McKenzie-Thorpe

How frustrating are you finding Google Adwords?

Is it taking all your money and giving you nothing in return?

Are your clicks getting more expensive and falling further down the page?

Once you get those clicks, are you actually getting any customers?

Are you mad with Google Adwords and ready to throw in the towel?

Well don’t.

Don’t get mad. GET EVEN!

Here’s how.

It’s really easy to set up a Google Adwords campaign. It’s because it’s so easy to get one running that so few people actually go much further than setting up a basic campaign and then watch as their clicks get more expensive and their conversions disappear.

Have you ever wondered how the Google Adwords professionals make a living? They must know some black art that allows them to make a success of their campaigns.

The truth is that they are using techniques that few people are using but they are hardly magically tricks. I’m going to share with you some of these tricks. Once you know and start to use these tricks then you’ll have better than an even chance that your campaigns will start to become very profitable. That’s what I mean when I say now it’s time to get even.

Step One: Understand Google’s Quality Score

Have you ever wondered why some of your keywords have a higher minimum cost more than others? You probably think it’s because there is greater competition for that keyword. That might be true, but the real reason the minimum cost varies is because of the quality score that Google sets against each of your keywords.

So what is the Quality Score? Well it’s a measure of the relevance and relationship between your keyword, your ad and the page you are sending your visitors to when they click on your ad (this page is referred to as the landing page). If your keyword appears in your ad and also prominently on your landing page then it will have a very good quality score. If it doesn’t, it will have a poor quality score. The better your quality score, the less money you will need to bid for your clicks.

So, it is good practice to arrange your keywords into AdGroups where the keywords are all similar and feature well in the Ad and the Landing Page. Obviously you can’t get every keyword into the Ad but you should be able to spread them a lot of them into the landing page.

You can check the quality score of your keywords by clicking on the customise columns link in your adgroups. You will see the option to Show Quality Score. Select it and you will see the Quality Score for each of your keywords. Avoid any keywords that are reported with a Poor Quality Score. You should either delete them or improve their score by moving them into their own Adgroup with their own specific ads and landing page.

Step Two: Look for the best match

Are you using Phrase and Exact matching? A phrased match is one where the keywords will only match if they are used in the exact sequence of your keyword and an Exact match is one where the keywords will match only if that exact phrase is entered and no other words are used for the search.

To make a keyword a phrase match you put quotation marks around it and to make it an exact match you put square brackets around it.

As default Google sets up keywords as broad matches. This means that you keywords would match to a search query if your keyword were included anywhere in the search query. It would also accept synonyms as well.

Broad matching is best explained with an example. Let’s say I am selling red paint and my keyword is red paint then it would match with the following searches. Red paint, red painted cars, painter sees red over forgery, paint your garden fence red and so on. As you can see few of these searches would be from people looking to buy red paint and so my ad selling red paint is unlikely to get many clicks from these searches.

By using phrase and exact match keywords you can target more closely the searches that you want your ads to appear for.

Step Three: Try to be negative!

Are you using negative keywords for your ads? Negative keywords are another form of matching. If you set a word as a negative keyword then any searches that contain that word will not be able cause your ad to be displayed. A common keyword used by people trying to sell something is free. Any searches containing the word free will not display their ads. To add a negative keyword you type it with the minus sign in front of the word like this -free.

Step Four: Schedule your ads.

Do you run your ads 24 hours every day? Is that sensible? Think about your target audience and when you think they are most likely to be looking for your goods or services. Set your ads to only appear during those times. You can make changes to the schedule through your campaign settings.

If you sell business to business, should you really run any ads over the weekend? Is your target audience likely to be surfing in the evening at home or at work during the day? If you are not sure you can actually get reports out of Google that will tell you the times of the day and what days people are clicking on your ads. Work out when your popular click times are and schedule accordingly.

Step Five: Remember its customers not clicks.

In everything you do, keep in mind that it is customers you want and not just clicks. Implement Conversion Tracking and measure the success of your ads by how many conversions you get and not by how many clicks. Shops don’t normally count customers through the door. They count money in the till and stock sold. So should you.

These five simple steps should help to get your Adwords campaigns back on track. There are many, many more techniques you can apply that will further enhance your success but if you aren’t doing the five listed here then you have little chance of success.

Mike Seddon is the founder of KKSmarts. Their website contains many free guides on http://www.kksmarts.com/

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Link Building Tip.

Here’s one of the strategies I use to build links from other sites. It uses a combination of article writing and Google Alerts.

Step One: Write some articles.

Start writing articles and ideally make sure they are related in some way to your business.

I suggest you prepare at least a couple of articles. Don’t write them in Microsoft Word. Try to use something like Notepad. I’ll explain why in a minute.

When you have a couple of articles of about 400 to 700 words each, you should then submit them to the article submission sites.

Here are a couple of sites I use.

www.articlemarketer.com

www.ezinearticles.com

Article submission sites are great for getting your articles distributed around the web. Not only do they send articles onto other article distribution networks, but lots of website owners come to these sites for content to put onto their own websites.

When you submit your article to one of these submission sites, you are allowed to add an “About the Author” paragraph to go with your article. It is here that you put a link back to your website using whatever keyword phrase you are trying to optimise on.
To submit your article it is simply a case of copy and paste from your prewritten articles. I tend to have an “About the Author” paragraph already prepared to copy & paste as well.

Now the reason I suggested using Notepad for your articles is because when you copy from Word it tends to bring with it certain formatting issues and these can cause you article to be rejected by the submission sites. Notepad doesn’t have this problem.

Step Two: Find out who’s using your article.

By using Google Alerts you can set up alerts for each of your articles. You basically tell Google to alert you if it finds your phrase being used on the web. I tend to use the article name as the alert phrase if it is fairly unique. Otherwise try using a distinctive line from your article.

Whenever Google finds your alert phrase, it sends you an email with the web address of the site where it found it.

You can now check out this site. If you think it will give you good traffic or pass on good page rank, you can contact the website owner. As they already have one of your articles then they probably like your material so you can either offer more articles (with links of course!) or even point them to pages on your site that they should link to because the content would be of interest to their visitors.

So there you have it. One of my tips for building links back to your site.

By the way, you might just like to put your website name into Google Alerts as you’ll be surprised how many alerts that can generate and you can find many places mentioning your website.

More top tips for you soon.

Regards,

Mike Seddon

More Website Promotion Guides

available at KKSmarts.com

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So you want to make your website perform. Is your website doing what you want it to do? Are your customer views satisfactory? Are the clicks on your website producing sales? Just sit back for a minute and I will attempt to help you with answers to all 3 of those questions.

So you have the nicest looking website on the net, spent a ton of money for great hosting and graphics but that means nothing if enough people are not seeing it. Now if you haven’t heard the term search engine optimisation then you are living in a cave somewhere and just got on the Internet today. Well your going to be inundated with gurus and rookies telling you to optimise like this and that but I guess you should know what it is first.

You want to make your website perform by making it friendly with the search engines. remember people will be looking for your website on such search engines as Google, Yahoo, and MSN and them alone have the ability and power to boost your business like you would have never believed. The trick is to get your sites optimised thus giving them a greater chance to appear higher in the search engines. That’s how you will make your website perform.
People are creatures of habit and what we have learned is that when people type their phrase into a search engine they will usually look at the first few websites they see. For the most part your customers will find what they are looking for on the first page. Besides that its proven that only 10% of people click on to page 2 of a search engine. So you want to optimise and get your website on to page one of the search engines.

Well having high rankings has a few things that are a must for good search engine rankings. You have to have a well built site. just throwing anything up there just wont cut it. However your website company should offer features to help you make this happen.

Now the next and very important thing is keywords. These are words that are used to track back to your business. You want to have these in your website in the proper way so that the search engines find them. this results in your customer typing in those words and getting sent to your website. Now you do want to use words that are relevant to your business. Using race cars if you are selling diapers is going to hurt you.

Now you really want to make your website perform. Two Words. Back links. These are very important. They are simply your link showing up on other peoples sites. When the search engines find your links on other peoples sites it highly boosts your popularity thus raising your search engine ranking.
I find the best thing to do is submit my site to directories. You seem to get tons of back links but also as your popularity goes up you start to see more customers from these links. Its important to research the directories you are using to make sure they are respected and please don’t try and submit your business site to an auto directory. Chances are you will be accused of spamming and that’s it you are done on that directory.

One other thing that the search engines love is seeing a site that is being constantly updated. Search engines are high on seeing new content so this will greatly boost your rankings. So what does all this mean? Well a boost in your website ranking is obviously going to move it higher in the search engines.

Now these are just a few methods to help make your website perform. There are many other factors to boosting your website performance in the search engines. Remember there is always someone else trying to get that first spot so you are going to have to be continually working on improving your website to get it to the top.

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February 18, 2008
Daniel Booth

Spam emails claiming to contain video reports on the US election as a lure to download malicious software are bombarding computers worldwide.

The malware onslaught has been spotted by security experts at McAfee, who detected a rise in US elections-themed spam since the Super Tuesday primaries, which took place on 15 February 2008.

The spam emails have the subject heading "Hillary Clinton Full Video !!!" and contain the message: "Hillary Clinton visited her campaign headquarters in Virginia and did satellite interviews, looking beyond Tuesday’s trio of contests and touting the importance of a March 4 vote in Ohio".

Clicking the link doesn’t take you to a video showing Clinton on the campaign trail, but redirects your browser to a malicious URL that infects your computer with malware.

The attack is suspected to originate from the notorious Russian Business Network, one of the world’s biggest cybercrime organisations and operators of the infamous Storm botnet.

www.mcafee.com

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Top-performing sites of 2007 named
February 14, 2008
Web User

Google’s search engine was the most visited website in the UK in 2007 with an average of 27.1 million hits each month, according to statistics.

Though this news will hardly surprise most surfers, the fastest-growing website in the UK last year was BeatThatQuote.com with an increase in traffic of 1,165 per cent over the year.

It’s growth was far in excess of Facebook, which was the second fastest-growing site, with a traffic increase of 781 per cent, statistics from web monitor Nielsen Online showed.

"Many will be surprised to see that Facebook wasn’t the fastest growing site of the year, this honour went to price comparison site Beat That Quote – a reminder that the internet provides valuable services other than virtually poking friends and acquaintances," said Alex Burmaster of Nielsen Online.

However, in terms of websites that encourage surfers to come back again and again, Yahoo Widgets won out, with the average visitor coming back to the site 23 times in a month.

"In terms of ’stickiness’, however, services from the large portals tend to perform strongest. Yahoo’s widget service has people coming back on an almost daily basis and AOL’s email service and MSN/Windows Live Messenger visitors tend to go there two in every three days," said Burmaster.

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February 13, 2008
Web User

Hoax Valentine’s messages that aim to infect your PC and turn it into a bot are circulating already.

Security firms are warning that cybercriminals are attempting to infect the PCs of innocent surfers by convincing them that they have a secret admirer.

Anyone who opens the email is putting themselves at risk of losing their own personal information, as well as allowing hackers to remotely control the PC for their own ends.

The emails have subject lines such as "Love Rose", "Rockin’ Valentine" and "Just You" and contain a file called valentine.exe.

Greg Day, security analyst at McAfee, said: "This virus will try to steal the personal information you keep on your PC, try to bring down your security defences and sign your machine up to an online army.

"This means that your PC can be used to blast out millions of junk emails and to carry out denial of service attacks – by flooding a computer, system or website with so much information that it brings it down," continued Day.

Another security firm warned that sometimes the attachment isn’t actually the infected file itself, but a piece of code that directs your PC to find the malware online.

"The advantage of this method is that since it’s a hosted file, they can change the malicious code as and when they want. This enables them to churn out variants at will without having to take the pains of resending the emails again," said Govind Rammurthy of MicroWorld Technologies.

This new attack is linked to the Storm Trojan, which first emerged more than a year ago and attempts to use events such as Christmas, the New Year and Easter to spread itself.

"Like other threats, the Storm Worm continues to use world events to successfully dupe users – from New Year Celebrations in December 2006 to the European floods in April last year and now this – so we all need to stay vigilant," said McAfee’s Day.

Another security firm, F-Secure, warned that the gang behind the Storm worm would carry on beyond Valentine’s Day.

"They’ll keep on doing it as long as people keep falling for it," said F-Secure’s Wing Fei Chia.

It’s not the first time Valentine-related malware has been spotted this year either. Similar emails were circulating almost a month before 14 February.

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Pharming concept becomes reality
January 23, 2008
Web User

The theory of wireless ‘pharming’ attacks, which was outlined by security firm Symantec, has been put into practice by cybercriminals.

What’s more, the attacks are more damaging than Symantec thought when it first stumbled on the concept last year.

The attack involves changing the DNS (domain name system) server settings on the victim’s home broadband router. If the DNS server is altered, cybercriminals can direct your browser to any web page they wish.

"We recently saw instances of actual attackers attempting a basic version of drive-by pharming," wrote Zulfikar Ramzan on the Symantec blog.

He said that a particular brand of router sold in Mexico was even more vulnerable to attack than first imagined.

"The first real-life instance of drive-by pharming that we witnessed was even more devastating than the original concept we envisioned a while back, because this particular brand of router has a more substantial vulnerability that makes the attack far more potent," he said.

Typically, routers are password-protected but few users actually know of this, let alone bother to change it. Since the default passwords are easy to find out by doing a simple web search, if a cybercriminal knows what type of router you have, they can find out the password and hack into it.

However, the Mexican routers in question are not even password-protected.

Ramzan recommended that everyone whose router password had not been changed since it was set up should make sure they do so now.

"Also, I’d recommend that you reset the router anyway before changing your password. This step ensures that if you have become a victim already, you can start with a clean slate as the DNS server settings are also restored to the default during a hard reset," Ramzan said.

www.symantec.com

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Natwest top target for phishers
January 22, 2008
Web User

Natwest is the bank that most phishing gangs impersonate when trying to get UK surfers to part with their banking details, according to research.

ClearMyMail, a company that specialises in anti-spam solutions, said that 41 per cent of phishing emails it intercepted in December 2007 were disguised as messages from Natwest.

Citibank, HSBC and Abbey also featured highly on the list, as well as PayPal, eBay’s payments arm. According to the company, the emails look very convincing.

Dan Field, managing director of ClearMyMail said: "The phishing emails used are very well constructed and often look exactly like a legitimate message from the bank."

Field also warned that the methods the phishing gangs used had become more sophisticated.

"People have to remain vigilant as it has almost got to the stage where cybercrooks are building up a portfolio of email databases containing contact information that is profiled to fit a certain bank or building society’s typical customer in order to improve the success rate of their fraudulent attacks," he said.

www.clearmymail.com/phishing

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A discussion in an online webmaster forum indicates that Google might have invented a new ranking penalty for websites that rank well for popular search terms.

What has happened?

During the last few weeks, some webmasters noticed that some of their long term position 1 or position 2 rankings in Google suddenly ranked at position 6.

The problem affected well established websites with a long history. The dropped web pages had long time rankings for popular search terms, usually on position 1.

Why has Google done this?

It is not exactly clear yet which factors cause that ranking drop in Google’s results. There are two theories:

1. Google now considers usage data when calculating the rankings.

2. Google now has a better understanding of word and phrase relationships.

If different usage data is the reason for the change then web pages with a higher click-through rate would get higher positions. However, some webmasters reported that even web pages with high click through rates have been downranked.

The penalty also seems to affect web pages that are listed with an appealing title and a description that is very relevant to the search term so it might be that the click-rate is not taken into account.

We think that it’s more likely that the word and phrase relationships are the reason for the ranking drops. It seems that web pages with too many inbound links using exactly the searched keyword as the anchor text were affected by the filter.

If the link to a special web page always uses exactly the same anchor text then the word variety is probably extremely low compared to the competing websites in the top results. That indicates a manipulation of the anchor texts and Google applies the filter.

What can you do to avoid that filter?

When you build links to your website, make sure that you use different but related keywords for the links to your site. If you overuse the same link text, Google might discover a manipulation.

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Marketing consultant Jim Symcox outlines the importance of marketing strategy and highlights the dangers of not having a marketing strategy in place!

Peter Drucker famously described marketing in the context of the firm with: “Marketing and innovation are the two chief functions of business. You get paid for creating a customer, which is marketing. And you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost centre.”

He further defined marketing by saying: “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

Many SME firms approach to marketing is often one of “we can’t afford to spend money on marketing we need sales!” And of course they’re right. And they’re also wrong. They’re right because without the lifeblood of sales a company drops dead.

And they’re wrong because without the ability to get to the right customers that marketing can provide there is a lot of wasted effort in all areas of the business, not just sales.

Wasted Effort Without Marketing

These are examples of the many areas of a firm at risk or fail through the lack of a suitable marketing strategy:

• Customer prospecting
• Product or service development
• Sales
• Accounting
• Advertising
• After sales service
• Ad hoc marketing

Customer Prospecting

Many firms begin with a big idea they believe people will buy. Research into whether people want the product or service the company intends offering may be minimal or even non-existent.

Without a properly defined market to aim at, the business is tempted to go after all prospects they can think of. This leads to sales staff wasting their time following up with leads that either never convert or are wrong for the product they offer.

Product or Service Development

Often in the course of business customers inform companies of features or benefits of their product, or their competitor’s products, that they like or dislike.

If the company simply includes every good idea into their service or product they may be creating a product that 1% of their customers finds “exactly” what they want but makes the other 99% of customers switch to another company because of the increased price to cover the development costs.

A company without a strategy for their product means all ideas are equal and there is no way to categorise them as helpful to their customer and prospect base.

Equally companies can innovate based on what they believe is the next product their market wants. Without some market research and test marketing they could end up spending money on wild goose chases that cost money rather than make money.

Sales

Without marketing, the sales team produce their own disparate letters, proposals and sales direction.

This is an ineffective use of time. Sales people should be out meeting prospects and customers as often as possible. They should be winning the sales with prospects they know are right for the business.

As sales staff come into the company they need training to understand the market they’re selling to and proven ways they can meet and sell to prospects in that market.

Without this sales staff are doomed to re-invent the wheel and create sub-optimal sales tools.

And of course without a marketing strategy and the tactics that follow the sales staff don’t know the best prospects to go for or the best ways to approach them to win the business.

Accounting

It may seem surprising that a lack of marketing affects the accounts function. But accounts hold the key company data about which marketing campaigns, which sales tools, even which sales people have been most effective.

If there is no strategy in place before sales begin, how do you know what data you need to keep analysing your sales effectiveness?

All the data may be held in the accounting system but there may be no way to retrieve it in a useful form to allow the company to analyse the best performing campaigns, tools and sales people.

Identifying great campaigns means you can repeat them, or modify them for a slightly different set of prospects. Identifying great sales tools mean you can concentrate on using and polishing those. Identifying great sales people allows you to analyse what they do so that other sales people can follow their methods.

Advertising

Companies without a marketing strategy are in danger of giving the wrong message, using the wrong media for their market, using a blanket approach to cover all bases, and not tracking lead performance against advertising

The result? Advertising is wasted on markets that have no interest in the company’s product or even that the right market doesn’t get the full message and consequently ignores the product.

After sales service

Companies which haven’t defined how they tackle customer service could lose out on their ability to make more sales through their after sales service.

A customer may ring up to check where they can buy spare parts, or because they misunderstood the manual. In the first example a marketing strategy guides whether the company offers spares. If not, what should they tell their customers to leave them with a positive view of the company?

If the manual is misunderstood is it possible that other customers may face the same misunderstanding? Is it worth editing the manual immediately, or is there another way the company can provide the information to the customer until the manual is edited and re-produced?

These decisions need to be made with regard to the strategic marketing direction of the company. Otherwise staff make their own decisions based on what they believe is right and which may cost the company money without benefit to the company, the customer or the future customers.

Ad-hoc Marketing

There are so many forms of marketing that SME companies use on an ad-hoc basis:

• Advertising
• Direct mail
• Email
• PR
• Referrals
• Telesales
• Web sites
• Yellow pages

Yet without a marketing strategy every one of these tactics could be:

• hitting the wrong target completely
• sending an inconsistent message
• not telling the whole story

At the end the company says, “that was a waste of time, we won’t do that again.”

Is Just More Marketing The Solution?

The short answer to that question is - No! Because using marketing tactics in isolation, as we’ve just noted, brings the risk that they’re completely ineffective.

About the author: Jim Symcox runs marketing consultancy Acorn Service.

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