Category: News & Trends

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Google AdWords Explained

Google AdWords is a pay per click program. Pay Per Click programs, PPC or Pay For Performance are all the buzz in Internet marketing. The growth in web traffic generated by pay per click services is growing and a marketing option to be seriously considered. With PPC, you pay each time a web viewer chooses your ad listing link and clicks into your website.

Pay per click targets a specific audience reaching up to 85% of all Internet users in a cost effective and immediate way. There can be as much as a $20 return of investment for each $1 spent.

The first step is to select which pay for performance agent to use.

Although Yahoo has more overall visitors statistically, due to their Web properties, than Google, Google AdWords is the most productive pay per click vehicle and the place you should start with when you decide to advertise using pay per click. In the United States, over 80% of all Internet searches will start on Google first. With Google AdWords, you can see your ads in several hours, and have the ability to start and stop campaigns easily. You will show your products and services to millions of viewers and active shoppers using the massive reach of Google. Additionally Google AdWords will typically out perform Yahoo and MSN adCenter when it comes to generating conversions and return on investment.

The second step is to select your targeted keyword or phrases.

At this point you may want to consider increasing the density of your selected keywords in your website’s HTML code, your site’s description, and title. However, we have found that you can still experience great returns using PPC without revising your website, as your PPC ads are triggered by the keywords you selected that are tied to your ad and not your web site’s content.

The third step is to select your monthly budget.

You select the maximum amount that you will pay each month for click throughs to your website. Once the maximum amount is reached your agent will halt click throughs to your site automatically. Additionally, you will select how much you are willing to pay by keyword.

With Yahoo! Sponsored Search, you will be charged your pre-designated budget amount on a monthly basis in advance of the clicks. Clicks are then deducted from your account balance on a daily basis. With Google AdWords, you may pause a campaign or update your settings at any time. There are no minimum monthly spending limits and no contracts or long term commitments. You can select to be charged for clicks after they happen.

How much should you allot for a pay per click program?

I suggest that clients should set a budget of at least $500 and better yet $800 to $1,500 for 30 days of clicks on top of our fees for the first month. This allows Google to have enough budget to not minimally serve the account and allows us enough latitude to find the sweet spot for a market competitive cost per click.

When you are ready to get serious about pay per click for your business we invite you to consider our AdWords services. Not sure which account manager to use? Review our client ratings and testimonials as you evaluate your choices.

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Top Google AdWords Questions

There are questions that we get asked by clients about Google AdWords frequently. Here are several and our answers to each.

I am looking for my ad at 8:00 PM on Google and can’t see it why?

When you cannot see your ad in the evening it is typically because your daily budget has already been spent for the day and Google has stopped showing your ads. The frequency of your ad being shown is all tied to your daily budget which is found by taking your 30 day click budget and dividing it by 30 days. Google may spend over 20% of your daily budget on any one day, but will never spend over your 30 day budget in a 30 day period.

My budget is $500 and Google spent $516 in December, why?

December is a 31 day month so Google could spend an extra day spend in December. Remember the budget you set is for clicks for a 30 day period. Some months will have 31 days.

I have reviewed my credit card and it appears that I was billed by Google several times why?

Google does not bill according to your credit card billing cycle or for that matter even on a set monthly basis. Google bills when you have spent your pre-assigned Google spending limit. Here are the limits from the Google help center:

The initial credit limit of $100 is incrementally raised each time an account hits its credit limit before 30 days have ended. The credit limit is first raised to $100, then to $250, then to $500 and then to $1000. The amount billed may be slightly in excess of the credit limit if an account accrues clicks very quickly.

So you may actually have several transactions to your credit card in the same month or straddled over two months appearing that Google is constantly billing you, but in essence they are following their credit guidelines noted above.

I thought it used to be $5 to set up an AdWords account, but I got billed $10

 Google has recently changed its set up fee. You are right it has always been $5 and just in the very recent past has Google started to bill $10 for set up.

As pricing and billing are some of the most asked questions about AdWords, here is a link to the AdWords help center to specifically additionally address some other topics you may find of interest.

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Our January Newsletter is Posted

Topics in our January e-newsletter are:

Simple Blog Security May Prevent Hacking

Have you checked out your blog admin or writer passwords lately? Are they something simple like aabbccdd or squirrel94? If you don’t have a secure password like Afj*2p!5, a password that includes upper and lower case letters, characters and numbers, you may be a prime target for hacking.

We had a most unusual case this past month where one of our top performing client sites went from top placement on Google.com to no where to be found. More problematic was in the Google Webmaster control panel new strange gambling related keywords were being reported as top page keywords. Additionally his meta title tag and description on Bing showed casino and gaming descriptions. Yet, when the specific website pages were inspected using an online browser, the keywords did not exist in the source code. Read mor…

What Happens If You Let Your Domain Name Expire

For most website owners, the ownership of their website domain name is secure. You know where you registered it, you keep the same email, and you renew your domain on time. But for large volunteer organizations, sometimes this is not the case. This past month we’ve had a very thorny situation for a webmaster client and have been hired to try to fix it.

In this case, the association had a key member leave. The domain name was registered to the organization but with the key person as the registrant. Additionally the email address tied to the domain was the one referencing the site’s domain name. When the key member left the association, no one thought to change the domain’s registration records. When the domain’s annual renewal came around the renewal notification was sent to the past key member’s email account, but no one ever checked it because the key member was no longer associated with the group. Read more…

Will you place well on Caffeine?Does Your Site Place Well on Caffeine? Wait ’till January to Know

Google is rolling out a new algorithm after the holidays and it has some webmasters shaking in their boots. It appears that this new update will have far reaching consequences. When a huge adjustment comes, it even gets a name, and this one has been named Caffeine. The last one that shook the webmaster world was called Florida and it was, and still is, infamous in my circles.

Google is indicating that with the new Caffeine algorithm that website speed may be a key factor in deciding organic placement. We suspect that Google will be further devaluing inbound links in this new algorithm as well. One interesting conversation has surfaced about Caffeine that is mentioning that the number of social bookmarks a site has may replace links as a website popularity vote. There is strong talk that Google will strongly consider these numbers for organic ranking. Read more…

To read the full newsletter click in to read more.

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Getting Started on LinkedIn

Use social networking for business. Find out how!Okay, I admit it, I have dabbled half heartedly with social networking for the last year. Yes, I do have the cursory MySpace site, a Facebook page, and a LinkedIn profile, but I have not embraced social networking; it seems like too much trouble.

It wasn’t until this last month that I decided I really should carefully evaluate social networking to see how the typical business owner could use social networking for successfully growing their business and connecting with customers.

I selected LinkedIn as the social networking service I would really focus on. One reason is that this is where many professionals in my business arena have migrated. MySpace is still owned by the high school set, Facebook by the college and young professional set (although I do use and like Facebook too), and LinkedIn has become the social networking platform of choice for most business professionals such as myself.

What I found out in my testing was, well, shocking. So much so, that it has dramatically changed my viewpoint of social media and social networking. Here’s my candid experience and story.

In mid August, I had 10 contacts on LinkedIn. I had simply connected to anyone who had sent me an invitation. I had not aggressively tried to grow my own network. My point of view was I was incredibly busy and spending time on a social enterprise was “fluff” and consumed time that I simply did not have.

So, one afternoon, I decided I would give it a “real go” as research for an article for this e-newsletter. I loaded my Outlook address book to LinkedIn and clicked “send invitations”. I didn’t even do a custom message, as I was so half hearted on embracing this new “time pit” called social networking. What happened in less than 30 minutes staggered me. I had clients, contacts, and prospects send responses, some with an immediate link to connect with me, others with personal notes. I earned nearly 20 new connections in a very short period of time. Wow, what a response and nearly immediate! What I found was that people are hungry, no, starving to connect.

I then went a step further and sent a request for recommendations to a number of clients. In no less than another 30 minutes I had five excellent reviews of my services that were posted on my LinkedIn profile. As I staggered away from my computer, I was shaken with how quickly all this had all happened. Word of mouth testimonials are “worth their weight in gold” for a business such as mine.

I was able to get an approval from each client to use the recommendation on my website for marketing purposes. (If you post testimonials on your own website, you know and understand how truly important great comments can be toward establishing your authority and winning new clients.) The people who did my recommendations were warm and eager to help me. Wow, the power of social networking at play right in front of my own eyes.

Use social networking effectively.The next thing I did was to post a question in the “Question and Answer” section on LinkedIn. I asked what type of social media people were using, was it generating sales, and did they consider social networking a “time pit”. (Oh, I was woefully ignorant then!). In less than 30 minutes again, I had 12 excellent responses; thoughtful in nature and addressed to me personally. Many of the responses to my question were from top executives at companies like Boeing or from film makers or professional social networking consultants. I really benefited from the group insight and comments returned from my “loaded question”.

After that I decided that maybe I should interact too in the “Question and Answer” section and went on to review and then answer 9 questions. All comments and results were posted to my LinkedIn profile as well. My responses allow others to review my insight, candor, and point of view, kind of like a snap shot of my personality and expertise.

The next day, after now having doubled my connections to over 30 or so, I decided that I should really “get serious”. I loaded my e-newsletter subscriber list of over 1,000 names and sent a custom greeting and explanation of who I was, how I had their email address, and sent out the invitation to connect with me on LinkedIn using email within the LinkedIn control panel.

In under 12 hours from my large list invitation my LinkedIn network contained over 90 connections. Less than one week later I am at 140 connections and still growing. In the first 24 hours, I also picked up a possibility for a new speaking engagement in front of 60 local area public relations professionals and a potential new subcontracting partner project for search optimization, ghost blogging, and Google AdWords management. All this with a wee bit of time investment.

This is the bottom line of what I have found from my own personal experience with social networking and LinkedIn. People crave, no, they thirst for personal interaction. People want to connect with you and want to share their knowledge and themselves!

Here Are Some of My Tips and the Lessons I Have Learned

One – You should not be focused on selling all the time in using LinkedIn. The value of your expertise and open sharing of resources and ideas is well worth the time investment alone. Being able to tap others for references or to recommend someone you know to a connection has incredible value and is super easy to do. Reviewing new connections’ profiles and then their network can give you opportunities to join new conversation groups and to connect with people with common interests in your industry. To do this, you can either introduce yourself to a new connection directly (if they have that option enabled) or ask your common connection to introduce you. You get five free introductions with your LinkedIn account set up. After that, you can buy more.

Two – Responding to “Questions and Answers” can help to educate you and to share your knowledge with others. Each time you answer a question the information is posted to your profile allowing others to see your insight and style.

Three – Asking for a recommendation is easy and painless. You can even ask for a revision gracefully, if you do not like what someone has said and you have the option to post the recommendation or not in your profile. If you decide to use the recommendation off the LinkedIn site best business practices recommend that you ask the author for approval. What a great way to build your authority for your services and products in an easy, unthreatening, and painless way.

Try our suggestions for successful social networking.Four – Have fun and invest 15 minutes each day to add new connections either from new prospects you have had the previous business day or by reviewing connections of your connections and looking for common ground to connect with new people.

Five – When a prospect contacts you by email through your website, make sure to not only add their email to your e-newsletter subscriber list, but invite them to connect with you online with LinkedIn or Facebook. Make sure you have noted in your privacy policy on your website what you will do before you do this to prevent a problem. Although you may not create a sale, by adding the individual to your network, you retain a way to easily share information back and forth and keep connections up-to-date with new services offerings, promotions, new white papers, and other things that bring value to your relationship that may lead to a possible future sale or recommendation.

My Conclusion

What has surprised me from all of this was the friendliness, speed of response, and overall positive attitude from others eager to connect with me. Truly people are starving to connect and share with others. It just takes you to make the first step to reach out to them. By doing so, you build your network, your credibility, and enhance your LinkedIn profile allowing connections to view your “resume” and interact with you and even approach you for a business.

On my end, I have already recommended one previous client to a connection who was looking for a branding expert, and written one recommendation for another. So referrals and recommendations work both ways benefiting your connections from your relationships with others.

You can also send out notes to your connections and post news updates. In fact, I notified my connections that I was publishing this newsletter to share my experience and to encourage connections to subscribe to my monthly e-newsletter list.

There Are Options to LinkedIn – Facebook Is an Excellent Application!

Now one note about Facebook, although I am speaking solely about LinkedIn in this article, I do use and like Facebook. One of the big differences between LinkedIn and Facebook is the ability to add applications like Google Lively, YouTube videos, Grow a Plant, and Flairs to your profile. These are very cool interactive widgets that are easy to add, and add color to your profile, and interest to your profile page, and allow you to interact with “friends” in a fun way.

Additionally, I like that you can instant message other connections directly from Facebook by clicking the icon in the bottom right of the page. There are more cool interactive features on Facebook from my point of view than for LinkedIn, but I find LinkedIn simpler to use on a daily basis.

Which social networking system you use is really best based on where your colleagues and clients have migrated. Which ever one you choose, make a small time investment to reap big benefits. I think that you will find out just like I did your relationships with clients, prospects, and other people will be richer for their use.

Ready to Try Out Some of These Social Networking Sites Yourself?

If you are ready to try out social networking, it is easy. Just visit LinkedIn or Facebook to set up a free account and get rolling. You can send me an email invitation as I would be glad to be your first connection for Facebook at nmccord56@msn.com or to nancy@mccordweb.com for LinkedIn. I’ll look forward to meeting and sharing with you online at either LinkedIn or Facebook.