Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for November, 2008
PPC and How it can benefit your company
Jon Sanderson, OrangeSoda Inc,
Each company, small or large, has to allocate resources to marketing efforts to find new customers. The question that needs to be answered is “How much and where do I use it?” Traditional marketing for most businesses seems like a safe bet since it’s been around for a long time and everyone else does it. But is it really a safe bet? How trackable is traditional marketing? How long does it take to see results?
Many online marketing campaigns are trackable and measurable in every way a business owner wishes marketing would be. Considering how many people are turning to the major search engines to find the businesses and services they need, offering targeted advertisements when they do a search query can be a very effective way of growing your business. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is this very form of marketing that not only shows up when your ideal client does a search, you obviously only pay when they click.
With the weakening economy and when businesses are making cuts all over the place, marketing is usually one of the first to go. That is, unless you can track the ROI your marketing is giving you. PPC can be trackable from the actual click of each user, down to when they converted to a sale or lead for you. All you have to do is find out the average value of your leads or those sales and compare them with how much you are spending on PPC advertising.
PPC campaigns can be live the day you create them, no set up costs, you can see results & repots almost live, you only pay for the actual people who come to your site, you can track conversions back the keyword that generated them, and you can slow it down/ramp it up/or pause it whenever you want. What’s not to love? Especially comparing this to a yellow page, billboard, various print options, video, and even radio advertising.
There is no guarantee that PPC will work for everyone, but it’s always worth trying.
7 Mistakes Most Bloggers Make
Chris McCombs, KickBackLife.com
Blogging is all the rave among small business owners these days… and for good reason…
Blogging is one of the best ways to bring lots of new prospects into you marketing funnel.
Today, people are naturally skeptical and distrustful of just about anyone trying to sell them anything… ESPECIALLY on the internet.
Blogging allows you start your relationship off with your prospect with the giving hand instead of the taking hand. It allow you to GIVE high quality to your prospect right out of the gate.
So instead of a sales page being the first thing someone sees when they visit your site, you can direct them to content pages.
But just like anything else in life, there is a learning curve to blogging. The goal of this post is to help accelerate the learning curve for you and help you avoid many of the mistakes that most new bloggers make.
Mistake # 1- Not knowing what the purpose of your blog is
Your blog needs to serve a purpose. Don’t just blog because you heard that you should blog.
Here are some of the reasons I blog:
- Build relationships with my target audience
- Establish authority in my niche
- Build relationships with experts in my niche
- Get found in the search engines
- Build a feeling a reciprocity in my readers
- Get opt-ins
- Drive readers to my sales pages ( Usually in a subtle way)
- Have fun
Mistake # 2 – Not knowing your target audience
If you wanna find out who your target audience is, ask them these questions:
- What are your biggest fears regarding this area of your life?
- What are your biggest frustrations regarding this area of your life?
- What are your biggest desires? And why do you want to achieve them?
Mistake # 3 - Writing blog posts that are boring
There is so much content on the internet today that you have to do something to separate your posts from all the other content out there on the web.
Make sure and put some of your personality into your posts and when you can, teach in stories. When you can use pictures to spice things up a little.
Mistake # 4 - Trying to be overly professional or “better than”
People like buying from people they like. We all like Average Joe’s and underdogs. Keep that in mind when you’re writing.
On my personal blog, I want my readers to feel like it’s just me and them sitting in some hole-in-the-wall bar sharing a beer and talking about life… and I just happened to have discovered some short-cuts and secrets I’m sharing with them.
Mistake # 5 – Not linking back to your blog
if you want your blog to be found in the search engines, then you’re going to want to link back to your pages using the main keyword terms for your pages as the anchor text in the link.
Google is mostly an “off page” search engine. What does that mean?
It means get links.
Mistake # 6 – Not hosting your own blog
Don’t host your blog on Blogger or WordPress. Host it yourself.
I could go into the 43 reasons why you want to host your own blog… just trust me on this one.
Mistake # 7 – Pitching your products or services in your posts too often
Make sure that over 80% of your posts are pure content and that less than 20% are pitches. FAR too many bloggers make all their posts all about their products or services. People could honestly care less about your products or services.
No one is going to come back to blog like that, much less bookmark it or let their friends know about it.
Make your blog fun, personal and informative.
Bottom Line – Keep these seven things in mind when creating your blog posts and you’ll be ahead of 99% of the other bloggers in your niche.
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