’m starting a new series on the SWISSMoneyBlog about the fundamentals of marketing online. The series will cover the basic concepts, tools, and strategies for successfully marketing on the Internet – including how to get traffic, what to do with it, how to profit from it, and more.

What you will not find in this series is a lot of hype or promoting of programs that claim you can make $10,000 a day without ever getting out of bed by following some ultra-secret, easy to follow step-by-step formula that’s never been revealed to the public before. If that’s what you’re looking for, I’d suggest going here.

What you will find in this series is a solid foundation that you can use to either create a new online business, take your existing brick-and-mortar business online, or create additional leads/revenue streams for a business you already have online.

If that sounds good to you, stay tuned as we kick off the series next week with posts on the essential concepts you need to understand before you even think about marketing online. I hope you’ll join me!

Copyblogger’s Talking About You

There was a short, yet powerful post by James Chartrand on Copyblogger last Friday titled “I Don’t Care About You.”

James writes about “Egotistical Marketing.” It’s a great term that describes a mistake many marketers make – focusing on themselves instead of others.

Bottom line: If you want people to pay attention to your marketing then tell them about their favorite subject – themselves!

After you read James’ post, check out my take on the concept and how to put it to use by creating an About You page on your website.