What if you could finely tune who would see your display ads? The value of Facebook ads versus other PPC advertising platforms would need to be tested for your own products/services to determine its actual merit. But since Facebook is the current social network gorilla on our little planet, it’s worthy of consideration.
An important aspect of Facebook ads to recognize right off the bat is its unique opportunity to target ads to user profiles (and related permutations as listed below) as opposed to only keywords and/or locations (such as other PPC platforms).
10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads You Should Know
1. Location Targeting
2. Likes and Interests Targeting
3. Connection Targeting
4. Relationship Targeting
5. Age Targeting
6. Birthday Targeting
7. Education Targeting
8. Sex Targeting (male/female)
9. Workplace Targeting
10. Language Targeting
If you’re going to test Facebook as an advertising platform, you should contemplate all of the above ways to more effectively target the presentation of your ads.
In addition to testing the workability of Facebook ads for your products/service, also bear in mind Facebook Click Fraud 101 as well as Facebook Demographics.
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Posted in Social Media by .
Nov 10
16
Email Marketing Naïveté
Even in this day and age, there are business owners who consider that because email is inexpensive and easy to send, that there’s not much to know about it. Of course, given that most of their attention is on running a business, they cannot be faulted for their naïveté about email marketing. (Or their lack of success in getting email marketing to work for them).
But if anyone has gone through the trouble of collecting email addresses, and crafting a campaign of messages, then having an awareness of at least what it will take to get the message into inboxes of the recipients should be of interest.
The best way to accomplish bulk email delivery is by using one of the many online services that specialize in such. In fact, it should be emphasized that using a permission-based, Email Service Provider (ESP) is an important component of getting a bulk emails to arrive at the intended destination.
Additionally, ESPs often provide features such as:
♦ The ability to send both HTML and plain text formats. Plain text has the best opportunity for getting through to the intended recipients, but HTML allows the use of colors, embedded images and other formatting choices that make a better email presentation.
♦ Spam scoring, which allows the sender to edit a message before sending it, for the purpose of reducing factors that may result in a message getting blocked before it gets to the recipients.
♦ Automatic list maintenance, which includes stopping emails from being sent to recipients who request such, as well as functionality to allow new subscribers to add themselves via web forms.
♦ Email templates, which can make it easier to send emails that are designed to look more like web pages and/or to make the email messages more readily readable by recipients.
♦ Email analytics, which are statistical metrics pertaining to each email campaign sent, as a way of measuring readership engagement.
Of course, the main point of using an ESP is to get your message through to recipients. Although no service is perfect, there are better ones than others. I have used a number of free and paid ESPs over the years and if you are interested in ESP recommendations, click CONTACT and shoot me a message and I’ll let you know what my current favored choices are.
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Posted in Email Marketing by .
1) How do you know if you are focusing your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies on the right keywords?
2) How do you know if you have the best headlines?
3) How do you determine the best offer for your product or service?
The answer is keyword research accompanied by TESTING, TESTING and more TESTING!
Of course there are a variety of ways to test keywords, to test headlines (and other copywriting points), as well as to test for the best offers.
You can certainly set up different pages that are focused on different sets of keywords, with different headlines, and different offers, and monitor key performance metrics, such as “visitors,” and “sales,” and compare them over time to see which perform the best and then continually refine their performance.
However, you can accomplish the same much faster using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
A) Write different PPC ads using your best selected keywords. Which keywords get more visitors to click on them?
B) Write PPC ads using different combinations of headlines with the best performing keywords. Which headlines get clicked on the most?
C) Write your best offers on your landing pages for your product or service, which are in harmony with your PPC ads. Which landing page offers convert the most visitors to sales? (Click the following link for #1 Copywriting Tip for more information on writing offers.)
With your testing results in hand, you can use this information to refine your long-term SEO campaign. Obviously, you want to keep the winners and get rid of the losers. But don’t stop there. Then the game becomes establishing new tests to beat the current “winner” (more technically referred to as the “control” item).
Of course you can accomplish all the above over time using natural traffic, but that takes much longer to be statistically significant. For relatively small amounts of expenditures, you can test keyword effectiveness and other important factors much faster, using pay-per-click advertising, before embarking on a long and involved strategic SEO process.
In essence you’re trading money for time, so that you can generate higher performance and profits.
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Posted in Pay Per Click by .
Press Releases may be viewed as holdovers from traditional media and are still relevant in the digital age. But what can be done to leverage them more effectively with modern business messaging initiatives?
In short, basic Internet marketing stuff.
The same key basics that are used to leverage technology to distribute your message farther than ever, with lower costs than in the past.
1) Keywords
Search Engine Optimization should be fundamental to any and all online publications. Press Releases should integrate pertinent keywords for your business products or services (or whatever you wish to rank for). The most prominent keywords should be featured in the title. Of course, don’t go overboard by stuffing an inordinate quantity of keywords into any parts of the press release, including the title or body, which has been ineffective for a long time. (For more info, visit High Keyword Density).
2) Include Links!
Whether paying for a press release service (or using free press release services) to distribute your messages, pointing links back to your website for SEO and traffic benefits is arguably one of the more important purposes. In fact, for some businesses, the search opportunities gained from the embedded links for SEO within their press releases is the main reason they publish ongoing press releases in the first place.
3) Pictures and Graphics
Including images and graphics to make the press release more interesting and informative serves the reader well. Furthermore, image seo is another way to leverage images, in conjunction with press releases, to gain more readers and traffic to your website.
4) Support Your Messages with Video
Videos not only can be more effective at getting out your communications than written text, search engines favor video and offer your business increased opportunities for more exposure. In some cases, video can be embedded directly into your press release, or, it can be linked from your press release to the video itself. (Visit the following link for the right length for internet videos).
NOTE: Since it is common to upload videos to hosting services such as YouTube and then embed them on a website, I have been asked a number of times, “Which page should I link to from my press release: YouTube or my website’s video page?” There are some circumstances when it would be desirable to link to your YouTube video directly, for example, if you are working to position your YouTube video higher within YouTube itself. However, generally speaking, businesses typically want the traffic on their own website. Hence, for many businesses, linking from your press releases to your video pages on your own site is the way to go.
Visit the following link for 6 Ways to Optimize Your Video for Maximum Search Engine Exposure.
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Posted in Keyword Marketing by .
Sep 10
23
Generating Free Traffic with Blogs
There are a number of ways to generate traffic, but they can all be boiled down to either:
1) Buying traffic or
2) Growing traffic naturally (free), primarily through Search Engine Optimization and including the use of social media.
And if you have a blog, the opportunities are even greater in regards to developing traffic naturally.
Because there is a large community of bloggers in the world, there is a likelihood that there are others blogging about a similar subject that you are.
Some of those bloggers may be influential in their respective areas and may have a considerable following of people who read what they have to say.
If such a high-profile blogger were to cite something that you wrote about, and link to your website, then you stand to benefit from their traffic visiting your site.
And it all has to do with how easy it is for blogs to link to each other, which is an important component of the community of blogging. (Blogging is not about a one-way communication that is typical of static websites. Blogging is about 2-way communication and community).
For example, let’s say you are a beginning blogger writing about the subject of photography. If you search around to discover other bloggers who write about photography, or a related area, such as art or design, you can determine that some have quite a following, as evidenced by the large amount of comments they receive on their blog.
Here is a customary way to inspire such a high-profile blog to link to yours:
A) Write thoughtful comments on their blog
B) Link to their posts from within your own blog
Such bloggers will notice your comments and, over time, they’ll gain insight into your thinking, or humor, or viewpoint, or experience, and personality. Any one of these points could result in that person linking to you.
Many bloggers automatically track what others are saying about them on other blogs. So, when you write their name on your blog, or when you write their website address on your blog, they are automatically notified. Do that a number of times over a period of weeks or months and you may very well inspire a reciprocal mention, which is a useful component of the 3rd part of the SEO Triangle. (See training video Driving Traffic Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle).
Realize that such a link, itself, and all by itself, even if no traffic were to arrive, is valuable enough that search engines may push your site higher up in the search rankings. (See training video on the SEO Triangle).
But when receiving links from a high-profile blogs, this can be a very useful source of like-minded TRAFFIC.
If a high-profile blogger cites an insightful post of yours, you can benefit from a flood of traffic, and some of those visitors will subscribe to your RSS and others may subscribe to your email newsletter list to see what else you’ve got to say in the future, which would then put them in the process of potentially buying something from you, such as a product or service.
Of course, underpinning this whole thing is an understanding that you’ve got something of value to add to the community. Conversely, that does not suggest that every post you write should be worthy of a Nobel Prize. Sometimes all it takes is a concise statement of simplicity about a matter of community interest and/or a humorous presentation of something already tacitly understood.
It’s also useful to be aware that the highest profile bloggers have LOTS of other bloggers vying for their link love, hence, depending upon how much traffic they command, it may be some time before they link to you, particularly if your blog only has a few posts, which would be a reflection that you have more developing to do as a blogger to become recognized as a stable source of contribution.
But there is nothing wrong with poking around on the Internet today to start commenting on the websites of other bloggers to set the stage for some later opportunities!
And the best part is that in a number of cases, it’s quite EASY to get links from other bloggers who are NOT so high-profile, which is still very helpful to generating more traffic for you!
(See training video Driving Traffic Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle for a better understanding of this concept).
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Posted in Blogging by .
Sep 10
13
Internal Linking
Since not all the content on your site has equal value, one simple way to establish greater authority for any given page(s) on your website is to create your own additional internal links that point to those pages.
Although that value can develop naturally over time as incoming links from external sites begin to point to your more important pages, you can give those same important pages an advantage by indicating to the search engines, as well as visitors, which pages are more important, by simply creating internal links (within your own site), that point to those pages.
For example, let’s say you are selling vitamins. Although your website may have many pages on all kinds of vitamins, if you have determined that a handful of all those offerings are more popular and/or more profitable, then by creating more internal links that point to those pages, you are increasing the importance of those pages within your own site, which can help make them more visible externally, as well.
As another example, here is an internal link to Driving Website Traffic with the SEO Triangle. That post has greater overall interest to a larger audience, than this post, and it also has a training video that makes it more valuable. However, the subject matter is related. So, by directing visitors to that post with an internal link, I’m indicating to search engines and to visitors that there is a more important page to serve up to searchers.
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Posted in Link Building by .
One of the common questions I get from clients trying to figure out how to manage their marketing budgets is “Should I use search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to generate more sales for my business?”
SEO embraces all the ways to drive visitors naturally to your website to take advantage of low-cost traffic, including the use of social media.
PPC is simpler to understand, since the concept of paying for ads to drive visitors to purchase products and services is about as interwoven within the fabric of our commercial world as the concept of exchanging money for goods.
In most circumstances, my answer is “You should be using both.”
Although it’s quite common to categorize SEO and PPC as opposing disciplines, they are truly complementary, as explained below.
First of all, let’s review rudimentary points about each.
SEO ADVANTAGES
♦ “Free” Traffic (The traffic may be free, but there is labor involved)
♦ More Traffic (More traffic flows through natural than paid listings)
♦ Building an Asset of Ongoing Traffic (The traffic continues even if you stop doing SEO)
♦ Better ROI (Low-cost traffic means better return on investment)
♦ Competitive Advantage (Fewer business understand and use it)
PPC ADVANTAGES
♦ Instant Results (Set up a campaign now and monitor your results in minutes)
♦ Very Quantifiable Results (Abundant analytics available for paid traffic)
♦ Full Transparency (Each penny can be accounted for)
♦ Ability to Adjust Quickly (Change your ads now and get different results now)
♦ Easy to Target Specific Audiences (Very powerful advantage)
♦ Does Not Require IT Skills (Marketing guys can control this, without consulting with Information Technology professionals)
SEO and PPC SYNERGY
As noted above, it’s best to drive traffic using both SEO and PPC channels to generate better short-term and longer-term performance.
However, they can be used in conjunction with each other to gain greater results.
For example, the immediacy of paid search advertising can be used to determine which keywords would benefit from organic SEO strategies.
Conversely, proper search engine optimization of landing pages leads to better performing paid advertising results and lower costs.
Finally, by having your business show up in natural and paid listings on the same search engine pages, it presents a more dominant presence for a business’s products and services.
For more information, visit The Two Primary Sources of Internet Traffic.
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Posted in Pay Per Click by .