Seven PPC Optimization Benchmarks That Cut Your Costs in Google Adwords

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Seven PPC Optimization Benchmarks That Cut Your Costs in Google Adwords

I won’t go into what makes a successful PPC ad campaign because this topic is better covered by experts like Perry Marshall.

My goal is to describe seven specific aspects of a Google AdWords campaign that you can control, which I will go over in more detail in a minute. These are the limits or benchmarks you can set for your campaign results. They are based on your financial goals –That is, the numbers of leads or sales results you want to aim for.

These benchmarks will vary depending on what your price point is, the type of market you are pursuing, the keywords you choose and whether you use Search or Content marketing. That’s already a lot of variables and it doesn’t even take into account the following list from Noble Samurai, (They make a nifty keyword research tool.)

What the competition is in your market.

What your visitor-to-sales conversions are.

How many competitors exist in the market.

How easily you can achieve high rankings

How strong the competition is in that market.

How hard you work.

How easily your can dominate your niche.

All that being said, what CAN you control? Consider establishing these benchmarks before you even set up an AdWords campaign. With these controls you will be able to optimize your adgroups as you see results and improve your keyword scores, CTR and positioning. Optimization is part of “speaking Google” so it’s a good idea to learn the language.

From the start, decide what position you want to “own.” Are you going for the very top (1-3) of the first page, or are you happy to be in the middle, or just anywhere you can afford on the first page? The quality of your traffic will vary and so will the price, so keep an eye on how your positioning affects results. “Owning” a position is the only way to get consistent traffic, and consistency is the only way to build a business. So keep track of which keywords are producing conversions and cut out the ones that are not giving you adequate results. Focus on keeping your keyword quality scores high-at least 5-7. When a keyword score falls below a 5, the cost per click goes up 15+ %. So watch those scores! Profitability in a competitive market can be tough when keywords are expensive, so set a limit on your CPC (Cost per click.) Never pay more than a click average. Depending on your niche, you may pay much less, but low cost clicks don’t always mean quality traffic. You also may pay more at first. Your goal is  to find a price that works in your niche. Always aim for a 1% CTR (Click through rate) or more on Search keywords. Google likes relevancy and they score it based on your CTR. Again, you get a better position and pay less when your ad is relevant (It gets traffic and clicks.) However, high CTR doesn’t guarantee sales. Conversion rates for leads or sales will be a factor that varies for each market and price point, but generally speaking, shoot for at least 5% for Content, and 10% conversion for Search keywords. Don’t waste your advertising budget on keywords that don’t convert to sales! And finally, decide what you are willing to pay for those conversions. (Also called Cost per Acquisition or CPA.)  Whether it’s a visit to your website, a lead, or a sale, what is the average price that works for your metrics and produces a profit on the back end? You may go above it or below it, so find an average profitable conversion price, and stick to it.

Obviously this all requires a lot of surveillance on your part. It also means becoming intimate with the “Reports” tabs and other tools on Google that provide the information you need to evaluate your returns on each keyword so you can cut out the “weeds” and only keep the best.

Does optimization take a bit of work? Yes it does, and you can skip it if you want to…. It’s your money and your business.

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Seven Google Adsense Tips

admin    Google Optimization     Adsense, Google, Seven, Tips

Seven Google Adsense Tips

Making money with Google AdSense can be as easy as creating the Google AdSense account and including ads on a site. However, to get the most out of AdSense takes more effort. It requires designing an attractive layout, using proper keywords and positioning among others.

Tip #1: Keywords Keywords Keywords

Google uses keywords as a major part of their algorithm to determine search results. This is simple – a website promoting golf clubs should include golf clubs multiple times on the website. This makes sense.  Google will parse through the content on the website, find keywords for golf clubs and understand that the website is about golf clubs. Make sure the quantity of the keywords you are promoting is high.  Google will detect keyword density and move your website ever closer to the desired number 1 page results spot!

Tip #2: Quality Content

While keywords are important, having a website that is nothing but keywords after keywords after keywords is not the way to go. Google is extremely concerned about quality content. Both you the webmaster and the casual surfer appreciate this. When searching for golf clubs, you want to see a quality site on golf clubs, showing specs, prices, different brands, etc. What you do not want to see is a website that says nothing but golf clubs over and over again. Therefore, Google not only looks at keywords but looks at content. Google’s customer is the web surfer. And the web surfer wants content.  So, Google includes quality content in their search engine algorithms as well as keywords.

Tip #3: Update your Content

The more quality content you have, the better. But it is also important that you update your content. It is quality information that originally gets surfers to your site. But it is the continually updated content that keeps them coming. Would you go to the movies if theatres only played one movie? No. People love variety, and though your website may be about golf clubs all the time, what surfers want is your  golf club site to include recent information and news about the golf club world. They need specs on the latest club technology. More users will come to the site and potentially click your Google AdSense ads. 

This does not mean you have to update your website every day. Many Google AdSense practitioners we talk to update their content once a week but no later than twice a month. If you can update your content every day, well good for you and your free time! But many AdSensers use AdSense for parttime income, and once a week is sufficient to keep your website relevant.

Tip #4: AdSense Format

If you are adding AdSense to blogs, chances are the blog site mandates certain sizes of their AdSense ads. However, if you developed your own site, you can create custom sizes for your ads. Google adds a step in their wizard for creating AdSense ads of different sizes. A lot of research has been done that shows wider ads are more successful than other sized ads. Below are the three most popular and successful ad sizes.

160×600 wide skyscraper

300×250 medium rectangle

336×280 large rectangle

Tip #5: Choose your Color Wisely

Another step in the AdSense creation wizard allows you to choose the color scheme for the ad. Your ideal solution is to choose colors that blend into the color scheme of your website or blog. The background and border color should be the same color as the most prominent color on your website.  We have had better success with black for the text color no matter what the text color on the website is.  If not choosing black, the most dominant font color on your site should be used. Another major tip is to not use background or border colors. Experience shows that ads without background colors or borders get more clicks than ads with background colors or borders.

Tip #6: Layout and Positioning

Surfers do not browser the Internet looking for AdSense ads to click. Although that would be great to the AdSenser, surfers browse the Internet looking for quality content. Who knew! It is best to keep your AdSense ads in subtle but obvious locations. Though this may seem counterintuitive, it is not. The subtleness comes from the natural flow of the website and the placement of the ads. Say, you have a page of ten paragraphs. Put two ads at the end of the third paragraph and another two ads at the end of the sixth paragraph. A surfer reading the page content will eye the AdSense ads in a natural manner, during the course of regular reading. That is ideal. So, the placement of the ad is subtle enough that the ads work in the flow of the page, but the ads are obvious enough that they will be viewed by visitors.

Tip #7: Maximize the Ads

Google does not allow unlimited ads. This prevents Made for AdSense (MFA) sites or Free for All (FFA) sites from posting nothing but ads. Google has set a maximum of six ads per page, three AdSense units, two AdSense search boxes, and one unit of ad links. Maxing out your limit does increase the potential for profit, provided you are using the previous 6 tips. 

In summary, use these 7 tips wisely. Keep them in mind when creating blogs or websites and adding AdSense ads. You will find that your click through rate increases, and your profit increases as well. Happy AdSensing!

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Seven Low Cost Traffic Generation Methods To Kick Start Your Marketing

admin    Twitter     Cost, Generation, Kick, Marketing, Methods, Seven, Start, Traffic

Seven Low Cost Traffic Generation Methods To Kick Start Your Marketing

There are multiple ways to get traffic to your website for very little cost that can make you money online.

Even if you only get a small percentage of your visitors to convert successfully, it hasn’t cost you any money just your time.

There are two hard facts of any internet business that you cannot escape.

To make money online, you need to generate traffic to your website and second, you need to convert that traffic into buyers.

You might try to do this directly by sending them to a sales page or you may do it indirectly by sending them to an opt-in page to capture their details or to your information site or blog.

First, you should focus on identifying your killer keywords – the ones that attract the right kind of people into you business.

Matching up searches with your content means the resulting traffic will be pre-qualified and pre-disposed to your offer.

If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income.

BUT, it doesn’t take thousands to generate website traffic to your site.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, the holy grail is knowing how to generate low cost website traffic without having to run up a huge daily advertising bill.

Here I present to you my top 7 strategies to generate low cost website traffic that could help make money online for you.

1. Link exchanges

This is a well known and proven strategy. It’s rare these days to see a website without a link to another site.

Many business owners are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more visibility for their sites.

The more you create back links to your website from other pages, the more the traffic you’ll see coming as you’ll start to rank higher.

If you’re exchanging links with other sites, it’s important that the link is relevant. This usually means it is in the same niche or a relate niche as your own site.

This is more likely to please your human visitors as it provides additional information or services related directly to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links with authority sites or sites with high page ranks will also increase your traffic even more significantly, as it will boost your rankings in search engine listings.

This is known as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

2. Article Marketing

There are many electronic magazines (called ezines) and online newsletters around on the internet which provide free space for you to submit articles.

If you want to keep your costs low, you can write the articles yourself. But you can save time, by using the many freelance writers who are willing to create articles on your best converting keywords or keyword phrases. The fees are much smaller than you might think.

Write articles that complement your website, product, business or other offer. Write on topics that you have expertise on so you develop your knowledge researching around the subject and can come across as an authority.

Write articles that produce tips and guidance on the subject or your niche. Checking what has already been written means you can identify topics and solutions that are less competitive so your article will rank higher on your chosen keywords.

At the end of the article submission process, you can insert a “resource box”. It’s here that can say something about yourself or your business and provide your visitors with a link to your site if they want to find out more.

If they do go there, they are already impressed and predisposed to your offer, wouldn’t you say?

Once you have your article accepted in your primary article directory, you can also send variations to other article directories.

There is a lot of free article submission software available to automate the process and if you are doing a lot of article marketing, a great paid service I personally use is SubmitYourArticles.

3. Video marketing

Video marketing can send literally thousands Of visitors to your primary business. It really is the social medium of the moment. Just look at the popularity of YouTube! 5-10 minutes is all you need to get your point across.

You can either use a camcorder to video your own talking head or create a footage around your product or offer and add the audio later.

If you’re not yet confident on camera, you can also create a series of photos and powerpoint slides and record an audio commentary around that.

It’s important to put your website address in your titles along one edge of your screen.

Once you have a few videos made, you then need to drive traffic to them. The best way is to submit them to video sites. The most popular are youtube.com, metacafe.com and dailymotion.com.

To really maximise exposure and get the most traffic back to you website, you can use video submission tools. There’s a free video submission service, TubeMogul. An even better tool is a paid service I use is Traffic Geyser.

When you have registred on the prime video sites, the submitter tool will submit your videos automatically to various video sites and get you lots of traffic to your url.

4. Forum marketing

This is completely free – it only requires an input of your time. Do some initial sculking around to identify the kinds of problems people have in this niche.

Once you feel you understand the community, you can start to feedback a comment, start a post, here and there, using your knowledge and expertise.

You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

With every post, you can add a link to your site. But remember first to give value, not just blatantly advertise your site.

As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

5. Twitter marketing

Twitter and blogging go hand in hand. They help you build your authority and social networks within your niche.

Twitter has totally transformed the way that people communicate online and since it’s free, it really should be an indispensable part of your overall marketing strategy and link to your blog.

Twitter is free to join and you can get set up with an account in a matter of just a few minutes.

Twitter has proven itself to be incredibly addictive and, for business owners, very valuable too.

Technology such as Twitter has the potential to give us more than just an opportunity to tell others what happened in our day. It can be used to connect with people in a meaningful manner.

Imagine if you had cost-efficient and fast marketing tools that met existing customers where they are and that also helped you acquire new customers.

Imagine if you had the power to build a network of like-minded peers, a community of shared ideas and creativity.

6. Blog marketing

You blog should therefore be one of the main hubs for your business. It’s all about YOU Inc.

As your name gets passed around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list and RSS subscribe feed for people who regularly visit your site.

People buy from people they know, like and trust. A blog is like dating – you wouldn’t propose on the first date so why shove your sales pitch down a new visitors throat.

You can point your articles, videos, forum posts and social media activities all through your blog.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a blog but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many many sources of ideas and inspiration for your blog, which come from your day to day activities and your own personal development.

7. Facebook marketing

Social networking has always been a main part of many internet marketers strategy. But most don’t use it effectively at all. They flood the likes of Facebook and Myspace with offers and promotions. This won’t work.

If you want to use social tools like Facebook to generate traffic to your website, you first have to identify the right groups and then invest something of yourself.

You need to be prepared to make a personal connection with other folks in the community. It’s all about relationships and connecting with people on a personal level.

Posting up useful content on social networks will get you some awesome rankings on Google. The search engines seem to put a premium on sites like Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Squidoo and Hubpages.

In all these free or low cost traffic generation methods, it’s all about giving value to your niche community.

Leads generated in this way will be far more valuable as leads back to you – interested, highly targeted, committed and profitable.

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