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.

Two Reasons Why Google AdWords Just Became Even More Powerful

Google just upped the ante when it comes to pay per click advertising. I was already convinced that Google AdWords was the most powerful advertising tool to come along in a very long time. That’s even more true today.

Google recently announced two significant changes to AdWords that will be a huge improvement for all AdWords advertisers.

1. An Improved Keyword Tool

Once upon a time Yahoo!’s Overture Keyword Tool was the tool of choice for internet marketers researching keywords online. For some reason, however, Yahoo!’s done away with it (want to know why Yahoo!’s struggled, it’s decisions like these). One of the key features of Overture is was that it would give you traffic estimates for your keywords, something Google’s Keyword Tool did not.

No more. Google’s improved Keyword Tool now lets you see estimated search volumes for keywords. It also displays a graph of each keyword’s search volume trends for the last 12 months and tells you which month over the past year had the highest search volume for each keyword.

It gets even better. Not only can you get search volume estimates for broad matches of your keywords, but for exact and phrase matches too. This shows you how including or excluding the various match types in your campaign will effect the amount of traffic you can expect.

But wait, there’s more! Google throws negative keywords into the equation as well. The improved Keyword Tool lets you view a list of potential negative keywords and the search volume you’d expect for each. In this case, though, the estimated search volume you see will indicate how much less traffic you can expect by adding that negative keyword. Strategically adding a lot of negative keywords can go a long way toward boosting your CTR and prevent you from wasting a lot of money on irrelevant impressions/clicks.

2. Advanced Content Network

This feature gives advertisers more control over ads in the content network. The Advanced Content Network allows advertisers to combine keyword and placement targeted campaigns in one campaign. What does that mean?

A placement targeted campaign allows advertisers to target specific websites on which to run their ads. However, up until now Google would take a look at your keywords, come up with a “theme” for the keywords in an AdGroup and run your ads on sites that it thought matched that theme. The problem for advertisers is that one of your keywords could be “industrial work positioners” and your ad would appear on a website detailing sex positions (I’ve actually seen this happen!). Needless to say, Google’s idea of an AdGroup’s theme does not always match what the advertisers theme actually is.

The new Advanced Content Network can help advertisers avoid those problems. Now you can bid on specific keywords (not a theme), select what websites you want your ads to run on, and have your ads appear only on the web pages on those sites that contain your keywords.

The really nice thing about this Advance Content Network is you can now adjust your bids based on specific keyword and placement combinations. So if you find your ads perform especially well on a few websites, you can increase your bids just for those sites to hopefully get more impressions, more clicks, and more sales. (By the same token you can lower your bids for sites that don’t perform as well.)

I’ve just started experimenting with this new feature this week and need more time to kick the tires on it. However, from the looks of things, advertising on Google’s content network just got a whole lot more enticing.

3 Ways to Deal With the Dreaded Google Slap

Reports of skyrocketing minimum bids. Pissed off advertisers complaining on message boards and blogs. That must mean it’s “Google Slap” time again!

Google Slap, for the uninitiated, is when many AdWords advertisers find that Google’s algorithm tweaks have caused Quality Scores to drop and minimum bid prices that were under $1 to go to $5 – $10 overnight.

Why does this happen? Google is Google because it strives to provide the most relevant search results to its users. This is true in the organic search results as well as in AdWords. The algorithm Google uses to determine relevance changes constantly as Google keeps trying to improve the search results for its users. Every now and then, these changes can be significant.

When this happens, advertisers whose keywords, ads and landing pages still provide relevant results in Google’s eye have nothing to worry about. However, advertisers whose campaigns fail to live up to the new standards get punished, or “slapped.” If you log into your AdWords account one morning and see your minimum bid prices have rocketed and many keywords have become “Inactive for search” – you’re the victim of the “Google Slap.”

So if you’ve been slapped, what can you do?

Here are 3 options for AdWords advertisers to deal with Google Slap:

1. Pay the increased bid prices. If Google says you need to pay at least $5 or $10 per click, you could just raise your bid prices to those levels. For those selling high priced, high margin products or services, this may be an option. It’s not an option, however, for those selling items where the lifetime value of a customer is a few hundred bucks or less. Whatever the case, I don’t recommend this option.

2. Find out how you offended Google and fix it. If Google doesn’t think you’re relevant for the keywords you’re bidding on, find out why and fix it.

Often your website is the culprit. Adding more content to your site (especially your landing page) that contains the keywords you’re bidding on can help your bring those Quality Scores back up and minimum bid prices back down. I’d definitely recommend testing this option out before even thinking about option #1.

3. Advertise elsewhere. I think AdWords is the most powerful marketing system to come along in a very long time. But it’s not for everyone. And I would never recommend compromising your business model just to make Google happy.

If you’ve tested your site out and discovered that a one page sales letter site makes the most sense for your business but Google doesn’t like it – don’t change it! Take your advertising dollars elsewhere. Get traffic from other sources (which you should be doing anyway). Try video marketing, article marketing, SEO, affiliates, or even (gasp!) offline promotions. AdWords is not the only game in town.

3 Mistakes You’re Probably Making in AdWords

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt

A number of small business owners have hired me to review Google AdWords accounts they’ve set up. I’ve noticed a number of the same mistakes over and over again in these campaigns. If you’ve set up your own AdWords account, chances are you’re making the same mistakes too.

Here are 3 of the biggies that you should fix immediately!

1. Not split testing ads. Split testing is the most powerful, yet underused feature in AdWords.

A split test is basically a competition for your AdWords ads. You have two or more competitors in each AdGroup that run against each other. The one the generates the best response from the audience is the winner. Then you bring in new competitors to try to beat the winner. By letting your prospects pick the winners, over time, you end up with the ad that gets the gold medal in bringing you lots of gold (or, cash, if you prefer).

One bonus mistake I’ll mention that’s related to split testing. When split testing, go into your campaign settings to the “Ad serving” option under “Advanced Settings” and make sure you select “Rotate: Show ads more evenly.” Leaving the default option of “show the better performing ad more often,” will skew your results and won’t give you a good read on which ads are the true winners.

2. Running keywords on Google search and the content network in the same campaign. Google gives you a few options of where your ads will show:

1. Google search shows your ads when someone searches for your keywords on Google.com
2. Search network shows your ads when someone searches for your keywords on Google’s search partner sites (ie. AOL.com and Ask.com)
3. Content network shows your ads when someone visits a webpage in Google’s content network that Google believes is relevant to your keywords (these can be sites ranging from the New York Times down to Joe Blow’s blog)

Google search and the search network are a very different beast than the content network. On Google search and the search network people are typing in keywords related to your business. This means they are actively searching for something related to what you offer. They have a conversation going on in their brains at that very moment that makes them a highly relevant and motivated prospect.

People surfing the pages on Google’s content network sites are not actively looking for you. They are in a much different mindset than someone who’s actively typing in keywords. You have to interrupt the people on the content network to get their attention. The clicks you get from the content network are often not as high a quality as those you’ll get from search traffic.

These differences between search and content traffic have a few implications for your AdWords campaigns. First, the ad text that might work on search, might not work in content and vice versa. Second, the bidding strategies are different. Generally clicks are less expensive on content than on search. Lastly, having content and search in the same campaign can throw off the results of your split tests. And as we learned above, split testing is vital to your success so you want your results to be as accurate as possible.

Content and search traffic don’t play nicely together. So while it may take more time to set up and monitor the same keywords in separate campaigns, it’s time well spent.

3. No negative keywords. Keyword research is essential to success in AdWords. But keyword research is not just about finding the search terms that will drive relevant traffic to your website. It’s also important to find search terms that may drive irrelevant traffic to your website. This is especially important when using the broad matching option in AdWords.

I’ll make up an example. Let’s say you have a company that manufactures raffle tickets that are sold to charities for their fundraisers. If you bid on the broad match keyword ‘raffle tickets’, it’s possible that your ads will appear for search terms such as ‘airline tickets’, ‘football tickets’, ’speeding tickets’, etc.

It’s easy to blow a sizable chunk of your AdWords budget on irrelevant traffic. Adding a comprehensive list of negative keywords can go a long way towards making sure visitors to your site are actually interested in what you have to offer.

There are a few places you can find good candidates for negative keywords.

• Keyword research tools like the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.
• Running a “Search Query” report in AdWords which will give you a list of search terms that have triggered your ads.
• Looking at your website logs to see what search terms people are typing in to find your site.
• Your brain.

So there you have it. Three mistakes (plus a bonus) that many small business owners make in AdWords. Eliminate them from your campaigns and you will improve your CTRs, Quality Scores and drive higher quality traffic to your site.

Do You Make This Mistake in Your Marketing?

“Well I never click on those.“

That’s a fairly common reaction I get when describing Google AdWords to people. (Just an aside for those who aren’t familiar with AdWords. AdWords ads are the “sponsored” results located primarily on the right side of the screen when you perform a search in Google. You can learn more about AdWords here.).

It’s the same reaction people have to direct mail and how they put theirs straight into the circular file.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who’s admitted to either opening their “junk mail” or clicking on AdWords ads!

But here’s the thing:

A lot of people do open their “junk” mail and buy the stuff being advertised. Billions of dollars a year of it.

A lot of people do click on AdWords ads. And these clicks are making AdWords advertisers a lot of S.W.I.S.S. Money.

The mistake comes when you make marketing decisions for your business based on your behavior and not your target market’s behavior. Just because you don’t open, click, buy, or care doesn’t mean your prospects and customers don’t.

Remember, it’s not about you – the business owner, it’s About You – your customer.

Keep that in mind, and you’re on your way to building a successful marketing campaign whether it’s online or off.

Why Free Search Engine Traffic is a Myth

It’s probably the biggest misconception I hear from people looking to promote their site online – “free” traffic from the search engines.

It doesn’t exist. It’s a myth. Forget about it.

I understand the confusion. You probably think if someone clicks a link to your site in the natural search engine rankings (as opposed to the sponsored pay-per-click (PPC) ads) it doesn’t cost you a dime. And you’re right.

However, getting your website ranked high enough in the search engines so that you’ll get a significant number of quality clicks from the natural search results will cost you – usually a lot more than a dime.

Welcome to the world of SEO. For those who are not familiar with the term SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process (art? science? magic?) of optimizing your website for certain keywords so that your site will appear high up in the natural search engine rankings.

A few months back, I blogged about the 7 Potential Pitfalls of SEO which explains why SEO is not really free and is not as appealing as you might think. A recent blog post on Search Engine Land titled “SEO is Not Free Traffic” looks at the true costs that are involved in SEO.

Bottom line: While it can be very rewarding, it’s not easy and it’s definitely not free.

The article also talks about a compensation model you should definitely consider if you’re going to hire an SEO firm. Read the full article here.