Home

Phone Numbers In Paid Ads – It Will Cost You!

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 01:28:27 +0000

We have all seen them, phone numbers in paid ads like Google Adwords or Yahoo Sponsored Ads, but what are they doing for you?

Giving a perspective customer your phone number right?

Hmmm maybe, but they are also costing you in a big way!

A phone number has no relevance to the keyword phrases you are bidding on for your ad and can decrease your click-through-rate (CTR) and quality score. This will in turn drive up your cost-per-click (CPC) and pushes your ad further down in the results and possibly out of sight from what your potential customer. Not what you were hoping for!

With paid search ads, you really want people to click your ad and go to your website so try leaving your phone number out of the ad. You should find your CTR and quality score increase therefore giving you a lower CPC.

Now that Google or Yahoo are rewarding you with lower CPCs due to a better performing ads, you will be receiving more clicks = more traffic for the same budget, now you have the opportunity to convert all this new traffic from window shopper to lifelong customer!

Phone Numbers In Paid Ads – It Will Cost You! is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Frequency V’s Quality When Blogging

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:52:21 +0000

Often when we suggest to business owners that blogging will help your search rankings we are faced with helping them overcome some hurdles. The two main hurdles for business owners are that they believe blogging is super time consuming and you need to write/post multiple times a day, or every day and then is my personal favourite:

I thought blogs were for teenagers or geeks that don’t have anything to do after school or on weekends!

In the below video, Matt Cutts from search engine giant Google, address the point of frequency V’s quality when blogging and some of the benefits for users or search engines.

Will you be changing your blogging attitude?

Frequency V’s Quality When Blogging is a post from: Home

Related posts:

One Magic Bullet For Viral Success On YouTube Please!

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:09:11 +0000

Sorry, according to the “What You Don’t Know About YouTube” panel at SMX, there is no magic bullet for viral success on YouTube.

You will need to optimise your videos to see strong ROI from YouTube, here are some factors that Gregory Markel of Infuse Creative points out each of your YouTube video will to help achieve YouTube greatness!

Title
Description
Tags
Links
Keywords
Playlists
Flagging
Close captioning/transcriptions
Social media outreach
Inbound link building
Subscriber rate
Annotation usage
Social bookmarking
Blogger outreach
Press releases
Crowd sourcing

To be truly victorious on YouTube you will need an integrated strategy, all the planets must align and the following fundamentals should be kept in mind along the way:

Respect the audience’s intellect but a little shock and awe never hurts
Find the equilibrium between entertainment and branding
Include a clear call to action to be able to measure results
Promote the video with honesty and transparency
Don’t underestimate the power of a few key influencers blogging or tweeting about your video
If organic success doesn’t happen, a paid campaign is always a good option

Article source

One Magic Bullet For Viral Success On YouTube Please! is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Tools For Optimising ROI On Social Media Campaigns

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:47:09 +0000

Below are some tools that Tony Adam of MySpace shared at SMX for optimising ROI from social media campaigns:

For PR: HARO (help a reporter out), PitchEngine
For customer and user insight: RapLeaf, Flowtown
For Twitter management: Soxialize, Hootsuite, Seesmic Desktop
For reputation management: KnowEm, Social Mention, ScoutLabs
For social media analytics: BackType, SWIX (in Beta)
For forum monitoring: Big boards, Omgili, Board Tracker

Article source

Tools For Optimising ROI On Social Media Campaigns is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Real Time Search – Do You Understand?

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:31:55 +0000

Conventional search marketing is a many-to-many approach: Many searchers asking questions, and many marketers providing answers. However with Twitter now receiving 18 billion searches queries per month, the concept is shifting.

This new, so-called “real-time” search is one-to-one. One person asks a question that anyone can see and answer within seconds. With Twitter, nothing like traditional search, you know precisely who is asking and who is answering. This creates a gigantic opening for marketers.

According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, marketers need to go further than just brand monitoring on Twitter. He points to new tools like Replyz which make it easy for marketers to find relevant questions that Twitter users are asking. Sullivan’s guidance boils down to Marketing 101: Listen to what your audience needs, present first-class answers and observe your reputation soar…in real-time of course!

Article source

Real Time Search – Do You Understand? is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Quality Links To Your Site Will Get Google Love

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 03:14:33 +0000

The goal posts on SEO are changing all the time as search engines make adjustments to their algorithms, like the introduction of Google Caffeine. However, some things never change, like Google’s view on spammy links.

Google has recently given advice on their Webmaster Central Blog how you can achieve higher quality links that will help your search results. Below is the advice Google has provided:

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.
A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.” Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way.
Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We’ve seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site’s source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn’t rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.
It’s important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site’s reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them.
Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.
It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it’s important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.
Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easily.
Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users’ attention.

For more information on this blog post from Google, take a look at what WebProNews had to say here

Quality Links To Your Site Will Get Google Love is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Is This The Social Media War Room Of The Future?

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:36:38 +0000

War room and social media, what the hell are we talking about here?

The answer is simple, Gatorade. The company known for creating splashy ads with the world’s best athletes has created what has been described by Mashable as a war room for monitoring the brand in real-time across social media.

The Gatorade brand is being used as a testing ground for the PepsiCo owned sports drink and how it approaches marketing with the use of social media.

The Goal of the project according to Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, Consumer & Shopper Engagement Carla Hassan is to:

take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.

If the strategy is successful for the Gatorade brand, the approach will be applied to other businesses and brands with the PepsiCo according to Bonin Bough, Director of Global Social Media.

Have PepsiCo set the new standard for major International brands in social media monitoring and engagement? Yes!

Is This The Social Media War Room Of The Future? is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Google Caffeine Goes Live – How Fresh Is Your Content?

admin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:23:28 +0000

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I guess every movie star had to start somewhere and this is where Will Smith evolved. Can’t believe I used to run from the bus stop to watch that show!

Just like Will Smith, Google has also evolved, yesterday they announced that they will be rolling out their new web indexing system called Caffeine.

So What Is Google’s New Caffeine?

Well it is still the search engine we have come to trust to deliver us the most relevant content related to our searches, but now it’s way cooler!

Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before. (source)

Why Did Google Create Caffeine?

Google created Caffeine with the future in mind. Currently when you do a search you are not searching the live web. . Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. As the web continues to evolve with new and fresh content, such as videos, images, news and real time updates, so do people’s (the searcher’s) expectations to be delivered the most up-to-date information available as it’s published. Not days, weeks or months later!

Will This Effect Your Rankings?

It is very possible, if your business/website relies heavily on Google for traffic, leads and sales, keep an eye on your search rankings over the next few weeks as the changes could push your website down the serach results.

What Does Caffeine Want From Me?

Keep your website content snap lock fresh! Google’s very own search veteran Amit Singhal had this to say:

As the web is moving forward, freshness is becoming critical and we have worked a lot on this. Starting tomorrow our users will see 70 per cent fresher results in Google’s search results. In our world, users come first, and with Caffeine we will observe our user search experience getting much better, much fresher.(source)

How To Keep It Fresh For Caffeine

It’s all in the hips, I mean blogging! It’s all in the blogging. In the past hosting a blog on your domain as part of your website has been gold for boosting your search engine rankings, now with Caffeine looking for fresh content, regularly blogging is a perfect way for you to keep your website content fresh and up-to-date and in front of your competition in the search engines!

Google Caffeine Goes Live – How Fresh Is Your Content? is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Will Kevin Rudd & Tony Abbott Get It Right With Mums?

admin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:31:37 +0000

If Kevin “07” Rudd and Tony “Budgie Smuggler” Abbott are looking to woo working mothers, then research reveals they should be spending more time targeting them online!

Birth.com.au and Kidspot.com.au has released some research that shows mothers media consumption has changed since becoming a mother. The majority of mothers had increased their internet usage and have reduced their consumption of magazines and newspapers.

According to the research, 82% of mums and mums-to-be seek opinions online to help them make a purchasing decision, while 75% research products online more than once a month.

(Mum’s) penchant for online is triggered by a persistent hunger for information and advice during pregnancy that shows her the merit of the medium in a whole new way. She quickly learns the value of specialist editors plus online forums full of mums that have done it all before. Her fondness grows, her dependence deepens and the trust she puts in websites exceeds any other option – online or offline,” Kidspot CEO Katie May.

So Kevin and Tony, if your want to woo mothers for their votes, please save the tax payers of Australia some money and appeal to them online!

Image source – Heraldsun.com.au
Article source – Marketingmag.com.au

Will Kevin Rudd & Tony Abbott Get It Right With Mums? is a post from: Home

Related posts:

Are You Doing It Right?

admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 23:33:29 +0000

Self-promotion that is!

The increased popularity of social media as a marketing channel for businesses of all sizes has introduced a few interesting challenges, mainly, how to self promote your services without being seen a spammer.

If done correctly, self-promotion can be very powerful, but bad self promotion can be extremely damaging to your business and brand.

WebProNews recently talked to Patrick O’Keefe from the iFroggy Network who talked about several interesting areas of concern in the use of social media. Patrick’s first point on the use of sock puppets is one area of social media that is getting abused, especially on Twitter.

The trend of sock puppets is when people post promotion or positive comments about a particular company but do not disclose that they are directly affiliated with that company, for example, making multiple twitter accounts that re-tweet (RT) all the same content. As a result, the company loses its credibility, trust and is seen as a spammer by its community.

Are You Doing It Right? is a post from: Home

Related posts: