Maximize Your Return on Investment With Google Adwords

admin    Google Optimization     Adwords, Google, Investment, Maximize, Return

Maximize Your Return on Investment With Google Adwords

Most businesses want a cost-effective way to bring in more customers. The challenge is to find prospects who are thinking about your products at the exact time that you reach them.

With Google AdWords, it is possible to target prospects at the very moment they are thinking about buying your products or services. Most of you know how it works: If someone does a Google search on digital cameras, for example, she sees ads for digital cameras. If someone does a search on organically grown coffee beans, he sees ads for organically grown coffee. Google AdWords enables you to implement precisely targeted advertising.

Here’s how to maximize your success with Google AdWords. With proper preparation and execution, starting Google AdWords can be like planting a money tree that will provide your business with a steady stream of revenue.

What Is Google AdWords?

Open up a Web browser and go to the Google Web site. Type in the search term coffee and click search.

Essentially, two types of search results come up: on the left and below are the organic search results that no one has sponsored. On the right side of your browser window and sometimes above the organic results are the Sponsored Links. The Sponsored Links are paid advertisements—they are always identified as such by the heading Sponsored Links.

As participants in this automated auction, each of these advertisers is bidding for the keyword coffee. They pay only if someone is interested enough to click on the advertisement; if nobody clicks on the ad, the cost is zero. The higher the advertiser bids on a keyword, the higher in the rankings the ad appears and the more likely Web searchers will see it. Ranking means visibility, though you do not have to be at the top of the rankings or bid the highest amount for prospects to see your ad and click on it. Your goal is to get the lowest cost per click (CPC) and the highest quality clicks (sales and leads) for your budget.

Finding Your Niche

Sometimes with popular keywords (like coffee), there are many companies competing. On the other hand, popular keywords get millions of searches, so there might be enough clicks to go around.

The only way to find out if a particular keyword will work for you is to try it. The problem is that many other advertisers are bidding for the popular keywords, so your CPC is likely to be high. You are more likely to get a low CPC with more obscure, highly targeted keywords. It will take some thought to come up with the right keywords.

Our coffee roaster would probably want to try the keyword coffee, and watch it like a hawk as it could result in many low-quality clicks (not many conversions to leads or sales). If a keyword does not produce high-quality clicks after a reasonable trial period (a couple of weeks), then remove it; it may even be obvious sooner that a keyword is costing money but not producing results.

Perhaps our coffee roaster sells shade-grown coffee that protects Central American songbird habitat. While far fewer people are searching for shade-grown coffee than just coffee, it is likely to yield a lower CPC and higher quality clicks.

Do some brainstorming and write down an initial list of keywords that match your market niche. This process of finding targeted keywords will be a useful exercise to help you focus your campaigns and maximize your return on investment.

Getting Started

The first thing you need to get started with AdWords is a goal. Is your goal to make direct sales via e-commerce on your Web site? Is your goal to capture sales leads that you can follow-up with and make the sale? Alternatively, is your goal a combination of both? Once you have determined a goal, you need a Web site that helps you achieve that goal.

Your site should be eye-catching and well-organized and should include landing pages for your products or services. To see some examples of landing pages, do a search for your services, and look at what other companies in your market are doing.

The landing page can be your homepage if your site tightly focuses on one product or service you are advertising (e.g., this permission-based email marketing site). Otherwise, the landing page should be within your larger site and should focus on the specific product or service you are advertising.

If you are selling directly from your Web site, it should include a secure e-commerce system. Any good, technically competent Web design firm can set this up for you.

If you want sales leads, then your site should include a call to action to persuade people to request more information. The way they submit a lead is to click on a link to a lead-capture form. You need a form that at a minimum sends you—or the appropriate sales staff—an email, but ideally it should also create a lead for you in a customer relationship management (CRM) system such as SalesForce or SugarCRM.

Whether you are selling directly from your site or capturing leads, your site should always have obvious ways to contact you using whatever method the prospect feels most comfortable using: a contact form, email, or telephone. Some company sites make it hard to figure out how to contact them for more information.

It is important to have a number of people—both inside and outside of your company—test your Web site for usability and ease of use. Prospects should never have to wonder how to buy from you or how to contact you to ask a question about your products or services.

Signing up for Google AdWords

Once you have a goal, Web site, and landing page, you are ready to sign up for Google AdWords. Learn by doing. It is easier to write the advertisement and select keywords using the tools that Google provides during the sign up process.

If you plan to spend at least /day on AdWords, Google offers a JumpStart program to help you get started using AdWords. Google JumpStart specialists will help you create a campaign. The cost of the program is 9, but Google will apply that as a credit toward the cost of your initial clicks.

Campaigns and Ad Groups

The Campaign level is where you set your daily budget, language targeting, location targeting, ad distribution preferences, and the start and end dates for your campaigns (if applicable).

The Ad Group level is where enter your keywords and the advertisements themselves. Each Ad Group has one or more ads. Write at least two ads for each ad group so you can try different approaches and compare the results.

In my experience, it has been beneficial to create multiple campaigns so I can experiment with different parameters and compare the results.

Targeting

Choose the language you want to target, and then the countries or territories. This requires some thought. Can you offer your product or service globally, in just the United States, or in just your city or region? You can target your campaign to the world or to specific countries, regions, states, or cities.

For even more precise targeting, you can even target your campaign to a certain number of miles from your business or even an area bounded by coordinates.

Writing Your Advertisements

You have just a 25-character title to get surfers’ attention, and a 70-character ad to get people interested enough to want to click on your ad. It is not a lot of text, so make it pithy.

Write the Headline, the text of the ad, and enter the Display Link (always link to main page of your Web site), and then enter the Destination URL (your landing page). The Destination URL might be your main page or a page within your main site dedicated just to selling the product at hand.

Here’s a fictional ad example:

Headline: Shade Grown Coffee Beans

Description line 1: Shade grown coffee. Tastes

Description line 2: better & saves valuable rainforest.

Display URL: www.goodshadegrowncoffee.com

Destination URL: www.goodshadegrowncoffee.com?&utm_id=coff1

Another example:

Headline: Shade Grown Coffee Beans

Description line 1: Coffee that tastes better and

Description line 2: protects valuable rainforest.

Display URL: www.goodshadegrowncoffee.com/

Destination URL: www.goodshadegrowncoffee.com?&utm_id=coff2

Conversion Tracking

To track the conversion rate of your campaigns—i.e., how many sales or leads you get for your investment—requires a little preparation. You will need to have your webmaster embed snippets of code to the appropriate pages on your Web site. Google explains how to set up and implement your conversion tracking code here, including example code.

Google Analytics

In the fictional advertisement examples I gave, you may have noticed codes in the destination URLs: “coff1″ and “coff2″. These are tracking codes that facilitate the tracking of a wealth of information by Google Analytics.

Google Analytics, which Google has integrated with AdWords, is a very powerful service for tracking the success of both your organic and paid search results for your site. It will help you better understand your site visitors’ experience in detail. In addition, you can learn what keywords bring in the best prospects, and which of your campaigns are delivering the best return on investment. You can use Google Analytics to track marketing campaigns other than AdWords as well.

Google Analytics is too big a topic to cover much here, but I will devote a future article entirely to this powerful marketing tracking service.

Choosing Your Keywords

As I mentioned earlier, it is important to pick good keywords. Initially, choose both general keywords and narrowly targeted keywords, and carefully evaluate the results. Keep keywords that are getting you results, and remove keywords that are not working for you. You will probably need to run your campaigns for a while before you will have enough information to determine which keywords are succeeding for you.

In the keyword space provided in the setup process, list the keywords or keyword phrases you would like to use. Because people tend to type fast when they search the web, be sure to include common misspellings of your keywords. Here are some example keywords that our fictional coffee roaster might use:

* coffee
* coffe
* shade grown coffee
* shade grown coffe
* shade grown
* shade coffee
* coffee shade grown
* shade grown coffee migratory birds
* benefits of shade grown coffee
* gourmet coffee
* gourmet coffee beans
* gourmet coffees
* coffee beans
* gourmet coffee beans
* organic coffee
* organic coffee beans
* certified organic coffee
* coffee beans organic
* mail order organic coffee
* bulk coffee

To get more keywords, enter a keyword into the Keyword Tool Box and click on Get More Keywords. This will generate additional keywords, some of which will be relevant to you and some of which will not be relevant. Keep the relevant keywords and toss the rest.

Now, you have a good starting list. Later, you will want to add new keywords and remove non-performing keywords. A good keyword is one that yields conversions: customers or good leads.

Google Search vs. Google Content Network

Google AdWords can place your add in essentially two places: Google search and the content network. Google search are results from searches that prospective customers do directly using www.google.com. The content network consists of Google partner sites and sites that run advertisements through Google’s AdSense program.

In my experience, Google search has yielded much more quality clicks than the content network. The content network is worth trying, but I recommend putting it into a separate campaign so you can measure its results against your Google search campaign.

The content network is opt-out, and it is not possible to opt out during the setup process. However, to opt out of the content network for a specific campaign, you can go back to campaign settings and uncheck the checkbox for content network.

Then setup a separate campaign where you focus on the content network and opt out of the search network. Compare the results between the two campaigns. It is possible that you will find Google search is more productive than the content network, but of course your results may be different from mine.

If you want to keep it simple until you are more comfortable with AdWords, I recommend starting with just the search network. Then come back in a few weeks and set up a separate campaign to try the content network, then compare the results with what you are getting with the search network.

Your Daily Budget

Your daily budget for your campaign is the ceiling on your daily spending. You can set this number at whatever you want. It is a good idea to start out with a relatively low daily budget while you refine your AdWords effectiveness. As your ad campaigns succeed and bring you more business, you will likely want to increase your budget.

Start with a daily budget of about – per day and gradually increase that amount as you fine-tune your approach.

Your Bid

In addition to your daily budget, you will need to set a maximum bid that you are willing to pay as a cost per click (CPC). This requires some trial and error to get right. Being the highest bidder is not really what that you want. Instead, you want to get the most quality clicks you can for your budget. If you bid too high, your CPC will be too high and will eat up your budget too fast; if you bid to low you will not get enough clicks and hence enough sales.

You might try starting with a bid of .50, and see what happens for a day or two. Then gradually raise or lower the bid, depending on results. If clicks consume your daily budget in a couple of hours, then lower your bid. If the advertisements are not getting many clicks, then raise your bid. Continue this process until you find the optimal bid.

Leads and Sales

What if visitors are clicking on your ad but are not buying or contacting you? That likely means your ad is working but your site or landing page is not persuading prospective customers to take the next step. It can also mean that your product or service needs some work to become more competitive. Compare what you are offering to what your competitors are offering.

The simplest things can make a dramatic difference. When your landing page is not getting you conversions, change one thing and see what happens over the next day or two. That way, you can determine which changes work. Do not be afraid to try possible solutions, knowing that some changes will fail and some will work well.

Recently, one of our landing pages was not getting enough conversions, so I made some minor changes to the wording on the page and conversions started going up the next day. On another page, we replaced our very simple order form with a much more elaborate version. Our sales for that service immediately plummeted. We simply changed the order form back to the simpler version and sales picked up again immediately.

Harvesting From the Money Tree

The Google AdWords money tree is now planted, optimized, and working to bring you leads and sales. What do you do now? Harvest it, of course, by solid follow-through and providing the best possible service for your clients.

Go back from time to time and take a look at your results. Make adjustments to your budget and bids as needed. Write another advertisement that takes a slightly different tack. Remove an ad that is not producing high quality clicks for you. Make some improvements to your Web site to see whether you can increase your conversion rate.

Practice Kaizen—a Japanese word for continuous, incremental improvement. Even if your Google AdWords money tree is providing good yields, there are always ways to improve its performance.

So pour yourself a cup of good coffee, and get started using Google AdWords today!

Return on Investment (roi) for Search Engine Optimization & Social Media Marketing

admin    Social Media     Engine, Investment, Marketing, Media, Optimization, Return, Search, Social

ROI for networking – a perspective

If you’ve ever placed an ad in any magazine or newspaper, what do the magazine or newspapers promise? Do they promise “x” leads and “y” calls leading to “z” number of clients? Or do they talk about “a 2 million circulation” which means that the ad will be viewed by many but there are no guarantees of new business?

Also, when you answer the phone, respond to emails, make cold calls, and attend networking events, how do you measure your ROI?

Or how many events have you attended where you’ve passed out 50 business cards, come back to the office with 100 business cards, sent out 10 follow-up emails and heard back from ZERO?

So you spent $25 to attend the event, $5 in gas money, 3 hours of your time that is worth say $150, and in the end what did you get? A bunch of business cards and a few people writing or calling to sell their services to you! So did you sit down and measure the ROI for that? I think not.

And how many events can you attend in a given day? What reach can you have, meaning how many people can you reach out to at any given event? And how do you build a relationship with someone in brief encounters where everyone is hurrying to meet one more person before the event is over?

The SMM ROI

By participating in Social Media Marketing (SMM), what we are doing is leveraging conversations and discussions to begin building relationships. Building relationships and networking online takes time and therefore it requires time and investment. Since you have a business to run, you can do this by retaining professionals like us (had to get a plug in).

And so to summarize, I leave you with this thought.

The evolution of online marketing and especially social media marketing requires a paradigm shift in how businesses view ROI. Social Media Marketing allows us to form relationships. These relationships may eventually lead to business.

But ROI for Social Media Marketing doesn’t apply nor does it make sense because how can we measuring ROI of human interactions?

Hiring a SEO Company or PPC Marketing? The Slam Dunk Investment

admin    PPC     Company, Dunk, Hiring, Investment, Marketing, Slam

Despite the differences, search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC campaigns have one thing in common: they are both keyword driven. Both the processes require investment and both are effective mediums of creating online presence.

In the recent times, we have seen the click cost increasing. As a result there are many companies who had invested in PPC marketing campaigns are looking at other options. One such option is hiring an SEO company to enhance their online marketing portfolio. This will help them to reduce the advertising investment and also increase their visibility.

There have been many cases of click fraud in the recent past, which has led to the increase on the PPC costs. Hence, slowly more and more businesses and marketing companies are moving towards the search engine optimization medium to fulfill their online marketing needs. But the evaluation process remains the same for choosing a SEO company, which is through cost per click.

One of the most important things to note is that an online promotional campaign created by a reputed SEO company will always provide a lower cost per click than the PPC and this stands true for any industry.

The critical difference between the two lies in the advertising investment that a business or a company will have to undertake. Although both hiring an SEO company and creating a PPC campaign have their merits and demerits, going organic also called natural SEO is by far the best choice. Organic or natural SEO is the result of the work an SEO services company because the ranking is not dependant on paid positioning.

To judge the difference and the impact they have on the advertising costs, we will take a look at PPC and search engine optimization separately.

PPC Marketing

There is one common factor that binds PPC campaigns to other avenues of advertising like billboards, print ads, television etc. All of them create a public awareness and remain in public view as long as the advertisements are on. Which basically means that as long as you pay for them, you advertisement will be on air and the moment you stop the investment, you will be off air and consumers normally have a short-term memory. So there goes your visibility.

It stands true for PPC as well as a print advertisement. In a PPC, once you stop paying, your advertisements will not appear on the search engines and this means there will be no more traffic. So you will end up losing all the exposure and all the graphs, charts and traffic reports from PPC campaigns will suddenly become useless.

This means that you need to figure out your average cost per click in a PPC campaign as everything us happening in real time. A PPC campaign can begin almost instantly. The moment you make your investment, your campaign will start and the moment you cut down on your investment or stoop paying, the PPC campaign will end instantly. This is a clear delineation.

Search Engine Optimization

We mentioned earlier that more and more businesses are looking at using services of a SEO company because it comes across as a sound investment and it doesnt happen in real time.

Search engine optimization as compared to a PPC campaign doesnt have any clear delineation as far as deriving benefit from the campaign is concerned. In a search engine optimization process, there is no end.

If you have invested in a SEO company to carry out search engine optimization services, you can stop your investment after the SEO campaign and it will not affect your visibility. The SEO campaign will still generate revenue and get traffic to your website, long after it has been executed.

The impact of the search engine optimization campaign is not dependent on whether you keep the SEO company or not for long-term but the distinct advantage will definitely be long-term and can extend to a year or even more.

Quitting in the middle of a SEO campaign is not recommended as it may be detrimental for the growth of the business but you can always cut down on your SEO marketing spend. If on a low budget, you can derive several benefits through search engine optimization.

This is the sole reason why going organic with a SEO company is preferred to the PPC campaign because it enhances the ROI on a long-term basis.

Insurance CE – Worth the Investment

admin    CES     Insurance, Investment, Worth

If you are an insurance professional, you would be well aware of the statutory requirements in the field of insurance – of continuing education (also known as CE) each year so that your license remains up to date.

Insurance CE is a huge industry; and there are hundreds of training centers across the country which survive solely on insurance continuing education. As the number of insurance agents in the country increases, there is more and more demand for continuing education, as it is mandatory in all the states to have a prescribed number of training hours attended each year, failing which the insurance license may be revoked.

But like many other things, insurance CE has also gone online, and in the last couple of years, there has been a major increase in the percentage of people who have shifted online for their training hours. In the beginning, the large training institutes shifted online and the certification was done from their local centers. However, today, there are superb online institutes which have been set up solely for the purpose of Insurance CE. Some of the best ones even allow their visitors to read through all the material online for free – even without registration, and then pay for the examination. Even the test is done online, and certification also is done through a secure server through the website itself. Since the whole process is done online, the insurance professional need not worry about booking a slot and attending classes at a training institute locally. From the comfort of his own home, he can log on, read all the topics any number of times, and then attempt to take the test.

The mandatory topic of Ethics is the first paper that people will need to take, and for every additional paper they attempt, the pricing structure is different. One thing, however, is certain. The investment it takes for people to get certified online is nothing when compared to what a training institute would charge you outside. That is one more reason (and a major one at that!) as to why a great number of people prefer to shift online for their insurance CE. Since the number of hours is to be logged every year or every couple of years (depending on the state) for the insurance license to be valid, it would amount to quite a bit of savings in the long run.

If you are not familiar with insurance CE yet, get there! You will enjoy it. You will not only fulfill your state requirements, but you will learn a great deal with every course you take. You will learn about new laws, sales tactics, and different products and services available for your clients. Whether you decide to do classroom CE or online, make sure you pay attention to detail and learn as much as possible. I would suggest taking your courses online, they are fast, easy, and affordable. You don’t have to sit in a classroom and it all ends with a short multiple choice exam.

How To Make Money From Twitter? Is It Possible To Earn From Twitter Without Any Investment?

admin    Twitter     Earn, From, Investment, Money, Possible, Twitter, Without

I heard that it is very difficult to earn money on twitter. How are many people making so much money on Twitter? I want to know how people are using Twitter to become rich. I am totally confused.
Are there any books or like which can teach how exactly to use twitter to earn much money? Please tell me what are the ways in detail, I am willing to pay if I find useful information on how to monetize on twitter.
Thanks.