11 · 24

Putting "Ad" into Adwords!

When you're new to AdWords, it's tempting to devote far too much time and energy in trying to craft that "killer" ad. But the truth is that writing ads is a science, not an art. Here are a few of the rules. 1) Don't Fly Blind... In over five years developing AdWords campaigns, we've haven't ever seen a profitable example that didn't track conversions. AdWords Conversion Tracking is simple to install and a "must" for measuring ad performance. Remember, by itself the Clíck-Through- Rate (CTR) of an ad tells you nothing about the ROI it's delivering. We've seen many examples of ads with a lower CTR, but higher conversion rate. Google Analytics obviously adds a great deal more data, but takes time to master. However, one feature worth using immediately is its ability to tell you which ad position yields the best results. Finally, don't forget the AdWords Reports section. This has improved significantly over the past year, and the Search Query Performance report is a real asset in optimizing keywords and ad copy. 2) Cut out the Middle Man... In this case, the "middle man" is Google. When developing and testing your ads, it's vital to put yourself in control as far as possible: Delivery Method: By default, Google spreads the delivery of your ads evenly throughout the day, ensuring you don't exhaust your daily budget (and they get to spend as much of it as possible). However, it also serves to mask the true demand for your product or service. We have seen many cases where ads are more profitable at certain times of the day. If you have a limited budget, spend it when you'll get the best return. We recommend running campaigns using Accelerated delivery. Keep an eye on your daily budget and adjust accordingly. Ad Serving: If you're running multiple ads, Google will automatically start favouring the one with the highest CTR once a certain volume of clicks have been receíved. We don't use the default Optimize option, and recommend you select Rotate for ad serving. We have AdWords campaigns for some of our clients that have been running for over three years, but we always maintain at least two ad variations per ad group. Even if there's only a single word difference, one ad will ultimately prove superior and deliver an improved ROI. The Rotate option also gives you more granularity when testing ad variations. Say you want to do a 1/3-2/3 split; you simply create two copies of ad "A" and one of ad "B". Using the same principal allows you to create 60/40 and 70/30 splits, which are very useful in some circumstances. Network Options: Start your testing using Google's Search network only. Uncheck both their Partner and Content networks. Once you have some solid data from mainstream search traffic, you can add their Partners. Google's partners are a pretty "mixed bag", and you may decide to exclude them altogether (we often do). Finally, enable the Content network and Content Bids. Don't run on the Content network with the same bid as Search - you're just handing Google money. By default, we set Content Bids at 1/10 of that on the Search network: so if your Search bid is 0.50p, set your Content bid to 0.05p for openers. If you find your product or service has "traction" on the Content network (true in about 25% of cases in our experience), it may be worth running separate campaigns for Content searches. All these options can be set from the Campaign Management tab in your account. Select a campaign and clíck the Edit Settings button. 3) A Stitch in Time... It's important to optimize your ads (and separately your keywords and bids) to a fixed schedule. By default, we run a three-month cycle: Every three hours for the first day. Every day for the first week. Every week for the first month. Every second week for the second month. At the end of the third month. You can adapt this schedule to suit your clíck volume, but make sure you have a schedule and stick to it. You'll learn more about your target audience, and employ your time more efficiently. Don't forget to take weekdays, weekends and seasonal trends into account. 4) Study your Competition First... Before writing your first ad, take time to study your competition using a selection of core keywords and phrases. This is particularly important if you're thinking of using Google's Keyword Insertion feature. This is becoming increasingly popular and can be counter-productive; making your headline look identical to the competition. 5) All for One and One for All... Achieving a good Quality Score, and providing visitors with a rewarding experience, means treating your keywords, ads and landing page as a single unit. Ensure your most popular keywords appear in your ad's headline and copy. If you cannot accommodate core keywords in your ads, segment your ad groups further. Make sure core keywords follow-through to your meta data and landing page copy. Try to write ad copy that flows naturally and qualifies visitors to your site. If you sell software for Microsoft Outlook, for example, a headline such as "Using Microsoft Outlook?" will help avoid Apple users, who might find your product of interest, but are unlikely to become customers. 6) Simplicity Sells Harder... Capitalize letters and words in your ad copy for emphasis (not all the time). Capitalizing the first letter of every word in your copy actually makes reading more difficult. Be honest and don't use words like "free" unless you're really giving something away for free within 3 clicks of your landing page. 7) Understand what Matters... According to research undertaken by Google in 2005, the headline of your ad represents 40% of its impact. The first line of copy accounts for 25%, the second line 20% and the Display URL 15%. AdWords' power comes from the ability it gives you to intercept prospects at the exact moment they're looking for what you sell. The basic PPC ad format is simple, and works best with a single clear message and a strong call to action.
About the Author Kyle Reddoch is a Web Expert located in Amarillo, TX, USA. He can be contacted on his website or thourgh Twitter.
11 · 24

Site of the Week - November 24, 2008

One of the key goals of the Internet founders was to make all information available to everyone. While some sites, like the Gutenburg Project, have attempted to put all out of copyright books on the Web, the results are usually just a bunch of big text files. Well, my site of the week, Open Library changes that. You actually see a book, where you can turn the pages with your mouse. You can even hear someone read it to you. Check it out at openlibrary.org.
11 · 23

Video Search Engine Optimization

Most of us know that a site that is well configured for search engine access is a major part of getting internet traffic levels. However, you might not have thought about optimizing your videos and well as the rest of your site. Since multimedia is becoming much more popular now days as a way of distributing information, correct optimization for video is important. For example, on YouTube alone (which accounts for more that ninety-eight of videos view by Google), more that eighty-two million people watch over four billion videos last year. That make YouTube the top video sharing site and top video search engine. YouTube receives over thirty-two hours of user-submitted videos every minute, and more than fifty percent of people watching videos online share links with other people. So, getting a good rating on YouTube could be an important way of driving traffic to your site. For owners of video content, video search engine optimization is a good way to get free traffic to your site. Being discovered by viewers must happen before you get tons of views on your site. This means having data rich in media information and using quality RSS or MRSS feeds that are updated on a regular basis. Make sure that your meta data is well placed and topic relevant. Only after you produce well optimized content should you contact the search engines and submit video. This places you in the queue for the web crawlers, and means that you will be indexed more quickly and more often that if you didn't submit your content. Index your site on other engines than just Google and YouTube. They can spread your content to search engines you might not have heard of before. For instance, indexing your site to Blinkx will cause it to show up on Ask and MSN, among many others. One more important part of your strategy is a series of videos. When a viewer sees a video that he or she likes, there is a high possibility that they will look for others like them. While a single, great video is popular and welcomed, you will do better if it is part of a series. The more views you get, the more likely you are to get picked up by other sites, linked to, and rank well on video searches. You can even customize embedded video players to display playlists related to your company, adjusts layouts, and many other information. You can use Google Analytics to track how long a customer stays on your video page, which will tell you if your video is too long. You can also use analytics to see which of your videos get the best response. From here you will be able to decided which content needs to be linked first from your home page. You might also want to make sure that your videos are high enough quality and in the correct format for television. Google TV is very affordable and lets you create closely targeted video. Don't use Active X controls and export all files in swf format. Use Google Video sitemaps to help you with navigation, and build separate pages for each video, rather than having many videos on same page. Use a simple text title and description, and optimize that page that you would any other. Then link to it from your index page. Don't tag with irrelevant search terms, no matter how popular they might be. Remember that you need to appeal to real people, rather than just optimizing blindly. While you might turn up early in a search with good optimization, an unappealing video will cause people to pass you by. If you know what kind of content your audience prefers, you'll be able to create the right video marketing plan for your business or organization. Video search engine optimization is an important part of any video marketing strategy. If you're planning to market your business or organization using multimedia content, creating it correctly and surrounding it with the right keywords and other information can help it be noticed. Before you submit a video, make sure it's optimized.
About the Author Kyle Reddoch is a Web Expert located in Amarillo, TX, USA. You can contact him on his website at KyleReddoch.com.
11 · 21

How Often should I update my website?

Think about the websites you visit more than once a week. What draws you? Perhaps it is a daily blog or new photography. Perhaps it is that free download. The fact is, new, interesting and fresh content will bring visitors back to your site time after time. Nobody wants to read the same few paragraphs over and over! Keeping your site timely and current will not only increase traffic, it can also help your search engine placement. A website should be updated as often as is reasonably possible and appropriate for your type of business. For an artist, monthly art and show updates may work. For a mail-order business, once a week or more often might be in order. Many informational sites and blogs are updated many times a day. Consider how often your target audience might consider your information useful when making the decision as to how often to update your site. And most importantly, stick with that decision firmly for as long as your website is needed. My goal as a web developer is to see you with a fabulous website. Your site should be a natural extension of you and your creativity! If your current website needs to be updated and revamped to meet the current internet standards, feel free to give me a call or go to my website, www.kylereddoch.com, to get you free quote today!
About the Author Kyle Reddoch is a Web Expert located in Amarillo, TX, USA. You can contact him through his website at KyleReddoch.com. Also, sign up for his weekly newsletter and receive his FREE e-book entitled, "10 Reasons You Need a Website."
11 · 21

12 Steps to Explode Your Site Traffic!

Last year saw the arrival of online social media. If you operate a website or blog, you would be well advised to realign your site to exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic. You should also introduce social media components to your site because web users are experiencing these new forms of interaction on more and more sites and they will have an expectation of the same from your site too. If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay longer, your focus for the next few months should be on the social aspects of your site. Social media uses technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting, tagging, etc. and offers social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features. The central theme of these sites is user generated content used for sharing amongst other users. The social aspects of these sites allow users to setup social communities, invite friends and share common interests. You don't have to change your site immediately to take advantage of these new technologies. Introduce small changes incrementally and you will be well on your way to measure up to your visitors' new expectations. Step 1. Declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don't like to deal with people they don't know. Create an About Me page to líst your achievements, skills and aspirations. Step 2. Create a MySpace page and link your biography in the Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of your new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services. Step 3. Install a free blog and start publishing at least one article in your blog every week. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site. Step 4. Provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg, Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you. Step 5. Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine. Step 6. If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products. Step 7. Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your content. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers interest them. Step 8. Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services. Step 9. Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site URL. Post these videos using catchy titles, teaser descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them easy to discover. Step 10. Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites rather than on your site's server. Step 11. As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites. Step 12. Provide a "Send to Fríend" feature for all the products and services you provide. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail. Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and brings a profound change to web surfers' experiences. Now is the right time to implement features that will make your site Social-Media-Friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize popular social media sites, you will see a massive íncrease in traffíc to your site. About the Author Kyle Reddoch is a Web Expert located in Amarillo, TX, USA. You can contact him through his website at KyleReddoch.com.
Kyle Reddoch

I am an aspiring Web Developer, Android Fanatic, Family Man, and all around Web Geek! I also do Freelance Development work.

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