Posts Tagged ‘google’

As a person trying to promote your website, the Google Toolbar can be your friend and your enemy at the same time.

Here are some things to be conscious of. Read the rest of this entry »

I am going to write a mini-series on setting up and running a fake Google AdWords search campaign. Think mini-series like The Jacksons: An American Dream, only with an abusive blogger instead of an abusive father.

Chances are, your advertisement isn’t going to run smoothly when you start it up. I’m going to help you reduce your chances of wasting money. Believe me, Google is definitely ready to collect it.

Here are the steps that I will describe and illustrate:

1. Keyword research
2. Writing ad text
3. Creating landing pages
4. Maintaining your campaign
5. Reporting and metrics

How generic would this be if I didn’t have something to advertise? So, to make things interesting, I will be creating a fake campaign for marble toilets. And I’m going to DOMINATE. Just you watch.

Google likes for you to think that advertising on its AdWords platform is simple. Getting started on AdWords is easy enough, but getting great business results from it is not easy at all.

I’m not going to cover the exact mechanics of running an AdWords campaign in this post, but I am going to tell you what you should expect.

Top priority: gathering intelligence

The first thing to expect from Google AdWords is that you can’t predict what’s going to happen until you’ve let your campaign run a little bit. I’ve set up dozens of campaigns and found that some perform wonderfully out of the gate, but some will perform so miserably that it almost seems impossible to get a return on your investment.

Sometimes you enter a space with no competition and get great prices on clicks. Sometimes you enter a space so competitive that it’s very costly to even get in the first 8 spots.

It can take anywhere from a month to 3 months to get enough data to know how to improve your campaign. I like to think of this data as an investment. If you analyze your first 1-3 months’ worth of data correctly, you gain some valuable intelligence for improving your results.

AdWords is not a short-term activity

Like your website, AdWords campaigns need to be optimized. It is not a “set it and forget it” affair. Just letting destiny take its course is going to cost your business a lot of money with nothing to show for it.

Like I said, any intelligence that you gain for the purpose of optimizing your campaign is an investment. Why is that? Once you’ve reached a certain level of optimization, you can just let the campaign run. All of the work that you do to figure out which keywords and ads drive the best business can just run on its own for a while.

With AdWords, there’s always a changing landscape of competition, so you do need to keep an eye on things. But it certainly does feel good to let things run for a while, knowing that you’re getting a much better ROI than your competitors.

Most search marketers don’t know what they’re doing

I know that this makes things tough on you as a business owner. Who can you trust? As a search marketer myself, I’ve tried scratching the surface in conversations with other professionals in my industry. I’ve discovered some awesome techniques for improving AdWords lately, and none of my colleagues seem that interested in putting in the elbow grease to run these techniques and save their companies some serious cash.

Unless you’re set on becoming an expert search marketer yourself, you’re going to have some major trouble. My rule of thumb: if you’re not paying someone who questions Google’s intentions, you’re probably paying someone who’s only interested in collecting your money. If you’re paying someone who is confident that the campaign is going to run peachy out of the gate, then they obviously don’t have much experience.

Most web designers and web developers ignore accessibility. Now that Target is being sued for not having an accessible web site, the bar is going to be raised for your own site as well. Yes, this is yet another thing to worry about. And no, you should not half-ass it.

If you cater to those with visual impairments, then you will also reap benefits from the world’s most famous blind user: Google. I kid you not.

HTML, the document format of web pages, was designed to be consumed by those with vision impairments, not just by those of us with good eyesight. Once again, everyone has gotten lazy and hasn’t learned how to truly use HTML for this purpose. I’m going to point out a few things that should be done to help improve your site’s accessibility. Read the rest of this entry »

In the 20th century, the success metric for marketing was eyeballs. But that’s just not enough for the 21st century. Relevance is the name of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a serious question to ask yourself. How much do I rely on Google for my business’s success? If Google banned your site from their search results today, what would happen to your business? You probably have a serious problem if Google rankings determine whether you live or die.

You hear stock analysts preach about “diversifying” your stock portfolio to minimize risk. Following that same sound logic, you should ask yourself, just how diverse are my marketing activities?

Here are some alternatives to Google that you should consider. Read the rest of this entry »

Ahh, the good old saying, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it.” Google’s FeedBurner service helps solve this problem with your RSS feeds (What the hell is RSS?), and it adds some really cool features along with it. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve become all narcissistic and decided to release a list of online tools that I find very useful. The good part: most of them are free!

Recommended online business tools

Software companies like Google and 37signals are lowering the cost of starting a business. You can sign up for free or low-cost software to track Internet marketing activities; draft documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations; and even invoice your customers.

One caveat. Be wary of what you are paying in exchange for free software. I’d argue that 37signals offers free trials in order to “hook you” into signing up for paid versions. But what is Google’s motivation for providing free analytics software? Are they using your data in order to make Search better? What does that mean for your site?

I’ve made the trade-off in all of these cases to get my free beer. But always remember these possible implications and their impact on your strategy.