Donna Knight’s Internet Marketing Tools and Reviews

By Donna Knight

So, you’ve tried all the other marketing techniques you have read about, and you’re now ready to work some of that pay per click magic. What you may not know is that this form of online wizardry needs more than just a sleight of hand. It requires careful planning and a good sense of what should be expected.

I’m talking about Google AdWords. This is a advertising system that allows you to advertise your site through a short ad that is displayed prominently in every page of a Google search performed on keywords relevant to your business. Your ad is just like a tiny classified ad. The way it works is that advertisers like yourself bid on certain keywords. The winner of the bid gets his link shown at the top of the page on every query that contains the winning keywords.

Unlike other pay-per-click systems such as Overture, the bid price is not the only consideration in awarding keywords. Your Click-Through Rate, or CTR, also plays an important factor in the rank of your ad. CTR is acquired by dividing the number of times a user clicks on your link whenever it appears on search engine results by the number of impressions. An impression is whenever your site’s ad appears in a search query. For example, suppose your site’s ad appears 200 times in several searches. Your impression would be 200. Suppose also that 2 users click on your ad during this period, your CTR would be 2/200, or 1%.

The best thing about AdWords is that the winner of the bid only has to pay when a user actually clicks on his link. This method has given birth to the term Pay Per Click, or PPC. This is much less expensive than paying per impression, like advertisers did in the early days on the internet.

Here are some strategies to help you develop a strong AdWords marketing campaign.

1. RESEARCH YOUR KEYWORDS WELL. If you have an existing business, make sure that the keywords you choose are commonly searched words or phrases that people type in their search queries. If you have yet to set up a business, make sure that the keywords you are considering are actually profitable, meaning, they cater to a market with a high demand, also known as a “hungry market.”.

2. CONSIDER CREATING MULTIPLE ADS FOR EVERY KEYWORD. By having several ads appearing for the same search query, you would be able to determine which works best. The ad that performs best should be used as a control for subsequent ads to try to beat.

3. SET A BUDGET YOU’RE WILLING TO SPEND PER DAY. Google allows you to set a cap on the number of hits you could generate in a day. Study your budget and come up with a ceiling that would not eat up a major portion of your projected earnings.

4. WRITE YOUR ADS WELL. Ad writing is not a place to get sloppy. The quality of your ad affects your clickthroughs. Use words that will attract the readers’ attention. The words should be powerful without being full of hype. The length of your ad is very limited, so don’t write more than you need to, but make sure you mention the benefits of what you’re advertising.

5. ALWAYS STUDY YOUR ADS. Even if your ads have a high ranking on Google’s search pages and are producing a passable CTR, you should always take time to study and refine your ads. Changing their structure from time to time would also help in winning back the attention of those who have viewed them before. Get rid of ads that are not performing well and create new ones.

6. CHECK OUT THE COMPETITION. Check the high-ranking ads of those competing for the same keywords. You should never copy but looking at competitor’s high-ranking ads will give you an idea of what the target market is looking for. If the competitor’s ads are the top, that means they are saying to your potential customers what they want to hear.

7. TRACK YOUR ADS. There are many tools available on the net that would allow you to track which of your ads produce the most visitors. These tools will help you a lot in weeding out non-performing ads and discovering a pattern that makes your successful ones tick.

8. DESIGN NOW, ADJUST LATER. Since Google considers CTR before awarding top listing for a keyword, it is important that you produce a site that is rich with informative content. Content is what attracts visitors and increases your site’s sales conversion. Once you have a high listing for a keyword and your ads are producing a consistent number of hits, you could adjust the sales copy on your landing page to try to convert more of your visitors into successful sales. Great sales copy can also be informative despite being a sales pitch.

It is said that Google AdWords levels the playing field between rich and poor advertisers. This does not mean it is easy and inexpensive. What it means is that while corporate advertisers play it dumb because they have large sums of money to waste on advertising, you can win the competition against them by playing it smart and following some simple precautions.

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Donna Knight is a Computer Trainer and Website Promotion Specialist. She has built over 200 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time in your online marketing efforts, visit her Internet Marketing Tools blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com

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Copyright (C)2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to post this article in newsletters, free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource box remain intact.

By Donna Knight

You’ve got a hot new website with all the bells and whistles: cool Flash presentations, eye-catching colors, informative text, easy-to-maneuver layout, and an interesting topic. You think your site is amazing, and you know that others will agree with you. If only they know it existed.

How do you let others know about your site? How do you make yours stand out amongst millions of sites? You can spend lots of money on advertising, but that’s a catch 22. You can buy expensive advertising because you haven’t made any money yet. So what do you do? Make search engines work for you, that’s what!

You want your website to be a shining star on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AltaVista - That means getting at the top of their results for your targeted keywords. The higher your site is in a search results, the more visitors you will get. The science behind getting a top rank on search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t worry, though - even if SEO is referred to as a science, you can still get good results without hiring a $5000 a month SEO expert. You just need to follow some simple steps, and before you know it, your site will have more visitors than you can shake a stick at.

Here are five tips to maximize your search engine ranking on as many search engines as possible:

1. Content is more important than appearance.

Do you want to share your knowledge on a subject that you have authority on? Do you want to sell your products? Do you want to build an online shrine for your favorite actor? For whatever topic you have chosen for your website, make sure you give useful information. Search engines determine relevance of the sites listed by work by scanning sites for keywords. All they care about is the text on your site. They don’t care about your high-tech flash or other graphics. In fact, most can’t even see flash. Rich content is much more important than rich colors. While graphics on your site should be professional-looking, they are not as important to visitors as you think they are. Nice graphics may impress people once, but great content makes them come back. There’s a common saying that you should live by: content is king!

2. Master your topic

If you know your topic well, you will already know what questions people have about it. The keywords people use to search for information on search engines are related to the question they have about it. When you are maximizing keywords on your site, try to picture what keywords people will type into a search engine when looking for that particular topic. Make sure your site gives answers to those questions. If you are selling a product from your site, keep in mind people search for information. If your site feeds their hunger for that information, they will be more likely to buy your related product.

3. Learn from other people’s success

Take time to browse and read sites that get lots of visitors and have the same topic as yours. Take note of any recurring phrases in these sites’ text. These phrases are most likely keywords. Incorporate them in your own site’s content. Don’t saturate your site with keywords, though. You can actually get penalized in your ranking for having a keyword too many times on your site. A 3% keyword density is enough.

In searching for the right keywords, use Overture’s keyword tool at http://inventor.overture.com. This tool tells you the actual keywords and related keywords people actually did search for last month. The benefit is you’re no longer guessing in your keyword research. Your prediction about what people will search for is based on historical information about real searches people have performed.

4. Submit…and re-submit

You will never get a certain job if you don’t send in your application for it. The same thing applies to SEO. If you want your site to be recognized by search engines, then go out of your way to register your site with them. After a couple of weeks, search for your site by putting in the keywords you used in your content. If your site is still not coming up in the search results, don’t give up. Just re-register and resubmit your site. It can take as many as 6 months to get listed in some search engines despite your best efforts. This usually happens because a lot of submissions are done on a particular day.

5. Constantly update your site

Google recently released information on the algorithm they use for ranking. One thing they mention is rank can be boosted by having constantly updated information. This is not only true for Google. Yahoo also will re-visit sites with constantly updated content more often. If you add a blog and post something to it–preferably keyword-rich content–search engines will like your site even more. Blog software that many expert bloggers use is WordPress, which you can get at http://www.wordpress.org.

I have to admit that tip #5 is the most valuable tip. Even if the content on your site is mediocre, constantly updating it will make the search engines take notice and keep paying attention to your website.

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Donna Knight is a Website Promotion Specialist and Website Builder. She has built over 200 websites and helps new site owners promote their site cheaply. For tips that will help you save money and save time in your online marketing efforts, visit her Internet Marketing Tools blog at http://www.DonnaKnight.com

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Copyright (C)2005 Donna Knight. All Rights Reserved. Permission granted to post this article in newsletters, free ebooks or websites as long as the article and resource box remain intact.

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Below is an article by Jim Edwards who was at the Internet Marketing Superconference 7 which I recently attended (and had a blast! despite a severe allergy attack :)). Jim was one of my favorite speakers there. If you ever get the chance to see this very funny and informative speaker in person, don’t miss it. For more details about the bombshell that was dropped at the conference, read on…

Software Patent Debate Rages Online

• by Jim Edwards

© Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved http://www.thenetreporter.com -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I recently attended a conference in Las Vegas where 3 presenters got on stage and said that consumers, software developers, and website designers risked massive fines and even criminal charges for using MP3 audio online.

After I recovered from my initial shock, I realized they were talking about a software patent held by a French based company, Thomson, which enables them to charge licensing fees for anyone using their MP3 audio technology.

Upon opening this proverbial “can of online worms” I discovered that a whole world of what many consider unenforceable software patents exists online.

From my research, much of the online software patent debate stems from patents issued in Europe that may or may not get enforced. Did you know that someone patented the process of an online shopping cart?

Sun Microsystems patented the “shopping cart” process and could try to collect a royalty from anyone who uses a similar system (which rates as anyone selling anything online). http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=EP807891

Another company patented paying with a credit card over the Internet, which would definitely shut down the vast majority of all ecommerce if they could enforce that patent! http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=EP820620

Log on to www.nosoftwarepatents.com and http://webshop.ffii.org for some startling information.

I contacted an attorney specializing in Internet law, Bob Silber of www.InternetLawProducts.com, to get his opinion specifically on the debate about MP3’s.

“The mp3 licensing issue is not new, but recently resurfaced after an Internet marketer did a ’scare tactics’ campaign for his own marketing purposes. Thomson is the company holding the portfolio of patents related to MP3… Currently Thomson doesn’t require an mp3 license for non-commercial activities or for businesses generating an annual gross revenue less than US $100 000.”

So, unless you’re making MP3’s or software that creates MP3’s and making over $100,000 a year doing it, it doesn’t appear you need to worry about this particular patent issue.

Even then, it appears the owners of the MP3 patents would find it very difficult to enforce their patents with so much new technology emerging that builds on, and fundamentally changes, the original technology.

But this does open up a greater debate about what should and should not get patented when it comes to software.

I’m fully in favor of people protecting their rights when they create any intellectual property (software, audio, written material, etc.), but that’s a copyright issue, not a patent issue.

“Copyright” means nobody can do it the way you did it (with exact words, computer code, etc.).

“Patent” means nobody can do it at all without paying someone else a fee / royalty or “TAX” because they patented the “result!”

That makes a big difference when you talk about fundamental elements necessary to make the Internet and computers run.

It was fine for Bill Gates to copyright DOS, but what if he patented “computer operating system?”

Would that give him dominion over every computer that booted up for next 50 years? Impossible!

Unless the courts want to shut down the Internet or computers in general, software patents are, by their nature, unenforceable.

With so many different computer languages, methods, and means to do anything with computers, it’s not fair or practical for one person or company to own a “result” or a “process” like online “shopping carts” or “online audio.”

That would be just like allowing someone to patent “bottled water,” and charge us all every time we took a swig from a plastic bottle.

– Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist and the creator of an amazing course that will teach you step-by- step and click-by-click how to finally create your own money-making mini-sites…

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