15 Questions That Will Change The Way You Think About SEO Forever (Q’s 11-15)
As much as the title is vastly overstated, these questions will at the very least help you ponder SEO in a way you hadn’t pondered before. At least that’s my […]
As much as the title is vastly overstated, these questions will at the very least help you ponder SEO in a way you hadn’t pondered before. At least that’s my […]
Wow, mobile is evolving fast. AT&T introduced location-based “ShopAlerts” in NY, SF, Chicago and LA. People can opt-in to receive offers and promotions via SMS or MMS when they physically enter a designated area defined by the advertiser (e.g. a mile from their store). This can help drive in-store traffic and reach mobile users in very specific markets. This is even more targeted than web-based and app-based advertising, but it is opt-in.
Although in beta and only open to VIP advertisers that are invited, Twitter has finally released their ad platform called Promoted Tweets. The general format is that you can use tweets you’ve created or that have been retweeted by someone else as “ads” that are promoted in certain environments. The way the ads are served are analogous to both search and contextual advertising in AdWords, where you pick keywords that are searched on to have your tweet shown or it is matched to a stream of tweets given the contextual nature that you choose in your account. You pay on a cost per engagement which include clicks, favoriting, retweets and replies. There is also Promoted Account where you can essentially buy followers and Promoted Trends where you are shown on hashtags.
Last week, we talked about PPC trick #1 to building your online business for the long-term – using keywords correctly. This week, let’s talk about another “trick of the trade” that will also help on the way to this goal.
As the number of targeting options for PPC increases, so do the creative ways in which you can organize your campaigns to get the maximum effectiveness out of them. As I mentioned last week, for example, you can create a “fishing” campaign and a “bucket” campaign in order to separately control budgeting, bidding and other targeting options to focus your efforts on dominating the locations (search queries) that really put food on the table.
In my last post, I shared using a fishing metaphor to talk about stepping your PPC game up to the point where you know how to use it to build your online business for the long haul. So, let’s start looking at some of the “tricks of the trade” to do just that.
One of the great things about PPC advertising is its immediacy. You can start running ads right now and see almost instantaneous results; whether good, bad or just ok. But, the trap that we don’t want to fall into when running our accounts is limiting our thinking just to what can be gained right now. The fact is, PPC is a great way to help build all areas of your online business long-term. And with the continuous expansion of features and avenues being offered in this channel today, the possibilities continue to grow.
One of the questions that I keep hearing from small business owners every year is this: How can a small business like me afford SEO/SEM? It’s a fair question coming […]
Operating an online business has a lot of advantages over brick and mortar shops. But, contrary to what many believe, being online is not the holy grail of business success. […]
The 12-Step Program, developed by AA, has been used by countless individuals and copied by many organizations to help people get their lives on track. Here, we present the 12-Step […]
I’ve never really been an algorithm chaser. As an SEO, I understand the need to keep up with what’s going on with the major search engines as a prerequisite to […]
SEO used to be all about getting top search engine rankings. While that is still a primary function of an SEO provider, that’s not all there is to it anymore. […]
I recently heard about a company that was working on having their site optimized and wanted to increase those efforts. Instead of doing so, they dropped the idea due to […]
Online marketing, like many other things in life, has several levels of, um… let’s call it “luxury”, for lack of a better word. You go from your basic model online […]
Your competition should play an important role in your research before you move forward with any SEO, PPC, or online marketing campaign. In fact, it’s generally a good idea to […]
I’ve started powering through David Szetela and Joe Kerschbaum’s new PPC book called Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day and I really like this PDF they made available online to their readers. Although it’s about classified ads, you can pull direct correlations to apply to your PPC text ads when advertising on search engines. Really, search engine results pages (SERPs) are just like classified ads except the page is digital instead of paper.