Pay Per Click Campaign Management – Get Better Quality Scores, Spend Less Money

Manage your pay per click campaigns better and improve your quality score with Google (and with Yahoo! or MSN). You’ll spend less money to get more traffic to your website.

Pay Per Click Campaign Management For Better Quality Score

Getting a better quality score means you don’t have to bid as much to get your text ads shown. You could even bid less than your competitors and still get better placement of your ad. How does it work…

In addition to your click-through rate quality score is determined by factors such as:

the relevance of your ad to the keyword being searched
the relevance of the landing page to the keyword being searched

…you may find you get better results when you organize your paper click advertising campaign around word concepts and types.

An Example:
If you are advertising for office products you might want to organize your campaigns by the same categories that you use to organize your website navigation. So you may find yourself with separate campaigns for furniture, copiers, paper, printers, organizers etc. rather than one large campaign for office supplies.

So instead of having one campaign for office supplies with 2000 keywords that lumps together all sorts of keywords for office products such as ergonomic chairs together with copier toner in one long contiguous list… you will be better off twenty campaigns with 100 words each where the keywords and ads are organized and separated by concept, theme, or product line.

Form leads to relevance
Managing your pay per click campaigns with this new categorization method you will find that when you write your text ads you are not creating an ad that is very general like “ Get office products, large selection available”. Instead, you will be creating targeted unique copy and targeted unique ads for each of your twenty campaigns.

Writing text ad copy that is highly targeted to the keywords being searched will greatly improve your quality score and lower the amount of money you are required to bid to get that coveted top placement. You’ll find the added work you put into your pay per click management is well worth the effort.

Now go one step deeper
When you have organized your pay per click campaign by the larger concepts you can then use ad groups as sub-sections of your campaigns to further subdivide your keywords and achieve even higher relevancy and improve your quality score.

Take your campaign for copier paper… break it down into Adwords subsections of very specific keywords that match up with some very specifically worded advertising copy. Your campaign for copy for copiers might have ad groups broken out by manufacturer:

Xerox
Brother
Konica
Canon
Etc.

You can see the number of ad groups you end up with is going to be rather large… but that’s the general idea of being more targeted and relevant. It’s better to have 100 at groups with twenty keywords than to have everything loaded into one big lump. And as I have noted earlier you’ll find the added work you put into your pay per click management is well worth the effort when you see your quality score go up and your minimum bid requirements go down.

Breaking your keywords up in this manner forces you to write ad copy that is specific for each keyword group and will provide the structure and discipline you need to write more targeted copy and improve your quality store.

And a better quality score means you will spend less money to get more clicks.

How Many Links Does It Take

Google does not let anyone know the ingredients of their secret sauce so there is no definitive answer to the question ” how many links does it take to get page rank X”. However, everyone loves trying to solve a mystery.

Here’s a chart that tries to approximate the number of inbound links it takes to achieve the desired page rank.

PR	To Get PR3	To Get PR4	To Get PR5	To Get PR6	To Get PR7	To Get PR8
1	555	3000	17000	93000	508000	2800000
2	101	555	3000	17000	93000	508000
3	19	101	555	3000	17000	93000
4	4	19	101	555	3000	170000
5	1	4	19	101	555	3000
6	1	1	4	19	101	555
7	1	1	1	4	19	101
8	1	1	1	1	4	19
9	1	1	1	1	1	4
10	1	1	1	1	1	1

For example: to get a page rank of 5 you would need either 4 inbound links from a page with rank 4 or 3,000 inbound links from pages with rank 1.

Deep Linking Solutions

GDM Interactive is now offering Deep Linking Solutions that go way beyond traditional linking techniques. It’s a powerful way to turn every page of your website into a magnet for targeted qualified traffic.

What Exactly Will We Do?

Create an extensive map of all your unique URLs
Carefully select anchor text for each link
Write concise page descriptions for each link
Develop powerful word tags for your link
Create links to your site from a large network of websites, blogs, and social media sites

Who Should Be Using Deep Linking?

Deep Linking is highly effective for most websites but especially for:

Commerce websites with multiple product pages
Business websites with built-in blogs or new pages
Websites with a large number of detailed pages about services

If your website is a little short on pages GDM Interactive can also help you develop new content pages for your site. Every page we create for you will not only persuade but also convince and sell your products… they will also be fully optimized to attract highly targeted organic search traffic to your site.

How Will Deep Linking Affect Your Traffic?

We spread out our medium sized Deep Linking campaigns over 2-4 weeks from start to finish but you should begin to see results almost immediately. Plus, the positive effects of your deep linking campaign will be a significant long-term upswing in organic traffic lasting many months or even years. So, the small investment you make today will have a lasting benefit on your website traffic for a long time.

How Can You Track the Effects of Deep Linking?

Most of the huge boost in traffic you’ll see from Deep Linking doesn’t come from customers clicking on the links themselves but rather from giving you better presence in organic search results with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and hundreds of other search platforms. The best way to track the boost from Deep Linking is to benchmark the traffic levels of your pages before the campaign starts and compare the benchmark with the increased traffic.

Need help benchmarking traffic to your current pages? No problem we can offer you expert guidance on easy-to-use web analytics that allows you to effectively measure your traffic and campaigns. Be sure to ask about campaign analytics!

How Much is Deep Linking Going to Cost?

We’ve got packages that allow you to test the waters with a very low commitment of cash.

To learn more about how Deep Linking can help you build highly targeted traffic to your website contact me using the form on the right-hand side of this page or at this location. We’ll set up a free 30-minute consultation that will answer any of your remaining questions and help you select a solution that right for you.

Building Your Email Lists With Incentives

Chances are you have a newsletter sign up form of some sort on our site… but are you getting any sign ups? Well, if you are not offering your website visitors some form of incentive to sign up you could be missing a lot of potential business.

Boost Email Sign-ups With These Proven Incentives

Offer Exclusive Discounts

If you are a retailer you can offer discounts or rebates. This applies to both e-commerce sites and brick and mortar businesses. Even the best products in the world need some kind of an offer to truly succeed. Don’t think of a discount as devaluing your product or service. Think of discounts as a way to get y our foot in the door. A customer who is undecided about making a purchase is often just waiting for you to make an offer. Learn to use this common human trait by approaching your website visitors with a chance to get exclusive discounts if they sign-up with their email address.

Be sure to try different ways to word your offer to keep it fresh… “half off” and 50% discount meant the same thing but sound different. Free shipping and gifts with purchase are also proven winners.

Give Away Free Information

If you are looking to generate leads for follow up sales efforts try giving away free information. Information can take the form of PDF whitepapers, case studies, invitation to free webcasts and so forth. If the content is relevant to your website and your product or service anyone signing up to join your email list can be considered a qualified lead. Plus, with free content you get to show off your professional expertise.

For example: you can also repurpose content developed for one format and use it in another format. Take that canned sales presentation you have… add a bit more useful info and work it into an online video you can offer as a free webcast or podcast.

If you are considering offereing a newsletter BEWARE. This classic online offer actually entails a lot of back end work on your part. Ask yourself “do I really have the time to devote to writing a weekly newsletter that iwll be of value and interest to visitors on my site?”. If you are strapped for time then stick with a white paper, its a lot less work! The trade off is that you don’t establish a regular schedule of communication.

Promote Free Samples or Trials

Offer to let cusomters use your product or service free of charge for a limited time. The quality of your product may end up doing the job of convincing the prospective cusomter to purchase! But even if they do not… you have contact info you can use to follow up with or cross sell other related products.

If you are running a retail operation consider using a twist on this by offereing free in-store samples, special events, or free demonstrations of your product or service.

Offer Entertainment

Don’t over do this one… but a brief quote of the day, joke, or cartoon can be a welcome diversion for people. If you can develop a theme relevant to your product or service then you might have a winner here.

Run A Contest

Running a contest with the chance to win a valuable prize can be a highly effective way to get visitors to your web page to sign up. This offer is similar in nature to the “free gift with purchase” gambit BUT with a contest you get to ffere something of considerably greater value because you are only gong to have to give away one!

Plus, if you send out notifications of new contest to your existing email file you have a great way to confirm and update the email addresses of everyone who responds.

7 Proven Ideas For Building Your Email List Online

Your website is one of the most effective means for getting email addresses and building your list. Visitors who have taken the time and expended the effort to find and visit you online have demonstrated an interest in your product or service. These folks should be considered qualified leads and getting them to give you their email address for future contact is a top priority.

Build Your Email List On Every Page

Make sure you provide all your visitors the opportunity to opt-in to your mailing list at every opportunity on the pages of your site. Your subscription form should be prominently displayed on your home page. In the website world “prominently” means visible on the initial page view without having to scroll down to see it. You should also use graphics and color to draw attention to your subscription form and catch your visitor’s eye.

7 Proven Ideas For Building Your Email List Online

Incentives – The most important of these 7 ideas is to offer visitors to your pages incentives to sign up. Get this one right and you’ll get more bang for your buck from all the remaining 6 ideas. Write and give away a free PDF white-paper, offer access to special discounts, give away free shipping, offer a chance to win a contest prize etc. and you will increase the percentage of visitors to your site who sign up.

Your PPC Landing Pages – if you are using paid search to drive traffic to your site make sure your opt-in form or a link to your registration form is prominently displayed on the landing page associated with your paid search campaign. Note: it is also helpful to assign a dollar value to your leads and use it to cost justify your spend for your paid search campaigns.

Use Other’s Email Lists – Take a look around for similar businesses that your can form a partnership with. A company that has a similar customer profile to yours but who is not competitive is a perfect match. See if they are interested in sending out a “blind” outbound email promotion to their list on your behalf. and in return, you will agree to do likewise. IMPORTANT: make sure you have worked out some sort of “soft offer” to get the maximum clicks and traffic from the promotion. Focus on getting the maximum traffic and the email names... don’t necessarily go for the direct sale. Offer something free.

Links In Newsletters – look into reciprocal links or banners in email newsletters with complementary content that relates to the same target audience. For example. performance car parts would be of interest to readers of a NASCAR newsletter. This technique of swapping links has the least headaches when the company lists are about the same size. If you don’t have much of a list consider swapping a link on your home page in return.

Use Your House List – include a “forward to a friend” or “refer a collegue” as an option in your out-bound emails. You can generate a low volume of new opt-ins by asking current subscribers to end the email to a friend. Make sure to include a prominent opt-in link on the version of the email that is forwarded to the friend. Your email benefits from the implicit recomendation you get.

Be Social – if you have a social media marketing program offer the opportunity to opt-in to your list here as well.

Signatures & Footers – Add your sign-up link to the footer of every email you send. including personal emails send by your or other employees at your company! This can easily be set up as a default signature in popular email client programs like MS Outlook. Add “Get the latest news and special offers from company X by email” or “sign up for special offers here” to your employee signatures. This is especially useful for customer service and sales teams.

6 Ways To Build Your Email List Offline

Most businesses are not just online operations. Your marketing and advertising mix probably include pre-printed materials for trade shows and conferences, direct mail, flyers, signage, in-store foot traffic, and plenty of others. Every touch point you have with customers and potential customers hold an opportunity to build your email list.

6 Ways To Build Your Email List… OFFLINE

Events – Ask for an email sign up at trade shows and conferences. Try using a laptop pointing to a page on your website which your guests can use to register. This trick eliminates having to re-key the names into your database later. Re-keying the names is a stumbling block and often the names never get used if you have to re-key them in from paper-based forms. Some visitors may not want to use the laptop concept so be sure to also collect business cards and scan them in after the show.

Print – Get your URL, preferably with your opt-in link, on all print materials, bags, flyers, signage, customer forms, ads, catalogs etc. IMPORTANT: Include a short tagline explaining the benefit of reason to sign-up such as free stuff, access to special deals etc. and keep the opt-in link URL simple and easy to remember.

Direct Mail – Encourage email sign-ups on all your outbound direct mail. If you have a good sized mailing list the small investment of time will pay off by converting your list away from expensive direct mail to lower cost, highly efficient email communications.

Ask and you will receive – Make a request for email addresses a part of all your inbound and outbound call center scripts.

Directories – When you add your company profiles to directories add a link to the sign-up page for your email list to your profile and include a brief benefit statement explaining why they should consider signing up.

In-store foot traffic – Ask customers face to face when they enter your establishment or store. Get them to provide their email while you ring up their order at checkout. Or, you could keep a small pad of subscription forms next to the cash register. Also, try adding a bowl where they can leave a business card with their email address.

Mailing List Basics

There are really only to major categories of business lists: internal or house lists and secondly, there are external or rented lists.

House Lists Vs. Rented Lists

Internal lists come from your own company files from your customers, or former customers, from your subscribers, and your former subscribers, from inquiries, leads, registrations, and signups. External lists can include compiled information from large databases pended with meaningful information or they can be lists similar to your home which you rent on an agreement basis from other companies like your own.

The best lists are the lists that you own internally. These internal lists — more commonly known as house files — should be considered your most important asset and looked upon as an information database.

Building a customer file or purchasing a customer file can be a costly adventure. Many excellent resources available online contain resources that allow you to gather free information and create your own customer database or append new information to your existing files.

The Essential Information For A Useful Mailing List

The essential information needed to build a meaningful customer database includes business name, mailing address, physical address, contact telephone information, facts contact information the mail address and contact name. Additionally, most good databases include some indication of the type of business and the size of business.

Gathering and creating a custom database from online resources is a great way to contact business professionals for a significantly lower cost. To make this technique work you will need some skill with Microsoft Excel for some other form of a spreadsheet to filter source and analyze the data before you begin creating mailing campaigns or telephone campaigns.

Basic Content Writing Tips For Better Search Results

Everyone who works on your website can write to improve search results and help out whatever search engine optimization work is being done elsewhere.

Writing copy for search engines is for everybody

A great deal of search engine optimization will probably always remain mysterious and arcane to the uninitiated but many hands make light work and a lot of small contributions add up to a greater whole.

Everyone who contributes content should know the basics of building body copy with the keyword in city and prominence. Let’s get started…

Have you done your keyword research?

I am going to assume that you have already created a cheat sheet of keywords you wish to target across your entire site. If you have not already done so then back up a few steps, go back to your keyword research output and create just such a list.

OK, now with every content producing employee now having a copy in hand we can proceed.

Search engines look at copy according to some simple rules

Search engine spiders work on some very basic principles for analyzing body copy on an HTML page. The search engines spider assumes that Whatever comes first is most important and whatever is emphasized is even more important. This is most important when writing your opening paragraph. Make sure that you kick off your content pages with a great opening sentence containing your favorite keywords and preferably starting with your favorite keywords.

Here’s your first sentence (which is ridiculously weak):

You should consider trying our wonderful services.

Now, let’s add a dash of keyword goodness:

You should consider trying our wonderful internet marketing services.

Now just a pinch of keyword prominence:

Internet marketing services don’t get much better than GDM. You should consider trying us.

And a drop of keyword emphasis:

Internet marketing services don’t get much better than GDM. You should consider trying us.

Top it all off by wrapping the keywords in <H1> tags:

Internet marketing services

They don’t get much better than GDM. You should consider trying us.

Note: <h1> tags have to be used sparingly. If you use them as you page header you are going to be golden! But subheads lower down on the page are good too.

Simple content tricks like these will not in and of themselves get you top ranking on search engine SERPs. As I mentioned earlier a great deal of search engine optimization is mysterious and takes place behind the scenes however simple tricks like this can it had just a little bit more of an edge to your website’s overall success.

Do you see how it works? Internet marketing isn’t so hard after all.

Local Search Beginners Guide

If your business model is all about attracting local customers then you need to start thinking about local search as a way to drive traffic to your website and to your phones.

Small businesses have always used directories and business listings to attract new customers. That’s just a fancy way of saying – get yourself a yellow page ad. The problem is that now there are so many different yellow page books out there it’s hard to keep track and hard to know where to best spend your dollars. The same proliferation is found on the internet.

Most yellow page directories have options available for web-based search and have free options available. These are often referred to as local search engines helping web searchers find companies within their specific geographic area.

25% of all searches are for local merchants or local services
75% of all searchers say they have conducted searches for local businesses at some point

The trend is definitely moving away from the yellow page printed book format to the yellow page web format. Your business can benefit from this huge shift In how customers find companies by taking advantage of local search programs.

Some helpful hints when you are setting up your profiles:

Have a detailed description of your company written and ready to copy and paste as you go through the online registration process with each local search engine.
Do your keyword research before registration. Most local search engines give you the opportunity to add tag words and keywords that searchers will use to try and find what they are looking for. Usually, you will be able to go back and edit your account at a later date but to save time have your keywords ready to go and paste in.
Free listings tend to get buried way down the list, often completely off the first page. But, be careful before you start opting for upgrades and premium listings – you may no get a lot of bang for your buck. See our article on paid local search listings.

What’s NEW in local online search?

Google has a new option available called Local Business Center which is taking over local search. If you do a search for “dentist” you get local search blended in with your overall results… like so:

Set up is very easy. The interface is found by creating an email account with Google, you can use your existing g-mail account or you can use your existing AdWords account. When you log in to your account and you’ll see it. Like so:

You can edit your profile to your heart’s content.

Pay attention to your ratings
Most of the local search directories and listings now include ratings. Make sure you pay attention to your ratings – here are some ideas for how to get good ratings.

What about Paid Search (PPC)?
To cover your bases with local search you should try paid search advertising (PPC) with geographic targeting. This means you purchase general purpose keywords such as, handyman, catering service, air conditioning or whatever suits your particular business model.

You will set up your keywords like any other advertiser national, global, or local. But, when you set up your keywords you also set up your account to restrict results by the searcher’s geography. The search engines know approximately where the searcher is located based on the IPE address. But let’s not get bogged down in the technical aspects. It’s enough to know that they can do it.

So, even if you are a small business with a local footprint you can still benefit from developing a good PPC keyword strategy and simply limiting your listings to the geographic area you are interested in.

Unlike free listings with local search directories and yellow pages, PPC advertising requires ongoing expense. Because you pay for every click it is essential that you actively manage your PPC program.

You may be hiring a marketing agency (like GDM Interactive) is a good way to stay on top of your PPC expenses if you are unable to afford the time required.

Color Selection For Website Content

Landing page Design Color

The color theme of your website content pages impacts how your message is received by your visitors. Let’s take a very brief look at the unconscious reactions your visitors will have to your message based on the colors you select for your web pages.

The purpose of content-driven web pages is to get web traffic
Every home page, every blog post, every sign-up, and register page has to a goal of engaging the visitor. That’s why you write your website content, isn’t it?

When writing website content we all think about offering the right products at the right price, writing convincing and persuasive sales copy, offering solid content visitors can use, but, the colors we are using? No way! admit it… most of us select the color of our web pages based on what we like… our personal favorites.

How should you choose colors for web pages?

Our web page color selections have an impact on our customers. This impact takes place below the surface, its unconscious, emotional, visceral. Color choices for our web pages affect our image and our sales.

What is the surface color your website saying beneath the surface? Your background colors, the color of your header, the color of your text, headlines and sub-headlines and elements can all have a psychological impact on your website visitors.

Don’t design boring web pages

To sell, you have to be exciting… you cannot bore your readers into submission. They have too many other options.

Do everything possible to avoid boring your website visitors. Create excitement on your web page, get attention, show you are human, set the mood and reach out. Color will influence your audience… use it wisely.

Here is a list of some of the common colors and what type of psychological emotion they invoke in people:

BABY BLUE: weakness (ouch MSFT)
BLACK sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery, seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy.
BLUE the world’s favorite color! It is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism. (IBM)
BROWN is associated with earth, nature, tribal, primitive, simplicity.
GOLD: wealth, prestige, precious.
GREEN nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance. It is the color of nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony… but also money!
GREY is associated with neutrality, indifference, reserved.
ORANGE: comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability. For some weird reason, this is one of the lest popular colors in the U.S.
PINK: nurture, security, femininity, softness, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness.
PURPLE royal, spirituality, dignity, royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams. It can also have a religious meaning to some people.
RED is the color of danger, risk, love, passion, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure, excitement, strength, sex, speed.
SILVER prestige, cold, scientific.
WHITE: innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.
YELLOW warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness, also curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement.
Some of the known psychological uses of color:

Color affects shopping habits. Impulse shoppers respond best to red-orange, black and royal blue.
Shoppers who plan and stick to budgets respond best to pink, teal, light blue and navy.
Traditionalists respond to pastels – pink, rose, sky blue.
How can you design website content with this information?
It all depends on the message you want to get across to your website visitors with your color selection. I suggest you:

Start a list of your goals and objectives, or simply refer to your strategic marketing plan.
Now write the best color match for each of your objectives.
Which colors show up the most? Hey! What do you know… you’ve created a color scheme. Your design team is going to love you. Yell I Got too many colors? Maybe you are trying to achieve too much with your marketing plan or your website. Perhaps you should spin off a separate website to achieve some of the goals on your list. Now, your brand management gurus are going to love you! Surprised
Blue Website Designs
Everyone likes blue… so its a no-brainer. Right? Hmmm, blues against a white background is a common theme for business sites (trustworthy, innocent.. oh give me a break…). But you run the risk of being cliche. I’ve seen way too many websites that use blue and they are boring. Be careful.

Website Design Caveat

Don’t make the mistake of thinking your website’s colors carry all the weight. Your color theme is a framework to support and draw attention to your artwork, logos. Put them on display, push them over your borders and bars as if they are bursting off the page. This gives them a 3-D look and they will appear to be popping off the pages.

Website Content Typography

It’s not a law, but black type against a white background is best for readability. Readability is your main concern. If your website visitors don’t read your message, they won’t buy from you.

Even the smallest factor that makes your message just a teensy bit more difficult to read could lose a lot of readers and waste the opportunity your awesome SEO work has done getting them there in the first place.

Also, most people don’t have 20/20 eyesight like you! Type that too small, too fancy (read the script) or has a conflicting background (read background images), won’t get read. For most website designs a white background behind your type is best, a very light color is second best. choice (read 10%m screens).