Make Money Online

Click through rate continues to be a key metric for Internet marketers. However, the question “What’s a good click-through rate?” is a little bit like asking “What’s your favorite movie?” Truthfully, it really comes down to personal preference. Just as some people might lean toward an adventure film as their favorite movie, others might prefer something from another genre.

The same is true for click-through rates on your Sponsored Search ads: The highest possible click-through rate may work for some—but it doesn’t work for all. That’s why the honest answer to the question is, “It depends.”

Click-through rates are naturally going to vary from campaign to campaign, and even from keyword to keyword. Everything involved in the way your ad is displayed plays a part, from your ad copy to the ad’s ranking on the results page.

This being the case, your click-through rate should really be viewed as only one indicator of your ad’s performance. It’s best to try and balance your evaluation of those rates with a just-as-critical look at your conversion rates (number of clicks converting into sales or other actions you want people to take). While it might be easy to generate a bump in your clicks, you also want those extra clicks convert into sales.

An ideal click-through rate provides the best possible return on investment, and to achieve that, it’s important to consider these factors:

1. Competition

Are your keywords fighting for clicks? Generic keywords, such as “dvd,” tend to have a lot of competition, which lessens the chance of getting clicks. More specific keywords, such as “transformers dvd,” generally have less competition and a greater chance for clicks.

2. Position

An ad with a high ranking may generate more traffic to your web site. To help attain a good position in search results, keep your bids competitive and your ad quality high.

3. Ad Quality

Are your ads relevant? Do they contain the related keywords? Do they reflect the offering of your site in a way that will appeal to users? And do they include any competitive advantages you offer that might set you apart from your competitors?

4. Ad Testing

Create multiple versions of your ads and use ad testing to determine which ad works best. Vary your ad offerings, as well as your display URLs, to see what gets the best results.

5. Identifying Low-Performing Keywords

Compare the click-through rate of similar keywords, to see if any are significantly under performing in relation to the others. If so, consider moving those low-performing keywords to a different ad group and creating new, highly relevant ads for those keywords.

There really is no hard and fast rule as to how high a click-through rate should be. But if your ads are compelling and your click-through and conversion rates are well balanced, you’re off to a great start.

Post provided by Noah Belson

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Making the Most of Your Click-Through Rates

For small businesses and retail establishments, local search can have a favorable impact. Marketing to customers in your neighborhood used to be as easy as putting up a sign or advertising in the local newspaper. But today’s web-savvy consumers shop for products and services locally on the Internet using local search.

Using a local search engine, marketers can target customers in a specific area while maximizing their marketing investment. They can use specific targeting, using the right keywords and search phrases to pull customers to their site and front door.

Local search offers low cost, relevant advertising dynamics, an audit trail to measure results and opportunities to increase revenues and profit. The key is partnering with a local search company that provides relevant search results, so your customers can find you easily. They should provide high-quality location data, geo-targeted advertising and efficient search algorithms.

Here are five reasons you should use local search:

It is on the rise The local search marketplace is expanding. Local search is estimated to grow to a $6.2 billion market opportunity by 2010. (Kelsey Group). According to Com­Score, 47% of local searchers contacted or visited a local merchant as a result of their online search.

There’s money to be made It’s been proven that “local” searchers convert into buyers.

According to industry analysts, approximately 80% of an indi­vidual’s income is spent within about 50 miles of their home. With 95% of the potential local search advertising market today remaining untouched, this is a huge opportunity for businesses.

Online advertising just makes (dollars and) sense

In today’s economy, more local companies are turning to online advertising as a new way to capture greater local customer revenue. At the same time, many Internet players are refocusing on local search as a method of increasing revenue and profit. (Mike Dobson, president of TeleMapics).

Local search costs less and delivers more

One of the reasons that local search attracts new advertising customers is that it offers relatively precise targeting capabilities, at one of the lowest costs per lead offered by any advertising medium (29 cents,according to Piper Jaffray & Co.). It also offers an audit trail.

Your customers can find you faster

Traffic has declined for traditional print publishers, as it is easier and quicker to research a buying opportunity online than to search print media. In the Yellow Pages arena, the market has fragmented because of increased competition between publishers, diluting the effective­ness of Yellow Pages advertising that many small businesses once relied upon.

If you haven’t considered local search as an important part of your marketing program, now is the time to do so. You’d be surprised at what an impact you can make!

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Local Search: What You Need to Know

Have you Googled your name recently? Today, more than ever, individuals are turning to the web to learn more about people they meet, interview, and simply want to know more about. With information being so pervasive, managing your reputation is more important than ever.

Fortunately, managing your reputation online isn’t all that difficult, but it does take work. Here are 7 basic steps you can take to ensure that your reputation doesn’t become negatively impacted by what’s being said about you online.

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Reputation Management Made Easy: 7 Effective Ways For Managing Your Reputation Online

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Marketing Through Admission

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Make Your Search Campaign Successful

Here Are 7 Reasons to Use a Professional Online Shopping Cart Instead of An 800#

1. People live in dozens of different time zones. Do you want to answer the phone at 2 a.m. your time because someone in England is having her first cup of coffee and wants to order your product?

2. People shop on weekends. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be out in my kayak on a weekend than sitting by the phone waiting for a product order.

3. Telephone tag. Let’s say you just appeared on a talk radio show and people are calling to order your product or service. They will get a busy signal since you can talk to only one person at a time. You’ll find that you have to call back a dozen people. If this happens, you run the risk of playing telephone tag – and possibly never connecting with them.

4. Expensive phone charges. When you return phone calls, you risk paying long-distance rates including international phone calling rates. Your cost of taking the order just jumped through the roof.

5. Too much time, not enough money. When you take orders over the phone, you have to be nice. There’s nothing wrong with being nice, but you have to engage people in a conversation: How’s the weather? Where are you calling from? How long have you been interested in this topic? If you don’t ask questions like this, people will think you are rude and might not want to buy your product! This all takes time.

6. When you only take order over the phone, you have to sell the person, not just take the order. Many companies are not comfortable selling on the phone. Or they are bad at asking for the order. You could blow the sale.

7. Too many mistakes. It is all too easy to misspell the person’s name, mailing address or credit card number. I call this unintentional dyslexia. You think you typed in “54″ and you said “54″ to the client, but you really wrote “45.”

If you had an online shopping cart, you’d solve all these problems! Add an online shopping cart to your website today and you will sell more products and services while protecting your time and energy. And, it’s very easy to get started.

Just go to www.prleads.com/meos for a special report on how to choose a shopping cart. You’ll even find information on how to get started today! Author and Serial Internet business entrepreneur, Dan Janal has built multiple six-figure income businesses using MyEasyOnlineStore.com.

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Sell More Online With A Professional Shopping Cart Versus An 800#

The new engine claims to combine web index with content-based relevance methods with results organized by ideas and offering complete user privacy. Cuil uses innovative search techniques by going beyond the contemporary approach of link analysis and traffic ranking. Instead, it analyzes the context of each page and the concepts behind each query. The latest search engine then organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category.

Moreover Cuil offers users additional features including tabs to clarify subjects, images to identify topics and search refining suggestions.

Cuil, pronounced as “Cool”, is ran by Tom Costello, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, who expertise in search engine, search index and led a web page rankinghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank . Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford B-School-Isnt-What-It-Used-To-Be University and IBM; while Patterson and Power have worked with Google.

The Cuil search engine’s features include:

· Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine

· Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category

· Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity

· Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

When it comes to search engines it’s not just the size of the index but also the relevancy of the search results. It still remains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Remains to be seen if Cuil.com can be successful in taking away a part of Google and Yahoo’s market share. One thing is for sure though, as long as there’s search, there will always be new search engines looking to defeat Goliath!

What’s New In The World Of Search?

Do you use white papers in your marketing? Are you happy about the new business they help attract? Many marketing executives are disappointed at the results from white paper lead generation programs. In spite of their high cost and drain on company brain power, they often prove ineffective at bringing in new business.

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Why White Papers Fail At Bringing In New Business

Hello all,

Just a quick note that The Marketing Blog is on vacation this week. We’ll provide a new post sometime this coming weekend or Monday, July 28th.

How to Make the Most of Order Confirmation and Ship Notification Emails

As the internet has evolved over time, marketing to customers via email has become more challenging. People and companies have implemented SPAM filters resulting in fewer messages being delivered to inboxes. When marketing emails are delivered, the messages still need to be opened. Email is obviously a cost effective way to market to existing customers.

This begs the question, “How can I get more existing customers to see my email marketing messages?” One way is to put marketing material into order confirmation emails and shipped notification emails (emails that are sent when orders are placed and shipped).

These types of emails have a tendency to get delivered more often. Much of the content is unique (order number, customer’s name, items purchased), making the email less likely to be flagged by a spam filter. Additionally, customers are likely to open these emails to confirm their order has the right contents or to see when a package might be delivered. It’s a good medium to ask for an additional sale.

Should you decide to merchandise additional products in the email, consider putting them below the core data. For example, if a customer receives an email confirming his order, put the promotional copy and/or images below the invoice. Customers don’t want to feel like they are being deceived when opening emails. Also, make sure the email addendum contains links so that it’s easy for customer to get to the products that are being merchandised. Use clean crisp images that will pop and get the customer’s attention.

It’s an unfortunate fact of email marketing that fewer emails are reaching their intended recipients. However, merchants that seize the opportunity to market to their customers upon every touch point will have more success in generating repeat business.

Originally posted here:
Confirmation Emails: Make Them Work For You

When using email marketing to sell a product or service you can’t just start selling to your readers in the first email. The reason is the odds of the reader knowing who you are or what you are all about are pretty low, even if they subscribed to your newsletter from a form on your website.

People do not purchase from those they do not know. So the key to a successful email marketing campaign is “warming up” your readers to the sell.

The “warming up” process can be broken down into five distinct phases. It’s a good idea to keep these in mind as you work to warm up your lists.

Phase 1 — “Cold Readers”

These are folks who have just filled out the form on your website, or whose details you have received via co-registration.

You know nothing about them, and they know nothing about you, so at this phase, your primary job is to introduce yourself, and begin to establish yourself as a source of credible and useful *free* information.

I emphasized the word *free* in that, because “cold” leads are very unlikely to buy anything from you, no matter what you do.

PHASE 2 — “Curious Readers”

At this phase, people may have opened one or two of your emails and have at least decided to stay on your list long enough to find out what you’re about, and what they can gain by reading your emails.

Another way of thinking of this group is that they are the ones who are actually opening and reading your emails, whether they open the first or the tenth that you send them.

Your job with this group remains essentially the same as was true at Phase 1 … you are still in the process of “warming them up” to the idea that you are credible and trustworthy.

Again, not a time to be trying to sell them things, because few of them will buy, anyway.

PHASE 3 — “Interested Readers”

These are the folks who have opened and read several of your emails, and now continue to read them. Perhaps they have “moved” themselves from your “cold” list by opting-in to one or your newsletters or free mini-courses.

By doing so, they have “told” you that they are interested in what you have to say, willing to read more of your emails, and may, in due time, buy something on the basis of your suggestion.

One way to know who your “interested” prospects are is to offer a free ebook or mini-course, and make them “register” for it by opting in to a second autoresponder.

Another is to run a survey form on your site, invite them to participate, and capture their contact information when they do so.

The point is they have taken some “action” based upon your previous emails, and have told you by that action that they are interested in what you have to say, and willing to read what you write to them.

PHASE 4 — “Excited Readers”

These are folks who are almost ready to buy. They may have written you asking for more information, or visited your sales page several times. Maybe they are thinking about joining your business opportunity, but for some reason not quite ready to sign up and pay their money. They need some sort of “push” or “nudge” to get them to take action.

Maybe they need a “special offer” of some kind, or simply a personal follow-up email or phone call from you. Whatever it is, these are your “Hot” prospects.

PHASE 5 — “Customer”

The final phase is, of course, obvious. These are the folks who have bought your product, joined your opportunity, or bought something that you promote as an affiliate.

In the long run, these are the folks who will make you the most money, because it will become easier and easier for them to act on your recommendations, as long as you don’t betray their trust by endorsing poor quality products or programs.

You need to think of these folks as *friends*, because that is what they really are. They have now given you permission to send them follow-up offers and program endorsements.

Even though they may represent only a tiny percentage of the entire population of your list, these people are your long term gold mine group.

Treat them with respect, they have warmed up to you and what You have to offer. Maintain a high level of integrity and they will continue to follow you for years to come

This post provided by Chris Stirling who is the owner of Top-Work-From-Home-Directory.com His website is geared for people who are interested in finding an online work at home opportunity. If you would like to learn more visit his website at: http://www.top-work-from-home-directory.com

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Five Steps Toward Effective Email Marketing

If your marketing material is not generating a response from potential clients then you need to follow this “two step” method of getting your marketing materials right. I recently received the following question from a reader: “I’m not getting massive success with the marketing I’ve done so far. In fact, not one person has called me because they’ve seen my flyers. I’m starting to think people may be turned off by them. Any suggestions on how I can judge if they’re a turn off?”

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Improve Your Marketing: Move to Two-Steps

Now that you’ve focused on finding the right keywords, setting up your Adwords campaigns, and choosing your bids, it’s time to divert your attention toward landing pages. Internet marketers have proven that a change in landing pages, to accommodate your specific keyword groupings, can have a positive impact on results.

We all know landing pages are important and A/B testing is a common phrase among search marketers, but are we as an industry taking landing pages to the next level? Search engine marketing traffic is highly engaged and quite honestly, different from other online media. So, why do we direct this traffic to the same generic landing pages?

There is a new movement that centers Web design around search intent. Strong keyword groupings that in the past didn’t have a good “home” will now get a custom built landing page with tailored content. For instance, for a travel client, we created new landing pages with content specific to the psychographic intent of the search phrase or phrases.

Landing pages like this take time and effort to brainstorm and build, but the rewards are worth it if thought out. These custom landing pages are also lead generation forms. They created a great experience with tailored content for the consumer and also increased conversions by 25% when compared to the previous destination pages.

In another instance, we built out landing pages for certain geographic based terms that were important to our client, as it was a service offering that had not been hitting our online metrics. When a new landing page was created around the context of the keyword groupings, the cost per lead dropped significantly (think hundreds of percentage points).

The moral of the story is that search marketers should think more strategically in their landing page decisions. It is more than A/B testing these days. Work with your client and creative teams to enhance the full search experience from start to finish.

by Lindsay Blankenship of AvenueA-Razorfish.com

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Search Marketing Soars: Focus on Landing Pages

What do you get when you bake three years of work and twelve years of Internet marketing experience? The answer is “SEO Made Simple: Strategies for Dominating the World’s Largest Search Engine.”

In 2000, I launched my first marketing related website, MarketingScoop.com. At the time I didn’t plan on such a significant amount of interest in Internet marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), or search related advertising. Over the years, I continued to receive many questions from browsers, blog readers, and colleagues, about their online businesses and decided to focus my time on answering one of the most common questions I received, “What makes a web site rank in the #1 position on Google for a particular keyword or keyword phrase?”

After a few years of trial and error, as well as learning from others who had already been successful in the area of SEO, I applied the principles I learned to propel my websites and blogs into the #1 position on Google for very competitive search terms. Today, my web site is ranked #1 on Google for “Marketing Expert”, “Internet Marketing Expert”, and dozens of other terms.

But I didn’t stop there. I chronicled everything that I tried over the past three years related to search engine optimization (SEO). There were many techniques and tools that worked and others that did not. Some were total failures leaving me only with a bad taste in my mouth and a few less dollars in my pocket.

In trying to answer that all-important question about how to rank on top for Google, I realized that I had collected some very important information that could help fellow marketers, small business owners, and virtually anyone with a website or blog. The greatest lesson was that I shouldn’t have listened to all those so-called experts that make SEO out to be the most complex science on the face of the earth. The reality is that search engine optimization is quite simple.

That is why I have published, SEO Made Simple: Strategies for Dominating the World’s Largest Search Engine. I was thrilled with the results I had achieved and fed up with a lot of the solutions I paid for that simply did not work. The good news is that publishing a book makes the truth about SEO available to everyone for as little as $25 bucks (but you can get a sample chapter for FREE at MySEOmadeSimple.com).

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Book Review: SEO Made Simple by Michael Fleischner

The truth is, there is a fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners do not understand the difference between the two. This is important because while a creative, well developed Internet marketing campaign can help to attract new customers and keep existing customers loyal, spam of all kinds is likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers. This can be extremely damaging to your business.

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Is Your Marketing SPAM?