The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

A few years ago, if you wanted to advertise using a pay-per-click model, you either had to go with Google or opt for one of the smaller search engines, pay less, and get less traffic. In fact, that wasn’t too long ago. But now, Facebook advertising is growing at a very rapid pace and seems to be threatening Google’s dominance. One thing that could tip the balance for advertising is real-time advertising.

According to AdAge, Facebook has started experimenting with real-time PPC ads.

It works like this: You post a status update that says, “I love peanut butter sandwiches.” In that instant, an ad appears on your wall promoting peanut butter. Maybe it’s Jif, maybe it’s Peter Pan, but you know it’s peanut butter. Would you click the ad?

I’m guessing that many users would click the ad – probably enough to make it worthwhile to advertisers to spend money on real-time advertising.

The article doesn’t say whether real-time ads would cost more than regular PPC ads, but if the value is there, it might be worth paying more. Virtually anything can be promoted in real time just based on users’ posting habits. This takes PPC advertising to a new level and it could push Facebook ahead of Google as the preferred PPC provider.

While most online businesses are stressing over SEO, social media marketing, and perhaps even pay per click campaigns, email marketing rolls along delivering a steady flow of targeted traffic. Email marketing suffers from an image problem in some sectors. First, it is viewed as being too hard. Secondly, it is viewed as being below the old-fashioned junk mail that still floods our snail mail boxes.

These are both misconceptions that need clarifying. Let’s take the second point first. Today’s email marketing campaigns are as much controlled by the receiver as it is the sender. If you run your email campaigns correctly, then the only email addresses you have are those who have opted in – and they always have the opportunity to opt out again whenever they want. As to junk mail, that depends on you. You can choose to send junk, or you can choose to send newsletters that receivers will read and find useful.

Is email marketing too hard? Hard is probably too strong a word. There are several services available that will handle the grunt work for you. That is, collecting and storing the email addresses. You just need to make a form available to your visitors, and they will do the rest.

You actual marketing emails are up to you. They can be very simple and very plain emails inviting your recipients to come back to your website, perhaps offering discounts or special offers. You can also make your newsletters quite professional by hiring a specialist in this field.

Email marketing is neither hard nor junk mail. A recent report has highlighted how successful promotional emails are in relation to search and social media marketing. If you haven’t tried before, I suggest you do a little research.

There are many businesses that are not aware that pay per click advertising can be run internationally. Back in December, Google released a new website that could make life for businesses looking to expand internationally a whole lot easier. The appropriately named Google Ads for Global Advertisers website acts as a central hub for all of the tools required to run successful international campaigns.

Of special interest to advertisers with only a little experience with international markets is a new tool, the Global Market Finder.  This tool has the potential wow factor for those advertisers who may at least be exploring international options. Enter your keyword and the new tool will automatically translate it into 56 different languages, and then use Google search data to determine which countries have a high demand for that keyword.

As with other Google tools, you can see the search trend data, what competition there is, and the estimated price for your keywords. For many businesses, you may find that trading internationally has a lower cost per click while delivering similar conversion rates – the difference being either more profit, or more funds to up your keyword bid price locally.

There are a lot of businesses that could possibly investigate including overseas trade in their business development program. Google’s new website will certainly make life a little easier when it comes to research. The only concern I have is the use of translation software, especially for those looking to target two or three word keyword phrases.  Translation software can often make a real meal of these translations, often with interesting results. Before proceeding with a pay per click campaign in another language, check on the translation first – just to be on the safe side. Have you ever considered expanding internationally? For many businesses, there is a whole new marketing waiting for them.

SEO is not Internet marketing. In fact, SEO is just one link in what is an ever growing chain of Internet marketing options. There are some online businesses that are quite profitable, yet they have not done any ounce of search engine optimization, they have the other links to be profitable. So what are those other ‘links’ in the chain? Here are a handful of marketing options that should keep you occupied for a while.

Pay-per-click advertising. There are many businesses that prefer the targeted traffic that comes from PPC advertising. It can be easy to measure your ROI, and you have complete control of your spending.

Social Media Marketing. There are some niches that are more suited to social media marketing than others. Some businesses can survive by attracting customers through social media rather than search.

Email Marketing. Newsletters have long been a popular channel for marketers. Email marketing has proven to be highly successful for some online businesses, particularly those that are catalog-based.

Offline Marketing. Large corporations still use traditional offline marketing strategies. Online businesses are now finding that some of these channels are well suited for promoting their online businesses.

Blogs. Blogs are certainly not dead. In fact, blogs are becoming a favorite place for many that are researching products and brands before making decisions on where to spend their money. Blogs are also an excellent way for your online business to connect with the social side of the web.

Businesses, both online and offline, that can harness all of those links in the Internet marketing chain are going from strength to strength. That doesn’t mean you need to utilize all of them, but if you can determine which of those options are best suited to your niche, you can focus your attention on building your presence and building your business – to success.

Google has made a number of minor tweaks to their Adwords pay-per-click advertising program. The aim is to increase clicks, thus driving more revenue to Google, while it is hoped it will also drive more revenue to advertisers. Whether or not it does is open to debate although one change, relating to site links for those that use them, should see improved CTR and with it improved sales.

Do you include site links in your Adwords campaign? It is certainly worth having a closer look if you don’t. Site links allow you add extra links to your Adwords ad unit – up to ten for a campaign. Google has, in the past, shown the top four links in any ad unit displayed. Google has now changed this and will automatically rotate these links based on historical performance. This is good news for website owners who have several pages they want to drive traffic to.

In other changes, Google will change the way that domain URLs are displayed. Over the next week Google will modify all ad units displayed in search results so that the domain URL is all in lower case. This is to match the way domain URLs are displayed in search results. According to Google:

In any given month, we experiment with hundreds of subtle variations of the Google search results page, testing everything from font sizes and colors to layouts and spacing, as well as dozens of other variables. Recently, we found that by standardizing the look of the URLs on the page, we were able to improve many of our user metrics, including ad clickthrough rates

I am not sure that a change in the display of URLs will make a huge difference in click through rates, but then, any improvement is bound to be welcome.

The final modification will be a welcome one for those who have drilled down to really fine tune their ads. Negative keywords, in other words keywords, or parts of keywords that your don’t want associated with your ads, had to be set campaign by campaign. Now you can create a set of negative keywords that can be used with multiple campaigns. That will make life a little easier for Adwords users.

Of course, there are many Adwords users that don’t use site links or negative keyword lists when they really should. This could be costing them a significant amount when it comes to wasted or lost clicks. If you don’t completely understand how to use them, then consider working with a team of pay-per-click management specialists to fine tune your Adwords campaign.

Can you build an online business without the help of free traffic from search engines? In simple terms, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” In fact, most online businesses are built without the help of search engine traffic – at least, the free organic traffic that comes from search results. The reason, it often takes months before a website’s pages start to appear on the front page of search results.

If that’s the case, can you continue to run a business successfully without traffic from organic search results? Again, the answer has to be yes – if you’re prepared to work at it. There are many businesses surviving on pay per click marketing including pay per click from minor search engines where ‘quality scores’ are not an issue.

The biggest move in non-search marketing is social media marketing, particularly sites such as YouTube and Facebook. They say that YouTube is the second largest search engine online. That may be so, but it does take time and effort, and sometimes money, to put together videos that are of an acceptable quality. Even then, there is no guarantee that viewers will actually visit your website.

Facebook is another story. Being the most trafficked site on the Internet, it is quickly becoming one of the major target areas for business. Add Facebook’s own advertising program and the opportunities are there to succeed without search. If you can steadily build an email marketing list from your social traffic, so much the better.

There is, however, a certain irony in building a business without the reliance of search. Over time, your pages will rank (unless you block them). You will start to get a trickle of traffic from search engines and it will have an impact on your business, even if it’s just a small impact. If that’s the case, then why not incorporate some of the basic tenets of search engine optimization. It doesn’t take a lot of extra effort, and the benefits down the track could be significant. Can you succeed without search? Many businesses already think they do – notice I said “think!”

When it comes to succeeding online, there are more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. In fact, you should never rely on just one way. The best Web marketing is a multi-tiered approach that focuses on the best methods and strategies for the current time.

When planning your Web marketing strategy, try to incorporate these 5 proven strategies that work today and likely will work next year and the year after too.

1. Search engine optimization – After all these years, search engine optimization is still at the top of the Web strategies that are proven and work. In fact, it works just as well today as it did ten years ago – if you know what you are doing.
2. Competitive intelligence – Gathering information about the competition and your niche is an important starting point for any Web strategy. But it’s more than just a starting point. You should collect information on an ongoing basis.
3. Pay per click marketing – Click prices are a lot higher now than they used to be. But pay per click marketing is still a good Web strategy to employ. It’s effective, results can come quickly and conversions are high if you are capable of managing a campaign that draws in traffic.
4. Social media optimization – Social media is here to stay. From Facebook to Twitter and LinkedIn to Flickr, there are opportunities to engage with your audience in powerful ways.
5. Video marketing - Video marketing is still in its infancy. The right video can go viral in a heartbeat and if you are effective in uploading the right video at the right websites then this Web marketing strategy can pay off big time.

Internet marketing has changed over the years, but it hasn’t changed that much. From SEO to video marketing, these Web strategies should be a part of every Internet marketing campaign.

When it comes to Internet marketing there are services that are worth pursuing and services that you can afford to put on the back burner for awhile. In other words, not all services are created equal. The following 7 services are services that I’d say are worth considering today and that will likely be necessary services five and ten years from now.

1. Pay Per Click Management – PPC has become a staple of online advertising. You pay for traffic and if you do it right then your traffic will be targeted and conversion ready.
2. Search Engine Optimization – The original search engine marketing. There is no reason not to pursue a search engine optimization strategy. It’s the perfect search engine marketing.
3. Online Reputation Management – Don’t wait until you need it. Incorporate reputation management into everything you do.
4. Social Media Optimization – Social media is here to stay. This is evidenced by Facebook becoming the No. 1 trafficked website online. Develop a strategy and make it work for you.
5. Competitive Intelligence – Learn everything you can about your competition, then use it against them.
6. Web Design & Development – It all starts with your hub on the Web. Web design is one of the most important things to do in your total marketing strategy. Give it some thought.
7. Video Marketing & Production - Video marketing is the Internet sleeper. It’s taken awhile to catch on, but it is catching on. This is where the money will be in the future. Count on it.

If you’re serious about Internet marketing, these 7 strategies should be a part of your plan – starting today.

Internet marketing is about one thing – primarily. How you employ your fleet of keywords. But what makes a good keyword?

If you don’t know, a keyword is any word (or phrase) that a searcher would use to look for information that would be found on your website. Ideally, you want them to find your site and not your competition’s website. So how do you make that happen?

In a word, it happens when you effectively manage your keywords so that you use keywords that have high conversion rates and that you acquire at lower costs.

So the question is, How do you find these keywords?

There are several methods for finding keywords. Some of them are good and others are not so good. Your real goal is to find your best keywords at the best prices. So what are your options?

• Your first option is to go at it blind. This isn’t a very good option because if you can’t see your target then you aren’t likely to hit it.
• You can use a keyword research tool to help you narrow down your list of keywords. This is a great way to find an initial list of keywords, but it’s limited in giving you information on the effectiveness of those keywords.
• You can evaluate the websites of your competition and come away with some reasonable keywords, but those are keywords that your competition uses. They may or may not be good keywords for your business.
• Or, you can wage a small scale pay per click campaign to test your keywords and see which ones convert better at lower click prices.

Our preference for finding the right keywords for your business is the last option. It will narrow down your list of keywords to the best keywords, tell you which ones convert the best, and provide you with information on expected click-through rates and click prices.

Effective keyword management begins with a good list and from there you narrow it down to the best keywords.

Whether you are conducting a pay-per-click campaign, search engine optimization or social media marketing, you need to do some keyword research and pick the right keywords for your marketing efforts. But how should you go about doing that?

Of course, even if you’re just building your website then keyword research is in order.

First, study your competition. What are they doing? Write down any keywords you find on your competition’s websites. Analyze those keywords with regard to your differences and similarities to your competition. Does anything stick out?

That should help you narrow down your keywords to a niche that you fill within your industry. Now look for some synonyms. Using a tool like Google’s keyword research tool, enter your keywords and look for related keywords that might help you.

Now search for those keywords in Google and Bing and see what the competition is like. Are there a lot of websites targeting those keywords? That can be both good and bad. It’s bad because the more websites targeting those keywords the tougher your competition; it’s good because if there are a lot of websites targeting a keyword then it’s because that keyword is valuable.

After you’ve done all your keyword research, pick the ones that are best for your business. Those are the keywords that you’d expect a searcher to type into Google’s search box when they are trying to find the products and services you offer.

Don’t cut corners on keyword research. It’s an important part of your online marketing plan.

If you run pay per click marketing campaigns and you aren’t checking in on them every single day (or more often) then you are probably losing money. You cannot run a PPC campaign and just let it sit.

Managing a PPC campaign is time consuming. You can’t just allocate money for your campaigns, select your keywords, write your ads and then forget about it. It requires constant monitoring.

To manage a PPC campaign effectively you’ve got to narrow down your keywords and see which ones are working for you. You can’t do that if you aren’t checking in. You should check your campaigns at least once daily. Find out which keywords are most profitable, which ones are getting the click-throughs and which ones are leading to sales. In essence, you want to know which PPC campaigns are most profitable for you.

Until you know these things, you cannot be effective in pay per click advertising. It’s not a set-and-forget deal.

If you want to become an Internet marketer, whether your interest is in affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing or you intend to promote your small business through Internet marketing strategies, then you need to become familiar with Internet marketing terms. Here are 5 terms every Internet marketer should know before starting their IM career.

• Keyword – What’s a keyword? If you don’t know what that means then you’ll have a difficult time figuring out how to market yourself online. It’s a very basic concept and an important one. A keyword is any word that you would like your website to rank for in the search engines.
• Search Engine Optimization – Also called SEO, for short. Search engine optimization is the utilization of keywords and links to help your web pages rank better in the search engines.
• Social Media Optimization – You’ve no doubt heard of social media. Maybe you’ve heard of social media marketing. But have you heard of social media optimization? This is the practice of producing your content in such a way that it has an increased chance of spreading itself around in social media circles.
• Link Building – You cannot maximize your SEO efforts without inbound links. These are links that point to your website without a reciprocal link back to the linking site. Also called one-way links. Link building is the process webmasters utilize to build their one-way link portfolio.
• Pay Per Click Advertising – Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is a form of online paid advertising where you bid on keywords and you pay for the advertising after your target audience clicks on the ad and visits your website. Other forms of PPC-like advertising include pay per action (PPA) and pay per view (PPV), or CPM (cost per thousand views).

These are not, by any means, the only terms you should be familiar with. There are others – viral marketing, video marketing, HTML, PHP, CSS (cascading style sheets), and many more – but these 5 Internet marketing terms are so basic that no one should start their Internet marketing plans without being familiar with them.

Take the time to learn if you want to earn.

Internet marketing is too important a task to leave to chance. It is important that you do a few things to set up your campaigns and measure your results along the way. Without measuring your results you cannot know what is working and what you need to change.

The first step to planning an effective Internet marketing campaign is to take inventory of your business. What are your strengths? What are you good at? How do you differ from your competitors?

You should write down your core values and mission statement. These are your guiding principles – offline and online.

After you have written down your core values and mission statement and discovered how you fit into your industry and how you differ from your competitors, you can begin to set your budget and line out how you will market yourself online. Your Internet marketing plan should contain, at a minimum, the following details:

• Your website – The hub of your Internet marketing plan. How many pages will you need? What keywords will you target? Figure out your approach to search engine optimization and build from there. Make sure your website design represents your core values and mission statement.
• Pay Per Click Marketing – Will you incorporate a pay per click campaign into your Internet marketing strategy? If not then state so in your plan. If so then you need to set a budget and plan your keywords.
• Social Media Marketing – Will you use social media? If so, which sites will you benefit from the most? What percentage of your overall marketing budget will be devoted to social media? Be specific in detailing your social media marketing plan.
• Blogging – Will you benefit from a blog? Include the details of your blogging strategy into your plan as well.
• Video Marketing – Will video be a significant part of your Internet marketing strategy? Will you embed video on your website or simply use it as a traffic generation tool? Outline your video marketing plan in as much detail as possible.
• Other Marketing Initiatives – What else is important to your Internet marketing strategy? Include it in your plan. Whether you plan to use article marketing or mobile marketing, put it into your plan. If there is anything you plan to incorporate into your online marketing plan then it needs to be written down.

Don’t worry about whether you’ll stick to your plan completely. At this stage you are simply making a plan. You can change it later. You can modify it as needed. But failing to plan is planning to fail and no one wants to engage in Internet marketing only to fall on their face. Least off, you.

A lot can be said of organic SEO and I’ll have to admit, you can’t really run a Web business without it. The lion’s share of Web traffic, even today, comes from organic SEO. It’s a necessary component to Web success.

However, PPC is the bedrock of Web marketing. Not SEO.

Why do I say that? Because pay per click marketing is a pay now-buy now model. When you operate a successful pay per click marketing campaign you know you are getting good traffic. You know it from the results. You paid for the traffic, but you paid for traffic that responds and it happens quickly. With SEO, you could wait for months to see your results. With PPC, it’s instantaneous.

Well, almost.

Rarely will you find great PPC keywords by running an organic SEO campaign. If you did, it would take months to figure it out. But webmasters do use PPC to find new keywords for their organic SEO campaigns all the time.

Another reason I can say that PPC is the bedrock of Web marketing is because it can also be used as a basis for determining website valuation. Cost per click is an important metric that domainers use to value Web properties they are interested in. They know that if a website can command a high cost per click on a pay per click campaign then it is in a competitive niche. Niches garner that kind of competition in only one way – there’s money to be made. It’s a profitable niche.

So when you think about how you want to conduct your next marketing campaign online. Think about combining your SEO and PPC efforts. That’s how you should be doing it anyway.

I had a customer ask me if there was a more immediate way to make money online than blogging. I said the best way the make money right now is to wage a pay per click campaign. And I fully believe it. It’s the best way to make your efforts pay right now.

Why is pay per click advertising the best “right now” marketing tool online? Because you can set a budget, write your ad and have your ads online within 30 minutes. Your ads could be live within five minutes of starting your new campaign. You could get your first click within a few seconds of that ad going live. You could make your first sale just a minute or so after that. So, literally, pay per click marketing is the best “right now” marketing tool online.

But that doesn’t mean you should drop everything and just jump on the pay per click bandwagon. Pay per click has its benefits, but there is one thing that it cannot do that almost every other online marketing method can – SEO.

That’s right, pay per click marketing is not search engine optimization. That means you still need to perform some other form of search engine marketing with a long term strategy for ranking your web pages in the search engines. Pay per click is good for right now, but it isn’t so good for next year. To be successful online, you need both a short term and a long term strategy.

Does your website load slowly? If so then you need to figure out how to get it to load faster because Google has now made page load speed a ranking factor.

This is very significant. If you do any pay per click advertising then page load speed has already been a factor for your quality score. But yesterday Google announced that site speed will now be considered as a ranking factor.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Users don’t like to land on a page and have to wait for it to load. It could mean the difference between them staying on your site or visiting your competition. So why should Google be concerned about that?

Truth is, they’re not. They don’t care if you make any money or not. But they do care if they make money and they do care if searchers have a good experience on any site that Google sends them to. If your site is an AdSense site and it loads slowly then Google will make less revenue. If you advertise your site using pay per click advertising and it loads slowly then you’ll likely have fewer clicks and Google will make less money. See how it works now?

Fix your site load speed or you might start seeing your pages fall in the rankings.

Pay per click marketing has its ups and downs. There is no doubt about it. Clicks can be expensive, you have to deal with click fraud and if your landing page isn’t ready for taking orders and closing sales then you could be paying for clicks that don’t convert. Even worse, you could have a poorly written ad and be paying for unqualified leads. But enough about the dangers. How about the pros?

It’s easier to explain why you need pay per click advertising for a new website by explaining the negatives in search engine optimization and social media marketing. Let’s start with SEO.

You can work your tail off day in and day out and not see any real results from SEO for a year or two. Depending on the competitive nature of your industry it will likely be an uphill climb. That doesn’t mean it won’t be worth it and that you shouldn’t employ search engine optimization in your marketing strategy. You should. But don’t expect immediate results.

Social media marketing has its own challenges. Like SEO, the results will likely not be immediate. You’ll have to work for them. Then there’s the whole tracking of your results issue. But that’s a completely different item.

When you consider that even the best SEOs and social media marketers have to spend hours managing their campaigns over a long term basis just to see the beginning of their results, it becomes much more clear why pay per click marketing is ideal for new start ups. You don’t want to wait forever for results to start coming in. You see want to some ROI soon. The sooner the better. Pay per click is the best option for most start ups.

When it comes to search engine marketing there are some dos and don’ts. But we tend to think in terms of principles. You can get started with search engine marketing in just a few simple steps and it’s not that hard. Be prepared, however. You will need to spend some money.

1. Step 1: Make a tentative plan. Don’t just wing it. Search engine marketing involves planning and execution. Your first step should be to plan.
2. Step 2: Research. Why is this step second? Because you really should know what general direction you are headed before you start your research. The research will guide you in a more specific direction. What kind of research? Competitive. Keyword. Opportunity.
3. Step 3: Adjust your plan. This is where you hone the details. Take your research and make the best plan you can. Include a budget and be specific about your goals.
4. Step 4: Open accounts. You’ll need accounts with pay per click companies. Set up your accounts based on your budget set in step 3.
5. Step 5: Implement. Remember, it isn’t all about pay per click advertising. Search engine marketing also involves organic search. Make sure they work together.

Now that you know the steps to get started in search engine marketing, why waste time?

New pay per click advertisers often wonder where they should get their keyword list. The obvious answer is from your initial keyword research – the same place you get the keyword list for your organic search campaigns. But that’s a little too pat. And the answer is not so cut and dry. There are other ways to get your keyword list.

• Borrow from the competition – Have you analyzed your competition’s PPC and organic search campaigns? If not then hop to it. It’s a great resource for your own keyowrd list.
• Your own referrer logs – Study your referrer logs from time to time to see what key phrases people are using to find your site. You can often find phrases that you haven’t targeted. If some of those phrases turn out to be popular phrases then you’ll have a few gems in the rough.
• Google Zeitgeist – This little known product from Google will show you what search queries have trended each day.
• Google Trends – Another product from Google. It allows you to look at trends over time, which can tell a story all its own.
• Twitter Trends – Twitter Trends tells you what is popular right now. This is real time data and if you hit your new keyword trends just right you might find a gold mine.

There is really is no right or wrong way to find new keywords for your pay per click campaigns, but if you think creatively then you can likely find your own.

Can you make money with smaller pay-per-click companies? You know I’m not talking about Google, or Yahoo!, or Bing. Those are the majors. I’m talking about the small companies and search engines. Some of them you’ve probably never heard of, such as:

• Miva
• Looksmart
• 7Search
• Search123
• GoClick
• Kanoodle
• AdBrite
• Enhance

This is just a small list. There are plenty more.

Most pay per click advertisers stick with the big three, but they are missing opportunities with the small search engines. The advantage to using the small PPC companies is that your cost per click will be lower – much lower. In some cases, keywords that you’ll spend $1 or more at Google or Yahoo! will cost your mere pennies at one of the smaller companies. The downside is you won’t get anywhere near the traffic that you’ll get at Google, but if you get any traffic for a fraction of the cost then it’s worth it. Right?

Yes, right. So don’t discount the small pay per click companies. They could be very profitable.