A Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click Marketing
January 26, 2008
Writes: Kalena Jordan
Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine marketing refers to a specific type of advertising where you pay a search engine every time a potential customer clicks on your ad. These ads appear on search engine results pages and sometimes on sites within a search engine’s network of partners.
How do Pay Per Click Ads Work?
If you look at a search engine results page (SERP) carefully, you can generally distinguish between search results that are regular algorithmic or “organic” search listings and PPC search results which are actually paid advertisements. The latter are generally listed under the headings “sponsored results” or “featured listings” and consist of specially designed text, image or video ads that are triggered to display when your target keywords are used in a search query. The PPC ads generally appear on the right hand side and/or at the top of the search results pages.
To appear in the PPC results, advertisers sign up for the PPC program of their choice and create short text ads, image ads or videos describing the product or service available on their site in a way that will best entice searchers to visit it. During the program setup, an advertiser will decide which trigger keywords/phrases they wish to bid on and how much they are willing to pay when a visitor clicks on their ad. Generally, the higher the bid, the more likely their ad will show above their competitor’s.
The Origins of Pay Per Click Marketing
The PPC industry was pioneered by GoTo.com (later re-branded as Overture before it was purchased by Yahoo! in July 2003). Despite their enormous success, GoTo’s PPC model was met with a lot of skepticism in the industry following their IPO in 1999. Their eventual purchase by Yahoo put to rest any doubts that pay per click advertising was here to stay.
REFERENCES:
1. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
2. Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions
3. The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Marketing: Pay Per Click Advertising Secrets Revealed
The New Rules of Marketing - Internet Marketing Tools For 2008
January 16, 2008
Write(s): Sam Law and Julian Stone
Online businesses are coming to the realization that in an organic environment like the Internet, organic marketing is required; paying for traditional or static marketing only gets you so far before it becomes ineffective. The consumer now controls your marketing.
Old marketing methods are failing because users are beginning to wise up (Rise Up) against the old brute force advertising that tries to win users over through sheer volume, using abrasive web-page banners, unrelated Adwords displayed on the page, or repeated newsletters (most being restricted by anti-spam laws).
The old methods no longer work effectively for two key reasons. One is the fact that they are a “flash in the pan”, directing users to websites only so long as you continue to pay for the campaign, the second reason is consumers are now at the stage where they either ignore them or go out of their way to block them (with plug-in based browser or email filtering).
The “Old World” marketing relied on one or two large marketing sources to drive traffic with big budgets and marketing firms. You have to get people to create the “news” then you pay other people to distribute the “news”, so you are pulling people into your “store” to show them what you have (whether they want it or not).
These days having others create and distribute your content for you is in vogue, this can mean syndicating your articles for other users to repost, paying users to review or rate your services, guiding users directly on forums or having users sign up to receive exclusive information. In every case, the handiwork of distribution is left to others.
REFERENCES:
1. Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business
2. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
3. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
4. Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords (Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords)
5. The New Influencers: A Marketer’s Guide to the New Social Media
10 Key Content Strategies to Increase Online Visibility
January 15, 2008
Write(s): Lani and Allen Voivod
Now more than ever, if you want to be a successful business owner, you need a successful business website. Which means you have to make nice with the search engines. And the long-standing rule of search engine friendliness is to create inbound links — links from other sites pointing to your site.
Ten-ish years ago, when Google started the shift away from code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining “relevance,” the world changed. Immediately, businesses owners started scrambling, and begging, for every link they could get. Thank goodness that’s not the case anymore! But inbound links are still important. In many ways they’re more vital than ever.
How then, does one go about getting those precious nuggets of hypertext anchor tagging? Social Media maven and “Chief Nut” Kevin Skarritt, our good friend and strategic ally at Acorn Creative, offered up these 10 strategies on his “Nuts and Bolts of Brand” blog. Good guy that he is, he gave us permission to share those key linking strategies with you here. Hit it!
REFERENCES:
Related Article: Web Usability and Accessibility are as Important as Search Engine Prominence
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
January 2, 2008
Writes Donovan Baldwin:
Anyone involved in any sort of Internet marketing sees the term, “search engine optimization”, or SEO, everywhere these days. Everybody throws it around as if they were experts on the subject. It crops up again and again in forums and advertising alike. People provide their “SEO services” for fees ranging from a few bucks to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Everybody seems poised to provide free advice on how to effectively incorporate SEO into YOUR website.
However, hardly anyone ever comes out and says WHAT search engine optimization really is! So, as we explore the history of SEO, let’s try to get an idea of what it is and what it does.
At its simplest, search engine optimization is just the art and/or science (often more art than science) of making web pages attractive, or MORE attractive, to the Internet search engines. Obviously, most Internet businesses will consider search engine optimization to be one of THE major factors of any search engine marketing plan or program.
So, how did a need for “optimizing” a website so as to attract the attention of search engines come about?
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