Don’t Make These Adwords Mistakes

Google AdWords can be an awesome advertising tool to give  your business ginormous exposure if used correctly. If you’ve never tried it, don’t be put off if it seems confusing at first. Because once you’ve mastered the skill of making an AdWords campaign work, you’ll be able to see increased profits. Here are three mistakes to avoid:

When starting out, many simply throw together a campaign without doing much market research, and this is a serious mistake. You shouldn’t start an AdWords campaign until you are confident that you know your market well. For instance, lets say you are in custom labels niche (for industrial purposes, military specification and commercial applications), what keywords could you target? You could target “Custom Labels” or “Custom Label“, but ask yourself – is that going to get you converting traffic? How many times was that keyword searched for last month? Adwords will tell you.  You also want to have a good sense of who your competition is and what they’re up to. You want to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and how much they cost to bid on so you can calculate your own strategy. Fine tune your keyword list with a keyword tool. Taking the time to do your market research allows you to get off on the right foot with your AdWords campaign. Remember to stay relevant and laser-focused with your keywords. If you don’t, this could affect your Quality Score.

Displaying your ads through the content network of Google is another common mistake. This network consists of all those partnering websites that show Google ads through their AdSense program. These ads could prove to be a distraction to people viewing your add, since these sites are not that targeted. In the end you may even achieve a high click through rate, but low conversions. It’s not unheard of  those losing large amounts of money on ads by leaving the content network on, which translates into a poor ROI. So you might consider not using AdSense until you feel comfortable working with AdWords.

When starting out, Test, Test and Test.  Keep learning and not only will you increase your experience but also your profits…

Niche Marketing

As discussed previously, niche marketing is focusing on a specific vertical and creating a marketing campaign for it. You can build a Web site or blog and design a marketing plan around it for a tightly focused niche.  You take a broad category and drill down to long tail keywords that can be targeted more specifically.

What are the advantages? The main benefit of a smaller and more defined vertical is less competition. When building SEO for your sites, you’ll have an easier time optimizing more descriptive and less competitive keywords, thus ranking quicker. And since these terms are more descriptive in nature, they are more targeted and prone to higher conversion rates.

Choosing a niche is easier if the category is something you are familiar with or have a strong affinity to. If you a passion for cooking, you can cater to a specific type of cooking or type of food, says Latin American. You can create a tightly focused Web site with Spanish food cookbooks, ingredients, utensils, etc.  Then get your keyword list created. Research your competition looks like for others on the keyword phrase. Your domain can have the keyword in it.  Then start your optimization and some PPC and watch our niche take off…

SEO Basics

Is your landing page up yet? How serious are you in making it successful? If your answer is ‘Very!”, then SEO should be part or your marketing plan. But if you know next to nothing about it, then here’s the lowdown on SEO basics. If you can master the basics, then the rest will be much easier for you.

Let’s start with keyword research. How can you optimize your website if you do not know what keywords you should be targeting? Which ones are you going use? For instance, the identity theft niche has been hot for a few years now. Suppose you were marketing the IdentityHawk solution. Well, ask yourself: What keyword or search phrase, when typed into a search engine, should display my website as part of the results? Could you use “identity theft protection“? You could. Which keywords get the most traffic? Which ones are “informational” keywords (which may drive traffic but low conversions), and which ones are  ”buying” keywords (conversion-centric)? What is your competition ranking well for? How many inbound links does their website have? The answers to these questions will help you come up with a good keyword list.

After your keyword list is generated, you’ll need to them for your on-page optimization. What this means is that your keywords should be visible in the web copy of your website. You should put your keywords in the title, the H1 tag, the image alt tag, the meta description and of course, in the body of the text. Don’t overdue it (keyword stuffing), as this could get your site de-indexed.

Next comes Link building. Links are the most important factor in search engine optimization. Your goal should be to get as many quality links as you can. Quality being subjective, think of links that are surrounded by fresh, unique, relevant content on pages with adequate page rank.

These are just some of the SEO basics that you can do for your own website. Practice these and you can see great results within the coming months.

The Power of Blogging

It seems like almost everyone today blogs. Anyone trying to build a business should consider having their own blog. But just what exactly is a blog?

Well you are reading one now.  Blogs (short for WebLog) is a site that shares information. This particular blog you are now reading is about Online and Affiliate Marketing – but, my friend Matt, who manages a computer store, mentioned that the techniques found here can be used by his business too.

Matt could begin blogging about how frustrating it is to have a slow computer – he mentioned his customers have this problem and most don’t know much about optimizing, maintaining and defragging their computers. His business helps customers remove junk files, fix registry errors, protect their privacy by removing history tracks, and defragment their disk drives for better disk access speed. They call him their speed up computer guy!

How does this apply? Matt could share his experience on the subject on his blog and others who follow his blog may know and comment on something of value others may find useful, thereby providing a resource center on computer issues and how to address them.

The basic premise of a blog is to supply the reader with something of value. How? Chances are if you found something of value and shared it with like-minded people, they would find it valuable too. So start sharing! Blog good content and see how you now can connect with people – your trusted and engaged audience.

So if you want to establish and grow relationships with clients and add value to their lives, start blogging; your community will thank you for it…

Going for the Goal

I just bought a house.  If was a shortsale.  Needs some work.  But I’m slowly making it mine by refurbishing it just the way I want it. It’s got a nice sized front lawn, a 10′ deep pool, a brick fireplace in the family room, and a 2 car garage, in a quiet, “established” neighborhood.

This house buying was not something done on a whim.  It was a goal I set over a 1.5 years ago and was blessed to make it happen. It was process though.  But I had a plan: check my credit score, save, line-up financing, shop around for the right house in the right area and finally make a  purchase. Mission accomplished – goal realized!   How about you? How are you doing with YOUR goals, on and offline?

Have you heard of a SMART Goal? The SMART Goal is a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely goal. However, the biggest and the most common mistakes of new affiliate marketers is not being smart by setting unrealistic goals when starting out.  How does this happen? Many are misled by those super affiliates, selling the idea that you can make millions of dollars on the internet in a blink of an eye. It’s not possible to achieve a million of dollars overnight if you’ve never sold a dime online. It takes great expertise to reach such a lofty  goal. So set realistic but modest achievable goals. First crawl, then walk. Only then can you run.

Think short and long term. What are some goals you can set?

Short term goals may include:

• Increasing the Number of Subscribers in Your Lists
• Increasing Daily Targeted Traffic Flow
• Increasing Sales Conversion by 5% every month
• Write More Reviews & Articles for a Blog

Then some long term goals you might consider setting:

• Increase Profit by 20% every year
• Develop Your Own Affiliate Products
• To Become Six-Figure Super Affiliate
• Quit Your Boring Job and become Full-time Affiliate Marketer
• Replace Your Day Job and Spend More Time with Your Family

So the 1st step is to set your goals. But how do you achieve them? You’ll need an action plan log.  Write down your goals, their benefits, the timeline to reach it, people who could help you reach them, the obstacles.  Write it all down.  Be specific. Goals can be easily made but never executed so a clear action plan will enable you to succeed. When I first pulled my credit to see how I would fair in getting a loan, I saw some discrepancies.  I had to ensure it was accurate.  So I requested the changes and rechecked my free credit score and it improved. Likewise, review your action plan periodically to check your progress.  Make modifications when necessary, but stay on track. These are YOUR goals.

Goal for it!!!

The Delicate Art of Preselling

When doing affiliate marketing it’s imperative that you keep your eye on small but important details.

No. 1 in my book: Please avoid the conversion-killing mistake of trying to hard sell. Take a look at your bounce rates: if site visitors are only at your sites for a few seconds, could they feel as if you be trying to hard sell? Your responsibility as an affiliate marketer is to “presell” your readers before they get to the actual sales message from the vendor.

No one wants to read a sales pitch, and they don’t want to see anything resembling it on a website. So keep in mind that you only presell, and the person who made the product does the selling part. Your presell efforts will create a desire to know more and also make the person feel comfortable about clicking through to read more. You’ll discuss the benefits of the product in an objective manner and even talk about the negatives. Be honest – it’s critical that your readers feel and believe they are reading someone’s objective and unbiased review of a product.  Remember: your visitors want help making a decision, and if you do that then you’ll help enough people to decide to buy from you.

The better affiliates build a sense of community with their sites. You can too. Try to have your target audience participate at your site. Make your site interesting so that your visitors stay longer, perhaps with some video production. Add a cool voiceover, perhaps a female voiceover.  And don’t forget social links so that visitors can tweet or share something from your site on facebook. Remember, preselling is giving valuable info to your vistors so they can decide to buy something they need.

So give value –  and receive value in return…

Adwords Copywriting Greatness

Many things go into successful PPC campaigns; however we must say that ad copy is extremely important. You could say that it is the cornerstone of your entire PPC campaigns. Here are just a few Adword ad copywriting tips that you can turn around and use later today.

When you’re at the end of your ad copy, don’t ever forget that little jewel known as the call to action. Yes, of course some people either don’t know it or don’t do it for some reason. It’s just that a call to action has been tested over and over for decades in direct response advertising and has been shown to produce higher conversions. Never forget to put your strongest benefit in each and every ad you create – people need to know that. Unfortunately, no one cares about you or what you want or like; it’s all about the reader. So if you’re aiming at taking him away to another page, you will have to make sure you give him a strong reason to click on your ad. For example, let’s say you’re an affiliate for http://www.thesteamteam.com and are promoting geo-targeted cleaning keywords.  If the searcher is thinking about organic carpet cleaner austin,  then he needs to get to a landing page where he gets exactly what he’s looking for. If there are any surprises, the reader will click away, never to return.

When writing copy, make sure that you remove any common words such as “in, an, it, on”; since they will take up a lot of space. There is just no getting around it that all letters and words really count a lot with PPC ads. You will be putting yourself at a handicap by using unnecessary words.

If you read about writing good classified ad copy, then you will learn about the importance of including the strongest benefit you can find in your ads. So try making a list of every benefit you can think of, and then choose a group of the best ones to test. You need to offer the benefit that speaks the loudest to your target market. Don’t know the difference between features and benefits? No problem, go to Google and do a search on it and learn.

Hopefully after reading this article you have a better idea of how to write Adwords ad copy that is compelling and powerful. If you’re new to Adwords, or PPC, then you just need to get more confidence in your abilities, and that is where practice comes into play.

Niche Marketing Ideas

Niche marketing involves choosing a subset or a finite portion of a much larger market that has specific needs and problems, and then providing the solutions needed. This isn’t new, as business has always been about solving a problem with a unique solution. Every single industry has elements of niche marketing within it. New niches are being developed by businesses all the time, and that is only good news affiliates. For instance, a unique niche is commercial lockers. Sometimes the nichey-er, the better, and the following methods can be employed:

One effective strategy is to market to different social categories using the same offer. We’re not talking about reinventing the offer or product, just repositioning it. You may be surprised at how effective and doable this has been across the board. Consider that ‘school lockers‘ and ‘steel lockers‘ are all lockers. Of course something like this requires some research and a little creative tweaking, but if could be worth it to expand your customer base.  No matter what new niche you choose, the rules will always apply. Once you know what a market needs, you can then fulfill that need.This creates maket differentiation and your target market will be more than happy to pay for your solutions if they feel that you cater to their industry better than your competitors.

Something else to consider with your niche marketing is local markets. Presently local search engine marketing is hot because more and more people are searching for solutions that are in their specific geos.

So for instance, if your niche is “employee lockers“, you could go more specific with it and get more customers – “employee lockers in California”. Such targeted keywords are easier rank for in search and thus enhance your niche marketing efforts.

Niche marketing is not just a trend, but an awesome way to cross promote your products and services in a unique way, garnering more exposure and sales conversions. Try it! You won’t look at marketing the same again…