Tag: internet marketing

Think of an advertising system where you can target specific prospective customers based on how they are searching for your services. You can appear to them at the very moment they are looking to buy from suppliers just like you.

You only pay when someone clicks on your advert unlike traditional print media where you pay a fixed fee whether you get leads or not.

Depending on the type of business you have, you can scale up your marketing or narrow it down. You can re-market to visitors that have visited your site without buying so that you increase brand awareness. Research shows that a prospect will interact with your brand at least 7 times before buying.

The advertising platform that does all this is called Google Adwords, otherwise known as pay per click (PPC) advertising.

The importance of being on page one of Google search results

If you’re not on the first page of Google, prospective customers aren’t going to find you. Think about it, do you look beyond the first page of Google search results when you’re looking to buy something on-line? Research shows that most people don’t.

Click through rates vary massively even if you do appear on the first page of the search results, depending on what position you’re listing appears, for instance the first 3 positions on Google get over 60% of all the traffic with the bottom 3 positions getting less than 10%.

In a recent study on the effectiveness of social media as a sales generator compared to PPC and SEO it concluded, “As far as driving on-line sales goes, social media is an astoundingly ineffective channel. If you want to grow your on-line sales, the evidence is clear: SEO and PPC are where you need to invest”

SEO is a long term strategy, simply because it can take months to get a decent listing position, providing you follow the SEO guidelines for onsite and offsite SEO, all of which takes time to put in place. Whereas PPC is immediate, there’s no waiting months to see results. As soon as your adverts get Google approval, they go live. I have had adverts go live within minutes of setting them up.

Quick Tip – Success in Pay Per Click isn’t just about getting your advert displayed as much as possible for the least cost. It’s about getting it in front of good prospects that are interested in buying your product or service. You don’t want to be paying for people who are just looking for information, particularly if your budget is tight or you’re bootstrapping. You don’t want them clicking through your advert and bouncing off your landing page either, ideally you want them to buy if they click through your adverts, or not click at all, if they’re not interested in your product or service. How you achieve this balance is where the magic happens. Focused targeting is the name of the game.

DIY or pay someone else to do it for you?

Now you can learn to do Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising yourself, there’s lots of  free information available out there that takes you through the process. However much of it may be out-of-date, with Google constantly making changes to its system. There is also a lot of mis-information circulating that you should be aware of.

Alternatively you can pay an expert to do it for you, many of which will want a large up-front commitment of £300-£800 to set the system up for you, followed by a minimum contract period. I used a very reputable SEO company to do PPC for me some years ago, and after spending £1000+ I didn’t get a single sale out of it. I still get calls from PPC businesses now that promise the world but don’t ask anything about my business, and without knowing about it and my prospective customer profiles, how can they know who to target?

I decided to learned the system myself from the ground up, and I still use it successfully today because I’ve tested it, tweaked it, and improved it as I’ve gone along. I use it for my own business (not related to this site), and it works for me. I have learned to build on each campaign by split testing, peeling and sticking, dropping poor performing adverts and replacing with new improved versions, in an ever improving spiral. It takes time, I’ve spent lots of money as I’ve gone along but I’ve learned, DOING is the only way to learn in this game.

I highly recommend you try PPC for yourself, it’s made a huge difference to my business. I compete with some of the big UK based experience companies and have consistently ranked higher than them, so it can be done with the right targeting. And with a ROI of well over 300%, it can also be profitable.

Local business campaigns can be effective for as little as a couple of pounds per day, of course if you want a bigger reach you’ll have to employ a bigger budget. Return On Investment is what it’s all about. If you can make £2 for every £1 you spend, than spending £10k a month means you’re making £20k, spending £100k means you’re making £200k, and that’s how you should look at it.

For more about marketing, please check out our Marketing guide.

Below is a blog post I did back in 2013, but which was on another website, I thought I would include it here as it has some relevance today.

I have been using Google Adwords for my photography business for 7 years now. Initially I used a third party to execute a campaign for me, but after spending about £1000 without getting a single sale, I decided to cut my losses and end the whole sorry saga.

However in the back of my mind I thought the basic premise of Adwords was a sound one. Your ads appear to anyone searching for your product / service, at the very time they want it. Surely this is one of the best ways to target your customers? So why was my previous experience of Adwords such an expensive disaster? Had I not given it enough time? The company that ran my Adwords campaign thought I should have given it more time, I ran it for approx 4 months. Only when I questioned why I wasn’t getting any conversions did they talked about changing certain aspects of my site to improve performance.

I decided to run my own campaigns and set the whole thing up from scratch. I read a lot of stuff online, and invested in what turned out to be a great book a “Ultimate Guide to Google Ad Words: How To Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes” by Perry Marshall. which was great at giving me a clearer understanding of the psychology of how Adwords works and then how to develop the campaigns to get better and better results. I read much more after that book but would have to credit it for getting me off to a solid start, so thanks Perry.

Once I had a clearer understanding of the techniques that make the difference between a successful campaign and one that empties your pockets faster than an hole in the bottom of them, I understood why I hadn’t got anything out of my previous attempt. I now get more in voucher sales from my site than I spend on Adwords and with a good chance of up-selling those vouchers once they are redeemed, I find Adwords to be an invaluable sales channel.

The moral being that if your product is suitable for online selling (and not all products are) and if you know your customers have a tendency to look for your service online, which I did, then Adword can be very profitable if you know what you are doing.

So what did I do to change my results, from having no sales to actually making a profit from Adwords? Well first of all I took a close look at my customers. Who was buying what from me? Initially I had Ads selling portraits, with lots of different keywords that included Babies photoshoots, Family photoshoots, Pet photoshoots,  and Mother and Daughter Makeover photoshoots. Once someone clicked on the Ads they were taken to a page that sold vouchers for all of of these photo experiences. The first thing I learned to do was split my business into all the separate experiences  and who the likely buyer of those experiences would be.

Makeover photo shoots – Usually purchased as a gift for friends or relatives, sometimes bought for self, enjoyed by 12 year olds up to middle aged women. Having said that the purchaser is often an husband or boyfriend.

Newborn Baby photo shoots – usually purchased as a gift for friends or relatives, sometimes bought by mother of newborn babies.

I then split these separate experiences into their own campaigns, chose keywords that were relevant to each such as baby photos, newborn photo shoots for the baby campaign, makeover photo shoot for ….guess what …the makeover photo experiences…and so on.

I kept the number of keywords down to about 1-2 per ad group, making sure that each keyword was included in the Advert and again on the landing page, which contained information about just that particular kind of photo experience. What was I doing? I was focusing my Ads towards specific customers who were looking for specific photo experiences. So someone looking for a baby shoot would type in say “baby photo packages” into the search engine, which would trigger my ad to appear on their search results. They would see my headline “Baby Photos just £30” and hopefully would click on it to find out more, they would then go through to see my landing page which would give more information about my baby photo packages. They then have the option to buy a voucher for the package there and then, or give me a call to order one.

This way of structuring my Adwords campaign has helped turn my fortunes around. It sounds like common sense but wasn’t how the so called experts that managed my first campaign had gone about it.

Adwords can work for you but you need to know what you’re doing. I guess that applies to any kind of advertising. I am sure there are many great PPC agents that can execute very good PPC campaigns for you, but only when they understand your business, your products and your customers. If they don’t ask many questions about your business at the start, how can they know enough to give you the best return on your investment. I will be going into my Adwords experience in more detail in future posts.

Summary

Google Adwords can work for local businesses, but you really need to know what your doing, otherwise it can be an expensive waste of time. The key to setting up a successful Adwords campaign is to know your business and focus on each of your product offerings (either individual products or by category depending on the nature of your business) and the type of customer who buys that particular product offering. Focus is the key here. If you are using an agent to do your Adwords campaign for you, make sure they understand your business as well as you know it. Even if you do use an agent to manage your Adwords campaign for you, I would suggest having a basic understanding of how Adwords works, so that you know if your agent is giving you the best service. I would suggest reading “The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords” by Perry Marshall, it contains everything you need to know at this time. Adwords is ever evolving so you will need to stay ontop of the changes to get the most from the platform.

Hope you found something useful in this one….thanks for stopping by.

This article is about using KEYWORD RESEARCH to understand how customers are finding you, or your competitors on the net. It is a look into the psychology of the people looking for your products or services. Use keyword research to GET RESULTS online.

What is keyword research?

There are a number of tools available online, that allow you to see what people are typing into search engines like Google, when looking to buy from businesses like yours. You can use these keywords to better understand your prospective customers, and apply the same search terms to rank your website, so that it appears at the very moment, prospective customers are looking for a product that you sell. It’s the ultimate in matching supply and demand.

The information is provided to businesses looking to advertise through platforms like Google Adwords, and details things like monthly  search volumes, and estimated cost per click (if you advertise on Adwords). This information can also be used for Search Engine Optimisation purposes, aligning your website with searchers intent, and the good part is it’s FREE traffic.

Remember your website is useless if it doesn’t appear when searchers type in a search query. If your site isn’t optimised for these same search terms, you won’t appear in the search results, which means you won’t get any relevant visitors and customers.

Google Adwords for instant traffic

If you have a new website it can take months for your site to appear in organic search results, depending how competitive your niche is, even if your site is well-optimised.

Using advertising tools like Google Adwords, allows you to rank your site much quicker. In fact, if you know what you’re doing it can be ranking on the first page of the search results, within minutes, but you will have to pay for this rapid success. The cost for which varies, depending on your niche. Let’s look at how keyword research works and what you can learn from it to benefit your business online.  Prices per click can be as low as 30p or be multiple pounds depending on how much money can be made by advertisers. Insurance companies tend to have a CPC of as much as £5-£10. Florists can pay £2-£3 per click.

At that cost, you really don’t want people just looking for information or searching for pretty pictures, clicking on your ad and costing your £2. You only want serious buyers to do so, so you need to focus on keywords that include buying intent.

Let’s look at keyword research for a typical local business, floristry.

Keyword research for florists

“Flowers” is the top searched-for-term, relating to florists, however it is too general, it could include searches for photos of flowers, or for information to identify flowers. There is no buying intent connected to this search term.

“Flower delivery” on the other hand is much more “buying intent” driven. People wouldn’t likely be using this search term unless they were looking to buy flowers or at least, find out information about flower delivery.

You would expect “flower delivery” to have a relatively high cost per click if it were purchase driven, which it does, at £2.81.

Other top search terms include:

• Rose
• Orchid
• Plants
• Florists
• Lily
• Funeral flowers
• Flowers by post
• Artificial flowers
• Flower delivery UK
• Red rose
• Mothers day flowers
• Send flowers

These are the top searched-for keywords. As you can see by this list there are a number of very general searches, which you would expect, with longer tailed searches being used less often. A long tail keyword would use more words, for example “cheap flowers online same day delivery” which had just 10 monthly searches compared to 201000 searches for “flowers”.

If I were a florist, I would use from the list above, only maybe “flower delivery UK”,  and maybe “Mothers day flowers”(if it were coming up to mothers day of course), “Send flowers” seems to be an information gathering search term on the face of it.  All the other terms would be fine to use for Search Engine Optimisation purposes, but not for Pay Per Click advertising, where each click is going to cost you.

If you’re a small business owner, and would like a full list of keywords for your business, please provide your email in the box below and we will get one to you, free of charge. If you’re an entrepreneur, you should try to figure it out yourself, you’ll need it going forward, if you’re intending to keep building businesses.

Please check out our marketing guide.

Below is an article I did back in 2013 regarding Keyword Research which was, at the time on another website, so I thought I’d include it here, as I think it contains some interesting material.

What is Keyword Research

Keyword research can be used in a couple of different contexts, the first would be by a business owner or niche website owner, looking to improve visibility on the internet, so that they appear higher up in search results of popular search engines such as Google and Bing. If you are such as business owner, this would involve finding out what your target market is typing into the major search engines to find the products, services or information that you provide. Once you have these keywords you can use them to optimise your website so that you show up in those very same search results. When I say “optimise your website” I’m talking about writing articles that are centred around those keywords, as well as adding the keywords to your page title, and description.

The second context in which you can use keyword research is when you’re looking to start a website from scratch and want to set it up solely around monetising it around adverts such as Google Adwords (where you are paid if someone clicks on an advert on your website). To do this you look for money keywords, which can be compared to ‘panning for gold’ where you sieve out all the dirt and soil (poor quality keywords) until you are left with little gold nuggets (money keywords).

The golden rules for gold nugget keywords are:

#1 Relevance – keywords relating to niche to attract ‘targeted traffic’

#2 Traffic – high traffic volume is best to ensure there is sufficient potential custom.

#3 Competition – low competition is best but not too low as this might be evidence of there not being much of a market.

#4 Commerciality – is the measure of high value keywords.

Keyword research can be done in Google Adwords for free, by simply signing up for an account, alternatively there are a number of software solutions available that will do more in-depth analysis of potential keywords such as Market Samurai which I have used myself in the past.

#1 Relevance

Relevance is important if you’re a business owner and have particular products to sell or already have a website in a particular niche. It is about finding keywords that will attract ‘targeted traffic’ This is traffic that is going to be interested in your offering, and who are likely to buy from you or click on the ads on your site.

If you’re using PPC such as Google Adwords, where you’re paying to drive traffic to your site then Keyword research is vital to make sure you’re not spending money on unnecessary clicks. For example If your selling ‘dog collars’ then you will want to remove keywords such as ‘training’ for instance, because these searchers are not looking to buy dog collars at this time. You can set such keywords as negative keywords in Google Adwords so that when someone types in this negative keyword your advert will not show, and you won’t be charged for an inappropriate click.

You will definitely want to include the word ‘dog’ as a keyword rather than something like pet, otherwise you might find cat searches are included in the results. Using long tail keywords can help qualify searches. for instance ‘buy dog collars’ is likely to qualify potential purchasers rather more than ‘dog collars’ would.

tip – Go to amazon.com and type in keyword, look at books section (relating to your niche), and look at the table of contents, and check some of key terms and add the interesting ones, and do further searches of these ‘semantic’ keywords. This tactic can be used for writing articles and also to find what subjects would be popular to include on your website.

If you fall under the second context of keyword researcher (described above) than relevance doesn’t matter as much because you don’t have a particular product offering. Whatever you make the website about, Google Adwords will match the advert content to your content. In this circumstance you want to make sure you are targeting niches and keywords that have a higher value, see #4 commerciality below for more information about this.

#2 Traffic

It is important to know the difference between “total searches” which are cited in most of the keyword research platforms and the volume of traffic you are likely to actually get on your website should you rank on the first page of the Google SERP results. Below is a table showing the typical breakdown for traffic that is likely in each of the 10 listings on the first page of Google

• 95-98% of traffic come from 1^st page of Google
• Even if you are #1 you won’t get all the traffic

#3 Competition

There are two important measures when looking at the competition for a particular keyword phrase the first is the amount of competition. Ideally look for a lower amount of Google searches ideally less than 30,000 search results for any particular keyword phrase, you can check this by going to www.Google.com and typing in your keyword to see the amount of searches found.

Secondly consider the strength of competition. It’s best to avoid competing with professional websites, that have been around a long time, and that are highly optimised for the particular keyword phrase you are targeting. Also avoid competitor websites that have lots of webpages and a lot of backlinks pointing to them. If the first page on Google or Bing is mainly made up of these kinds of sites you are unlikely to be able to outrank them, so it is better to avoid these competitive keywords phrases altogether. Of course you have little option if you have a particular product offering and these keywords are the ones used by your target market, in this circumstance, where you are unlikely to get a first page listing you may consider PPC (pay per click) advertising to get a first page presence.

#4 Commerciality

The commerciality of a keyword is how much a particular keyword is worth. Google Adwords is a bidding system for keywords and is based on supply and demand. The more demand for a particular keyword the higher the cost per click (CPC) for that keyword. This is a good indicator of how much money is being made on a particular keyword. If an advertiser is paying $10 per click for a keyword it is likely that they are making more than that from their website sales, otherwise they wouldn’t be willing to pay that to Google to drive traffic to their site.

So when your conducting any keyword research keep in mind these golden rules and your more likely to find those golden nuggets.

Check out market Samurai’s explanations below of each of the golden rules. Useful information even if you aren’t considering using their software.

Relevance

Traffic

Competition

Commericality

Promotion

Track your Ranking

Market Samurai is a great tool which saves you valuable time and helps give you a greater insight into your keyword selection. Alternative you can use a free service provided by Google called Google Keyword Planner. You need to sign up for an account to access this online tool, but it’s a great resource. However it’s not as good as Market Samarai in terms of depth and insight. In fact MS uses your Google Keyword planner account to access much of the data needed but is much better at organising it for analysis.

…. hope you found this article useful.

While you’re here, check out my marketing guide.