Where it all Begins – Four Steps to Success

If you need, and you do need, to advertise your business on the Internet, the first thing you’ll have to do, is to Plan your Internet Marketing Strategy!

• The first point to cover is setting up a solid Internet presence. Something steady that presents your business or product at all times, 24/7, and doesn’t break down on the first traffic rush your website will get. To achieve this you need two things, and two things only: A solid and affordable ecommerce web hosting package and Wordpress, the worlds best content management system (CMS). The latter is free, and the web hosting package won’t rid you of your last shirt, it only costs 84 bucks a year! And check the link above to see what you get for this money; it’s unbelievable! It doesn’t leave a single wish open. – Wordpress is the worlds most popular blogging software. It is very easy to install and even easier to keep it upgraded almost on auto pilot. No other content management system in the world offers this feature. Installing Wordpress on Blue Host is a piece of cake and a matter of two clicks! Important! To setup your Wordpress Blog the correct way, follow this guide.
• The second point to cover in your Internet marketing strategy is knowing what your prospects are searching for when they are looking for your products and services on the Internet. Just about two month ago, this was stil a difficult task, widely depending on guesses and trial and error. Now the world of Internet marketing has changed once again. And as in most such cases we can pin it on Google once more, but this time in a very positive way! Google has finally desided to open up those not quite informative green bars in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Now, here is your top tool to plan your Internet marketing strategies, right, not only one strategy, but several strategies. Once you entered the keyword or key phrase you ‘think’ that your prospects would type into the Google search bar when they search your business, you will see the number of people who infact typed this keyword into Google during the past month and a prediction of how many will search for your keyword in this month. Additionally you will see all similar and related searches. And I can tell you right now, the results will not only make you want to change the title, description and keywords of your new blog right away, but it will make you re-think your whole Internet Marketing Strategy!
• Once you have obtained your new input, start using it wisly. Note down the longtail key phrases that have most searches and use them when promoting your products and services on your website. – A hint – Get a cross refference on Google for a desired key phrase before you set all your money on one horse. If you see too many websites coming up in the search results, you might want to choose another phrase that is less competitive. It happens many times that the difference is in only one letter; e.g. singular or pural. You need to know exactly what you prospects are looking for! Otherwise your whole Internet marketing strategy is doomed to fail, or in the best case scenario, to be too expensive.
• Now you can use the same keywords and key phrases for your Google AdWords campaign. Right, i forgot to tell you, when you sign up for an account with Blue Host, you’re entitled to a 50$ bonus on a Google AdWords account. This is great because you can test drive Google AdWords without spending your own money. Create one campaign for starters. In this campaign you put two ads. Think well about the text in you ads; this is most important. Test-run your two ads against each other in competitive style. As soon as you see one ad performing better than the other, remove the one with lesser clicks and create a new one. Run those two against each other until you have a new winner. Repeat this until you have reached the maximum on clicks. Now you have the perfect ad running. Google will charge you much less per click if your ad produces many clicks, thus your ads run cheaper, you get more targeted visitors and make more sales for lesser money! Thus your ROI (return of Investment) increases. And there is always the possibility to put a few AdSense ads on your own site as well to cover some of the advertising costs.

This is my personal Internet Marketing Strategy, and it has yet to fail me! I’m going down that road for years now, using these strategies for my own products and projects as well as for my customers with great success. Man Am I glad that we don’t have to fool around with the good old Overture Keyword-Tool.

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How to Save Your Domain Based Campaigns?

Google has changed its ‘Ad URL’ policy and many owners of multiple domain names now have a problem. What can you do about the new rules and how to apply to the new URL policy without loosing valuable ground in your advertising campaign? And what about split testing of domain based campaigns?

In most cases it is still possible to use any domain you own and direct it to your landing page URL. And to overcome the question right away; no, it is no black hat tactics or cheap trick to fool Google, that wouldn’t be wise in any case, no, what I’m talking about here is legally assigning all your domain names you own to your main account domain.

Redirecting Domains / Domain Forwarding

According to the new rules it looks like this: If you are redirecting your URL’s to lead users, who click your Google ad, to your landing page, hosted on a different domain, you will be breaking the rules and Google will stop your ads from showing in some time soon. Not so if you park your domains.

What is Domain Parking?

A Parked Domain (or pointed domain) is a domain name that points to the same directory as your Primary domain. This means that the website of the parked domain will be the same as your-domain.com which is your Primary Domain. Caution though, you cannot ‘park’ a domain to an addon domain.

What are Addon Domains?

An Addon Domain is a domain name that points to a different subdirectory on your account. This gives you the ability to make it look like an entirely different website.

Additionally a sub domain will automatically be created. Let’s say you main account is www.your-domain.com and you add a new website on your account (Only possible if your host allows you to host multiple domain on your account) let’ say www.new-site.com , stored in a folder called ‘new-site’, the automatically assigned sub domain will be www.new-site.your-domain.com.

Taken the above example, you can only park one or more supplementary domains (unlimited on Blue Host) to www.your-domain.com, not to www.new-site.com neither to www.new-site.your-domain.com

How do I Park my Domains?

If your website(s) are e.g. hosted at Blue Host you can do the following:

1. Open ‘Parked Domains’ in your C-Panel and select one of the two options, existing or new domain name. In case you want to ad a domain name that is hosted by a different registrar, enter the EPP code in step two.

2. Choose ‘Parked domains’ in step three and click ‘Addon Domain’. That’s all you need to do.

You can now use the URL that has proven best for your campaign. Or any www.new-site.com address in the visible URL field in your Google AdWords ad and use the landing page URL, directing to your main account URL in the hidden field. Since Google will be widely ignoring the content of your new domain, you’re also not likely to loose any rankings and search engine position at Google for ‘duplicated content. The best part though is that you don’t have to let go of your most precious tool in AdWords, split testing.
Be wise though and do not submit your newly parked domain name to any search engine if you’re pushing it, you will end up getting punished for duplicated content. I have been showing you this on the example of http://www.bluehost.com/, where you can ‘life test’ the feature in a complete demo version. And sure, because I’m very familiar with this host, running several accounts here for many problem free years.

I know this is possible to do on other web hostings as well, but i obviously can’t give you the details on all of them. Check back with the domain support of your current host, the will explain to you what to do and how tom apply to the changes.
Even though Google is not likely to stop all ads not applying to the changes by April 1^st 2008, you should get onto it asap or you’re eventually gonna find your Google AdWords campaigns stopped.

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What Has Changed?

Google has listened once more into customer requests and has "based on feedback from both, advertisers and users" changed it’s URL policy. In consistency with Google’s efforts to present the most relevant results to it’s users, it will no longer be possible to use two different URLs in Adwords ads in the way it was before. Until now an advertiser could enter a visible url for the user to see in the ad and an invisible URL, where the user actually has been directed to. With the newest changes in the Google Adwords policy, both url’s have to direct to the web site adevertised in the ad. "These include, but aren’t limited to, redirects and vanity URLs."  In clear text this means the URL of your landing page. The new policy will be strictly enforced for new ads and i see a hard time coming for affiliaters.

Even though Google will not take  immediate action on existing ads, you might want to make the changes as soon as possible to ensure that your ads run without interruption and red flags.

Using Tracking URLs

Your ads will be approved if the URL of your landing page domain matches that of your display URL domain.

The following would be an acceptable URL set:

• Display URL: www.yoursite.com/topic1
• Destination URL: www.tracking-url.com/topic1
• Landing page URL: www.yoursite.com

And this URL set would not be accepted:

• Display URL: www.yoursite.com/topic1
• Destination URL: www.tracking-url.com/topic1
• Landing page URL: www.tracking-url.com

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The Strength of two Goliaths – AdWords™ and Adsense™

I don’t want to fool you if i say; niche marketing with Google Adsense can bring an overwhelming success. But Niche Marketing with both Google Adsense™ AND Google AdWords™ in play can well lead to market domination and making lots of money. Let me prove it too you right here:
Simply type or copy/paste ‘dive center software‘ into a Google search box, or click on the link below which does that automatically for you: 

Google  search for: dive+center+software (Opens in a new tab or window)

You will probably get close to 2 million results and you can see now on the right side one single ad, my client’s ad. Now that is niche marketing. Every single time someone types a keyword, related to dive shop software or dive resort software,into a Google search box, one of the ads that have been setup in Google Adwords, will be shown on the right side of the search page. This is a good example of market domination. Even though, there is a huge amount of competition on the market, non of the other software developers runs a Google Adwords campaign. That is as good as it gets! My customers ad has the whole right side of the Google search page for itself. Every time a prospect searches for a product related keyword or key phrase.

continue reading "Market Domination Using Google Adsense and Google Adwords in Combination"

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Advertisers Can Now Exclude Site Categories!

The newest Google update to the AdWords Tool Section allows advertisers now to exclude whole categories of web sites, rather than excluding individual sites, with the Site Exclusion Tool.This particular update also brought a new name to the game. It is called “Goodbye Site Exclusion Tool – Hello Site AND Category Exclusion Tool”.

How it Works

When Google uses their contextual targeting technology – real hi-tech stuff – to scan a page in the Google Content Network to find relevant ads to show, their bots also check if the content on the page matches any of the topics or page types you have set to be excluded in your Google AdWords Campaign. If there is a match between a category you’ve excluded and the page classification, your ads won’t show on that page. Google bots classify pages dynamically, so even as the content of a page changes your ads should be prevented from showing for categories you have excluded.

The Up-Side

This new revision is supposed to make it easier on advertisers to keep their precious ads out of sites where they feel the incoming clicks fail to convert to sales at a satisfactory rate.
The Inside AdWords Blog states that category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the Google content network both, keyword targeted and placement targeted advertising campaigns.

The Down-Side

Google already hopes that they haven’t shot themselves with one bullet in two feet and advertisers won’t use the new feature too heavily. The blog post cited points where the company feels category exclusion could easily be overkill.
The Google blog further states “Excluding a category could potentially block your ads from appearing on a number of relevant pages and severely impact your campaign’s performance. We recommend that you refer to the statistics provided in the Site and Category Exclusion tool before making any exclusion”.

I don’t think that many advertisers will buy these arguments. Category exclusion has been an often-requested feature. Advertisers who see that category exclusion has too much of an impact on their AdWords campaign will likely turn it off again.But once more; Google is looking to make our life easier and is doing a good job herein.

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Welcome back to part 2 of the most common mistakes made on Google AdWords^TM.If you have been following up on the first five steps, you should by now already be seeing some results of your effort.

Now, you might have wondered if the yellow Corvette is my ride; it isn’t. I wouldn’t need a car like that where I live but the car is a kind of a symbol to me. Think of your business as if it was a yellow Corvette. It’s a fine thing to sit in that car and go for a joy-ride, but what if you find out that you use 1 gallon of gas on 2 miles? Wouldn’t you go and fix the problem as soon as possible? In most cases the problem of burning too much gas is the carburator. And in most cases it only takes a small screwdriver to adjust a tiny little screw and your car will stop burning your money away. In our case where the car symbolizes the business, the carburator is the Google Ads. And if you don’t know where those tiny little screws are to make the necessary adjustments, it’s time to do some reading or find a good mechanic who can solve your problem. Now since you are the do-it-yourself type of guy or gal, let’s get to the second part of my collection of common mistakes made in Google AdWords advertising campaigns. The five remaining point are as vital as the first five points.

1. Check if Your Keywords are Specific Enough. Sometimes broad and generic keywords can push a lot of traffic to your site. Depending on what you are trying to achieve, they may even be very successful. For example if you do a specific internet marketing research where you target a broad spectrum at first. Often, however, they can also do just the opposite — drain your funds with poor results. A user searching on one of these generic phrases is often doing research of his own in an early part of the buying process. It is important that you know your keyword-level results and filter out bad variations.

2. Are You Going After Long-Tail Keywords? This point follows the above on generic keywords. Building a list and individual ads for the long-tail keywords can be a major time-sucker. It can also be profitable if the task is performed correctly. Those earnings per click will likely vary widely from a generic keyword like “software”, “hotel software” and “hotel reservation software HotRez 1.02″. The first one is doing research while the last one knows what he/she wants and is most likely looking to purchase.

3. Separate Your Content and Search Networks. Another part of Google AdWords that is widely underestimated and will leak your gas tank without getting any mileage, or worst, attract click fraud is to not to separate your search network ads from your content network ads. If you don’t know what the difference is, chances are, that they are most likely not separated in your account. Bad keywords are most properly leaking your funds on daily bases.

4. What about Your Local Clients and Geo Targeting? Are you selling your products locally? If so, the three big Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines allow you to geo-target your customers by selecting the area and the language where your ads will be shown. This is likely to bring the local market right to your doorstep on non-local keyword phrases. A highly profitable surplus.

5. Are You Frequently Monitoring Your Accounts? If you don’t have the time to run split testing on a daily basis or frequently checking your EPC’s you will need to get someone to do it for you. The simple reason for this is that the big PPC search engines are also in competition with each other and will always try to give there users to most accurate search results for their search terms. Having that said, you will understand why Google is increasingly cracking down on poor performing keywords, smacking advertisers with the “Inactive for Search” status for certain keywords. You have to know what’s going on or you’ll end up losing traffic and profits. Even if you are just spending your free bonus 45 $ that Google or Yahoo will offer you upon signup, there is no way that you let your analytics get out of sight. With your initial advertising budget you can learn most of the tricks. Use the above 10 tips for your Google AdWords campaign and you can not fail. Remember the srewdriver ; if you cannot find the right screw, you might need to get help.

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The devil with Google AdWords^TM lays in the detail. Attending to the tiny details of your advertising campaign can help you avoiding the most common mistakes of PPC Advertising and will eventually save you a lot of money. In this article I will talk about the common mistakes and in some follow up articles I will get more into detail on five particular points that will immediately result in a better click through rate (CTR) for your Google AdWords^TM Campaign later on here. Following the advice below and avoiding the most common mistakes will boost your success and reward your effort in a very short period of time.

The Ten Most Common and Costly Reasons Why Your Google AdWords^TM Campaign Fails

1. You Have Too Many Keywords in one Ad Group Clean out your keywords often It is vital to target your ads to be as relevant as possible. Break your keywords into more than just one or two ad groups. This will allow you to monitor each of your ad variables so that you can be as relevant as possible. The effect is here that you will get a higher CTR and Google will honor this by drastically reducing your cost per click price (CPC) and positioning your ads higher up the ladder. As higher your CTR is as lower your CPC gets and as better your ad positioning will be. (This only applies to Google AdWords^TM, not to Yahoo Search Marketing, on Overture and Yahoo always the highest bidder is on the top result).

2. You Are Not Using Negative Keywords The reason to use negative keywords is to reduce unwanted clicks on your ads. With increasing priority given to quality scores and click through rates in the PPC engines, it’s key to trim the fat from your keyword campaigns. If your company sells “hotel reservation software” then be sure that you have keywords like “-serial” or “-free” assigned as negative keywords unless, you offer it for free or you intend to waste your advertising money on people who are looking to find software cracks and hacks e.g. warez sites.

3. You Are Not Properly Testing Your Ads. There are only 95 letters you can use in Goggle AdWords. 25 of letters make your title and that leaves only 70 letters for the text. What could you possibly do wrong in 95 letters? EVERYTHING! Testing your ads is crucial. Even the smallest change can make the difference between success and failure. Test your ads effectiveness in pairs. Run two ads in one campaign and see which one gets more clicks. Create a new ad and replace it with the looser ad. Run the two ads again and sort out the looser to be replaced until you are happy with your CTR. Remember the “Bonus Line” of your ad, the displayed url, can also be optimized.

4. You Are Not Tracking Your Results To The Maximum Extent. Testing your ads and fine tuning your ad campaigns and keyword lists will only work if you are tracking your results down to the bone. Google Analytics offer you all the tools you could possibly dream of. Use them to the full extent. Once you have created your Google AdWords Campaign all tools are free for you to use. If you don’t have the time to study and implement the Google codes, give it to your webmaster or your Internet Marketing Division but don’t just leave this part out. It can save you thousands of Dollars.

5. You Are Not Doing Your Keyword Level Tracking Right. Google AdWords^TM can easily leak your money out the window if you are not careful. If you have keywords that are not performing and leaking your budget slowly but steadily, you are throwing money out the window. Monitoring the keyword level allows you to adjust your bids for the maximum effect. If you have one keyword with a $2.00 earnings per click and another at 30 cents, this is vital key information that allows you to maximize your profits. Raise one bid and lower the other to optimize your profits.

Now until you are going to have this five steps adjusted on your AdWord Campaigns I will be ready to present you with five more crucial “To Do or Not To Do’s” in Google AdWords^TM.

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Why using AdWords™ PPC?

AdWords™ advertising has become the most important tool vor Internet Marketing. With Google AdWords, you will immediately be able to reach a far wider audience and therefor more potential customers than ever before. Your ad variations will show on Google, on the Search Partners of Google and Content Pages that you can select yourself. You can select if you want to pay for clicks or impressions. Once you have created your Google AdWords Account, you will have access to many features such as multiple ad formats, location targeting, or placement targeting. And yes Google AdWords help even a small business to market their products or services better.

A vital instrument to measure the effectiveness of each particular ad campaign is the Conversion Tracking Tool or “Google Analytics”. You can use these tools free of charge as soon as you have an account and you will most properly wonder how you ever could be without them.

• Reach exactly the people who are looking for your product or service
• Quick and easily create and edit your ads
• Have your ads running within minutes and start gaining customers
• Control all your site performance and statistics with Google Analytics 24/7
• Cost-per-click (CPC) pricing. You will only have to pay for the clicks you’ve received at a price you’ve set by choosing a maximum CPC from 1 cent USD to US$100. Or you can use the brand new Google Optimizer, another great tool
• Or you can select the Cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing if you prefer to target individual content sites e.g. in the same line of business, and pay by the impression.
• Run or pause your campaigns at will. Schedule your ads to run on the days and hours you want.
• The AdWords tools let you fully control your ad budget. Your budget can start from as low as 1 cent USD/ day
• No monthly minimum spending limit or time commitment and only a minimal fee of 5 $Us to set up your account

Now if you haven’t got your own web hosting account yet and you are just staring to bring your business online, here is a deal that might be interesting for you at this point. When you sign up with Blue Host, one of the five largest hosting companies, you get a 50 $US bonus in AdWords for free. Blue Host also offers one of the largest hosing packages for the lowest price on the Internet, so it’s worth checking it out. You can even use a live demo and play a bit with the many tools before you make decision. But that’s another story, now it’s time to
Act!

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