Get massive exposure for your business, no special computer skills needed.
Quit wasting money on traditional advertising and marketing campaigns.
Blog to connect with customers and generate word of mouth.
Boost your visibility with Google, use MySpace for viral marketing.
Ignite word of mouth with Web social networks
No matter what kind of business you have, its success depends on two things: It must serve a need, and you must find customers. Most new businesses fail simply because the right people never heard about them. And this is the paradox for entrepreneurs: People aren’t paying attention to traditional marketing and advertising anymore. But free advertising is alive and well.
Whatever you want to call it—buzz, word of mouth, peer-to-peer or viral marketing—you can’t just manufacture it. You must earn it—by engaging your target market.
Fortunately, there is a very straightforward, ethical way of gaining this free exposure: by participating on social networks. These social media sites, such as MySpace and other Web 2.0 networks, allow members to create profiles of themselves (or their business) with the objective of meeting like-minded friends and partners who share the same passions and goals.
The individuals participating on these networks might be searching for anything—a mentor, a ride to work, a date for Saturday night, recommendations for a movie, a new job, or perhaps they want to meet someone who’s an expert in their hobby. For business owners who learn to use them, social networks can provide valuable free exposure to a worldwide pool of new customers and fans.
These social networks have turned traditional marketing on its head. No longer must a business owner scrape together a huge pile of cash for a marketing campaign, then pray that it works. Hundreds of thousands of businesses large and small are leveraging social networks to lure new customers, often at virtually no cost. And unlike most traditional advertising, social networking can pay dividends for years to come because it forges a strong link between you and consumers, enabling your biggest fans to become evangelists for your business.
Internet social networks allow entrepreneurs to build their businesses one customer at a time. It’s the same as having a “street team” pounding the pavement for you. Just as your street team might pass out fliers about a show or new product, your MySpace friends can forward the same type of information using electronic messages to a much larger audience.
When you’re successful, your loyal customers begin spreading the word for you, generating true word of mouth.Entrepreneurs can no longer depend on interruption-based ads, such as commercials and junk mail, which force consumers to stop what they’re doing and pay attention. But with social networking, you can influence these consumers precisely at the point where they’re engaged.
In the old days, with postal direct mail or telephone cold-calling, your chance of getting a response from someone who didn’t know you was about 2 percent—and that’s if you had a big marketing budget and were doing everything right. But today, the social-networking skills described in this book can result in response rates of 80 percent or more.
Many web designers fail to take into account the importance of web colors and text legibility when building their site. Watch this video which talks about this at length.
A good video discussing the difference between online marketing tactics and strategies. This is a good watch if you are beginning your online marketing campaign.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search engines offer some of the best value advertising online. Where else can you get targeted visitors from just $0.01 each?
However, because they aren't sure how it all works, or perhaps unconvinced that it does, many have yet to take advantage of the medium. With that in mind, I'm going to explain how you can benefit from PPC search engines, and spend as little as possible in the process.
In the PPC model, you write your own title and description, select a keyword searchers must enter for your listing to appear, and bid against other site owners for its rank in search results. Your bid equals the amount you will pay for each click on your listing.
I use several PPC search engines. Widely acknowledge to be the best performer, GoTo brings me more traffic - and sales - than all the rest put together. Being the most important, I will focus on it here, although the same techniques apply to any PPC SE.
#1 Secret To Big Returns On A Shoestring Budget
Bid prices for good rankings on very popular, common keywords are often high. However, the vast majority of advertisers *only* bid on these obvious terms. They ignore THOUSANDS of other keywords. Because few people are bidding on those overlooked keywords, the bid prices remain low. You and I can get good listings here for just a cent or two!
Of course, less popular keywords aren't searched for as often. But that *does not* matter. Play smart. Bid on LOTS of keywords. Hundreds, thousands even. Here's an example of how it works: # Keywords in Account # Times each Keyword Searched per Month Number of Times Your Ad is Seen* 20 1000 20,000 200 100 20,000
*Assume all listings have the same ranking, say the #3 spot.
As you can see, listing under 200 keywords, each of which is only searched for 100 times a month, can bring you the SAME amount of traffic as 20 listings for much more expensive, popular keywords that are searched for 1000 times each month.
Researching Your Keywords
Once you've opened your account, start researching your keywords. You will probably already have several relevant words and phrases in mind. Write them all down and head over to the GoTo Keyword Suggestion Tool with your list.
The Keyword Suggestion Tool tells you how many times in the previous month people have searched for the keyword you input, or any phrase containing it. Results are listed in order, with the most popular searches at the top.
Type your first keyword into the tool's search box. When the results come up, select "Save As" on your browser, and choose to save as "Text." This will save your results in a small plain text file that can be opened by any text editor (like NotePad). Use the keyword as the file name.
Do likewise with all of your keywords, phrases, and other potentially important terms within phrases. For example, one of your main keywords may be "marketing" and one of your phrases "marketing courses." In this case, search for "courses" as well. Although the majority of results will be inappropriate, you will usually find a handful of new terms that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise.
When you've finished your list, open the first file saved. Delete all irrelevant terms. From the remainder, identify potentially good words that you haven't yet investigated. Input these into the Suggestion Tool and repeat the process. Do the same for every file and you will soon have hundreds of terms.
For even more suggestions, try JimTools Keyword Generation Tool at http://www.jimtools.com . Bear in mind however that these are terms found in Web pages, and therefore not necessarily keywords used by searchers.
Get Databased
Create a simple database for your listing details - it will make managing your account much easier. You can use Excel or similar; I personally prefer FileMaker Pro for PPC accounts (Vicki at http://www.sitesell.com/info.html provides a basic template for affiliates).
Essential headings you will need are:
* Search Term
* URL
* Title
* Description
* Current Bid Amount
Optional headings Include:
* Number of Searches per Month (from GoTo tool)
* Title Length (auto calculated function)
* Description Length (auto calculated function)
* Listing Status (New, On, Off, Pending, Rejected)
* Product (helpful if advertising various products)
* Current Rank
* Top Bid Amount (time consuming to update: select terms only)
* Minimum Bid Amount (as above)
* First Page Minimum bid amount (as above)
* Date Last Modified (suggest auto function)
I also have FileMaker assign a serial number, so that it can mark terms as 'original' or 'duplicate', making the latter easy to delete.
Once you have your database, paste in the search terms from your collection of text files (if you have a good text editor, use 'search and replace' strings to batch process, deleting unwanted information, and tab-delimiting the remainder for direct import, either individually or merged into a single file).
Your Titles And Descriptions
Next compose your titles and descriptions. Remember you are writing an ad. Make your title catchy. Incorporating the search term within it usually increases clickthroughs. Beware however that more clicks doesn't always equal more sales (or more targeted visitors).
Some searchers will click on the first title they notice containing the term searched for, thinking it more relevant. What you are offering may be an exact match to the keyword, or it may be related. If the latter, think before you automatically include the term in your title. In addition, writing a different title for every search term is very time consuming.
Make your description as comprehensive and benefit-laden as you can within the space allowed (with GoTo, this is 40 characters for the title and 190 for the description. Other PPC engines vary, but most have higher limits).
If your budget is tight and you simply wish to sell something, consider making it obvious from your description. Unless you have a secondary strategy (like collecting email addresses) save money by filtering out those least likely to part with any cash. Concentrate on attracting your perfect prospect: one open to the possibility of making a purchase.
Your Maximum Bid Price
How much should you bid? Ideally, calculate your maximum bid limit based on the average conversion ratio of the page you are linking to. If you don't know what that is, I suggest you initially base your limit on a 1% conversion ratio (1 in every 100 visitors buys).
Lets say you make $20 on every sale. That means - on average - for every 100 visitors, you get $20. To be in profit, those 100 visitors must cost you less than the $20 you make. It therefore follows that one visitor must cost less than $20/100, or $0.20. This is your break-even point. Always bid below this figure.
With a bid of $0.04, the 100 visitors required for a $20 sale will only cost you $4. You make $16 profit. If your conversion ratio is in reality 3%, at $0.04 per click you will make $56 for every $4 you spend. That's a 1400% profit!
Use coded (tracked) URL's for your PPC listings, or if feasible link them to specific pages that cannot be accessed by a surfer on your site (can be duplicates with no inbound links). You will soon have a good idea of your real conversion ratio.
Bidding Strategy
The idea is to bid as little as possible for the highest number of targeted visitors. Being first on the results page will bring most visitors. However, as I mentioned earlier, simply getting more clickthroughs is not necessarily a good thing.
In the top position, you are more likely to attract 'lazy' searchers that simply click on the first thing they see, and others who automatically assume that since your listing is at the top, it must be the most relevant (like a regular search engine). Although your listing may be highly relevant, it might not be what THEY had in mind.
How important or not this is, depends on the cost of the listings and your budget. If the current top bid is, say $0.10 and the second $0.05. It makes more sense to bid $0.06 and get the number two position, than pay $0.11 for the top spot.
The further down the listings your ad appears, the less likely it will be seen. This is not only due to the behavior of searchers. Web sites that partner with GoTo seldom display all of the listings. AOL for example only displays the first three. Others display the first five, ten, or possibly twenty listings.
With this in mind, create various 'cut-off' points in the listings, in relation to your budget. Can you afford to be in the top three listings? If not, look at the top five, then ten.
Don't overly concern yourself with individual positions within these groupings. Your exposure and - all else being equal - the number of clickthroughs you get will be almost the same whether you are at, say, number 7 or number 10. The difference in bid price however can be substantial. Pay as little as possible to get into the highest group within your budget. That notwithstanding, increasing your bid by 2 cents to jump five positions in the top half of the page would be worthwhile.
On popular terms where bids are high, simply try to get into the first half of the results page (the top 20 on GoTo). If that is still beyond my budget, I aim for a cheap position right at the bottom of the page.
My theory is that most searchers who have bothered to scroll more than halfway down the page will continue to the end. In addition, most people tend to scroll in 'chunks'. This makes them likely to miss listings in the middle, as their eyes are naturally drawn to the white space at the bottom of the page.
If you can't afford page one at all, try and get within the first five or ten listings on page two.
Getting Your Listings Online
GoTo have a good account manager, and I would suggest using it to submit your first listings. However, like most online tools, it can become extremely tedious when you have a lot of work to get through.
GoTo will happily accept bulk submissions in an Excel spreadsheet they have available for download. If you don't have Excel, you can send your listings in tab-delimited text format (other PPC engines operate the same way, but some don't advertise the fact, requiring you ask).
Use the account manager to get your first few listings online. GoTo check all submissions for relevancy (good for your conversion ratio) so it will be 3-5 days before they go live. Meanwhile, work up a list of several hundred keywords. Instead of spending hours inputing these yourself, email them to GoTo and let them do it for you.
If you're not yet using PPC search engines, now is the time to start. You won't regret it. Follow these guidelines and it's impossible not to profit!
Online since 1998, Azam Corry Helps Newbies Develop a Winning Web Marketing Strategy with Great Free Guides, Tools and Resources. Also Discover Resale Rights eBooks & Resell Kits That Make Money Fast! ==> Special from Azam: Subscribe now to my Biz Bits Marketing eZine & get the Net's most Comprehensive ecourse PLUS real-value ebooks completely FREE!
Here's a great video explaining PPC a little more...
is an excellent book detailing how you can use the power of communication and internet social networking to expand your business. From the author:
