Step 1: Establish Team & Stakeholders.

Make sure you have the buy in from all stakeholders involved on the team which are accountable for web visibility, presence & online sales work-flow.

Step 2: Describe the Performance.

Describe the performance or action you are looking to achieve and how it will integrate with your online/offline sales process. Clicks, Leads or Sales are three examples of key performance indicators.

Step 3: Examine Marketplace.

Keyword / Competition analysis is key to the success of any campaign. More so, if keyword & Competitive Analysis is done right you would be able to reverse engineer your budget, goals and even results prior to campaign launch.

Step 4: Decide how to Track, Measure & Manage.

Develop the online work-flow to Track, Measure & Manage the Campaign to success.

Step 5: Selecting the right people.

Experience Data Driven Marketers are key to the success of any performance based campaign. Make sure these people, whether in-house or outsourced are comfortable in assessing current and past data sets.

Step 6: Manage Performance.

Performance based Campaigns are rarely profitable right out of the gate. Take action for desired results, Measure, Optimize campaign to Desired Results & Measure again. As they say;  Lather, Rinse And Repeat

What is really cool about this tool (and should be used as a tool) is that you can observe what and more importantly HOW people are using keyphrases and/or what people are saying about a particular subject.

This should go along way in your social media marketing strategies

Great tool for keyword research, content sourcing and/or just getting involved in online conversations.

In todays Search Engine Service environments there are two Types of companies:

1)      SEO companies with mass appeal price model that gets clients humming for $149

2)      Professional SEO service firms that are run in the thousands per month

Frankly, you get what you pay for so if you are a client of the former and compalin about being scammed by an SEO firm..

Well… you deserve it.. J

There are also two types of Pay Per Performance SEO companies out there:

1)      Those that get paid for ranking

2)      Those that get paid for sales or leads.

What would you rather have?

We negotiate our Pay Per Performance SEO services based on a best of breed hybrid model.

This provides our customers with less risk and allows us to pick & choose the customers with work with.

The perfect win/win.

The basis of a FAILED campaign.

My two first questions to them are:

1) Are you running these campaigns yourself?
2) Are you running negative keywords on these campaigns?

Look, DYI Google Adwords is certainly a steep learning curve. This learning curve costs YOU money.

Negative keywords are a root cause of most failed search campaigns.

This post is geared towards software companies that are utilizing the paid search environments as part of their online marketing mix.

First and foremost if you are unclear as to what negative keywords are you can read about them here.

One of the most UNDERUTILIZED ways of acquiring a negative keyword list is your own data, under your nose.

Print out a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly report (depending on volume) of the keywords being used to find your website. This data can be acquired through your organic data source or through Adwords own, Search Query Performance report.

Sift through these reports and you will notice many negative keywords that just do not apply to your product or service.

Here is a list of generic ones that I use for my ppc campaign management and I use as a starting point.

To negate freeloaders I use the following:
free
freeware
gratis
kostenlos
gratuit
“public domain”
“open source”

To negate people looking for cracks or pirated software:
crack
cracks
cracked
crackz
key
key gen
keygen
keygens
key gens
key generator
key gens
keygenz
“registration key”
“license key”
pirated
pirate
patch
patches
rapidshare
rapid share
serial
serials
serialz
wares
warez
unlock
unlocking
hack
hacked
hacks
password
torrent
torrents
torrentz
bittorrent

Programmers love to click on ads to search for sample code:

c++
delphi
php
flash
xml
visual basic
ajax
vb
api
excel
java
code
source
template
templates
model
example
sample
xls
xsl
sheet
schema
project

What about negating exact terms such as:
[software]
[program]
[programs]
[shareware]

The above are just a quick sample which might help my readers out in running their own campaigns. It is certainly NOT an exhausted list.

Negative Keyword Search is imperative to your paid search success.

As a Pay Per Performance PPC Management Company we take as much of the guesswork out of our PPC Managed Campaigns as we can. Not because we can, because we have too..

I hope this helps..

Good luck.. And good marketing..

Cheers,

How are you using social marketing?
Search Marketing?
eMail Marketing?
Convergence marketing?

If your understand Today’s environment then you know that today is the fastest, easiest & cheapest way to get a hold of your target market.

Not convinced? Have a look at this:

Check it out here.

http://blog.quantcast.com/quantcast/2009/09/quantcast-top-sites.html

In the coming months Google will open its Content Network to competing ad networks and give the power to it’s AdSense publishers to turn ON other certified network in order for these networks to compete for advertising space.

This will undoubtedly increase average cost per click on the Google Content Network.

Check out this video:

Google Content Network is expanding

Google writes to their publishers (affiliates):

“This new capability will help you generate the most profit for every ad that appears on your site, whether the ads come from AdWords advertisers or Google-certified ad networks,”

From an advertiser perspective or affiliate perspective..  This is going to hurt..

Time to diversify boys & girls…

Still don’t understand the impact this could have on your business.

We can help through our Pay Per Performance Marketing Services.

http://ppcsummit.com/newsletter/?p=404

I myself am noticing that PPC Training is on the rise

Back to helping my clients get ready for the holiday season..

The old way of stuffing keywords into your titles are long gone, not only is google ’s algorithm getting smarter the average Internet searcher reads the title for spammy looking sites.

In other words, you might be losing out on good clicks by being a bit to spammy with your titles.

Let’s dissect our title here for a second..

“What does Internet Marketing and “Potty Training” have in common?”

Well the fact that I used the words “Internet marketing” might suggest that people clicking on this link would actually be interested in the subject and/or topic. The basis of a question as your title always makes the person reading it think and comparing “Potty Training” suggest that this might be a funny post..

So if you are reading this post..  HELLO…  thanks for dropping by but this post is really about how to choose your title in order to get targeted clicks..

So why “Potty Training”?

Well I am going through that right now and my 2 year old loves Elmo..

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