Real Web Marketing Blog

Blogs an Integral Part of Website Marketing

By John Eberhard

Today I believe that the successful combination of actions for website marketing is:

1. Blog: Post an article or shorter post once per week, then notify (called “pinging”) the blog search engines.
2. Optimized Press Release: Writing a press release once a week that contains the top keywords you are targeting, posting this on a separate blog that is just for your releases, then ping the blog search engines. Then submit it to several online PR sites.
3. Social Media: Post your articles on a Facebook corporate page, Squidoo, and HubPages, then bookmark those pages on Delicious, Digg, and Stumbleupon.
4. Article Directories: Write a new article at least twice a month (once a week is better) and submit it to article directories such as www.goarticles.com. Recently we have found a number of directories that allow you to create links within the article body, to your web site, called “anchor text.”
5. Email Newsletter: Send an HTML newsletter to your in-house email list of clients, prospects and subscribers, 2-4 times per month.
6. Pay Per Click Advertising: Advertising on Google AdWords and other pay per click providers gives you immediate response.

I have been finding that this combination of actions is very powerful. But you have to keep all these actions in.

Content

First of all, this combination of actions requires a continuous stream of content, which of course takes work to create.

But if you follow the above recipe, you can see that you can write one article per week, 500-700 words, and use this article for your article blog (#1 above), social media sites (#3), article directories (#4), and the email newsletter (#5). So you write one article per week but you put it to use in a variety of media.

Then you write a press release and put it up on a blog, then submit it to online PR sites. Most of these sites require that the release be at least 300 words.

Blogs

You’ll notice that the first two items on the list above are blogs. I am recommending a blog for your articles, and then another one that is geared to press releases. The advantages of using blogs are numerous.

1. There are a group of search engines specifically geared to blogs, and it is easy to notify these search engines about your latest blog post, by pinging them using one of the sites that pings them. Also some blog services such as Typepad and Wordpress can be configured to ping these search engines automatically when you save your post.
2. Blog posts seem to find their way into the regular search engines very fast when you ping the blog search engines.
3. When you enter your post, you can create a link from some of the words, to your web site. A link from a word or phrase is called “anchor text.” Some sources say that anchor text pointing to your site is the most valuable thing you can get on the web, in terms of improving your search engine rankings. You make sure you include some of the top keywords that you are trying to rank for, and link those to an appropriate page on your main site.
4. Particularly if you use one of your target keywords in the headline, you will often notice you rank very well shortly thereafter for that keyword on Google News or in Google.
5. Blog services usually create an RSS feed automatically when you post something. Without a blog, in order to create an RSS feed you have to create an XML file by hand, and it’s a bit of a pain.
6. It is easy to add photos or videos to a blog post.

You can add various elements to a blog, such as thin columns on the right and/or left side of the main column where you posts go. You can add pictures of and links to books or other items you’re selling. You can link to various pages on your web site. You can link to your MySpace and Facebook corporate pages. You can put a newsletter subscription box. You can put a customized masthead at the top. You can also buy a new web address and then set that up as your blog address. 

I think it’s important to add features like this to a blog and it makes it look a lot more professional. My preference for a blog service is Typepad, but Wordpress is very good too. My Typepad service is $15 per month which allows me to create an unlimited number of blogs. I have four running now, including an article blog, a press release blog, a political blog, and one for my son for his writing.

Currently, aside from Google AdWords, my blogs are referring more traffic to my site than any other source.

 

How Much is Pay Per Click Advertising Going to Cost Me?

By John Eberhard

Often clients or prospective clients will ask me this question. They want to know how high the bids are for their industry, or how much they will pay per lead, or how high their budget needs to be, or what we charge for our services to set up and manage a pay per click account on Google, Yahoo, MSN or Facebook.

I wish there was a cut and dry way to answer this question, but there isn’t. But I can explain how pay per click advertising works, and together we can arrive at an answer.

The first thing to know is that an advertiser bids a certain dollar amount that they are willing to pay every time a searcher clicks on their ad. Let’s say you bid $1.00. That means that the maximum amount you will pay when someone clicks on your pay per click ad is $1.00. The actual amount will vary somewhat and will usually be a little less than that.

Now that you have bid $1.00 for that keyword, what happens next? Well, there are almost always other companies competing for that keyword. In other words, when someone types in that keyword on Google let’s say, you will see a variety of sponsored ads come up for other companies. Each one of those companies has set their maximum bid amount that they are willing to spend for that keyword.

So if you have set your max bid amount at $1.00, and there are four other competitors and they have set their max bids at $0.90, $0.80, and $.075, your ad will appear in the first position. There are other factors that determine this other than the bid, but for the most part the bid will determine whether your ad comes up in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 27th position.

And your ad’s position, to a large extent determines how many people are going to click on your ad, which is called the clickthrough rate. You don’t have to be in the number one position to get people to click through on your ad, but generally the ads at or near the top get the most clickthroughs.

So as an advertiser you want to pay as little as possible for your clickthroughs. BUT, if other advertisers are already bidding high, you will need to bid higher for that keyword if you even want your ad to be seen. Because if there are more than 10 advertisers for a given keyword, and for many keywords there are, if your bid is really low your ad won’t even appear on the first page (and that means you will get no or virtually no clickthroughs).

So how do you know what the other people are bidding? That will determine how high you have to bid, right? That will tell you whether it is even going to be viable to advertise on a given keyword.

Unfortunately there is no exact way to tell before you set up a campaign, what other people are bidding for a specific keyword. Yahoo used to offer a tool that showed you the exact bids on any keyword, but they took that away over a year ago.

Now Google offers a tool within their interface called the “Traffic Estimator,” where you can enter your keyword or a list of keywords, and try different bids, and it will estimate the number clickthroughs you’ll get at various levels. The Google Traffic Estimator will give you an idea of how high you will need to bid, but it won’t give you an exact idea.

The only way you get an exact idea of how high you need to bid is to start a campaign on Google or one of the other providers. After a week you will know. Because you will put up a campaign, check it after a day or so and see what happens. Google will show you the average position of your ad. If your average position is 1 or 2, then your bid is fine. But if your average position is 8 or 9 or 27, or if the keyword interface shows that your ad is not appearing on page one, then you need to raise your bids. You should check your campaign every day or so for the first week, and adjust your bids according to what you see. Then you’ll know after a week or so how high you have to bid.

I have seen campaigns where a client was able to bid 25 cents for a group of keywords and get traffic at that level. But that’s rare today. Some campaigns you can bid $1.00 to $2.00 (and I almost always start out with a bid of $1.00 or $2.00). But some campaigns, due to extremely high competition for those keywords, you will need to bid $5.00, $10.00 or even more. Different sectors of the home improvement industry are especially competitive at this time.

The best thing is to start up a campaign and monitor it closely for a week. Then you’ll have a really good idea.

Cost Per Lead

The cost per lead is something you can track very carefully with Google, and this is one of the things that determines whether your campaign is viable or not. The cost per lead depends on two factors:

1. The bid
2. The conversion ratio

Obviously if you have to bid higher for a given keyword or group of keywords, your cost per lead is going to be higher. But then when someone lands on the page of your site, the next factor is how well you close them to do what you want them to do. This is the conversion factor, i.e. what percentage of people landing on that page do the desired action? With a lead generation campaign, you are trying to close them to fill out the lead form on the web page or call you and become a lead. When you are selling a product online, you want to close them to buy the product right now.

I have seen campaigns with a cost per lead as low as $10 (one just recently). I have seen other campaigns with a cost per lead as high as $150, and where the company was very happy with that. With lead generation campaigns, including both form reaches and phone calls, most campaigns can get a cost per lead of $30 to $80. Whether the cost per lead is viable depends on what your sales closing percentage is, and your average dollar amount of sale.

Once you know what your bid level is, and your approximate cost per lead, you can decide how many leads you want to get from pay per click, then set your monthly budget accordingly.

Website Marketing in the Current and Future Economy

By John Eberhard

What does the current economic climate bode for the future of marketing media, and specifically, for traditional media such as print advertising or direct mail, vs. website marketing?

Pay per click advertising, using Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN Ad Center, and Facebook’s pay per click ad program, has many strengths when considered against traditional media.

For one thing, pay per click advertising is so trackable. Using Google’s online interface, and particularly if you use their conversion tracking code, you can know which keywords are producing conversions for you (i.e. people who not only click on your ad to come to your site, but also fill out the form and become a lead or a sale). You can know which of your campaigns are producing conversions. And if you are running multiple ads side by side in a single campaign, you can know exactly which ones are producing what.

Not only that, but you can know exactly what your cost per lead is. And by adjusting your keyword list, your bids, your text ads, and your landing pages on your site, you can be remarkably in control of that cost per lead.

Another advantage of pay per click advertising over traditional types is that you can test a new campaign for just a few days. If no one clicks on it, you don’t pay anything. You can test something new for a short time and see how it’s going to do. Or test it in one state and roll it out to others if it works well.

You don’t get anything like that level of control or accountability with, say print advertising. You pay whether there is any response or not.

So what is the result going to be of the current economic climate, where advertisers in many markets are likely to have less to spend? I agree with Eric Qualman of Search Engine Watch, who writes:

“1. Online Marketing Spend OK

“As we've seen during tough financial turns in the last 14 years, proven online marketing channels are often the last to be cut because they're so efficient. The medium is trackable to a hard ROI, so companies often shift a higher percentage of their total spend to online. Paid search and e-mail are the last two pillars to be cut.

“Some of this depends on which vertical (business segment) your company is in. For example, Proctor & Gamble is probably more likely to cut paid search than Hyatt.”

…

“One likely outcome of all of this is a permanent shift from traditional channels of marketing to online marketing. Yes, online marketing could become the highest percentage of marketing spend sooner than any of us imagined.”

Search Engine Watch is a great source for data on search engine marketing by the way.

So my advice is to keep your dollars in pay per click, search engine optimization and link building during this time period. Pay per click will get you the fast result and return on investment, while SEO and link building take a bit longer to get results but the return on investment is higher in the long run.

 

Don't Stop Promoting in Uncertain Economic Times

By John Eberhard

The natural tendency in uncertain economic times is to cut back on all expenses for your business. Often included in the cutbacks is your promotional expenditures. This is a mistake. Here's why.

You probably understand that marketing and promotion are vital to the survival of your business. Even if you feel like you are making enough right now or have enough business, because of attrition, you will eventually have certain customers fall off. So it is vital not just to deliver excellent service to your existing customers, but to continually promote for new customers.

Promoting for new customers is more challenging and more expensive than promoting to your existing customers to buy more from you, but it must be done.

In an economic situation like we are in right now, with a banking crisis looming and Congress debating various forms of a bailout package, the tendency for your customers will be to cut back on their expenses. So they may be considering how they can buy less of your product or service right now. Even if your product or service is not a discretionary thing, i.e. even if it is something that is definitely needed and they can't do without it, they still might be looking at cutting down or delaying the expenditure.

So in the face of such a situation, it is more vital than ever for you to promote your products or services. Cutting back on your promotion or cutting out one or more of your major promotional actions is a bad move. If anything, it is better to increase promotion during such a period. You have to give customers and prospects more reasons to buy your products or services, to overcome their desire to cut back or their fear of the economic climate.

I read somewhere recently, that if you continue to promote during a period when your competitors are cutting back on promo, then at the end of that period you will have expanded and they will have contracted. In other words, you'll eat their lunch and take a share of their business away.

Over the 20 years that I have worked in the marketing field, sometimes as an employee and sometimes as an outside consultant, I have seen several times where a company decided to cut back on promo, usually because their income was tight and they needed to cut back on expenses. In each case I advised against this. In each case it made the situation worse for the company to cut back on promo. In several cases the company went into a new period of even lower income, and after learning their lesson, had to resume promoting and were able to pull themselves out of the mess. In one case, the company went out of business.

I'm not trying to be alarmist here. But it is a law that if you cut back on or discontinue your promotional efforts, that your income will drop. It's especially important right now, with all the financial worry and hysteria, to keep this in mind and keep your promotional efforts going strong.