For most of us with content driven sites whose purpose online is to make money there are a few companies out there that help fascilitate this process. These companies are particularly beneficial in that they allow you to make money with only the initial setup involved. No sales team needed!
They can help give smaller sites a helping hand and larger sites a major boost in revenue.
So who are these companies and how can I get started with them? (more…)
Marketing Your eZine
The internet marketing “Guru’s” have been saying for years that the “money is in the list”. In other words, having thousands of subscribers to your ezine or newsletter increases your chances of potential sales. It is pretty hard to dispute that quote but how do you go about getting those thousands of subscribers to sign up for your ezine?
I use three primary ways to get interested subscribers to sign up for my ezine. Purchased leads and subscription services, ezine directories and article writing.
Purchased Leads/Subscription Services
Purchased leads and subscription services work with you to get subscribers to sign up for your ezine. You agree to purchase x amount of subscribers per month from a subscription service for a fee and they will advertise your ezine for you until they have filled the amount of subscribers you have purchased. Most companies will always give you more than the amount you purchased due to bad email addresses, removals, and undelivered emails.
Subscription services are ideal for anyone that is first starting out as a way to get quite a few subscribers in a relatively short amount of time. You will also have a choice of single opt-in or double-in subscribers. Double opt-in subscribers actually have to reply to an email to validate that they are interested in your ezine, where single opt-in will get your ezine automatically. There are many subscription services to choose from and I advise trying different ones because every list is different.
EZine Directories
Ezine directories are websites that will allow you to submit your ezine to their website. There are free and paid directories. You submit your url for your ezine and a short ad about your ezine and that is it. Here are few examples of some ezine directories I use.
http://www.bestezines.com
http://www.ezineadvertising.com
http://www.ezine-dir.com
http://www.ezinelocater.com
http://www.ezine-marketing.com
http://www.ezinesearch.com
http://www.ezine-swap.com
http://www.ezine-universe.com
http://www.ezinepublisher.org
You may also do a search at http://www.google.com for more ezine directories.
Writing Articles
Writing articles is a great way of promoting your ezine, website, or products. Simply write a short article of 500-1000 words on the subject of your choice, preferably about your home business and submit them to article directories. At the end of each article you get to use a author resource box to tell the reader about yourself. This is where you promote your ezine, website or product. Use four to six lines to give your name and details. Then submit your article to article directories that are always looking for quality content. Here are some of the article directories I use.
http://www.authorconnection.com
http://www.addme.com/nlsubmit.htm
http://www.allnetarticles.com
http://www.articlecentral.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.articles911.com
http://www.bestparentingresources.com/Article.html
http://www.boconline.com/sub-art.htm
http://www.business-dynamics.com/resource_library/index.html
http://www.businesstoolchest.com/articles/submit.shtml
http://www.bytesworth.com/articles
http://cerebuswebmaster.com/onsite/articles.html
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml
http://www.clickforcontent.com
http://www.connectionteam.com
http://www.digital-women.com/submitarticle.htm
Tools
There are some tools you will need in order to deliver your ezine to your subscribers. A good autoresponder is a must if you hope to have thousands of subscribers to your ezine.
Autoresponders house your ezine and subscribers on one system and automatically send your ezine to your subscribers. The autoresponder takes care of when to send the subscriber the next addition of your ezine based on the intervals you set.
Another good tool to use is a pop-up or pop-over ad on your website for those that are visiting your website. The pop-up/over ad will capture the prospects name and email address and send it directly to your autoreponder. Once you have them in your autoresponder you start to develop a trust relationship with your subscribers, this is important because once your subscriber feels like they can trust you they are more likely to buy what you are selling.
Good luck with your ezine marketing!
Author Bio:
Dirk Wagner is CEO and owner of http://team4success.biz and the free, easy to install #1 home business toolbar with automated updates.A website dedicated to helping the home-based business entrepreneur start and succeed with there very own home-based business.
Choosing the right keywords for maximum ROI
Today, for a company or ad agency to be truly successful in search engine marketing (SEM), choosing the right keywords that people are actually typing into Overture or the other search engines can mean the difference between a very rewarding online ad campaign, or one that fails miserably.
However, it is fortunate that selecting the right keywords that will drive targeted and qualified sales leads to your website is a fairly simple exercise. Using Overture, Google’s AdWords or any other similar PPC program, marketers can easily delete keywords that don’t produce the desired results, add new ones or modify the ones that currently exist, by simply accessing their accounts at any of these search engines. Companies can even experiment with certain keywords if they so desire, in an attempt at producing the maximum ROI.
Nevertheless, the initial start-up phase still needs close observation and requires a careful monitoring of the first results. The wrong set of keywords can seriously hamper the overall success of any online ad campaign, not to mention the frustration and the waste of time and resources. Additionally, launch an ad campaign with the wrong keywords and your PPC costs can quickly drive up a bill to levels you never taught possible. If an initial campaign only attracts casual browsers or “lookers” and not serious buyers, you should carefully review all of the keywords you originally selected.
In search engine marketing, keywords fall into two very distinctive and main groups:
1. Generic keywords
2. Branded keywords
How to manage generic keywords
As a rule, managing branded keywords is usually simpler than managing generic keywords, although this doesn’t mean it’s impossible, on the contrary. If your site visitors or prospective clients aren’t familiar with the brand names or trademarks of your company, then you will have to concentrate on generic (or organic) keywords for your website.
For companies or subsidiaries that wish to expand into new market segments, even they will need to concentrate in promoting keywords that will be directly connected with their business, but that may not be names of specific trademarks, service marks or traditional brand names.
The secret in managing generic keywords is to avoid keywords that are too broad. For example, if you are in the travel industry, the keyword ‘travel’ would much too broad. Is it air travel, by car, by boat, what? You would need to narrow it down further, in an effort to avoid what is called ‘junk traffic’. Junk traffic is determined by traffic that has no value to you, but that you will still need to pay for if you rely on pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-for-performance (PFP).
Generic keywords by topics
Most likely, your website is about one single topic or subject. Usually, in any corporate website, you have one major topic, along with a few subtopics, or secondary themes. Let’s take the example of a company offering travel packages to sun-filled beaches in the south. One effective way to group subtopics and make them keywords that you can advertise could be: Caribbean Travel, Pacific Travel, Florida Travel, Gulf of Mexico Travel, etc.
What’s important to remember here is, when writing up your keywords, think of what people would type in a search engine to find that nice sunny beach. A great tool to help you with this would be Wordtracker, or the free keyword suggestion tool at Overture.
How to manage branded keywords
The best way to manage branded keywords is to start with your company name, its products, services, trademarks, service marks or brand names if you have any. Since your company is the only one using a specific trademark or brand name, a good idea is to only bid the minimum price asked by the search engine you are using. There is no sense in bidding more for it, since your brand or trademark should always be unique and exclusive to your company.
In fact, since no other company is competing for the same search terms you will be using, this just explains why well-known branded keywords deliver such high returns on investment (ROI). Still, you should make certain that your branded keywords are really being searched by people, again using Wordtracker or the free keyword suggestion tool at Overture.
Trademarks and brand names
Surprisingly, a large number of companies don’t bid on their own trademarks or brand names. In fact, I still hear a lot of executives at large Fortune 500 companies say their brand is well recognized and they don’t need to bid on them. This is a very big mistake, since they are loosing out on very targeted traffic, and what’s more, that traffic costs very little, since they should be paying the minimum acceptable bid for it.
If you don’t believe me on this, try typing some well-known trademarks or brand names in Google or Yahoo and notice the large amount of them that don’t even appear on the first results pages, in the generic (or organic) listings.
Domain names
Sadly, it may not always be possible to register a Web domain name (URL) that matches your company name, trademark, service mark or brand name. To protect your own brand, you should register all domain name extensions. For example, you should register the .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc. extensions and have them all point to your website, using a 301 re-direct command.
For example, I know for a fact that many large chemical companies usually register their domain names, as soon as a new chemical product or trademark is about to be marketed. Additionally, if they have two or three sub-products they are manufacturing, and all those sub-products will carry different brand names, they will also register all of those domain names too.
Conclusion
Choosing the right keywords in search engine marketing isn’t difficult and can be done rather quickly once you understand the basics. What’s more, carefully selecting the right keywords that real people type in search engines will significantly increase your ROI.
Gain valuable market share at the expense of your competition, and boost your sales and increase your profits by implementing the right keyword strategy in your search engine marketing. If you follow the advice offered in this article, you should be well on your way of achieving these goals.
Reference: ‘Search Engine Advertising’ by Catherine Seda. 347 pages.
New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau of Rank For Sales
How to lower your client acquisition cost
The whole purpose of search engine marketing is to attract new prospects and buying customers. In certain cases however, your sales could become limited, for the simple reason that not everybody is seeking the products or services your company offers. Across the World Wide Web, if there are only 6,000 searches a month for the keywords �industrial pump rebuilding�, it will be hard for you to make more people search for that keyword phrase when Wordtracker tells us there has been only 6,000 searches for those three keywords in any given month or period.
Even if you were to buy the keywords �industrial pump rebuilding�, you cannot expect them to appear more than about 6,000 times a month, which will limit your page impressions to that same number of 6,000.
One efficient way to turn around this problem is to lower your client acquisition cost (CAC). If you can successfully achieve that goal, it will effectively boost your ROI for the search engine marketing campaigns you are currently managing.
The breakeven point
If your company sells a product for $25, there is normally a percentage or dollar amount of that total price which is profit. Using information from your search engine marketing ad campaign, if you actually spend $25 on advertising, you will actually need to acquire at least one new client at $25 just to break even.
In such an example, $25 would be your maximum client acquisition cost for this particular ad campaign.
Since search engine marketers usually want to maximize their ROI on their campaigns, to increase your profit level and by the same way reduce your CAC, some will try to reduce the unit acquisition cost set in this example ($25) to a lower level.
Importance of making some �road checks� along the way
Before committing any kind of significant ad budget to any campaign, an experienced search engine marketer will perform a few �road checks� along the way. This single step is critical to the overall success and ROI of your ad campaign, and will act as a �test-bed� for all your online marketing efforts.
One great way to start such a road check is by utilizing Google�s AdWords program. For only $ 5.00 you can set up a new PPC (Pay per Click) ad program, where your listings can appear within less than 30 minutes in most cases. Depending on your industry, and depending on the general level of competition there is in your market, it is suggested that you start with a low bid price, say fifty cents to a dollar. You might even try an initial bid price of less than fifty cents if you think it is appropriate to do so. This is one area where trial and error can actually save you money.
It is extremely important that you accurately monitor all of your road checks along the way, since you want to learn as much as you can from these tests. Failing to do this could seriously hinder your overall ROI later, once your ad campaign starts maturing.
More ways to �test-drive� your ads
As you delve deeper into your test runs, it will become more and more important to check your click-through reports (CTR) provided by your paid inclusion or paid placement search engine. Just log into your Google AdWords account and verify your number of clicks, page impressions, click-through rates and also check your single click fees for each and every keyword or keyword phrase in all of your ad campaigns.
One word of caution: CTR�s don�t always deliver the tell tale signs you need to discover or won�t always give you a true or accurate picture of your campaign profitability. The best tool to achieve that goal is to utilize a good ROI tracking system that will carefully monitor all your sales data, and produce individual reports for every product you sell on every search engine you are using, along with every keyword or keyword phrase used in your campaign.
Putting to work those conversion-tracking tools
No search engine marketing campaign can ever be complete or efficient without an accurate system of measuring conversion tracking. It�s great to get targeted traffic, but if those prospects don�t convert into buying customers, this will have a damaging effect in the overall profitability of any online ad campaign.
Today, most paid inclusion or paid placement search engine offers conversion tracking to most of their advertisers, large or small. Most of those tracking packages are good and can spell a marked improvement in a campaign.
However, if you are running many individual ad campaigns, spread across many different search engines, you should consider a third-party ROI and conversion-tracking tool available from a number of good vendors.
Conclusion
Significantly lowering your client acquisition costs for all of your online marketing campaigns can be easily implemented if the tips and techniques given in this article are followed. Remember that time can work for you, as it can very well work against you, if your competition is harder at work than you are.
Accurately measuring your ad performance against certain benchmarks you have developed in-house, by a third-party or by an experienced search engine marketing firm can make a big difference in the ROI your campaigns can really deliver.
Make good use of today�s campaign management tools available, either by buying the commercially available software needed for your application, or by using third-party management and monitoring programs offered for that task.
____________
Reference:
“Search Engine Advertising” by Catherine Seda.
347 pages. New Riders Publishing. Indianapolis, IN. 46240.
Author:
Serge Thibodeau or Rank For Sales
Using Words That Sell
This article may come as a surprise to you.
Especially since it is written by a web designer. Let me explain……
Rescue Your Web Site from Boring Words and Poor Design.
The difference between a successful website design and a site that brings in zero or very little business is not how nice the graphics are, not the colors you choose. It’s not the flashy animation, and it’s not your precious company logo.
I’m not saying to remove these elements. Some of them are important. But they’re mostly ego-driven. They are “me” messages, and have absolutely nothing to do with what you want your visitor to do.
And what is that you ask? The answer is of course. You want your visitors to buy something.
People who are considering doing business with you are only interested in one thing; “What’s In It For Me?”
One of the first steps toward a successful website is writing copy that tells the reader what’s in it for him, in a style that is easy to read.
Make More Cash
Study any website that makes money and I promise you’ll see the following copy elements in place:
In the main body copy, the text color is always black with a white background, making it easy to read. This should be obvious, but it’s amazing how many websites out there do not follow this very basic guideline.
Testimonials, and other secondary elements commonly use a contrasting font such as courier, courier new. The background in light blue, beige, or yellow shade to make it stand apart from the white background of the main body copy.
Verdana is the most widely used font for your body copy. This font was actually developed for use in the web. Times New Roman, Arial, and Georgiana are also popular. Never use more than two different font faces in your sales copy.
The use of yellow highlights, italics and bold font-style for emphasis.
Headlines and Subheads are usually a contrasting color from the black body text. A shade of red, dark green and dark blue are good colors. However, do not use more than three or four different colors.
Sentence and paragraph font size is commonly between 8pt. and 12pt. Never smaller than that, and never bigger.
Headlines and sub headlines usually between 14pt. and 18pt.
Paragraphs never justified. Most common is left-margin with no indent.
How To Write Successful Headlines
In your sales copy you need an attention-grabbing headline and a compelling sales message full of benefits, clearly describing what your product or service is all about.
Legendary copywriter Ted Nicholas author of 14 best-selling books including “Magic Words That Bring You Riches” has these excellent tips on writing headlines
“Start with a well thought out headline.”
“Five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. It makes sense, therefore, to spend the major portion of your effort on headlines.”
“A good headline motivates action by stirring an emotion”
“Write as many as 250 headlines before settling on one”
13 Proven Headline Words
Announcing…
Secrets of…
New…
Now…
Amazing…
Facts you…
Breakthrough…
At Last…
Advice to…
The truth of…
Free…
How would…
How to…
How To Write Attention-Grabbing First Sentences
Joe Sugarman (of blu-blocker sunglass fame) and author of best-selling book “Advertising Secrets of the Written Word” has these tips on writing first sentences;
“Keep it short, sweet and almost incomplete.”
For example:
It’s easy.
It had to happen.
It’s time.
It’s crazy.
The sole purpose of the first sentence is to get you to read the second sentence.
How To Write Attention-Grabbing Ending Sentences
“You must plant seeds of curiosity for the reader.” “At the end of a paragraph offer a reason to read the next paragraph.”
Using sentences such as…..
But there’s more.
So read on.
But I didn’t stop there.
Let me explain.
Now here comes the good part.
These tips represent just the tip of the iceberg on breathing new life into your half-dead web site.
We’ll cover all of the other necessary elements in future articles. Stay tuned.
I hope that you have found this information to be helpful in your pursuit of excellence. Thank you for reading.
Regards,
Dave Peterson
Author Bio:
Dave is not only a Professional Website Designer. He also incorporates exciting state-of-the-art marketing strategies and expertise that help clients put more cash in there pockets. Providing great value to his clients.
The Rise and Fall of Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs were once a great source of online revenue, a savvy webmaster with an eye for marketing could easily parley a site into a money making machine with a little luck and effort. However, the evolution and growth of the Internet has hampered the growth of fortune making affiliate programs. Constant search engine algorithm changes, along with the search engine’s clear distaste for sites participating in affiliate programs; have made it a little more difficult to earn a healthy affiliate revenue. An influx in the use of software programs that terminate cookie tracking and privacy programs that prevent webmasters from tracking referrers, have also hindered the affiliate sales channel. While it is still possible to make money through affiliate marketing, other alternatives ought to be considered.
A Healthy Alternative or Supplement
Google’s Adsense program allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google’s pay-per-click Adword results. This has become a popular alternative and an effective revenue sharing program for webmasters. Google’s spider parses the adserving website and serves ads that relate to the website’s content. While the Google’s Adsense program still has some issues, they are making efforts to improve it.
The website maintenance related to Adsense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert javascript into the webpage or website template. The javascript calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the webpage. If the visitor clicks one of the Adsense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral.
The implementation, while simple, has its drawbacks. Google dictates the format of the ads. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted text boxes that lack creativity. A recent improvement allows webmasters to modify the ad boxes to resemble the website’s color scheme. Still, a far cry from some of the creative ads webmasters are accustom to.
The example below reflects how the color scheme can be modified to match the look of the website, but the ads physically don’t fit well into the overall website design.
sample modified to match sites color scheme:
http://www.hospital-software.com (scroll to the bottom)
Google determines the content of the ads that are shown. Sometimes the ads are poorly targeted, and of no interest to the website visitors.
sample of poorly targeted ads:
http://www.real-estate-supply.com
Adwords can be a great addition to a website, and when well matched to the content the revenue stream from Google is consistent and effortless.
sample of effective Adsense program:
http://www.police-supplies.com (scroll to the bottom)
http://www.small-business-software.net (scroll to the bottom)
Not that the Google Adsense program is not without its problems.as the reporting provided by Google is lacking. Google has not implemented any way to track multiple sites that serve ads; they simply show the number of ads served, the percentage of clicks received, and the revenue earned each day. Google does not disclose the amount of the revenue they share, what percentage of the revenue they earn and what someone can expect to receive for each click. Webmasters with multiple sites will have difficulty determining which websites are producing the money in the Adsense program.
With affiliate programs many webmasters implement a new browser launch with each click off the site, Adsense removes the visitor from the website and there is not currently an option to launch the visitor into another browser.
Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed webmasters to prevent a specific domain’s ads from being served on the website. Ad blocking meant that webmasters could prevent their competitors ads from being dynamically served on their website.
Overall, adwords are great supplements to websites where affiliate programs are either not performing or when affiliate programs don’t exist that target the sites content.
Give it a Try
Implementing and maintaing Google Adsense program on a content site requires very little effort and can often bring a steady stream of additional revenue for webmasters. Consider supplementing content and see what happens.
Author Bio:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.small-business-software.net
Boost Affiliate Sales
The old ways are not always the best ways.
The traditional model of making money from affiliate products was simple. Create an interesting website geared to a specific theme, slap up some banners for affiliate products that were related to your theme, and sit back, hoping that some of the audience your website drew would click on those banners, giving you some sales. If you really wanted to get creative you might have done some email campaigns for specific products on the side.
But email campaigns are mostly ineffective (and God-forbid you should spam anyone). And banner advertisements don’t generally work. And websites take a long time to build, and promote. And even longer to get good ranking in the search engines.
So it was a slow steady process. There were no quick routes' to affiliate gold.
Until now.
Hang on to your hats, ladies & gentlemen, because pay-per-click advertising is here!
Pay-per-click search engines like Google AdWords and Overture offer an exciting way to quickly bring highly-targeted, highly-motivated people who want to buy straight to your affiliate products and services. You don't even have to have a website.
All you have to do is write a cleverly worded ad describing your affiliate product and put it up. When searchers click on your ad, they are whisked right to the affiliate product, and given the opportunity to purchase. Wham, you've just made money. It really is that simple.
To demonstrate how quick and powerful pay-per-click advertising can be, I'll offer myself as an example. I came into the let’s make money on the Internet’ game late,and when I started I didn’t even have a website, and I barely knew what an affiliate' was.
The first month I cleared $1500 in profits, even though I barely knew what I was doing. For every one dollar I spent on pay-per-click, I got three dollars back in profits. And I was a total newbie, a marketing virgin’. I didn’t have a website, I didn’t know how to conduct an email campaign, and I barely knew what a `tracking URL’ was. Does that wake anybody up to the power of pay-per-click advertising?
However, don’t think it’s all wine and roses in the pay-per-click field. The fact is, almost everyone who tries it fails, at least initially. I failed myself, by the way. The first two days I netted over $50 in losses. And I still maintain those were the most valuable two days of my entire pay-per-click experience, in terms of how much I learned, and how quickly I adapted to the learning curve.
So don’t go into it with false expectations. Pay-per-click has a learning curve. But if you’re willing to demonstrate a little stick-to-it-ness, pay-per-click can be wildly profitable, and kick-start your affiliate sales business.
Author Bio:
Daniel Brough is the founder of AdWord Wizards, a free mentoring program designed to teach anyone how to profit from pay-per-click search engines. Want to start a profitable AdWords campaign in less than 30 minutes? Come to http://www.adwordwizard.com and sign up for this free program.
Affiliates & Adwords
I’ll have to admit that I didn’t believe all the hype about Google Adwords for the longest time. Then I caught myself clicking on some of the Adwords ads instead of the search results. That made me think.
Five bucks. What’s five bucks? Lunch at McDonalds. I could skip that for a day. So I surfed Clickbank for a while, found something new and really targeted, popped a few keywords in and wrote the ad. Basically, I used the sledgehammer method of marketing. Fifteen minutes later, I was getting clicks. Then I went to bed, of course. A few things I have learned. If I’m on the computer at one in the morning, I must hide my credit card from myself. Or maybe I was wrong?
I woke up the next day and discovered a few things. One, all of these gurus I decided not to listen to weren’t lying. I had made sales. In fact, I made more instant affiliate sales in 12 hours than I ever did before. Another, I had a lot more to learn. But I was hooked. So I bought a few ebooks to learn more and went to work. Why the hell had I waited so long?
Adwords is a crash course in direct marketing. You learn quickly what people want and what keywords they type in to find it. And you can just as quickly lose money if you don’t learn the medium. Google Adwords takes all the guesswork out of optimizing webpages. If you have the money, you can buy all the traffic you want. The key, though, was to buy sales as cheaply as possible. These are the basics. After the basics, Adwords gets complex. It comes down to fine tuning. Fine tune your keywords correctly and you will receive instantly targeted visitors who are ready to purchase specific products.
Clickthrough Quantity
A lot of internet marketing comes down to keywords. Adwords is no difference. You must learn to think like your customers. What keywords would they use to find the product you are selling? Sometimes you just can’t think of them. This is where keyword tools come into play. I have listed a few free keyword tools that will help at the link in the resource box.
If the keywords you are using are not performing well, there may be a few ways to fix this. One is to fine tune the keyword. Instead of using “e-mail” to sell a spam blocker, you can use the Adwords keyword suggestion tool to find such words as e-mail filter, junk e-mail, and such. Then delete “e-mail.” Obviously, everyone who uses “e-mail” in their search terms isn’t looking for a spam blocker. In fact, very few will be, so don’t destroy your click through rate by using terms that are too general.
You can also fine tune the keyword by using brackets, quotation marks, or negative keywords. Brackets around [e-mail filter] will allow your ad to be shown only when searchers type just “e-mail filter” in Google’s search box, not “e-mail” and not “free e-mail filter.” Using quotes will allow your add to be shown for both “e-mail filter” and “free e-mail filter”, but not “filter e-mail”. Using “-” like “email-filter” will allow your add to be shown for all searches containing “e-mail” that do not contain “filter.” You can find more details here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html.
Another problem may be that your customer just does not see your ad. Just by creating a new ad that contains the keyword that hasn’t been producing that well may improve your click through rate. This works because Google highlights the keywords that the searcher used in your ad. You can also try capitalizing power words in your ad to get that ad seen. If you know the keyword should be working but isn’t, try this first. If this doesn’t help consider narrowing the keyword or dropping it. Don’t be scared too.
Use 300 keywords instead of 30. The more keywords you use the better. You will receive customers looking for specific products and you will have a better chance of getting keywords that cost five cents instead of five dollars.
It may just come down to good old ad copy. An Adwords ad is haiku of advertisements. You must pack a punch in three lines, four if you count the url. Go for the benefits not features of the product. Use active verbs that make your surfers want to click instead of static nouns.
Clickthrough Quality
You can get all the clicks from Adwords that you can imagine, a 20% click through rate and still not get any sales. All this means is that you are throwing money down an internet hole. If you are paying for every click, all clicks are not the same.
If you are trying to sell a product you definitely want to get rid of freebie hunters first. How do you do this? Add a price to the ad. Or if the ad copy on the product’s page is killer, you can use something along the line of “Low-priced”. In other words, use a phrase that tells the surfer that he will be getting out his credit card.
Another way to convert more clicks through Adwords comes down to keywords again. More specific keywords will convert more surfers into customers. If you are an affiliate for a motorcycle helmet company, you don’t want to use “motorcycle” as a keyword. You want to use “motorcycle helmet.” Or else, you’ll customers who are searching for jackets, exhaust, pictures.
There are a few types of affiliate programs where you wouldn’t mind freebie hunters. One is site that uses cookies. Think of the last time you purchased an ebook. Did you buy it when you saw the first ad? Probably not. You waited. But after reading about the product all over the net, you decided to get out your credit card. I discovered these types of customers after I deleted the campaign from Adwords that actually brought in the sales. The site’s cookie credited me with the sales weeks after my ad brought them to the site.
Another example is programs that pay for leads. Some companies will pay you if the surfer fills out a form. They depend on their professional follow-up to get the sale. But the point is, you have made cash and the surfer didn’t even have to pay. You just have to get him to sign up for info.
Set A Budget
Figure out how much you want to spend a day and stick to it. A good start is $5.00 a day. Also set your maximum cost per click. This will keep you form spending way too much. Some products I have the CPC set at $0.05. On others, I have it set at $0.50. It depends on how many clicks you actually convert into sales.
You must also set a cutoff point. Decide how much money you can spend on a new campaign without any sales before you drop it. It could be 300 clicks or $20 spent. Whatever you set it at, you must stick to it.
Tracking
Google Adwords allows you to set up campaigns, followed by ad groups, followed by individual ads. This structure is great for testing your ads. And believe me, you have to test and you have to track. A campaign can be set up for one product. Then you can set up an ad group for each feature of the product. One ad group may focus on the products ease of use. Another may focus on the low price. And in each ad group you can have multiple ads. Using this system and Adwords tracking features, you track which ads work best for clickthroughs.
But you still have to track your conversions. Commission Junction is great in that you can send each ad to a link. Then when you go to their site you can discover which ads are producing the most sales.
But whatever you do, know your average sale, know your average price per click and know how many clicks it takes for you to make a sale. Then figure your return on investment. You may be spending more than you are making. It’s easy to get caught up in the process and forget you are trying to make money. Don’t get into bidding wars. And always test something new. Nobody’s perfect.
Following The Rules
In my little experiment, I also ran into a few rules that Google wants you to follow by breaking them. The best way. Here is the link to the FAQ: https://adwords.google.com/select/faq/index.html. One, you can’t use trademarks as keywords. Second, you must get a 0.5% clickthrough rate or Adwords will slow your campaign down. Also, if you are an affiliate, you must at least put “aff” at the end of your ad.
In summary, Adwords can get you instant sales, but you must study the system, fine-tune your campaigns, and track your results.
Author Bio:
Stephan Miller is a freelance programmer, and writer. For more Adwords resources, visit the page below http://www.profit-ware.com/resources/googleadwords.htm
Google Adsense
If you’ve been looking for an easy way to increase your website’s revenue, Google AdSense may be your answer.
Google AdSense is a phenomenal new advertising revenue program that is taking the Internet by storm. It was specifically designed to enable content rich sites to increase their advertising revenue simply by displaying Google AdWords ads.
Google AdSense makes selling advertising space easy, as they handle everything for you. With access to a database of 100,000 advertisers, you’ll never have to worry about finding advertisers for your website again.
The concept is simple. If you have a quality site that provides content, such as articles, you may qualify to display Google AdWords text ads on your web pages. If your site is approved, you will receive a portion of the pay-per- click payment.
The great thing about Google’s sophisticated advertising system is that the ads that display on your web pages are relevant to your content. They scan each page to determine what your page is about and display the ads accordingly. This will increase your click-through rate considerably, as relevant text ads combined with quality content are highly effective.
Although the AdSense program is free to apply, your site will be reviewed and must be approved in order to begin displaying the ads.
As there have been many sites turned down, you’ll need to ensure your site meets Google’s criteria prior to applying. You can find the guidelines at the following web address: http://web.archive.org/web/20040605173906/https://www.google.com/adsense/policies
They’re basically looking for quality sites offering content. The keywords here are “quality and content.” If your site is under construction, loaded with advertising and/or broken images and links, don’t even waste your time applying, as you won’t be accepted. However, if you have a quality site and provide your visitors with content, you will most-likely be accepted.
The more content pages you have, the more advertising revenue you can make. It’s really that simple. If you don’t have your own content, there is a wealth of content available on Internet completely free. Subscribe to any of the following article announcement groups to receive new article submissions each day:
Article Announce – All types of articles
AABusiness – Business oriented articles, including: Business, Ecommerce, Sales, Networking, Business Communication, Internet Marketing, Promotion, etc.
AAInternet – Internet oriented articles, including: Ebooks, Ezines, Search Engines, Web Design, Web Development, Web Sites, etc.
AAHome – Home and Family oriented articles, including: Parenting, Relationships, Cooking, Recipes, Crafts, Gardening, Home, etc.
AAHealth – Health and Fitness oriented articles, including both physical and emotional health.
AAGeneral – General Interest oriented articles.
With your subscription to any of the above groups, you’ll not only receive new article submissions delivered to your email, but you’ll also have access to the archives which contain thousands of quality articles.
Visit the following web address for further information: http://web.archive.org/web/20040605173906/http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
Once you’ve located articles that are relevant to your website, simply create a page for each. For example, if you find ten appropriate articles, you can create ten new content pages in which you can display Google AdWords ads. Not only will you be adding valuable content for your visitors, but you’ll also increase your website’s traffic and revenue. It’s a win-win deal no matter how you look at it.
Once your site has been approved, you simply select the style of ads you’d like to display and paste the code into your web pages where you’d like the ads to display.
Although all of the ads are text ads, there are currently four layout options to select from:
Although all four ad styles can be effective, the “skyscraper” ads placed toward the top right side of your page or the “Leaderboard” ads placed at the top of the page generally will provide a higher click-through rate than the other two styles.
However, each page is different and will produce different results. For this reason, you may want to test your pages and display the style that produces the highest click- through rate.
Once you begin displaying the ads on your website, you can visit Google and log in to your account to see how the ads are performing. You can view the number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate and your earnings.
If you’re concerned about displaying ads that may compete with products or services you’re promoting, Google offers an option to filter out unwanted ads. In addition, you can display the ads along with any affiliate programs you may be promoting, as long as the ads don’t look like Google ads.
Google AdSense is the hottest advertising revenue program on the Internet. Isn’t it about time you got paid for your content?
Visit Google AdSense for further information:
https://www.google.com/adsense
Author Bio:
Shelley Lowery is the publisher of Etips — Web Design, Internet Marketing and Ecommerce Solutions. Visit Web-Source.net to sign up for a free subscription and receive a free copy of Shelley’s highly acclaimed ebook, “Killer Internet Marketing Strategies.”
Google Adsense
The popular search engine, Google has introduced a dramatic new contextual advertising service called Adsense. This new program could mean death to affiliate programs on those web sites that qualify for the Adsense program. Why would Google advertising affect affiliate programs? Because Google is making Adsense ads available to smaller content rich sites.
Adsense dramatically simplifies the process of choosing appropriate advertising for sections of sites. Since it’s all automatic with Adsense, I’m through with searching for affiliate programs to fit my content. It just doesn’t pay enough to justify the effort in most cases. While I won’t dump existing producers, I’m dropping those affiliate programs that don’t produce like hot potatoes.
I’ve moved house often over the last few years and in that process have struggled to keep affiliate programs abreast of the latest contact and banking information. Several honest affiliate program managers have emailed me after getting my affiliate checks returned from previous snail mail addresses. Adsense will resolve this issue for me as I needn’t keep the hundreds of affiliate programs up-to-date on my latest mailing address and/or banking information – only Google Adsense. I’m dropping smaller unproductive affiliate programs.
Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs penned an interesting and insightful article on Adsense this past week where he mentions this as an issue and predicts the death of smaller or weaker affiliate programs.
I agree.
http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/search/adsense.shtml
Google Adsense simply requires the host site to paste in a few lines of HTML code on their pages where they want those ads to appear. Once Google has spidered your content pages, they can assess what those pages are about. Adsense serves a series of ads that match and compliment your page topics automatically without site owner participation!
I’ve been impressed how Adsense has performed for me in just the last week. I’ve actually enjoyed looking at my own sites to see what ads are served to match my content. WebSite101 demonstrates very well how Adsense works. If you visit the HTML tutorial, you see Adsense ads for web page editing software or web hosting. If you visit my email tutorial, you’ll see Adsense ads for email broadcasting software and targeted email list broadcasting services. If you visit the Domain Name tutorial, you’re served Adsense ads for Domain Registrars and web hosting. If you visit the Anti-Spam Tutorial, you get Adsense Ads for Spam Filtering Software.
http://www.website101.com/email_e-mail/
http://www.website101.com/HTML/
http://www.website101.com/Domain_Name
http://website101.com/SpamFilter/
You get the idea.
I like not having to mess with my own ad-serving software and twiddle with the rates and I absolutely LOVE not having to do any ad sales. I’m sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense to anyone with sufficient content to support it.
Between my 3 main sites,
http://WebSite101.com
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com
http://PrivacyNotes.com
I’ve got over 1000 pages of good solid content that I’ve built over the last 6 years. I’ve struggled in vain to get that content to pay by carefully choosing affiliate programs to fit neatly into dozens of topic areas. My two biggest producers have been software sales and health insurance referrals for small businesses. Those have been sporadic producers.
My biggest complaint is that I can’t track what is producing clickthroughs. Google simply tells me clickthrough percentage, number of ad impressions per day and average earnings per clickthrough across all of my sites. That makes it very difficult to know where to concentrate my energy to produce additional revenue generating content. But it does seem to offer site owners incentive to maintain quality content and spread the ads across all content pages.
My privacy site runs a variety of HIPAA compliance ads, GLB compliance ads, and DoNotCall List Compliance ads. It seems the money in privacy is in charging large corporations to keep them within the letter of the law so they don’t get sued for violations.
It is interesting to see my own site ads to know where the money is in PPC for each of the topic areas. Sometimes it’s just not what you expect. I’ve got an article about Google’s reverse phone lookup and how to get out of reverse phone lookup databases that is on the Privacy site and it sometimes shows ads about “low long distance rates”. Clearly the keyphrase “Phone number” is triggering ads that are quite off target on this page.
While Adsense won’t outperform my total affiliate income from the many programs spread across my sites, it WILL, if current trends continue, match my total affiliate income and therefore double advertising income!
The biggest benefit was the incentive to rebuild WebSite101, which got it’s design in 1998. I’ve needed to do that, but man is it tedious adapting all that content while maintaining page names and fitting it all back together with existing affiliate links and updating outdated stuff. Adsense gave me the incentive to do that by making my content finally pay for itself. It also gives me incentive to keep adding more relevant content.
I’m sold and wholeheartedly recommend Adsense to anyone with sufficient content to support it. While I won’t dump existing affiliate program producers, I’m dropping those that don’t produce clickthroughs and sales – fast – like hot potatoes. Get Adsense if Google approves your site. You’ll love it too.
http://www.google.com/adsense.
Author Bio:
Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization specialist practicing ethical small business SEO Search Engine Placement, Optimization, Marketin.
