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AdWords Content When Do You Use It?

There is a time and place for advertising in the content network. When would that time be you ask?

Typically, we do not recommend advertising in the content network as we know from historical data that content does not convert into sales at the same percentage that search converts. However there is a reason to advertise in content. If you have a new product or brand name and you need massive exposure, content advertising can be excellent. If you expect sales from this exposure you may want to rethink your expectations of content advertising performance.

When advertising in content do not pay the full amount per click that you would pay in search. Google by default will enable content exposure at the same cost per click setting you select for search. With this particular tactic Google will rapidly soak up your cash so be careful about your budget.

In some cases to control the budget we will even set up separate campaigns for content advertising. Google does not recommend doing this, but their reason is really self serving. My feeling is that if you can control how much you spend in content and are able to clearly see what conversions come to you via the content network, you can adjust your advertising spend more appropriately.

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It’s Girl Scout Cookie Delivery Time

Time for a commercial break…

I live in Maryland and this year I am, again, my two girls’ Girl Scout Troop Cookie Mom. This means I will have over 150 cases of cookies containing 12 boxes each of wonderful tasty cookies in my house. That is 1,800 boxes of cookies and the girls are still selling!

With over 21 girls in their troop, and an average of about 125 boxes sold by each girl, and some girls selling 500 boxes, cookie time is hectic and huge business for the troop. It is not all about making money for the troop though, the money raised goes to the Council to help girls participate in scouting who cannot pay and a small portion stays with the troop to fund fun activities for the girls themselves.

Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are some of the best activities that you can involve your kids in. Not only do they help to build self confidence, team work, and leadership skills, but scouting is just great fun for the kids AND parents alike.

If you have a Girl Scout in your family now’s the time that you buy cookies to help them make their goal. As for me, the tons of cookies arrived this past Tuesday and are filling my living room waiting for the girls to arrive to pick up their orders. It is bound to be a great sale, so do your part and support Girl Scouts this year by buying cookies. By the way, I have more room for cookies and can order more!

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Everyone Wants a Professional Blogger

Blogging is big business. Website owners are coming around to the fact that they need a professional blog to build traffic and build new content for search engines, but few site owners want to blog themselves.

This is where a professional blogger can really help build your online presence. A professional blogger is more than an employee on staff who likes to write and has time on their hands. A professional blogger is one who writes content for your audience, not drivel of what they ate for lunch or the current office gossip. A professional blogger will try to create a keyword dense title and post that will win placement on search engines, all while weaving a story that draws you in from the beginning to the end of the post.

If you want to see a great example of blogging with a personal spin, here’s a blog we’re doing for a client to the tune of 10 posts per week. Visit www.CremationOptions.com/blog. Although our writers call this type of writing “experiential” and the personal tone is not one we take with all blogs, it totally works on this blog. The stories that our writers share are from real-life, from their own experiences, and each one reads like a well-written short story. We’ve had some great blogging gigs, some that we have really loved to write for, and this one is one of our favorites. Check it out and see what you think? We have four different writers working on this project and each writer has a different voice and style. The combination make for a very interesting read.

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Are You Stealing Images?

We typically do not install images on the blogs that we write for, or for that matter on our own blog. Part of that is due to time constraints and part is due to actively working to prevent a copyright violation. But this does not keep clients from following along behind us and adding photos of their own to our blog posts that we write for them.

Here’s one example, I saw an image on a new blog that we were doing and sent a quick email to our writer reviewing copyright law on images and asked where she had gotten the image. She was surprised one was even added to her post which means she did not add it but rather the client had.

Many clients simply do not understand that you can not just right click on an image your find anywhere, on Flickr, or even Google images for that matter. Someone some where owns the copyright and to just right click and grab the image is akin to stealing. You wouldn’t go to a stop and just pocket something and walkout. Why is it that people feel that you can just take any image they see?

When we use images we only use images from the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery and from iStockPhotos (where we buy images for $1 for a one time use). These are great places for inexpensive images, but never do we visit a site and right click and grab something.

Commercial businesses can end up in a copyright infringement lawsuit by grabbing someone else’s content or images. Why waste the time when the right thing is to create your own images or use legitimate resources.